Gov. Kathy Hochul Is Extra Special....,

dailycaller  |  Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York warned colleges and universities in a letter on Saturday that she would order legal action against them if they fail to address antisemitism on campus.

Three university presidents appeared before Congress on Dec. 5 to testify about antisemitism on their campuses, after which they were heavily criticized for failing to say whether “calling for genocide against Jews” violated their institutions’ codes of conduct. Hochul wrote to all colleges and universities in New York that a failure to address antisemitism would result in legal action from the state under New York State Human Rights Law and Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“I assure you that if any school in New York State is found to be in violation, I will activate the State’s Division of Human Rights to take aggressive enforcement action and will refer possible Title VI violations to the federal government,” Hochul wrote in the letter, which was posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.

UPenn’s president and chairman of the board of trustees resigned on Saturday, while Harvard’s president issued a public apology amid calls for her removal.

“The moral lapses that were evidenced by the disgraceful answers to questions posed during this week’s congressional testimony hearing cannot and will not be tolerated here in the State of New York,” Hochul wrote.

Hochul has previously dealt with fallout from an antisemitic controversy at a university in her own state. Police arrested Cornell University undergraduate student Patrick Dai on Oct. 31 for allegedly making violent threats to commit a mass shooting against Cornell’s Center for Jewish Living.

“Gov. Hochul cannot command colleges and universities to violate the First Amendment. Nor may she enforce state law to compel action against speech protected by the First Amendment,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Broad, vague bans on ‘calls for genocide,’ absent more, would result in the censorship of protected expression.”

 

"Our" Crisis du Jour Makes It Clear That The U.S. Government Is A Purchased Entity

PCR  |  US Representative Matt Gaetz  has courage and principles, for the most part good ones.  

It was Gaetz who had the courage and leadership ability to get rid of Rino McCarthy as Speaker of the House.

It is Gaetz who understands that hardly any member of Congress in either party represents Americans.  Instead, they represent the military/security complex’s power and profits, the profits of the pharmaceutical companies,  the profits of agri-business (ethanol for example), the profits of Wall Street, the profits of energy, timber, and mining, and so forth.  And especially, the US Congress represents the artificial state of Israel and all of Israel’s agendas.  

Indeed, Matt Gaetz himself cannot escape having to support an occupier of Palestinians’ land, claiming that it is Israel’s.  The fact that even a brave man like Matt Gaetz has to support an aggressor against a people abandoned by the “moral” West shows how captured the US government is at all levels by vested monied interests.

Gaetz along with the entirely of the US Congress and the President  are purchased by the billions of dollars that American taxpayers are forced to hand over to Israel each year. American taxpayers are forced to give Israel annually billions of dollars that are used to purchase our government. Israel, considered a rich country, does not need foreign aid, but any member of Congress who does not vote for  Israel’s billions finds in his next election a challenger financed by Israel’s billions  and himself a victim of Israel’s slander machine. The same thing happens if you vote against an excessive military/security budget or against the agendas of powerful organized interests.  A government whose election is financed by interest groups has to represent those interest groups.

So, obviously, the solution is not term limits on members of Congress.  The solution is to take the money that Congress gives Israel to buy our government out of politics along with the ability of corporations to purchase the US government, thanks to an  unconstitutional ruling of the  US Supreme Court that it is a “free speech right”  for corporations and foreign interests to purchase the US government for their own use. 

There you have it. The US government is a purchased entity. It has nothing whatsoever to do with American interests or protecting the interests of the American people.

What needs to be done?

Matt Gaetz, the conservatives and libertarians naively  think that term limits is the answer.  This is another of Americans’ insouciant mistakes. The real solution is to extend, not limit, the terms of members of Congress and to give Congress the police powers  on which Congress’ enemy–the executive branch–has a monopoly. The corrupt Justice Department can frame up and arrest  members of Congress, and Congress has no corresponding powers.

The founding fathers distrusted democracy because of their fear of ignorant mobs. For this reason they limited the terms of US Representatives to two years.    So US Representatives and Senators are turned into whores prostituting themselves for reelection money as soon as they are elected. It is never possible for Congress or the President to represent American’s interests.

This is because of money.  The solution is to take out of politics the ability of corporations, Israel, and foreign interests to purchase the services of the US Government, which as a result of interest group funding of election campaigns turns the US government into a whore.  The Founding Fathers should have lengthened the terms of Congress and the President, prohibited all outside money from financing election campaigns, and financed at taxpayer expense free speech forums for candidates to debate their differences.  They also made a mistake by creating a legislative body too large for a common interest to emerge. This failure of the Founding Fathers doomed America to the control of vested interests.  The Democrats when they limited the terms of committee chairmen eliminated legislative power centers that could stand up to the executive branch and thereby weakened Congress as an institution.

