In an April 29, 2021, opinion piece published by Newsday,1 Arthur Caplan and Dorit Reiss, Ph.D., argue for the implementation of vaccine passports as a strategy to regain our freedom to travel and the “safe” reopening of schools and businesses.
Caplan is the director of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Reiss is a law professor at UC Hastings College of the Law and a member2 of the Parent Advisory Board of Voices of Vaccines.
Caplan is also co-chair of the Vaccines Working Group on Ethics and Policy, a group formed specifically to address “key policy challenges associated with the testing and distribution of vaccines intended to prevent COVID-19 transmission in the United States,” and Reiss is a member of the board.3
Part of their argument is that vaccinations have “always” been “necessary for travel,” which is patently false. Proof of vaccination requirements are rare, and strictly limited to travel to certain destinations where the risk of contracting a disease and bringing it back to a population with nonexistent immunity against it is high. You’ve never had to show proof of vaccination when flying to Paris, France, for example.
Arguing for Unconstitutional Practices
Caplan and Reiss also argue that prohibiting businesses from requiring vaccine passports, which some state governors are now doing, is “unusual and irrational,” as private businesses have the right to make their business more attractive by increasing the safety for its staff and patrons.
The problem with that argument is that it is the government’s job to protect the Constitutional rights of all Americans. Allowing or encouraging businesses to create a two-tier society where unvaccinated people are barred from participating in civic society is unconstitutional on its face.
What’s more, proof of vaccination against COVID-19 will not ensure safety. It won’t even remotely promote it, as the so-called vaccines are designed to merely reduce symptoms of the infection. They don’t make you immune. You can still contract the virus and spread it to others. The only one who might benefit from the jab is the one getting it.
Of course, Caplan and Reiss make no mention of this crucial point, but since the vaccinated person is the only one getting any protection, no one needs to know your vaccination status, as it doesn’t affect them either way. A COVID-19 vaccinated individual poses the same risk to the community as an unvaccinated one.
So, the only reason for a vaccine passport is a control-related one, and Reiss and Caplan are keeping busy, trying to convince you otherwise. In a February 2021 Barron’s article,4 they argued for letting employers mandate vaccines for their employees, using the same lame arguments.
What’s happening here is that the U.S. federal government recognizes that it cannot legally mandate vaccine passports. It would be unconstitutional, as it would create a two-tier society built on medical discrimination. So, government is depending on private businesses to push through this measure. Reiss and Caplan’s efforts are part of this strategic subversion of Constitutional rights.
Caplan and Reiss also paired up for an opinion piece published April 27, 2021, by The Hour,5 in which they sank to typical propagandist lows, bashing parents of vaccine damaged children who fought against the removal of religious exemption to vaccination in Connecticut.6
The Threat of Utilitarianism
Caplan’s and Reiss’ one-sided obsession with utilitarianism, where risks to the individual are ignored and the idea of self-determination and personal choice is ridiculed, is clearly spelled out in an article published in the January/June 2020 issue of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences:7
“There is a large literature about school mandates, and a somewhat more limited literature on adult mandates, but there is less principled discussion of when is it appropriate to mandate a specific vaccine. Field and Caplan suggested an ethical framework to consider when school mandates ought to apply …
Their framework explains that autonomy, beneficence, utilitarianism, justice, and non-maleficence are the values affected by immunization mandates. Applying the framework here provides important insights on the suitability of a COVID-19 vaccine mandate …
[U]tilitarianism — acting for the benefit of the greatest number for society as a whole — supports a COVID-19 mandate, as it supports other vaccine mandates … The current pandemic is causing harms in lives and suffering, and also economic harms as preventing loss of more life requires measures like sheltering at home, closing businesses, and the closing of public spaces. Preventing these staggering costs is a huge social benefit.
Once a vaccine is available, the justification for measures like shelter at home will decrease, but preventing harms will depend on vaccine use. A mandate will increase use, boost herd immunity and reduce costs. The only caveat is that the balance of costs and benefits depends on the safety of the vaccine.”
Utilitarianism is a discredited pseudo-ethic that has repeatedly been used to justify horrific human rights abuses. By now, we can accurately predict what the outcome will be if we allow it to be used to justify vaccine passports and mandatory COVID vaccinations.
