patrick.net

https://westminsterdeclaration.org/

Dismantle The Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Westminster Declaration

We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.

Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.

This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.

Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest, and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.

Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’

This complex often operates through direct government policies. Authorities in India[1] and Turkey[2] have seized the power to remove political content from social media. The legislature in Germany[3] and the Supreme Court in Brazil[4] are criminalising political speech. In other countries, measures such as Ireland’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill[5], Scotland’s Hate Crime Act[6], the UK’s Online Safety Bill[7], and Australia’s ‘Misinformation’ Bill[8] threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.

But the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance. They have done so with the full support of ‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers’ in the mainstream media, who have abandoned the journalistic values of debate and intellectual inquiry.

As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society. Soon, the European Union’s Digital Services Act will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.

Some politicians and NGOs[9] are even aiming to target end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.[10] If end-to-end encryption is broken, we will have no remaining avenues for authentic private conversations in the digital sphere.

Although foreign disinformation between states is a real issue, agencies designed to combat these threats, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States, are increasingly being turned inward against the public. Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.

We recognize that words can sometimes cause offence, but we reject the idea that hurt feelings and discomfort, even if acute, are grounds for censorship. Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny.

Speech protections are not just for views we agree with; we must strenuously protect speech for the views that we most strongly oppose. Only in the public square can these views be heard and properly challenged.

What's more, time and time again, unpopular opinions and ideas have eventually become conventional wisdom. By labelling certain political or scientific positions as 'misinformation' or 'malinformation,' our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defence against disinformation.

The attack on speech is not just about distorted rules and regulations – it is a crisis of humanity itself. Every equality and justice campaign in history has relied on an open forum to voice dissent. In countless examples, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, social progress has depended on freedom of expression.

We do not want our children to grow up in a world where they live in fear of speaking their minds. We want them to grow up in a world where their ideas can be expressed, explored and debated openly – a world that the founders of our democracies envisioned when they enshrined free speech into our laws and constitutions.

The US First Amendment is a strong example of how the right to freedom of speech, of the press, and of conscience can be firmly protected under the law. One need not agree with the U.S. on every issue to acknowledge that this is a vital 'first liberty' from which all other liberties follow. It is only through free speech that we can denounce violations of our rights and fight for new freedoms.

There also exists a clear and robust international protection for free speech. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)[11] was drafted in 1948 in response to atrocities committed during World War II. Article 19 of the UDHR states, 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.' While there may be a need for governments to regulate some aspects of social media, such as age limits, these regulations should never infringe on the human right to freedom of expression.

As is made clear by Article 19, the corollary of the right to free speech is the right to information. In a democracy, no one has a monopoly over what is considered to be true. Rather, truth must be discovered through dialogue and debate – and we cannot discover truth without allowing for the possibility of error.

Censorship in the name of 'preserving democracy' inverts what should be a bottom-up system of representation into a top-down system of ideological control. This censorship is ultimately counter-productive: it sows mistrust, encourages radicalization, and de-legitimizes the democratic process.

In the course of human history, attacks on free speech have been a precursor to attacks on all other liberties. Regimes that eroded free speech have always inevitably weakened and damaged other core democratic structures. In the same fashion, the elites that push for censorship today are also undermining democracy. What has changed though, is the broad scale and technological tools through which censorship can be enacted.

We believe that free speech is essential for ensuring our safety from state abuses of power – abuses that have historically posed a far greater threat than the words of lone individuals or even organised groups. For the sake of human welfare and flourishing, we make the following 3 calls to action.

We call on governments and international organisations to fulfill their responsibilities to the people and to uphold Article 19 of the UDHR.

We call on tech corporations to undertake to protect the digital public square as defined in Article 19 of the UDHR and refrain from politically motivated censorship, the censorship of dissenting voices, and censorship of political opinion.

And finally, we call on the general public to join us in the fight to preserve the people's democratic rights. Legislative changes are not enough. We must also build an atmosphere of free speech from the ground up by rejecting the climate of intolerance that encourages self-censorship and that creates unnecessary personal strife for many. Instead of fear and dogmatism, we must embrace inquiry and debate.

We stand for your right to ask questions. Heated arguments, even those that may cause distress, are far better than no arguments at all.

Censorship robs us of the richness of life itself. Free speech is the foundation for creating a life of meaning and a thriving humanity - through art, poetry, drama, story, philosophy, song, and more.

