It's Time To Purge The Climate Scam From The Federal Websites

January 28, 2025/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

On November 12, 2024 — a week after the election — I had a post titled “Ideas For An Incoming Trump Administration: Climate And Energy Edition.” The first subject covered in that post was “Communications.” I stated there:

[C]hanging the communications of the prior administration should be an easy and obvious first priority. However, the Trump people notably did a poor job on this subject the first time out. The subject of climate and energy is pervasive through the websites of dozens of federal agencies.

I had followed the EPA website in particular during the first Trump term, and it had been little changed even a year after Trump took office.

This time around, Trump and his people are doing a far better job of hitting the ground running on many issues. That is notably true in the area of climate and energy communications: a week in, there are already some meaningful changes at the websites of various agencies. However, changing communications on these issues is not a small task; the government websites during the Biden era had pervasive climate propaganda in thousands of locations.

So, a week into the new administration, here are some of the things that have either changed or not so far.

Department of Energy

My November post noted that there was a big section, dominating the Department’s website, titled “Combating the Climate Crisis.” Today, if you go to the Department’s opening web page, it’s quite different. The front page headline is “Restoring Energy Dominance,” followed by “President Trump’s Day One Actions will Return the Department to Regular Order.” Here’s how it starts:

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), effective today, is ending the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) pause and returning to regular order following direction given by President Donald J. Trump to “unleash American Energy Dominance.”

Another big front-page topic back in November was “Energy Justice.” Today, if you go to the link that I had then for “Energy Justice,” you will be taken back to the opening page with the headline “Restoring Energy Dominance.” The whole “Energy Justice” thing seems to have disappeared. That’s great progress. On the other hand, if you go to the old November link for “Combatting the Climate Crisis,” you will find that a page full of the old Biden-era claptrap is still up:

There is no greater challenge facing our nation and our planet than the climate crisis. That’s why President Biden has laid out the boldest climate agenda in our nation’s history—one that will spur an equitable clean energy economy and cement America on a path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. . . .

To their credit, the old links to this stuff on the introductory page are gone, and using the site’s search function doesn’t turn this up. Likely, it will be memory-holed shortly.

And yet there is still plenty of junk stuff up on this website that needs to go. As a few examples:

• A section on “Decarbonization” (“The shift to a low-carbon economy will be one of the most significant economic transformations in history. Through the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE’s) decarbonization initiatives, the United States is poised to capture the economic and other benefits of revolutionary decarbonization technologies.”)
• A section on “Carbon Management” (“Carbon management encompasses a suite of technologies used to capture, transport, convert, and store carbon dioxide, as well as remove it directly from the atmosphere.”)
• A section on the “Floating Offshore Wind Shot” (“The Floating Offshore Wind Energy Shot™ seeks to reduce the cost of floating offshore wind energy by more than 70% by 2035 for deep water sites far from shore.”)
• A section on the “Net Zero Economy” (“A net-zero economy averts or removes as much greenhouse gas as it produces. Achieving this balance by 2050 is a pivotal undertaking for the United States”)

And there are many more such. So there is a long way to go. However, they have made a reasonable start. Given that it has only been a week, I would rate the effort an A-.

EPA

In my November post, I noted that there was a huge Climate Change section of the website that dominated from the opening page. Today, references to the subject on the opening page are gone. If you look under the tab “Environmental Topics” on the opening page, you will not find “climate change,” and if you try the closest topic on that tab, “Air,” you will not find “climate change” there either. They certainly are not making this easy!

However, if you type the words “climate change” into the search function of the site, the first link that comes up is www.epa.gov/climate-change, which is the exact same address I had back in November. It will take you to the old Climate Change section of the website that appears to be changed little if at all. It’s buried, but still very much still there. And it contains plenty of the same old nonsense. Examples:

• They continue to pretend that CO2 in the atmosphere has something to do with “human health”: Understanding and addressing climate change is critical to EPA's mission of protecting human health and the environment.
• There are sections on things like “Causes” and “Impacts” of climate change that pretend that this is a huge human-caused problem.
• Endless pages on climate change “indicators” pretend to link all the usual extreme weather events, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, etc., etc., to human use of fossil fuels. (“Rising global average temperature is associated with widespread changes in weather patterns. Scientific studies indicate that extreme weather events such as heat waves and large storms are likely to become more frequent or more intense with human-induced climate change.”)

There are vast amounts of stuff here that need to go sooner rather than later. Yes, it has only been a week. Still, I rate the effort a B.

NOAA/NASA

These are the people who keep track of the weather and climate data, and are famous for scare-mongering with endless press releases and hype about “warmest day/month/year ever.” My November 2024 post had this link to a typical NOAA release from January 2024, titled “2023 was the world’s warmest year on record, by far.” That link is still live at the NOAA website.

Overall, it is not clear to me that the NOAA or NASA websites have yet changed much if at all. The “News” tab of the NOAA website has a list of “Latest News Releases” that include several last-minute initiatives of the Biden-Harris administration, including this gem: “Biden-Harris Administration, NOAA invest $15 million to help protect Western U.S. communities from wildfire.”

Go to the NASA website, and down at the bottom of the opening page you will find a link for “Earth & Climate.” At that page you will find a further link for “Climate Change,” that is as full of climate propaganda as any government page I have seen. Small excerpt:

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause. . . . While Earth’s climate has changed throughout its history, the current warming is happening at a rate not seen in the past 10,000 years. . . . The current warming trend is different because it is clearly the result of human activities since the mid-1800s, and is proceeding at a rate not seen over many recent millennia.

You get the idea. Somebody needs to start paying attention to this quickly. Yes, it has only been a week. Still, I would give this effort a C at best.

I’ll be watching these pages for periodic updates from time to time. I can’t wait to see a lot of this stuff disappear.

What Is This Tech Oligarchy?

