Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) recently got in touch with his inner mobster and threatened Elon Musk — the new owner of Twitter and the CEO of electric car company Tesla and space ventures company SpaceX. He told Musk, “Fix your companies” or “Congress will.” As part of this threat, Markey referred to an ongoing National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigation into Tesla’s autopilot driving system and Twitter’s 2011 consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Markey has done more than make threats: He is one of a group of Democratic senators who wrote to the FTC urging an investigation into whether Musk’s actions as the new owner of Twitter violated the consent decree or consumer protection laws. Since FTC Chair Lina Khan wants to investigate as many businesses as possible, it is likely she will respond favorably to the senators’ letter.
President Biden has also endorsed an investigation into the role foreign investors played in financing Musk’s Twitter purchase. Biden may be concerned that Musk is not likely to ban tweets regarding Hunter Biden’s business deals.
Concerns that Musk would allow tweets containing information embarrassing (or worse) to the Biden administration point to the real reason many Democratic politicians and progressive writers and activists are attacking Musk. They support efforts to suppress conservative, libertarian, and other “non-woke” speech on social media. They view the prospect of a major platform refusing to silence those who dissent from the woke mob or the Democratic Party establishment as a threat to their power. Musk further angered the left by committing what, to many Democrats (and Liz Cheney), is the ultimate hate crime — allowing Donald Trump back on Twitter.
The threat against Musk shows the threat to liberty is not just from big tech; it is from the alliance between big tech and big government.
Some conservatives think that increasing government’s power over social media is the correct way to make big tech respect free speech. However, increasing the US government’s power over social media can just end up putting more power behind government threats like those from Rep. Markey. Expanded government control over how social media companies conduct their business can also further incentivize the companies to work with the federal government to shut down free speech.
Once the government steps in with increased regulation, the risk is that greater government control over what is communicated on social media will follow. The question will just be who is calling the shots on the exercise of that control. Will the result be an increase of the liberal or “woke” pressure on social media companies to silence conservatives, libertarians, opponents of teaching critical race theory and transgenderism in schools, and those who question the safety and effectiveness of covid vaccines? Alternatively, will a new sort of pressure become dominant, maybe pressure to comply with conservative or Republican preferred limits on speech? Either way, liberty loses.
Big tech companies silence their users to curry favor with politicians and bureaucrats, often after “encouragement” from politicians and bureaucrats. Therefore, to end big tech’s censorship, Americans should demand that all government officials — including the president — not violate the First Amendment. We must work to put an end to government officials pressuring or even “encouraging” social media platforms either to silence any American citizen because of his opinions or to downplay or suppress any news story. The way to protect free speech online is to separate tech and state.
Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute.
November 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, United States |
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Samizdat – 29.11.2022
The British government’s draft Online Safety Bill has previously come under fire from free speech campaigners and MPs — including current culture and media minister Michelle Donelan — for demanding social media sites censor posts which do not break any law.
The UK’s media minister has demanded Beijing grant British journalists freedom of speech — while suppressing it at home.
But her department is also spearheading new legislation to censor social media posts even if they do not break any laws against threats or incitement.
Speaking on a radio programme on Tuesday morning, Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Michelle Donelan said it was “absolutely shocking” that a reporter for British state media was arrested while covering protests against COVID-related restrictions in Shanghai.
“We believe in press freedom and the media to be able to report all over the globe,” Donelan said.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian accused the British media of “playing the victim” after it claimed cameraman Edward Lawrence was “beaten and kicked” by police.
Zhao urged foreign journalists not to engage in activities “unrelated to their role” — implying they were taking part in the protests rather than reporting them impartially.
The new draft of the Online Safety Bill, which Donelan’s department is pushing through Parliament, would force social media moderators to delete users’ posts if they have “reasonable grounds to infer” their content could cause “serious distress” to some individuals.
The previous version drafted under Donelan’s predecessor Nadine Dorries was criticised by MPs and free speech advocates for attempting to ban comments it dubbed “legal but harmful”.
Donelan herself said at the time that wording would create “a quasi-legal category between illegal and legal.”
A government factsheet published in May said the bill would only mandate censoring social media posts if some harm was “intended”, without a reasonable excuse or the defence of public interest — theoretically protecting satirical cartoons and statements of political opinion.
Ironically, Dorries was herself reportedly banned from a private WhatsApp group for Conservative Party MPs in December 2021 for defending then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson from her colleagues’ criticism.
November 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | China, Human rights, UK |
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“Right-wing conspiracy theorists with ties to anti-Xi opposition elements spread baseless rumours, deny science, and endanger lives” – strangely not how the NYT chose to caption this image.
Three years ago, Zero Covid was the aspiration of public health bureaucrats and politicians across the West. Charlatan techbros like Tomas Pueyo appeared on national television to demand nationwide house arrest; leaders like Angela Merkel surrounded themselves with virus-eradicationist modellers and imposed unprecedented months-long closures upon their countries. When protests inevitably broke out, they were violently suppressed; the protesters were slandered as conspiracy theorists and fascists.
The New York Times played a leading role in this long and excruciating charade. In April 2020, they reported that “an informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups, some with close connections to the [Trump] White House” was responsible for “quietly working to nurture protests and apply … pressure to overturn state and local orders intended to stop the spread of the coronavirus.” In March 2021, they ran an obnoxious opinion piece about What Happened When Germany’s Far-Riught Party Railed Against Lockdowns, which called the German protesters “an amorphous mix of conspiracy theorists, shady organizations and outraged citizens” and appeared to accuse the right-populist party Alternativ für Deutschland of opportunism for joining their ranks.
What a difference a few years have made.
China Protests Break Out as Covid Cases Surge and Lockdowns Persist is a lead headline in today’s New York Times : “Strict Covid restrictions are hurting the country’s economy and angering members of the public, who are taking to the streets,” we read in the article that follows. Western anti-lockdown protesters are fascists and conspiracy theorists; Chinese anti-lockdown protesters, on the other hand, are ordinary people protesting their oppression:
“Lift the lockdown,” the protesters screamed in a city in China’s far west. On the other side of the country, in Shanghai, demonstrators held up sheets of blank white paper, turning them into an implicit but powerful sign of defiance. One protester, who was later detained by the police, was carrying only flowers.
Over the weekend, protests against China’s strict Covid restrictions ricocheted across the country in a rare case of nationwide civil unrest. There had been signs of dissent, but the new wave of anger may pose a bigger challenge for the government.
Some demonstrators went so far as to call for the Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, to step down. Many were fed up with Mr. Xi, who in October secured a precedent-defying third term as the party’s general secretary, and his “zero-Covid” policy, which continues to disrupt everyday life, hurt livelihoods and isolate the country.
Western lockdowns were necessary to save lives. Chinese lockdowns are the repressive tactic of an undemocratic regime.
The Chinese government on Monday blamed “forces with ulterior motives” for linking a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region to strict Covid measures, a key driver as the protests spread across the country.
In much the same way, the New York Times blamed shadowy political actors with ties to Trump for anti-lockdown protests in 2020.
Outside China, the rest of the world has adapted to the virus and is near normalcy. Take soccer’s premier event, the World Cup. Thousands of people from across the globe have assembled in Qatar and are cheering on their teams, shoulder-to-shoulder, without masks, in packed stadiums.
China’s approach won praise during the beginning of the pandemic, and there is no doubt it has saved lives. But now that approach looks increasingly outdated. Almost three years after the coronavirus emerged, the contrast between China and the rest of the world couldn’t be starker.
Emphasis mine, because it’s probably the most amazing line in the whole piece. Here we have America’s foremost propaganda outlet, trying desperately to accuse China of unjust dictatorial repression, for the crime of implementing in a more organised and coherent way the very same Zero Covid policies that Times journalists spent nearly two years supporting. What’s actually wrong with the harsh Chinese lockdowns? Well, say the Times, because they can’t say anything else, they’ve become unfashionable.
The Times have also suddenly discovered that lockdowns are bad for the economy. “China’s economy has been hurt by the restrictions,” which have “hammered business both large and small,” they report. Major companies are seeking to escape the effects of closures by “expand[ing] production outside China”, all while “reduced foot traffic” hurts businesses in “the main streets of towns and cities.” That’s bad when it happens in China, but Germany or Canada it’s totally worth it.
On the one hand, we should be probably be happy about the implicit repudiation of lockdowns that articles like this represent, and the strong signal they send that none of our opinion makers wants to return to them. Some of you will have your own more detailed theories about why this is, but my broad view, is that mass containment adheres to the same trajectory everywhere: 1) There is the initial lockdown followed by a seasonally-induced collapse in cases, which encourages among policymakers to an illusion of control. 2) When infections inevitably surge the second time, they try to play the lockdown card again and again, always with less success. 3) Finally, in the face of growing protests and destruction, the policies are abandoned and everything reopens. The only difference between China and the West, is that a few years intervened before the first and the second of these steps.
