Category Archives: Media

New Survey: Fewer Germans feel free to express their political opinions in 2023

. . . than in any year since the early days of the Federal Republic

Article by eugyppius.

Excerpt:

The impression of a closed and stifling discourse is present across the political spectrum. Only 39% of centre-right CDU voters feel free to express their views, but for Die Linke, or the Left Party (the successors of the East German SED), that number falls to 36%, and for AfD voters it is lowest of all, a mere 11%. A clear majority (75%) of Greens alone feel that they can speak their minds, and so here we learn who feels best represented by our present discourse.

“Do you have the feeling, that you can freely express your political opinion today in Germany, or is it better to be cautious?” Blue: “I can speak freely.” Orange: “It is better to be cautious.”

No surprises lurk in the breakdown by education: 51% of those with university degrees or an Abitur feel their political expression is unhampered, while clear majorities of everybody else say they cannot speak their minds.

The historical perspective is sobering. The Federal Republic was only five years old in 1953; the Allied occupation and denazification were recent events, and even then Germans enjoyed a substantially greater subjective sense of political expression than they do today. This sense peaked under Willy Brandt during the Cold War, but has been in a state of decay since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. This would be good evidence in favour of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s thesis, that Western liberal states rapidly lose their enthusiasm for principles like free expression in the absence of competition from rival systems.

Yet it was not the end of the Cold War, but rather the chancellorship of Angela Merkel that saw the most dramatic decline in free political expression. Specifically, Merkel’s strategy of “asymmetric demobilisation,” via which she sought to disarm the leftist opposition by adopting central elements of their political programme, had a very perverse influence. German voters and hence the politicians who appeal to them have always had pronounced conservative tendencies, while the media here as everywhere else lean to the left. Before 2005, politicians provided an important counterweight to the line taken by our press, but Merkel’s triangulations created a new system of soft political enforcement sustained by establishment politicians and mainstream journalism alike.

The consequence is a system that has placed all of us in thrall to the whims of an eccentric minority. The opinions which govern German society, as I’ve written many times before, are not those of most people, but rather of an increasingly insular, university-educated urbanite class, who are relatively affluent, who vote overwhelmingly Green and who constitute no more than 15% of the population. I doubt the old socialist countries of the Warsaw Pact were any different in this respect. More and more, it feels like we defeated communism only to recreate an equivalent system, which threatens to be much worse, insofar as its informal nature and soft asymmetrical methods confuse everybody and thwart opposition.

About New Zealand Whistleblower & The Damning NZ Vaccine Data

Jimmy Dore interviews Steve Kirsch (40 minutes)

Whistleblower to be arrested (5 minutes)

Here the whistleblower himself speaks (9 min)

How the NZ mainstream media reacts (2.32 min)

The Vigilant Fox has a substack summarizing the case so far.

Paul Craig Roberts has a take on it.

Four NZ doctors discuss the issue (18 min)

Tess Lawrie has some wise words to say (3 min), her text is below:

Events of the past week in relation to the New Zealand population data share have been confusing to say the least. With so much contradictory information and intrigue, people have been left wondering what to believe and who to trust.

How do we check and verify the integrity of these NZ data and, for that matter, of any other data and events occurring around the world in the name of health, freedom and sovereignty?

Just as we can be sure that academic science has been infiltrated and corrupted, one can be certain that truth and freedom movements have too.

With unprecedented excess deaths being recorded on official databases and witnessed by ordinary people in most countries, do these NZ data add to what we already know about the Covid vaccines? That they are harming and killing people worldwide?

No it doesn’t.

So the answer to the question, whom can we trust is simple. We must trust ourselves, we must trust our own intuition, and we must trust our own hearts.

The old world with its non-sensical, corrupt, and anti-human rules and regulations is crumbling fast. We are in the process of creating the new. A new healthy, sovereign and equitable world where we all have what we need to thrive is not for everyone, especially the minority interest groups that have captured our governments and are dead-set on owning us.

It has been said that civilisations progress through the following sequence:

‘From bondage to spiritual faith,

From spiritual faith to great courage,

From courage to liberty,

From liberty to abundance,

From abundance to complacency,

From complacency to apathy,

From apathy to dependence,

From dependence back into bondage.’**

We are at the end of this sequence. We are in bondage. A civilisation is on its way out, thrashing and destroying as it goes. So let’s be careful, let’s step back. Let it thrash and crumble, and let’s avoid getting caught in the rubble.

For we are all precious.

Every loving man, woman and child is needed for the better world we are creating afresh.

So let’s hold onto our loving kindness and compassion for one another, including for those who wish us harm, find that great courage and spiritual faith inside each and every one of us, and keep moving steadily in the direction of our liberty. Just like the sun rises every day, our freedom and a better world are assured.

The Globalist Vision: “15 Minute” Prison Cities and the End of Private Property

Article by Brandon Smith.

Excerpts:

The 15 Minute City is more like a recipe, containing every single ingredient of the climate change and covid lockdown agendas in a single comprehensive Orwellian vision. It includes removing motor vehicles, removing private transportation and roads, smart city and AI monitoring of each person’s electricity usage, monitoring of product consumption and “carbon footprint”, biometric surveillance within a compact and stacked urban landscape, the cashless society concept, equity and inclusion cultism, population control, etc.

It is the culmination, the end game; a massive prison with no bars. A place where you are conditioned to grow accustomed to artificial limitations on privacy, no civil liberties, no private property, and no work options or mobility. You are tied to the land and the land is owned by the state (or corporation). If you want a historic comparison, the closest I can find is the feudal system of Medieval Europe.

