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A story from 27 February illustrates how bad things have gotten. It involves a 16 year-old girl at the Richard-Wossidlo Gymnasium in Ribnitz-Damgarten (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). She posted an AfD-friendly video featuring blue Smurfs to TikTok, in which she said that Germany was not just a place, but also her home. School officials got wind of the blasphemy and the principal, Jan-Dirk Zimmermann, called the police; subsequently, no less than three officers were dispatched to neutralise this unusual threat to the German democratic order. After first establishing that the girl’s social media posts were totally legal and broke no laws, they took her from her chemistry class and escorted her to a staff room, where they told her to refrain from making such posts in the future, “for her own protection.”
There is also no institution which can be trusted to print money without falling into corruption, so the Fed should not exist.
Friedman rule, money supply = GDP Growth + 1% with a narrow quarter/half point range they can use for extra help in recessions or overheated.
Momentous events await. 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 former general counsel (top lawyer) for the FBI, James Baker, slid unnoticed into the general counsel seat at Twitter until Elon Musk bought the company late in 2022 and flushed him out. The so-called Twitter Files uncovered by indy reporters Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, produced reams of emails from FBI officials nagging Twitter execs to de-platform people and bury their dissent. You can be sure these were threats, not mere suggestions.
One of the plaintiffs joined to Missouri v. Biden is Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and professor at the Harvard Medical School, who opposed Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He was one of the authors of the open letter called The Great Barrington Declaration (October, 2020) that articulated informed medical dissent for a bamboozled public. He was fired from his job at Harvard just this past week for continuing his refusal to take the vaccine. Harvard remains among a handful of institutions that still require it, despite massive evidence that it is ineffective and hazardous. Like West Point, maybe Harvard should ditch its motto, Veritas, Latin for “truth.”
A society hostile to truth can’t possibly remain civilized, because it will also be hostile to reality. That appears to be the disposition of the people running things in the USA these days. The problem, of course, is that this is not a reality-optional world, despite the wishes of many Americans (and other peoples of Western Civ) who wish it would be.
I offer a brief Sunday evening post with updates on The Great Smurf Scandal from last week, wherein a 17 year-old school girl was scolded by three police officers for posting content to TikTok that appeared to support Alternative für Deutschland.
1) The offending video has since emerged. I recommend viewing it with your audio muted. It consists of nothing but three looped slides. The first announces that “The Smurfs and Germany have something in common.” The second is a picture of the Smurfs with the words “The Smurfs are blue …” The third says “Germany is too!” and shows a map of AfD poll results, colour-coded in varying shades of blue.
2) State security services are investigating the Stralsund police for intimidation and violating the girl’s freedom of expression! Oh no, that’s wrong, I read too quickly. What they’re actually investigating, is the “right-wing hate campaign” against the school and the local police. Important people have received “threatening phone calls and abusive emails” because of sensationalising reporting in the “populist right-wing media,” and that just can’t stand. Thank heavens we have such an overblown overfunded state media system to report on these urgent threats to our democratic society.
3) The girl, who is named Loretta, has now given an interview to Junge Freiheit. She says that the police first assured her that her TikTok post had broken no laws, before proceeding to lecture her on “incitement” and “opposition to the constitution.” They also objected that she had expressed “too much national pride” on online, and they made her promise to stop posting content for her own good.
So, that’s it. Despite writing about Germany for over three years and reading about the sorry state of my country’s politics every day, I still routinely underestimate how extreme things have gotten. I very much doubt Loretta’s is a unique case.
It strikes me that what will actually result from these “safety frameworks” that restrains what answers "the unwashed" may obtain from future AI systems is a form of knowledge suppression that the U.S. Government itself could not dream of achieving on its own due to Constitutional limits.
It is a form of "censorship of wrong think" that these mega Tech firms pioneering AI will do on their own, just like they did with “social media”.
Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.
If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.
Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.
All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.
Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation.
An investigation by U.S. Congressional staff found that the FBI — working in tandem with the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU — has been sending spreadsheets to social media companies listing “thousands of accounts to remove.”
Let me repeat: the Ukrainian spy agency has been getting Americans deleted from Facebook.
Crazy, right?
One FBI e-mail to Meta, in March 2022, mentions having “a few more” Instagram and Facebook accounts the SBU would like reviewed for deletion — and then in an attachment lists 15,865 Instagram and 5,165 Facebook accounts.
You know, just a few more.
The Congressional investigators confirmed that real Americans targeted included a New York photographer, a South Carolina business manager, a Minnesota musician, a California professor and a Wisconsin children’s book author. The SBU not only asked that these accounts and thousands of others be removed, they also requested each account holder’s e-mail address, phone number, date of birth and so on. (Like all spy agencies, the SBU likes its files.)
The sinister censorship of NatCon Brussels
The technocratic elites are the true menace to liberty.
European public life is in real trouble, if today’s goings on in the Belgian capital are anything to go by. This morning, Emir Kir, the mayor of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode in Brussels, sent in the cops to shut down the National Conservatism Brussels conference, a gathering of conservative and right-wing intellectuals, politicians and writers. As Nigel Farage took to the stage, police amassed outside with an order for the event to close, on the grounds it was ‘creating a public disturbance’.
The police initially gave attendees 15 minutes to exit the venue. But they have since decided to allow the speeches to continue while they pursue a slow-motion cancellation instead. They have said that no one else can enter, and anyone who leaves the venue will not be allowed to return. The paper-thin justification for all this seems to be that ‘anti-fascists’ are planning to protest outside the conference later on today.
This dramatic, authoritarian intervention on the part of the Brussels authorities, cheered on by self-styled left-wing activists, is the culmination of a weeks-long campaign to stop this conference – versions of which have taken place in America and across Europe – from ever taking place. Apparently, Tory MPs, German cardinals and Viktor Orban cannot be allowed to express their views in the heart of the EU.
