From clown to President to dictator, Zelensky’s career progression

From clown to President to dictator, Zelensky’s career progression

June 23, 2022

in Geopolitics, Global Issues

Reading Time: 2 mins read

When Volodymyr Zelensky was elected as the President of Ukraine, it was anticipated that he would begin a serious campaign against corruption, halt the decline of the nation’s economic potential, and restore respect for the state’s institutions. He became a symbol of hope for the average Ukrainian person. However, Zelensky failed on all fronts miserably. He in fact followed the path of strengthening his personal power.

Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Western left-liberal media cabal has attempted to present Zelensky as a democratic hero, and a protector of the liberal values, as a superman, who is fighting Vladimir Putin, the Russian bad guy. Just like how they show in a Hollywood film. However, in reality, Zelensky is the biggest threat to the Ukrainian democracy.

Undemocratic ways of so-called democratic Zelensky

The most important question here – Has Mr. Zelensky himself adopted these democratic practices that he claims to be a hero of?

Let us substantiate his so-called democratic moves through different instances.

Recently, a Ukrainian court banned the biggest pro-Russian political party in the nation and seized all of its assets after the organisation was charged with undermining Ukraine’s national security sovereignty.

The decision was made after President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a proclamation in March prohibiting the activities of various groups that the security services had identified as being supportive of Moscow.

An appeals court “banned the activities of the political party Opposition Platform — For Life,” Ukrainian Justice Minister Denys Malyuska said in a statement on social media.

“The court has ruled to transfer all property, funds and other assets of the party to state ownership,” he added.

Zelensky is shunning the opposition

In another instance in May 2021, Zelensky got his rival politician and the leader of opposition Viktor Medvedchuk house arrested. Ukraine had also banned three of Viktor Medvedchuk’s news channels in what seemed to resemble a gag order. The American media has always tried to describe Viktor Medvedchuk as some sort of a pro-Russia leader in order to justify Zelensky’s actions.

These two incidents show that Zelensky fundamentally misunderstands what the term “democracy” actually means. He has every right to protect his home, but he has no right to silence his rival political parties and leaders. In actuality, democracy has been murdered in plain sight under Zelensky’s rule.

The Economist Intelligence Unit likewise found that Ukraine was a “flawed democracy” and referred to it as a “hybrid government” in its 2021 Democracy Index, which evaluates the democratic status of countries annually.

On the 2021 report, Ukraine’s ranking in that index dropped, and this was “in part due to rising tensions with Russia.”

“Government functioning under a direct military threat usually restricts democratic processes in favor of the centralization of power in the hands of the executive and the security or military apparatus with the aim of guaranteeing public safety,” the report said.

“In Ukraine, the military played a more prominent role in 2021 and exerted more influence over political decision-making; government policy also became less transparent,” the report added.

This is the undeniable evidence of how Zelensky transformed from being a president of a country to a fervent dictator. The Ukrainian democracy is surely bruised and this is something the West is failing to acknowledge and pushing the Russia-Ukraine war further for its own motives i.e. to defeat Russia.

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Source

https://tfiglobalnews.com/2022/06/23/from-clown-to-president-to-dictator-zelenskys-career-progression/

DNC to Court: We Are a Private Corporation With No Obligation to Follow Our Rules

DNC to Court: We Are a Private Corporation With No Obligation to Follow Our Rules

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Created: 02 May, 2017

Last update: 14 August, 2022

Update: A federal judge dismissed the DNC lawsuit on August 28. The court recognized that the DNC treated voters unfairly, but ruled that the DNC is a private corporation; therefore, voters cannot protect their rights by turning to the courts:

"To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC's internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary."

Rather than reflecting on the consternation everyday voters are having over the conduct of the Democratic presidential primary, the Democratic National Committee is doubling down on the assertion that the primary election belongs to the people who control the party -- not voters.

In the transcript for last week's hearing in Wilding, et. al. v. DNC Services, d/b/a DNC and Deborah “Debbie” Wasserman Schultz, released Friday, DNC attorneys assert that the party has every right to favor one candidate or another, despite their party rules that state otherwise because, after all, they are a private corporation and they can change their rules if they want.

The argument is not without merit. In fact, it is a legally sound argument that has rarely been overcome in the court of law, where courts are extraordinarily hesitant to get involved in the “political thicket.”

The last time the court rejected the “private party rights” argument was in 1944 when, despite the Democratic Party’s objections, the court held that the party had to let African-Americans participate in “their” primary. (See, Smith v. Allwright)

In that case, the court sided with the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, holding that the exclusion of blacks from the Democratic primary violated their fundamental right to vote at meaningful stages of the election process.

In this case, a group of Bernie Sanders supporters filed a class action lawsuit against the DNC and former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz because, they argue, they were denied a fair and impartial election and had given money to a campaign on the belief that it was fair and impartial.

In other words, the plaintiffs are relying on laws that impose a fiduciary obligation on corporations to protect their shareholders and protect against tortious conduct like misrepresentation, not fundamental rights secured by the constitution.

But the Democratic Party’s argument remains the same as it did over 70 years ago.

From the transcript:

"The court would have to basically tell the party that it couldn't change [the neutrality rule], even though it's a discretionary rule that it didn't need to adopt to begin with." - DNC attorney Bruce Spiva

"The party could have favored a candidate. I'll put it that way. Maybe that's a better way of answering your Honor's original question. Even if it were true, that's the business of the party, and it's not justiciable." - DNC attorney Bruce Spiva

"[I]f you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I'm gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that's different. But here, where you have a party that's saying, We're gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we're gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have — and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That's not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right, and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions." - DNC attorney Bruce Spiva

Leaked DNC emails showed that Democratic leaders indeed tried to minimize and undermine Sanders' campaign, despite organization bylaws that say DNC officials must be neutral in the primary process.