This declaration was the result of an initial meeting of free speech champions from around the world who met in Westminster, London, at the end of June 2023. As signatories of this statement, we have fundamental political and ideological disagreements. However, it is only by coming together that we will defeat the encroaching forces of censorship so that we can maintain our ability to openly debate and challenge one another. It is in the spirit of difference and debate that we sign the Westminster Declaration.

Patrick says

https://westminsterdeclaration.org/

Story about by Tiabbi and Schellenberger:

https://public.substack.com/p/introducing-the-westminster-declaration

Nearly all the countries that have sought to institute online censorship regimes have something in common: they’ve seen recent rises of “populist” movements, at times followed by shocks at the ballot. The phenomenon pre-dated Donald Trump, and includes parties as different as SYRIZA in Greece and Fidesz in Hungary, Brexit but also the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, along with Catalan Independence, the Gilets Jaunes, and others. New censorship laws are clearly designed, at least partly, as authoritarian responses to these movements, and often confuse real threats to public safety with legitimate political challenges.
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We are happy to note that The New York Post, The Telegraph of London, The Times of London, Die Welt, France-Soir, La Veritá, and other newspapers have written about or will soon publish articles about the Declaration. As such, it will become increasingly difficult for mainstream news media to maintain the charade that there is no Censorship Industrial Complex and that it’s perfectly normal for governments, NGOs, and Big Tech to create special agencies, committees, and boards of individual people to decide what can and cannot be said on the Internet.

It’s not normal, it’s not right, and it needs to stop. Now.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/23/supreme-court-temporarily-green-lights-biden-admin-conspiring-with-big-tech-censors/

Supreme Court Temporarily Green-Lights Biden Admin Conspiring With Big Tech Censors

Media Decides Censorship Is Bad Now That It Hits The Left

https://public.substack.com/p/media-decides-censorship-is-bad-now

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/belles-boogaloo-tuesday-october-24

Washington Post ran an encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Trump files new challenges to federal election-obstruction case in D.C..”

Trump’s newest motion to dismiss the DC Election Integrity case was filed late last night, right before the midnight deadline, which is a completely typical and totally unremarkable legal practice that for some reason seemed to delight the drooling morons at the Washington Post.

This new motion joins the previous motion to dismiss the case. The earlier motion argued Trump’s presidential immunity covers official actions taken while he was in office. Last night’s new motion added three more arguments: First Amendment free speech, double jeopardy since Trump was already acquitted for the same conduct by the Senate during his second impeachment trial, and lack of fair notice that his complaining about democrat cheating would be considered criminal conduct.

I thought you’d enjoy, as I did, the way Trump’s lawyers began their new motion. Here’s my lightly-edited version (only edited for brevity):

The prosecution opens its indictment by stating that President Trump “had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election,” including his deeply held view that there had been fraud and other irregularities “during the election and that he had won.” These points are not in dispute. Nonetheless, in an astonishing display of doublethink, the prosecution simultaneously claims that President Trump—simply by speaking his mind and petitioning for a redress of grievances—also somehow conspired to “defraud the United States,” “oppress rights,” and “obstruct an official proceeding.” Attempting to explain this obvious contradiction, the prosecution argues that there was no “outcome-determinative fraud in the election” (whatever that means), and that President Trump supposedly knew this because some government officials “notified” him “that his claims were untrue.”
If there is any constant in our democratic system of governance, it is that the marketplace of ideas—not the mandates of government functionaries or partisan prosecutors—determines the scope of public debate. Countless millions believe, as President Trump consistently has and currently does, that fraud and irregularities pervaded the 2020 Presidential Election. As the indictment itself alleges, President Trump gave voice to these concerns and demanded that politicians in a position to restore integrity to our elections not just talk about the problem, but investigate and resolve it.
The first section begins with the First Amendment, and appropriately starts by citing the Supreme Court referencing George Orwell: “Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.” The 9-0 decision, which is significant far beyond Trump’s case, also explained, “The mere potential for the exercise of (a broad government censorial) power casts a chill, a chill the First Amendment cannot permit if free speech, thought, and discourse are likely to remain a foundation of our freedom.”

Indeed. They could have been arguing the Missouri v. Biden case. It’s a fascinating confluence of issues.