In short, utilitarianism is based on a mathematical equation that some individuals can be sacrificed for the greater good of the majority. In other words, if some people are harmed by vaccines, it’s an acceptable loss because society as a whole may or will reap gains.
Caplan and Reiss express this as “acting for the benefit of the greatest number.” The flip-side is that a smaller number — it could be 49 out of 100 — may be harmed and that’s acceptable, because the people harmed is still a smaller number than the majority.
More Than 11,000 COVID Vaccine Deaths Logged
The latest data on COVID-19 vaccine side effects suggest governments are already operating under this horrific utilitarian ideology.
How else do you explain the fact that the European Union’s vaccine injury reporting system had logged 330,218 adverse event reports, including 7,766 deaths, as of April 17, 2021,8 and the U.S. reporting system had logged 118,902 adverse event reports as of April 23, including 3,544 deaths and 12,618 serious injuries,9 yet all of these injuries and deaths are simply ignored and the call for everyone to get their jab continues unabated — all while bashing vaccine hesitancy as a mental illness, intellectual deficit or act of domestic terrorism?!
In a utilitarian system, you cease to be an individual with rights to autonomous decision-making and become a tool of the government, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing here. Government has apparently decided that some people — quite a few people, apparently — are expendable, which is the exact converse of what they’re telling us publicly.
They say we all must get vaccinated to save lives, especially the elderly. Yet lives are being taken, and these are not people who already have one foot in the grave. While COVID-19 kills the elderly and the seriously ill, these gene therapy injections are stealing the lives of younger, healthy individuals who are in the prime of their lives. How can you even compare those two scenarios and come to the conclusion that mass vaccination is the greater good?
While utilitarianism was a popular ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it went out of fashion in the mid-20th century, after the Third Reich employed the utilitarian rationale as an excuse to demonize and eliminate minorities judged to be a threat to the health, security and well-being of the State.10 Its abhorrent and unethical nature was clearly recognized and clarified during the Nuremberg trials.
Although we may disagree about the quality and quantity of the scientific evidence used by doctors and governments to declare COVID-19 “vaccines” safe, at our peril do we fail to agree that, while government may have the power, it does not have the moral authority to dictate that individuals born with certain genes and biological susceptibilities give up their lives without their consent for what the ruling majority deems is the greater good.
Having everyone conform to a normal weight and not having insulin resistance issues would be for the greater good of society. Does that mean government should have the power to send everyone above a certain BMI to a forced internment camp where they are exercised and underfed until they no longer pose an increased health care cost risk?
We really ought to think long and hard before we jump on the utilitarian wagon and start pumping our fists in the air in endorsement of the “greater good” narrative.
Most people in the U.S. are engaging in lifestyle practices that put them at a seriously increased risk of being a financial burden on society and the health care system, so don’t fall for the baseless idea that unvaccinated people, specifically, will end up costing more because they’ll end up with more serious cases of COVID-19. There’s no data at all to back that up.
Conspiracies Blamed for Growing Sensibility
As more and more people are starting to realize the perilous road we’re on and where it’s taking us, the mainstream propagandists are turning up the heat, blaming vaccine hesitancy on one “conspiracy theory” after another. They simply refuse to admit that people can, and most want, to make their own decisions.
Rising anti-vaccination sentiment is being blamed on everything from Russian bots and trolls spreading misinformation online and making a tiny minority appear larger than what it actually is,11 to rebranding “harmful anti-vaccine views” as a civil liberties issue or a part of some other conspiracy theory involving the drug industry or Bill Gates.12
The fact is, the vaccine mandate pushers have nothing but foul language and mockery at their disposal. They have no facts with which to prove that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective, or that mass vaccination will save lives. They cannot disprove the financial incentives and ties that exist between Gates, the World Health Organization, vaccine makers and government.
Gates is one of the largest funders of the WHO, which has been responsible for the global response to the pandemic, while simultaneously being heavily invested in COVID-19 vaccines and funding censorship of vaccine information.13
The WHO is also promoting global censorship of vaccine information, in part through its “Stop the Spread” campaign14 aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19 “misinformation,” and a coalition of groups is calling on the Biden Administration to put together a disinformation task force.15
Showing just how ludicrous this suggestion is, the task force would “explore ways to crack down on deliberate disinformation campaigns in ways that don’t unduly limit free expression.” In other words, they’re to figure out how to censor people without making it a clear breach of the First Amendment.
