Charities “Wasting” Money On Staff Unconscious Bias Training
By Richie Allen | February 20, 2021
Some of the UK’s biggest charities have been criticised for spending donations on “unconscious bias” training for staff. Companies pay for courses, often delivered online, where staff are taught to accept that even though they don’t think so, they are in fact inherently racist. The Red Cross and The Alzheimer’s Society are among the charities throwing away public donations on this utter nonsense.
The government scrapped it last year. Previously civil servants had to undergo it, but ministers rightly deemed it a waste of money. The Telegraph newspaper said today that as many as 120 charities are sending staff on courses that will make them aware of their bias. Speaking to the Telegraph, the MP Ben Bradley said:
“Whether they are ticking a diversity box or showing how lovely they are, that money really should be put toward the purpose of the charity. I hope in future that if charities waste the money people donate on things like this then the Government will be able to step in.”
In response, Corinne Mills, director of people and organisational development at Alzheimer’s Society, said:
“Unconscious bias training, offered online only, is one of a number of modules provided to the whole workforce aimed at increasing awareness, skills and confidence on equality, diversity and inclusion. We offer this core training as part of our wider commitment to ensure we have an inclusive workplace that demonstrates respect and values diversity.”
Core training. Gimme a break. What a load of tosh. Lewis Feilder, writing in the Spectator last August said;
We should be worried that firms are seeking to reprogramme their employees’ trains of thought, often through mandatory training, in which the refusal to participate would result in disciplinary action. When delivered by an amateur (and the people teaching these courses are not clinical psychologists), meddling with someone’s subconscious is like sticking a screwdriver into an aircraft engine and waggling it about in the hope it might fix something. We should be very worried about a corporate culture which encourages employers to tinker with their employees’ psyches in whatever manner they see fit, particularly when driven by pseudoscience they barely understand.
I think that it might be part of an agenda to gaslight the population. Telling people that they are subconsciously biased or racist is one part of it. I’ve explored this on The Richie Allen Show. Government and media are constantly breaking us down by telling us we are racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, not inclusive enough, not diverse enough and on and on.
It’s psychological abuse. When you inflict this sort of emotional distress on an individual, it leaves them feeling worthless and helpless. The military does it to new recruits. The idea is to break the young private mentally and then build him/her back the way you want them to be, in the army’s case, a killer. It’s not such a stretch to suggest that it can be used against the population. I think it has been going on for years.
Maybe, just maybe, it goes some way to explaining why the public rolled over and accepted the tyranny of lockdown. Maybe we’re not mentally equipped to stand up to our totalitarian governments as we’ve been stripped of the ability to recognise what is happening. I know that identity politics plays a big part here too, something else I have covered extensively on the radio show.
Richie Allen is the host of The Richie Allen Radio show, Europe’s most listened to independent radio show and is a passionate supporter of free speech. He lives in Salford with the future Mrs Allen and their two dogs.
DHS is paying Deranged Leftists to find a way to make you change your political beliefs
By Eric Striker | National Justice | February 19, 2021
Fresh off a summer of prolonged murder and arson organized by leftists, the Department of Homeland Security announced the lucky winners of its “domestic terrorism prevention” grant system last September.
One recipient program is at American University’s School of Communications, which got $568,613 from the DHS to partner with Google’s Jigsaw (an AI project that specializes in manipulating search results to achieve political ends) in order to “define and describe the growing threat of violent white supremacist extremist disinformation, evaluate attitudinal inoculation as a strategy for communication to combat the threat, and develop a suite of operational tools for use by practitioners and stakeholders.”
The highly subjective language of this description is only the tip of the iceberg. The project is being led by Kurt Braddock, a professor of Public Communications at AU. Braddock is known for pioneering social engineering and Soviet-style indoctrination techniques as a “vaccine” against what he arbitrarily deems to be “hate.”
Braddock’s leading role in this project, which seeks to develop his theories and put them into practice on a wide scale, is cause for concern. He doesn’t hide his fanatical left-wing prejudices, and he makes it a point to show his disregard for fundamental American values like free speech.
“Stochastic Terrorism”
Last month, Braddock penned a piece for Common Dreams declaring Donald Trump a “stochastic terrorist.”
The logic of the stochastic terrorism concept is that an individual engaging in lawful political advocacy should be found guilty of a crime if a person who he has no relationship to but shares his critique crosses the line and becomes violent. In other words, guilt by association.
In his article, he asserts that Trump should’ve been held responsible for the FBI agent instigated plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, merely for previously tweeting the slogan “LIBERATE MICHIGAN.”
To understand the absurdity of the idea, Dylann Roof told investigators that his main inspiration for the shooting spree at the Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina was reading interracial crime statistics, which the FBI itself compiles and releases every year. Under a system that prosecutes stochastic terrorism, the FBI itself would be partially responsible.