On the other hand, the increasingly open hypocrisy and manipulation of the press are reaching terrifying levels I’d never imagined before, and I think this is very bad.
November 28, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | China, Covid-19, Germany, Human rights, New York Times |
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Last week Elizabeth Hart wrote to Mark Butler, Australian Minister for Health and Aged Care, about the government misleading health practitioners who are administering Covid injections into believing they are covered by a government medical indemnity scheme. “It has now been confirmed by your department that health practitioners are not covered by a specific Covid-19 government medical indemnity scheme,” she wrote.
Elizabeth Hart is an independent researcher investigating the overuse of vaccine products and conflicts of interest in vaccination policy.
According to a response Hart received on 17 November from Nigel Murray – Assistant Secretary, MBS Policy and Specialist Services Branch – the government did not put in place a medical indemnity scheme for health professionals. Instead, Murray told Hart, “the former [Morrison] Government established the no-fault Scheme, which commenced operations on 13 December 2021.” Later in the same letter, he again confirmed the scheme did not exist:
“While a medical indemnity scheme for health professionals administering the Covid-19 vaccine was not established per se, the creation of the no-fault Scheme was intended to support increased participation by health professionals in the Covid-19 Vaccination roll-out.”
Hart informed Butler, the promise of “a medical indemnity scheme for health professionals administering the Covid-19 vaccine” probably did intend “to support increased participation by health professionals in the Covid-19 Vaccination roll-out”. But it turns out they are not personally protected by a government scheme. She explained to Butler:
In July 2021, the Morrison Government stated it was establishing a “fit-for-purpose Covid-19 vaccine medical indemnity scheme” to “support increased vaccination uptake by assuring Australians that health professionals, including GPs, nurses and pharmacists administering Covid vaccines as part of the Commonwealth vaccination program have appropriate indemnity coverage”, with a further announcement in August 2021 stating “The Morrison Government has finalised the details of the no-fault Covid-19 Vaccine Claim Scheme following extensive consultation with the peak medical, healthcare, business and insurance sectors to ensure a comprehensive National Scheme”, noting “It also ensure [sic] that health professionals administering vaccines will be able to continue with their crucial role in the vaccine roll out with assurance that the claims scheme will offer them protection”
But it now turns out health professionals are not personally protected by a specific Covid-19 medical indemnity scheme.
The letter from Nigel Murray also confirms: “Informed consent should be obtained for every Covid-19 vaccination, as per usual consent procedures for other vaccinations.”
Mark Butler, it appears health practitioners don’t have specific government medical indemnity re the Covid jab rollout, although they might think they do. They will have to look to their own medical indemnity insurance to protect them. And they should be obtaining informed consent for every Covid-19 jab…but is this actually happening?
What is the quality of information being provided to people, including parents of children, to enable them to properly evaluate the threat of SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19, and the risks and benefits of the multiple Covid jabs, in their own specific circumstances? Why are people of most ages and health status being called upon to have the Covid-19 jabs? Who is actually at serious risk with SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19? Does having repeated Covid jabs compromise the immune system and make people more vulnerable? Nigel Murray includes reference to the ‘Covid-19 vaccination – Patient resources’ webpage in his letter, but this webpage only includes information re Covid jabs for children, not for adults. Nigel Murray’s letter also includes a link to a ‘Consent form for Covid-19 vaccination’.
How does this information re Covid jabs referred to by Nigel Murray stack up in the ‘valid informed consent’ stakes? I would say not very well at all…
This is an extremely serious situation, Mark Butler – it’s highly likely ‘valid informed consent’ has not been properly obtained by many health practitioners before administering Covid-19 jabs.
The health practitioners inserting the needle must be warned they’re not protected by a specific government Covid medical indemnity scheme after all…and they need to consider the quality of the information they’re providing to people to gain their ‘valid informed consent’ to the jabs. They must also consider the impact of jab mandates – which pressure, coerce and manipulate people to submit to Covid jabs, in contravention of The Australian Immunisation Handbook, i.e., jab mandates inhibit a ‘voluntary’ decision.
Mark Butler, please advise what steps you are taking to address this matter.
This email is being circulated to other parties, including the response from your department.
Health practitioners, Covid jabs and ‘valid informed consent’ – a medical ethics disaster, Elizabeth Hart emails
As Dr. Mike Yeadon noted on his Telegram channel: “This has all the appearance of government throwing medical staff under the bus on liability & requirements for informed consent.”
Two days later, Hart forwarded her email trail with Butler to Kamran Abbasi, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal (“BMJ”), copying in numerous “people influential on international public health/vaccination policy via the scientific and medical establishment, and other parties.” People copied into her email included infamous modeller Neil Ferguson, UK’s Chief (Covid) Medical Adviser Chris Whitty, President of the Royal Society, and Oxford/AstraZeneca injection’s developers Adrian Hill and Sarah Gilbert.
The BMJ claims to be evidence-based and patient-centred and customer-focused – surely ensuring ‘valid informed consent’ before medical interventions, such as Covid jabs, should be foremost in your values?
Sadly, ‘valid informed consent’ appears to have been sacrificed during the grossly disproportionate and ill-targeted Covid debacle. This scandal is now unfolding in Australia.
FYI, please see [above] my response to Australian federal health minister Mark Butler, on the subject of health practitioners’ medical indemnity insurance for Covid-19 jab administration, and health practitioners’ obligation to obtain ‘informed consent’.
This information has major implications for health practitioners administering Covid-19 jabs in Australia – they need to know they’re not covered by a specific government Covid-19 medical indemnity scheme, and that they’re obligated to obtain informed consent before every Covid-19 jab.
But I strongly suspect many health practitioners have failed to obtain ‘valid informed consent’ before the Covid jabs. How have things gone so terribly wrong?
This is a very serious situation, Kamran Abbasi, at the heart of medical ethics. This should be a priority topic on the BMJ.
November 28, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception | Australia, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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By Maxim Minaev – Samizdat – 28.11.2022
On November 26, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of the radiation, chemical and biological defense troops of the Russian Armed Forces, said that Russia is concerned about US-controlled tests of infectious agents on military personnel and mental patients in Ukraine.
Russia has not received an exhaustive response from the United States and Ukraine regarding US biological and military activities on Ukrainian territory under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), Russia’s permanent representative to the Geneva-based UN headquarters, Gennady Gatilov, said.
“We still have not received a proper and meaningful response to the documents and evidence presented, which shed light on the true nature of interaction between the Pentagon and its contractors and the Ukrainian side in the field of military and biological activities,” he said.
The diplomat added that Russia’s complaint was ignored and its proposal for an international investigation under the auspices of the UNSC under Article VI of the BWC was blocked by the United States.
Earlier, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of the radiation, chemical and biological defense troops of the Russian Armed Forces, said that a network of more than 30 biological laboratories had been formed on the territory of Ukraine, which worked in the interests of the Pentagon. According to him, everything for the continuation of the US military-biological program was removed from Ukraine after the start of the Russian special military operation.
Earlier this month, Kirillov recalled that former US President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton had participated in formulating the US drive for global dominance in bioweapons research. He said that Bolton led the US delegation to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention’s Fifth Review Conference in November-December 2001. Later, the US blocked the operation of the UN body’s verification mechanism, as well as proposed measures to check bioweapons storage sites, citing threats such verification measures would pose to US “national interests.” Bolton also characterized the BWC’s verification protocol as “dead,” and promised that it’s “not going to be resurrected.”
Igor Kirillov accompanied his presentation with a fresh trove of documents, including papers related to US efforts to build up the country’s military-biological potential.
November 28, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, War Crimes | Human rights, Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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In September, the University of California (“UC”) mandated bivalent COVID-19 boosters for the 2022-2023 academic year for all faculty, staff, and students, in effect shifting its policy from fully vaccinated to up-to-date and suggesting that boosters will be required in perpetuity. We the undersigned, eleven members of the UC faculty from several campuses, sent the following letter to university administrators calling on them to reverse this new mandate. To date, we have received no response. In addition, we sent the letter to nine UC student newspapers for publication as an Op-Ed. The Op-Ed editors from two of these newspapers, the Daily Bruin (UCLA) and the Daily Cal (UC-Berkeley) initially agreed enthusiastically to publish the letter. However, they subsequently withdrew their decision to publish, we presume in the face of pressure from higher up to censor us.