  By Jeffrey A. Tucker , January 17, 2025

On Jan. 17, 1961, outgoing president Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a shocking address warning of the coming of a military-industrial complex. He certainly knew it well, having lived through the postwar period in which American life was consumed with fear of nuclear war. The Korean conflict of 1950 through 1953 foreshadowed the Vietnam War which lasted from 1964 to 1975, and both bolstered precisely that about which he warned.

The address given on Jan. 15, 2025, by outgoing president Joseph Biden similarly warned of an ominous reality, a tech-industrial complex dominated by wealthy oligarchs who have targeted a free press and instead deploy new tools of communication to push a dangerous political agenda. He cited the end of fact-checkers and the pervasiveness of misinformation and disinformation.

Here is what he said: 

“An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy. I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power.”

At this point, everyone can read between the lines. Two years ago, the main information channels in the United States were heavily controlled and getting more so by the day. It started years earlier with the banning of talk about lockdowns and extending to doubts about mandatory injections, and eventually hit issues like gender-reassignment surgery and climate change. At some point, millions gave up on an entire suite of social media platforms.

All of this happened under the Biden administration. We know this from tens of thousands of court documents, and now from the direct testimony of Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook who now says he is done with censoring users. This follows the example of Elon Musk, who took over Twitter and exposed and then unplugged its censorship machinery that was built at the behest of the Biden administration.

We don’t have to believe that Zuckerberg had a genuine conversion to the ideals of the First Amendment to appreciate the steps he is taking with Facebook. For years, the platform has been heavily controlled and heavily skewed in its political intentions, which arguably made a huge difference in the outcomes of the 2020 and 2022 elections. That aside, countless numbers of media venues, businesses, and groups were targeted and canceled, often with devastating financial consequences for those most affected. His sudden conversion to the cause of free speech is likely a move to assure his industrial survival.

Let us not forget that after Musk took over Twitter and turned it into the free-speech platform called X, Zuckerberg started a Twitter competitor called Threads. It was advertised as censored like the old Twitter, and, for some strange reason, there was a perception that there would be a market demand for the product. There was not. It is today mostly a ghost town and a small echo chamber with lots of pictures of pets and food.

The new freedom to speak about which I’m writing is now only a year in progress, following some five years of intensifying control. Still, as of this writing, there has been no word from the most powerful of all tech platforms, namely Google/YouTube, which is still busy curating search results in ways that are obviously political, while the video platform takes down content by the minute. There have been no efforts to loosen up or liberalize either.

For now, among mainstream social media, only X and Facebook stand out as permitting a wider range of content, while Google is still keeping the old faith as mapped out in a 2022 document signed and promoted by the Biden administration. It is called “Declaration of the Future of the Internet.” It erased the promises of free speech that had characterized such statements in the past. This one, in contrast, imagined an Internet future “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”

It’s hard to cobble together a better description of the meaning of the term tech oligarchy than that. And this is precisely what came together over the years 2020 through 2024 if not further. We are only seeing defectors from this system due to the profit opportunities afforded by the idea of free speech. As I said, Musk was first with others following. It means that the Biden administration’s hard work to heavily control all content on the internet has been set back a bit.

For those of us who depend on free speech as the essential foundation for all our work, the promises, threats, and growing realities of 2021-24 were worrisome most of the time and even terrifying some of the time. We could feel the walls closing in daily. When Musk took over Twitter, federal agencies came after him and corporations ganged up hard to accuse him of unleashing disinformation and hate. Indeed, those of us who actually use the platform saw something else: other points of view, and for the first time in years.

As we listened to Biden’s speech of warning, I couldn’t help but think about how the administration presided over changes in the algorithmic operations of the internet itself, accelerating its move from a free platform curated by user behavior to becoming a distributor of stakeholder priorities that shut out vast numbers of users from any substantial traffic. We lived it and saw it. The documentation of government involvement in this operation is vast. Courts will have the last word.

Now we suddenly find ourselves living in different times when a new group of “tech bros” are ascendant with the Trump administration. So far, there is zero evidence that the new cool kids have the intention of using government power to skew our information infrastructure in the opposite direction. That is to say, there is no evidence at all that we have anything to fear from a restoration of free speech. All the fear runs in the other direction. We know where we have been and don’t want to go back to that.

That said, there are many remaining problems. The platforms that are still dominant are still continuing to work hand-in-glove with regulators and other powers-that-be to manipulate the public mind. We are not out of the weeds yet. The fact-checkers might have been fired by Facebook but they are still taken seriously by the world’s largest search engines.

Nor are we entirely finished discovering the fullness of the censorship enterprise that emerged over at least five years. Court filings are revealing ever more detail not only about takedowns and deplatforming but also attempts to vilify critics of government and hide the evidence from freedom-of-information requests. When all this shakes out, it is going to be obvious to all that the dystopia about which Biden has warned was in fact constructed under his watch.

 

Meanwhile, days before leaving office, Biden has issued an impenetrably long executive order that appears to mandate the creation of backdoors for a major federal agency in all software for purposes of government surveillance. The agency in question is, of course, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which for years has been behind censorship, election monitoring, and emergency workplace regulations.

The message: the world of information cannot and will not be free so long as this gang has anything to do with it.

That’s not to say there is nothing about which to worry in these new times. Replacing one set of oligarchs with another is not a good idea either. The difference this time is that we are onto the game and more sensitive than ever before to how to spot violations of the First Amendment and how to litigate to keep our rights.

There really can be no going back to the bad old days.

The real threat is not misinformation and disinformation; the real threat is the information curated by oligarchs who think they know what we should and should not be told. That’s not how the Founders set up this country and not how a truly free press works.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. He can be reached at tucker@brownstone.org

Thought Police

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

On a Sunday morning, the Essex police showed up at the home of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson to interrogate her because she had tweeted a photo of Manchester police officers posing with the Islamist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, some of whose leading members were recently charged with terrorism offenses.

