Wednesday, April 12, 2023

America’s censorship regime, which includes virtually all government “agencies,” is on trial in Missouri v Biden. In March 2023 a Missouri judge denied government’s motion to dismiss-Tablet, 4/10/23

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Just last month [March 2023], in what is likely to become a decision of historical significance, the Missouri judge denied the government’s motion to dismiss.”...During Trump administration, "a number of agencies, including CDC, NIH, DHS, and FBI, acted independently to achieve these censorship aims," which continued and escalated during Biden admin.

4/10/23, America’s Censorship Regime Goes on Trial," Tablet, Jenin Younes

“Missouri v. Biden will test the government’s ability to suppress speech in the name of fighting ‘misinformation’.”

“Ernest Ramirez, a car-wash technician in a small, south Texas town, led a simple but fulfilling life with his son, Ernesto Junior. Junior was a “wonderful child, full of smiles.” Ramirez had raised his son alone; he’d never known his own father and sought to provide Junior with the paternal love he had missed. A talented baseball player, Junior dreamed of playing professionally. The two lived paycheck to paycheck but were happy because, as Ramirez put it, they had each other.

Then, on April 19, 2021, 16-year-old Junior—who had no previous health problems—received the first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Five days later, the young athlete collapsed while running. By the time the elder Ramirez arrived at the hospital, having been told he could not ride in the ambulance with his son,

Junior was dead.

According to the autopsy report, the cause of Junior’s death was an “enlarged heart.” Upon receiving the news, Ramirez lost all desire to go on living. But after the initial shock subsided, Ramirez decided to travel and speak about Junior’s fate, in hopes that he could help other families avoid similar tragedies.

That plan proved more difficult than Ramirez anticipated. In September 2021, GoFundMe removed an account he had opened to raise money for a trip to the nation’s capital to share his son’s story. “The content of your fundraiser falls under our ‘Prohibited Conduct’ section,” the company’s email explained. Ramirez lost the donations he had thus far received. Two months later, Twitter took down a photograph Ramirez had posted depicting him standing beside Junior’s open casket, along with the caption “My good byes to my Baby Boy” followed by three brokenheart emojis. Even a father’s simple expression of grief was apparently forbidden by the social media platform’s government-supported censorship regime.

Around that time, Ramirez met Brianne Dressen, a 40-year-old woman who had volunteered for the AstraZeneca vaccine trials and suffered a severe adverse reaction diagnosed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

as “post-vaccine neuropathy.”

Her varied and acute symptoms at times required use of a wheelchair and drastically curtailed her ability to participate in her young children’s lives.

For a time after her diagnosis, Dressen fell into a severe depression. However, during the spring of 2021, she discovered online support groups for vaccine-injured individuals and their family members. Connecting to others who understood her plight greatly improved her outlook on life, and she began serving as an administrator of several of the groups.

But in July 2021, less than 24 hours after Dressen participated in a press conference with U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Facebook shut down one support group’s account. Though participants had merely discussed their often-harrowing personal experiences and shared medical treatments that they found helpful, Facebook claimed they were spreading harmful “misinformation” that warranted the group’s removal.

The cascade of shutdowns of support groups and accounts belonging to the vaccine injured on Facebook and other social media platforms continues to this day. Ramirez, Dressen, and others learned that

when their accounts weren’t suspended or removed,

they were shadow-banned—

meaning that the platforms’ algorithms buried their posts so that they were rarely, if ever, viewable, even to like-minded individuals facing similar health problems. In Dressen’s words: “The constant threat of having our groups shut down and our connections pulled apart left me and many other members and leaders frozen, unable to communicate and connect with those who needed our help the most. We spent more time managing the chaos of the censorship algorithms that continued to evolve, than we did actually helping people through the trauma of their injuries.”

The obstacles encountered by Ramirez, Dressen, and thousands of other individuals with similar experiences and opinions were in no way coincidental or accidental. Nor were they the result of a series of errors in judgment made by low-level employees of social media platforms. Rather, they were the products of

concerted efforts at the highest levels of the American government to ensure that individuals with opposing viewpoints could not be heard,

contrary to the guarantees made to every American citizen in the Bill of Rights.

One purpose of these unconstitutional actions to violate the rights of American citizens was political gain.

As COVID-19 inoculations became widely available to the American public, the Biden White House came to view vaccine hesitancy as a significant political problem. Beginning in spring 2021, the administration explicitly and publicly blamed social media platforms for vaccine refusal: By failing to censor “misinformation” about the vaccines, the president infamously alleged, tech companies were effectively “killing people.” The president’s incendiary accusation was accompanied by threats of regulatory or other legal action (should the companies refuse to comply) from various high-ranking members of the administration, including former White House Press Secretary Jennifer PsakiSurgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Psaki boasted that government officials were in regular touch with social media platforms, telling them what and in some cases even whom to censor.

