Poastocracy

John Carter | Postcards From Barsoom

 

Trust The Plan/Always Chimp: a new kind of 'community relations service'

Whenever there's a horrific interracial attack of the black-on-racist variety, there's a familiar script that we've all gotten so used to that it has become a kind of liturgy. It goes something like this: a multiple felon, frequently let out early on parole, breaks into a pretty young blonde college student's house, rapes her, strangles her to death, mutilates her body, and is found wandering outside with his shirt soaked in her blood, shouting "I just wanted to kill that white bitch!" In the atrocity's aftermath, the girl's bereaved father holds a press conference. Looking dolefully into the camera, he intones, "In this time of loss for our family, please do not use our grief to turn this into a racial issue. This horrible tragedy is an isolated incident, committed by a troubled young man with mental health issues. As Christians we are called upon by God to forgive, and we hope that he gets the help he needs. Don't look back in anger."

This script is so familiar that it has engendered a pervasive background of frustrated despair throughout that subset of the population that has retained some modicum of sane instinct in the face of postmodern antinaturalism. What is wrong with white men? Have they all been castrated? Are they just golden retrievers, with their instincts for self-preservation and familial loyalty completely bred out by a thousand years of living in a high trust society? Have they been MKULTRAed so deeply that they can't see what's happening even when it comes for their own children? It's all over, man, there's no saving these people, they deserve everything that's coming for them, etcetera, etcetera. The responses from the online right to the don't-make-this-about-race liturgy have become as familiar as the liturgy itself, almost a part of the performance.

As it turns out, like everything in the false and homosexual manufactured consensus of the hyperreal television age, none of that is true. The statements of those families are not organic, and they never were.

Title X of the 1964 Civil Rights Act created a secretive government agency that you've never heard of: the Community Relations Service. The explicit goal of the CRS was to further the political aims of the Civil Rights movement. It played an active role in stage-managing demonstrations and riots, and it worked to actively prevent whites from fighting back against those riots, for instance by leaning on the media to downplay the damage to life and property while deflecting attention from the role played by Civil Rights leaders in inciting violence. You can read a summary of the CRS's activities here.

The most repugnant aspect of the CRS's secretive mission has been to intervene in cases of incendiary interracial crime by pressuring the victims and their families to stick to the this-isn't-about-race script. Exactly how they apply pressure isn't known. It's likely that the 'conciliators' of the CRS would start out by speaking in the priestly grammar of concern and compassion: we're just there to help, to advise, tragedies such as those that befell your child are just the kind of thing that racist white supremacists seize upon in order to drive a wedge into Our Community, let us help you navigate the bewildering media environment in this difficult time. Such soft-spoken manipulation works very well on a lot of people, particularly those in a state of emotional shock from the sudden eruption of horror into their peaceful, ordinary lives. Of course it won't work on everyone: some will want blood. Those who don't cooperate might be warned that if they say anything prejudicial to the media, this might be interpreted as jury tampering, possibly leading to the murderer being let off and getting whoever spoke out of turn hauled into court themselves for interfering with judicial proceedings. And we wouldn't want anything like that to happen, would we? Why, you still have two younger children ... think of the consequences for your career if people started calling you racist, how would you support them? ... and if you went to jail for obstructing justice, they might end up in the foster care system ... not to worry, though, there are plenty of available foster families, now that the gay community is allowed to adopt...

That's all speculation, of course. The truth is we have no real idea of what methods conciliators apply to ensure that families follow the script. Not one family has ever said anything about what the conciliators said to them behind closed doors, and the CRS themselves certainly aren't telling. They don't have to. The CRS is specifically exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, records kept by conciliators are destroyed, and conciliators can invoke FBI-style confidentially privileges both in court and in front of Congress. All we really know for sure is that essentially no one has ever gone off script, and that no one has ever so much as talked about the CRA. We can only surmise that families have never said anything because their arms have been twisted into signing NDAs.

Given the secrecy, how do we know any of this? Awareness of the CRS and its activities began to slowly leak into the public consciousness just a couple of years ago. In 2023 William Wheelwright and Raw Egg Nationalist started talking about it, although this seems to have gotten lost in the general noise of the discourse. The CRS surfaced again in June when the Academic Agent Neema Parvini came across a book written by CRS agents Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, in which they spill the beans by way of bragging. Parvini made a video reporting on the book, which got the attention of Auron MacIntyre, and between the two of them they generated enough publicity to precipitate an online chimpout as everyone discovered that the government had set up a secret X-files of Black Crime.