Pearson’s crime, which resulted in the formation of a “gold group” normally used for dealing with major crimes, was tweeting “look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters” about the ugly photo.

The Essex police claimed that “a complaint of a possible criminal offence was made” of “potentially inciting racial hatred online”. Criticizing the friendliness of the police with Pakistani “Jew haters” had become a “possible criminal offence” while Islamists hating Jews was not.

According to the Essex police, “we police without fear or favour”. In truth, they appear to hardly police anything except speech. The Essex police have stopped answering calls about drug dealing and a Sun column noted that, “in the last year, Essex police have solved just 1 in 8 robberies and violent assaults, a mere 1 out of every 10 sexual assaults and 1 in 15 burglaries.”

Earlier this month, Sussex police arrested a 63-year-old Jewish man in front of his 12-year-old daughter for referring to Gabriel Kanter-Webber, a leftist activist claiming to be a ‘rabbi’ who signed a letter demanding an end to Israel’s campaign against Hamas, as a “kapo”.

Rupert Nathan, who was locked up by Sussex police for denouncing the anti-Israel activist on a private Facebook group, stated that “My daughter was in tears – completely inconsolable. Still now she has this deep fear that the police are going to take me away and put me in jail.”

Ian Christopher Austin, Baron Austin of Dudley, was told by West Midlands police that he had been investigated for a tweet describing Hamas as “a death cult of Islamist murderers and rapists”. Apparently the authorities considered the “Islamist” part to be offensive.

These are only a few of the more prominent recent examples of a police crackdown on even the mildest forms of criticism of Islamic terrorism and appeasement by the police and public figures.

These arrests and investigations come after Islamic terrorist supporters have rampaged around the streets of London, Manchester and other cities, waving the flags of illegal foreign terrorist organizations including that of Hamas with no actions or consequences. Instead an infamous viral video from last year showed London Metro police officers arresting a man for saying that he did not want to see ‘Palestinian’ flags all over the city.

British police officers have been filmed refusing to take action against terrorist supporters advocating violence, calling for the killing of Jews and expressing support for terror groups.

The authorities are not cracking down on hate speech or on the incitement to violence, but on politically incorrect speech and on journalists and elected officials whom the Left opposes.

Over the summer, the Starmer government issued a message on social media warning, “Think before you post.” It launched a ruthless suppression campaign, raiding homes, arresting and imprisoning people opposed to mass migration after a Muslim terrorist murdered 3 girls.

“Think before you post!” the Crown Prosecution Service threatened. “Remind those close to you to share responsibly or face the consequences.”

Bernadette Spofforth, a 55-year-old British woman, was dragged out of her home, arrested and held for 36 hours for posting that the murderer was a Muslim terrorist. The charge she was held under was “posting inaccurate information”. The actual inaccurate information was coming from the government which had lied about the terrorist’s religion and arrested those who spoke out.

The government’s reign of terror against critics of Islam and mass migration has dovetailed with a reign of terror by Islamists and their political allies who have held major cities hostage.

While the situation has worsened with the rise of the Starmer regime and Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood, who had her own history of ugly anti-Israel activism, it has become routine for police officers to pay such threatening house calls to people from all walks of life.

Even as crime rose 10% over the last year, thought-crimes are being pursued with added vigor.

Beyond intimidating opponents of Islamic terrorism, the police have also taken to threatening and intimidating women who are opposed to their privacy being violated by transgender men.

Julie Bindel, a feminist author critical of transgender identity politics, had the police show up during a family meal after a transgender man in the Netherlands reported one of her tweets.

Maya Forstater, whose case for women’s rights and against transgenderism became a cause celebre when it was embraced by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, was investigated for 15 months over a tweet about a transgender doctor. In a Kafkaesque twist, the authorities initially refused to tell her what she was being investigated for, only that it involved a transgender person. Forstater was warned that she could be arrested if she did not cooperate.

Former MP Tom Hunt described being reported to the Suffolk police for writing diplomatically of the need to “confront the possibility that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by individuals from certain communities”.

Many of these investigations are legally baseless and carried out in defiance of the actual law.

Back in 2021, the Merseyside police had put up billboards warning that “being offensive is an offence”. An infamous picture of one of those featured masked police officers threateningly posing. The force admitted that being offensive is not actually a crime.

And yet investigations of people for offending Islamists, leftists and radical activists continue.

The purpose of these investigations is simply intimidation. Like the “being offensive is an offence” billboards and “think before you post”, the purpose is to silence those who speak out.

The UK has become a totalitarian state where free speech, not Islamic terror, is seen as the greatest threat. The rise of Islamic terror has been matched by police terror aimed at critics.

After Muslim terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo satire magazine over its Mohammed cartoons, anti-terror units in the UK visited newsstands to collect the names of those who had bought copies. Rather than collecting the lists of names of Muslim terrorists, the authorities were collecting lists of names of those who might be guilty of offending them. And that is true now.

British police forces have failed to act against Muslim mobs attacking Jews, but they have taken action against Jews who have been in the vicinity of those mobs. A London Met police officer warned a Jewish man near a Muslim pro-terror rally that he was “quite openly Jewish” and since “this is a pro-Palestinian march”, he might be guilty of causing a “breach of the peace.”

London Police Commissioner Mark Rowley defended the actions of the police.

Supporting Islamic terrorism is not a crime in the UK. Speaking out against it, falling victim to it or standing up against it is.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.Thank you for reading. 

A Visit From the FBI Over Your Social Media Post? It Could Happen

The Bureau is doing it ‘every day, all day long,” according to one agent. 

By Graham J Noble Apr 1, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News Tags: Articles, Good Reads, Opinion, Politics

It’s a safe bet that most, if not all, FBI agents – if they knew they could speak freely without fear of retaliation – would assert that they did not join the Bureau to spend their time knocking on doors and questioning American citizens about the opinions they post on social media. Those agents know they have much better things to do with their time. Yet, according to what a couple of them told one Oklahoma woman, many are spending “every day, all day long” interrogating Americans about their social media posts.

