By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 24, 2020
The manner in which free speech has been coming under attack over the past several years makes it easy to forget that this is not the only era of the internet and social media when this has been happening.
Different approaches and debates about how to handle what is, or is seen as “misinformation” and “disinformation” (used by most censorship champions interchangeably these days) have existed in the past as well, as have attempts to justify limiting freedom of speech protections provided by the US Constitution’s First Amendment.
And in the US, the go-to “crutch phrase” used by those favoring the stifling of speech over promoting freedom of expression has been to explain it as the need to sanction those who are, proverbially, “shouting fire in a crowded theater.”
The expression is derived from a 1919 US Supreme Court case, US v. Schenck, during which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked that, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”
The phrase would in the meantime all but inevitably appear whenever an argument is being made that censorship is acceptable and needed in order to prevent some type of harm. But the use of “shouting fire in a crowded theater” in this way is itself a form of disinformation.
Charles Schenck got himself in trouble, and in jail 100 years ago not by literally starting any fires, but by opposing the WW1 draft policy of his government, and putting together a pamphlet to this effect. Schenck v. The United States held that the defendant’s speech opposing the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment.
Some of the slogans he used are fairly universal, though, and can be applied to a variety of issues, including the present-day curtailing of online speech: messages like, “Do not submit to intimidation,” and, “Assert your Rights.”
Schenck was put on trial and found guilty under the Espionage Act, but in 1969, the US Supreme Court ruled on the issue of inflammatory speech in the Brandenburg v. Ohio case to annul the validity of that decision, when it established that the First Amendment does in fact protect free speech, all the way to the right of Ku Klux Klan members to advocate violence – unless there as a direct threat of “imminent lawless action.”
Although the expression about fires in crowded theaters never carried actual legal weight, the 1969 decision should have also made it less and less appealing to censorship proponents. However, it is still going strong.
There are several cases when the phrase was used in the last decade by officials and commentators, such as a Twitter user accused of spreading disinformation during Hurricane Sandy, WikiLeaks and its activities, and a pastor calling for the burning of Qurans.
In internet years, 2012 is today a distant past, however, the same issues concerning free speech and transparency around attempts to suppress it online were taking place at the time as well. What’s changed in the last eight years is the intensity of the argument that the only way to deal with misinformation or disinformation is to obliterate such suspected content in acts of, by and large, unaccountable censorship, particularly that taking place on social media.
In the US, this has become an often fear mongering campaign that promotes the notion that other approaches would directly and dangerously undermine democracy. In reality, though, it’s the rampant censorship that is more likely to achieve this; even Justice Holmes eventually came round to the idea that “free trade in ideas” was preferable to their suppression, when he later dissented in a case similar to Schenck’s.
The best, and likely the only truly legal and legitimate way to deal with false information on social media is to identify and expose it, rather than censor it, or prosecute its authors.
As for the “crowded theater” phrase, these days it is almost exclusively used in the media to heap criticism on US President Donald Trump, such as this recent Vanity Fair article that calls him “The Human Embodiment of Yelling ‘Fire’ in a Crowded Theater.”
This was said in the context of the coronavirus epidemic, and, of course, a particularly heated election campaign that is fertile ground not only for censorship but also for using strong and suggestive language like this – whether or not it has any legal, or ethical relevance.
RT | May 12, 2023
Electricity rationing could become unavoidable in Germany as part of an energy transition strategy starting from next year, public broadcaster BR24 reported on Friday.
Germany’s Federal Network Agency is considering limiting the use of power in peak hours as local grids fail to cover rising demand, which is expected to surge by over 10% in the coming years driven by a shift to clean energy, the outlet said.
More e-cars and heat pumps mean greater demand for electricity but local networks are not always designed for high loads, the article stated. Another problem for the country’s power operators is insufficient network expansion which currently lacks around 14,000 kilometers of infrastructure.
The head of the Federal Network Agency, Klaus Muller, suggested allowing German network operators limit the use of electricity at peak hours to avoid overload, from January 2024.
“If it is proven that this network overload could occur, then the distribution network operator has the right to dim,” he told BR24.
In addition to the EV transition, the German government also faces the challenge of switching heating systems from oil and gas. Abandoning hydrocarbons means they will have to be replaced with electric heating pumps, but the cables and transformers presently in use are not suitable for the increasing needs of the future, the outlet noted.