Well, we already know one way in which they’re doing that, and that is by calling on private companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor for them. It’s still a violation of the First Amendment, though; it’s just harder to see.
Vaccine mandate pushers also cannot disprove that the pandemic is being used to roll out the Great Reset and global “build back better” plans that will decimate the U.S. Constitution and rob the working class of its wealth and autonomy. In short, they have no counter-arguments. All they can do is paint people who question their flimsy utilitarian narrative as crackpots of one sort or another.
If the vaccines were truly fantastic, word of their miraculous nature would spread like wildfire, just as reports of horrendous vaccine side effects now are, and people would flock to get them even in the absence of advertising and celebrity promotion.
The fact that name-calling and smear tactics are employed en masse to paint dissenters as crackpots and terrorists rather than presenting actual data and evidence that supports their pro-vaccine stance is proof positive that there’s something strange afoot.
Utilitarian Extremism Is on the Rise
I’ve previously written about the sudden influence wielded by a group called Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a progressive cancel-culture leader with extensive ties to government and global think tanks that recently labeled people questioning the COVID-19 vaccine as a national security threat.
The CCDH has published two reports16,17 naming me as one of the top 12 individuals responsible for 65% of vaccine “disinformation” on social media, and in true utilitarian fashion, CCDH founder Imran Ahmed is calling on all platforms to silence me for the public good.
Ahmed has also published an article18 in the journal Nature Medicine, calling for the “dismantling” of the entire “anti-vaccine industry.” In it, he repeats the lie that he “attended and recorded a private, three-day meeting of the world’s most prominent anti-vaxxers,” when, in fact, what he’s referring to was a public online conference open to an international audience.
All attendants have access to the recordings as part of their attendance fee, so unless he illegally hacked his way into the conference, he didn’t have to record a thing. We gave it to him. When you lie about something that stupid, it really puts your credibility about larger issues in question.
The CCDH is partnered with Anti-Vax Watch, which held a demonstration outside the halls of Congress in this bizarre getup. While the CCDH claims to be fighting the good fight against dangerous crackpots and extremists, they work with people who look like they epitomize those terms.19
This is hardly the look of people standing on higher moral and ethical ground. This is pure theatre, which makes sense, seeing how they don’t have facts and data with which to make their point.

Gates-Funded Doctor Demands Terrorist Experts Attack Me
Dr. Peter Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute,20 recently cited the CCDH in a Nature article in which he goes so far as to call for cyberwarfare experts to be enlisted in the war against vaccine safety advocates and people who are “vaccine hesitant.”
“Accurate, targeted counter-messaging from the global health community is important but insufficient, as is public pressure on social-media companies,” Hotez writes.21
“The United Nations and the highest levels of government must take direct, even confrontational, approaches with Russia, and move to dismantle anti-vaccine groups in the United States.
Efforts must expand into the realm of cyber security, law enforcement, public education and international relations. A high-level inter-agency task force reporting to the UN secretary-general could assess the full impact of anti-vaccine aggression, and propose tough, balanced measures.
The task force should include experts who have tackled complex global threats such as terrorism, cyber attacks and nuclear armament, because anti-science is now approaching similar levels of peril. It is becoming increasingly clear that advancing immunization requires a counteroffensive.”
This appears to be part of the campaign to pressure the White House administration into creating an information warfare task force, as mentioned earlier. Not surprisingly, the Sabin Vaccine Institute has received tens of millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.22,23,24,25 Most recently, funds from the Gates foundation were used to create a report called “Meeting the Challenge of Vaccine Hesitancy.”26,27
A Well-Informed Humanity United Is the Answer
Even while censorship and utilitarian-driven extremism heats up, we must never stop seeking out and sharing information that impacts our health and freedom. Informed consent demands transparency of the bad along with the good. Right now, all people are given free access to is the supposed benefit, while all potential harms are whitewashed and scrubbed from the internet.
Nothing good can come of this. As noted in Kennedy’s October 24, 2020, online speech,28 “International Message of Hope for Humanity” — which kicked off a day of protest against the coup d’état by the technocratic elite — we must shed our imaginary fears, reject media fearmongering, insist on freedom of speech and engage in the democratic process.
