Constant
Demand For Censorship By Elites Shows Their Rule Depends Upon Disinformation. Over
the last two years, we have been reporting on the alarming rise of censorship by governments around
the world and speaking out against it. If you're an American, you might not think this should
bother you. But in every one of these nations, the people pushing for censorship made clear
that they wanted to censor the entire Internet, not just in their own countries. The picture
you get is of nations working together to make censorship global not local. Free speech
advocates have won a number of important battles. In the last few months, Senators in Ireland
and Australia rejected censorship legislation, while the executive branch of the European Union
forced its top censor to step down after he warned Elon Musk not to speak to Donald Trump on X.
We are more aware of the strategies that the Censorship Industrial Complex of politicians, government
agencies, supposedly nongovernmental organizations, and the media use, around the world, to demand
ever-more censorship by Internet and social media companies.
The
Rise and Fall of the Surveillance State. In a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan
Experience podcast, Mike Benz, a former U.S. Department of State official and current Executive
Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, delved into what he terms the "Censorship Industrial
Complex." This complex, according to Benz, involves a network of government agencies, NGOs,
universities, and tech companies working together to control and censor information, particularly
online. [...] Benz described how the U.S. government has increasingly leaned on tech companies like
Google and Twitter to censor content deemed as misinformation or disinformation. He traced
the origins of this collaboration back to when tech companies were part of national security
strategies, especially the post-2016 election period and the Russian Collusion hoax, to "combat
foreign interference", which has since morphed into broader domestic censorship efforts.
Nothing
Cool About Democrats' Woke Religion. [Scroll down] [T]here is absolutely
nothing "cool" about being a Democrat these days. If you want to get a stern lecture, you
hang out with Democrats. If you want to have a good time with other happy people, you go to a
Trump rally. If you scrutinize all jokes for their compliance with the tenets of "political
correctness," then you vote Democrat. If you make jokes without worrying about "triggering"
somebody, then Democrat operatives are most likely censoring whatever you say online. Nobody
likes being censored. And as shocking as this must be to Deep State Democrats, censorship
isn't "cool."
Members
of the Censorship Cartel Fear Donald Trump's Presidency. Donald Trump's vow to
dismantle the censorship cartel of "misinformation" researchers, media blacklisters like NewsGuard,
and Big Tech has sent shivers through the academic community that has dedicated itself to censoring
conservatives. The Financial Times reports that since Donald Trump's election victory,
researchers and academics who study alleged digital "misinformation" are growing increasingly
worried that the new administration will follow through on campaign threats to crack down on their
work. During the campaign, Trump said he would seek to curb federal funding to universities found
to have engaged in censorship activities like flagging conservative social media content for removal.
Australia
has shown the way on free speech. In what might be a world first, the Australian
parliament has just dealt a death blow to counter-disinformation legislation that threatened to
fundamentally reshape the country's free speech landscape. The bill, which would have created
a two-tier system of speech rights, was comprehensively rejected — and the story of its
defeat reveals much about the evolving dynamics of political discourse in the post-pandemic
world. Originally initiated by the previous Conservative government and championed by the
centre-left Labor Party, the legislation promised to be a watershed moment in Australian media
regulation. It proposed stringent controls on information sharing, with a curious twist:
some, including legacy media and academics, would be exempt from the most restrictive provisions,
while the hoi polloi would face intense scrutiny and potential censorship.
Free
speech win Down Under as misinformation bill is binned for good. In a win for free
speech advocates, the Australian Government formally abandoned its misinformation bill over the
weekend, after failing to secure support in the Senate. The proposed laws would have forced
social media companies to show that they were preventing the spread of misinformation and
disinformation on their platforms, with fines of up to 5% of global revenue for
non-compliance. The controversial bill was opposed by the Coalition (conservative Liberal and
National Parties) but after several amendments, it sailed through the House of Representatives
earlier this month with the support of Labor (centre left) and the Teals (the Greens did not
participate in the vote).
Australia's
misinformation bill dead in the water. In what looks set to be a win for free speech
Down Under, critical support from independent senators for the Australian Government's
controversial misinformation bill has collapsed completely. The Labor Government needed votes
from four out of seven independents to pass the bill, but as of today, every single one of the
seven independent senators on the crossbench has declared their opposition to the bill.
Formerly undecided Senator Lidia Thorpe today stated her intention to vote against it, due to
concerns that "white-dominated institutions" would regulate what constitutes truth, which would
would "further erase, suppress and misrepresent First Nations narratives and activism."
The
FCC is finally going after big tech censorship. The one-two-three punches of the
Russia Hoax, COVID, and the 2020 election gave the tech companies the excuse they needed to crack
down on ideas with which they disagreed. The magic word was "misinformation." In addition to
embracing it themselves, the tech companies were vulnerable to pressure from the Deep State and the
Biden administration. They told the tech companies that it was patriotic to use private
corporations to do what the government couldn't do directly: Censor political speech in
America. Using social media censorship and search engine manipulation to dry up traffic was
one way to attack those who opposed the Democrat agenda. However, even with decreased traffic
from social media and search engine referrals, sites were still getting by, thanks to the ad
revenue from those loyal to them. Something more was needed. The "something more" was
"fact checkers" and "credibility" researchers. In the latter category, the main organization
was NewsGuard.
Canada's
Censorship Crusade Targets Tech Giants in a Push for "Disinformation" Control. Over
the last four years, Canada's Liberal government headed by Justin Trudeau got itself heavily
aligned with the neighbor to the south on several key but also very contentious issues —
such as restrictive Covid measures, various forms of pressure on tech companies, and
"disinformation" censorship. A flurry of controversial bills in Canada, some of which became
law, serve to cement this impression. Now, as President Trump prepares to start his second
term in office in the US, Canada's "orphaned" ruling class continues with the "disinformation"
narrative — either as a sign of long-term commitment or looking for new "disinformation
partners" elsewhere in the world — or simply as a sign of inertia.
Disinformation:
The Dark Sword of Tyranny. Disinformation is a powerful tool for wannabe
tyrants. Those who practice the disinformation dark arts wield a double-edged sword.
With one edge the government apparatus claims their critics and opponents are spreading harmful
disinformation and use their considerable power to censor and eradicate dissent. Much as the
term "hate speech" opens the door to the suppression of free speech, "disinformation" is the
skeleton key of modern domestic propaganda and censorship. With it, the regime can target
political movements, specific politicians, and prominent voices on the grounds that they are
influenced by or in thrall to foreign "disinformation." The goal is consensus. Silencing all
opposing views creates by default an apparent unity of thought. The climate change crisis is
a prime example of censorship creating false consensus.
Is
Kamala Harris Bent on Killing Free Speech? Signs Say 'Yes'. Kamala Harris'
Labour Party advisor's #1 priority is killing Twitter. We can't let the proles speak.
Only the vanguard of the proletariat and their Pravda media propagandists can be allowed to have a
say, lest the dirty dumb demos quit doing what they are told. [Advertisement] Matt Taibbi
and Paul Thacker have the scoop, and it is just as scary as you think. The campaign to
destroy free speech is in full swing, and they are executing the plan. [Tweet] I have
written a lot about censorship because, in the long run, it may present the greatest threat to our
freedom. If we have free speech, we can at least fight back. We can make an appeal to
reason. The key to Democrat power has been control over the flow of information, and the left
has a near monopoly on distributing information. As much as the public now distrusts the
media, we still need to be armed with facts. Facebook is controlled. TikTok is
controlled. The so-called "mainstream media" has turned into a brainwashing tool.
Twitter stands alone as a place where you and I can speak relatively freely. That is why the
European Union, the UK, Ireland, Brazil, China, and all the totalitarians in the world are
hell-bent on killing it.
A
strategy for countering dis-, mis-, mal-, non-, and non-trans information. It is
maddening that the most egregious examples of disinformation and its variants come from the MSM and
the government accusing us of the same. While alternative conservative media and internet
sleuths have done an excellent job exposing their every malfeasance, somehow these entities are
still mostly getting away with it, not changing their behavior, with low-information voters often
unaware and still trusting mainstream media and government broadcasts and material. A
coherent strategy is needed.
Democrats
Are a Major Threat to Free Speech; Trump Isn't. The Democratic presidential nominee
Kamala Harris has threatened to sic the Justice Department on social media platforms that "profit
off hate." That was in 2019. Her vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim
Walz, has said that "there's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech."
That was in 2022. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has said that the government needs
to figure out how to "rein in the media environment." That was in 2021. Hillary Clinton,
the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, has suggested that Americans
who share misinformation should be criminally charged. That was a month ago. The former
Secretary of State John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, has worried about the First
Amendment being a "major block" to stopping "disinformation." That was two weeks ago.
The
Dems vs. Free Speech. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the government ordered
draconian lockdowns. Regular people violating the lockdown were punished while those in power
doing the same suffered no consequences. Following state-ordered vaccine mandates, those
refusing to take the untested vaccine were compelled to quit their jobs. The Biden
administration set up a 'Disinformation Governance Board' whose stated function was to ensure
national security by combating "misinformation" and "disinformation" on social media. The
powers of this board weren't clearly stated but the principle was that the government would sit in
judgment of its citizens and become the arbiter of what should and should not be allowed.
Disinformation
Isn't the Problem. Government Coverups and Censorship Are the Problem. In a
perfect example of the Nanny State mindset at work, Hillary Clinton insists that the powers-that-be
need "total control" in order to make the internet a safer place for users and protect us
harm. Clinton is not alone in her distaste for unregulated, free speech online. A
bipartisan chorus that includes both presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has
long clamored to weaken or do away with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which
essentially acts as a bulwark against online censorship. It's a complicated legal issue that
involves debates over immunity, liability, net neutrality and whether or not internet sites are
publishers with editorial responsibility for the content posted to their sites, but really, it
comes down to the tug-of-war over where censorship (corporate and government) begins and free
speech ends.
Maricopa
Elections Chief Enlisted Foreign Censorship Group In War On Disapproved Speech.
Maricopa County Recorder Steven Richer turned to the left-leaning States United Democracy Center
and an overseas group bankrolled by the State Department to help his office target election speech
that's disapproved of by the government, according to emails obtained by The Federalist.
Richer thanked States United for offering to let his office "piggy back" on the group's anti-speech
operations, which he described as "deep scanning" the internet for "disinformation," a term often
invoked to censor speech the government disagrees with. States United is a left-wing election
law group that consistently opposes Republican election integrity legislation like voter ID laws
and supports Democrat attempts to diminish election security, according to InfluenceWatch.
The group has praised the weaponization of the justice system against Trump, and was described by
The New York Times as part of a "coalition" preparing to "push back" against a potential Trump
victory with "extraordinary pre-emptive actions."
Trust
Me, We Would NEVER Do That, Says Mayorkas to Disbelieving Americans. Alejandro
Mayorkas, the impeached Department of Homeland Security Secretary, wants you to know that he's
vewy, vewy angwy that people would dare say that the reason he, Border Czar Kamala Harris, and
President Joe Biden have opened the borders to a marauding horde of millions of illegal aliens is
to import new Democrat voters. That's just "disinformation," he said on CBS's Face the Nation
on Sunday morning, with just a tad too much-feigned disbelief in his voice. Mayorkas told
Margaret Brennan that these kinds of stories combined with the concerns over helping North Carolina
hurricane victims vote this election have caused Americans to "lose confidence in the integrity of
the election system, and we need people in positions of authority to actually communicate accurate
information to the voting public." Getting "accurate information" would be a refreshing
change, wouldn't it?
Citing
the Biden-Harris admin's own FEMA facts isn't misinformation. In a perfect storm of
Democratic nonsense, White House chief flack Karine Jean-Pierre blew off factual info around
Federal Emergency Management Agency spending and foreign aid that her own employers released as
"misinformation" before stomping off in a huff. What more proof does America need that labels
of mis- and disinformation have nothing to do with whether any statement is true or false, but only
whether it's helpful or harmful to the political project of the left? Fox News' Peter Doocy
posed Jean-Pierre (Joe Biden's newest "senior adviser") a simple question: Why does the Biden
administration have close to $157 million ready to go for Lebanon aid but has to go hat in
hand to Congress for extra funds for FEMA to deal with Hurricane Helene damage?
FEMA's
Ridiculous New 'Hurricane Misinformation' Website Needs Some Serious Fact Checking.
How do you know when you're being lied to by the political left? Well, yes, when their lips
are moving, but also when they scream "Disinformation!" Such is the case with Biden-Harris's
FEMA, which has announced a new website to address what they're calling "hurricane disinformation."
The translation of that nonsense little phrase being that they were caught with their pants down after
Hurricane Helene, whether accidentally or deliberately, and it's all the fault of disinformation. [...]
Imagine how the people of storm-ravaged North Carolina will feel when, in the face of the disastrous
response by the federal government, they hear that FEMA is wasting time and resources on a rumor
website. They know the truth about FEMA. Forget misinformation; we're dealing with criminally
bad mismanagement here.
FEMA
Says "Disinformation" is a Problem — What Disinformation? The Disinformation About
the Information. Politico has written an article about FEMA Administrator Deanne
Criswell, saying disinformation about the federal government response to Hurricane Helene, "is
absolutely the worst I have ever seen," Criswell told reporters on a Tuesday morning call.
"It's creating distrust in the federal government, but also the state government, and we have so
many first responders that have been working to go out and help these communities," she
added. However, if you go read the article fraught with pearl-clutching and protestation, you
might curiously discover there is not a single citation for any claimed "disinformation." It
is very odd to see FEMA and by extension Politico in their defense, claiming that massive
disinformation is running rampant, and yet they do not cite a single example of the disinformation
they claim to exist.
FEMA
sets up a 'rumor response' webpage to set the record straight after all the scrutiny of its
response to Helene. When enough of the public harbors such deep distrust for our
federal government that our federal agencies feel compelled to establish official "rumor response"
websites to try to convince the people that they're not corrupt and incompetent, I'd say it's game
over, and there's no road to redemption. You've blown it. Obliterated everything.
Nuked your last shred of credibility. In light of mounting accusations against FEMA as
bumbling the response to Hurricane Helene beyond all comprehension, the disaster relief agency took
it upon itself to create a fact-checking website, to battle the "rumor" mill — despite
what those conspiracy theorist MAGA haters are saying, FEMA takes its mission seriously, and is
adeptly handling the emergency response!
Like
a Prayer. You have also known for some time now, that Hillary is exactly the something
wicked that has been coming this way for many years, to the siren song of the cable news harpies
shrieking Trump Trump Trump... Putin Putin Putin at all hours, day and night,
month after dreary month, and all the other avatars of ruin pretending to run the life of our nation.
But this utterance begs enough questions to keep Chat GDP vexed and perplexed for the rest of its unnatural
life: We lose total control...? Yes, as matter of fact, you do. This
might be a book tour too far for Mrs. Clinton and her claque, now that her basket of deplorables
shivers in the cold and dark out in Appalachia amid the stink of their kinfolks' uncollected corpses.
Did
She Really Just Say That?: Hillary Clinton Lets the Cat Out of Bag on Dems and Controlling
Speech. One of the things that Elon Musk just warned about at former President Donald
Trump's rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was the danger that the Democrats posed to free speech and
how important it was to vote for Trump to preserve our Constitutional rights. [Advertisement]
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton let the cat out of the bag during an interview with CNN on Saturday, where
she spoke about the need to control social media. She said it should be "at the top" of every
legislative agenda: [Tweet with video clip, partial transcipt] "We lose total control."
That's the real problem to them right there, that's why Democrats are so upset. Yes, that's the
point of the First Amendment — the government is not supposed to be in "control" of the
speech of the people. Sounds pretty fascistic to me. People can now see and hear the truth
without having it be filtered through liberal media organs. We can now know when the media is
lying to us.
Censorship
Is THE Biggest Issue in This Election. There is a lot at stake in this election
cycle, as you all know. But in my mind, the make-or-break issue is protecting the First
Amendment and, by extension, the Constitution and our freedoms. Yes, the border matters
immensely. Yes, the US is embroiled in wars abroad that should never have broken out.
But without freedom of speech and the ability to break the near monopoly on information
distribution, our country will be gone. We won't even have a fighting chance. Before
you say, "the Supreme Court will save us," recall that the Democrats have been agitating to expand
the Court and pack it with leftists.
Hillary
Clinton Calls for Stricter Online Censorship as Establishment Fears Losing "Total Control".
In an interview with CNN, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her pressing need for
social media companies to enhance censorship measures, suggesting that failure to do so would lead
to the loss of "total control." This declaration aligns with broader concerns expressed by
figures within the Democratic Party regarding the control of information online.
[Video clip] Clinton's remarks come in the wake of substantial changes in the space of
online expression, notably influenced by Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022. Under Musk's
stewardship, the platform, now rebranded as X, has championed a more laissez-faire approach to
content moderation. This stance has facilitated a pushback against what some perceive as
misleading mainstream narratives, particularly evident in the recent coverage of FEMA's reported
mishandling of hurricane relief efforts in North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee — a
narrative that the government is calling "misinformation."
Vance
is right. Harris and Walz are a threat to Americans' free speech. In the vice
presidential debate Tuesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pulled the fire alarm. His
opponent, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, cited the massive system of censorship supported by Vice
President Kamala Harris and her running mate. Walz proceeded to quote the line from a 1919
case in which Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said you do not have the right to falsely
yell fire in a crowded theater. It is the favorite mantra of the anti-free speech
movement. It also is fundamentally wrong.
US:
In Danger of Losing Freedom of Speech, Replaced by Politburo. Some politicians in the
US are itching to take away your free speech rights and, given the chance, if they get enough
votes, they will. How do we know? Because they tell us that they will. Last week,
at a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on climate, former US Secretary of State and Biden-Harris
administration climate envoy John Kerry complained that the First Amendment prevents the US
government from shutting down what it deems to be "disinformation" on social media, which makes it
more difficult to "hammer disinformation out of existence... particularly in democracies," he
lamented. What he does not mention of course is who decides what is "disinformation," or if
it is just whatever the current government wants the public to think. What comes immediately
to mind are government narratives such as the Russia collusion hoax, that Covid-19 was transmitted
by bats, or that Hinter Biden's laptop, according to no fewer than 51 former intelligence
officials, was "disinformation." All those allegations of disinformation, we now know, were
themselves disinformation.
The
left is going to war on the First Amendment. In the last 48 hours, two
extraordinary videos have arrived on X. The first features John Kerry, the Democratic
candidate for President in 2004. The second is of Bill Gates, the world's fifth-richest man
and, with George Soros, its top left-leaning charity funder. Kerry's video runs a mere two
minutes. Gates's lasts barely 30 seconds. And both should terrify anyone who believes
in free speech. Both reveal that the top of the American left now explicitly rejects the
First Amendment.
Tim
Walz Endorsed Censorship In Front Of Millions Of Americans And No One Cares. The most
important exchange in Tuesday's vice presidential debate has been almost entirely ignored by the
corporate media. Not surprisingly, that's because it makes Walz look like an authoritarian
and a fool in one fell swoop: [Transcript] Ok, let's unpack what happened here. Walz
challenged Vance on Trump's questioning of the 2020 election results and Jan. 6, and Vance
countered by saying that if Walz and his running mate, Kamala Harris, were so concerned about the
fate of democracy they wouldn't be so adamantly pro-censorship. Specifically, Walz has
previously said, quite incorrectly from any legal or moral standpoint, that there's no First
Amendment right to "misinformation." Walz interjects to, near as I can tell,
try and clarify that he was also talking about limiting "threatening" words or "hate speech."
Interestingly, I looked at multiple debate transcriptions, and none of them had this quite audible
interjection included — though the first word or two is hard to discern, the part about
"threatening or hate speech" is quite clear. In any event, to the extent that Walz is trying
to defend himself he's doing an awful job.
Why
the [Australian] misinformation bill must be stopped. The whole concept of
"misinformation" is highly subjective. This legislation would give the Australian Media and
Communications Authority (ACMA), a government bureaucracy, sweeping powers to decide what is true
and what is not true. The elected parliament will not be able to intervene. Digital
platforms will be made to invent codes of practice to prevent "misinformation and disinformation"
that satisfy ACMA. They will then implement these codes to censor content that the ACMA deems
is "not true" and might cause "serious harm". That means everything you can see, hear or say on the
internet will be policed.
Disinformation
vs. the First Amendment. I came across this John Kerry diatribe lamenting the perils
of free speech in my news feed this morning. [...] ["]If people only go to one source, and
the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation,
our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of
existence.["] I think it's safe to say that Kerry's idea of a "sick" source likely
begins with Fox News and includes every other outlet that isn't part of the DNC propaganda
machine. And given his druthers, would love to "hammer it (and the rest of them)
out of existence." This should scare [...] every free-thinking American. Not
that Kerry has any political power, but the leadership of his party does and feels the same as he
does on this subject. Kill the filibuster, stack the Supreme Court, decree a Presidential
nominee without a single primary vote. The party that sees threats to democracy behind every
tree desperately needs a mirror!
Just
who can we trust in this election? Just as the left has tried to hide the truth from
the American people about Biden and Harris, they have had to replace those facts with a
manufactured narrative about Trump. Trump's entire political life has largely been shaped by
lies from the left, from the Clinton campaign's dossier, to Russia collusion, all the way to the
'Kamalies,' with every gap between filled by the legacy media. The biggest ironies are about
mis- and disinformation, when they point to Trump, or someone else with a differing opinion than
their own. Hillary Clinton just suggested that Americans who interfere with elections by
spreading propaganda should be criminally or civilly charged. Which Americans do you think
she was talking about? Do you think it was anyone named Clinton, Obama, Biden, or
Cheney? What about any of the other prolific traffickers in falsehoods, like White House
press secretaries, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, or ABC?
Idaho
Secretary of State Partners With Federal Censors In The Name Of 'Election Security'.
Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, is partnering with the federal censorship
office Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to talk about "election security."
McGrane held a press conference on Wednesday with CISA director Jen Easterly in the Idaho state capital,
after which the Idaho Republican said he was "grateful for the partnership" in a post on X.
CISA is America's newest federal agency, established in 2018 in part to protect the American
electrical grid and "critical infrastructure" from "cybersecurity threats." In 2017, this
included election infrastructure, which then-outgoing DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson designated as a
"critical infrastructure subsector," as noted in a 2023 federal report. The agency has also
been working with Big Tech to silence Americans' speech and put its thumb on the scale of elections.
On
State Department Censorship and Blacklisting. Last Friday, Josh Christenson at the
New York Post published "State Department tried to discredit reporters, Republican pol over
conservative 'blacklist.'" The article described an internal memo showing the State Department
strategizing public relations responses to the Washington Examiner's Gabe Kaminsky, me, and
Republican congressman Jim Banks. The memo criticizes Banks in an extremely devious
way. The Indiana Republican last February was quoted by Gabe in the Examiner saying
the Biden administration appeared to be "knee deep" in efforts to "crack down" on speech. The
State Department memo listed the Banks quote among its list of criticisms to answer. However,
the agency didn't quote the Examiner. It claimed to be quoting the Russian news agency
RIA-Novosti, giving the impression that Banks offered his criticism of Biden in Russian state
media: [Exhibit] But Banks never spoke to RIA-Novosti, or any Russian agency. His
quotes only appear in wholesale Russian translations (read: thefts) of Gabe's Examiner
article. [...] A miffed Banks just responded with a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
"The State Department, in defense of its domestic so-called 'disinformation' operation,
purposefully spread disinformation about a U.S. lawmaker," he wrote, adding that "this is a sloppy
and hypocritical lie and it is typical of the Biden-Harris State Department's repeated attacks on
the First Amendment."
California
Bans Election 'Deepfakes,' Celebrates Biological Ones. California Governor Gavin
Newsom (D) on Tuesday signed a law immediately banning the sharing of election-related "deepfake"
videos, images, or audio, enforceable up to 120 days before an election and 60 days after
an election. He also signed two more laws, which take effect in January, requiring
disclaimers on AI-generated political ads and requiring social media companies to remove deepfakes,
or else courts will force them to do so. [...] The term "deepfake" describes electronic media that
has been manipulated, altered, or entirely fabricated, but which is so true to life that it
deceives people into thinking it is real. [...] My purpose here is not to litigate the debate
between these two arguments, nor explore various compromises that could address the concerns of
each. Instead, I write to demonstrate the contrast between California's aggressive pursuit of
one form of technological deepfake (electronic) and their unquestioning embrace of another form of
technological deepfake (biological). For that is what gender transition procedures are: a
biological deepfake.
Hillary
Clinton, queen of disinformation, issues two-faced call for censorship. Amidst all
the shocks of the 2024 presidential race, who expected Hillary Clinton to ride in like Joan of Arc
to rescue truth — or at least to call for the crushing of government critics? On
Monday, Hillary declared on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC talk show that the federal government should
criminally prosecute Americans who share "propaganda" — which she made no effort to
define. Hillary has long been one of America's foremost censorship advocates. In 2022,
she wailed that "tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability"
and endorsed European Union legislation to obliterate free speech. But as we've seen,
"disinformation" is often simply the lag time between the government pronouncing something a
falsehood and the government getting debunked.
The
Dangers of Hillary's Duplicity. Hillary Clinton orchestrated the most destructive
misinformation campaign in history. She cast the President of the United States as a Russian
agent, thereby destabilizing not only the country but also the world. If anyone should be
jailed for spreading misinformation, it is Hillary Clinton. [Video clip]
Hillary
Clinton Wants To Jail Americans For 'Misinformation.' Let's Start With Her. Hillary
Clinton went on MSNBC this week and told Rachel Maddow that she thinks Americans who spread
"misinformation" and Russia propaganda should be prosecuted. [...] What she's describing is of
course odious and totally incompatible with the First Amendment. Americans are free to spread
as much Russian propaganda as they want, whether they believe any of it or not. [...] But fine, for
the sake of argument if Clinton wants to go down this road, let's go. Let's say we're going
to start criminally prosecuting American citizens for spreading Russia propaganda. In that
case, Clinton herself is first up. No one has done more to interfere in our elections by
spreading Russian propaganda than Hillary Clinton herself. She is arguably the greatest
spreader of Russian propaganda and lies in American history, so she can be first to stand trial
under these insane new rules she's proposing. After all, it was the Clinton campaign that
created the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy, which hamstrung the incoming Trump administration
and held the nation hostage for more than two years. After 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witness
interview, and nearly 300 wiretaps and pen registers, Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that
there was zero evidence of collusion by Trump or his associates.
How
Wikipedia Became a Propaganda Site. When it was founded in 2001, Wikipedia had an
idealistic mission: to provide all the world's information for free — gathered, updated,
and fact-checked democratically by the people. But in recent years, as our politics have
become increasingly angry and divided, so too have the key editors of Wikipedia who engage openly
in battles over "the truth."
A
Note to the Temporary Oppressors. [Scroll down] Let me be clear, anyone in
government, or otherwise coerced by it, who seek to silence or punish free speech, free thought or
free association are guilty of 18 U.S. Code 241 Conspiracy against rights, which states:
[Text omitted for brevity.] This is what I think of when I see videos of a sheriff's deputy standing
behind two federal agents at a person's door wanting to talk to them about a social media post. The
very act of a police organization, federal, state or local inquiring about an exercise of free speech is by
definition intimidation. Any social media site who censor's an act of free speech is likewise a
conspirator. To me, the response should be to look at the deputy and inquire if he is part of the
conspiracy or if he's going to take the offenders into custody as the crime was committed in his
presence. Get names, badge numbers and be willing to file charges on the spot.
Gavin
Newsom Signs Bill Into Law Allowing The Government To Ban 'Deceptive' Social Media
Posts. CA Gov. Gavin Newsom signs bill into law that bans the distribution of
"election communications that contain materially deceptive content." According to his own
statement, content from the Kamala Harris Campaign X account could be banned but most likely
won't. CNN recently released a report detailing all of the "deceptive" content coming from
Kamala HQ. "A social media account run by Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign has been
repeatedly deceptive." "[Kamala HQ] has made a habit of misleadingly clipping and inaccurately
captioning video clips to attack former President Donald Trump." In Newsom's own statement,
"deceptive content," as CNN described, is now banned. [Video clip]
Hillary
Clinton Demands 'Criminal Penalties' for Americans to Deter 'Misinformation'. It's
2016 all over again! Eight years later, having learned nothing from the epic public
humiliation she suffered when her fact-free Russiagate hoax collapsed into itself with the Mueller
Report, Rachel Maddow is still asserting "election interference." Hillary Clinton is eager to
assist her in her Red Scare propaganda efforts. Ironically, Hillary is now demanding criminal
prosecutions for her opponents' alleged propaganda — and not just foreign state
actors, but explicitly "Americans," presumably private citizens who post loosely defined
"misinformation" on social media.
An
Active X User Is Visited By The Feds Over Social Media Posts, They Refuse To Indentify Themselves
Before Being Forced To Leave. A man filmed two U.S. federal agents as they approached
him to ask about posts he'd made on social media, leading to them being publicly shamed for
targeting a First Amendment-protected activity. In a viral video, X user Jeremy Kauffman
filmed as two plain-clothes agents approached his front porch requesting he not film them, as the
citizen asked for their full names while notifying them he intended to post the interaction
online. After appearing thoroughly embarrassed, the agents eventually departed while the man
chided them, saying, "You know Americans that believe in the Constitution think you're laughable.
You go home and you think about what you did today. Go home and think about it. You
coward." It's unclear what social media post prompted the visit. [Video clip]
French
State Regulator Hits Broadcaster with €20,000 Fine for Climate 'Misinformation'.
Watched by a global audience, last month's opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris featured
an obscene mockery of the Christian Last Supper. Everyone is entitled to their view was a
liberal response and some even suggested it was a 'celebration' of diverse religious belief.
Just days before, the French state fined the second largest rolling news channel CNews €20,000
(£17,000) for failing to question a contributor's view that human-caused global warming was a
scam. Welcome to free speech, French style. It is fine and dandy to mock religious
belief, or at least the Christian beliefs held by millions of citizens, but take a sceptical view
of a hotly disputed and highly politicised science matter and the fines rain down.
Kamala
Harris Is The Real Threat To Our Constitutional Republic. Freedom of speech is so
fundamental to our constitutional republic that the founding generation prohibited government
infringement on that right in the First Amendment. However, since Donald Trump's surprise
victory in 2016 launched the censorship-industrial complex, the government has been moving
aggressively to silence speech. And the consequences of government censorship can be
devastating, as Americans learned in the context of COVID, when our government hid or minimized the
dangers of vaccines, and deprived citizens of a fulsome debate over mandatory masking and school
closures. Donald Trump has promised to end the federal government's efforts to censor speech,
pledging last week to "sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from
colluding with any organization, business or person to censor, limit, categorize or impede the
lawful speech of American citizens." Trump further committed to "ban[ning] federal money from
being used to label domestic speech as mis- or disinformation" and to firing federal bureaucrats
responsible for domestic censorship activities.
Former
Clinton Apparatchik Robert Reich: Elon Musk Should Be Threatened With Arrest for
'Disinformation'. The more I read about or hear about Elon Musk, the more I like the
guy. Oh, I don't agree with him on every issue, but then, if two people agree on everything,
one of them isn't necessary. But I like his tenaciousness, I like his grit, and I admire his
First Amendment absolutism. So, when Clinton creature Robert Reich, the former Labor
Secretary (because of course he was), opines that Musk should be threatened with arrest by regulators
for "disseminating lies and hate" — meaning anything Robert Reich doesn't agree with —
well, I'm inclined to tell Robert Reich precisely where he can place that idea, [...]
The
Last Election Before the War. This election, if seen for what it is, is an expression
of wills. It's a choice of regular order or communist rule. Since the pandemic, we've
seen the private armies of the globalists, our police forces and sheriff's offices, impose rules
and dictates sent down from on high. These were not laws and they were not acting
lawfully. We have suffered the surveillance, the monitoring of our actions, the visits by the
secret police concerning social media posts. We have seen censorship for our views that were
ultimately proven true, not the misguided, antigovernment screeds they were proclaimed by a biased
and criminally negligent press. We now see people going to prison here and elsewhere for
things they've said, especially when true. Pavel Durov, CEO of Instagram, has been arrested
in France for things other people have said. These are the dark days of communisms showing
themselves in real time, across the globe, so there can be no doubt as to the future under Harris/Obama.
CIA
and FBI Spread Disinformation and Interfered In 2020 Presidential Election. Many
people saw the letter that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent to Rep. Jim Jordan earlier this
week as old news. In 2022, Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that Facebook had limited the spread of
the New York Post story about the Hunter Biden laptop in response to information from the FBI.
"The FBI basically came to us and was like, 'Hey, you should be on high alert. We thought
that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election; we have it on notice that
basically, there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that.'" In fact,
Zuckerberg's letter went further than what he told Rogan in 2022 because he specifically mentioned
Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company Hunter Biden worked for. Zuckerberg wrote, "the
FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma
in the lead up to the 2020 election."
DNC:
Disinformation, Narcissism, & Coercion. The DNC has long been pushing plans for
"counter disinformation." This is simply more outlandish inversion and it has nothing to do
with fact checking. They seek to create a whole ecosystem of wildly reactive tripwires whose
aim is to cause instant "struck beehive" response to "any facts we don't like." [Illustration,
not shown here.] This is a 2023 presentation from Tim Durigan, the DNC's "lead disinformation
analyst." This is, indeed, threat detection but the threats are "someone is out telling the
truth" not "disinformation." This is an actual no fooling around propaganda factory.
They are spewing tactics, talking points, and content with the express goal of "helping confused
people/campaigns know how to react." None of this is grass roots. It's all astroturf.
Our
rights are being wronged, starting from the First Amendment. The government has
effectively established leftism, meaning itself, as the official religion of the United States of
America. And that government [surely] prohibits the free exercise of Christianity. As
some who have prayed next to an abortion mill well know. Government tells religious
organizations what they can and can't do, tells the private owner of a small bakery that he or she
must make a pro-LGBTQ (or transgender) cake or be run out of business, threatens priests and
pastors who read "anti-gay" passages from the Bible, typically refuses to allow benign and
nominally Christian-themed flags, such as "An Appeal To Heaven," to fly over public buildings ...
but has no such compunctions regarding LGBTQ — or often even Palestinian —
banners. Freedom of speech? Say or write something — anything —
that goes against The Agenda, and prepare to be shamed, counseled, cancelled, or worse.
Increasingly, anything that doesn't completely comport with leftist dogma is simply branded
"misinformation" and/or "hate speech."
Britain,
Which Birthed American Ideas About Liberty, Has Embraced Despotism. Seeking to
curtail what it claims is misinformation and incitement, the government warned the British
citizenry, "You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is
false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred." They also warned potential
anti-immigration protesters, "We're watching you." So basically, the government decides what's
false, threatening, or hate speech, and if you post anything about it online, you could end up in
jail. And if threatening Brits' freedom of speech wasn't enough, the government threatened
online platforms (and Musk) if they allowed prohibited speech. Nor did the government stop
there. It promised to extradite citizens of other countries if they engage in such prohibited
online speech, even if not in Britain at the time. And because there's not enough room in
British jails to hold all of these anti-immigration "racists," the government plans to release
5,000 criminals from jail to make room for those guilty of "wrongthink." While the Tories are
responsible for the unfettered immigration over the last three decades, July's election, which put
Labour in power, represented a leap in transforming Britain into a tyranny. A free Britain,
which took over 1,000 years to evolve, essentially became a Stalinist police state in less
than two months.
Who's
for the First Amendment — and Who Isn't. "There's a lot of opposition to
just hearing what President [Donald] Trump has to say," Elon Musk said at the beginning of his
two-hour interview on X with the 45th and would-be 47th president. Musk noted, "I got a
letter from the EU Commission, like, saying to not have disinformation during this discussion we're
having. And there's a lot of attempts to do censorship and to force censorship even on
Americans from other countries." That's not quite right, but it's close. The letter was
not from the European Commission, but from EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, a French
citizen and former CEO of France Telecom. The letter purports to remind Musk of the European
Union's Digital Services Act's requirements of "all proportionate and effective mitigation
measures" regarding "detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security." In other
words, X must censor questions to and answers from an American presidential candidate and keep the
EU informed of its censorship procedures.
The
great disinformation panic. The transatlantic campaign to stanch 'misinformation'
burgeoned with the elites' revulsion at the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain and
the election of Donald Trump, also in that year. That campaign has intensified with the
prospect of Trump's re-election in the US and in the wake of the recent riots in the UK, which were
sparked by erroneous online reports that the person who fatally stabbed three children in Southport
on 29 July was an asylum seeker. In both countries, the right-on, smart take is to embrace,
in the name of democracy and social justice, such doublethink as the Labour government's new
enthusiasm for the policing of and crackdown on 'legal but harmful' online content. The
muddled nature and pernicious implications of this crusade are laid bare by dissecting what remains
among the most widely praised of the establishment's examinations of the problem of disinformation —
a three-day conference in 2022 titled titled 'Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy', co-hosted
by the Atlantic and the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics.
Our
Future. Today it is not only the CIA, FBI, the State Department, and AIPAC who
sponsor "fact-checkers" to protect their narratives from the truth, but also corporations and
left-wing organizations. The Constitution's guarantee of free speech notwithstanding, the
easiest and most certain way to get into trouble in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe is to tell the
truth. Witness the current federal police state attacks on Tulsi Gabbard, Scott Ritter and
Donald Trump. If such high profile people can be threatened, anyone can. Today there
are so many governmental agencies, so many advertisers, so many employers that can bring troubles
to people and publications that step on their feet. Remember, the editors of the two most
prestigious medical journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet said that they had
no confidence in the articles they published because 70% of them were written with Big Pharma
research grants. Displease your sponsor, and there go your research grants and career.
US
government awards billions in contracts to censorship cartel. The federal government
has awarded billions of dollars in contracts to corporations that are part of a powerful censorship
cartel, a report said Thursday. The Gold Report reported last month how the World
Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which includes global corporations like IBM, Mastercard, PepsiCo,
AB InBev, Nestlé, and L'Oréal, forces media and other corporations to embrace woke
narratives and ideologies. The WFA buys approximately 90% of the world's advertising, which
translates to nearly $1 trillion in ad spending annually. In 2019, the WFA created the
Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) to address "harmful content" and "misinformation."
GARM's steering committee includes Proctor & Gamble, Mars, Unilever, Diageo, and three trade
associations. This steering committee also acts as GARM's board of directors.
Yucky
UK. [Scroll down] Native Brits are upset that foreign nationals are
committing crimes, and domestic police officers are using their resources to incarcerate citizens
for voicing their concerns. Violent crime is okay, but denouncing violent crime is not.
How surreal is that? [...] One thing is certain: we are all being watched. Among the various
secret agencies monitoring online communications in the U.K., the National Security Online
Information Team (formerly the Counter Disinformation Unit used to combat dissent during the Reign
of COVID Terror) is on the lookout for "problematic" speech. Although British censors (like
their American cousins) claim to be "protecting" citizens from "hateful" words and inaccurate
"disinformation," their job essentially boils down to targeting independent thinkers who express
opinions at odds with official government orthodoxy.
We
Will Get Fooled Again. The recent move by British police to monitor online comments
and even arrest people for improper retweets or Facebook postings is no surprise. The basic
premise of any Marxist/Socialist system is that the government knows best. Though parents
have been bringing up children for ages, Michelle Obama — in justifying her foray into
food served at school cafeterias across the country — said that even though she studied
at Princeton and Harvard, she didn't know what proper food for children is. So we need the
experts. And where the left sees the government as knowing best, the Founding Fathers
believed that the people knew best and had their rights protected against a government like the
present one in England. But expect under Harris that comments about trans being fake, COVID
vaccines having safety issues, or any other officially unapproved thoughts to lead to suspension
from a platform and possibly, as in England, a visit from the police.
UK
police commissioner threatens to extradite, jail US citizens over online posts: 'We'll come after
you'. Riots have broken out across the United Kingdom in recent days over false
rumors spread online that an asylum seeker was responsible for a mass stabbing at a Taylor
Swift-themed dance event that left three girls dead and others wounded. The murders,
allegedly committed by a now 18-year-old British citizen born to Rwandan parents, sparked a series
of violent protests that tapped into broader concerns about the scale of immigration in the U.K.
Footage of the violent clashes involving anti-immigration protesters and the groups of
counter-protesters, some of whom have been seen waving Palestinian flags, has gone viral on social
media, and the government is warning that sharing such content may have serious consequences.
One key aspect that makes this apparent crackdown on social media particularly shocking to critics
is that the British government is threatening to extradite American citizens from the U.S. to be
jailed in the U.K. for violating their rules about political speech online.
The Editor says...
Whether the Muslim killer who started the recent chain of events is a recent arrival or the son of
less-recently arrived immigrants is a distinction that's hardly worth arguing over, let alone
imprisoning people for inaccurately stating. The core of the issue is that England has
admitted too many violent Muslims, the Muslims are no longer laying low, the situation will inevitably
get worse, and it's not the fault of the white people who have lived there for multiple generations.
Who
Gets To Decide What Is 'Misinformation'? A chilling letter this week from Michigan
Attorney General Dana Nessel is a reminder that Americans cannot forget about the importance of the
judiciary in upholding free speech and our other constitutional freedoms. On
Tuesday — ironically, the day Michiganders went to the primary polls to participate in
our constitutional right to vote — Nessel issued a "cease-and-desist letter" against a
citizen whom the letter claimed was violating a state law against "misleading or false information"
about "polling locations." The recipient of the letter, Kerry Lynn Elieff, was threatened with
"criminal prosecutions" if she did not follow the order. What raises the biggest red flags is
that Nessel's letter doesn't ever state what information was false or misleading. Elieff told
me after the cease-and-desist letter became public that all she was trying to do was verify that
due process was followed in changing polling locations. She actually took down her public
posts out of fear of prosecution — and who can blame her? She wasn't sure what to
do after being under surprise threat by a state official.
