Volume 80, no. 9 September 2024
In a startling development in electoral politics, prominent Democrats are endorsing Donald Trump: Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The key issue for them is the threat to freedom of speech from censorship and lawfare.
Meanwhile, the “conservative” U.S. Supreme Court has declined to rule on the merits on possibly the most important civil liberties case in history, Murthy v. Missouri (see p3).
In the 1964 case of Jacobellis v. Ohio, which concerned the showing of a film The Lovers, the Court held that the First Amendment protected everything except “hard-core pornography.” The Court did not then define “obscenity”; Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote, “I know it when I see it” (tinyurl.com/ykf96ct5).
The three-part obscenity test was established by Chief Justice Warren Burger in the 1973 case of Miller v. California: prurient interest, patently offensive, and SLAPS (lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value) prongs (tinyurl.com/5x5ksz4n).
In the 1960s, censors were concerned about Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips. Today, the internet, the airwaves, and public streets are saturated with what Justice Stewart would surely have considered pornography. Even school libraries offer books that contain material too offensive to be read aloud at a school-board meeting. Perhaps it all passes the SLAPS prong because of the political value of promoting tolerance for the LGBTQ+ agenda.
The focus has now shifted to “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” which “fact-checkers” and “disinformation experts” know when they see it. This includes once sacrosanct political speech, key unchallengeable dogmas such as on COVID and “climate change,” or allegations about election fraud. The remedy is not just to remove the offending item but to cancel and de-platform the speaker.
Prison
Short of assassination, which is also used, the most effective tool for silencing opposition is arresting and imprisoning its leaders. In foreign affairs, this is a CIA tool of statecraft, states Mike Benz in an interview with Tucker Carlson (https://tinyurl.com/497rejdb). Academic journals such as the Journal of Democracy, the official publication of the National Endowment for Democracy, have articles on how to get U.S.-approved regimes to arrest opposition leaders—politicians, judges, journalists—after a government has been overthrown. This is called “transitional justice,” for “stabilizing democracy.” It proved so effective that it was mobilized against Trump. Articles of impeachment were drafted even before he took office, Benz said.
Telegram founder and owner Pavel Durov has been arrested in France, accused of complicity in crimes such as child pornography and drug trafficking. Telegram has 900 million users around the world. Durov states that he is defending free speech by offering secure, encrypted connections.
It “feels like a pivot point,” Carlson said, and found it hard to believe that Macron could have made the arrest without the encouragement or at least agreement of the Biden Administration.
Benz says that “Telegram is the main artery of the CIA for cultivating political resistance movements.” Free speech is a tool used to enable CIA-supported regime change, but a threat when it can lead to outcomes like Brexit or the election of Donald Trump. “Free speech is a casualty of a proxy war of the blob [foreign policy establishment] against populism” (ibid.).
To protect the guilty, evidence can be made to disappear. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter claims that when the FBI raided his home recently, they took “the truth” (https://tinyurl.com/2d5rryka)—his files containing the only copies of the “receipts” regarding Iraqi weapons inspections. The warrant was only for electronic devices, but a truckload of documents was also seized (https://tinyurl.com/bdfyaf8f).
Public-Private Partnership
The U.S. is not like Russia or China. Instead of top-down government censorship, there is a Whole of Society framework that astroturfs an apparently bottom-up organic censorship industry that the government simply funds, directs, and pressures. The government is just the quarterback of the censorship ecosystem.
Like Marxism, censorship changes language. Its lexicon totally removes the human element, so that the operatives don’t really feel as if they are censoring people—just cyber threat actors. Democracy has been reframed to mean the consensus of institutions rather than the voice of the people (ibid.).
Social media giant Facebook is totally dependent on the U.S. State Department and intelligence services to protect its data monopolies and advertising revenue and to protect it from laws like the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. Mark Zuckerberg now admits to succumbing to censorship demands related to Hunter Biden’s laptop and COVID.
RFK, Jr., told Carlson that 37 hours after Harris and Biden were installed in the White House, they opened an illegal portal between social media giants and the FBI, CIA, CDC, et al., and threatened them with loss of §230 immunity if they did not comply (https://tinyurl.com/tnnknkuk).
Artificial Intelligence (AI) censors through the work of thousands of “lie engineers” at Google and other developers(tinyurl.com/yf62ah4y), concealing truth on COVID, climate, gender, and other controversies. Is this the future of medicine?
The French Great Reset
Justice Stewart would have surely found the opening of the Paris Olympics (tinyurl.com/3m59xzv9), to be obscene.