The Establishment vs. The American Liberation Movement

Newsweek  |   Newsweek has also reviewed secret FBI and Department of Homeland Security data that track incidents, threats, investigations and cases to try to build a better picture. While experts agree that the current partisan environment is charged and uniquely dangerous (with the threat not only of violence but, in the most extreme scenarios, possibly civil war), many also question whether "terrorism" is the most effective way to describe the problem, or that the methods of counterterrorism developed over the past decade in response to Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups constitute the most fruitful way to craft domestic solutions.

"The current political environment is not something that the FBI is necessarily responsible for, nor should it be," says Brian Michael Jenkins, one of the world's leading terrorism experts and senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation.

In a statement to Newsweek, the FBI said: "The threat posed by domestic violent extremists is persistent, evolving, and deadly. The FBI's goal is to detect and stop terrorist attacks, and our focus is on potential criminal violations, violence and threats of violence. Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism is one category of domestic terrorism, as well as one of the FBI's top threat priorities." The FBI further said, "We are committed to protecting the safety and constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity, including a person's political beliefs or affiliations."

The White House declined to comment. The Trump campaign was given an opportunity to comment but did not do so.

What the FBI Data Shows

From the president down, the Biden administration has presented Trump and MAGA as an existential threat to American democracy and talked up the risk of domestic terrorism and violence associated with the 2024 election campaign.

"Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country," President Biden tweeted last September, the first time that he explicitly singled out the former president. "MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections but elections being held now and into the future," Biden said.

Biden's Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall said: "The use of violence to pursue political ends is a profound threat to our public safety and national security...it is a threat to our national identity, our values, our norms, our rule of law—our democracy."

For Attorney General Merrick Garland: "Attacks by domestic terrorists are attacks on all of us collectively, aimed at rending the fabric of our democratic society and driving us apart."

Though the FBI's data shows a dip in the number of investigations since the slew of January 6 cases ended, FBI Director Christopher Wray still says that the breach of the Capitol building was "not an isolated event" and the threat is "not going away anytime soon." In a joint report to Congress this June, the Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security say that "Threats from...DVEs [domestic violent extremists] have increased in the last two years, and any further increases in threats likely will correspond to potential flashpoints, such as high-profile elections and campaigns or contentious current events."

The FBI and DHS report concludes: "Sociopolitical developments—such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence—will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence."

The threats listed in that paragraph are all clearly associated with America's right and in particular with Trump's MAGA supporters. Right after January 6, the FBI co-authored a restricted report ("Domestic Violent Extremists Emboldened in Aftermath of Capitol Breach, Elevated Domestic Terrorism Threat of Violence Likely Amid Political Transitions and Beyond") in which it shifted the definition of AGAAVE ("anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism") from "furtherance of ideological agendas" to "furtherance of political and/or social agendas." For the first time, such groups could be so labeled because of their politics.

It was a subtle change, little noticed, but a gigantic departure for the Bureau. Trump and his army of supporters were acknowledged as a distinct category of domestic violent extremists, even as the FBI was saying publicly that political views were never part of its criteria to investigate or prevent domestic terrorism. Where the FBI sees threats is also plain from the way it categorizes them—a system which on the surface is designed to appear nonpartisan. This shifted subtly days after the events of January 6 when it comes to what the Bureau calls AGAAVE.

"We cannot and do not investigate ideology," a senior FBI official reassured the press after January 6. "We focus on individuals who commit or intend to commit violence or criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security."

Please, If You Can, Stay Free....,

thesun  |  The Canada-based platform has come under scrutiny after being used by Brand to share videos as he denies allegations of rape and sexual assault.

He has been posting daily episodes of his Stay Free programme on Rumble since signing a deal with the website a year ago.

It now faces being regulated by UK media watchdog Ofcom under the new Online Safety Bill, which was approved by Parliament last week and is due to become law next month.

Tougher new rules could prompt Rumble's bosses to stop broadcasting to Britain, a tech expert has now suggested.

The new law says internet firms must prevent children from seeing pornography as well as any material promoting eating disorders, self-harm and suicide.

Violent content and material harmful to health, including misinformation about vaccines, will also be barred.

And platforms will also be told to take down illegal material such as videos inciting violence or race hate.

Former Facebook executive Lord Allan of Hallam told The Times a new crackdown could deter Rumble's management.

He said: "You can’t get out of this by saying, 'I’m a crazy American platform, that’s not OK’, and that somehow you get a free pass - they don’t get a free pass.

"Their whole philosophy is freedom of expression, a kind of 'screw you'.

"So when they get a letter from Ofcom saying, ‘Here are all the things you’re going to have to do’, it seems to me the most likely reaction is going to be they’re going to say, ‘Well, we won’t operate in the UK any more'."

Failing to co-operate with Ofcom could put Rumble executives at risk of arrest if visiting Britain, it has been suggested.

Dame Caroline Dineage, who chairs the Commons' Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, wrote to Rumble last Thursday asking whether they would be "suspending Brand's ability to earn money".

The comic and film star has 1.4million followers on Rumble.

Her letter came as YouTube announced it would be demonetising his account on their platform, meaning Brand could no longer cash in on ads accompanying his clips there.