And now, several months later, the CRS is gone. Defunded. Kaput. 

 

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Mahmood and Starmer “weaponising” appalling Manchester synagogue attack to further restrict right to protest

Stop the War Coalition

The right to protest is fundamental in any democratic society and must be defended

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Prime Minister Keir Starmer are seeking to weaponise the situation to ramp up the attack on the Palestine movement, with talk of “repeated protests” being a drain on police resources, the Stop the War Coalition has said.

In response to the home secretary’s announcement of plans to crack down on pro-Palestine protests, Stop the War convenor Lindsey German said:

“Stop the War is alarmed that the UK government intends to introduce greater restrictions on the right to protest in the wake of the appalling attack at the Manchester synagogue.

“It defies logic for the Home Secretary to suggest that there should be limits placed on how often people can protest against a genocide that has been waged on the people of Gaza for two years.

“Marches organised by the Palestine coalition, which Stop the War is a part of, have been attended by hundreds of thousands of people, and we believe they are representative of majority public opinion in this country which wants to see an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

“We condemn the attack on the Manchester synagogue, just as we condemn recent attacks on mosques and hotels accommodating asylum seekers.

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Police arrest almost 900 at London protest supporting banned group Palestine Action

Comment: Police whining about being shouted at, punched, kicked and spat on is the ultimate irony. Try experiencing life in what's left of Gaza. THAT'S  "intolerable". No policemen or women with any moral integrity would stay in a force that penalises people for standing against the slaughter of innocents. 

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WCPO

British police said Sunday that they arrested almost 900 people demonstrating in London against a ban on the group Palestine Action, which has been deemed a terrorist organization by the government.

Almost 1,600 people have now been detained, many for silently holding signs supporting the group, since it was outlawed two months ago. Protesters say the ban on Palestine Action is an unwarranted curb on free speech and the right to protest.

British police said Sunday that they arrested almost 900 people demonstrating in London against a ban on the group Palestine Action, which has been deemed a terrorist organization by the government.

Almost 1,600 people have now been detained, many for silently holding signs supporting the group, since it was outlawed two months ago. Protesters say the ban on Palestine Action is an unwarranted curb on free speech an the right to protest.

The Metropolitan Police force said 890 people were arrested at Saturday's demonstration, the vast majority, 857, under the Terrorism Act for supporting a proscribed organization. Some 33 were detained for other offenses, including 17 for assaulting police officers.

Defend Our Juries, the campaign group organizing the protest, said 1,500 people took part in the demonstration outside Parliament, sitting down and holding signs reading “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”

Within minutes, police began arresting the demonstrators, as bystanders chanted “Shame on you,” and “Met Police, pick a side, justice or genocide.” There were some scuffles and angry exchanges as officers dragged away demonstrators who went limp as they were removed from the crowd.

“In carrying out their duties today, our officers have been punched, kicked, spat on and had objects thrown at them by protesters,” said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Claire Smart, who called the abuse directed at police “intolerable.”

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Inside the Submissive Void — Propaganda, Censorship, Power, and Control

Greg Maybury
Pox Americana

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. David Hume, Of the First Principles of Government, 1768.

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Brief: The use of propaganda and censorship is more frequently associated with totalitarian, corrupt and/or despotic regimes, not modern democracies in the West. Yet the history of how western governments and their ever-vigilant overlords in the media, financial, and business spheres have controlled the political narrative of the time via these means is a long, storied and ruinous one, going back well before 1914. Along with serving the contemporaneous political objectives of its perpetrators as contrived, such activities often continue to inform our understanding, and cement our interpretation, of history. If as the saying goes, “history repeats itself”, we need look no further as to the main reason why. In this wide-ranging ‘safari’ into the fake news, myth-making, and disinformation wilderness—aka The Big Shill—Greg Maybury concludes that “It’s the narrative, stupid!”

— Controlling the Proles —

The following yarn may be apocryphal, but either way the ‘moral of the fable’ should serve our narrative well. The story goes like this: sometime during the height of the Cold War a group of American journalists were hosting a visit to the U.S. of some of their Soviet counterparts. After allowing their visitors to soak up the media zeitgeist stateside, most of the Americans expected their guests to express unbridled envy at the professional liberties they enjoyed in the Land of the Free Press. 