“The only way we can win it is with democracy,” he said. “We need to fight to get our democracy back, to reclaim our democracy from these villains who are stealing it from us. Notice the people who are getting richest from this quarantine are the same people who are censoring criticism of the quarantine.”
The same is true for vaccines and vaccine passports. Kennedy also stressed another crucial point, namely the need to unify. We must put aside our quibbles over nonessential things like race, religion and political affiliations, and stay laser-focused on the real enemy.
“What the Big Tech villains … want us to do is fight with each other. They want Blacks fighting against Whites. They want republicans fighting against democrats. They want everybody polarized. They want everybody fragmented because they know that if we all get together, we’re going to start asking questions and those are questions they can’t answer …
Stop identifying yourself. The enemy is Big Tech, Big Data, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the medical cartel, the government totalitarian elements that are trying to oppress us, that are trying to rob us of our liberties, of our democracy, of our freedom of thought, of our freedom of expression, of our freedom of assembly and all of the freedoms that give dignity to humanity …
The free-flow of information, the cauldron of debate, is the only thing that allows governments to develop rational policies in which self-governance will actually work and triumph.
You are on the front lines of the most important battle in history — the battle to save democracy, freedom, human liberty and human dignity from this totalitarian cartel that is trying to rob us, simultaneously, in every nation in the world, of the rights that every human being is born with …
And I pledge to you: I will go down dying with my boots on, fighting side-by-side with all of you to make sure that we return these rights and preserve them for our children.”
I too will continue fighting for human rights, free speech and medical freedom. Without these, what are we? What is life reduced to? What’s the point of preventing a few COVID-19 cases and deaths if the entire global population — including the billions who are at no risk from this virus — must gamble their health in the process?
The Rise of Utilitarian Extremism, and How to Recognize It | Mercola
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VIDEO: Trending as a Transphobe and Bi-Phobe
I had the privilege of having my name trend on Twitter for a good part of Wednesday and into Thursday morning because journalists in the liberal sector of media along with left/liberal activists accused me of transphobia and bi-phobia (with half-hearted accusations of misogyny tossed in) so many times that Twitter’s algorithm catapulted my name onto its sacred most-discussed list. Twitter’s new team of extremely politicized editorialists summarized the trending term this way:
So repetitious were the accusatory tweets that a journalist entering my name in the Twitter search feature found these helpful prompts:
Among the many bizarre aspects of this episode is that I am and long have been someone who resides on the far end of the spectrum when it comes to trans rights: in favor of full legal rights for trans people, in favor of honoring their gender identity, and opposed to efforts to malign or exclude them, so much so that, in the past, when attacked on the rare occasions that I discuss this issue, it is almost always from people who oppose the core tenets of trans rights, not from those who support them. If I, with these views, am a bigoted enemy of the trans movement, then who are its allies? Do many of those who form this movement even want allies? So often it seems like they are more intent on insisting that those who perceive themselves as supporters are actually enemies due to the slightest deviations from the full panoply of dogma rather than persuading their actual enemies to become supporters: the persusaion-driven way that all successful social movements succeed in fostering change. . . Read More
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House Democrats, Targeting Right-Wing Cable Outlets, Are Assaulting Core Press Freedoms
Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.
Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday announced a February 24 hearing, convened by one of its sub-committees, entitled “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.” Claiming that “the spread of disinformation and extremism by traditional news media presents a tangible and destabilizing threat,” the Committee argues: “Some broadcasters’ and cable networks’ increasing reliance on conspiracy theories and misleading or patently false information raises questions about their devotion to journalistic integrity.”
Since when is it the role of the U.S. Government to arbitrate and enforce precepts of “journalistic integrity”? Unless you believe in the right of the government to regulate and control what the press says — a power which the First Amendment explicitly prohibits — how can anyone be comfortable with members of Congress arrogating unto themselves the power to dictate what media outlets are permitted to report and control how they discuss and analyze the news of the day?
But what House Democrats are doing here is far more insidious than what is revealed by that creepy official announcement. Two senior members of that Committee, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Silicon-Valley) and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) also sent their own letters to seven of the nation’s largest cable providers — Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice — as well as to digital distributors of cable news (Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu) demanding to know, among other things, what those cable distributors did to prevent conservative “disinformation” prior to the election and after — disinformation, they said, that just so happened to be spread by the only conservative cable outlets: Fox, Newsmax and OANN.