Despite the WaPo’s snide commentary, it’s a terrific motion, and in a fair court it should be an easy winner. Here’s the link to the whole thing, which I found very entertaining and think is quite accessible for non-lawyers. LINK: President Trump’s Motion To Dismiss The Indictment Based On Constitutional Grounds (31 pages).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b3ddbfc4-455a-4eae-8332-e0c3948ea53e.pdf

https://aaronkheriaty.substack.com/p/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-missouri

The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over the Fifth Circuit’s grant of a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden. As I mentioned in previous posts, the injunction would bar officials from the White House, CDC, FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Surgeon General’s office from coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms to censor constitutionally protected speech. My fellow plaintiffs and I welcome this opportunity to defend the First Amendment rights of all Americans in the U.S. Supreme Court. We expect to hear from the Court soon regarding the hearing dates—it could be in February or March.

The Fifth Circuit panel of judges last month upheld the key components of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 preliminary injunction order, prohibiting named federal officials from coercing or significantly encouraging social media companies to suppress legal speech. That decision vindicated our claims that we—and countless other Americans—were blacklisted, shadow-banned, de-boosted, throttled, and suspended on social media as part of the government’s years-long censorship campaign orchestrated by the federal government.

The Biden Administration’s censorship regime has successfully suppressed perspectives contradicting government-approved views on hotly disputed topics such as whether natural immunity to covid exists, the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, the virus’s origins, and mask mandate efficacy. Beyond covid, the documents we’ve obtained on discovery demonstrate that the government was also censoring critiques of its foreign policy, monetary policy, election infrastructure, and lighting rod social issues from abortion to gender ideology.

Minnesota Senator and Hindenburg presidential candidacy Amy Klobuchar sent a letter (h/t ReclaimTheNet.org) to Jeff Bezos demanding that he enjoin Alexa from citing “unvetted sources,” specifically Substack and Rumble. No hell is hot enough for this person.

https://www.racket.news/p/amy-klobuchar-you-suck

Note to Readers: On "Project Amy"

Someone has to be made the face of the digital censorship movement. It might as well be Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar

MATT TAIBBI
OCT 26, 2023

If you read this morning’s Racket article about Senator Amy Klobuchar’s letter to Jeff Bezos asking for “proactive measures” to suppress sites like Substack or Rumble, you probably gathered I’m in a mood. I’ve had it.

Whether it’s NewsGuard slapping “anti-US” labels on Joe Lauria and Consortium News, or Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Aaron Kheriaty, and Martin Kulldorff censored on multiple platforms for being right on Covid, or podcaster Alison Morrow fired from a state job for interviewing Kheriaty, or friend CJ Hopkins in Germany criminally convicted for a book cover, or the FBI asking Twitter to remove Aaron Mate for the Ukrainian Secret Police, or ballooning budget requests of “counter-disinformation” enforcement agencies, or the new jailing even of Owen Shroyer for having “helped create January 6th” with speech, or of course the forever-detention of Julian Assange, and above all the total indifference of legacy media to all of it, it’s over. I’ve lost patience. Time for a more focused approach.

A problem when grappling with the censorship hydra is that it has no public face, no Tipper Gore or Jerry Falwell to personify the topic. Klobuchar, for reasons listed this morning and beyond, is right for this role. She needs to be Red Pencil Amy, Blacklist Amy, Amy “Thought Police” Klobuchar. And longshot or not, removal of her from office in next year’s election or even from Senate leadership positions is a worthwhile goal. The rest of Washington needs to read public sentiment about this issue through a colleague’s public relations dilemma.

https://www.racket.news/p/note-to-readers-on-project-amy

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/a-defense-of-trump-from-the-aclu

https://twitter.com/theblaze/status/1719438646829269355

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/revenge-plots-tuesday-november-7

The New York Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “New Emails Show DHS Created Stanford ‘Disinfo’ Group That Censored Speech Before 2020 Election.”

https://nypost.com/2023/11/06/news/new-emails-show-dhs-created-stanford-disinfo-group-that-censored-speech-before-2020-election/

It could have been headlined, How Stanford Basically Put a Kid Who Looks 16 In Charge of All Social Media. Meet Graham Brookie, who at least wears a suit:




In case you thought America’s “prestigious” universities could still be rehabilitated, then … oh never mind. Nobody thinks that. I’ll start over.

The Post’s article was the latest item of conclusory evidence that our “top” university system should be liquidated and sold to the Chinese for scrap, since they love it so much, but only so long as they promise to keep it and never give it back.