For Braddock, there is no such thing as the peaceful expression of beliefs or even raw data that challenges his worldview. Most enlightened people side with Socrates in the trial that found him guilty and put him to death for blasphemy, but the assistant professor upholds the Athenian court’s decision, “As a professor of communication, my teaching and research is based on a fact that has been clear since the days of Socrates– words have consequences,” he says.
In an interview with CBS News earlier this week, he reiterated this view, complaining that “far-right leaders” will be emboldened by Trump’s Senate acquittal into making statements that “motivate the far right” due to seeing a lack of “repercussions.”
The underlying first principle of all of Braddock’s work, seen in works like Weaponized Words which talks about using social psychology and manipulation to alter people’s political values, relies on the assertion that simply disagreeing with him on a broad range of issues is an act of violence.
Braddock’s Experiments Aren’t New
While Braddock may present his ideas and experiments as novel to DHS grant makers, they are in truth mostly taken from the established work of Chinese commissars in the 1970s and 80s.
In Michael Keane’s The Chinese Television Industry, he details the Maoist theory of culture and mass media. Journalists and state-backed intellectuals in China were instructed to become “guardians of the soul” tasked with instilling loyalty to the ruling elite’s interests as a way to “protect” the masses from the “viral infection” of so-called disinformation and counter-revolution.
The process of social engineering was referred to by Chinese officials as “positive education.” In Keane’s retelling, “positive education” was described as a way to “inoculate” the people against ideas critical of the state. Positive education methods were used until the 1980s.
In Braddock’s experiments, individuals are shown pro-white or populist arguments deliberately taken out-of-context in a way to induce a psychological response. The subjects are then rapidly bombarded with ideological “counter-arguments,” almost identical in method to what Maoists did on a wide scale in China.
Braddock claims these experiments have shown a high success rate in “inoculating” white people against anti-establishment ideas. Through his partnership with Google, he is trying to figure out ways to apply this on an industrial scale to social media, similar to how Mao attempted to solidify obedience to his doctrine through newspapers and television in China.
Petty Partisanship, Not Science
Braddock’s social media behavior reveals an individual deeply entrenched in the world of the online far-left.
In one tweet tagging Tom Cotton, he refers to him as a fascist “licking the boots of those who advocate white supremacy” over a June op-ed calling for government action against unabated anarchist violence.
In an older message from 2016, Braddock refers to Antifa members who tried to stab outnumbered Sacramento nationalists attending a permitted march as “counter-protesters.”
A cursory look at Braddock’s personal webpage is filled with Rick & Morty references and infantile writings that demonstrate a lack of professionalism, such as a self-description that reads “Terrorism is bad, so I try to understand, interpret, and stop it. Counter-terrorism is good, so I try to do work that helps it.”
It should be noted that the money behind this crusade was allocated to Braddock’s team by the Trump administration. At best, the grant is a huge waste of taxpayer dollars. But the malice behind his thinking should not be underestimated. This small-souled man isn’t a blogger for the Huffington Post, he has the full deference of history’s most advanced surveillance state. If he gets his way, half of America could be classified as terrorists targeted for re-education. The consequences of this kind of designation is no laughing matter.
Israel prepares law to prohibit cooperation with ICC
MEMO | February 18, 2021
Israeli authorities are preparing a law that would prohibit any cooperation with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, and would propose five years in prison for any violations of this law, RT reported yesterday.
Reporting Israeli TV Channel 7, RT said the law would also include a ban on handing over Israeli nationals to the ICC, financing the expenses of legal defence before it and imposing penalties on the court and those working for it.
This, it explained, comes as part of a series of measures taken by Israel against the ICC after its announcement that it would probe potential Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.
Channel 7 reported that the bill is being inspired by the American Civil Service Protection Act, which was enacted in Congress in 2002.
The US law, which was known as the Invasion of The Hague, gives the US president wide ranging powers to do anything in order to release any American citizen arrested by the ICC, including the use of force.
Reporting the Israeli NGO Shurat HaDin, Channel 7 said that the Israeli law aims to create a legal safety network for Israeli soldiers and senior officials who could be prosecuted.
It will also sanction the tribunal’s members, ban them from entering Israel and impose restrictions against foreign entities that help them.
The ICC’s declared intention to investigate possible war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories has enraged Israel. The government has apparently drafted a list of its officials and former officials who should avoid foreign travel as they may be arrested and charged with such crimes.
New York Waitress FIRED For Not Getting Covid Jab
By Richie Allen | February 18, 2021
A New York City waitress was sacked on Monday, after telling her employer that she had concerns about the safety of coronavirus vaccines and would rather wait until more was known about the jabs.
Bonnie Jacobson from Brooklyn said that her manager at Red Hook Tavern fired her a few days after she had expressed concern about how the vaccine affects fertility. She had been working at the tavern since August and she and her husband had been planning to have a baby. Speaking to NBC News yesterday, Bonnie said:
“I do support the vaccine. I’m not, as they say, an anti-vaxxer.”