"We're not asking this Court to infringe on the province of another branch of this government or to get involved in the conduct of Congress or the conduct of the Office of President. We're asking this Court to determine whether representations and omissions were false and misleading, and whether money was paid on the basis of those representations, whether folks were injured in a financial sense as a result of those representations, and whether duties to the class members were breached, including fiduciary duties." - Jared H. Beck, attorney for the plaintiffs

“People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee—nominating process in 2016 were fair and impartial. And that’s not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that’s what the Democratic National Committee’s own charter says. It says it in black and white. And they can’t deny that. Not only is it in the charter, but it was stated over and over again in the media by the Democratic National Committee’s employees, including Congresswoman Wassermann Schultz, that they were, in fact, acting in compliance with the charter.” - Jared H. Beck, attorney for the plaintiffs

However, DNC lawyers have argued and continue to argue that the Democratic Party doesn't owe anyone a fair process. It has every right to disregard its own rules or interpret its rules how it wants because it is a private organization, and therefore the plaintiffs have no standing. And that is the conundrum millions of American voters find themselves in today.

This is the very reason why organizations like the Independent Voter Project (a co-publisher of IVN) have supported nonpartisan primary election reform like the “top-two nonpartisan primary” they authored in California. At a fundamental level, the “top-two nonpartisan primary” in California took away the private purpose of the primary election (to elect a party nominee) and made the first stage of the process serve the  public (to narrow the candidate field, regardless of party).

Unfortunately, however, even in California, the presidential election is another big animal and was not reformed along with the rest of the state elections. This is because parties have control of the process in 50 states all the way to the federal level -- a much bigger fight that organizations like the Independent Voter Project, Fair Vote, Open Primaries, and many others vow to continue.

READ MORE: California’s Presidential Primaries are Blatantly Unconstitutional

There are few Americans who will say they do not want a fair election process, a process that holds elected officials accountable to all voters. Now more than ever, voters are calling for it. But that can't exist when private corporations define and manipulate the rules at will, and are allowed to do so because they control the entire process. Elections should belong to voters, not parties.

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Source

https://ivn.us/posts/dnc-to-court-we-are-a-private-corporation-with-no-obligation-to-follow-our-rules

How Do We End Government-Sponsored Censorship?

How Do We End Government-Sponsored Censorship?

 06/26/23

All of the early internet freedom technologies of the ’90s were funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State. Now, these same technologies have been turned against the American public and are used to control public discourse.

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Story at a glance:

• The internet was likely not intended to remain free forever. The intention for it to be used as a totalitarian tool was baked in from the start.
• Google started as a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant and was part of the CIA’s and National Security Agency’s (NSA) digital data program, the purpose of which was to conduct “birds of a feather” mapping online so that certain groups could be neutralized.
• All of the early internet freedom technologies of the ‘90s were funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State. They were developed by the intelligence community as an insurgency tool — a means to help dissident groups in foreign countries to develop a pro-U.S. stance and evade state-controlled media. Now, these same technologies have been turned against the American public, and are used to control public discourse.
• In the past, censorship was a laborious task that could only be done after the fact. Artificial intelligence (AI) has radically altered the censorship industry. AI programs can now censor information en masse, based on the language used, and prevent it from being seen at all.
• One of the most effective strategies that would have an immediate effect would be to strip the censorship industry of its government funding. The House controls the purse strings of the federal government, so the House Appropriations Committee has the power to end the funding of government-sponsored censorship.

In the video below, I interview Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.

Benz started off as a corporate lawyer representing tech and media companies before joining the Trump administration, where he worked as a speechwriter for Dr. Ben Carson, the former U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and former President Trump.

He also advised on economic development policy. He then joined the State Department as deputy assistant secretary for International Communications and Information Technology. There, he ran the cyber desks at state, meaning all things having to do with the internet and foreign policy.

Benz says:

“This is toward the end of 2020, which was a really fascinating time to witness the merger, in many respects, of big government and Big Tech companies themselves. I had grown up, I think, like many Americans, with a belief that the First Amendment protected you against government censorship.

“The terms of engagement that we had enjoyed from 1991, when the worldwide web rolled out, until 2016, the election in the U.S. and Brexit in the U.K., which is, really, the first political event where the election was determined, in many respects, by momentum on the internet.

“There was that 25-year golden period where the idea of being censored by a private sector company, let alone the government, was considered something, to me, very deeply anathema to the American experience.

“What I witnessed at the State Department — because I was at the desk, basically, that Google and Facebook would call when they wanted favors abroad when they wanted American protection or American policies to preserve their dominance in Europe, or in Asia or in Latin America.

“And the U.S. government was doing favors for these tech companies while the tech companies were censoring the people who voted for the government. It was a complete betrayal of whatever social contract typically underlies the public-private partnership.”

The internet was founded by the national security state

Ostensibly, the rapid expansion of censorship started post-2016, but you can make a strong argument that the internet was never intended to remain free forever. Rather, the intention for it to be used as a totalitarian tool was likely baked in from the start when the national security state founded it in 1968.

The worldwide web, which is the user interface, was launched in 1991, and my suspicion is that the public internet was seeded and allowed to grow in order to capture and make the most of the population dependent upon it, knowing that it would be the most effective social engineering tool ever conceived.

Benz comments:

“I totally agree … A lot of people, in trying to understand what’s happening with the net censorship, say ‘We had this free internet, and then suddenly there was this age of censorship and the national security state got involved at the censorship side.’

“But when you retrace the history, internet freedom itself was actually a national security state imperative. The internet itself is a product of a counterinsurgency necessity by the Pentagon to manage information during the 1960s, particularly to aggregate social science data. And then, it was privatized.

“Opening it up to all comers in the private sector, it was handed off from DARPA to the National Science Foundation, and then went through a series of universities on the infrastructure side.

