Germany’s Green Minister Targets Algorithms: Baerbock’s Latest Bid to Suppress Populist Rise
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | October 4, 2024
Even in the world of the EU’s often perplexing politics, Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (of the Greens) stands out. And while she may “excel” at political gaffes – a passion for protecting free speech doesn’t seem to be among her strong suits.
Instead, with a seemingly straight face, Baerbock is now joining the legion of politicians urging for even more social media censorship, as a distinctly counter-intuitive way to “protect” democracy.
Baerbock wants the EU to do the heavy lifting on behalf of Germany’s current authorities this time as well, and one of the arguments the minister uses is that what she considers to be “disinformation” is allowing what she calls populist parties to grow in – popularity.
It should be a basic democratic principle that no party or political grouping can stay in power forever, so this kind of underlying “argument” smacks of authoritarian, rather than democratic traditions.
When one strips away Baerbock’s latest rant about fake news, disinformation, and attacks that are “disintegrating our democratic reality” (whatever that may mean) – what is left is the “problem” of the success of the opposition AfD party, and the German authorities’ inability to counter it with meaningful policies, therefore resorting to anything from name-calling, to open censorship.
On Monday, Baerbock turned to the European Commission to ask for “new rules” around what she and her political comrades consider to be disinformation. At this point, even the Commission – the enforcer of the infamous censorship law, the DSA, might have been thinking – “but what more can we do?”
If that was the case, it didn’t last long. As soon as on Wednesday, the EC “summoned” three major social media companies and demanded information about their algorithmic recommendations.
It might just be a coincidence, but algorithms were on Baerbock’s brain the day before, too. Reports say she suggested that Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution team up with the EC, against “algorithms that work against democracy.”
‘Crimes beyond comprehension’: US doctors recount horrors of Israeli war on Gaza
Press TV – October 5, 2024
A group of 99 American physicians, who volunteered to work in Gaza, rejected Israeli allegations of military activity in the territory’s hospitals, calling on the Biden administration to immediately halt all military, economic, and diplomatic support for the Tel Aviv regime.
In a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the volunteers, who collectively dedicated 254 weeks to Gaza’s healthcare facilities, recounted dire humanitarian conditions amid ongoing Israeli offensives, describing their experiences as witnessing “crimes beyond comprehension.”
“We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian military activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities,” they stated in the letter.
Previously, Hamas had dismissed Israeli claims regarding the al-Shifa hospital, once the largest medical facility in Gaza.
Izzat al-Rishq, a member of the political bureau of Hamas, stated that the Israeli allegations that the Gaza-based resistance group is using the hospital for military purposes lack credibility.
The physicians called attention to Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, stating that their colleagues were targeted with “torture, disappearance, and murder” in the besieged area.
The letter detailed the suffering faced by Gazan women and children in hospitals, highlighting severe malnutrition and a critical shortage of medical supplies.
The doctors referenced a July study from the medical journal Lancet that said the death toll in Gaza has already surpassed 118,000, marking more than 5% of its population.
“Every day I saw babies die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved,” Asma Taha, a pediatric nurse practitioner, recounted.
“Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic and hand surgeon, reflected in the letter.
The doctors condemned “Israel’s continued, repeated” displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, particularly children, into areas devoid of basic necessities like water and sanitation, calling it “absolutely shocking.”
“It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year, is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities,” they said.
The doctors urged the Biden administration to support an international arms embargo on Israel until a permanent ceasefire is established.
They also requested a meeting with Biden and Harris to discuss their observations and advocate for a fundamental shift in American policy regarding West Asia.
Additionally, the signatories reiterated their earlier calls from their July 25 letter, including reopening the Rafah crossing to allow humanitarian aid, including water and medical supplies, into Gaza.
“Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets,” they said.
Israel has killed at least 41,825 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in Gaza since October 2023.
The Israeli war machine ignited its genocidal campaign by targeting helpless Palestinians trapped in the coastal territory.
It was after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas conducted surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against the Palestinians.