In case there was any doubt about their true goal — coercing these cable providers to remove all cable networks that feature conservative voices, including Fox (just as their counterparts on that Committee want to ban right-wing voices from social media) — the House Democrats in their letter said explicitly what they are after: namely, removal of those conservative outlets by these cable providers:
Congresswoman Eshoo boasted on her official site about these efforts, lauding herself and McNerney for “urging 12 cable, satellite, and streaming TV companies to combat the spread of misinformation and requesting more information about their actions to address misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies spread through channels they host.”
For the last four years, we were inundated with media messaging that Trump posed an unprecedented threat to press freedoms. The Washington Post even flamboyantly adopted a new motto to implicitly ratify that accusation (while claiming it was not Trump-specific). Other than the indictment of Julian Assange — which most Washington Democrats cheered — what did the Trump administration do in the way of attacking press freedoms that remotely compares to Democrats abusing their majoritarian power to force the removal of conservative cable outlets from the airwaves, just days after doing the same with dissident voices online?
There is not a peep of protest from any liberal journalists. Do any of the people who spent four years pretending to care so deeply about the vital role of press freedom have anything to say about this full frontal attack by the majority party in Washington on news outlets opposed to their political agenda and ideology?
Evidently not. While many conservative outlets are covering this story, it is difficult to find any liberal outlets writing about it at all. An article from The New York Times was one exception, though it largely attempted to justify these censorship efforts, with paragraph after paragraph purporting to demonstrate the dangerous misinformation spread by these channels. The only nods to the dangers of press freedoms in the article came from statements by Fox News and a GOP member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Revealingly, these same two members of Congress who sent this threatening letter to cable providers said during the Trump years that freedom of the press must be safeguarded at all costs. “The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making laws that abridge the freedom of the press, and we cherish our country’s culture of free expression,” they intoned when writing to the FCC in 2019 to complain that Russian news outlets were concealing their affiliation with the Kremlin. “We’re not requesting any press censorship,” they assured the FCC under Trump. Yet they are clearly doing exactly that now.
In a statement he emailed to me and publicly posted, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr denounced the Democrats’ actions as a “marked departure from First Amendment norms.” He said “it is a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys.” In response to my inquiries, Commissioner Carr added in a separate statement to me:
The greatest threat to free speech in America today is not any law passed by the government—the First Amendment stands as a strong bulwark against that form of censorship by state action. The threat comes in the form of legislating by letterhead. Politicians have realized that they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by public bullying. The letter sent by two senior Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cable companies and other regulated entities, and the Committee’s own hearing this week on “disinformation in the media,” are the latest examples. They are singling out selected newsrooms for their coverage of political events and sending a clear message that these media outlets will pay a price if they do not align their viewpoints with Democrat orthodoxy. That is a chilling transgression of free speech and journalistic freedom. No government official has any business inquiring about the ‘moral principles’ that guide a private entity’s decision about what news to carry.
Carr’s GOP colleague on the FCC, Commissioner Nathan Simington, similarly accused House Democrats of seeking to “intimidate into silence those who would distribute on their platforms disfavored points of view.”
The way Democrats justify this to themselves is important to consider. They do not, of course, explicitly acknowledge that they are engaged in authoritarian assaults on free speech and a free press. Not even the most despotic tyrants like to think of themselves in that way. All tyrants concoct theories and excuses to justify their censorship as noble and necessary.
Indeed, the justifying script Democrats are using here is the one most commonly employed by autocrats around the world to silence their critics. Those they seek to silence are not merely expressing a different view, but are dangerous. They are not merely advocating alternative ideologies but are destabilizing society with lies, fake news, and speech that deliberately incites violence, subversion and domestic terrorism.
In her boastful posting, Rep. Eshoo says her efforts targeting these cable outlets are necessary because “misinformation on TV has led to our current polluted information environment that radicalizes individuals to commit seditious acts and rejects public health best practices, among other issues in our public discourse.” This is the rationale invoked by virtually every repressive state to imprison journalists and ban media outlets.