The actual news was that the House Judiciary Committee released an interim report yesterday concluding that Stanford University was essentially the hub of a vast criminal conspiracy to censor conservative speech in advance of the 2020 election. Using contemporary vocabulary, Stanford and its demonic officials orchestrated an insurrection, interfered with the presidential election, and conspired with swarms of government officials to deprive U.S. citizens of their Constitutional rights.

There are more details in the article, but the gist was that in classic fascist style — meaning ‘actual’ literal fascism — Stanford served as the hub between a bunch of acronymed NGO’s — almost certainly funded by the tax dollars of the same citizens who were being censored — and university students and faculty, interfacing the NGO’s (who were picking which speech to censor) with government agencies who then sent officious threatening emails to private social media companies, basically telling them what and who to censor on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis.

To try and simplify things, I made an infographic for you. Now, I’m a lawyer, not a graphic designer, so apologies to your eyeballs. Here’s how the scam worked: Stanford was a sort of censorship hub, helping gag the very same Americans whose money was being stolen (taxed) to pay the outsized salaries of pretentious liberals like Graham Brookie employed by sketchy, grant-funded, shake-and-bake, leftist non-profit groups:




Stanford and the other members of the “prestigious” university club believe both that they are simultaneously (1) entitled to our money and (2) smarter than we are. Unfortunately, they hallucinate a perfectly rotten idea that the “smartest” people around should be able to tell everybody else what to do and be supported by them at the same time, never mind that history has proven such technocratic systems are only effective at filling mass graves.

The marxist occupation of our so-called ’top’ educational institutions used to be a hilarious artifact of college life. Silly red berets, squatting in coffee shops, stomaching socialist poetry readings, all that kind of stuff. But the marxists morphed into fascists while nobody was looking, and now they have shoved their bloody hands dangerously deep right into the federal government’s bowels.

Obviously Stanford has grown too dangerous for us to allow it to keep wandering around society and it should be powered down. I’d suggest corporate America should boycott hiring students graduating from any of these odious institutions, but it seems like the fascists also control the Fortune 50. Let’s see, what else we could do?

Oh wait! Trump and the Heritage Foundation have some ideas.

Patrick says

But the marxists morphed into fascists while nobody was looking

Very little difference between a Fascist and a Marxist. Both believe in overwhelming government control of society in the name of the worker, with the only difference being the Fascists allow limited private property.

https://public.substack.com/p/new-documents-reveal-us-department

https://twitter.com/SonnyBunch/status/1722712643306147866

https://twitter.com/America1stLegal/status/1723810894197477489

https://thehighwire.com/news/the-fcc-just-voted-to-take-control-of-the-internet/

The FCC voted today on a plan that gives the Federal government full control over the Internet. The plan passed by a 3-2 margin. A press release posted immediately after the meeting stated, in part, “Under the new rules, the Commission can investigate possible instances of discrimination of broadband access, work with companies to solve problems, facilitate mediation, and, when necessary, penalize companies for violating the rules. The FCC will review consumer complaints of digital discrimination of access through an improved consumer complaint portal and staff will meet monthly to assess trends in complaint patterns. Finally, the Commission adopted model policies and best practices that will support states, local and Tribal governments in their efforts to combat digital discrimination.”

The decision means that the Biden Administration is well on its way to implementing the plan that FCC commissioner Brendan Carr said “…reads like a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university’s Soviet Studies Department.” Commissioner Carr sent out his letter of dissent last week to warn the public about this “unlawful power grab” that “chooses central planning over free market capitalism.”

Patrick says

Ernest Ramirez says he wanted to do the right thing for his son, so he decided to have 16-year-old Ernesto take the COVID-19 vaccine.

After all, what was the harm? Ramirez was told the vaccine was 100 percent safe.

Five days later, on April 24, 2021, his son died from complications related to an enlarged heart, Ramirez told LifeSiteNews.

https://twitter.com/kevinnbass/status/1725658863448347052

Ernest Ramirez’s 16-yo son died 5 days after receiving the Pfizer COVID vaccine.

FEMA then contacted Mr. Ramirez and offered to pay for his son’s burial so long as he would report that he died from COVID, not the vaccine.

https://unherd.com/2023/11/moderna-is-spying-on-you/

Far from viral deception, much of the content flagged by Moderna as “misinformation” and a supposed danger to public health was nothing of the sort, it was legitimate discussion of vaccine-related issues. But the Moderna misinformation reports, reported here for the first time, reveal what the pharmaceutical company is willing to do to shape public discourse around its marquee product. And, even affect policy-making.