The BBC and Channel 4 also removed content featuring Brand from their streaming sites.

 

 

Everything The Biden Administration Does Seems Designed To Give Americans The Finger

jonathanturley  |  We previously discussed the defunct Disinformation Governance Board and its controversial head Nina Jankowicz. After the outcry over the program, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas finally relented and disbanded the board while insisting that it was never about censoring opposing views. Jankowicz has sued over the portrayal of her views. Now, Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) has exposed just how broad the scope of the censorship efforts were under the board in combatting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM). This range of authority in what the agency called the “MDM space,” included targeting views on racial justice and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

New documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) argued that the agency could regulate speech related to “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine” as well as “irregular immigration.”

Those subjects stretch across much of the “space” used for political speech in the last few years.

Notably, within DHS, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” The resulting censorship efforts included combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” I testified earlier on this effort.

So DHS asserted the authority to target viewpoints on racial justice, Ukraine, and other political subjects, including views based on fact but viewed as misleading in context.

What is also troubling is the continued effort to conceal these censorship activities. Homeland redacted much of this information on a now defunct board under FOIA Exemption 7(E), which protects “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations.” That claim is itself chilling.

After the demise of the board, National Public Radio ran an interview entitled “How DHS’s disinformation board fell victim to misinformation.”

As the title suggests, NPR just repeated the view of Jankowicz despite the objections of many of us in the free speech community. Jankowicz insisted “we weren’t going to be doing anything related to policing speech. It was an internal coordinating mechanism to make sure that we were doing that work efficiently.” Yet, what were the criminal investigations, prosecutions, and enforcement efforts now being claimed as connected to this work?

Recently, a court found that the Biden Administration’s censorship efforts constituted “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” Those words by Chief U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty are part of a 155-page opinion granting a temporary injunction, requested by Louisiana and Missouri, to prevent White House officials from meeting with tech companies about social media censorship.

Rupert Murdoch Launched The Hit On Russell Brand

CTH  |   The Sunday Times, a Rupert Murdoch publication in the U.K, published a hit piece against Russell Brand accusing him of rape and sexual assault 20-years ago.  It did not take long before the accusations triggered the cancel culture and YouTube demonetized the actor and pundit.  Russell Brand has vehemently denied the allegations.

However, in a remarkable escalation the U.K Parliament is now targeting Russell Brand.  The British government has sent a letter to U.S. social media companies, including video platform provider Rumble demanding they take action against Brand.  Not only is the British government targeting an individual and demanding action over an unproven allegation, but they are also sending a letter to the U.S. company demanding acquiescence to their censorship demand.

Standing solidly on the side of freedom, Rumble said no. However, now Rumble is the subject of a global smear campaign using a variety of media outlets and constructed controversies.  Today, Russell Brand responded to the overall effort by the British government.

Supreme Court Stays Appeals Court Ruling Against Biden Administration Censorship

PCR  |  The Nazi Biden Regime Takes Its Claim that it Has a Right to Impose Censorship on Media to Supreme Court

There is no doubt whatsoever that the Biden Regime is a Fascist Censor controlling information in the interest of its criminal agendas.  A Federal Appeals Court spelled out the censorship and banned it:  

“Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social-media companies’ decision-making processes.”

The Biden Regime hopes to convince the Supreme Court that “national security” requires abandoning the US Constitution and to coerce the court into reinstating the Biden regime’s cancellation of the US Constitution.

It is impossible for a country to survive when the values on which the country is founded are abandoned by its leaders.  America is so far gone that not even the media believes in free speech and has happily accepted the role as Ministry of Propaganda.

Certainly corporations do not respect the First Amendment.  Employees must take “harassment training” to remain employed.  Failure to use “Woke pronouns” constitutes harassment and grounds for firing.  In other words, employees do not have freedom of speech.  A coerced Woke policy has control of their tongues and forces the use of words they do not voluntarily use and to which they object.  Employees are forced to lend their validation to the preferences of a tiny perverse collection of confused people.  Why do the non-normal minority have this power over the normal majority?

Take a few minutes and try to identify any institution, public or private, that supports American values.

Trump’s goal of taking back our country might be a task too large.

Privatization Is At The Core Of Fascism

off-guardian  |  The first group of privatizations occurred in the first fascist nation, Italy, in the 1920s; and the second group of privatizations occurred in the second fascist nation, Germany, in the 1930s. Privatizations started under Mussolini, and then were instituted under Hitler. That got the fascist ball rolling; and, after a few decades of hiatus in the wake of fascism’s embarrassing supposed defeat in WW II, it resurfaced and then surged yet again after 1970, when fascist forces in the global aristocracy, such as via the CIA, IMF, Bilderberg group, and Trilateral Commission, imposed the global reign of the world’s main private holders of bonds and of stocks: the world’s aristocrats are taking on an increasing percentage of what were previously public assets.