“And then, right out of the gate in 1991, you had the Cold War coming to an end, and then simultaneously, you had this profusion of Pentagon-funded internet freedom technologies. You had things like VPNs [virtual private networks], encrypted chat and TOR [The Onion Router].

“All of the early internet freedom technologies of the ‘90s were funded by the Pentagon, the State Department, and developed by the intelligence community, primarily, as a way of using internet freedom as a means to help dissident groups in foreign countries be able to develop a pro-U.S. beachhead, because it was a way to evade state-controlled media.

“This was, basically, an insurgency tool for the U.S. government, in the same way that Voice of America and Radio Free Liberty, and Radio Free Europe were tools of the CIA in the Cold War, to beam in, basically, pro-U.S. content to populations in foreign countries in order to sway them towards U.S. interests. It was a way of managing the world empire.

“The internet served the same purpose, and it couldn’t be done if it was called a Pentagon operation, a State Department or CIA operation. But all of the tech companies themselves are products of that. Google started as a DARPA grant that was obtained at Stanford by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

“In 1995, they were part of the CIA and NSA’s massive digital data program. They had their monthly meetings with their CIA and NSA advisers for that program, where the express stated purpose was for the CIA and NSA to be able to map so-called ‘Birds of a feather’ online … so that they could be neutralized.”

How it all began

As noted by Benz, the idea of having the intelligence community map political “Birds of a Feather” communities in order to either mobilize or neutralize them was (and still is) justified in the name of counterterrorism.

Nowadays, as we’ve seen during the pandemic, it’s used to control public discourse, suppress truth and promote propaganda angles.

The technology used to control public discourse is an AI technique called natural language processing. It’s a way of aggregating everyone who believes a certain thing online into community databases based on the words they use, the hashtags, the slogans and images.

“Emerging narratives, all manner of metadata affiliations, all that can be aggregated to create a topographical network map of what you believe in and who you’re associated with, so that it can all be turned down in a fast, precise and comprehensive manner by content moderation teams, because they’re all birds of the same feather,” Benz explains.

“The fact that this grew out of the U.S. National Security State, which is running the show, essentially, today, to me says that there’s a continuation between the internet freedom and internet censorship. They simply switched from one side of the chess board to the other.”

What is the National Security State?

For clarity, when Benz talks about the “National Security State,” what he’s referring to are the institutions that uphold the rules-based international order.

Domestically, that includes the Pentagon, State Department, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), certain aspects of the U.S. Department of Justice and the 17 intelligence agencies.

Of those, the Pentagon, State Department and the intelligence community (IC) are the three central ones that have managed the American world empire since the 1940s. None of them are supposed to be able to operate domestically, but in a sense their power has expanded so much that they essentially control domestic affairs.

As explained by Benz, the Pentagon, State Department and IC are not supposed to be able to operate domestically. “But in a sense, they really control domestic affairs, because their power has expanded so much that they’ve developed an extraordinary laundering apparatus to be able to fund international institutions that then boomerang back home and effectively control much of domestic political affairs, including discourse on the internet.”

As for the CIA, it was created in 1947 under the National Security Act. It was created as a cloak-and-dagger mechanism, to do things the State Department wanted done but couldn’t get caught doing due to the diplomatic repercussions — things like election rigging, assassinations, media control, bribery and other subversion tactics.

The birth of hybrid warfare

Benz continues his explanation of how and why internet censorship emerged when it did:

“So, there’s the U.S. National Security State, and then there’s the transatlantic one involving NATO. The story of Western government involvement in internet censorship really started after the 2014 Crimea annexation, which was the biggest foreign policy humiliation of the Obama era.

“Atlanta’s School of Foreign Policy was deeply inflamed by this event and blamed the fact that there were these breakaway Russia-supporting entities in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea on a failure to penetrate their media, and this idea that hearts and minds were being swung towards the Russian side because of pro-Russian content online.

“NATO then declared this doctrine of so-called hybrid warfare — this idea that Russia had won Crimea not by a military annexation, but by winning, illicitly in a sense, the hearts and minds of Crimeans through the use of their propaganda. And the doctrine of hybrid warfare, born in 2014, was this idea that war was no longer a kinetic thing.

“There hadn’t been a kinetic war in Europe since World War II. Instead, it had moved sub-kinetic into the hearts and minds of the people. In fact, NATO announced a doctrine after 2014 called ‘From tanks to tweets,’ where it shifted its focus, explicitly, from kinetic warfare to social media opinions online.

“Brexit, which happened in June 2016 … was blamed on Russian influence as well. And so all of these institutions that argued for control over the internet in Eastern Europe said, ‘Well, it needs to come now. Now it’s an all-of-Europe thing.’

“When Trump was then elected five months later, explicitly contemplating the breakup of NATO, all hell broke loose. This idea that we need to censor the internet went from being something that was touchy and novel, in the view of Pentagon brass and State Department folks, to something that was totally essential to saving the entire rules-based international order that came out of World War II.

“At the time, the reasoning was, Brexit, in the U.K., was going to give rise to Frexit, in France, with Marine Le Pen and her movement there. Matteo Salvini was going to cause Italexit In Italy, there’d be Grexit in Greece, Spexit in Spain, and the entire European Union [EU] would come undone, just because these right-wing populist parties would naturally vote their way into political power.

“They would vote for working-class, cheap energy policies that would make them more closely aligned with Russia naturally, because of the cheaper oil prices, or cheaper gas prices. Then, suddenly, you’ve got no EU, you’ve got no NATO, and then, you’ve got no Western military alliance.

“So, from that moment, after Trump’s election, immediately, there was this diplomatic roadshow by U.S. State Department officials, who all thought they were getting promotions in November 2016. They thought they were going to get promoted from the State Department to the National Security Council. Turns out, they all got fired, because someone with a 5% chance of winning ended up winning that day.