Moderna did incredibly well out of the pandemic. It was shot from a fledgling biotech firm to a household name, having created one of the most effective vaccines during the outbreak. The mRNA Covid-19 vaccine catapulted the company to a $100 billion valuation and minted five new billionaires, including the chief executive, Stéphane Bancel, its chairman, Noubar Afeyan, co-founder Robert Langer, president Stephen Hoge, and Timothy Springer, a Harvard Medical School professor and early investor. ...

Behind the scenes, the marketing arm of the company has been working with former law enforcement officials and public health officials to monitor and influence vaccine policy. Key to this is a drug industry-funded NGO called Public Good Projects. According to documents we have seen, PGP works closely with social media platforms, government agencies and news websites to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by rapidly identifying and “shutting down misinformation”. A network of 45,000 healthcare professionals are given talking points “and advice on how to respond when vaccine misinformation goes mainstream”, according to an email from Moderna.

Moderna’s disinformation arm is perpetuating the public discourse wars that have been raging since early in the pandemic, aimed at shutting down anything that might undermine Covid-19-related policies, including lockdowns and efforts to encourage mass vaccinations. These documents provide a new window into the process that has roiled speech debates over the last three years. ...

But despite the growing backlash against social media censorship, the network of fact-checking nonprofits has grown at an industrial pace, providing opaque opportunities for private and public interests to take subtle control over the public discourse. Such sophistication in blending public-health messaging and corporate advertising should concern anyone with an interest in how government controls free speech.

“This is an interesting peek behind the disinformation industry, what it actually does,” said Kheriaty, the bioethicist. ”It’s about controlling a narrative, controlling the flow of information, controlling how people think about public policy, like the vaccine mandate, and how people think about a particular product that a corporation is profiting from,” he added. “It’s deeply disturbing.”

https://public.substack.com/p/ctil-files-1-us-and-uk-military-contractors

The whistleblower's documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques. ...

In truth, the building of the Censorship Industrial Complex began even earlier — in 2018.

Internal CTIL Slack messages show Terp, her colleagues, and officials from DHS and Facebook all working closely together in the censorship process.

The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.

https://notthebee.com/article/lol-disney-made-microsoft-change-their-ai-image-generator-because-people-were-making-too-many-savage-fake-disney-pixar-movie-posters

Disney got Microsoft to change its AI image generator because people were making too many savage Pixar-style posters

https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1729538920487305723?s=20

https://notthebee.com/article/the-irish-government-doesnt-want-citizens-to-equate-the-recent-dublin-stabbing-with-immigration-so-they-went-ahead-and-colluded-with-social-media-companies-to-censor-speech-can-you-guess-whic

The Irish government doesn't want its citizens to connect the recent Dublin mass stabbing to immigration, despite the fact that the perp, who stabbed four people on Thursday including three children, is an Algerian immigrant who has lived in Ireland for 20 years.

So following the attack — again, an attack by an immigrant — the Irish people rioted in the streets, which seems to have frustrated the lefties in parliament who just can't stand these "far-right," "anti-immigration," "extremists" who, for some reason, don't like it when immigrants stab their children. So what did they do in order to "stop the hate?"

They got in touch with social media companies and colluded with them to censor the speech of these Irish citizens who don't quite hold the right set of ideas. Not kidding.

A little context here: Gardai is Ireland's national police force, and Coimisiun na Mean is Ireland's new media regulator. Here's Ireland "Justice" Minister Helen McEntee, the face of the nanny state:

I spoke to a detective in Pearse Street on Saturday who was actively engaged with the social media companies throughout Thursday who was actively engaged with TikTok, actively engaged with Meta, so Instagram and Facebook, who was actively engaged with Twitter or X. She said very clearly that social media companies, in particular TikTok and Meta, they were responding, they were engaging with Gardai, and they were taking down these vile posts as they came up.

X were not. X were not, they didn't engage, they did not fulfill their own community standards, and that is why we are moving to a situation where these companies do not get to self-monitor. That's why Coimisiun na Mean has been established to make sure that these companies are held responsible. Because while some were responsible others were not.

So let me reassure you Guardai were seized of this, they were engaging, they were engaging directly with the social media companies.