TSA,
SSSS, Tulsi Gabbard, Pre-Crime and PsyWar. Frankly, receiving an "SSSS" designation
by the TSA is one of the constant fears that have nagged at me for the last few years, as I fly
almost weekly. Given how often I fly and how outspoken I have been regarding the COVIDcrisis,
synchronized corporate-government Fearporn messaging, psychological terrorism, and the methods and
deployment of psychological warfare by Western governments on their own citizens, I half expect to
find the dreaded "SSSS" at the bottom of my air travel ticket every time I run through the
pre-board process for my next flight. Every time I go through customs, my heart beats a
little faster as I wonder if this is going to be the time that I find out that I have been flagged
for spreading mis- dis- or mal-information and consequently designated as a domestic terrorist for
committing this speech and thoughtcrime. Or of the pre-crime of being at risk for committing
mis- dis- or malinformation distribution at some point in the future.
Brits
Are Being Arrested for Social Media Posts Now. Britain is no longer falling. It
has fallen, and it may never get back up. Hate speech laws have been plaguing Britain for
years, and people have sporadically gotten arrested for offending the wrong person —
usually somebody in the alphabet community, who are the most "protected" people in the Western
world right now. Close behind are Muslims, who can rampage across Great Britain shouting
about killing all Jews, replacing English law with Sharia, and run a parallel police system to
enforce Sharia among Muslims. But now that violence has broken out in retaliation for the
murder of English children, the State has decided to crack down on... social media posts.
The
Government's sinister disinformation unit is threatening free speech again. Isn't it
curious how almost every problem this country faces seems to have a ready-made solution rooted in
digital authoritarianism? Less than one month into his premiership, Sir Keir Starmer was
faced with an unthinkably monstrous fatal stabbing of three little girls, followed by some of the
most shameful scenes of street violence in our country's living memory. His government's
response has notably included online censorship powers and AI facial recognition surveillance.
[...] and now Technology Secretary Peter Kyle is reviving Whitehall's disgraced Counter
Disinformation Unit (now deceptively rebranded as the National Security Online Information Team)
which was responsible for the secretive, politicised and sometimes unlawful speech-policing against
Brits during the pandemic.
They
Create Anarchy To Impose Tyranny. For hundreds of years, liberals have been fierce
opponents of authoritarianism. [...] But increasingly, it's been liberal politicians who have
demanded authoritarian restrictions on free speech and personal freedom. In
December 2022, Democratic Vice Presidential candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz claimed,
"There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our
democracy." In fact, the First Amendment protects both. And in 2020, Walz also
implemented a Covid snitch line and encouraged residents to report violations of pandemic
restrictions. It turns out he wasn't alone. The Civil Rights Department of California
Governor Gavin Newsom introduced last year a snitch line and urged citizens to report their fellow
citizens for alleged hate speech. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called for greater
censorship of social media platforms, and British police have over the last few days arrested three
people for what they posted online. And Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has demanded
greater online censorship, froze bank accounts of protesting truckers, and is pushing legislation
that could send a person to prison for life for speech.
This
is how we fall to tyranny. [Scroll down] If the government has the
authority to restrict "intimidating," or "threatening" speech, how long before they decided
criticism of the government or certain approved parties counts regardless of what that speech
actually is? We've seen plenty of people refer to being bullied, threatened, attacked, and a
host of other things because they spoke publicly and were criticized for it. Giving the
government power over who can say what to any degree is a recipe for disaster. But these
people actually want this. Granted, it's a third as opposed to two-thirds or anything like
that, but anything more than three people is alarming. And the idea that more than half think
the First Amendment goes too far in any manner is even more disturbing.
The
Stranglehold of Censorship. Much of what you see and hear through electronic devices
can be and is carefully crafted to a predetermined end. AI machine learning can control
narratives online in real time by dialing viral messages up or down. AI algorithms can scan
and ban tens of millions of keywords in posts, shutting down or boosting narratives. AI tools
can shape thought and action. Mike Benz so aptly calls them weapons of mass deletion.
Not some happenstance of tech evolution, these tools were developed by DARPA to take on ISIS and
are utilized by the CIA, DHS, DoD, and State Department in what Benz calls the censorship
industrial complex. An entire malinformation cottage industry has grown into a sprawling
beast woven throughout government agencies and third-party NGO 'researchers' like EIP, the
Orwellian-named Election Integrity Partnership. Fed by government grants and donor dollars,
these weapons of censorship are now trained on us. Google controls everything you are shown.
Secretary
Of State Asks Michiganders To Report Their Neighbors For Election 'Misinformation'.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is encouraging residents to report so-called
"misinformation" from their neighbors ahead of November's election. "Misinformation about the
election process, voter rights, or even an issue on the ballot is a serious threat to election
security," reads an online document from Benson's office. "If you see misleading or inaccurate
information regarding voting or elections in Michigan, please report it." The document
requests residents email reports of election "misinformation" — with "an image if
possible" — to misinformation@michigan.gov. Benson's office solicits residents to
report misinformation on its "voter education resources" page. The Federalist asked Benson's
office who this email reaches and how the state responds to alleged "misinformation," but her
office did not comment in time for publication.
House
demands info from dozens of major businesses over ties to shadowy ad cartel GARM in collusion probe
over free speech. The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday sent letters to more than
40 major companies in its ongoing probe of a left-leaning advertising cartel that has allegedly
sought to defund news outlets and platforms, including The [New York]Post. The panel, chaired
by Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), asked the companies — which included Adidas, American Express,
Bayer, BP, Carhartt, Chanel, CVS, General Motors and Goldman Sachs — to preserve
documents and provide information pertaining to their activities with the Global Alliance for
Responsible Media (GARM). "The Committee has learned that collusive activity is occurring
within the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, of which your company is a member," the letter began.
Judge
Dumps Suit by Former 'Disinformation Czar,' Says She Really Was a Government Censor.
Nina Jankowicz, the one-time (and short-lived) head of the Department of Homeland Security's
"Disinformation Governance Board," filed suit against Fox News last year alleging that the network
"built a narrative calculated to lead consumers to believe that Jankowicz intended to censor
Americans' speech" among other allegations. In a delicious and deserved irony, the judge
summarily tossed the suit, writing that, in essence, Fox told the truth. "Fox contends, and I
agree, that Jankowicz has not pleaded facts from which it could plausibly be inferred that the
challenged statements regarding intended censorship by Jankowicz are not substantially true," U.S.
District Judge Colm F. Connolly wrote in his July 22 order to dismiss. "On the
contrary, as noted above, censorship is commonly understood to encompass efforts to scrutinize and
examine speech in order to suppress certain communications. The Disinformation Governance
Board was formed precisely to examine citizens' speech and, in coordination with the private
sector, identify 'misinformation,' 'disinformation," and 'malinformation.'" Case dismissed.
Federal
Judge: Disinformation Czar's Defamation Claim Against Fox Is ... This morning,
a federal judge threw out a lawsuit by self-proclaimed disinformation expert and one-time
censorship board chief Nina Jankowicz. Jankowicz had sued Fox News for defamation involving
37 separate statements that she claimed were false and defamatory. — ie,
'disinformation.' Federal judge Colm F. Connolly dismissed the case because Jankowoicz' claims
turned out to be false and, well ... disinformation-y, at least: [Excerpt from news
report] That makes it sound as though Judge Connolly dismissed the suit on a technicality.
That technicality exists, but the larger problem is that the statements that Jankowicz claimed to be
lies were in fact were "substantially true."
Obama
Lied to Everyone About Biden's Senility at Infamous L.A. Fundraiser. The push to get
Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race continues. The New York Times is now reporting
that Obama himself saw how senile the president was at an infamous Los Angeles fundraiser back in
mid-June. At the time, essentially all mainstream press outlets rushed to dismiss the viral
video showing Biden freezing for multiple seconds on stage before being led off by the former
president. [Tweet] That incident began the now-defunct "cheap-fakes" campaign from the
White House. [...] I want to point out the obvious here. When given the chance to tell the
truth, Obama and his underlings lied to everyone. They didn't just abstain from commenting on
Biden's troubles at the fundraiser. They came out publicly and countered them. They
claimed that anyone who pointed out his senility was pushing disinformation, giving the press
everything they needed to run with the "cheap-fakes" nonsense.
Censors
Everywhere We Look. [Scroll down] I'm not on social media, so I have only
been informed by others of the rampant censorship surrounding posts about January 6, election
integrity, and the official Covid response, among other taboo topics. Five years ago, if you
had been told you needed to watch what you said on social media and in public in the US, no one
would have believed it. It would have seemed a tongue-in-cheek reference to Orwell's 1984,
or an absurd comparison to totalitarian states where freedom of speech is not a thing. So which
group are you in? The group that thinks freedom of speech is alive and well in the US, and that
our Constitutional rights are firmly protected? Or are you in the group that has watched the
erosion of every civil liberty and human right over the past five years as an increasingly
totalitarian machine censors discussions about topics deemed "unwanted" by... Someone?
Big
Brother is Watching You; So Where is the outrage? [Video clip] [Transcript:] The
totalitarianism we warned of is happening. The European Union is at this moment forcing big tech
companies to secretly engage in mass censorship. Google and Facebook are, apparently, going along
with it. Only Elon Musk's X, among the major platforms, is resisting. [...] Most terrifying is the
apparently direct involvement of government intelligence and security agencies, and their intermediaries,
in demanding censorship. This is all happening at the very moment that the same governments,
including our own, warn of Russian disinformation through spam accounts that hardly anybody ever sees.
Don't be fooled by what is happening. Governments and former intelligence officials in Europe,
Australia, Israel, Brazil, and Ukraine and other nations are not only demanding censorship but also
often spreading their own disinformation. For example, the EU claims that there is more false
information on X than on other platforms, and more censorship would reduce it. This is false.
Trove
Of Biden Docs Details How DHS Planned To Crack Down On Conservative Voices, Law Group
Says. America First Legal (AFL) made public a trove of documents that reveal a
coordinated effort within the Biden administration to crack down on the free speech of its
political opponents, according to the conservative law group. AFL obtained the documents
through legal action taken against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over its now-defunct
Homeland Intelligence Experts Group. The group coordinated with an advisory body led by
former intelligence officials John Brennan and James Clapper on ways to combat "domestic
terrorism," which includes cracking down on political dissent, according to AFL.
Dems
Are Consolidating Absolute Power In The Name Of 'Democracy'. Democrats have taken a
sledgehammer to the First Amendment over the past few years, limiting what information the public
can read, listen to, or watch. After taking office, the Biden administration began a
widespread coordination effort with social media companies to "censor posts" that were, as my
colleague Shawn Fleetwood explained it, "deemed unfavorable, even if said posts contained factually
correct information." A lower court judge issued a preliminary injunction last July after
Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden administration, citing an abridgment of the First
Amendment. The 5th Circuit later upheld the injunction in September before the Supreme Court
gutted the First Amendment in a June decision, permitting the censorship activities to go
forward. CNN described the implication of the ruling as permitting the Department of Homeland
Security to continue "to flag posts to social media companies such as Facebook and X that it
believes may be the work of foreign agents seeking to disrupt this year's presidential race."
But unelected bureaucrats also censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, alleging it was the
work of "foreign agents" who wanted to disrupt the election.
How
Biden's Mental Decline Went From 'Misinformation' to Fact in a Week. On CNN today,
Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, reports that people close to Joe Biden — people "who
loved him, have supported him, and among them are some people who would raise a lot of money for
him" — say his disastrous debate performance wasn't a "one-off." There have been,
according to these insiders, "15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has
appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed." Yeah, we know.
All of us saw the horror show in a bunch of videos you hacks kept telling us was "misinformation" a
week ago. Last month, for instance, the same network's Dem apparatchik Oliver Darcy attacked
the "glaring problems" of a well-sourced Wall Street Journal piece detailing a litany of Biden's
slips. Not long before the first presidential debate, CNN ran another piece headlined,
"Right-wing media outlets use deceptively cropped video to misleadingly claim Biden wandered off at
G7 summit."
The
West's War on Critical Thinking. [W]e are all bombarded each day with messages from
people and institutions vying to shape our thoughts and control our behaviors. Television
commercials push us to buy certain products. Politicians describe domestic and foreign
threats in such ways that only they can provide necessary solutions. Religious leaders choose
which doctrines of their faiths must be diligently observed and which ones can be casually
overlooked. More open societies might be marketplaces for competing ideas, but the most
effective salespeople within any society are the ones who know how to magnify their own messages
while silencing others. Given that this is the case, a society interested in protecting its
people from manipulation would be highly invested in educating citizens from a young age how to use
reason, rationality, and logic to filter truth from falsehood.
America
is Riding on this Supreme Court Decision. [Scroll down] According to the
Daily Signal & Media Research Center
• 45 pro-political censorship organizations collected $80.8 million[,]
all coming from liberal financier George Soros.
• Initiatives such as the State Department-backed Global Disinformation Index
and news-rating company NewsGuard partner with Big Tech to deprive so-called "fake news sites" of
ad dollars and user engagement. Their ratings are deeply biased.
• Analysis from the Media Research Center found that NewsGuard rates liberal
media outlets 27 points higher on average for trustworthiness than conservative outlets.
• The Global Disinformation Index maintains a "Dynamic Exclusion List" of websites
that it subjectively determines are "high risk" purveyors of "disinformation," including at least 10
conservative-leaning media outlets.
• Microsoft, partnered with the Global Disinformation Index to defund so-called disinformation groups.
• Microsoft integrated the NewsGuard rating system into "numerous products," including the company's
Edge browser, news aggregators, Bing search, and various AI-powered assistants.
The whole point is to control what the population thinks before the election. We've seen Microsoft
partner with NewsGuard and other pro-speech censorship authoritarian organizations. We are currently
watching the FBI once again engage, not surprisingly during this election year, with social media platforms
to remove what they deem "misinformation," but what we know are vital stories to an informed electorate,
such as the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Biden's
Chief Gaslighter Says Those Videos Of Joe Freezing And Wandering Aimlessly Are Fakes.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says videos of Biden freezing and appearing confused
are "cheap fakes video." Don't believe your own eyes, folks. Pierre said right-wingers
who are sharing these videos have a "credibility problem." "I think you all have called this
the cheap fakes video, and that's exactly what they are. They are cheap fakes video."
"They're done in bad faiths. And some of your news organizations have, have been very clear,
have stressed that these right wing, the right-wing critics of the president have a credibility
problem because of the fact-checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation,
disinformation." [Video clip]
The
Censorship-Industrial Complex and How It has the Internet in its Grip. Mike Benz, a
former State Department official who now heads the Foundation for Freedom Online and is a staunch
campaigner against the CIC, reveals that the complex is controlled by the State Department, the
Defense Department, the CIA, MI6, and Brussels. [...] One global nonprofit headquartered in D.C.,
part of the massive web of entities constituting the CIC, stands out in Benz's
exposé — the Aspen Institute. [...] In 2020, the institute established the
Commission on Information Disorder to, among other things — believe it or
not — determine acceptable levels of diversity in viewpoint and opinion! Once
members decided something was "disinformation" or "misinformation," it was looked on as a societal
problem with "life or death consequences." Blaming such material for decreasing levels of public
trust in government institutions, members worked to block access to information that was
politically inconvenient. Opposing viewpoints were deplatformed or banned, false narratives
were presented, and propaganda was put out as press releases and news stories.
State
Department Won't Say If It's Colluding With Big Tech To Censor Speech Ahead Of 2024
Election. The State Department is refusing to say whether it is communicating with
Big Tech platforms to censor free speech online leading up to the 2024 election. The agency's
silence on the matter came after The Federalist asked about a new working group launched by the
United States and Poland on Monday that seeks to counter Russian "disinformation" about Moscow's
ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Called the "Ukraine Communications Group (UCG)," the body will
involve the two aforementioned countries and representatives from NATO states, and work to
"coordinate messaging, promote accurate reporting of Russia's full-scale invasion, amplify
Ukrainian voices, and expose Kremlin information manipulation." According to the Associated
Press, James Rubin, the special envoy and coordinator for the State Department's Global Engagement
Center (GEC), was involved with and attended the UCG's inaugural launch in Warsaw.
Leading
Misinformation Expert Accused of Misinformation. Her name is Joan Donovan and she was
(maybe still is?) considered one of the country's leading experts on internet misinformation.
But in 2023 she lost her staff job at Harvard's Kennedy School and subsequently filed a
whistleblower complaint that was hundreds of pages long. [Advertisement] The gist of her
complaint is that the power and money of Facebook/Meta had pushed her out of her job after a
specific confrontation that took place at a public event in October 2021. Here's Donovan
herself explaining what happened to her. [Tweet with video clip] Last week, the
Chronicle of Higher Education published a very long and detailed story about Donovan.
It's titled "The Distortions of Joan Donovan" and as you can probably tell it casts a skeptical eye
on some of the specific claims she has made.
Trudeau
Pushes Online Censorship Bill To "Protect" People From "Misinformation". Canadian
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week complained that governments have allegedly been left
without the necessary tools to "protect people from misinformation." This "dire" warning came
as part of Trudeau's effort to have the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) — one of the most
controversial of its kind pieces of censorship legislation in Canada of late — pushed
across the finish line in the country's parliament. C-63 has gained notoriety among civil
rights and privacy advocates because of some of its provisions around "hate speech," "hate
propaganda," and "hate crime." Under the first two, people would be punished before they
commit any transgression, but also retroactively. However, in a podcast interview for the New
York Times, Trudeau defended C-63 as a solution to the "hate speech" problem, and clearly, a
necessary "tool," since according to this politician, other avenues to battle real or imagined hate
speech and crimes resulting from it online have been exhausted.
The Editor says...
How did Canada wind up with Castro Junior in charge, and why would anyone want his "protection" from anything?
Alternative
Media Giants Sue The Censorship Industrial Complex. In a new lawsuit, Webseed and
Brighteon Media have accused multiple US government agencies and prominent tech companies of
orchestrating a vast censorship operation aimed at suppressing dissenting viewpoints, particularly
concerning COVID-19. The plaintiffs, Webseed and Brighteon Media, manage websites like
NaturalNews.com and Brighteon.com, which have been at the center of controversy for their
alternative health information and criticism of government policies. The defendants include
the Department of State, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), the Department of Defense (DOD), the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and tech giants such as Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook),
Google, and X. Additionally, organizations like NewsGuard Technologies, the Institute for Strategic
Dialogue (ISD), and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) are implicated for their roles in
creating and using tools to label and suppress what they consider misinformation.
Introducing
the Censorship Files. In the last year, newspapers, magazines, and even broadcast programs
like 60 Minutes have been aggressively arguing that civic-minded "anti-disinformation researchers"
are suffering under assault by outside investigators, who misuse tools like congressional subpoenas
and the Freedom of Information Act to slow or halt their crucial work. The "bad actors" are
almost always described as "right-wing activists," "conservatives," "Trump's allies," and so on,
who attack beleaguered protectors of the informational realm out of "bias" and bad faith.
[Nonsense]. These are publicly funded researchers who've spent years developing tools for
suppressing or deamplifying the speech of the very people paying their salaries. Taxpayers
shouldn't have to use FOIA to find out what these programs do or how they're funded, but a look
under the hood makes clear why they want things that way: [...] These are not "anti-disinformation"
programs. They're "censorship technology" programs, and should be identified as such.
Exposing
the CIA's Secret Effort to Seize Control of Social Media. While the CIA is strictly
prohibited from spying on or running clandestine operations against American citizens on US soil, a
bombshell new "Twitter Files" report reveals that a member of the Board of Trustees of InQtel —
the CIA's mission-driving venture capital firm, along with "former" intelligence community (IC) and CIA
analysts, were involved in a massive effort in 2021-2022 to take over Twitter's content management
system, as Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag report over at Shellenberger's
Public. According to "thousands of pages of Twitter Files and documents," these efforts were
part of a broader strategy to manage how information is disseminated and consumed on social media
under the guise of combating 'misinformation' and foreign propaganda efforts — as this complex
of government-linked individuals and organizations has gone to great lengths to suggest that narrative
control is a national security issue.
A
Global Censorship Prison Built by the Women of the CIA. [Scroll down] As
terrifying as this all seems, and it is terrifying, it is instructive to look at the ruination of
the career of America's chief censor, Renée DiResta. DiResta, as research head of the
Stanford Internet Observatory, is now being sued for abuse of power and unethical behavior that
violates the constitution. Spookily, DiResta soared from "new mom" to providing the
intellectual under-pinnning for censorship, until she headed up the Stanford Internet Observatory
during Covid, where she was instrumental in censoring vaccine and Covid "disinformation."
People thought her backstory contrived and in fact, Shellenberger found that she was, unmistakably
another CIA trained censor of inconvenient information under the guise of "safety." At this
point, every time you hear the word 'safety", it's best to check your ammunition supply.
What
Is The Most Pernicious Example Of "Misinformation" Currently Circulating?
"Misinformation" — It has been one of the most-used buzzwords of the past few
years. The "misinformation" label has been applied by advocates on both sides of the
political divide in the attempt to discredit their opponents. Numerous assertions that have
dominated the news cycle for months or even years have ultimately proven to be completely false,
that is, "misinformation." Examples of such assertions that have been established as
"misinformation" include the assertion that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election;
the assertion that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian plant; and the assertion that the Covid
virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan. After the thorough discrediting of so many false
narratives during these years, there remain plenty of narratives still out there that richly
deserve the "misinformation" label. But of those, which is the very worst, the very most
pernicious? Here is my candidate: the assertion that the cheapest way to generate
electricity today is with wind and solar generators.
Why
Is DHS Keeping 'Disinformation' Regulation Docs Secret? Nearly two years after Nina
Jankowicz briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security,
she's launched an organization demanding transparency and the public release of documents about the
public debate on disinformation. An interesting move, likely without true transparency in
mind. My organization, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, has spent the same two years
fighting DHS for documents on the federal board Jankowicz managed. We're filing a second
lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to fight continued government stonewalling of our
requests. Thus far, DHS has refused to provide unredacted versions of documents that outline
its purported authorities to regulate disinformation. Nor will the agency release more
information about its work on misinformation related to "irregular migration" and "Ukraine" before
the board was disbanded in August 2022. So, taxpayers are unable to find out what legal
authority DHS is exercising, and they aren't allowed to learn about the work being done with their
tax dollars.
Smoke,
mirrors and CO2 emissions, Part 2. There is a move afoot in the Western world to
prevent anyone from having a new idea. Not unlike the Inquisition in its fervour, this latest
version is being disguised as a caring attempt to protect citizens from the harm that comes from
what is being called misinformation. It has been tried many times before, mostly by common or
garden varieties of dictators, who proudly boast that 97 percent of the population agree with
their diktats, little realising that the claim itself is misinformation.
FBI
Confirms It's Restarting Online Censorship Efforts Ahead Of 2024 Election. On Monday,
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters that
federal agencies such as the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
restarted discussions with Big Tech platforms. According to NextGov/FCW, this coordination
will focus on "removing disinformation on their sites as the November presidential election nears."
Warner claimed these talks resumed in March, around the same time oral arguments in Murthy
v. Missouri — which centers on the feds' censorship efforts — were heard
before the U.S. Supreme Court. When pressed on the validity of Warner's remarks, an FBI
representative confirmed to The Federalist that the agency has resumed communications with social
media companies ahead of the 2024 election.
The
Proof of Censorship is... Censored. Four years ago, many of us suspected censorship
was going on, that the throttling and banning was not merely a mistake or the result of zealous
employees stepping out of line. Three years ago, the proof started to arrive. Two years
ago, it became a flood. With the Twitter files from a year ago, we had all the proof we
needed that the censorship was systematic, directed, and highly effective. But even then, we
only knew a fraction of it. Thanks to discovery from court cases, FOIA requests,
whistleblowers, Congressional inquiries thanks to the very narrow Republican control, and some
industrial upheavals such as what happened at Twitter, we are overwhelmed with tens of thousands of
pages all pointing to the same reality. The censors developed a belief at the highest levels
of control in government that it was their job to govern what information the American people would
and would not see, regardless of the truth. The actions became truly tribal: our side favors
banning gatherings, closing schools, says the Hunter Biden laptop is a fake, favors masking, mass
vaccination, and mail-in voting, and denies the import of voter fraud and vaccine injury, whereas
their side takes the opposite approach. It was a war over information, undertaken in total
disregard for the First Amendment, as if it doesn't even exist.
Maricopa
County and Arizona state collaborate to surveil social media and censor "misinformation".
The Arizona Secretary of State's Office and the Maricopa County Recorder's Office have been exposed
as doing their best to team up with social media companies, non-profits, as well as the US
government to advance online censorship. This, yet another case of "cooperation" (aka,
collusion) between government and private entities to stifle speech disapproved of by federal and
some state authorities has emerged from several public records, brought to the public's attention
by the Gavel Project. The official purpose of several initiatives was to counter
"misinformation" using monitoring and reporting whatever the two offices decided qualified; another
was to censor content on social platforms, while plans also included restricting discourse to the
point of banning users from county-run accounts. "Online harassment" was another target, and
Maricopa County took it upon itself to "identify" — and then report to law enforcement.
The
Golden Age Of Disinformation Has Only Just Begun. Disinformation is all about power,
and because of the harmful and far-reaching influence that disinformation exerts, it cannot achieve
much without power. As a tool for shaping public perceptions, disinformation can be used by
authoritarian regimes and democracies alike. The dissemination of false information is not a
new practice in human history. However, over the last few decades, it has become
professionalized and has taken on exorbitant proportions at both national and international
levels. Disinformation can be understood as misleading information, intentionally produced
and deliberately disseminated, to mislead public opinion, harm a target group, or advance political
or ideological objectives.
Biden
DHS shuts down 'experts' panel featuring signatories of infamous Hunter laptop letter.
The Biden administration agreed Friday to shut down a panel of "experts" that included multiple
signatories of a letter that dismissed a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden as Russian
disinformation. The Department of Homeland Security agreed to "wind down" the Homeland
Intelligence Experts Group in 30 days following litigation from America First Legal, according
to court documents. The experts in the group included former CIA Director John Brennan and
former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who signed an October 2020 letter that
claimed a bombshell New York Post report about emails from the laptop supposedly abandoned by
Hunter Biden "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."
Government
officials push against First Amendment, claiming disinformation is 'threat to democracy'.
Government officials and even some journalists claim that the First Amendment prevents crackdown on
"disinformation," which they say is a "threat to democracy," despite the constitutional protection
of free speech. While journalists and government officials are supposed to uphold and defend
the First Amendment's protection of free speech, several on the left are now claiming that because
mis- and disinformation are "threats to democracy," shutting down such information is of greater
importance than protecting speech. Katherine Maher, who runs National Public Radio and has no
journalistic experience, has long propounded that the same constitutional right upon which her
employees rely every day should be curtailed.
OnlyFans
Creator Says Biden Regime Paid Her To Spread Propaganda. OnlyFans creator Farha
Khalidi says she was paid by the Biden Administration to spread "political propaganda" & was told
not to disclose her videos were ads. Khalidi says the Biden admin reached out to her because
they wanted someone with darker skin sharing propaganda for Biden. "I was doing full on
political propaganda," she said of her TT videos.
Disinformation's
'Mary Poppins' is back, and boy, does she want payback. Always faintly ridiculous,
Nina Jankowicz, the self-described "disinformation expert," TikTok enthusiast, Mary Poppins
impersonator, and onetime Biden "disinformation czar" is back in action. [...] Do you notice what
this little think tank is really about? That's right, it's about her. Her mission
number one is to justify herself and her disgusting lifework of censoring others in the name of
"national security," as well as take down her opponents and critics. In this she implicitly
admits that her industry has been discredited based on its own disinformation and partisan
orientation, but by golly, she's going to make it, or more specifically, herself, respectable again
in the eyes of mankind.
'Mary
Poppins Of Disinformation' Returns With New Group To Defend Disinformation Industry.
The Biden administration's former "disinformation czar," ousted after an apparent attempt to create
an Orwellian ministry of truth within the Department of Defense, has launched a new nonprofit that
declares criticism of "disinformation researchers" such as herself as a chief threat to the United
States of America. "The campaign against counter-disinformation work is the greatest threat to
freedom of expression and academic integrity since the McCarthy era," Nina Jankowicz said in a
press release, pledging that her group would not "allow it to continue." "Once researchers are
free to conduct their essential work, the American people will gain a better understanding of the
nature and severity of the disinformation threats we face," she said. "Disinformation knows no
political party. Its ultimate victim is our democracy." The group, the American
Sunlight Project, was announced as a bipartisan advocacy organization founded by Jankowicz that was
"launched to expose and oppose efforts to weaponize disinformation in the United States."
She says Elon Musk should be "JILED." Australian
Senator Says Elon Musk Should Be Jailed For Allowing Free Speech On X. Australian
Senator Jacqui Lambie says Elon Musk needs to be jailed because he's allowing too much free speech
on X. "Quite frankly the bloke should be jailed, and the sooner we can bring laws in and do
something about this game playing with our social media the better off we're going to be," she told
ABC Radio. [Video clip]
Australia's
Communications Minister Tells People To Report Social Media Posts to the Chief
Censor. Australia's Federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has urged
citizens to report content posted on social sites to what's known as the country's "chief censor,"
the eSafety commissioner. Appearing on the ABC Radio Sydney Breakfast, Rowland explained to
host Craig Reucassel what the current government thinks should be done about "misinformation."
Often-repeated assertions were heard that there is dangerous misinformation on social media along
with exposure to "reactions and rumors" that traumatize users — because, for example,
they are able to view breaking news videos "with no censorship." (This last bit is what rubs
Reucassel the wrong way, and it has to do with the recent Sydney stabbing attacks that he would
evidently like "nicely packaged" first, in that way controlling how the public learns about an
event and reacts to it.) And so, clearly, both the minister and the host agree that the
government should step in (even more) and intervene, the only question is, how?
A
Massive Government-Censorship Industrial Complex. SCOTUS will rule in June 2024
on a First Amendment free speech case the federal judge called "the most massive attack against
free speech in United States history" and the circuit court judge described as "fairly unsubtle
strong-arming" by government officials using "mafiosi style" threats to increase regulation.
Should government officials immediately cease contacting social media companies to censor content,
with exceptions for illegal speech? The U.S. government attorney, Brian Fletcher, eloquently
argues for SCOTUS to discuss the following theoretical legal issues regarding free speech
censorship on social media rather than specifics of the case. Should the government have
privacy in speech moderation policies? The lawsuit discovery process exposed government
pressure applied behind closed doors, with 24/7 badgering and profanity arising from the highest
W.H., FBI, CDC, and CISA officials until Big Tech capitulation. The Twitter Files released by
Elon Musk and the House Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee investigation
uncovered a massive government-funded censorship-industrial complex that links third-party "trust
and safety teams" within universities and foundations to social media platforms.
Hawaii
Lawmakers Call for Set Standards for Ethical News Sources. Lawmakers in the US state
of Hawaii are trying to get a journalist association there to come up with and adhere to a new
"process" that would make sure their sources are "ethical and objective." This comes in the
shape of a state Senate resolution asking the Society of Professional Journalists chapter in Hawaii
to find a way to carry out such evaluation. This week, the resolution was passed by the
Judiciary Committee with no votes against or abstainees, and is now headed for adoption by the
Senate. The resolution was introduced by Senator Chris Lee, and explained as a way to "help"
the public understand who might be spreading "misinformation."
Popular
Nullification of the State's Propaganda. [Scroll down] All these years
later, though, mass media's worst propagandists have begrudgingly come to accept a striking truth:
in a world where anybody can be a messenger, authenticity is king. You might even say that in
a world flooded with competing points of view, authentic truth possesses enhanced power. The
public's capacity to deconstruct lies means that propagandists must work harder to construct false
realities. Because those with political and economic power no longer maintain exclusive
narrative monopolies, they are stuck playing on a more level playing field with everyone else.
No matter how much they might pay homage to the virtues of "democracy," the last thing those with
power want is a world where knowledge, ideas, and viewpoints blossom democratically.
This is why the United Nations and the World Economic Forum have both declared "disinformation" and
"misinformation" the planet's most dangerous threats. It is why NATO is openly expanding
operations to "counter cognitive warfare" by manipulating what the public can see and say on
social media platforms.
The
Coming Disinformation War. In the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins reviews the
dishonorable role that the intelligence community played in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and
predicts more of the same. [...] The "mainstream" press was an active and knowing collaborator in
the disinformation campaigns of both 2016 and 2020. Why would they blow the whistle on themselves?
["]The real motive for the press silence is fear and shame over acts that are close to
treasonous.["] Here, Jenkins gives the press way too much credit. It is true that
the news media's acts were close to treasonous, but they are not at all ashamed of them.
Their goal was to swing the 2016 election for Hillary Clinton, and the 2020 election for Joe
Biden. In their eyes, one out of two isn't bad. They are proud of what they did.
The
Bezmenov Plan: Is America now in the Last Stage? [Scroll down]
Simultaneous to the changes to election rules to facilitate stuffing the ballot boxes, a social
media censorship and cancellation campaign was undertaken by the Stanford University-based NGO
Election Integrity Project (EIP) in consultation with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency (CISA), a unit within the Department of Homeland Security. EIP had an inordinate
influence on the 2020 election by convincing major social media companies such as Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter, You Tube, Reddit, and Pinterest to change their customer terms of service
policies to incorporate language about "delegitimization." Once that was accomplished, according
to Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department communications policymaker and an expert on propaganda,
the door would be open to instantaneous algorithmic mass censorship and cancellation. EIP
then exerted pressure on all the social media companies to adhere to their customer service
policies and censor, cancel, or deplatform any content that contained "delegitimized" terms such
as: 'new election protocols and processes,' 'issues and outcomes,' 'mail-in ballots,' 'early
voting,' 'drop boxes,' and 'Antifa.' And when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in
mid-October 2020, it was immediately delegitimized, and taken down from every social media site.
RFK
Jr.: Biden's Censorship Regime Is Arguably A 'Worse Threat To Democracy' Than Trump.
Independent presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Monday that President Joe Biden is a
"worse threat to democracy" than former President Donald Trump because Biden is weaponizing federal
agencies to target free speech. CNN's Erin Burnett asked whether the "threat to democracy
that Trump poses" is "equal evil to Biden." "Listen, I can make the argument that President
Biden is a much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first
candidate in history, the first president in history that has used the federal agencies to censor
political speech," Kennedy said. "I can say that because I just won a case in the Federal Court
of Appeals, and now before the Supreme Court, that shows that [Biden] started censoring not just
me — 37 hours after he took the oath of office, he was censoring me. No
president in the country has ever done that," the independent presidential candidate continued.
The
Biden Democrats don't respect the Constitution. Under the 14th Amendment we are
entitled to equal protection of the law. Racial preferences are prohibited. The
"Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" agenda, known as DEI, creates favored groups based on skin color
and other arbitrary distinctions. The 2nd Amendment right to "keep and bear arms" is under
attack again. Biden just announced a "federal center" to support "red flag laws." Those laws
empower bureaucrats and left-wing judges to confiscate a citizen's firearms without notice and a
court hearing. In comparison we have more legal protection against involuntary commitment for
insanity. Our 1st Amendment right of freedom of speech has been diluted by a conspiracy of
the Biden Democrats and social media companies who claim that there is a "misinformation" exception
from the 1st Amendment.
Biden's
DHS Using Taxpayer-Funded Comic Books to Fight Perceived Election 'Disinformation'.
The Biden government is deploying taxpayer-funded comic books to combat what it considers
'disinformation' ahead of the 2024 presidential election in November. Produced by the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the comic books are intended to educate
voters on how foreign governments try to influence U.S. elections. Backed by CISA's parent
agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the government-produced comic books also raise
civil liberties concerns as they position the government agency as the final determinant of
'truth.' Several lawmakers on Capitol Hill have criticized the DHS program. Rep. Dan
Bishop (R-NC) called the comic books another avenue for the government to "trample on the First
Amendment" and label any dissident as 'disinformation.'
Free
speech hangs in the balance in 3 Supreme Court cases. This month, the Supreme Court
reviewed a trifecta of free speech cases that has government and civil libertarians alike on
edge. While each of the cases raises an insular issue, they collectively run across the
waterfront of free speech controversies facing this country. For some of us, what was most
chilling from oral arguments were the sentiments voiced by justices on the left of the court,
particularly Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The court may now be reflecting the shift among
liberal scholars and politicians away from freedom of speech and in favor of greater government
speech regulation. [...] We are now living through one of the most anti-free speech periods in our
history. On our campuses, law professors are leading a movement to limit free speech under
the pretext of combating hate speech or disinformation. A dangerous triumvirate has formed as
government, corporate and academic interests have aligned to push limitations of free expression.
California
proposes restricting 'influential' anonymous online speech. An influential California
state legislator is proposing that social media companies restrict large-scale anonymous online
free speech by requiring social media accounts with more than 25,000 followers provide personal
identifying information. Under the proposed bill, California government attorneys would be
authorized to sue companies that fail to seek verification, which in the case of users with more
than 100,000 followers would require government-issued identification. Under SB 1228,
authored by State Sen. Steve Padilla, D-Chula Vista, social media companies would be required
to verify "influential" users with 25,000 to 100,000 followers through their names, telephone
numbers, and email addresses. Social media companies would be required to verify "Highly
influential" users with more than 100,000 followers via their government-issued identification.
"Verifying the identities of accounts with large followings allows us to weed out those that seek
to corrupt our information stream," said Padilla in a statement.
The Editor says...
I guess you're allowed to say whatever you want as long as you're not influential.
That's not what the First Amendment says.
10 times
the censorship industry attacked the truth. An organization founded by Mike Benz, a
former State Department official who worked on U.S. foreign policy, has revealed its top 10 list of
times "the censorship industry suppressed the truth." And it includes instances of targeting
"malinformation," Hunter Biden's laptop, multiple issues that developed during the COVID pandemic
and more. Its report explains it was "media-driven panics" about "fake news" that drove the
censorship agenda. And the ultimately result was the censorship of true information, the
report said.
The
right to shout "BS" during a pandemic. I found the oral argument of the case now styled
Murthy v. Missouri this past Monday to be utterly demoralizing. As soon as the
oral argument concluded I rashly hazarded my assessment that it portends a victory for the massive
censorship-industrial complex represented by the Biden administration. My assessment was a
hot take based on the tenor of the argument. The argument seemed to me to reflect a fantasy
world. It was unreal. In the case argued by Biden administration, the big sticks from
the feds were simply here to lend a helping hand to their friends in social media. They all
got along beautifully. No problem! The misinformation promoted by the government went
unmentioned. The government appeared only as our benefactor. "My biggest concern," said
Justice Jackson, "is that [plaintiffs'] view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in
significant ways." She only wants to leave government censors free to persuade their social
media partners to do their bidding. You got a problem with that?
What
happened at the Supreme Court Monday, and what it means for Berenson v Biden — and free
speech. On Monday, the Supreme Court heard two cases vital to the future of the First
Amendment — and Berenson v Biden, my lawsuit against the White House and Pfizer officials
for their conspiracy to force Twitter to ban me in 2021. The first, Murthy v Missouri,
came out of broad federal efforts to monitor and suppress "misinformation" on social media.
The second, NRA v Vullo, looks specifically at whether the state of New York overreached
when it leaned on insurers to stop doing business with the National Rifle Association. Both
cases may impact my suit. In fact, the two cases are so vital to it that on Tuesday federal
Judge Jessica G.L. Clarke, who is hearing it, officially delayed it until after the Supreme Court
decides them. Based on how the justices handled oral arguments, the court seems on track to
rule for the government in the Missouri case but also in favor of the NRA, overturning appellate
courts in both cases.
This
Country Cannot Afford A Weak Supreme Court Decision On Internet Censorship. The Biden
administration attempted to distract the Supreme Court from the voluminous evidence of federal
abuse of Americans' speech rights during oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri
Monday. It sounded like several justices followed the feds' waving red flag. "The
government may not use coercive threats to suppress speech, but it is entitled to speak for itself
by informing, persuading, or criticizing private speakers," said Biden administration lawyer Brian
Fletcher in his opening remarks. He and several justices asserted government speech
prerogatives that would flip the Constitution upside down. The government doesn't have
constitutional rights. Constitutional rights belong to the people and restrain the
government. The people's right to speak may not be abridged. Government
officials' speaking, in their official capacities, may certainly be abridged. Indeed,
it often must be, precisely to restrict officials from abusing the state's monopoly on violence to
bully citizens into serfdom.
American
CJ Hopkins, Charged Again in Germany, Describes Global Censorship Effort. The German
people are famous for putting everything in print, even things they shouldn't, and in this instance
at least, American playwright and author CJ Hopkins is glad. "The irony," he says, laughing.
"The Germans, always documenting everything." In a letter from the Berlin Prosecutor's file
on Hopkins, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA, analogous to our FBI) acknowledges receipt of a document
from a government office describing an effort to have tweets deleted. "The Hessen Gegen Hetze
reporting office," the highlighted portion reads, "has already initiated measures to delete the
relevant post on the social network": [Illustration] Hopkins reached out to me after
listening in disgust to the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court hearing Monday.
Standing was a big issue: our government said plaintiffs like Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and
Aaron Kheriaty lacked definite proof that the government was responsible for suppressing their
speech. No such issue exists in CJ's case, as you can see.
SCOTUS
Set to Hear Free Speech Case on Biden Admin Colluding With Big Tech to Stifle 'Misinformation'.
