After speaking at the National Press Club, I will be testifying today before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on free speech and censorship. My testimony is below.
The hearing, titled “The Censorship Industrial Complex” will be held in Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building at 2 p.m.
We now know a great deal about the censorship system developed under the Biden Administration in coordination with academic and corporate units. Indeed, the release of new information since January has proven a windfall for those of us who have been seeking greater transparency for years. There is still much to be done. It is essential for Congress to complete this work and allow for total transparency on the past funding and coordination by the government.
The past efforts to block investigations and withhold information on the censorship system have failed. However, the motivation is telling. While publicly declaring the need to combat misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, the Biden Administration and its allies in the censorship system struggled to withhold information on their actual targets or actions. The reason again is obvious. The public understands the threat to free speech and strongly supports an investigation into the FBI’s role in censoring social media.
Almost 250 years ago, Tom Paine famously wrote that “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” That was the first line of a work published by Thomas Paine in the Pennsylvania Journal on December 19, 1776, a work which would become known as “The American Crisis.”
We are living through a new crisis in the fight for free speech. The anti-free speech movement that has swept over Europe has now reached our shores. The United States remains a final line of defense for free speech, a nation founded on free speech as our indispensable right as a free people. This is a crisis of faith as the “summer soldier and sunshine patriot” finds every excuse for remaining silent as others are censored or canceled for their views. Congress must step forward to demand both greater transparency and protection for free speech. This new “American crisis” can be our greatest American moment in speaking in one voice – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents – in support of the right that defines us as a people.
You need a quantum computer to keep up with all the lies Democrats tell. The people whose pictures are next to the dictionary definition of “misinformation” continue claiming they want to prevent it. The irony could power a small city.
Before I explain Democrats’ new strategy, let’s revisit just a few of their lies.
They’ve lied about COVID, vaccines, the 2020 election, January 6th, the border, Biden’s health, Kamala Harris’ popularity, and more. At this point, it’s easier to compile a list of what they haven’t lied about—although that might be a very short article.
Take Biden’s health, for instance. According to the Left, Biden is a spry 81-year-old whose physical fitness rivals an Olympic decathlete. Forget the times he’s needed directions to exit a stage or appeared to shake hands with invisible people. These are just “Right-wing conspiracy theories,” they assure us. Pay no attention to the fact that his press secretary has to fend off questions about cognitive tests as if she were playing dodgeball at a middle school gym.
But the lies don’t stop there. Polls, the Holy Grail of Democrat propaganda, are another playground for their creativity.
They’d have us believe that Kamala Harris is an inspirational leader—a cross between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Beyoncé. Never mind her poll numbers, which are less popular than cold soup on a winter night. It’s not that people dislike her; it’s that they “don’t understand her brilliance,” we’re told. Apparently, Harris’ true genius is just too avant-garde for the unwashed masses.
When it comes to controlling the narrative, Democrats run their misinformation machine with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. They use their iron grip on media and social platforms to determine what’s permissible to discuss. Don’t believe Hunter Biden’s laptop is real? Good. Because until recently, they didn’t want you to. Now that they’ve quietly admitted its authenticity, it’s suddenly not a story. The Left’s motto? “When caught lying, either double down or move on.”
COVID might be their magnum opus of deception. Remember “two weeks to flatten the curve”? That turned into two years of lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, and lives disrupted—all built on shifting narratives. When questioned about the science behind their mandates, they responded with a collective shrug and a mantra: “Trust the experts.” But their experts were often caught contradicting themselves. Masks worked until they didn’t. Vaccines prevented transmission until they didn’t. Yet, questioning any of this earned you a label: “misinformation spreader.”
And then there’s the border. According to Democrats, it’s “secure.” To anyone with eyes, it’s a humanitarian disaster. Footage of people streaming across the border like concertgoers at a music festival? That’s just Right-wing fearmongering, they insist. Meanwhile, cities like New York and Chicago are collapsing under the weight of their sanctuary policies, but don’t expect an admission of failure. For the Left, reality is just another obstacle to overcome with spin.
Speaking of spin, the 2020 election was a masterclass in narrative control.
Question the results? You’re a “threat to democracy.” Ignore the irregularities, the last-minute rule changes, and the statistical anomalies—all “perfectly normal,” they assured us. Then came January 6th, which they’ve weaponized to such an extent that it’s become the Left’s 9/11. To hear them tell it, the Capitol breach was an existential threat to the republic, second only to people questioning vaccine efficacy.
But perhaps the most brazen lie is their insistence that they’re the party of “truth.” They’ve launched a new version of Obama’s infamous “Attack Watch” website, this time with a straight face. It’s a digital tattletale system designed to flag dissent and offer counter-narratives, which are really just rebranded talking points. Back in 2011, Attack Watch was mocked out of existence, but Democrats are banking on the fact that people have short memories.
“Big Disinfo” is their answer. A website dedicated to trying to debunk the truth.
And if you’re wondering where all that extra money went that the Biden team gave to the NGOs to spend as quickly as possible, you guessed it. Big Disinfo promises to defend democracy the lies with fact-checking operations promised to patrol the boundaries of reality.
Their desperation to control the truth is a sign of how tenuous their grip on it has become. They’re the snake oil salesmen of politics, peddling elixirs that don’t work and hoping no one notices. But here’s the catch: the American people are noticing. Polls show increasing skepticism of the media, distrust of institutions, and disapproval of the Biden administration’s policies. The harder the Left tries to sell their version of reality; the more people question the product.
Democrats are trapped in a web of their own making.
Their lies have become so convoluted that even they can’t keep them straight. Like a bad sitcom with too many plot twists, the audience is tuning out. And while they’ll undoubtedly try to spin this as another “Right-wing conspiracy,” the truth is catching up with them. Slowly, but inevitably.
As we head into 2025, expect the Left’s misinformation machine to go into overdrive. The lies will get bigger, the narratives more absurd, and the denials more emphatic. But remember: desperation smells a lot like a Democrat trying to convince you they’re telling the truth. And the stench is getting harder to ignore.
Below is my column in the New York Post on the recent interview of Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz defending his record on free speech. The interview with Fox host Shannon Bream only magnified concerns over what I previously described as the most anti-free speech ticket in centuries.
Here is the column:
Roughly five centuries ago, a new dance first reported in Augsburg, Germany was promptly dubbed the “waltz” after the German term for “to roll or revolve.” Today, there is no nimbler performer of that dizzying dance than Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz.
Indeed, “Walzing” has become the Minnesota governor’s signature political two-step after his controversial statements on his allegedly socialist views, eliminating the electoral college and other topics. On Sunday, Walz’s dance partner was Fox News host Shannon Bream, who seemed to be fighting vertigo as the candidate tried to deflect his shocking prior statements on free speech.
Bream asked Walz about his prior declaration that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech”— a statement that runs counter to decades of Supreme Court decisions. Walz notably did not deny or retract his statement. Instead, his interview ironically became itself a flagrant example of misinformation.
First of all, misinformation and hate speech are not exceptions to the First Amendment: Whether it is the cross burnings of infamous figures like KKK leader Clarence Brandenburg or the Nazis who marched in Skokie, Ill., hate speech is protected. Yet both Harris and Walz are true believers in the righteousness of censorship for disinformation, misinformation and malinformation.
The Biden administration defines misinformation as “false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm” — meaning it would subject you to censorship even if you are not intending harm. It defines malinformation as “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” So, you can post “true facts,” but would still be subject to censorship if you are viewed as misleading others with your pesky truth-telling.
Furthermore, “book bans” are not equivalent to the Harris-Walz censorship policies. After years of supporting censorship and blacklisting, Democrats are attempting to deflect questions by claiming that the GOP is the greater threat.
“We’re seeing censorship coming in the form of book banning’s in different places,” Walz told Bream. “We’re seeing attempts in schools.”
First, a reality check: The Biden-Harris administration has helped fund and actively support the largest censorship system in our history, a system described by one federal court as “Orwellian.” These are actual and unrelenting efforts to target individuals and groups for opposing views on subjects ranging from gender identity to climate change to COVID to election fraud. While Walz and others rarely specifically reference the book bans in question, Florida is one state whose laws concern age limits on access to graphic or sexual material in schools.
School districts have always been given wide latitude in making such decisions on curriculum or library policies. Indeed, while rarely mentioned by the media, the left has demanded the banning or alteration of a number of classic books, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Men,” under diversity or equity rationales.
I have long opposed actual book bans perpetrated by both the left and the right. However, school districts have always made such access and curriculum decisions.
Finally, Walz and others often sell censorship by citing the dangers of child pornography or of threats made against individuals. Walz on Sunday followed Hillary Clinton’s recent pro-censorship campaign as he employed such misdirection.
“The issue on this was the hate speech and the protected hate speech — speech that’s aimed at creating violence, speech that’s aimed at threats to individuals,” he claimed. “That’s what we’re talking about in this.”
First, he’d said there is no protected hate speech. Second, the law already provides ample protections against threats toward individuals. What’s most striking is that, after years of unapologetically embracing censorship (often under the Orwellian term “content moderation”), the left does not seem to want to discuss it in this election.
Democrats in Congress opposed every major effort to investigate the role of the Biden administration in the social-media censorship system it constructed. Many denied any such connection. Elon Musk ended much of that debate with the release of the Twitter Files showing thousands of emails from the administration targeting individuals and groups with opposing views.
Now the public is being asked to vote for the most anti-free speech ticket in centuries — but neither Harris nor Walz want to talk about it in any detail. The result may be the largest bait-and-switch in history. Walz, Clinton and others also falsely claim they are simply trying to stop things like child pornography — which is already covered by existing criminal laws.
But what many on the left want is to regain what Clinton called their loss of “control” over what we are allowed to say or hear on social media.
Make no mistake about it: The “Walzing” of free speech is one dance you would be wise to decline. Otherwise, do not be surprised if, when the music stops, you find yourself without both your partner and your free speech.
Maricopa County Recorder Steven Richer turned to the left-leaning States United Democracy Center and an overseas group bankrolled by the State Department to help his office target election speech that’s disapproved of by the government, according to emails obtained by The Federalist.
Richer thanked States United for offering to let his office “piggyback” on the group’s anti-speech operations, which he described as “deep scanning” the internet for “disinformation,” a term often invoked to censor speech the government disagrees with. States United is a left-wing election law group that consistently opposes Republican election integrity legislation like voter ID laws and supports Democrat attempts to diminish election security, according to InfluenceWatch. The group has praised the weaponization of the justice system against Trump, and was described by The New York Times as part of a “coalition” preparing to “push back” against a potential Trump victory with “extraordinary pre-emptive actions.”
According to email records, States United set up a call with Richer’s staff and the global censorship group, Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). ISD is a London group that has been accused of wrongly labeling “mainstream views” as “misinformation” and subsequently censoring conservative opinions online, according to InfluenceWatch. The group was the recipient of a 2021 grant sponsored by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which “fund[s] the development of censorship tools,” as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland has reported. The ISD works with governments, leftist 501(c)(3) groups, and Big Tech companies as well as some of the left’sbiggestfinancialbackers.
Richer later suggested Arizona State University officials should fire Faculty Associate Aaron Ludwig for retweeting election concerns, apparently looping States United in on the process.
Briefings by Professional Censorship Gurus
“Thanks very much to States United for the kind offer to let us piggyback on some of the deep scanning you’re contracting for election threats and disinformation,” Richer emailed then-States United Senior Counsel Bo Dul on June 17, 2022. Richer indicated his office and “some … partners at the county” do some of this work already, but that he would “love to fill any holes” with the offer from States United.
A few minutes later, Dul told Richer that the States United senior adviser “leading our disinfo work,”Caroline Chambers, would be “circl[ing] up with our partners at ISD and your team to set up a call soon.” Before working for States United, Dul was the senior elections policy adviser and general counsel in the Arizona secretary of state’s office under Democrat Katie Hobbs. Now she’s again working as general counsel for Hobbs, who became governor of Arizona last year.
Chambers sent an email to Dul on June 21 and copied Richer, indicating she wanted to “set up a briefing.” On June 23, a States United staffer emailed Chambers, Dul, and other recipients a link to a Zoom meeting with the subject line “Maricopa County Recorder’s Office x SUDC x ISD Briefing.” The meeting was scheduled for June 28.
A “management analyst and special assistant to the Maricopa County Recorder” emailed staff on June 27, reminding them about the briefing the next morning.
The assistant pointed recipients to “background information on the Electoral Disinformation work the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) performs,” linking to an ISD webpage on “electoral disinformation.” The page boasts about ISD working with States United ahead of the 2022 midterms to “detect, analyze and escalate threats” like “election denialist activity,” and links to news clips of ISD representatives celebrating efforts to pressure Big Tech into censoring more speech.
The June 27, 2022, email from the “special assistant” indicated Richer was traveling at the time of the briefing and may or may not have attended the call but wanted his staff to “go ahead” and attend either way. Asked how long the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office has collaborated with States United and ISD and whether they are currently working with those groups, a representative from Richer’s office told The Federalist the recorder has “worked with numerous entities” over “the last several years.”
“We have received information from States United Democracy Center regarding election worker safety and, as we do with all new information, taken it into consideration,” the representative said, before listing ways the office has made itself “widely available to the public.”
Attempt to Cancel a Professor for Retweeting Election Post
Just the next month, Richer emailed Arizona State University officials to suggest they fire Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Associate Aaron Ludwig for his online speech. Richer was upset because Ludwig had retweeted election concerns.
“He is a regular purveyor of election disinformation and misinformation,” Richer wrote on July 31, linking to Ludwig’s account on Twitter (now X). “I ask that you assess if he is fit to be part of the ASU faculty.”