A deeper meaning was homage to dark aspects of the French Revolution, including a song by Marie Antoinette, holding her severed head. The mascot, the Phyrge, was a cartoon of the red Phrygian cap, familiar to French schoolchildren as an emblem of the Revolution. Long a symbol of freedom, it lost popularity in America because of its connection with the Reign of Terror, radicalism, and political factionalism (tinyurl.com/59s6ypan). It was the symbol of the Jacobins, who sought to destroy the higher levels of society, especially aristocracy and religion. Christianity was banned in France for years and replaced by the cult of Reason (tinyurl.com/bdf2fek7, tinyurl.com/2y4wk24m).
Some see more horrors in the ambiguous occult symbolism woven into the spectacle (tinyurl.com/2s4fsjc4). The Phrygian hat was worn by the goddess Cybele of the convoluted ancient Greco-Roman cult that involves myths of Hermaphrodite, incestuous relationships, and self-castrated priests. One of its rituals, the Taurobolium, included the decapitation of a bull. Interestingly, the head of a bull was prominently displayed next to the Olympic symbol during the opening ceremony.
The Revolution reset the calendar to Year Zero. The term “reset” got a new, very sinister meaning after it was introduced in 2020 by the World Economic Forum. In France, it led to the streets of Paris running red with the blood of aristocrats, priests, and anyone who opposed the Revolutionary masters—but most victims were ordinary citizens who had been denounced to the tribunal for acts such as hoarding, desertion, or rebellion.
Order was restored by Napoleon. His “forever” wars killed from 3.25–6.6 million people. Napoleon was defeated by Russia, then ultimately at Waterloo. French president Macron is a prominent member of the WEF. Casualties from its proposed Global Reset could number billions. So, maybe the opening ceremony was not just an obscenity but a dreadful warning.
Flashback: Leftist Goals
In 1998, David Horowitz wrote in Radical Son: A Generational Oddysey: “The more I thought about the moral posturing of the Left, the more I saw that its genius lay not in reforms but in framing indictments. Resentment and retribution were the radical passions. In the Eighteenth Brumaire [of Louis Bonaparte] Marx had invoked a dictum of Goethe’s devil: ‘Everything that exists deserves to perish.’ It was the progressive credo. To the Left, neither honored traditions nor present institutions reflected human nature or desire; the past was only a dead weight to be removed from their path. When the Left called for ‘liberation,’ what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again in the year zero of creation. Marxism was indeed a form of idolatry, as Berdyaev had written, and the Creator/Destroyer that the Left worshipped was itself.”
“There is freedom of speech but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” Idi Amin
“We will continue to be your single source of truth…. Remember, unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.” Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand
Establishment Keeps Control of Hospital
AAPS treasurer Tamzin Rosenwasser, M.D., ran a valiant campaign for a seat on the Sarasota Memorial Hospital Board, in Sarasota County, Florida, along with Stephen Guffanti, M.D.
Big money poured more than $250,000 into the campaign to defeat them, and reportedly more than 7,000 Democrats switched to the GOP in this primary. Tamzin and Stephen were outspent by 10-to-1, but finished strong enough to run again, if needed.
While coercing patients to take dangerous but lucrative drugs like remdesivir, Sarasota Memorial denied patients the option to receive safer, less expensive repurposed treatments including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. It did not try to answer why 577 patients died of COVID.
“The business of the board is the business of the hospital, and not the practice of medicine,” said establishment candidate Kevin Cooper (https://tinyurl.com/m9vypa7h).
Evading the Point
On issues such as transgenderism, some purported opponents use the same trick that G.K. Chesterton described for journalists in The Flying Inn: “dismissing the important part of a question as if it could wait, and appearing to get to business on the unimportant part of it. Thus, he would say, ‘Whatever we may think of the rights and wrongs of the vivisection of pauper children, we shall all agree that it should only be done, in any event, by fully qualified practitioners.’”
GARM Censorship Cartel Disbands
The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), facing House Judiciary testimony and lawsuits from X (formerly Twitter) and Rumble, announced that it was disbanding. GARM, which counted almost all advertising companies as members, who had to pledge not to place ads alongside “harmful content” such as “misinformation” was bullying platforms into censoring more content. The “riskiest sites” are conservative, and the “least risky” are left-leaning (tinyurl.com/2e259nyv). GARM was facilitating an advertising boycott of all media that does not bend the knee to Globalist/WEF/European Union-approved narratives, writes Robert Malone, M.D. (https://tinyurl.com/r64c7b6x).
Linda Yaccarino, X CEO, stated that “no small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized. This is an important acknowledgement and a necessary step in the right direction. I am hopeful that it means ecosystem- wide reform is coming.”
AAPS Calendar
Sep 18-21. 81st Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX. https://aapsonline.org/2024am
ACTION OF THE MONTH
A free non-partisan voter-registration flyer with a QR code to help smartphone users check their registration status or register can be downloaded at: https://aaps.pub/usavotes. It can be distributed in your office, churches, farmers’ markets, school or athletic events, fairs, and outside grocery stores or post offices.