As we wrote in Oct. 2023, the attorneys general of Missouri and Lousiana, along with five
plaintiffs, asked the United States Supreme Court to uphold an injunction prohibiting the Biden
administration from colluding with Big Tech companies to stifle free speech on social media sites
by calling it "misinformation." They also argued that the case should be heard in front of the
High Court. [...] SCOTUS will hear arguments in what's now called Murthy v. Missouri,
which may become a landmark case in the fight to uphold Americans' First Amendment rights[.]
Journalist Glenn Greenwald and Twitter-X owner Elon Musk were just a few of the people talking
about the case in anticipation of the SCOTUS hearing the case: [Tweet]
Consequences
Minus Truth. This Monday, the Supreme Court will entertain oral arguments on the case
Missouri, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. The integrity of the
First Amendment hinges on the decision. Do we have freedom of speech as set forth in the
Constitution? Or is it conditional on how government officials feel about some set of
circumstances? At issue specifically is the government's conduct in coercing social media
companies to censor opinion in order to suppress so-called "vaccine hesitancy" and to manipulate
public debate in the 2020 election. Government lawyers have argued that they were merely
"communicating" with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others about "public health disinformation and
election conspiracies." You can reasonably suppose that this was our government's effort to
disable the truth, especially as it conflicted with its own policy and activities — from
supporting BLM riots to enabling election fraud to mandating dubious vaccines. Former
employees of the FBI and the CIA were directly implanted in social media companies to oversee the
carrying-out of censorship orders from their old headquarters.
The
disinformation playbook: how industry manipulates the science-policy process — and how
to restore scientific integrity. The scientific community faces frightening
realities: the public's ability to distinguish science from pseudoscience is declining,
corporate efforts to influence evidence-based policymaking are intensifying, and foundational
processes to protect science — including the integrity and independence of peer review
systems and advisory committees — are under attack. The examples covered here
offer a glimpse into the problems that are ubiquitous worldwide, and the solutions presented can be
adopted outside of the United States. All stakeholders, in and outside the global scientific
community, must develop and enforce policies that ensure transparency and accountability in
science-based decision making.
The
truth about disinformation. What's the difference between misinformation,
disinformation or any other sort of bad information? There is none. All are merely
propagandistic ways of labeling free speech Democrats/socialists/communists (D/s/cs) don't like as
somehow bad and evil. The more convincing or effective that speech, the worse and most
dangerous to "our democracy" it must be. D/s/cs virtually never refer to America's actual
form of government, which is a constitutional, representative republic, preferring instead "our
democracy, which is a one party, tyranny of the majority. One such is one Barbara McQuade:
["]MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade argued Monday [02-29-24] that the United States'
"deep commitment to free speech" makes Americans uniquely susceptible to disinformation campaigns.
McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor, went on "The Rachel Maddow Show" to promote her new
book, [...] ["] McQuade wants Americans to know the "truth," which can't be "disinformation,"
because disinformation can't be true, and she knows, because she, unlike anyone that doesn't share her
political views, is uniquely capable of speaking, writing and knowing the truth.
Canada's
descent into tyranny is almost complete. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is
threatening his most tyrannical attack on freedom yet through his government's proposed Online
Harms Act (currently Bill C-63). Brought to you by the same farcically-named "Liberal" party
who froze the bank accounts of the truckers who protested vaccine-mandates, the OHA is the
government's overzealous attempt to promote online safety. The proposed legislation
supposedly achieves this by requiring operators of social media services to adequately mitigate the
risk that their users will be exposed to harmful content through measures such as publishing
standards of online conduct, providing blocking tools and ways to flag and label harmful
content. The OHA would create a Digital Safety Commission to administer and enforce its rules
along with a Digital Safety Office to support social media users and advocate for online
safety. These agencies can investigate complaints, summon people to testify in hearings and
to produce records. Costs of all this will be paid by unspecified charges on social media
platforms, presumably contemplating Canada's planned Digital Services Tax on big tech platforms.
The
American Stasi Controls What You Hear And See To Control What You Think And Do. It's
tempting to look at Big Tech, corporate media, and federal agencies as distinct industries and
entities with their own goals and organizational structures, but that's not the right way to
analyze them in 2024. In reality, they are just different systems within the same organism,
similar to how eyes, ears, and legs are all part of a human body. They have different roles
and functions, but all are subordinate to the same overarching goal: total power. In
2024, these entities all function as part of a single system: the American Stasi. Recall
that the Stasi was the oppressive spying and law enforcement regime deployed by the Soviet Union
against the people of East Germany. The American regime today is every bit as corrupt and
deceitful as the Soviet Stasi was during the Cold War. Big Tech and the federal surveillance
system work hand in glove to manipulate what you see, hear, and think. The surveillance state
spies on you constantly if you engage in activities it detests: going to church or speaking out
at a school board meeting, for example. It develops and deploys complex technologies used to
manipulate your perception of reality.
Here's what America does not need: another secret court: New
Data Protection Review Court gets its first panel of judges — including Eric Holder.
The Biden administration named the first panel of judges to a new data court mandated by a deal with the
EU, and it includes a familiar name — Eric Holder, the attorney general under former President
Barack Obama. The Data Protection Review Court was created through an executive order President Joe
Biden signed in 2022 that was designed to comply with Europe's data-privacy regulations. It will
review cases filed by EU residents alleging the US government is violating American regulations by digitally
surveilling them.
The Editor says...
Whatever the ostensible purpose of this secret court is now, I predict the "mission creep" will begin shortly,
and it will be used against U.S. citizens.
Free
speech is under attack all over. Democratic societies suddenly seem to have forgotten
the value of speech and debate. Elites inside and outside government lash out against
"misinformation" — a word they can rarely if ever define — and demand
measures against it. Most stunningly, the media itself now regularly demands that speech be
suppressed. The reasons why are complex, but the heart of the crisis seems to be that the
elite institutions have lost confidence in their ability not just to win arguments but to set
the underlying rules for them.
Canada's
New Democratic Party introduces bill that would prescribe jail terms for speaking well of fossil
fuels. An NDP bill is seeking to criminalize the "promotion" of fossil fuels, and
prescribe jail time even for Canadians who say scientifically true things such as how burning
natural gas is cleaner than burning coal. C-372, also known as the Fossil Fuel Advertising
Act, was tabled Monday as a private member's bill by Charlie Angus, the MP for Timmins-James Bay
and a longtime member of the NDP caucus. "Today, I am proud to rise and introduce a bill that would
make illegal false advertising by the oil and gas industry," Angus announced in the House of Commons.
Government-Backed
Censors Who Rigged The 2020 Election Are Now Stealing 2024. If you didn't see Tucker
Carlson's interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole
thing. In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls "military rule"
through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt
and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become. Most
importantly, Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, explains how a
constellation of federal agencies and publicly funded institutions, under the pretext of countering
"misinformation," rigged the 2020 election and are right now smothering the First Amendment and
rigging the 2024 election through massive state-sponsored censorship online. The 2020
election and the Covid-19 pandemic, says Benz, were the "two most censored events in human
history." And 2024 is shaping up to be the same, thanks to the emergence of a federal
censorship-industrial complex.
Delaying
the Inevitable. Just in case you were not yet aware, there is an effort to make
fact-checking and (mis)information management into an academic discipline. [...] The experts we
surveyed defined misinformation as false and misleading information. They agreed that
pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are misinformation, while satirical news is not.
Experts across disciplines and methods disagreed on the importance of intentionality and whether
propaganda, clickbait headlines, and hyperpartisan news are misinformation. The experts
agreed that social media platforms worsened the misinformation problem and that people are exposed
to more opposing viewpoints online than offline. Respondents were also skeptical of the claim
that misinformation determined the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, whereas
psychologists were not. The most popular explanations as to why people believe and share
misinformation were partisanship, identity, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and lack of
trust in institutions.
'Trusted
Messengers:' Volunteer Censors Trained to Control Your Community's Speech. During the
2020 election and in its immediate aftermath, the growth of the censorship industry could reliably
be traced back to the U.S. federal government. The DHS-born Election Integrity Partnership
infamously worked to throttle and remove speech en masse in 2020. Starting in 2020, the
government began pouring taxpayer money into tech tools, university "disinformation research" labs,
and the media literacy field's leading organization, NewsGuard — all of which
contributed to the rapid growth of the censorship industry's capabilities. This is how the
government and private funders capacity-built the censorship industry — by injecting the
financial resources needed to develop the structure and tools to target oppositional American
political speech and narratives online. [Video clip]
State
Department Threatens Congress Over Censorship Programs. The State Department is so
unhappy a newspaper published details about where it's been spending your taxes, it's threatened to
only show a congressional committee its records in camera until it gets a "better understanding of
how the Committee will utilize this sensitive information." Essentially, Tony Blinken is
threatening to take his transparency ball home unless details about what censorship programs he's
sponsoring stop appearing in papers like the Washington Examiner: [...] A year ago the
Examiner published "Disinformation, Inc.", a series by investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky
describing how the State Department was backing a UK-based agency that creates digital blacklists
for disfavored media outlets. Your taxes helped fund the Global Disinformation Index, or GDI,
which proudly touts among its services an Orwellian horror called the Dynamic Exclusion List, a
digital time-out corner where at least 2,000 websites were put on blast as unsuitable for
advertising, "thus disrupting the ad-funded disinformation business model."
Has
Our Government Erased the First Amendment? The most important thing you will see this
week is this interview of Mike Benz by Tucker Carlson: Benz is with the Foundation for
Freedom, which tracks government censorship. In this interview he explains how our government
rigged elections abroad and has now, through DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and CISA
(Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency), censored online communications, noting that its
most substantial censorship involved blocking and limiting any critiques online respecting the
government's responses to COVID-19 and the security of the 2020 election. [...] Benz has made a
persuasive historically accurate case demonstrating how techniques developed by government agencies
to meddle with elections abroad have now metastasized online to interfere with domestic elections
and policies. He has also persuasively shown how these agencies fear popular control,
justifying their actions by confusing the concept of "democracy" with the preservation of existing
institutions like NATO and the IMF.
Biden
White House Pressured Amazon to Censor Vaccine-Skeptical Books, Internal Emails Reveal.
In early 2021, the Biden White House sent a series of emails to Amazon pressuring the online retailer
to suppress the distribution of books that cast vaccines in a negative light. The administration
was ultimately successful in its efforts: Amazon began limiting the visibility of titles that
cast doubt on vaccine efficacy soon after hearing from the White House. The internal Amazon
emails, provided to the House Judiciary Committee in response to a subpoena, reveal that White House
senior adviser for Covid-19 response Andrew Slavitt concluded that the retail giant was trafficking
in "misinformation" after conducting a cursory search on the topic of vaccines. "Who can we
talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic]
Amazon?" Slavitt asked an Amazon representative in an email dated March 2, 2021. "If you
search for 'vaccines' under books, I see what comes up," Slavitt wrote in a follow-up email.
"I haven't looked beyond that but if that's what's on the surface, it's concerning."
The
Curious Case of Disinformation. Since the American Godzilla came down the escalator
in 2015 our liberal friends have been obsessed with disinformation coming from the Far Right. [...]
So, in the 1980s, experts agreed that disinformation was a government thing. But now all the
best people at the Atlantic are worried about Substack, which is "unwilling to remove avowed Nazis
from its platform." But are the avowed Nazis committing "misinformation" or "disinformation"
or "malinformation?" How would we know? How could we tell? Fortunately, the
Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency has the whole thing covered and defined with
comprehensive and mandatory definitions of "misinformation" and "disinformation" and
"malinformation." And naturally, our liberal friends and their miasma of NGOs — led by
the noble ADL and the SPLC — are doing their bit to winkle out the bad guys. The
SPLC recently helped the FBI horn in on dangerous radical Catholics practicing the Tridentine Mass.
Biden's
Secret Internet Surveillance Court — But Really, It Seems Like a Filtering System.
A revelatory article in Politico discusses a secret tribunal that Joe Biden has created to act as an
arbiter in the space between the USA internet and the EU user privacy rules. However, if you apply
the Occam's Razor perspective, you might discover the tribunal or secret court is really just an arbiter
of content, a "filtering system". Those who do not pretend have long ago realized the systems
deployed to control information and communication will always be the priority. You cannot
intentionally abuse a victim and yet allow them to have uncontrolled contact with family, the
abuser needs to keep the victim isolated. The same is true for government in their need
to control information that might expose their purpose. Recently European Commission
President Ursula von der Leyen said controlling information was the #1 priority of the WEF
group for 2024. That makes sense, when you consider that organized pushback would be counter
to their agenda. The western alliance of nations is collaboratively focused on
definitions to help with their disinformation, misinformation and malinformation agenda.
EU
President Says Number One Challenge for Global Control Systems is to Control Information and
Speech. In her keynote address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reaffirmed Europe's unwavering support for
Ukraine in the face of Russia's invasion. However, in the open admission of priority,
President Von der Leyen declares the #1 priority of the corporations who run the WEF and world of
politics, must be control of speech and information against their interests. She goes on to
note that political dissent, what she calls "polarization within our societies" must be controlled,
as the ability of individuals and groups to assemble against the WEF plan remains a constant threat
to the fulfillment of the agenda. [...] Yes, you do not need to interpret their intent, you
only need to listen to their words and accept them.
Lawmakers
Sue Democrat Governor, Election Officials To Halt 'Misinformation' Contracts Against
Election-Related Speech. Oregon state legislators, radio show hosts and GOP
representatives are suing government officials to put an end to the state's censorship of so-called
"false election information." According to a First Amendment lawsuit against Democrat
Gov. Tina Kotek, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade and Elections Director Molly Woon,
Oregon's election officials are negotiating deals with censorship vendors to silence "criticism of
its election system" through a contract to "identify and mitigate" purported "MDM," purported
misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. Twelve plaintiffs, including former Oregon
gubernatorial candidate Marc Thielman, state Sens. Dennis Linthicum Kim Thatcher, filed a
motion for a preliminary injunction last week following an attempt to resolve the dispute with the
plaintiffs in a "good faith effort through a telephone conference" to no resolve.
BBC
'Disinformation' Reporter Plans Six-Month Sabbatical to go on Climate Course Funded by Green
Billionaires. Marco Silva is taking time out from his role as a senior reporter for
BBC Verify specialising in 'climate disinformation' to enrol on a six-month course at the Oxford
Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), a green activist operation funded by billionaire foundations
promoting the collectivist Net Zero project. [...] The OCJN runs what is described as an intensive
programme for about 100 journalists/activists around the world. Participants can expect to be
immersed in the correct political narrative surrounding climate collapse, the so-called 'settled
science' and the need for extreme Net Zero measures, whatever the economic and societal cost. [...]
Marco Silva should enjoy his time confirming his climate science priors. He has a keen nose
for what he calls 'disinformation', basing his work on what he deems to be the authority of 99.9%
of scientists who say humans are primarily responsible for the current warming of the
climate. This is provided as a reason for not hearing from the "other side". The ongoing
scientific process, alas, seems to play little part in the BBC's Net Zero agitprop.
Biden's
Campaign Message 2024. The Biden's administration's agents in social media censored
his political opponents before the 2020 election, including censoring the true Hunter Biden
laptop story. The Biden administration have still been working with social media to censor
Americans after the election.
Biden
Admin Pays Anti-Israel Group That Spreads Lies About Gaza War To Fight 'Disinformation'.
The Biden administration, in its efforts to fight the spread of disinformation in the Middle East,
awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to an anti-Israel nonprofit that has pushed
fake news about the Israel-Hamas war. The State Department gave $573,000 on Oct. 1 to
MENAACTION Inc., a Virginia-based nonprofit, to protect "media and society against disinformation"
and to train Jordanian journalists how to identify "fake news," according to federal spending
records. It's a topic that MENAACTION's founders know all about. Cofounder Chris Aboukhaled
pushed Hamas's claim that Israel bombed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza. The rocket that struck
the hospital was actually fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terrorist group in Gaza.
MENAACTION's other cofounder, Mohammed Abu Dalhoum, who also suggested that Israel was behind the bombing,
claimed Israel's military response to Hamas "isn't self-defense" and accused Israel of "genocide."
Experts agree that Israel's targeted retaliatory strikes against Hamas do not constitute genocide.
Misinformation
Does Not Exist. Misinformation does not and cannot — by
definition — exist. Correct information, incorrect information, true information,
false information can all certainly exist, as can partial, missing, complete, and detailed.
Just not misinformation — same with disinformation, by the way. So why is the term
used with such vitriolic abandon? Why not call something a lie and leave it at that?
Because misinformation is not about describing factual information but about dismissing and
denigrating personal opinion and belief. It is about changing when someone says "I think..."
into "I know" and then claiming that person is spreading a factual misrepresentation. Like
the famous Jordan Peterson Channel 4 interview in which the host over and over again said "so what
you're saying is..." to Peterson even though he had said no such thing (see the interview
here: [Video clip]
Biden
Admin Praised YouTube's Censorship, Used It To Pressure Facebook To Intensify Suppression Of
Vaccine Stories. As the Biden administration pressured Big Tech companies to censor
Americans' speech during the COVID vaccine rollout, Google's YouTube went along with the White
House's requests before Facebook was pressured to follow suit, according to documents shared with
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and obtained by The Daily Wire. In an April 18, 2021,
email, Facebook President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg expressed concern after Andy Slavitt, a
senior White House advisor, told him that Facebook was "lagging behind" as YouTube "made
significant advances to remove content leading to vaccine hesitancy."
Politicians
Urge Censorship Of The Disasters They Create. Ireland must pass new legislation to
crack down on the online hatred behind the rioting in Dublin on Thursday, said its Prime Minister
Leo Varadkar, on Friday. "It's not just the platforms that have a responsibility here, and they
do," he said. "It's also the individuals who post messages and images online that stir up
hatred and violence. We need to be able to use laws to go after them individually as well."
But what triggered the riots were accurate news media reports that the suspect in the stabbing
of multiple individuals, including a five-year-old child, was an Algerian immigrant. Either
Varadkar is spreading misinformation by attributing the riots to "messages and images," or he wants
to criminalize sharing accurate news stories.
Government-Funded
Stanford Group Successfully Urged Censorship Of Republicans But Not Democrats For Equivalent
Claims. The US government-funded Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) claims that its
2020 Election Integrity Project (EIP) and its 2021 Virality Project (VP) were "non-partisan
research coalitions." They did not discriminate against Republicans or conservatives, SIO
insists. But a new tranche of SIO files requested by the House Homeland Security Committee
Chairman, Mark Green (R-TN), and Homeland Security Subcommittee for Oversight Chairman Dan Bishop
(R-SC) reveal that SIO singled out Republicans for censorship, even though Democrats engaged in
similar kinds of inaccurate or misleading speech. One member of Congress singled out for
censorship was alarmed to learn of the pattern. "In striving to silence duly elected Congressmen
and prevent them from communicating with constituents," Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Public,
"this government-funded censorship network has shown itself to be a far greater threat to our
representative democracy than any foreign nation."
Censorship
Industry: 'Business Booming' for Ex-Facebook 'Disinformation' Experts amid Wars. A
new report in CNBC confirms what many observers, including the House Judiciary Committee, have
noticed: online censorship has become a global industry, worth billions of dollars. And with
two major wars underway, one in Ukraine and one in the Gaza Strip, that industry is reportedly set
to expand. According to one industry insider interviewed by CNBC, the worldwide market for
"trust & safety" (Silicon Valley shorthand for "censorship") services now stands at $11 billion.
NY Gov
Admits Out Loud to Social Media Surveillance, Government Will "Reach Out" if They Catch You Using
"Hate Speech". Big Sister is now watching. George Orwell predicted a future of
a dystopian surveillance state where words are monitored, unacceptable speech is censored, and a
person's existence can be denied for ideological thought crimes. Unfortunately, we are now in
a time where acceptable speech is decided by both elected and unelected bureaucrats over what is
permitted online. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Monday that the state is "very
focused" on collecting data from social media platforms as part of an effort to counter online
"negativity" and "hate speech" after a rise in antisemitic attacks. [Tweet]
Meet
NewsGuard: The Government-Backed Censorship Tool Billed As An Arbiter Of Truth.
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter
executives on a powerful censorship tool. In an exchange that came to light in the "Twitter
Files" revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal,
touted his product, NewsGuard, as a "Vaccine Against Misinformation." His written pitch
highlighted a "separate product" — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge
browser — "for internal use by content-moderation teams." Crovitz promised an
out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to
rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous
content. How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as Covid-19,
NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for
Disease Control. [...] NewsGuard's ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a
growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation
to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives.
The
Tragic Victimhood of "Disinformation Experts". I've been in media long enough not to
be shocked by much, but the people picked to man "anti-disinformation" bureaucracies have an almost
admirably bottomless capacity for self-pity and deception. With teary eyes, they'll swear
they're not in the censorship business, but then it will come out that they're sending notes to
platforms like, "We recommend that these posts be removed immediately." They'll describe
concerns about the First Amendment as conspiracy theories, but then we learn about people like
Stanford's Renée DiResta making notes about "very real 1st amendment questions" in a
presentation about the EIP, or a lawyer for former CISA director Chris Krebs snapping at
congressional investigators to cite a legal authority "other than the First Amendment" to justify
questioning. "Researchers" will declare unequivocally that CISA did not "found, fund, or
control" their program, but then it will come out the superficially private structure of the EIP
was necessary because "DHS cannot openly endorse the portal," while a "behind-the-scenes"
arrangement was fine. And so on.
How
about some hearings on human disinformation and electoral interference instead of so-called AI
disinformation? The Senate is worried about disinformation and interference in the
2024 election by artificial intelligence. It appears they think the computers have programmed
themselves. [...] I'll believe that the media and other Democrats care about election interference
and misinformation the day they apologize for all the intentional lies and misinformation that they
have spread over the last several elections. Trump is despised by many voters because they
say he is divisive because he vociferously fought back against the lies by the media, Justice
Department, other Democrats, and never-Trumpers instead of quietly taking it. Trump's
policies were successful and popular. The cabal of attackers would have sought to destroy him
even if he was a squish who never tweeted a word.
Documents
Shed New Light on Feds' Collusion with Private Actors to Police Speech on Social Media.
In the runup to the 2020 election, cybersecurity experts at the Department of Homeland Security and
Stanford University decided they had discovered a major problem. The issue was not
compromised voter rolls or corrupted election tallies but a "gap" in the government's authority to
clamp down on what it considered misinformation and disinformation — a gap identified by
DHS officials and interns on loan to the agency from the Stanford Internet Observatory. Given
what SIO research manager Renee DiResta described as the "unclear legal authorities" and "very real
First Amendment questions" regarding this gap, the parties hatched a plan to form a public-private
partnership that would provide DHS with an avenue to surreptitiously censor speech. The
collaboration between DHS' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and the Stanford outfit would
quickly expand into a robust operation whose full extent is only now becoming clear.
The
Weaponization of "Disinformation" Psuedo-Experts and Bureaucrats. Following the 2016
presidential election, a sensationalized narrative emerged that foreign "disinformation" affected
the integrity of the election. These claims, fueled by left-wing election denialism about the
legitimacy of President Trump's victory, sparked a new focus on the role of social media platforms
in spreading such information. "Disinformation" think tanks and "experts," government task
forces, and university centers were formed, all to study and combat the alleged rise in alleged
mis- and disinformation. [...] The First Amendment to the Constitution rightly limits the
government's role in monitoring and censoring Americans' speech, but these disinformation
researchers (often funded, at least in part, by taxpayer dollars) were not strictly bound by these
constitutional guardrails. What the federal government could not do directly, it effectively
outsourced to the newly emerging censorship-industrial complex.
Jim
Jordan: Censorship Org 'Election Integrity Partnership' Was Created at DHS Agency's
Request. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has released further evidence of the
collaboration between the federal government and private institutions to censor the First Amendment
protected speech of Americans, including new files show that the infamous Election Integrity
Partnership, which targeted social media posts for censorship during the 2020 election, was created
"at the request" of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). [...] Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC),
in a hearing of the House Homeland Security Committee earlier this year, played a clip unearthed by
the Foundation for Freedom Online showing the Atlantic Council , showing the Atlantic Council
casually discussing the EIP's "partners in government... most particularly those in CISA/DHS."
DHS
officials created a 'disinformation group' at Stanford University to help censor American's speech
on social media ahead of the 2020 election. The Department of Homeland Security
partnered with Stanford University and other colleges to create a 'disinformation group' to censor
speech leading up to the 2020 election, new emails reveal. The Election Integrity Partnership
(EIP) was created in July 2020, and consisted of members from the Stanford Internet Observatory,
the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council's
Digital Forensic Research Lab, according to a new report from the House Judiciary Committee and
released Monday evening. '[T]he federal government and universities pressured social media
companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions,' the report said of the partnership.
SCOTUS Takes
Up Free Speech Case. Late Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Missouri
v. Biden, a case that may end the Biden administration's circumvention of the First
Amendment by outsourcing censorship to Big Tech. The case was initially filed by the states
of Missouri and Louisiana, along with various private plaintiffs who allege that social media
platforms censored them at the behest of federal agencies. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty
ruled for the plaintiffs on July 4, enjoining the agencies from communicating with platforms about
"content moderation." The Biden administration sought relief from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals
and lost again, making a Supreme Court clash inevitable.
Supreme
Court lifts restrictions on Joe Biden's administration pushing for the removal of controversial
Facebook and X posts about COVID and election security. The Supreme Court on Friday
said it would indefinitely block a lower court order curbing Biden administration efforts to combat
controversial social media posts on topics including COVID-19 and election security. The
justices said they would hear arguments in a lawsuit filed by Louisiana, Missouri and other parties
accusing administration officials of unconstitutionally squelching conservative points of
view. The new case adds to a term already heavy with social media issues.
Supreme
Court Takes Up Landmark Government Censorship Case. The Supreme Court on Friday took
up Missouri v. Biden, the free speech case challenging the Biden administration's efforts to
censor content on social media, while issuing a pause on a preliminary injunction granted by a
lower court. Republican attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana sued the Biden
administration over its communications with social media companies related to the suppression of
online speech, arguing it violated the First Amendment. District of Louisiana Judge Terry A.
Doughty issued an injunction in July blocking certain parts of President Joe Biden's administration
from colluding with social media platforms to censor content online. The Supreme Court paused
the injunction, but agreed to take up the case, according to the court order.
The
High-tech Lynching of America. [Scroll down] In 2020 the main issues for
Deep State influence and control of the American people were the COVID-19 pandemic and the November
national election. The CIA, FBI, and DHS, which all had personnel who were hired by such
social media companies as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, also had information-and-influence portals
to these social media companies. However, directly influencing the election through
censorship was perceived to be constitutionally problematic. In June of 2020, the Election
Integrity Project was formed by Alex Stamos, who was then a "research professor" at Stanford
University, after resigning his role at Facebook as chief security officer in 2018. Stamos' first
endeavor at EIP was to meet with the Chris Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security to identify what EIP needed to do to
influence the upcoming election, particularly regarding censorship, which CISA was reluctant to
do. Although Stamos had a staff of some 120 at EIP, keeping up with flagging and censoring
the tens of millions of social media posts deemed to have "misinformation" would be impossible.
Meta
[and] TikTok [have been] Given A Week By [the] EU To Detail Measures Against Disinformation.
Meta and TikTok have been given a week by the European Commission to provide details on measures taken
to counter the spread of terrorist, violent content and hate speech on their platforms, a week after
Elon Musk's X was told to do the same. The European Union's executive body said on Thursday it
had sent a request for the information to the two companies as researchers point to the proliferation
of disinformation following Hamas' attack against Israel more than a week ago. The Commission
can open investigations into the companies if it is not satisfied with their responses.
Who
Ghostwrites Reports for the Center for Countering Digital Hate? I wrote an
investigation last week for Tablet looking into Imran Ahmed, a political operative with ties to
British intelligence who runs the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a dark money nonprofit that
is now attacking the Biden administration's political opponents. Through one of their board
members, Simon Clark, Ahmed's group has been linked to the Center for American Progress, a think
tank and lobby group for corporate Democrats. A few days before we released this
investigation, Imran Ahmed's Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) released one of their flimsy
reports that took off in the media, garnering press in almost a dozen outlets. In my
investigation, I noted that Elon Musk is now suing CCDH, in part, for a report Ahmed released last
July that made up allegations that hate has increased on Twitter, and I wrote that Facebook shot
down a 2021 CCDH report by pointing out that CCDH was making up numbers about vaccine
disinformation. So I just took a hard look at CCDH's latest report and discovered something
very odd: CCDH never names their researchers. I then dug through past reports and found
the same: CCDH's reports are written by ghosts, anonymous writers who the media then quote as
expert "researchers" in news articles.
Google
Throws Its Support Behind Australia's Online "Misinformation" Censorship. Google's
recent endorsement of the Australian government's proposal to bolster the powers of the media
watchdog, aimed at countering online "misinformation," unfolds a narrative much larger than what
meets the eye. The discourse transcended beyond its original intent during a Senate inquiry
on Tuesday, which saw representatives from tech behemoths delve into the implications of amplifying
the regulatory might of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The draft
legislation in the spotlight seeks to empower ACMA with an enforceable industry code of conduct to
ensure digital platforms rigorously address misinformation and disinformation. While the
legislation does not authorize the ACMA to remove content deemed inappropriate, it does allow the
body to scrutinize the internal practices of platforms, paving the way for penalties should they
deviate from the code. This development signals a furthering of the usual, revealing Google's
willingness to align with government interests, as shown by Lucinda Longcroft, a government
relations representative for Google.
The
Politics of Third-Party Validation. [Scroll down] The examples are too
numerous to mention, though it should be noted that — unlike private "take the money and
run" groups — government agencies are usually in on the game — or even
started it — very early on in the process. But one of the most devastating
examples currently occurring involves the censorship industry. Groups were created and
funded — quite often by government agencies — to silence opponents while
giving the government, again, some distance from the stink (although Missouri V. Biden
may be cutting in that scheme.) One of these groups is the Center for Countering Digital Hate
(CCDH,) a "non-profit" created out of whole cloth to police the internet for bad thought.
Funded by foundations, the CCDH sprung from the loins of the British Labour Party. Like the
(formerly) U.S. State Department-funded Global Disinformation Network, the foundation-funded CCDH
hunts hate and misinformation (read: honest opinions and anything that challenges the elite
narrative) and then writes reports about and then tells advertisers they shouldn't do business with
people or companies it doesn't like or it finds threatening to its vision of a not at all free future.
The
New Push for Censorship Under the Guise of Combating Hate. In March of 2021 a
nonprofit group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) released a report about online
misinformation. [...] The report quickly reached the hands of executives at Twitter. "COVID-19
misinfo enforcement team is planning on taking action on a handful of accounts surfaced by the CCDH
report," a Twitter official wrote on March 31. One account they eventually took action against
belonged to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was then running against Joe Biden for the Democratic
Party's nomination for president. A few months later, the same report was being cited by the
Biden administration. At a press briefing in July 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki
quoted from the CCDH report in a briefing where she accused Facebook of undermining federal vaccine
policies. "There's about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on
social media platforms," Psaki claimed, citing the CCDH's work, while warning social media
companies to shut down these "misinformation" accounts. "They're killing people," President Biden
told a reporter a short time later, leveling the charge of murder against Facebook for its alleged
role in providing a platform for "vaccine misinformation."
The
New Rules for Radicals. It is a reflection of these volatile times that the Supreme
Court's First Amendment ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio echoes in the back of my mind whenever
I sit down to write. In that case, the Court defended inflammatory speech from government
punishment unless it is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to
incite or produce such action." How the government defines "lawless action," though, is quickly
changing. Just being a concerned parent opposed to a school board's sexualized curriculum can
make an otherwise law-abiding American a potential "domestic terrorist" in the eyes of the FBI.
Today, the federal Leviathan is neck-deep in the ugly business of propaganda and censorship.
It persecutes J6 election protesters for their political beliefs. It seeks to imprison President
Trump for the "crime" of having delivered a political speech. Congress engages in Soviet show trials
devoid of due process or exculpatory defense but rife with unsupported accusation and criminal innuendo.
Canada
Regime to Monitor "Meaningful Content" of Podcasters & Platforms. The Canadian
Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is allegedly modernizing its framework
and wants to ensure "online streaming services make meaningful contributions to Canadian and
Indigenous content." What they really want is to control speech and anyone who challenges the
totalitarian rulers. They have over 200 interventions they've opened up to public
consultations on which two decisions have been made. And they've only just begun.
First, online streaming services in Canada making over $10 million must register. Second,
they will have "to provide the CRTC with information related to their content and
subscribership. The decision also requires those services to make content available in a way
not tied to a specific mobile or Internet service."
What
We're Up Against. A corps of people like Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety
Ella Irwin, so certain of their tolerance and love of freedom that they are able to convince the
richest man in the world who staked his wealth on your job, that they'll carry forth his
vision. Then at the first chance they get, they slap down a conservative documentary.
It's not that they're necessarily hypocrites or liars. They genuinely believe they are
champions of free speech even as they suppress differing opinions. The warp in their
character is not just a staggering lack of basic self-awareness, but they assume their opinions
equal truth, and any deviation is not just falsehood, but hatefulness. And they're permitted
to condemn what (and who) they deem hateful, which means you.
These
House Republicans Voted To Fund CISA's Criminal Censorship And Election Interference.
In true Orwellian fashion, CISA officials use illegal powers to suppress information that they
know to be true in order to preserve official government narratives and control the minds of
the American public. In addition to addressing mis- and disinformation, CISA directs the
censorship of "malinformation," defined by the agency as information "based on fact, but used out
of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate." "In other words, malinformation is factual
information that is objectionable not because it is false or untruthful, but because it is provided
without adequate 'context' — context as determined by the government," explained
lawmakers on the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
The agency justifies censoring truth because it claims to be "protecting" the American public's
"cognitive infrastructure." In the lead-up to the 2020 election, CISA began treating speech
critical of American institutions as a threat to said institutions and the infrastructure of our
country. Former CISA Director Chris Krebs, who served during the 2020 election cycle, cracked
down on speech that called into question the integrity of the election by deeming it a threat to
election infrastructure.
Slouching
Towards 1984. Joe Biden tried but failed to institute a Disinformation Governance
Board. His administration also pressured social media companies to restrict access to posts
it deemed untruthful or otherwise harmful. One wonders, why after almost 250 years without
such a board, this became necessary. In the 1990s, internet-based news sources led to a vast
increase in the availability of information, significantly more than had been available when
partisan daily newspapers dominated the information landscape. Philosophers and Supreme Court
Justices alike agree that the solution to bad speech is more speech. But according to the
Left, now that we have more news sources than ever before, this no longer holds true. Only
their approved sources should be allowed a platform.
EU
Signs Law To 'Police' The Entire Internet And Takes Down Websites With Unapproved Speech.
Unbeknownst to most people of the world, the internet has officially changed forever and what people are
allowed to say and publish is in great jeopardy. One month ago to this point the European Union's
invasive law called the Digital Services Act (DSA) took effect, that essentially allows bureaucrats in
the EU to become the arbiters of speech and free thought online, legally restricting what platforms can
and cannot say.
California
quietly passes bill repealing COVID 'medical misinformation' law. California
legislators have subtly passed a bill that would repeal a law targeting doctors who take a stand
against mainstream COVID-19 narratives after previously labeling them as engaging in "medical
misinformation." Assembly Bill 2098, which Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed last
year, considers medical doctors and surgeons to be guilty of "unprofessional conduct" if they
"disseminate misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19, including false or misleading
information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the
development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines." The legislation also subjected
physicians found to have violated the law to disciplinary action from the Medical Board of
California and the Osteopathic Medical Board of California, including potential suspension of
medical licenses.
Biden
Administration Makes Unbelievable Move to Re-Employ James Clapper and John Brennan.
Remember James Clapper and John Brennan? It's easy to forget given how much has transpired
since both men consistently led the news throughout the Trump administration. At one time,
though, their involvement in Crossfire Hurricane, otherwise known as the Russia collusion
investigation was really big news. For those less initiated, here's a quick refresher.
Clapper was Barack Obama's DNI and has been credibly accused of lying to Congress. Meanwhile,
Brennan is Obama's former CIA Director and has been credibly accused of doing the same. Both
men lived on cable news after Trump's inauguration, making all kinds of wild, unsubstantiated
claims related to nefarious Russian collusion supposedly committed by the former president.
Then, in 2020, the two men reentered the spotlight as the most notable signatories of a now
infamous intel letter that claimed the Hunter Biden laptop story was "Russian disinformation." That
was a completely false contention that was used to influence the outcome that year's presidential
election. But while they've been quiet the last several years, both Clapper and Brennan are back.
Journalists
Who Get Trolled Are Receiving Taxpayer-Funded Counseling to Fight 'Misinformation'.
Buried within spending provisions that passed in 2022 is a little-known program that has come to
light and is raising eyebrows. According to reports, journalists who get "harassed" online
can seek taxpayer-funded counseling and other services as part of a program that seeks to fight
"misinformation." No, I'm not making that up. Your hard-earned tax dollars are going to
soothe the souls of aggrieved journalists who get trolled online so they can return to doing the
regime's bidding. [...] Expert Voices Together, the program in question, has received millions of
dollars in grant funding from the Biden administration. It is completely Orwellian in
nature. The federal government has no role in "monitoring and reporting" online "harassment"
of journalists, which is just another way of saying people are using their free speech rights to
push back on said journalists.
DHS
Secretary Appoints Primary Trump-Russia Conspiracy Agents as "Expert Group" to Identify Domestic
Terrorism and Disinformation. If you put the individual names within this group in
the search bar, you will discover their connection. Most of them were the primary background
operatives who pushed the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy in '16, '17, '18 and '19. With
names like James Clapper (DNI), John Brennan (CIA), Tashina Gauhar (DOJ-NSD), David Kris (DOJ-NSD,
FISA), Paul Kolbe (CIA) and Benjamin Wittes (Lawfare), what you will find is that this specific
group are functionaries of the corrupt intelligence apparatus that framed the Trump-Russia
collusion nonsense. This is the team now that will define for DHS how to focus their future
targeting efforts.
Meta's
Threads blocks COVID-related searches to combat so-called disinformation — health
officials slam decision. Meta's new social media platform, Threads, recently
confirmed that it is blocking COVID-related search terms in order to combat disinformation,
according to the Washington Post. Threads, a social media site launched by Mark Zuckerberg's
company in July to compete with X, formerly known as Twitter, has already landed in hot water for
censoring search terms that could populate sensitive results.
BBC's
Millennial Misinformation Czar Under Fire for Reportedly Lying on Her Resumé.
The face of the BBC's disinformation fact-checking unit allegedly fabricated details on her
resumé when she applied for a different media role in 2018, sparking another round of
criticism for the millennial presenter. In what has been described as an "unsurprising" turn
of events, legacy media darling and the lead figure for the UK publicly-funded broadcaster's
'Verify' disinformation division, Marianna Spring is once again facing allegations of lying.
According to a report last week from The New European, Spring allegedly made up details on her CV
when she applied for the position of Russian correspondent for the American news site Coda Story.
You
Should Be Very Worried About the Digital Services Act. Article 11 of The EU Charter
of Fundamental Rights, which replicates a part of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human
Rights, protects the right of European citizens to "hold opinions and to receive and impart
information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers," and
affirms that "the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected." Sadly, the fate of
freedom of expression in Europe now very much hangs in the balance, as the European Union has just
enacted a law that empowers the Commission to significantly restrict the ability of citizens to use
digital platforms to engage in robust and sincere democratic discourse. Under the recently
enacted Digital Services Act, the European Commission may apply significant pressures upon digital
platforms to curb "hate speech," "disinformation," and threats to "civic discourse," all of which
constitute notoriously vague and slippery categories, categories that have historically been
co-opted to reinforce the narrative of the ruling class.
BBC
'Disinformation' Reporter Caught Lying on Her Resume. The BBC's so-called
"Disinformation Correspondent" Marianna Spring has added yet more controversy to the corrupt
"fact-checking" industry as she was caught lying on her resume. Spring is facing claims that
she filled her resume with "disinformation" about her experience in order to advance her
career. According to a report from the Daily Mail, about five years ago Spring was trying to
get work as a freelancer in Moscow for U.S.-based news site Coda Story. When Spring applied
to the website's Editor-in-Chief Natalia Antelava in 2018, she said she had worked alongside BBC
correspondent Sarah Rainsford.
Facebook
Files V: How Facebook Bent the Knee to White House Demands. On the latest episode of
uncovering the Censorship Industrial Complex, Rep. Jim Jordan exposed how the White House used
foreign misinformation to get Facebook to do its political bidding. Jordan released part five
of the Facebook Files on X (formerly Twitter) Tuesday which brought to light an alliance between
the formerly U.K. based censorship activist organization Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH),
the Biden White House and Facebook. "Foreign activists at the CCDH feed false info to the Biden
White House," Jordan wrote. "The Biden Admin then uses the full weight of the federal govt to
coerce Facebook to censor Americans, Biden's critics and political opponents, and the truth."
In March 2021, the CCDH claimed that 12 accounts, dubbed the "disinformation dozen," accounted for
65% of "of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media." But it seems the disinformation
complainers became the disinformation spreaders. Jordan said that even Facebook was aware
that the claim was false. "First, that 65% stat? CCDH was off by quite a bit. Facebook
knew the actual number was closer to 0.05%," he added[.]