Openly — right out in the open at parliament — this lady is talking about censoring speech — using Facebook and TikTok to get rid of opinions the state dislikes.

What a great treat it is to know that Elon Musk's X was the only social media company to say no. The world has changed, my friends, and now, thanks to Elon, these poor politicians will have to write laws specifically aimed at censoring speech instead of simply colluding with the platforms and getting away with it Scot-free. This is revolutionary!

Man, I love new Twitter!

You will still get banned for saying "faggot" on Twitter though.

https://billricejr.substack.com/p/dhd-tries-to-scrub-its-big-brother

In a short post today, I’d encourage my readers to simply watch this 2-minute video that was produced by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The video encourages a young girl - depicted in a cartoon - to report her “Uncle Steve” for spreading “disinformation” about Covid.

Uncle Steve had written on a social media post that the Infection Fatality Rate for Covid is “the same as the flu.”

For most healthy people under the age of 60, this is a completely true statement.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s not true - that Uncle Steve is wrong.

According to the DHS, Uncle Steve is a threat to public health and should be turned in - by his own niece … who, in this video cartoon, does dutifully turn Uncle Steve into authorities.

Right, wrong or possibly right, Uncle Steve can’t even share an opinion if it goes against what Anthony Fauci said.

As this must-read article shows, the DHS has now gone back and scrubbed all of its website posts that brag about how the bureaucracy is now performing “domestic” surveillance on Americans who are spreading disinformation. (It also scrubbed - or tried to erase - this video.)

The article depicts some of the methods and techniques numerous government agencies - and various partners - are employing to target people and organizations who do not believe the “authorized narrative.”

In the above video, we learn that the CDC is the trusted authority for Covid information and that Uncle Steve’s sources are all dangerous disinformation spreaders.

This is the same CDC that spent years repeating the Big Lie that Covid vaccines are “safe and effective” … that masks prevent virus spread … that schools had to be closed … and that Covid is a life-threatening disease even for children.

These organizations are not just captured, they’re dangerous …
I’ve recently written many words stating my belief that all important organizations are “captured.” These organizations are also incredibly dangerous.

Giant tax-payer funded organizations like the DHS are, of course, the sources who have spread volumes of dis-mis and mal-information.

It’s these organizations that brought fictional Big Brother into the real world.

When the Department of Homeland Security was created in a rush in the mass panic after 9-11, the only politician I remember predicting this agency would do great harm to the country was Congressman Ron Paul.

It’s amazing to me - but not to Paul - how rapidly this agency did become Big Brother and a sinister force in society.

I’ll finish this short article with two more Socratic-like questions:

What would happen if Americans abolished the Department of Homeland Security?

Would you suddenly feel less safe?

I wouldn’t. I’d feel much safer.

But as we all know by now, once created, no U.S. bureaucracy will ever be abolished.

Big Brother would approve.

https://rumble.com/v1hbnan-dhs-censorship-cartoon-report-uncle-steve-for-disinformation.html


original link

As far as censorship on Patrick.net, we no longer have Sikh posters writing about the immorality of Hindus.

Funny how killing off an activist in Canada and trying to off one in the USA chilled that line of communication.

I guess it's self censorship vs extreme censorship.

We are at war right now with our own government. It is why they relentlessly try to disarm us.
Recruiting video for the Army 4 PSYOP Group. Bear in mind watching this that 'enemy' now means the American people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA4e0NqyYMw
DHS has been "using this language of "domestic threat actor" to describe accused US citizen "misinformation" posts since its Oct. 2019 Whole-Of-Society Disinfo report."
https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1633228175592370179

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/grim-vermin-tuesday-december-5-2023

He’s not out of the woods yet, but things were looking up a little yesterday for convicted “meme criminal” Douglass Mackey. The Post Millennial covered the story in an article headlined, “BREAKING: Federal appellate court sides with Douglass Mackey in meme case, drops prison sentence until after appeal.” (As of this morning, Corporate Media was silent as the grave, which means it was good news for the rest of us.)

In October, a federal judge sentenced Mackey to seven months in federal prison for a speech crime: in 2016, as a joke he tweeted a fake meme suggesting that Hillary supporters should vote by text. Judge Ann Donnelly didn’t get the joke. Instead she found it was an attempt to “impair the votes of black and latino Hillary supporters,” who apparently aren’t sophisticated enough to tell the difference between a joke meme and official voting instructions. And according to the judge, black and latino people are gullible, so they believe you can vote for president by text message.