The Democrats sound a great deal like the Egyptian regime of Gen. Abdel el-Sisi. Just two weeks ago, Sisi’s regime finally released an Al Jazeera journalist who had been imprisoned for four years based on accusations that he had “spread false news” and was guilty of “incitement against state institutions and broadcasting false news with the aim of spreading chaos.” Sound familiar? It should, since that is precisely what House Democrats are saying to ennoble their multi-pronged assault on free expression.
Accusing one’s domestic opponents of being subversives and domestic terrorists is by far the most common way that despots on every continent justify their censorship and silencing campaigns of oppositional media outlets. In 2014, the French journalist Valeria Costa-Kostritsky warned in the Index on Censorship that anti-terrorism laws and accusations of promoting subversion were becoming the primary means which authoritarian states from Turkey and Jordan to Russia and the UAE use to justify the silencing of journalists:
Anti-terror legislation seems to be the perfect tool for a state seeking to crack down on opposition. “It’s so elusive. You can [see] anything as terrorist propaganda. There needn’t be any evidence of violence, any praise of violence. Plus, if you blame someone for having a connection with the [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] the public buys that argument easily, especially in a country that is suffering from terrorism, as Turkey is,” said Sevgi Akarçeşme, former editor-in-chief of Turkey’s Today’s Zaman (the English-language edition of daily Zaman), who had her newspaper taken over by the government in March 2016.
A similar means used by repressive governments to silence disfavored media outlets is to claim they are promoting “extremism.” As Costa-Kostritsky detailed:
There’s another word one can use to browse through reports published on the [Mapping Media Freedom] map: “extremism”. Anti-extremism legislation is used to intimidate journalists in post-Soviet countries, particularly in Russia. On the map, of the 35 incidents flagged with “extremism”, 11 took place in Russia, and seven in Crimea, others include Belgium, Italy, Hungary, France and Spain. Five reports connecting the media to “extremism” took place during the first half of 2016. They include website closures and journalists being put on a list of extremists. In Russia, most cases using anti-extremism legislations against journalists happen via Roskomnadzor, the national media regulator.
When China arrests journalists it typically justifies its actions by accusing them of fomenting extremism that jeopardizes national security.
And accusing journalists of spreading “fake news” — always a dangerously vague term from its inception — is equally commonplace when government authorities want to silence media outlets. The Washington Post reported that “as 2019 draws to a close, there are 30 journalists in jail worldwide on charges of ‘false news’ — or, as it’s also called these days, ‘fake news.’” In sum:
It has now become commonplace to throw around fake-news accusations in the United States. But in other countries around the world — like Egypt, Turkey, Somalia and Cameroon — such charges can have very chilling and stifling impacts on the press, according to an annual report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
In Egypt — where General-turned-President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi has been overseeing a crackdown that human rights groups say is harsher than any before — there are 21 journalists in jail for allegedly publishing “false news,” according to the CPJ’s data. In practice, press freedom advocates say, these charges stem from a simple fact: The journalists published news that Sisi didn’t like.
In a passage that the Post would only publish about foreign countries but never about House Democrats, even though it now applies equally, they observed: “There is a serious global problem of disinformation spreading online and sowing distrust and sectarianism. The problem, say press advocates, is that the laws regulating fake news all too often are a means of stifling the media rather than fostering a more transparent environment online.”
This framework is hardly rare in the west either. When the Obama administration collaborated with the UK Government in 2013 to detain my husband David Miranda at Heathrow Airport in connection with the work he was doing in the Snowden reporting, they cited an anti-terrorism law to justify his detention, and repeatedly threatened to prosecute him for terrorism if he did not cooperate by providing all of his passwords to them. He ultimately prevailed in his lawsuit against the U.K. Government on the ground that it constitutes an illegal assault on press freedoms and human rights to abuse anti-terrorism frameworks to intimidate or silence journalists.
Justifying the silencing of journalists by accusing them of inciting domestic terrorism and extremism is now the most common means used globally for censorsing the press. The Committee to Protect Journalists in 2013 said they had “tracked a significant rise in journalist imprisonments.” The culprit, said the group, was “the expansion of anti-terrorism and national security laws worldwide” after the 9/11 attack, which had been repeatedly abused to criminalize media outlets. “The number of journalists jailed worldwide hit 232 in 2012, 132 of whom were held on anti-terror or other national security charges.” In sum: “CPJ’s analysis has found that governments have exploited these laws to silence critical journalists.”