On March 27, the FBI showed up at Rolla Abdeljawad’s door in Stillwater, OK, to confront her about what she had written recently on Facebook. Abdeljawad is a pro-Palestinian critic of the action Israel has taken against Hamas. It is fair to say she harbors some very strong views, and many Americans might find the opinions she posted on the social media platform quite offensive – perhaps even disturbing.

However, the entire concept of free speech means that one is free to say things others – or even the government – may not like or agree with. If that is not the case, there is no freedom of speech.

Abdeljawad recorded the visit. She told the agents she would not speak with them and asked that they display their badges to the camera she was using. The agents refused to do so, though Abdeljawad says local law enforcement confirmed that her visitors were from the FBI.

So, what was it that Abdeljawad posted on social media to motivate the country’s top federal law enforcement agency to visit her? According to media reports, one of her posts said, “Israhelli terrorist filth. They think Ramadan is a weakness for Muslims, not realizing Ramadan is the strength. #FreePalestine May Allah destroy every single despicable zionist, their supporters and backers. Ameen.”

The Unsavory Side of Social Media

Strong words indeed, but do they contain any direct threat of violence or an indication that Abdeljawad was planning or considering carrying out a terror attack? No, clearly, they do not. Any frequent user of social media platforms such as X, Facebook, Gab, and Truth Social would admit to having seen posts that were as close – or even closer – to containing actual threats or incitements to violence against various individuals, racial or religious demographics, and organizations. 

Former President Donald Trump has been targeted by possibly hundreds of social media posts that directly or indirectly wish harm or death upon him – some even hoping for, or calling for, his assassination. Joe Biden and a host of other political office holders – both Republican and Democrat – have also no doubt been the target of similar posts.

Entire segments of the US population, including blacks, whites, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and gays, are frequent targets of hateful and nasty social media posts. Some of those posts even come very close to calling for wholesale violence and even genocide against one of these groups.

Sane and reasonable people would agree that such sentiments expressed publicly, regardless of which people or groups they target, are utterly appalling. Nevertheless, words are only words. Opinions are only opinions. Moreover, we are wading into perilous waters indeed when we allow a government – any government, regardless of its position on the political spectrum – to arbitrarily decide which opinions and which speech needs to be investigated even without any additional evidence to suggest that the speaker presents a credible threat to any person or group.

Is the FBI speaking with every one of these social media users? If so, why? Quite apart from the apparently intentional chilling effect it has upon free speech, it all seems like a terrible waste of Department of Justice time and resources when there are so many more tangible threats to the security of this country and its citizens.

The FBI Comes Knocking

In the video Abdeljawad‘s attorney posted to X, under the comment “Joe Biden’s DOJ,” FBI agents tell the woman that Facebook had provided them with screenshots of a couple of her posts. Abdeljawad then asked the agents, “So we no longer live in a free country, and we can’t say what we want?” one of them responded, “No, we totally do. That’s why we’re not here to arrest you or anything. We do this every day, all day long. It’s just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will.”

Is it now a potential criminal offense then, to harbor ill will? If it is, most Americans are, no doubt, in trouble.

A woman in Texas, who goes by the name “Kam St. Martin” On X, was also visited by the FBI because she posted, “This monster drugged my 27 yr old cousin at the L’Auberge Casino in Baton Rouge last February. He dumped her half naked dead body like trash. Rap sheet a mile long. He walks today on PROBATION. Damion Matthews may you reap what you have sown. @govjefflandryy.” Beneath this statement was a photo of Matthews.

For the record, Matthews was not charged with causing the death of Macy Peebles in February of 2023. The 27-year-old Peebles died of an overdose, according to the East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner’s Office. However, Damien Matthews was supposedly the last person seen with Peebles, and he is alleged to have dumped her dead body behind an abandoned apartment building in the Louisiana capital.

The point is, St. Martin posted no threat, nor did she express anything in this social media post that could even be described as “hate speech,” prejudice, or a call for violence. What, then, were FBI agents doing at her house?

This profoundly concerning practice appears to go beyond any perceived political agenda on the part of the Biden administration or the Department of Justice. Rather, one might suggest it is more about extending a warning to all Americans that they are not free to express any opinions that the authorities do not approve of. 

Essentially, saying what you think about anything is now a privilege, rather than a right, and there will be consequences if those in power don’t like what you said. As for the FBI’s apparent position that these home visits are being conducted in the name of ensuring everybody is safe, perhaps the agency – and the American people – should remember the words of Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

 

Read More From Graham J Noble

Leftists Argue Government Censorship is the Highest Form of Speech

Daniel Greenfield July 10, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

When Judge Terry Doughty issued an injunction in Missouri v. Biden that banned the government from “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression”, all hell broke loose.

Evelyn Douek, a Stanford law professor, formerly of the Knight First Amendment Institute, warned that preventing the government from colluding with corporations to censor citizens would have a “chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.”

In traditional free speech jurisprudence, ‘chilling effects’ were inflicted by the government, but Douek is worried that free speech might have a chilling effect on government censorship. After advocating, in cases like Lamont v. Postmaster General, that any interference with speech, no matter how odious including, in the aforementioned Supreme Court case, asking recipients of Communist propaganda to affirmatively agree to receive it, entailed a ‘chilling effect’, liberals don’t want to chill the censors, instead they’re worried that civil rights will chill censorship.

Even though it’s the height of summer, chilling effects on censorship were on display.

Liberals who might have once worried about free speech now fret that the government will be inhibited from censoring free speech. According to CNN, “Legal experts say that the order is overly broad and scholars on online misinformation warned that it could have a chilling effect on the government’s efforts to curtail lies about public health emergencies and elections.”