Richer claimed Ludwig was “promoting messages that encourage harassment of and violence toward” two Maricopa County Elections Department employees. The recorder included several screenshots of tweets Ludwig reposted, including one that accused the employees of improperly using a security badge and deleting election files and another that was critical of Richer himself.
“The allegations are, of course, errant nonsense that only imbecilic troglodytes could possibly believe after five minutes of research,” Richer spewed in the email, referencing the retweet.
An ASU dean, Cynthia Lietz, sent an email to Richer the same day with the subject line “RE: Aaron Ludwig.”
“Thank you for this important information, we will look into this,” she wrote.
Dul, the States United operative, also emailed Richer and his staff the next day with the subject line “Re: Aaron Ludwig.” The entire body of the email was redacted when released to The Federalist.
Months passed, but Richer wouldn’t let Ludwig’s speech go. He followed up with Lietz on Feb. 6, 2023, in the same email thread.
“Did anything ever come of this?” he asked.
“Yes, we did address this,” Lietz wrote in an email the next day.
Ludwig told The Federalist his supervisors never discussed the matter with him, but he first heard about the situation in April when acquaintances found the interchange in a public records request. He said he thinks Richer’s actions violate the First Amendment.
“The government should not be allowed, and I believe, is not allowed pursuant to the First Amendment, to censor free speech unless it is those few things that can” constitutionally be regulated, he said.
Ludwig was chief of the racketeering and asset forfeiture section at the Arizona Attorney General’s Office from 2011 to 2014, and a special prosecutor for the office until 2015, according to his LinkedIn.
“I led Arizona’s charge against organized crime and the southern border, the transnational criminal organizations including all the drug cartels,” he told The Federalist. “For somebody to attack my background and credentials and professionalism and integrity, and accuse me of being some filthy liar or anything is so offensive. It’s destructive to my reputation. I believe it’s defamatory per se.”
Called Free Speech a ‘Thorn in the Side of My Office’
Richer recently lost the Republican primary for county recorder. He initially campaigned on election integrity, but once in office, he used “his perch as an opportunity to regularly defend the Democrat-run 2020 election in Maricopa County, write op-eds at CNN against the type of election audits he conducted to gain power, draft lengthy screeds lambasting Republican leaders and voters for their election integrity concerns, and push ranked-choice voting and other efforts critics say are disastrous for voter confidence in elections,” as the Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway previously reported.
“The Constitution today is in some ways a thorn in the side of my office. Specifically the First Amendment,” the recorder allegedly wrote in a draft speech, according to Just the News. The outlet also obtained a document with instructions on “banning a user on social media,” which the county reportedly told Just the News was “a draft document of ideas that were brought up in a meeting but never implemented.” Richer has also worked with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — the federal government’s censorship“nerve center” — in his war on unapproved speech.
Richer, who has become a corporate mediadarling for criticizing the election integrity concerns of his former supporters, has also attracted the attention of Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman. During Richer’s unsuccessful primary bid, Hoffman helped fund mailers backing the recorder, as The Federalist previously reported.
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Wednesday to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA) — which has been called the “nerve center” of government censorship — notifying the agency that documents related to CISA’s partnership with Pennsylvania to target so-called “misinformation” are included in the Judiciary Committee’s ongoing subpoena, according to a copy of the letter obtained exclusively by The Federalist.
Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro recently announced the state’s Election Task Force would partner with CISA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to “mitigate threats to the election process, protect voters from intimidation, and provide voters with accurate, trusted election information.”
The Pennsylvania State Department revealed to The Federalist that the state would also be partnering with CISA to “open lines of communication and share intelligence among the included government agencies.” The State Department did not clarify what “intelligence” refers to or what will be done with said information.
Jordan demanded the DHS provide more detailed information on the partnership by April 3.
“The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of how and to what extent the Executive Branch has coerced or colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech,” the letter reads. “In light of recent public reporting that the [CISA] has partnered with at least one state government in a way that may target Americans’ speech online in the lead-up to the upcoming 2024 election, we write to notify you that documents about such partnerships are responsive to the Committee’s April 28, 2023 subpoena.”
“The reporting about a partnership between CISA and the Pennsylvania Election Threats Task Force reinforces concerns that CISA is again partnering with third parties in a way that will censor or chill Americans’ speech,” Jordan wrote.
“The government’s involvement in this type of speech is particularly alarming because, as the Supreme Court has recognized, ‘the importance of First Amendment protections is at its zenith’ for ‘core political speech,’” the letter continued.
Shapiro said the task force would “combat misinformation” but CISA, the DHS subagency which congressional Republicans have called the “nerve center” of federal censorship, has a history of targeting Americans and their free speech by smearing it as “misinformation” or “malformation.” CISA defines“malinformation” as anything “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
In other words, CISA has censored Americans for stating true information. For example, America First Legal obtained documents showing CISA created a six-point list in October 2020 warning of the risks of unsupervised mail-in voting. Publicly, however, the weaponized agency flagged social media posts highlighting those concerns as “disinformation” for Big Tech companies to censor.
CISA partnered with consulting firm Deloitte and asked for notifications of social media trends about “narratives relating to ‘Vote-By-Mail’ — and to flag specific social media posts for CISA’s awareness and attention.”
One of the posts Deloitte flagged was an October 2020 tweet from then-President Donald Trump in which he claimed there were “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested in oral arguments Monday that the First Amendment should not be allowed to “hamstring” the government amid a crisis. Pictured: Jackson arrives for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address at the Capitol on March 7. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government strong-armed Big Tech companies into censoring as “disinformation” Americans’ true experiences while effectively mandating government propaganda, which itself turned out to be misinformation. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether that strategy violated the First Amendment.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested during oral arguments Monday that the First Amendment should not be allowed to “hamstring” the government amid a crisis.
Jackson asked J. Benjamin Aguiñaga, the solicitor general of Louisiana, a rather revealing question about the issue.
“So, my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” Jackson said.
The Supreme Court justice presented an extremely unlikely hypothetical that most American young people would find very insulting. She presented a scenario in which young people took cellphone video of their peers jumping out of windows, and that trend went viral on social media (preposterous), Big Tech companies failed to take action on their own (very unlikely), and the government wanted to stop it.
She asked Aguiñaga, “What would you have the government do? I’ve heard you say a couple times that the government can post its own speech, but in my hypothetical, ‘Kids, this is not safe, don’t do it,’ is not going to get it done.”
“So, I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” Jackson said. “I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems.”
“I understand that instinct,” Aguiñaga replied. “Our position is not that the government can’t interact with the platforms there … but the way they do that has to be in compliance with the First Amendment.”
🚨REVEALING: Justice Jackson says "your view has the First Amendment📄 hamstringing the federal government in significant ways."😲 Some of us might think THAT'S THE ENTIRE POINT. https://t.co/kFD1yerSwxpic.twitter.com/exa2Wxezha
Jackson suggested it would be unjust for the First Amendment to limit the government’s actions in addressing a hypothetical crisis, but the First Amendment expressly exists in order to hamstring the federal government.
As Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said in response to Jackson’s concern about the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government, “that’s what it’s supposed to do, for goodness’ sake.”
The amendment states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The amendment does not include a “crisis-exemption clause” allowing the government to trample on free speech if the president declares a national emergency. If it did, President Joe Biden might declare a national emergency on climate and strong-arm Big Tech into censoring opposition to the climate alarmist narrative. He might declare a national emergency on the nonexistent “epidemic” of violence against transgender people, and pressure social media to ban any disagreement with gender ideology.
Big Tech platforms already censor conservative speech on those issues, but it could become far worse.
Missouri v. Murthy presents an excellent illustration.
The plaintiffs in the case—Missouri and Louisiana, represented by state Attorneys General Andrew Bailey and Liz Murrill, respectively; doctors who spoke out against the COVID-19 mandates, such as Martin Kulldorff, Jayanta Bhattacharya, and Aaron Kheriaty; Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft; and anti-lockdown advocate and Health Freedom Louisiana Co-Director Jill Hines—allege that the Biden administration “suppressed conservative-leaning free speech” on the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election; on COVID-19 issues, including its origin, masks, lockdowns, and vaccines; on election integrity in the 2020 presidential election; on the security of voting by mail; on the economy; and on Joe Biden himself.
On July 4, federal Judge Terry Doughty in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction barring the Biden administration from pressuring Big Tech to censor Americans. Doughty’s injunction named various federal agencies—including the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci formerly directed), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the State Department—and officials, including HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit narrowed the extent of Doughty’s injunction, and the Supreme Court stayed the 5th Circuit’s order before taking up the case.
“The Twitter Files” revealed how the process worked: Federal agencies would have frequent meetings with Big Tech companies, warning about “misinformation” and repeatedly pressuring them to remove or suppress content. Federal agents and politicians occasionally threatened that if the companies did not act, the government would reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, removing legal protections the companies enjoyed.
As Justice Samuel Alito noted, federal officials treated Facebook, Twitter (now X),and other social media companies “like their subordinates.”
🚨Justice Alito: "I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media. … The only reason why this is taking place is because the federal government has Section 230 and antitrust in its pocket." They're "treating Facebook… like their subordinates."😲 pic.twitter.com/QKRchwXlJF
As part of this lawsuit, Bailey unearthed documents in which Facebook told the White House that it suppressed “often-true content” that might discourage Americans from taking COVID-19 vaccines. In that context, Jackson’s question about the First Amendment “hamstringing the government” seems particularly alarming. The federal government did not act to suppress speech amid an existential crisis like a world war or a civil war. It acted after good data became available showing that COVID-19 poses a deadly threat to the elderly and those with co-morbidities, and while the government was advocating vaccines for all populations, not just the most vulnerable.
Jackson’s question suggests that she wants the government to have more control over speech on social media, even after the abuses this case uncovered. If the First Amendment is good for anything, it should “hamstring” the government from silencing Americans in order to push its own propaganda. Jackson, as a sitting Supreme Court justice, should know that.
Then again, if she can’t define the word “woman,” perhaps Americans shouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t grasp the fundamental purpose of the First Amendment.
West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner last month eviscerated the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” the election integrity champion told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.
The agency’s work, particularly the extracurricular business CISA has conducted in recent years, has been rightly criticized for its massive overreach. A report released last fall by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details just how CISA “Colluded With Big Tech And ‘Disinformation’ Partners To Censor Americans.”
“Although the investigation is ongoing, information obtained to date has revealed that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries,” the congressional report states.
The report goes on to assert that the shadowy agency has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.”
‘Platforms Have Got to Get More Comfortable With Gov’t’
Launched in 2018, CISA was supposed to be “an ancillary agency designed to protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats,” the report notes. By 2020, the agency was “routinely” targeting what CISA officials claimed to be “disinformation” on social media. A year later, the agency had established a formal team devoted to what it decided was “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the latter of which CISA defines as “information based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In other words, factual information that is problematic to the Biden regime.
CISA’s parent agency DHS launched the much-ridiculed and ultimately disbanded “Disinformation Governance Board” in 2022, to streamline the work of colluding with social media providers to shut down speech the government didn’t like or found inconvenient.
A federal lawsuit filed by then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, uncovered troubling conversations between the Biden administration and private companies about the pathways for removing information the government deemed false or misleading. A federal judge in a ruling last year barred the Biden administration from its censorship work, although the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the injunction when it took up the case.
Leaked documents obtained by The Intercept show that Microsoft executive and former DHS official Matt Masterson texted CISA director Jen Easterly in February 2022, saying “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”
But it seems Big Tech was getting pretty comfortable with the Biden administration’s puppet enforcer. The Intercept report showed, among other alarming revelations, that Facebook operated a portal where Homeland Security could report allegations of “disinformation.” CISA also has worked in concert with the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, which is accused of conspiring with state, local, and federal government officials to trample the First Amendment rights of social media users, according to a class-action lawsuit.
“But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created ‘in consultation’ with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students,” The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland wrote in May.
‘Only a Matter of Time’
Facing more public outrage over its unconstitutional actions, the CISA audaciously insisted it merely plays an “informational” role.
As the congressional report notes:
CISA is “working with federal partners to mature a whole-of-government approach” to curbing alleged misinformation and disinformation.
CISA considered the creation of an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” capable of physically deploying across the United States.
CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded non-profit after CISA and the Biden Administration were sued in federal court, implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional.
CISA wanted to use the same CISA-funded non-profit as its mouthpiece to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
The agency’s advisory committee, according to the report, worried that it would be “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” Incidentally, the advisory committee created a “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee whose members included Vijaya Gadde — Twitter’s former chief legal officer who was “involved in censoring [the New York] Post’s Hunter Biden laptop” story. Gadde was also “behind the decision to permanently ban former President Trump from Twitter.”
‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’
Geller’s Wired piece took aim at Warner, West Virginia’s outspoken secretary of state who is making a run for governor. At last month’s secretaries of state meeting, Warner “lambasted” CISA and FBI officials for “what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks,” Geller wrote, as if he is not privy to the same public documents and testimony confirming Warner’s assertions. In Geller’s account, the FBI was merely advising Twitter and Facebook to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation.
But how do you square the intelligence community’s “advisory” role after learning Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign prompted a former acting CIA director to “help Biden” by leading 50 colleagues to sign a letter spreading the false claim that damning emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop — published by the New York Post — were Russian disinformation? And all of that just weeks before the election.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the FBI and CISA officials did not respond to Warner’s charges and the meeting quickly went on, Geller reported before he quickly attempted to establish Warner as a dreaded “election denier,” noting that the secretary of state “attended an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory.”
But Warner is no conspiracy theorist. The West Point graduate served nearly a quarter century in the U.S. Army and then worked with the State Department in Afghanistan, according to his bio. Warner knows about security threats.
