Former Conservative MP Leona Alleslev

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Ex-Conservative MP Leona Alleslev said she was told by Chinese Canadians that they were afraid to vote for her because they knew foreign operatives were working at polling stations.

Documents from a federal inquiry looking at meddling in Canada’s past two elections by foreign state actors show that agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) allegedly worked as Elections Canada poll workers in the 2021 campaign.

According to the documents, former Conservative MP Leona Alleslev noted in a sworn affidavit that she was told by Chinese Canadians they knew foreign operatives were working at polling stations.

“Around half the Chinese Canadian constituents she canvassed would tell Ms. Alleslev they were afraid to vote for her because they feared repercussions against themselves or their family members both in Canada and in China,” said Alleslev’s as per her affidavit, which was filed with the Commission on Foreign Interference.

According to the affidavit, as reported by Blacklock’s Reporter, some people claimed that they took the threat “seriously because there were agents of the Chinese Communist Party working in the local Elections Canada office and in the polling stations or monitoring outside of the significantly reduced number of polling stations to watch who voted.”

Despite this, Alleslev did not let Elections Canada or the Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections know about these concerns while on her campaign due to “her experience with Elections Canada’s lack of clear process, unresponsiveness and inaction on other matters.”

Besides Alleslev, who lost the 2021 election to Liberal MP Leah Taylor Roy, other MPs have accused Elections Canada of not being responsive when it came to such complaints. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals won the 2021 election by a narrow margin.

The Foreign Interference Commission was convened to “examine and assess the interference by China, Russia, and other foreign states or non-state actors, including any potential impacts, to confirm the integrity of, and any impacts on, the 43rd and 44th general elections (2019 and 2021 elections) at the national and electoral district levels.”

The commission is headed by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, who had earlier said she and her lawyers will remain “impartial” and will not be influenced by politics. In January, Hogue said that she would  “uncover the truth whatever it may be.”

Thus far, the Commission has revealed that there were 13 electoral ridings with suspicious activity. The Commission is currently on break and will resume regular hearings in September.

As for Trudeau, he has praised China for its “basic dictatorship” and has labeled the authoritarian nation as his favorite country other than his own.

To date, Trudeau has been coy and has never explicitly stated whether he was ever told by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) that CCP agents’ actions were in breach of the nation’s Elections Act.

A few months ago, the head of Canada’s intelligence agency testified under oath that he gave Trudeau multiple warnings that agents of the CCP were going after Conservative MPs, yet the prime minister has denied receiving these warnings.

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jayanta Bhattacharya  

In a 6 to 3 ruling on the Murthy v. Missouri case, the Supreme Court ruled against me and my fellow co-plaintiffs, in effect rendering the US First Amendment a dead letter in the social media age. At stake in the case was the status of a preliminary injunction issued by lower federal courts ordering the Biden Administration to stop coercing social media companies to censor and shadowban people and ideas that the government does not like.

On July 4^th of last year, federal Judge Terry Doughty issued the preliminary injunction under consideration in our case, ruling that – given the evidentiary record already considered – we are likely to win on the merits of the case we brought before the court. He described the Biden Administration’s censorship campaign as “Orwellian,” violating the First Amendment root and branch.

The facts of the case are simple to understand, voluminously documented, and shocking, and they explain why the lower courts – including a unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals – issued the preliminary injunction to stop the Biden Administration from censoring in the first place. The injunction that reached the Supreme Court was narrowly constructed, specifically exempting national security-related communications between the government and social media companies, as well as communications regarding criminal activity on social media platforms such as child porn. The government was still permitted to tell social media companies about such speech.

The evidence revealed in the discovery of our case showed that employees of a dozen federal government agencies and the Biden White House directly pressured social media companies to censor viewpoints contrary to the official narratives they had pushed on the American people. Emails from the White House to Facebook show government officials threatening to use regulatory power to harm social media companies that did not comply with censorship demands.

Depositions of high–ranking career staff and political employees and unearthed emails between the government and social media companies like Facebook and Twitter/X revealed the government’s tactics to suppress speech. The Surgeon General’s office, the FBI, the CDC, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House were all closely involved.

