Category Archives: freedom of speech

TWITTER FILES: Brown University’s Claire Wardle Aids Censorship

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Researchers on “disinformation” have little in common with academic scholars teaching Proust or studying astrophysics.

By Paul D. Thacker

Source: The Disinformation Chronicle

The Washington Post defended campus researchers collaborating with federal agencies to censor Americans in an awkward, bumbling article last week, alleging that congressional staff demanding university documents were “harassing academics” who studied falsehoods spread by Trump. In reality, Congress is investigating campus employees who have little in common with traditional university scholars teaching Proust or studying the atmospheric chemistry of distant planets.

Just last year, one Stanford University researcher disclosed that he and other academics at Stanford and the University of Washington worked with an agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “to fill the gap of the things the government could not do themselves,” admitting that academics served as a cutout for federal censoring of Americans. The DHS agency campus researchers collaborated with is called the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA.

In a recent investigation, Tablet magazine noted that in 2021 CISA began determining which ideas Americans were allowed to discuss and debate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Documents I discovered at Twitter’s headquarters further tie these censorship efforts to another researcher—Brown University’s Claire Wardle.

Who is Claire Wardle?

Largely unknown to most Americans, Wardle is a central figure in the disinformation industry and helped organize many of today’s campus disinformation groups in 2015 with funding from Google. But searching through Twitter’s files, I uncovered a government document marked “for official use only” that finds Wardle had also been chosen to brief CISA’s advisory committee.

A spokesperson for CISA emailed yesterday that he would get back to me and explain how often Wardle had briefed the agency.

Wardle has no training or background in science, yet she has long sought to define herself as an expert on vaccines. In a 2019 Twitter email that I discovered, Wardle tried to involve the company’s executives in a Ted Talk event that would define “credible sources” and “quality information around vaccines.”

That next year, Wardle emailed Twitter executives a report she had written looking into what she deemed to be antivaccine conspiracies and narratives found on social media. Wardle sent the email days after Pfizer announced initial positive findings for their COVID vaccine—results which Wardle said forced her to hurry up the report’s release.

“The dominant vaccine narrative is designed to undermine confidence in institutions and scientific sources,” Wardle alleged, in her email to Twitter. Wardle claimed in her report that vaccine mandates are “one of the prominent anti-vaccination narratives”—a narrative which, oddly enough, proved to be accurate when US companies as well as state and federal agencies began mandating COVID vaccines.

Since Wardle published her vaccine findings, one of the report’s authors joined a secretive UK government agency that investigative journalists exposed in recent weeks for censoring British citizens. Meanwhile, one of the report’s contributing researchers now works for a global PR firm that an Australian investigation found was helping that country’s government to censor its own people.

Julian Assange’s Imprisonment Is The Intellectual Imprisonment of Us All

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Julian Assange has been imprisoned since 2012 because he had provided, to whistleblowers who were in government and who saw and could supply to his WikiLeaks organization, items of evidence which indicated that their government was breaking its own laws, protection of their personal identity, which confidentiality they could then rely upon for their personal safety, to protect those whistleblowers against retaliation by their government. No regular ‘news’-medium could or would reliably do that, but Assange and his WikiLeaks organization could, and they always did. This is why governmental whistleblowers did go to them for this purpose.

The power that a government has to ‘classify’ documents is the power that it has to hide evidence from its public and so to rule its population as being their subjects instead of (authentically) their citizens: it is the ability to BE a dictatorship. (It might arguably be acceptable when a democracy is being invaded by a foreign country, but never — other than that — can there be governmental secrecy to protect itself unless the government is a dictatorship — NOT a democracy — in which case the Government is, itself, being the enemy of its own population.) Without such secrecy against the public, the government would be a democracy, because then the population would be voting in an authentically free information-environment where there exists uncensored information to the public, so that each individual can make one’s OWN individual judgments regarding what is true, and what is false. But, otherwise, a government is a dictatorship.

This power (classifying governmental information) is also a government’s power of legal impunity so that it can violate its own laws and know that the voting public will not know that it did. That routine power of classifying information is the intellectual imprisonment of the nation’s entire population.

