By John & Nisha Whitehead, 10/8/24

John Whitehead is a constitutional lawyer and author. He is the founder and former president of The Rutherford Institute. Nisha Whitehead is the executive director of The Rutherford Institute.

“What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”—Hannah Arendt

In a perfect example of the Nanny State mindset at work, Hillary Clinton insists that the powers-that-be need “total control” in order to make the internet a safer place for users and protect us harm.

Clinton is not alone in her distaste for unregulated, free speech online. A bipartisan chorus that includes both presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has long clamored to weaken or do away with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially acts as a bulwark against online censorship. It’s a complicated legal issue that involves debates over immunity, liability, net neutrality and whether or not internet sites are publishers with editorial responsibility for the content posted to their sites, but really, it comes down to the tug-of-war over where censorship (corporate and government) begins and free speech ends. 

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes for Reason, “What both the right and left attacks on the provision share is a willingness to use whatever excuses resonate—saving children, stopping bias, preventing terrorism, misogyny, and religious intolerance—to ensure more centralized control of online speech. They may couch these in partisan terms that play well with their respective bases, but their aim is essentially the same.” In other words, the government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.

The internet may well be the final frontier where free speech still flourishes, especially for politically incorrect speech and disinformation, which test the limits of our so-called egalitarian commitment to the First Amendment’s broad-minded principles. 

On the internet, falsehoods and lies abound, misdirection and misinformation dominate, and conspiracy theories go viral. This is to be expected, and the response should be more speech, not less. As Justice Brandeis wrote nearly a century ago: “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Yet to the government, these forms of “disinformation” rank right up there with terrorism, drugs, violence, and disease: societal evils so threatening that “we the people” should be willing to relinquish a little of our freedoms for the sake of national security. 

Of course, it never works out that way. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns only to become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. Indeed, in the face of the government’s own authoritarian power-grabs, coverups, and conspiracies, a relatively unfettered internet may be our sole hope of speaking truth to power. The right to criticize the government and speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom. You see, disinformation isn’t the problem. Government coverups and censorship are the problem. Unfortunately, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. Every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable. Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police. Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats. 

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat. This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list. Thus, no matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. 

The next phase of the government’s war on anti-government speech and so-called thought crimes could well be mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions. Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list. This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are already being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others. In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.” 

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.” 

As the Associated Press reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit. Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union. 

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state. The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.” This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates. 

Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens. The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State. 

The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors. In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” 

Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how you subdue a populace. The ensuing silence in the face of government-sponsored tyranny, terror, brutality and injustice is deafening.