“So that there are no delays when connecting the heat pumps and charging devices, the distribution system operator also needs an instrument for control,” the Federal Network Agency told BR’s political magazine, Kontrovers.
The only feasible measure to maintain the stable operation of power networks is to take heat pumps and electric vehicles off the grid during peak load times, the outlet said, adding that the Federal Network Agency is now working out the details of the new regulation.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 12, 2023
An FBI surveillance contractor infiltrated the chatrooms of two airline industry groups opposed to vaccine mandates to collect intelligence on the groups’ organizing activities, investigative journalist Lee Fang reported.
The contractor, Flashpoint, which in the past infiltrated Islamic terror groups, now focuses on “anti-vaccine” groups and other domestic political organizations, according to Fang.
In a webinar presentation for clients last year, which Fang analyzed on his Substack, Flashpoint analyst Vlad Cuiujuclu demonstrated his company’s methods for identifying and entering encrypted Telegram chat groups.
He explained how the company attempted to join chatrooms of transportation workers resisting the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Fang described the presentation:
“‘In this case, we’re searching for a closed channel of U.S. Freedom Flyers,’ said Cuiujuclu. ‘It’s basically a group that opposed vaccination and masks.’
“As he clicked through a database, Cuiujuclu showed a chat group on Telegram sponsored by Airline Professionals For Justice, another group formed by airline industry workers opposed to the mandate. The forum, he added, provided useful insights, including Zoom links for meetings of the grassroots organization.
“‘Private chats,’ said Cuiujuclu, ‘require for you to have an invite link,’ which he noted can often either be found by scrolling through public forums or by ‘engag[ing] the admin of that channel.’”
Flashpoint also offers clients artificial intelligence and internet scraping tools.
According to Fang, the firm is a leader in the “threat intelligence industry,” a growing number of security and surveillance firms that create fake online identities to infiltrate Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums and dark web message boards to gather information for clients, including corporations and the FBI, to monitor potential threats.
Joshua Yoder, president of US Freedom Flyers, said he is aware that Flashpoint infiltrated private chat groups associated with his organization.
Yoder told The Defender :
“Tradecraft and other strategies are often used to gain inside knowledge of conservative organizations with the intent to disrupt, mislead and otherwise thwart effective campaigns.
“Infiltration is a tactic used by the deep state to prevent the truth from being told by attempting to destroy the advancement of the message. The team at US Freedom Flyers has been successful in recognizing these attacks and we have taken decisive actions to protect the organization and our members.”
Aviation industry workers were some of the most vocal and organized against COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
They wrote an open letter to the aviation industry signed by thousands of organizations, physicians and pilots. They also organized research on the risks of vaccines for pilots, spoke publicly about the “culture of fear and intimidation” around the mandates in the industry, and filed multiple lawsuits in Canada, the Netherlands, and the U.S.
US Freedom Flyers brought a lawsuit against Atlas Air, one of the largest air cargo carriers in the aviation industry, in May 2022.
Fang told The Defender the targeting of American citizens resisting the vaccine mandates fits into a long history of surveillance being used to subvert democracy. He said:
“There is a long sordid history of informants and surveillance contractors working to undermine democratic engagement in this country.
“The push against regular citizens opposed to COVID-19 vaccine mandates has come in many forms: censorship, demonization and in this case, surveillance.”
The growing market for spying on domestic dissent
Flashpoint advertises its surveillance success on its website, providing examples of its work undermining environmental activism, G20 protests and protests against the aviation industry.
The webpages describing these activities were taken down after Fang published his investigation, but they can be found on the Wayback Machine internet archive.
For example, Flashpoint described its capacity to monitor activists organizing against pollution and the aviation industry. The website said:
“By monitoring the situation and assessing tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP’s), Flashpoint was able to assess the impact of upcoming protests, and determine that these groups would likely continue to protest and attempt to impede airport construction and expansion projects through direct action. …
“Based on this information, Flashpoint customers were able to take actions to help control the impact to business operations, and to ensure the safety of their employees and facilities as well as the safety of those protesting.”
Flashpoint was founded by Evan Kohlmann, former NBC News contributor who investigated Islamic terror groups and whom The Intercept described as “the U.S. government’s go-to expert witness in terrorism prosecutions.”