Julian Assange is not a subject (‘citizen’) of the U.S. Government, nor is he a subject of the UK Government, nor is he a subject of the other two Governments (Sweden and Ecuador) that have participated in assisting America and Britain to place and keep him in varying forms of (now super-max) imprisonment for over a decade, but they have done it, during all of this time, and never yet has he been tried and convicted of anything other than his having jumped bail in 2012 on a phony rape charge that even its alleged victim admitted had been false; so, in effect, if not in reality, his very imprisonment is an example of those governments’ dictatorships — it has already been long-term imprisonment without trial. ONLY a dictatorship does that. Only a dictatorship can do that.

Assange is instead a subject of the Australian dictatorship, which has done nothing at all to assist him or to protest his being raped by ‘law’ in those foreign lands. The fact that there are not revolutions overthrowing and replacing the Governments in each one of the countries that has participated in this ‘legal’ rape of Assange is testimony to the effectiveness of the intellectual imprisonment of each one of those nations’ populations.

Assange has been in various forms of imprisonment by UK for the last ten years without his ever having been convicted of anything except that in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail (on sexual charges against him that even the alleged accuser denied were true). And yet he remains now in solitary confinement (“23 hours a day locked in their cells”) in a super-max British prison, because the U.S. Government won’t stop its demand that he be extradited to the U.S. (and killed here — imprisoned for up to 175 years — instead of in Britain). His only ‘crime’ was his publishing only truths, especially truths that cut to the core of exposing the U.S. regime’s constant lying. So, this blatant and illegal injustice against an international hero (virtually everywhere except in the United States) is today one prominent disproof of the U.S. and UK lies to the effect that they are democracies. On 26 September 2021, Yahoo News reported (based largely on reporting in Madrid’s El Pais on 5 January 2021) that the Trump Administration felt so embarrassed by some information that had been WikiLeaked, they drew up detailed plans to kidnap Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to “rendition” him for possible execution by America. The plans, including “meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president,” were finally stopped at the National Security Council, as being too risky. “Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration”, even without any legal basis to try him in the United States. So: the Trump Administration then prepared an indictment against Assange (to legalize their extradition-request), and the indictment became unsealed or made public on the same day, 11 April 2019, when Ecuador’s Government allowed UK’s Government to drag Assange out into UK super-max solitary-confinement imprisonment, and this subsequently produced lie-based U.S. & UK tussles over how to prevent Assange from ever again being able to reach the public, either by continuing his solitary confinement, or else by, perhaps, poisoning him, or else convicting him of something and then executing him. On 4 January 2021, a British judge nixed Assange’s defense case: “I reject the defence submissions concerning staying extradition [to U.S.] as an abuse of the process of this court.” Earlier, her handling of Assange’s only ‘trial’, which was his extradition hearing, was a travesty, which would have been expected in Hitler’s courts, and which makes clear that UK’s courts can be just as bad as Nazi courts had been. However, the U.S. regime’s efforts to grab Assange continued on. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the overwhelmingly compliant U.S. Congress, are all to blame for that dictatorial regime’s pursuit against that champion of truth-telling; and the same blame applies to the leadership in UK. On 10 December 2021, BBC bannered “Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules”. Blatantly, both America and England lie in order to refer to themselves as being democracies. In fact, America has the world’s highest percentage of its residents in prisons. It’s the world’s #1 police-state. Is that because Americans are worse than the people in other countries, or is it instead because the thousand or so individuals who collectively control the nation’s Government are, themselves, especially psychopathic? Evidence will now be linked-to on that question: America has been scientifically examined more than any other country has, in regards to whether it is an aristocracy, or instead a democracy, and the clear and consistent finding is that it’s an aristocracy. And it clearly is that at the federal level. (Here is a video summarizing the best single study of that, and it finds America to be an aristocracy, because it’s controlled by the richest few). And Norway’s aristocracy had also been part of this scandal. It is an international scandal, and keeps getting worse.

On June 19th, Chris Hedges headlined “The Imminent Extradition of Julian Assange & the Death of Journalism” and documented that the alleged ‘assurances’ that the U.S. regime had provided to the UK regime on the basis of which the latter dictatorship would be transferring Assange to a super-max prison in the United States, had as many holes in it as a ton of Swiss cheese.

ONLY in barbaric dictatorships is any of this even possible, but here it is real.