Russia Matters, 10/15/24

1. “There is talk behind closed doors” in Western capitals of a deal in which “Moscow retains de facto control over… one-fifth of Ukraine it has occupied—though Russia’s sovereignty is not recognized—while the rest of the country is allowed to join NATO or given equivalent security guarantees,” according to FT editors. “Under that umbrella, it could rebuild and integrate with the EU, akin to West Germany in the Cold War,” they write. Some of these discussions are echoed in Kyiv, according to Der Spiegel. “For the first time since the Russian invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainian capital is seriously discussing scenarios in which the country foregoes the complete reconquest of its occupied territories, almost 20% of Ukrainian territory, for the time being,” this German outlet reports. According to Robert Kagan of Brookings, however, a stable peaceful resolution of the conflict is unlikely because Putin will assume that the West will keep arming Ukraine even if a deal is reached. “Unless something dramatic changes, this is a war that, like most wars, will be won or lost on the battlefield… Americans need to decide soon whether they are prepared to let Ukraine lose,” Kagan writes in WP.
2. Requests for more weapons and security guarantees by the West, which Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to refer to when briefing the Rada leadership on his victory plan on Oct. 16, have so far received a tepid response by the Biden administration, according to WSJ. In their comments on the plan, U.S. officials have pointed out that it repackages some of Ukraine’s earlier requests for arms and noted that members of NATO are divided about whether to offer Ukraine a formal invitation to join, WSJ reported. Ukrainians are increasingly exhausted by the war, and polls show an incremental increase in the number of Ukrainians prepared for negotiations, according to this U.S. newspaper.
3. The fall of Pokrovsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region would leave the Ukrainian military without a key logistics hub for operations in eastern Ukraine, and it could serve as Russia’s gateway to conquering the rest of that region, according to Keith Johnson of FP. Moreover, “Pokrovsk’s fall could have an even more insidious impact on Ukraine’s ability to keep fighting: The city is the source of most of the coal used for the country’s steel and iron industry” which is the second-largest sector of the Ukrainian economy, according to Johnson. Without Pokrovsk’s mine, “the country’s remaining steel industry will be crippled,” according to The Economist.
4. “Russian forces proved more flexible and effective in the conduct of defensive operations in 2023 through a combination of maneuver and positional defense,” according to Michael Kofman of CEIP. Despite these adaptations, however, the Russian army’s assaults on Ukraine’s prepared defenses led to grinding battles. “The net effect was incremental Russian gains at high cost, as Russian forces proved unable to attain operationally significant breakthroughs when possessing quantitative advantages in manpower, materiel and munition,” according to Kofman. However, “[w]hat was true in 2023 may not hold for 2024, and beyond,” this leading expert on the Russian military finds in his CEIP piece, “Assessing Russian Military Adaptation in 2023.” Looking beyond 2023, Kofman finds Ukraine’s fall 2024 incursion into Russia’s Kursk region to be a success on the tactical level, but not “that successful” on the operational level “because if the primary goal was to shift significant Russian forces from their advances” in eastern Ukraine, “this did not take place,” Kofman told NYMag.
5. Since the first Western restrictions on Russian oil exports were introduced in 2022, Moscow has assembled a fleet of more than 400 tankers that are currently moving some 4 million barrels of oil a day beyond the reach of sanctions, according to FT’s investigation. Presently nearly 70% of the Kremlin’s oil is being transported on these shadow tankers, according to a separate investigation conducted by the Kyiv School of Economics Institute and reported by NYT. Russia has invested about $10 billion in developing its fleet of such shadow tankers. Commenting on the FT investigation, Harvard professor and RM principal investigator Graham Allison wrote on his X account: “For those who still imagine that Western sanctions are strangling Russia’s economy, the FT’s Big Read… masterfully illuminates how Russia is out-playing the US at the cat and mouse game of economic sanctions.”*
6. Without dedicated reintegration programs in Western countries for fighters returning from Ukraine, the risk of radicalization and violence appears “rather high,” according to Jean-François Ratelle of the University of Ottawa in his PONARS commentary. Western governments may think that most such fighters will not pose a security threat, but that view seems “short-sighted… because it… puts the focus on ideology rather than the broader context of the war and postwar experience,” Ratelle warns.

By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 10/4/24

Uriel Araujo, PhD, anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts

Finland and Estonia, two NATO countries, have recently signed an agreement about Baltic Sea security. Moreover, and more importantly, they have announced their intention to blockade the Gulf of Finland by closing it to Russian shipping. The Russian Foreign Ministry reacted by stating that Russia would regard any such action as a violation of maritime law. Establishing their boundaries (pertaining to the Gulf of Finland’s contiguous zones) would be within their sovereign rights, of course. However, restricting maritime shipping the way they intend to do cannot be described as anything else than a violation of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – with potential serious consequences.

The Gulf of Finland extends to Saint Petersburg in Russia to the east. Its southern coast contains a network of ports plus the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant. The port of Primorsk at the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland is important for oil products, for example – there are several others. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the gulf for Russia. For one thing the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline began in Finnish waters.

With that said, as  Pavel Klachkov (Russian political scientist and a Financial University director) remarks, NATO’s military presence is increasing in the Baltic region, which is such a strategic area for Russia as well. In April, for instance, NATO joint military exercises commenced in Lithuania. Finland’s accession to the Alliance, he argues,  gave “new momentum to the northern direction, where conditions are being created for a potential conflict between NATO and Russia.” The Atlantic Alliance has also begun setting up a headquarters in Mikkeli, a Finnish city, which lies very close to the Russian border.

 He adds: “Since Finland joined the North Atlantic Alliance, it has quickly integrated into its operational structure and actively participates in exercises. These maneuvers are not merely a show of force — they are a rehearsal for possible military conflict scenarios with Russia. NATO’s active operations in the Kola Peninsula and the Gulf of Finland, both in close proximity to Russia’s borders, are particularly notable.”

Moreover, NATO exercises have been rehearsing the blockade of key routes for Russia – both the Suwalki Gap and the Gulf of Finland are crucial for supplying Russia’s northwestern regions. This is the larger context behind the recent Finnish-Estonian announcement.