CISA’s activities are “the most insidious attack on American democracy that I know of in U.S. history,” Warner told The Federalist in an interview last week. He called the targeting and censoring of state-defined “disinformation” a “psychological operation against the American people” that is “as bad as it gets.”
Warner said he has spoken to CISA officials multiple times but that they have yet to heed his calls for an after-action report on the 2020 election — to truly find out what went right and what went wrong.
A Warning
It appears most state elections officials don’t want to deal with the actual threat of the Biden administration’s disinformation and political silencing campaign.
“They know they will be lambasted by mainstream press,” Warner said. No one wants to be hit with the “election denier” label so effectively applied by the accomplice media. “It’s not easy, not politically expedient for them.”
Warner is one of the few speaking out against CISA and pulling away from involvement with the agency. But Geller worries Warner’s conservative colleagues will join him in breaking ties with CISA, as conservatives in Congress work to cut the budget of the abusive agency.
“It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA,” Geller wrote.
“But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution,” he added.
They need only look at CISA’s record and its rhetoric in the agency’s brief existence to know that Warner’s warnings aren’t merely the stuff of a “right-wing controversy.”
“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA director Jen Easterly said at 2021’s RE:WIRED conference.
Apparently running roughshod over the First Amendment isn’t warning enough.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
A left-wing dark money group masquerading as a Midwestern newspaper selectively clipped the announcement speech for a Wisconsin Senate candidate to frame the businessman as a heartless, clueless elite.
Eric Hovde launched his campaign to unseat Democrat incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin Tuesday. Heartland Signal, a political newspaper based in Chicago, published a 44-second segment from Hovde’s speech when he addressed the crisis on the U.S. southern border.
“It’s not just a humanitarian crisis for our country,” Hovde said. “But do you know how many lives are lost on that journey to get here? How many people’s life savings have been wiped out by the human trafficking cartels? And they’ve lost 100,000 children that they can’t account for.”
“Let me assure you,” Hovde added, “more than a few of them have ended up being sexually trafficked. I know this all too well. My brother and I have homes all over the world, and we have three in Central America that deal with issues like this.”
Heartland Signal, a leftist digital website backed by Democrat donors, posted the clip on X with the caption, “Hovde says he understands the tragedy of children being trafficked through Central America because he owns three homes there.”
Announcing his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin, Republican Eric Hovde says he understands the tragedy of children being trafficked through Central America because he owns three homes there. pic.twitter.com/LsQhPWvpAc
The post received more than 383,000 views before a community note was attached to offer accurate context.
“‘Hovde Homes’ are shelters the Hovde Foundation has built around the world to support children – including those who have been trafficked,” the note reads. “They are not residential homes as this post suggests.”
The Midwestern news group published a follow-up post offering the right context. That post, however, received a fraction of the views of its misleading post.
Misleading tweet: 383,000 views Devastating correction: 4,800 views They do it on purpose. pic.twitter.com/1noKDDLksr
Heartland Signal was recently purchased by Future Now Action, a left-wing activist group. Hovde faces four GOP opponents in the Wisconsin Republican Senate primary that concludes Aug. 13 to challenge the two-term Democrat incumbent elected in 2012. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, the state’s other U.S. senator, narrowly captured a third term two years ago by roughly 27,000 votes in the hotly contested swing state that dramatically expanded mail-in voting in 2020.
Immigration is a top issue going into the 2024 election, with Democrats on defense after spending four years turning control of the U.S. border over to international criminal cartels. Last week, House Republicans formally impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for dereliction of his constitutional duties.
On Tuesday, more than a dozen conservatives in the upper chamber penned a letter to demand that GOP Senate chief Mitch McConnell prepare for the Mayorkas impeachment trial.
“It is imperative that the Senate Republican conference prepare to fully engage our Constitutional duty and hold a trial,” they wrote.
The Republican Senate leader faced humiliation this month following the defeat of a border amnesty and mass migration bill.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board — the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”
In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”
The legal problems and public backlash to the Disinformation Governance Board also demonstrated to him that “the government has a major role to play, but they cannot be out in front.”
Murphy, who made headlines late in the Trump administration for improperly building dossiers on journalists, has spent the last few years trying to help the government find ways to suppress and censor speech it doesn’t like without being so “out in front” that it runs afoul of the Constitution. He has proposed that law enforcement and intelligence agencies formalize the process of sharing tips with private sector actors — a “hybrid constellation” including the press, academia, researchers, nonpartisan organizations, and social media companies — to dismantle “misinformation” campaigns before they take hold.
More recently, Murphy has worked to make his vision of countering misinformation a reality by joining a United Kingdom-based tech firm, Logically.AI, whose eponymous product identifies and removes content from social media. Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.
Logically says it uses artificial intelligence to keep tabs on over 1 million conversations. It also maintains a public-facing editorial team that produces viral content and liaisons with the traditional news media. It differs from other players in this industry by actively deploying what they call “countermeasures” to dispute or remove problematic content from social media platforms.
The business is even experimenting with natural language models, according to one corporate disclosure, “to generate effective counter speech outputs that can be leveraged to deliver novel solutions for content moderation and fact-checking.” In other words, artificial intelligence-powered bots that produce, in real-time, original arguments to dispute content labeled as misinformation.
In many respects, Logically is fulfilling the role Murphy has articulated for a vast public-private partnership to shape social media content decisions. Its technology has already become a key player in a much larger movement that seeks to clamp down on what the government and others deem misinformation or disinformation. A raft of developing evidence — including the “Twitter Files,” the Moderna Reports, the proposed Government Disinformation Panel, and other reports — has shown how governments and industry are determined to monitor, delegitimize, and sometimes censor protected speech. The story of Logically.AI illustrates how sophisticated this effort has become and its global reach. The use of its technology in Britain and Canada raises red flags as it seeks a stronger foothold in the United States.
Logically was founded in 2017 by a then-22-year-old British entrepreneur named Lyric Jain, who was inspired to form the company to combat what he believed were the lies that pushed the U.K. into voting in favor of Brexit, or leaving the European Union. The once-minor startup now has broad contracts across Europe and India, and has worked closely with Microsoft, Google, PwC, TikTok, and other major firms. Meta contracts with Logically to help the company fact-check content on all of its platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.
The close ties to Silicon Valley provide unusual reach. “When Logically rates a piece of content as false, Facebook will significantly reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it, apply a warning label to let people know that the content has been rated false, and notify people who try to share it,” Meta and Logically announced in a 2021 press release on the partnership.
Meta and Logically did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
During the 2021 local elections in the U.K., Logically monitored up to “one million pieces of harmful content,” some of which they relayed to government officials, according to a document reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. The firm claimed to spot coordinated activity to manipulate narratives around the election, information they reported to tech giants for takedowns.
The following year, the state of Oregon negotiated with Logically for a wide-ranging effort to monitor campaign-related content during the 2022 midterm elections. In a redacted proposal for the project, Logically noted that it would check claims against its “single source of truth database,” which relied on government data, and would also crack down on “malinformation” — a term of art that refers to accurate information that fuels dangerous narratives. The firm similarly sold Oregon on its ability to pressure social media platforms for content removal.
Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl has a led push against the state from renewing its work with Logically for the election this year. The company, he said in an interview, violates “our constitutional rights to free speech and privacy” by “flagging true information as false, claiming legitimate dissent is a threat, and then promoting “counter-narratives” against valid forms of public debate.
In response, the Oregon secretary of state’s office, which initiated the contract with Logically, claimed “no authority, ability, or desire to censor speech.” Diehl disputes this. He pointed out that the original proposal with Logically clearly states that its service “enables the opportunity for unlimited takedown attempts” of alleged misinformation content and the ability for the Oregon secretary of state’s office to “flag for removal” any “problematic narratives and content.” The contract document touts Logically as a “trusted entity within the social media community” that gives it “preferred status that enables us to support our client’s needs at a moment’s notice.”
Diehl, who shared a copy of the Logically contract with RCI, called the issue a vital “civil rights” fight, and noted that in an ironic twist, the state’s anti-misinformation speech suppression work further inflames distrust in “election systems and government institutions in general.”
Logically’s reach into the U.S. market is quickly growing. The company has piloted programs for the Chicago Police Department to use artificial intelligence to analyze local rap music and deploy predictions on violence in the community, according to a confidential proposal obtained by RCI. Pentagon records show that the firm is a subcontractor to a program run by the U.S. Army’s elite Special Operations Command for work conducted in 2022 and 2023. Via funding from DHS, Logically also conducts research on gamer culture and radicalization.
The company has claimed in its ethics statements that it will not employ any person who holds “a salaried or prominent position” in government. But records show closely entrenched state influence. For instance, Kevin Gross, a director of the U.S. Navy NAVAIR division, was previously embedded within Logically’s team during a 2022 fellowship program. The exchange program supported Logically’s efforts to assist NATO on the analysis of Russian social media.
Other contracts in the U.S. may be shrouded in secrecy. Logically partners with ThunderCat Technologies, a contracting firm that assists tech companies when competing for government work. Such arrangements have helped tech giants conceal secretive work in the past. Google previously attempted to hide its artificial intelligence drone-targeting contracts with the Defense Department through a similar third-party contracting vendor.
But questions swirl over the methods and reach of the firm as it entrenches itself into American life, especially as Logically angles to play a prominent role in the 2024 presidential election.
Pandemic Policing
In March 2020, as Britain confronted the spread of Covid-19, the government convened a new task force, the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU). The secretive task force was created with little fanfare but was advertised as a public health measure to protect against dangerous misinformation. Caroline Dinenage, the member of Parliament overseeing media issues, later explained that the unit’s purpose was to provide authoritative sources of information and to “take action to remove misinformation” relating to “misleading narratives related to COVID-19.”
The CDU, it later emerged, had largely outsourced its work to private contractors such as Logically. In January 2021, the company received its first contract from the agency overseeing the CDU, for £400,000, to monitor “potentially harmful disinformation online.” The contracts later swelled, with the U.K. agency that pertains to media issues eventually providing contracts with a combined value of £1.2 million and the Department of Health providing another £1.3 million, for a total of roughly $3.2 million.
That money went into far-reaching surveillance that monitored journalists, activists, and lawmakers who criticized pandemic policies. Logically, according to an investigation last year in the Telegraph, recorded comments from activist Silkie Carlo criticizing vaccine passports in its “Mis/Disinformation” reports.
Logically’s reports similarly collected information on Dr. Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Figueiredo had published reports on the negative ways in which vaccine passports could undermine vaccine confidence and had publicly criticized policies aimed at the mass vaccination of children. Despite his expertise, Logically filed his tweet in a disinformation report to the government. While some of the reports were categorized as evidence of terms of service violations, many were, in fact, routine forms of dissent aired by prominent voices in the U.K. on policies hotly contested by expert opinion.
The documents showing Logically’s role were later uncovered by Carlo’s watchdog group, Big Brother Watch, which produced a detailed report on the surveillance effort. The CDU reports targeted a former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies.
Carlo was surprised to even find her name on posts closely monitored and flagged by Logically. “We found that the company exploits millions of online posts to monitor, record and flag online political dissent to the central government under the banner of countering ‘disinformation,’” she noted in a statement to RCI.
Marketing materials published by Logically suggest its view of Covid-19 went well beyond fact-checking and veered into suppressing dissenting opinions. A case study published by the firm claimed that the #KBF hashtag, referring to Keep Britain Free, an activist group against school and business shutdowns, was a dangerous “anti-vax” narrative. The case study also claimed the suggestion that “the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory” was one of the “conspiracy theories’’ that “have received government support” in the U.S. — despite the fact that a preponderance of evidence now points to a likely lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of the pandemic.
Logically was also involved in pandemic work that blurred the line with traditional fact-checking operations. In India, the firm helped actively persuade patients to take the vaccine. In 2021, Jain, the founder and CEO of the company, said in an interview with an Indian news outlet that his company worked “closely with communities that are today vaccine hesitant.” The company, he said, recruited “advocates and evangelists” to shape local opinion.
Questionable Fact-Checking
In 2022, Logically used its technology on behalf of Canadian law enforcement to target the trucker-led “Freedom Convoy” against Covid-19 mandates, according to government records. Logically’s team floated theories that the truckers were “likely influenced by foreign adversaries,” a widely repeated claim used to denigrate the protests as inauthentic.
The push to discredit the Canadian protests showed the overlapping power of Logically’s multiple arms. While its social media surveillance wing fed reports to the Canadian government, its editorial team worked to influence opinion through the news media. When the Financial Times reported on the protest phenomenon, the outlet quoted Murphy, the former FBI man who now works for Logically, who asserted that the truckers were influenced by coordinated “conspiracy theorist groups” in the U.S. and Canada. Vicesimilarly quoted Joe Ondrak, Logically’s head of investigations, to report that the “Freedom Convoy” had generated excitement among global conspiracy theorists. Neither outlet disclosed Logically’s work for Canadian law enforcement at the time.
Other targets of Logically are quick to point out that the firm has taken liberties with what it classifies as misinformation.
Will Jones, the editor of the Daily Sceptic, a British news outlet with a libertarian bent, has detailed an unusual fact-check from Logically Facts, the company’s editorial site. Jones said the site targeted him for pointing out that data in 2022 showed 71 percent of patients hospitalized for Covid-19 were vaccinated. Logically’s fact-check acknowledged Jones had accurately used statistics from the U.K. Health Security Agency, but tried to undermine him by asserting that he was still misleading by suggesting that “vaccines are ineffective.”
But Jones, in a reply, noted that he never made that argument and that Logically was batting away at a straw man. In fact, his original piece plainly took issue with a Guardian article that incorrectly claimed that “COVID-19 has largely become a disease of the unvaccinated.”