We write to register deep dismay over UC’s September 22, 2022 memorandum mandating a fall 2022 COVID-19 booster for all students, staff, and faculty. Our concerns are driven by the scientific information on the virus and on the vaccines that we have now accumulated nearly three years into the outbreak.
Our concerns in brief:
First, University of California Office of the President justified the original mandate on the assumption that vaccination would protect against COVID-19 infection and prevent transmission. We now know it does neither, a fact acknowledged by the CDC, the FDA, the HHS, the WHO, health ministries and medical researchers around the world, and now, by Pfizer itself. Moreover, more than 150 peer-reviewed studies demonstrate that natural immunity acquired by recovering from a COVID-19 infection is equal to if not superior to vaccination, and that paradoxically, over time, COVID-19 shots increase rather than decrease the risk of contracting and spreading the virus. One May 2022 article in the high-impact British Medical Journal has warned that “mandatory vaccine policies are scientifically questionable and are likely to cause more societal harm than good.” The CDC has “recommended” and not mandated the new booster. The University’s decision to mandate boosters at this time is therefore not in accordance with CDC guidelines. Moreover, the CDC recently greatly relaxed its COVI-19 guidelines and no longer recommends making distinctions based on a person’s vaccination status.
Second, mounting evidence demonstrates serious risks associated with vaccination, especially for healthy males 18-39, where risks may outweigh benefits. A Florida Department of Health analysis of mortality following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination, to cite one study, reported an 84 percent increase in death for men 18-39 within 28 days of vaccination. Also, well documented is the elevated risk of myocarditis, pericarditis, and emergency cardiovascular events among those under 40, a demographic that includes the vast majority of our student body and large portions of staff and faculty. The Florida study also showed that males over 60 had a 10 percent increased risk of cardiac-related death in the same 28-day period, and that non-mRNA vaccines did not have those increased risks in any population. Multiple data sources show that young healthy people who contract COVID-19 have a recovery rate of 99.995 percent.
In March 2022, a court order compelled Pfizer to release 55,000 pages of internal reports on vaccine effectiveness and side effects. Among the 1,246 different adverse effects in Pfizer’s own documents were cardiac arrest, deep vein thrombosis, immune-mediated hepatitis, myocarditis, brain stem embolism and thrombosis, interstitial lung disease, juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, liver injury, and multisystem inflammatory syndrome. Another study by medical researchers, including one of our colleagues at UCSF, found that 22,000-30,000 previously uninfected adults aged 18-29 must be boosted with an mRNA vaccine to prevent just one COVID-19 hospitalization, and that “booster mandates may cause a net expected harm: per COVID-19 hospitalization prevented in previously uninfected young adults, we anticipate 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3.0 booster-associated myocarditis cases in males, and 1,373 to 3,234 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity.”
Data from CDC’s official Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) released on July 15, 2022, show 1,350,950 reports of adverse events for all age groups following COVID-19 vaccines, including 29,635 deaths and 246,676 serious injuries. It is well documented that fewer than one percent of all vaccine-associated adverse events are ever reported to the CDC’s VAERS. This means that actual morbidity or mortality is many times greater, as pointed out, among other sources, by a recent HHS-funded Harvard Medical School vaccine injury study. Another study published by UCLA Professors Sander Greenland and Patrick Whelan and others in the high-impact journal Vaccine in September, 2022 lamented the lack of “full transparency of the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial data” and called for a harm-benefit analysis of the vaccines.
Third, while we are not against vaccination for those who chose it, we are deeply concerned about the coercive nature of this medical procedure. Any medical treatment must be an individual choice and should be made in consultation with one’s physician. Never before in medical history has an entire population been required to receive a vaccine approved only for emergency use, for which there are no long-term data, and without informed consent, that, as a matter of law and ethics, requires that no one be coerced into a medical treatment. The shift in UC policy from fully vaccinated to up-to-date signals anticipation of an open-ended process of continuous vaccinations and boosters that goes far beyond addressing a temporary emergency.
The LAUSD (among others) suspended its vaccine mandate for students (but not staff) in September 2022, after a Superior Court judge ruled that the school district did not have the authority to mandate vaccination. The State of California has not mandated boosters for anyone except health workers. Nationwide, the trend is toward eliminating all mandates. The rate of hospitalizations is radically down and COVID-19 related deaths now appear to be about on par with annual deaths from the flu. In contrast, “excess,” sudden, unexpected unexplained deaths have skyrocketed since the rollout of the experimental vaccines. Even Bill Gates, who helped finance and promote the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, has now acknowledged: “We didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate and that it’s a disease mainly in the elderly, kind of like flu.”
If UC leadership continues to insist on this ill-advised action, are they ready to accept full personal responsibility and legal liability for the multitude of harms certain to result?
Carole H. Browner
Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science
University of California, Los Angeles
William I. Robinson
Distinguished Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara
Roberto Strongman
Associate Professor of Black Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
Arvind Thomas
Associate Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles
Anton Van Der Ven
Professor of Engineering
University of California, Santa Barbara
Hugo Loaiciga
Professor of Geography
University of California, Santa Barbara
Aaron Kheriaty, MD
Former Professor, School of Medicine
Former Director of Medical Ethics Program
University of California, Irvine
Gabriel Vorobiof
Associate Professor of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
Lazlo Boros
Assistant Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics, Endocrinology and Metabolism (retired)
University of California, Los Angeles
Patrick Whelan
Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics
University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Aditi Bhargava, Ob/Gyn, Reproductive Sciences
Professor Emeritus, School of Medicine
University of California, San Francisco
November 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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Bob Baer isn’t a fan of Elon Musk’s Twitter
Former CIA analyst Bob Baer, in an interview with CNN’s Boris Sanchez, said that the idea of “free speech” on Elon Musk’s Twitter is “nonsense.”
Sanchez started the discussion by noting that Musk recently said that banned accounts will be reinstated, after a poll the Tesla owner launched went in favor of granting amnesty to accounts that had been censored by Twitter.
Baer said, “Well Boris, I can tell you one thing, Putin is going to be all over Twitter.
“If there’s no regulations on this, fake accounts, spoofed accounts, the rest of it – this is a great opportunity for him. And so when he’s talking about the popular voice, Musk he’s really talking about Russian intelligence.”
He added: “The Russians are waiting for something like this. They need a propaganda campaign against the United States and against our support for Ukraine, and they’re gonna be all over Twitter – I guarantee this – supporting the far right, plans, demands to stop arming Ukraine. You just wait.”
Baer explained how Russia could use the platform for a disinformation campaign: “What Putin’s gonna do, and the Russians, is they’re gonna use this as a vehicle to save himself in Ukraine. And you know, whether it’s gonna work or not, I don’t know. But we’re gonna see, as soon as these restrictions come off, we’re gonna see the Russians all over it.”
Asked how Twitter can combat the spread of disinformation, Baer said that the platform was already doing it before Musk took over.
“Well that’s why the pre-Musk Twitter had 7000 people going through these accounts. You can pick ‘em out with algorithms, you can pick ‘em out by looking at ‘em. You can check IPs and the rest of it, and you simply block ‘em,” the CIA analyst explained.
7000 was the approximate total number of employees at Twitter, not the size of the moderation team.
Baer blasted Musk’s idea of free speech, saying, “And it’s not right. And you know, this freedom of speech is just nonsense, ’cause you can’t go into a movie theater and yell, ‘fire!’ It’s against the law,” – 🛡 repeating a statement that in itself is misinformation.
November 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | CIA, Human rights, United States |
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‘Hate speech’ laws are not simply censorship. Their deeper purpose is to terminate equality under the law, so the normative indigenous members of a nation are made to feel like an alien underclass.
Pawns Take Out the Kings & Queens
Those who have doubted that Western Civilisation is in the process of being dismantled are about to receive their definitive reply. The supposedly ‘unavoidable’ fire-brigade damage inflicted on our freedoms in the Spring of 2020, which has never been repaired or reversed, is about to be consolidated. The shout of ‘Emergency!’ was at that time sufficient to quiet most objections and provide reassurance that this was indeed a temporary imposition. Now, two and a half years later, the maintenance vans pull up and the workmen start to scrutinise the damage done by the firemen — the windows shattered by their axes, the shards of glass still protruding dangerously upwards, the splintered frames. As we look on expectantly, imagining that they are about to replace the broken glass and repair the damaged frames, another convoy of vehicles pulls up, this time bearing men with sledgehammers, crowbars, pneumatic drills, wonder bars, angle grinders — and, bringing up the rear, a scammel transporter with a large crane and wrecking ball. It becomes clear that what the workmen have in mind is not reconstruction, but demolition.