One of the Russian scribes was indeed compelled to express his unabashed ‘admiration’ to his hosts…in particular, for the “far superior quality” of American “propaganda“. Now it’s fair to say his hosts were taken aback by what was at best a backhanded compliment. After some collegial ‘piss-taking’ about the stereotypes associated with Western “press freedom” versus those of the controlled media in the Soviet system, one of the Americans called on their Russian colleague to explain what he meant. In fractured English, he replied with the following: ‘It’s very simple…In Soviet Union, we don’t believe our propaganda. In America, you actually believe yours!’

As amusing as this anecdote is, the reality of the Russian journo’s jibe doesn’t simply remain true now; that ‘belief’ has become even more delusional, farcical, and above all, dangerous. One suspects that Russian journos today would think much the same. And in few cases has the “delusional”,“farcical”, and “dangerous” nature of this conviction been more evident than with the West’s continued provocations of Russia, with “Skripalgate” in Old Blighty (see here, and here), and “Russia-Gate” stateside (see here, and here) being prime, though far from the only, exemplars we might point to.

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The FBI’s Alleged Conspiracy Theorist-Terrorist Connection Is Anti-American

Andrew Korybko 
Global Research 

The Mainstream Media reported earlier this month on an intelligence bulletin released by the FBI’s Phoenix office back in May alleging that a connection exists between so-called “conspiracy theories” and domestic terrorism, and while there have veritably been some people who hold such controversially defined beliefs and then ended up killing others, it’s anti-American to suspect that people who don’t believe the official narrative about various events automatically qualify as potential terrorists.

***

The de-facto criminalization of free speech is an ongoing trend in American society that’s already pressured a lot of people to self-censor their beliefs in public in order to avoid official scrutiny from the authorities or harassment by their political opponents, but an intelligence bulletin released by the FBI’s Phoenix office back in May and only reported on by the Mainstream Media earlier this month might spread the dragnet even further by de-facto criminalizing the online pursuit of additional information that contradicts the official narrative about various events.

The “secret police” (as they’d be described by the Mainstream Media if any other country’s version of the FBI was being reported on) believe that a connection exists between so-called “conspiracy theories” and domestic terrorism, and while there have veritably been some people who hold such controversially defined beliefs and ended up killing others, it’s anti-American to suspect that anyone engaged in seeking out all sides of every story (no matter how possibly implausible) automatically qualifies as a potential terrorist.

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The EU’s latest assault on internet freedom

Andrew Tettenborn
spiked.com

Soon online speech will be regulated by Brussels.

As things stand, what you can and cannot say on the internet is largely a matter for national law, decided by national parliaments. This means that every nation in Europe currently has different laws and practices. 

But the EU has quietly been moving to change this. Take last year’s Copyright Directive, which more or less demands the introduction of automated content filters on social-media platforms. And last month, it became clear that an impatient Brussels wants to turbocharge this process by bringing internet regulation to the EU level, where it can pull the necessary strings.

The EU Digital Services Act sounds innocent on the surface. It is ostensibly aimed (in Euro-speak) at enhancing the so-called Digital Single Market by harmonising national laws and removing competitive barriers. Member states have not yet been consulted or made aware of any specific proposals in the Act. But thanks to the leak of an internal briefing to the Digital Single Market steering group, obtained German digital freedom activists Netzpolitik, we can see what Brussels has planned.

One of the EU’s key concerns, as the briefing makes clear, is the lack of EU-wide rules and regulations covering what people can see and say online. The fight against online hate speech, for example, is said to be ‘expensive and inefficient across the Single Market’. There are also no EU-wide rules on online advertising, nor does the EU have oversight of online services as a whole.

The prescription? EU regulation of the internet. 

 

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FBI document warns conspiracy theories are a new domestic terrorism threat

Comment: We knew it was coming.... 

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Yahoo.com

The FBI for the first time has identified fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terrorist threat, according to a previously unpublicized document obtained by Yahoo News. (Read the document below.)

The FBI intelligence bulletin from the bureau’s Phoenix field office, dated May 30, 2019, describes “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists,” as a growing threat, and notes that it is the first such report to do so. It lists a number of arrests, including some that haven’t been publicized, related to violent incidents motivated by fringe beliefs.

The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate, the theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant (which didn’t actually have a basement).