“So, they took their international connections, their international networks around the Atlanta Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the entire think tank, quasi-intelligence, quasi-military, government-funded NGO [non-governmental organization] soup, and they did this international roadshow, starting in January 2017, to convince European countries to start censoring their internet …

“Out of that came NetzDG [Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, the Network Enforcement Act] in Germany, which introduced a necessity of artificial intelligence-powered social media censorship.

“All of that was, essentially, spearheaded by this network of State Department and Pentagon folks who then used their own internal folks in the government to procure government grants and contracts to these same entities. Eventually, they all rotated into those tech companies to set the policies as well.”

Threat from within

So, to summarize, the infrastructure for worldwide internet censorship was largely established by IC veterans who were forced out by the Trump administration, and that infrastructure was then used to catalyze the international censorship response during COVID-19 in late 2019, early 2020.

Benz continues:

“Right. And those veterans were not alone. The full story is not just the shadow security state and exile. The fact is this. The Trump administration never had control of its own defense department, State Department or intelligence community.

“It was the intelligence community that, essentially, drove his first impeachment, that drove a two-and-a-half year special prosecutor investigation that rolled up 12 to 20 of Trump’s closest associates. You had a chief of staff there who was hiding the military figures from the government. The careers at state threatened the political appointees from the inside. I experienced that myself.

“This permanent aspect of Washington, with unfireable careers in high places, combined with a turf war in the GOP [Republican Party] between the populist right and the neo-conservative right, with the neo-conservative right having many well-placed Republicans in the Defense Department, State Department, in IC, to thwart the previous president’s agenda there, allowed this political network and exile, on the censorship side, to work with their allies within the government to create these censorship beach heads.

“So, for example, that’s how they created the Department of Homeland Security’s … first permanent government censorship bureau in the form of this entity called CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, founded in November 2018], which is supposed to just be a cybersecurity entity.

“It was done because of media and intelligence community laundering of a never-substantiated claim that Russia had potentially hacked the 2016 election, hacked the election machines or voting software, or might be able to do so in the future, and so we need a robust armed-to-the-teeth DHS unit to protect our cybersecurity from the Russians.

“It’s the mission creep of the century. After the Mueller probe ended in June 2019, this unit, CISA, within DHS — which had set up all of this, and which is only supposed to do cybersecurity — said ‘Well, if you squint and look at it, discourse online is a cybersecurity threat because if it undermines public faith or confidence in our elections, and it’s done using a cyber nexus, i.e., social media post, then that’s a form of cybersecurity threat, because democracy is essential to our security.’

“And so you went from this cybersecurity mission to a cyber censorship bureau, because if you tweeted something about mail-in ballots in the 2020 election, that was deemed to be a cyber attack on critical infrastructure, i.e., elections.

“When they got away with that in 2020, DHS then said, ‘Well, if you squint and look at it, public health is also critical infrastructure.’ So, now, DHS gets to direct social media companies to censor opinions about COVID-19.

“Then they worked their way into saying the same thing about financial systems, financial services, about the Ukraine war, about immigration. It got to the point where, by late 2022, the head of CISA declared that cognitive infrastructure is critical infrastructure.”

Cracks only appeared after Republicans got a majority in the House of Representatives in November 2022 and Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Public support for the government also dwindled as Musk’s release of the “Twitter Files” revealed the extent of the government’s involvement in the censoring of Americans.

So far, though, public awareness hasn’t changed anything. The very entities that once stood for internet freedom, like the National Science Foundation, are still actively funding and furthering government censorship activities.

AI gives censors god-like powers

Benz first became “gripped by the stakes of what was happening on the internet” in August 2016, after reading a series of papers discussing the use of natural language processing to monitor, surveil and regulate the distribution of information on social media based on the words used.

“DARPA provided tens of millions of dollars of funding for this language processing, this language chunking capacity of AI in order, ostensibly, to stop ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] recruiting on Facebook and Twitter,” Benz says.

He continues:

“As part of the predicate for putting military boots on the ground in Syria, there was a lot of talk about ISIS coming to the U.S., and they were recruiting on Facebook and Twitter.

“And so the Pentagon, DARPA and the IC developed this language spyware capacity to map the dialectic of how ISIS sympathizers talk online, the words they use, the images they share, the prefixes, the suffixes, all the different community connections.

“And then, I saw that this was being done for purposes of domestic political control instead of foreign counterterrorism, and the power that it has. It is what totally changed the internet forever.

“Before 2016, there was not the technological capacity to do mass social media censorship. That was the age of what censorship insiders like to call the whack-a-mole era. Censorship was reactive.

“It was done by forum, by moderators, essentially. Everything had to be flagged manually before it could be taken down, which meant millions of people had already seen it, or it had already gone viral, it had already done its damage, so to speak, and you were just cutting off the backend with an act of censorship.

“You could never have a permanent control apparatus in that setting, because there would always be a first-mover advantage to whoever posted it. What AI censorship technology breakthroughs enabled after 2016 was a kind of nuclear weapon, if you will, on the censorship side, to be able to end the war immediately.

“You don’t need a standing army of 100,000 people to censor COVID-19. You need one good developer, working with one manic social scientist who spends her entire life mapping what Dr. Mercola says online, and what he’s talking about this week, what his followers are saying, what they’re saying about this drug, or what they’re saying about this vaccine, or what they’re saying about this institution.

“All of that can be cataloged into a lexicon of how you talk. And then, all of that talk can just be turned down to zero. At the same time, they can super amplify the language that they themselves are doing. So it gives a God-like control to a tiny, tiny, tiny minority of people who can then use that to control the discourse of the entire population.

“What’s also so terrifying about the National Security State’s involvement in this is, when they discovered the power of this by mid-2018, they began to roll it out to every other country in the world for purposes of political control there — to the Ghana desk, to the Ecuador desk, to Southeast Asia, all over Europe.”