Other Logically fact-checks have bizarrely targeted the Daily Sceptic for reporting on news in January 2022 that vaccine mandates might soon be lifted. The site dinged the Daily Sceptic for challenging the evidence behind the vaccine policy and declared, “COVID-19 vaccines have been proven effective in fighting the pandemic.” And yet, at the end of that month, the mandate was lifted for health care workers, and the following month, all other pandemic restrictions were revoked, just as the Daily Sceptic had reported.
“As far as I can work out, it’s a grift,” said Daily Sceptic founder Toby Young, of Logically. “A group of shysters offer to help the government censor any criticism of its policies under the pretense that they’re not silencing dissent — God forbid! — but merely ‘cleansing’ social media of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”
Jones was similarly dismissive of the company, which he said disputes anything that runs contrary to popular consensus. “The consensus of course is that set by the people who pay Logically for their services,” Jones added. “The company claims to protect democratic debate by providing access to ‘reliable information,’ but in reality, it is paid to bark and savage on command whenever genuine free speech makes an inconvenient appearance.”
In some cases, Logically has piled on to news stories to help discredit voices of dissent. Last September, the anti-misinformation site leaped into action after British news outlets published reports about sexual misconduct allegations surrounding comedian and online broadcaster Russell Brand — one of the outspoken critics of government policy in Britain, who has been compared to Joe Rogan for his heterodox views and large audience.
Brand, a vocal opponent of pandemic policies, had been targeted by Logically in the past for airing opinions critical of the U.S. and U.K. response to the virus outbreak, and in other moments for criticizing new laws in the European Union that compel social media platforms to take down content.
But the site took dramatic action when the sexual allegations, none of which have been proved in court, were published in the media. Ondrak, Logically’s investigations head, provided different quotes to nearly half a dozen news outlets — including Vice, Wired, the BBC, and two separate articles in The Times — that depicted Brand as a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who had finally been held to account.
“He follows a lot of the ostensibly health yoga retreat, kind of left-leaning, anti-capitalist figures, who got really suckered into Covid skepticism, Covid denialism, and anti-vax, and then spat out of the Great Reset at the other end,” Ondrak told Wired. In one of the articles published by The Times, Ondrak aired frustration on the obstacles of demonetizing Brand from the Rumble streaming network. In an interview with the BBC, Ondrak gave a curious condemnation, noting Brand stops short of airing any actual conspiracy theories or falsehoods but is guilty of giving audiences “the ingredients to make the disinformation themselves.”
Dinenage, the member of Parliament who spearheaded the CDU anti-misinformation push with Logically during the pandemic, also leapt into action. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, she sent nearly identical letters to Rumble, TikTok, and Meta to demand that the platforms follow YouTube’s lead in demonetizing Brand. Dinenage couched her official request to censor Brand as a part of a public interest inquiry, to protect the “welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour.”
Logically’s editorial team went a step further. In its report on the Brand allegations published on Logically Facts, it claimed that social media accounts “trotting out the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ refrain” for the comedian were among those perpetuating “common myths about sexual assault.” The site published a follow-up video reiterating the claim that those seeking the presumption of innocence for Brand, a principle dating back to the Magna Carta, were spreading a dangerous “myth.”
The unusual advocacy campaign against Brand represented a typical approach for a company that has long touted itself as a hammer against spreaders of misinformation. The opportunity to remove Brand from the media ecosystem meant throwing as much at him as possible, despite any clear misinformation or disinformation angle in the sexual assault allegations. Rather, he was a leading critic of government censorship and pandemic policy, so the scandal represented a weakness to be exploited.
Such heavy-handed tactics may be on the horizon for American voters. The firm is now a member of the U.S. Election Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, the group managed by the Center for Internet Security that helps facilitate misinformation reports on behalf of election officials across the country. Logically has been in talks with Oregon and other states, as well as DHS, to expand its social media surveillance role for the presidential election later this year.
Previous targets of the company, though, are issuing a warning.
“It appears that Logically’s lucrative and frankly sinister business effectively produced multi-million pound misinformation for the government that may have played a role in the censorship of citizens’ lawful speech,” said Carlo of Big Brother Watch.
“Politicians and senior officials happily pay these grifters millions of pounds to wield the red pen, telling themselves that they’re ‘protecting’ democracy rather than undermining it,” said Young of the Daily Sceptic. “It’s a boondoggle and it should be against the law.”
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser — “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as Covid-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers,” and “government agencies,” which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the “overall reliability of websites” and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites.”
NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the “Twitter Files” revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the government works through seemingly benign non-governmental organizations — such as the Stanford Internet Observatory — to quell speech it disapproves of.
Or it pays to coerce speech through government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.
Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels.” The ratings — which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in — use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria,” including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points), and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points), etc.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective — The New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100 percent rating. RealClearInvestigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many other outlets including the Times still have not), has an 80 percent rating. (Verbatim: the NewsGuard-RCI exchange over the whistleblower.) Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5 percent rating, and conservative site The Federalist, with a 12.5 percent rating.
As it stakes a claim to being the internet’s arbiter of trust, the company’s site says it has conducted reviews of some 95 percent of news sources across the English, French, German, and Italian web. It has also published reports about disinformation involving China and the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars. The model has received glowing profiles in CNN and The New York Times, among other outlets, as a viable solution for fighting fake news.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
NewsGuard is pushing to apply its browser screening process to libraries, academic centers, news aggregation portals, and internet service providers. Its reach, however, is far greater because of other products it aims to sell to social media and other content moderation firms and advertisers. “An advertiser’s worst nightmare is having an ad placement damage even one customer’s trust in a brand,” said Crovitz in a press release touting NewsGuard’s “BrandGuard” service for advertisers. “We’re asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem,” Crovitz told reporters.
How NewsGuard Starves Disfavored Sites Of Ad Clients
NewsGuard’s BrandGuard tool provides an “exclusion list” that deters advertisers from buying space on sites NewsGuard deems problematic. But that warning service creates inherent conflicts of interest with NewsGuard’s financial model: The buyers of the service can be problematic entities too, with an interest in protecting and buffing their image.
A case in point: Publicis Groupe, NewsGuard’s largest investor and the biggest conglomerate of marketing agencies in the world, which has integrated NewsGuard’s technology into its fleet of subsidiaries that place online advertising. The question of conflicts arises because Publicis represents a range of corporate and government clients, including Pfizer — whose Covid vaccine has been questioned by some news outlets that have received low scores. Other investors include Bruce Mehlman, a D.C. lobbyist with a lengthy list of clients, including United Airlines and ByteDance, the parent company of much-criticized Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.
NewsGuard has faced mounting criticism that rather than serving as a neutral public service against online propaganda, it instead acts as an opaque proxy for its government and corporate clients to stifle views that simply run counter to their own interests. The criticism finds support in internal documents, such as the NewsGuard proposal to Twitter, which this reporter obtained during “Twitter Files” reporting last year, as well as in government records and discussions with independent media sites targeted by the startup.
Beginning last year, users scanning the headlines on certain browsers that include NewsGuard were warned against visiting Consortium News. A scarlet-red NewsGuard warning pop-up said, “Proceed With Caution” and claimed that the investigative news site “has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war.” The warning also notifies a network of advertisers, news aggregation portals, and social media platforms that Consortium News cannot be trusted.
But Consortium News, founded by late Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Robert Parry and known for its strident criticism of U.S. foreign policy, is far from a fake news publisher. And NewsGuard, the entity attempting to suppress it, Consortium claims, is hardly a disinterested fact-checker because of federal influence over it. NewsGuard attached the label after pressing Consortium for retractions or corrections to six articles published on the site. Those news articles dealt with widely reported claims about neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and U.S. influence over the country — issues substantiated by other credible media outlets. After Consortium editors refused to remove the reporting and offered a detailed rebuttal, the entire site received a misinformation label, encompassing over 20,000 articles and videos published by the outlet since it was founded in 1995.
The left-wing news site believes the label was part of a pay-for-censorship scheme. It notes that Consortium News was targeted after NewsGuard received a $749,387 Defense Department contract in 2021 to identify “false narratives” relating to the war between Ukraine and Russia, as well as other forms of foreign influence.
Bruce Afran, an attorney for Consortium News, disagrees. “What’s really happening here is that NewsGuard is trying to target those who take a different view from the government line,” said Afran. He filed an amended complaint last month claiming that NewsGuard not only defamed his client, but also acts as a front for the military to suppress critical reporting.
“There’s a great danger in being maligned this way,” Afran continued. “The government cannot evade the Constitution by hiring a private party.”
Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, observed that in previous years, anonymous social media accounts had also targeted his site, falsely claiming a connection to the Russian government in a bid to discredit his outlet.
“NewsGuard has got to be the worst,” said Lauria. “They’re labeling us in a way that stays with us. Every news article we publish is defamed with that label of misinformation.”
Both Lauria and Afran said that they worry that NewsGuard is continuing to collaborate with the government or with intelligence services. In previous years, NewsGuard had worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. It’s not clear to what extent NewsGuard is still working with the Pentagon. But earlier this year, Crovitz wrote an email to journalist Matt Taibbi, defending its work with the government, describing it in the present tense, suggesting that it is ongoing:
For example, as is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China. Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.
The company has not yet responded to the Consortium News lawsuit, filed in the New York federal court. In May of this year, the Air Force Research Lab responded to a records request from journalist Erin Marie Miller about the NewsGuard contract. The contents of the work proposal were entirely redacted.
Asked about the company’s continued work with the intelligence sector, Skibinski replied, “We license our data about false claims made by state media sources and state-sponsored disinformation efforts from China, Russia and Iran to the defense and intelligence sector, as we describe on our website.”
Punishing An Outlet That Criticized A NewsGuard Backer’s Pharma Clients
Other websites that have sought to challenge their NewsGuard rating say it has shown little interest in a back-and-forth exchange regarding unsettled matters. Take the case of The Daily Sceptic, a small publication founded and edited by conservative English commentator Toby Young. As a forum for journalists and academics to challenge a variety of strongly held public-policy orthodoxies, even those on Covid-19 vaccines and climate change, The Daily Sceptic is a genuine dissenter. Last year, Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve his site’s 74.5 rating.
In a series of emails from 2022 and 2023 that were later forwarded to RealClearInvestigations, NewsGuard responded to Young by listing articles that it claimed represent forms of misinformation, such as reports that Pfizer’s vaccine carried potential side effects. The site, notably, has been a strident critic of Covid-19 policies, such as coercive mandates. Anicka Slachta, an analyst with NewsGuard, highlighted articles that questioned the efficacy of the vaccines and lockdowns. The Daily Sceptic, for example, reported a piece casting Covid-19 lockdowns as “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful,” citing academic literature from Johns Hopkins University.
Rather than refute this claim, Slachta simply offered an opposing view from another academic, who criticized the arguments put forth by lockdown critics. And the Hopkins study, Slachta noted, was not peer-reviewed. The topic is still, of course, under serious debate. Sweden rejected the draconian lockdowns on schools and businesses implemented by most countries in North American and Europe, yet had one of the lowest “all-cause excess mortality” rates in either region.
Young and others said that the issue highlighted by NewsGuard is not an instance of misinformation, but rather an ongoing debate, with scientists and public health experts continuing to explore the moral, economic, and health-related questions raised by such policies. In its response to NewsGuard’s questions about the lockdown piece, Young further added that his site made no claim that the Hopkins paper was peer-reviewed and added that its findings had been backed up by a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Yet to NewsGuard, Young’s site evidently posed a misinformation danger by simply reporting on the subject and refusing to back down. Emails between NewsGuard and the Daily Sceptic show Young patiently responding to the company’s questions; he also added postscripts to the articles flagged by NewsGuard with a link to the fact checks of them and rebuttals of those fact checks. Young also took the extra step of adding updates to other articles challenged by fact-checking non-governmental organizations. “I have also added postscripts to other articles not flagged by you but which have been fact checked by other organisations, such as Full Fact and Reuters,” Young wrote to Slachta.
That wasn’t enough. After a series of back-and-forth emails, NewsGuard said it would be satisfied only with a retraction of the articles, many of which, like the lockdown piece, contained no falsehoods. After the interaction, NewsGuard lowered The Daily Sceptic’s rating to 37.5/100.
“I’m afraid you left me no choice but to conclude that NewsGuard is a partisan site that is trying to demonetise news publishing sites whose politics it disapproves of under the guise of supposedly protecting potential advertisers from being associated with ‘mis-’ and ‘disinformation,’” wrote Young in response. “Why bother to keep up the pretence of fair-mindedness John? Just half my rating again, which you’re going to do whatever I say.”
NewsGuard’s Skibinski, in a response to a query about The Daily Sceptic’s downgrade, denied that his company makes any “demands” of publishers. “We simply call them for comment and ask questions about their editorial practices,” he wrote. “This is known as journalism.”
The experience mirrored that of Consortium. Afran, the attorney for the site, noted that NewsGuard uses an arbitrary process to punish opponents, citing the recent study from the company on misinformation on the Israel-Hamas war. “They cherry-picked 250 posts among tweets they knew were incorrect, and they attempt to create the impression that all of X is unreliable,” the lawyer noted. “And so, what they’re doing, and this is picked up by mainstream media, that’s actually causing X, formerly Twitter, to now lose ad revenue, based literally on 250 posts out of the billions of posts on Twitter.”
The push to demonize and delist The Daily Sceptic, a journalist critic of pharmaceutical products and policies, reflects an inherent conflict with the biggest backer of NewsGuard: Publicis Groupe.
Publicis client Pfizer awarded Publicis a major deal to help manage its global media and advertising operations, a small reflection of which is the $2.3 billion the pharmaceutical giant spent on advertising last year.