She went on to say that she feels there is still a lack of research about how the vaccine affects pregnant women. She said her manager understood her concerns and assured her that the tavern wouldn’t be requiring staff to have the jab. A few days later, workers received an email which stated that the vaccines would be mandatory for all staff. NBC has seen the email:
“Please be advised that we will require that all employees receive the vaccination. This will be mandatory for all existing employees and any new hires. The exception to this policy will be if your own personal health or disability prohibits you from obtaining this vaccination. We encourage you to consult your healthcare professional to determine if getting a vaccine is right for you.”
Jacobson replied:
“While I fully support the vaccine and understand its importance I do believe this is a very personal choice. I really hope this choice would not affect my employment at Red Hook Tavern. Also once there is more research to support that it does not affect fertility I would reconsider my position.”
Two days later, she was fired.
“It was really impersonal. I was honestly shocked,” she told NBC. “My gut reaction was to just say, OK. Fine, I’ll get it. I need my job. But that just didn’t sit right with me. I was like, actually, I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think that’s the choice I need to be making here.”
The owner of Red Hook Tavern, Billy Durney, released a statement saying:
“Once New York state allowed restaurant workers to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, we thought this was the perfect opportunity to put a plan in place to keep our team and guests safe. No one has faced these challenges before and we made a decision that we thought would best protect everyone. We now realize that we need to update our policy so it’s clear to our team how the process works and what we can do to support them. We’re making these changes immediately.”
Pelosi’s 9/11-Type Commission to Give More Powers to US Domestic Spying Apparatus
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 18.02.2021
On 15 February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced plans to form a “9/11-type commission” to probe the Capitol protests. The Dems real aim is to give more powers to US spy agencies, expand homeland security, and anti-terrorism measures and use them against the American right-wingers, US observers say.
A new independent 9/11-type Commission will be assigned to “investigate and report on the facts and causes relating to the January 6, 2021 domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex,” Pelosi wrote to her party fellows on Monday. According to CNN, the commission of this nature is typically established by a statute, passed by both chambers of the Congress and signed into law by the president.
9/11-Type Commission to Bolster Domestic Surveillance
The original 9/11 Commission was established on 27 November 2002 by President George W. Bush and the United States Congress with the aim “to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks.” The bipartisan body consisted of five Democrats and five Republicans and was chaired by former New Jersey Republican Governor Tom Kean.
”The 9/11 Commission was supposed to be a bipartisan effort to find out what went wrong on 9/11,” says American author and political analyst William Stroock. “Today the Dems will use this ‘9/11’ style commission to stoke fears of Q, white nationalism, Trump and his supporters in general. This commission will not be independent at all and will not be interested in ascertaining facts, only in assigning blame to Republicans, conservatives and Trump supporters.”
Nearly 20 years on, it’s clear that 9/11 has proven disastrous for the US in many ways, according to Strook. However, first and foremost it led to the creation of a “vast domestic spying apparatus with secret courts and gave the Feds vast new spying powers,” says the political analyst. Stroock suggests the Democrats “will want to give even more power to the domestic spying apparatus and turn it upon the right.”
Irreconcilable Contradictions in Democratic Party’s Policies
Meanwhile, the Biden administration plans to expand grants from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for studying and preventing “domestic violent extremism”, according to NBC News’ Friday report. Earlier, on 27 January, the DHS released its first-ever national terrorism bulletin warning about the looming threat of violent domestic extremism supposedly encouraged by the Capitol Hill protests.
In the wake of the DC incident, the Democratic Party also pushed ahead with the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act (DTPA). Andrew McCarthy, former assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, suggested in his January op-ed for National Review that the bill “is not about countering terrorism” but “weaving a political narrative.”
The legislation fell short of targeting jihadists, Antifa or Black Lives Matter militants, while focusing on white supremacists, “or, more specifically, Trump-inspired insurrectionists in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot,” according to the lawyer.
“The double standard here is appalling,” says Stroock. “The Democrat Party has winked and nodded at the BLM/Antifa riots… The media even invented a new term to describe the orgy of looting and destruction, ‘mostly peaceful.’ To see them comparing the Capitol Hill riot to the 9/11 terrorist attacks is pretty rich.”
It’s not the only controversy haunting the Democrats, according to American independent journalist Max Parry: the Dems have previously supported the BLM’s “defund the police” movement and now they are advocating the expansion of homeland security and anti-terrorism measures.
“These are an inherent and irreconcilable contradictions,” Parry says. “Meanwhile, curiously absent is any mobilisation to demilitarise the police, which under the 1033 Program with the Pentagon has hyper militarised US domestic law enforcement even in small towns in the past few decades, yet numerous studies shows has not resulted in lower crime rates… So the irony of calling to ‘defund’ the police while trying to ram through legislation that would likely increase their counter-terrorism training and militarisation is incompatible.”