“The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the document states. It also goes on to say the FBI believes conspiracy theory-driven extremists are likely to increase during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

The FBI said another factor driving the intensity of this threat is “the uncovering of real conspiracies or cover-ups involving illegal, harmful, or unconstitutional activities by government officials or leading political figures.” The FBI does not specify which political leaders or which cover-ups it was referring to.

President Trump is mentioned by name briefly in the latest FBI document, which notes that the origins of QAnon is the conspiratorial belief that “Q,” allegedly a government official, “posts classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring.”

This recent intelligence bulletin comes as the FBI is facing pressure to explain who it considers an extremist, and how the government prosecutes domestic terrorists. In recent weeks the FBI director has addressed domestic terrorism multiple times but did not publicly mention this new conspiracy theorist threat.

The FBI is already under fire for its approach to domestic extremism. In a contentious hearing last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray faced criticism from Democrats who said the bureau was not focusing enough on white supremacist violence. “The term ‘white supremacist,’ ‘white nationalist’ is not included in your statement to the committee when you talk about threats to America,” Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said. “There is a reference to racism, which I think probably was meant to include that, but nothing more specific.”

FBI Conspiracy Theory Redacted by Kelli R. Grant on Scribd

Crypto Is Part of Free Speech, and Free Speech Is Everything

Graham Smith 
Activist Post 

 On July 23, U.S. Attorney General William Barr gave a speech demanding big players in the tech industry work with government agencies in providing backdoor entry points for encrypted devices and software. Per his reasoning, certain devices and messaging services pose a safety threat by providing a secure, third-party-inaccessible area where crime can rapidly proliferate. He didn’t note that this “warrant-proof encryption” also protects journalists, researchers, and individuals in areas of political unrest living under corrupt governments. Secure encryption also protects and verifies the financial assets and transactions of cryptocurrency holders everywhere. If strings of code — ideas, in essence — are now being made illegal, it would appear that a brand new battle for humanity’s free expression is just beginning. 

Crypto Is Free Speech

Article 19 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Of course, governments worldwide, and the UN itself, do not abide by this proclamation, but that last point is still of critical importance. The reception, transmission, and search for information via any media “regardless of frontiers” is part of free speech. Crypto is a technology. An idea. And it’s not limited by geographical constraints or “frontiers.” It’s a means by which to impart, receive, and seek information. After all, a bitcoin transaction or encrypted message is, in essence, an expression of information. 

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Next to go - Tony Cartalucci - Banned From Facebook and Twitter

Anthony Cartalucci
Land Destroyer

(LD) -  Facebook and Twitter joined forces to investigate and delete my accounts. This includes my Facebook page, as well as my Land Destroyer Twitter account, my Thai-centric AltThaiNews account, my personal Twitter account @TonyCartalucci and my LocalOrg account discussing solutions and technology.



It even made international news with Reuters in their article, "Facebook removes fake accounts from Thailand, Russia, Ukraine, Honduras," claiming:

The accounts removed in Thailand used “fictitious personas” to promote narratives about Thai politics, U.S.-China relations, protests in Hong Kong, and criticism of democracy activists in Thailand, Gleicher said. 

“We were able to determine conclusively that some of the activities of this network was linked to an individual based in Thailand associated with New Eastern Outlook, a Russian government-funded journal based in Moscow,” Gleicher said.

Tony Cartalucci is my pen name and a form of anonyminity - it is not a "fictitious persona." I write in a country where US-backed political agitators - referred to as "democracy activists" in the Reuters article - regularly use deadly violence against their opponents.

The Reuters article and those citing it and celebrating censorship are engaged in the now familiar tactics of smearing targeted individuals to justify otherwise indefensible censorship.

I am associated with New Eastern Outlook. They regularly publish my articles, as do hundreds of other alternative media websites around the world.

What I perhaps noticed most were all the so-called "democracy activists" in Thailand - taking time from complaining about Bangkok "censoring" them - to celebrate Facebook and Twitter's censorship - including Thailand's Human Rights Watch senior researcher, Sunai Phasuk who gloated on Twitter that my "information operation" was finally "ended."
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EU Looking To Regulate Everything Online, And To Make Sites Proactively Remove Material

Tech Dirt

One of the reasons that Techdirt and many others fought so hard against the worst ideas of the EU Copyright Directive is that it was clearly the thin end of the wedge. If things like upload filters and the imposition of intermediary liability become widely implemented as the result of legal requirements in the field of copyright, it would only be a matter of time before they were extended to other domains. Netzpolitik has obtained a seven-page European Commission paper sketching ideas for a new EU Digital Services Act (pdf) that suggests doing exactly that. The Act's reach is extremely wide:

The scope would cover all digital services, and in particular online platforms. This means the clarification would address all services across the internet stack from mere conduits such as ISPs to cloud hosting services; while a special emphasis in the assessment would be dedicated to updated rules for online platforms such as social media, search engines, or collaborative economy services, as well as for online advertising services.