IS EUGENICS MAKING A COMEBACK?
The HighWire with Del Bigtree | October 3, 2024
From loss of life for the greater good to sterilizations to medically assisted suicide, world government’s role in population control has become a matter for humanity. Is eugenics no longer being hidden in western culture?
‘Biggest West Bank massacre in decades’: Israel bombs crowded Tulkarem café
(Photo credit: AFP/Jaafar Ashtiyeh)
The Cradle | October 4, 2024
Israel bombed a café in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem late on 3 October, killing at least 20 in what is being described as the worst massacre in the territory since the Second Intifada.
Among those killed were a woman, her husband, and their child.
A Quds Brigades commander, Ghaith Radwan, and a member of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades, Zahi al-Aoufi, were killed in the indiscriminate attack on Tulkarem.
“In the attack, a number of key operatives who were also active in the terrorist infrastructure in Tulkarem were eliminated,” the Israeli army and Shin Bet security service said in a joint statement.
Aoufi was reportedly the head of Hamas’ organization structure in Tulkarem. “He provided weapons to terrorist operatives in the area and planned to carry out numerous attacks on settlements in the West Bank and deep inside Israel,” according to Yedioth Ahronoth.
Israeli warplanes fired at least one missile at the café in Tulkarem’s Hamam neighborhood on Thursday night as it was packed with civilians, according to WAFA news agency’s correspondent.
Civil defense teams and ambulances immediately rushed to transport the casualties to the city’s Thabet Thabet Government Hospital.
WAFA news agency referred to it as the biggest massacre in the occupied West Bank in over 24 years.
The Israeli army launched a massive operation against several West Bank cities on 28 August. The camps of the West Bank witnessed numerous military incursions, indiscriminate airstrikes and massacres, and assassinations.
Abu Shujaa, the late commander of the Quds Brigades’ Tulkarem branch, was assassinated by Israel on 29 August.
The latest massacre in Tulkarem comes as Israel continues its brutal assault across Lebanon, which has killed around 2,000 and displaced over a million.
Hours before the attack, the US State Department warned that Israeli escalation in Lebanon could lead to a tense situation in the occupied West Bank.
Dawn raids, assaults, imprisonment: how Germany’s government treats good doctors
Around 200 doctors issuing mask exemptions were put on a blacklist – and the consequences are shocking
World Council for Health | October 2, 2024
On June 8, 2024, a call regarding ‘Mask Exemption Certificates and House Searches’ was initiated by Dr Walter Weber, head of the doctors’ association Ärzte für Aufklärung. On this call, we received some shocking information: in Germany, there is a ‘blacklist’ of about 200 doctors who issued mask exemptions and as a result are apparently monitored by state security. Around 100 doctors who had issued similar certificates then came forward. Approximately 95% of these doctors experienced unannounced house searches, with one doctor being searched eight times.
These house searches typically took place from 6am and often lasted during office hours for 1-3 hours. In many cases, doors were broken down, and there were reports of inappropriate treatment of those affected. One example is Rolf Kron, who had to endure sitting in his nightgown with an open door for hours in the winter. Physical violence was also a concerning issue: Dr. Woitzel had to undergo a leg amputation due to police violence.
Psychological and physical consequences
These reports of physical assaults are alarming. An eye doctor from Münster suffered hearing loss after a violent incident. Moreover, several female colleagues became seriously ill, and one doctor, Dr. Ströer, was sentenced to two years in prison without parole and died six months later “for no reason”. Dr. Bianca Witzschel has been in pre-trial detention for 1.5 years due to a negative expert report, while a counter-report was rejected by the judge.
The financial implications are also severe.
Many doctors had to ‘buy their freedom’, paying sums of up to 6,000 euros. One colleague reported costs of around 30,000 euros because the waiting room chairs did not meet the required distance. Most doctors affected agree to the anonymized publication of their experiences, underscoring the gravity of the situation.
