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Censorship Industrial Complex

Journalism against the globalist narrative is now considered ‘terrorism’ in the UK

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12 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Richard Medhurst, an ‘internationally accredited journalist’ is allegedly the first journalist to be arrested and held under section 12 of the United Kingdom’s Terrorism Act 2000.

An independent journalist in the United Kingdom has been arrested under terrorism laws upon his return to London.

Richard Medhurst, an “internationally accredited journalist” with strong views against Zionist actions in Israel, was arrested on Thursday, August 15, by six police officers in a move he described on his release as “political persecution.”

“I feel that this is a political persecution and hampers my ability to work as a journalist,” said Medhurst, in a statement released on X (formerly Twitter) on August 19. The reason supplied for his arrest was: “Expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization.”

Police refused to explain, Medhurst said, although he has been known, in reaction to ongoing IDF slaughtering of innocent Palestinians, to express support in his frequent commentaries for some of Hamas’ violent acts.

Stopped by police as he left the aircraft, Medhurst was taken into a room, searched, had his phone confiscated, and was not permitted to inform his family of his arrest. He spent almost 24 hours in detention in what he described as an attempt to intimidate him for the crime of – journalism.

Describing his journalism as a “public service” and a “counterweight to mainstream media,” Medhurst cited the many other cases of the British liberal-global state using the police to suppress criticism of its foreign and domestic policies.

“Those like myself who are speaking up and reporting on the situation in Palestine are being targeted,” he said.

U.K. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced the redefinition of “terrorism” to include “anti-establishment rhetoric,” “anti-LGBTQI+ sentiment,” “anti-abortion activism,” and any speech online or offline which it deems to be “extreme” – as a report from LifeSiteNews below shows.

The new definition of terrorism now includes regime-critical journalism.

“Many people have been detained in Britain because of their connection to journalism,” explained Medhurst, naming “Julian Assange, [former diplomat] Craig Murray, [GrayZone journalist] Kit Klarenberg, David Miranda, Vanessa Beeley,” who have all been imprisoned, harassed, and detained by U.K. police for their journalism.

Medhurst pointed out that he is the first journalist in the U.K. to be arrested and held under section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

Medhurst says U.K. terror laws are “out of control” and have “no place in a democracy,” as they are used to “muzzle” reporting on issues such as the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

He argues that “counter terrorism laws should be used to fight actual terrorism” – and not to have “journalists dragged off planes and treated like murderers.”

Medhurst’s argument is an embarrassment for a state which has created the conditions of terrorism abroad and at home, whilst seeming reluctant to stop “actual terrorists” themselves.

The Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 was carried out by a Libyan whose family had left Libya in 1994. He was radicalized alongside the British-backed war launched in 2011 to topple Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Salman Abedi was known to the authorities and they did nothing to stop him. He traveled with his father to fight with Islamist militants against the Libyan government forces the U.K. had helped to destroy. His brother Hashem traveled to Libya to join ISIS and helped to organize the bombing.

Schoolmates and a youth worker had warned authorities Abedi was openly announcing his intention to pursue violent jihad in Manchester. When he did so, he killed 22 men, women, and children, leaving hundreds more with life changing injuries.

In April of this year, over 250 injured survivors began suing MI5, the British state security service, for failing to act on this information and permitting the attack to take place.

In almost every case, violent terrorists are previously known to police and intelligence services in the U.K. In most cases, these terrorists seek to replicate the atrocities committed by Islamist militias who have entered the power vacuum created by U.K. government-backed wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya.

They are radicalized in our homelands by the violence the liberal-global state has unleashed abroad. Yet we are told, in every case, that online censorship must follow every preventable attack. This is absurd, as British writer Douglas Murray has pointed out:

It is this liberal-global state which has smashed nations abroad, driving mass migration into the West. Why do these attacks keep happening? Why does the state not prevent them when the attackers are almost always known to them beforehand?

Instead of preventing terrorism as is their duty, state authorities use anti-terror laws to prevent people like Medhurst – and Kit Klarenberg – from informing the public of the cause of this permanent state of emergency which has replaced our normal lives.

In May 2023 British journalist Kit Klarenberg was “detained and interrogated” by six plainclothes police on his return to the U.K.

Klarenberg was questioned on “his personal opinion on everything from the current British political leadership to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” as The Grayzone reported last May.

His interrogation was seen as “retaliation” by the British state for his “blockbuster reports exposing major British and US intelligence intrigues.” Klarenberg has documented the illegal process of the election of Boris Johnson as Conservative leader and exposed U.K. involvement in Ukrainian acts of sabotage such as the Kerch Bridge. He was accused, of course, of being a Russian agent during his detention.

Klarenberg, an “anti-establishment” independent reporter, saw his targeting as part of a wider campaign by British security services to shut down The Grayzone. Klarenberg’s reporting has disturbed what retired British diplomat Alastair Crooke has termed “the deep structure of the deep state”, showing how laws are used to protect the exercise of permanent policies untouched by elections and undertaken with complete disregard for public opinion.

As The Grayzone report said: “Among Klarenberg’s most consequential exposés was his June 2022 report unmasking British journalist Paul Mason as a U.K. security state collaborator hellbent on destroying The Grayzone and other media outlets, academics, and activists critical of NATO’s role in Ukraine.”

The Grayzone, whose mission statement is to provide “independent news and investigative journalism on empire,” was founded by Max Blumenthal. It was one of many “media outlets, academics, and activists critical of NATO’s role in Ukraine.”

Following the angry protests over the murder of three small girls by a man of Rwandan origin in Southport, “keyboard rioter” Wayne O’Rourke has been jailed for over three years on charges including “anti-establishment rhetoric.” The protests, fueled by decades of ongoing organized child rape gangs, terror bombings, and murders by immigrant populations, were described by one former police chief as “terrorism.” Others have been imprisoned for protesting in person under terrorism charges.