A core aim is to replace the e-Commerce Directive, passed in 2000. This is presented as "outdated", but the suggestions in the paper are clearly a continuation of attacks on the fundamental principles underlying the open Internet that began with the Copyright Directive.

One of the problems for the EU when pushing through the upload filters of Article 13/17 in the Copyright Directive is that Article 15 of the e-Commerce Directive explicitly states that there is "No general obligation to monitor". Constant surveillance is the only way that upload filters can work -- if you don't monitor all the time, you can't be sure you block everything that the law requires. Furthermore, Article 14 of the e-Commerce Directive emphasizes that "the service provider is not liable for the information stored at the request of a recipient of the service". That's subject to certain conditions, such as being required to remove material that infringes on copyright, but only after being informed of its presence on their servers.

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Newspeak at the Media Freedom Conference

Kit Knightly  
Off Guardian

Joint UK-Canada Event Littered With Insidious Undertones

 

OffGuardian already covered the Global Media Freedom Conference, our article Hypocrisy Taints UK’s Media Freedom Conference, was meant to be all there was to say. A quick note on the obvious hypocrisy of this event. But, in the writing, I started to see more than that. This event is actually…creepy.

Let’s just look back at one of the four “main themes” of this conference:

"building trust in media and countering disinformation"

“Countering disinformation”? Well,that’s just another word for censorship.
This is proven by their refusal to allow Sputnik or RT accreditation. They claim RT “spreads disinformation” and they “countered” that by barring them from attending. 

“Building trust”? In the post-Blair world of PR newspeak, “building trust” is just another way of saying “making people believe us” (the word usage is actually interesting, building trust not earning trust).

The whole conference is shot through with this language that just feels…off.
Here is CNN’s Christiane Amanpour:

Our job is to be truthful, not neutral…we need to take a stand for the truth, and never to create a false moral or factual equivalence.”

Being “truthful not neutral” is one of Amanpour’s personal sayings, she obviously thinks it’s clever. 

Of course, what it is is NewSpeak for “bias”. 

Refusing to cover evidence of The White Helmets staging rescues, Israel arming ISIS or other inconvenient facts will be defended using this phrase – they will literally claim to only publish “the truth”, to get around impartiality…and then set about making up whatever “truth” is convenient. 

Oh, and if you don’t know what “creating a false moral quivalence is”, here I’ll demonstrate:

MSM: Putin is bad for shutting down critical media. OffG: But you’re supporting RT being banned and Wikileaks being shut down. BBC: No. That’s not the same. OffG: It seems the same. BBC: It’s not. You’re creating a false moral equivalence.
Understand now? You “create a false moral equivalence” by pointing out mainstream media’s double standards.

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Demand for DHS to disclose surveillance program that tracks, monitors and mines social media influencers

The RutherFord Institute

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Pushing back against the expansion of secret government surveillance programs and the chilling impact they have on lawful First Amendment activities, The Rutherford Institute is demanding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) disclose the details of a government program proposed by DHS in April 2018 that aims to track, monitor, catalogue and mine content posted by social media “influencers.”

In filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Rutherford Institute attorneys are asking for all records relating to a “Media Monitoring Services” surveillance program that would create a “media influencer database” for content created and posted by journalists, editors, social media influencers, and bloggers.  The Institute is asking for records and information on the program because of the chilling effect it will have on the First Amendment activities of the citizens targeted by the program.

“Government surveillance stifles dissent. The impact of this far-reaching surveillance is reduced trust, increased conformity, diminished civic participation and a populace cowed by fear,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The Department of Homeland Security’s secret surveillance of social media influencers is not only antithetical to the principles of a free society, but will also have a chilling and deleterious effect on the ability of all Americans to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech.” 