Smeared, ostracised, silenced
Local press often reported on these doctors, leading to defamation and slander. Families were bullied, including children. The medical profession in Germany, consisting of about 150,000 practicing doctors, has been silenced by this systematic persecution. The 200 or so doctors willing to issue mask exemptions constitutes less than 0.00013% of the total number.
There is no justification for such treatment – but there is plenty of justification for these doctors having issued mask exemptions.
We recently reported on the leaked protocols from Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI), which revealed the extent to which the German people were deceived by their own government during the so-called pandemic. One revelation was that the RKI – the equivalent of the US’ CDC – knew there was no evidence that masks stopped the spread of Coronavirus. Those doctors who issued mask exemptions were both acting in their patients’ best interests and in line with the evidence, as acknowledged by the RKI. The problem is, they weren’t in line with their government and the consequences of this should shock the world.
This is what totalitarian, centralized medicine looks like.
The systematic persecution of doctors who issued mask exemptions highlights a concerning development in German society. The fear of house searches and the resulting consequences have deterred many doctors from helping patients in need. This not only silences the medical profession but also isolates them from society. It is time to question these practices and protect the rights of doctors as well as the needs of patients. Especially taking into account the actual science supporting their decision to be cautious about the inefficacy and even harm created by using masks as a mandatory tool for the management of Covid 19 (Brownstone, 2024).
The World Council for Health is grateful for these 200 brave doctors and all those supporting informed consent and the Hippocratic oath primum non nocere, first do no harm. The WCH calls on the people of Germany to speak up for these doctors and demand that all charges against them are dropped, that they are compensated for the crimes their own government has committed against them, and that they are duly honoured for maintaining their moral and scientific integrity despite devastating consequences.
Sources:
https://brownstone.org/articles/studies-and-articles-on-mask-ineffectiveness-and-harms/
Adam Schiff and Other Democrats Demand Social Media Censor “Misinformation” and “Disinformation” This Month
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | October 2, 2024
In the US, the Democrats continue with their sustained efforts to pressure major social media platforms, now about a month ahead of the presidential election.
The Twitter Files give some idea about what may be happening behind closed doors (if previous campaigns/elections are any indication), but this is about public pressure. This time, Congressman Adam Schiff’s turn is to “demand action” from companies behind social media.
Meta (Instagram separately), X, Google (and YouTube separately), TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and Microsoft are the recipients of a letter Schiff signed along with seven fellow members of the House of Representatives (four of them, like Schiff, California Democrats).
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
The demand is this: disclose what plans these companies with the most influence and reach in the online space have to counter what the congressman and his colleagues consider to be the spread of mis- and dis- information – but also, “potential incitement of violence on their platforms in the lead-up to the 2024 elections.”
Schiff’s letter doesn’t clarify if (repeated) attempts to assassinate a candidate count as “incitement of violence,” or really, what kind of violence he has in mind – but he does mention “attacks on our democracy.”
Yet, the companies are supposed to let him know what they are doing to stop it. Along the way, the assertion is made that they have all “rolled back” their previous election policies.
“This almost universal reversion on the issue of combating election mis- and disinformation is incredibly troubling,” the letter reads.
Meta, Google, X, etc. are also asked, among other things, “Will your company commit to sharing data and metrics on the effectiveness of your enforcement systems in relation to US elections and political speech?”
On the other side of this political maelstrom, Republicans – notably the House Judiciary Committee – continue trying to shed light on how the White House and government agencies pressured and then colluded with major social platforms during previous campaigns and elections, all in the name of supposedly combating “misinformation.”
This has produced some visible, public results – like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg writing to the committee to apologize for succumbing to that pressure on issues like Covid and the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression.
The revelations that the government and Big Tech colluded to usher in unprecedented levels of censorship in the past continues to be tested in the courts as well.
Russia sends 33 tons of humanitarian aid to Lebanon amid exodus from south
MEMO | October 3, 2024
Russia has delivered dozens of tons of humanitarian aid to Lebanon, amid the growing series of crises afflicting the country and its population amid Israel’s bombardment of some areas in recent weeks.
