Tag: police state

Hands Off My Social Media!

Democrats have found a new superstar to help get out the progressive vote: Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan. Khan has done town halls with Representatives Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) and Mark Pocan (D-WI), Senate candidate and current Representative Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Khan’s appearances are official government events—not campaign rallies. However, politicians would not appear at an event in an election year unless they where sure it would appeal to a key constituency. It may seem odd that politicians would consider it helpful to appear with an FTC chair. However, Lina Khan is no ordinary agency head. Khan has been a star in progressive circles since, while still a law student, she penned “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” This article argued that the rise of Big Tech companies like Amazon and Google required government to take a more aggressive approach to antitrust. Khan has brought high-profile antitrust cases against Amazon and META (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and What’s App), as well as attempts to block mergers and acquisitions in areas ranging from  handbags to grocery stores.

Khan advocates a “holistic” approach to antitrust that recognizes how “workers and independent businesses, in addition to consumers, can be harmed by antitrust and consumer protection violations.” She has also called for the FTC to consider how certain business practices can help facilitate antitrust violations. This holistic approach gives federal antitrust enforcers justification for second-guessing almost any decision made by almost any American business.

The FTC chair has a number of fans on the “populist-nationalist” right. These “Khanservatives” want Republicans to embrace a Lina Khan-like approach to antitrust. Khanservatives want to use antitrust to punish Big Tech for manipulating their algorithms to suppress conservative news and opinions. Some Khanservatives believe the Big Tech companies influenced the outcome of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

The most prominent Khanservative is Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. Senator Vance (R-OH) has publicly praised Khan and, before being picked as Donald Trump’s running mate, suggested that if Trump returns to the Oval Office he should “use the administrative state” to advance a conservative agenda. Senator Vance has also called for the government to break up Google because “the monopolistic control of information in our society resides with a progressive company.”

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Inside the Push for Police-Run “Misinformation” Units

Lexipol, a private consultancy geared towards providing services to law enforcement in the US, has come up with a recommendation to law enforcement to set up a “Misinformation/Disinformation Unit.”

A piece published on the company’s platform, Police1.com, asks its client police departments whether they are “prepared (for) the battle against mis/disinformation.”

Coming from Lexipol, this is no ordinary question, as the firm is said to have contracts with more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies, and is consequently considered to be a key player in what is known as “privatized police policymaking.”

According to Lexipol’s own statements, its reach in March 2020 extended to 8,100 agencies that used the company’s services and manuals (a year earlier, reports said that these agencies were located across 35 US states).

From that position, Lexipol is now making recommendations to its “subscribers” in the law enforcement community to establish a unit that would not only tackle supposed misinformation and disinformation, but also “collaborate with tech companies and civil society organizations to develop early-warning systems and identify harmful content in real time.”

This can be read as brazen defiance of the ongoing efforts, including in the US Congress, to put an end to just such “collaboration” between private and government (here, law enforcement) entities – investigated in one instance as government-Big Tech collusion.

But Lexipol’s write-up plays on fears that it is “disinformation” that might increase public hostility toward police officers and put them at greater risk.

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Escape From Psychopathocracy

You thought Halloween was over, but somehow the horror show won’t stop, and it’s not so much fun anymore. Those oversized ghouls, werewolves, and dead souls you erected in the front yard, like shrines to wickedness, represent something truly roiling and moiling around the zeitgeist of this troubled land: the ruling Party of Chaos. Look at what they have done to you and what they are still doing. Hoaxing you, sucking the life-blood out of you, and lying about everything. Wrecking the country.

     Why does it seem that the Democratic Party is in it solely to remain in power? I will tell you: because it controls the money-flows to the vast cadres of a vicious parasitical bureaucracy and its support system of outside orgs that commit crimes and make war on the rest of us. It’s called “the blob” for a reason. It’s exactly like that monster out of the 1950s horror movies, a shape-shifting leviathan that devours everything in its path with only one purpose, to grow ever larger until it consumes. . . everything.

     In my state of New York last week, the DEC authorities sent a swat team to seize a man and woman’s pet squirrel and raccoon and then killed the animals. Why? Because they could. How is that different from the DOJ swatting and seizing a grandmother for walking through the US capitol building and then stuffing her in prison for the rest of her natural life on misdemeanor charges? It’s not different. They are both demonstrations of deliberate cruelty — and that’s why the squirrel story resonated so widely around the country. You know exactly what it says: we can take whatever is dear to you. . . your pets. . . your livelihood. . . your freedom. . . your life.

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The Assassination of ‘Peanut the Squirrel’

Did state officials execute a squirrel? That appears to be the case for this New York couple whose story set social media ablaze. It’s a classic tale of government overreach. It’s overkill—literally. The squirrel was a social media sensation, having been rescued by Mark Longo of Pine City, New York, several years ago. For some reason, the Department of Environmental Conservation thought ‘Peanut’ and another of Longo’s critters, Fred, the raccoon, were illegally owned. The length at which the state secured search warrants for the Longo home. 

Mr. Longo alleges that he was treated like a terrorist as Peanut and Fred were seized by the state and then euthanized. Let’s call it what it is: the squirrel and the raccoon were brutally murdered because these woodland creatures just had to be taken because they posed a severe risk or something. What a crock. The incident even attracted the attention of the Trump campaign on TikTok. There was a statement that Mediaite thought Trump issued about the death of Peanut but that was fake news…

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They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day. 