Can we get out of the grip of censorship?

At the time of this writing, we’re in a lull. The COVID-19 pandemic has been declared over and aside from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, there are no major political crises going on that warrant heavy censorship.

The networks and technologies for radical suppression are already in place, however, and can be turned up at a moment’s notice.

We’ve also recently seen just how easy it is for alternative media to be infiltrated and upended, so the fact that there are alternative platforms doesn’t guarantee that future censorship efforts will fail.

“There are so many threat vectors,” Benz says.

He continues:

“There are a lot of questions about what’s going on, for example, at Project Veritas, with how quickly it ousted James O’Keefe after releasing the most viral video ever, on Pfizer.

“It was about one week later — after their biggest accomplishment, perhaps, ever — that it was totally overthrown.

“A similar thing has happened with Fox News with [the firing of] Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable TV host in the country — the guy who gets three times more concurrent viewership than CNN, in the opposing spot. Institutions can absolutely be penetrated and co-opted when enough pressure is applied.”

Transatlantic flank attack 2.0 underway

As mentioned earlier, U.S. censorship really began with NATO. Benz refers to this as the transatlantic flank attack.

Basically, when U.S. intelligence wants to impact the internet domestically, they first work with their European partners to enact regulatory changes in Europe first. This then ends up spilling into the U.S. market, and the IC appears to have had nothing to do with it.

The first transatlantic flank attack took place in early 2017 with the NetzDG. We’re now under transatlantic attack again, through the Digital Markets Act. This law, Benz says, will make it very difficult for Rumble and other free speech platforms to maintain that posture during the next pandemic.

Once these platforms are forced to comply with the Digital Markets Act on the European side, the changes will be felt everywhere.

Cause for cautious optimism

While Benz remains hopeful that solutions to global censorship will present themselves, he still recognizes that the forces at play are enormous and the risks are high.

“It’s one of these things where the more you see what we’re up against, the more sobering it becomes. I think you need to maintain hope in order to maintain energy, to maintain momentum. With momentum, weird things can happen, even if you’re not supposed to win. Strange things break, or take a life of their own, or resurface.

“All the little weaknesses of the system get tested, simply by a momentum here and there. For example, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is probably the reason that the GOP got over the hump in doing all of these congressional investigations into the government’s role in censorship.

“They felt like they had an ally at Twitter, that they had billionaire backing. There was a waterfall, cascade impact. So, I am hopeful. DHS is on the run right now.

“They purged their website of all their domestic censorship operations that they listed and were loud and proud about for two whole years after the catastrophe of the disinformation governance board in April 2022.

“They already had a Ministry of Truth at DHS. They just gave one hypothetical board the wrong name. They didn’t call it the CISA. They made the mistake of calling it by the right name, and that’s what ended the entire political support for the underlying apparatus.

“So, the importance of an Orwellian name is essential for maintaining the political support. But I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m hopeful, and I’m honored to be a part of this rebel fleet of folks trying to take on the empire behind the censorship situation.

“But having seen, in so many iterations the toolkit they use, it is a medieval torture toolkit that can do strange things. Pressure can do strange things, even to great people. And so I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Essential internet backbone is not politically neutral

In my view, internet decentralization is one key innovation that could break the grip of censorship. That said, other aspects, such as cybersecurity, must also be reinvented.

CloudFlare, for example, a content delivery and cloud cybersecurity service, basically controls the internet because they protect online businesses and platforms from hackers using denial-of-service attacks.

Without it, you cannot survive online if you’re a big business. Even with a decentralized internet, CloudFlare might still be able to exert control by leaving sites open to distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Disturbingly, CloudFlare got political for the first time after 2016, when it decided to remove protection from a site called Kiwi Farms, which expressed anti-transgender views. As a result, the site had to move over to a Russian server to get back online.

Basically, U.S. citizens had to look for internet freedom in Russia because their architecture could not be supported in the U.S. — all because a government-integrated backbone of the internet made a political decision, likely at the behest of the IC.

“If there is another pandemic, for example, and there’s a push for certain medical interventions or countermeasures that certain sites don’t go along with, the CloudFlare, absolutely, could be a weapon in that respect,” Benz says.

He continues:

“One of the things I found so troubling is that CISA, this DHS censorship agency, after the 2020 election set up a private sector liaison subcommittee for mis- and disinformation policies in the private sector.

“It was a seven-person subcommittee, with all of the top censorship experts at the University of Washington and Stanford.

“Vijaya Gadde, the former head of censorship at Twitter, was a part of this board. I thought it was very troubling that the CEO of CloudFlare was also one of the seven people on the DHS censorship board.”

Major challenges to a decentralized internet

Benz continues:

“To proceed to the various challenges to a decentralized internet, when you move up the stack of censorship … they can move up to cloud servers, to payment processors, and even to things like CloudFlare and your infrastructure protection.

“In the early era of censorship, there was a rebuttal by censorship advocates that if you don’t like what private sector companies are doing, start your own social media companies. Build your own Google, build your own YouTube, build your own Facebook, build your own Twitter.

“And then, what started to happen as censorship got completely insane, when it went from being troubling to disturbing, to saturating … you started to see these alternative social media platforms like Gab and Parler … that tried to escape the content moderation policies with Big Tech. But what started to happen is, those social media companies, like Parler, were completely destroyed.

“Parler was de-platformed from, basically, the entire internet, when the president had just moved there, after being kicked off Twitter. That was a very instructive moment, and one that censorship insiders have reflected on, I should say, many, times as a moment of, ‘Should we have done that? We did it, but it costs us a lot of political capital.’

“Parler was kicked off of Amazon Web Services. They were kicked off of all of the banks. They were banned from email providers. They could not hook to the internet, essentially, to even maintain the ability to post anything there. So, it went from build your own social media company to build your own bank.