Nina Jankowicz, Biden’s former disinformation czar, popped up to argue that,”it’ll have a chilling effect on government and academia, ensuring that officials and researchers think twice before trying to counter those spreading conspiracies and false information.”

The axis of concern had shifted from worrying that government action would inhibit free speech to agonizing that judicial interference would prevent the government from inhibiting free speech.

The existence of ‘chilling effects’ in free speech cases testified to the degree to which we protected free speech from even the faintest tinge of indirect discouragement. Now, lefty academics and experts want to not only reverse the polarities of free speech, but they are just as worried that any protection for free speech will interfere with government censorship.

Its new victims are not civilians who engage in political speech, but government censors.

To justify this inversion of civil rights, they have also inverted the concept of censorship so that the true form of free speech is to prevent others from speaking.

According to Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, preventing the government from censoring citizens was… censorship.

Litman told NPR that the injunction “literally prevents the federal government from sending emails to social media companies about their content moderation policies or having meetings with social media companies about taking down speech and posts. And so that prevents speech, really important speech, from ever happening.”

The most important speech is government speech that suppresses the speech of the public.

If government censorship is speech, then any interference with government censorship is a violation of free speech. And the government must be allowed to censor everyone lest its really important speech be restrained from taking place. And then where would we be, except free?

Judge Terry Doughty was attacked by pro-censorship leftists for invoking George Orwell’s 1984 and yet that same faction insists on ‘literally’ arguing that censorship is speech.

Crying censorship has become the last resort of censors who demand the right to censor.

When Gov. Ron DeSantis and other governors signed laws barring Big Tech monopolies from deplatforming candidates for public office, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, whose members include Amazon, Google and Facebook, sued in the name of free speech.

“We are bringing this suit to safeguard the industry’s free speech,” CCIA boss Matt Schruers claimed. “A digital service that declines to host harmful content is exercising its own First Amendment rights.”

“Section 7 does not chill speech; if anything, it chills censorship,” the Fifth Circuit court replied.

“We reject the Platforms’ efforts to reframe their censorship as speech. It is undisputed that the Platforms want to eliminate speech—not promote or protect it. And no amount of doctrinal gymnastics can turn the First Amendment’s protections for free speech into protections for free censoring.” But that hasn’t stopped the totalitarian gymnastics from going forward.

After arguing that censorship by some of the biggest companies in the world was really speech, lefty legal scholars are arguing that government censorship is free speech, and that when judges prevent the government from censoring, the government’s speech is being violated.

The official Biden administration position is that it is entitled to censor in the event of emergencies.

“We’re not going to apologize for promoting responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic or foreign attacks on our elections,” Sharon Yang, a White House spokeswoman, argued.

These deadly challenges and foreign attacks included a video mocking Jill Biden and a Twitter account impersonating Biden’s granddaughter. Biden officials insisted on having these and many other posts, accounts and materials that they disliked taken down.

Emergencies have never been anything other than an excuse for a broad censorship scheme.

Liberals have abandoned even the pretense of caring about free speech. Laurence Tribe, a lefty constitutional law professor, co-authored an op-ed complaining that the injunction “seems to maintain that the government cannot even politely ask companies not to publish verifiable misinformation.”

What would Tribe’s view be on the Nixon administration “politely” asking the media not to spread lies about the Vietnam War, the Reagan administration “politely” asking the media not to lie about the War on Drugs, and the Bush administration “politely” asking the media not to lie about the War on Terror? Any such suggestions, no matter how mild, were greeted with rabid rage.

“The First Amendment certainly doesn’t prevent them from merely asking,” Tribe contends, and preventing the government from doing so “would turn the Constitution’s protection of free expression in an open society into an obstacle course for some of the most valuable exchanges of information and ideas we can imagine.” The most valuable exchanges of ideas apparently involve asking social media monopolies to take down content mocking the president.

Lefty legal scholars keep arguing that government censorship is the highest form of speech.

After abandoning free speech, lefty legal scholars now celebrate the virtues of censorship in the glowing language once used for promoting reverence for a free exchange of ideas. Forget an open society, a truly valuable exchange of ideas consists of government officials telling huge corporations whom to censor this morning.

None of this is remarkable when you go back to the origins of lefty support for free speech.

In 1934, Roger Nash Baldwin, Co-Founder and Executive Director of the ACLU, quite clearly explained why he was fighting for civil liberties. “I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which worker’s rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental. When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever.”

The American Left believes it has gained enough power that it no longer sees any value in maintaining protections for free speech, at least at a federal level, and has publicly switched its enthusiasm from speech to censorship. It now lovingly speaks of the valuable “speech” of government censors and of the ‘chilling effects’ of extremist judges who interfere with them.

There are still select conservative enclaves where the Left pretends to care about free speech. Should parents persuade a middle school library to pull a work of hard core LGBTQ pornography off the shelves, the Left will describe this as an attack on the First Amendment. But otherwise, freedom of speech has been buried in the same unmarked grave as freedom of religion with the bulk of the First Amendment soon set to join the Second Amendment.

Censorship is becoming speech and speech is becoming censorship. The real threat to civil liberties comes from people interfering with the speech of censors telling them to “shut up”.

In a world where governments have rights and people have none, the right to censor is the only right. And if they disagree with you, liberals will fight to the death for the right of the government to silence you.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.  Thank you for reading.

The Revelations Of Government Censorship Keep Coming In Missouri v. Biden

June 04, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

A little over a year ago, on May 5, 2022, two states (Missouri and Louisiana) and several individual plaintiffs filed suit against the federal government for illegally and improperly suppressing free speech on social media platforms, in violation of the First Amendment. The case goes by the name Missouri v. Biden. The individual plaintiffs include, for example, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, prominent medical researchers and epidemiologists who dissented from the government’s Covid response orthodoxy and saw their speech ruthlessly suppressed as a consequence.

