Tag: wrongthink

New DHS Training Videos Reveal How Far The Biden Administration Will Go To Eliminate Opposition

Consider the following scenario.

You meet up with your friend from college. While you went on to make a career for yourself in HR, she married right after graduation and started her family. You are disturbed by how she has changed over the last 10 years. She has doubts about the 2020 presidential election and Covid vaccines, speaks highly of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, and refuses to drink Bud Light. She has also become quite religious, attending potlucks and Bible studies, and laments how immoral and unsafe the world has become. You later discover she expresses her dangerous views to a sizable crowd of followers on social media.

You have a few choices on how to respond:

(1) You cut off all communication with her and report her to federal authorities for spreading misinformation.

(2) You confront her about the falsehoods and try to correct her in a kind yet firm manner.

(3) You try to investigate by talking to her husband and children as well as some of her friends.

According to documents obtained by the America First Legal Foundation, agents at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were in the process of producing short videos for these kinds of scenarios for “bystander training.” Other videos involved “a white teenage male who hurls ‘racial epithets’ and flashes a gun at his girlfriend and a young environmental activist.” Apparently, the leaders of the DHS believe these are the types most at risk of committing acts of terror — not jihadists, radical Marxists, or demented incels who are almost always the main perpetrators of such violence.

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St. Petersburg Uhuru members speak for first time since indictment

It’s a matter of free speech, says Omali Yeshitela, the longtime leader of the St. Petersburg-based Uhuru Movement and founder of the African People’s Socialist Party.

Yeshitela was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa last month and accused of working with Russian nationals to sow discord in the United States, spread pro-Russian propaganda and influence elections, along with two other members of the Uhuru Movement, Penny Joanne Hess and Jesse Nevel.

On Wednesday, the three Uhuru members spoke to the press for the first time since their indictment.

“I believe in free speech,” Yeshitela said at the news conference. “If I didn’t believe in free speech, I would never have said anything because they kill Black people for talking in this country.”

Yeshitela founded the African People’s Socialist Party in 1972. The Uhuru Movement is the party’s activist branch, started in the 1990s. The group supports reparations for Black people and has protested racism, colonialism and capitalism for decades. Hess and Nevel are the chairpersons of groups for white allies under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement, respectively.

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It’s Been 10 Years Since the IRS’s Tea Party Scandal. Will Congress Finally Act?

A bombshell revelation came to light 10 years ago this week in 2013, when the IRS apologized for years of deliberately delaying applications for tax-exempt status from right-of-center organizations. Hundreds of groups were improperly subjected to baseless investigations, invasive and improper demands about their donors, and lengthy delays in processing routine paperwork. The IRS’s actions at the time put a severe chill on conservative speech at the height of the Tea Party movement and leading up to the 2012 presidential election.

The revelation set off years of investigations and resignations at the IRS. Yet the agency secretly continued its efforts to silence nonprofits disfavored by the agency’s bureaucrats and political appointees. In November 2013, the IRS proposed new regulations that were nearly as damaging to the First Amendment as the targeting itself.

The agency proposed severe limits on issue speech by certain nonprofits, which would have forced many nonprofits to reclassify as political action committees and publicly expose their donors’ names and home addresses. The IRS also solicited comments on potentially expanding the restrictions to cover trade associations and other groups in the future. After backlash from across the political spectrum, the proposal was withdrawn, but that victory does not change the sad fact that federal law governing nonprofits is no safer today than it was when IRS officials decided they had the authority to discriminate against groups based on their views.

Enter the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act, the subject of a full committee hearing tomorrow in the Committee on House Administration. The legislation addresses a broad range of election, free speech, and privacy-related issues, including remedies for the IRS’s sordid history of policing speech. The bill, first introduced in 2022 and awaiting reintroduction this Congress, would prohibit the IRS from writing new speech-chilling rules for nonprofits and codify Trump-era reforms protecting nonprofit donors against unnecessary disclosures and warehousing of their personal information.

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Bringing the War on Terror Home to Target Americans for ‘Disinformation’

The U.S. government took the information techniques it learned after 9/11 and has turned them on Americans. America may have lost the Great War on Terror, but our technocratic elites could still win their war against American liberty.

That’s the argument made by Jacob Siegel in a 13,000-word Tablet magazine article titled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” which seeks to explain “a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people” by elitists “who believe themselves to be infallible.”