SCOTUS Dismisses Censorship Case
The case of Murthy v. Missouri, originally Missouri v. Biden, asked the question of whether the government may pressure social media companies to suppress speech in a way that would be illegal for the government to do itself. The AAPS amicus brief (tinyurl.com/bdh3uuka) countered arguments by the AMA et al. that criticism of vaccines should be added to the narrow category of “unprotected speech,” and that censorship should be allowed to fight a “grave threat to public health” (AAPS News, March 2024). AAPS wrote that “the proper antidote to alleged false information is a stronger right to free speech.”
In the 6:3 majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote: “We begin—and end—with standing.” She ruled that “The plaintiffs fail, by and large, to link their past social-media restrictions and the defendants’ communications with the platforms.” Thus, the Court did not reach the merits of the case.
Dissenting, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years,” and “we are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents…. The court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think” (https://tinyurl.com/yc7a682h).
Plaintiff Aaron Kheriaty, M.D., states, “The crime itself made the [Court-demanded] evidence disappear” (tinyurl.com/uue3e4he).
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said, “Missouri is not done,” but will seek further discovery.
Too late to affect the case, Mark Zuckerberg confessed that during the pandemic, Facebook allowed the government to control the information it was permissible for U.S. citizens to receive. He also expressed “regret” about demoting the true Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election. According to Jeffrey Tucker, effectively silencing criticism of the COVID response affected thousands of U.S. elections at all levels in 2020 and 2022. It may have gotten Tim Walz elected governor of Minnesota. By banning advertising by his opponent Scott Jensen, M.D., who made COVID an issue, Facebook reduced his reach by 90% (https://tinyurl.com/yjttcvmt).
Murthy concerned “the global shutdown of all opposition to radical, egregious, unworkable, and deeply damaging policies,” Tucker writes. “This was an earth-shattering decision that goes way beyond managerial cowardice. It goes beyond even election manipulation. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who acquiesced to power exactly at the time it mattered the most” (ibid.).
As the world races toward peak authoritarianism, the U.S. is teaching other governments how it is done, writes Jeff Childers (https://tinyurl.com/2en9kxea).
While disappointing, the Murthy decision is instructive, writes David McGarry. Congress also needs to act to protect free speech, by restricting officials’ action and by robust disclosure requirements. And the American people need to look to themselves. They have ratified congressional atrophy and impotence, and too many of them support the platforms’ chosen course.
“A republic cannot live by judges or by parchment barriers alone. It requires a citizenry dedicated to keeping it” (https://tinyurl.com/yckh3rxp).
Publishers Sue Florida over Book Removals
Several large publishers have sued over Florida state law HB 1069 (tinyurl.com/mrx2e5ms), which requires schools to remove a book if a single parent or county resident complains that it depicts sexual conduct. Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Authors Guild, a plaintiff in the suit, said the law could have “a chilling effect on what authors write about” (tinyurl.com/525ber25). It does not require considering the value of the book as a whole, or its literary, scientific, or political value.
Transgender Litigation
Ruling en banc, the 11th Circuit held that Houston County, Georgia’s, health insurance policy was not discriminatory in declining to cover “gender-affirming” surgery for a transgender person. “Coverage depends on the treatment requested, not the person requesting it.” AAPS filed an amicus brief opposing this insurance mandate (https://tinyurl.com/3hzeu5ed).
Ohio Judge Michael Holbrook upheld the constitutionality of H.B. 68 (https://tinyurl.com/3ccsbs7x), protecting minors from mutilating surgery (AAPS News, May 2024).
‘Transgender Care’ Providers Face Risks
Now that 26 states have restrictions on “transgender health care” for minors, clinicians in other states report long waiting lists for out-of-state patients evading bans.
It is now a felony in six states—Alabama, Idaho, Florida, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Carolina—to prescribe puberty blockers or hormone therapy to transgender youths. In 20 states there are civil and professional penalties, such as empowering parents to sue or subjecting providers to discipline from the medical board. Those sanctions are paired with an “aiding and abetting” clause in eight states, preventing doctors from even referring families elsewhere for treatment. “Shield laws” in 16 states prohibit information-sharing with prosecutors in states with bans and block the extradition of medical professionals. Many feel that these protections are tenuous (tinyurl.com/3krfjuvw).
Death threats have been reported, attributed to people with political agendas, such as “conservative pundits” (https://tinyurl.com/dh7cuyt8). Not yet considered, apparently, is a scenario like in Kurt Schlichter’s novel Inferno of groups of patients (“the Mutilated”), enraged at having been sterilized or maimed, seeking brutal justice against those who performed or enabled it.
We are not aware as yet of delicensure or decertification, as has been used to punish doctors who prescribed or advocated repurposed drugs to treat COVID (tinyurl.com/32sx7tmb).