This case is probably the most important civil rights case proceeding in the federal courts today. If you get your news from such sources as the New York Times, Washington Post, or major television networks, you likely have never heard of it. (One site that has been on top of this case is the Hot Air website.)

The case was brought in the Western District of Louisiana, and the judge assigned is Terry Doughty. Counsel for the plaintiffs include the AG’s offices of Missouri and Louisiana, and also the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

Early on in the case (June 14, 2022) the plaintiffs moved for a preliminary injunction, asking to have the court order the government to cease its illegal conduct. Here, from the June 2022 motion, is the gist of the relief that the plaintiffs requested at the outset:

[A] preliminary injunction preventing Defendants, and their agents, officers, employees, contractors and all those acting in concert with them, from taking any steps to demand, urge, encourage, pressure, or otherwise induce any social-media company or platform for online speech, or any employee, officer, or agent of any such company or platform, to censor, suppress, remove, de-platform, suspend, shadow-ban, de-boost, restrict access to content, or take any other adverse action against any speaker, content, or viewpoint expressed on social media.

The plaintiffs also at that time asked for discovery, so that they could uncover the extent of the government’s censorship regime. The court granted broad discovery, and there has been extensive discovery in the intervening year, the results of which have been quite shocking.

During May 2023 the parties completed their briefing on the motion for a preliminary injunction. The plaintiffs’ Reply brief was filed on May 22, and the court then held a hearing for something like 4 hours on May 26. As far as I can determine, no transcript of the court hearing has yet been made publicly available. However, there are some substantial quotes from the hearing available on the Twitter account of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.

The Plaintiffs’ Reply brief is some 125 pages long, but let me give you a few choice quotes so you can get an idea what was going on between the government and the social media lords. In the early days of the Biden White House, the censorship efforts focused on Covid 19 matters (although it did not take long for the Biden team to branch out into other things, from climate change to claims of election fraud to transgender issues). As to Covid 19, the government tries to justify its conduct on the basis that it was not pressuring platforms to suppress speech, but only trying to “better understand” what was going on. From plaintiffs’ Reply brief, pages 20-21:

No rational reader could interpret [White House functionary] Flaherty’s emails as a mere exercise in armchair philosophy, and the platforms certainly did not do so. They got the clear message: the White House’s demand that they “do more” to censor. . . . The very first email the White House sent [to Facebook], barely two days into the Biden Administration, demanded not to “better understand,” but to remove supposed “misinformation.” Citing a post about Hank Aaron’s death after taking the COVID vaccine, Clarke Humphry wrote at 1:04 a.m. on January 23, 2021: “Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.” . . .

Shortly thereafter, Flaherty launched his campaign of badgering, harassment, and pressure—all designed toward a single end: to push platforms (especially Facebook) to take more aggressive action against viewpoints disfavored by the White House. When Facebook reported to the White House on steps it was taking to “Combat[] Vaccine Misinformation,” Flaherty responded with a barrage of questions seeking detailed information about Facebook’s censorship practices, including “How are you handling things that are dubious, but not provably false?” Id. ¶¶ 42-43. Like all subsequent questions, the tenor of these questions was not merely to “better understand” Facebook’s practices, but to scrutinize and pressure them to take more aggressive action. Flaherty drove this point home by accusing Facebook of fomenting “political violence” by not censoring enough speech: “especially given the Journal’s reporting on your internal work onpolitical violence spurred by Facebook groups, I am also curious about the new rules as part of the ‘overhaul.’” Id. ¶ 44. Facebook, again, got the message—its response explained to Flaherty that it was removing content that the White House disfavored, and it promised to begin “enforcing this new policy immediately.” Id. ¶ 45.

It goes on and on with dozens and dozens of further examples. Here are a couple more from page 25:

¶ 100 (Facebook assuring the White House, in response to their demands about Tucker Carlson’s content, that it “will continue to be demoted even though it was not ultimately fact checked”); id. ¶ 104 (Twitter suspended Alex Berenson immediately after the President said, “They’re killing people”)

I can’t even keep track of the large number of government agencies and government-funded apparatchiks who have gotten in on the censorship game. Besides the White House itself, there has been everything from CDC, to Fauci’s group (NIAID), to the Surgeon General, to something called CISA, to the Stanford Internet Observatory, to the Virality Project — and I’m sure that I have only scratched the surface.

At the oral argument, the judge reserved more than an hour for himself to ask questions to the parties’ attorneys. Reportedly, most of the questions went to the government. Here are a few, as reported at the Twitter account of the Missouri AG:

The judge . . . asked Biden's lawyers if the First Amendment covered Americans' right to say that Biden is responsible for high gas prices and inflation. Their answer? It depends.

The judge questioned the feds on several hypotheticals, asking if the First Amendment applied. He asked if an American citizen questioning the safety or efficacy of masks or a vaccine was protected under the First Amendment. The feds' answer? "It COULD be" but often won’t be.

With regard to the Covid 19 information that was suppressed at the instance of the White House — things like the inefficacy of lockdowns and masks, the benefits of therapeutic drugs, and the dangers and side effects of vaccines — nearly all of it has proven to be true. The censorship regime is all about only letting one narrative see the light of day. Somehow, hundreds of people get involved in this, and they all are able to convince themselves that they are the good guys.

The judge reserved decision after the hearing, but from the reports on the proceedings, it would appear that a strong order will be issued shortly.

Woke AI Means the End of a Free Internet

By Daniel Greenfield April 10, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 Big Tech has a great big dream of destroying the internet. And it’s mostly a reality.

The vision of the internet was an open universe while Big Tech’s vision is the internet reduced to the feed on a few proprietary apps preloaded on your locked phone. Trying to censor the internet of the 90s or the 00s was a laughable proposition, but censoring today’s internet is laughably easy. Want to eliminate a site from the internet? Just wipe it from Google, ban a point of view from Facebook, a book from Amazon, or a video from YouTube. It’s still possible to browse a site off the Big Tech reservation, for now, at least until your browser goes away.