Astute social media users noticed that censorship on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook escalated in tandem with the government’s threats, often yielding absurd results. For example, Twitter marked as misleading Dr. Martin Kulldorff’s April 2021 tweet

stating that not everyone needed a COVID-19 vaccine, especially children and the previously infected.

Dr. Kulldorff is one of the world’s most cited epidemiologists and infectious disease experts. That he was censored for speaking on the area of his expertise by someone almost certainly far less knowledgeable should concern any fair-minded person purely on the basis of preserving the openness that is required for educated scientific debate. (Last month [March 2023], the World Health Organization revised its official recommendation, saying that children and teenagers may not need COVID-19 vaccines—

a position deemed “misinformation” not half a year ago.)

The administration’s public threats, combined with the corresponding campaign of social media censorship, prompted several prolific social media users to file lawsuits against the Biden administration and a number of federal agencies alleging that their First Amendment free speech rights had been violated.

One of the First Amendment’s fundamental promises to all American citizens is freedom from government-induced, viewpoint-based censorship. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion,”

the Supreme Court explained in 1943.

A doctrine known as state action theory explicitly prohibits the government from using private entities as intermediaries to do what it cannot do directly. In the court’s words, it is “axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what [the state] is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

The plaintiffs in the social media cases argued that, since the First Amendment prohibits the government from censoring Americans for expressing certain views, government actors likewise cannot coerce, direct, or collude with private social media platforms to suppress airing of perspectives disfavored by the United States government.

For the most part, the initial wave of lawsuits against the Biden administration have been unsuccessful:

The judges held that the plaintiffs had not supplied sufficient facts from which to infer that the censorship on social media platforms was the product of government intervention, as opposed to the companies’ own internal content moderation policies.

But in one case, Missouri v. Biden, the judge wisely allowed the lawsuit to proceed, implicitly recognizing that

without a discovery order to permit a look behind the scenes at the companies’ own internal deliberations and direct communications with the government,

virtually no individual plaintiff would ever be able to establish that he or she had been censored at the government’s behest.

The lawsuit was brought last May [2022] by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana,

who were joined by private plaintiffs including epidemiologists and co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Dr. Kulldorff. (Full disclosure: In my capacity as litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, I represent Drs. Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and two other private plaintiffs in the case.)

Written in October of 2020, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration warned against the economic and social repercussions that lockdowns and other COVID restrictions would entail. Instead, they recommended steps in line with what had previously been the consensus approach to pandemic management, which would protect the vulnerable while allowing the rest of society to resume normal life. As revealed in private emails exposed pursuant to a FOIA request, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were censored extensively on social media after Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Dr. Francis Collins of the NIH targeted the GBD for a “quick and devastating takedown.” During the same exchange, Collins described Stanford’s Bhattacharya and Harvard’s Kulldorff as “fringe epidemiologists.”

The Missouri judge ordered both the government defendants and tech companies to produce written exchanges between them containing various search terms, and required several high-ranking government officials—including Dr. Fauci—to sit for depositions. The resulting emails, text messages, and testimony have revealed that scads of

government actors, across at least a dozen federal agencies as well as within the White House itself, exerted direct and continuing pressure on social media platforms to censor posts expressing viewpoints on a wide variety of matters—from COVID-19 to the 2020 election to the Hunter Biden laptop story—that threatened the agenda of government actors. (Though Biden did not assume office until January of 2021,

a number of agencies, including CDC, NIH, DHS, and FBI, acted [during the Trump administration] independently to achieve these censorship aims,

which then escalated shortly after the [Biden] inauguration.) Put otherwise, the fruits of discovery established that the government was doing what it said it was doing.

For example, in March of 2021, Rob Flaherty, White House director of digital media, sent an email to a Facebook executive bearing the accusatory subject line, “You are hiding the ball.” The body of the email contained only a link to a Washington Post article claiming that Facebook was aware that its platform was being used to “spread ideas that lead to vaccine hesitancy.” When the Facebook executive responded that there had been a “misunderstanding,” Flaherty replied that he did not think so: “We are gravely concerned that your service is one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy—period. … We want to know that you’re trying, we want to know how we can help, and we want to know that you’re not playing a shell game … this would all be a lot easier if you would just be straight with us.”