Thus, the ‘emergency’ is signalled as over and the Era of Permanent Despotism begins. Now we move into the world predicted two years ago by one Larry Fink, the CEO of the world’s leading assets management behemoth, BlackRock: ‘Markets don’t like uncertainty. Markets like, actually . . . totalitarian governments, where you have an understanding of what’s out there, and obviously the whole dimension is changing now with a democratisation of countries. And democracies are very messy.’
Since those fateful days in the Spring of 2020, this was always going to happen, being baked into the lockdown cake. This is because, if an ‘authority’ suspends supposedly inalienable rights and freedoms, and then, after a long period of withholding them without objectively discernible justification, trickles their simulacrum back out under the rubric of concession, it soon becomes clear that these rights and freedoms have ceased to exist. After that, it is only a matter of carting the husks away.
The portents of this were present from the beginning — in the absence of appropriate responses from media and ‘civil liberties’ bodies, in the strange mutism that gripped the familiar voices of objection and dissent — the poets, artists, philosophers — in the vacuum created by dogs not barking. It is like — as we have so often repeated in mutating sentences to ourselves, as though trying to hit upon a new formulation that would magic some new apprehension of the meaning of things — we have awoken in a world after a long, oblivious sleep, to find that the world has not merely changed but turned into something like the opposite of what we recall from the moments before unconsciousness. Out in the street in search of clues as to the dateline, we make eye-contact in the hope of encountering someone as troubled by what we are finding as ourselves, but receive back merely blank, indifferent stares. The New Normal is already normalised, and our memories of freedom and reason are as though increasingly unreliable, if not actual signs of derangement.
On mature reflection, it becomes clear that the era of freedom was not a stage along the way to Utopia, but a brief experiment that has now been abandoned as a failure. Only certain elements of the Freedom Revolution have been deemed worthy of retention: the right of the richest to stay rich; the rights of nonces and perverts to have their evil ways with children; the right of those claiming victimhood to plunder the reserves of those entitled to make no such claim. All this was set out in advance in the loosely framed prospectus known as Cultural Marxism. Even those who took the warnings on this score seriously did not take them seriously enough, for this new formula for human co-existence was in deadly earnest, whereas we thought it had something to do with the passing disgruntlement of the young or the ideological fancy of some of life’s losers. Now, or at least soon, we shall begin to see that it is all meant to be permanent and, once accomplished, irreversible.
Each former nation and its former citizens will soon discover their own concrete examples of what is a universal project of reversing the presumed gains made within Western civilisation going back to the Magna Carta. Some 30 months ago, we passed the terminus of the period of personal freedom, barely even remarking the moment, which occurred on perhaps an evening in late February or early March of 2020. Since then, we may have noticed in fits and starts that most of what we had always taken for granted about our terms of existence in the public world had changed utterly. The assumption that, as free people, we had the right to walk unfettered down a road or street, answerable to no one; or speak our minds on matters that struck discordantly our sense of justice or truth; or speak casually using possessive adjectives like ‘my’ or ‘our’ in respect of a house or a country — all this was coming to an end. In the interval between the initial sledgehammer blows to the windows of our liberty and the arrival of the demolition crews to take down the remnants of Western civilisation, we had gotten accustomed to being, you might say, pampered serfs, a condition that perhaps had some residual harmonic in the tom-tom rifts rippling through from back the ancestral line. We were ready for the next bulletin from on high. And now it has arrived, or is about to arrive, to a notice board near you, and the chief ‘takeaway’ is that the pampering is about to come to an end.
This week, in my country, Ireland, the bulletin board has overnight been posted with a new set of instructions, concerning what may be written, said or — in the first analysis — thought. It is called the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022, and relates to the issue that has become known as ‘hate speech’, which refers to the manner in which the citizenry is henceforth to be permitted to speak to and about certain named categories of ‘protected minorities’ whom we awoke not long ago to find unexpectedly in our midst. A quarter of a century ago, most of these minorities were unrepresented in our country, and no one dreamed that it might be necessary to introduce ‘hate speech’ legislation to protect the population from the various categories of ‘hate’ going around at that time. Since the turn of the millennium, however, our political class, under instructions from unseen external masters, has been diluting our population with indifferent aliens, more or less randomly selected or self-selecting, and delivered here for the purpose of sundering the claimed attachment of the Irish to the country they once thought of as ‘theirs’ — this country called ‘Ireland’. The Irish in general did not react with hostility to the newcomers, but that may have been because neither did they understand that the influence of new arrivals here was merely the first step in a much more elaborate and ominous process. This moment of the commencement of the Era of Permanent Despotism, however, brings a new dimension: the news that these outsiders are not merely hopeful newcomers, to be welcomed or tolerated or resented or embraced, but in fact the legal inheritors of what we once thought of as ‘our’ country. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022 makes this abundantly clear: These people are not in any sense to be regarded as having come here as mendicants or aspirants, but as the legally protected instruments of a new order that essentially excludes those who were here all along.
The idea of Ireland belonging to the Irish is now legally dead — the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022 makes that quite clear. The idea of ‘my’ or ‘our’ country is dead too: It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
I confess that, having warned at some length about the dangers of the Irish manifestation of ‘hate speech’ laws — well in advance of their arrival — (see here and here),
I had lapsed into a distracted complacency at the moment of their publication in draft form last week. Bizarrely throwing myself at the mercy of jounaliars — a word I actually invented! — I read a number of media accounts that appeared to suggest that the sting of the proposals had been pulled — possibly on legal advice — and what remained was merely a reheating of existing lip service provision concerning ‘incitement to hatred’, which had barely if ever been used in its prior manifestation.
This article from the Irish Mirror, sent to me by a friend, provides an example.
Its description of the draft legislation expressly states that its primary purpose is to augment existing law with regard to crimes perceived to have an aggravating element of prejudice — or ‘hatred’ — based on, for example, race or sexual identity.
The report states:
The new Bill will create, for the first time in Ireland, specific hate crime offences.
They will be in the guise of aggravated forms of existing criminal offences where offenders are motivated by hatred of a protected characteristic such as race, colour, nationality, religion, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity and disability.
The report, citing a Department of Justice statement, later elaborates:
‘All offences that were aggravated by a hate element will incur penalties that are higher than the ordinary form of the offense [sic], unless the penalties are already set at the maximum possible.
‘The Bill also provides that in any offence, other than the specific aggravated offences, where the Court determines that the perpetrator was motivated by prejudice in carrying out the offence, the Court shall treat that as an aggravating factor in sentencing the person.’
Even allowing for the article’s extreme tendentiousness and sensationalist mode of expression, it was hard, reading it, to see how such a measure could be any more than tedious, a nod toward multiculturalism, progressivism, et cetera, and therefore no great cause for concern. Perhaps our commentaries at the preliminary stages had had some effect? After reading the article, I responded reassuringly to what I thought my friend’s somewhat overwrought response to it, foolishly using the Mirror report as my point of reference:
In my estimation it will have no effect: The new Act is a paper tiger, which has been radically watered down from the early proposals and drafts of the Bill. This legislation requires an actual crime to have been committed, which may then be deemed to be of greater gravity by virtue of some ‘hate’ dimension. So it will only be relevant if, for example, someone assaults another person and it emerges that they were motivated by racism, or whatever. The sole area in which it might have relevance for commentators arises if the police were to engineer a situation where a crime was committed and could be linked to some utterance of a public figure. If someone beats up some nonce, for example, and offers as a defence that he was inspired to do it by Gemma O’Doherty, John Waters [et cetera]. But such prosecutions are already provided for in the 1989 Incitement to Hatred Act, which has been used about half a dozen times in 33 years, and never for this purpose. It is clear that the legal advice the Government was receiving made clear that they had no constitutional basis for creating the law they were seeking to, in which someone could have someone else prosecuted for ‘hate speech’ on the basis that he or she was ‘offended’ by something that person said, even if the ‘offence’ was targeted at someone else who was not offended. This Act is a very long way from that, and is clearly a face-saving exercise intended to reassure the Combine that ‘something is being done about hate speech’, when in reality little or nothing is altered.
Wrong, wrong, WRONG! I cannot say whether the article — and others of a similar nature that I have come across — was intended as a piece of deliberate misdirection, or whether it was simply a lazy co-option of a departmental press release with perhaps a similar objective, but either way it could scarcely have been pitched at a further remoteness from the truth. Certainly the author of the article does not appear to have had a copy of the draft Bill in front of him as he wrote his prejudicial diatribe, since virtually all of the article is directed at the provisions contained in the second half of the Bill, so that he would have had to plough his way through the most radical and important elements in order to construct the article as he did. This may indeed be part of a deliberate strategy to lull the public into a false sense of complacency — insofar as the public is exercised in the matter at all, which to a high degree it is not. In any event, it briefly lulled me into something that does not flatter me. It was several more days before I came to read the draft Bill, and what I found therein rattled me to the core of my being.