Assange’s ‘trial’ will be the trial of ‘democracy’ in whatever nation it will be executed.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

How Did Someone Like Me Get Shadow-Banned?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

It seems there are many reasons to get shadow-banned, but unfortunately we’re never told what “crime” we committed nor are we given a chance to defend ourselves from the “indictment” in whatever “court” found us “guilty.” As in a nightmarish tale right out of Kafka, the powers making the charges, declaring the verdict “guilty as charged” and imposing the penalty are completely obscured.

Those found “guilty” discover their secret “conviction” and “sentence” when their livelihood is destroyed (i.e. they’re demonetized) and their online presence suddenly diminishes or vanishes.

I call this being sent to Digital Siberia. As with the real gulag, most of those convicted in the secret digital Star Chamber are innocent of any real crime; their “crime” was challenging the approved narratives.

Which leads to my question: why was little old marginalized-blogger me shadow-banned? Those responsible are under no obligation to reveal my “crime,” the evidence used against me, or offer me an opportunity to defend myself against the charges, much less file an appeal.

My astonishment at being shadow-banned (everyone in Digital Siberia claims to be innocent, heh) is based on my relatively restrained online presence, as I stick to the journalistic standards I learned as a free-lancer for mainstream print media: source data, excerpts and charts from mainstream / institutional sources and raise the questions / build the thesis on those links / data.

I avoid conspiracy-related topics (not my interest, not my expertise) and hot-button ideological / political cleavages (us vs. them is also not my interest). My go-to source for charts and data is the Federal Reserve database (FRED) and government agencies such as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, IRS, etc., and respected non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Pew Research Center, RAND, investment banks, etc.

Given my adherence to journalistic standards, I wonder: how did someone like me get shadow-banned?

The standard cause (or excuse) for being overtly banned is “distributing misinformation.” This charge is never specific; something you posted “violates our community standards,” or equivalent broad-brush language.

Shadow-banning is even more pernicious because you’re not even notified that your visibility to others has been restricted or dropped to zero. You see your post, but nobody else does.

What are the precise standards for declaring a link or statement as “misinformation?” As the twitter files revealed, what qualifies as “misinformation” is constantly shifting as a sprawling ecosystem of censors share information and blacklists. This report is well worth reading: The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Top 50 Organizations To Know (Zero Hedge).

Not only do we not know what qualifies as “misinformation,” we also don’t know what Big Tech algorithms are flagging and what their response is to whatever’s been flagged. My colleague Nate Hagens, who is equally scrupulous about using authoritative sources, posted this comment last year:

“It’s both funny and scary. It was explained to me today that the new Facebook/Meta algorithm downrates users who have cookies w evidence of visiting non-mainstream news sources/blogs. Even when one uses proxy servers and incognito mode, if you frequent e.g. Aljazeera or other news sites instead of CNN or FOX the algorithms categorizes your FB content (even if it’s a chicken soup recipe) as ‘non-mainstream’.
Big brother is watching (and not even thinking).
Those ideas/voices outside the status quo aren’t on equal footing- and the status quo (material growth/cultural values) is what’s leading us down the current path, without a map or plan.”

The systems that shadow-ban us are completely opaque. Who’s to say that a knowledgeable human reviews who’s been banned or shadow-banned? Given the scale of these Big Tech platforms and Search Engines, is that even possible?

It’s well known that YouTube constantly changes its ranking algorithms so they are harder to game, i.e. manipulate to advance one’s visibility.

It’s also known that simply posting a link to a site flagged as “misinformation” is enough to get your post excommunicated and your site flagged in unknown ways with unknown consequences.

What I do know is that Of Two Minds was publicly identified as “Russian Propaganda” by a bogus organization with no supporting data, PropOrNot in 2016. This front’s blacklist was prominently promoted by the Washington Post on page one in 2016, more or less giving it the authority of a major MSM outlet.

One might ask how a respected, trusted newspaper could publish a list from a shadowy front without specifying the exact links that were identified as “Russian Propaganda.” Standard journalistic protocol requires listing sources, not just publishing unverified blacklists.

Clearly, the Washington Post should have, at a minimum, demanded a list of links from each site on the blacklist that were labeled as “Russian Propaganda” so the Post journalists could check for themselves. At a minimum, the Post should have included inks as examples of “Russian Propaganda” for each site on the list. They did neither, a catastrophic failure of the most fundamental journalistic standards. Yet no one in the media other than those wrongfully blacklisted even noted or questioned this abject failure.