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London police official warns journalists not to publish gov. leaks with threats of imprisonment

Boing Boing

After a leak revealed that the British Ambassador to the USA had called Trump "inept, insecure and incompetent" (leading to the ambassador’s resignation and a round of Twitter insults between Trump and senior Tory officials), London’s Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu publicly warned journalists not to publish government leaks, threatening to imprison them if they do: "The publication of leaked communications, knowing the damage they have caused or are likely to cause may also be a criminal matter. I would advise all owners, editors and publishers of social and mainstream media not to publish leaked government documents that may already be in their possession, or which may be offered to them, and to turn them over to the police or give them back to their rightful owner, Her Majesty’s Government."

The comments drew sharp criticism from the British press. The Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman called it a "sinister, absurd, anti-democratic statement" and tweeted, "Do you have any comprehension of a free society? This isn’t Russia." The US managing editor of the Financial Times, Peter Spiegel, called the remarks "rather chilling from a major police force in a western democracy."

The Tory leaders jockeying to be Prime Minister staked out opposing positions. Boris Johnson demanded that the leaker be "hunted down and prosecuted" (while not calling for any journalists to be targeted by police) while his rival Jeremy Hunt said he defended publishing leaks "in the public interest...to the hilt."

Labour leader and PM-in-waiting Jeremy Corbyn defended the right of journalists to publish leaks, calling it "vital" and applauding the law’s "considerable protections" for a free press.

However, former defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon said the leak was a clear breach of the Official Secrets Act and the police were entitled to try to prevent further disclosures.
"If they [the press] are receiving stolen material they should give it back to their rightful owner," he told the Today programme.
"They should also be aware of the huge damage that has already been done, and the potentially even greater damage to be done by further breaches of the Official Secrets Act."

Ambassador row: Met Police criticised for warning off press [BBC]

How American Corporations Are Policing Online Speech Worldwide

Gizmodo

The architects of Silicon Valley’s big social media platforms never imagined they’d someday be the global speech police. And yet, as their market share and global user bases have increased over the years, that’s exactly what they’ve become. Today, the number of people who tweet is nearly the population of the United States. About a quarter of the internet’s total users watch YouTube videos, and nearly one-third of the entire world uses Facebook. Regardless of the intent of their founders, none of these platforms were ever merely a means of connecting people; from their early days, they fulfilled greater needs. They are the newspaper, the marketplace, the television. They are the billboard, the community newsletter, and the town square.

And yet, they are corporations, with their own speech rights and ability to set the rules as they like—rules that more often than not reflect the beliefs, however misguided, of their founders. Mark Zuckerberg has long professed beliefs that representing oneself through more than one identity indicates a lack of integrity, and that conversations held under one’s real name are more civil—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As such, Facebook users are forced to use their “authentic identity”—a name found on some form of written ID—regardless of whether it puts them in danger, or at risk of exposing a piece of themselves that could put them in harm’s way. It prevents youth from exploring their sexuality freely for fear of being outed; people with chronic illnesses from engaging with support groups out of concern that insurance companies or employers might learn of their plight; and activists living under repressive regimes from organizing online.

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‘Assange extradition should be warning to liberals who believe in American democracy’ – Zizek

   “What really worries me is the inertia of the wider public; they are aware and yet they don’t really care about it.”

RT

The UK’s decision to extradite WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange to the US should be taken as a warning to all liberals who still have any faith in ‘American liberal democracy,’ says cultural philosopher Slavoj Zizek. 

The Slovenian sociologist told RT that signing of the extradition order is just one of two recent events that really worry him. The other “ominous” event was the Ecuadorian government’s invitation to US authorities to take possession of Assange’s property from its London embassy when he was taken to prison, including book manuscripts, computers and other personal possessions.

“The nightmare is that the accuser was directly invited to take possession of all these documents. This breaks even the elementary the norms of legality,” Zizek explained.

“The message is, ‘Yes, we will be brutal beyond measure.’”

Zizek drew particular attention to the sheer brutality of the coordinated effort against the whistleblower after he exposed the US government and military’s gross misdeeds.

“It’s always an ominous signal when measures against a threatened individual are done in such a directly brutal way that this very brutality means something,” he said.

Zizek also railed against so-called liberals back across the pond in the UK arguing that “those in the UK who are most fervent advocates of Assange’s extradition, are not conservatives but more centrist Blairite wing of the Labour Party.” 