According to a statement by Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, Moscow this week sent a special Il-76 aircraft to Beirut under the direction of President Vladimir Putin and Emergency Situations Minister, Alexander Kurenkov.
The plane reportedly carried 33 tons of humanitarian aid, which included food, essential goods, medicines and portable power stations, all of which are intended to assist the Lebanese population, especially those who have been fleeing the destruction in the south of the country over the past few weeks and who have been heading further north.
That destruction is the direct result of Israel’s ongoing air strikes on areas throughout Lebanon, particularly in the south where the Hezbollah group is largely based.
Deal or No Deal?
By Andrew P. Napolitano | Ron Paul Institute | October 3, 2024
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive.”
–Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
The case of the Gitmo plea agreement keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.
A few weeks ago, we learned that a plea agreement had been entered into by way of a signed contract between the retired general in the Pentagon who is supervising all Gitmo prosecutions, the Gitmo defendants and defense counsel, and the military prosecutors. The agreement, as we understand it from sources who have seen it, provides that in return for a guilty plea, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others will serve life terms at Gitmo, rather than be exposed at trial to the death penalty. The guilty plea is to include a public and detailed recitation of guilt.
Stated differently, Mohammed agreed to reveal under oath the nature and extent of the conspiracy that resulted in the crimes of 9/11.
So far, this is straightforward. While the trial judge may have given his nod of approval to the terms of the agreement, under the federal rules of criminal procedure, the agreement is not final until the judge hears the defendants actually admit guilt under oath in a public courtroom and then accepts the plea in a written order.
That admission has not yet taken place because the Secretary of Defense, who learned of the plea agreement while traveling in Europe, removed the authority of the retired general supervising the prosecution to enter into plea agreements without his express approval.
Thereupon, defense counsel asked the court to enforce the agreement anyway since it is a signed contract, and schedule the plea hearing at which Mohammed and others will presumably comply with their obligations to spill the beans on this 23-year-old case.
The military prosecutors — who initiated the plea negotiations because they recognized that they cannot ethically defend the George W. Bush administration’s torture of these defendants — have been ordered by the Pentagon to ask the judge to reject the plea.
Thus, we have a tangled web, tangled because the government deceived the American public and federal judges about its own criminal behavior — the Bush torture regime. The signed contract was initiated and drafted by the same military prosecutors who have been ordered — against their professional judgement — to ask the trial judge to repudiate it.
Those who have seen it have revealed that the agreement contains a poison pill — a clause that survives the agreement even if it is nullified.
That poison pill removes the death penalty from the case, should the case go to trial.
This was apparently made a part of the agreement in case the political winds blow against the government and it gets cold feet. That is probably what happened.
When Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin — who is not a lawyer — was asked why he ordered the agreement rescinded, he stated that the American public has a right to learn “all” the evidence in the case. He must have made that comment while ignorant of the terms of the plea agreement, as the agreement requires a full recitation by the defendants of their knowledge of the events leading up to 9/11; and nothing prevents prosecutors from revealing whatever evidence they choose to reveal.
Moreover, the Pentagon’s own team of prosecutors have warned against the public revelation of “all” the evidence in the case because the evidence of stomach-churning torture will expose war crimes for which there is no statute of limitations.
Stated differently, if this case is tried in the traditional way as opposed to the entry of a plea agreement with the defendants’ recitation under oath of their knowledge of the crimes, George W. Bush himself and others in his administration, in the CIA and in the military could be indicted and tried in foreign countries for war crimes.
As well, there will be blowback against American troops now stationed abroad, most of whom were not born when Bush ordered torture and deception and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. His “don’t mess with Texas” presidential style continues to haunt today. He failed to understand that the problem of searching the world for monsters to slay is that the monsters you find will follow you home.
Adding to the jurisprudential oddities here is the intrusion of Congress. When President Barack Obama revealed his intention to close Gitmo — it costs half a billion dollars a year to operate — Congress enacted a statute that prohibited the removal of the defendants from Gitmo to the American mainland for any reason, including the infliction of capital punishment. That statute is probably unconstitutional as violative of the separation of powers. Just as the president cannot tell Congress when and how to vote, Congress cannot tell the president how to manage federal prisons or prosecutions.