In effect, the real propaganda was the unsourced, un-investigated blacklist on the front page of the Washington Post.

How did I get on a list of “Russian Propaganda” when I never wrote about Russia or anything related to Russia?

There are two plausible possibilities. One is “guilt by association.” I’ve been interviewed by Max Keiser since 2011, and Max and his partner Stacy Herbert posted their videos on RT (Russia Today) and an Iranian media outlet. Needless to say, these sources were flagged, as was anyone associated with them. So perhaps merely having a link to an interview I did with Max and Stacy was enough to get me shadow-banned. (Shout-out to Max and Stacy in El Salvador.)

Alternatively, perhaps questioning the coronation of Queen Hillary in any way also got me on the blacklist.

Once on the blacklist, then the damage was already done, as the network of censors share blacklists without verifying the “crime”–a shadowy “crime” without any indictment, hearing or recourse, right out of Kafka.

Shadow-banning manifests in a number of ways. Readers reported that they couldn’t re-tweet any of my tweets. Another reader said the Department of Commerce wouldn’t load a page from my site, declaring it “dangerous,” perhaps with the implication that it was a platform for computer viruses and worms–laughable because there is nothing interactive on my sites and thus no potential source for viruses other than links to legitimate sources and adverts served by Investing Channel.

Users of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have probably noticed that your feed is populated by the same “friends” or “folks you follow.” In other words, the feed you’re presented with is curated by algorithms which sort and display posts / tweets / search results according to parameters that are invisible to users and regulators.

It’s easy to send flagged accounts to Digital Siberia, and trouble-free to leave them there until the trouble-maker goes broke.

It’s impossible to chart the extent of the shadow-banning, or who’s doing it, sharing blacklists, etc. This entire ecosystem of censorship is invisible. Recall that in the Soviet gulag, having an “anti-Soviet dream” was enough to get you a tenner (10-year sentence) in the gulag. Here, posting a flagged link will get you a tenner in Digital Siberia.

When Your Own Government Confirms It Paid Censors To Silence You…

In today’s zeitgeist, merely mentioning the possibility that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab resulted in an instant ban in 2020. How could the possibility that it escaped from a nearby lab dedicated to viral research be labeled as “disinformation” when the facts were not yet known?

The answer is of course that the lab-escape theory was “politically sensitive” and therefore verboten.

You see the problem: what’s deemed “politically sensitive” changes with the wind, and so the boundaries of what qualifies as “misinformation” have no visible or definable edge. Virtually anything consequential can suddenly become “politically sensitive” and then declared “misinformation.” When the guidelines of what’s a “crime” and the processes of “conviction” are all opaque, and there is no hearing or recourse to being “convicted” of a shadow-“crime,” we’ve truly entered a Kafkaesque world.

How did someone like me get shadow-banned? There is no way to know, and that’s a problem for our society and our ability to solve the polycrisis we now face.

I joke that what got me shadow-banned was using Federal Reserve charts. Perhaps that’s not that far from reality.

Traitor to the Constitution: The U.S. Government Is the Real Criminal

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”—H.L. Mencken

And so it continues.

This entire fiasco—indicting Donald Trump for allegedly violating both the Espionage Act and obstructing justice by improperly handling classified records—is merely the latest in a never-ending series of distractions, distortions, and political theater aimed at diverting the public’s attention from the sinister advances of the American Deep State.

Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, diverted or mesmerized by the cheap theater tricks.

This indictment spectacle is Shakespearean in its scope: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nothing is the key word here.

Despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, this is all just smoke and mirrors.

Mark my words: the government is as corrupt and self-serving as ever, dominated by two political factions that pretend to be at odds with each other all the while moving in lockstep to maintain the status quo.

If you really want to talk about who’s guilty of treason, set your sights higher: indict the government for overstepping its authority, abusing its power, disregarding the rule of law, and betraying the American people.

When we refer to the “rule of law,” that’s constitutional shorthand for the idea that everyone is treated the same under the law, everyone is held equally accountable to abiding by the law, and no one is given a free pass based on their politics, their connections, their wealth, their status or any other bright line test used to confer special treatment on the elite.