********************
Having since had an opportunity to read the draft Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022, I believe it to be extremely dangerous and, in fact, capable of, in the first instance, entirely deleting what is left of public debate or discussion on a number of issues: viz, race, ‘colour’, sexuality, what is called gender, Islam, atheism, et cetera — i.e. ‘protected characteristics’, which essentially means characteristics protected under Political Correctness/Cultural Marxism — as well as, purely tokenistically, nationality, disability and ‘descent’, whatever that may be.
Essentially, the Bill identifies and lists (though mostly without defining) the qualifying ‘protected characteristics’ which entitle a person to enhanced protection from the critical opinions of others under such headings. Instead of ‘critical opinions’, however, the Bill uses the term ‘hatred’, an amorphous term that is nowhere defined other than tautologously, as follows:
‘hatred’ means hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.
The Bill co-opts ideological definitions like ‘colour’ and ‘gender’ without defining them legally or in everyday terms. Instead it presents a series of inter-linking reiterative terms that simply assume the definitions to be already clear.
‘Gender’, for example, is ‘defined’ as follows:
‘gender’ means the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female.
To the apocryphal man arrived from the Moon, this might refer to anything from hair-colour to horsepower.
In some contexts, by way of offering clarification, readers of the Bill are referred to the EU Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of November 2008, dealing with ‘combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law’. (Confirming that the Bill is, accordingly, the expression of EU policy and mandates.) However, the Framework Decision tells us very little else, its ‘definitions’ being just as tautologous as those in the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022, which lazily informs that ‘A word or expression that is used in this Act and is also used in the Framework Decision has, unless the context otherwise requires, the same meaning in this Act as it has in the Framework Decision.’
‘Hatred’, for example, is defined in the Framework Decision as follows:
‘Hatred’ shall be understood as referring to hatred based on race, colour, religion, descent, or national or ethnic origin.
This is in no sense a definition of ‘hatred’. In fact, it tells us nothing of what hatred is, assuming that everyone already knows. The trouble is that, when the law starts to trick around with notions that ‘everyone already knows’, we very rapidly descend into subjectivism, arbitrariness, and — yes — prejudice.
Other critical words, terms and concepts are not defined at all. The concept of ‘incitement’, for example, is nowhere spelt out as to its meaning or particularities in either the Bill or the EU Council Framework Decision. What are to be the thresholds between acceptable public discourse (said to be protected in the Bill, but never defined) and what is called ‘hatred’? Who decides, and on what basis, is never specified.
Due to the paucity of adequate definitions, the Bill, once passed, would place virtually all consideration of the relevant issues in the hands of judges — all or most of whom are likely to be in sympathy with the Cultural Marxist agenda, or at least aware of which side their bread is buttered on — or juries likely to be prejudiced by relentless, expensively-purchased propaganda and NGO agitation.
In relation to the headline ‘offence’ of ‘incitement to violence or hated to persons on account of their protected characteristics’, the Bill would in effect render unsafe any commentary at all on certain contentious issues — for example transgenderism, immigration and the activities of homosexuals and/or LGBT activists. This is because the framework of the legislation is so hastily sketched out that it would be a matter ultimately for the subjective appraisal of a judge as to whether the alleged offence constituted a ‘hate crime’ or not, requiring would-be critics of the policy or campaign in question to err on the side of extreme caution. The result would be an inevitable chilling of all commentary in these areas.
The same will apply in respect of the consequence of the section headed ‘Offence of condonation, denial or gross trivialisation of genocide, etc., against persons on account of their protected characteristics’
The introduction of such an offence would, I believe, destroy any possibility of achieving revision of established understandings of key historical events, even if new information were to become available, rendering the existing interpretations cast in stone. Indeed, it is possible that, in certain circumstances, it might open up the possibility of rendering the use of the word ‘genocide’ illegal for all usage except in respect of those formally approved prior episodes in which it is already an agreed definition (i.e. ‘events specified in Article 6 of the Rome Statute’ — issued by the International Criminal Court in Rome on July 17th, 1998). This might mean, for example, that someone describing the Covid vaccination programme as ‘genocide’, in a context in which ‘hatred’ of some individual or group covered by the ‘protected characteristics’ provision was in the mix, might find themselves on the hook under this heading also and thereby liable, on summary conviction, to a sentence of up to 12 months, or, in the case of convictions on indictment, a sentence of five years imprisonment.
The offence of incitement would mean, in effect, that anyone who, in seeking to comment on certain controversial matters, risked ignoring the new underfoot conditions might be subject to prosecution on foot of the actions of random or unknown individuals which had simply been associated by the prosecutorial authorities or some (not necessarily implicated) complainant with some statement of that person at any time in the past. The connection could be made subjectively and would only need to satisfy a test of ‘reasonableness’, whatever that might mean.
It also seems that someone could be convicted under this legislation for simply possessing material likely to incite hatred — for example, a book by an author — such as Douglas Murray’s books about mass immigration and Woke insanity, for example — who is critical of issues implicating individuals or groups with ‘protected characteristics’.
The relevant section here specifies that a person shall be guilty of an offence of inciting violence or hatred if he/she ‘prepares or possesses material that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics or any of those characteristics with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public, whether by himself or herself or another person . . . or being reckless as to whether such violence or hatred is thereby incited.’ It shall be a defence to plead that the material was purely for the defendant’s own use, but if ‘it is reasonable to assume that the material was not intended for the personal use of the person’, the person shall be presumed, until the contrary is proved, to have been in possession of the material for the purposes of disseminating it to others.
In any particular case where allegations are made under the provisions of this legislation, if passed into law, concerning incitement to violence or hatred, or condoning or trivialising genocide, a search warrant may be obtained to search any premises at which any relevant material is alleged to exist. If a judge of the District Court is satisfied by information on oath of a police officer that there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that evidence of, or relating to, the commission of an offence is to be found in a particular place, the judge may issue a warrant for the search of that place and any persons found there. The investigators may use ‘reasonable force’ to enter the place named in the warrant, to search it and anyone found there, and to ‘examine, seize and retain anything found at that place, or anything found in possession of a person present at that place at the time of the search’, that the investigating officer(s) reasonably believe(s) to be evidence of, or relating to, the commission of an offence.
The legislation will also permit the seizure and retention of any such material — for example a computer or document — ‘for so long as is necessary’. The officer conducting the search may open and operate any computer found at the location or require anyone present to supply relevant passwords or encryption keys, or operate a computer for the purpose of enabling a search of its contents, and, if requested, to produce the information accessible by the computer ‘in a form in which the information is visible and legible, or . . . in which it can be removed and in which it is, or can be made, visible and legible.’
In other words, Welcome to Stasi Ireland, changed utterly in the name of progress and ‘tolerance’: totalitarianism bearing down on all in the name of defending the sensitivities of noisy minorities.
Incidentally, the generality of the Bill’s provisions refers to material being disseminated ‘to the public’ and to ‘a section of the public’, suggesting that it shall not be a defence to argue that the commentary was — in whatever sense — ‘in-house’ — even if the location of the alleged offence was a private house: it is entirely probable that the law will be applied to statements made in a private dwelling where non-family members are present and have elected to file a complaint.
The religious aspects are confusing (religion is, nominally at least, a ‘protected characteristic’) and likely to be of no benefit in protecting any aspects of Christian culture or belief. For the first time, atheism becomes a protectorate of Cultural Marxism. Since the Government has already taken steps to remove anti-blasphemy legislation and its constitutional underpinning, it is scarcely credible that the effect of this law would be to restore it in substance, other than for groups (like Muslims) that are protected under another characteristic as well.
