Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris worried in 2019 that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” Presidential rival Donald Trump, on the other hand, thinks that people who criticize judges should be jailed, along with anyone who burns an American flag. Photo by The Associated Press
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The U.S. political system is peculiar. While it’s wandered far from its origins, it’s a government based on the principle that people who seek power can’t be trusted, and it’s a democracy rooted in the belief that majorities can be as tyrannical as dictators. Not everybody agrees, of course, including members of the political class who propose to “save the republic” from rivals while rejecting restraints on power.
Last month, former Secretary of State and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry complained that the competing voices of social media make it difficult “in terms of building consensus around any issue” because “people self-select where they go for their news or for their information.”
He fretted that if people prefer a news source that “is sick and has an agenda … our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer it out of existence.” His hope was to overcome this impediment by “winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
The same month, 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Americans are spreading what she calls “Kremlin propaganda” and should be “civilly or even in some cases criminally charged” for their speech. Last week she complained “we lose total control” if online discussions aren’t heavily regulated.
Current presidential hopeful Kamala Harris worried in 2019 that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” Harris is vice-president in an administration that tried just that through back channels, leading Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to tell Congress “senior officials from the Biden administration … repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor” discussions about COVID-19 and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, wrongly claims ”there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” Robert Reich, the Clinton-era secretary of labour, wants Elon Musk arrested “if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) threatened “to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets” after Amazon slapped back at her over tax policy.
This flurry of threats to speech protected by the First Amendment comes from a rogues’ gallery of Democrats who will respond that Donald Trump did it first and that they need to save democracy from his threat. They’re right the GOP presidential hopeful also has a taste for abusing power, though who started it is a judgment call, as is the question of who poses the greatest threat to the republic.
“Burning the American flag, I want to get a law passed … you burn an American flag, you go to jail for one year,” Trump harrumphed in August. It wasn’t the first time he’s called for jailing protesters who use flags as fiery props. He made the same call in July and floated the idea when he was in the White House, even though flag-burning is protected by the First Amendment.
Trump also thinks people who criticize judges and Supreme Court justices “should be put in jail,” as he commented last month (he might want to be careful about that, given his own criticism of the bench).
Also worthy of legal attention, says the former and potential future president, are “lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, & corrupt election officials” involved in what Trump, who claims the 2020 presidential contest was stolen, considers unscrupulous election-related behaviour. They “will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our country.”
Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, wants to ban pornography, though it generally enjoys constitutional protection. Vance’s instincts extend to political opponents. In 2021, Vance asked interviewer Tucker Carlson, “why don’t we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation” and other non-profits that pursue left-wing policies on hot-button issues. The veep nominee also wants to “seize the administrative state for our purposes,” replace existing bureaucrats with “our people” and defy the courts if they object.
Florida’s Republican Governor and recent presidential contender, Ron DeSantis, and his party’s lawmakers pushed the Stop WOKE Act to ban controversial racial training adopted by private companies. It was blocked on First Amendment grounds.
If you seek evidence that candidates for public office and political partisans disdain restraints on power when that power is in their hands, and want to punish opponents, there’s plenty of evidence on both sides of the aisle. This would come as no surprise to the founders. During debates over adopting the constitution, James Madison wrote about the balance necessary in designing a government. “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
Madison feared letting majorities run roughshod. “In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign, as in a state of nature where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger,” he warned.
The imperfect result was a constitution that limited government with checks and balances, and a Bill of Rights that forbade officials from interfering with many freedoms. The intent was to let people do and say a good many things that officials don’t like but are powerless to prevent or punish. It goes without saying that the U.S. government is now much larger than intended, and exercises far more authority than was contemplated by the founders. But that’s still not enough for some critics.
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Writing last month in The New Yorker, Louis Menand noted a new crop of scholars who are dissatisfied with the constitution. In their ranks is Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California–Berkeley, who hopes to strip anti-majoritarian elements from the system. Others want to completely scrap the document and start over with something that would deliver their preferred results.
But these scholars are playing catch-up with a political class intent on simply ignoring First Amendment protections for speech and constitutional restraints on their power. Ironically, efforts to abuse the power of office to hurt opponents is precisely what the founders intended to prevent with the constitution.
That authoritarian politicians justify their actions as responses to opponents who they allege are the real danger to the republic is also no surprise. Those who think coercive government is a solution to problems will inevitably try to apply it to opponents they see as problems.
The American Constitution was intended to thwart the kind of people who now make up pretty much the entire political class. We’ll see if it’s up to the challenge.
Canada’s darkest hour In the present day and considering the status of free speech in Canada, it would not be a stretch to say this country is facing its own “darkest hour”. What else to think when its longstanding history and tradition of Magna Carta-inspired rights and freedoms stand to be lost with the enactment of Bill C-63 (Online Harms Act). The legislation in questions has been remarked on by C3RF patron, David Solway, as being “nothing less than a censorship closely reminiscent of the justice apparatus in authoritarian states likes China and North Korea”. He is not alone in this assessment as other notables both domestic and international, such as Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand and Margaret Atwood, have likewise chimed in to describe the new law in terms of the “lettres de cachet” once issuable by the king of France to enforce “arbitrary actions and judgments that could not be appealed”. It’s like Canada has retreated back into the 17th century and the days of the “Star Chamber”.