When the government and its agents no longer respect the rule of law—the Constitution—or believe that it applies to them, then the very contract on which this relationship is based becomes invalid.

This abuse of power has been going on for so long that it has become the norm, the Constitution be damned.

There are hundreds—make that thousands—of government bureaucrats who are getting away with murder (in many cases, literally) simply because the legislatures, courts and the citizenry can’t be bothered to make them play by the rules of the Constitution.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

For too long now, the American people have played politics with their principles and turned a blind eye to all manner of wrongdoing when it was politically expedient, allowing the government to wreak havoc with their freedoms and act in violation of the rule of law.

“We the people” are paying the price for it now.

We are paying the price every day that we allow the government to continue to wage its war on the American People, a war that is being fought on many fronts: with bullets and tasers, with surveillance cameras and license readers, with intimidation and propaganda, with court rulings and legislation, with the collusion of every bureaucrat who dances to the tune of corporate handouts while on the government’s payroll, and most effectively of all, with the complicity of the American people, who continue to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by their politics, distracted by their pastimes, and acclimated to a world in which government corruption is the norm.

It’s the nature of the beast: power corrupts.

Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

The republic has fallen.

The Deep State’s plot to take over America has succeeded.

The American system of representative government has been overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, corporate oligarchy bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad.

Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).

These are dangerous times.

These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime or terrorism or illegal immigration.

No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.

The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.

This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.

This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.

This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.

Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

  • Americans have no protection against police abuse.
  • Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state.
  • Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty.
  • Americans no longer have a right to private property.
  • Americans no longer have a say about what their children are exposed to in school.
  • Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police.
  • Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity.
  • Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy.
  • Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.
  • Americans no longer have a representative government.

I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.

Indictments, impeachments and elections will not save us.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

From Clinton to Bush, then Obama to Trump and now Biden, it’s as if we’re caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

There can be no denying that the world is indeed a dangerous place, but it’s the government that poses the gravest threat to our freedoms and way of life, and no amount of politicking, parsing or pandering will change that.

It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by political circuses and entertainment spectacles.

What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where “we the people” are at a distinct disadvantage in the face of the government elite’s power grabs, greed and firepower.

The Constitution doesn’t stand a chance against a federalized, globalized standing army protected by legislative, judicial and executive branches that are all on the same side.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no matter what political views they subscribe to: suffice it to say, they are not on our side or the side of freedom.

That is the real betrayal.

US Gov’t Remaining Silent on American Detained in Ukraine for His Political Views

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Detained by Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) due to his political views on the conflict…

By Dave DeCamp

Source: The Free Thought Project

The State Department has refused to say if it’s engaging with the Ukrainian government over American citizen Gonzalo Lira, who was detained by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) due to his political views on the conflict with Russia.

Lira has a popular YouTube channel and a large following on Twitter and Telegram. He is also a writer who has contributed to several media outlets, including Business Insider. Lira was born in California and is a dual citizen of the US and Chile and had been living in Kharkiv, Ukraine, throughout the war.

Lira is a critic of the Ukrainian government and was arrested by the SBU on charges of justifying the Russian invasion. “After the start of the full-scale invasion, the blogger was one of the first to support the Russian invaders and glorify their war crimes,” the SBU said in a press release referring to Lira.

The SBU also accused Lira of “discrediting the top military and political leadership and the Defense Forces of our state.” He was charged under sections 2 and 3 of Article 436-2 of Ukraine’s criminal code, which outlaws the “distribution of materials” that justify Russia’s actions going back to 2014.

Epoch Times reporter Liam Cosgrove asked State Department spokesman Matthew Miller if the administration was aware of Lira’s detainment and how the US feels about Ukraine arresting an American for speech.

“So I will say in general that we’re aware of the report. We obviously support the exercise of freedom of speech anywhere in the world, and I’ll leave it at that,” Miller said.

When asked if the administration was working to secure Lira’s release, Miller said, “I’m going to leave my comments where I just left them.”

https://twitter.com/cosgrove_iv/status/1662896498596560896

Cosgrove also asked Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) about Lira’s detainment. Lieu said that he wasn’t aware of the case but said US citizens should “have the ability to express their thoughts and views” and that he would look into the arrest.

