Former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf laid out a case for impeaching his successor to The Washington Times, saying Alejandro Mayorkas violated his duty to carry out the laws Congress wrote by exempting whole categories of illegal immigrants from the threat of enforcement action.
Asked to grade Mr. Mayorkas, who took over for Mr. Wolf in the change from the Trump to Biden administrations, he didn’t hesitate.
“Oh, it’s an ‘F’,’” Mr. Wolf said on the latest edition of The Times’ “Politically Unstable” podcast. “I don’t know how you look at any of the metrics out there and say it’s a passing grade.”
The Supreme Court’s latest momentous term delivered major victories for religious freedom.
The ability to freely exercise one’s religious beliefs is one of the most essential rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution by our Founding Fathers. It distinguishes America as a free nation. Yet many governmental institutions — from schools to cities and states — have curtailed this constitutionally-protected right by misrepresenting the First Amendment.
The rulings in three cases this term, Carson v. Makin, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, and Shurtleff v. Boston, corrected decades of misinterpretation and applied the First Amendment as originally intended. Predictably, some progressive legal scholars referred to the rulings as “hypocrisy” and “regressive decision-making” spurred by the “religious right.” But such hyperbolic characterizations minimize the problems that pervaded religious liberty jurisprudence. The decisions in these cases are indeed consequential, but only as a remedy proportionate to the issues they resolved.
The First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Otherwise known as the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, these words were meant to protect the expression of faith but have, ironically, been used as a basis for religious discrimination.
This paradox was clearly evident in Carson v. Makin. In this case, the justices evaluated Maine’s Town Tuitioning Program, which provided state aid to students living in towns without public schools. The program supported education at secular schools only; faith-based institutions and their students were prohibited from receiving funding. This unmistakably biased policy adversely affected specific groups of students and needlessly deprived them of a values-aligned education. While the state attempted to distinguish between discrimination based on religious status and identity, both prevent students from freely exercising their faith. Discriminating against schools with religious instruction is simply discrimination against religion.
It was not surprising that the justices agreed with this view since they reached a similar judgment in analogous cases. Referring back to Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer and Espinoza v. Montana, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, plainly indicated that the “Free Exercise Clause forbids discrimination on the basis of religious status.” Roberts concluded that “there is nothing neutral about Maine’s program. The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion.”
But this wasn’t the only triumph for religious liberty this term. In Shurtleff v. Boston, the justices unanimously decided that the City of Boston’s refusal to fly Camp Constitution’s “Christian flag” was a violation of the First Amendment. Boston denied the request because it believed flying a religious flag at City Hall could violate the Establishment Clause, a claim that the justices rejected. In his concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that although the city got the Establishment Clause “so wrong … some of the blame belongs here and traces back to Lemon v. Kurtzman” since “[it]sought to devise a one-size-fits-all test.” The “Lemon test” was a judge-created standard used to determine if a law or government activity constituted entanglement with religion. This standard persisted for decades, even though it failed to provide a reliable metric by which judges could evaluate Establishment Clause cases.
A month after the ruling in Shurtleff, the court retired the Lemon test in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. This case was centered around Joseph Kennedy, a football coach who regularly prayed in the middle of the field after games. The district claimed that a “reasonable observer” could misconstrue his actions as the school sponsoring religion and subsequently put him on paid leave and allowed his contract to expire.
Like the other cases, the justices were not persuaded, recognizing that the school’s actions betrayed an erroneous understanding of the First Amendment. Echoing his sentiments in Shurtleff, Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion that the court “long ago abandoned Lemon” and that, in its place, judges would now interpret the Establishment Clause with “reference to historical practices and understandings.” This means that courts are no longer encumbered by the Lemon test, a significant stumbling block that prevented courts from adjudicating Establishment Clause cases fairly and consistently under the law.
The government ought not to show preference for any faith, but it should also not disadvantage individuals based on religious identity. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened: The government warped the First Amendment so severely that it turned what was intended to be the protection of a fundamental right into a license to discriminate. To that end, this trio of rulings, far from “regressive decision-making,” promoted equality by liberating the First Amendment’s religious liberty protections. This is good for everyone.
Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Donald Trump, Kash Patel, laid bare the FBI’s invasive and unnecessary raid of the former president at Mar-a-Lago on August 8. Kash Patel appeared on “Life, Liberty & Levin” on Sunday night and exposed the “fake news mafia” for its fictional narrative.
“People say, look, he issued orders, a lot of orders, declassifying information before he left office. Do you know anything about this?” Levin asked.