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours. 

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media. 

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time. 

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now. 

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Policy Founded on Distorted Evidence

How can decision-makers justify promoting the mammoth undertaking of annual influenza vaccination when the best-quality evidence base is nearly empty?

This was the first question we left you with in the previous post.

In 2008, we examined several policy documents written by influential organisations from WHO, the UK, the US, Germany, Australia, and Canada. The power brokers of influenza prevention created compelling policy arguments for vaccination. For example, the WHO estimated that “vaccination of the elderly reduced the risk of serious complications or death by 70-85%.” What they didn’t point out was that this estimate was based on single studies. In the US, reductions in cases, admissions, and mortality of grandma were central arguments for extending vaccination to healthy children aged 6-23 months.

Therefore, we asked simple questions like who wrote the policy documents, whether there was a methods chapter explaining how the bigwigs reached their conclusions, and whether they had done some quality assessment of the studies or the data. 

We were persistent and looked inside some of these documents. All policy documents contained misquotes, selective citation of text or results, factual mistakes in reporting either estimates of effect or the authors’ conclusions, inconsistent logic, and contradictions.

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P’nut the Squirrel, beloved pet and internet sensation, euthanized after being seized by NY state

P’nut the Squirrel, of internet fame, has been euthanized after the pet was seized by New York state earlier this week, according to the Department of Environmental Conservation.

The seven-year-old gray rescue squirrel, commonly referred to as “P’Nut” on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, was put to death, along with Fred the raccoon, so that the animals could be tested for the presence of rabies, according to a statement from the agency obtained by WETM.  

P’nut’s guardian Mark Longo took to Instagram to memorialize his beloved pet in a video.

Through tears Longo, with his girlfriend at his side, said, “P’nut was the best thing that ever happened to us.”

“RIP MY BEST FRIEND. Thank you for the best 7 years of my life. Thank you for bringing so much joy to us and the world. I’m sorry I failed you but thank you for everything,” Longo wrote in a caption to the post announcing P’nut’s death.

Longo also asked fans for financial help for a “legal battle” and for his non-profit P’Nut’s Freedom Farm.

The DEC claims that P’nut, who was notably docile and friendly over the course of his very public facing life, bit one of the investigators on the hand while being confiscated from his Elmira home on Wednesday.

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Revealed: Governor TIM WALZ is as Guilty as Former NY Governor Cuomo in Killing Elderly at Nursing Homes in His State During COVID

Governor Tim Walz is as guilty as Cuomo of killing the elderly in his state during COVID.

Earlier this week, we learned that former New York governor Andrew Cuomo was being recommended for criminal prosecution related to his actions and responses under oath surrounding his actions during the COVID pandemic.

Cuomo deserves much worse.

His policies of mandating the placement of COVID-19 patients back into nursing homes and other extended care facilities were deadly.

Thousands of elderly Americans died in New York as a result of this policy.

But Cuomo wasn’t the only Democrat governor who had this insane policy. Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota also instituted this dangerous program in his state.

Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz faced fierce criticism for putting sick COVID patients into nursing homes during the height of the pandemic — even doubling down on his decision when the facilities accounted for a staggering 81% of his state’s pandemic deaths.

Walz had other insane policies during COVID, but he never took any blame.

Walz also thought it was a good idea to shoot paintballs at citizens during COVID.

Walz also set up a COVID snitch hotline during COVID—the communist way.

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NHS is sedating a man with Down’s syndrome to force vaccinate him

The National Health Service (“NHS”) in the UK has been secretly sedating a 30-year-old man with Down’s syndrome, Adam, with powerful sedatives in his drinks (tea, orange juice, or Coke) to subdue him before administering the covid “vaccine” and booster injections against his mother’s will.

As Law or Fiction tweeted, “This is not only about Adam, it is about everyone’s ability to protect their loved ones” and shared the video below.

Adam is a pseudonym to protect his identity.  His mother, Catherine, has launched a legal battle to stop this practice, labelling it “forced vaccination” and “tantamount to assault” on her son’s human rights.

A Court of Protection order in 2021 allowed the covert sedation process, citing that it avoids the use of restraint or physical force and overcomes Adam’s needle phobia. The judge concluded that the vaccine was in Adam’s “best interests” due to his learning disabilities, autism, Down’s syndrome and obesity, placing him in a “clinical risk group.”

Catherine argues that the pandemic is over, and covid is now treated as a mild illness. She claims her son is being unfairly categorised as high-risk and that the sedation and vaccination process is an assault on his autonomy.

The family’s lawyer, Stephen Jackson of Jackson Osborne, joined Talk TV’s Mike Graham at the end of last month to discuss what had happened.

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Civil Liberties Groups Push DOJ to Probe UK-US Collusion in Online Censorship

America First Legal (AFL) has announced that it has filed a formal complaint, based on new evidence, urging an investigation into the activities of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

This UK-based group has been accused of direct involvement in online censorship, including in the US, notably in the affair around the “naming and shaming” of the supposed Covid “Disinformation Dozen” – which is why the AFL’s complaint has now been submitted to the US Department of Justice (DOJ).

The key question that AFL wants to be answered is whether those behind CCDH should be treated as “agents of a foreign principal” who took on the role of stifling free speech in the US.

Such a designation of the group, if confirmed, would be in line with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).

We obtained a copy of the request for you here.

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