Gitmo was a Devil’s Island, flawed from its inception. More than 100 years ago, the U.S. leased the land on which Gitmo is located from Cuba. When the lease ran out, the U.S. refused to leave. Bush’s lawyers advised him that if he tortured and prosecuted in Cuba, federal laws didn’t apply, the Constitution wouldn’t restrain him and, best of all, those pesky federal judges couldn’t interfere with him.
In five cases, the Supreme Court rejected Bush’s arguments for evading the Constitution. Bush has visited upon all of his successors a nearly insoluble jurisprudential mess. A mess born out of antipathy to the Constitution he swore to uphold and the knee-jerk bravado apparently integral to his persona.
Gitmo is a tragic example of what happens when the American public entrusts the preservation of constitutional norms into the hands of those unworthy of that trust and quick to cut constitutional corners in order to persecute unpopular defendants. The Constitution itself was written in large measure to assure that these things can’t happen here. But they do.
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
Ukraine is making life for its Hungarian minority hell
By Tamás Pilhál | Remix News | October 2, 2024
A Ukrainian politician came up with another great, very European-compatible idea. Natalija Pipa, a representative of the Ukrainian legislature, believes that from now on in schools, teachers and students should only speak Ukrainian during breaks, while standing in line at the cafeteria, or even in the restroom. That’s right, they should not be allowed to speak any other language, even in their free time between classes.
Hungarians from Transcarpathia, Poles from Lviv, Romanians from the Chernivtsi area, or even Russians should not even be able to talk to each other in their mother tongue outside of school hours, because it threatens the existence of Ukraine. Mrs. Pipa also drafted a bill for teaching national minorities to speak Ukrainian.
As we know, Ukrainian lawmakers will certainly accept it without any bone of contention. They did not have any problems with previous deprivations of Ukraine’s ministry populations either, with Brussels and Washington patting their heads and encouraging them throughout the entire process.
It is truly a sight to see. Our eastern neighbor is closing in on European Union membership with full force. Their national hero, Stepan Bandera, who massacred tens of thousands of Polish civilians, would obviously be proud of them.
Let’s just go over the facts. Ukraine has been fighting a life-and-death battle with the Russians for two and a half years, but their main concern is still how to make the lives of their helpless national minorities even more hellish. Their house is on fire, but instead of putting out the fire, out of necessity, they kick those who are forced under the same roof with them. And the neighbors, they spit in our faces and then expect us to applaud them, feel sorry for them, and send even more money, and weapons that they can manage to shoot deeper into Russia, all to see if they can start WW III.
If we look at the recently retired U.S. State Department honcho Victoria Nuland, they have been doing this since the $5 billion CIA coup in 2014. These nationalists have been fomenting unrest, terrorizing their minorities, and beating the crap out of them.
They started with the Education Law of 2017, the detailed rules of which in 2020 divided people living in Ukraine into four castes. According to this, the Ukrainians are first class. (There was already such a thing in history. Only then the word “Aryan” was used.) The second class are the native peoples, for example, the Crimean Tatars, who can study in their mother tongue until they graduate. On the other hand, Hungarians, Romanians and Poles are classified as third class and treated as non-natives and can study in their mother tongue only until the fourth grade of primary school, after which they are forced to learn Ukrainian.
The goal? Complete assimilation and destruction of identity.
Then, the 2019 language law made Ukrainian mandatory everywhere except for private conversations and religious ceremonies. Since the summer of 2021, events can only be held in the state language, and the texts of speakers who do not speak Ukrainian must be translated. The Ukrainian state is operating under total paranoia.
It’s as if the Ukrainian puppet governments have been pulling the strings according to a ready-made script since 2014. Of course, we’ve seen this before. In how many South American, African, and Asian countries has a rainbow revolution “unexpectedly” broken out, have peoples living in peace been incited against each other? The story is the same. Once the “revolution” broke out, the complete looting of the colony could then begin under the command of an agent who did not necessarily speak the native language of the country, but at least was parachuted in to step on their necks from overseas.