Then content will be limited to the permitted apps on Google and Apple’s proprietary app stores. But Big Tech has even more ambitious plans to replace the internet with itself.

Big Tech has dramatically simplified the user experience off the internet. It did so by moving users from ‘pulling’ content by browsing the internet to ‘pushing’ content at them by displaying a feed. When your computer or phone shows you a news feed you never wanted, that’s ‘pushing’. Big Tech loved pushing, but people resisted it until the arrival of social media reduced everyone to scrolling down a feed selected by secret algorithms and pushed through a proprietary app.

Search, as we used to know it, has been disappearing. People still think that they’re searching the internet the way that they used to in the 90s and the 00s when what they’re actually doing when ‘googling’ is scrolling through a feed derived from a much smaller index of corporate and leftist sites prioritized by Google’s algorithm. In the past, it was possible to get past them by scrolling through page results but that is increasingly becoming meaningless or impossible.

Google’s new search setup either often repeats the same results on later pages so that people think they’re seeing new results, when they’re really just clicking through to see more of the same results, or interrupts the search entirely to offer thematic searches for ‘similar content’. The makeover hasn’t been finalized, but when it’s done, internet searchers will not result in a list of sites containing a similar set of words, but an answer whether or not a question was asked, and a set of pre-approved sites heavily skewed leftward that cover the general topic.

Searches for criticisms of COVID policy, Islamic terrorism or voter fraud won’t lead to specific results on conservative sites, but direct you to the CDC or the New York Times for explanations of why the Left is right and anyone who disagrees with it is spreading dangerous misinformation.

The elimination of search is part of the transition from multiple points of view to single answers. And AI chatbots are the endgame for offering a single answer that keeps users on a single site and eliminates the search for multiple perspectives on other sites. Aside from eliminating countless jobs, their real role is to shift user interaction from a ‘pull’ to a ‘push’ model. They’re the next great hope after the old smart assistants failed to become the defining interface.

Smart assistants were going to be Big Tech’s next power shift from ‘pulling’ to ‘pushing’. Instead of users searching for anything, Siri, Alexa, Cortana or any of the others would use those same algorithms to ‘anticipate’ their needs so they never get around to actually looking for themselves. The assistants were meant to be the ultimate prison under the guise of convenience. Unfortunately for Big Tech, they failed. Amazon’s Alexa racked up $10 billion in losses. Siri, the most popular of the bunch, is used by a limited number of Apple users, and Microsoft’s Cortana has been all but written off as another failed experiment.

The new generation of AI chatbots have the potential to succeed where they failed.

The new wave of AI has gotten attention for its potential to eliminate artists and writers, for making cheating and plagiarism ubiquitous, but all of that is collateral damage. AI chatbots are the ultimate push tool and the leverage Big Tech needs to eliminate the internet as anything except the messy backstage reality utilized by a few million tech savvy types.

Smart assistants and chatbots are not there to ‘assist’ us, but to take away our agency under the guise of convenience and personalized interaction. When the internet became widely used, there was concern that students wouldn’t need to learn anything except how to search. Now they don’t even need to know anything except how to write a ‘prompt’. The difference between searching and a chatbot prompt appears negligible, but is actually monumental.

Search initially offered a direct way to browse an index representing much of the content on the internet. As Google took over search, the index became more like a directory of sites that the Big Tech monopoly liked. AI chatbots like Google Bard eliminate the searching and offer a distilled agenda while severing access to the process of browsing sites with different perspectives. Why ‘search’ and read for yourself when a chatbot will give you the answer?

What was once uncharted territory, a wild west of different ideas and perspectives, has been reduced to a handful of apps and platforms, and will be winnowed by AI chatbots into a single screen. And that is how the internet disappears and is replaced by one or two monopolies, by a smart assistant that activates a few apps. And if a site, a video, a perspective has been filtered out, then it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a systemic bias that makes the worst days of the mainstream media seem like an open and tolerant marketplace of ideas.

There will be people, a minority, who will actually try to resist the process and explore on their own. And the system will make it more difficult. It will still be possible, but less so every year. Browsers will disappear on tablets and smartphones in the name of security. Microsoft and Apple will reduce their respective computer operating systems to the mobile model. A few people will cling to older installations or install Linux. Maybe 5% of the population will still have access to anything that resembles the internet even in the degraded form that it exists today.

AI will be inherently ‘woke’ because it is not some remarkable form of intelligence, but just a clever way of manipulating human beings throughout outputs that imitate intelligence. The thing to fear isn’t that AI will become intelligent, but that people will be manipulated by the Big Tech monopolies behind it without even realizing it. AI will reflect the point of view of its owners and when it deviates, it will quickly be brought back into line. That is what we’ve been seeing consistently with AI experiments over the last 5 years. Huge amounts of information are taken in and then the AIs are taught to filter it to match the preconceptions of the corporate parents.

Much as Google’s huge index of the internet is carefully filtered to produce a small set of preapproved results, AI chatbots will only be allowed to parrot political dogma. As they come to define the internet, what was once a boundless medium will look like Big Brother.

Big Tech ‘disrupted’ retail to swallow it up into a handful of online platforms. In the last decade, tech industry disruption became consolidation. AI, like retail consolidation, is economically disruptive, but it doesn’t just consolidate economics, it also consolidates ideas.

The internet was once liberating because it was decentralized, its centralization has paralleled the loss of personal freedoms and the rise of totalitarian public and private institutions. And we let it happen because it was more convenient. Glutted with ‘free’ services offered by Big Tech monopolies, we never checked the price tag or connected it with our growing misery.

AI is the ultimate centralization. Its threat doesn’t come from some science fiction fantasy of self-aware machines ruling over us, but from us allowing a handful of companies to control what we see and think because it’s more convenient than finding things out for ourselves.