“Now you need to build your own bank and get a banking license for the payment processors. You need to build your own email distribution. You need to build your own cloud servers.

“You need to build your own software service providers. And, eventually, are you going to need to lay your own subsea cables across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans? The social media companies didn’t invent the internet. They are superimposed on Pentagon infrastructure.”

The house needs to defund the censorship industry

Without a doubt, there will be another crisis, whether it be another pandemic or war or something else, that will send the censorship machine into full gear yet again.

Right now we’re in a lull, so this is the time to think ahead and get prepared. The question is, what can we do? How do we prepare and fight back?

According to Benz, one of the most effective strategies that would have an immediate effect, and could be done right now, would be to strip the censorship industry of its government funding.

He explains:

“Right now, there’s a Republican-controlled House. The advantage of the House is that it controls appropriations, the purse strings of the federal government.

“If the House Appropriations Committee took seriously the government subsidization of censorship networks in the private sector, you could defund the speech police, even though, on the AI side, it only takes one good coder to be able to take out an entire political philosophy.

“The fact is, they can only do that job because of an army of social science folks across 45 different U.S. colleges and universities who get paid.

“There are tens of thousands of them who are paid through the National Science Foundation, through DARPA grants and State Department grants, to map communities online as a matter of social science, and then provide that to the computer scientist to censor it.

“My foundation, the Foundation for Freedom Online, has detailed $100 million, just in the past 18 months, that have gone from the federal government institutions directly into social media censorship insiders. Censorship is not an act anymore, it’s an industry, and you can cripple their capacity building.

“When you pump it full of money, you go from having a couple of people do it, to tens of thousands of people doing it. The censorship capacity is built on an infrastructure of an industry that relies on government to pay for it, and it relies on government to spearhead their penetration into the institutions.

“Right now, there are about eight different congressional committees trying to solve this problem from different aspects. I’ve personally briefed eight different congressional committees … But only a few of those committees are taking it seriously enough to pursue the issue deeply, and where that will shake out remains uncertain.

“CISA worked with dozens of social media companies and private sector cutouts to launder censorship from the government into the private sector, but the institution I worked with more than anyone was the University of Stanford, the Stanford Internet Observatory in particular.

“Jim Jordan’s Weaponization Subcommittee just subpoenaed Stanford for what I call the perfectly preserved First Amendment crime scene. Stanford meticulously kept logs of all of its censorship activities with government officials for the COVID-19 pandemic, and for two election cycles.

“They detailed 66 narratives that they censored online, having to do with everything about vaccines, efficacy of masks, opposition to lockdown mandates. And then, they had a fourth category for conspiracy theories, basically anything that someone said about the World Economic Forum or Bill Gates.

“They’re now refusing to comply with that subpoena. But the stakes keep getting escalated, because who’s going to enforce that subpoena?

“Steve Bannon, regardless of your opinion of him, just got indicted for not complying with a subpoena, but is this Justice Department going to pursue criminal penalties against Stanford, for withholding congressional subpoena for their government?

“This is for their government, because they were the formal partners. They had a formal partnership with the DHS. That stuff should be FOIA-able, first of all. You shouldn’t even need a subpoena for it. The only reason you can’t FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] it is because they laundered it through Stanford. Standord holds the records rather than DHS.

“I tried to FOIA that from DHS, and DHS says, ‘We don’t have it, even though they were our communications.’ So this is the way the CIA structures in an operation, through a web of cutouts and offshore banks, so you can never really get transparency. They’re now doing that for the censorship industry at home …

“Whether they will continue to raise the stakes is now a terrifying open issue. And the fact that it’s the inside guys who are running the censorship situation means there may be other tactics that need to be pursued here, which is why I talked about, simply, going to the appropriations committee and zeroing it out, so you don’t even need to enforce subpoenas, necessarily.”

Building a whole-of-society solution

As explained by Benz, the censorship industry was built as a so-called whole-of-society effort. According to the DHS, misinformation online is a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society solution.

By that, they meant that four types of institutions had to fuse together as a seamless whole. Those four categories and key functions are:

1. Government institutions, which provide funding and coordination.
2. Private sector institutions that do the censorship and dedicate funds to censorship through corporate social responsibility programs.
3. Civil society institutions (universities, NGOs, academia, foundations, nonprofits and activists) that do the research, the spying and collecting of data that are then given to the private sector to censor.
4. News media/fact-checking institutions, which put pressure on institutions, platforms and businesses to comply with the censorship demands.

What the Foundation for Freedom Online is doing is educating people about this structure, and the ways in which legislatures and the government can be restructured, how civil society institutions can be established, and how news media can be created to support and promote freedom rather than censorship.

To learn more, be sure to check out Foundation for Freedom Online. You can also follow Benz on his very active Twitter account.

Originally published by Mercola.

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Source

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/united-states-government-censorship-cola/

Former Head of FBI J6 Pipe Bomb Investigation Comes Clean With Stunning Admission: “I Don’t Want Any Conspiracy Theories, Right?”

Former Head of FBI J6 Pipe Bomb Investigation Comes Clean With Stunning Admission: “I Don’t Want Any Conspiracy Theories, Right?"

June 14, 2023 (2w ago)

We recently reported on the remarkable fact that former senior FBI official Steven D’Antuono voluntarily submitted himself before the judiciary committee and raised powerful objections to the Mar a Lago raid that serves as the basis of the sham indictment of President Trump. We reported that the most remarkable part of this story is not the objections themselves, but Steven D’Antuono’s identity — indeed, D’Antuono has long been a subject of Revolver News’ reporting as the man who oversaw the investigation into the infamous entrapment operation known as the Michigan Kidnapping plot and the equally bogus investigation into the so-called January 6 pipe bombs.

