Tag: police state

Disinformation Isn’t the Problem — Government Coverups and Censorship Are the Problem

“What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”—Hannah Arendt

In a perfect example of the Nanny State mindset at work, Hillary Clinton insists that the powers-that-be need “total control” in order to make the internet a safer place for users and protect us harm.

Clinton is not alone in her distaste for unregulated, free speech online.

A bipartisan chorus that includes both presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has long clamored to weaken or do away with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially acts as a bulwark against online censorship.

It’s a complicated legal issue that involves debates over immunity, liability, net neutrality and whether or not internet sites are publishers with editorial responsibility for the content posted to their sites, but really, it comes down to the tug-of-war over where censorship (corporate and government) begins and free speech ends.

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes for Reason, “What both the right and left attacks on the provision share is a willingness to use whatever excuses resonate—saving children, stopping bias, preventing terrorism, misogyny, and religious intolerance—to ensure more centralized control of online speech. They may couch these in partisan terms that play well with their respective bases, but their aim is essentially the same.”

In other words, the government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.

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Virginia Prosecutors Fight to Uphold Life Sentence for Man Found Not Guilty

In 1998, someone shot and killed police officer Allen Gibson in the woods behind an apartment complex in the small town of Waverly, Virginia. Police arrested Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne for Gibson’s murder days later—despite a lack of physical evidence linking them to the crime and the presence of another possible suspect. 

In 2001, a jury found them not guilty of murder. A judge sentenced them to life in prison anyway. 

Richardson and Claiborne have been fighting to prove their innocence ever since.

In February, the Virginia Supreme Court gave Richardson a chance to make his case by ordering a new hearing to examine potentially exculpatory evidence. Richardson’s legal team says this material was never shared with his original defense attorneys—a violation of a U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Brady v. Maryland. (Richardson’s case is following a separate procedure than Claiborne’s.)

The innocence claim centers around three pieces of evidence: an anonymous call to a police tip line identifying someone other than Richardson as a suspect, a photo lineup administered to a 9-year-old witness, in which she identified a suspect other than Richardson, and a statement made by her on the day of Gibson’s death in 1998 describing someone whose hairstyle did not match Richardson’s.

At the hearing in Sussex County Circuit Court this May, Richardson’s legal team set out to prove that this evidence could have changed the outcome of the case. But they were derailed by what Richardson’s attorneys have characterized as a deliberate effort by state prosecutors and federal law enforcement officials to undermine Richardson’s innocence claim.

“Terence and Ferrone are innocent,” Jarrett Adams, an attorney for both Richardson and Claiborne, told The Appeal. “They are not innocent by accident.”

For Richardson and Claiborne, the hearing was perhaps their best chance to bolster their innocence claims with recently unearthed evidence. But ultimately, the judge allowed only one item to be admitted as evidence before the Virginia Court of Appeals—the same court that had previously dismissed his case.  With Richardson’s case now once again set to go before the potentially unfriendly Appeals court, his legal team fears he faces an uphill battle to prove his innocence.

“We’re up against the impossible,” Adams said.

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The Big Tech Think Tank Campaigning to Censor Satire

The Brookings Institution, seems to believe it has solved the problem faced by those who would like to censor memes. The problem is that memes are a form of satire, and censoring them while claiming to be a democracy is a difficult task.

But now, senior Brookings Institution fellow Nicol Turner Lee and Isabella Panico Hernandez, a project assistant, have revealed their thinking: AI memes should be treated as election disinformation “manifested” through satire.

One could use a similar form of mental gymnastics to say that this kind of argument represents a call for censorship manifested through supposed concern about disinformation.

The Brookings, meanwhile, is not just any foot soldier in the “war on memes”: it is a powerful think tank funded by the likes of Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, but also massive financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase (via its philanthropic foundation) and that of Mastercard, Impact Fund.

Brookings speaks about memes, particularly those AI-generated (adding some AI panic into the mix can only help the cause), as an extremely dangerous phenomenon hidden behind humor, and perceived as humor by pretty much everyone.

But the think tank, and others going after memes, present themselves as smarter and able to understand the true nature of this clearly humorous and often satirical imagery, which they say only “seem harmless” and “appear innocuous.”

Instead, the authors of the article say memes can influence how voters perceive candidates and other election-related information, “could potentially lead to violence” – and are “globally perceived” as being capable to “fuel extremist behavior” – which is in contrast to the US, supposedly because of the lack of appropriate regulation.