Within these cities you are a labor mechanism, nothing more. You will never be allowed to own your own property and thus own your own labor. Everything you have is given to you by the state and can be taken away by the state if you defy them. You might be able to leave the village or community you are tied to for a time, but this will change with increasing restrictions on the public’s movement according to the dictates of climate ideology.

As long as you are productive and submissive you will be give the things you need to survive, but never to thrive. In the case of a technocratic feudal system you would not have any guarantees that the state would need your services. At least in feudal Europe a peasant was seen as valuable resource because of limited population.  In a world where many people are considered “population excess”, you could easily be replaced and booted out of the city to starve and die.

The Westminster Declaration of 18th October 2023

Published on this German blog site.

We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.

Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.

This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.

Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest, and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.

Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’

This complex often operates through direct government policies. Authorities in India and Turkey have seized the power to remove political content from social media. The legislature in Germany and the Supreme Court in Brazil are criminalising political speech. In other countries, measures such as Ireland’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill, Scotland’s Hate Crime Act, the UK’s Online Safety Bill, and Australia’s ‘Misinformation’ Bill threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.

But the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance. They have done so with the full support of ‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers’ in the mainstream media, who have abandoned the journalistic values of debate and intellectual inquiry.

As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society. Soon, the European Union’s Digital Services Act will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.

Some politicians and NGOs are even aiming to target end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. If end-to-end encryption is broken, we will have no remaining avenues for authentic private conversations in the digital sphere.

Although foreign disinformation between states is a real issue, agencies designed to combat these threats, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States, are increasingly being turned inward against the public. Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.

We recognize that words can sometimes cause offence, but we reject the idea that hurt feelings and discomfort, even if acute, are grounds for censorship. Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny.

Speech protections are not just for views we agree with; we must strenuously protect speech for the views that we most strongly oppose. Only in the public square can these views be heard and properly challenged.

What’s more, time and time again, unpopular opinions and ideas have eventually become conventional wisdom. By labelling certain political or scientific positions as ‚misinformation‘ or ‚malinformation,‘ our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defence against disinformation.

The attack on speech is not just about distorted rules and regulations – it is a crisis of humanity itself. Every equality and justice campaign in history has relied on an open forum to voice dissent. In countless examples, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, social progress has depended on freedom of expression.

We do not want our children to grow up in a world where they live in fear of speaking their minds. We want them to grow up in a world where their ideas can be expressed, explored and debated openly – a world that the founders of our democracies envisioned when they enshrined free speech into our laws and constitutions.

The US First Amendment is a strong example of how the right to freedom of speech, of the press, and of conscience can be firmly protected under the law. One need not agree with the U.S. on every issue to acknowledge that this is a vital ‚first liberty‘ from which all other liberties follow. It is only through free speech that we can denounce violations of our rights and fight for new freedoms.

There also exists a clear and robust international protection for free speech. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was drafted in 1948 in response to atrocities committed during World War II. Article 19 of the UDHR states, ‚Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.‘ While there may be a need for governments to regulate some aspects of social media, such as age limits, these regulations should never infringe on the human right to freedom of expression.

As is made clear by Article 19, the corollary of the right to free speech is the right to information. In a democracy, no one has a monopoly over what is considered to be true. Rather, truth must be discovered through dialogue and debate – and we cannot discover truth without allowing for the possibility of error.

Censorship in the name of ‚preserving democracy‘ inverts what should be a bottom-up system of representation into a top-down system of ideological control. This censorship is ultimately counter-productive: it sows mistrust, encourages radicalization, and de-legitimizes the democratic process.

In the course of human history, attacks on free speech have been a precursor to attacks on all other liberties. Regimes that eroded free speech have always inevitably weakened and damaged other core democratic structures. In the same fashion, the elites that push for censorship today are also undermining democracy. What has changed though, is the broad scale and technological tools through which censorship can be enacted.

We believe that free speech is essential for ensuring our safety from state abuses of power – abuses that have historically posed a far greater threat than the words of lone individuals or even organised groups. For the sake of human welfare and flourishing, we make the following 3 calls to action.

  • We call on governments and international organisations to fulfill their responsibilities to the people and to uphold Article 19 of the UDHR.
  • We call on tech corporations to undertake to protect the digital public square as defined in Article 19 of the UDHR and refrain from politically motivated censorship, the censorship of dissenting voices, and censorship of political opinion.
  • And finally, we call on the general public to join us in the fight to preserve the people’s democratic rights. Legislative changes are not enough. We must also build an atmosphere of free speech from the ground up by rejecting the climate of intolerance that encourages self-censorship and that creates unnecessary personal strife for many. Instead of fear and dogmatism, we must embrace inquiry and debate.

We stand for your right to ask questions. Heated arguments, even those that may cause distress, are far better than no arguments at all.

Censorship robs us of the richness of life itself. Free speech is the foundation for creating a life of meaning and a thriving humanity – through art, poetry, drama, story, philosophy, song, and more.

This declaration was the result of an initial meeting of free speech champions from around the world who met in Westminster, London, at the end of June 2023. As signatories of this statement, we have fundamental political and ideological disagreements. However, it is only by coming together that we will defeat the encroaching forces of censorship so that we can maintain our ability to openly debate and challenge one another. It is in the spirit of difference and debate that we sign the Westminster Declaration.

List of Signatories