The NewsGuard-Publicis relationship extends to the Paris-based marketing conglomerate’s full client list, including LVHM, PepsiCo, Glaxo Smith Kline, Burger King, ConAgra, Kellogg Company, General Mills, and McDonalds. “NewsGuard will be able to publish and license ‘white lists’ of news sites our clients can use to support legitimate publishers while still protecting their brand reputations,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman of the Publicis Groupe, upon its launch of NewsGuard.
Put another way, when corporate watchdogs like The Daily Sceptic or Consortium News are penalized by NewsGuard, the ranking system amounts to a blacklist to guide advertisers where not to spend their money.
“NewsGuard is clearly in the business of censoring the truth,” noted Dr. Joseph Mercola, a gadfly voice whose website was ranked as misinformation by NewsGuard after it published reports about Covid-19’s potential origin from a lab in Wuhan, China.
“Seeing how Publicis represents most of the major pharmaceutical companies in the world and funded the creation of NewsGuard, it’s not far-fetched to assume Publicis might influence NewsGuard’s ratings of drug industry competitors,” Mercola added, in a statement online.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
Lee Fang is an investigative reporter. Find his Substack here.
A “disinformation” group is out with new reports flagging online information as “misinformation” for corporate tech giants known for censoring such info — even if the content is true.
VineSight, a Tel Aviv-based tech company with offices in New York, relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to scan the internet for “toxic narratives” and “misinformation.” A thorough examination of the company’s recent reports, however, reveals so-called “toxic narratives” and “misinformation” are synonymous with conservative arguments and inconvenient truths.
The company’s report on clean energy, for example, highlights a post from a “bot-like” account as misinformation that reads, “China emits the most CO2.” The statement, however, is verifiably true. China is by far the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions on the planet and has been for almost two decades.
VineSight’s clean energy report also highlights statements from human accounts as misinformation including, “Climate advocates are hypocrites,” and “[electric vehicles] repeatedly catch on fire.” Climate advocates, however, are often hypocrites when they endlessly lecture about fossil fuels while flying to glitzy conferences courtesy of private air travel. And electric vehicles, including bikes and scooters, are seeing a rise in spontaneous combustion triggered by the malfunction of lithium-ion batteries.
On Facebook, allegedly misleading viral topics include a claim from conservative radio host Glenn Beck saying an “EV battery factory needs fossil fuels to run” and another from Breitbart that “Biden’s green policies benefit China.” But studies have shown that electric vehicles are worse for the environment than their gas-powered counterparts — in part because of the pollution-inducing production of lithium-ion batteries, a market China dominates. In other words, the more President Joe Biden subsidizes rich Americans buying electric vehicles, the more Beijing stands to profit.
Almost every energy-related statement VineSight flagged in its “misinformation” report is backed by either an outright truth or, at minimum, evidence to support the claim. For example, VineSight identified as misinformation a statement attributed to former President Donald Trump that went viral on TikTok: “The Green New Deal is the Destruction of Our Country.” The Green New Deal is a far-left proposal to radically reengineer the nation’s economy and power grid to prioritize climate change above all else. Residents in California are already suffering the effects of state officials implementing aspects of the Green New Deal on a local level; frequent blackouts and strict rules on water use are the new norm.
VineSight’s reports on climate change and voter fraud are not much different. Its climate change report this month flagged topics such as “climate change is a hoax” and “there is no climate crisis” as top examples of viral misinformation. Yet earlier this year, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist became the second Nobel laureate to sign a declaration with more than 1,600 other scientists that emphatically says, “There is no climate emergency.”
“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” reads the declaration, organized by the Climate Intelligence Foundation. “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
Another climate “topic” written off as disinformation by the misinformation group is, “China opens a new coal transportation network.” Yet here’s a headline from National Public Radio (NPR) in March: “China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds.”
A VineSight press release in May celebrated the firm’s updated disinformation technology to “not only identify and alert organizations to disinformation attacks faster but also help mitigate, counter-message, takedown or label content before it damages a company’s reputation and business.”
“Today VineSight’s premier solution is used by major Fortune 500 brands including financial, manufacturing and pharmaceutical institutions, political campaigns, and other causes across the globe,” the company wrote.
The same press release highlights how “VineSight works with the terms of service of each social platform and where possible, get [sic] messages labeled or removed, to counteract any attacks or minimize virality.” In other words, by VineSight’s own admission, it shares its reports with major tech platforms to flag posts for censorship.
The company also admits its concerns about “disinformation” are related to election outcomes. “Disinformation is disrupting the legitimacy of the election process, threatening democracy, and allowing extremist views to become prevalent,” VineSight said in its May press release.
VineSight’s “tracking report” on voter fraud identified conservative themes on election integrity as “viral misinformation and toxic narratives.”
Here are a few The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway highlighted on X:
The topics also included “allowing illegal immigrants to vote is an insult to Americans,” and “MAGA movement was able to make election fraud a top voters issue.” The group also flagged the topic: “the 2020 election was stolen and now Democrats are trying to interfere with 2024.”
Democrats did of course rig the 2020 election — a conspiracy they’ve admitted to — by way of exploiting Covid-19 to transform “Election Day” into election season with the radical expansion of mail-in voting, the least secure format to conduct elections. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also dumped some $350 million into the leftist nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life, which funded and staffed local government election offices. These dollars flowed overwhelmingly to the blue areas of swing states, effectively making the operation a Democrat get-out-the-vote effort.
Then there was the collusion of Big Tech and the media, which openly suppressed blockbuster stories surrounding the corruption of the Democratic nominee and his involvement in his son’s potentially criminal overseas business ventures. Hemingway wrote an entire 448-page book documenting the myriad ways Democrats rigged the 2020 contest.
As for the upcoming election, Trump, now the Republican front-runner in his third run for the White House, is faced with 91 felony indictments just over a year ahead of the next election. On Monday, the leading candidate for the GOP nomination was slapped with a gag order from an activist judge who effectively barred the former president from even campaigning against his top political opponent: the federal government. It bars Trump from publicly defending himself against attacks from potential witnesses, court personnel, or his federal prosecutors, including Special Counsel Jack Smith. According to VineSight, none of that constitutes election interference. Saying as much is amplifying “misinformation.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
On Thursday afternoon, three Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges heard Biden administration arguments to let government keep pressuring social media monopolies to ban ideas they don’t like from the internet. On July 4, a lower court had ordered the Biden administration to cease what it called “arguably … the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The Fifth Circuit paused that injunction on July 14 and heard oral arguments against it on Aug. 10 in Missouri v. Biden.
In this major case likely to hit the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden administration is fighting to stop American citizens from sharing messages government officials don’t like. This case uncovered reams of White House and other high-level officials threatening internet monopolies with the end of their entire business model if they didn’t ban speech by Democrats’ political opponents.
“It’s far beyond the scope of what people realize,” says a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Zhonette Brown, of the public interest firm New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA).
Internal documents Twitter divulged under new owner Elon Musk provided more proof that social media monopolies are silencing Americans from Tucker Carlson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to millions of non-famous citizens at the behest of government pressure. Here are some key takeaways from Thursday’s oral arguments and earlier revelations from this massive First Amendment case.
1. By the Government’s Own Definition, It’s Censoring
Key to Thursday’s arguments was the question of coercion: Did government demands of internet monopolies equal coercion, or were those merely officials advocating for their views?
“If the government was doing something like that in a coercive manner, then that could be the subject of a proper injunction,” Department of Justice lawyer Daniel Bentele Hahs Tenny told the court in his opening remarks. “The problem is that what you would have to do is say, ‘Here is what the government is doing that’s coercive, and I’m enjoining that.’”
Judge Don Willett responded: “How do you define coercive?”
Tenny: “I don’t think there’s too much disagreement on this point. Coercive is where a reasonable person would construe it to be backed by a threat of government action against a party if it didn’t comply.”
That’s exactly what the government did, the voluminous documents already discovered in this case show. In just one of the examples, Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former high-ranking U.K. official, told his bosses Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content” (emphasis original).
Clegg also characterized to colleagues an interaction with Andy Slavitt, a White House Covid adviser, this way: “[H]e was outraged – not too strong a word to describe his reaction – that we did not remove this post” of a meme about trial lawyers getting 10 years of vaccine-injured clients from government mandates.
2. Government Officials Treated Internet Monopolies Like Their Subordinates
The Fifth Circuit panel demonstrated familiarity with the numerous examples of this kind of government behavior, such as this email exchange between White House digital director Rob Flaherty and Facebook, in which Flaherty swears at Facebook engineers, “Are you guys f-cking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”
“What appears to be in the record are these irate messages from time to time from high-ranking government officials that say, “You didn’t do this yet,’” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod told Tenny. “And that’s my toning down the language. … So it’s like, ‘Jump!’ and, ‘How high?’”
The judges also noted the White House publicly threatened the business model of all online communications monopolies through potentially revoking Section 230 and launching antitrust lawsuits. The lawsuit documentation shows leading Democrats making the same public threats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and multiple U.S. senators.
Joe Biden even threatenedto hold Zuckerberg criminally liable for not running Facebook the way Biden wanted. In office, Biden also famously accused Facebook of “killing people” by not doing enough to spread the administration’s message and suppress opposing messages. FBI agent Elvis Chan‘s deposition in this case noted federal officials showed adverse legislation to social media monopolies’ leaders as examples of what the government would do to them if they didn’t ban Americans’ speech.
“It’s not like, ‘We think this would be a good public policy and we want to explain to you why that would be a good policy,” Elrod said. “There seems to be some very close relationship that they’re having these — ‘This isn’t being done fast enough’ you know, like it’s a supervisor complaining about a worker.”
3. Judges Likened Government Behavior to Mobsters
Tenny claimed there was no “or else” explaining what the government “would do” if the internet monopolies didn’t obey, so there was no government coercion present.
“This is an analogy, probably an inapt analogy, so if you’ll excuse me — like if somebody is in these movies we see with the mob or something. They don’t spell out things but they have these ongoing relationships and they never actually say, ‘Go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence,’ but everybody just knows,” Elrod replied. “And I’m certainly not equating the federal government with anybody in illegal organized crime, but there are certain relationships that people know things without always saying the ‘Or else.’”
Willett followed that up by commenting the case documentation makes it look like the government is “relying on a fairly unsubtle kind of strong-arming and veiled or not so veiled threats. ‘That’s a really nice social media platform you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
4. Censorship Is Election Interference
The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, John Sauer, initiated this case as Louisiana’s solicitor general. In representing state government interests to the judges, he noted that elected officials have to pay attention to what their constituents are saying online, or they won’t have a good read on what voters what them to do in office.
“We’ve gotta be able to craft messages and know what policies we’re adopting to be responsive to our citizens,” he summarized from statements submitted to the court from multiple state officials. “…Going back to 1863, as everyone knows, going back to the Federalist number 56 where [Bill of Rights author James] Madison said it, everyone knows state legislators have a sovereign interest in knowing what their constituents think and feel, and that’s directly impacted.”
When the federal government silences some Americans’ views online, Sauer said, it makes it harder for elected representatives to actually represent them. Two of the state injuries the plaintiffs assert against the federal government’s censorship are “Interference with our ability to hear our constituents’ voices on social media” and “interference with our ability to have a fair and unbiased process for our people to organize and petition the government for grievances.”
Court documents also revealed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a federal agency, set up a private entity to ban and throttle election-related online speech Democrats dislike. Much of the information choked by this algorithmic censorship operation is true, such as the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop, investigations and members of Congress have noted.
“They invented a whole new word, ‘mal-information,’ to justify going after the censorship of true speech and ideas,” Sauer said last month in a public discussion of the case that YouTube banned.
5. Democrats Want Free Speech for Themselves While Banning It for Their Enemies
The oral arguments also got into the FBI’s 2020 election interference in telling online monopolies that The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was foreign disinformation. Tenny claimed the FBI refused to comment on the laptop because it was a pending investigation.
Yet the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies actually did comment on the laptop by calling it “foreign disinformation,” both privately to the internet monopolies and publicly. This was false, and the FBI knew it. The lower court ruled this deception constituted coercion because it caused people to act on false information.
As Ben Weingarten notes, these lies and FBI-demanded online content bans to protect them benefitted Joe Biden in the 2020 election:
According to Elvis Chan (pdf), an FBI official leading engagement with the social media platforms, while the bureau didn’t explicitly ask the companies to change their hacked material policies, it did frequently follow up to ask whether they had changed said policies, as the FBI wanted to know how they would treat such materials.
The judges almost broached an important question: If the First Amendment protects the FBI’s lies that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation, for which not one federal employee has been disciplined, how can it allow for criminalizing the same behavior by average Americans by labeling their views “disinformation” and “mal-information”?
6. Today’s Internet Is Still Massively Rigged
Taibbi also noted that court documents show the Biden administration got mad enough to fire the F-bomb at social media companies when the algorithmic censorship they demand affected Biden’s Instagram account. Instagram instantly fixed the issue for the White House, but not for non-powerful Americans.
It’s clear from the case documents and other disclosures such as the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” that the algorithms controlling what Americans see online are now deeply, massively rigged. That rigging is multilayered. It includes all this government coercion of entities including Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Snapchat, Tiktok, and Twitter going back to at least 2017, as well as pressure operations from corporate media and internal employee groups.
Beyond algorithm changes, social media monopolies have also changed their terms of service in response to government demands, the NCLA attorneys noted last month. So government control of public discourse will continue even if the Fifth Circuit reinstates the injunction.
Tenny told the Fifth Circuit the Covid-era censorship that ignited this case is over because the government currently deems Covid not an emergency. In court, Sauer cited YouTube banning two weeks ago a video of attorneys discussing this case as more proof this massive censorship persists. He also cited court documents showing Americans still can’t post social media messages about censored topics.