The supposed ‘free speech provision’ of the Bill is meaningless and toothless, since it offers only the promise that consideration of a reference to a person or group on the basis of protected characteristics shall not ‘solely’ be the basis of the court’s decision. Again this is ringed around with non-specific concepts and loose definitions. There is supposedly a provision allowing for ‘reasonable and genuine contributions’, in the contexts of literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse, and we are told that this means ‘a contribution that is considered by a reasonable person as being reasonably necessary or incidental to such discourse.’ Again, who decides this? How is ‘reasonably necessary’ to be measured? In a highly-charged, propagandised culture such as Ireland has recently been converted into, how can this be regarded as offering any guarantee of protection to someone seeking to advance unpopular, untested or culturally unsupported viewpoints? And, since the public discourse occurs primarily to support the advancement of tentative and often esoteric ideas, how can this be described as a protection for freedom of expression and commentary where it might matter? It is interesting, here, that the term ‘reasonable person’ has hitherto been mainly associated, legally speaking, with defamations, where at stake in the judicial process would be the reputation of a specific individual. In such circumstances, the complained-of commentary would be defensible by dint of truth or fair comment, but here, since the entire crucible is decked out in ideology, anyone who detects disparagement of himself under a ‘protected characteristic’ will be able to trump any defence of free expression by virtue of his hurt feelings. Before writing, saying something — and yes, according to the Bill, ‘displaying’, ‘publishing’, ‘distributing’, ’disseminating’, ‘showing’ or ‘playing’ such communications, or ‘making the material available in any other way including through the use of an information system to the public or a section of the public’ — the would-be cultural critic will therefore need to think about how his remarks will go down with the most ideologically-slanted person in the (court)room.
Indeed, the restriction is likely to go much further in practice, since the text of the legislation refers to problematic ‘behaviour’ as well as statements.
For the purposes of this Part, a person’s behaviour shall include behaviour of any kind and, in particular, things that the person says, or otherwise communicates, as well as things that the person does and such behaviour may consist of a single act or a course of conduct.
What this means is anyone’s guess, but it is certain that, by ‘behaving’ — i.e., by being alive and breathing in a public space — a person may be liable to prosecution under this legislation. It all depends on how his ‘behaviour’ or ‘communications’ is/are interpreted by the most angry/paranoid individual in the vicinity. For once in this piece of draft legislation, we have stumbled upon a reliable — if accidental — definition, for this is the precise definition of totalitarianism.
Under the heading of ‘incitement to hatred’, the Bill supplants the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act, 1989, which will be repealed in the new law, if it is passed. This crime, it appears, can now be committed either with intent or inadvertently, since the criteria include inciting violence or hatred against a protected group or person with or without the intention of doing so. The criterion, again, will be whether some unspecified observer, applying some unspecified non-definition, believes that such an incident of incitement has occurred. Here, the Bill again provides for the defence of ‘genuine contribution to literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse’, but nothing of this is defined, and already the NGO lobbyists are screaming blue murder against any such defence being permitted. Indeed, the incorporation of ‘bodies corporate’ within the scope of the Bill’s prosecutorial reach will mean that theatres, media organisations, cinemas, art galleries, political organisations, churches, schools and colleges, and scientific bodies may be held responsible for anything said or communicated, or any behaviour of any person on its property, that is found to fall under the heading of ‘hatred’.
A body corporate shall be liable if the relevant offence is ‘attributable to the failure, by a director, manager, secretary or other officer of the body corporate, or a person purporting to act in that capacity, to exercise, at the time of the commission of the relevant offence and in all the circumstances of the case, the requisite degree of supervision or control of the relevant person.’ In such circumstances, the body corporate shall be guilty of an offence.
As regards jurisdiction, the Bill stipulates that its provisions should apply to all material placed on any information system, ‘whether or not the offence involved material hosted on an information system in the State’, or ‘whether or not the person was in the State when the offence was committed.’ This would seem to mean that any person, in any country, might be liable to prosecution in Ireland for anything posted on any such information system, regardless of the location of that system. Again, total totalitarianism.
All in all, it is an extremely dangerous piece of legislation every bit as bad as was promised by the various projections and drafts we saw coming through over the past couple of years. In effect, anyone seeking to speak publicly about any of the issues relating to ‘protected characteristics’ (chiefly Cultural Marxist obsessions) would be taking their liberty in their hands.
Let us be straightforward: The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 is essentially a Bill to protect the pursuit of the externally imposed policy amounting to a programme for the destruction of Ireland from any internal commentary or criticism.
A friend observes: ‘Even in the Arts (theatre, literature, painting, film-making, etc), anything that ‘offends’ those protected anti-Christian minorities will be deemed a hate crime offender, hence, culture is f****d. If they carry out this law in a draconian way and start jailing people, Ireland will become unliveable. Basically, it’s a law that prevents heteronormative people and Christians from expressing the truth.’
This, of course, is entirely correct. The vagueness of the legislation will, if anything, exacerbate its intrinsically tyrannical nature, imposing a chilling cautiousness on those who might be disposed to challenge proposed initiatives and developments, especially those proposing the most radical changes to Irish society. These laws will therefore enable even the most far-reaching of reality-reshaping measures to be pushed through the institutions of society without any possibility of proper discussion or debate.
But, over and above all that, the proposed law is a charter for the disincorporation of each and every existing Irish-born person as a proprietorial shareholder of the nation of Ireland, from which flows the inevitable effect of winding up the Irish nation as a community of people sharing the same island space. ‘Hate speech’ laws are not simply censorship — their deeper purpose is to terminate equality under the law, so that the normative indigenous members of a nation are made to feel like an alien underclass, while the actually imported underclass, and the State-sponsored disaffected, are used as battering rams to decimate the native culture and existing societal structures — the pawns taking out the Sovereign People, Kings and Queens alike.
This has, finally, triggered the vindication of the fear expressed by the great Irish journalist and patriot, Thomas Davis:
‘This country of ours is no sand bank, thrown up by some recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, honoured in its archives of civilisation, traceable into antiquity by its piety, its valour, and its sufferings. Every great European race has sent its stream to the river of Irish mind. Long wars, vast organisations, subtle codes, beacon crimes, leading virtues, and self-mighty men were here. If we live influenced by wind and sun and tree, and not by the passions and deeds of the past, we are a thriftless and a hopeless people.’
The Government, of course, has such contempt for the intelligence of the Irish public that it will claim that what it is seeking to achieve is a kinder, gentler Ireland for everyone. This is nonsense: The way to achieve a kinder, gentler Ireland would have been to control inward migration to whatever was necessary to meet the needs of the economy, and the limits of what the culture could bear. At the very least, it would have entailed consulting the population concerning what a succession of governments since the turn of the millennium has imposed. By dint of stealth and moral blackmail, the political class has, for more than 20 years, been flooding the country with indifferent aliens who come here seeking benefits and are coached on arrival by NGOs to treat the host population as inherently racist. This, too, is a key element of the Cultural Marxist agenda, which seeks to impose burdens of guilt on ‘white’ populations on foot of the mixed history of Western imperialism. Ireland, however, far from having an imperial past, was itself, for hundreds of years, the casualty of English colonialism, having had much of its culture, including its language annihilated by barbaric laws, and its population periodically decimated by genocide camouflaged as natural disaster. These calamities also, of course, provoked the mass exodus of population to the New World and Britain, leaving Ireland in the early years of the third millennium semantically helpless before the disingenuous charge that, its own people having been ‘welcomed’ in these places, the Ireland of 2010 and 2020 had a responsibility to repay the favour to the universe. What is never allowed is that Irish people went abroad with little or no chance of ever returning home, to work like Trojans in menial jobs in inhospitable places, leaving their native land to stagnate for want of youthful energy and creativity.
Ireland, then, itself a sufferer at the hands of globalist colonialism, has in recent years been force-fed a diet of imported ideology, including Critical Race Theory, which creates a public discussion bearing the almost constant insinuation that Ireland is on a par with Alabama in its past treatment of black and coloured people. The truth could hardly be more different, but truth has been among the most recent emigrants from the Emerald Isle. The result is that the Irish Government, under instructions from the EU bureaucrats, now invites the world to our shores, with promises of free houses, incomes without obligation, immunity from all kinds of legal consequences for wrongdoing — and now: cultural protection from the merest slight of a disgruntled native who is himself entitled to none of these benefits. This week, homelessness among Irish people approached 11,000 — the highest ever recorded — while a massive building near Castlebar was being prepared to house a further tranche of (alleged) Ukrainians. Irish people live in tents and cardboard boxes while Ukrainians, supposedly ‘fleeing a war zone’, but without encountering any process of vetting or verification, move into duplex apartments at the taxpayer’s expense.
Among the true objectives of the ‘hate speech’ legislation is to protect a treasonous political class against criticism from its own taxpaying population for the crimes it is committing against them, its treachery against the heroes of the long struggle to achieve freedom at a cost invariably paid in blood and life-force, and ultimately the destruction of one of the oldest and intellectually richest cultures in human history.
But even this is not the deepest, most malevolent of the reasons why the Irish political class — Irish-born men and women who have been privileged to be entrusted with care of their country and its inheritance, are in 2022 seeking to impose these new Penal Laws on their own people. The deepest reason has to do with facilitating powerful and already wealthy outsiders in plundering Ireland of everything worth taking, nailed down or otherwise.