In fairness, the meme was intended to look ‘official’:




Further complicating Douglass’s case were some text messages from a 4Chan message board where he’d workshopped his meme. Several still-unidentified users on that board encouraged Mackey and explicitly expressed hopes that “illegal Hillary voters” would fall for it and waste their votes.

(When these facts emerged this year, some observers wondered whether the users who encouraged Mackey to mislead voters might have been the same FBI agents who also coordinated the Gretchen Whitmer fednapping plot. But who knows.)

Back to Mackey’s sentencing. Sticking the old judicial knife in right up to the hilt, Judge Donnelly devilishly denied Mackey’s request to stay his sentence pending appeal, intentionally defeating the entire point of an appeal. In other words, by the time his appeal was decided, he’d have already served his seven-month sentence. So, take that.

Accordingly, Mackey’s lawyers rushed to appeal Judge Donnelly’s denial of the stay of his prison sentence, so that Mackey could have enough time to appeal his conviction.

Unfortunately for Mackey’s lawyers, an appeal of a stay is almost as much work as an appeal of the conviction itself. To grant a stay, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals must review enough of the case to conclude that Mackey has a “substantial likelihood of prevailing on the merits.” This is a high standard. The appellate judges must be convinced not only that Mackey’s appeal is likely to prevail, but also that it’s substantially likely to prevail.

But after reviewing the briefs from Mackey and the government, the Second Circuit granted Mackey’s stay. This was correct, in my view. The order did not comment on the merits apart from simply granting the stay and, in a compromise for the government’s position, “expedited” the appeal by shortening up the briefing deadlines.

As a litigator with decent appellate experience, I can assure you an expedited appeal is both a blessing and a curse. Under the expedited schedule, Mackey’s initial brief is now due on January 5th, meaning Mackey’s lawyers just canceled all their holiday travel plans.

Still, it could be worse. I once had a trial scheduled with jury selection set to start at 9am on January 2nd. Ugh.

https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/p/kevin-mckernan-loses-entire-database?publication_id=791657&post_id=139458552&isFreemail=true&r=6gdz

US-based genomics scientist Kevin McKernan says he has lost an estimated US$200, 000 worth of research data after his account on file hosting service MEGA was deleted overnight.

It appears that McKernan’s account was deleted by MEGA in response to an urgent injunction granted to New Zealand’s (NZ) Ministry of Health (MOH) to prevent the sharing of anonymised data leaked by whistleblower Barry Young.

Young, a 56 year old database administrator and former employee of the MOH, leaked data from a ‘pay per dose’ Covid vaccine database to NZ journalist Liz Gunn and US tech millionaire and Substacker Steve Kirsch.

Both Gunn and Kirsch claimed that the data showed conclusive proof that the Covid vaccines are killing people at high rates. Kirsch publicly uploaded the data on Friday 1 December, the same day the injunction was granted to the MOH.

McKernan had ‘mirrored’ Kirsch’s data upload on his MEGA account to make it easier for people to download and analyse after international confusion broke out following the sensationalised release, which brought the integrity of whistleblower’s data into question.

Having heard that an injunction had been granted to the MOH to prevent further distribution of the NZ data, McKernan says that he texted Kirsch to get clarity on Sunday 3 December, but did not hear back.

In a thread posted to X on Monday 4 December Boston time* (where McKernan is based), McKernan says he woke up to find that his entire MEGA account, including medical genome sequencing and vaccine sequencing data, with an estimated value of US$200,000, had been suddenly deleted. McKernan is one of the leading scientists involved in researching DNA contamination in the mRNA Covid vaccines.

How the fuck one doesn't have an offsite backup copy sitting somewhere in a safe and still has the gall to call himself a DBA?

https://public.substack.com/p/totalitarian-bid-to-censor-entire

PumpingRedheads says

https://public.substack.com/p/totalitarian-bid-to-censor-entire

Thge author is part of the problem"
But we do know that demands for censorship have come both directly from the US military and from heads of state of Western nations around the world. What's happening should terrify all freedom-loving people.

It is not the "US Military," it is the Biden administration that is demanding censorship. This clown does not want to admit that.

RWSGFY says

How the fuck one doesn't have an offsite backup copy sitting somewhere in a safe and still has the gall to call himself a DBA?