Jack Poulson of Tech Inquiry, a group that researches the surveillance industry, told Fang that “Flashpoint has been selling its chatroom infiltration services to companies and governments for years.”
But, he said, it has shifted its focus from “surveilling Muslims after September 11” and “followed the money into both the Pentagon’s information warfare programs and the business of monitoring domestic protest groups.”
Last year, Flashpoint acquired Echosec Systems, another intelligence contractor, and last month it formalized a partnership with Google Cloud.
These acquisitions come in addition to “a steady stream of contracts to Flashpoint in recent years from the FBI, the Department of Defense, Treasury Department, and Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies,” Fang wrote.
Fang also spoke to Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., professor of medicine at Stanford University, research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research and one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Bhattacharya said:
“This kind of domestic spying violates the implicit protection Americans have in these kinds of settings.
“This isn’t terrorism, this doesn’t have anything to do with national security.
“This is a private set of employees, workers who are trying to maintain their jobs in the face of unscientific demands for COVID vaccinations.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | May 11, 2023
Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, also the president of the country’s Superior Electoral Court, told tech platforms not to campaign against a proposed internet censorship bill.
If they do, he’ll punish them.
Moraes said that the tech companies were undermining Brazil’s democracy.
“The big tech platforms have been challenged and they will be penalized. They will be held accountable, to guarantee the voter’s freedom to vote,” Moraes said, speaking to judges and government employees studying electoral law.
He added that Big Tech platforms, “believe no jurisdiction in the world can oversee them.”
The proposed “Fake News Law” aims to put the responsibility of finding and reporting illegal content on internet platforms.
Non-compliance with the extreme measures would result in fines.
Tech platforms have obviously campaigned against the legislation, claiming it would lead to more censorship.
On Tuesday, Telegram Brazil posted to the Telegram app and said that “democracy is under attack in Brazil,” claiming that the bill would “kill the modern internet” and “put an end to freedom of expression.”
Moraes quickly went further and directly threatened messaging service Telegram with a nationwide ban unless it removed the post on its platform.
Telegram retracted the message and posted a state-ordered message.
Google recently deleted its criticism of the law after the legal threat of fines.
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MAY 10, 2023
Ex-Tory MP Andrew Bridgen, who was expelled from the party for criticising the Covid vaccines, has announced he’s joining Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party, making him its first member of Parliament. At a press conference today Bridgen said he would be standing at his North West Leicestershire constituency at the next General Election. He also confirmed he would be suing Matt Hancock MP for defamation over an allegation of antisemitism.
At the press conference this morning Bridgen confirmed he has decided not to appeal his expulsion and blasted the Conservative Party. He said:
Even if I were to be given a fair hearing, which I doubt, I would not wish to rejoin the party after the treatment received by myself and my family over the past few years.
I feel now that the party no longer represents the people of this great country. If I am to represent my constituents and countrymen it must be from outside the party which I have served dutifully for many decades.
I will be standing again in North West Leicestershire at the next election. Not as a Conservative, but as a Member of the Reclaim Party. More than anything, the Reclaim Party stands for freedom of speech.
I will cross the floor today, Wednesday May 10th, and sit on the opposition benches as the first Member of Parliament for the Reclaim Party. I say first because I have no doubt I will not be the last. This is just the beginning.
If the Conservative Party wishes to contest my seat it can do so at the next General Election.
I have more confidence that I will win my seat than the vast majority of sitting Conservative MPs, so I welcome the challenge should the Prime Minister and Parliamentary Party wish to take it.
Bridgen was accused of antisemitism for agreeing in a tweet with an anonymous heart doctor he quoted that the Covid vaccine rollout was “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust”.
He has denied the allegation – which we at the Daily Sceptic agree is spurious and an example of a weaponised antisemitism allegation to achieve political ends. This morning Bridgen confirmed that he will be suing ex-Health Secretary Matt Hancock for defamation after the Conservative MP tweeted in January that he was spouting “antisemitic, anti-vax, anti-scientific conspiracy theories”.
In a YouTube video Bridgen said he has submitted a “defamation claim to the Royal Court of Justice against Matthew Hancock MP”. The basis of the claim is that Hancock’s accusation of antisemitism is “a false slur to deliberately try and shut down valid concerns raised by me on behalf of constituents and thousands of others around the world about the safety and efficacy of the experimental COVID-19 injections”.