Privatizations, after starting in fascisms during the pre-WWII years, resumed again in the 1970s under the fascist Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet; and in the 1980s under the fascist British leader Margaret Thatcher (a passionate supporter of apartheid in South Africa) and also under the smiling fascist American leader Ronald Reagan (who followed the prior success of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of White domination in the by-then resurgent-conservative U.S., and might even be said to have been America’s first fully fascist President); and in the 1990s under several fascist (formerly communist) leaders throughout the former Soviet Union, under the guidance of Harvard University’s fascist economics department, which transferred control from the former nomenklatura, to the new (Western-dependent) “oligarchs,” all under the virtual guidance of its former head, Lawrence Summers, who then was serving as the World Bank President.

And, privatizations are now all the rage throughout the world, such as in today’s fascist United States, and today’s fascist United Kingdom.

Mussolini was the man-of-the-future, but — after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died, and finally Thatcher and Reagan and other ‘free-marketeers’ came into office — Mussolini’s “future” has increasingly become our own “now”: the Axis Powers’ ideology has actually been winning in the post-WW-II world. Only, this time, it’s called instead by such names as “libertarianism” or “neo-liberalism,” no longer “fascism,” so that only the true-believing fascists, the aristocrats, will even know that it’s actually fascism. It’s their Big Con. It’s their Big Lie. Just renaming fascism as “libertarianism” or “neo-liberalism,” has fooled the masses to think that it’s pro-democratic. “Capitalism” has thus come to be re-defined to refer to only the aristocratically controlled form of capitalism: fascism. The ideological battle has thus apparently been won by a cheap terminological deceit. That’s all it takes for dictatorship to be able to win.

The democratically controlled form of capitalism, such as in some northern European countries, has commonly been called “socialism”; and, of course, it’s opposed to all forms of dictatorship, both communist and fascist. Socialism is the democratic form of capitalism. It’s not the dictatorial form of socialism, which is Marxism. It’s the form of capitalism that serves the public, instead of the aristocracy, at any point where the two have conflicting interests. It subordinates the aristocracy to the public. Fascism instead subordinates the public to the aristocracy, which is the natural tendency (because the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%,” and the “World’s Richest 80 People Own Same Amount as World’s Bottom 50%”).

Unelected Cockroaches In The West Wing Pushing Biden To Privatize Water

commondreams |  An under-the-radar report by U.S. President Joe Biden's National Infrastructure Advisory Council should not go unnoticed, said the national watchdog Food & Water Watch on Thursday, as buried in the document is a call for the privatization of U.S. water systems, which progressive lawmakers and civil society groups have long opposed.

On page 15 of the 38-page report, the advisory council said the federal government should "remove barriers to privatization, concessions, and other nontraditional models of funding community water systems in conjunction with each state's development of best practice."

Food & Water Watch (FWW) suggested that the recommendation goes hand in hand with the panel chairmanship of Adebayo Ogunlesi, who is the chairman and CEO of Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).

GIP is "an infrastructure investment bank with an estimated $100 billion in assets under management that targets energy, transportation, digital, and water infrastructure," said FWW, making the takeover of public water and wastewater utilities by a private corporation—often under the guise of improving aging systems and lowering costs—financially beneficial for the bank.

"Instead of relying on Wall Street advisers, President Biden should support policies that will truly help communities."

Mary Grant, Public Water for All campaign director at FWW, called the recommendation "a terrible idea."

"President Biden should have never appointed an investment banker to chair an advisory council for the nation's infrastructure," said Grant. "Wall Street wants to take control of the nation's public water systems to wring profits from communities that are already struggling with unaffordable water bills and toxic water."

FWW has analyzed water privatization schemes for years, finding that they it often leave communities "with higher water bills, worse service, job losses, and little control to fix these problems."

A 2018 report by the group titledAmerica's Secret Water Crisisfound that out of 11 privatized water utilities across the U.S., all but one refused to provide data about shutoffs for nonpayment. The group's 2011 brief Water = Lifeshowed that low-income households are disproportionately affected by water price hikes by private owners, as privatization turns a resource recognized by the United Nations as an "essential human right" into a commodity.

"Privatization would deepen the nation's water crises, leading to higher water bills and less accountable and transparent services," said Grant. "Privately owned water systems charge 59% more than local government systems, and private ownership is the single largest factor associated with higher water bills—more than aging infrastructure or drought."

Grant noted that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2021 was "a step forward" as it invested $55 billion to expand water infrastructure, but pointed out that "it provided only about 7% of the identified needs of our water systems."

"Instead of relying on Wall Street advisers, President Biden should support policies that will truly help communities by asking Congress to pass the Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity, and Reliability (WATER) Act (H.R. 1729, S. 938)," she added.

Elite Maleficence And Impunity (REDUX Originally Posted 8/17/23)

washingtonexaminer  |  On Monday, we got a bombshell. New documents indicate the entire justification for vaccine mandates was based on a falsehood — and that public health officials knew it. 

Emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and former NIH Director Francis Collins were aware of, and discussed, “breakthrough cases” of COVID in January 2021 — right when the vaccines became widely available. In her email, Walensky says that “clearly,” it is an “important area of study,” links to a study raising the issue, and assures the person she is sending it to that Dr. Anthony Fauci is looped into these conversations.

However, in public, Walensky was saying something quite different. Two months after discussing this data, she said vaccinated people “don’t carry the virus” and “don’t get sick.” In a congressional hearing, after it became clear people were able to get infected with COVID even after receiving the vaccine, she defended her original statements by claiming it was true at the time she said it — namely, for the strands we were dealing with in early 2021.

We now know that was not true and that Walensky herself knew it was not true.

Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, called the revelation “stunning.” He pointed out that despite this knowledge, “they continued to push vax mandates anyway.”

This is the real scandal, as there is little harm in getting something like this wrong in a vacuum. After all, COVID-19 vaccines certainly saved many, many lives and reduced the severity of infection for many more. But the fact vaccine mandates were pushed, even though those in charge knew people could contract and spread the virus while vaccinated, is indefensible. That they mislead the public on this makes it even worse.

If the vaccine stopped COVID dead in its tracks, as Fauci explained, then the decision to institute a vaccine mandate would merely be a controversial yet ultimately legitimate public health measure. The fact it did not do that but rather had primarily personal benefits completely removes the justification for mandates.

The Biden administration tried to impose a vaccine mandate on employers, thousands of people were fired from their jobs, and there was a time when unvaccinated people were not even allowed into restaurants in some of the country’s largest cities.

And it was all based on a lie.

 

 

Elite Maleficence And Impunity

washingtonexaminer  |  On Monday, we got a bombshell. New documents indicate the entire justification for vaccine mandates was based on a falsehood — and that public health officials knew it. 

Emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and former NIH Director Francis Collins were aware of, and discussed, “breakthrough cases” of COVID in January 2021 — right when the vaccines became widely available. In her email, Walensky says that “clearly,” it is an “important area of study,” links to a study raising the issue, and assures the person she is sending it to that Dr. Anthony Fauci is looped into these conversations.

However, in public, Walensky was saying something quite different. Two months after discussing this data, she said vaccinated people “don’t carry the virus” and “don’t get sick.” In a congressional hearing, after it became clear people were able to get infected with COVID even after receiving the vaccine, she defended her original statements by claiming it was true at the time she said it — namely, for the strands we were dealing with in early 2021.

We now know that was not true and that Walensky herself knew it was not true.

Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, called the revelation “stunning.” He pointed out that despite this knowledge, “they continued to push vax mandates anyway.”

This is the real scandal, as there is little harm in getting something like this wrong in a vacuum. After all, COVID-19 vaccines certainly saved many, many lives and reduced the severity of infection for many more. But the fact vaccine mandates were pushed, even though those in charge knew people could contract and spread the virus while vaccinated, is indefensible. That they mislead the public on this makes it even worse.

If the vaccine stopped COVID dead in its tracks, as Fauci explained, then the decision to institute a vaccine mandate would merely be a controversial yet ultimately legitimate public health measure. The fact it did not do that but rather had primarily personal benefits completely removes the justification for mandates.

The Biden administration tried to impose a vaccine mandate on employers, thousands of people were fired from their jobs, and there was a time when unvaccinated people were not even allowed into restaurants in some of the country’s largest cities.

And it was all based on a lie.

 

 

Thank GAWD Brandon An'em Protecting Our "Cognitive Infrastructure"

tablet  |  My fellow citizens, meet the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency—better known as CISA—a government acronym with the same word in it twice in case you wondered about its mission. This agency was created in the waning days of the Obama administration, supposedly to protect our digital infrastructure against cyberattacks from computer viruses and nefarious foreign actors. But less than one year into their existence, CISA decided that their remit also should include protecting our “cognitive infrastructure” from various threats.

“Cognitive infrastructure” is the actual phrase used by current CISA head Jen Easterly, who formerly worked at Tailored Access Operations, a top secret cyber warfare unit at the National Security Agency. It refers to the thoughts inside your head, which is precisely what the government’s counter-disinformation apparatus, headed by people like Easterly, are attempting to control. Naturally, these thoughts need to be protected from bad ideas, such as any ideas that the people at CISA or their government partners do not like.

In early 2017, citing the threat from foreign disinformation, the Department of Homeland Security unilaterally declared federal control over the country’s election infrastructure, which had previously been administered at the local level. Not long after that, CISA, which is a subagency of the DHS, established its own authority over the cognitive infrastructure by becoming the central hub coordinating the government’s information control activities. This pattern was repeated in several other government agencies around the same time (there are currently a dozen federal agencies named among the defendants in our suit).