“As a former Deputy Director of National Intelligence, I know how this system works,” Patel responded. “The president is the sole and universal arbiter and classification authority in the United States of America. If he says a document is declassified, or a set of them, that is it, there is no written material required. That is a fiction being created by the fake news and the radical left.”
“In October of 2020, President Trump put out for the world to see a sweeping declassification order and he did it via social media,” Patel points out. “Every single Russiagate doc, every single Hillarygate doc, every one, those are his words. That is the precedent that the president of the United States is allowed to operate under. And then in December and January, on the way out, I witnessed him declassify whole sets of documents. So it is not incumbent upon President Trump and his lawyers and he as a target of this investigation to show that he did, in fact, declassify them. It’s up to the government who has the burden of proof, who are trying to deprive a man of his liberty, to show that no such order was, in fact, given.”
“They know they can’t. So what happens?” he continued. “The fake news mafia comes in and says, ‘Oh, but there was no protocols followed.’ Mark, you know, when they’re arguing protocols and procedure, it is because they lost the factual argument and the truth. And now they are trying to hide behind this magistrate judge who is going to supposedly play this game of redactions. We saw it in Russiagate. When I was the Deputy DNI, we lifted all those redactions from the Russiagate docs and what did we see, Mark? Corruption, FBI and DoJ corruption and breaking of the law. That is the same game they are going to play here and the fake news media is going to attempt to applaud them for their farce in terms of their transparency. We cannot allow them to do that. The President declassified documents, the government has failed to show that that did not occur, protocol do not apply to the president of United States when he is declassifying documents.”
“And let me underscore that point,” Levin added. “The Constitution of the United States, the first sentence, Article Two, Section One, the President is the executive branch. That’s why everybody agrees he can declassify and classify as much as he wants, and he can do it right out the door. The Espionage Act in this sense simply does not apply to a former president. It does not apply to the president of the United States. It was passed in originally in 1917, it was pushed by Woodrow Wilson to use against his enemies, people who opposed World War I, it was never ever intended to apply to a president. Let me ask you this, Kash Patel. Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton — Bill Clinton, Vice President Gore, Vice President Biden, Vice President Cheney, do we know if any of them secreted any documents, took any documents with them to their homes, classified or otherwise? Do we know?”
“I know for a fact that President Biden has classified access at one of his homes, so those such documents exist there, and they should as for former president the of the United States and that law and that rule should apply equally, but the Government Services Administration is responsible for packaging and parceling those documents,” Patel said. “And you bring up a great point. They were the ones who moved the documents to Mar-a-Lago. They’re the ones who now admitted they mistakenly moved boxes. It’s not like President Trump — even if they get past the declassification part, or a ruse, I should say, it’s not like President Trump put them in a backpack and moved them down there and said, ‘Nothing to see here, I want to illegally distribute these documents.’ The law should be applied, there should not be a two-tiered system of justice. Clinton, Obama, Bush and Trump as former presidents must be treated equally when it comes to classified information.”
“I think it’s very interesting that not a single former president or vice president have opened their mouths, because I suspect they have taken documents with them, whatever it’s in violation, quote/unquote, of one law or another,” Levin noted. “This entire event was completely unnecessary and it’s just more of an effort to try to trap and drag down Donald Trump.”
Staffed by NATO military officers and former government ministers and notorious for training the West’s top spies, the Department of War Studies at King’s College London is also providing the workforce for many of the largest social media companies. This includes Facebook, TikTok, Google, and Twitter.
A MintPress study of professional databases and employment websites reveals a wide network of War Studies alumni holding many of the most influential jobs in media, constituting a silent army of individuals who influence what the world sees (and does not see) in its social media feeds.
SPY SCHOOL
Set in an imposing building near the banks of the River Thames in Central London, the Department of War Studies is at the heart of the British establishment. Current staff includes the former Secretary General of NATO, former U.K.Minister of Defense, and a host of military officers from NATO and NATO-aligned countries.
It is also a favored training ground for the secret services. A 2009 report published by the CIA described how beneficial it is to “use universities as a means of intelligence training,” writing that “exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system,” also mentioning that the department’s faculty have “extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience.”
In 2013, then-Secretary of Defense and former CIA Director Leon Panetta gave a speech at the department. “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience,” he said, adding that expansion into tech, surveillance, and cyberwarfare was of critical importance.
Last year, MintPressinvestigated the department’s intelligence links more deeply.