Responding to the news, Greene told Cosgrove: “America is providing weapons, equipment for the defense of their country, but the Ukrainian government is not going to defend any American’s freedom of speech, and that’s a real problem.”

Lira’s arrest received virtually no attention in Western media. One of the few outlets to cover it was the Daily Beast, which smeared the American instead of questioning the charges. According to the Beast, Lira is facing five to eight years in prison.

Conspirators for the Constitution: When Anti-Government Speech Becomes Sedition

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”— George Orwell

Let’s be clear about one thing: seditious conspiracy isn’t a real crime to anyone but the U.S. government.

To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, the charge levied against Stewart Rhodes who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for being the driving force behind the January 6 Capitol riots, one doesn’t have to engage in violence against the government, vandalize government property, or even trespass on property that the government has declared off-limits to the general public.

To be convicted of seditious conspiracy, one need only foment a revolution.

This is not about whether Rhodes deserves such a hefty sentence.

This is about the long-term ramifications of empowering the government to wage war on individuals whose political ideas and expression challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

This is about criminalizing political expression in thoughts, words and deeds.

This is about how the government has used the events of Jan. 6 in order to justify further power grabs and acquire more authoritarian emergency powers.    

This was never about so-called threats to democracy.

In fact, the history of this nation is populated by individuals whose rhetoric was aimed at fomenting civil unrest and revolution.

Indeed, by the government’s own definition, America’s founders were seditious conspirators based on the heavily charged rhetoric they used to birth the nation.

Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, and John Adams would certainly have been charged for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to protect their liberties and defend themselves against the government should it violate their rights.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine.

“When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.”

Had America’s founders feared revolutionary words and ideas, there would have been no First Amendment, which protects the right to political expression, even if that expression is anti-government.

No matter what one’s political persuasion might be, every American has a First Amendment right to protest government programs or policies with which they might disagree.

The right to disagree with and speak out against the government is the quintessential freedom.

Every individual has a right to speak truth to power—and foment change—using every nonviolent means available.

Unfortunately, the government is increasingly losing its tolerance for anyone whose political views could be perceived as critical or “anti-government.”

All of us are in danger.

In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American with an opinion about the government or who knows someone with an opinion about the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

You see, the government doesn’t care if you or someone you know has a legitimate grievance. It doesn’t care if your criticisms are well-founded. And it certainly doesn’t care if you have a First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

What the government cares about is whether what you’re thinking or speaking or sharing or consuming as information has the potential to challenge its stranglehold on power.

Why else would the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies be investing in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?

Why else would the Biden Administration be likening those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists?

Why else would the government be waging war against those who engage in thought crimes?

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers.

For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

According to one FBI report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”

In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.

There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State.

Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.

Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

And then at the other end of the spectrum there are those such as Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, for example, who blow the whistle on government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.

In true Orwellian fashion, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.

Since his April 2019 arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S., where if convicted, he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.

This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.

This is also why the government fears a citizenry that thinks for itself: because a citizenry that thinks for itself is a citizenry that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, which translates to government transparency and accountability.

After all, we’re citizens, not subjects.

For those who don’t fully understand the distinction between the two and why transparency is so vital to a healthy constitutional government, Manning explains it well:

When freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … I believe that when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship. There is a bright distinction between citizens, who have rights and privileges protected by the state, and subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.

This is why the First Amendment is so critical. It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.

The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.

A little over 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Washington Post Co. to block the Nixon Administration’s attempts to use claims of national security to prevent The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing secret Pentagon papers on how America went to war in Vietnam.

As Justice William O. Douglas remarked on the ruling, “The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

Fast forward to the present day, and we’re witnessing yet another showdown, this time between Assange and the Deep State, which pits the people’s right to know about government misconduct against the might of the military industrial complex.

Yet this isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.

Following the current trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, watched all the time, and rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

We’re almost at that point now.

Eventually, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we will all be seditious conspirators in the eyes of the government.

We would do better to be conspirators for the Constitution starting right now.

Matt Taibbi Discovers Democrats are Authoritarians

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There is nothing mysterious, arcane, or byzantine about what is happening in America.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo Substack

First, allow me to thank Mr. Taibbi for his work exposing the social media censorship agenda. The uniparty wanted to skin him alive and hang him out to dry. Taibbi didn’t back down despite ominous threats to his freedom. Thank you, Mr. Taibbi.