“Attorneys present gave estimates ranging from a few weeks to two months for the panel to rule” on whether to reinstate an injunction against more of this government behavior, reported Taibbi, who attended the oral arguments in New Orleans, Louisiana. The previous injunction includes exceptions for crimes such as sex trafficking.
“The government wants to be doing something that it shouldn’t be doing, and they really, really want to be doing it,” said NCLA attorney John Vecchione in the discussion YouTube banned.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
In a preliminary injunction issued against the White House and federal agencies on Tuesday in Missouri v. Biden, Judge Terry Doughty eviscerated government actors for colluding with social media companies to censor users’ protected speech in the name of eliminating “misinformation.”
Doughty, as others have done, compares the government censorship to Orwell’s hypothetical “Ministry of Truth.” But Orwell’s satirical title gives the speech police too much credit: It assumes “truth” is still a functional part of their vocabulary. No, our censors speak in terms of “misinformation.”
The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information. Truth has a moral component; information doesn’t. Years of moral relativism have eroded our cultural understanding of “truth” as a knowable, agreed-upon concept — and in our modern world, all we’re left with is an infinite supply of information.
Truth, Discerned in Nature by Reason
For most of Western history, philosophers and laymen alike have agreed upon the existence of “truth,” as a factual concept but also as a moral one. Plato said the “true philosophers” were those “who are lovers of the vision of truth,” which he described in terms of an ideal reality that transcended the imperfect reflections of truth, goodness, and beauty in the natural world. Similarly, Cicero believed in the existence of a natural law that could be understood via man’s reason.
Christianity describes the law being written on the hearts of men in similar terms, and presents the good, true, and beautiful as originating from and perfectly fulfilled in the triune God. The Bible refers to Christ as the Logos, the Word of God — a term closely associated with wisdom, reason, and truth. Elsewhere, Christ describes himself as “the way, and the truth, and the life.”
As Christianity and Greek thought spread throughout the West, an emphasis on the comprehension of truth via reason took root. Presuppositions about rational thought and laws of nature spawned mathematic, scientific, and artistic advancements, most famously during the Renaissance. A few centuries later, Enlightenment thinkers began to break away from the theistic grounding of the Western pursuit of truth, elevating reason alone as a sufficient basis for a functioning society. Modernism rejected the Enlightenment obsession with reason, as the booming industrial world sought to overcome nature and its laws and limits. As religious foundations continued to crumble, relativism emerged and completely unmoored itself from traditional assumptions about objective and knowable truth.
Today, we see factual relativism as well as moral. Not only does our prevailing social ethic tolerate individuals’ self-determination of “what’s right for me,” we’ve gone so far as to nod along when a man says he is actually a woman, lacking the philosophical footing to explain why that simply can’t be true.
To “speak your truth,” as distinct from the truth, is a moral victory to be praised according to our prevalent irrational dogma. Our cultural rejection of reason is evident in every field: Look at the deconstructionist sculptures and poetry that pass for art, or the assault on the fixed, rational rules of mathematics.
In this cultural condition, people are no longer equipped to speak in terms of truth, grounded in the divinely appointed laws of nature, discernible by human reason. Those concepts aren’t in our contemporary vocabulary.
“What’s right for me.” “Speak your truth.” These are samples of a culture that rejects all authority except their own. Self-centered, selfish, insecure, afraid of normal society, and moral laws they create their own world with cliches, beliefs, and a language that supports their self-created world. They are a spiritual, and natural law unto themselves.
Rather than blind themselves into society, their self-centered egos demand sociaity change just for them, adapt their language and definition to theirs, and respect their decisions or else they’ll shame you, or bully you (riots and violent demonstrations) into submission.
This is what happened with the homosexual lobby in the beginning of all this mess going back to the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. The bully has made a lot of progress. Now they are so bold that they don’t care we know what they are doing in indoctrinating our children recruiting them into homosexuality. With the help of Margrett Sangers disciples of birth control, they are sterilizing our children through this trans garbage getting children to sterilize themselves through sex change surgeries. Welcome to 2023 Liberalism Psychotics.
Truth Isn’t Fragile, But Regime-Approved Narratives Are
In granting the preliminary injunction, Judge Doughty explains: “It is the purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of the market, whether it be by government itself or private licensee.”
The essential context and goal of meaningful free speech — a world in which ideas are debated openly so that truth may triumph — is no longer feasible when ideas cease to be judged on their merits and are instead judged by the intensity with which a person feels them to be true.
When there is no longer an agreed-upon concept of “truth,” ideas are reduced to those with which you agree and those you don’t. When you can’t rely on your ideas to endure simply because they’re true, contradictory perspectives and ideas become more of a threat.
Enter the pervasive concept of “misinformation.” It’s not a new term — Noah Webster defined it in 1828 as “false account or intelligence received.” The very idea of “misinformation” as it was understood in Webster’s time was basically a photonegative of truth: One could be misinformed, but the “false account” could be understood to be false precisely because it contradicted something true.
But in a post-rational world, “misinformation” means something else. One of the government bureaucrats accused in Missouri v. Biden of working to censor Americans admitted as much, in a very un-self-aware statement: “CISA Director Easterly stated: ‘We live in a world where people talk about alternative facts, post-truth, which I think is really, really dangerous if people get to pick their own facts,’” according to Doughty.
Of course, if everyone is picking his own facts, the government doing so is no different. As Doughty concluded, “The Free Speech Clause was enacted to prohibit just what Director Easterly is wanting to do: allow the government to pick what is true and what is false.” If there is no ultimate truth, then all that’s left is the prevailing narrative and information that challenges that narrative: misinformation. Government censors can make an appeal to reported facts or scientific studies, but man is ultimately fallible and those conclusions have no grounding if they are rooted in no higher law than the men who derive them.
That’s because truth is inseparable from goodness. It’s more than sterile informational accuracy — to be true is to reflect the created order that is ultimately good because its Creator is goodness Himself.
Man possesses the knowledge of good and evil, and it cost him dearly. Until we admit the language of goodness — and its opposite — back into our cultural vocabulary, we’ll be vainly squabbling over “misinformation,” and the most powerful actors will get to define it.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
The members of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project conspired with state, local, and federal government officials to violate the First Amendment rights of social media users, a class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday in a Louisiana federal court alleged.
Over the course of the 88-page complaint, the named plaintiffs, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft and Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana Jill Hines, detailed extensive direct and indirect government involvement with the defendants’ censorship activities, allegedly making the private entities and individuals “state actors” for purposes of the Constitution.
Here are the highlights of the government’s alleged connection to the defendants’ censorship activities.
A Bit About the Defendants
Formed in 2020, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) describes itself as a partnership “between four of the nation’s leading institutions focused on understanding misinformation and disinformation in the social media landscape: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.” In early 2021, the same four entities expanded their focus to address supposed Covid-19 “misinformation” on social media, calling the effort the “Virality Project.”
In both the run-up to the 2020 election and since then, EIP and the Virality Project pushed Big Tech companies to censor speech. Excepting the University of Washington, which was not named in the class-action lawsuit, the institutions involved in the EIP and Virality Project are private entities, and the individuals running those institutions are non-governmental actors. Thus, without more, the censorship efforts would not implicate the First Amendment.
The Alleged Conspiracy
But there was more — much more — a conspiracy between the defendants, according to the complaint. Those defendants include the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Leland Stanford Junior University and its board of trustees, the latter two of which are allegedly legally responsible for the observatory’s conduct; Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory; Renée DiResta, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s research manager; the Atlantic Council; the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab; and Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab.
In support of the alleged conspiracy, the plaintiffs quoted at length the defendants’ own words, much of it culled from the EIP’s post-election report, but also pulled from interviews and its webpage. Here we see the EIP boast of its “coalition” that exchanged information with “election officials, government agencies,” and “social media platforms.” “The work carried out by the EIP and its partners during the 2020 U.S. election,” the defendants stressed, “united government, academia, civil society, and industry, analyzing across platforms, to address misinformation in real time.”
The united goal, according to the complaint, was censorship. This is clear from Stamos’ Aug. 26, 2020, comment to The New York Times, when the Stanford Observatory director explained that the EIP sought to collaborate with Big Tech to remove “disinformation.” The EIP further explained that it saw itself filling the “critical gap” of monitoring supposed election “misinformation” inside the United States — a gap the EIP recognized existed because the First Amendment prevents the government from censoring speech.
But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created “in consultation” with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students. The CISA then assisted Stanford as it sought to “figure out what the gap was” the EIP needed to address. Two weeks before EIP officially launched, Stanford also met “with CISA to present EIP concept.”
Government Collaboration with EIP
The government continued to work with EIP after its formation. Both federal and state-level government officials submitted “tickets” or reports of supposed misinformation to EIP, which would then submit them to the social media companies for censorship. EIP’s post-election report identified government partners who submitted tips of misinformation, including CISA, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), and the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the last of which received reports of disinformation from state and local government officials. EIP would then forward the complaints to the social media companies for censorship.
CISA also helped EIP by connecting it with election-official groups, such as the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors, both of which represent state and local government officials. CISA facilitated meetings between EIP and those groups as well, leading to censorship requests fed to the EIP and then forwarded to social media companies.
The government’s entanglement with the censorship efforts of EIP was more pronounced when it came to the Center for Internet Security because CISA both funded the Center for Internet Security and directed state and local election officials to report supposed misinformation to it. CISA further connected the Center for Internet Security to EIP, resulting in the former feeding the latter a substantial number of misinformation tickets. EIP then pushed those censorship requests to social media companies.
Later, as the 2020 election neared, CISA coordinated with the Center for Internet Security and EIP “to establish a joint reporting process,” with the three organizations agreeing to “let each other know what they were reporting to platforms like Twitter.”
Overlapping Personnel
The individuals responsible for EIP, including Stamos, DiResta, and Kate Starbird, all “have or had formal roles in CISA.” Both Stamos and Starbird are members of CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, while DiResta is a “Subject Matter Expert” for a CISA subcommittee.
Additionally, two of the six CISA members who “took shifts” in reporting supposed misinformation to Big Tech companies apparently worked simultaneously as interns for CISA and at the Stanford Internet Observatory and EIP, reporting “misinformation” to the social media companies on behalf of both CISA and EIP. In fact, the two interns reported “misinformation” to platforms on behalf of CISA by using “EIP ticket numbers.” One of the CISA interns also forwarded a detailed report of supposed “misinformation” from the Election Integrity Partnership to social media companies using CISA’s reporting system.
Coordination with Virality Project
As noted above, after the 2020 election, the Election Integrity Project replicated its censorship efforts to combat so-called Covid “misinformation” through the Virality Project. The Virality Project used the foundations established with the government’s assistance for the EIP and continued to collaborate with government officials and Big Tech.
The Virality Project boasted of its “strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC.” The Virality Project also identified “federal health agencies” and “state and local public health officials” as “stakeholders” who “provided tips, feedback and requests to assess specific incidents and narratives.” And as was the case with the Election Integrity Project, the Virality Project flagged content for censorship by social media companies, including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, through a ticket system.
While it was those private platforms that censored Hoft, Hines, and an untold number of other Americans, the class-action complaint establishes it was the government that initiated and pushed for that censorship, while hiding behind EIP and other organizations. And because EIP allegedly conspired with the government to silence the plaintiffs’ speech, the class-action lawsuit seeks to hold it liable too.
The defendants have some time before responding. When they do, they’ll likely seek to have the lawsuit tossed, arguing they aren’t the government and thus could not violate the First Amendment. The detailed allegations of collaboration with the government make it unlikely they will succeed on a motion to dismiss, however, which will mean the plaintiffs will be entitled to discovery — and that’s where we’ll likely see the real evidence of a conspiracy.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
“Why, you little… I’ll teach you to laugh at something that’s funny!” -Homer Simpson
As a society, we understand very well the term, “free speech isn’t free.” This double-entendre statement has arguably been more applicable in the past several years than in any other time in history. That all freedoms come at a cost, most understand, but the freedom to say what you believe or think, is literally under siege these days.
In such cases, due to terms like, ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ it need not even be a lie; an imagined slight is all it takes. This quote from “The Simpson’s movie” back in 2007 references an ideology that at the time, seemed far-fetched. However, as life imitates art in 2023, simply laughing at something funny or speaking unpopular truths can end a career.
During the last weekend of February 2023, the popular comic strip “Dilbert” was dropped by nearly 80 newspaper outlets across the country after what many considered a ‘racist rant’ by its creator, Scott Adams.
According to News One, “It followed an incident in which Adams, on his program “Real Coffee with Scott Adams,” reacted to a recent survey by Rasmussen Reports that concluded only 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” If only about half thought it was OK to be white, Adams remarked, this qualified Black Americans as a “hate group.” “I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” Adams added. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, just get the f— away because there is no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”
Adams later doubled down on his statements, writing on Twitter that “Dilbert has been canceled from all newspapers, websites, calendars, and books because I gave some advice everyone agreed with.”
According to Forbes, this was the timeline of events:
February 22: Adams spends several profanity-laden minutes telling white people to “get away” from Black people after reading a Rasmussen poll that found that only 53% of Black respondents agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.”
February 24: Some newspapers and publishing groups, including the USA TODAY Network and Advance Local Group, decide to stop publishing Dilbert, removing the cartoon from over 200 papers across the country.
February 25: The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Antonio Express-News, among others, drop Dilbert.
February 25: Adams expands on his remarks in an almost two-hour interview with online personality Hotep Jesus.
February 26: Adams links to Saturday’s interview and tweets he’s only accepting criticism from people who know the full context, claiming that much of the coverage against him is “fake news.”