The movement to “defund the police” was well intentioned but potentially misguided where the legitimate concerns of citizens about the need to reform law enforcement could be used for other agendas, the journalist warns.
How GOP May Give Dems a Taste of Their Own Medicine
While cracking down on Trump supporters in the aftermath of the DC protests, the Dems have failed to convict former President Donald Trump over the alleged incitement of insurrection. As a result, Trump was once again acquitted in the Senate.
”It seems they really thought they would convince 17 Republicans to crossover and vote to convict”, notes Stroock. “Only seven Republicans did so and they’re now in deep trouble with their voters back home. Several have already been censured by their state parties. The Democrats had a plan, a bad one, and had no idea what to do when the plan was foiled by reality.”
Now that the Dems created a new legislative tool, the “snap impeachment,” the GOP could hypothetically fight back and give their political opponents a taste of their own medicine, the political analyst presumes.
“Given the way political gravity works, the Republicans will almost certainly win control of the House and Senate in 2022,” he says. “The Republican base will call for the GOP to impeach Joe Biden. Given the Dem’s own precedent, why not?”
Kamala Harris may also find herself in a heap of trouble given that she earlier tweeted support for a fund that bailed out rioters, according to Strook. Following Trump’s acquittal Republican Senator Lindsey Graham warned that Harris could be impeached because she “actually bailed out [BLM] rioters,” pointing to her support of a Minnesota-based bail fund.
“It’s quite a bit of a stretch to say that Harris could be impeached for asking to contribute to a fund that went towards bailing out activists, especially since there is no evidence she herself bailed anyone out,” Parry suggests. “However, that Graham made such threats does show how the prospect of impeachment is now being thrown around so loosely as a political football since the bar has been set so low by the Democrats who impeached Trump over a dubious phone conversation.”
While a lot may happen before the 2022 midterms, the GOP should jump at the opportunity to instrumentalise the potential 9/11-style Commission, argues Strook.
“The Republicans will (or should) approach this commission with great skepticism, turn the camera around and highlight the violence and racism of the left. This commission is a tremendous opportunity for the GOP,” the political analyst believes.
After ban on Russian TV news Latvia now will criminalize watching ‘illegal’ cross border channels
RT | February 18, 2021
Tens of thousands of Russian-speaking Latvians will be turning down the volume and listening out for neighborhood snoopers after a new law came into force that will see viewers of unlicensed satellite TV fined just for tuning in.
Earlier this month, local media reported that the Seimas, the Baltic nation’s parliament, had adopted a bill in its final reading that will criminalize people for watching unauthorized broadcasts.
The networks that will be affected are said to include dozens of Russian television channels for which signals can be picked up from across the border. More than one in three Latvians speaks Russian at home, but dozens of broadcasters showing programs in the language have had their licenses revoked and been banned from the country’s airwaves since earlier this month.
Ivars Abolins, the chairman of Latvia’s National Council for Electronic Media (NEPLP), issued a statement backing the ban. “We have protected, are protecting, and will protect our information space,” he said. Regulators claim that talk show guests on the Russian-speaking channels have incited hatred and called for war in Europe.
The Russian Embassy in Riga issued a stern protest in response. In a post to its Facebook page it said that the policy was “in the best traditions of dictatorship.”
Riga’s move has likely been inspired by the fact that “Harmony,” the country’s main opposition party, is led by Russian speakers and has close links to the leftist Russian grouping, “Fair Russia.” Harmony won 23 of the 100 seats in the Seimas in the 2018 election.
“Violation of free speech? That’s just the start of it,” it added. “Apparently, in a free market environment, Latvian television channels cannot compete, even in the information space of their own country.”
However, under the old rules, while the channels themselves were prohibited, plucky viewers intent on getting a fix of their favorite shows in their native language did not fall foul of the law. Now though, consumers themselves are likely to face financial penalties if they are caught watching illicit programming. Lawmakers note that 62,000 households tuned into illegal satellite broadcasts in 2018, the most recent year for which figures were given.
The Reporters Without Borders NGO issued a warning last summer after a number of Baltic nations moved to ban several separate RT channels. The free speech watchdog said that “While it is legitimate to defend and promote independent and reliable news reporting,” it “regards these closures as a misuse of the EU sanctions policy.”
“Rather than banning media outlets on loose grounds and on a flimsy legal basis,” it argued, “countries can require all media to guarantee editorial independence and can then impose legitimate sanctions, subject to judicial control, when it is established that media outlets have not complied with their obligations.”
Ukraine has also recently come under fire from both Russian and European politicians for its decision to block and ban a series of Russian-language outlets, run and produced by Russian-speaking Ukrainians from within the country. One in three Ukrainians speaks Russian at home as a first language, but Kiev has claimed the channels amount to pro-Kremlin propaganda.
Incitement is the New Terrorism
By Peter Van Buren | We Meant Well |February 15, 2021
You can only make up your own definition of “incitement” in the movies and at presidential impeachment trials. Otherwise the actual law is going to have to do.