And so, less than a month before the presidential election, these according to the authors insidious messages use humor merely as a vehicle to spread dangerous influence, but are not properly tackled in the US.

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Jack Smith Trump Filing Argues That Free Speech Is Criminal

Illegal DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith wants Twitter jail to be physical. His new election-interfering filing against Donald Trump essentially argues that Trump’s free speech should be considered criminal.

Challenging the integrity of election results is almost as old as the United States itself, and Democrats have most certainly been claiming that elections are fraudulent or illegitimate since Andrew Jackson. Remember when Hillary Clinton and her supporters claimed that the 2016 election was a fraud? Jack Smith apparently does not, because his new filing against Trump argues that Trump’s speech, including his tweets, about election integrity and election fraud is reason to prosecute and convict the former president.

The First Amendment protects Americans’ free speech when criticizing the government and criticizing elections. In America, you have always been allowed to claim that you thought elections were fraudulent, whether that is true or not. It’s a First Amendment right. Smith wants to criminalize that constitutionally protected free speech when the Democrats’ most formidable opponent uttered it. But if you think it will stop with Trump, think again. The Democrat party has become the anti-free speech party, the party of the censorship industrial complex.

The Biden-Harris administration and the Harris-Walz ticket want to silence Americans as much as Smith wants to silence Trump. Didn’t John Kerry just describe the First Amendment as a “block,” and didn’t Tim Walz just endorse and defend censorship during the vice presidential debate?

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These 12 Policies Need to Change If We Want True Health Freedom

As a requirement for discussing and appreciating the imperative of health freedom in the U.S., we must first define what is meant by health freedom.

A simple definition is the right of every American to decide what medical interventions to put into or onto one’s body, the right to access and use the medical and healing modalities of one’s choice, the right to maintain one’s health according to one’s conscience and the right to live free of involuntary medication be it via the food supply, the water supply or something airborne.

In a free and moral society, health freedom is not simply a convenience; it’s an imperative.

In this vein, in the event of injury or illness, all Americans must possess the absolute right to choose what medical interventions and treatments to accept and what medical or healing modalities to utilize in order to address illness or injury; Americans must be free to choose how to maintain their health whether that be through nutrition, supplements, herbs, drugs or a myriad of healing modalities; Americans must have access to truthful information regarding how the seeds for plants and animal feed and the food in our food supply has been grown or developed, medicated, processed and packaged; and Americans have the right to exist in a society free of water and airborne medications, insect vectors and chemicals.

Health freedom can only exist in a free and moral society that values each and every member of that society. This prerequisite thus excludes medical mandates of any kind. It is immoral to force another individual to risk their life for the theoretical benefit of another.

Moreover, the government does not have the moral authority or power to dictate what medical products any American puts into or on his or her body. If anyone in government does possess that power, then no American is truly free, nor does he or she possess any meaningful right whatsoever — Americans are merely chattel.

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Germany Rushes to Expand Biometric Surveillance

Germany is a leader in privacy and data protection, with many Germans being particularly sensitive to the processing of their personal data – owing to the country’s totalitarian history and the role of surveillance in both Nazi Germany and East Germany.

So, it is disappointing that the German government is trying to push through Parliament, at record speed, a “security package” that would increase biometric surveillance at an unprecedented scale. The proposed measures contravene the government’s own coalition agreement, and undermine European law and the German constitution.

In response to a knife-stabbing in the West-German town of Solingen in late-August, the government has introduced a so-called “security package” consisting of a bouquet of measures to tighten asylum rules and introduce new powers for law enforcement authorities.

Among them, three stand out due to their possibly disastrous effect on fundamental rights online. 

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Columbia Law School Told Professors to Call Campus Police on Student Protesters

Administrators at Columbia University braced themselves over the weekend for planned citywide walkouts marking the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks in Israel and the start of the war on Gaza. In an email Sunday evening, a Columbia Law school administrator told professors to call campus security officers on protesters who did not heed requests to stop any disruptions in classrooms.    

The administrator’s email instructed professors to give two warnings to “students or others who violate the Rules of University Conduct.” Afterward, professors and teaching assistants were told to call the campus Public Safety department if the students “involved in the disruption refuse to stop despite your request they do so” and “there is no immediate safety concern,” according to the email, which was obtained by The Intercept. The email referred to the instructions as “highly practical tips for addressing and de-escalating classroom disruptions.”

