Tag: wrongthink

FDA Official Pressures YouTube Into Removing a Channel For Posting His Own Vaccine Comments

Last week, a top official with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) apparently filed a bogus copyright claim to get a critic’s YouTube account taken down. This is an inappropriate act of censorship that, not long ago, conservatives would rightly have stood against.

“Jonathan Howard, a neurologist and psychiatrist in New York City, received an email from YouTube on Friday night, which stated that Vinay Prasad, who is the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, had demanded the removal of six videos of himself from Howard’s YouTube channel,” The Guardian reported this week. “Howard’s entire channel has now been deleted by YouTube, which cited copyright infringement.”

On his channel, Howard hosted videos of public health officials—including Prasad, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya—making statements during the COVID-19 pandemic that turned out to be untrue or overly myopic. “I had accumulated about 350 videos, almost all of which were short clips of famous doctors saying absurd things,” Howard wrote in a blog post, “that herd immunity had arrived in the spring of 2021 and that RFK Jr. was an honest broker about vaccines, for example.” Howard is also critical of Prasad’s stance on vaccines, which Prasad now has the authority to regulate.

According to an email Howard posted, YouTube “terminated” his channel after “multiple copyright strikes” against his videos, and the “removal request” came from Prasad.

“Publishing someone else’s videos without modification or commentary is a clear copyright violation,” an FDA spokesperson told The Guardian. “The mission of Johnathan Howard was not medical transparency, but personal profit by grifting and stealing someone else’s intellectual property.”

“My YouTube channel had 256 subscribers and its videos were typically seen by dozens of people,” Howard wrote. “I never promoted the channel and made no money from it.” Besides, U.S. law allows for fair use of copyrighted material, which means someone can use protected content for purposes such as “criticism, comment, news reporting,” or “research” without the creator’s permission.

Howard is the author of the book We Want Them Infected, which criticized doctors and public health officials who advocated a herd immunity strategy for dealing with COVID-19. Howard says such warnings fed into anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. His YouTube channel collected videos of people who are now in charge of public health institutions, making what he feels were irresponsible claims during the pandemic.

But whether you agree with Howard or not, it is wrong and hypocritical for Prasad to silence his critics in this way.

Keep reading

Military Pursues AI Systems To Suppress Online Dissent Abroad

The U.S. military wants artificial intelligence to do what human propagandists cannot: create and spread influence campaigns at internet speed while systematically suppressing opposition voices abroad, according to internal Pentagon documents obtained by The Intercept.

The classified wishlist reveals SOCOM’s ambition to deploy “agentic AI or multi-LLM agent systems” that can “influence foreign target audiences” and “suppress dissenting arguments” with minimal human oversight. The military branch seeks contractors who can provide automated systems that operate at unprecedented scale and speed.

“The information environment moves too fast for military remembers [sic] to adequately engage and influence an audience on the internet,” the document said.

“Having a program built to support our objectives can enable us to control narratives and influence audiences in real time.”

As reported by The Intercept, the proposed AI systems would extend far beyond simple content generation. SOCOM envisions technology that can “scrape the information environment, analyze the situation and respond with messages that are in line with MISO objectives.” More controversially, the systems would “suppress dissenting arguments” and “access profiles, networks, and systems of individuals or groups that are attempting to counter or discredit our messages.”

The Pentagon plans to use these capabilities for comprehensive social manipulation, creating “comprehensive models of entire societies to enable MISO planners to use these models to experiment or test various multiple scenarios.”

The systems would generate targeted messaging designed to “influence that specific individual or group” based on gathered intelligence.

SOCOM spokesperson Dan Lessard reportedly defended the initiative, declaring that “all AI-enabled capabilities are developed and employed under the Department of Defense’s Responsible AI framework, which ensures accountability and transparency by requiring human oversight and decision-making.”

The Pentagon’s move comes as adversaries deploy similar technology. Chinese firm GoLaxy has developed AI systems that can “reshape and influence public opinion on behalf of the Chinese government,” according to recent reporting by The New York Times. The company has “undertaken influence campaigns in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and collected data on members of Congress and other influential Americans.”

Keep reading

MASSIVE! “In the Closet” Playwright and DOJ Lawyer Drafts Motion to Dismiss Proud Boys’ $100M Lawsuit — Biden’s Star Witness Recants, Admits Feds Forced False Testimony! NAMES NAMED! VILE CORRUPTION STILL INSIDE DOJ & FBI!