The picture is becoming clearer now: 1/6 will be sold to frightened Americans as a new 9/11, the prime mover for a whole new range of “crimes.” Incitement will become this generation’s version of “material support to terrorism,” meaning the complex legal definition will be massaged in the name of safety so that it will become a not-real crime based on the flexibility of a word that will mean whatever the Dems/MSM/FBI want it to mean in a particular scenario.
So the kid in his bedroom chatting online will be talking to a Fed pretending to be a white supremacist instead of pretending to be ISIS. The kid’s arrest for incitement (those social media messages supposedly about white supremacy) will be played across the news and, like post-9/11, add fuel to the fires calling for more censorship, more surveillance, more arrests. It is literally the exact playbook from 2001.
Only better. The upgrade to the old playbook is that incitement scales well. So instead of just being pointed at naive kids online, it can be a death ray aimed at a conservative writer, a Congressperson, anyone with a platform. It is a way to eliminate an opinion, take out a rival, even impeach a president. That is why incitement is not aimed at stopping violence but alongside big tech censorship, a tool aimed at thought, at unpopular ideologies, a tool to crush free speech. All in the name of preserving democracy.
What stands in the way is current law, which following the evolution of free speech over the decades, has created increasingly specifics test on when speech becomes such a danger it must be stopped. And there’s a lot more to it than just that old bit about not being allowed to shout fire in a crowded theatre.
From its earliest days concerns existed about the interplay between the 1A and the ability of speech to incite violence to the point where words should be censored or criminalized. It sounds easy to sort out, until you consider almost any political viewpoint, passionately expressed, has the potential to incite. But a democracy can’t exactly lock up everyone who says aloud “abortion is murder” or accuses the president of murdering young boys sent into an unwanted war. Speech which inspires, motivates, stirs up the blood is not incitement, and in fact is an important part of a rugged democracy. Can every speaker be held responsible for what people who hear him talk do later? A finer line was needed.
The Fire! quote from the Supreme Court decision in Schenck v. United States is often cited as justification for limiting free speech. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger.”
Words in these decisions have hyper-specific legal meanings, often defined through multiple cases, which is why simply Googling a term and passing judgment on its vernacular via Twitter usually is wrong. The Fire! line is actually a kind of inaccurate shorthand. The full decision says the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that meets three conditions: 1) the speech must be demonstrably false; 2) it must be likely to cause real harm, not just offense or hurt feelings, and 3) must do so immediately.
But Schenck was what jurists call bad law, in that it sought to use the Espionage Act against a Socialist pamphleteer opposing WWI to stop free speech, not protect it. The case was eventually overturned, and Holmes’ statement is better understood not as a 21st century test but to simply mean that while the First Amendment is not absolute, restrictions on speech should be narrow and limited. It would be for the later case of Brandenburg v. Ohio to refine the modern standard for restricting speech.
Brandenburg v. Ohio (Clarence Brandenburg was an Ohio KKK leader who used the N-word with malice) precludes speech from being sanctioned as incitement to violence unless 1) the speech explicitly or implicitly encouraged the use of violence or lawless action; 2) the speaker intends their speech will result in the use of violence or lawless action, and 3) the imminent use of violence or lawless action is the likely result of the speech, a more specific definition than in Schenck. Brandenburg is the Supreme Court’s final statement to date on what government may do about speech that seeks to incite others to lawless action. It was intended to resolve the debate between those who urge greater control of speech and those who favor as much speech as possible before relying on the marketplace of ideas to sort things out.
Intent as included in Brandenburg is purposely hard to prove. A hostile reaction of a crowd does not automatically transform protected speech into incitement. Listeners’ reaction to speech is thus not alone a basis for regulation, or for taking an enforcement action against a speaker. The speaker had to clearly want to, and succeed in, causing some specific violent act. The reliance on intent exposes the danger of the 1A not applying to corporate censors. Twitter suppressed the speech of 70,000 users simply for retweeting material with “the potential to lead to offline harm” under its Orwellian named Civic Integrity Policy, no intent required. They made up their own version of the law.
The law is similar for (incitement to) sedition, seeking to overthrow the U.S. government by force. It is intimately tied to the concept of free speech in that any true attempt at overthrow, as well as any legitimate criticism of the government, will include persuasion and stirring up of crowds. The line between criticizing the government and organizing for it to be overthrown is a critical juncture in a democracy. Current law requires the government prove someone conspired to use force. Simply advocating broadly for the use of violence is not the same thing as violence and in most cases is protected as free speech. For example, suggesting the need for revolution “by any means necessary” is unlikely to be seen as conspiracy to overthrow the government by force. But actively planning such an action (distributing guns, working out the logistics, actively opposing lawful authority, etc.) could be considered sedition.