Now the tough part. Prior to his wake-up call before the House, Matt was fuzzy on uniparty careerists, for instance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thinks she’s a socialist.

Taibbi writes:

Not long ago I was writing in defense of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When she first entered Congress as an inner-city kid who’d knocked off longtime insider Joe Crowley with a Sandersian policy profile, her own party’s establishment ridiculed her as a lefty Trump. Nancy Pelosi scoffed that her win just meant voters “made a choice in one district,” so “let’s not get carried away.” Ben Ritz, director of the Progressive Policy Institute, an offshoot of the old Democratic Leadership Council, groused, “Oh, please, she just promised everyone a bunch of free stuff.”

But like aggressive, competitive, and often sociopathic government careerists worldwide, Ocasio-Cortez naturally strives for the most powerful and dictatorial seat in Congress, that of Speaker. Taibbi and others are alarmed by Ocasio-Cortez’s demand the state censor Fox News.

“We have very real issues with what is permissible on air,” she said [during an interview with Jen Psaki], adding people like Tucker Carlson are “very clearly” guilty of “incitement to violence,” a problem in light of “federal regulation in terms of what’s allowed on air and what isn’t.”

It is a common mistake to not fully comprehend that the political class is deeply Machiavellian. A Machiavellian state will impose “tyrannical methods of rule,” according to the dictionary. The state and its political class are “destitute of political morality; cunning in political management; habitually using duplicity and bad faith; astutely crafty.” This is a standard operating procedure in Congress, the Executive, and across government. It is not difficult to see, that is if one is not “inculcated” with false, misleading, and harmfully deceptive propaganda broadcast daily by the state’s media conduits, which claim to be independent.

Prior to his roasting at the hands of uniparty “democrats,” Taibbi was “attracted to liberalism as a young person precisely because it didn’t want to ban things… liberalism celebrated the belief that truth, tolerance, and forgiveness are the way to reach closed minds.”

Rank and file democrat normies may still believe democrat politicians are all about truth and forgiveness, but that is an optical illusion. Consider President Wilson, a democrat. His administration, with the blessing of Congress, censored and prosecuted speech in opposition to America’s involvement in the “Great War,” WWI. The uniparty of the day considered any such speech sedition.

The liberal icon, FDR, forced “Radio Priest” Charles Coughlin off the air for the sin of not following the Nazi demonization narrative in the lead-up to WWII. Granted, Coughlin overlooked the totalitarian policies of Nazi Germany, and its racist ideology, but the point here is that the state decided to censor and strip Coughlin of his natural right to speech.

Then there was Truman, the man who dropped two atom bombs, incinerating more than 100,000 Japanese civilians. During this democrat’s time in office, the administration and Congress used the Alien Registration Act or Smith Act of 1940 to prosecute not only communists, but folks like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and defense attorneys during the McCarthy hearings (run by republicans) were cited for contempt of court and imprisoned.

Clinton pushed through the Child Online Protection Act of 1998, legislation designed to throttle speech on the then-new world wide web.  Obama blocked access to government, despite a pledge to support transparency. The Obama administration used the Espionage Act to go after journalists critical of the state.

The uniparty is united on the effort to vilify, intimidate, indict, and prosecute all in opposition to the crony capitalist state, its rigged economics, endless wars, rigged elections, and unwavering service to corporations, banks, and billionaires, while the people are expected to pay for corporate gambling losses and clean up their environmental messes while the commoners slowly sink into poverty.

Unfortunately, it took a fair degree of abuse heaped on Taibbi during a House hearing on the “Twitter Files,” and the threat of perjury, before he finally disinvested himself from democrats, the uniparty faction that likes to pretend it works for “the people,” when in fact it works for a corporatist state, the “defense” (endless war) industry, Big Pharma, the insurance cartel, and, above all, the “financial sector,” that is to say bankers and their enablers at the Federal Reserve and the USG Treasury.

There is nothing mysterious, arcane, and byzantine about what is happening in America. The destruction of the Middle Class, economic warfare, violent regime change, arms shipments to neo-Nazis, bailouts of corrupt and parasitical banks and corporations—all of it plain to see, if one looks—these are not “weaponized” conspiracy theories.