'The
green movement is a disinformation campaign'. This summer, wildfires from Greece to
Hawaii have been portrayed as nature's punishment for mankind's polluting activities. Each
disaster has been treated as a portent of the End Times. Reining in human development, we're
told, is the only way to avert an even more serious catastrophe. But is there any truth to
these apocalyptic claims? [...] There has been a concerted effort since the 1990s to convince
people that climate change is making natural disasters worse. Yes, there is some evidence
that climate change is causing more heatwaves and changes to precipitation. But a disaster is
defined by two things: deaths and costs. And we're not seeing an increase in either.
In fact, deaths from extreme weather events have actually drastically declined over the past
century. Only a few hundred people now die each year from natural disasters in the US, for
example. So the climate movement is undeniably a disinformation campaign.
Direct
Government Censorship Of The Internet Is Here. Censorship of the Internet has been
getting worse for years, but we just crossed a threshold which is going to take things to a whole
new level. On August 25th, a new law known as the "Digital Services Act" went into effect in
the European Union. Under this new law, European bureaucrats will be able to order big tech
companies to censor any content that is considered to be "illegal", "disinformation" or "hate
speech". That includes content that is posted by users outside of the European Union, because
someone that lives in the European Union might see it. I wrote about this a few days ago, but
I don't think that people are really understanding the implications of this new law. In the
past, there have been times when governments have requested that big tech companies take down
certain material, but now this new law will give government officials the power to force big tech
companies to take down any content that they do not like. Any big tech companies that choose
not to comply will be hit with extremely harsh penalties.
Globalists
Resurrect Roman Censor to Police Public Morals. Western governments embrace
widespread censorship today because they have gained tremendous leverage over our property.
They do not need to conduct a census or inspect our farms to determine the size of our homes or the
numbers of our various livestock. They simply conduct warrantless searches of our financial
transactions, recorded debts, and digitized savings — while monitoring our movements and
business activities. They do not need to formally assess our qualification for certain
honors. They simply conduct warrantless searches of our phone calls, text messages, emails,
and social media histories to determine whether we are "worthy" of receiving State-bestowed group
privileges or social-credit-score-enabled ranks. They do not need to chastise us for
breaching "woke" public morals. They simply "cancel" us from the online public square and
deny us access to the digital infrastructure connecting the modern world.
U.S.
government to deploy surveillance software to detect 'problematic sentiment and
emotion'. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), under the umbrella of the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has purportedly partnered with AI tech firm Fivecast
to deploy social media surveillance software that, according to its proprietor, can detect
"problematic" emotions of social media users and subsequently report them to law enforcement for
further action. [...] What could go wrong? If the government is going to utilize surveillance
software to more precisely ascertain our sentiments and emotions on social media, and then
determine if they are "problematic," how else will it use it? What other methods will it
deploy to keep us from stepping out of line? And who determines what is "problematic," anyway?
Secretive
Covid disinformation unit worked with security services. A government unit accused of
seeking to suppress free speech during the pandemic worked with Britain's intelligence agencies,
senior civil servants have confirmed. Documents submitted to the Covid inquiry and marked
"official sensitive" reveal that the "UK intelligence community" has been involved in the
Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU) since it was founded in 2019. The unit was set up by ministers
to tackle disinformation — false information that is deliberately spread —
and initially focused on foreign interference in the European elections. However, in 2020 it
turned its attention to the pandemic and collected social media posts by members of the British
public. The intelligence community — which includes MI6, MI5 and GCHQ —
continued "working closely" with the CDU "where appropriate" during this time, documents
show. The disclosures were made in witness statements by two senior civil servants, and come
amid growing concerns that the CDU was monitoring the activities of British citizens during the
pandemic. Earlier this year, The Telegraph revealed that the secretive unit had paid an
external AI firm to trawl the web for so-called disinformation — but that the firm's
reports had also included legitimate posts criticising lockdown policies.
'Legal'
concerns halt NIH $154 million 'false information' program. The National Institutes
of Health halted a $154 million research program intended to study "equitable health communication"
and combat alleged medical misinformation. The "pause" came "in the context of the current
regulatory and legal landscape around communication platforms," according to a website for the
initiative. A spokeswoman for the NIH did not answer direct questions about the reason for
the pause. A federal court is considering a lawsuit brought by plaintiffs who allege the
federal government colluded with Big Tech companies to silence their speech, often critical of
COVID policies or the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.
Government
minister says who should get to decide what speech is 'permitted'. Totalitarian
governments such as China's, North Korea's, and Iran's — among many others —
have long been the arbiters of truth and have gone to great lengths to control what can be said and
where. Tragically and despicably, many formerly open and liberal governments of Western
nations have begun doing much the same thing... with a twist. Each in turn claims that it
must take these autocratic, tyrannical, and anti-democratic measures... "to save our
democracy." This should immediately engender a response [...] from every sane person.
Unfortunately, due to the modern media's fanatical unwillingness to speak truth to power when that
power is left-leaning, combined with the apparently rapidly dwindling numbers of sane persons,
those in these governments are getting away with this ridiculous and reprehensible ruse.
Irish
Media Minister Supports Government Defining What Is True and What Speech Can Be Permitted
Online. Discussing the implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA), Ireland's
Media Minister defends the decision that a government appointed entity will ultimately decide what
speech is permitted by citizens. This is the next phase in the control of opposition to the
expansion of government controls. We are all traveling at the front of one long continuum
toward tyranny. Are the people of Ireland so weak and pathetic they cannot make decisions or
formulate opinions for themselves? Of course not. This is not what government control
of information is about. Government control of information is about CONTROL of the
people. [Video clip]
UN
Builds 'Digital Army' to Punish Dissent, Censor Critics. The globalist United Nations
revealed that it is "building a digital army" that would police and censor the speech of the
taxpayers online. The organization doubled down on the narrative about the supposedly serious
threat that this new "fight against online misinformation" phenomenon brings to humanity, Slay News
reported. In addition to that, the UN added that it is not satisfied with just censoring
"misinformation." The globalist agency upped the ante by starting a war against "deadly
disinformation," as the globalists themselves described it. The international organization
warned that "disinformation" is "deadly" and poses an "existential" risk to the core building
blocks of modern societies such as "democratic institutions" and "fundamental human rights," the UN
wrote in an announcement that was published on their website.
YouTube
amps up "medical misinformation" policy: Now you can't talk about alternative cancer
treatments or prevention of any disease. The Google-owned YouTube video platform is
changing the rules again to now prohibit the sharing of information about alternative cancer
remedies, which the tech giant says constitute "medical misinformation." In a "long term
vision" notice on its official blog, YouTube's Dr. Garth Graham, the Director and Global Head
of Healthcare and Public Health Partnership, along with Matt Halprin, the Vice President and Global
Head of Trust and Safety, explain how "removing cancer misinformation" is now a top priority
alongside removing all contrary information about the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19).
Thought
Police: The Center For Countering Digital Hate. During the recent pandemic, all
of those who considered or attempted to approach the crisis without the blessings of authorities
were summarily belittled, repressed, and disgraced. Many voices of reason were confounded by
the enigmatic organization, the Center For Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Their
duplicitous activities were neither creative nor supportive, and simply aimed at destroying those
who refused to agree with dogmatic mandates and protocols generated by the pharmaceutical
industry. At the peak of CCDH's influence, they released a malicious piece of propaganda,
called The Disinformation Dozen. The document was a frontal, full-scale attack on
those who questioned the viability and motives of the mainstream response to the pandemic.
This manifesto was conceived as a distractive and deceptive instrument — disseminated
among the willing world press corps. Not only was the news media compromised by their
funders, but they were also hungry for a scapegoat and eager to enthusiastically repeat easily
drawn, though suspect conclusions.
The
FDA can't be sued for providing false or dishonest information. The gist of a current
court case that you've likely never heard of, is that three heroic doctors are suing the FDA about
the loss of their jobs, about their careers being derailed, about the loss of their
reputation — all because their professional, scientific opinion as to what was in the
best interest of their patients, was different than the political agenda of the FDA. What is at
stake here could not be more significant, and it applies across the board to EVERY federal
agency. The question is: do federal agencies have the unsupervised right to replace
Science with political science? Put another way: can they act dishonestly, incompetently,
etc. with essentially no meaningful consequences?
FDA
Admits Guidance on Ivermectin was Illegal, Invokes 'Sovereign Immunity' for Misleading
Statements. This Substack has chronicled the illegal war on PSYOP-19 early treatment
therapies by the very perpetrators of the "pandemic," and their associated criminal mandates.
It is no surprise that the most vilified early treatment repurposed drug Ivermectin has also been
by far the most effective: [...] The reason that the captured FDA along with their
partners-in-crime the CDC, WHO, UN, WEF, CFR, DoD, Pentagon, CIA, the illegitimate Federal
government, Rockefeller and Gates "nonprofits," et al. have targeted Ivermectin is threefold:
it is exceptionally effective as an early C-19 treatment, mass administration would have resulted
in plummeting global (turbo) cancer rates, and this wonder drug attenuates and reverses the slow
kill bioweapon DEATHVAX damage. A landmark lawsuit filed against the FDA by doctors Mary
Talley Bowden, Paul Marik, and Robert Apter was heard in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
yesterday [8/8/2023]. Part of this lawsuit against the FDA was specific to fraudulent and
illicit claims made by the agency against Ivermectin.
Surgeon
General demanded Facebook remove TRUE information. "Misinformation" is an elastic
term. It can cover anything from intentional falsehoods to incorrect information to contested
claims to unverified claims. But it's hard to argue that it covers things known to be
truthful. Now I am, to say the least, not a fan of any efforts to suppress "misinformation"
because it empowers some authority somewhere to impose a standard of what is true and what is not,
and doing so is dangerous in itself. While I would agree that in a perfect world everything
we read, hear, and speak would be entirely true and completely in context, the reality is that we
live in an imperfect world where nobody knows everything and everybody has some agenda or
another. Best to let the conversation flow freely. Even "consensus" claims have turned
out to be false or misleading, and often the people we recognize as geniuses are the people who
were considered heretics at the time.
Biden's
Inaugural Address was a big, fat lie. President Biden pledged "Unity" in his
Inaugural address, but see his call immediately following the words "uniting our people": "uniting
to fight the common foes we face." Now, two and a half years after the Biden inauguration, the
Biden/Garland persecution by prosecution of former president Donald J. Trump makes it obvious
that for the incumbent regime, the major "foe" is political opposition. Further, an
administration that respected diversity of political viewpoint would not pressure social media
platforms to censor conservative opinion under the false label "disinformation." For the
incumbent regime, "disinformation" is the term used to silence dissent.
Judge
who called out Biden's 'Ministry of Truth' consolidates free speech cases. A federal
judge who not long ago called out the Biden administration for running a "Ministry of Truth" now
has consolidated two separate challenges to the president's campaign to have federal bureaucrats
tell private social media companies to censor ideas that don't align with the White House. In
issuing an injunction that banned the administration from meeting with social media companies to
discuss that censorship, a decision suspended by an appeals court for now, U.S. District Judge
Terry Doughty had said in one of the cases, the "evidence produced thus far depicts an almost
dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by
widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar
to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth.'"
Democrats
Are Becoming the Censorship Party. A Pew Research poll released July 20 found that
70% of Democrats think the government should restrict what appears on social media, a dramatic
change from five years ago when a majority of Democrats supported a free marketplace of
ideas. It's no wonder, considering the drumbeat of warnings from leftist politicians and
their liberal media allies about "disinformation" and "misinformation." But be warned:
Democracy cannot survive for long if one of the nation's two major political parties wants to put
blinders on the public, limiting their access to information and canceling political
opponents. That's a rigged system. Ask the Iranians, Russians or Chinese.
The
scariest poll you'll see this summer. A majority of Americans — and an overwhelming
number of Democrats — no longer support First Amendment protections for free speech. The
government should restrict "false" information online, even if doing so blocks people from "publishing or
accessing information," 55 percent of Americans said in a large poll released Thursday. Only
42 percent disagreed. The antipathy to free speech represents a sea change in attitudes
in just five years. It is driven by a powerful new hostility to First Amendment rights on the left.
How
the Democrats and Media Enablers Censor News. [Scroll down] The idea that
you can permit the government to decide true from false statements will always be selectively
enforced to protect the interests of the officeholders. [...] Censorship, whether it is direct or
indirect through threats to social media (enjoined by Judge Terry A. Doughty in Missouri
v. Biden a few weeks ago) is a danger to us. We saw how the serious concerns about
the COVID vaccine by reputable scientists were blocked from public view; how bad medical treatment
(use of ventilators for COVID victims) and denial of alternative therapies cost lives; how
exaggeration of COVID mortality locked down schools, businesses, and place of worship, magnifying
terror in those who misunderstood the degree of risk. Indeed, the overblown coverage paved
the way for overriding sensible election integrity laws and surely enabled fraud.
10
Paradigm Shifts that Shatter Establishment Illusions. [#6] Western governments are so
terrified of losing control over their citizens that they attack freedom of speech as a threat to
their continued monopolies over information. Words and ideas are now labeled as "hateful"
whenever they contradict official State dogma. Debate and argument are censored as
"misinformation" so as to stifle dissent. Corporations and bureaucrats have anointed
themselves as high priests for assessing "truth" or "disinformation." Their anti-Enlightenment
efforts to smother freethinking have exposed the political Establishment as mere propagandists and bullies.
Will
Someone Please Wake Me From This Nightmare? While Trump was in office you were pretty
much permitted to say whatever you knew to be true and free speech was not hindered. Now,
under Biden, you can be fired for simply pointing out something destructive, but which you know to
be true. This includes issues about climate change, the value of masks and vaccinations, and
other so-called health measures.
The
Feds Get Their Knuckles Rapped on Censorship. On the 247th anniversary of America's
Independence Day, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the US District Court of the Western District of
Louisiana (Monroe Division) issued a major preliminary injunction against the US government in the
Covid censorship lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana (and others).
The government was enjoined and restrained from "meeting with social-media companies for the
purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion,
suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media
platforms," and related actions cited in the ruling posted [elsew]here. [...] The federal agencies
and individuals listed in the injunction cited an extra-constitutional power to fight
misinformation and disinformation as rationale for coercing private social media companies to
censure the free speech rights guaranteed under the First Amendment.
Woke
Neo-Marxist Hard Left Declares the First Amendment a Psychological Disorder. A 2020
article published by a World Health Organization-affiliated medical doctor in Nepal gains new
relevance in light of the recent disclosure that the Biden administration's FBI worked with a
Ukrainian spy agency to take down social media posts that Ukraine considered "spreading Russian
disinformation." The "woke" leftists' ambition to censor as "disinformation" any communication they
consider harmful to their neo-Marxist agenda may well be just the first step to designating as
"mentally ill" any dissenter to their views who dares to exercise free speech rights under the
First Amendment. In a 2020 article entitled "Information Disorder Syndrome and its
Management," published in the Journal of Nepal Medical Association, Nirmal Kandal, a member of the
Nepal Medical Association, argued that there were three grades to the psychological disorder of
sharing or developing "false information."
• Grade 1: in which the individual "shares false information without the intent of harming others."
• Grade 2: a moderate form of psychological disorder in which "the individual develops and
shares false information with the intent of making money and political gain, but not with the intent of harming people."
• Grade 3: a severe form "in which the individual develops and shares false information with the intent of harming others."
Kandal suggested that "all sufferers from grade 2 and 3 levels need psycho-social counseling and sometimes require
strong regulations and enforcement to control such information disorder."
Biden's
social media manipulation is exactly what the Framers feared. The nation's
constitutional Framers worked hard to create a government that responded to its citizens' interests
rather than telling citizens what their interests should be. The Framers, indeed, feared a
government that could control the flow of information and impose its views on the governed.
The First Amendment was created to allow for citizens, not the government, to manage the
marketplace of ideas. Federal District Judge Terry Doughty clearly understands this
principle, as evidenced by the preliminary injunction he handed out recently that restricts the
Biden administration from manipulating and pressuring social media outlets for its own messaging
purposes. It's a safe bet that every single signer of the original Constitution would have
agreed with Judge Doughty. Such was their fear of and opposition to government control of the
rhetorical sphere.
Free speech is seen as a threat: Emergency
Petition Filed in Major Biden Admin Social Media Censorship Case. The attorneys
general for Missouri and Louisiana have submitted a petition to oppose the Biden administration's
motion to stay an injunction against its efforts allowing it to contact social media firms about a
range of online content, including its efforts to flag so-called misinformation. Over the
weekend, the two states filed a memorandum of opposition to the administration's motion, coming
days after a federal judge partially granted an injunction that blocks various Biden administration
officials and government agencies such as the Justice Department and the FBI from working with big
tech firms to censor posts on social media. It came in response to a lawsuit filed by the
attorneys general, who accused the White House and various federal agencies of putting pressure on
social media firms to take down posts or suspend accounts. "Evidence in this case
overwhelmingly shows that the way the Government supposedly 'prevent[s] grave harm to the American
people and our democratic processes' is to pressure and induce social-media platforms to censor
disfavored viewpoints on COVID-19, elections, and other core political speech," they argued on
Sunday [7/9/2023].
Louisiana
Official Blasts Legacy Media Coverage of Biden Big Tech Case. Last week, a federal
judge ordered the Biden administration to stop strong-arming Big Tech into silencing Americans'
free speech online in a first-of-its-kind temporary injunction. Rather than celebrating this
move to uphold free speech, many legacy media outlets appear to be demonizing the very idea of
protecting speech from government censorship, according to one of the lead attorneys in the
case. Liz Murrill, the solicitor general of Louisiana and co-counsel in the case Missouri
v. Biden, spoke with The Daily Signal about the "misinformation or disinformation censorship
complex" and criticized media outlets for suggesting that this censorship apparatus is a good
thing. "As someone who was a journalist at one time before I went to law school, it still
baffles me to see the mainstream press buying into this massive effort to create a 'misinformation'
or 'disinformation' censorship complex," Murrill said.
Censorship
Is More Dangerous Than Disinformation. The First Amendment is under assault by the
very people entrusted to protect it. The Biden administration and the corporate media removed
any doubt about this after a July 4 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty.
Evidence revealed during the discovery process in Missouri v. Biden convinced the judge
that administration officials illegally pressured social media platforms to censor disfavored
views. Doughty issued a 155-page opinion and an injunction prohibiting federal officials from
"pressuring or coercing social-media companies in any manner to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce
posted content of postings containing protected free speech."
The
appalling media campaign to bow to government censors. The censorship efforts of the
government are, unfortunately, not new. However, what is new is the support of the media and
the Democratic Party in such censorship. That was on display on various channels after the
recent opinion finding that the Biden administration had violated the First Amendment in "the most
massive attack against free speech in United States history. However, the New York Times immediately
warned that the outbreak of free speech could "curtail efforts to combat disinformation." Yet,
no one expressed it more simply and chillingly than CNN Chief White House Correspondent Phil Mattingly
who stated that it "makes sense" for tech companies to go along with government censorship demands.
Judge
Doughty and Biden's Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth'. It's hardly news that the
government has long managed news reporting through a combination of leaks, favored treatment, and
threats. With the growth of social media and the COVID-19 "pandemic," the Biden
administration blatantly used every tool in its arsenal to censor constitutionally protected free
speech. Posters on the pre-Musk Twitter and Facebook, to take the most obvious examples, were
regularly shadow banned and even silenced altogether from posting alternate views to those of the
government. This past week, Judge Terry A. Doughty detailed the government's manipulation of
social media in a 155-page memorandum. Based on what was presented to the court, he enjoined
agencies, officers, and employees from HHS, NAIAD, CDC, FBI, DoJ, White House, OMB, DHS, and DoS
from continuing their practices. Those practices, which the judge characterized as "almost
dystopian," included flagging posts and "urging encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner
for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech."
Democrats
[are] mad [that a] court won't let them censor conservative ideas. A federal judge
has enjoined the Biden administration from colluding with Big Tech to censor conservative ideas,
and Democrats are mad. According to the New York Times, "disinformation researchers"
are worried that the ruling will make it harder for "civil society organizations" to police online
speech. "That's the really important distinction here," University of California at Santa
Barbara communications professor Miriam Metzger told the paper. "The government should be able
to inform social media companies about things that they feel are harmful to the public." Apparently,
when left-wing organizations try to police speech on their own, Big Tech companies don't listen.
Judge
Bars Biden Press Secretary From Flagging Posts For Big Tech To Censor, Two Years After Admin
Bragged About It. Afederal judge in Louisiana on Tuesday specifically barred
President Joe Biden's press secretary from colluding with corporate tech giants to censor
Americans' speech. In a preliminary injunction handed down on July 4, Judge Terry Doughty,
chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, implemented
restrictions on collusion between the Biden White House and social media companies. White
House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was among the more than three dozen administration
officials specifically named who are now prohibited from engaging in collaborative censorship.
Departing CDC
Director Says The Agency Plans To Work With Media To "Prebunk" "Misinformation". As
the CDC's Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, concludes her controversial tenure, her revelations
about the agency's decision to work hand in glove with the media to shape public opinion raise
alarming questions about government overreach and the erosion of free speech. In an interview
with The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Walensky did not mince words about her agency's attempts to
shape the narrative concerning public health information through a process she terms "prebunking."
This involved pre-emptive communication with media outlets to nudge them in a particular
direction regarding health reports, ostensibly to curb misinformation. But herein lies the
crux of the issue — who decides what constitutes misinformation?
What
the Left Has Left for America. In our Animal Farm left-wing world, free speech
is "hate speech" and "individual liberty" is selfish privilege. The ACLU transmogrified into
an activist group targeting conservative expression deemed "hateful." Universities' "hate
speech" codes and "free speech" zones are Orwellian. They are subtexts for ensuring that any
prominent conservative speaker should expect to be shouted down, threatened, slandered, and run off
campus — sometimes violently — for infringing on the "safety" of the
marginalized and vulnerable. Social media, Google searches, and internet access are warped by
corporate efforts to alter the flow of information. Once dangerous censorship has become a
noble effort to silence "misinformation" and more dangerous "disinformation" — as
adjudicated by ignorant 20-somethings at computer screens in Silicon Valley and obsequious
30-somethings in government cartels.
WHO
Declares 'Infodemic,' Announces 'Misinformation' Surveillance Program. The World
Health Organization (WHO), funded primarily by the CCP and Bill Gates tag team, has been very busy
getting its so-called "pandemic treaties" into place, which in effect hand over national control of
a state's public health response to unaccountable multinational bureaucrats — whose
interests, not unimportantly, are not shared by the populations over which they exercise
authority. Relatedly, the WHO also succeeded recently in instituting "vaccine passports"
across the European Union. Dovetailing with both of those projects of social control is the
organization's declaration of war on something called an "infodemic."
Now
Obama wants even more power. The media, government bureaucrats and other Democrats
have spread a massive amount of lies to the public for years through many election cycles.
All are meant to mislead the public and influence or interfere in elections but now Obama wants
more government control to determine what the truth is. This, from a former president who has
a long record of lying. ["]Obama suggests digital fingerprints to counter
misinformation, so we know what is true or not true.["] [...] Who will be Obama's
arbitrators? Will they be Rachel Maddow and MSNBC, Brian Stelter, WaPo, DHS, SPLC, the
Justice Department? Obviously, Obama wants some kind of censorship power under the rubric of
"stopping disinformation" because lying is so hard to conceal when the truth keeps getting out.
Australian
government threatens Elon Musk with $475,000-a-day fine if he doesn't stop people's feelings from
being hurt on Twitter. Oh no, Elon! You better watch out! The whole
nation of Australia is REALLY mad at you because now Twitter has free speech! [Tweet]
Whatever is Elon going to do now that the government of Australia is mad at him and their feelings
are hurt because people say mean things online? The threat from Australia does have
some teeth, at least in the mind of the Australians: ["]Twitter could be fined as much
as $475,000 a day if it doesn't comply, under an online safety law that Australia touted as
world-first when it was introduced in 2021.["]
U.S.
military leaders prioritizing protecting themselves rather than the nation? Forget
defending against China, Iran, North Korea, et. al., the Obiden administration has fundamentally
transformed what was previously the world's most powerful and capable fighting force. It has
emasculated it — and tasked it with defending against nationalism, climate change,
Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, misgendering, "disinformation," "domestic terrorists" (i.e.
patriots and parents), and now posts critical of military heads themselves.
The
World War On Free Speech Intensifies. The war on free speech is hardly a novel
phenomenon, instead mutating over the centuries. What is new, however, is its global
aspirations: today, the conflict takes the form of a world war. You can see its shadow
in every Western country, from the US and Canada to Ireland and Australia, as well as in every
multinational organization, from the EU to the UN. Rising levels of hate speech and misinformation,
we are told, make it more urgent than ever for governments, corporations, and multilateral
organizations to adopt stronger measures to protect vulnerable populations online. It is for
this reason that Biden's Department of Homeland Security recently created a "Disinformation
Governance Board," the European Commission crafted a new Digital Services Act and Code of Practice
on Disinformation, and the UN is proposing a "Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital
Platforms." All of these initiatives are allegedly the product of good intentions; all of
them, however, are rooted in the same fallacy: there is little evidence to suggest that hate speech
and misinformation are on the rise.
Obama's
Suggested Plans To Combat 'Misinformation' Should Scare Us All. Former President
Obama wants the government to be able to track and hunt down Americans by their fingerprints if
they dare spread so-called "misinformation." During an interview with podcast host David
Axelrod, Obama called for implementing "digital fingerprints" as a mandatory online requirement to
combat misinformation. The Democrat suggested the government needs a way to track and
identify people who spread so-called "misinformation" online. The CNN podcaster claimed he
has seen "misinformation, disinformation, [and] deep fakes" targeting the former president, which
Obama agreed with, adding that he was the most "recorded, filmed, photographed human in history."
UN
Secretary-General Proposes 'Global Digital Compact' to Push Laws Against Online 'Hate'.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, proposed a "Global Digital Compact," (GDC) to push
sweeping international laws against "hate and lies" online. "The proliferation of hate & lies in
the digital space is causing grave global harm. This clear & present global threat demands clear
and coordinated global action. We don't have a moment to lose," he wrote in a tweet announcing
the compact. The UN policy brief, which was released on June 12, called for handing control
of the internet to international bodies, as part of the UN's 2030 Agenda. Guterres also referred
to another UN brief, "Information and Integrity on Digital Platforms" (IIDP), which he said will be used
as a guide to coordinate global efforts against "hate."
FDA
Sets Up a Stoolie Network. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration launched an updated
"Rumor Control" hub aimed at enlisting the public to help stop the spread of "misinformation,"
which the agency defined as "false, inaccurate, or misleading ... spreading intentionally and
unintentionally," Children's Health Defense reports. They say the facts are found in: medical
journals, a nonprofit "fact checker" or a government website. Medical journals? You
mean the ones that told us it's not possible for COVID to have originated in the Wuhan lab?
A
Government at War with Its People. You might have noticed that the word "propaganda"
has been somewhat retired from polite conversation. Occasionally, some State-allied news
corporation will apply the term to a public statement coming from inside Russia, but otherwise, the
idea that governments promote falsehoods cloaked as official truths has quietly disappeared.
Instead, ordinary information enjoyed and shared among regular people is now targeted for
classification. An alliance of national governments, international institutions, and
propaganda engines disguised as disinterested nonprofits has sprung up to toss
"unacceptable" thoughts into garbage piles for "mis-," "mal-," and "dis-" information trash
bins. As with everything else in modern society, the cult of expertise has even given
us "disinformation experts" to decide what knowledge belongs where. The small coterie of
"disinformation experts" recognized and promoted by governments then monitor what the common people
are saying among themselves, cast their nets around anything "unacceptable," and stigmatize those
words and thoughts as deserving of censorship.
Let's
take the whole 'misinformation' con and run with it. "Misinformation" and
"disinformation" used to have a concrete meaning. But lately, they've been reduced only to a
convenient way to call someone a liar without addressing any facts. They have been re-created
to shut people up, shut down debate, and in general make it much easier to declare oneself right
and an opponent wrong and evil and stupid. Because calling people wrong and evil and stupid
for a living is apparently a rather profitable enterprise — and because suppressing
opposing thoughts is a useful tool for governments and other powers that be — billions
of tax dollars around the world are being funneled into the "information space" industry to
forcefully remind people that if they are exposed to, let alone listen to, or heaven forbid
consider such inconvenient facts, then they are even more wrong and evil and stupid and really need
to knock it off before they are deemed a terrorist by the people calling them wrong and evil and
stupid. And don't forgot that if you are a "denier" of anything, you are also wrong and evil
and stupid.
Five
Questions for Prospective Republican Candidates. [Question #4] Given the
accumulation of evidence proving that the federal government is engaging in constitutionally
impermissible censorship of Americans' free speech, why have Republican politicians remained
largely silent? From the Department of Homeland Security's "Disinformation Governance Board"
to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's "Foreign Malign Influence Center,"
government agents have taken formal steps to monitor and manipulate the information Americans are
allowed to see. A whole new official lexicon now exists to stigmatize unsanctioned ideas as
"mis-," "mal-," or "dis-" information. Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech
platforms actively conspire with the government to undermine Americans' free speech and promote the
"official truth." When free speech dies, other freedoms soon follow. How can Republicans
remain quiet?
Elon
Musk withdraws Twitter from European Union's 'voluntary Code of Practice on online disinformation'.
With no pesky First Amendment to deal with, the bureaucrats of the European Union have a relatively
easy time dictating what the truth is, and what is not allowed to be part of the public
conversation. But "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk wants nothing to do with it and has
withdrawn Twitter from the EU's "voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation," as if the
"voluntary" part of that name is not itself disinformation. But that may not be the case, as
EU Commissioner Thierry Breton is already issuing not-so-veiled threats.
WHO
to Use 'Listening Surveillance Systems' to Monitor Americans' Speech for 'Misinformation'.
Congress is launching an investigation into the World Health Organization (WHO) after details
emerged of the United Nations health body's disturbing Orwellian plan to combat so-called
"misinformation." The WHO's pandemic prevention initiative, the Preparedness and Resilience
for Emerging Threats (PRET), pushes plans to use "social listening surveillance systems" to monitor
the public's speech for "misinformation." However, PRET has been met with a backlash as more
people start to push back against unelected bodies who are trying to suppress speech and
potentially override sovereignty. PRET aims to "guide countries in pandemic planning,"
according to documents from the UN agency.
Australian
Authorities Made 4,000 Requests to Big Tech to Censor COVID-19 Content. The
Australian Home Affairs Department — normally responsible for dealing with terrorism and
border security — made over 4,000 requests to U.S. tech giants to review
COVID-19-related content during the pandemic years. The revelations come after a Freedom of
Information request from Senator Alex Antic and highlight the extent to which government
authorities attempted to control public discourse around issues like vaccine efficacy, lockdowns,
and mask mandates. Between Jan. 1, 2017, [and] Dec. 15, 2022, the Home Affairs
Department made 4,213 "COVID-19-related content referrals" to digital platforms like Facebook and
Twitter to review content against their own terms of service — the height of the
pandemic was from 2020 to 2021.
Christian
Broadcasters Join Pushback Against California's "Misinformation" Censorship Law. The
National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) has announced that it has joined a lawsuit against a law in
California, which its proponents say is aimed against online hate speech — but which is
actually simple censorship. The NRB, an association of Christian communicators, in this way
joined other plaintiffs — The Babylon Bee, Tim Pool, and Minds, Inc. — in a
bid to block the implementation of the law, AB 587. Proposed by Democrat Jesse Gabriel and
signed last September by California Governor Gavin Newsom, it mandates that companies behind social
media platforms report what is deemed as hate speech, disinformation, radicalization, extremism,
harassment and foreign political influence to the authorities, in this case, the California
Attorney General. The law envisages fines of up to $15,000 per day for each violation for
those who fail to comply.
Biden's
'Ministry of Truth' Is Back, But With New Branding. Every American should be alarmed
by the Biden administration's pushes on multiple fronts, from the regulatory state to the
surveillance regime, to expand its "oversight" of our constitutionally-protected civil
liberties. But this effort seems to be less focused on safeguarding Americans and more about
exerting control over us. Any government agency determining the merits of American speech is
dangerous. [...] The most egregious examples of this administration's censorial instincts can be
seen in the government's extensive effort to suppress of the Hunter Biden laptop story. The
same goes for the Covid-19 lab leak theory, which was initially dismissed as conspiracy but has
since been found to have legitimate grounds for investigation. Instead of allowing the
American public to examine information and make up their own minds, the administration has stepped
in to bury or shape these stories and many others. The Biden administration's assault on our
First Amendment rights is un-American.
The
Union Is Not a Suicide Pact. Anybody in any office attempting to implement some form
of a "disinformation" board to monitor and modify Americans' speech should never hold office
again. That so many elected and unelected federal employees not only disregard Americans'
constitutional rights, but also vocally brag about infringing them demonstrates that a malignant
cancer afflicts the central government from head to toe. So, yes, disband the FBI, but don't
stop there until all the powers stolen by the federal government have been properly returned to the
states and the American people. To save the Republic, the federal government must be starved
and diminished.
Now
They're Trying Censor Your Text Messages. Ever since journalist Matt Taibbi and I
testified before Congress on April 10, critics of the Twitter Files have claimed that we were
making a big deal about nothing. We were being paranoid, they said, to imagine that the U.S.
government was involved in spying on ordinary Americans and demanding censorship. The various
groups involved in what we called the Censorship Industrial Complex were merely "flagging"
problematic posts for social media companies, said our critics. The platforms were by no
means required to act on it. Yet act on it, they did. As I noted in our video about CIA
Fellow Renee DiResta, who oversaw the Censorship Industrial Complex's effort to censor disfavored
speech and disfavored users in 2020 and 2021, the social media companies responded to 75% of
flagged posts and acted on one-third of them. And now, new information has come to light that
the censorship activists are trying to spy on and censor even supposedly encrypted text messages
through apps like What's App, Signal, and Telegram.
Fox
News Sued for Defamation by Biden's Former Disinformation Chief. A former Biden
administration official who oversaw a federal initiative against alleged disinformation filed a
civil lawsuit against Fox News on Wednesday, alleging that the news outlet defamed her and damaged
her career. Nina Jankowicz, former head of the now-disbanded Disinformation Governance Board,
alleged in a complaint filed Wednesday that Fox News, via figures like host Laura Ingram and former
host Tucker Carlson, waged "a malicious campaign of destruction" against her that allegedly damaged
her career and well-being. "By particular, Fox described Jankowicz as moronic, an embarrassment
to her parents and employers, and a 'self-obsessed social media neophyte,'" reads the complaint,
filed in the Delaware Superior Court on May 10.
Biden
Admin Creates New Disinformation Office To Oversee The Rest. With the Biden
administration elevating disinformation to a national security threat, as codified in its
first-of-its-kind National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, published in June 2021, new
government (and non-government) offices dedicated to fighting foreign disinformation are cropping
up everywhere. To oversee organizations like the Pentagon's new Influence and Perception
Management Office and at least four organizations inside the Department of Homeland Security alone,
the Director of National Intelligence has created a new office - the Foreign Malign Influence
Center, The Intercept reports.
AFL
Reveals a DHS Campaign to Surveil and Censor Speech. America First Legal (AFL) has
uncovered a vast, coordinated campaign to surveil and censor American speech. They filed a
lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security cyber security division that is
responsible. In a series of tweets, AFL President Stephen Miller reveals he has documents
proving the vast left-wing conspiracy, which is banned under US law. They learned from the
Missouri and Louisiana deposition, that Brian Scully was in charge of censoring election
"misinformation" in CISA's Countering Foreign Interference Task Force during the 2020 election cycle.
We
Already Have a Disinformation Governance Board: Media Decides What You Can and Cannot Hear From RFK
Jr.. Old Joe Biden's handlers tried and failed to establish their own little Ministry
of Truth, the Disinformation Governance Board, but they were likely not devastated by the
ignominious failure of this initiative. That's because they already have plenty of Disinformation
Governance Boards: they're known as "news outlets." The mainstream media happily
carries water for the establishment line, as we saw again this week with ABC's censorship of its
own interview with a Democrat presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., because his
views on vaccines dissent from the establishment line.
The
White House Keeps Twisting the Truth About Florida. In late April 2022, the White
House named Nina Jankowicz — who believed in the Steele dossier and considered the
Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation — its disinformation czar. But
the Department of Homeland Security Disinformation Governance Board that Jankowicz headed lasted
only four months; Jankowicz herself resigned after just three weeks. A year later, it's hard
to ignore the irony that a White House that created an office allegedly to combat disinformation
keeps trafficking in it to damage its political opponents. President Biden and his press
secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, are spreading disinformation about Florida schools to discredit
Governor Ron DeSantis. At a White House briefing on April 20, Jean-Pierre referred to
Florida's Parental Rights in Education law as "the state's dystopian Don't Say Gay law."
There's nothing "dystopian" about the legislation, which prevents K-12 teachers in the state from
engaging in "classroom instruction" on "sexual orientation or gender identity" through third grade
but doesn't prevent teachers or students from saying the word "gay," having conversations about
being gay, or discussing gay people.
Bringing
the War on Terror Home to Target Americans for 'Disinformation'. The U.S. government
took the information techniques it learned after 9/11 and has turned them on Americans.
America may have lost the Great War on Terror, but our technocratic elites could still win their
war against American liberty. That's the argument made by Jacob Siegel in a 13,000-word
Tablet magazine article titled "A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century," which
seeks to explain "a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people" by elitists "who
believe themselves to be infallible." Specifically, Siegel writes, these "infallible" elitists
believe they are saving the world from "disinformation," which is whatever they view as untruths
about Russia, Ukraine, Donald Trump, Covid, climate change, election fraud, Brexit, etc. You
name a flavor of disinfo, and they want to save us from it.
A
Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century. In a technical or structural sense,
the censorship regime's aim is not to censor or to oppress, but to rule. That's why the
authorities can never be labeled as guilty of disinformation. Not when they lied about Hunter
Biden's laptops, not when they claimed that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy, not when they
said that vaccines stopped transmission of the novel coronavirus. Disinformation, now and for
all time, is whatever they say it is. That is not a sign that the concept is being misused or
corrupted; it is the precise functioning of a totalitarian system. If the underlying
philosophy of the war against disinformation can be expressed in a single claim, it is this:
You cannot be trusted with your own mind.
ABC
'News' Edits Out Robert F. Kennedy's Jr's Covid Vaccine Comments. ABC News aired an
interview with Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week. The
interview did not air in full. Rather, ABC edited the conversation to exclude Kennedy's
commentary on Covid-19 vaccines. ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis announced the edit on
air. Like the good little girl she is, she read what her bosses wrote verbatim: "We
should note that during our conversation, Kennedy made false claims about the COVID-19
vaccines. We've used our editorial judgment in not including portions of that exchange in our
interview. [...]" [...] The corporate press holds itself up as a group of experts. But it's
far from that. Particularly when deducing what is "false." The same network that censored
RFK on the topic of the vaccine long told viewers the vaccine would stop the spread. It did
not. ABC reported that the jab would prevent infection. It did not do that
either. The outlet parroted the talking point that the virus originated in a wet
market. Yet, the U.S. Energy Department and the FBI say no, the virus most likely formed in a
Wuhan lab. Another conspiracy turned reality. ABC promulgated the idea that plexiglass
barriers worked. That cloth masks were effective. That school closures protected
children And that our "experts" accurately counted the fatality rate. Wrong. All of
it. ABC "News" proved itself to be a beacon of Covid untruths. Yet it has the gall to
suppress an interviewee and accuse him of spreading vaccine misinformation.
FDA
Commissioner is lying again. "Misinformation" is the Left's new boogyman, up there
with White Supremacists, carbon dioxide, and transphobes. We are supposed to believe that all
these things are threats to human existence itself and that all of them must be ruthlessly
suppressed in order to save humanity. Yeah, whatever. The FDA Commissioner
Dr. Robert Califf has apparently been traveling the country making a rather amazing claim:
that misinformation is the leading cause of death in America. If so, that's pretty
shocking. A number of studies suggest that medical errors may be the third-leading cause of
death in America, resulting in 250,000 to 440,000 deaths a year, depending upon how you define
medical errors. The data is all over the map, with some estimates as low as 22,000 a year to
high-end estimates that seem implausible to me. There is even a medical term for death caused
by a doctor: iatrogenic.
Arguing
COVID came from China could land you on Minnesota's government bias registry according to new
bill. Minnesota state Rep. Harry Niska, R., asked during a debate on a new bill
whether praise for "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling or arguing that COVID originated in China
would qualify as biased speech that would put citizens on a government database. Minnesota
lawmakers are mulling a change to state law, House File 181, that would log alleged bias incidents
even when they aren't considered a crime. The bill, introduced in January, would allow people
to report perceived bias-related incidents such as alleged slurs and verbal attacks that would fall
outside the hate crimes compiled annually by the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, according
to the St. Cloud Times. Republican state Rep. Walter Hudson warned House File 181
could pose a threat to religious freedom.
U.N.
Is A Climate "Disinformation Threat Actor". The United States government's
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), within the Department of Homeland
Security, is raising the alarm about the threat of "foreign influence" that is "leveraging
misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation." CISA defines "malinformation" as
information "based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate." In 2021,
CISA, along with the White House and private sector partners, successfully persuaded Facebook and
Twitter to censor accurate information about the origins of the SARS-2 coronavirus and covid
vaccines. And yet CISA is failing to do its job when censoring malinformation, misinformation,
and disinformation about climate change, including by "threat actors," often funded or employed by
foreign governments.
Oracle
Ends Relationship With Global Disinformation Index Over Free Speech Concerns.