A 1982 case, Claiborne v. NAACP, not only made clear the Court’s strict standards on blocking speech for incitement but also how such suppression can strike any view, not just conservative ones. In the 1982 Claiborne v. NAACP the Court ruled NAACP civil rights leaders were not responsible for a crowd which, after hearing them speak, burned down a white man’s hardware store. The state of Mississippi had wanted to charge the NAACP leaders with incitement on the grounds their speeches urging a boycott of white-owned stores incited their followers to burn down a store. The state’s argument was that the NAACP leaders knew their inflammatory rhetoric would drive the crowd to violence.
The Supreme Court rejected that argument, explaining that free speech will die if people are held responsible not for their own violent acts but for those committed by others who heard them speak and were motivated in the name of that cause. The Court wrote “there is no evidence — apart from the speeches themselves that [the NAACP leader] authorized, ratified, or directly threatened acts of violence… To impose liability without a finding that the NAACP authorized — either actually or apparently — or ratified unlawful conduct would impermissibly burden the rights of political association that are protected by the First Amendment.” They concluded instead the NAACP “through exercise of their First Amendment rights of speech, assembly, association, and petition, rather than through riot or revolution, sought to bring about political, social, and economic change.”
All of this may soon change, however. Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress are actively considering new laws (“Patriot Act 2.0”) against domestic terrorism which will likely draw from and enlarge the current definitions of incitement and sedition, with the Trump impeachment as their philosophical touchstone. The new laws may seek to define beliefs such as “whites are a superior race” not as bad science or an unsavory opinion but as an actual threat, an illegal thought. Proposals include prohibiting people with such beliefs from joining the military or law enforcement.
The groundwork is already in place. Don’t forget Biden often claims credit for writing the original Patriot Act. The MSM has been priming Americans to believe they have too many rights for their own safety. The NYT is openly soliciting stories about “right wing extremism” in the military.
It is necessary to say it again. America at present, on paper at least, legally holds apart from some very narrow exceptions free speech exists independent of the content of that speech. This is one of the most fundamental precepts of our democracy. There is no need for protection for things people agree with, things that are not challenging or debatable or offensive. Free speech is not needed to discuss the weather or sports. The true tests for a democracy come at the edges, not in the middle.
Involuntarily masked drivers BANNED from wearing sunglasses or hats: Germany’s Saxony state
RT | February 17, 2021
Drivers must still be identifiable by traffic cameras, even when they follow existing health protocols and wear masks, a new rule in Germany’s eastern region says.
According to the Bild newspaper, Saxony became the first region in Germany to ban hats and sunglasses on masked drivers.
“Wearing a hat and sunglasses in addition to a mask that covers the face and mouth makes [the driver] unrecognizable. So that’s not allowed,” Saxony’s Interior Minister Roland Woller said.
Woller explained that “general facial features” of the driver must still be visible to the road safety cameras. He added that officials responsible for handing out fines to drivers were advised to handle the new rule on a case-by-case basis.
Starting from Monday, people are required to wear masks in vehicles in Saxony if members of more than two households are traveling together.
Last month, Germans were mandated to wear medical-grade respirator-type masks on public transport and when going to supermarkets. Simple cloth or homemade masks are not allowed in such cases.
How the Gates Foundation seeded America’s COVID-19 policy catastrophes
By Jordan Schachtel | The Dossier | February 16, 2021
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is finally facing the heat for his botched and criminally negligent coronavirus response policies, yet no one seems to be asking why Cuomo and select governors made the fateful decisions that led to the excess deaths — and the coverup campaigns — of tens of thousands of senior citizens in New York and elsewhere across the United States.
After being awarded an Emmy and writing a book on his supposedly heroic response to the pandemic, Cuomo is finally receiving the very necessary inquiries into his handling of the crisis. Cuomo is perhaps the most egregious example of abuse and neglect (given his refusal to use the Javits Center or a Navy hospital ship), he is far from the only governor who executed the “nursing home death warrants.” Governor Cuomo was accompanied by the governors of California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere.
The common thread seen in the United States is the delegation of state policy to prediction modeling forecasts from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a Washington State-based institution that is wholly controlled and funded (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars) by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In March and early April, politicians were informed by the modeling “experts” at Gates-funded IHME that their hospitals were about to be completely overrun by coronavirus patients. Modelers from IHME claimed this massive surge would cause hospitals to run out of lifesaving equipment in a matter of days, not weeks or months. Time was of the essence, and now was the time for rapid decision making, the modelers claimed.
On two separate April 1 and April 2 press conferences, Cuomo made clear that his policy decisions were based off of the IHME model.
“There is a group that is funded by the Gates Foundation. Thank you very much Bill Gates,” Cuomo said on April 1 in discussing ICU needs and how he was using Gates models to make other healthcare policy decisions.
“There’s only one model that we look at that has the number of projected deaths which is the IHME model which is funded by the Gates Foundation,” Cuomo said on April 2, adding, “and we thank the Gates Foundation for the national service that they’ve done.”
In an April 9 briefing, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer referred to the IHME model in order to project deaths and the PPE resources needed for the supposed surge.