In the U.K., the broad sweep of “terrorism” laws now provide for the arrest, detention and imprisonment of anyone in open disagreement with the liberal-global ideology. If you oppose abortion, permanent war, genocide in Gaza, if you notice these policies have replaced peace with routine atrocities and a police state at home – you are a terrorist.

The liberal-globalist state which has exported terror abroad and imported it at home will do nothing to prevent it taking place, because this chaos is the result of three decades of the bid for worldwide dominance of the liberal-global empire. The liberal-globalist government is not going to save you from the problems it has caused.

The liberal-global state will never protect you from the consequences of its actions. Its actions will prevent you from talking about them. It will protect others from finding out the truth about its crimes, which are so enormous they do not even have a name.

Like the former dictator of Uganda Idi Amin, the liberal global state in Britain now says “there may be freedom of speech – but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.”

Medhurst was handcuffed tightly and locked in a “mobile cage” within a police vehicle, driven to the station and searched again.

After the confiscation of all his electronic equipment, he was “placed in solitary confinement in a cold cell that smelt like urine.”

Medhurst was informed he had the right to make a phone call and to know why he was being locked up. Both rights were “waived,” “given the nature of the offense,” as Medhurst says he was told by police. He was not permitted to make a phone call and the reason for his imprisonment was not explained.

“For many hours, no one knew where I was.” Medhurst spent almost 24 hours in captivity, waiting 15 hours to be interviewed – a delay he says was intended to “rattle him.” He says this failed.

He also strongly rejects the charge he is a “terrorist” – saying his work is dedicated to a diplomatic tradition of peace he inherited from his own family.

“Both my parents won Nobel Peace Prizes for their work as U.N. peacekeepers,” said Medhurst, before noting he has himself been a victim of terror.

“When I was at the international school in Islamabad, the Egyptian embassy adjacent to my school was blown up in a double bombing.”

“I categorically and unequivocally condemn terrorism,” said Medhurst.

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Brownstone Institute

They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. TuckerDebbie Lerman  

For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.

It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.

Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.

Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.

As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.

The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.

In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.

It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.

What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.

We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”  All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.

To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”

When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.

Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years,  Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.

Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.

Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.

Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.

This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.

Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.

Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.

No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.

All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.

One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.

As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.

The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.

Authors

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Australian local council calls for ‘immediate suspension’ of mRNA COVID vaccines

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From LifeSiteNews

By David James

The Port Hedland council cited a report by molecular virologist Dr. David Speicher that ‘evidences excessive synthetic DNA contamination in Pfizer and Moderna vaccine vials used for both adults and children.’

Councillors in Port Hedland, in Western Australia’s north-west, have called for the “immediate suspension” of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, challenging federal and state government policy.

The council cited a report by molecular virologist Dr. David Speicher that “evidences excessive synthetic DNA contamination in Pfizer and Moderna vaccine vials used for both adults and children.” A council statement said testing revealed DNA contamination levels between “7 to 145 times higher than Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) limit”.

In addition, the council claimed that Pfizer vials contain elements not initially disclosed to regulators. “The report raises serious concerns about potential long-term health impacts such as genomic integration, exponential cancer risks, and adverse outcomes due to synthetic DNA contamination.”

The research is just one of many investigations pointing to serious issues with the mRNA vaccines. For example, an analysis by David E Allen, honorary professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Mathematics and Statistics, found that all-cause mortality is up in Australia where vaccination rates are high, and that at least two thirds in the variation per region is explained by mass COVID-19 vaccination.

Troubling results are being replicated around the world. To cite one instance of many, researchers in Japan are warning that Covid mRNA shots are now “affecting every possible aspect of human pathology.” They have linked the Covid mRNA injections to increases in 201 types of diseases.

Rather than responding to the council’s concerns and investigating its claims dispassionately the Western Australian premier, Roger Cook, chose the bullying option. He told the Port Hedland council to “stick to its knitting,” whatever that means. He argued the council “should stay focused on the services and people of that community” adding that “it’s another example of that council lacking the focus on the issues which matter to their constituents … making sure they look after the people, not get distracted by these silly ideological debates.”

It was a ridiculous response, reported uncritically by the government funded media outlet the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Why is expressing concern about a health danger “ideological”? If anyone is being ideological, it is Cook. And surely such a potential danger would be “of concern” to the local community?

The ABC article was an example of the aggressive suppression of non-compliant views by Australia’s political and media elite. Neutral, disinterested reporting now seems all but abandoned in the mainstream media, replaced by commentary from journalists with no expertise.

Cook’s attack on vaccine dissenters has become a routine feature of public discourse. State and federal governments are stridently trying to divert attention away from what they did.

But the Port Hedland Council move is significant because it comes from the local level. When the upper levels of government are compromised, and the executive branch of government is out of control, the best hope of reviving some sort of democracy and focus on the interests of ordinary people may be at the municipal level. It is why anti-lockdown and pro-freedom activist Monica Smit is directing her interest towards council elections.

There is little doubt that there is a growing awareness in the Australian public that something is very wrong not only with the vaccines, but also the government’s response to dissent. Even powerful proponents of the vaccines are starting to feel unease, especially about the federal government’s proposed misinformation bill, a blatant attempt to impose censorship. Dr. Nick Coatsworth, a television doctor, senior health official and one of the most public figures in Australia’s Covid response, has warned against the ‘weaponization’ of misinformation to silence debate.

Australia’s local councils are the nation’s oldest layer of government. They are not mentioned in the Australian constitution because they were formed before it was written. As Australia’s political and government institutions deteriorate, the Port Hedland council is perhaps showing a way that some semblance of democracy might be restored.

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