Matt Hancock in the dock: that’s a court case to look forward to.
You can donate to Andrew Bridgen’s legal fund here.
Undermining the EU’s self-described commitment to privacy
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | May 10, 2023
There are few things the EU Commission (the EU’s executive arm) would like to present more than the bloc and its institutions speaking with one voice, particularly on controversial topics, such as attempts to destroy encryption.
However, documents leaked from the EU Council Legal Service regarding the legality of a proposal known as “chat control” (formally, Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, CSAR), show that there may be “trouble in paradise.”
As digital rights advocate and European Parliament member (MEP) Patrick Breyer of Germany reports, the Service has warned the Commission that its idea probably runs contrary to the fundamental right to respect for private life – meaning that the European Court of Justice would likely annul it.
Summed up, the “chat control” scheme proposes forcing providers of chat, messaging, phone, and email services to screen all private messages in search for illegal content and then inform the police.
But the problem with this, as the Service has noticed, is that it very easily could be interpreted as general and indiscriminate, as well as permanent surveillance, given that the plan gives “generalized” access to every citizen, including those the analysis says are “not even remotely connected with child sexual exploitation.”
And with the high likelihood that CSAR’s “detection orders” would be considered a violation of the fundamental right to privacy and confidentiality of correspondence, the EU court is also highly likely to squash “chat control” as indiscriminate surveillance, the Service warns.
The analysis also notes that while if the justification for “communications metadata screening” is national security, the court allows it – the drastic measures proposed in the CSAR would probably not be considered proportional to their stated purpose.
There’s also the issue of the EU Commission making the dubious claim that the process, rather than generalized, is somehow “targeted” (it does target everyone – so perhaps that’s the sophistry those behind the CSAR chose to go with.)
But the Legal Service’s analysis fears this is actually a “contradiction” between what the Commission is saying, and what the proposal actually spells out.
The Service’s logical suggestion then is to actually target detection orders so that they apply to people “in respect of whom there are reasonable grounds to believe that they are in some way involved in, committing or have committed a child sexual abuse offense.”
Observers have noted that the analysis of the CSAR – whose UK counterpart is the Online Safety Bill, represents serious criticism of similar, encryption-undermining proposals on both sides of the Atlantic.
RT | May 10, 2023
Washington has developed an artificial intelligence-based system to detect and gather ‘Russian’ disinformation online, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed on Tuesday at the Freedom House 2023 Annual Awards Ceremony.
The State Department has created “an AI-enabled online Ukraine Content Aggregator to collect verifiable Russian disinformation and then to share that with partners around the world,” the US top diplomat said.
The government is cooperating with scholars to be able to “reliably detect fake text generated by Russian chatbots,” he added.
Last year, social media analytics company Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory said hundreds of accounts disseminating pro-Western narratives over the past five were likely being run by the Pentagon’s Centcom unit. In March, news website The Intercept reported on federal contract documents, which suggest that the US Special Operations Command is planning to conduct propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake technology.
Last month, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the US of waging “an unprecedented information campaign” against Russia since the start of the conflict in Ukraine. Washington and its allies “need war at any cost, and their favorite method of solving their own problems is provocations, disinformation and threats,” Zakharova argued.
Speaking about artificial intelligence in general, Blinken warned that the technology can backfire and “amplify discrimination and enable abuses.”
“It also runs the risk of strengthening autocratic governments, including by enabling them to exploit social media even more effectively to manipulate their people and sow division among and within their adversaries,” he said.
Since the release of the artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT last November, the debate over the dangers posed by AI has intensified in the industry and in academic circles. Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as one of the ‘godfathers’ of AI, warned last week that the technology could present a “more urgent” threat than climate change.
In March, several tech industry leaders, including Elon Musk, co-signed an open letter, urging a six-month pause in the development of AI technology more powerful than ChatGPT, and the appointment of an independent regulator to provide oversight in the field.
Sputnik – 10.05.2023
PARIS – France will block websites that share information of sanctioned media, including RT France and Sputnik, under a new law on security of digital space, French Minister for Digital Transition and Telecommunications Jean-Noel Barrot said on Wednesday.