Are there conspiracy theories and disinformation sometimes found on the conservative cable outlets which House Democrats want taken off the air? Of course there are: all media outlets disseminate conspiracy theories and fake news at times. MSNBC and CNN spent four years endorsing the most deranged conspiracy theory imaginable, one with very toxic roots in the Cold War: namely, the McCarthyite script that the Kremlin had taken over control of key U.S. institutions through sexual blackmail over the President, invasions into the nation’s heating system and electric grid, and criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the Trump campaign to hack into Democrats’ emails.
All of that was false, just as the one-month tale told over and over by the media about a pro-Trump mob murdering Brian Sicknick by bludgeoning him to death with a fire extinguisher was false — a story which remains unretracted or corrected by most who spread it.
Just imagine if, during the Trump years, the GOP Senate had abused its power to bully cable outlets into removing MSNBC from their platforms, or banning liberal journalists and activists from using social media platforms, on the grounds that they were spreading conspiracy theories and fake news. It is hard to overstate how extreme the rhetoric would have been that Trump and the Republicans were engaged in authoritarian measures to destroy free speech and a free press.
And I would have joined in those denunciations (as I did with the Assange prosecution): as much as I loathe so much of what those outlets do, it is not the role of the government to regulate let alone silence them. The corrective is for journalists to rebuild trust and faith with the public by exposing their misinformation and proving to the public that they will do accurate and reliable reporting regardless of which faction is aggrandized or angered.
But corporate media outlets and Democrats (excuse the redundancy) who spent the last four years posturing as virulent defenders of press freedoms never meant it. Like so much of what they claimed to believe, it was fraudulent. The proof is that they are now mute, if not supportive, as Democrats use their status as majority party to launch an assault against press freedoms far more egregious than anything Trump got close to doing.
February 23, 2020 | Nightly News Rebroadcast | Video: 49 Minutes 26 Seconds
Massive flames and clouds of smoke filled the sky in Texas after a train crash, former Capitol police agree the Jan. 6 Capitol breach was pre-planned, and the Biden administration is reopening a Trump-era migrant facility for children.
Bannon’s War Room | Morning Edition Hour 2 | Recorded February 23, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 38 Seconds
Eric Greitens co-hosts, we discuss with Sam Faddis the killing of the republic and Trump as Tiberius Gracchus. Then we go to the grassroots initiatives of Dan Schultz and precinct committeeman Joe Chesney. Our guests are: Eric Greitens, Sam Faddis, Dan Schultz, Joseph Chesney.
Bannon’s War Room | Evening Edition | Recorded February 23, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 59 Seconds
“He’s (Fauci) Big Pharma’s puppet, their tool. He basically tried to take down the President of the United States with his lies.” Our guests are: Ben Bergquam, Mike J. Lindell, Dr. Peter Navarro.
Bannon’s War Room | Morning Edition Hour 1 | Recorded February 22, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 41 Seconds
Mike Lindell is being sued in court by Dominion, Steve Cortes pumps up Trump, and Matt Palumbo talks about his new book. Our guests are: Mike J. Lindell, Steve Cortes, Matt Palumbo.
Bannon’s War Room | Morning Edition Hour 2 | Recorded February 22, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 41 Seconds
We hear from two precinct volunteers from Oregon and Michigan, Raheem and Steve talk about Fauci, and we get an inside scoop from Kane on ESPN’s next competitor. Our guests are: Samantha Strayer, Mark Knowles, Kane.
Bannon’s War Room | Evening Edition | Recorded February 22, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 59 Seconds
Dr. Peter Navarro adds to the discussion on the border debacle, going through his new report, which explains the human and economic cost of the proposed immigration bill. Our guests are: Ben Bergquam, Raynard Jackson, Boris Epshteyn, Dr. Peter Navarro, Sharri Markson, Matthew Tyrmand.
February 22, 2020 | Nightly News Rebroadcast | Video: 49 Minutes 26 Seconds
President Joe Biden’s pick for Attorney General faces difficult questions during day one of his confirmation hearing, the Supreme Court is throwing out several remaining 2020 election lawsuits, and House Democrats are pressing cable companies that aired news about election fraud allegations.