Moreover, the university has freely admitted to having entered into a number of secret funding agreements with the U.K. Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defense. However, it has refused to elaborate on these contracts, tellinginvestigative news outlet Declassified U.K. that doing so could undermine national security.
While the Department of War Studies plays a key role in producing the West’s intelligence operatives, it also trains many of the world’s top journalists, as well as social media managers, whose task it is to protect us from the misinformation put out by the others. As such, it is a central part of the new high-tech information war being waged between Russia and the West, in which the national security state is increasingly taking control over the means of communication under the guise of protecting us from the Kremlin.
FACEBOOK
At any one time, the department educates around 1,000 students, many of whom have gone on to become top military commanders, intelligence chiefs, and government officials, both in the West and in countries as disparate as Jordan, Nigeria, and Singapore. But increasingly, large numbers of War Studies graduates are finding employment in the most influential media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Silicon Valley.
Chief amongst the social media companies where War Studies graduates hold considerable sway is Facebook (now rebranded as Meta). For example, while working at senior levels in the U.K. government, Mark Smith pursued a Master’s at the department, completing it in 2009. Between 2007 and 2017, he worked for the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Office, and the National Security Secretariat. According to his own LinkedIn profile, he was deployed overseas three times as a political advisor to top NATO military commanders and was a key figure in strategizing responses to ISIS and other terrorist groups, as well as working on the Ministry of Defense’s response to the Scottish independence question.
In 2017, Smith moved straight from the government to Meta, where he is now the Global Director of Global Content Management, giving him considerable power to dictate what is allowed and what is censored from the world’s biggest news and media platform.
Facebook’s Global Director of Strategic Response is also a former War Studies student. After graduating, Caitlin Bakerworked on Middle Eastern counterterrorism policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in Washington and as Director for Jordan and Lebanon at the National Security Council at the White House. Between 2015 and 2017, she was also VP Joe Biden’s Middle East Policy Advisor. During this time period, the administration rapidly expanded its drone program, coming to bomb seven countries simultaneously.
In October 2017, Baker moved seamlessly from the Defense Secretary’s office to work for Facebook’s strategic response team, rising to become a global director. The strategic response team decides how Facebook will react to global events like elections, wars and coups, determining what content will be permissible and which views will be banned or suppressed.
There are many more War Studies graduates in influential roles at Facebook, including:
While this is certainly not to say that all those mentioned are government plants, or even that they are anything but model employees, this connection does come at a time when Facebook has rapidly begun intertwining itself with the national security state. In 2018, the company announced that, in a bid to combat fake news, it was partnering with NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council, in a deal that gave the latter significant influence on the platform’s content. Today, Facebook’s head of intelligence is NATO’s former press officer. And a MintPress study published last month detailed how the company has hired dozens of former CIA officials, many of whom now hold the most politically sensitive positions in the company and are in charge of deciding what billions of users see daily.
TIKTOK
War Studies alumni also hold or held several influential positions on the video platform TikTok. These include Haniyyah Rahman-Shepherd, an intelligence analyst who works on threat detection and identifying hate speech, extremism, and mis- and disinformation; Michelle Caley, content strategy leader; Manish Gohil, a former risk analyst for TikTok; Alexandra Dinca, investigations lead; Jeanne Sun, safety program manager; and Tom Dudley, head of physical security.
Scott O’Brien, meanwhile, worked for both Facebook and TikTok, first as an intelligence analyst for Facebook, where he specialized in “human rights investigations” in “at-risk countries,” according to his LinkedIn. He is now an influence operations intelligence and discovery analyst at TikTok. Before that, he worked for the infamousintelligence agency, Pinkerton.
In recent times, TikTok has been the recipient of significant amounts of government attention. From the Trump administration’s threats to ban the platform altogether to the news that President Biden was briefing TikTok stars on how they should cover the war in Ukraine, the U.S. government, it appears, performed a 180-degree turn on the app. This occurred at the same time as the company began employing large numbers of state functionaries in key positions, including individuals from NATO, the White House, and the CIA. A MintPress investigation detailing all this described it as a “NATO to TikTok pipeline.”
TWITTER AND GOOGLE
Twitter has comparatively fewer War Studies alumni. But some are in important positions. For instance, Global Program Manager Sean Ryan describes his role as “lead[ing] a global program team that drives a holistic understanding of Twitter’s dynamic risk and threat landscape while working across the cyber, physical, information, platform, policy, health, and reputation domains.” He notes that his analysis, “informs the decision-making of strategic leadership while supporting key policies across multiple teams.”