“As part of measures to protect democracy we will also begin blocking websites that share content of media under international sanctions like the ones the EU imposed against RT France and Sputnik. This measure will complement our existing tools to fight the propaganda of the enemies of democracy,” Barrot told a briefing after a cabinet meeting.
The French ministry has claimed the measure will allow the authorities to protect people from disinformation by expanding the powers of Arcom, the country’s media regulator, which will be authorized to impose restrictive measures against media.
The draft law will be submitted to the Senate in early July, Barrot stated.
Since the start of Russia’s special military operation, a number of jurisdictions, including the European Commission, have decided to censor Russian media and affiliated journalists. In early March 2022, the EU banned the broadcasting and distribution of content by RT and Sputnik as part of the sanctions against Russia, applying the restrictions to all means of content transmission and distribution, such as cable, satellite, IPTV, platforms, websites and apps. All relevant RT, Sputnik licenses and agreements are suspended.
The Cradle | May 10, 2023
Pakistani police have detained at least 945 supporters of ousted prime minister Imran Khan in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, since protests erupted on 9 May following Khan’s arrest.
At least one protester was shot dead by security forces in the southwestern city of Quetta on Tuesday, according to a CNN reporter present at the scene.
“Police teams arrested 945 lawbreakers and miscreants from across the province,” officials said in a statement to the media, adding that 130 security officers were injured, 25 police and government vehicles were burnt, and 14 government buildings were attacked during the protests.
In the face of popular discontent, the interior ministry on 10 May requisitioned the help of the army to “maintain law and order” in Punjab.
On Tuesday, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) deployed dozens of paramilitary troops to dramatically detain Khan under alleged charges of “corruption and corrupt practices.”
The former premier was presented in an Islamabad court on Wednesday morning to face the charges. During the hearing, the NAB requested the court approve Khan be kept under police custody for 14 days, a move his lawyers opposed.
Khan’s lawyers also insisted that the court investigate the irregular manner in which the 70-year old politician was arrested from the premises of the Islamabad High Court.
In a pre-recorded statement released on YouTube by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party after his arrest, the former premier said he was “detained on incorrect charges” and told his supporters, “the time has come for all of you to come and struggle for your rights.”
“I have always followed the law. I am being apprehended so that I can’t follow my political path for this country’s fundamental rights and for me to obey this corrupt government of crooks which has been hoisted on us,” Khan added.
Following his arrest, his supporters broke into the military’s headquarters in the city of Rawalpindi, just outside the capital.
Protesters also blocked one of the main thoroughfares into Islamabad, throwing stones and pulling down street signs.
Authorities responded by deploying internet jammers and disrupting access to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in the nation of 270 million.
Khan’s arrest came just a few months before crucial elections in October, where many expect the ousted premier to win the largest democratic mandate ever secured by any politician in the 75-year history of Pakistan.
The former cricket star was ousted from government last year in a US-backed parliamentary coup that saw Shehbaz Sharif – a protégé of the Sharif business dynasty that has governed Pakistan for much of the last three decades – come to power.
Khan previously saw his relationship with the US sour after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. They were also at odds over Afghan state assets frozen by Washington and about US flights over Pakistan.
More pressure started to build against Khan after he criticized western powers for pressuring Islamabad into condemning Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.
“What do you think of us? Are we your slaves … that whatever you say, we will do?” Khan said at a political rally early last year.
Since his ousting, he has been arrested, charged with “terrorism,” banned from running for office, and even survived an assassination attempt.
By Michael Lesher | Brownstone Institute | May 9, 2023
Suppose I tell you in advance that the essay you are reading is meant to startle you. And suppose I suggest, by way of demonstration, that two people as loosely connected as the leader of the “COVID Crisis Group” and Joe Biden’s “Special Envoy To Monitor and Combat Antisemitism” – both of whom have recently offered recommendations for improving political life in the United States – are in fact determined to unravel American freedoms.
Would you be surprised?
Well, if so, that is exactly the startling fact I am trying to bring to your attention. True, you may not have heard that the 34 COVID-19 “experts” headed by one Philip Zelikow (last seen justifying the concealment of information about the 9/11 attacks) and anti-Semitism “ambassador” Deborah Lipstadt – perhaps best known for slandering scads of Jewish survivors of the Nazis as “soft-core” Holocaust deniers because they objected to the massacre of 1,462 of Gaza’s civilians nine years ago – are both out to dismantle the Bill of Rights. But if you haven’t, it isn’t because they’ve been coy about their objectives.