Margaret Atwood – Bill C-63 will give Canada its own “lettres de cachet”-style legal system It’s easy to see how the Online Harms Act could give rise to Star Chamber or kangaroo courts in Canada. After all, the legislation calls for: the creation of a “Digital Safety Commission” that can, on the basis of anonymous charges, punish alleged wrongdoers of past and even potential future acts with fines, house arrest, electronic tagging or communication bans; Commission-appointed investigators to conduct warrantless searches and for the Commission to conduct its business without the need to be bound by any legal or technical rules of evidence; and the use of vague definitions of hate speech that will flood the Canadian human rights system with “eye-of-the-beholder” complaints of offensive, discriminatory speech. Such blatant disregard for the most basic tenets of Western judicial philosophy, including “innocent until proven guilty”, are more than a little remarkable. It might be for this reason that the act throws a bit of a sweetener into the mix with popular measures that serve to protect against the “sexual abuse of children, intimate images shared without consent, and material that can be used to bully a child or encourage them to commit self-harm”. These clearly harmful activities, however, are already illegal under Canada’s criminal code and seem to be included in Bill C-63 only to give cover to its freedom-crushing measures.
Justice Minister Virani, Bill C-63 will not be split into two parts! Sweetener aside, the legislation represents a baldfaced attack on the Charter rights of everyday Canadian citizens. The ability of the Digital Safety Commission, for example, to turn anonymous charges, of potential future offenses no less, into serious fines and punishments is a direct assault on the Charter’s Section 7 right to life, liberty and security of the person in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. Then there is its ability to demand warrantless searches in direct contravention of Section 8 of the Charter and its protections to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure. When all of these injustices are tied together with a bow in the form of the Commission’s authority to dispense with the evidence requirements of Section 1 of the Charter, we can see that anyone entrapped within the net cast by Bill C-63 will find themselves in a very dark place. Indeed, the country as a whole may feel it has descended into its darkest hour as the rights and freedoms that used to underpin its reputation as a Western liberal democracy will have evaporated.
Looks like Bill C-63 will supersede the Charter as the supreme law of the land?
Descent into darkness David Solway has made note of the darkened depths to which Canada has descended. Indeed, if Bill C-63 passes the House and is ratified by the Senate “Canada would no longer be a country any sensible and freedom-loving individual would consider worth living in.” The rule of law would most certainly be pitched out the window as the citizen would become “utterly dependent on the favour of the government” as he or she was forced through a gauntlet of informers given the power to issue “damaging but unverified accusations”. And so, citizens will be forced to tread on eggshells as they try not to say, do or even think of anything that, in accordance with Bill C-63, is “likely to foment hatred”. A subjective standard if ever there was one and one that is inextricably influenced by the eye-of-the-beholder.
Canadian essayist and C3RF patron, David Solway, queries whether Canada “is worth living in” Given the pressure that can be brought to bear on everyday citizens by the subjective eye-of-the-beholder strictures associated with Bill C-63, it’s easy to see how other Charter rights like freedom of religion, assembly, association and mobility, along with a fair and responsible press, will need to be sacrificed to keep offence at bay. The new Canada that prioritizes the sensibilities of the thin-skinned over the civil liberties of the all is quite a stretch from the nation that had been built up on the tradition of individual sovereignty and the concept of “free men” as conceptualized in the Magna Carta of 1215. Concepts marvellously captured by John Stuart Mill in his “On Liberty” of 1859 which is well suited as an addition to the reading list of any authority involved with enacting Bill C-63. After all, its analysis of the “nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual” is one the Bill could have benefited from.
John Stuart Mill “On Liberty” needs to be on the reading lists of Canadian legislators? The framers of the Canadian Charter, like The Honourable Brian Peckford, might have intended for individual sovereignty to be accommodated in the “fundamental” rights section of the document but the intention seems to have faded away over time. This vanishing act has been aided and abetted by a judiciary besotted by the ever-flexible concept of the “living tree”. This doctrine has proven popular with Canadian courts and paved the way for “progressive interpretation” to address the “realities of modern life”. These new realities, eagerly taken up by the political class, have oftentimes distinguished themselves by their rejection of traditional mores and the development of diverse identity groups which are open to division on the basis of being oppressed or being an oppressor. Conflict and acrimony reign supreme and the situation is ripe for exploitation by psychopaths with the help of useful idiots. And so the descent into darkness began.
Charter framers Brian Peckford et all intended for the development of competing camps?