Finally, there is some more good news in the battle for free speech. The Global
Disinformation Index has taken yet another hit after being exposed for its campaign to limit the
reach of conservative and libertarian views online. Oracle, the multinational software
company, has announced that it is ending its relationship with the Global Disinformation Index
(GDI), a group that has been secretly blacklisting conservative media outlets. The decision
comes after a review by Oracle, which stated that its services must be in full support of free speech.
They
Fear You. Long before the Department of Homeland Security attempted to justify the
formal recognition of a "Disinformation Czar" to monitor Americans' speech or news broke that the
State Department had been using a foreign organization called the Global Disinformation Index to
censor conservative voices here at home, it was clear that the war for free speech had begun. [...]
Now the cat is out of the bag, and neither government agencies nor their corporate co-conspirators
are hiding their embrace of viewpoint discrimination. The FBI continues to flag more
language — including words as innocuous as "red pill," "based," and "Chad" —
as extremist rhetoric. Google blocked Right Side Broadcasting Network from covering President
Trump's Democrat-engineered Manhattan arraignment on YouTube, claiming that the censorship was
necessary to combat "elections misinformation." A revolving door now exists to fill social media
companies with employees from the ranks of the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security.
The
'RESTRICT Act' Is About Controlling Online Information By Force. We have spoken about
online censorship, social media silencing content they do not approve of, Google demonetizing
websites like ANP that doesn't follow the "authoritative, scientific consensus," but the 'RESTRICT
act' takes things to a whole new level. Stefan Stanford recently described the RESTRICT act,
otherwise known as Senate Bill 686, as an attempt at "controlling Internet content," in order to
ensure that the "never-ending stream of lies that we've been getting from the government and the
mainstream media for the past several decades at least will be the ONLY information that we're
'allowed' to get."
Homeland
Security Hired Left-Wing Consultants to Combat "Misinformation" During 2022 Election.
Homeland security officials in the Biden administration enlisted the help of progressive
organizations as they sought to combat misinformation leading up to the 2022 midterm elections,
according to a new report from the Daily Caller. An advisory panel convened by the
Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA), a subset of the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), began its work in December 2021 reaching out to individuals and groups linked to
Democratic causes. Members of the panel include former Twitter legal counsel Vijaya Gadde,
University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, and Suzanne Spaulding from the Center for
Strategic and International Studies. Gadde, perhaps the most prominent member, was known
publicly for supporting the decision by Twitter to ban former President Donald Trump from its
platform following the 2020 elections.
Russell
Brand Debriefs Matt Taibbi With Some Solid New Intel Surfacing About Larger Internet and Social
Media Control Operations. U.K. cultural and political pundit Russell Brand sits down
for an interview with U.S. Twitter File journalist Matt Taibbi, to discuss Taibbi's experience with
his recent congressional testimony, the advancement of the 'Restrict Act', and new revelations
still coming from his exploration into the Twitter communication files. After some general
overview and sense about the issues in/around congress, at 06:45 of the interview Taibbi begins to
highlight new information he is discovering about how the Aspen Institute group was organizing,
discussing and planning a larger objective about controlling any/all information on the
internet. [Video clip]
Disinformation
Is the Word I Use When I Want You To Shut Up. While your back was turned, the federal
government erected a convoluted apparatus of control for what you can say and see online.
They did this, we are told, to protect us. Protect us from what, you ask? Well, mostly
from ourselves, but also from a threat that makes nuclear annihilation feel like a pinprick by
comparison: disinformation. Also misinformation and
malinformation — the latter defined as "bits of actual reality we totally object
to." But disinformation is the big dog. And by "disinformation," they mean the web.
And by the web, they mean, of course, you — but I already said that. I have
written long, deeply researched tracts about the technical aspects of disinformation. Why did
I bother? Nobody cares. Disinformation is just a jargon word with a subliminal meaning,
thrown out by the mighty of the earth whenever they worry that they are about to lose an
argument — something that happens with painful regularity these days. The word
means, "Shut up, peasant." It's a bullet aimed at killing the conversation.
How
the Biden administration has quietly helped to 'score' conservative speech. Last
year, the Biden administration caved to public outcry and disbanded its infamous Disinformation
Governance Board under its "Disinformation Nanny," Nina Jankowicz. Yet, as explored in a
recent hearing (in which I testified), the Biden administration never told the public about a far
larger censorship effort involving an estimated 80 FBI agents secretly targeting citizens and
groups for disinformation. Now it appears that the administration also was partially funding
an "index" to warn advertisers to avoid what the index deemed to be dangerous disinformation
sites. It turns out that all ten of the "riskiest" sites identified by the Global
Disinformation Index are popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. The
index, run by a British organization, appears to be an effort to score and sanction sites based on
their "reliability" to those in the political and media establishments. That sounds like a
knockoff of China's "social credit" system which scores its citizens, based in part on social media
monitoring. Clearly, the administration never abandoned its intent to fund and field efforts
to curtail speech on the internet — with the support of many in the media and academia.
People Can Win. Earlier today
Susan Schmidt and I published an article about a series of changes at the Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a creepy sub-division of the Department of Homleand
Security. It turns out that CISA, which just a week or so ago was busted for scrubbing
embarrasing text from its website by the Foundation for Freedom Online, quietly eliminated its
so-called "MDM" or "Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation" subcommittee. Just a
year ago, the Department of Homeland Security was going all-in on the fight against "MDM." The
notion that America is fatally infected with "Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation"
was in fact the animating idea begind the asinine plan the Biden administration announced last
April to institute a "Disinformation Governance Board," which was to be headed by Nina Jankowicz, a
self-styled Mary Poppins of digital rectitude: [Video clip]
The
Crusade Against 'Malinformation' Explicitly Targets Inconvenient Truths. Last month,
I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the
scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook
attached a warning to that column, which it said was "missing context" and "could mislead people."
According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials
that journalist Michael Shellenberger calls the "censorship-industrial complex," I had committed the offense
of "malinformation." Unlike "disinformation," which is intentionally misleading, or "misinformation,"
which is erroneous, "malinformation" is true but inconvenient. As illustrated by internal Twitter
communications that journalist Matt Taibbi highlighted last week, malinformation can include emails from
government officials that undermine their credibility and "true content which might promote vaccine
hesitancy." The latter category encompasses accurate reports of "breakthrough infections" among
people vaccinated against COVID-19, accounts of "true vaccine side effects," objections to vaccine
mandates, criticism of politicians, and citations of peer-reviewed research on naturally acquired immunity.
The
U.S. Government Is Building A Vast Surveillance And Speech Suppression Web Around Every
American. Our government is preparing to monitor every word Americans say on the
internet — the speech of journalists, politicians, religious organizations, advocacy
groups, and even private citizens. Should those conversations conflict with the government's
viewpoint about what is in the best interests of our country and her citizens, that speech will be
silenced. While the "Twitter Files" offer a glimpse into the government's efforts to censor
disfavored viewpoints, what we have seen is nothing compared to what is planned, as the details of
hundreds of federal awards lay bare. Research by The Federalist reveals our tax dollars are
funding the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning (ML) technology that
will allow the government to easily discover "problematic" speech and track Americans reading or
partaking in such conversations. Then, in partnership with Big Tech, Big Business, and media
outlets, the government will ensure the speech is censored, under the guise of combatting
"misinformation" and "disinformation."
U.N. Is A Climate
"Disinformation Threat Actor". The United States government's Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), within the Department of Homeland Security, is raising the
alarm about the threat of "foreign influence" that is "leveraging misinformation, disinformation,
and malinformation." CISA defines "malinformation" as information "based on fact, but used out of
context to mislead, harm, or manipulate." In 2021, CISA, along with the White House and private
sector partners, successfully persuaded Facebook and Twitter to censor accurate information about
the origins of the SARS-2 coronavirus and covid vaccines. And yet CISA is failing to do its
job when censoring malinformation, misinformation, and disinformation about climate change,
including by "threat actors," often funded or employed by foreign governments. A Google
survey of over 2,300 people conducted last year by the nonpartisan research organization
Environmental Progress, which I founded and lead, found that 53% of people surveyed in the U.S.
agree with the false statement, "Climate change is making hurricanes more frequent," while 46%
agree with the false statement, "Climate change threatens human extinction."
Time
Is Running Out To Speak Freely About Free Speech In America. Donald Trump's rise, his
successful use of social media, and new media's refusal to join the crusade against Trump caused a
fatal case of Stockholm Syndrome, with Big Tech and legacy media outlets welcoming government
requests for censorship. With support from both for-profit and nonprofit organizations and
academic institutions, a Censorship Complex emerged, embracing the government's definition of
"truth" and seeking to silence any who challenged it, whether it be new media or individual
Americans — even experts. The search for truth suffered as a result, and Americans
were deprived of valuable information necessary for self-governance. We know this because
notwithstanding the massive efforts to silence speech, a ragtag group of muckrakers persisted and
exposed several official dictates as lies: The Hunter Biden laptop was not Russian disinformation,
Covid very well may have escaped from a Wuhan lab, and Trump did not collude with Putin. But
if the Censorship Complex succeeds and silences the few journalists and outlets still willing to
challenge the government, Americans will no longer have the means to learn the truth.
Twitter
Files reveal government-sponsored suppression of the truth with the help of Stanford
University. According to LifeSiteNews, "the nineteenth 'Twitter Files' installment
has revealed that a Stanford University initiative routinely told social media companies to
suppress posts containing '[t]rue content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.'" Journalist
Matt Taibbi posted the latest batch of files on March 17th. Taibbi stated that a federally
funded Stanford University initiative called the Virality Project instructed Big Tech social media
platforms such as Twitter and TikTok to take action against admittedly true posts regarding the
experimental COVID-19 vaccines as part of its fight against "disinformation." The Virality
Project, which is partially funded by the Department of Defense and the National Science
Foundation, also directed the social media giants to treat "often true posts which could fuel
hesitancy" as "misinformation" on their platforms. Some of us on conservative sites have long
alleged that this has been happening. Those on the left often deem anything with which they
disagree, especially if true, to be "misinformation" or "disinformation."
The CDC's
Vaccine "Misinformation" List. One of the most important findings of the Twitter Files was an
email from Stanford's Virality Project (the favored "disinformation experts" of the Biden White House, the
CDC, and the US Surgeon General), which discussed the potential removal of "True content which might promote
vaccine hesitancy." This would include "stories of true vaccine side effects" — information
that is not "mis or disinformation" but may be "malinformation" that is "exaggerated or misleading".
The Virality Project, like its clients and supporters within the US government, was concerned that these
true social media posts "could fuel [vaccine] hesitancy." [Tweet]
Private-federal
censorship machine targeted true 'misinformation'. Did you make any "worrisome jokes"
about the Biden administration's proposal to send agents door-to-door to browbeat people to get
COVID vaccines? Then you were a public enemy guilty of spreading dangerous
disinformation. Did you ask questions about COVID policy? You were guilty of a tactic
"commonly used by spreaders of misinformation to deflect culpability." Did you complain to
anyone that vaccine passports violated your liberty? You were deluded, if not depraved, and
guilty of propelling a deceptive "anti-vaccination narrative about the loss of rights and
freedoms." Your tax dollars at work: These are the bizarre revelations from the latest and
perhaps funniest Twitter Files from Matt Taibbi.
Latest
Twitter Files tackle 'Great Covid-19 Lie Machine' flagging true content as 'disinformation'. The
latest installment of the Twitter Files examined Stanford University's Virality Project meant to combat
"disinformation" but in reality targeted COVID content that defied establishment narratives. According
to its website, the objective of the Virality Project, which was launched in May 2020, was "to detect, analyze,
and respond to incidents of COVID-19 vaccine disinformation across online ecosystems, and ultimately mitigate
the impact of narratives which would otherwise undermine the public's confidence in the safety of these processes
in the United States." On Friday, independent journalist Matt Taibbi showed the project didn't exactly
live up to its mission statement.
Censorship:
The Week Democrats Finally Came Out. It has long been obvious that the Democrats harbor a
deep aversion to free expression and that they are perfectly willing to silence voices that fail to
parrot the pungent orthodoxies of the left. Historically, however, this authoritarian impulse
has been impeded by the First Amendment and the revulsion with which most Americans regard
censorship. It is no small irony that the advent of the internet, which was widely expected
to make it all but impossible to interfere with the free flow of information, actually rendered it
easier to suppress speech by stealth. The Democrats were quick to realize this and have
effectively used the technology as an instrument of censorship for years. Inevitably, this
has come to light and forced the Democrats to adopt the position that censorship has become a
crucial weapon in the battle to protect "our democracy." And they demonstrated late last week
that this is not empty rhetoric.
Taking
Back Our Country, One Word at a Time. [4] Disinformation does not exist.
There are two kinds of false information: mistakes and lies. The term isinformation is
promulgated to obfuscate and sanitize lying. Disinformation is lying committed by liars.
They
Say We're Dangerous. There's a price to be paid when you go against the left-wing
narrative. Many of you faced the ire of friends, family members, and the medical community
when you voiced skepticism about the origins of the Covid-19 virus, the lockdowns, the jabs, and
the anti-science masking rules. You've been called conspiracy theorists and told you were
(literally!) killing people when you did your own research and decided what was best for you and
your family. Some of you lost your jobs because you refused to take the unproven
vaccine. You've been censored on social media or banned from platforms outright. The
same thing has happened to PJ Media. Our articles about Covid have been demonetized,
censored, and throttled on social media platforms. Our writers have been suspended and/or
banned. They said we're "dangerous." That we're spreading harmful disinformation and
making "unreliable and harmful claims."
This
week we saw more proof of the Democrats' disdain for democracy. Journalists Matt
Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, who are among the authors of the Twitter Files, were in D.C. to
testify regarding Twitter's inner workings before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of
the Federal Government. Twitter had suppressed the expose of Hunter Biden's Laptop which was
the most important story of the 2020 election cycle. A NewsBusters poll revealed that 16% of
Biden voters would have voted differently had they known of Hunter's laptop. Another survey
showed that 79 percent of Americans think Trump would have won reelection if voters had known facts
about Hunter's laptop. The Twitter Files series that began last December revealed how the
Social Media giant was colluding with government agencies and Democrat politicians to manipulate
the narrative in favor of the Democrats. For every claim they made, they provided evidence
of documents or screenshots of correspondence. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio chaired the
hearings and made it clear that selective state-sponsored targeting 'disinformation' is an attack
on the First Amendment.
Matt
Taibbi Releases Twitter File Review #18 — Whole of Government Censorship Approach, Including
Senate Intel and Legislative Branch. One aspect that draws particular interest to those
who spent years deconstructing the false Trump-Russia narrative, appears in the section beginning in
Tweet #34 where Taibbi again visits the influence of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
(SSCI). At the epicenter of the SSCI effort we have always found then Vice-Chair Mark Warner
manipulating events. Taibbi pulls this thread a little further with his review of how the SSCI
contracted with outside government agencies to maintain the false premise of Russian interference in
the 2016 election. A name that might be familiar to those who read the SSCI report on "Russian
Active Measures and Disinformation in the 2016 Campaign" might be familiar to you. Taibbi
notes: ["]Profiles portray [Renee] DiResta as a warrior against Russian bots and
misinformation, but reporters never inquire about work with DARPA, GEC, and other agencies.
In the video below from @MikeBenzCyber, Stamos introduces [Renee DiResta] as having "worked for the
CIA." DiResta has become the public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a name promoted
everywhere as an unquestioned authority on truth, fact, and Internet hygiene, even though her former
firm, New Knowledge, has been embroiled in two major disinformation scandals. This, ultimately,
is the most serious problem with the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Packaged as a bulwark against
lies and falsehood, it is itself often a major source of disinformation, with American taxpayers
funding their own estrangement from reality.["]
Shellenberger
on Censorship: It's No Longer a Slippery Slope. Shellenberger: "Seeing this
censorship industry go from, well, we're just fighting ISIS to well, we're just fighting Russian
disinformation bots to well, now we need to fight domestic misinformation, which is just saying we
need to fight against people who are saying things we disagree with online, that's all that
means. And I — I mean, it's not a slippery slope. It's an immediate leap
into a terrifying mechanism that I — we only see in totalitarian societies of attempting
to gain control over what the social media platforms are allow — are allowing." [Video clip]
Michael
Shellenberger Outlines Deep State Psychological Operations Being Conducted Against Americans.
After his review of the Twitter Files, Michael Shellenberger is beginning to take a big picture approach to
each of the discoveries. Shellenberger, appears on Tucker Carlson tonight to discuss how in the big
picture the U.S. government is conducting psychological warfare against domestic citizens through the auspices
of Twitter and likely other social media platforms. He's not wrong, we've been calling it out in
real time. [Video clip]
Jim Jordan subpoenas former head of DHS
disinformation board. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Monday
subpoenaed a former Biden administration official who oversaw the Department of Homeland Security's
disinformation board. Jordan, R-Ohio, called on Nina Jankowicz to appear before the committee
April 10 for a deposition as Republicans scrutinize the short-lived Disinformation Governance
Board, which drew widespread GOP criticism after it launched last year. Jankowicz "ignored
voluntary requests for a transcribed interview," Jordan said, citing two letters last year and
three letters since he took the helm of the committee in January.
Nina
Jankowicz puts out new video seeking cash to sue Fox News — and barely anyone
donates. Joe Biden's now-former disinfomation czar, Nina Jankowicz, of the now junked
Disinformation Governance Board, is stepping up her gofundme campaign to sue Fox News, issuing this
self-pitying video pitch: [Tweet] This is pretty wretched. I'm surprised she didn't
use TikTok, the medium that got her famous. Perhaps the would-be disinformation tsarina has
been informed that it's a China data-mining outfit, or at least doesn't want other people to laugh
and point at that unfortunate fact with her name on it. Using all of her theatrical skills,
she attempts to rouse the public into donating money for her claim that Fox News lied about her and
was mean to her and, sniff, sniff, it messed up her relationship with her newborn son. She
doesn't seem to have heard about the First Amendment.
WHO
Advances Plan to Censor 'Disinformation' under Global Law. The World Health
Organization (WHO) is advancing its plan that would see the unelected United Nations health body
receive sweeping new powers to censor so-called "disinformation" under global law. This week,
the WHO held a meeting to advance the "international pandemic treaty." Once passed, the
treaty is a "legally binding" instrument that will enhance the WHO's powers to target anything that
it deems to be "false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation." The scope of the WHO is
vast and its 194 member states will have to comply with the treaty under the new international law.
Twitter
discloses another possible government censorship effort. In the 17th release of the
"Twitter Files," journalist Matt Taibbi disclosed that the U.S. government is funding a group that
has supported the censorship of dissenting viewpoints on social media, including those of U.S.
citizens. That may sound familiar. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote here that the
congressionally created, federally funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) had supported the
British-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI). The index was widely ridiculed for targeting ten
conservative and libertarian sites as the most dangerous sources of disinformation; it sought to
persuade advertisers to withdraw support for those sites, while listing their most liberal
counterparts as among the most trustworthy. At the time, I noted that the Biden
administration had played us for chumps. As we celebrated the demise of the infamous
Disinformation Governing Board with its "Disinformation Nanny," the Biden administration never
disclosed a larger censorship program. Shortly after my column posted in The Hill, the NED
wrote to me to say that it was discontinuing support for the GDI. Microsoft also was forced into
retreat after it was shown to be pushing the GDI's biased blacklist. Again, many celebrated a
victory for free speech. Yet, here we are again [...]
People
Behind Biden Announce Creation of Formal National Surveillance State, Yet No One Seems
Bothered. On March 2, 2023, the people in control of the Joe Biden administration
officially announced that government control of internet content was now officially a part of the
national security apparatus. If you have followed the history of how the Fourth Branch of
Government has been created, you will immediately recognize the intent of this new framework.
The "National Cybersecurity Strategy" aligns with, supports, and works in concert with a total U.S.
surveillance system, where definitions of information are then applied to "cybersecurity" and
communication vectors. This policy is both a surveillance system and an information
filtration prism where the government will decide what is information, disinformation,
misinformation and malinformation, then act upon it. In part, this appears to be a response
to the revelations around government influence of social media, the Twitter Files. Now we see
the formalization of the intent. The government will be the arbiter of truth and cyber
security, not the communication platforms or private companies. This announcement puts the
government in control.
Canned
Disinformation Governance Board's Nina Jankowicz now wants to stick it to Fox News.
Remember Nina Jankowicz? That would be the now flamed-out Biden administration appointee who
was to lead Joe Biden's "Disinformation Governance Board," the agency hatched by the Bidenites to
police Americans' speech in the name of "protecting" Americans from "disinformation." That was
until Congress got wind of it and the public found out and the Homeland Security's Advisory Board
scrapped it last August. Jankowicz was out of a job then, but seemed to have landed on her
feet, reemerging as a registered foreign agent working for some British public relations firm
seeking to exert some kind of influence on the American government. Apparently that didn't
pan out, or perhaps she couldn't stop stewing about losing that six-figure government job that made
her feel so important. So now she's out raising money through GoFundMe campaign to sue Fox
News, claiming they lied about her.
Biden's
Ex-Disinformation Czar Nina Jankowicz Soliciting $100,000 to Sue Fox News and for 'Other'
Costs. Nina Jankowicz, the short-lived disinformation czar for the Biden Department
of Homeland Security, is soliciting funds for a lawsuit against Fox News for allegedly spreading
"lies" about her. Jankowicz posted a five-minute video to her Twitter account along with a
GoFundMe page asking for money to sue Fox News. According to the GoFundMe page, she is
seeking to raise $100,000. So far, she has raised over $10,000.
Hitler was mad, too. The
Former Disinformation Governance Board Chief Is Back, and She's Mad. Nina Jankowicz
is back, and she's mad. Jankowicz, you'll no doubt recall, was the chief of the Biden
regime's ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board, which was ominously part of the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) and was widely reported to be an Orwellian exercise in policing the speech
of Americans that strayed from the line of the establishment Left. But Jankowicz insists that
the Disinformation Governance Board was nothing like the way it was portrayed. She claims
that Fox News' negative coverage of it spread lies about her, endangered her life as she was
inundated with death threats, and even interfered with her ability to bond with her newborn son.
(Yeah, she is really throwing the kitchen sink into this one.) Jankowicz has published a video,
"Help Nina Fight Fox," asking for donations to help her sue the beast that ruined her life.
Obama's
Global Engagement Center (GEC) Labeled U.S. Accounts as "Foreign Actors" to Promote Media
Narrative. Matt Taibbi has done another extensive review of Twitter data in File
Release #17. This information release focuses on the Global Engagement Center (GEC), an
internal sub-agency within the State Department as constructed by the Obama administration.
As noted by Taibbi, the GEC was funded mostly from the Pentagon and the financial outlays were to
various leftist organizations who constructed the Trump-Russia narrative. The outcome of the
original deception created a need for the illusion of "foreign influence agents" in U.S. social
media, specifically in this instance, Twitter. The GEC was created as a targeting system to
label any voice adverse to the Obama interests as a "foreign actor." Generally speaking, the
GEC network identified usernames and social media account information they deemed adversarial to
the Obama administration, then told Twitter to take down the accounts. The people working
within GEC were political activists, financed through government agencies by the very taxpayers'
they were targeting. Ironic, no?
6
Ways The Censorship Complex Silences Speech It Doesn't Want You To Say Or Hear. [#3]
Twitter Followed Requests from 'Disinfo' Groups: As if accepting government censorship requests
through the FBI were not enough, Twitter allowed nonprofits to ask for tweets to be blocked if
those organizations deemed them "disinformation." A partnership portal expedited censorship
requests from outside think tanks, such as the Stanford Observatory, which, at times, passed along
requests for other nonprofit organizations. [#4] Chorus of 'Disinfo' Claims Prompted
Censorship: While at times Big Tech censorship followed requests solely from the government or
nonprofit "disinformation" think tanks, more often Twitter was pushed into silencing speech because
of a concerted PR pressure campaign undertaken when private organizations, academics, the media,
and government actors — including agencies, commissions, committees, and individual
lawmakers — fanned unfounded claims of "disinformation."
CNN
and Election Disinformation. My friend and I sometimes argue about media outlets like
CNN and MSNBC. Why do they spread misinformation?
A. Are they grossly uninformed?
B. Do they know the truth but tell falsehoods anyway?
C. Do they think we are stupid or naïve?
My buddy feels that the media outlets know the truth but lie about it. To me, it is more complicated. The
nice-looking journalists who read the teleprompters are genuinely ignorant. On the other hand, the news producers
probably know the truth but spread misinformation anyway. Producers are the ones who select the topics, construct
the programs, and hire the special analysts.
Government-backed
'disinformation' group under fire for punishing outlets that reported on lab leak theory. A
government-affiliated group that attempted to blacklist conservative networks over "coronavirus conspiracies"
is now coming under fire after a federal agency announced its analysis that the lab-leak theory could be
true. The Global Disinformation Index reportedly sought to convince advertising companies to distance
themselves from and punish conservative websites that suggested the coronavirus may have initially spread
because it was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Earlier this week, the Energy
Department concluded based on new intelligence that the virus most likely did originate in a lab.
"The stuff labeled as dangerous disinformation keeps turning out to be true." Get Tomorrow's
Disinformation Today! This disinformation business sure has gotten complicated
lately. [...] A recent batch of Twitter files, for example, showed that the Alliance Defending
Democracy's widely cited Hamilton 68 dashboard of Twitter accounts "linked to Russian
influence" was bogus — which meant that every mainstream press outlet that relied on
Hamilton 68 was involved in a massive disinformation campaign organized by a left-wing
group. But no matter how many times the leftist press is shown to have peddled
misinformation, it continues to get gold stars for reliability from "independent" groups. A
Washington Examiner investigation found one such well-funded group, the Global Disinformation
Index, gives sites such as the far-left Huffington Post top-level reliability scores while labeling
the RealClearPolitics site — which links to both liberal and conservative news and
commentary — as one of the 10 "riskiest" in the nation. "All of the websites that
GDI ranks as the 'least risky' lean left in their news coverage," the Examiner found.
NY
Times Editorial Board Member Questions Free Speech on Internet: 'I don't think we can allow it to go on'.
Mara Gay of the NY Times editorial board appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe this week and questioned the idea of free
speech on the internet. She whined about so-called 'hate speech' and disinformation, which is classic leftist talk
for, speech I don't like. Remember, this woman works for a newspaper that pushed the Russia collusion hoax for
four solid years. She is appearing on a network that did the same, but now she is worried about disinformation?
Probe
Launched Into State Department Censorship of Conservatives. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer
announced an investigation into the State Department after it was revealed by the Washington Examiner the federal
bureaucracy spent hundreds-of-millions in taxpayer dollars on censorship of conservative news outlets.
Disinformation
index collapses after targeting conservative media content. AState Department-backed group is severing its
connections with a disinformation index group also backed by progressive megadonor George Soros following reports about
the group's efforts to muzzle conservative media outlets by blacklisting them with advertisers. The National
Endowment for Democracy, a private foundation created by Congress whose funding is part of the State Department budget,
said it will no longer provide grants to the Global Disinformation Index, according to The Washington Times.
"Recently, we became aware that one of our grantees, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), was engaged in an
initiative, funded by a different donor, that focused on specific U.S. media outlets," the NED told the newspaper
Tuesday. "We recognize the important work GDI has done with NED support in other countries .... However,
given our commitment to avoid the perception that NED is engaged in any work domestically, directly or indirectly, we
will no longer provide financial support to GDI."
State
Department-backed group cuts ties with group blacklisting conservative news. As a direct result of
multiple Washington Examiner reports, a State Department-backed nonprofit group is severing its financial
relationship with a "disinformation" tracking organization that is secretly blacklisting and taking steps to shut down
conservative media. The National Endowment for Democracy, a group funded almost entirely through congressional
appropriations, granted $545,750 between 2020 and 2021 to the Global Disinformation Index, which is feeding conservative
website blacklists to advertising companies. Amid GOP lawmakers raising concerns, the National Endowment for
Democracy is taking steps to distance itself from the purported "disinformation" monitor and will no longer be providing
it future grant money, the nonprofit group told the Washington Examiner.
How
the Biden administration has quietly helped to 'score' conservative speech. Last year, the Biden
administration caved to public outcry and disbanded its infamous Disinformation Governance Board under its
"Disinformation Nanny," Nina Jankowicz. Yet, as explored in a recent hearing (in which I testified), the Biden
administration never told the public about a far larger censorship effort involving an estimated 80 FBI agents secretly
targeting citizens and groups for disinformation. Now it appears that the administration also was partially
funding an "index" to warn advertisers to avoid what the index deemed to be dangerous disinformation sites. It
turns out that all ten of the "riskiest" sites identified by the Global Disinformation Index are popular with
conservatives, libertarians and independents. The index, run by a British organization, appears to be an effort to
score and sanction sites based on their "reliability" to those in the political and media establishments. That
sounds like a knockoff of China's "social credit" system which scores its citizens, based in part on social media monitoring.
NTSB
Chair Wallops Buttigieg for 'Spreading Misinformation' About Derailment. After the woefully inadequate
Transportation secretary found a way to blame Trump for the catastrophic train derailment, he got pushback from an
unexpected quarter: National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy, who branded Buttigieg's
politically opportunistic claims "misinformation." Misinformation! That's something that only "MAGA
Republicans" are supposed to be spreading, not good team players such as our Pete! Homendy's word choice made her
rebuke all the more blistering. The Biden regime has repeatedly sought to deplatform and silence those who
questioned their propaganda line, on the spurious grounds that the dissidents were spreading "misinformation." Will
Biden's handlers now silence Buttigieg? Don't bet on it, but the onetime front-runner for becoming America's first
(openly!) gay president has seen his star dim considerably during his stormy demonstration of his own incompetence as
Transportation secretary.
Report:
Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson Demand Investigation into Government Backing Group Leading Conservative Media
Blacklist. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) are demanding an investigation into
reports that U.S.-backed entities funded a foreign think tank that is trying to blacklist and defund conservative media
outlets. [...] Microsoft's ad network, Xandr, has used GDI's Dynamic Exclusion List to blacklist conservative media
outlets. Xandr has reportedly, at least temporarily, removed the negative flags for conservative media.
Disinformation
Inc: Rubio and Johnson demand investigation into conservative media blacklists. Republican
Sens. Marco Rubio (FL) and Ron Johnson (WI) are demanding an investigation into the United States government
bankrolling an organization that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media outlets. The
Global Engagement Center and the National Endowment for Democracy, two State Department-backed entities, have granted
$665,000 combined to the Global Disinformation Index, which is feeding conservative website blacklists to advertising
companies. Now, Rubio and Johnson are calling for an inquiry into how taxpayer dollars have flowed to GDI, which
intends to shut down disfavored speech.
Microsoft
Suspends Foreign Disinformation 'Experts' That Blacklist Conservative Media. Microsoft has stopped
partnering with a foreign think tank, pending review, that was designed to blacklist conservative media. The tech
company also reportedly removed negative flags for conservative media outlets. After Breitbart News, the
Washington Examiner, and the Daily Caller News Foundation highlighted how a Microsoft-owned ad network, Xandr,
employed foreign think tank Global Disinformation Index's (GDI) media blacklist, otherwise known as the "Dynamic
Exclusion List," Microsoft said it has stopped using its blacklist, pending review.
The
State Department helped defund conservative websites. Last week, news broke that American Thinker and
other conservative internet sites were the subjects of a successful campaign to defund them by telling advertisers that
their content was misleading. That's bad. What's worse is that we're learning that the State Department was
helping fund the campaign to defund conservative media. The Washington Examiner revealed in a two-part report how
various organizations claimed to track "disinformation." That "disinformation," of course, was anything that
countered the Democrat narrative on politics and social issues. American Thinker was among the list of 39
conservative sites that also included Newsbusters, Town Hall, Rush Limbaugh, Daily Wire, Breitbart, etc.
Disinformation
Inc: Microsoft removes conservative sites from blacklist 'defunding' outlets. Microsoft has removed
negative flags for conservative media outlets that have blocked them from reaping key advertising dollars amid the
corporation launching an internal review and suspending its subscription to a "disinformation" tracking group's
blacklist used to "defund" disfavored speech, according to internal data obtained by the Washington Examiner. The
Microsoft-owned Xandr, a major advertising company, previously abided by a secret blacklist of conservative news
compiled by the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups.
Now, as Microsoft appears to be taking steps to distance itself from GDI, the company has, for the time being, deleted
flags such as "false/misleading" and "reprehensible/offensive" for right-leaning websites, data show.
Disinformation
Inc: Meet the groups hauling in cash to secretly blacklist conservative news. Major ad companies are
increasingly seeking guidance from purportedly "nonpartisan" groups claiming to be detecting and fighting online
"disinformation." These same "disinformation" monitors are compiling secret website blacklists and feeding them to
ad companies, with the aim of defunding and shutting down disfavored speech, according to sources familiar with the
situation, public memos, and emails obtained by the Washington Examiner. Brands, which have been seeking to
promote products online through multiple websites to expand their digital footprint, are turning to corporate digital ad
companies keyed into global markets. In turn, some of these companies are contracting "disinformation" trackers to
obtain private information about which websites they should purportedly "defund."
The
Biden Administration Is Colluding With Corporate Censors To Blacklist Dissidents. The State Department is
funneling taxpayer dollars to a shadowy network of corporate censors to blacklist dissident media, the Washington
Examiner's Gabe Kaminsky reported Thursday night. On Thursday morning, the Examiner published the paper's first
expose on the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British group that compiles secretive lists of news organizations the
index encourages major corporations to boycott. Advertisers that seek out online platforms to promote their
products contract with such "disinformation" groups and make decisions on which websites to advertise based on their
recommendations. The network of corporate censors disguised as groups on the frontlines countering disinformation,
such as GDI and NewsGuard, often label conservative media with low ratings while they offer high scores to legacy
outlets that botched major stories. NewsGuard, for example, continues to label major papers at the heart of the
Russia hoax with perfect credibility while the Fox News, the New York Post, and The Federalist, which accurately
reported on the Hunter Biden laptop, are given failing grades.
Microsoft-Owned
Ad Group Blacklisted Conservative Sites, in [an] Attempt to Break Them Financially. The attack on
conservatives by major corporations, internet companies, and political activist groups is nothing new. This
doesn't just include conservatives, but conservative sites as well. There have been repeated high-profile attempts
at silencing conservative news and opinion sites, usually by attacking their ability to generate revenue from ads using
flimsy excuses about misinformation or hate speech. According to the Washington Examiner, new information has been
discovered about a low-profile attempt to target conservative sites by blacklisting them for various "safety"
reasons. This includes sites such as Daily Wire, Newsmax, Epoch Times, and even RedState. The Examiner
revealed the existence of the "Global Disinformation Index," a British organization with two American affiliates that
was bought by Microsoft in 2021 for $1 billion. This company is responsible for giving blacklists to ad
companies like Xandr to restrict ad dollars and break conservative websites financially, effectively silencing them.
Ad
Network Owned by Microsoft Is Using Foreign Disinformation 'Experts' to Blacklist Conservative Media
Companies. The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a foreign think tank headquartered in the United
Kingdom, released an assessment of American online media designed to blacklist conservative media outlets and choke off
their advertising revenue. The information is kept on what GDI calls its "Dynamic Exclusion List." Ad
networks — including most prominently Xandr — which is owned by Microsoft — are now
using this list to refuse to allow advertising on conservative media websites. Microsoft has yet to respond to a
request for comment regarding Xandr's use of the Dynamic Exclusion List, which is censoring conservative outlets.
State
Department Helped Fund 'Disinformation' Research Group That Reportedly Blacklists Conservative News Sites.
The U.S. State Department, through its Global Engagement Center (GEC), helped facilitate funding for a group that
reportedly works to demonetize sites it claims are disseminating "disinformation," including conservative news outlets,
according to its website. The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a United Kingdom-based nonprofit that styles
itself as a "non-political" monitor working to "disrupt the business model of disinformation," lists as a funder the
Disinfo Cloud, a now-shuttered GEC project. However, GDI has worked to demonetize conservative news sites by
collaborating with ad exchanges to flag alleged purveyors of disinformation, the Washington Examiner reported Thursday.
AOC
serves up disinformation about Hunter Biden — and us. "I believe that political operatives who
sought to inject explosive disinformation with the Washington Post couldn't get away with it — and now
they're livid," railed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Wednesday's hearings about Twitter censoring the Hunter Biden
story. First off, Congresswoman, we're the New York Post. We understand how you can get confused
since you don't spent much time in the city that elected you. But that's the least of your problems. For
someone who claims to be an opponent of "disinformation," you sure shovel enough horse manure to fill an MSNBC
studio. The Hunter Biden laptop was indeed "explosive" but not fake. If you don't believe us, you can read
the confirmations and follow-up reporting in countless other publications, including the Washington Post. Or you
can believe Hunter Biden, who admitted it was his laptop in legal letters last week.
Court
Slaps Down California's Attempt To Muzzle Doctors Who Dissent From Covid Groupthink. [Scroll down] In
passing the law, the California legislature made multiple "findings," including facts purveyed by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) that there is a much higher risk of death for unvaccinated individuals from Covid-19 than the vaccinated.
The legislature also found that "the spread of misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines has weakened public
confidence and placed lives at serious risk" and that "major news outlets have reported that some of the most dangerous propagators
of inaccurate information regarding the COVID-19 vaccines are licensed health care professionals." Soon after Newsom signed
AB 2098, a group of doctors and organizations representing doctors filed suit in federal court in California.
Judge
blocks California's covid misinformation law. On January 25, the case of Hoeg v. Newsom
prompted a federal judge to pause California's covid misinformation and disinformation law for violating the First and
14th Amendments to the Constitution. Five doctors who are plaintiffs in the case say Assembly Bill 2098 violates
their constitutional rights. These include Drs. Tracy Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, Aaron Kheriaty, Pete Mazolewski,
and Azadeh Khatibi. Gov. Gavin Newsom and other elected officials, including the president and members of the
Medical Board of California, are named as defendants in the case (and there is also a second lawsuit, separate but
related in nature, called Hoang v. Bonta that makes similar allegations). AB 2098 puts a muzzle
on California doctors, preventing them from providing information to their patients that the state deems to be
"misinformation" or "disinformation." Doctors who advise and treat their patients based on science rather than
lies face the potential loss of their medical license under AB 2098.
Report:
George Soros Funds Global 'Fact Checking' Empire. Over the past few years, a cottage industry of "fact
checkers" and "misinformation" experts has emerged to advance the left's mission of silencing dissent to its agenda
around the world. Analysis of the funding of these organizations leads back to a familiar figure: left-wing
billionaire George Soros. The New York Post broke down the trail of Soros dollars linking a global network
of organizations intent on suppressing and discrediting conservative voices online.
Federal
Judge Uses Covid Regime Case To Attack Key Leftist Tactics. A new California law that went into effect on
January 1st is intended to punish doctors who spread "misinformation" about Covid — and especially about
treatment options and the dangerous mRNA injections. That law has been challenged in federal court. In what
follows I'll be drawing from an article in the Sacramento Bee, which was brought to my attention by Thomas Lifson.
Yesterday Judge William Shubb stayed enforcement of the law, while subjecting it to a withering critique. What I
found particularly encouraging is that a federal judge directly attacked a major shibboleth of Leftist ideology as well
as one of the Left's key tactics in attacking the free flow of information to the American public.
California's
COVID-19 Misinformation Law Blocked by Judge. A federal judge in California on Jan. 25 paused the
state's so-called COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation law that has been challenged by doctors in two lawsuits,
claiming it violates their constitutional rights. In Hoeg v. Newsom, five doctors alleged that the state law,
AB 2098, is unconstitutional under the First and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The doctors, Tracy
Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, Aaron Kheriaty, Pete Mazolewski, and Azadeh Khatibi, filed their lawsuit against Gov. Gavin
Newsom and other officials, including the president and members of the Medical Board of California. A separate
related lawsuit, Hoang v. Bonta, makes similar allegations. The doctors say the law prevents them from
providing information to their patients that may contradict what the law permits or prohibits. They also alleged
the law was used to intimidate and punish physicians who disagreed with prevailing views on COVID-19.
Emails
Reveal the CDC's Role in Silencing COVID-19 Dissent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
played a direct role in policing permissible speech on social media throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Confidential
emails obtained by Reason show that Facebook moderators were in constant contact with the CDC, and routinely
asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines.
[...] After Elon Musk took control of Twitter, he permitted several independent journalists to peruse the company's
previous communications with the FBI, the CDC, the White House, and government officials elsewhere. These
disclosures, which have become known as the Twitter Files, reveal that government bureaucrats put substantial pressure
on Twitter to restrict alleged misinformation relating to elections, Hunter Biden, and COVID-19.
How the CDC Became
the Speech Police. Anthony Fauci, the federal government's most prominent authority on COVID-19, had his
final White House press conference two days before Thanksgiving 2022. The event served as a send-off for the
long-serving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was finally stepping down after
nearly four decades on the job. [...] Indeed, the U.S. public's understanding of COVID-19 — its virality, how
to prevent its spread, and even where it comes from — was largely controlled by Fauci and bureaucrats like
him, to a greater degree than most people realize. The federal government shaped the rules of online discussion in
unprecedented and unnerving ways.
California's
'Misinformation' Law Targets 'Doctor Zero'. A new and unconstitutional, Orwellian gag-order law took
effect on Jan. 1. Titled "Physicians and surgeons: unprofessional conduct," the law permits the Medical Board
of California to discipline doctors who "disseminate" misinformation. It's an obvious and direct attack on the
First Amendment — freedom of speech — as well as the Fifth Amendment, which says an individual
cannot be compelled by the government to provide incriminating information about himself, and the Fourteenth Amendment's
equal protection under the laws. This law attempts to mandate a new and undefined standard known as "contemporary
scientific consensus" and illegally suppress differing professional opinions counter to this consensus on
COVID-19. Differing professional opinions are of course protected from governmental interference and censorship by
the First Amendment. The importance of differing professional opinions is also enshrined in the practice of
medicine by the longstanding right and traditional entitlement of patients to the time-honored "second opinion."