Eight months into President Trump’s second term, Biden-era operatives still infest the Department of Justice.

Check out exposé on dirty DOJ bad actors still hiding out in the agency’s darkest corners:

DOJ moves to dismiss the $100M Proud Boys lawsuit

DIRTY DOJ EXPOSE!!! We name names!!

DOJ attorney Siegmund F. Fuchs just filed paperwork to kill the case brought by Enrique Tarrio and the “Seditious Five” — men who say they were politically persecuted by Biden’s DOJ… pic.twitter.com/oIjJxnvQH0

— LindellTV (@RealLindellTV) August 29, 2025

This seemingly permanent class of partisan bureaucrats — holdovers from the Obama–Biden years and deep state administrations before them — have festered in place across administrations, surviving presidents and feeding off power like leeches, draining the institution while weaponizing justice against Trump supporters.

Now, one of them — DOJ attorney and part-time playwright Siegmund F. Fuchs — has filed paperwork to dismiss the $100 million lawsuit brought by Proud Boys leaders, in yet another bid to shield the deep state from accountability for political persecution.

The lawsuit, filed by Enrique Tarrio and the so-called “Seditious Five,” charges that Biden’s DOJ engaged in “egregious and systemic abuse of the legal system” to silence political opponents. Proud Boys civil attorneys argue their clients were railroaded with inflated charges, deprived of due process, and sentenced to decades in prison before President Trump ultimately pardoned or commuted many of them earlier this year.

Yet the Department of Justice insists there was “no misconduct.”

That claim collapses under the weight of bombshell new revelations from the government’s own star witness.

Keep reading

Graham Linehan Arrested by Armed Police Over X Posts as UK Free Speech Crisis Deepens

There are many ways to return to Britain after a long-haul flight. Maybe you get a cup of tea, a mildly annoyed customs agent, and a taxi driver who tells you London’s gone to hell. Or, if you’re Graham Linehan, you’re met at Heathrow by five armed officers who then take you into custody over things you wrote on the internet.

The man who created Father Ted and The IT Crowd, shows that helped define British humor, was arrested, detained, and taken to hospital, all because of three tweets.

He wrote later: “I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online.”

The Metropolitan Police confirmed that Linehan was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence, related to posts he made on X. Armed officers from the Met’s Aviation Unit escorted Linehan off of a flight from Arizona and into custody.

The tweets in question included one joke suggesting that if a “trans-identified male” is found in a women-only space, people should “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Keep reading

UK free speech crackdown sees up to 30 people a day arrested for petty offenses such as retweets and cartoons

Bernadette Spofforth lay in jail on a blue gym mattress in a daze, finding it difficult to move, even breathe.

“I just closed down. But the other half of my brain went into Jack Reacher mode,” she said, referring to the fictional action hero. “Every single detail was in this very vivid, bright, sharp focus.”

She remembers noticing that you can’t drown yourself in the toilet, because there’s no standing water in it and the flush button is too far to reach if your head were in the bowl.  

She’d end up being detained for 36 hours in July 2024. Three girls had just been murdered in Southport, England, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. But Spofforth was not under suspicion for the crime.

Instead, horrified, and in the fog of a developing tragedy, she’d reposted on X another user’s content blaming newly arrived migrants for the ghastly crime — clarifying in her retweet, “If this is true.”

Hours later she realized she may have received bad information and deleted the post — but it had already been seen thousands of times. 

The murders resulted in widespread civil unrest in the UK, where mass migration is a central issue for citizens. Four police vehicles arrived at her home days later. Spofforth, 56, a successful businesswoman from Chester, was placed under arrest.

“We’re a year on now and I can honestly tell you that I don’t think I will ever recover,” she told The Post. “I don’t mean that as a victim. Those poor children were victims. But I will never trust anything the authorities say to me ever again.”

Her story is one repeated almost hourly in the UK, where data suggests over 30 people a day are arrested for speech crimes, about 12,000 a year, under laws written well before the age of social media that make crimes of sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character.”

Social media continues to be flooded with videos of British cops banging on doors in the middle of the night and hauling parents off to jail—all over mean Facebook posts and agitated words on X.

Keep reading

Shopify Reimposes Content Restrictions Through Shop App, Reviving Ban on “Hateful” Content

Shopify has reintroduced restrictions on certain types of merchandise, targeting what it calls “hateful content.”

This marks a significant shift back toward censorship, though the company has avoided framing it that way.