So, what exactly has the government been doing to protect our cognitive infrastructure? Perhaps the best way to wrap your head around the actual operations of the new American censorship leviathan is to consider the vivid analogy offered by our brilliant attorney, John Sauer, in the introduction of our brief for the injunction. This is worth quoting at length:

Suppose that the Trump White House, backed by Republicans controlling both Houses of Congress, publicly demanded that all libraries in the United States burn books criticizing the President, and the President made statements implying that the libraries would face ruinous legal consequences if they did not comply, while senior White House officials privately badgered the libraries for detailed lists and reports of such books that they had burned and the libraries, after months of such pressure, complied with those demands and burned the books.

Suppose that, after four years of pressure from senior congressional staffers in secret meetings threatening the libraries with adverse legislation if they did not cooperate, the FBI started sending all libraries in the United States detailed lists of the books the FBI wanted to burn, requesting that the libraries report back to the FBI by identifying the books that they burned, and the libraries complied by burning about half of those books.

Suppose that a federal national security agency teamed up with private research institutions, backed by enormous resources and federal funding, to establish a mass-surveillance and mass-censorship program that uses sophisticated techniques to review hundreds of millions of American citizens’ electronic communications in real time, and works closely with tech platforms to covertly censor millions of them.

The first two hypotheticals are directly analogous to the facts of this case. The third, meanwhile, is not a hypothetical at all; it is a description of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project.

The censorship activities of the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, which it terms “information warfare,” have turned the FBI, in the words of whistleblower Steve Friend, into an “intelligence agency with law enforcement powers.” But there is no “information warfare” exception to the constitutional right of free speech. Which other federal agencies are involved in censorship? Besides the ones you might suspect—the DOJ, NIH, CDC, Surgeon General, and the State Department—our case has also uncovered censorship activities by the Department of the Treasury (don’t criticize the feds’ monetary policies), and yes, my friends, even the Census Bureau (don’t ask).

In prior precedent-setting cases on censorship, the Supreme Court clarified that the right of free speech guaranteed by the Constitution exists not just for the person speaking but for the listener as well: We all have the right to hear both sides of debated issues to make informed judgments. Thus all Americans have been harmed by the government’s censorship leviathan, not just those who happen to post opinions or share information on social media.

The judge presiding over the case, Terry Dougherty, asked on Friday in court if anyone had read George Orwell’s 1984 and whether they remembered the Ministry of Truth. “It’s relevant here,” he added. It is indeed time to slay the government’s Ministry of Truth. I hope that our efforts in Missouri v. Biden prove to be a crucial first step in this project to restore our constitutional rights.

 

Gleichschaltung: The Legal Coordination Of Public Life

consentfactory  |  Given its history and the character of its denizens, Berlin felt like the last place on Earth that was ever going to go totalitarian again … and then it did. In the blink of an eye. Like someone had flipped a big “fascism on” switch.

Constitutional rights were abruptly cancelled. Protests against the New Normal were banned. The German media started pumping out propaganda like a Goebbelisan keyboard instrument. Public displays of conformity were mandated. “The Unvaccinated” were banned from society. Hate drunk mobs of New Normal Germans began hunting down maskless people on trains. By the end of it, the government was making plans to forcibly “vaccinate” the entire population.

I’m not going to tell the whole story again here. I told it in the book. I told it as it happened. I told it these Consent Factory columns …

The Storming of the Reichstag Building on 29 August, 2020 (September 2020)
The Germans Are Back! (November 2020)
The “Unvaccinated” Question (March 2021)
The Criminalization of Dissent (May 2021)
Greetings From New Normal Germany (May 2021)
The Road to Totalitarianism (July 2021)
The Year of the New Normal Fascist (December 2021)
The Rise of the New Normal Reich (May 2022)
The Federal Republic of New Normal Germany (June 2022)
The Normalization of the New Normal Reich (July 2022)
The “Unvaccinated” Question Revisited (August 2022)
New Normal Germany’s Geisterfahrer Geist (August 2022)
The Rise of the New Normal Reich, Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III,
(2020-2021) banned in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands (August 2022)

… and in many other non-New-Normal-Germany-related columns.

As anyone who has read those columns or the book knows, “The New Normal Reich” does not refer to Germany exclusively. I have also written extensively about the New Normal USA, the New Normal United Kingdom, New Normal Canada, New Normal Australia, and various other New Normal countries, none of which, as far as I’m aware, are attempting to imprison me for my writing, currently.

But Germany is sensitive about its Nazi history, and, well, who wouldn’t be? I certainly would be. If I were a member of the German government, or the police, or the media, or the culture industry, I probably wouldn’t take very kindly to an American writer reminding everyone of when my people tried to conquer Europe, and systematically murdered millions of Jews and assorted other types of human beings because they thought they were the “master race.”

Of course, the New Normal has nothing to do with the Jews, or the Holocaust, or even Nazism, specifically. As I’ve written and stated in my columns and my interviews, the New Normal is a new form of totalitarianism … totalitarianism, of which Nazism is one example among others.

It happens to be a really good example … and it is an example that I am allowed to cite when I am writing and speaking about totalitarianism, or else The Universal Declaration of Human Rights means nothing.