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Jordan Peterson Announces Free Speech Platform ‘Thinkspot’

Alexander Hall
NewsBusters

An upcoming free speech platform promises to provide users the best features of other social media, but without the censorship.

The subscription based “anti-censorship” platform “Thinkspot” is being created by popular psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. It’s being marketed as a free speech alternative to payment processors like Patreon in that it will “monetize creators” and as provide a social media alternative to platforms like Facebook and YouTube. 

Peterson discussed Thinkspot with podcaster Joe Rogan on June 9, emphasizing a radically pro-free speech Terms of Service. He described that freedom as the “central” aspect saying, “once you're on our platform we won't take you down unless we’re ordered to by a US court of law.”

That will be a profound contrast to platforms that ban users for “misgendering” people who identify as trans, or for tweeting “learn to code” at fired journalists. 

The only other major rule on comments he mentioned was that they need to be thoughtful. Rather than suggesting that some opinions are “off limits,” Peterson said they will have a minimum required length so one has to put thought into what they write. 

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Facebook bans Natural News; Health Ranger responds with message for humanity

Mike Adams
Natural News

In response to a coordinated, heavily-funded smear campaign against Natural News and myself, the Health Ranger, Facebook has now permanently banned Natural News from posting content. The channel name that has been banned is Facebook.com/healthranger, which was our primary channel reaching over 2.5 million people.

This is on top of the permanent bans of Natural News content from Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Google News, Apple and other techno-fascists that now represent the greatest threat to human freedom the world has ever seen.

The techno-fascists, including Wikipedia, have decided that no speech that questions any official narrative will be allowed on any platform. Anyone who questions the safety of toxic vaccines, 5G cell towers, geoengineering, chemotherapy or glyphosate weed killer chemicals is now maliciously attacked, smeared and de-platformed. You’re not even allowed now to talk about nutrition, anti-cancer foods or nutritional supplements without being labeled a “vitamin” website accused of pushing fake cures. (That’s right: The left-wing authoritarian tyrants are now anti-nutrition on top of everything else.)

Every website or individual who expresses any view of dissent against the corrupt scientific establishment is immediately labeled “fake news,” even as the left-wing media routinely pushed total fabrications about President Trump and anyone who supports Trump.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the tech giants and their CEOs are truly enemies of humanity.

Remember: As all this censorship is taking place, the tech giants somehow claim they aren’t censoring anyone at all. They claim to have a monopoly on “facts” or “truth” and proclaim themselves to have the King’s unique right to decide who gets to speak and who must be silenced. These criminals like Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Cook are un-elected, subject to zero transparency and offer no mechanism for due process whereby channels who are banned might defend themselves against unfair, dishonest smears or fake news attacks run by left-wing journo-terrorism hacks.

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See also:

Glenn Greenwald Rips Liberals Begging For Censorship After YouTube 'Adpocalypse'

Against Big Tech Viewpoint Discrimination 

YouTube to delete thousands of accounts after it bans supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other ‘harmful’ users

Here's A List Of Ideas & Statements YouTube Will Ban You For Expressing Under Their New 'Hate Speech Policy'

Police raids escalate as the war on journalism goes worldwide

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium

The Australian Federal Police have conducted two raids on journalists and seized documents in purportedly unrelated incidents in the span of just two days.

Yesterday the AFP raided the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst, seeking information related to her investigative report last year which exposed the fact that the Australian government has been discussing the possibility of giving itself unprecedented powers to spy on its own citizens. Today they raided the Sydney headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corp, seizing information related to a 2017 investigative report on possible war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan.

In a third, also ostensibly unrelated incident, another Australian reporter disclosed yesterday that the Department of Home Affairs has initiated an investigation of his reporting on a story about asylum seeker boats which could lead to an AFP criminal case, saying he's being pressured to disclose his source. 


"Why has AFP suddenly decided to carry out these two raids after the election?" tweeted Australian Sky News political editor David Speers during the Sydney raid. "Did new evidence really just emerge in both the Annika Smethurst and ABC stories?!"

Why indeed?

"If these raids unconnected, as AFP reportedly said, it's an extraordinary coincidence," tweeted The Conversation chief political correspondent Michelle Grattan. "AFP needs to explain ASAP the timing so long after the stories. It can't be that inefficient! Must be some explanation - which makes the 'unconnected' claim even more odd."

Odd indeed.