It was the same story with the government of Pennsylvania. The PA Health Department exclusively uses IHME models to forecast coronavirus outcomes.
Governor Phil Murphy, another nursing home death warrant participant, used IHME models to navigate the state’s policy response.
It wasn’t just state governors relying on this data, federal bureaucrats Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, both of whom have substantial ties to the Gates network, used the IHME COVID-19 forecasting models (which Birx endorsed specifically as the best prediction modeling outfit) to make policy recommendations to states. In her White House briefings, Birx, who simultaneously had a seat on the board of a Gates-funded institution, almost exclusively relied on IHME models to project outcomes.
These models, and the policy decisions that were made by relying on them, set off a chain of events that led to indefinite lockdowns, complete business closures, statewide curfews, and most infamously, the nursing home death warrants.
States across the nation went to extremes, resorting to full bunker mode while waiting for bodies to start dropping in the streets, but the IHME modeling never panned out. Hospital capacity was never threatened. Most states that had created “surge capacity” pop-up health care centers never even used these facilities. IHME, for its part, regularly “adjusts” its models, and has never acknowledged their routine failures to forecast outcomes.
Bill Gates has never discussed the catastrophic failures of his prized “health metrics” forecasting organization, and how it has contributed to the suffering of millions of Americans. Instead, he has seamlessly washed his hands of COVID mania, and has moved on to demanding that the western world sacrifice itself in the name of the latest “crisis” that is climate change.
Bill Gates: Rich nations should shift entirely to synthetic beef In his new book, “How to Avoid a #Climate Disaster,” Microsoft cofounder lays out tech breakthroughs and sweeping policies we’ll need to take on global warming. #vegan #animals #sentientism 
In December, however, Melinda Gates acknowledged that “we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts “ of demanding that people stay locked in their houses indefinitely, among other policy requests demanded by Gates Inc.
The IHME models that demanded lockdowns and other insane restrictions relied entirely on sketchy COVID-19 data coming from the city of Wuhan, China. The early statistics concerning deaths, hospitalizations, and overall age stratification have not come close to matching the actual data on the virus. For example, IHME used a 3+% death rate when the real number *from* COVID-19 is only around 0.1%. IHME’s risk projections, which they presented as sound science, were all incredibly overinflated.
The buck does indeed stop with the elected leaders who made the fateful decisions to send sick COVID patients into nursing homes, lock down their states, and mask up their citizens in perpetuity, but that’s only half of the story. The bad data they used almost exclusively came from the Gates network, which has trafficked in pseudoscience and has demonstrated complete incompetence and reckless forecasting since the beginning of last year.
The Hague court sides with activists, tells Dutch government to IMMEDIATELY lift ‘illegitimate’ curfew
RT | February 16, 2021
The Dutch government has been told by the court to reverse its coronavirus pandemic curfew after The Hague ruled there was no legal basis for it and called it an infringement on people’s rights.
In a statement, The Hague declared that the government’s use of the Extraordinary Powers of Civil Authority Act – an emergency act which allows the state to bypass the legislative process to impose a curfew in “very urgent and exceptional circumstance” – was not justified in this case during the Covid-19 crisis.
“The Preliminary Relief Judge ruled that the introduction of the curfew did not involve the special urgency required to be able to make use of the [act],” the Hague continued, noting that the government had had time to discuss such a curfew beforehand, before ruling that “the use of this law to impose curfew is not legitimate.”
“The curfew is a far-reaching violation of the right to freedom of movement and privacy and (indirectly) limits, among other things, the right to freedom of assembly and demonstration.”
The country’s Justice Ministry says it is now studying the ruling.
After the Dutch government imposed the curfew on January 23, citizens were legally required to stay home between the hours of 9pm and 4:30am unless they had a valid excuse, and they were warned that they could face fines if they refused to do so.
Valid excuses to go outside during the curfew included emergencies, essential work, to seek medical assistance, and to walk a dog on a lead.
The Hague’s decision was made after a group known as the Virus Truth Foundation filed a lawsuit arguing that the curfew was an infringement on human rights and the Dutch constitution.
The Netherlands experienced several nights of rioting over the curfew, which resulted in burnt cars, looted business, clashes with police, and hundreds of arrests.
UC Berkeley Reverses Its Absurd Ban On Outdoor Exercise
By Thomas Lifson | AmericanThinker | February 15, 2021
Five days after instituting an embarrassing ban on students exercising outdoors, the University of California, Berkeley, reversed itself and reinstated the ability of 2000 students isolated in dorm rooms to leave them for the purpose of exercise. Angela Ruggiero of the San Jose Mercury-News reported Friday, Feb. 12:
UC Berkeley has reversed a ban on students exercising outdoors that was imposed earlier this week after a rise in coronavirus cases on campus.