If everyone were forced to adopt the undefinable "contemporary scientific consensus," second opinions could be deemed to
be "misinformation."
WaPo:
You know that big gov't-media freakout over "disinformation"? Yeah ... never mind. Does "disinformation"
on the Internet actually do anything — even to persuade? When the freak-out over
Russia-generated Facebook and Twitter memes began in late 2016, I repeatedly asked one basic question: where is the
evidence that these campaigns changed even one single vote? The answer: No such evidence exists.
[...] The disinformation panic that should never have started in the first place is now a fully industrialized aspect of
our journalistic platforms as well as our political institutions.
'The
View' is the biggest source of misinformation in America. Barbara Walters died last week at 93, but the
legendary journalist's legacy lives on: "The View," the daytime-TV talker she created in 1997, is the
most-watched — and most-talked-about — show in its genre. Some legacy, though: What Walters
envisioned as "women of different generations, backgrounds and views" discussing "the topics of the day, mixing humor
with intelligent debate," devolved after she departed as co-host in 2014 into a four-against-one daily catfight with few
laughs and even fewer smarts. The New York Times calls it "the most important political TV show in America."
If so, America is in trouble — because "The View" is the biggest source of misinformation in the
country. More than 2.4 million people watch "The View" every day — and are less informed for it
every day. The show's moderator is one of its worst offenders.
The FBI's Top Ten Most Dangerous Thought Crimes
of 2022: [Thread reader]
[#1] The vaccine does not prevent spread
[#2] Natural immunity is real and, in fact, optimal
[#3] Ballot harvesting laws were changed in 2020 to give Dems a major electoral advantage
[#4] Biological men are naturally stronger than women.
[#5] This coronavirus most likely leaked from a gain-of-function research lab in Wuhan, China.
[#6] Placing every man, woman and child in lockdown will do more harm than good.
[#7] A drag queen reading books to a classroom of 6 year olds is sexually abnormal behavior.
[#8] My doctor prescribed me Ivermectin.
[#9] Your best protection against COVID is to lose weight, improve your lifestyle. Get outside, spend time on the beach, walk nature trails, etc.
[#10] The mRNA COVID vaccine is still experimental and is potentially dangerous, especially to young people.
California's
Crazy New Year: Five Radical Laws Go into Effect. [#2] AB 2098: 'COVID Misinformation' — This
law, signed in September, requires California's medical licensing boards to take disciplinary action against doctors who
are involved with the "dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or
'COVID-19'." The law does not take into account the fact that authorities like Dr. Anthony Fauci changed
their recommendations over time.
2010
DHS Contract to General Dynamics Information Systems for Domestic "Media Monitoring and Social Media
Networking". During my trip to DC in the summer of 2020 there were a myriad of disconcerting datapoints
assembled; revelations that made sense of the madness and disappointments found everywhere. However, one of the
key notations for future reference was to watch the political evolution of Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) and spot the
jump where the ideological outlook turns into specific government action. With that in mind, this recent discovery
of a 2010 to 2015 DHS contract to a very well-known USG defense contractor, General Dynamics Advanced Information
Systems Inc., surfaces. As many are now becoming aware, DHS is the lead agency behind all of the engagements with
Twitter and other social media. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), specifically created
as an outcome of the post-911 Patriot Act, is the pivot point on the surveillance radar sweep. Prior to the DNI
the general Intelligence Community (IC) surveillance faced offshore and swept foreign adversaries.
The
latest Twitter Files focus on COVID "misinformation". The latest installment of Twitter Files dropped
today as a slightly late Christmas present from independent journalist David Zweig. This batch may wind up being
the best yet in terms of demonstrating the Biden administration's direct and deliberate intervention in the social media
platform's "content moderation" activities and the censorship of speech, particularly when it comes to the COVID-19
pandemic. [...] After Joe Biden was sworn in, the first White House meeting with Twitter focused on COVID-19
"misinformation." They immediately put pressure on Twitter to deplatform Alex Berenson, a frequent critic of the
administration's policies and CDC "science." Biden specifically called Berenson out in public, saying that social
media was "killing people" by allowing Berenson to speak. He was suspended within hours and his account was
deleted the following month.
Biden
admin funding AI research to detect and censor "microaggressions". Here's one part of the nearly $2 trillion
American Rescue Plan passed last year that few people apparently read. The bill included more than half a
million dollars in grants for tech researchers to develop artificial intelligence algorithms capable of identifying and
suppressing "microaggressions" in social media posts. Part of the money was quietly gifted to researchers at the
University of Washington earlier this year and they expect to receive the rest of it in coming years as the development
work proceeds. You may find yourself wondering how the federal government wound up handing out taxpayer money to
develop ways to automatically censor the free speech of its citizens. It's a great question.
The
Feds' 'Misinformation' Scam. The biggest political story of 2022 was not the midterm election. It
was the release of the "Twitter Files" by Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter. In the sixth installment published
last week on Twitter in a thread by journalist Matt Taibbi, the headline was "Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary." The FBI
had its own channel of communication for tipping off Twitter executives as to authors of tweets who needed to be
censored, if not banned, for posting "election misinformation" during the 2020 election season. What was insidious
is that some of the offending tweets were satirical in nature and posted by people with relatively few followers.
At least 80 FBI agents were assigned to a social media task force. The Department of Homeland Security had its own
operation. Both were inspired by the alleged foreign interference in the 2016 election, known now as the "Russian
collusion hoax." However, it was just days before Election Day for the 2022 midterms that we learned that censorship has
been a secret project for over two years of the DHS, the FBI, and "Big Tech." Apart from Twitter, that included
Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media.
DHS
Redacted Critical Details About 'Anti-Disinformation' Activities: Sens. Grassley, Hawley. The
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has neglected to provide in full certain disclosures requested by members of the
U.S. Senate relating to the department's growing role in "counter-disinformation" activities, and this failure is
particularly egregious in light of the co-equal roles of the executive and legislative branches of the government, two
senators have charged in a Dec. 15 letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Sen. Charles Grassley
(R-Iowa), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) charge the DHS with ignoring or
downplaying their "serious concerns" about the DHS's "growing counter-disinformation efforts" as conveyed previously in
a letter of June 7, which formally requested "information necessary to inform our congressional oversight of DHS
activities."
Grassley,
Hawley slam DHS for redactions of disinfo docs: 'The people's business ought to be public'. Two Republican
senators this week slammed the Department of Homeland Security for what they said were overzealous redaction decisions
pursuant to an oversight request made by the senators themselves. In their letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro
Mayorkas, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley criticized the department for its response to
a request for documentation the two lodged in June of this year. Of the two responses the senators received, they
wrote, one "did not answer any of the ten questions" they originally posed, while the other consisted of "two documents
already in the public domain" and "500 pages of material, approximately half of which are mostly or entirely redacted."
"We remind you that the oversight letters we send to the Executive Branch are signed in our capacity as sitting members of
Congress, a separate and co-equal branch of government," the senators wrote.
I Am A Misinformation
Denier. Misinformation does not and cannot — by definition — exist. Correct
information, incorrect information, true information, false information can all certainly exist, as can partial,
missing, complete, and detailed. Just not misinformation — same with disinformation, by the way.
So why is the term used with such vitriolic abandon? Why not call something a lie and leave it at that?
Because misinformation is not about describing factual information but about dismissing and denigrating personal opinion
and belief. It is about changing when someone says "I think..." into "I know" and then claiming that person
is spreading a factual misrepresentation.
FBI
Agent Testifies About Bureau's Involvement in Social Media Censorship. An FBI agent has provided sworn
testimony that the bureau's leadership was directly involved in colluding with Big Tech companies to censor certain
political information during the 2020 presidential election. As reported by Just The News, Elvis Chan, the
assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Cyber Branch in San Francisco, provided the information to lawyers for
the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana, as part of a lawsuit filed by those two states regarding government
coordination with Big Tech to censor alleged COVID-19 "misinformation." Chan testified that he was in charge of a
"command post" in San Francisco that played a crucial role in a nationwide censorship operation. Chan said that
his office would sometimes enlist the help of other federal officials, including federal prosecutors, lawyers for the
FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as FBI field offices all across the country, before making direct requests
to social media companies to censor any content that the office determined to be "misinformation."
Why
Wasn't the Lesson From 2016 to Eschew Corrupt Candidates? Dictators all have elections. But the
dictators control the media so the public only hears the approved messages. [...] Not so long ago the media argued with
a straight face that it needed to censor to protect the public from the kind of "misinformation" they believe tilted the
2016 election. We've heard the line repeated so often that it's easy to forget what the Wikileaks releases
revealed. We were told not to believe the evidence because it came from a Russian hacking operation.
Google
Announces 'Pre-Bunking' Censorship Tools for Behavioral 'Interventions'. Big Tech giant Google has
announced the development of its new "pre-bunking" censorship tools that seek to manage behavioral "interventions."
Google has dubbed its project "Info Interventions" and claims it is based on behavioral science. The tools are
effectively aimed at predicting so-called "misinformation" and "disinformation." By "pre-bunking" information,
Google hopes it can block it before it is viewed by anyone online.
The
Ministry of Truth was far more sinister than we were told. It would appear that Alejandro Mayorkas has
"some 'splainin to do," as the kids like to say these days. As you may recall, the Biden administration briefly
attempted to set up a Ministry of Truth under the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year. The quickly
abandoned office was fancifully named the "Disinformation Governance Board" and it was planned to be headed by Nina
Jankowicz, who quickly left the government after the effort was curtailed and went on to register as a foreign agent for
Great Britain. When Congress looked into the attempt to establish the board, Mayorkas offered lengthy testimony as
to what had been going on and sang lofty praises of Jankowicz. But newly revealed documents presented by Senator
Josh Hawley and others strongly suggest that the board had progressed far further than Mayorkas testified and he
seemingly lied under oath about some of the details.
If
You Have Not Been Taught to Think for Yourself, Then Disinformation is Scary. There needs to be an open
venue for all information. Unfortunately, when we begin to apply labels or categorization to information, there's
an opportunity for information to be manipulated — even weaponized. Saul Alinsky spent decades
pondering the best techniques to weaponize information and speech. Alinsky's intentions in the endeavor to change
society by changing how language and information was used were not good. He devoted his completed rulebook book to
Lucifer. Be careful about anyone saying we need to label or categorize information in order to control or remove
speech from the discussion. You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you
were born with a God-given brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.
Let the Credits
Roll. I wrote about Matt Ofalea's brilliant four-and-a-half video below in "The playbook on the
laptop." The video compiles clips — mostly of news anchors and reporters — opining on air
with mind-numbing certainty and Hive-like unanimity that the New York Post's reportage on Hunter Biden's laptop was "a
lie," "altered or fake," "pure distractions," and of course, "RUSSIAN
DISINFORMATION." I have posted the video once again below. [Video clip]
Are
You Freer than You Were Two Years Ago? Twenty twenty-two was an election in which authoritarians employed
every sort of disinformation. They ran on "character" while engaging in corruption on a multi-trillion-dollar
scale. They rolled out the old "take your Social Security away from you" fear-mongering for seniors. And,
this year in particular, they stoked fear of losing access to abortion when in fact the Supreme Court's reversal of
Roe v. Wade returns decisions on abortion to states. More bizarre yet, Democrats attacked
conservatives as "a threat to democracy," but the code word "democracy" in the progressive lexicon actually means "more
government control" and less freedom. Donald Trump is not a threat to democracy; he is a threat to those who
continually undermine our democracy by limiting what we can say, read, listen to, discuss at work, hear at church, and
learn in school. Joe Biden used "threat to democracy" many times in the 2022 campaign, and in every case, it was
not a threat to democracy he had in mind; it was a threat to his party's power and with it the enslavement of the
American people by Big Government.
Would-be
'Disinformation Czar' Nina Jankowicz [is] Now a Registered Foreign Agent. Nina Jankowicz, the would-be
"disinformation czar" who was dropped from the Department of Homeland Security after public scrutiny, has now registered
officially as a foreign agent, according to government records. [Tweet] Jankowicz, who was executive director of
the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, was at the center of controversy over the Biden
administration's attempt to censor opposing views. She also advised the British Parliament to set standards for
speech on the Internet, telling it that the British government could find ways to suppress undesirable speech, ignoring
"freedom of expression and fairy dust."
HHS
Gives $1M to Researchers to Predict Vaccine Misinformation. The U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services is giving $1 million to researchers who can predict what misinformation about vaccines might be spread on
social media and how it can impact people's trust in vaccines. The grant opportunity, "Developing a Public Health
Tool to Predict the Virality of Vaccine Misinformation Narratives," will go to a single applicant to predict how
"vaccine misinformation" can affect people's trust in vaccines, Fox News reported.
Obama
says democracy under threat if Republicans win in Arizona. Former (and sort of current) president Barack
Obama used a rally in Phoenix Wednesday night to deliver a crazy remark about America's system of self-government.
The Anointed One asserted that if the Arizona Republican candidates are successful, "democracy as we know it may not
survive" there. He added, "That's not an exaggeration. That is a fact." Opinions are now facts, as facts
are "disinformation" to the wannabe tyrants called Democrats. Democrats have routinely asserted recently that "our
democracy is in danger" if Republicans do well on a national scale in the upcoming midterm elections. Now they are
doing the same at the local level. What will they claim next? "If the Republican candidate wins in West Topeka,
our democracy may not survive"? What gall!
FBI Agent Who Pushed
To Censor Hunter Biden Story Is Shaping Biden Admin's Response To 'Misinformation'. An FBI agent who
coordinated with Facebook to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story is advising the Biden administration in its push to
suppress information on social media, according to leaked documents published by The Intercept. Laura Dehmlow was
involved in conversations between the FBI and Facebook ahead of the social media company's decision to censor the story
surrounding the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop before the 2020 election, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
She was later involved in the Biden administration's efforts to suppress and censor content on social media platforms
for misinformation-related purposes, according to The Intercept. "We need a media infrastructure that is held
accountable," she said during a March meeting attended by Twitter executives and executives from JP Morgan Chase,
according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
Leaked Documents
Outline DHS's Plans to Police Disinformation. The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening
its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal
DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public
documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms. The work, much of
which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new
"Disinformation Governance Board": a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally),
disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out
of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed,
immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to
monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.
Big Brother's Playbook.
The federal government's guidelines to counter "misinformation" and "disinformation" — what we might more
accurately describe as Big Brother's Playbook — has been released. The US government and its allies,
including media gatekeepers and educational institutions and global corporations, have become the judges and juries of
"misinformation." And Big Tech is their executioner. According to recently-filed court documents in
Missouri v. Biden that were made available by The Intercept (big hat tip to Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein),
"The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous."
Leaked
FBI document lists "misinformation" as an "election crime". A whistleblower leaked a document to Project
Veritas showing that the FBI is focusing on election misinformation ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. The
document lists what the agency should categorize as "election crimes." Among the election crimes highlighted in the
documents is "misinformation." The document defines misinformation as "false or misleading information spread mistakenly
or unintentionally." Disinformation is also an election "crime," and is defined as "false or inaccurate information
intended to mislead others." It adds: "Disinformation campaigns on social media are used to deliberately confuse,
trick, or upset the public." The document appears to be another effort by the federal government to determine what
is true and what is false.
Seven
Times the Media Lied about 'Disinformation' that was True. Just about every time the mainstream media
tells you that something is "disinformation," it turns out that it's the media that is pushing the lies. Last
week, Just the News put together a list of seven important times that the media told everyone something was
"disinformation," but that later turned out to be true. The list includes:
• Hunter Biden's Laptop
• The origins of COVID-19
• COVID-19 vaccines
• Pelosi's Jan. 6 role and calling in the National Guard
• The mistreatment of Jan. 6 defendants
• Irregularities in the 2020 election
• Critical race theory in schools
"Don't Trust Experts, Experts
Say". I'm worried. "Is 'rainbow fentanyl' a threat to your kids this Halloween? Experts say no,"
NPR assures me. And if there's one thing we've learned in these past few years it's to believe the opposite of
what experts say. The media has given up trying to get people to trust it and now asks it to trust its handpicked
experts. And those experts say the same exact things that the media says. Every subject is now tackled by
experts. Do you think that a Senate candidate who can barely grasp a sentence is worrisome? "Fetterman's use of
captions is common in stroke recovery, experts say," the Washington Post wheedles. Experts tend to say that
Democrats should be elected and Republicans shouldn't be. They agree that when a Democrat does something it's very
different than when a Republican does it. And if you think the experts are biased, the experts will say that
they're not. Q.E.D. Experts warn of the rise of "misinformation". And misinformation has come to be
defined by people disagreeing with experts. Experts say that anyone who disagrees should be deplatformed. If
you disagree with the deplatforming, they say you should be deplatformed too.
Government
Using Big Tech To Control Citizens' Speech Means The End Of Free And Fair Elections. "When the government
controls the information, then it also controls the people and therefore, the electoral processes," said Federalist
Executive Editor Joy Pullmann during an interview on OANN. "What that has the effect of is making elections a sham
because people cannot make informed decisions about who they're voting for if the government controls what they can know
about the candidates before them." [Video clip]
When
Corporate America Pulls A PayPal, There's No Escaping The Digital Gulag. Last week, PayPal published a new
user agreement that would allow the company to debit up to $2,500 from a user's account for engaging in "restricted
activities," including spreading "misinformation." [...] Many angry users posted screenshots of them closing their
PayPal accounts in protest of the company's anti-free speech policy and caused #BankruptPayPal to trend. It seemed
that the backlash had been severe enough that on Sunday, PayPal walked back the policy, claiming the new user agreement
"went out in error" and the company wouldn't punish users for spreading misinformation. That said, people who
cherish free speech should not declare victory. After all, PayPal only partially reversed its policy. The
company will still fine users up to $2,500 for other offenses listed under its user agreement, including activities
presumably promoting "hate" and "intolerance." After all, PayPal has a long history of labeling speech disagreeing
with the woke ideology as "hateful" and "intolerant."
The
PayPal Fiasco Was No Accident. PayPal on Oct. 8 sent out an update to its terms of use, or acceptable use
policy (AUP), that included a shocking addition. It reserved the right to confiscate $2,500 from people's accounts
if they spread "misinformation." It was a clear announcement of what many already suspected: PayPal has enlisted in the
information war. This comes weeks after PayPal blocked several important accounts in the UK, including Toby
Young's personal account, the Free Speech Union, and the DailySceptic. These are hugely important venues for the
English-speaking world in countering the COVID propaganda narrative. It was no accident that they were
targeted. After global protests and news coverage from alternative sources, PayPal relented and restored their
accounts without explanation. In a similar vein, protests all over the world poured in about PayPal's new
policy. Twitter filled up with announcements from people who were canceling their accounts. By the following
day, PayPal reversed itself, claiming that the banning of "misinformation" was just a mistake.
Searches
for 'delete PayPal' spike as shares plummet amid 'misinformation' controversy. Searches for "delete
PayPal" skyrocketed as controversy reigned this weekend over a policy saying users would be fined $2,500 for promoting
"misinformation," which the payment platform quickly retracted and claimed was posted in error. Searches for the
phrase exploded by 1,392% over the past few days, according to Google Trends data. Related searches of "how to
cancel PayPal," "cancel PayPal account," "delete PayPal account," and "how do I delete a PayPal account" spiked as well,
according to Market Watch. The search interest surge was accompanied by real-world results, as PayPal's stock plummeted
by over 6% on Monday. The company's stock crashed by two-thirds of its value at the beginning of this year.
California
makes it illegal for doctors to disagree with politicians. Conformity of thought is now required whether
it is online, on college campuses, or, if you are in California, in a physician-patient relationship. PayPal
recently introduced a $2,500 fine for anyone involved in "the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content,
or materials" that — in "PayPal's sole discretion" — "promote misinformation." After a
firestorm of criticism, PayPal withdrew the policy, claiming the whole thing was a misunderstanding and was not official
policy — hardly a convincing explanation from a site with a history of banning those it considers politically
incorrect. But California physicians have had no such relief. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed
California Assembly Bill 2098, making it the first state to attempt to censor what physicians can say about COVID-19 to
their patients. This is a dangerous, and likely unconstitutional, effort that other states must resist.
Dem
Operatives Behind Network Of Fake News Pop-Up Sites In Battleground States: Report. Democratic operatives
are flooding battleground states with more than 50 supposedly local media outlets that are really designed to promote
liberal candidates, according to a bombshell investigation by Axios. One man linked to the scheme is David Brock,
the one-time conservative journalist who did a 180-degree turn and founded Media Matters For America, the controversial
nonprofit that attacks conservative news sites. Axios' investigative reporters Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley
say the operation uses a "patina of independent local news content designed to put a sheen of original reporting on
partisan messaging." The 51 pop-up sites have names such as the Milwaukee Metro Times, Macomb Digest, Mecklenburg
Herald, and the Tri-City Record, and are aimed at key swing states Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire,
Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, according to the report.
PayPal
Updates User Policy to Include Possible $2,500 Fine For Speech It Doesn't Like. It's no big secret that
Big Tech's tentacles have a vast reach, with platforms like Facebook and Twitter admitting in so many words after the
fact to deliberately suppressing news content prior to the 2020 presidential election that portrayed then-Democratic
nominee for president Joe Biden and his international wheelin' and dealin' son Hunter in a less than flattering light
being one of the more notable examples. But as has already been made clear by online payment systems like PayPal
and Venmo, even more silencing of alternative points of view is needed in the form of financial strangulation if
necessary, which can occur via shutting down accounts entirely or, in PayPal's case, will soon also potentially include
$2,500 fines for WrongThink, according to a recently updated acceptable use policy set to take effect in November.
PayPal to expand
its speech restriction rules in November. PayPal's clause about taking users' funds for a violation of its
rules has long been established. But, as published on September 26th and to be effective on November 3rd, 2022,
PayPal will add restrictions to its acceptable use policy that go beyond illegal activities and fraud and into the realm
of policing speech. The updated policy prohibits users from using PayPal for activities that: "Involve the
sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal's sole discretion, (a) are
harmful, obscene, harassing, or objectionable ... (e) depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected
groups or of individuals or groups based on protected characteristics (e.g. race, religion, gender or gender identity,
sexual orientation, etc.) ... (g) are fraudulent, promote misinformation ... or (i) are otherwise unfit for
publication." Big Tech platforms are increasingly finding ways to punish people's speech under the guise of banning
[Emoji] "misinformation," and making themselves as the arbiters of truth in deciding what is and isn't true.
Update: PayPal
Pulls Back, Says It Won't Fine Customers $2,500 for 'Misinformation' after Backlash. PayPal has
backtracked on a published policy that would have fined users $2,500 for spreading "misinformation," claiming the update
had gone out "in error." "An AUP notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information.
PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy.
Our teams are working to correct our policy pages. We're sorry for the confusion this has caused," a spokesperson
told National Review in a written statement.
Additional update: PayPal claims
policy of $2,500 'misinformation' fines was posted in error. PayPal faced criticism online for a policy
that would have fined users $2,500 for spreading "misinformation" — a policy that the payment platform later
said was released in error. An "Acceptable Use Policy," which the post said was to go into effect Nov. 3, included
"prohibited activities" such as the "ending, posting, or publication of messages, content, or materials that meet
certain criteria." Anything that was found to "promote misinformation" would be punished with "liquidated damages"
of $2,500.00. But now, references to misinformation do not appear in the current policy, and a representative for
PayPal said the post about the fine was made by mistake, as backlash mounted on Saturday.
The Editor says...
Others before me have pointed out that any changes to PayPal's terms and conditions are carefully reviewed by a team of
lawyers before they are posted. They are never accidentally published.
Outsourced
censorship: Feds used private entity to target millions of social posts in 2020. A consortium of four
private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social
media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of
federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the
News. The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns
among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of public-private partnership to evade the First Amendment's
prohibition of government censorship may be expanding. The consortium is comprised of four member organizations:
Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic
Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like
service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and
State's Global Engagement Center to file "tickets" requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored
or flagged by Big Tech.
Report:
'Election Integrity' Project Worked with Feds to Censor News Sites in 2020. A coalition of globalist
nonprofits, academic institutions, and one private company reportedly worked with arms of the federal government and
Democrat activist organizations to censor news websites in the runup to the 2020 election, and plans to do so again in
2022. The consortium, called the Election Integrity Partnership, is made up of four organizations: the Stanford
Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council's Digital
Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a social media analytics company.
Political
Censorship Campaign Unconstitutionally Targeted Millions of Americans. The United States government is
unconstitutionally targeting millions of Americans for their political speech by directly contracting with private
'third parties' that flag their viewpoints for alleged 'misinformation.' The federal government has contracted with
at least five private companies or public non-profits to 'flag' Americans' views on everything from Covid-19 to the 2020
election. In an editorial at Just the News, John Solomon and Greg Piper reported on four of these groups, but the
report suggests that the radical left's operation to chill free speech is just the tip of the iceberg. "A
consortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive
numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded
with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents
obtained by Just the News."
Some
Helpful Ideas For Biden's Impeachment. [Scroll down] Maybe they could also get to the bottom of the
FBI's role in limiting speech on social media platforms during the 2020 election. The White House, after all, has
proven to be quite comfortable attempting to dictate speech. In July 2021, the White House admitted it was
"flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation." The White House not-so-subtly threatened social
media platforms to suppress certain political opinions and stories. Under what constitutional power does the
president get to dictate what should be considered mis- or dis-information? And under what power does Department
of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas get to create an Orwellian "Disinformation Governance Board?" How
pervasive is the law enforcement agency's contact with media companies?
New Zealand prime
minister shows why gun rights matter. Following the deadly shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand enacted a
series of gun control measures that removed AR-15s and similar rifles from law-abiding citizens. This was touted
as a necessary measure required to prevent such another horrific event from happening. However, many of us have
long argued that such measures are actually a first step on the road toward tyranny. New Zealand Prime Minister
Jacinda Ardern probably doesn't agree with that. In fact, I suspect that she disagrees with it so strongly that
she'd like to ban anyone from saying that.
Traitors:
NBC News slammed after suggesting that the Feds should begin censoring text messages. NBC News has proven
yet again that 'mainstream' media outlets in America are nothing but propagandists for the deep state, which is exactly
the opposite of the vision our founders had for a "free press." NBC published a story exaggerating the issue of
supposed "disinformation" going out via text messages, citing one campaign that nearly ended what the outlet described
as "abortion protections" in Kansas to make its point. In addition, the 'story' referenced a former Obama campaign
official, Scott Goodstein, who "built the bulk text messaging apparatus for" the former president's 2008 campaign, who
now claims that Americans are being inundated with text message "disinformation."
New
Zealand's Jacinda Ardern at the U.N.: 'Disinformation' Should Be Controlled Like Guns, Bombs, and Nukes.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called for more "collective" action in her address to the U.N. General
Assembly on Friday, especially on the issues of climate change, nuclear non-proliferation, pandemic response, and
opposing wars of aggression such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Ardern's authoritarian impulses were on display
in her call for tighter regulations on Internet speech, although she insisted she values free speech and merely wishes
to cleanse "disinformation" from international discourse. Ardern portrayed the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, which
New Zealand addressed with some of the heaviest lockdowns to be found outside of communist China, as a painful lesson
that "schooled" mankind in the importance of "collective action." "It forced us to acknowledge how interconnected,
and therefore how reliant we are on one another," she said of the pandemic.
Senator Ron
Johnson Blasts Big Tech Execs for Double Standards on Misinformation. Thursday, Senator Ron Johnson took
it to Big Tech for their practices of silencing and banning one side of the vaccine debate while letting the pro-vaccine
crowd get away with mis and disinformation. His presentation left them silent. "During that time period when
President Biden lied to the American public, 'This was a pandemic of the unvaxed. And if you got vaccinated,
you're not going to go the hospital. You're not going to be in [an] ICU unit, and you're not going to die.'
Well, 63.5 % of the people fully vaccinated were dying in England at the exact same time. Why didn't you pull
this? Have you ever labeled the President the United States' comment as misinformation? Have you ever done
that?" Silence ensues. "Any of you? I'll take that as a no."
Shut up, they
explained. President Biden has already mused that the US government has F-15s ready to go should they be
needed to suppress the MAGA crowd. They have even invented a term for people who think and talk like you and me:
stochastic terrorists. A quick search on Google for the term "stochastic terrorism" (the neologism being used to
describe the violence of unapproved speech) shows a disturbing growth in the use of the term. (Stochastic terrorism:
"The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts
of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random.") [Illustration] Fear not,
readers. The Brookings Institution is here to root out stochastic terrorism and aid in its suppression. And
since we live in the Internet age, it may yet be possible to avoid the use of using Hellfire missiles and drones and
resort to less kinetic tactics, such as deplatforming the offenders. After all, hunting down and killing these
dangerous free thinkers should only be a last resort. They are now rating podcasts in a manner that is reminiscent
of the Chinese Social Credit score.
Mayorkas
officially cancels DHS disinformation board. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro
Mayorkas put the final kibosh on his disinformation governance board on Wednesday [8/24/2022],
after a review he ordered came back with a firm recommendation that the idea was a stinker.
The board had been on hold since May, when Mr. Mayorkas hit pause after a botched rollout that
saw critics accusing him of Orwellian attempts to silence people who had competing views on issues
of the day. Mr. Mayorkas had insisted that wasn't his goal. But the pick of Nina
Jankowicz, who had a history of spreading dodgy information, to lead the board, as well as
revelations that the board had been trying to coordinate directly with major tech companies had
fatally damaged the secretary's plans.
Biden
Administration calls for censorship on energy. This is shocking, or would be in a sane world: Gina
McCarthy, the Biden administration's National Climate Advisor, is openly calling on tech companies like Facebook and Twitter
to censor any dissent from the administration's "green" fantasies. McCarthy says the tech companies "have to stop
allowing" people to disagree with Biden. [...] We wrote [elsew]here about the lawsuit that the states of Missouri and
Louisiana have brought against the Biden administration, accusing it of coercing, or colluding with, tech companies to violate
Americans' First Amendment rights. Watch for Gina McCarthy's open call for censorship to be an exhibit in that case.
Republicans
declare victory after panel finds Homeland Security disinformation board unnecessary. A Homeland Security panel
has recommended against the controversial Disinformation Governance Board, calling the body needless. While not final,
the recommendation from a Homeland Security Advisory Council subcommittee prompted Republicans on social media to declare
victory. While the council subcommittee said it had not decided how best to counter disinformation while "protect[ing]
civil rights, civil liberties and privacy ... we have concluded there is no need for a Disinformation Governance Board."
Stelter
Allows Former Ministry of Truth Head to Spread Disinformation. On Sunday's Reliable Sources on CNN, host
Brian Stelter spent the opening monologue of his show in a tizzy over the amount of disinformation on the internet and in
American politics in general. So naturally, Stelter decided to bring the former head of President Joe Biden's Ministry
of Truth Nina Jankowicz to help her rehabilitate her image. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jankowicz spread disinformation
herself during the interview. Predictably, Stelter opened the segment by sucking up to her and failed to correct her on
any of her lies. [...] She purposefully lied about former President Trump's ties to the Russian Alfa Bank and that he had two
secret email servers to communicate with the Russians. Both claims were and are flat-out false. Screenshots are
forever, Nina! Of course, Stelter never confronted her about this either.
Missouri
Attorney General Files Landmark Lawsuit Against Biden for Colluding with Big Tech. Totally overlooked by the
mainstream press, at the beginning of May 2022, Missouri Attorney General (AG) Eric Schmitt's office filed a landmark lawsuit
against the Biden Administration. Then, just last week, Attorney General Schmitt landed a big blow against Biden by
filing a motion to prohibit the censorship conspiracy immediately. [...] The suit, brought along with the Louisiana
Attorney General's Office, is filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. In the
suit, Missouri Attorney General Schmitt pounds away on the Biden regime for both conspiring with and also compelling Big Tech
social media companies, to censor millions of Americans on their social media accounts through a governmentally created
social media censorship program.
Kamala:
the new grand inquisitor. In short, what cannot be done by revoking the First Amendment will be done by a new
government entity which, unfathomably, says nothing on behalf of straight white men and women. I guess they are rarely
victims. This is the old (last month) "Disinformation Board" reimagined and revivified. Our
achievement-challenged VPOTUS is going to head up a group whose sole job it is to find people who claim to be harmed in some
way. The government will then wield their sword to shut down and maybe imprison anyone who dares bring up the Left's
perverse, deviant, and anti-white racist policies, or an alt-position about masking or vaxxing. The radical Left have
created a new "task force" to fight back against the parents who have risen up en masse on behalf of their children who are
being maleducated and sexualized in government schools.
Good
News! Harris to Head New Biden Disinformation Task Force. The bad news is that the Biden administration's
notorious Disinformation Governance Board, a flagrantly unconstitutional effort to restrict the freedom of speech that was
"paused" in May after an avalanche of criticism, is back (although its Orwellian name is still on ice). The good news is that
heading up Biden's handlers' new foray into authoritarianism is none other than Vice President Kamala Harris. This is
good news because Harris has handled the previous jobs she has been given with spectacular ineptitude. If she stays
true to form this time, she may end up actually strengthening speech protections, rather than destroying them as she has been
tasked to do.
Kamala
Harris is Now Taking on the Big Job of Censoring the Democrats' Critics. Kamala Harris was once rated the most
radical member of the entire Senate. Now, she's taking on the big job of policing the Internet for 'misinformation.'
And by 'misinformation,' that means political opinions that extremely partisan Democrats don't like. [Tweet] Kamala
Harris will be heading up a new internet policy task force, the Biden administration announced on Thursday. Its goals
including "developing programs and policies" to protect "political figures" and journalists from "disinformation," "abuse"
and "harassment."
Dems
want to ban telling the truth. In a virtual Axios event on Thursday, Gina McCarthy, Joe Biden's top climate
official, urged tech companies to suppress truthful information about climate issues: "The tech companies have to stop
allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation," she told Axios' Alexi McCammond at a virtual
event that aired Thursday. "We need the tech companies to really jump in," McCarthy said. "Really jump in" means
to ban, suspend, delete and censor views on climate issues different from those of the Biden administration's extremists,
like McCarthy. ["]McCarthy said that overall, the problem of disinformation has shifted from disputing the
reality of climate change...["] No one has disputed the "reality of climate change." [...] The issue is not
climate change per se, but rather the theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming that is in dispute. On
that issue, the realists are winning out over the alarmists.
It
is time to admit that the American left is malevolent. The Biden administration, the FBI, and the DOJ are
willfully ignoring the Constitution and countless laws regarding the border, medical freedom, election integrity, the
protection of the Supreme Court Justices, and our freedom of speech. They abhor the views and values of conservatives
and mean to squelch them. They call any speech with which they disagree "disinformation." Thus, their campaign
against what they call "the big lie," that the 2020 election was stolen.
Mayorkas
misled under oath about DHS disinfo board, GOP senators charge. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro
Mayorkas has been accused of misleading top Republican senators about the purposes of the controversial Disinformation
Governance Board. Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Josh Hawley argue the board was designed with more power
than the top Biden official admitted during testimony. Mayorkas repeatedly downplayed the power and role of the group
during congressional testimony, telling the Senate Homeland Security Committee last month it was "established with the
explicit goal of ensuring that the protection of free speech, privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties is incorporated into
all of the department's disinformation work." He contended that "we're not the truth police" and said the board "does not
have any operational authority or capability."
Whistleblower
said Biden's 'disinformation' board would have acted on what the government determined to be factual, would.
Senior Republicans are keeping up their attacks on the Biden administration's attempts to tackle misinformation, claiming
internal documents show the Department of Homeland Security's disinformation board would have ruled on what was true and what
wasn't across a broad range of issues. Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Josh Hawley on Wednesday [6/8/2022] wrote
to the department demanding more information about how it would have worked. They released a string of internal
documents, provided by a whistleblower, they said showed the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) would have worked with
social media platforms to enable the removal of user content.
Hawley
and Grassley Receive Evidence from Whistleblower Showing DHS Intent to Weaponize Social Media to Control
Information. Thanks to a DHS whistleblower who has come forward to Senators Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley, we
are now seeing the direct evidence of how the Fourth Branch of Government, specifically the Dept of Homeland Security, were
planning to take control over public discussion on Big Tech platforms. Previously the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency (CISA) announced a new Dept of Homeland Security priority to combat disinformation on technology platforms
including social media. Many eyebrows were raised as the original CISA announcement appeared to be an open admission
that the U.S. government was going to control information by applying labels, that would align with allies in social media,
who need a legal justification for censorship and content removal. The whistleblower leak confirms exactly that.
This CISA announcement was quickly followed by various government officials and agencies saying it was critical to combat
Russian disinformation, as the events in Ukraine unfolded. In essence, Ukraine was the justification for search engines
like Google, DuckDuckGo, and social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to begin targeting
information and content that did not align with the official U.S. government narrative.
Ill-fated
DHS disinformation board pursued partnership with social-media platforms to censor content. The Department of
Homeland Security's ill-fated disinformation board would have been part of an effort to work with private social-media
platforms to police their content, two senators revealed Wednesday, citing new documents provided to them by a
whistleblower. The documents described the issues that led DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to want to create the
board. Among them were such heated topics as debates over the coronavirus pandemic and efficacy of vaccines, and what
Homeland Security described as "conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections." The documents also
suggested the board would play the role of policy cop at Homeland Security, with input on disinformation budgets and a role
in how the department engages with "private sector stakeholders."
The
Biden Regime Claimed That Their 'Disinformation Board' Was Just For Advisory Purposes; Newly Released Documents Paint A
Darker Picture. The Biden regime's now-defunct 'disinformation board' was supposed to serve an advisory role,
according to DHS officials. The board was disbanded after the person who was supposed to lead it, Nina Jankowicz, was
harshly criticized for statements on social media and promoting disinformation of her own, including the discredited
Russiagate scandal. The Board also came under fire by Republican politicians and the general public for bearing an
eerie resemblance to the 'Ministry of Truth' in George Orwell's "1984". Newly released documents indicate that those
accusations were correct.
Grassley,
Hawley demand details on Disinfo Board after whistleblower revelations. The Associated Press reported yesterday
that GOP senators Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Josh Hawley (Missouri) are demanding that the Department of Homeland Security
provide them with specifics on how it planned to coordinate its Disinformation Governance Board with social media companies
to remove user content after a whistleblower provided them with key documents about the board. [...] The public learned about
the Disinformation Governance Board when Mayorkas testified about its existence in April. Observers were troubled by
the appointment of Nina Jankowicz as the head of the board. Jankowicz has an abominable relationship with the
truth. Back in 2020, she dismissed news about Hunter Biden's infamous laptop as "Russian disinformation." She was an
advocate of the discredited Steele dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign, that was the source of the Russian Collusion
hoax. She is also a blatant partisan with a history of embracing and spreading disinformation to undermine political
opponents. Observers were also concerned that Mayorkas wasn't explicit about the powers of the Disinformation
Governance Board. Was the board meant to be a supervisory body that would order social media firms to add disclaimers
or warnings about "disinformation" and deplatform frequent peddlers of "disinformation"? Was the board empowered to act on
the ground and direct law enforcement to conduct arrests and searches? Was the board authorized to initiate legal
proceedings?
Former
Obama Adviser Lets Cat out of the Bag on What Dems Want to Do to Control Us. Former White House Communications
Director for the Obama administration Dan Pfeiffer appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Monday [6/6/2022] and what he said was
revealing, threatening, and great — all at the same time. Pfeiffer claimed that the people who listen to
"right-wing media" were "more likely to believe conspiracy theories about vaccines, conspiracy theories about elections.
[...] He put out what was the constant theme of the segment — attacking Facebook for purveying "news," which Mika
laughingly said was "not where you get news." Because how dare you not listen to mainstream outlets like hers? That
was quietly hilarious, when you think about all the conspiracy theories that Democrats and MSNBC have pushed over the last few
years, with Russia collusion, paid for and spread by the DNC, with the Clinton campaign top of the list. People on the
left believe all kinds of crazy things about pee tapes and Ginni Thomas (Justice Clarence Thomas' wife) trying to "overthrow"
the government (big scoop: she did no such thing) because of the crazy pushed by liberal mainstream media. Meanwhile,
while there's a lot from the mainstream against conspiracy theories on the right, there's not so much targeted at deflating
the conspiracy theories that flourish on the left.
Unchecked
by Courts, Government Censorship of Social Media Platforms Will Prove Fatal to Free Speech. The Biden
administration's increasingly aggressive efforts to combat so-called misinformation, along with the prospective acquisition
of Twitter by free speech advocate Elon Musk, have sparked a national debate about what role, if any, the government should
play in censoring social media. While some have applauded the administration's campaign to police online
"misinformation" about COVID-19 and other subjects, including through its recent creation of a "Disinformation Governance
Board" within the Department of Homeland Security, others have harshly criticized the notion that the government should be
the arbiter of truth. As these critics have observed, many views derided as COVID-19 "misinformation" in 2020 or
2021 — for instance, that the virus originated in a lab and that community masking appears to be relatively
ineffective — are now gaining traction in mainstream circles.
One Way Government.