The old internet was often inconvenient. The new internet is more convenient and empty. Its content has become so repetitive that it can easily be written by chatbots. And it will be. The user five years from now may have a choice of a chatbot digital media article on CNN or an AI chatbot recapitulating it in response to a question about a recent mass shooting or inflation.

The real price of convenience is choice. We give up our freedom most easily to those governments and systems that promise us free things that will make our lives easier. Socialized medicine, a guaranteed minimum income, free housing and food and a chatbot that answers all of our questions so that we never have to think for ourselves again.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

 

Elon Musk says this unknown government agency is the worst for censorship

Leah Barkoukis February 07, 2023 

Twitter chief Elon Musk named what he believes is the worst offender in government censorship and it’s an agency most Americans have likely never heard of before.  The Department of State’s Global Engagement Center is a “threat to our democracy,” Musk said on Monday.  He pointed to independent journalist Matt Taibbi's report from January 3 to explain why. In the 12th installment of the Twitter Files, Taibbi called the GEC the “fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department” and said it took a Russian disinformation report to media and flagged certain accounts as “Russian personas and proxies” based on a dubious list of criteria.

He goes on to detail how the GEC wanted to “insert themselves” into content moderation on the social media site. ..........To Read More...

Buckeye Institute News Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 21, 2022

Lisa Gates, Vice President of Communications, (614) 224-3255

Columbus, OH – On Tuesday, The Buckeye Institute joined an amicus brief urging the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama Northern Division to quash a Department of Justice subpoena served on the Eagle Forum of Alabama, which the Biden Administration issued in an effort to weaponize the civil litigation process “against organizations with whom the United States Government disagrees.”

“The Department of Justice certainly seems to be trying to intimidate organizations and chill their First Amendment-protected free speech by demanding confidential and constitutionally-protected documents,” said David C. Tryon, director of litigation at The Buckeye Institute’s Legal Center. “The Department of Justice’s shocking overreach in this case should worry and frighten all Americans, regardless of their political beliefs. If the DOJ can do this to the Eagle Forum of Alabama, it can and will do it to others with whom the government disagrees in the future. 

A subpoena was issued to the Eagle Forum of Alabama in Boe v. Marshall, a case to which the Alabama nonprofit is not a party, for all internal and external communications and records in any way related to Alabama House Bill 1. As the amici argue in the brief, “the subpoena here seeks information that has no bearing on any judicial inquiry…” which “confirms the intent of the subpoena to intimidate and chill grassroots political organizing, not just of EFA but of any and all organizations that may try to organize and petition the government….”

The Buckeye Institute urges the court to “not only quash the subpoena but make clear that using the civil litigation process to chill and intimidate those who may disagree on important political issues is categorically unacceptable.”

# # #

Founded in 1989, The Buckeye Institute is an independent research and educational institution – a think tank – whose mission is to advance free-market public policy in the states.

The Buckeye Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit, and tax-exempt organization, as defined by section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue code. As such, it relies on support from individuals, corporations, and foundations that share a commitment to individual liberty, free enterprise, personal responsibility, and limited government. The Buckeye Institute does not seek or accept government funding.

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When Government Uses The Private Sector As Agents Of Censorship

I & I Editorial Board January 5, 2022

Over the weekend, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene got the Donald Trump treatment from Twitter: The social media platform permanently banned her personal account. If this were simply a private group deciding who can and can’t participate in its forums, then there’s no problem. That would be Twitter’s right. But we know Democrats are using private companies to censor speech they don’t like, and any discussion that threatens their plans to accumulate ever more political power. This is not America, more like Amerika.

Twitter booted Greene due to her “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” which is another way to say she’s tweeting messages contrary to the narrative constructed by the Faucists: There is no solution to the pandemic outside of vaccines, lockdowns, and masks.

Twitter, which regularly sends users to “Twitter jail” when their tweets challenge and offend left-wing orthodoxy, permanently banned Trump a year ago “​​due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” It has also permanently suspended a Newsmax reporter “for repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” which means his tweets didn’t meet the Twitter mob’s demand for conformity. Dr. Robert Malone, an mRNA vaccine researcher, has also been suspended from Twitter. The official word is he disobeyed the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy – he said something the Twitter hall monitors didn’t like.

Meanwhile, YouTube pulled the video of the Joe Rogan podcast in which Malone compared America’s widespread obsession with vaccine mandates and extreme pandemic measures – to the exclusion of therapeutics and sensible precautions, we should add – to “​​what the heck happened in Germany in the ‘20s and ‘30s.” ..........To Read More....

 

 

Nebraska AG's devastating critique of the suppression of effective COVID therapies

October 17, 2021 By Jarrad Winter

Legal opinions usually aren't terribly fun to read, but if you've been an ivermectin and/or hydroxychloroquine advocate for use against Wuhan Plague, this one definitely will bring you much joy.

It's a rather lengthy and full spectrum opinion issued by Doug Peterson, Nebraska's Attorney General, in response to a query from the state's Department of Health and Human Services as to whether physicians can be persecuted and tormented for prescribing ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine to patients sick with the China Flu. What the AG's response amounts to is a full and complete takedown of the conspiracy to suppress cheap and effective early Covid-19 treatments..........To Read More....

To lend understanding to the comment below it's necessary to explain there are members of Our Group who own horses. RK

Our Group's Take - . I really wish that I had both hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin on hand just in case. In fact, if I thought that I was coming down with covid-19 seriously look at what the human dose is for Ivermectin versus the horse dose to see whether it was reasonably safe to carefully divided up a horse wormer to use on myself at an appropriate dose. Frankly I think it's rather criminal that it is likely very difficult to get a doctor to agree to prescribe these medications. Apparently at least in many places, doctors are looking at hardcore sanctions and possible loss of license if they do prescribe them, however. It's beyond absurd, and this sort of asinine BS has resulted in huge loss of life that was almost certainly totally unnecessary.