The email also instructed professors to call 911 “if the disruptive behavior is so severe that it poses an immediate threat to your safety or the safety of others.” Campus security officers are unarmed.

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Don’t Let the ‘Infaux Thugs’ Close Down Debate

Today’s censors wield cudgels with the word ‘information.’ Content they don’t like they call ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation.’ The justification is fake. The protection is faux protection. Pretending to protect people from bad information by means of censorship may be called infaux thuggery.

The cudgels are hidden, of course, but it is not hard to see through the pretence and discern the underlying message: knuckle under or we will hurt you.

The UK’s Online Safety Act exemplifies infaux thuggery, as does Brazil’s recent action against X (formerly Twitter). The Australian government is dominated by another gang of infaux thugs. The UK, sadly, not only practices infaux thuggery at home, it tutors the world in infaux thuggery.

The same goes for where I live, the United States. Kamala Harris threatens: ‘If you act as a megaphone for misinformation… we are going to hold you accountable.’ Hillary Clinton calls for criminalization of speech not to her liking. Harris’ running mate Tim Walz threatens: ‘There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation and hate speech.’

Thankfully, that’s not true, at least in the US. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. responded, the US Constitution ‘is exactly what prevents the government from stifling dissent by labeling something “hate speech” or “misinformation.”’ Alarmingly, former Secretary of State John Kerry recently lamented that the First Amendment ‘stands as a major block to…hammer it [“disinformation”] out of existence,’ and implied that that ‘is part of what this race, this election is all about.’

Of course, malicious actors, including enemy states, may spread lies to sow discord – especially online. So too can those who are simply ill-informed. Yet in the absence of censorship, big lies will be torn to shreds. In this battle, the infaux thugs are on the wrong side.

The infaux thugs use ‘information’ to confuse matters. The content they suppress is more aptly termed narratives, interpretations, opinions or judgments. Those terms are more capacious, befitting frank and open debate and controversy.

In their hostility to open debate, the infaux thugs are mounting an attack on modern civilisation. They evoke our crude instincts from pre-modern life, instincts for a small, simple society, in which the leader’s narrative must be believed by all and enforced upon the members of the band. If you don’t share the leader’s narrative, you are a miscreant. You are to be corrected, expelled or destroyed. At the very least, you are to shut up.

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The Corporate Transparency Act — The Most Aggressive Domestic Spying Program Since the Patriot Act

At a press conference on August 12th, 1986, President Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

These words reflected the general and growing distrust of the government.

Today, this quote could be reinterpreted to say, “I’m from the federal government, give up your personal data, and as long as you don’t step out of line, we will keep you safe”. Not as snappy but truer today than ever before.

By the end of this year, every citizen in the United States will be required to hand over the personal data of their small business, S-corp, LLC, HoA, Board of Directors, Trustees, Real Estate Holdings, etc., to the Federal Government’s law enforcement database, operated by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen) under the Department of Treasury. Welcome to the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA).

President Trump saw this act for what it was, just another way for the Federal Government to target the middle class and their political enemies. President Trump vetoed this unconstitutional power grab in 2019, but it’s back.

In an unprecedented act of overreach, the Federal Government is moving to aggressively collect data on all small business owners, who make up the backbone of the U.S. economy, for reasons that seem “murky” at best.

The sole goal appears to be setting up yet another new database of citizens to monitor, observe, and punish. The Feds are moving to implement the CTA at warp speed, and in seeming total secrecy, as the majority of the millions of small business owners in the United States have no idea this law even exists.

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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg Orders Suspension of Private Drone Flights in North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene Flood Zone — Immediately Issues Clarification After Backlash

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has ordered a suspension of private drone flights in North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene flood zone, only to backtrack amid intense backlash.

The deadly storm has left a trail of destruction across North Carolina, with 94 confirmed deaths in the western part of the state alone. Hundreds remain unaccounted for, and residents are desperate for help.

However, instead of expediting rescue efforts, FEMA and the Biden administration seem more focused on suppressing the efforts of private citizens who stepped up where the federal response has faltered.

Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation took to social media to announce, Drone pilots: Do not fly your drone near or around rescue and recovery efforts for Hurricane Helene. Interfering with emergency response operations impacts search and rescue operations on the ground.”

Many on social media rightfully pointed out the absurdity of the ban.

One user wrote, “The USDOT and FAA don’t know drones are saving lives and aiding rescue efforts by flying insulin to inaccessible regions, locating trapped and isolated individuals, and providing imagery to the world.”

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