The proposed law will destroy — as is the uppermost intention behind it — the concept of equality before the law. It need hardly be pointed out that the Bill, while presenting itself as a charter for increased tolerance and societal gentleness, is in reality a charter for the dominance of minorities over the pre-existing population. In each individual case, it will defend, uphold or elevate that which is alien, esoteric or abnormative, which means that the normal, the here-before and the undemanding get stuffed and silenced every time. It is obvious that anyone who imagines they will be able to use the law to defend themselves from attacks on their Catholicism/Christianity would be barking up the wrong tree. Similarly anyone imagining that it offers some kind of protection from what the new gender ideology classes as ‘cis gender’ persons (i.e. those who wish to remain as they were made) had better think again. The law will benefit listed minorities only, and everyone else will be laughed out of court by the occupiers of a now all but totally corrupted Bench. Because this is a Cultural Marxist-inspired law, it is designed to weaponise the grievances of minorities so as to silence and thereafter dispossess the indigenous former majority. The trick is that it empowers each individual only in particular sub-divisions of his existence — sexuality, colour, et cetera — while simultaneously denying him as much as anyone else the generic rights that citizens of Western democracies (now ‘former democracies’) took for granted until the day before yesterday. Even the most ‘protected characteristic’ endowed beneficiaries will be entitled to prosecute their grievance only on the narrow basis of particular, singular characteristics, and in other contexts have the same rights as everyone else, which is to say practically none. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022 will not restore to any person walking upon the sand bank of 2023 Ireland the rights which the political class stole from the Irish people in 2020, with no intention of restoring.
Once the Bill passes into law, what for the moment we might call the ‘native Irish’ will immediately become second-class legal citizens, being in a sense the prisoners and slaves of newcomers boasting legally superior ‘protected characteristics’ that give them exalted protection in any dispute with a native Irish person. Each surviving member of the native Irish will thereafter live on tenterhooks, waiting for the moment of accusation, to be followed hard in the ideological kangaroo courts of post-Irish Ireland by conviction, punishment, incarceration, and thereafter lifetime ignominy. Placing this alongside other imminent measures, such as the banning of public protests under certain headings (abortion, for example), the ‘delimiting’ of private property, and the seizure by the State of rights over every drop of water in the land, what we are observing is the introduction of a new charter of Penal Laws directed at the indigenous people of Ireland, albeit this time framed and implemented not by a monstrous occupier by their own elected ‘representatives’, the ‘monsters with human faces’ who smile as they help the robber barons to steal our children’s birthright. Be in no doubt: The ultimate purpose of this is the wholesale plunder of all resources that have not already been transferred into the ownership/control of the Combine.
What is happening, then, amounts to the final dispossession, re-plantation and re-colonisation of Ireland and the re-enslavement of the indigenous Irish people, using indifferent aliens baited by fistfuls of toytown money, as the principal instrument of plunder.
The present moment is a little analogous to what occurred a decade ago, when the Irish electorate was persuaded to annul the parental rights of parents, essentially transferring them in their entirely to the State, in the name of giving ‘rights to children’. This cleared the way for gay marriage, gay parenting and ‘legal’ gay families, at the expense of the normative and natural definitions arising from procreative heterosexuality. In a somewhat comparable fashion, enforced mass migration is an instrument of rights-stripping in the context of the nationhood of the individual: each newcomer is set against each indigenous person, who is thereby cancelled out and reduced to a free-floating nomad in his own former country. That much of this process will be effected on an ostensibly ‘voluntary’ basis — i.e, people surrendering to the chilling intent of the legislation — is all part of the plan. When it is all done and dusted, and the old Irish take belatedly to recrimination, they will be told that there was nothing in the least coercive about the handover: They went along with everything of their own free will, and have no one to blame but themselves.
It is important to stress that what is happening is in no sense or respect intended to be to the ultimate benefit of the newcomers, who are simply being used as proxy occupiers so as to effect the first, and most difficult, stage of dispossession. To loosen the grip on Ireland of a people who, in many instances, can trace their lineage there for hundreds or thousands of years, is a massive undertaking. The purpose, in the first instance, as already stated, is to dislodge the Sovereign People, and the proxies are here used as pawns to take out the Kings and Queens who have lived here all their lives and thought of this, their metaphysical home, as being no sand bank thrown up by some recent caprice of earth.
November 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Ireland |
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Samizdat – 26.11.2022
WASHINGTON – Twitter’s new owner, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, says he will create a new smartphone if the social network is removed from the Apple and Google app stores.
“I certainly hope it does not come to that, but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone,” Musk tweeted on Friday, in response to a user’s suggestion that Musk should produce his own phone instead of the “biased, snooping iPhone and Android,” if the Twitter app becomes unavailable on them.
On October 28, Musk finalized the acquisition of Twitter, which cost him $44 billion. Following the takeover, Musk changed the company’s day-to-day operations, including the termination of Twitter’s executives, who were responsible for the platform’s privacy and cybersecurity, as well as regular Twitter employees. The significant policy changes have caused a wave of concern.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing market research data, that more than one-third of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers had stopped putting ads on the social media platform in the two weeks following Musk’s takeover of the company.
Earlier this month, Twitter unblocked former US President Donald Trump’s account, banned after the January 6, 2021 events at the US Capitol, as the majority of participants in a survey conducted by Musk voted in favor of the measure.
Musk has promised that Twitter will reinstate blocked accounts after the majority of users voted for “general amnesty.”
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Apple, Google, Human rights, Twitter |
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The US’ destructive wars on Muslim countries launched in the wake of 9/11 under the misplaced rubric known notoriously as the “War on Terror” spawned senseless deaths and bloodshed on an unprecedented scale.
The George W. Bush administration, heavily infested with neoconservatives and Likudniks, contemptuously ignored and wilfully disregarded the sovereign status of Muslim lands by unleashing invasions, bombings, massacres and, ultimately, occupying them.
In a gross display of raw power, the US shamelessly sought to demonstrate its unchallenged position as a military superpower to refashion the world in its image.
Since the unmistakable target of US belligerence was Islam and Muslims, it adopted a well-worn Israeli strategy by dehumanising victims as “terrorists”. The tactic was designed to fool the world by claiming that the war was not on “good Muslims” but only the “bad ones” depicted as “terrorists”.
Against this backdrop, one is reminded of the extent of maliciousness associated with the War on Terror paradigm and the abuse of justice flowing therefrom.
A classic example in this regard is the case of what became known as the “Holy Land Foundation Five (HLF5)”.
Fourteen years ago, five highly respected US-based Palestinian academics were unfairly targeted and jailed for providing humanitarian aid to orphans and widows in Palestine.
They have been described as the “Holy Land Five” who were actively involved in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) based in Texas.
The HLF was, at the time, the largest Muslim welfare and charity organisation in the US until it was singled out and hounded by the Bush administration and Israeli forces.
Using the cover of the War on Terror and fuelled by hostile Zionist agencies who profiled the HLF as a “nest of terror”, it was shut down in December 2001 by US authorities.
The case against the “Holy Land five” led to the wrongful conviction and unjust long-term imprisonment of five highly respected Palestinian men. Three of them – Mufid Abdulqader, Ghassan Elashi and Shukri Abu Baker – remain imprisoned today.
The two others, Abdulrahman Odeh and Mohammed El-Mezain, sentenced to 15 years each, were released in 2020 and 2022, respectively.
An intriguing yet deplorable aspect of the highly politically charged case is the fact that these men were convicted on false charges of “providing material support to terrorism,” even though they were never even accused of funding the legitimate armed resistance to Israeli occupation and colonisation.
According to various reports, including by Samidoun, interestingly, the same charities funded by the Holy Land Foundation were also funded by the International Red Cross and even USAID, the US Agency for International Development.
In other words, the criteria for aiding or funding “terrorism” ought to have been applicable to the International Red Cross and USAID, rendering them “guilty” as well.
However, as is known, the Holy Land Foundation was selectively targeted and borne out by the fact that after failing to convict the HLF5 in their first attempt, the US judiciary allowed untested “evidence” by an anonymous Israeli intelligence agent.
The War on Terror has and remains a playbook on how to subvert justice to gain political goals. The dubious, torture-produced “evidence” by a faceless Israeli spook against the HLF5 was typical sensationalism and anti-Palestinian bigotry.
Though Israel’s subversion of US politics is a well-known documented fact, it cannot remain unchallenged. By the same token, the ill-conceived path of destruction known as the War on Terror needs to be derailed, and its perpetrators brought to justice.