The change comes more than a year after Shopify eliminated similar content bans in what was then seen as a move toward supporting free expression in commerce.

Recently, the company updated a help page related to its Shop app and payment system to include a ban on products promoting “hateful content, violence, gore, profanity, or offensive content.”

This revision, made sometime after May, and noticed by Bloomberg, applies specifically to the Shop sales channel.

While Shopify’s main platform-wide acceptable use policy still does not include a hateful content clause, this new rule effectively reintroduces content control through a different path.

The company had previously removed its ban on hateful content in July 2024.

That decision appeared consistent with CEO Tobi Lütke’s long-standing defense of open commerce.

In a 2017 blog post, Lütke wrote, “commerce is a powerful, underestimated form of expression.” He went on to say, “We don’t like Breitbart, but products are speech and we are pro free speech,” and added, “To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas…When we kick off a merchant, we’re asserting our own moral code as the superior one. But who gets to define that moral code?”

Rather than restoring the original company-wide policy, Shopify has now imposed restrictions within a specific tool. This segmentation allows the company to present itself as a neutral platform while still controlling what merchants can sell. In practice, it results in censorship through back-end enforcement.

Keep reading

South Korea’s Ruling Party Pushes “Special Court for Rebellion” – A Communist-Style Assault on Judicial Independence

Korea’s pro-China totalitarian leader met with President Trump this week at the White House.

On August 28, 2025, South Korea’s Democratic Party (DP) crossed a dangerous line. In response to the judiciary’s rejection of an arrest warrant for former Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, the DP not only condemned the courts but also moved to create a so-called “Special Court for Rebellion.”

This is not a normal judicial measure. It is an attempt to strip authority from ordinary courts and build a parallel tribunal designed to guarantee convictions. In reality, this amounts to the creation of a Communist-style pseudo-court—courts in appearance, but not in substance—serving as instruments of political repression.

Key developments on August 28:

** The DP’s emergency committee and hardliners denounced the judiciary’s decision as sending the “wrong signal” to so-called “rebellion forces.”

** Calls for a “Special Court for Rebellion” escalated from rhetoric to formal resolution and legislative planning. According to Yonhap News, the DP will present legislation to establish the tribunal as early as September 4.

** Senior DP lawmakers declared: “The ordinary judiciary cannot be trusted. A special panel is required to handle rebellion charges.”

On social media and in press briefings, DP figures demanded “swift reapplication of warrants” and labeled the judiciary’s independence as an obstacle to “ending rebellion.”

This is nothing less than a Stalinist tactic:

** Branding political opponents as “rebels” to justify extraordinary tribunals;

** Overriding the independent judiciary with a handpicked court loyal to the ruling party;

** Turning the language of law into a weapon for political purge.

The Communist People’s Courts of the 20th century operated in precisely this way: they mimicked judicial form while serving as political tools. The Democratic Party is now attempting to reproduce this in South Korea. It is a direct assault on the separation of powers and the rule of law.

Keep reading

Germany: Economist Thomas Vierhaus Fined €16,100 for Sarcastic X Posts

A Düsseldorf-based economist has found himself at the center of a criminal case for making sarcastic remarks online about high-profile public figures.

Thomas Vierhaus is being prosecuted under Section 185 of the German Criminal Code for three separate X posts that government officials and journalists deemed insulting.

The total fine, delivered in the form of a penalty order from the Düsseldorf District Court on August 12, amounts to €16,100.

This is part of a growing trend in Germany where speech that irritates those in power increasingly results in legal consequences.

The first incident dates back to June 2023. Katrin Göring-Eckardt, Vice President of the Bundestag and a leading figure in the Green Party, had issued an alarmist post about climate change.

She cited droughts, wildfires, and high sea temperatures as proof that the climate crisis was unfolding “with full force.” Vierhaus, unimpressed, replied that “there is indeed an extreme drought, namely in Katrin Göring-Eckardt’s head.”

This offhand remark would likely have disappeared unnoticed if not for a doctoral student who had taken it upon himself to patrol the internet.

The student filled out a criminal complaint form on Göring-Eckardt’s behalf and sent it to her. She signed and forwarded it to the police, setting off the first of several investigations into Vierhaus’s social media activity.

The second charge came after Vierhaus discovered the identity of the same doctoral student and referred to him online as a “little snitch.”

Given that the student had already been submitting complaint forms to politicians for them to sign, the label was hardly unprovoked. Nevertheless, the student filed a personal complaint and claimed insult.