Don’t get me wrong. I am thankful Matt Taibbi has finally seen beyond the facade, the window dressing and propaganda in regard to democrats and the state. As I have said for a couple of decades on crucial issues—economics, war, and peace, the attack on natural rights—there is little difference between the two factions of the corporate uniparty.

The War on Free Speech Is Really a War on the Right to Criticize the Government

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.”— Justice William O. Douglas

Absolutely, there is a war on free speech.

To be more accurate, however, the war on free speech is really a war on the right to criticize the government.

Although the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom, every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

Indeed, those who run the government don’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

In fact, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

For instance, as part of its campaign to eradicate so-called “disinformation,” the Biden Administration likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative.

In his first few years in office, President Trump declared the media to be “the enemy of the people,” suggested that protesting should be illegal, and that NFL players who kneel in protest during the national anthem “shouldn’t be in the country.”

Then again, Trump was not alone in his presidential disregard for the rights of the citizenry, especially as it pertains to the right of the people to criticize those in power.

President Obama signed into law anti-protest legislation that makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest activities (10 years in prison for protesting anywhere in the vicinity of a Secret Service agent). The Obama Administration also waged a war on whistleblowers, which The Washington Post described as “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” and “spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records.”

Part of the Patriot Act signed into law by President George W. Bush made it a crime for an American citizen to engage in peaceful, lawful activity on behalf of any group designated by the government as a terrorist organization. Under this provision, even filing an amicus brief on behalf of an organization the government has labeled as terrorist would constitute breaking the law.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the FBI to censor all news and control communications in and out of the country in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt also signed into law the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate by way of speech for the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence.

President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which made it illegal to criticize the government’s war efforts.

President Abraham Lincoln seized telegraph lines, censored mail and newspaper dispatches, and shut down members of the press who criticized his administration.

In 1798, during the presidency of John Adams, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious” statements against the government, Congress or president of the United States.

Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now.

Good, bad or ugly, it’s all free speech unless as defined by the government it falls into one of the following categories: obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, and solicitations to commit crimes.

This idea of “dangerous” speech, on the other hand, is peculiarly authoritarian in nature. What it amounts to is speech that the government fears could challenge its chokehold on power.

The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.

Conduct your own experiment into the government’s tolerance of speech that challenges its authority, and see for yourself.

Stand on a street corner—or in a courtroom, at a city council meeting or on a university campus—and recite some of the rhetoric used by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams and Thomas Paine without referencing them as the authors.

For that matter, just try reciting the Declaration of Independence, which rejects tyranny, establishes Americans as sovereign beings, recognizes God (not the government) as the Supreme power, portrays the government as evil, and provides a detailed laundry list of abuses that are as relevant today as they were 240-plus years ago.

My guess is that you won’t last long before you get thrown out, shut up, threatened with arrest or at the very least accused of being a radical, a troublemaker, a sovereign citizen, a conspiratorialist or an extremist.

Try suggesting, as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin did, that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to shed blood in order to protect their liberties, and you might find yourself placed on a terrorist watch list and vulnerable to being rounded up by government agents.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Observed Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

Better yet, try suggesting as Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, John Adams and Patrick Henry did that Americans should, if necessary, defend themselves against the government if it violates their rights, and you will be labeled a domestic extremist.

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine. “When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.” Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.” And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Then again, perhaps you don’t need to test the limits of free speech for yourself.

One such test is playing out before our very eyes on the national stage led by those who seem to believe that only individuals who agree with the government are entitled to the protections of the First Amendment.

To the contrary, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was very clear about the fact that the First Amendment was established to protect the minority against the majority.

I’ll take that one step further: the First Amendment was intended to protect the citizenry from the government’s tendency to censor, silence and control what people say and think.

Having lost our tolerance for free speech in its most provocative, irritating and offensive forms, the American people have become easy prey for a police state where only government speech is allowed.

You see, the powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

This is how freedom rises or falls.

Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.

We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

Tolerance for dissent is vital if we are to survive as a free nation.

While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

By suppressing free speech, the government is contributing to a growing underclass of Americans who are being told that they can’t take part in American public life unless they “fit in.”

Mind you, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable to respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of law is labeled an “extremist,” is relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

It doesn’t matter how much money you make, what politics you subscribe to, or what God you worship: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are all potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government.