As the Biden administration attempted to create its own Ministry of Truth with the Disinformation Governance Board this
month, it was common to hear conservatives and Republicans saying things like "just wait until President Trump or President
DeSantis is the one appointing the head of that agency, then you'll be sorry." [...] The fear of a weapon in the hands of the
enemy is supposed to govern the desire to wield it yourself. Self-preservation limits the aspirations of the country's
ruling class. This check and balance that the mechanism of democracy is meant to provide may have functioned at some
point in the country's past, but that's not how the United States government actually operates today. The majority of
our government's day-to-day decisions are not made by the legislature or even the President. The elected officeholder
is not even the one regularly exercising discretion. Today, those decisions are handled by the technocracy, which is
safely tucked away in our government agencies, i.e. the permanent bureaucracy that has come to be known as the deep state.
Biden
Disinfo Board Advisor Once Hinted Discouraging 'Conflicting Views' Was Bad. An advisor for the Biden
administration's Ministry of Truth once suggested that discouraging differences in opinion at the government level was a bad
thing. Irony abounds! Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) advisor Michael Chertoff signed a letter in 2016
criticizing then-presidential candidate Donald Trump for apparently discouraging "conflicting views." Signers of the
letter said regarding a potential Trump presidency: "In our experience, a President must be willing to listen to his
advisors and department heads; must encourage consideration of conflicting views; and must acknowledge errors and learn from them."
Biden's
Disinformation Board may be 'paused,' but that's a sketchy claim. [Scroll down] The Biden
administration's record on honoring democratic values (by respecting political opponents) hasn't exactly been stellar.
The protesters of January 6 are being subjected to draconian punishment. The partisan January 6 Select Committee's sole
function is to harass and intimidate political opponents. Parents concerned about their children being indoctrinated
with Critical Race Theory were branded as domestic terrorists. Biden branded the "MAGA crowd" as "the most extreme
political organization that's existed in recent American history." Government works for the citizen. It is a
citizen's function to sit in judgment of the government, not the other way around. When the government assumes that
role and places the citizen under the microscope, it ceases to be democratic. There were also several open questions
about the Board. The obvious question was how it was going to define "disinformation." There were questions and
concerns about the authority the board would have and whether it would be constitutional. Would it be just within the
realms of social media platforms, or would they collaborate with law enforcement to conduct arrests? Even their most
ardent fans of the Democrats — i.e., the mainstream media found it hard to defend the disinformation board.
A Cabinency
of Dunces. [Scroll down] But one area of agreement is the sheer craziness of Biden's cabinet
appointments, who have translated his incoherent ideology into catastrophic governance. Secretary of Homeland Security
Alejandro Mayorkas has essentially nullified federal immigration law. Over 2 million foreign nationals have illegally
crossed the southern border without audit — and without COVID vaccinations and tests during a pandemic.
Mayorkas either cannot or will not follow federal law. But he did create a new Disinformation Governance Board.
To head his new Orwellian Ministry of Truth, he appointed Nina Jankowicz — an arch disinformationist who helped
peddle the Russian collusion, Steele dossier, and Alfa Bank hoaxes. While Jankowicz's adolescent videos and past tweets
finally forced her resignation, Mayorkas promises his board will carry on.
Biden
Is Already Plotting To Restart His 'Disinformation Board'. [A]ll the huzzahs about the demise of the Biden
administration's Orwellian "Disinformation Governance Board" are premature. [...] For starters, team Biden said it would only
put a "pause" on the board in the wake of a furious backlash from the public and revelations that the woman chosen to head it
had herself peddled disinformation on numerous occasions. During this 75-day "pause," the Homeland Security Advisory
Council will review the board and make "recommendations on how the department can garner public trust surrounding its
disinformation efforts." (Note statement says "how" not "if.") Meanwhile, a Department of Homeland Security official
said "the Department's critical work across several administrations to address disinformation that threatens the security of
our country will continue." The White House has also been completely unapologetic about creating the board, calling
criticism of it "smears leveled by bad-faith, right-wing actors."
Caitlin
Johnstone: They Fear Information, Not Disinformation. We're in the final countdown to British Home
Secretary Priti Patel's decision on the fate of Julian Assange, with the WikiLeaks founder's extradition to the United
States due to be approved or rejected by the end of the month. Joe Lauria has an article out with Consortium
News on the various pressures that Patel is facing from both sides of this history-making issue at this crucial
time. And I can't stop thinking, as this situation comes to a boil, about how absurd it is that the U.S. empire is
working to set a precedent that essentially outlaws information-sharing that the U.S. doesn't like at the same time Western
news media are full of hand-wringing headlines about the dangerous threat of "disinformation." Fairness and Accuracy In
Reporting (FAIR) has an article "'Disinformation' Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts" about the way the mass
media have been spinning that label to mean not merely the knowing distribution of false information but also of information
that is true but inconvenient to imperial narrative-weaving.
Homeland
Security's Rebooted Disinformation Plan Is No Better Than the First. Constitutionalists, free-speech lovers,
and sane people alike cheered upon hearing the announcements that the Department of Homeland Security was disbanding its
nascent Disinformation Governance Board and the board's designated head, Nina Jankowicz, was resigning. The reasons why
are obvious: The federal government has no business determining what is truth, it is nowhere near the mission of
Homeland Security, and Jankowicz had a consistently wrong record of identifying "disinformation." But Americans should
take no comfort in the fact that the Biden administration's efforts to censor information from within DHS and elsewhere will
end. In fact, the administration has announced that former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former U.S.
Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick will take the baton from Jankowicz and continue down the disinformation track.
This plan is no better than the first one.
The
'Mary Poppins of Disinformation' Inadvertently Spills the Truth About What the Board Was Going to Do. Nina
Jankowicz, the self-proclaimed "Mary Poppins of Disinformation" who was up until recently supposed to become the chief of Joe
Biden's Orwellian and ominous Disinformation Governance Board, can't seem to stop herself from stepping on rakes. She
has complained, now that the Board has been "paused," that the Board itself was a victim of "disinformation," which casts
into question how effective it could possibly have ever been, if Jankowicz couldn't even manage to counter false statements
about what it was supposed to be doing. On Monday, she made matters even worse by remarking off-handedly that the Board
was meant to do something that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had said it would not be doing:
countering "disinformation" not just from foreign sources, but from Americans.
Homeland
Security Pick To Clean Up 'Disinfo Board' Pushed Disinfo Himself. The Biden administration is calling in backup
to bail out its Disinformation Governance Board just days after a disastrous launch. Their ringer is a former
government official who blamed Russia for the Hunter Biden laptop story. Department of Homeland Security chief
Alejandro Mayorkas this week tapped former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff to advise the board. Its executive director,
Nina Jankowicz, had come under fire after she asserted the release of Biden's emails was a "Russian influence op." Chertoff
has made similar claims, arguing after the 2020 election that "human intelligence sources" — referring to Russian
spies — likely obtained emails from Hunter Biden's computer. Chertoff dismissed as "preposterous" the claim
that the emails were recovered after Biden abandoned his laptop at a computer repair shop. Chertoff's appointment could
signal more trouble for the board, which has come under intense scrutiny from Republicans.
The
Typhoid Mary of Disinformation. The most blatant and shameless liars from the first term of the Bush/Cheney
administration have, revealingly, enjoyed great success in media and journalism. That is because serial deceit is not a
liability for a thriving career in corporate journalism but rather a vital asset — provided that the lies are in
service of ruling class policies. Tawdry propagandists who helped drive post-9/11 America into a bottomless pit of lies
and self-destruction have become the most highly-paid and beloved stars of liberal media.
Obama
Supercharged the Left's Embrace of Censorship. It seems every day some notable Democrat is pushing for
censorship. After the horrific Buffalo mass murder on May 14, New York Governor Hochul threatened social media
companies for not purging "hate speech," that dangerously elusive term that has the potential to cover anything Democrats
don't like. Former New York mayor Bill de Blasio demanded that Congress pass legislation to "reign in the spread of
hate" on the Internet. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had the audacity to send a formal letter to Fox News
ordering the network to "immediately cease the reckless amplification" of ideas he blamed for the Buffalo shooting.
MSNBC's Carl Cameron insisted that "it's time to actually start doing things" to control speech, such as "maybe taking some
names and putting people in jail." And all of these attacks on free speech are occurring while President Biden is flirting
with the creation of a "Ministry of Truth" and the Democratic National Committee is "working with" Big Tech to "enforce a
comprehensive political misinformation policy."
Disinformation
Board Paused, 'Mary Poppins' Director Out, but Biden Suppression of Free Speech Continues. After only a few
weeks, the unconstitutional, correctly criticized federal Disinformation Governance Board has been "paused" and "Minister of
Truth" Nina Jankowicz has resigned. It is appropriate to celebrate, but amid statements from the White House saying the
"work is going to continue," we should beware that some version of the board will quietly pop up again in the Department of
Homeland Security and other agencies. And we should be ready to expose the suppression of free speech wherever it
continues. As many have pointed out, this effort was entirely unconstitutional from the start and violated the First
Amendment. The board even opened President Joe Biden and Jankowicz up to robust lawsuits from two states. The
Constitution clearly states that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." The executive branch
cannot abridge free speech either, nor can the federal government collude with Big Tech to censor free speech, as they are
wont to do.
Biden's
'disinformation board' is paused after just three weeks following outrage over its head Nina Jankowicz pushing debunked
Russian collusion claims. The controversial head of the Department of Homeland Security's disinformation board
resigned on Wednesday following weeks of attacks on her appointment and as it emerged that the panel was being 'paused' only
three weeks after it was set up. The board was intended to combat misinformation but critics quickly homed in on the
role of its chief, Nina Jankowicz, and her history fighting disinformation and extremism. In particular, they
questioned her expertise after it emerged she had dismissed the 2020 discovery of Hunter Biden's laptop as being a 'Trump
campaign product.'
Disinformation
Czar Resigns, Board On 'Pause' Following Criticism She Spread Disinformation. The Department of Homeland
Security put a "pause" Monday on its disinformation board after the truth czar, who resigned Wednesday [5/18/2022], came
under fire for spreading disinformation herself, The Washington Post reported. DHS shut the board down Monday and Nina
Jankowicz, who was tapped to lead the department, drafted a resignation letter Tuesday, according to The Washington
Post. Jankowicz was reportedly pulled into a meeting late Tuesday night, however, with officials giving her the chance
to stay on as the department determines whether to move forward with the highly polarized board. Jankowicz formally
resigned Wednesday, according to The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz.
Executive
Director of Biden's Ministry of Truth Resigns. After a rough three weeks in which conservatives landed
significant hits on and exposed major flaws with the Department of Homeland Security's "Disinformation Governance Board," the
much-mocked Ministry of Truth has been "paused" and Disinfo Czar Nina Jankowicz is looking to the exits. This news,
comes from a new "scoop" reported by none other than The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz. Most of permanent-victim
Lorenz's post is the same pablum we've seen from the mainstream media about how extremely qualified Jankowicz is and how
critical the threat of so-called disinformation is to democracy — all without mentioning that Jankowicz has been a
leading voice pushing debunked narratives and outright false information.
Wicked
witch of the woke Nina Jankowicz resigns as Disinformation Governance Board is put on 'pause'. Just when I
thought the Biden administration was beyond shame, it (at least temporarily) pulled the plug on the Disinformation Governance
Board, causing the buffoonish Nina Jankowicz to resign. I can't recall a speedier and more embarrassing belly flop of a
government initiative than the announcement of this transparently Orwellian state organ, headed by a cringeworthy
exhibitionist besotted with her own musical talent and purported wisdom.
The Editor says...
I wonder who will be the next person to hire Nina Jankowicz.
Biden
Regime Hires Michael Chertoff to Lead Disinformation Board. The Biden regime announced on Wednesday they hired
Michael Chertoff, another Hunter Biden laptop truther to lead the government's Disinformation Board. Chertoff has
worked as an attorney at Covington & Burling. Chertoff is the co-author of the Patriot Act that allowed the federal
government to spy on its citizens. Michael Chertoff was a board member of a website Alliance for Securing Democracy
that claimed it was tracking Russian disinformation during the Trump years. Its real purpose is to smear websites
supportive of Donald Trump and his accomplishments as Russian propaganda. In this venture, Chertoff and his colleagues
labeled The Gateway Pundit and Breitbart as top Russia disinformation websites because we did not believe the media lies on
the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
The
Clownish Disinfo Czar Got The Boot, But Biden's 'Ministry Of Truth' Hired Monster Replacements. The Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) hired the co-author of the PATRIOT Act, arguably the harshest crackdown on civil liberties in
modern American history, and an official under former President Bill Clinton to head the Disinformation Governance Board
during its "pause." The DHS shut the board down Monday after just several weeks and its head, Nina Jankowicz, wrote a
resignation letter Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. Jankowicz was scrutinized for pushing disinformation
about Hunter Biden's laptop and the now-discredited Steele Dossier, which Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA officer, said was
possibly "part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot." She also called Republicans who criticize critical race theory
(CRT) "disinformers." Videos of her singing as the "Mary Poppins of disinformation," "[...]" and satirical, sexualized
renditions of Harry Potter themes have also raised eyebrows. The department announced Wednesday former DHS Secretary
Michael Chertoff and former U.S. Deputy Secretary General Jamie Gorelick under Clinton "will lead a thorough review and
assessment" of the board that was "grossly and intentionally mischaracterized."
DHS
Says [the] Disinformation Board [is] Being 'Paused' Due to Harassment of Its Chief Enforcer. Is there hope for freedom of
speech in America after all, despite all of the Left's efforts to destroy it? Maybe: the Washington Post
announced Wednesday [5/18/2022] that "just three weeks after its announcement, the Disinformation Governance Board is being
'paused,' according to multiple employees at DHS, capping a back-and-forth week of decisions that changed during the course
of reporting of this story." [...] However, there are plenty of enemies of the First Amendment within the DHS, and so after
the Board was killed, it became undead: [...]
Cowardly
Dems Can No Longer Defend Their Idiotic 'Disinformation' Czar; Decide To Cancel Her Senate Hearing. Democrats'
decision to appoint a 'Disinformation Czar' to work in the Department of Homeland Security has generated significant
controversy since the decision was made last month. Many people have taken to calling the newly created disinformation
board the 'Ministry of Truth', the name given to a propaganda ministry in George Orwell's book '1984'. If the creation of
the new board wasn't controversial enough, the Disinformation Czar, Nina Jankowicz, has landed herself in hot water for
incendiary political comments she made prior to her appointment. Last week, she said that verified Twitter users such
as herself should be able to edit other users' Tweets so that they can add context to them.
Did
the Disinformation Governance Board originate in a D.C. think tank? The Department of Homeland Security's new
and controversial Disinformation Governance Board may have originated from an under-the-radar think tank report that called
on the department to change its focus by prioritizing "nonmilitary threats," such as white supremacism and
disinformation. The report, titled "Future of DHS Project: Key Findings and Recommendations," was published in
September 2020 by the Atlantic Council, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C. and committed to a mission of "shaping the
global future together." Thomas Warrick and Caitlin Durkovich, the report's authors, both served in the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) but left their posts during the Trump administration. Durkovich currently serves on the White
House National Security Council.
Former
Fox News reporter wants Biden to start putting people in jail for 'misinformation'. A face you're surely to
recognize, former Fox News reporter Carl Cameron, was on MSNBC bashing Fox News and Republicans as purveyors of
misinformation today in the aftermath of the massacre in Buffalo. Not only did Cameron accuse Republicans of being the
purveyors of misinformation, essentially blaming them and Fox News for the shooting, but he suggested that it's time for
Biden to start putting them in jail for it.
Biden
Tries Controlling (Dis)Information. The goal of tyrants, dictators, and oppressive governments is to gain power
and then stay in power. They largely do this by controlling information — the information available and who
has access to it. Information is power, and tyrants use information to gain power. [...] State-sponsored media in
countries like the Soviet Union, North Korea, China, Turkey, and Iran insured the people heard only what the government
allowed. All other information was labeled "disinformation" and was banned. Facts that made the government look
bad were banned as dangerous misinformation, were not allowed to be disseminated, and became a crime to share. [...] Leftists
in America have long been enthralled with communists, tyrants, and dictators; largely because those regimes control
information, and thus control the people.
Biden's
"Minster of Truth" Nina Jankowicz Participated in Secret NATO-Funded Cabal to Subvert Western Democracies Using
Disinformation as Cover. As Revolver and others have covered, Nina "Moaning Myrtle" Jankowicz is a joke.
The Harry Potter superfan-turned-propagandrix is now the Biden Administration's chosen head for the "Disinformation
Governance Board." Among many other embarrassing videos in circulation is the following clip of Nina Jankowicz bizarrely and
emphatically dismissing the notion of the so-called "deep state." [Video clip] [...] Whatever one thinks of the
precise term "deep state," Nina badly wants everyone to dismiss the very concept of secret groups operating within
Washington. She works "with and around" them after all, and she says such a cabal or network of cabals does not
exist. In fact, Nina does know the truth, and it's the opposite of what she claims above. Nina's name appeared in
one of the most explosive and aggressively censored national security leaks of the century. The leak in question
exposed the "Integrity Initiative," a dark government-funded NGO that appears to have engaged in political meddling and
covert influence operations in Western countries under the guise of fighting "disinformation."
Meet
the Head of Biden's New "Disinformation Governing Board". Late last month, the Joe Biden administration
publicly confirmed that a "Disinformation Governing Board" working group had been created within the Department of Homeland
Security. The news prompted a flood of concern about the impact of such an Orwellian organ on America. But
there's no need to engage in hypotheticals to understand the dangers. One has to only consider the past of Nina
Jankowicz, the head of the new disinformation board. Jankowicz's experience as a disinformation warrior includes her
work with StopFake, a US government-funded "anti-disinformation" organization founded in March 2014 and lauded as a model of
how to combat Kremlin lies. Four years later, StopFake began aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups
with a long track record of violence, including war crimes. Today, StopFake is an official Facebook fact-checking
partner, which gives it the power to censor news, while Jankowicz is America's disinformation czar.
This sounds like disinformation: White
House falsely claims 'no vaccine' was available when Biden took office. The official White House Twitter
account posted false COVID-19 information Thursday [5/12/2022], wrongly claiming there was "no vaccine available" when
President Biden took office in January 2021. "When President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was
no vaccine available," the verified account tweeted to its 7 million followers Thursday. "In the last 15 months,
the economy has created 8.3 [million] jobs and the unemployment rate stands at 3.6% — the fastest decline in
unemployment to start a President's term ever recorded," the tweet concluded. But eagle-eyed critics were quick to
point out that the 79-year-old Biden actually received his first dose of the vaccine on December 2020 — a month
before he moved in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Meet
the Head of Biden's New "Disinformation Governing Board". Late last month, the Joe Biden administration
publicly confirmed that a "Disinformation Governing Board" working group had been created within the Department of Homeland
Security. The news prompted a flood of concern about the impact of such an Orwellian organ on America. But
there's no need to engage in hypotheticals to understand the dangers. One has to only consider the past of Nina
Jankowicz, the head of the new disinformation board. Jankowicz's experience as a disinformation warrior includes her
work with StopFake, a US government-funded "anti-disinformation" organization founded in March 2014 and lauded as a model of
how to combat Kremlin lies. Four years later, StopFake began aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups
with a long track record of violence, including war crimes.
Fauci,
Biden, Psaki Sued in Major Big Tech Collusion Lawsuit! Things continue to get worse for the apparatchiks of
the ruling regime: now, in addition to losing the abortion battle and much of the mask battle in the courts at the same time
that Elon Musk is taking a hammer to the censorship regime by buying Twitter, Fauci and Biden just got rocked by a massive
lawsuit. That lawsuit, filed last Thursday by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General
Jeff Landry, names Biden, Psaki, Dr. Fauci, and Nina Jankowicz (the Disinformation Board woman) as defendants and
accuses them of colluding with Big Tech to crush certain messages on platforms like Facebook and YouTube under the guise of
fighting "misinformation".
Head
of Biden's 'Ministry of Truth' Previously Compared Free Speech to "Fairy Dust". The head of what has been
dubbed the Biden administration's 'Ministry of Truth' previously compared free speech to "fairy dust" during testimony about
social media censorship in front of the UK Parliament. [...] Nina Jankowicz, recently appointed DHS 'disinformation czar,'
made the comments while providing oral evidence regarding the implementation of the UK's controversial Online Safety Bill,
which will ban legal content which has "the potential to cause harm." After agreeing that the government should set
minimum speech standards which ban "misogyny," Jankowicz blasted alternative social media platforms for supporting "freedom
of expression and fairy dust." She also said that government-connected communications regulators such as Ofcom should
"be able to establish the minimum standards that would be applied to all platforms and incur fines."
Power-Drunk
Disinfo Czar Wants to Control People's Tweets. Joe Biden's new disinformation czar, Nina Jankowicz, wallowing
in the authoritarian power that the role has given her, has proclaimed that she wants "verified" people to edit the Twitter
posts of other people. As part of a Zoom call with fellow leftists, Jankowicz explained how she wants Twitter to
operate similar to Wikipedia, which allows anyone to edit and add information about a topic — but only if they
have been verified, as she has been, reported Summit News. "I am eligible for it because I am verified," she explained
about her sainted status on Wiki and how, presumably, it would translate to other social media under her directives.
Clueless,
pharma-infested FDA now says independent media is "leading cause of death in US". The leading cause of death in
the United States today is not heart disease but rather "independent media," according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) chief Dr. Robert Cardiff. A Joe Biden appointee, Califf claimed during a recent appearance on CNN that
independent media outlets must be purged from existence immediately if there is to be any hope of ending the scourge of death
throughout the country. Only corporate-controlled, government-approved fake news outlets like CNN should be allowed to
exist and spread information online, Califf maintains. Allowing free speech, he says, will result in "deadly
misinformation" spreading and influencing people's health decisions.
At
Last We're Getting Some (Chilling) Hints About What the Disinformation Chief Wants to Do. Old Joe Biden's
handlers haven't been able to give us a clear answer about what the Department of Homeland Security's ominous new
Disinformation Governance Board is actually going to do. But now its censorship power-drunk chief, Nina Jankowicz, has
provided a detailed description of an authority she wants to have in order to fight this alleged disinformation, and it's
downright chilling. So far, the powers behind the Disinformation Board haven't been able to get their stories straight
about exactly what "disinformation" the Board would supposedly combat. When Politico first revealed the existence of
the Board, it said it would be "countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular
migration and Russia." Then DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas went further, saying it would "combat this threat not only to
election security, but to our homeland security." Jen Psaki then suggested that it would be dealing with supposed
disinformation about "COVID for example, and also elections and eligibility." Under fire over this brazen assault on the
First Amendment, Mayorkas claimed that the Board would not be dealing with the statements of American citizens at all.
Conservatives
question true motives of Biden's DHS disinformation board. Conservatives who oppose the controversial
Disinformation Governance Board doubt the Biden administration's claims that it is narrowly focused on foreign threats and
not censorship, saying the board would then be housed by a different federal agency. The Biden administration says the
Department of Homeland Security's new disinformation board is focused on noncontroversial foreign threats that both parties
agree should be combated, but conservatives are fiercely skeptical. Republicans see the board as a vessel for the
government to determine what information is considered true and false and thereby censor conservative speech. Some top
House Republicans are even eager to threaten a government shutdown to nix the board if necessary.
Disinformation
Chief Jankowicz Defended Hunter's Corrupt Burisma Deals. President Biden's DHS disinformation chief Nina
Jankowicz defended Hunter Biden's corrupt dealings with Burisma Holdings during a July 2020 book interview —
calling the Biden scion, known for crack addiction and selling influence, a "foreign expert." Hunter sat on the board of
the Ukrainian Burisma Holdings company from 2014 to 2019, while Joe Biden was vice president and campaigned for president
during the 2020 election cycle. Hunter was compensated $83,000 per month as a board director, which raises questions if
Hunter was selling influence to his father in the Obama administration. Joe Biden and his staff have denied at least
seven times that Biden has been involved in his son's dealings. But evidence shows Joe Biden was involved in Hunter's
business affairs at least eleven times.
American
Matrix: Biden's Disinformation Governance Board. The Biden administration's announcement of creating a
new 'Disinformation Governance Board' reveals desperation in the face of Americans waking up to overwhelming evidence of
coverup and deceit by mainstream and social media on life and death matters. First, people are coming to realize the
truth behind the so-called COVID-19 pandemic, with all the attendant life-threatening bad advice and loss of Constitutional
freedoms and rights that took place. Second, people are now seeing documentary proof of undeniable evidence of
industrial-scale vote fraud that drove an illegitimate result in the November 2020 elections. Many have drawn parallels
between Biden's 'Disinformation Governance Board' and George Orwell's 'Ministry of Truth,' arguing that it's a threat to
First Amendment free speech. But wait. Haven't we already been living in the matrix of an Orwellian world, with
freedom of speech in America hanging by a thread even before this crazy Disinformation Governance Board was hatched?
Ministry
of Misinformation: Freedom is Slavery! Since Elon Musk, who I think is one strange person, started
buying Twitter stock, and overnight became the largest stock holder of the company, the media world went nuts. When he
bought it, the media world, leftists, Democrats, government bureaucrats, RINO's, pundits and lunatic Hollywood Stars, went
apoplectic. They're outraged that "an independent-thinking billionaire like Elon Musk could ever get control of a media
outlet". Amazing, since not one of them were outraged at leftist billionaires like "Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg,
Jeff Bezos, and the Google billionaires running media outlets:
• CEO Jeff Bezos reinvented the failing, Washington Post he bought for $250 million.
• CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS continually collude on what to report
and how to report. They all suppressed the true story about Hunter Biden's laptop because they were campaigning for his dad.
• They intentionally interfered in the election.
• They all intentionally spread the lies about Russian collusion as they colluded with the Democrats.
• They all suppress anyone who dared disagree with Dr. Anthony Fauci and the CDC.
20 States Threaten
Legal Action Over the Ministry of Truth. The attorneys general of 20 states have threatened legal action
against the US government unless they disband the newly formed Disinformation Governance Board. We shared with you
recently an article about the people behind the DGB, who have a history of trying to curb dissenting speech by calling it
"disinformation." [...] In a letter addressed to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the Attorney General of Virginia, Jason
Miyares, spoke for the AGs of 19 other states and shared his concerns about the overreach.
5
Signals Of Government Disinformationists. The lies of politicians and federal agency bureaucrats are
particularly dangerous because we want to believe these groups. Few want to accept the notion our fabled FBI, DOJ, or
HHS are corrupt [or] dishonest. Pundits, often from government, blame social media and extremist groups for spreading
falsehoods. But we expect outlets like Slate, the Daily Beast, or The Blaze, and Newsmax to be biased. When we
watch them, we know we what we are getting. Twitter personalities, no matter how many followers they gain, will never
hold the clout of the federal government. Because of its outsized reach through its agencies, NGO's, big tech,
association publications, paid "fact-checkers", and the legacy media, government is the most effective disseminator of
disinformation and the greatest threat to our safety and security.
More
Evidence the Biden Administration Does Not Care About Misinformation. The Biden administration has once again
shown that it does not truly care about misinformation. While Democrats and their comrades in the activist media have
railed against false narratives — except for the ones they promote — it has become clear that their
fixation on misinformation is nothing more than a cover for their true agenda: Suppressing voices they don't
like. Last week, the White House announced it was enlisting Karine Jean-Pierre to replace press secretary Jen Psaki
after she resigns on May 13th. It was touted as a historic moment. The nation would finally have its first black
homosexual official tasked with lying to the public about the many failings of the president. The announcement came
about a week after it was revealed that the administration had created a Disinformation Governance Board ostensibly to
counter false information coming from foreign actors like Russia and Mexican cartels.
Biden
FDA Chief Insists "Misinformation" is Impacting Life Expectancy in the US. So much for COVID, abortions,
cancer, heart attacks, violent crime, or fentanyl killing off people like the plague. They all need to move
aside. There's a new threat that has been identified by the 'experts.' Now, the Biden regime says that online
"misinformation" — a/k/a the exercising of free speech rights — is impacting life expectancy in the
United States, according to Biden's FDA chief Robert Califf. And no, he isn't talking about all of the "safe and
effective" propaganda that has been force-fed to populations around the globe by elitist tyrants who are hellbent on jabbing
them full of experimental mRNA treatments — actually, it's quite the opposite.
Official
Co-Leading Biden Disinfo Board Worked for George Soros. A member of President Joe Biden's Orwellian
Disinformation Governance Board has close ties to liberal billionaire activist George Soros. Disinformation Governance
Board leader Jennifer Daskal has at least three connections to Soros. Daskal previously served as an Open Society
Institute fellow "working on issues related to privacy and law enforcement access to data across borders." Daskal also worked
as senior counterterrorism counsel for the anti-Semitic Human Rights Watch. HRW received at least $32,106,746 from
Soros between 2000 and 2014 alone. Daskal was also founding editor of the Just Security blog. Soros' Open Society
Foundations gave $675,000 to Just Security between 2017 and 2019. Daskal's involvement with the censorship board fits
right in with the Soros agenda. Soros has been involved in funding a litany of so-called fact-checking operations,
making the revelation of Daskal's Soros-tie par for the course.
This sounds like disinformation: NPR's
Nina Totenberg: 'Leading theory' is conservative clerk leaked abortion opinion. One of the Supreme Court's
longtime reporters said the "leading theory" is that a conservative clerk leaked the majority draft opinion indicating the
high court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Nina Totenberg, a legal affairs correspondent for NPR,
said the only theory that makes sense is that the leak came from someone who "was afraid that this majority might not hold."
Biden's
New Press Secretary Turns out to Be a Big Fan of Conspiracy Theories. Remember when denying the legitimacy of
any election was not only disqualifying but also got you kicked off Jake Tapper's low-rated CNN show? I wonder if that
rule will hold for Karine Jean-Pierre, who is set to take over as Joe Biden's press secretary on May 13th. I think we
all know the answer to that. Apparently, Jean-Pierre has a colorful history on social media, and now some of her old
tweets are painting a far different picture than the one she's tried to present since joining the White House. Far from
the level-headed, straight shooter that she wants people to believe she is, Jean-Pierre is apparently a conspiratorial lunatic.
This sounds like disinformation: Biden's
new WH press secretary claimed Trump, GA Gov. Kemp 'stole' elections. President Biden's new White House
press secretary has previously claimed the 2016 presidential election was "stolen" from Hillary Clinton and that Georgia
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp "stole" the 2018 gubernatorial election from Stacey Abrams. "Stolen emails, stolen
drone, stolen election .....welcome to the world of #unpresidented Trump," Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted after former President
Donald Trump's 2016 presidential win, repeating Clinton's claims that Trump was illegitimately elected. "Reminder:
Brian Kemp stole the gubernatorial election from Georgians and Stacey Abrams," Jean-Pierre tweeted on April 2, 2020,
reacting to a news story about Kemp saying he only just learned that asymptomatic people can spread COVID-19.
Biden
FEC pick claimed Georgia voting machines 'switched' votes from Abrams to Kemp in 2018. President Biden's recent
nominee to serve on the Federal Election Commission represented a Stacey Abrams-backed nonprofit in a lawsuit that made
several unproven allegations of voter suppression. Nominee Dara Lindenbaum also signed on to court papers alleging
voting machines "switched" votes during the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. The Senate Rules and Administration
Committee held a confirmation hearing for Lindenbaum, a lawyer with the Washington firm of Sandler, Reiff, Lamb, Rosenstein &
Birkenstock, to be a commissioner on the FEC. Days later, the Georgia trial for Fair Fight Action and Care in Action
v. Raffensperger began in U.S. District Court in Atlanta. Lindenbaum's name appears as the third signature on the
original complaint in the lawsuit alleging voter suppression in the race that saw then-Republican Secretary of State Brian
Kemp defeat Abrams by 55,000 votes statewide in the governor's race.
Biden's
Disinformation Board is a Gift to Republicans. If you worked really hard, you might be able to come up with an
idea as unappealing as a government disinformation board. Voters already distrust the government and are especially
concerned about its excessive intrusion and unchecked regulatory power. If you worked even harder, you might find as
bad a person to lead it as Nina Jankowicz, a self-styled "disinformation expert" whose real specialty seems to be spreading
disinformation to support her left-wing views. If you tried hard to justify this mess, you might come up with a
defender as ineffective as Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security. The secretary, already in deep
trouble because of the porous southern border, faced a hostile Senate hearing and admitted he knew nothing about
Ms. Jankowicz's dismal history of ideological fulminations and partisan statements. He refused to say whose bright
idea it was to hire her — only that he was clueless about her background.
Biden's
new 'Disinformation' czar pushed debunked Russia collusion claims from Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. The
head of President Joe Biden's new Disinformation Governance Board has a history of pushing now-debunked claims that there are
ties between Russia and Donald Trump, old and recently resurfaced tweets reveal. Nina Jankowicz promoted several claims
from Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign on Twitter, including allegations that are now being looked into by special
counsel John Durham.
175
House Republicans want answers on DHS disinfo board and chief. At least 175 House Republicans are demanding
answers from Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas about his department's new Disinformation Governance Board as
he struggles to defend the group's creation and the choice of Nina Jankowicz as its first director. Jankowicz, a
disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, will be the executive director of the Department of Homeland Security's new
anti-disinformation effort. She has a history of either labeling claims as disinformation that were later found to have
credibility or giving credence to assertions that were later discredited, including those related to Hunter Biden,
Christopher Steele, Iranian election meddling, the Wuhan, China, lab leak hypothesis, and more. The House Republicans
told Mayorkas in a Thursday letter they are "concerned" about Jankowicz's appointment to head the board, in part because she
has "on several occasions, displayed questionable judgment on matters of disinformation and freedom of speech." The
letter was organized by Rep. Scott Franklin (R-FL).
Biden
DOJ sets up a new 'Office of Environmental Justice' — headed by another fanatic. As if we didn't
need yet another government agency in this age of behemoth federal spending, the Biden administration has saddled the U.S.
with a new one, the Office of Environmental Justice. The $1.4 million monstrosity will be buried within the U.S.
Department of Justice under the authority of U.S. associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, who set up the new
bureaucracy-enforcer arm. It will be headed by one Cynthia M. Ferguson, whose title is acting director. And you
can bet it's going to be a problem. [...] We already know that activist groups have conspired with the Environmental
Protection Agency for millions in payouts as well as the 'right' to write regulations themselves in exchange for not
protesting the agency. We saw the details of that scandal in the late Obama years, after President Trump's officials
came to power and put a stop to it.
Bill Barr Throws
Cold Water On Biden's 'Disinformation' Board And Its 'Radical' Head. Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr
denounced the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) new Disinformation Governance Board, characterizing its leader as an
unqualified "radical." "I don't think that it's the government's function to set up a panel on disinformation," Barr
told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) about the board. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the
disinformation board on April 27. The board's purpose is to address disinformation and misinformation against minority
communities, according to the secretary. Nina Jankowicz, who worked at the Wilson Center as a global fellow and a
disinformation fellow, is the executive director of the board. She "joined the Biden administration to lead a new
initiative" in early March, according to her LinkedIn. "She doesn't seem qualified," Barr said about Jankowicz.
"She seems to be a radical."
Disinformation
Panels, Control over Social Media Content and Now DOJ Environmental Justice. Barack Obama and Eric Holder did
not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; instead, what they did was take the preexisting system and retool it, so the weapons
only targeted one side of the political continuum. This point is where many people get confused. Prior to 9/11/01
the greatest threat to government was considered to be from outside the U.S, vis-a-vis terrorism. After 9/11/01 the
greatest threat was redefined, Americans were now considered the threat, the enemy tracking radar was turned around to look
inside America. In the era shortly after 9/11, the DC national security apparatus was constructed to preserve
continuity of government and simultaneously view all Americans as potential threats. The Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) were created specifically for this
purpose. DHS and ODNI were created because Americans were now the threat to government. Stop. Pause.
Think. You are taking off your shoes at the airports because YOU are the threat. You pass through body scanners
because YOU are the threat. Stop. Pause. Think. How does that define your relationship with government?
The
Disinformation Governance Board Has Nothing to Do With Disinformation. This whole Disinformation Governance
Board idea isn't going over too well. When it was announced that the Biden administration was creating an entire agency
whose supposed purpose is to root out and address "disinformation," folks on both the left and right criticized the
move. As time went on and people learned more about the board's function, people became even more incensed. In a
Senate hearing Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul made Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wish for a stiff drink as
he gave him a grilling that would make even Joe Friday cringe. The senator's questions helped to expose why the creation
of such an entity is not only unnecessary but terrifying to those who value the First Amendment and the spirit behind it.
Rand
Paul devours Mayorkas on disinformation. Actor James Woods thoroughly enjoyed Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tearing
into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the formation of a newly-announced Orwellian "Disinformation
Governance Board," comparing it to a lion dining on a gazelle. [Tweet] "You say your new disinformation board is going
to help the public with disinformation," he told Mayorkas referring to what is being seen as a "Ministry of Truth" by
many. "You claim it is not going to be about domestic, it is going to be about foreigners. Those evil Russians."
"Here's my question: The FBI concludes that the Steele dossier was full of Russian disinformation. CNN propagated this
disinformation gladly for years and years. The difference between your opinion and our opinion is that no matter how
despicable it is that CNN propagated this disinformation, I wouldn't lecture them, I wouldn't put it on a government website
that CNN is wrong for propagating disinformation," Paul continued.
States
Sue Biden Administration for 'Pressuring and Colluding' With Big Tech to Censor Free Speech. Two Republican-led
states have filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and
other top administration officials for allegedly pressuring and colluding with social media giants with the aim of censoring
and suppressing free speech. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry filed
the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana on April 5, they announced in separate
statements on Thursday [5/5/2022]. The attorneys claim that Biden and other government officials worked with big tech
companies like Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to censor conversation around matters relating to everything from COVID-19 and
election integrity to the Hunter Biden laptop story, doing so under the guise of combating "misinformation." Others
named in the lawsuit include Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and
the executive director of DHS's newly established "Disinformation Governance Board," Nina Jankowicz.
Ministry
of Truth Director Shares Thoughts on 'Gender Disinformation' in Eyebrow Lifting Video. Governance
Disinformation Board Dir. Nina Jankowicz is an "expert." I've been assured of it by the Biden administration and
the news media. What are her credentials? Apparently, taking part in biased academic studies any undergraduate
student could do and making TikTok videos. In other words, for being such an "expert" on disinformation, Jankowicz sure
can't seem to understand what it is and what it isn't. Another video has emerged where she deals with "gender
disinformation." [Video clip] Two things stick out to me when I watch this, and I think they illustrate why
she's supremely unqualified to hold a position that shouldn't exist in the first place. To start, every single example
she gives is done in defense of someone on the left. It's as if "disinformation" about right-leaning figures simply
doesn't exist.
We
Can't Let Ourselves Be Oppressed by Weirdos, Losers, and Mutations. All leftists are insufferable, but this
current crop is insufferable in many diverse ways. It's not just the ones who defile or mutilate themselves to get
their parents' attention. It also includes ones that don't tatt up, who appear normal until they open up their kale
holes. Think Nina Jankowicz. On the surface, she looks like any other childless, middle-aged Chardonnay-guzzler
who is pushing 40 but has failed thus far to earn the love of a man. But when she starts talking, yikes. And just
look at the antics of that fascist disinformation girl. She sings show tunes. She's into Harry Potter —
non-threatening sensitive and magical boys are sooooo dreamy. She's also eager to shove you into a train car headed to
a gulag, and as it pulls away from the station she'll be shouting at you ruffians to use your inside voices. That's
right — the mediocre girl who played the lead in your high school's production of "Hello, Dolly!" [...] is the
harbinger of tyranny.
DHS
Secretary Threatened with Prison Time If 'Ministry of Truth' is Illegal and is Not Abolished. The Ministry of
Truth is now running up against a harsh political reality: Americans across the political spectrum have no desire to be
censored by their own government. Both Republicans and vulnerable Democrats facing midterm elections are under
increasing pressure to ensure voters are not silenced by the Department of Homeland Security's new 'Disinformation Board.'
Sen. Bill Hagerty, a Republican from Tennessee, sent a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week outlining
why the Disinformation Board is probably illegal. "Hagerty wrote that the board may violate the Antideficiency Act,
which says the executive branch can't spend money unless Congress authorizes it, and that its creation also may be subject to
the Congressional Review Act," the New York Post reported.
Missouri
and Louisiana File Suit Against Biden Administration Over Collusion With Tech Giants to Suppress Free Speech.
On Thursday, the states of Missouri and Louisiana filed suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of
Louisiana against numerous Biden Administration officials and agencies alleging that they colluded with social media
companies to suppress and censor free speech on several topics, including Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell" and the Wuhan lab
leak theory surrounding the origins of COVID-19.
Sen.
Kennedy Takes Mayorkas Apart Over Nina Jankowicz, Exposes a Larger Problem. Joe Biden and the DHS have been
getting justifiably pummeled over their new "Disinformation Governance Board" — a truly Orwellian idea that the
Biden Administration announced to prevent the spread of "disinformation," including in minority communities "ahead of the
midterms." An astonishing thing on multiple levels — for treating minorities like children who need to be told
what they should believe, as well as the government deciding what qualifies as "disinformation," particularly since they are
big purveyors of disinformation themselves.
Biden's
new disinformation czar said fears about CRT in Loudoun County schools are 'disinformation for profit'. Joe
Biden's new 'disinformation czar' dismissed concerns about Critical Race Theory in schools as 'disinformation for
profit' — despite parents across the country being worried about the teaching of the philosophy in their
children's classrooms. Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who has worked throughout Eastern Europe, was hired on
April 27 to lead a Homeland Security Department working group designed to help its different agencies in dealing with
disinformation on topics ranging from migration to plots from Russia and Iran. But her appointment has angered
Republicans. The Republican National Committee dubbed the committee she heads 'Ministry of Truth' in a nod to George
Orwell's novel '1984,' and raised fears that the group will deem as disinformation 'any speech we don't like.'