Take the Zelikow panel. Its new book on “the lessons learned from COVID-19” openly conflates the federal government’s management of a respiratory virus with “wartime” – thus rationalizing the executive branch’s preemption of democratic government. Not only that, Zelikow and his band of “experts” explicitly call for the consolidation of power in the hands of an unelected “health security enterprise” that would control, among other things, a “systematic biomedical surveillance network.” And in case you can’t guess who is likely to benefit from the snooping, the panel goes on to praise the coercive experimental drug program that gave us the COVID-19 “vaccines” – “a bargain at $30 billion,” according to the editors of the Washington Post – signaling at one stroke the experts’ contempt for the Nuremberg Code and their subservience to Big Pharma.
As for Lipstadt, she has launched her attack on the First Amendment by redefining “anti-Semitism” so as to include an extraordinary range of political speech. Her first step in that transformation is the familiar trick of confusing criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Jewish bigotry. But her second step is newer and, arguably, even more disturbing: she tars all denigration of Jews with the hot-button label “conspiracy theory.”
Let’s be clear: however noble the pretext of opposing Jew-hatred, it should be obvious that once you characterize anti-Semitism as a “conspiracy theory” you have made a case for censorship. As Lipstadt herself explained to Jane Eisner of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (in an interview printed in the latest AARP Magazine but not available online): “[I]t’s a conspiracy theory that Jews control the media, the banks, the election process, etc. If you believe that there is a group controlling these things, then essentially you’re saying that you don’t believe in democracy.”
And there’s the trouble. After all, an overt attack on democracy isn’t a viewpoint; it isn’t even an expression of run-of-the-mill bigotry. It’s a threat to the state. And it follows, if you accept Lipstadt’s formulation, that anyone the government can label an “anti-Semite” may now be punished in the same way the Biden administration is already punishing people who protested the presidential election results of November 2020. Note, too, the selective parameters of the offense: blaming Donald Trump’s election on the Russians is presumably “legitimate” speech; but accusing a “group” of controlling “the election process” can land you in jail – that is, when the “group” is not an official enemy but a favored minority, and when that “process” has reached results endorsed by those in power.
So the Zelikow panel and Ambassador Lipstadt can’t be accused of hiding their illiberal goals. Like the Democratic lynch mob that denounced Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger on the floor of Congress last March for revealing the extent of government censorship of Twitter, these propagandists quite openly assert that surveillance is good for us, while free speech is entirely too dangerous to be entrusted to mere citizens.
“Ordinary folks and national security agencies responsible for our security,” Congressman Colin Allred lectured Taibbi, “are trying their best to find a way to make sure that our online discourse doesn’t get people hurt, or see our democracy undermined.” It’s pretty breathtaking to watch an African-American liberal solemnly declare that the CIA and the FBI are the true guardians of democracy – not to mention his defense of the security state’s behind-the-scenes censorship of political speech. But what’s even more ominous is that not a single prominent Democratic politician nor a single pundit in mainstream liberal media has repudiated anything the congressman said.
Is it any wonder, then, that no one in mainstream media has mentioned the totalitarian tendencies implicit in the COVID Crisis Group’s recommendations for “pandemic” regulation via dismantling democracy, or in Ambassador Lipstadt’s appeals to the public to “discredit” anti-Semitism by recasting it as a criminal conspiracy?
Of course it isn’t. And that is my point. That is my motive in writing in tandem about these two apparently disparate subjects, connected only by the facts that both of them involve recent public declarations and that both of them represent attacks on fundamental liberties.
Because the truth is that condemning freedom is now so entirely respectable that it’s happening practically everywhere – under every possible pretext, almost any day, from just about any left-liberal institution that claims to care about the public good. Close your eyes, and you can hardly tell whether what you’re hearing is coming from a Democratic Party stalwart or from an old-line Soviet apologist explaining why Andrei Sakharov or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Yuri Orlov is really, notwithstanding the accuracy of what he’s been saying, a threat to the state who deserves to be muzzled or jailed.
And the media’s silence about it all is as ominous as the Orwellian nattering of the freedom-haters themselves.