The German authorities understand this. They’re not total idiots. They attended universities. Some of them studied political science, and logic, and even 20th-Century history. They know the difference between pro-Nazi propaganda and anti-totalitarian artwork. They know how absurd the charges against me are, but they have to be pursued, because … well, orders are orders!

And it isn’t just the German authorities. As I’ve tried to explain in my essays, and in the book, and at a recent “Real Left” conference in London, the New Normal is a global phenomenon. GloboCap, Inc. (i.e., global capitalism, or global corporatism, or whatever anyone needs to call the supranational network of global corporations, governments, banks, military contractors, media and entertainment conglomerates, pharmaceutical goliaths, imperious oligarchs, non-governmental governing entities, etc., that are currently running the world) is done playing grab-ass. Grab-Ass time is over. They are going totalitarian on us. It isn’t your grandfather’s totalitarianism. It is a new, global-capitalist form of totalitarianism. However, like every other form of totalitarianism, its ultimate goal is ideological uniformity and control of every aspect of society through a process the Nazis referred to as “Gleichschaltung.”

That process is well underway at the moment. The New Normal authorities and their diverse associates are implementing a variety of societal-control systems, censorship and “visibility-filtering” of speech, digital currencies, restrictions on movement, the enforcement of radical ideological dogmas, and so on. And they are aggressively cracking down on dissent.

One of the most repulsive aspects of their efforts to persecute political dissidents, censor our speech, and otherwise implement “New Normal Gleichschaltung” throughout the planet is the cynical way they’re using the Holocaust and false accusations of anti-Semitism as pretexts. If you wanted to make a mockery of the memory of the Holocaust and the dignity of its victims and “further the aims of a former National Socialist organization” … well, I cannot imagine a better way to do it.

I’ll keep you posted on the investigation, and I’ll try my best to not go full “L

Political Satirist CJ Hopkins Under Criminal Investigation For Thought Crimes In Germany

cjhopkins  |  The Berlin State Prosecutor has launched a criminal investigation of me for tweeting the image on the cover of my book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich. 

I am charged with “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization,” which is punishable by “imprisonment for not more than three years or a fine.”

The “propaganda” in question is the image on the cover of my book, which image will be familiar to the thousands of readers who have bought and read it. It was a Barnes & Noble and Amazon bestseller upon its release in 2022, and continues to sell quite well internationally. 

As you might recall, the book was banned by Amazon in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands in August 2022 (i.e., the time of my alleged Twitter crimes).

The Prosecutor’s notice orders me to respond to the charge within two weeks, though it’s possible the deadline to respond was today, June 8, 2023 (i.e, the day I received the notice of the investigation, dated May 25, 2023, in the mail).

Along with my response to the charge, I am ordered to provide the Prosecutor with all my personal identification papers and documentation of my net monthly income.

Obviously, the cover of my book is not “propaganda intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” Anyone vaguely familiar with my work over the last 30 years is aware of my fierce opposition to fascism, totalitarianism, and all other forms of authoritarianism.

The charge is utterly ridiculous. Swastikas are banned in Germany if they are used to promote Nazism, fascism, neo-Nazi organizations, etc. However, they are allowed to be displayed for the purposes of “civic education, countering anti-constitutional activities, art and science, research and education, coverage of historic and current events,” and similar purposes, according to German law.

Given the circumstances, I have to assume the Berlin State Prosecutor has launched this absurd investigation in order to punish me for my aggressive opposition to the roll-out of the New Normal, or intimidate me into silence. There’s quite a lot of that going around these days … just ask Matt Taibbi, Roger Waters, Sucharit Bhakdi, and Kit Klarenberg, among others.

It is possible these trumped-up charges are also a result of my criticism of the official Russia/Ukraine narrative. I’ve been pretty tough on the NATO-backed neo-Nazis and the official propaganda the corporate media has been churning out.

Whatever the actual reason is, I am, needless to say, angry. I will be responding to this baseless and unsupportable charge in a robust fashion. I’ll keep you posted.

 

 

What Is The Restrict Act And Why Is It Bad?

A short booster thread on this issue 👇

The RESTRICT ACT did not surface in a vacuum. It was preceded by Biden groundwork that is much deeper.

Unroll available on Thread Reader

2) The “TicTok ban” legislation (SB686), which is a fraudulent auspice for total internet control by the intelligence community, comes from within bipartisan legislation spearheaded by the aligned interests of Senator Warner, the SSCI and DHS.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686/text?s=1&r=15

3) None of this is accidental, and the legislative branch is walking into the creation of an online control mechanism that has nothing whatsoever to do with banning TikTok.

4) Preceding the Restrict Act, 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.

FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Announces National Cybersecurity Strategy | The White House Read the full strategy here Today, the Biden-Harris Administration released the National Cybersecurity Strategy to secure the full benefits of a safe and secure digital ecosystem for all Americans. In… https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/02/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-national-cybersecurity-strategy/

5) 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.