Twitter’s director of insider risk and investigations, Bruce A., is also a former KCL man. Bruce A. spent 23 years in the FBI, becoming a supervisory special agent, leaving the bureau in 2020 to directly transfer to Twitter.
Bruce is one of just dozens of FBI agents and analysts that Twitter has hired in the past few years – the majority of whom have been parachuted into highly politically sensitive fields, such as security, content moderation and trust and safety, thus effectively giving the bureau considerable influence over the platform’s content and outlook.
Google, too, employs a number of War Studies graduates, among them Asia-Pacific Information Policy Lead Jean-Jacques Sahel, Policy Advisor Grant Hurst, and Global Threat Analyst Jessica O.
JOURNALISM
For a single department in one college of a university, it is remarkable the impact that the Department of War Studies has had on the field of journalism as well. The department punches vastly above its weight, with alumni in most of the world’s top media outlets, including CNN, NBC News, The New York Times, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as a host of individuals populating the ranks of the British state broadcaster, the BBC. Indeed, it appears that if breaking into the field of journalism is the goal, then a degree from the Department of War Studies is more helpful than one from King’s College London’s Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, its de facto journalism school.
Some of these journalists cut their teeth at investigative outlets Bellingcat and Graphika, both of whom are funded by the U.S. government and both of whom put out questionable reports demonizing official enemy nations. No fewer than six Bellingcat employees or contributors — including Cameron Colquhoun, Jacob Beeders, Lincoln Pigman,Aliaume Leroy, Christiaan Triebert and senior investigator Nick Waters — all pursued postgraduate studies within the department. Indeed, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins joined the Department of War Studies in 2018 as a visiting research associate.
Graphika, meanwhile, is also inordinately staffed by KCL War Studies graduates. Together, these two groups pump out highly-publicized “intelligence” reports warning of nefarious actions committed by Russia or other official enemy states, all while quietly being funded by the U.S. national security state themselves.
STATE-BACKED NEXUS
The Department of War Studies publishes similar work to Graphika. Indeed, its faculty was crucial in propagating the idea of Russian interference in American elections, being the source of many of the most far-reaching claims about Moscow’s influence in American society. Reports published by the department accuse Russia of carrying out a campaign of “information-psychological warfare” and advise that military spending should be increased and that NATO must re-up its commitment to countering Russia. Professor Thomas Rid even testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the “dark art” of Russian meddling and condemned WikiLeaks and alternative media journalists as unwitting agents of disinformation.
Many of the organizations detailed above were also identified as proposed members of a Western government-aligned “counter”-propaganda nexus hoping to be established by the EXPOSE Network. EXPOSE was allegedly a secret U.K.-government-funded initiative that would have brought together journalists and state operatives in an alliance to shape public discourse in a manner more conducive to the priorities of Western governments.
A chart showing the leadership structure of the EXPOSE network published as part of the Integrity Initiative Leak 7
The Department of War Studies’ Dr. Neville Bolt was on the organization’s preliminary advisory panel, alongside Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council (NATO’s think tank) and Ben Nimmo, former NATO press officer, and ex-director of investigations for Graphika, and Facebook’s current head of intelligence. Training support, meanwhile, would be provided by individuals from Bellingcat.
In the past year, MintPress has been detailing how much of the public sphere, from social media organizations like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok to big search engines such as Google, to Think Tanks and Fact-Checking organizations, are quietly much more closely linked to the national security state than first meets the eye. The Department of War Studies at King’s College London is an important part of this state-backed nexus. It is a one-stop shop for training many of the spies, think tank employees, journalists, and supposedly independent intelligence investigators who have been at the forefront of the new information war.
Put simply, one department staffed by former and current military officers is training the people producing the news (journalists), the ones manipulating it (intelligence officials), and the ones who are in charge of sorting fact from fiction and pinpointing disinformation (social media managers). It is quite the system. All the while, they continually warn of the threat of (foreign) state-backed influence operations.
To be clear, Kremlin propaganda is real, but its reach is decidedly minor in comparison to the massive disinformation campaigns being launched by the Western national security state. And the Department of War Studies is a key part of this information war.
A whopping 4.9 million illegal immigrants have crossed our border since Biden has taken office, a report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) found.
The president of FAIR Dan Stein discussed the report, stating that “Roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Ireland has illegally entered the United States in the 18 months President Biden has been in office, with many being released into American communities.”
He continued, saying “In that time, the Biden administration has blamed an unprecedented surge of illegal immigration on all sorts of external factors, except their own sabotage of our nation’s immigration laws.”