February 26: Elon Musk tweets support of Adams, claiming: “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians.
February 26: The National Cartoonists Society disavows “all forms of racism and discrimination” (Dilbert won the Society’s highest honor, the Reuben Award, in 1998).
February 27: Adams is dropped by publishing company Andrews McMeel Universal, whose chairman and CEO tweeted that the company supports free speech but not “commentary rooted in discrimination or hate.”
February 28: Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House, cancels the September release of Adams’ Reframe Your Brain, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Cancel Culture Gone Crazy
Though Adams has been derided for his outspokenness before, this was something new. In a matter of only four days, an iconic comic strip with millions of devoted readers is erased from newspapers all over America. Amazing how damaging thinking aloud can be.
Whether audiences of media, social and otherwise realize it, we are at an inflection point. While it may appear hyperbolic, unless you’ve been sleeping- we should all be concerned. One of the best things that Americans and those seeking to be citizens of this country once appreciated was our Constitution.
Within that document sits a list of Amendments, and these contained rights that bestowed freedoms on every American. Among those are rights against illegal search and seizure, the right to bear arms, and of course- the freedom of speech.
No doubt most of us have watched over time as those rights (mentioned and not mentioned) have not just eroded, but rather, simply been taken away. If the adage, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” tells us anything, our Constitution, as is, may have a shelf life, with a looming expiration date.
Weighing In
While this writer does not agree entirely with Scott Adams’ feelings or assessment, he has every right to say it, much like a Klansman in full-hooded garb, can, and has the right to walk into an all-black-neighborhood and yell, “I HATE NIGGERS!” from the top of his lungs- at his own peril. And while “The Simpsons” is not anyone’s paragon of virtue, hope or even familial example, Homer’s words still ring no less true.
As we watch black-and-white films of civil rights attacks from the 60’s, and cringe at the Holocaust atrocities of the 40’s, we dare not be so naïve to miss the fact that history is repeating herself. However, don’t be fooled. It isn’t through angry words and rhetoric that this is occurring, and not even because of those colleges and venues that boycott and allow the shouting down of speakers.
It won’t be due to judges being mocked and bullied from outside their own homes, or pro-lifers being accosted because of praying in front of abortion clinics. No, it will be because of those that knew it happened, those that heard it happened, those that saw it happen, and those sat by as it happened-and did nothing.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened; stay tuned.
“It may be possible — if we can take off the tinfoil hat — that there is not a vast conspiracy,” Democrat Colin Allred of Texas scoffed at independent journalist Matt Taibbi during Thursday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. But while Allred was busy deriding Taibbi and fellow witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, the public was digesting the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” — which contained yet further proof that the government funds and leads a sprawling Censorship Complex.
Taibbi dropped the Twitter thread about an hour before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing began. And notwithstanding the breadth and depth of the players revealed in the 17-or-so earlier installments of the “Twitter Files,” Thursday’s reporting exposed even more government-funded organizations pushing Twitter to censor speech.
But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans.
In his prepared testimony for the subcommittee, Shellenberger spoke of the censorship slide he saw in reviewing the internal Twitter communications. “The bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from ‘countering terrorism’ to ‘countering extremism’ to ‘countering simple misinformation.’ Otherwise known as being wrong on the internet,” Shellenberger testified.
“The government no longer needs the predicate of calling you a terrorist or an extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity,” Shellenberger continued. “The only predicate it needs is the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”
Being “wrong” isn’t even a prerequisite for censorship requests, however, with the Virality Project headed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory reportedly pushing “multiple platforms” to censor “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.”
An excerpt showed this verboten category included “viral posts of individuals expressing vaccine hesitancy, or stories of true vaccine side effects,” which the so-called disinformation experts acknowledged might “not clearly” be “mis or disinformation, but it may be malinformation (exaggerated or misleading).”
Silencing such speech is bad enough, but the Virality Project “added to this bucket” of “true content” worthy of censorship: “true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines.”
Let that sink in for a minute. The Virality Project — more on that shortly — pushed “multiple platforms” to take action against individuals posting true news reports of countries banning certain vaccines. And why? Because it might make individuals “hesitant” to receive a Covid shot.
So who is this overlord of information, the Virality Project?
The Stanford Internet Observatory reports that it launched the Virality Project in response to the coronavirus, to conduct “a global study aimed at understanding the disinformation dynamics specific to the COVID-19 crisis.” Stanford expanded the project in January 2020, “with colleagues at New York University, the University of Washington, the National Council on Citizenship, and Graphika.”
Beyond collaboration with state-funded universities, the Virality Project, in its own words, “built strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC, to facilitate bidirectional situational awareness around emerging narratives.” According to the Virality Project’s 2022 report, “Memes, Magnets, and Microchips Narrative Dynamics Around COVID-19 Vaccines,” “the CDC’s biweekly ‘COVID-19 State of Vaccine Confidence Insights’ reports provided visibility into widespread anti-vaccine and vaccine hesitancy narratives observed by other research efforts.”
The Virality Project’s report also championed its success in engaging six Big Tech platforms — Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter, Google (including YouTube), TikTok, Medium, and Pinterest — using a “ticket” system. The social media platforms would “review and act on” reports from the Virality Project, “in accordance with their policies.”
With the Virality Project working closely with the surgeon general and the CDC, which provided “vaccine hesitancy narratives” to the Stanford team, and the Stanford team then providing censorship requests to the tech giants, the government censorship loop was closed.
Censorship requests were not limited to Covid-19, however, with the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership playing a similar role in providing Twitter — and presumably other Big Tech companies — requests to remove supposed election disinformation.
Earlier “Twitter Files” established that the Election Integrity Partnership was a conduit for censorship requests to Twitter for other government-funded entities, such as the Center for Internet Security. And in addition to receiving millions in government grants, during the 2020 election, the Center for Internet Security partnered with the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security — again completing the circle of government censorship we saw at play during the 2020 election cycle.
The groups involved in both the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project are also connected by government funding. The Election Integrity Partnership boasted that it “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Both Graphika and the University of Washington also partnered with Stanford for the Virality Project, along with individuals from New York University and the National Council on Citizenship.
Beyond the taxpayer-funded state universities involved in the projects, Graphika received numerous Department of Defense contracts and a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.” Graphika also received a nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping and had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.
The Atlantic Council likewise receives federal funding, including a grant from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center awarded to its Digital Forensics Research Lab. And Stanford rakes in millions in federal grants as well.
The government funding of these censorship conduits is not the only scandal exposed by the “Twitter Files.” Rather, the internal communications of the social media giant also revealed that several censorship requests rested on bogus research.
But really, that is nothing compared to what Thursday’s “Twitter Files” revealed: a request for the censorship of truthful information, including news that certain Covid shots had been banned in some countries. And that censorship request came from a group of so-called disinformation experts closely coordinating with the government and with several partners funded with government grants — just as was the case during the 2020 election.
This all goes to show that sometimes there is a vast conspiracy at play and that the problem is not that someone is donning a tinfoil hat, but that he’s buried his head in the sand.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The New York Times asked TikTok, a social media app with known connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), to censor American users sharing election integrity concerns on its platform.
In a recent article titled, “On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms,” Times writer Tiffany Hsu details how “TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information” ahead of the 2022 midterms, with the issue of voter fraud being a prominent topic shared across the platform. Buried within the article, however, Hsu tacitly reveals that as a result of the Times reaching out to the CCP-connected company, TikTok began censoring users from using a popular hashtag associated with fears about election interference.
“Baseless conspiracy theories about certain voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month,” the article reads. “Users cannot search the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but #StopTheSteallll had accumulated nearly a million views until TikTok disabled the hashtag after being contacted by The New York Times.”
Hsu goes on to note the platform’s failure to address the spread of “misinformation” in foreign elections, citing those in France and Australia as examples.
“The app [also] struggled to tamp down on disinformation ahead of last week’s presidential election in Kenya,” Hsu wrote, referencing a report by Odanga Madung, a researcher for the Mozilla Foundation. “Mr. Madung cited a post on TikTok that included an altered image of one candidate holding a knife to his neck and wearing a blood-streaked shirt, with a caption that described him as a murderer. The post garnered more than half a million views before it was removed.”
As reported by Federalist Senior Contributor Helen Raleigh, TikTok “is owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based internet company” and “collects an enormous amount of data on its users, including IP addresses, browsing history, and biometric information.” While ByteDance argues that American user data “is safe because it is stored on U.S. soil,” China’s national intelligence law mandates that “all Chinese tech companies must turn over any data they collect if the government demands it.”
“[A] recent BuzzFeed News report, based on leaked internal TikTok meetings, shows that ByteDance’s Chinese employees have repeatedly accessed nonpublic U.S. user data,” Raleigh said. “One employee of TikTok’s trust and safety department said in a September 2021 meeting that ‘Everything is seen in China.’”
The actions by the Times to push TikTok into censoring Americans isn’t the first time the news outlet has played footsy with the CCP. Late last year, the Times faced public backlash after purportedly downplaying the role Chinese leader Xi Jinping played in the genocide of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China.
“For unknown reasons, the New York Times appears to have intentionally withheld documents that directly linked top Chinese Communist Party officials, including General Secretary Xi Jinping, to the ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region” wrote Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio in a letter to New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger. “In those now-released ‘Top Secret’ transcripts — documents that the New York Times has allegedly had in its possession since at least 2019 — Xi explicitly authorized changing local counterterrorism laws, rounding up and sentencing Uyghurs, the use of forced sterilization, and the use of slave labor in Xinjiang.”
The paper has since denied such accusations, with Assistant Managing Editor for International Michael Slackman claiming Rubio was “simply wrong on the facts.” But a pattern seems to be emerging.
Shawn Fleetwood is an intern at The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Here is the erstwhile journalism foundation, Poynter, campaigning for red flag laws. Beware of misinformation about red flag laws, including critics who say they lack due process, which is not accurate. Another false claim is that the laws allow people with a grudge, such as an ex-spouse, to take guns away.
Beware of misinformation about red flag laws, including critics who say they lack due process, which is not accurate. Another false claim is that the laws allow people with a grudge, such as an ex-spouse, to take guns away. https://t.co/6hY8VcICNR
Let’s imagine a law that empowered a court to temporarily nullify the free speech rights of journalists who are accused by a third party of being potentially dangerous. Let’s imagine that the nullification could be enforced before the journalist even had a chance to respond to any of the allegations leveled against them. Would Poynter argue that the proper standard of due process was met? Because that’s what numerous red flag laws allow.
Let’s then imagine that this law demands the journalist prove their innocence, rather than the state prove their guilt, before reinstating First Amendment rights. And until the journalist can offer a compelling enough argument to convince a judge that they would not commit a crime in the future, the state would continue to strip them of their rights. Would Poynter argue that such a law lacked proper due process? (Considering journalism’s embrace of censorship, perhaps not.)
Let’s imagine now that the law also allowed the free speech rights of journalists to be canceled, not over a pre-crime, but because of “overblown political rhetoric” — as the ACLU, hardly the NRA, warned about Rhode Island’s red flag law. Does Poynter believe people who are offended by, say, social media posts should be able to petition a judge to shut down the rights of individuals? Does that law meet the proper standard of due process? (Again, these days, I’d be nervous to hear the answer.)
Or let’s imagine that the law also permits cops to show up at the home of the journalist, search it, and demand they hand over property, without offering any evidence that they committed, or ever planned to commit, a crime. Do laws that allow the authorities to circumvent normal evidentiary standards and procedures to help in investigations meet Poynter’s acceptable standard of due process? Because red flag laws allow for that kind of abuse.
Whether it’s the First or Second Amendment, the underlying due process arguments remain the same. It’s one thing — an authoritarian thing, for sure — to argue that some of our rights are so dangerous that we should now ignore fundamental Constitutional protections, but it’s another thing to claim that even pointing out this reality is “misinformation.”
David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post, and numerous other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.
If outfits like the Aspen Institute’s “Commission on Information Disorder,” along with Big Tech’s faceless “fact-checkers,” ever get a total monopoly on dictating reality, the result will be a 24/7 mix of falsehoods with the occasional limited hangout to cover up their lies. The icing on this fake cake is the use of conferences about disinformation, such as the recent stunt at the University of Chicago that served as cover for justifying political censorship. There former President Obama presented the perfect picture of psychological projection: a panel of propagandists accusing others of wrongthink.
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, for example, sought to censor the reality of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by announcing she didn’t find it “interesting.” See how that works? Truth depends upon how our elites personally feel about what should be true. But it gets much worse, because political censorship creates deep dysfunction in society. In fact, the surest way to kill a democracy is to practice political censorship under the guise of protecting society from disinformation.
Censorship causes disinformation. It’s the grandaddy of disinformation, not a solution to it. The sooner everyone recognizes this obvious fact, the better off we’ll be. Whenever a self-anointed elite sets up a Ministry of Truth, the link between censorship and disinformation becomes clear. Before long, they invent reality and punish anyone who expresses a different viewpoint.
So, it’s no small irony that those who claim to be protecting “democracy” from disinformation are the biggest promoters of disinformation and greatest destroyers of real democracy. Their dependence on censorship obstructs the circulation of facts. It prevents any worthwhile exchange of ideas.
Unchecked Censorship Isolates People
Consider what happens if a society is only permitted one propagandistic narrative while all other ideas and information are silenced. People start self-censoring to avoid social rejection. The result is a form of imposed mental isolation. Severely isolated people tend to lose touch with reality. The resulting conformity also perpetuates the censorship. This is unnatural and dangerous because human beings depend on others to verify what’s real. People weren’t able to verify reality in Nazi Germany, during Joseph Stalin’s Reign of Terror, or during Mao Zedong’s brutal Cultural Revolution. All were societies in the grip of mass hysteria because of ruthless censorship to protect a narrative.