Finally, we said that we haven’t heard the last from Mr. D’Antuono. Now, we are in a position to reveal that Mar-a-Lago is not the only subject matter D’Antuono discussed with the committee, and that Revolver News’ Darren Beattie worked with Congressman Thomas Massie to produce questions concerning the pipe bomb investigation for D’Antuono to answer. A letter recently published by Jim Jordan alludes to some of the stunning results of this interrogation.

Here is the background from the Jim Jordan letter (emphasis ours):

On June 7, 2023, the Committee on the Judiciary conducted a transcribed interview of Steven D’Antuono, the former Assistant Director in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Washington Field Office (WFO). In that role, Mr. D’Antuono oversaw the WFO’s investigations into the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including the placement of pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) on January 5, 2021. Mr. D’Antuono’s testimony provided new information about the FBI’s investigation into the pipe bombs and reinforces our concerns about the FBI’s handling of the matter.

Anyone who has followed Revolver’s ground-breaking coverage of the pipe bomb investigation knows that the alleged pipe bomber depicted in the surveillance footage presented by the FBI is using a cell phone. It is by now common practice for law enforcement to use geo-fencing technology to find out the identity of a person if they know where the person was at a particular time. In fact, it is public knowledge that the FBI has used precisely this geo-fencing technology to identify a number of January 6 protestors.

EPIC:

According to journalist Marcy Wheeler, the FBI relied heavily on controversial geofence warrants as part of its investigations into January 6 suspects, identifying over 5,000 unique devices based on Google Location History. Geofence search warrants are meant to locate devices within a given area based on digital services like GPS, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi signals. According to a follow-up report by Wired, the filings suggest that these geofence warrants also captured phones that were in airplane mode or otherwise out of cell service. Further, it appears that individuals who attempted to delete their location data in the days after January 6 were of particular interest to the FBI.

In fact, the pipe bomb suspect would be a particularly easy geo-fencing target because the suspect was alone in a specific, known area at a specific, known time. See, for instance, the surveillance footage released by the FBI:

According to Jim Jordan’s letter, Congressman Thomas Massie asked D’Antuono whether they attempted to identify the pipe bomber via geofencing, and received the following shocking answer: the data was corrupted! The telecom company just by sheer coincidence happened to lose the data for that particular place and time!

Here’s D’Antuono’s answer when asked about geofencing (emphasis ours):

So the – there’s a lot of phone data that came in. Yes, I’ve seen the same video. I’ve watched the same video. We put out the same video. It looks like a phone. Was it a real phone, a not a real phone, was it a ruse? Was it a – you know, I picked up my phone several times at meetings going, oh, yeah, I got to take this call, and walk out, right. The phone’s not on, right. So was the person just sitting there trying to pretend like they’re on a bench taking a phone call? We don’t know until we find the person, right, and ask them those questions.

We did a complete geofence. We have complete data. Not complete, because there’s some data that was corrupted by one of the providers, not purposely by them, right. It just – unusual circumstance that we have corrupt data from one of the providers. I’m not sure – I can’t remember right now which one. But for that day, which is awful because we don’t have that information to search. So could it have been that provider? Yeah, with our luck, you know, with this investigation it probably was, right. So maybe if we did have that – that data wasn’t corrupted – and it wasn’t purposely corrupted. I don’t want any conspiracy theories, right. To my knowledge, it wasn’t corrupted, you know, but that could have been good information that we don’t have, right. So that is painful for us not to have that. So we looked at everything.

What a quote for the ages: the dog ate the geofencing data that just happened to be critical to identifying this mysterious pipe bomber. It’s an “unusual circumstance” and he “doesn’t want any conspiracy theories.” Right Mr. D’Antuono, right.

Mr. D’Antuono was also asked whether the pipe bombs had live explosives or whether they were decoys. Mr. D’Antuono acknowledged that despite reports that the bombs were viable, in his estimation they were not set to go-off as the kitchen timer attached to the devices could not have detonated them. In a critical concession, D’Antuono admitted that “the timer used on the pipe bomb could not have detonated the pipe bomb on January 6th, given the time already elapsed between placement and discovery.” This led D’Antuono to join speculation that perhaps the pipe bombs weren’t intended to go off, saying “maybe they weren’t supposed to go off. We don’t know.”

Massie’s line of questioning and D’Antuono’s concession here reflect critical conclusions presented in Revolver News’ bombshell analysis of the pipe bomb case. Indeed, we noted that the mechanical timer on the pipe bombs had a maximum timer of only one hour. That means that, given that the pipe bomber planted the bombs around 8 p.m. on the evening of the 5th, the latest the pipe bombs could have gone off would be between 9 and 10 p.m. on the 5th. Given the placement of the bombs, this would have been a complete dud, and it’s not clear why a pipe bomber would plant them so far in advance of January 6th if the idea was to cause chaos on January 6th.

The implausibility that the pipe bombs were intended to go off at all gave rise to an alternative theory espoused by former Capitol Police chief Steven Sound that the pipe bombs were intended to be a diversion and not to go off. This theory gains support from the remarkable timing of the pipe bomb’s discovery. According to reports, the pipe bomb found by the RNC was discovered at 12:40 p.m. with an indication that it had 20 minutes left on the dial — discovered to the exact minute as to give the precise impression it was set to go off at 1:00 p.m., which was when the certification proceeding was to begin in Congress. Furthermore, the person who discovered the RNC pipe bomb at 12:40 p.m. called in and reported it, leading Capitol Police to start responding around 12:50 p.m., just a couple minutes before the first and decisive assault on the west perimeter of the Capitol began. Given the perfect synchronization between the discovery of the pipe bomb and both the certification proceeding in Congress and the assault on the western perimeter of the Capitol, it makes sense that the pipe bomb may have been panted as a diversion to divert resources away from the attack on the Capitol that began at 12:53 p.m. (incidentally, the very attack orchestrated by Ray Epps).