The nearly 5 million illegal immigrants who have entered our country since Biden took office includes nearly 200,000 that crossed the border in July of 2022.
With 199,976 illegal immigrants entering in July, the figure marks a whopping 325 percent increase over the average number of July apprehensions across former President Trump’s four years in office. Of the 199,976 illegal immigrants, 134,362, or 67 percent, were single adults.
There were also 10 individuals on the terror watch list who were stopped on our southern border last month.
Perhaps even more startling, July is the 17th straight month in which border patrol has had 150,000 encounters or more. In addition, 2,071 pounds of fentanyl, the equivalent of 469 million lethal doses, and 12,989 pounds of methamphetamine were seized at the southern border in July alone.
Thomas Homan, the former Acting Director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the Trump Administration, joined Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM to discuss the border crisis.
He said that the number of illegal immigrants entering our country under Biden “blows every other record out of the water” despite the fact that the Trump Administration “handed this administration the most secure border we’ve ever had.”
FAIR president Dan Stein also criticized the Biden Administration, saying “The endless flow of illegal aliens and the incursion of lethal narcotics pouring across our border will not end until this administration demonstrates a willingness to enforce our laws.”
Spencer Lindquist is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach out at slindquist@breitbart.com.
Warning about a “dark world of online harms” that must be addressed, the World Economic Forum (WEF) this month published an article calling for a “solution” to “online abuse” that would be powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence.
The proposal calls for a system, based on AI, that would automate the censorship of “misinformation” and “hate speech” and work to overcome the spread of “child abuse, extremism, disinformation, hate speech and fraud” online.
According to the author of the article, Inbal Goldberger, human “trust and safety teams” alone are not fully capable of policing such content online.
Goldberger is vice president of ActiveFence Trust & Safety, a technology company based in New York City and Tel Aviv that claims it “automatically collects data from millions of sources and applies contextual AI to power trust and safety operations of any size.”
Instead of relying solely on human moderation teams, Goldberger proposes a system based on “human-curated, multi-language, off-platform intelligence” — in other words, input provided by “expert” human sources that would then create “learning sets” that would train the AI to recognize purportedly harmful or dangerous content.
This “off-platform intelligence” — more machine learning than AI per se, according to Didi Rankovicof ReclaimTheNet.org — would be collected from “millions of sources” and would then be collated and merged before being used for “content removal decisions” on the part of “Internet platforms.”
According to Goldberger, the system would supplement “smarter automated detection with human expertise” and will allow for the creation of “AI with human intelligence baked in.”
This, in turn, would provide protection against “increasingly advanced actors misusing platforms in unique ways.”
“A human moderator who is an expert in European white supremacy won’t necessarily be able to recognize harmful content in India or misinformation narratives in Kenya,” Goldberger explained.
However, “By uniquely combining the power of innovative technology, off-platform intelligence collection and the prowess of subject-matter experts who understand how threat actors operate, scaled detection of online abuse can reach near-perfect precision” as these learning sets are “baked in” to the AI over time, Goldberger said.
This would, in turn, enable “trust and safety teams” to “stop threats rising online before they reach users,” she added.
In his analysis of what Goldberger’s proposal might look like in practice, blogger Igor Chudov explained how content policing on social media today occurs on a platform-by-platform basis.
For example, Twitter content moderators look only at content posted to that particular platform, but not at a user’s content posted outside Twitter.
Chudov argued this is why the WEF appears to support a proposal to “move beyond the major Internet platforms, in order to collect intelligence about people and ideas everywhere else.”
“Such an approach,” Chudov wrote, “would allow them to know better what person or idea to censor — on all major platforms at once.”
The “intelligence” collected by the system from its “millions of sources” would, according to Chudov, “detect thoughts that they do not like,” resulting in “content removal decisions handed down to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and so on … a major change from the status quo of each platform deciding what to do based on messages posted to that specific platform only.”
In this way, “the search for wrongthink becomes globalized,” concludes Chudov.
In response to the WEF proposal, ReclaimTheNet.org pointed out that “one can start discerning the argument here … as simply pressuring social networks to start moving towards ‘preemptive censorship.’”
Chudov posited that the WEF is promoting the proposal because it “is becoming a little concerned” as “unapproved opinions are becoming more popular, and online censors cannot keep up with millions of people becoming more aware and more vocal.”
According to the Daily Caller, “The WEF document did not specify how members of the AI training team would be decided, how they would be held accountable or whether countries could exercise controls over the AI.”