Specifically, Siegel writes, these “infallible” elitists believe they are saving the world from “disinformation,” which is whatever they view as untruths about Russia, Ukraine, Donald Trump, Covid, climate change, election fraud, Brexit, etc. You name a flavor of disinfo, and they want to save us from it. And they’re operating in the State Department and other federal agencies, in numerous foundations and NGOs, and at a hundred academic “centers” that have sprung up like ‘shrooms since 2016.

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FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf says “regulation” is needed to target “misinformation”

In an interview with CNBC, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said that online misinformation was harming the life expectancy of people, there is a need for “better regulation” on how to handle health misinformation and that “specific authorities at FDA, FTC, and other areas are going to be needed.”

“We know more and more about misinformation. It relates back to this life expectancy,” Califf said. Why aren’t we using knowledge of diet? It’s not that people don’t know about it. Why aren’t we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries? A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influence their thinking. The COVID vaccines and the antivirals give us an easy way to talk about it, but this is not limited to those areas. In heart disease, so many people don’t take their medicines, even though they’re now generic and very low-cost, often [they’re] deluded into taking things that are sold over the Internet that aren’t effective.”

According to the FDA commissioner, one of the solutions is telling the “truth is a louder volume.”

“In the good old days, when I was a practicing cardiologist, for the most part, people developed products, they got through the FDA, the label determined what was talked about, the Internet didn’t exist, you advertised in medical meetings and journals. There was sort of a hierarchy of information that went through the prescriber or the implanter in the case of devices to the patient. Of course, the problem in that system is it left a lot of people out. We now know about that. Now, everyone’s included because everyone’s connected to the Internet. But we can put out a statement about what we’ve determined based on the highest level of evidence, within ten minutes, someone who’s thought ten minutes about it can reach a billion people. And there’s nothing that restricts them from telling things that are not true. This has always existed. … But they couldn’t reach so many people,” he explained.

He added that there isn’t enough regulation on health information and that is “impacting our health in very detrimental ways.” As such, he thinks “there is a real need for better regulation of how to deal with this complex information.”

Califf noted that the FDA already has regulatory authority over advertisements content on tech platforms. But he feels the agency could do it better.

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Federal Reserve head is questioned on controversial “debanking of disfavored individuals”

During a recent House Committee hearing, Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell was grilled on “Operation Choke Point 2.0” — an alleged Biden administration effort that Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) described as being “particularly focused on debanking people that are disfavored by…the current…executive branch.”

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) told Powell that he’d spoken with multiple bankers who said “they’ve never seen a higher degree of regulatory burden, steering guidance, shaping activities in the market from regulators.”

He attributed this heightened scrutiny to Operation Choke Point 2.0 — a reference to an alleged extension of Operation Choke Point 1.0. The first Operation Choke Point was an Obama-era debanking effort that began in 2013 and attempted to prevent gun dealers, payday lenders, and other companies that were deemed to be “high risk” from accessing banking services. Some people in the cryptocurrency industry claim that Operation Choke Point 2.0 is now being carried out by the Biden adminsitration and is primarily focused on deterring banks from doing business with cryptocurrency firms.

“When people really feel like some third party is going to steer or shape their money, they don’t trust it,” Davidson added. “I mean the unbanked and the underbanked fundamentally that’s lack of trust is part of why they don’t use our banking system today. In fact, that’s part of the appeal of the digital asset space…the permissionless nature of it.”

Davidson continued by suggesting that lots of people working in the financial services space “feel threatened by the prospect of change” and are attempting to restrict access to services such as cryptocurrency.

“They’ve maybe reluctantly concluded that you can’t ban crypto,” Davidson said. “They at least want to keep it account based so some third party can actually control the assets which is a polite way of saying, ‘We don’t actually trust our citizens to control their money or their assets, we’ll let somebody else do it for them because we can control those third parties.’”

Davidson then pressed Powell on whether financial regulators use their powers to control third parties.

“If you don’t comply with the regulatory regime, you don’t get to operate a financial services business, right?” Davidson asked Powell.

“That’s right,” Powell confirmed.

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Feds give professors $5.7M to develop tool to combat ‘misinformation’

A group of professors is using taxpayer dollars doled out by the federal government to develop a new misinformation fact-checking tool called “Course Correct.”