A third post earned Vierhaus further legal trouble when he criticized ARD journalist Moritz Rödle on July 7, 2023.

Rödle had defended Economics Minister Robert Habeck’s decision to skip a Bundestag debate on Germany’s heating law, attending a Bundesrat session instead.

Vierhaus responded with a post calling Rödle a “nincompoop” and added, “You still have a lot to learn in order not to be constantly fooled.”

Rödle filed a complaint through Hessen gegen Hetze, a government-operated online platform that encourages users to report speech deemed hateful or offensive.

Keep reading

DOJ Settles With Ten FBI Whistleblowers Targeted By Biden Administration

Ten FBI whistleblowers who say the Biden administration punished them for their “political beliefs” and for disclosing misconduct in the bureau will have their security clearances reinstated and collect back pay, according to a settlement announced Tuesday.

“These ten (whistleblowers) collectively suffered 12-years-worth of unjustified suspension time,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, posted on X after getting word of the settlement. “They were punished (because) of their disclosures/political beliefs. In other words, they were treated like skunks at a picnic. Now they receive justice.”

Sen. Grassley has long advocated for the whistleblowers and has helped navigate the settlements to their retaliation complaints. According to the Senator’s office, under the Biden administration the ten whistleblowers received retaliation that included demotions, loss of pay, and revocation of security clearances.

The legal nonprofit Empower Oversight represented the ten FBI employees. The organization detailed in a 12-page, March 5 letter to the FBI’s general counsel the improper “retaliatory targeting” of the men and women it represented.

The letter also stated:

While it is our belief that new leadership of the FBI has the authority to remedy the wrongs suffered by our clients through management directives and should do so immediately, we are willing to work cooperatively on each of the fronts outlined above in order to explore amicable resolutions in each case.

The New York Post highlighted several whistleblowers and some of their conduct that spawned the reprisals.

One special agent was suspended indefinitely and lost his security clearance after he objected to a SWAT team being used to arrest a January 6 riot defendant on a misdemeanor charge.

Another was suspended without pay and lost his security clearance after being wrongly accused of leaking information to Project Veritas, a conservative undercover journalism operation.

Another agent in New Orleans lost his security clearance when he reported prosecutorial misconduct related to a sweetheart plea deal given to a district attorney charged with sex crimes.

A female FBI staffer was punished for reporting mismanagement and a “gross waste of funds” in connection with how criminal background checks were being processed.

“The actions taken against our clients were in reprisal for protected whistleblowing and/or improper targeting because of their political beliefs,” the March 5 letter by their attorneys stated.

Four of the whistleblowers remained anonymous.

Keep reading

‘World-first’ eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant exposed: How taxpayer’s money is being wasted on an endless game of online whack-a-mole – as it’s revealed banned X posts can simply be re-uploaded

The Australian government’s attempts to police online speech have descended into farce after its ‘world’s first’ eSafety Commissioner admitted it was effectively powerless to stop people re-sharing ‘banned’ posts.

On Tuesday, Daily Mail Australia revealed the Australian government tried to force a Canadian man called Chris Elston to delete an ‘offensive’ post about a UN trans expert, threatening X owner Elon Musk with an $800,000 fine if it was not removed from the platform.

Mr Elston, who goes by the name of ‘Billboard Chris’ on X and lives in Canada, refused to delete the post.

When X subsequently complied with the ‘removal order’ by geo-blocking the post in Australia, Mr Elston simply re-shared the offending post. 

In a colossal back-fire for the e-Safety Commissioner, that post alone has been seen over 130,000 times and a concerted campaign to re-share it by others has racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

In response to this publication’s story, Billionaire X owner Musk said: ‘What is the world coming to?’ 

Now, the taxpayer-funded eSafety Commissioner has admitted it can only block or remove the subsequent posts if other complaints are made by the offended party.

‘eSafety’s Adult Cyber Abuse Scheme is a complaints-based scheme,’ a spokesperson for the eSafety Commissioner told Daily Mail Australia. 

‘In cases where a new version of the material has been posted after a removal notice has been issued and complied with, we require a new complaint from the targeted Australian resident – or someone authorised to report on their behalf – to take regulatory action.’

This effectively means the ‘world’s first’ online safety regulator could be engaged in an endless game of whack-a-mole as it attempts to police speech online. 

Political figures were lining up to condemn the alleged waste of Aussie taxpayer’s money. 

Keep reading