About a week later, the Facebook executive followed up with Flaherty in an obvious effort to appease the White House official, notifying him that Facebook had made the requisite policy changes which included “removing vaccine misinformation” and “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.” That included removal of “Groups, Pages and Accounts” containing, in the executive’s words,

“often-true content” that “can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.”

The tragedies Dressen and Ramirez had endured and sought to share on social media undoubtedly fell into the category of “shocking” and “true.”

Indeed, their inconvenient truths

were just the sort of material Flaherty

sought to prevent from reaching the American public.

This was only one of dozens of emails employing a similarly aggressive, berating tone, that Flaherty sent Facebook, Google, and other companies. And Flaherty was only one of nearly 100 federal officials exploiting his office to ensure that Americans who expressed opinions or reported experiences that conflicted with the message the government wished to propagate

were not heard by the public—

and were not able to connect with each other.

Just last month [March 2023], in what is likely to become a decision of historical significance, the Missouri judge 

denied the government’s motion to dismiss.

In doing so, Judge Doughty recognized that federal government officials’ relentless pressure campaign to suppress the speech of Americans on social media that inconvenience the administration’s political agenda cannot be reconciled with the First Amendment. In the judge’s words, the “significant encouragement and coercion” exhibited by federal officials such as Flaherty “convert[ed] the otherwise private conduct of censorship on social media platforms into state action.”

The lawsuit is still in its early stages. But Judge Doughty’s decision marks a crucial first step toward ensuring that going forward, government actors like Flaherty cannot use their clout to effectuate the

removal of social media content or shut down online support groups.

Explicit judicial attention to such practices is necessary because it seems clear that, having enjoyed a taste of the censor’s power, political operatives and government bureaucrats

see no reason to give it up.

In fact, rather than retreating from its thus-far successful censorship activities, the government has been expanding its ambitions to encompass every corner of the public square. Disfavored viewpoints on an ever-increasing number of subjects on a growing array of platforms

are being targeted for removal and shadow-bans,

at the behest of more and more government agencies.

If the First Amendment stands for anything, it must mean that the government cannot be in the business of silencing Ernest Ramirez and Brianne Dressen, or of preventing them from associating with each other online simply because their inconvenient truths threaten a political agenda. It is up to the courts to put an end to this egregious transgression of the First Amendment’s guarantees, because if we have learned anything from history, it is that

governments do not relinquish power voluntarily.”


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Sunday, April 2, 2023

Japan joins the fun, Japan Prime Minister visits Ukraine while US eases Europe pals into US taxpayer funded World War III-Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire

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“On March 21, 2023, [Japan PM] Fumio Kishida and Volodymyr Zelensky form an alliance against Russia and China....In their final communiqué, Fumio Kishida and Volodymyr Zelensky emphasize “the inseparability of Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific security” and “the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. For them, it is not only a matter of defending Ukraine from Russia, but also Japan from China.”

3/28/23, The preparation of a New World War," Voltaire, by Thierry Meyssan

“The United States is pushing its European Union allies to prepare for a Third World War. They have no choice but to fight it if they want to emerge victorious from the “Thucydides trap”.

Unless all this commotion is just

a staging to “keep” the allies on their side

while many states in South America, Africa and Asia

declare themselves “neutral”.

At the same time, the noise of boots is stirring up the Japanese militarists

who, like the “radical nationalists” in Ukraine,

are back.

(This article is a follow-up to : “The Middle East is breaking free of the West,” March 14, 2023).

Faced with the progress made by the advocates of a multipolar world, the defenders of the “American imperialist” have not been slow to react. Two operations will be analyzed here:

the transformation of the European Common Market into a military structure and

the reformation of the World War II Axis. This second aspect brings a new actor into play: Japan.

The change in the European Union

In 1949, the United States and the United Kingdom created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). They included Canada and the states they had liberated in Western Europe. For them,

it was not a question of defending themselves, but of

preparing an attack on the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union responded by creating the Warsaw Pact.

In 1950, when the Korean War began [via fiat of globalist US Pres. Truman], the United States planned to extend the conflict to the German Democratic Republic (known as “East Germany”). In order to do this, they had to rearm the Federal Republic of Germany (known as “West Germany”) despite the opposition of France, Belgium and Luxembourg. They [US] therefore proposed the creation of a European Defence Community (EDC), but failed in the face of resistance from the Gaullists and the French Communists.

At the same time, they helped rebuild Western Europe with the Marshall Plan. This plan included

many secret clauses, including the

construction of a European common market.