As a DBA, I approve of this message.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/privacy-please-wednesday-december

🔨 In viral news yesterday, mRNA contamination researcher Kevin McKernan suddenly and unexpectedly reported that his entire lab’s data, including all his ongoing projects, was deleted by the authorities — because he hosted a downloadable copy of New Zealand’s jab-death data...

Kevin was understandably upset at Steve Kirsch, who provided the data to many other experts and to the general public with helpful links for downloading the data. (Dear misinformation enforcement team: I did not download the Young Data.) In fairness to Steve, though, it was not easy to foresee the long, withered, legal arm of Te Whatu Ora (or whatever it’s called).

How I would love to see what legal instrument Kevin’s data storage provider was served with, which has caused it to commit commercial suicide. Ironically, Kevin used a storage provider named ‘MegaPrivacy.’ Its slogan is literally, “The Privacy Company.” Well, ‘the privacy company’ has a lot of ‘splaining to do, because my first question is: how did Te Whatu Ora’s thugs so rapidly discover that McKernan hosted the Young Data on his “end to end encrypted” MegaPrivacy account?

Maybe there’s a good explanation, like Kevin said it was on MegaPrivacy or something. But from the outside, it looks a lot like someone or something might just have global access to search ALL these cloud providers, whenever they want, privacy or no, encryption or no. Another question is, could any of these cloud providers possibly be funded by persons or groups with interests that differ significantly from their customers’ interests?

To drive it to a point: Are there honeypot providers only pretending to be privacy-focused? It would make sense. They attract all the folks with the most to hide. We must assume there are honeypot providers, and that there’s no way to tell for sure. To me, today’s story mainly proves that the globalists were so panicked over the New Zealand data that they accidentally revealed capabilities we didn’t know they had yet.

I’ve been beating this drum for years now: Number one, keep your critical data on your own server. Or at least keep a current local backup. Data stored on someone else’s server is not your data anymore. You’re just allowed to access the data — for now. Number two: cloud data is not private, so don’t put anything on the Internet you wouldn’t want the world to see. It doesn’t matter what the providers tell you. Just read their EULAs and you’ll find lots of exceptions for subpoenas.

A subpoena is just a piece of paper.

Also ironically, Steve and Kevin are probably victims of prior rounds of public outrage. The ‘digital privacy laws’ that are almost certainly in play in this story are on the books. The public’s moral panic over ‘digital privacy’ led us right here. The irony is we were mainly trying to keep our data private from the government. But now we have tough, new digital privacy laws that the government can wield against us.

In this case, neither Steve Kirsch nor Kevin McKernan had any idea they could possibly be subject to New Zealand’s jurisdiction (and that suggests a whole ‘nother discussion about the de facto global government). But they might have noticed a teensy little red flag, which was that Barry Young, who uploaded the data, got arrested for it. That was the time to start planning contingencies.

To be clear, I am not suggesting I am smarter than anyone else. I did not see this coming (though I’m not surprised). What can I tell you? We’re in a war. The silver linings are that, first, the globalists have exposed a significant search capacity that we didn’t know they had. Second, it’s obvious they are terrified of the Young Data.

Are there any honest politicians left in New Zealand? It’ll be up to them now.

https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information?publication_id=1239256&post_id=139476619&isFreemail=true&r=6gdz

As the Israel-Hamas war began to heat up in late October, Courtney Carey, a Dublin-based employee of the Israeli website building company Wix, posted the Irish words “SAOIRSE DON PHALAISTIN” -- “Freedom for Palestine” -- on her LinkedIn page.

Within 24 hours of Carey’s LinkedIn post appearing, Alon Ozer, a Miami-based investor, took a screenshot of the post and shared it with a WhatsApp group of more than 300 like-minded investors, tech executives, activists, and at least one senior Israeli government official. Ozer took care to note that Carey worked for Wix.

Oded Hermoni, a tech journalist-turned-venture capitalist, piped up to assure everyone that Batsheva Moshe, Wix’s general manager for Israel and a member of the group chat, had been “on it since Sat[urday] night.”

Moshe then chimed in to assure her peers that the issue with Carey had been “taken care of since it was published.”

“I believe there will be an announcement soon re our reaction,” she added.

Wix terminated Carey the following day.

I hope that's not really the whole story. You should be able to say "Freedom for Palestine" without getting fired.

It's not that I'm on the side of Hamas, I just think free speech without penalty is extremely important.