From the Brownstone Institute

Mere words cannot restrain our aspiring censors from weaponizing their power to silence dissent. Enemies of the First Amendment vow to “hammer it out of existence,” as John Kerry explained this week, and they are prepared to circumvent legal protections to achieve their aims at all costs.

Kerry, speaking on a panel on climate change at the World Economic Forum, lamented what he regards as insufficient censorship of “disinformation” and called on his allies to “win the ground, win the right to govern” in order to be “free be able to implement change” despite the “major block” of the First Amendment.

But a survey of the dismal state of free speech in the United States shows that Kerry and his allies have already developed means to sidestep the “major block” of our founding documents. Hillary Clinton herself has floated the idea of criminal penalties for the spreading of “misinformation.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has similarly called for “reining in the media environment” so that people cannot just “spew information.”

Earlier this year, journalist Mark Steyn was forced to pay $1 million in “punitive damages” for mocking a climate scientist and comparing him to convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.

The prevailing attorney urged the jury to inflict the punishment to demonstrate the ramifications for engaging in “climate denialism,” which he compared to President Trump’s “election denialism.”

In New York, State Attorney General Letitia James has demonstrated the threat that change poses to our foundational freedoms. During her 2018 campaign for office, James proudly broadcasted her antipathy to the First Amendment, pledging to weaponize the justice system against a range of political enemies from President Donald Trump to the National Rifle Association.

Her intolerance for dissent led her to target VDare, Peter Brimelow’s immigration-restrictionist website. Unable to find a crime, James used her office to drown the organization in legal costs until it was forced to cease operations. Despite having never advocated for violence or committed libel, Brimelow and his group were guilty of dissent in a jurisdiction that elected a zealot.

Steve Bannon, Julian Assange, Douglass Mackey, Roger Ver, and Pavel Durov have undergone similarly brazen persecutions that debunk the supposed safety of free speech protections in the West.

Our Constitution cannot survive Soviet-style justice of “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” Brimelow, Assange, and Durov were targeted for their dissent, and the regime reverse-engineered means to punish them.

A similar process occurs in academia. Last week, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it would sanction law professor Amy Wax, a critic of affirmative action, by suspending her for a year and docking her pay. Penn insisted that the sanctions did not implicate freedom of speech and instead concerned “professionalism” standards for its faculty.

But Wax’s sanctions are explicitly based on 26 incidents of wrongthink, including criticizing “anti-assimilation ideas,” “rap culture,” and cities being “run like third world countries” as well as commenting on differences between the sexes and racial groups.

As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression explains, “Penn’s willingness to sidestep academic freedom protections to punish Wax sets a troubling precedent. If scholars with controversial views can lose their academic freedom merely for unspecified ‘unprofessionalism’ concerns, all faculty who hold minority, dissenting, or simply unpopular views are at risk.”

Americans more broadly face the same risk. Neither the First Amendment nor abstract free speech principles will stop the censors in their crusade. They will sidestep legal protections of our freedoms under the guise of ostensibly innocuous sloganeering.

Germany is already showing the way, with a guilty verdict for CJ Hopkins, an American living there who objected to Covid controls. With the documents already in place for “the future of the Internet,” the existing administration has a stated aim to close the Internet to free speech and install censors at all levels. This will necessarily run headlong into a confrontation with Elon Musk, but it will eventually hit Rumble and every other alternative source of information.

The target is the First Amendment but with a precise purpose: securing regime control over the whole population, with a public culture wholly controlled in the interests of protecting the administrative state against populist resistance. Those are the stakes.

Let there be no mistake about this. Your freedom to know the truth is what is at issue.

Author

Brownstone Institute

Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

The WHO’s Fides network consists of some 800 creators and was launched in 2020 with the purpose of “mobilizing health content creators to counter misinformation and elevate evidence-based content.”

TikTok and the World Health Organization (WHO) are entering a one-year partnership to train influencers and promote regime-approved content concerning public health on the social media platform.

TikTok put out a press release on the partnership last Thursday, saying that it was a way for the social media company “to create reliable content and combat misinformation.”

Today, we’re partnering with the World Health Organization (WHO) to create reliable content and combat misinformation through the Fides network, a diverse community of trusted healthcare professionals and content creators. — TikTok press release, September 2024

Working with the WHO’s Fides network, TikTok will provide training on how to best disseminate WHO propaganda.

“Through our collaboration with WHO, we will be engaging Fides creators to translate complex scientific research into relatable and digestible video content, expanding across various health topics.

READ: Democrat senators urge several Big Tech companies to censor election ‘misinformation’

“To further equip creators, we will be working closely with WHO to provide access to creator training programs and resources,” the TikTok press release reads.

The WHO’s Fides network consists of some 800 creators and was launched in 2020 with the purpose of “mobilizing health content creators to counter misinformation and elevate evidence-based content.”

Today, Fides boasts reaching 150 million users across various platforms.

Another part of the WHO-TikTok partnership is to suppress any information that doesn’t align with the unelected globalist health body.

People are increasingly being targeted with misinformation and malinformation on these digital channels. The new collaboration between WHO and TikTok is to help addressing these challenges by promoting evidence-based content and encourage positive health dialogues. — World Health Organization (WHO) press release, September 2024

WHO and @TikTokComms announce a year-long collaboration aimed at providing people with reliable, science-based information on health and well-being.

In an increasingly digitized world, harnessing the power of digital platforms is vital to reach people globally, promote health… pic.twitter.com/1ZnhteTVJA

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) September 26, 2024

This is where WHO can step in to support influencers in delivering evidence-based information, ensuring that health conversations on platforms like TikTok are both impactful and informed. — Dr. Alain Labrique, WHO Director of Digital Health and Innovation, September 2024

The WHO also put out a press release on the partnership, explaining how certain influencers would be chosen and targeted to be propagandists for the regime:

“The collaboration will expand efforts around a number of relevant health topics, translating science-based information into relatable and digestible video content, with more support for influencers provided through TikTok’s creator training programs.”

According to the WHO, the goal of the partnership is to leverage “multiple digital communication platforms to increase outreach to people globally, to promote health literacy, healthy behaviors and actions in an increasingly digitized world.”

This isn’t the first time a UN organization has partnered with big tech to deliver its messaging.

We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do. — UN Communications Director Melissa Fleming, World Economic Forum Sustainable Development Impact Meetings, September 2022

During the pandemic, the UN deployed 'influencers who were much more trusted than the UN' on health messaging while working with TikTok to give UN-trained doctors 'verified ticks': UN Comms Chief to WEF, Sept 2022 pic.twitter.com/zCQ2GjUD8c

— Tim Hinchliffe (@TimHinchliffe) August 17, 2023

In September 2022, UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming told a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on disinformation that the UN had partnered with TikTok on a project called “Team Halo” to boost COVID messaging coming from medical and scientific communities.

“Another really key strategy we had was to deploy influencers,” she said, adding, “influencers who were really keen, who have huge followings, but really keen to help carry messages that were going to serve their communities, and they were much more trusted than the United Nations telling them something from New York City headquarters.”

“We had another trusted messenger project, which was called ‘Team Halo’ where we trained scientists around the world and some doctors on TikTok, and we had TikTok working with us,” she added.

In the same panel, Fleming declared, “We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do” while bragging about how the UN partnered with Google to manipulate search results, so that only UN-approved messaging would appear at the top.

With this partnership, TikTok continues its role as a propaganda arm of the United Nations, of which the WHO is a part.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.