Tip of the Month: In the 15% of hospitals that are government-owned, physicians have additional due-process protections against being fired, if employed, or having their privileges unjustly revoked. Be careful not to resign when ambushed by unfair allegations, because that would waive your rights. There is strength in a rebuttal at a government-owned hospital that objects to an administrator’s interference with patient care or to a waste of taxpayer dollars. Publicly elected officials might be sent copies of communications by a physician who is fending off unjust accusations at a government-owned hospital, after consulting with an attorney.
Correspondence
AMA ‘Partners.’ A slick advertising campaign (https://tinyurl.com/45yz2jw3) highlights how AMA partners with health system leadership to “tailor solutions” for supporting physicians, best practices, coaching, and measuring burnout. Scrolling through the list of systems (tinyurl.com/36c58d4n), I recognize some as participants in sham peer review.
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY
Massive Money Laundering. A 1977 law eliminated the requirement for congressional approval of settlements of more than $100,000 dollars entered into by the government on civil suits. Then in 2009 Kamala Harris’s brother- in-law, Tony West, got the reins of the DOJ civil division and started arranging much larger settlements, which are used to fund favored non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—and law firms, as attorneys’ fees need not be disclosed. The Justice Dept. has a permanent blank check out of the Judgment Fund. Run by the Treasury Dept., the Fund’s secrecy is so complete that our often-penetrated CIA might study it for lessons. Once West arrived, settlements became the vehicle for paying off political allies. This “Honest Graft” machine pours taxpayer billions into left-wing activist groups (https://tinyurl.com/yc89pzau).
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
Safety First! Cult Paradoxes. The Cult has infiltrated all institutions of power, and uses this access to induce rulers to use violence—which it knows is unsafe—to ensure the public engages in or avoids behaviors deemed safe or unsafe. Any threat that might cause a departure from optimal health must be neutralized or avoided. But what if ill health occurs? Ardent Cult members will have themselves killed, with the participation of Death Experts. The Cult is strong in Canada, where euthanasia is the fifth leading cause of death. It may seem odd, at first, that Cultists not only seek out a painless existence, but they also seek to prevent other life, as through abortions and vasectomies. Here’s the solution to the paradox: Cultists are not operating irrationally —they know that the ultimate Safety First! condition is one in which no possible danger exists, i.e., when there is no life.
William Briggs, Ph.D., https://tinyurl.com/449h9v7k
Zersetzung. This East German Stasi tactic of decomposition and disruption was used to neutralize individuals or groups suspected of being “pre-crime” threats to the state. The objective was to “disintegrate” the target’s personal circumstances—career, family relationships, community standing. Methods included anonymous letters, compromising (often altered) photographs, and planting chaos agents. Sound familiar?
Robert Malone, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/99pz4ay5
Post-Democratic Era. It is not clear who is in charge of the U.S. government, but we have the 3-month express-check-in Kamala Harris campaign. In France, President Macron dissolved the National Assembly, called a snap election, lost, and remains in charge. Unprecedented in the Fifth Republic, it has been called a coup. In the UK, current prime minister Keir Starmer did win an election, unlike his two predecessors. But while having a two-thirds majority in the House of Commons, his party has the support of only 20% of eligible voters. Starmer is creating revolutionary conditions, and protesting mass migration will result in a call to Stormtroopers and an appearance before a politicized judiciary that does the PM’s bidding.
Mark Steyn, https://tinyurl.com/52zjbsz8
Fooling Congress. The NIH is a rogue agency, as shown by an investigative post by journalist Paul Thacker (https://tinyurl.com/2y5esm33). Buried on p 189 of a tranche of emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request is a letter from the NIH’s congressional liaison explaining to her superiors how to avoid answering questions: “We are going to draft a response to the letter that doesn’t actually answer the questions in the letter but rather presents a narrative of what happened at a high level…. The Committee may come back for other documents but I’m hoping to run out the clock.”
Peter A. McCullough, M.D., Dallas, TX
Physics v. Immunology. Physics is the original hard science, yet physicists admit that they have almost no idea how 95% of the universe—dark energy and dark matter—works. Immunology is much more complex than physics, and involves an almost infinite number of poorly understood variables. But I’ve never seen the field of immunology admit error or learn from its mistakes. The immunology that is forced upon us today in the form of endless vaccine campaigns is based on ideas from 1796.
Toby Rogers, https://tinyurl.com/mwt9j76s
France’s Sordid Spectacle. Maybe historians will look back and see the opening ceremony of the Olympics as the closing ceremony of the West. Theodore Dalrymple writes that “cultural decay can hardly go further.” The artistic director, Thomas Jolly, surprised by the criticism, said “We must all celebrate this diversity [emphasis added]” (https://tinyurl.com/2v43er9h).
Craig Cantoni, Tucson, AZ