There’s only one problem with this diversion thesis. In order for this thesis to make sense, the person who planted the bomb would have to count on the bomb sitting there undiscovered for 17 hours, only for it to be discovered by someone within a very narrow timeframe corresponding to the attack on the Capitol. According to the official story, however, the person who discovered the RNC bomb in a back alley by the Capitol Hill Club is just a random pedestrian. What a coincidence indeed that after the pipe bomb sat there for 17 hours, a random pedestrian just happened to discover the pipe bomb in an alley to the exact minute that would be required to serve this “diversionary” purpose. Recall the following from Revolver’s definitive report:

It appears that the only way the “diversion” theory makes sense is if the pipe bomber knew someone would specifically discover and report the devices to authorities shortly before 1 p.m.

And that’s where things start to get weird. As mentioned in the summary above, not only was the first pipe bomb discovered near the RNC building at 12:40, it was discovered with the mechanical timer actually stuck on the 20 minute dial, as confirmed in this Madison Magazine piece entitled, “A Madison woman found the RNC pipe bomb in D.C.”

Madison Magazine (emphasis ours):

At noon on Wednesday, Jan. 6, Karlin Younger, working from home in Washington, D.C., decided to use the lunch hour to do laundry.

Even though she’s now in D.C., Younger has still worked remotely since the pandemic. Her apartment is in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, just a couple of blocks from the Capitol itself.

To reach the laundry room, Younger must walk out the front of her building and walk around to the back via an alleyway that’s shared with the Republican National Committee building, which is located at 310 First St. Southeast.

“It’s an old city block with the buildings flush together,” Younger says. She started her laundry, returned to her apartment, and then around 12:40 p.m. went back out to put her clothes in the dryer.

Younger closed the back gate and as she did so, looked down at what she thought was a piece of garbage or recycling intended for the cans that sit near the gate.

Then she looked a little closer.

“It was right next to the garbage can,” she says. “I saw a tangle of wires. I looked closer and saw a six-inch pipe capped on both ends. Then I saw a timer that was stuck on the number 20. It was a radial dial.”

Younger peered closer. Was it 20 seconds ticking down?

“Thankfully, it was 20 minutes showing on the dial,” she says.

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Perhaps not to encourage any “conspiracy theories”, D’Antuono demures on saying whether he subscribes to the “diversion thesis” and, if he does, how one could account for the remarkable coincidence a random pedestrian discovering the RNC pipe bomb in such a time and in such a manner. According to Jordan’s letter, D’Antuono acknowledged that it would be “investigation 101” to interview the individuals who discovered the bombs, yet he was unable to confirm whether the FBI had taken this basic investigative step.” Remarkable indeed! D’Antuono is the face of the most high profile and serious of the January 6-related investigations, and he is unable to say for certain whether his people took the basic “investigation 101” step of interviewing the individuals who discovered the bombs. For that matter, he is unable to say whether Karlin Younger was ruled out as a suspect and if so, why.

As for the discovery of the DNC bombs, the story is even more bizarre. The bomb had been sitting conspicuously by a park bench outside of the DNC for 17 hours, and for 17 hours no one — not pedestrians, motorists, the security guard stationed 17 feet away or even the secret service — found the bomb. And yet, curiously, it happened to be found just moments after the RNC bomb was called in by Karlin Younger. Credible sources tell Revolver News there is video footage of the DNC bomb being found by a particular individual, but D’Antuono cannot even confirm whether that individual was even interviewed. 

You see folks, D’Antuono doesn’t want to encourage conspiracy theories.

To read the definitive treatment of the pipe bomb mechanical timer, read the classic Revolver News piece with all the dark details laid out: Jan 6 Pipe Bomber’s Mechanical Timer Detonates Fedsurrection Lie.

The Jordan letter concludes with a number of demands that follow directly from Revolver News’ ground breaking coverage on the pipe bomb investigation (emphasis ours):

Accordingly, we reiterate our outstanding request for a full briefing about the status of the pipe bomb investigation. In addition, to assist with our oversight of this matter, we request the following documents and information:

1. All FBI reports, analyses, or assessments conducted or prepared relating to the viability of the pipe bombs placed outside the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee on January 5, 2021;

2. The chain-of-custody logs for the video footage provided to the FBI from the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee, the Capitol Hill Club, or any surrounding residences;

3. All transcripts and memoranda, including but not limited to FD-302s and FD-1023s, of the FBI’s interviews with the individuals who discovered each of the pipe bombs, potential witnesses to the placement of the pipe bombs, or any other individuals with knowledge about the matter;

4. All documents and communications referring or relating to the FBI’s gathering of cell phone records relating to the placement of the pipe bombs; and

5. All documents and communications referring or relating to video and other material concerning the identification of the individual who discovered the pipe bomb outside the Democratic National Committee.

Note that Revolver News’ Darren Beattie has been calling for #2 in particular for a long time; that is, the full raw and unedited surveillance footage from the DNC depicting the pipe bomber. This is because Revolver News proved that the surveillance footage had been artificially degraded, producing an impossibly low frame rate that would make it impossible to identify key characteristics of the alleged pipe bomber depicted.

READ MORE: Did the FBI Tamper With the Frame Rate of the Jan 6 Pipe Bomb Footage?

We have Steven D’Antuono caught wide-eyed and scared, doing his best to cover his bases before the whole sordid plot unravels. In the wake of this incredible progress, the number one thing we have to do is exert public pressure to ensure that the FBI gives up to the Judiciary Committee the requested information.

It’s time to demand the answers that the American people deserve; no matter how dark, no matter how damning. Stay tuned. This thing is going to get a lot uglier.

Full Jim Jordan Letter Here:

Pipe Bomb Letter 6.14.23

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Source

https://www.revolver.news/2023/06/steven-d-antuono-former-head-of-fbi-jan-6-pipe-bomb-investigation-comes-clean-with-stunning-admission/