After the 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid, Biden famously said that Russian President Vladimir Putin was looking for the “Finlandization of Europe”, but would instead get the “NATOization” of that continent. With the accession of Sweden and Finland, the Atlantic Alliance’s territorial reach has extended as far out as the Russian eastward Arctic flank, thereby making Russia the only non-NATO country in the Arctic. Many Western journalists and commentators would be quick to dismiss the aforementioned Russian political scientist’s analysis about NATO enlargement as “Russian propaganda”. However, going back in time a bit, in December 2019, Mark Cancian (a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies) wrote that “it’s time to stop NATO expansion. He commented back then on the American support for North Macedonia’s membership in the NATO alliance, and wrote that “a larger NATO embroils the United States in obscure regional disputes, commits it to defend exposed countries, and unnecessarily antagonizes the Russians.” Voices like that of Cancian or – to name a more famous Western political scientist – that of John Mearsheimer have largely been ignored by American policy-makers. This is unfortunate.

In November 2020 I wrote that, under Joe Biden’s presidency, Washington would pursue the policy of countering and encircling Russia, bringing changes not only in US relations to Ukraine and Eastern Europe, but to the entirety of Europe. At the time, tensions were rising in most – if not all – countries neighboring Russia. For one thing, in September 2020 NATO troops took part in provocative military exercises in Estonia near the Russian border.

Earlier that same year Washington sent no less than 20,000 troops to Europe to take part in the NATO exercise “Defender Europe 20”, It involved 18 countries across 10 European nations, including Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Georgia (all of which share a border with the Russian Federation). It was described as the “largest military exercises on the continent since before the end of the Cold War.” From 2020 onwards things intensified considerably – with vast consequences for the continent and the whole world.

Considering all of this, it is really quite impossible to disregard Russian concerns and complaints about NATO expansion (or about Ukraine’s relations with the Alliance, for that mere) as nonsense or mere rhetoric. From a Russian perspective, those are of course valid concerns pertaining to its national security and vital interests. The Atlantic Alliance appetite for growth since at least 1999, with its breach of the 1990 promise, has in fact been one of the main causes of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine since 2014. One could arguably reason that Moscow’s main goals (culminating in the 2022 campaign) have been basically a response to that.

Ukraine is of course a focal point for tensions due to many reasons, historically. NATO-Russian tensions however extend way beyond the Ukrainian question. There is indeed a lot of room for escalating such frictions in the Northern flank of the Alliance. And the US-led West seems to be bent on doing precisely that – which once again makes the world a less secure place.

Source: InfoBrics

YouTube link here.

Let’s hope that YouTube channels like Dialogue Works and the Duran, among others, do not get deleted by YouTube. In recent weeks, Glenn Diesen, Mark Sleboda and Rachel Blevins have all had their channels permanently taken down, citing a vague accusation of hate speech as the excuse. – Natylie

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 10/14/24

The Ukrainian government is considering options to end the war with Russia that would involve ceding territory, Der Spiegel reported on Sunday, citing a Ukrainian official.

The report said it was the first time since Russia’s invasion in February 2022 that the Ukrainian leadership has considered a deal that wouldn’t involve it getting back all of the territory Russian forces have captured since February 2022.

Under a peace deal that was on the table in March and April 2022, Russia would have withdrawn its forces back to pre-invasion lines. But that deal was discouraged by the US and other NATO countries, who urged the Ukrainians to fight.

Over the past two years, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been pushing a “peace formula” that calls for a full Russian withdrawal from Ukraine before peace talks can even happen, which is a non-starter for negotiations with Moscow.

“We believed that victory had to mean the unconditional surrender of Putin’s Russia,” the Ukrainian source told Der Spiegel. The official acknowledged that was not a realistic view, saying, “A deal must also be beneficial for Russia.”

The report comes as Russian forces continue to make gains in eastern Ukraine, which have become more rapid in recent months. Ukrainian forces still hold a small chunk of Russia’s Kursk Oblast, but Russian troops are slowly pushing them back.

The Ukrainian official said that Kyiv believes the US will slowly wind down its support for Ukraine whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November. Trump is running on ending the war while Harris is vowing to continue supporting Kyiv.

“Whether it’s Trump or Harris, the Americans will slowly but surely withdraw,” the official said. “The prognosis is poor.”