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Lawsuit Shows Government’s Hands All Over The Election Integrity Partnership’s Censorship Campaign


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 03, 2023

Read more at https://www.foxnews.com/us/atlanta-active-shooter-situation-leaves-multiple-people-injured-police-say

man wearing mask votes in 2020 election
While private platforms did the censoring, the complaint establishes it was the government that initiated and pushed for that censorship.

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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.

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It’s OK to be WHITE, Maybe


By: Lawrence Johnson | March 13, 2023

 Read more at https://theblacksphere.net/2023/03/its-ok-to-be-white-maybe/

homer Simpson, cancel culture, Kevin Jackson

“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.

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The Censorship Complex Isn’t A ‘Tinfoil Hat’ Conspiracy, And The ‘Twitter Files’ Just Dropped More Proof


BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 10, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/10/the-censorship-complex-isnt-a-tinfoil-hat-conspiracy-and-the-twitter-files-just-dropped-more-proof/

Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger raise their right hands before testifying about Twitter Files and Censorship Complex
Sometimes there is a vast conspiracy at play, and the problem isn’t that someone is donning a tinfoil hat but that he’s buried his head in the sand.

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“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.

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REVEALED: New York Times Asked Communist Chinese Tech Company To Censor Americans


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | AUGUST 16, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/16/revealed-new-york-times-asked-communist-chinese-tech-company-to-censor-americans/

New York Times building

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

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PolitiFact Spreads Misinformation On Red Flag Laws And Due Process


REPORTED BY: DAVID HARSANYI | JUNE 14, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/14/politifact-spreads-misinformation-on-red-flag-laws-and-due-process/

red flag

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.

Here’s a thought experiment:

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.

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The Only Way to Fight Disinformation Is to Fight Political Censorship


REPORTED BY: STELLA MORABITO | APRIL 18, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/18/the-only-way-to-fight-disinformation-is-to-fight-political-censorship/

Chicago Disinformation Conference

The surest way to kill a democracy is to practice political censorship under the guise of protecting society from disinformation.

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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:

Censorship-Invoked Social Contagion Is Real

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.

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CNN’s Brian Stelter interviews 8th-graders who are learning about detecting ‘misinformation’ — and viewer reaction is priceless


Reported by DAVE URBANSKI | January 24, 2022

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/cnn-s-brian-stelter-interviews-8th-graders-who-are-learning-about-detecting-misinformation-and-viewer-reaction-is-priceless/

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 CNN repeatedly 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

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Rep. Ratcliffe DEFLATES Democrat Impeachment Hopes! Lists Off Partisan Whistleblower’s Numerous Errors and Lies (VIDEO)


Posted by Steven Ahle | 

URL of the original posting site: https://steadfastandloyal.com/politics/rep-ratcliffe-deflates-democrat-impeachment-hopes-lists-off-partisan-whistleblowers-numerous-errors-and-lies-video/

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.

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Obama Lies And Americans Die


Obamacare

Written by Pat Henry on October 5, 2014

http://girlsjustwannahaveguns.com/obama-lies-americans-die/

Imperial President Obama

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.

obama-border-is-open-378x257He 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.

PC-Rider-590-LIBut 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.Eagle Really

cause of deathThe 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.”

gone madHuh? 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.

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