Take another look at the Zelikow panel’s assessment of the US government’s performance during the “COVID crisis.” Writing about what the “experts” praise or blame in their report, the Washington Post never once mentions the crippling of the US working-class economy due to arbitrary confinements and business shutdowns, the educational damage done to a whole generation of children through needless school closures, the reckless suspension of representative democracy in four-fifths of our states, the medically unjustifiable trauma caused by “mask mandates,” or the undermining of the national healthcare system through an obsessive focus on one respiratory virus while more serious issues were sidelined for over a year. As far as the Post is concerned, the real outrages of the COVID coup never happened at all.
Even when the experts and the editors do manage to notice something sinister, they go out of their way to miss the point. The Zelikow panel specifically notes the “four pandemic planning exercises” staged by the US government barely a year before the announcement of the COVID-19 outbreak. And it offers a few technical criticisms of the proceedings.
But neither the panel nor the Post editors’ congratulatory summary of its conclusions addresses the fact that the exercises – which omitted any suggestion for using repurposed drugs as early treatment for a novel virus, as in all previous influenza-like outbreaks – made a point of discussing the importance of thought-policing social media. That prescription for censorship became a grim reality after March 2020. But you’d never know it from reading the Zelikow panel’s assessment of the government’s mistakes in addressing the “pandemic.”
And Lipstadt? She claims to be a passionate defender of free speech. But that didn’t stop her from smearing Senator Ron Johnson as a “white nationalist sympathizer” because of his politically incorrect comments about Black Lives Matter. And when that issue made it to the op-ed page of the New York Times, it was only to further demonize Johnson; Lipstadt’s slander got a pass.
Why do I worry so much about this? Well, first of all because an attack on freedom is an attack on all of us.
But I think there is a special reason for alarm. It’s not just that our ruling elites believe that we, the people, need to be stripped of our right to free expression. I’m afraid that the freedom-haters clustered around our figurehead President are not even aware just how thin the ice is onto which they’re propelling us. Their position (taking the most charitable possible view of it) runs something like this: if the public isn’t exposed to views of which the censors disapprove, hoi polloi will meekly accept whatever policies are imposed on them (for their own good, of course).
But the censors are wrong. The fabric of American political life has been strained to such tautness that a single acute crisis might rupture it altogether. And if that happens, people who have been deprived of reasonable dissent will not shrink from violent opposition; on the contrary, they will embrace it. When the monolithic narrative that is all they have been taught lies in ruins, they will replace it not with a rational, informed alternative – for they will know of none – but with whatever satisfies the rage of a population that realizes, too late, that it has been hoodwinked.
Woe to the freedom-haters when the lion they think they have tamed turns its fury on the liberal society that soothsayers like Zelikow and Lipstadt still imagine they are defending!
MEMO | May 9, 2023
The Israeli occupation authorities jailed former Jerusalem Minister Khaled Abu Arafa for four months on Monday under an administrative detention order. The order was imposed a week after he was kidnapped by Israeli occupation forces from his temporary residence in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.
Abu Arafa and three other Jerusalemites were stripped of their Israeli identity documents when they won seats in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election. They were all jailed under administration detention orders which were renewed regularly with neither charge nor trial until they were released in May 2010. They were then expelled from Jerusalem after staging a protest in the office of the International Red Cross in the city that lasted until September 2011, and were forbidden from returning to the occupied city.
Since then, they have been living in temporary homes in the occupied West Bank. This has not stopped the occupation authorities from harassing and now detaining them under new administrative detention orders.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Professor Roger Watson and Dr. Niall McCrae | The Daily Sceptic | November 15, 2021
As scholars at leading British universities over recent decades, we witnessed the replacement of critical thinking and debate by narrative: facts are discrimination and scientific method is imperialism; truth, instead, is derived from ‘progressive’ values. This educational trend may be a major contributory factor to the ease in which society has been inculcated to the Covid ‘new normal’ of masking, testing, and repeated doses of vaccines for a disease of similar risk to severe influenza.
One doesn’t need much critical reasoning to observe the flawed logic of some vaccination enthusiasts, such as people who respond to experiencing any side effects, however debilitating, by saying “at least I know it’s working”, or, after contracting the disease despite their promised inoculation (over 90% effective, according to initial drug company claims), “I’d have been worse off without the jab.” … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