About 2,000 students isolated in their dorm rooms will now be allowed to exercise outside again, Cal announced on Friday afternoon. However, students are still under a strict lockdown imposed Feb. 1 that is in effect until Monday. The exercise ban went into effect this week, along with stricter restrictions as the university saw a rise in daily coronavirus cases.
“New positive COVID-19 cases have slowed and as a result we are permitting some limited additional activities for students who are in self-sequester,” read an email sent out to students Friday.
Only those that are not under isolation or quarantine may leave their door rooms to exercise outside during daylight hours, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Student athletes also may now leave to practice as directed and monitored by Cal Athletics.
The exercise ban had followed on and strengthened an earlier ban on leaving dorm rooms had been imposed Feb 1, and extended on Feb 8.
The exercise ban made national and international headlines, and elicited surprise, laughter and even scorn.
“‘Even prisoners get to exercise!’ UC Berkeley bans solo outdoor exercise for dorm-bound students,” headlined RT.
Campus authorities may have been embarrassed when The University of Pittsburgh published a report the day before the ban was reversed that headlined,
“COVID-Related Depression Linked to Reduced Physical Activity”
New research from the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and University of California, San Diego, found that 61% of surveyed university students were at risk of clinical depression, a value twice the rate prior to the pandemic. This rise in depression came alongside dramatic shifts in lifestyle habits.
“Our findings indicate the pandemic has led to a dramatic increase in the rate of anxiety and depression among young adults, especially among college students. It’s disheartening to see, since it’s been well-documented, even before the pandemic, that university-age young adults are reported as experiencing more mental health issues than previous generations,” said Osea Giuntella, assistant professor of economics at Pitt and research co-author.
There is no Hippocratic Oath for campus bureaucrats, but if there were, the injunction “First, do no harm” would certainly apply to the exercise ban. The survival rate for people in their 20s, which would include nearly all students living on dormitories, is in the upper reaches of the 99th percentile, while, the effects of depression, including suicide, are severe.
The University claimed its initial ban and subsequent strengthening, and then 5 days later loosening of it, were based on a “spike” in on-campus cases:
UC Berkeley saw a spike of 164 cases the week of Jan. 31, including 154 undergraduate students, according to the university’s coronavirus dashboard. The number of cases has dropped to 84 this week, as of the latest data on Thursday, when 19 more people tested positive on campus. From Sept. 10 to Thursday of this week, the university has seen a total of 757 positive cases.
But an examination of the dashboard reveals that it counts any positive test result as a case:
The dashboard shows the number of positive cases for tests performed at UHS. It does not include saliva tests that were performed through the Innovative Genomics Institute’s FAST Study.
This appears to go against the WHO’s change in its definition of a case that was announced one hour after President Biden was inaugurated:
The guidance warned against diagnosing someone as having the virus just because he tests positive if he does not present with symptoms of COVID-19. It also warned about the high risk of false positives: “The cycle threshold (Ct) needed to detect virus is inversely proportional to the patient’s viral load. Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology.”
“As disease prevalence decreases, the risk of false positive increases. The probability that a person who has a positive result (SARS-CoV-2 detected) is truly infected with SARS-CoV-2 decreases as prevalence decreases, irrespective of the claimed specificity,” the WHO continued.
The University’s own dashboard reveals that the rate of positive tests on campus is lower than in the surrounding City of Berkeley, where people freely shop and move about.
(source)
There doesn’t appear to be a lot of science behind the drastic restrictions on students at Cal Berkeley, as locals call it. Did the campus bureaucrats panic?
The University of California, Berkeley has a solid claim to worldwide standing as one of the leading producers of scientific research in the world. No fewer than ten Nobel laureates (all in the hard sciences and economics) currently teach on its faculty, including two 2020 laureates. But the University’s draconian reaction to the Covid has embarrassed it and diminished its luster.
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Iran UN ambassador calls for destruction of all nuclear weapons
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo
Press TV – March 29, 2017
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo has called for the total eradication of nuclear weapons.
Khoshroo reiterated Iran’s call during a UN conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty in New York on Tuesday.
“Iran, as a victim of chemical weapons, strongly feels the danger posed by the existence of weapons of mass destruction and is determined to engage actively in international diplomatic efforts to save humanity from the menace of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Khoshroo stressed that Iran is committed to its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, which include negotiations based on effective nuclear disarmament measures.
He added that several countries continue to ignore international calls and treaties for nuclear disarmament and even continue to increase their nuclear stockpiles. “They do not have political determination to abandon doctrines of nuclear deterrence and nuclear terror,” he went on to say.
Iran’s UN ambassador noted that boycotting the talks by many countries, including the US, shows that the world’s nuclear powers are by no means committed to the eradication of nuclear arms. Britain and France were also among the some 40 countries that did not join the talks.
“We note that prohibition of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by the elimination of such weapons. There can be no doubt that without complete abolition of nuclear weapons, there will be no absolute guarantee against the danger of nuclear war and the use of such weapons,” Khoshroo added.
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