Government agencies funded universities and NGOs to support enterprises with Orwellian names like “Virality Project” and “Center for Countering Digital Hate” to create a target list for the Administration’s censorship efforts. With government backing, these entities – linked sometimes to prominent universities like Stanford and the University of Washington – work with corporate teams in social media companies’ “trust and safety” divisions to censor offending speech.

The problem is that the government and these entities are bad at identifying misinformation, and they have a predilection for censoring people and ideas that are critical of government policy, whether those criticisms are true or false.

For instance, according to court documents found during discovery, the Biden administration insisted on censoring and deboosting content that accurately pointed out the rapidly waning efficacy of the Covid vaccine against infections, which they used to justify executive orders imposing vaccine mandates.

The Biden White House pressured Facebook to censor vaccine discussions, such as groups of vaccine-injured patients, that did not violate Facebook’s community standards. In response to harsh communications from Biden Covid advisor Andy Slavitt in 2021, Facebook limited the reach of these groups and censored them.

Ironically, even the White House itself was caught by its censorship demands. At the Biden administration’s behest, Facebook implemented algorithms to suppress posts their computers deemed “anti-vax.” In April 2021, when the CDC issued a “pause” on the distribution of the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine because it had identified an elevated level of strokes in women, the Facebook algorithms tagged the White House account as an anti-vax account. The Administration angrily ordered Facebook to stop censoring its speech.

The censorship campaign harmed the health of Americans by preventing accurate speech by me and others from reaching the attention of the American people. Children were kept out of schools for years, churches, mosques, and synagogues were closed, businesses shuttered, and unvaccinated people lost their jobs and faced social discrimination because of misinformation put forward by the government. Had the government permitted a fair debate on the science of Covid, they would have lost on the merits. The continuing crisis of high excess mortality and many other harms caused by blinkered Covid policies might have been avoided.

The Supreme Court’s reasoning in denying the preliminary injunction against the Biden Administration is that the plaintiffs in the case, which included the states of Missouri and Louisiana, me, and several other targets of government censorship, have not established “standing” to sue the government on First Amendment grounds. The ruling, in effect, requires a chain of emails from a particular government bureaucrat to a social media company demanding that a social media company censor speech.

Since this censorship activity takes place in the dark recesses of government bureaucracies, outside of the capacity of regular citizens to observe, it sets a standard that is impossible to meet absent extraordinary circumstances. In my and my colleague Martin Kulldorff’s case, at least, the Supreme Court ignored evidence we uncovered of a high government official, Francis Collins (the former head of the National Institute on Health), directing Tony Fauci to conduct a “devastating takedown” of our ideas on how to better manage the pandemic (in brief, implementing focused protection of vulnerable elderly people and not closing schools or imposing harmful lockdowns).

The ruling also ignores the nature of the government censorship activities, which focuses more on censoring ideas and narrative themes than on censoring particular people. The government, directly and through its university and NGO proxies, coerces social media companies to implement automated algorithms to suppress and shadowban ideas that the government does not like, whether true or not. By requiring such a standard for “standing” in First Amendment cases, the Supreme Court has effectively greenlit sophisticated government censorship operations that moot the First Amendment.

The case now goes back down to the lower courts for more discovery and probing of the government censorship operation. While I anticipate we will win there, the case may come back up to the Supreme Court in due course. More importantly, though, our loss in the Supreme Court points to the need for Congress and voters to act to protect American free speech rights now that it is clear that the Supreme Court will not do so.

Congress should pass a law prohibiting the executive branch and associated federal bureaucracies from censoring Americans via direct and indirect pressure on social media, and it should cut funding to university and NGO operations that the government uses to launder its social censorship schemes. Voters should demand of every candidate for office, including the presidency, where they stand on the modern censorship operation and vote accordingly.

In a sense, by exposing and publicizing the government’s censorship operation, which cannot survive in the sunlight, we have already won despite the disappointing result in the Supreme Court.

Republished from the author’s Substack