6) 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.

7) 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.

8) Now put the March 2nd announcement, the executive branch fiat, together with Senate Bill 686 “The Restrict Act” also known as the bipartisan bill to empower the executive branch to shut down TikTok.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686/text?s=1&r=15

9) If you read SB 686 what you discover is that congress is giving the Comm Dept & Office of Director of National Intelligence the power to shut down internet content they view as against their interests. The definitions of interests? Outlined here👇:

FACT SHEET: Biden-Harris Administration Announces National Cybersecurity Strategy | The White House Read the full strategy here Today, the Biden-Harris Administration released the National Cybersecurity Strategy to secure the full benefits of a safe and secure digital ecosystem for all Americans. In… https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/03/02/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-national-cybersecurity-strategy/

10) /END

Tablet Calls The American "Disinformation Regime" The Hoax Of The Century

tablet  |  It was not enough for a few powerful agencies to combat disinformation. The strategy of national mobilization called for “not only the whole-of-government, but also whole-of-society” approach, according to a document released by the GEC in 2018. “To counter propaganda and disinformation,” the agency stated, “will require leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGOs.”

This is how the government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.”

Even trenchant critics of the phenomenon—including Taibbi and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Jeff Gerth, who recently published a dissection of the press’s role in promoting false Trump-Russia collusion claims—have focused on the media’s failures, a framing largely shared by conservative publications, which treat disinformation as an issue of partisan censorship bias. But while there’s no question that the media has utterly disgraced itself, it’s also a convenient fall guy—by far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex. The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.

It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.

The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.

What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

The first phase of the information war was marked by distinctively human displays of incompetence and brute-force intimidation. But the next stage, already underway, is being carried out through both scalable processes of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pre-censorship that are invisibly encoded into the infrastructure of the internet, where they can alter the perceptions of billions of people.

Something monstrous is taking shape in America. Formally, it exhibits the synergy of state and corporate power in service of a tribal zeal that is the hallmark of fascism. Yet anyone who spends time in America and is not a brainwashed zealot can tell that it is not a fascist country. What is coming into being is a new form of government and social organization that is as different from mid-twentieth century liberal democracy as the early American republic was from the British monarchism that it grew out of and eventually supplanted. A state organized on the principle that it exists to protect the sovereign rights of individuals, is being replaced by a digital leviathan that wields power through opaque algorithms and the manipulation of digital swarms. It resembles the Chinese system of social credit and one-party state control, and yet that, too, misses the distinctively American and providential character of the control system. In the time we lose trying to name it, the thing itself may disappear back into the bureaucratic shadows, covering up any trace of it with automated deletions from the top-secret data centers of Amazon Web Services, “the trusted cloud for government.”

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

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. What follows is an attempt to see how this philosophy has manifested in reality. It approaches the subject of disinformation from 13 angles—like the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens’ 1917 poem—with the aim that the composite of these partial views will provide a useful impression of disinformation’s true shape and ultimate design.

Less than three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, The New York Times published an important article titled “The First Amendment in the age of disinformation.” The essay’s author, Times staff writer and Yale Law School graduate Emily Bazelon, argued that the United States was “in the midst of an information crisis caused by the spread of viral disinformation” that she compares to the “catastrophic” health effects of the novel coronavirus. She quotes from a book by Yale philosopher Jason Stanley and linguist David Beaver: “Free speech threatens democracy as much as it also provides for its flourishing.”

So the problem of disinformation is also a problem of democracy itself—specifically, that there’s too much of it. To save liberal democracy, the experts prescribed two critical steps: America must become less free and less democratic. This necessary evolution will mean shutting out the voices of certain rabble-rousers in the online crowd who have forfeited the privilege of speaking freely. It will require following the wisdom of disinformation experts and outgrowing our parochial attachment to the Bill of Rights. This view may be jarring to people who are still attached to the American heritage of liberty and self-government, but it has become the official policy of the country’s ruling party and much of the American intelligentsia.

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich responded to the news that Elon Musk was purchasing Twitter by declaring that preserving free speech online was “Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.” According to Reich, censorship is “necessary to protect American democracy.”

To a ruling class that had already grown tired of democracy’s demand that freedom be granted to its subjects, disinformation provided a regulatory framework to replace the U.S. Constitution. By aiming at the impossible, the elimination of all error and deviation from party orthodoxy, the ruling class ensures that it will always be able to point to a looming threat from extremists—a threat that justifies its own iron grip on power.

A siren song calls on those of us alive at the dawn of the digital age to submit to the authority of machines that promise to optimize our lives and make us safer. Faced with the apocalyptic threat of the “infodemic,” we are led to believe that only superintelligent algorithms can protect us from the crushingly inhuman scale of the digital information assault. The old human arts of conversation, disagreement, and irony, on which democracy and much else depend, are subjected to a withering machinery of military-grade surveillance—surveillance that nothing can withstand and that aims to make us fearful of our capacity for reason.