In a disclaimer accompanying Goldberger’s article, the WEF reassured the public that the content expressed in the piece “is the opinion of the author, not the World Economic Forum,” adding that “this article has been shared on websites that routinely misrepresent content and spread misinformation.”
However, the WEF appears to be open to proposals like Goldberger’s. For instance, a May 2022 article on the WEF website proposes Facebook’s “Oversight Board” as an example of a “real-world governance model” that can be applied to governance in the metaverse.
UN, backed by Gates Foundation, also aiming to ‘break chain of misinformation’
The WEF isn’t the only entity calling for more stringent policing of online content and “misinformation.”
For example, UNESCO recently announced a partnership with Twitter, the European Commission and the World Jewish Congress leading to the launch of the #ThinkBeforeSharing campaign, to “stop the spread of conspiracy theories.”
According to UNESCO:
“The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a worrying rise in disinformation and conspiracy theories.
“Conspiracy theories can be dangerous: they often target and discriminate against vulnerable groups, ignore scientific evidence and polarize society with serious consequences. This needs to stop.”
“Conspiracy theories cause real harm to people, to their health, and also to their physical safety. They amplify and legitimize misconceptions about the pandemic, and reinforce stereotypes which can fuel violence and violent extremist ideologies.”
UNESCO said the partnership with Twitter informs people that events occurring across the world are not “secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful forces with negative intent.”
UNESCO issued guidance for what to do in the event one encounters a “conspiracy theorist” online: One must “react” immediately by posting a relevant link to a “fact-checking website” in the comments.
UNESCO also provides advice to the public in the event someone encounters a “conspiracy theorist” in the flesh. In that case, the individual shold avoid arguing, as “any argument may be taken as proof that you are part of the conspiracy and reinforce that belief.”
The #ThinkBeforeSharing campaign provides a host of infographics and accompanying materials intended to explain what “conspiracy theories” are, how to identify them, how to report on them and how to react to them more broadly.
According to these materials, conspiracy theories have six things in common, including:
An “alleged, secret plot.”
A “group of conspirators.”
“‘Evidence’ that seems to support the conspiracy theory.”
Suggestions that “falsely” claim “nothing happens by accident and that there are no coincidences,” and that “nothing is as it appears and everything is connected.”
They divide the world into “good or bad.”
They scapegoat people and groups.
UNESCO doesn’t entirely dismiss the existence of “conspiracy theories,” instead admitting that “real conspiracies large and small DO exist.”
However, the organization claims, such “conspiracies” are “more often centered on single self-contained events, or an individual like an assassination or a coup d’état” and are “real” only if “unearthed by the media.”
In addition to the WEF and UNESCO, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council earlier this year adopted “a plan of action to tackle disinformation.”
The “plan of action,” sponsored by the U.S., U.K., Ukraine, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, emphasizes “the primary role that governments have, in countering false narratives,” while expressing concern for:
“The increasing and far-reaching negative impact on the enjoyment and realization of human rights of the deliberate creation and dissemination of false or manipulated information intended to deceive and mislead audiences, either to cause harm or for personal, political or financial gain.”
Even countries that did not officially endorse the Human Rights Council plan expressed concernsabout online “disinformation.”
For instance, China identified such “disinformation” as “a common enemy of the international community.”
An earlier UN initiative, in partnership with the WEF, “recruited 110,000 information volunteers” who would, in the words of UN global communications director Melissa Fleming, act as “digital first responders” to “online misinformation.”
The UN’s #PledgeToPause initiative, although recently circulating as a new development on social media, was announced in November 2020, and was described by the UN as “the first global behaviour-change campaign on misinformation.”
The campaign is part of a broader UN initiative, “Verified,” that aims to recruit participants to disseminate “verified content optimized for social sharing,” stemming directly from the UN communications department.
Fleming said at the time that the UN also was “working with social media platforms to recommend changes” to “help break the chain of misinformation.”
Both “Verified” and the #PledgeToPause campaign still appear to be active as of the time of this writing.
On Aug. 8, 2022, the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) took the unprecedented step of raiding the Florida residence of former President Donald Trump. The raid prompted a litany of questions. What was the justification for the raid? Were there secondary or unofficial motives? Who ordered and approved the raid? Was the justification compelling enough to take such a dramatic step?
While many of these questions remain unanswered to varying degrees, there are enough facts on the table already to establish a timeline of events before, during, and after the raid.
Liberty International News 