It is true that the AFP has formally denied that there was any connection between the two raids, and it is in fact difficult to imagine how the two could be connected apart from their sharing a common theme of exposing malfeasance that the government wanted kept secret. If it is true that they are unconnected, then what changed? What in the world could have changed to spark this sudden escalation of the Australian government's assault on the free press?

Well, if as I suggested recently you don't think in terms of separate, individual nations, it's not hard to think of at least one thing that's changed. "The criminalization and crack down on national security journalism is spreading like a virus," WikiLeaks tweeted today in response to the ABC raid. "The Assange precedent is already having effect. Journalists must unite and remember that courage is also contagious." 

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Eliminating Free Speech The Smart Way

Jeff Thomas
International Man

Left-wing activists have recently been increasingly active in seeking to limit opposing political viewpoints, in order to create a more ubiquitous “groupthink.” One effort in accomplishing this has been to propose the creation of a “Human Rights Committee” in order to monitor the economic transactions of “white supremacist groups and anti-Islam activists.”

This should not be surprising, as, throughout the former Free World, collectivists are, increasingly, coming out of the closet and seeking to eliminate any and all opposition to their cause.

And this should not, in itself, be alarming, as it should be both predictable and understandable that any politically driven group, be it left-leaning or right-leaning, would seek to gain an advantage over its opposite number.

What may be a real cause for alarm, however, is that those whom they are trying to rope into their effort are banks and corporations… and that they’re succeeding without a shot being fired.

It might be hoped that those champions of industry and commerce would at least put up a perfunctory fight, but clearly, this is not the case. They’re not only caving in; they’re entirely on board.

As an example, MasterCard is considering the selective restriction of individuals from their services and funds. Those individuals would be the ones that held unacceptable political views.

But they’re not the first in the queue to economically force people to have “correct” views. PayPal and Patreon have barred selected individuals from receiving payments through their services when those individuals have been identified as holding “extreme views.” More alarmingly, they’ve been supported in this decision by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Journalist Ben Swann has commented that this means that the US government has granted “big corporations the ability to control what voices are heard.”

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No to Christchurch Call: Put aside your hate of Trump for a day – he may have just saved free speech

RT

Even adversaries of the US president should admit that he is the only one who has stood up to the disturbing anti-free speech proposal concocted by illiberal globalist world leaders and compliant tech companies. 

 

Ironically, by becoming the sole leader of a major Western power to reject the ‘Christchurch Call’ – the cross-border plan to restrict “terrorist and extremist” content online – Donald Trump has consolidated support for the document, sparing it deserved scrutiny.

After all, who doesn’t want to stop violence being spread through social media, particularly in the wake of the double mosque shooting in New Zealand in March? Well – judging by the commentary in mainstream media outlets – only that exceptionalist US president, and that band of white supremacists on whom he is relying to win in 2020.

But I would urge those of all political persuasions to study the text of the document, presented by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Emmanuel Macron in Paris this week, and endorsed by every major US online giant – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Twitter.

Are these really the powers you want to give away to officials and Silicon Valley execs? Or should we at least ask some clarifying questions first?

Orwell’s bingo

 

Here are some notable and representative excerpts:

We, the governments commit to counter the drivers of terrorism and violent extremism by strengthening the resilience and inclusiveness of our societies to enable them to resist terrorist and violent extremist ideologies, including through education, building media literacy to help counter distorted terrorist and violent extremist narratives, and the fight against inequality.

This is the first bullet point, and we are already onto loaded political terminology rife with assumptions. Why must societies become more “inclusive” – a byword for multiculturalism – to stop terrorism? Why is the “fight against inequality” – a predominantly leftist agenda – a pre-condition for preventing it? Osama bin Laden wasn’t a pauper, and neither was gym trainer Brenton Tarrant for that matter.

More important are the treacherously vague definitions that almost invite abuse. Who decides what is a “distorted narrative”? How do you “build media literacy” – is it, as always, by using NewsGuard to tell people not to click on RT.com instead of the New York Times? What is even “violent extremist ideology”? Support for mass murder in mosques is. But what about those who want mosques shut down because they believe Islam is a scourge on Western society? Or those who ride out in militias to protect the US-Mexican border from illegal migrants? Are they advocating a “violent extremist ideology”? How about Black Lives Matter – they often engage in violence, and demand radical social change? Antifa? The Venezuelan opposition, who plan to overthrow their elected president and want the army to defect? 

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