Washington [imperialists] wanted to dominate Western Europe economically and preserve it politically from communist influence and Soviet imperialism. The European Economic Communities – and later

the European Union – form the civilian side of the US token,

whose military side is NATO.

The European Commission is not an administration of the heads of state and government of the Union, but the interface between them and the Atlantic Alliance. The European standards for not only armaments and construction, but also for equipment, clothing and food, etc., are established by the NATO services, first in Luxembourg, then in Belgium. They are transmitted to the Commission, and today approved by the European Parliament.

In 1989, as the Soviet Union was collapsing in on itself, the

French President, François Mitterrand, and the German Chancellor, Helmut Köhl, imagined

freeing Western Europe from American tutelage

so as to be able to compete with Washington. Negotiations on this treaty took place at the same time as the end of the quadripartite occupation of Germany (12 September 1990), the reunification of the two Germanies (3 October 1990) and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact (1 July 1991).

Washington accepted the Maastricht Treaty [creation of European Union]

as long as it recognized their [US taxpayer funded] military domination. Western Europeans accepted this principle.

However, Washington distrusted the Mitterrand-Köhl couple

and demanded at the last moment

that the European Union include all the former members of the Warsaw Pact,

and even the new independent states, which had emerged from the former Soviet Union.

These states did not share the aspirations of the [EU] Maastricht negotiators. In fact, they are rather suspicious of them. They want to free themselves from both German and Russian influence.

They rely on the  [US taxpayer funded] “American umbrella” for their defence.

In 2003, Washington took advantage of the Spanish presidency of the EU (the socialist Felipe González) and of the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, Javier Solana, to have the “European Security Strategy” adopted, modelled on the National Security Strategy of US President George W. Bush. High Representative Federica Mogherini revised this document in 2016.

Emmanuel Macron devoted France’s European presidency to reconstituting the EDC under the guise of the EU’s “Strategic Compass”. This time, the project is not submitted to national parliaments. It is a decision of the heads of state and government alone,

never discussed and submitted to their voters.

In 2022, during the war in Ukraine, the United States, as in the Korean War,

once again felt the need to rearm Germany against Russia (successor to the USSR).

So they are transforming the EU, carefully this time. During the presidency of the Frenchman Emmanuel Macron, they proposed a “Strategic Compass”. This was adopted only one month after the Russian intervention in Ukraine. The members of the European Union are all the more stunned because they still do not know precisely whether they are together to cooperate or to integrate (the “constructive ambiguity”, as Henry Kissinger put it).

In March 2023, the current High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, organized the first “Robert Schumann Forum on Security and Defence”. A large number of defense and foreign ministers from the EU member states are participating. In addition to the non-EU European states that are pro-US [and US “rules based international order”], many others are represented at ministerial level, such as

Angola, Ghana, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia, Egypt, Chile, Peru, Georgia, Indonesia and Japan. In addition to NATO, ASEAN, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the African Union are also represented. Above all, the Arab League is sending its Secretary General.

 

The explicit aim of this Forum is to defend “multilateralism and

a [US controlled] rules-based international order”;

an elegant way of

denouncing the Russian-Chinese project of

a “multipolar world based on international law”.

With the Covid epidemic, the European Union has already invested itself with powers in the field of health that were not foreseen by the Treaties. I explained at the beginning of this epidemic that the measure of

confinement of healthy people had no precedent in history.

It was devised at the request of the former head of Gilead Sciences and former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, by Dr. Richard Hatchett, who became the director of CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations)

and, as such, the initiator of this measure worldwide [1].

According to his classified report of 2005, which we unfortunately only know from the reactions it provoked,

the confinement of healthy civilians to their homes was supposed

to allow the identification of jobs that could be relocated,

to close down the consumer goods industries in the West and

to concentrate the work force in the defense industry.

We are not there yet, but the European Union, having seized public health powers not foreseen by the Treaties,

without raising any indignation,

is now interpreting the texts to become a military power.

Josep Borrell at the Robert Schumann Forum on Security and Defense

Last week, during the Schuman Forum, Josep Borrell presented his first report on the implementation of the “Strategic Compass”. The idea is

to coordinate the pooling of national armies,

including intelligence services,

in a spirit of integration rather than cooperation. Emmanuel Macron’s project now buries that of Charles De Gaulle and the French Communists. The “Europe of Defence” now appears to be a slogan aimed at placing not only the operational forces of the EU member states

under the authority

of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR),

now the US General Christopher G. Cavoli,

but also at taking control of all the financing decisions that were

previously the responsibility of the national parliaments,

and even of the decisions on armaments and organization that were the responsibility of the member states’ executive bodies. Thus, the Union is organizing a common army without knowing who will command it.