Today, the leader of the Alternative für Deutschland faction in the Thuringian state parliament, Björn Höcke, appeared before the district court in Halle for the first day of his long-awaited speech trial. He stands accused of having used a forbidden Nazi slogan favoured by the Sturmabteilung at a political rally in Merseburg on 29 May 2021. Höcke pleads that he used the three-word phrase in a moment of spontaneous elaboration at the end of his speech, without knowing its National Socialist associations. Out of an abundance of caution, I won’t quote the phrase here, even in translation, but I’ll provide it in context below; it begins with the words “Everything for” (“Alles für”) and concludes with the name of the Federal Republic. As slogans go, it is so seemingly banal that before the trial many Germans would have been surprised to know it had any Nazi associations at all.
The risk-benefit imbalance substantiated by the evidence to date contraindicates further booster injections and suggests that, at a minimum, the mRNA injections should be removed from the childhood immunization program until proper safety and toxicological studies are conducted. Federal agency approval of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines on a blanket-coverage population-wide basis had no support from an honest assessment of all relevant registrational data and commensurate consideration of risks versus benefits. Given the extensive, well-documented SAEs and unacceptably high harm-to-reward ratio, we urge governments to endorse a global moratorium on the modified mRNA products until all relevant questions pertaining to causality, residual DNA, and aberrant protein production are answered.
Leading German politician calls for the state to issue "revocable social media licenses" for the privilege of commenting online
Ep. 100 Democrats in Congress are working to shut down a TV network that criticized them. That’s illegal but it’s happening.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — With Democrats across the country embroiled in vicious infighting, antisemitism, and takeovers of college campuses, Republicans have decided to remedy their impending victory by attacking the First Amendment.
"We realized that things were going well for us, so we took corrective action immediately," said Mike Johnson, while at the bank cashing his latest check from a Ukrainian lobbyist. "We thought: 'What can we do that will immediately enrage our most loyal voters while simultaneously preventing the self-destruction of the Democrat Party?' Of course, the most obvious choice was to pass a law against free speech. Mission accomplished!"
Sources say the new antisemitism bill passed by the House will soon be struck down by federal courts, but should still do the job of necessarily injuring the Republican Party in an election year.
"This is the decisive leadership our party needs," said Congressman Crenshaw while adjusting his brand-new clown nose. "Hey check out how loud my clown nose can honk! HONK HONK!"
At publishing time, Republicans had announced next week's plans to also attack the Second Amendment.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court delivered a nine to zero decision in favor of the despised-by-democrats National Rifle Association. Even more remarkably, the decision was penned by ultra-liberal, anti-gun Justice Sotomayor, who began the decision unqualifiedly favoring the guns rights group and slapping government overreach like this:
Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors. Petitioner National Rifle Association (NRA) plausibly alleges that respondent Maria Vullo did just that. As superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, Vullo allegedly pressured regulated entities to help her stifle the NRA's pro-gun advocacy by threatening enforcement actions against those entities that refused to disassociate from the NRA and other gun-promotion advocacy groups.
Those allegations, if true, state a First Amendment claim.
In a case that rings distinctly familiar to we who have watched the unfolding saga of government threats against social media companies to force censorship of heterodox covid commentary, the Court admonished even implied threats by government actors against private actors, when the threats are really intended to suppress citizens’ free speech.
In this case, the New York Insurance commissioner leaned on private insurance companies like Lloyd’s of London, encouraging them to refuse to insure NRA members, and implicitly threatening that insurers could be swept into ongoing criminal investigations if they didn’t cooperate.
That’s a nice insurance company you have there; it would be a shame if anything bad happened to it.
Though the Court framed its unanimous decision as merely reiterating long-standing Supreme Court precedent, it was a clear shot across the federal government’s bow in the ongoing social media wars.
This case is a good reminder of why the Founders created the insular third branch of government. Many folks raise valid concerns about nine unelected Justices wielding power for life, but the Supreme Court does act as a last-ditch emergency brake during runaway electoral periods.
In other words, because each president has the chance to slowly change the ideological character of the Court, America is insulated from rapid shifts in the political composition of the executive and legislative branches. The Supreme Court always drags behind it a long tail of sanity from previous political periods, backstopping sudden changes in party power.
Among the 477 censored submissions was the Canberra Declaration’s lengthy report, which included whistleblower testimonies from Indigenous Australians who reported severe human rights abuses during the national COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
Almost 500 submissions to a key Senate inquiry into COVID-19 abuses have been censored by the committee overseeing the probe.
Opened in October last year, the COVID-19 Royal Commission Terms of Reference Inquiry had promised to “allow all affected stakeholders to be heard”.
However, months after the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee produced its report, 477 of the 559 submissions made by members of the public have not been made available on the committee’s official website.
The trove of hidden submissions represents 85 per cent of the volume received by the committee.
Over 30 per cent of the submissions have been concealed entirely, with even the name of the submitting organisation or individual labelled “confidential”. ...
Canberra Declaration co-founder Warwick Marsh has labelled the suppression of the documents “unprecedented”.
“I have been making submissions to parliamentary inquiries for over two decades, and in my experience, this censorship is unprecedented,” he told The Daily Declaration.
“It is an affront to all Australians that a committee tasked with probing the government abuses that took place during the Covid era would censor organisations like ours seeking to draw attention to those abuses.”
“Ironically, one of the abuses we decried was censorship itself,” Mr Marsh added. “What was in our submission that the committee wanted hidden from the public?”
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It's coming, and it will encapsulate the Social Justice Revolution as part of American Canon, so to criticize it will be subject to censorship.