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At-large Iranian man charged in plot to assassinate Trump

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From The Center Square

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The U.S. Justice Department on Friday filed criminal charges against an Iranian citizen allegedly assigned to build a team to attempt to assassinate then presidential candidate and now President-elect Donald Trump, as well as others.

Farhad Shakeri, 51, of Iran, remains at large and is believed to be in Tehran.

“There are few actors in the world that pose as grave a threat to the national security of the United States as does Iran,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement. “The Justice Department has charged an asset of the Iranian regime who was tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran’s assassination plots against its targets, including President-elect Donald Trump.”

Also charged were Carlisle Rivera, 49, of Brooklyn, New York; and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, of Staten Island, New York. Rivera and Loadholt, who are in custody, are charged in connection to an attempt to murder a U.S. citizen of Iranian origin in New York, the Justice Department says.

“We have also charged and arrested two individuals who we allege were recruited as part of that network to silence and kill, on U.S. soil, an American journalist who has been a prominent critic of the regime,” Garland said. “We will not stand for the Iranian regime’s attempts to endanger the American people and America’s national security.”

According to the criminal complaint, Shakeri was ordered by an unnamed member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to build a team to plot to kill Trump.

“The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen attempts to target U.S. citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement. “The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – a designated foreign terrorist organization – has been conspiring with criminals and hitmen to target and gun down Americans on U.S. soil and that simply won’t be tolerated.”

​Dan McCaleb is the executive editor of The Center Square. He welcomes your comments. Contact Dan at [email protected].

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RFK Jr. tells Tucker how Big Pharma uses ‘perverse incentives’ to get vaccines approved

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From LifeSiteNews

By Matt Lamb

Kennedy defended his decision to fire all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which he decried as a tool used to “rubber stamp” vaccines.

The vaccine approval process is a “bundle of perverse incentives” since pharmaceutical companies stand to make billions of dollars in revenue from it, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Tucker Carlson recently.

Kennedy appeared on Carlson’s show yesterday to discuss a variety of issues, including the potential link between autism and vaccines and his overhauling of the vaccine advisory committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month.

Kennedy began by explaining that Big Pharma has been targeting academic journals to ensure its products receive favorable reviews.

“The journals won’t publish anything critical of vaccines … there’s so much pressure on them. They’re funded by pharmaceutical companies, and they’ll lose advertising and revenue from reprints,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy then noted that Big Pharma will “pay to get something published in these journals,” before accusing industry leaders of pushing drugs on doctors and of hiring “mercenary scientists” to manipulate data until their product is deemed safe and effective.

The entire complex is broken due to the “perverse incentives,” he lamented.

Later in the interview, Kennedy defended his decision to fire all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) in June, which he decried as a mere tool to “rubber stamp” vaccines.

This sort of “agency capture” explains the lucrative nature of vaccines, he added.

Kennedy then summarized the “perverse” process as follows:

First of all, the federal government often times actually designs the vaccine, [the National Institutes of Health] would design it, would hand it over to the pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company then runs it … first through [the] FDA, then through [the] ACIP, and gets it recommended.

If you can get that recommendation you now got a billion dollars in — at least — revenues by the end of the year, every year, forever. So, there was a gold rush to add new vaccines to the schedule and ACIP never turned away a single vaccine … that came to them they recommended, and a lot of these vaccines are for diseases that are not even casually contagious.

Kennedy further pointed to the Hepatitis B shot for newborns as an example of how the industry has been corrupted.

In 1999, the CDC “looked at children who had received the hepatitis vaccine within the first 30 days of life and compared those children to children who had received the vaccine later — or not at all. And they found an 1,135% elevated risk of autism among the vaccinated children. It shocked them. They kept the study secret and manipulated it through five different iterations to try to bury the link,” he said.

“We want to protect public health,” Kennedy explained, but “these vaccines … can cause chronic disease, chronic injuries that last a lifetime.”

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Global media alliance colluded with foreign nations to crush free speech in America: House report

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From LifeSiteNews

By Dan Frieth

The now-defunct ad coalition GARM shared insider data and urged boycotts of Twitter to punish non-compliance with its ‘harmful content’ standards, a US House Judiciary report shows.

A new report from the U.S. House Judiciary Committee has shed light on what it describes as an alarming collaboration between powerful corporations and foreign governments aimed at suppressing lawful American speech.

The investigation focuses on the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an initiative founded in 2019 by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which the committee accuses of acting as a censorship cartel.

According to the report, GARM, whose members control about 90 percent of global advertising spending, exploited its market dominance to pressure platforms like Twitter (now X) into compliance with its restrictive content policies.

A copy of the report can be found HERE.

The committee highlighted how GARM sought to “effectively reduce the availability and monetization” of content it deemed harmful, regardless of public demand for free expression.

Documents obtained by the committee reveal direct coordination between GARM and foreign regulators, including the European Commission and Australia’s eSafety commissioner.

In one exchange, a European bureaucrat encouraged advertisers to leverage their influence to “push Twitter to deliver on GARM asks.”

Similarly, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant praised GARM’s “significant collective power in helping to hold the platforms to account” and sought updates to “take into account in our engagement and regulatory decisions.”

Partial email from Julie Inman Grant to Rob Rakowitz dated November 9, 2022, expressing interest in GARM's collective power to hold platforms accountable and emphasizing the importance of brand and platform safety, with email addresses partially redacted.

Robert Rakowitz, GARM’s co-founder and initiative lead, expressed a chilling goal in private correspondence, stating that silencing President Donald Trump was his “main thing” and likening the president’s speech to a “contagion” he aimed to contain “to protect infection overall.”

Email from Rob Rakowitz dated Tuesday, November 1, 2022, discussing plans approved by the Steer Team to influence Twitter and Elon Musk regarding advertising standards, mentioning collaboration with WPP and outlining transparency and remediation plans for advertisers; includes blacked-out and redacted email addresses and ends with his title as Initiative Lead at the Global Alliance for Responsible Media and mentions WFA locations in Brussels, London, New York, and Singapore.

The report outlines how GARM distributed previously unavailable non-public information about Twitter’s adherence to its standards, fully aware this would prompt advertisers to boycott the platform if it failed to conform. According to the House report, Rakowitz admitted that this information sharing was designed to encourage members not to advertise on Twitter.

He went as far as to draft statements urging GARM members to halt advertising on the platform, telling colleagues he had gone “as close as possible” to saying Twitter “is unsafe, cease and desist.”

Despite the widespread impact of GARM’s actions, including what the committee describes as coerced “concessions” from platforms, internal polling circulated within GARM showed that “66 percent of American consumers valued free expression over protection from harmful content.”

Still, GARM pressed ahead with efforts to “eliminate all categories of harmful content in the fastest possible timing,” ignoring consumer preferences.

Even after GARM dissolved in 2024 amid legal challenges, similar efforts persisted.

A new coalition led by Dentsu and The 614 Group briefly attempted to revive GARM’s mission before disbanding under scrutiny. Gerry D’Angelo, a former GARM leader, reflected on the initiative’s overreach, stating, “Did we go too far in those first rounds of exclusionary restrictions? I would say yes.”

The Judiciary Committee warns that despite GARM’s downfall, the threat of collusion to stifle free expression remains.

It pledged to continue oversight to defend “the fundamental principles” of the Constitution and ensure that markets, not coordinated censorship efforts, shape the flow of information in the digital age.

Reprinted with permission from Reclaim The Net.

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