The reconstitution of the Nazi-Nippon Axis

When we think of the Second World War, in Europe we think of 1939 and 1945. This is absolutely wrong. The war started in 1931 after Japanese generals attacked Chinese soldiers in Manchuria. This was the first overreach of Japanese civilian power by the militarist faction, which was amplified a few months later with the assassination of the civilian Prime Minister by a group of military men. In a few years,

Japan was transformed into a militaristic and expansionist power.

This war did not end with the

liberation of Manchuria by the Red [USSR] Army in 1945.

In fact, the United States [on August 6 and August 9, 1945]

used two atomic bombs

to prevent Japan’s surrender to the USSR

and to ensure that it would only take place before its own generals.

They continued to fight until 1946 because many Japanese refused to surrender to the United States who had not fought much in the Pacific until then. The Second World War lasted from 1931 to 1946. If we make these date errors, it is because it only became globalized with the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis (the “Tripartite Pact”), which Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania soon joined.

The foundation of the Axis was not the disparate interests of its members, but their cult of strength. To reform it today, we must unite those who share this cult.

Yoshio Kodama, the first godfather of the yakuza, played an important role in Japanese militarism. After World War II, he was imprisoned and then benefited from the change of policy in the United States. He founded the Liberal Party from which Shinzo Abe and Fumio Kishida emerged. Kodama directed, under the radar, many CIA operations in his country. He was a member of the World Anti-Communist League when Slava Stetsko (the drafter of Article 16 of the Ukrainian constitution) was president.

When the U.S. occupied Japan in 1946, the first thought was to purge all militaristic elements from the country. But when the Korean War broke out, the U.S. decided to use Japan to fight communism. They ended the ongoing trials and rehabilitated 55,000 high officials. They implemented the Dodge Plan, the equivalent of the Marshall Plan in Europe. One of the lucky beneficiaries of this policy change was Hayato Ikeda, who became Prime Minister and restored the country’s economy. With the help of the CIA, he founded the Liberal Democratic Party. It is from this party that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (2012-20) and his successor Fumio Kishida (2020-) were born.

The latter has just made a surprise visit to Ukraine. He is the first Asian head of government to visit this country since the beginning of the war. He visited a mass grave in Bucha and expressed his condolences to the families of the victims of “Russian abuses”. Most analysts interpret the trip as preparation for the upcoming G7 summit in Japan. Unless it goes much further.

On March 21, 2023, [PM] Fumio Kishida and Volodymyr Zelensky form an alliance against Russia and China. Both extend the ties established by Yoshio Kodama and Slava Stetsko.

In their final communiqué, Fumio Kishida and Volodymyr Zelensky emphasize “the inseparability of Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific security” and “the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. For them, it is not only a matter of defending Ukraine from Russia, but also Japan from China. This communiqué lays

the foundation for a new alliance between the successors of the Nazis that are the Ukrainian “integral nationalists” [2]

and the successors of Shōwa nationalism.

Today’s Ukraine is the only state in the world with an 

explicitly racist constitution.

Adopted in 1996 and revised in 2020, it states in Article 16 that

Preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state.”

The widow of the Ukrainian Nazi Prime Minister, Yaroslav Stetsko, wrote this article.

In contrast, the Japanese Constitution renounces war in its Article 9.

But Shinzo Abe and Fumio Kishida have initiated a

fight to repeal this provision.

Among other things, it makes it impossible to transfer lethal defense equipment, so Mr. Kishima offered about $7.1 billion in humanitarian and financial aid to Kyiv.

As for non-lethal military equipment, this week he could only announce the shipment of a stockpile worth $30 million.

This remilitarization of Japan is supported by Washington, which has already switched sides by supporting Ukraine.

U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo Rahm Emmanuel tweeted,

“Prime Minister Kishida is making a historic visit to Ukraine to protect the Ukrainian people and promote the universal values enshrined in the UN Charter…

About 900 kilometers away, a different and more nefarious partnership is taking shape in Moscow,” (referring to the Putin-Xi summit).

For his part, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wang Weibin, said on the contrary, regarding the Prime Minister’s trip that he “hopes that Japan will press for an appeasement of the situation, not the other way around. For its part, Russia sent two strategic bombers over the Sea of Japan for about seven hours.”

Thierry Meyssan
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Translation
Roger Lagasse
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[1Covid-19 and The Red Dawn Emails”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 28 April 2020.

[2Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists ?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 15 November 2022.

 

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