National Science Foundation funding, awarded through a pair of grants from 2021 and 2022, has amounted to more than $5.7 million for the development of this tool, which, according to the grant abstracts, is intended to aid reporters, public health organizations, election administration officials, and others to address so-called misinformation on topics such as U.S. elections and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

This $5.7 million in grant money is on top of nearly another $200,000 awarded in 2020 through a Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act-funded NSF grant for a project focused in part on mental health that Course Correct is said to have grown out of.

According to the abstract of the 2021 grant, Course Correct’s developers, a group of five professors from various institutions nationwide, are using techniques related to machine learning and natural language processing to identify social media posts pertaining to electoral skepticism and vaccine hesitancy, identify people likely to be exposed to misinformation in the future, and flag at-risk online communities for intervention.

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New Law Sought by Brazil’s Lula to Ban and Punish “Fake News and Disinformation” Threatens the Free Internet Everywhere

A major escalation in official online censorship regimes is progressing rapidly in Brazil, with implications for everyone in the democratic world. Under Brazil’s new government headed by President Lula da Silva, the country is poised to become the first in the democratic world to implement a law censoring and banning, and punishing not only “fake news” and “disinformation” online, but also punishing those deemed guilty of spreading it. Such laws already exist throughout the non-democratic world, adopted years ago by the planet’s most tyrannical regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. 

If one wishes to be generous with the phrase “the democratic world” and include Malaysia and Singapore – at best hybrid “democracies” – then one could argue that a couple other “democratic” governments have already seized the power to decree Absolute Truth and then ban any deviation from it. But absent unexpected opposition, Brazil will soon become the first country unambiguously included in the democratic world to outlaw “fake news” and vest government officials with the power to banish it and punish its authors. 

Last May, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was forced to retreat from its attempt to appoint a “disinformation czar” to oversee what would effectively be its Ministry of Truth. That new DHS agency, at least nominally, was to be only advisory: it would declare truth and falsity and then pressure online platforms to comply by banning that which was deemed false. The backlash was so great that DHS finally claimed to cancel it, though secret documents emerged in October describing the agency’s plans to continue to shape online censorship decisions of Big Tech. 

Brazil’s law would be anything but advisory. Though the details are still yet to be released, it would empower law enforcement officials to take action against citizens deemed to be publishing statements that the government classifies as “false,” and to solicit courts to impose punishment on those who do so.

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Twitter Files: Sen. Angus King Targeted ‘Suspicious’ Americans for Blacklisting

According to the latest drop of the Twitter Files, Sen. Angus King (I-ME) flagged accounts his office disliked to the social media platform, accusing Americans of being “suspicious” for reasons including being excited by a Sen. Rand Paul visit, mentioning immigration in their tweets, or being followed by a political rival.

Twitter users have been sharing their ideas, opinions, and thoughts on the platform for a long time. But in recent years, the government’s role in policing this content has come under scrutiny. An intricate system of government involvement in Twitter moderation has been exposed by the Twitter Files, with journalist Matt Taibbi compiling a collection of thousands of moderation requests.

The Twitter Files have revealed a number of details about the internal workings of the social media platform in recent months. According to the latest batch released over the weekend, it has been discovered that government officials frequently misidentify Americans as fictitious Russians. Further complicating the role of governments in online content moderation is the discovery that Twitter has given the “U.S. intelligence community,” moderation authority.

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Police told to keep record of ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘communists’

The Queensland police are required to report interactions with people who “allegedly hold a range of ideological beliefs” including “conspiracy theorists” according to an email sent to all members of the Queensland Police Service on Thursday and seen by ABC News.

Police must record interactions with such individuals in the state’s QPrime database “at the first available opportunity,” the email states, explaining that in addition to “conspiracy theorists,” “religious, social or political extremists and sovereign citizens, as well as people with ideologies relating to capitalism, communism, socialism or Marxism” also fit the bill.

Officers were also told to report “all matters that indicate concerning or escalating behavior due to ideological beliefs, including religious and single-issue ideologies” and advised of the “risks” inherent in dealing with these groups.

The guidance comes after a deadly shooting in Wieambilla in December left two officers and a civilian dead, in addition to the three shooters. Nathaniel, Gareth and Stacey Train reportedly gunned down constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold and injured two other officers on their property, also killing neighbor Alan Dare when he was drawn to the scene by the noise. The Trains were then killed by specialist police following an hours-long standoff.  

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