As psychiatrist Joost Meerloo noted in his book “The Rape of the Mind,” no matter how well-meaning political censorship might be, it creates dangerous conformity of thought: “the presence of minority ideas, acceptable or not, is one of the ways in which we protect ourselves against the creeping growth of conformist majority thinking.”
The only way we can strengthen ourselves against such contagion is through real freedom of speech that allows fully open discussion and debate. However, if we’re confined by Big Tech to a relentless echo chamber and punished for expressing different thoughts, we’ll just keep getting more and more disinformation. In fact, we are now drowning in the distortions produced by “fact-checkers.” Take, for example, narratives that promote the gender confusion and sexualization of children. Public school teachers routinely post TikTok videos of themselves spewing forth their gender confusion. And if someone calls out Disney for its open grooming of children, Twitter suspends them.
If we never push back against such absurdities, we ultimately end up in a state of mass delusion, each of us a cell in a deluded hive mind, obedient to commands about what to say, how to act, and what to think. To get an idea of what that looks like in a population, check out this clip from North Korea:
One of the most telling incidents of censorship over the past year was YouTube and Twitter’s take-down of virologist and vaccine inventor Dr. Robert Malone, claiming he was “spreading misinformation”—i.e., spreading a second opinion—about Covid vaccines and treatments. But big tech saw an even bigger threat in Malone’s discussion of Mattias Desmet’s study of Mass Formation Psychosis (MFP) on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. This is a big reason Spotify was under pressure to de-platform Rogan entirely. Open discussion of such things would erode the illusions big media and big tech so doggedly prop up.
Malone explained how a propaganda-saturated population can end up in a state of mass hypnosis that renders people incapable of seeing reality. He described Desmet’s theory about how social isolation, a high level of discontent, and a strong sense of free-floating anxiety are keys to the development of this psychosis.
The anxiety is so painful that it causes people to cling, trancelike, to any narrative that seems to offer stability. Once all other views are censored, people become so invested in the narrative that they cannot consider any alternative views. They will even mob anyone who endangers the narrative. This phenomenon was prevalent in the German population under Nazism. Their obedience to the propaganda rendered them incapable of understanding any opposing narrative.
Mass psychosis should not sound farfetched. There’s nothing new about it. Hundreds of instances of mass hysteria are documented. In the 19th century, Scottish journalist Charles MacKay wrote up a whole catalog of them. In 2015 medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew co-authored a compendium of popular delusions or “mass sociogenic illness.”
Most past incidents of mass hysteria have been confined to geographic regions, such as the witch trials in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts. But with the internet accessible and addictive in the 2020s, the possibility of mass delusion on a global scale is upon us. Censorship—in the name of protecting “democracy” from disinformation—is the key to creating it.
Propagandists Guard Their Illusions Like Magicians
By definition, propaganda aims to psychologically affect people and change their attitudes. So, our social survival depends upon becoming aware of such phenomena. Building self-awareness about our vulnerability to crowd psychology would serve as a sort of psychological vaccine. Of course, elites do not want us even entertaining the possibility that we can be manipulated or vulnerable to social and psychological pressures. Propagandists are illusionists by nature. If their illusion falls apart, then the game is over for them. This is why they depend so heavily on the slur “conspiracy theorist” to distract us from the truth and from their use of censorship to cut us off from other ideas.
The late Nobel laureate Doris Lessing spoke against the dangers of social conformity and censorship in 1986. She noted there was a great body of knowledge that was continuing to be built about the laws of crowd psychology and social contagion. It was odd that we weren’t applying this knowledge to improve our lives. Lessing concluded that no government in the world would willingly help its citizens resist group pressures and learn to think independently. We have to do it ourselves. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and it sure looks like the keepers of this secret knowledge use it as a means of social control.
No sane person would want to live inside the boxes that the censors who claim to be fighting disinformation are building around us. If we want to escape this Twilight Zone existence, we must destroy that canard and insist on real freedom of speech everywhere.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her essays have also appeared in the Washington Examiner, American Thinker, Public Discourse, Human Life Review, New Oxford Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, she focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. She has also raised three children, served as a public school substitute teacher, and homeschooled for several years as well. She has a B.A. in journalism and international relations from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history, also from USC. Follow Stella on Twitter.
CNN’s Brian Stelter recently interviewed 8th-grade students and their teacher at P.S. 207 in Queens, New York, about their class on how to detect “misinformation” online. In a video published Sunday, Stelter — CNN’s chief media correspondent — spoke to teacher Barbara King, who said she began teaching media literacy 10 years ago and that it’s “a skill my students really need; there’s too much misinformation around us in the world.” The clip shows King telling her students about satire, false context, imposter content, manipulated content, and fabricated content.
Stelter also interviewed students outside classroom time about how they’ve been using what they’ve learned. One student said his family believed COVID-19 was a “hoax” when the pandemic was breaking but that he argued back that it was real. With that, Stelter emphasized the tendency of some who want to believe untruths — and then added that instead “you gotta face reality head-on.”
As readers of TheBlaze know, Stelter and CNNrepeatedly have been called out for pushing misinformation and bias. The latest example appears to be Stelter running “cover” for NPR’s report — refuted as fake news — claiming Chief Justice John Roberts “in some form” asked justices to wear masks because Justice Sonia Sotomayor has diabetes and that Justice Neil Gorsuch refused, Fox News reported. All that to say, a number of commenters under CNN’s YouTube video of Stelter’s report about the “misinformation” class mocked the notion of him interviewing teenagers about the subject:
“The irony of Brian Stelter talking about how to spot fake news is pretty incredible,” one commenter wrote.
“Like, ‘Kids, CNN is full of lies, so watch them as an example on how journalism shouldn’t be,'” another commenter quipped.
“LMAO! Tell me this is a joke!” another commenter wrote. “If Stelter wants to teach kids how to spot misinformation, he should give them a picture of himself.”
“They should just watch CNN,” another commenter said. “They’ll be experts in spotting it within a half hour.”
“How to spot misinformation, eh?” another commenter noted. “They should show a CNN article of the Covington kid then their undisclosed amount they had to pay him for defamation.”
“Brian Stelter story? On misinformation?!” another commenter remarked. “That’s rich.”
Don’t forget that CNN just last week announced that it’s putting together a news team “dedicated to covering misinformation.” The announcement also was met with derision.
These students are learning how to spot misinformationyoutu.be
Rep John Ratcliffe went into attack mode today as the House Intelligence Committee, headed by a man with no intelligence but loaded for bear with lies, were to holds hearings on the next round of hoaxes Democrats hope will bring the president down.
He took apart the whistleblower, the committee and the Democrats in general. While RINOs who are NeverTrumpers like Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse attacked the president, it’s nice to know some Republicans fight for the American people.
Rep. Ratcliffe pointed out numerous errors, conjecture and lies in the whistleblower report on President Trump’s July conversation with President Zelensky from Ukraine.
Rep. Ratcliffe: Chairman Schiff wrote a letter on September 13th accusing you of being part of an “unlawful coverup” and then the Speaker of the House took it one step further. She went on national TV and said not once but twice that you broke the law… You were publicly accused of committing a crime and you were also falsely accused of committing a crime. You were required as you noted to follow the opinion of the Justice Department, 11 page report, on whether or not you were required to report the whistleblower complaint. Correct?… So you were publicly accused and you were wrongly accused and yet here today I have not heard an apology. Welcome to the House of Representatives with Democrats in charge… The whistleblower is in fact wrong in numerous respect… The Democrats are intent on impeaching President Trump for lawful conduct… The whistleblower then goes on to say, ‘I was not a direct witness to the events described’ … In other words, all of this is secondhand information. None of it is firsthand information. The sources the whistleblower bases his complaints on include the Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, The Hill, Bloomberg, ABC News and others. In other words, much like the Steel Dossier the allegations in whistleblower’s complaints are based on third-hand mainstream media sources, rather than first hand information
Rep. Ratcliffe DESTROYED the liberal hack and whistleblower.
It was an incredible drubbing of this latest Democrat clown show.
Those of you who have not been asleep for the past six years are painfully familiar with the never ending stream of lies that emanate from this president. It would take an entire column to even begin to scratch the surface, but I will mention a few to jog your memories:
“You can keep your current health insurance plan”
“The AHCA will reduce premiums by $2500”
“Not even a smidgeon of corruption” – to Bill O’Reilly when asked about the IRS scandal
Benghazi violence was caused by an internet video & demonstrations – maintained despite the fact that the White House knew, and had been warned, that it was a terrorist attack, and in fact had a live TV feed from a drone during the attack.
“My budget will cut the deficit by $4 Trillion over 10 years”
I could go on forever, but you get the point. More recently he has been endangering the security of our nation with his lies. A current one is that ISIS/ISIL/IS/Khorosan Group or whatever Obama is calling them this week is a “JV” group that poses no threat to the Middle East, let alone America.
He famously told us in his second year of office that a fence on our Southern boarder was “nearly complete”. His own Department of Homeland Security, however, said it was only 5% completed. Recently we have seen illegals pouring into the country, and instead of turning them back, he is actually resettling them all over the country, making them somehow the financial responsibility of the US.
Reports from some of these sites confirm that these illegal aliens are bringing disease and pestilence with them. Naturally, as a human being, one has sympathy for these people and for the suffering peoples of nations all over the world, but where does it say that they have a “right” to come to this country and live off the few people who are still working?
Now, however, the illnesses and crime that are coming in with the illegals pales when compared with that of the ebola virus. Just weeks ago, Obama visited the CDC and assured us that the chance of ebola coming to this country was remote at best. He assured us that all precautions were being taken to ensure that the virus was contained in Africa, and that we would send a team of soldiers (?) over there to eradicate it. I guess they were going to shoot those pesky viruses. Well Pinocchio, ebola is here.
But what about all the measures we were taking? Turns out that the “measures” was a questionnaire at the airport. What happened was that a man who was completely knowledgeable of the fact that he had the disease, since everyone he lived with was sick or had died from it, decided to be less than candid on his questionnaire. He then took a plane, exposed the passengers, exposed people where he laid over in Brussels and at Dulles here in D.C., and then in Dallas.
He went to the hospital in Dallas, told them he was from Nigeria, told them he had been exposed to ebola, and that he had ebola-like symptoms, and they concluded that he had a simple case of the flu. They sent him home to infect his girlfriend and four children, who in turn very likely passed it on to their contacts.
He had such a fever that he literally soaked the bed, and such vomiting and bleeding that he couldn’t walk, necessitating calling 911 and exposing those people as well.
This man was the opposite of a hero. He knew he was sick, he knew that the virus had a huge mortality rate, and decided in an attempt to save himself that he would risk and probably kill untold numbers of people, perhaps beginning an epidemic or pandemic himself. He is laughingly being sought by the Liberian government for lying on his questionnaire, and will face prosecution if he lives that long.
Still, one can understand that a person who knows he will die if he doesn’t receive treatment (albeit there is none of the experimental drug remaining) can become desperate and do morally reprehensible things. What we cannot understand is how President Obama, ostensibly charged with the protection of the people of the United States, does nothing to stop the spread of this disease.
In an interview this morning on FOX News (which you can read here), Obama lackey CDC Director Tom Frieden told Brian Kilmeade, “I wish we could get to zero risk by sealing off the border. But we can’t.
The only way we are going to get to zero risk in this country is by controlling it in Africa. Until that happens, Americans may come back with Ebola. Other people who have a right to return or a visa to enter may come back. People will go to third countries and come from there. Sealing them off – first off won’t work.
Second off, it will backfire. Because if we can’t get help in there, then we’re not going to be able to stop the outbreak and ultimately we will end up at higher risk, not lower risk.”
I have heard some dumb statements from this administration, but this one has to top the list, and have the potential for killing the most people. Any soldier knows that in the case of a biological attack you identify the soldiers by their symptoms and then you isolate them.
This is a basic tenet of public health. In this case, the West African nations know that quarantine (isolation) is necessary to prevent the spread of disease and untold sickness and death, and are doing it themselves.
For us, the first thing we should have done, and should belatedly do, is to close the borders. Nobody to or from West Africa. Would that absolutely prevent ebola from arriving here? Probably not, but it would sure go a long way. Frieden, however, is saying, “It won’t absolutely stop it, so we are not going to even try.”
Huh? That reminds me of abstinence education used to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and thus abortions. Abstinence works 100% of the time, whereas other methods of birth control for multiple reasons do not. Some 56 million aborted babies would attest to that if they could. But abstinence education is not a part of the administration’s plan for this problem, because controlling people’s sexual drives is not part of the liberal agenda. It is, in fact, anathema to it. So they don’t try it.
Obama will not stop flights to and from West Africa, and will not close the borders, because like abstinence education, it is not part of the liberal agenda. Open borders and free influx of anyone who decides they want to come to America is a keynote of the Obama presidency, from which he has backed off only slightly recently, temporarily pocketing his pen and phone until after the November elections.
Any idea the public might get that something could be accomplished by closing the borders would jeopardize his amnesty plans, and that cannot be allowed to happen. So, as with the problem with illegal immigration, he will not try closing the borders.
The lack of a plan to combat ebola is as striking as his lack of a plan to combat militant jihadi Islam. The only existing plan, it would appear, is to pretend that the threat does not exist. These responses, or lack of responses, are simply a part of the political correctness that enshrouds liberals, with Obama as their poster boy.
Their response to anything depends entirely on how that response fits into their agenda and how they think it will affect the welfare of the democrat party. For this administration, open borders for more democrat voters trumps public health and possible the worst pandemic in history.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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