However, in the case of Ukraine, the booty was not enough for the United States. They wanted war. Some of their more talkative politicians even blurted it out: they want to weaken Russia, they cannot let the vast mineral wealth fall into their hands. Perhaps even those with a slower understanding could understand what it was about. If they have to make Ukraine war until the last Ukrainian is dead, it’s not a big price either — for them.
When the war is over, maybe only first-class Ukrainians will be left to pick up the pieces.
Ukraine plans unprecedented attack against its own Hungarian minority
Remix News | October 1, 2024
Despite fighting and dying on the front for Ukraine, the country’s ethnic Hungarian minority is facing further persecution, with a new draft bill moving forward that will ban them from speaking in Hungarian in schools, even on breaks between classes. The bill would stipulate that all lessons must be delivered in Ukrainian and that even the language used in personal conversations in the school would have to be in Ukrainian.
Natalija Pipa, a representative of the Rada, submitted the bill, according to a report from Mandiner.
The rights of the Hungarian minority were already being curtailed long before the Russian invasion of the country, with Ukrainian nationalists often targeting the population, which numbers approximately 150,000 in the Transcarpathia region.
The adoption of the bill may have a negative impact on relations with Hungary, and Budapest will block all EU aid packages to Ukraine in response. Language rights for Hungarians have been eroded over the years despite protests from the Hungarian government.
Notably, Ukraine amended its laws to comply with EU membership requirements, which included restoring many of the language rights stripped from minorities, an action demanded by Budapest, but Hungary’s government has indicated it is not fully satisfied. This new move by Ukraine appears to be a new salvo against Orbán’s government if it passes.
“Both Hungary and Ukraine are interested in the development of neighborly relations, they share the intention to do so, the government is doing everything to achieve this, but it expects Kyiv to restore the rights of the Hungarian national community,” said Péter Szijjártó Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade when he met with the new Ukrainian minister a day earlier.
“We expect Ukraine to restore the rights of the Hungarian national community in terms of access to the mother tongue, in the fields of education, culture and public administration.”
There have been numerous reports that ethnic Hungarians are being drafted in large numbers and often sent to frontline positions as “cannon fodder.“
“If this continues, there won’t be any Hungarians left in Transcarpathia,” said Füssy Angéla during a report from the region for Hungarian news portal Pesti Srácok.
Hungarian news outlet Magyar Nemzet reports that the “Transcarpathian morgues are also full, and they are deliberately slowing down the release of victims.”
According to Hungarian news portal Pesti Srácok, which delivered its report from the Hungarian-inhabited Ukrainian town of Munkács (Mukachevo in Ukrainian), there are rumors circulating that Ukraine is looking to recruit tens of thousands of men in the region. It is likely that a new brigade is being formed because the largest brigade of trained soldiers, the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade, suffered huge losses at Soledar. The Russian occupation of the eastern Ukrainian settlement was announced on Jan. 12, 2023.
Facebook Gave CDC ‘Backdoor’ Access to Help Remove Millions of Social Media Posts
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 30, 2024
Facebook provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “backdoor” access to its platform so the CDC could submit requests to remove COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to an internal Facebook document made public for the first time as part of an ongoing legal case.
America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2021, after then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed the Biden administration was flagging purported “disinformation” on social media platforms, including content posted by members of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.”
When the Biden administration didn’t comply with the FOIA request, America First Legal sued, leading to the release of the documents as part of the discovery process.
According to Reclaim the Net, in 2021, Facebook developed a “Content Request System” (see pages 54-72) — also called a “Government Reporting System” — accessible to CDC staff. The documents show Facebook “was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative.”
The Facebook-CDC partnership helped Facebook remove millions of posts, the documents show.
Gene Hamilton, executive director of America First Legal, told The Defender, “These documents show precisely how one of the social media platforms facilitated the federal government’s engagement in unconstitutional censorship activities.”