Spreading
Roe disinformation: Where are the disinformation police? For decades, scholars on both sides of the issue
have said Roe v Wade was wrongly decided by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is supposed to determine
if laws are constitutional and Roe V Wade created law, instead of interpreting law. Now that it looks like the
Supreme Court may correct the wrong, and send the issue back to the states or Congress, the media and other Democrats are
having a collective cow and colluding to just make [stuff] up to scare the public. In other words, they are
intentionally spreading misinformation to influence and interfere in the election.
1984 is Here Today.
Thought it could never happen in America? Welcome to 1984, written by George Orwell (written as a warning but now being
used as a "how-to" manual), and being promoted by, who else, Joe Biden and his extreme lefts cadre of handlers and stooges.
[...] Joe announced a new government watchdog department titled, now get this, the Disinformation Governance Board. [...]
This is the Left's blatant speech, thought and mind control machine being put into practice under the control of the most
unethical anti-American values bunch ever to gain power in this nation. The only reason they resort to this is that
their endless lists of failures, destructive policies, absurd spending, devaluing our dollars, and general shortages, have
American voters turning against them so they need a weapon of mass social destruction to try to stay in power. This is
their answer to the people's cry for relief and desire for common sense in government.
Motherboard
suggests women could take horse meds to induce abortions, not banned for disinformation. Some of the same
far-left voices who mocked popular podcaster Joe Rogan for using a so-called "horse de-wormer" to cure his COVID last year
are now actively encouraging women to use horse ulcer medication to induce an abortion. "Misoprostol is relatively easy
to acquire from veterinary sources, since in addition to medically inducing abortions, it's also used to treat ulcers in
horses," a Tuesday tweet from the far-left "news" publication Vice's tech department, Motherboard, reads. The tweet
links to a full-blown Vice piece on the subject. "With the Supreme Court poised to overturn the constitutional right to
abortion, an anarchist collective that makes DIY medicine has released detailed instructions for making abortion pills," the
piece states. [Tweet]
Either the Secretary is spreading some misinformation of his own, or he doesn't do his homework before hiring someone. 'I
Was Not Aware': Mayorkas Says He Didn't Know About Truth Czar's Viral Videos. Department of Homeland Security
Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Wednesday [5/4/2022] he was unaware that the Biden administration's new truth czar was
making TikTok videos. While testifying before the Senator Judiciary Committee, Republican Louisiana Sen. John
Kennedy asked "when the department picked [Nina Jankowicz], was the department aware of her TikTok videos?" "They're
really quite precocious," Kennedy said, alluding to Jankowicz now viral video. Mayorkas then admitted he "was not aware
of those videos."
When Nina Met Joey.
[Scroll down] As Roger Kimball explains, Nina Jankowicz is an "anti-Trump hack," already on record that Hunter Biden's
laptop is a "Trump campaign product" and "Russian influence op." Jankowicz is also a big fan of Christopher Steele, author of
the pissing prostitutes dossier, a Clinton campaign product now exposed as pure disinformation. Jankowicz also
criticized Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe for his declassification decisions. According to our
new government disinformation chief, Ratcliffe "dredged up the whole Hillary Clinton email scandal and the hack and leak
operation perpetrated by the Russians, and again, that seemed like a political decision designed to help President Trump."
Such faithful service is doubtless the primary reason for the selection of Jankowicz. On the other hand, another
possibility cannot be discounted. Nina Jankowicz is a wannabe chanteuse who croons "I want to be rich, famous and
powerful, step on all my enemies and never do a thing," on YouTube.
Beyond
a Slush Fund, Biden $33 Billion Ukraine Package Includes $8.8 Billion to Establish State Dept Global Disinformation
Bureau. The details of the Joe Biden $33 billion supplemental budget allocation have been released. I
would strongly urge everyone to read the proposal which now heads to congress for passage. The spending request
outlines a massive amount of money for various ideological foreign policy initiatives under the guise of Ukraine relief (it
isn't). The proposal outlines a kickback and bribery scheme. Some of the spending includes an allocation of funds
to the State Dept including funds to USAID to "provide $8.8 billion to the Department of State for economic support and
assistance to the people of Ukraine and other affected countries, including direct budgetary support, as well as support for
food security, democracy, anticorruption, cybersecurity, counter-disinformation, human rights, atrocity documentation,
energy, and emergency infrastructure needs." The request specifically authorizes the transfer of these funds globally,
outside of Ukraine.
Ri-i-i-ight. That's what they said about the Patriot Act. Biden
administration says disinfo board about foreign threats, not censorship. The Biden administration is insisting
that its controversial Disinformation Governance Board will protect the country from outside threats and won't impinge on
people's civil liberties amid criticism that the initiative could prompt increased government censorship. President Joe
Biden's press secretary defended the Orwellian-sounding board Monday, attempting to position it as a nonpartisan coordinating
body for the Department of Homeland Security's work responding to disinformation. "It's continuing work that was done
by CISA back to 2020," Jen Psaki said, referring to the federal cybersecurity agency that is a component of DHS, adding that the
board "would help coordinate internal activities from the department related to disinformation that poses a threat to the homeland."
Obama's
Fundamental Manipulation of Free Speech. Setting the stage for the DHS announcement of the Biden
Administration's Disinformation Governance Board recently, at a Stanford University Cyber Policy Center symposium entitled,
"Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm," deceptive mind-control specialist Barack Obama emerged from
behind his Joe Biden mask to deliver the keynote speech. According to the anonymous author of the 2009 Department of
Homeland Security treatise on "right-wing extremism," government needs to help companies better "...recognize the
often-dangerous relationship between social media, nationalism [and] domestic hate groups" like pro-lifers, ex-military,
Second Amendment supporters, Christians, and America-First patriots. Well aware that the voice of the people threatens
the trajectory of the global elite agenda, the former president used the opportunity to double down on what he does best,
which is to manipulate minds with clever word games.
A
Language Mauled In Service Of Power. We've heard since we were school kids that control of the language means
control of thought. Anyone who has doubts that this is exactly what the Democrats have in mind must have missed the
news last week when the White House named Nina Jankowicz to be the first disinformation czarina in U.S. history. Their
objective is to regulate our thinking. [...] Understanding how truly depraved the Democrats have become requires little more
than a glimpse of Jankowicz's logic twisting. She has argued that it should be against the law to mock women
online. Taking her insanity one step further, she claimed — yes, she really did — that "gender
disinformation" used to criticize Vice President Kamala Harris is a "national security concern." Of course, these
protections wouldn't apply to Sarah Palin, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was White House
press secretary under Donald Trump and is now running for governor in Arkansas, or any other GOP women. They have been
"othered" by Democrats and the media due to their party affiliation, and therefore deserve any disinformation and
misinformation that's heaped upon them.
FNC's
Turley: Biden 'Arguably the Most Anti-Free Speech President Since John Adams'. Monday [5/2/2022], Fox
News contributor Jonathan Turley reacted to the Department of Homeland Security's appointment of Nina Jankowicz to run its
so-called "Disinformation Governance Board." Turley said the Biden administration tabbing "one of the most outspoken
critics of free speech" to police what it deemed "disinformation" was "telling." He argued that President Joe Biden was
"arguably the most anti-free speech president since John Adams." "I think it's telling that the Biden administration went
out and recruited one of the most outspoken critics of free speech," Turley stated on "America Reports."
US
officials admit routinely spreading false information about Russia-Ukraine war. Following many years of
government and legacy media lies across broad spectrums of topics, perhaps intensifying most recently with regard to the
COVID-19 phenomenon and the relentless pushing of its dangerous and ineffective experimental gene-based "vaccines," many may
wonder if they can trust government information on other significant matters, particularly the current war in Ukraine.
Remarkably, according to NBC News, government officials have answered this question in the negative by admitting that they
regularly circulate war-related "intelligence" which they rate as "low-confidence," "based more on analysis than hard
evidence," or which is just simply false, as a means of fighting an "information war against Russia."
How
Republican Senators Can Defund Biden's Dystopic 'Disinformation Board'. In an apparent homage to George
Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" — one the rest of us realize is a pointed political allegory but the Biden
administration apparently views as a handbook — the Biden White House is establishing a Disinformation Governance
Board. Yes, you read that correctly. The government is going to decide what's true and what's false, and punish
disseminators accordingly. The bureaucrats who run the Department of Homeland security, where this board will be
housed, are going to be parsing fact from fiction, obviously to keep us all safe from the scourge of independent judgment and
thought. Naturally, Nina Jankowicz, the woman they've put in charge of this board, thinks America is a little too "free
spirited." Apparently, her life's work has been focused on doing something about that. White House Press
Secretary Jen Psaki has cited Jankowicz's "extensive qualifications," which include being a disinformation fellow (whatever
that is) at the Wilson Center and advising the Ukrainian foreign minister (about who knows what, exactly).
Do
We Draw the Line at a US Ministry of Truth? This aspiring dictatorship is getting desperate and
dangerous. Imagine having complete control over America's corporate news propaganda arm and still feeling vulnerable
when it comes to "securing the narrative." Imagine having all the Big Tech censors working for the U.S. Intelligence
Community, and the masters of disinformation are still unsure whether they can amply manipulate American opinion.
Imagine dedicating a year and a half to persecuting anyone who questions the legitimacy of the 2020 election and learning
that more Americans than ever now view that monstrosity as tainted by fraud. Imagine shamelessly spinning the Capitol
breach into an attempted coup d'état only to find that half the country believes that the federal government is in the
business of imprisoning political protesters. [...] When propaganda, domestic espionage, malicious prosecution, blackmail,
and an organized terror campaign of burn-loot-murder mayhem directed against ordinary Americans fail to subdue the
citizen population, what do aspiring totalitarians do next? That's right, friends, come on down: it's Ministry of Truth
time! The same Department of Homeland Security that has never had any interest in securing the homeland (come right
over, international terrorists and drug-runners, the border's wide open!) will now dedicate its malignant resources to
censoring so much truth that only the government's lies can be heard!
Mayorkas
on Jankowicz: She Is a 'Tremendous Authority' We 'Are Very Fortunate to Have Her'. Secretary of Homeland
Security Alejandro Mayorkas said on this week's broadcast of "Fox News Sunday" that the recently announced head of the
so-called Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz was a "tremendous authority." Anchor Bret Baier said, "The
president picked to lead this is Nina Jankowicz. She is taking heat for tweets and comments about major news stories,
the Hunter Biden laptop story, others. The laptop story obviously was blocked from social media outlets because it was
called Russian propaganda until it wasn't. Do you really think Jankowicz is anywhere near objective enough for this
particular job?" Mayorkas said, "Yes, I do, and by the way, highly regarded is a subject matter expert, and I don't
question her objectivity. There are people and the department who have a diverse range of views, and they are
incredibly dedicated to mission. We are not the opinion police. She has testified before Congress and number of
times. She is recognized as a tremendous authority, and we are very fortunate to have her."
Mayorkas's
oily assurances about his Disinformation Governance Board fall flat. Following the announcement of his
"Disinformation Governance Board," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas found himself scrambling to spin the
hideous new speech enforcer, claiming it was not as Orwellian as any normal person would think. [...] Like any Biden
administration official, he claimed that anyone who saw problems with this was responding to a "messaging" problem rather
than a real problem: [...] He also claimed that his choice for his rhymes-with-KGB board, Nina Jankowicz, was completely
objective. [...] Not one word of it is to be believed. [Bret] Baier did a pretty good objective-effort interview
but one thing he didn't mention was the strange timing of the DGB rollout: It was right when Elon Musk decided to
purchase Twitter in order to restore its free speech orientation. The left had an absolute meltdown about that, as
they had benefited politically from Twitter's outrageous censorship practices which were ongoing.
The
Nurse Ratched of Disinformation. When we first heard Alejandro Mayorkas announce a Department of Homeland
Security "Disinformation Governance Board," we thought he was trolling. Then he said Nina Jankowicz, best known as
TikTok's "Mary Poppins of Disinformation," would head it. LOL, as the kids say. Right out of the gate, Jankowicz
trumpeted her "committment [sic] to protecting free speech." Apparently Mayorkas is serious, and the administration is
rolling out Jankowicz, author of the new book "How to Be a Woman Online," as a "renowned expert in the field of
disinformation." That's true, though she's more a practitioner of the craft than an expert in combating it.
Jankowicz condemned the New York Post's reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop as a "Russian influence op" and fanned the
bogus claim that the Steele dossier began as a "Republican opposition research project."
CNN
Guest Gives the Game Away in Deranged Rant on Controlling Speech. Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter has made all
the right people mad, and that includes a lot of the talking heads within the mainstream media. Initial reactions were
as overwrought as you'd expect, with cable news setting its collective hair on fire. But, if anyone thought the passage
of time would bring about some moderation, I can assure you that hasn't happened. CNN held a hilariously composed
roundtable on Sunday morning with figures like Brian Stelter, April Ryan, and someone named David Zurawik. While
obviously being an avid political observer, I'll admit to having no idea who Zurawik is. Yet, my first exposure to him
has certainly left an impression. Namely, that he's deranged. While discussing Musk's acquisition, Zurawik lit
into a hysterical rant about the supposed dangers of unabridged free speech. In doing so, he managed to give the
game away on what about this deal is actually driving the media so insane.
Biden's
'Mary Poppins of Disinformation' the perfect nanny to tidy up mess of free speech? "You can just call me the
Mary Poppins of disinformation." That Twitter intro to a TikTok parody of the song "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" is
now indelibly connected to Nina Jankowicz, the new head of the federal government's announced Disinformation Governance
Board. Given her record of spreading disinformation and advocating censorship, Jankowicz hardly needed the
musical-inspired persona. Yet, for the Biden administration, Jankowicz — like Mary Poppins — is
"practically perfect in every way" to keep track of whether we all "measure up" in our public statements. It is still
unclear from the administration's public statements what authority the board will wield, but White House press secretary Jen
Psaki described the board as intended "to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a
range of communities."
Ukraine
passes "disinformation" law, begins making arrests. It would appear that it's not just Alejandro Mayorkas who
is setting up a Ministry of Truth in a supposedly free and democratic country and policing the speech of citizens. It
turns out that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky thought that was a fine idea as well, so he worked with his country's
legislature to put a similar program in place following Russia's invasion of his country. His government is seeking to
identify "traitors" who have expressed support for Russia and its war against "Nazis" in Ukraine. Anyone who has been
materially aiding the enemy is of course subject to prosecution, but people have been arrested just for expressing their
support for Moscow on social media. That's what happened to a man known only as "Victor" this month. Ukrainian
security officers in full riot gear showed up at his apartment in Kharkiv to talk to him about some of his social media posts
before hauling him off to jail.
Democrats'
attacks on what they call "disinformation" have their roots in Barack Obama's Truth Squad. While calling public
figures "Orwellian" goes back decades, usually it's an exaggeration. Not so with the new Misinformation and
Disinformation Governance Board, whose existence was revealed by the soulless hack Alejandro Mayorkas, Joe Biden's secretary
of Homeland Security. The board's executive director is Nina Jankowicz, a misinformationist. Among other things,
Jankowicz in 2020 called into question the veracity of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations. George Orwell's "Ministry
of Truth" in 1984 of course propagandized lies. The Democrats' Orwellian attacks on their opponents began during Barack
Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, when he created groups such as "The Truth Squad."
Truth
Social under 'direct attack' by Biden's disinformation board. Truth Social is a target of the Biden
administration's new Disinformation Governance Board, according to the man running former President Donald Trump's nascent
social network. Devin Nunes, the congressman who left office to become the CEO of the Trump Media & Technology Group,
posed the government as the most significant threat to freedom of speech now that "Big Tech tyrants" can't silence people's
voices. "I think it's so Orwellian, so dystopian, something you only see in dictatorships that now, they're going to
set up some type of disinformation board. I think that's a direct attack on what we are doing at Truth Social, because
we can no longer be canceled," Nunes told Maria Bartiromo on her Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures [5/1/2022].
Who
else should serve on the Government Disinformation Board? The Department of Homeland Security has decided to
create a "Disinformation Governance Board," Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated in congressional hearings held last
week. Though Mayorkas attempted to link it to efforts to combat misinformation from human smugglers and to counter
Russian cyber and election misinformation, no one really knows the extent of the board's mission. [...] The administration's
choice of an executive director to head the board, Nina Jankowicz, has not inspired confidence in the integrity of the DGB,
either. Jankowicz has historically been a staunch supporter of Democrats. And she believed the shocking Hunter
Biden laptop story was fabricated, part of a Kremlin influence operation. She has been wrong about numerous other
things, as well, while seemingly labeling anything with which she disagrees as "disinformation."
The
last people anyone should trust to tell or determine the truth are journalists and government officials. There
are many examples of where the media colluded with the Democrats to intentionally spread misinformation to the public.
Here is a small sample: Democrats in Congress have repeatedly challenged elections where they lost yet they weren't
called treasonous, weren't said to be against democracy, where we didn't have endless hearings, and they weren't
silenced. Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and others repeatedly lied to the public about Obamacare, but the media not only didn't
silence them, but they also supported them. Obama and Hillary concocted a lie about Benghazi, as Americans were killed,
and the media never silenced them. The Obama administration used the media to spread lies to get support for the Iran
deal, yet the media never silenced them. Most of the media still supports the deal that enriched Iran, which continues
to spread terrorism and pledge death to America. The media and others intentionally spread the lie of "Hands up Don't
Shoot" that ginned up racial hate against cops. How many cops have been killed and injured because of that intentional
lie? Yet, no one who spread the lie has been silenced. The media, DNC, the Hillary campaign and government
employees colluded to spread the lie about Russian collusion to destroy Trump and they have not been silenced.
A
Bridge Too Far, the Demise of the Democrats. [Scroll down] The other devastating part of the demise of
the Democrats is their totalitarian, tyrannical nature when it comes to squelching any dissenting thought, perspective,
opinions, and assessment. The fact that the left wants to establish a Disinformation Board in the Department of
Homeland Security is highly disturbing. And that is true especially when you consider the Secretary of Homeland
Defense's assertion that the southern border is being well managed. The left in America has gone too far, but will
constitutional conservatives rise to the occasion and crush them at the ballot box? The Republican party must realize
that this is not the time for bipartisanship, compromise, or any other forms of weakness. This is the time to
resoundingly defeat leftism in America.
Democrats
place American democracy in grave peril. The past few weeks have been extremely troubling for those who value
democracy, freedom, human rights, and civil liberties within the United States of America. Democrats have made
unprecedented power grabs. If left unchecked, democracy will wither away in favor of a sinister police state.
Recently, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified that a Disinformation Governance Board has been set up to
counter disinformation coming from Russia, China, Iran, the cartels, and other hostile actors, rebutting their misleading
information. Critics have rightly slammed this as Biden's Ministry of Truth. In recent days, Mayorkas didn't
state the specific powers the board may have, he only said that the board would "tackle the threat, not only to election
security, but to our homeland security," and would work with platforms to stop it. Will they be able to prosecute
people for spreading 'disinformation? Will this board be restricted to focus on social media only as its tool, or will
the powers also apply to 'right-wing media' directly? We do not know.
A
Government Disinformation Board? You Don't say! Just as the internet has been roiled by the news that
Elon Musk is buying Twitter and plans to turn it into a free speech forum, the administration announced its nifty plan to
stifle free speech. Of course, the creation of such an office is a tell that their ideas cannot withstand the sunlight
of open debate. It's also a distraction from the real issues a competent administration would be dealing with. [...]
The Disinformation Governance Board, announced this week, is a mysterious creation with no known purpose or need and will be
headed by a highly eccentric gal who has a weird history of denouncing as disinformation things that are true while insisting
on things that are demonstrably false. [...] To head this mysterious operation, Mayorkas has named Nina Jankowicz, [...] She
claimed there are many non-binary people who give birth. Actually, I think that is "gender disinformation," not mockery
of women officeholders.
The
Ministry of Truth Is Where the Rubber Meets the Road. Is this the hill that patriots will die on? Is this
the moment when MAGA nation says, "[...], no"? Is this the time when hardworking blue-collar Americans say with a
unified voice: "We will not comply"? Is this the legal case where the Supreme Court acts as if it is ...the Supreme
Court and declares Mr. Biden's newly created Bureau of Disinformation unconstitutional from its inception? Is this
the final straw, where a clear plurality of Republicans "man up" and act as the opposition party should, and refuse to fund
Mr. Biden's "Ministry of Truth"? I think America and the rest of the world will know the answers to these questions
soon. If the answers are yes, we still have a country based on the U.S. Constitution. If the answers are
no, we are done as a democratic republic, and the Constitution has no teeth.
The Disinformation
Governance Machine. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell called the enforcement mechanism of his
totalitarian propaganda regime the "Ministry of Truth." Appearing before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, the
ironically named Department of Homeland Security was slightly more subtle. Too many people have read Nineteen
Eighty-Four. Calling a government-funded effort to suppress criticism of the regime the "Ministry of Truth" would
cause people to worry and complain. Instead, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the creation of
the "Disinformation Governance Board." No, I am not making that up. I sympathize with Florida Governor Ron
DeSantis, who said he wondered whether this new assault on free expression was a "belated April Fools' joke."
Unfortunately, it's not.
Mayorkas:
Disinformation Board Won't Infringe on Free Speech, Monitor Americans. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro
Mayorkas said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" that the Disinformation Governance Board would not infringe on free speech
or monitor Americans. Anchor Dana Bash said, "Let's talk about what your department is calling, The Disinformation
Governance Board that you unveiled this week. Republicans are calling it Orwellian and comparing it to the ministry of
truth in the novel 1984. Can you clarify what exactly is this? What exactly will this disinformation governance board
do? Will it monitor American citizens?" [Mayorkas reply omitted for brevity, among other things.] [...] Bash asked,
"Will American citizens be monitored?" Mayorkas said, "No, no, the board does not have any operational capability.
What it will do is gather together best practices in addressing the threat of disinformation from foreign state adversaries,
from the cartels and disseminate those best practices to the operators that have been executing and addressing this threat
for years."
J.D.
Vance: Joe Biden's 'Propaganda Ministry' Is About Enforcing Speech Codes on Americans. J.D. Vance, the
best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy, says President Joe Biden's "propaganda ministry," referencing the administration's
new Disinformation Governance Board, is all about enforcing speech codes on American citizens. Vance, [... told]
Breitbart News Daily that Biden's Disinformation Governance Board is a blatant attempt to silence Americans on social
media companies controlled by a handful of billion-dollar tech corporations.
Homeland
Security Secretary Mayorkas praises Biden's new disinformation czar calling her 'eminently qualified and neutral' despite
fact she dismissed Hunter laptop as 'Trump campaign product'. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on
Sunday praised President Joe Biden's new disinformation czar as 'qualified and neutral' despite a slew of Republicans
criticizing her as partisan. Asked about that criticism on CNN's State of the Union, Mayorkas called Nina Jankowicz
'eminently qualified, a renowned expert in the field of disinformation.' 'And neutral?' host Dana Bash asked.
Mayorkas answered, 'Absolutely so.' He also pledged the White House's new Disinformation Governance Board will not be
used to monitor American citizens, despite mounting right-wing concerns that it will be a tool for censorship and surveillance.
DHS
secretary defends disinformation board and its 'neutral' leader. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas
defended his agency's controversial new Disinformation Governance Board. Mayorkas said the board would not be used to
monitor U.S. citizens and praised its new leader, who has come under fire, during a Sunday [5/1/2022] interview on CNN's
State of the Union. "The board does not have any operational authority or capability," Mayorkas told CNN's Dana
Bash. "What it will do is gather together best practices in addressing the threat of disinformation from foreign state
adversaries, from the cartels, and disseminate those best practices to the operators that have been executing in addressing
this threat for years." The secretary said "no" when asked if the board will monitor U.S. citizens.
Biden's
Ministry of Truth will spy on American citizens. In a disturbing development for freedom of speech, the Biden
administration announced that it will collaborate with social media to crack down on any information that is critical of
Biden's vaccination policy. Disinformation, said Tucker Carlson, "seems to be anything the Biden administration does
not want the people to know including, for example, how effective the COVID vaccines actually are and what the potential side
effects might be from taking them." You would no longer be allowed to text such information to other people. Your
private conversations would be controlled by Joe Biden and the Democrats. "The Biden administration considers
censorship applicable to private speech," said Carlson. To add insult to injury, we have a new development that frankly
is beyond my comprehension. The president has created an information czar to spy on American citizens. Biden is
establishing what he calls the Disinformation Governance Board as part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Biden's
New Disinformation Governance Board Is Already Expanding Its Scope. Old Joe Biden's ominous Disinformation
Governance Board has just been announced, and it's already expanding the scope of its responsibilities. [...] But in this
case, the expansion makes the agency in question even more dangerous to the American people than it was already. When
Politico revealed the existence of the Board in an offhanded statement buried 60 paragraphs down in its Wednesday "Politico
Playbook," it said that the Department of Homeland Security was "standing up a new Disinformation Governance Board to
coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia."
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, however, went farther than that almost immediately, saying on Thursday: "We have just
established a mis- and disinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security to more effectively combat this
threat not only to election security, but to our homeland security." And when Jen Psaki defended Biden's new Ministry of
Truth on Thursday, she went farther still: "We know there has been a range of [disinformation] out there about a range
of topics, I mean, including COVID for example, and also elections and eligibility."
Biden's
Controversial Ministry of Truth Czar Offered Advice to New President in 2020: Disinformation Is 'an American
Pathology'. Long before Nina Jankowicz was tapped by Joe Biden to head the Disinformation Governance Board in
the Department of Homeland Security, she offered advice to the new president and claimed disinformation is "an American
pathology" that has to be cured. In her piece "How to Defeat Disinformation: An Agenda for the Biden
Administration" in Foreign Affairs magazine in November of 2020, Jankowicz spelled out what she believed should be
done at the White House, including creating her job to quash conspiracy theories about the outcome of the election. The
author of books on disinformation not only offered advice to Biden but promoted the idea of a new federal post by saying that
Biden should use "new governmental structures and legislation" to fight back.
Why
Does the Left Have Such a Difficult Time With the Concept of 'Free Speech'? [Scroll down] This is one of
those truths that appear to be self-evident. But today, only some speech is considered "free." The rest must comport
with a dizzying number of rules, conventions, and arbitrary guidelines that makes a mockery of the concept of free
speech. The left just doesn't get it. They have lost sight of the beautiful simplicity of the concept of free
speech. "If you can think it, you can speak it," is no longer operative in America. It's been lost. And if
we don't find it ... Get in line my fellow sheep.
Naomi
Wolf Eloquently Deconstructs the Terms Dis, Mis, and Malinformation. The first principle in battling against
the Alinsky crew is to not to accept their terminology. Controlling language is a specific tactic of the professional
political left. We used to call it labeling, but modern leftists moved beyond labels into the creation of new
definitions. Modern leftists now use two different strategies depending on their target: (1) create new words, the
traditional labeling; and (2) redefine existing words. In this interview Naomi Wolf is one of the few people I have
seen who correctly starts her discussion by dispatching the linguistics and framing her own baseline argument. All
politicians and candidates for office should watch how Wolf responds to the first question from Tucker Carlson, and then
makes the better argument. Wolf doesn't waste time debating "misinformation", "disinformation", or "malinformation",
instead she accurately just says those things do not exist. Information stands undefined. From that position
there are truth and lies. Her approach is exactly correct. Do not accept the insanity of the Alinsky language
effort. [Video clip]
Guys... I
think we just got a Ministry of Truth. There's a lady in the Department of Homeland Security that now runs
something called the "Disinformation Governance Board." [...] Seriously, it is not the government's job to determine
truth. It is the government's job to protect the rights of its people, provide strong borders and defense for its
people, and promote the values of its people. All under the explicit authority of the people. When government
starts determining truth claims, it becomes a religious entity. Change my mind.
White
House defends disinformation board: 'I'm not sure who opposes that'. The White House on Thursday [4/28/2022]
defended the newly announced Disinformation Governance Board that critics say will be led by someone with a history of making
controversial and misleading statements. Nina Jankowicz, who was a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center and
adviser to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship, confirmed a report Wednesday
that she has been named executive director of the Department of Homeland Security's new panel.
Biden
appoints "Disinformation Czar". As we learned under the administration of Barack Obama, you can never have too
many "czars" running around the White House. (It's a rather odd choice of words when we're teetering on the brink of war with
Russia, but here we are.) Now, thanks to President Joe Biden, we're getting a brand new one. Inside the Department of
Homeland Security, there will be a "Disinformation Governance Board" that will be led by our new "Disinformation Czar."
That person is Nina Jankowicz, a former "disinformation fellow" at the Wilson Center who previously served as an advisor to
the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. I'm not sure how many people had the chance to review this new office, but the
unintentionally hilarious nature of the name they selected is pretty hard to ignore.
Biden's
Disinformation Chief Nina Jankowicz: Online Mockery of Kamala Harris a Threat to Democracy and National
Security. President Joe Biden's new disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz argued online mockery of Vice President
Kamala Harris and other women in public life was a threat to national security. "Platforms and governments aren't doing
enough," she wrote on social media. "It's time to act. Our national security and democracy are at stake."
The Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of the new Disinformation Governance Board led by Jankowicz on
Wednesday [4/27/2022]. Jankowicz argued that Congress should create new laws to block mockery of women online, citing the
volume of "gender disinformation" used to criticize Harris.
WH
Response on 'Disinformation Board' Shows Just How Desperate for Control They Are. It was not a coincidence that
you had Elon Musk buying Twitter and then all of sudden, the Biden team found the need to form a Ministry of Truth run by the
DHS — otherwise known as a creepy-sounding "Disinformation Governance Board." Now, the first reaction to such
an effort by the Biden Administration that most people would have to this is how incredibly Orwellian it is. The second
might be that it's exactly what the First Amendment was designed to protect against. The third might be to take notice
this says "governance," and is being run by the Department of Homeland Security, which usually is pursuing threats and
crimes. So, can fully-declared speech crimes be far away, when you start to have things like this?
Disinformation
and Censorship. As Scott noted yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security has established a "Disinformation
Governance Board" to combat misinformation ahead of the 2022 midterms. Administration spokespeople have widened the
alleged portfolio of this group to include covid, election integrity, and much else. The announcement has been greeted
with both outrage and ridicule. In a press conference earlier today [4/29/2022], Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took on
the Disinformation Governance Board along with a broader indictment of the Biden administration. I think it is a good
example of DeSantis's skill at communication: he talks in a way that everyone can understand, and just about everyone will
agree with. [Video clip]
Psaki
gives full-throated defense of Biden's new 'disinformation' czar. White House press secretary Jen Psaki on
Friday defended the head of President Joe Biden's 'Disinformation Governance Board' and slammed the board's critics, noting
its existence goes back to the Donald Trump administration. Republicans have attacked Nina Jankowicz, who was chosen to
head the board, as a 'Russia expert' and one senator released a video of her singing about 'misinformation' to the tune of
the Mary Poppins song 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.' Psaki pushed back, noting Jankowicz is 'an expert on online
disinformation.'
The Ministry
of Truth Is Real. Things got pretty weird, pretty quickly in the wake of Elon Musk's trial balloon about buying
Twitter[.] [...] The Biden administration and progressive activists (including former President Obama) sprang into action
following Monday's [4/25/2022] announcement and — quite literally — began the process of defining
disinformation and calling for its regulation to make sure bad speech was addressed and eliminated from the collective safe
space. [...] But the Biden administration, feeble as it is, was just doing the hard job laid out for it by former president
Barack Obama[,] who was just doing the job laid out for him by the Aspen Institute's disinformation commission. Obama
gave a speech at Stanford University on April 21st outlining the threats of disinformation online and how unfettered speech
is a threat to democracy (Musk was already well in the throes of figuring out how to convince Twitter to sell by this point,
of course). And the former president painted a very frightening picture, indeed. One that ultimately pointed a
finger back at "companies that have come to dominate the internet generally, and social media platforms in particular."
Meet
Biden's New Head Of The Ministry Of Truth, Nina Jankowicz. [Apparently quoting Tucker Carlson:] So, one of our
biggest law enforcement agencies has men with guns around the country doing so many things to stop disinformation and false
narratives. Those aren't even lies. They're just deviations from the approved script. Mayorkas told us
again that men with guns planned to "identify individuals who could be descending into violence." Could be
descending. Not people who've committed violence or even been accused of any crime at all. DHS is instead using
law enforcement powers to identify and punish people who think the wrong things. That would be opponents of the Biden
administration. Is this dystopian fiction? No. It's happening right in front of us. That means that
Joe Biden's partisan political enemies are now officially enemies of the state. How is this happening in America?
[Video clip]
DHS
Sec. Mayorkas claims he didn't know about new 'disinformation' czar's past. Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed he didn't know the Biden administration's newly appointed
"disinformation" czar had actively pushed faked news regarding the now-infamous Steele Dossier, used to smear former
President Donald Trump, and Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell." Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Mayorkas
was asked by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) if he knew who Nina Jankowicz is, the woman Fox News's Tucker Carlson on Thursday
called, "the most ridiculous of all in [President Joe] Biden's Ministry of Truth." "She is the executive director of the
Disinformation Governance Board," Mayorkas correctly stated. "Is this the same individual who said the Dossier was real
and the Hunter Biden laptop story was false?" asked Rep. Jordan. "Is that the individual who's now running the
Disinformation Governance Board?" "I'm not familiar with those statements," Mayorkas responded.
Joe
Biden's Disinformation Chief Nina Jankowicz Called Herself the 'Mary Poppins of Disinformation' on Tik-Tok.
President Joe Biden's new disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz once described herself as the "Mary Poppins of Disinformation,"
using Tik-Tok to warn people about 'atrocious' online content. Jankowicz made her Tik-Tok video private after it was
featured on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show Thursday night [4/28/2022], but a version of it still exists on Twitter.
Biden's
New "Minister Of Truth" Sang In Unbearably Cringe Music Videos. The ease with which insane leftists
confidently, albeit horrendously and erroneously, go through life is something worthy of a larger study. How can
self-confidence and attachment to reality be so far removed? It is simply a marvel. The Biden
administration's — indeed, the entire left's — gaslighting efforts went into overdrive this week when
it was announced that, under the Department of Homeland Security (yes, the same institution that labeled concerned parents at
school board meetings as "domestic terrorists") would be forming a separate entity with the truly Orwellian title of
Disinformation Governance Board. The Ministry of Truth is easier to say and is simply more accurate.
Biden
Forms 'Disinformation Board' to Go After Critics [and the] Official Heading It Played Role in Shutting Down [the] Hunter
Biden Story. The Biden administration is abandoning all semblance of Constitutional government by forming a
"Disinformation Board" within the Department of Homeland Security to target the Democratic Party's critics. The
provocative move — carried out in the aftermath of Elon Musk's stunning purchase of Big Tech platform
Twitter — appears to be a desperate attempt to rein in growing discontent at the Biden administration
online. The political intentions behind the maneuver are revealed by the DHS official that has been tapped to lead the
administration's version of the 'Ministry of Truth.'
U.S.
joins 55 nations to set new global rules for the internet. The United States and 55 other nations on Thursday
[4/28/2022] signed a political commitment to push rules for the internet that are underpinned by democratic values, at a time
when the U.S. has accused Russia of wielding internet disruptions as a part of its escalating attacks on Ukraine. The
commitment, called the "Declaration for the Future of the Internet" — the first such effort of its kind — protects human
rights, promotes free flow of information, protects the privacy of users, and sets rules for a growing global digital economy
among steps to counter what two Biden administration officials called a "dangerous new model" of internet policy from
countries such as Russia and China.
The Editor says...
Ri-i-i-ight. Joe Biden wants to "promote [the] free flow of information" while he sets up a "Disinformation
Governance Board" to filter out the information he doesn't like.
Should
we be alarmed by Biden's new Disinformation Governance Board? On Wednesday [4/27/2022], Homeland Security
Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified to Congress that a Disinformation Governance Board had recently been set up.
This news comes a week after former President Obama talked about disinformation and even called for censorship of social
media at Stanford University[.] It was also announced that Nina Jankowicz will head the Department of Homeland
Security's Disinformation Governance Board as executive director. The expectation usually is that such a department
would be headed by an individual with a consistent track record of being factual and a proclivity of spotting false
information. But since it is the Biden administration, you must expect the contrary of what is required.
The
comical buffoonery of Biden's new disinformation czarina. I confess to alternating between fear and scornful
laughter when it comes to the newly announced Disinformation Governance Board that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced
April 27 in a Senate hearing. The blatant violation of the First Amendment, the lack of Congressional authorization,
the blatant choice of topics of focus (immigration and Russia in Spanish Language media) right before an election and the
utter ridiculousness of the woman named to head, it all make it hard for me to take this Orwellian state organ seriously.
Yet, Joe Biden sits on the Oval Office and commands the federal bureaucracy, which is seeming eager to accommodate plans that
would expand their powers over the citizenry. Still, the selection of Nina Jankowicz to head the organization inclines
me to laughter. Tucker Carlson began his April 28, 2022 show with a segment on Jankowicz that was alternately
horrifying and hilarious.
Biden's
Ministry of Truth. Earlier this week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told
Congress that his agency is creating a "Disinformation Governance Board" to combat "misinformation" coming from Russia as we
near this year's midterm elections. The Biden administration's new Committee on Public Information will be led by Nina
Jankowicz, "a disinformation fellow" who, perfectly enough, comes to the administration from a think tank named after Woodrow
Wilson. Like Wilson, Mayorkas, himself a font of untruths, does not explain under what constitutional power he proposes
to oversee speech. It gets tedious to point this out, but you can vividly imagine the thermonuclear meltdown the
country would be (rightly) subjected to if a Republican president assembled a government panel tasked with weeding out
"disinformation." To our technocrats' dismay, this isn't Europe, where the state can dictate allowable speech and sometimes
arrests those who don't abide. Here, citizens are the ones who call out the state for peddling misinformation, not the
other way around.
WH
pick for Big Brother-like disinformation board spread lie about Hunter Biden laptop. President Biden's pick to
lead his Department of Homeland Security's Big Brother-like Disinformation Governance Board has her own history of posting
disinformation online. Nina Jankowicz, who was a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, has repeatedly cast doubt
on The Post's reporting about Hunter Biden's laptop. During a series of live tweets during the presidential debate
between Biden and Donald Trump in October 2020, Jankowicz had referenced the laptop. "Back on the 'laptop from hell,'
apparently — Biden notes 50 former natsec officials and 5 former CIA heads that believe the laptop is a Russian
influence op," Jankowicz tweeted.
A
Society Convinced It Needs Seeing Eye Dogs. As everyone who has used badly programmed graphics programs knows,
artifacts occur when narrative objects left over from the last rendering intrude on the current view. To deal with
artifacts, George Orwell coined the phrase "memory hole." "A memory hole is any mechanism for the deliberate alteration or
disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, such as from a website or
other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened." Often audiences of
mediated views simply pretend not to see the artifacts, even though they have not yet been refreshed away, because by
convention that is the way the game works. Lastly, there is pixelization, caused by mediation's ability to portray an
event in arbitrarily fine detail. In social media, these often appear as slogan-categories like 'climate denier',
'Nazi', 'Karen', 'oligarch' etc.
Biden
Regime Announces Creation of "Disinformation Governance Board" Under the Authority of Homeland Security with a Lunatic in
Charge. Following Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter last week, which was a triumphant victory in the ongoing war
over free speech, the Biden Regime announced the creation of a "Disinformation Governance Board" that will be tasked with
silencing anything deemed to be misinformation that's related to homeland security. And, yes. It's just as
dystopian and creepy as it sounds. The new board will operate under the authority of the Department of Homeland
security with a special focus on Russia and "irregular migration," according to the Post Millennial.
Deep
State Response, Dept of Homeland Security Will Establish Disinformation Board with Obvious Agenda. I think we
are now seeing the outlines of how the Fourth Branch of Government are planning to keep control over information,
specifically public discussion on Big Tech platforms, even as Elon Musk moves to open the valves of information from the
social media platform Twitter. Previously the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced a new
Dept of Homeland Security priority to combat disinformation {LINK} on technology platforms including social media. Many
eyebrows were raised as the announcement appeared to be an open admission that the U.S. government was going to control
information by applying labels, that would align with allies in social media, who need a legal justification for censorship
and content removal.
Biden
sets up 'Disinformation Board' to combat midterm fake news headed by Russia expert who called Hunter's laptop a 'Trump
campaign product'. President Biden has set up a 'disinformation' board headed-up by a woke so-called expert
who's against free speech and tried to pour cold water on the Hunter laptop scandal. Nina Jankowicz will head The
Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board as executive director, Politico Playbook reported Wednesday
morning [4/27/2022]. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did not disclose any powers that would be granted to
the dystopian-sounding board while addressing lawmakers on Wednesday. He explained that the board would work to tackle
disinformation ahead of the November midterms, particularly in Hispanic communities.
Biden's
'disinformation' chief Trump dossier author fan and Hunter Biden laptop doubter. The Biden administration's new
czar to combat disinformation has a history of sharing misleading claims about British ex-spy Christopher Steele's
discredited dossier and downplaying controversy embroiling President Joe Biden's son. Nina Jankowicz, who was a
disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center and adviser to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright Public
Policy Fellowship, confirmed a report Wednesday that she has been named executive director of the Department of Homeland
Security's new "Disinformation Governance Board." [...] But there's a lot to unpack before she even gets started in her new
role. The Washington Examiner dove into her comments in recent years.