And the case of the three men who remain behind bars deserves a global campaign to secure their freedom.
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Islamophobia, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Human rights, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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If you are like me, you are exhausted of the lies. Every day seems to bring new revelations about how our lives came to be upended. The connections are becoming clearer between the pandemic response and the growing economic crisis, the ballooning debt, the growth of the surveillance state, the corruption and scams, chilling absence of integrity in public life, and, with the failure of FTX, the way in which an outright financial scam was integral to the calamity.
While we await new revelations, depositions, coverups, pleas for amnesty, and bad economic news, whom can we trust? Is anyone telling the truth?
Today was Anthony Fauci’s last White House press conference, and he spoke as if life is all normal and everything is fine. It’s as if the whole disaster never happened. He never locked anyone down, he says. He is happy for any investigations, he says, because he has nothing to hide. And then he ended with a final push for everyone to get booster #5 or whatever number we are on.
It’s like we live in two universes: our own lives in which we read true things in some places, and official life, in which shills and publicists keep repeating the same nonsense over and over without flinching or providing anything like an honest account of these last three years.
Perhaps for this reason – and also because by any historical standard this is a tremendous autobiography – reading Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s Transcend Fear is a welcome relief from the nonsense of our times. It is brutally honest. It is emotionally affecting. It is careful and precise but also deeply radical in its observations. If what’s called the “public health world” has lost touch with both the public and health, this book provides a path to restoring it. In short, it is a beautiful and inspiring experience.
Dr. Ladapo is the Surgeon General of the State of Florida, picked by Governor Ron DeSantis to forge and explain the state’s health decisions and priorities to the public in the midst of a grave crisis. He has faced down the national press time and time again with Zen-like wisdom. He seems emotionally unflappable while also sticking to the science as he understands it. He is the only public health official in the country who has been upfront about the limits of the vaccines and warned healthy young people that they don’t need them.
What we learn from this book is that he has been a warrior against pseudoscience from the very beginning of this pandemic and the government response. After the lockdowns, most scientists and health professionals fell silent, fearing reputational and financial loss. Dr. Ladapo was different, On March 24, 2020, still within the window of “15 Days to Flatten the Curve,” he wrote in USA Today:
We are fretting and we are fuming. As a country, we have been caught miserably flat-footed after receiving warnings about what lay ahead when cases of Covid-19 began exploding in Wuhan, China. Messages from local and state leaders about how to respond to the pandemic change almost daily—a sure sign they have no idea what they are doing. Shutdowns are happening here in California and in New York, and will probably spread to the rest of the nation….
Here’s the problem: Because of the (understandable) fear and hysteria of the moment, few US leaders are seriously talking about the endgame. The epidemiologic models I’ve seen indicate that the shutdowns and school closures will temporarily slow the virus’ spread, but when they’re lifted, we will essentially emerge right back where we started. And, by the way, no matter what, our hospitals will still be overwhelmed. There has already been too much community spread to prevent this inevitability.
We don’t have a totalitarian government like China, and we value our civil liberties too much to take the measures (i.e., total lockdown) that would be needed to rapidly decrease the infection rate to zero. This means that, even with shutdowns, the virus will still spread. Unfortunately, this also means that rates of “community immunity,” often referred to as “herd immunity,” will slow. As a result, we will always be vulnerable to the virus spreading rapidly again as soon as shutdown measures are lifted, unless they are immediately reimplemented—over and over and over again.
Was he the first post-lockdown voice from public health profoundly to object in a public forum of this magnitude? Perhaps so. Consider the bravery and presence of mind it required to write those sentences. The entire country was on a wartime footing with unprecedented horribles taking place. The media was screaming “Run for your lives” but most of us weren’t even allowed out of our homes to do that.
These were utterly crazy times. The whole world was going bonkers. And yet this man kept his cool.
This book explains where his cool comes from. You see, he is the son of an immigrant from Nigeria, born 1979. A math and science whiz, he attended Wake Forest and then entered Harvard Medical School. While he was involved in his studies, he noted the existence of the Kennedy School of Government and enrolled there too. On graduation day, he was granted a MD plus a PhD in public policy. So essentially: the highest credentials in two fields that this country offers. He became professor of medicine at New York University and then the University of California, Los Angeles.
The trouble was that none of his training had prepared him to deal with medical issues closer to home, namely his wife’s unrelenting migraines that often landed her in the hospital and his own underlying psychological fears of social interaction. The details are very painful and told in this book with disarming detail. Long story short: his search for answers led him toward alternative medical paths that eventually fixed both issues, and burned a lesson in his mind. Health is individual, and the right path is not the same for everyone and not always found in expertise as codified in the textbooks and institutions.
It was soon after these difficult times that the pandemic broke and, along with it, the claims that the experts had all the answers in lockdowns and eventual universal mandates for vaccination.
Dr. Ladapo had meanwhile developed the self-confidence to speak about such matters truthfully and fearlessly. And he never stopped. He wrote for every venue he could, month after month, urging an end to the lockdowns, a focus on therapeutics, attention to the science we had, and genuine concern for the health of actual individuals, who are not lab rats but people with human rights and freedom.
Even though Dr. Joseph Ladapo is obviously a hero (and one for the ages, so far as I’m concerned), the prose here is remarkably lucid, humble, and precise. That’s why I say that the humane concern in this book is an inspiration. Moreover, reading it is a form of therapy because he connects with a common sense that we all had in 2019 before the world descended into utter madness.
What’s more, this book shows a path forward not only for public health but for all of us as individuals. He urges personal reflection as the first step in recovery, overcoming whatever hidden fears we had that caused too many among us to go along with the preposterous parade of dangerous nonsense that controlled our lives for so long.
In my own view, this book is a classic of our times. Its value added is not only the author’s credentials, though he has them galore, or even how it speaks so directly to issues that have profoundly affected all our lives. Its real value is as a model of autobiography that offers lessons for all of us without exception.
I write as Dr. Fauci just finished his last press conference without offering so much as a hint of apology for what has happened. Meanwhile, I’m sure Dr. Ladapo is tending to his work in Florida where he has been charged with dealing with public health policy with honesty, truth, and wisdom. I know who gets my vote for hero of the pandemic.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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The anti-Arab Religious Zionist party will also be in charge of the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank

Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir, who heads the Religious Zionism party is held back during a special session on 13 June, 2021. (Photo: EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP – Getty Images)
Israel’s Likud party, led by Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu, on 25 November reached its first coalition deal with the Jewish supremacist ‘Religious Zionist’ (Otzma Yehudit) party.
As per the agreement, anti-Arab zealot Itamar Ben Gvir will serve in the newly created role of National Security Minister – an expanded public security minister role – and will have a seat in the security cabinet.
“We took a big step tonight toward a full coalition agreement, toward forming a fully, fully right-wing government … I am happy that the agreement on the ministries that Otzma Yehudit will receive will allow us to realize our election promises,” Ben Gvir said in a statement.
While Likud and the Religious Zionist party have so far only signed an annex to a coalition deal, the agreement will also give Ben Gvir’s extremist group control of the ‘Development of the Negev, Galilee, and National Fortitude Ministry;’ the role of deputy minister in the Ministry of Economy; chairmanship of the Knesset’s Public Security Committee; and rotating chairmanship of the Special Committee for the Israeli Citizens’ Fund (which oversees state revenue from gas drilling).
The ‘Negev and Galilee Ministry’ will specifically be responsible for regulating the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Moreover, Ben Gvir’s freshly minted National Security Ministry will also be handed control over the West Bank Border Police, while a new “expanded southern law” will be implemented that will permit Israeli troops to shoot Palestinians “caught stealing weapons from military bases.”
During this month’s elections, the Religious Zionist party helped Netanyahu secure a commanding 64-seat majority in the Knesset.
The far-right party has on previous occasions called for the formal annexation of the entire occupied West Bank – in violation of international law – as well as the seizure of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem to place it under Jewish ownership.
Ben Gvir himself has led several violent incursions into the Muslim holy site under police protection and has overseen the expulsion of Palestinian worshippers.
Weeks before the election, Ben Gvir made headlines for pulling a gun on Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, urging settlers to shoot at the locals.
He is also an outspoken proponent of creating a “deportation law” that would target anyone who is “disloyal” to the State of Israel.
Earlier this month, Israeli media reported Ben Gvir asked for tougher conditions for Palestinian prisoners, as well as unfettered access for settlers into Al-Aqsa Mosque, during early coalition talks with Likud.
On top of this, just this week, the firebrand lawmaker called for the resumption of targeted assassinations of Palestinians in the wake of a bomb attack in occupied Jerusalem.
November 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism |
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