“The federal government cannot violate the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private sector, yet these documents clearly show that Facebook and the Biden-Harris administration collaborated and colluded on removing speech that did not comport with the federal government’s preferences,” Hamilton said.
Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, told The Defender that following the release of the “Twitter Files,” it should not come as a surprise “that the government has been actively trying to censor citizens through back doors and loopholes.”
“This censorship effort is yet another example of a public-private collaboration that fuses corporation and state,” Hinchliffe said. “Where the government can’t legally censor, it has the private sector to do its bidding. The question here is how much coercion was needed for Facebook to provide the backdoor?”
These latest revelations come as other entities ramp up their own efforts to target purported “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) and TikTok announced a new partnership to promote “science-based information.” Meanwhile, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a Big Pharma lobbying group, this month urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products.”
‘Red-carpet treatment’ for government to ‘silence critics and manage dissent’
Calling it a “fast lane for speech suppression,” Reclaim the Net reported that Facebook “built a slick ‘end-to-end workflow’ tailored to the White House’s censorship needs,” which provided CDC staff with a four-step process to flag COVID-19 “misinformation” for removal.
“This was the red-carpet treatment for anyone in the Biden Administration looking to silence critics and manage dissent,” Reclaim the Net reported. “The system could handle up to twenty censorship requests simultaneously.”
The Facebook document stated, “We empower and safeguard users with policies that are: Principled, Operable, Explicable.” These policies were aligned with Facebook’s “community standards” and adopted “a multi-pronged approach to combating COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.”
The policies — aimed at “bringing 50 million people a step closer to vaccinations” — included the removal of “false information that has been debunked by public health experts.”
Other types of content Facebook explicitly targeted include claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous to people than the common flu or cold, and content discouraging “good health practices” — such as wearing a face mask, social distancing, getting tested for COVID-19 and getting vaccinated against COVID-19.
Claims about the COVID-19 vaccines’ safety, side effects and efficacy also were targeted for removal, as were “widely debunked vaccine hoaxes” — including claims that vaccines cause autism.
The document also revealed that as of 2021, Facebook and Instagram had removed “more than 16 million pieces of content … for violating our COVID-19 and vaccine policies.”
Repeat offenders faced restrictions, including (but not limited to) reduced distribution, removal from recommendations, or “removal from our site.”
The platform also allowed government officials to bypass federal transparency laws.
“By using this specialized portal, and not email, the government could skirt those pesky federal record-keeping laws. FOIA requests? Public oversight? Forget about it. The new system made sure government actions were neatly tucked away in proprietary software,” Reclaim the Net reported.
‘The closest thing to a Ministry of Truth’
According to Reclaim the Net, Robert Flaherty, then-White House director of Digital Strategy and now a member of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, was “barking orders at Facebook to tighten the leash.”
“Twitter Files” documents have shown that Flaherty pressured social media platforms to censor the accounts of public figures such Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then-chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense (now chairman on leave). Kennedy was one of the figures named in “The Disinformation Dozen” report.
“The bureaucratic whims of entrenched CDC personnel and leadership determined what Americans could and could not say — the closest thing to a Ministry of Truth you can imagine in the United States,” Hamilton said.
Author Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of DailyClout, told The Defender, “This shocking new revelation of still more unlawful pressure by the U.S. government on social media companies to strip Americans of First Amendment rights, also fails to shock as it is evidence added to a mountain of documentation of such collusion.”
According to Hamilton, these and other documents may affect several ongoing lawsuits against the Biden administration on First Amendment grounds.
“As more records are uncovered through our lawsuit and other open records requests, as well as discovery in litigation, we are confident that courts will have the definitive links necessary to show the government’s facilitation of an unconstitutional censorship enterprise,” Hamilton said.
The latest revelations came just a month after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta — parent company of Facebook and Instagram — admitted that Biden administration officials pressured Meta to censor content related to COVID-19 during the pandemic.
“If the government can exert that much pressure on one of the largest platforms and its CEO, then it can do it to anybody,” Hinchliffe said.