Donald Trump Full Interview | Banned By Youtube | Recorded February 17, 2021 | Video: 22 Minutes 09 Seconds
As YouTube and Big Tech move into the realm of the ridiculous, everyday Americans continue to make an effort to remain informed. Here is Donald Trump’s full interview on NewsMax recorded February 17, 2021.
Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment
For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”
The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” adding: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”
House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. “Industry self-regulation has failed,” they said, and therefore “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.” In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.
I’ve written and spoken at length over the past several years about the dangers of vesting the power in the state, or in tech monopolies, to determine what is true and false, or what constitutes permissible opinion and what does not. I will not repeat those points here.
Instead, the key point raised by these last threats from House Democrats is an often-overlooked one: while the First Amendment does not apply to voluntary choices made by a private company about what speech to allow or prohibit, it does bar the U.S. Government from coercing or threatening such companies to censor. In other words, Congress violates the First Amendment when it attempts to require private companies to impose viewpoint-based speech restrictions which the government itself would be constitutionally barred from imposing. . .
Bannon’s War Room | Morning Edition Hour 1 | Recorded February 19, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 46 Seconds
“If you were deported under Trump, you can still gain Amnesty.” Our guests are: Rabbi Spero, Rosemary Jenks, Todd Bensman, Steve Camarota.
February 19, 2020 | Nightly News Rebroadcast | Video: 49 Minutes 53 Seconds
State attorneys general across the nation are demanding that President Joe Biden reactivate an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation that targets sex offenders.
Biden urges Americans to get vaccinated, and a White House adviser talks about why California and Florida share similar CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus numbers amid completely different lockdown strategies.
Bannon’s War Room | Morning Edition Hour 2 | Recorded February 19, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 46 Seconds
“We are in many ways headed toward fascism because the state and the government dictate to these private companies how to control communications,” Dr. Shiva said. Our guests are: Steve Camarota, Carol Swain, Mark Krikorian, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, Dr. Yan.
February 18, 2020 | Nightly News Rebroadcast | Video: 49 Minutes 10 Seconds
Utilities restore power to hundreds of thousands of homes in Texas, a Texas Mayor pleads with Biden to halt the release of immigrants into his city, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz is under fire for flying to Cancun during his state’s power outage.
February 17, 2020 | Nightly News Rebroadcast | Video: 52 Minutes 21 Seconds
Conservative talk radio legend Rush Limbaugh dies at 70 after a hard-fought battle with stage four cancer, Senator Mitch McConnell is under fire to resign as minority leader, and Trump’s impeachment lawyer is targeted by cancel culture after his role in the impeachment trial.
Bannon’s War Room | Morning Edition Hour 1 | Recorded February 18, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 43 Seconds
“[Ailes] taught me — to the extent I am — how to be a politician and he also taught Rush,” he said. “Roger to me is like a great football coach with the 10 great coaches that come from him.” Our guests are: Eric Greitens, Alexandra Preate, Mark Krikorian, Rudy Giuliani.
Bannon’s War Room | Morning Edition Hour 2 | Recorded February 18, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 50 Seconds
“If your church has gone woke, find another church,” he said. Stop buying from people who hate you, cut the cable cord, “including Fox and CNN,” and cut off the tech oligarchs ability to turn us into digital serfs. Our guests are: Eric Greitens, Alexandra Preate, Andrew Torba.
Bannon’s War Room | Evening Edition | Recorded February 18, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 58 Seconds
“There’s a deeper problem here,” said Stephen K. Bannon. “The Chinese are laughing at us.” Our guests are: Dr. Peter Navarro, Boris Epshteyn, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, Melissa Huray
February 16, 2020 | Nightly News Rebroadcast | Video: 51 Minutes 53 Seconds
Millions of Texans work to stay warm without power, Trump takes aim at the Senate minority leader, and thousands of migrants who’ve been awaiting entry into the United States will now be processed under a new Biden directive.
Bannon’s War Room | Morning Edition Hour 1 | Recorded February 17, 2021 | Video: 48 Minutes 41 Seconds
China’s human rights abuses the “most dangerous” foreign policy statement since Dean Acheson and updates on the recall effort of Gavin Newsom. Our guests are: Mike J. Lindell, Rudy Giuliani, Tom Del Beccaro.