In an interview earlier this month on “The Kim Iversen Show,” former U.S. State Department official Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the U.S. government coerced social media platforms to use “weapons of mass deletion” to censor content and as a workaround to the First Amendment.
According to Benz, this includes government coercion obliging these platforms to adopt automated censorship tools which employ artificial intelligence to sweep platforms for specific keywords or narratives. Benz said many of these tools were initially developed a decade ago for the fight against ISIS.
Benz said the U.S. government urged authorities in the United Kingdom and European Union (EU) to pass censorship laws, in order to then sidestep the First Amendment at home by obliging social media platforms to comply with more restrictive foreign laws.
Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst told The Defender the EU uses legislation such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) “to stop free speech outside EU borders.”
“According to the EU, the DSA prevents illegal and harmful activities online and protects fundamental rights,” Terhorst said. This means that the EU Commission can decide what is right and what is wrong, including ‘harmful disinformation.’”
TikTok ‘a propaganda arm’ of the United Nations?
TikTok and the WHO on Sept. 26 announced a new collaboration targeting health-related “misinformation.” The year-long partnership is “aimed at providing people with reliable, science-based health information.”
According to the WHO, the new collaboration will promote “evidence-based content and encourage positive health dialogues.”
The WHO quoted Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar, who said, “This collaboration can prove to be an inflection point in how platforms can be more socially-responsible.”
Farrar collaborated with Dr. Anthony Fauci and key virologists to draft “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published March 2020 in Nature Medicine. The paper has been used by media and the U.S. government to debunk the lab-leak theory of the COVID-19 outbreak and accuse its proponents of being “conspiracy theorists.”
According to public health physician Dr. David Bell, partnerships like the one between the WHO and TikTok are inappropriate. He told The Defender :
“WHO, as an organization subject to member states and with no direct standing over their citizens, should not be involved in such direct messaging. This is a clear infringement of the rights, role and sovereignty of the states themselves.
“WHO acts increasingly like a tool of colonialist corporate interests as it pushes their messages over the top of legitimate authorities and interferes in the running of health systems within countries.”
According to Hinchliffe, this is not the first TikTok partnership with the United Nations (U.N.). As part of a previous project, Team Halo, “the U.N. trained scientists and doctors on TikTok and worked with TikTok to boost their profiles in an effort to combat ‘misinformation’ while promoting ‘authoritative sources’ during the pandemic.”
“This latest partnership shows that TikTok is honored to once again be a propaganda arm for the U.N.,” Hinchliffe said.
The WHO previously established similar partnerships with other social media platforms, including YouTube, which last year revised its “medical misinformation” policy to allow for the deletion of content that contradicts WHO guidance.
The announcement of the TikTok partnership with the WHO — a U.N. agency — comes just days after U.N. member states passed the Pact for the Future.
The pact’s “Information Integrity on Digital Platforms” policy brief addresses “threats to information integrity,” such as so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation,” calling for the promotion of “empirically-backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge” — without clarifying how this “consensus” would be determined.
The TikTok partnership with the WHO also comes before the January 2025 legislative deadline for TikTok to divest its U.S. operations or face shutdown in the U.S.
Pharma wants expanded powers to ‘correct misinformation’
In another related development lobbyists for Big Pharma earlier this month asked the FDA “to expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products, including by allowing them to respond to opinions, value judgments or personal experiences and communications made offline,” Fierce Pharma reported.
The call was a response to the FDA’s draft guidance on “Addressing Misinformation About Medical Devices and Prescription Drugs.” Released in July and now open for public comment, the guidance would allow pharmaceutical companies to issue “tailored” responses to internet-based posts about their products, and “general medical product communications” that would address “misinformation.”
According to Fierce Pharma, “The FDA proposed prohibiting companies from posting tailored responsive communications in response to misinformation spread offline and in response to an individual’s posts about their own experience, opinion and value judgments. PhRMA wants the FDA to lift those restrictions.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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Book Review
Palantir CEO Calls for Draft to Fight the Empire’s Wars
Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
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