Darkest hour “call to action” The descent in darkness, amazingly begun on the heels of the patriation of the Charter in 1982, has accelerated over the 2015 investiture of Canada’s current Liberal government. The quickening pace could be seen to pick up almost immediately with the passage of Motion M-103 (Islamophobia). This motion, true to form and in line with the strategy of identifying and dividing people into camps, shamelessly stated that Canada and Canadians were “systemically racist” and prone to discriminating against whole religions – particularly Islam. Many, many accusations would follow as the good folk of once “strong and free” Canada would be labelled as genocidal, climate denying anti-vaxxers who were in urgent need of being reigned in through draconian measures that restricted their ability to express such hateful mutterings.
If diversity is our strength, then why are we so divided and so oppressed? As Canadians navigate through their darkest hour one thing has become abundantly clear, only they have the power to force their betters to reverse course. As the events of the Wuhan virus pandemic have shown, there is no cavalry coming over the hill to restore our free and democratic society. Indeed, if anything, it is quite apparent that those given this power over Canadians have abused it to place ever more restrictions on speech as demonstrated by Bill C-63. As Billboard Chris so eloquently stated, “politicians don’t change the culture, we do!” You can join in the battle to change our wayward, anti-free speech culture by confronting your federally elected representative by phone, email or, best yet, a personal visit at their constituency office. Your own Member of Parliament’s contact information may be found here and here are some thoughts for your MP to ponder: using ill-defined “hate speech” to bring citizens to task for what they say is a subjective mug’s game that stands to be abused by “eye of the beholder” sensibilities; allowing anonymous charges to result in prohibitive fines, house arrest, electronic tagging and communication bans is an abuse of your right to security of the person; allowing charges to advance on the basis of what a person might say, or think, is truly Orwellian; and allowing for warrantless searches and seizures is simply a slap in the face to Canada’s supreme law in the form of the Charter that is embedded in our Constitution. Your decision to intervene is critical to turning Canada away from a truly dystopian future for your children and grandchildren. It’s worthwhile remembering that although Churchill recognized a nation in its darkest hour, he also, in the same speech, recognized the opportunity to turn it into its “finest hour”.
Elon Musk says Justin Trudeau is trying to crush free speech in Canada
Elon Musk’s statement came in response to a journalist’s tweet on the Canadian government having “one of the world’s most repressive online censorship schemes”.
By CNBCTV18.com Oct 2, 2023 10:10:31 AM IST (Updated)
2 Min Read
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of “crushing free speech” in the country. Musk’s statement came in response to a journalist’s tweet on the Canadian government having “one of the world’s most repressive online censorship schemes”.Remaining Time -10:58https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.593.1_en.html#goog_604699895
“The Canadian government, armed with one of the world’s most repressive online censorship schemes, announces that all “online streaming services that offer podcasts” must formally register with the government to permit regulatory controls,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted on October 1.Retweeted Greenwald’s post, Musk said, “Trudeau is trying to crush free speech in Canada. Shameful.His remark came in the wake of tense diplmatic ties between India and Canada. The Canadian PM created an uproar after he alleged India’s role in the killing of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey in July this year.India has denied the claims, calling it ‘absurd’ and ‘motivated’, while Canada has yet to provide any public evidence to support the claim about Nijjar’s killing.This is not the first time the Trudeau government has been accused of acting against free speech.News agency ANI reported that in February 2022, Trudeau had invoked emergency powers – for the first time in the country’s history – to arm his government with more power to respond to the trucker protests, who were opposing the vaccine mandates at that time.(Edited by : Akriti Anand)
The richest man in the world takes on the most subversive group in the world
By James Edwards
We are witnessing what could turn out to be one of the most important battles in American history—Elon Musk vs. the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). I want to stress that while this could possibly be a pivotal point in American history, there’s certainly no guarantee of that. There is a very real risk that Elon Musk will cave in, or that the corrupt judicial system will sell him down the river to save their own hides.
The controversy began in late August, with calls by users on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, to ban the ADL for maliciously lying about and arguably defaming Musk and his free speech policies. Musk began to chime in on the trending topic, #BanTheADL, offering insight into the subversive nature of the ADL and its efforts to harm the financial success of the platform by organizing advertising boycotts and smear campaigns following Musk’s takeover.
Musk noted that Twitter revenues are down by billions of dollars due to the ADL intimidating corporations into pulling their ads from the social media platform. I want to focus on how high the stakes are for the future of free speech and the ability of the ADL to dictate what can and cannot be discussed in the modern day public square—social media.
The ADL claims to be a “civil rights” organization, but it’s just a viciously anti-white hate group that exerts tremendous control over business, politics, and culture in America. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly brazen with ever-escalating demands for censorship of opinions it doesn’t like. For anyone who wants an in-depth look at the history of this sordid outfit, a good place to start is the books by the late, great AFP writer, Michael Collins Piper.
If not for the fact that the ADL works to promote Jewish interests while masquerading as an “anti-hate” civil rights group, the government might have long ago declared it a criminal organization, seized its assets and locked up its executives. Many observers say that the ADL is essentially an extortion racket. In just one example, last year when NBA player Kyrie Irving tweeted his approval for a movie the ADL doesn’t like, the ADL demanded “consequences.” Almost immediately, Irving’s team suspended him. He was only allowed to play again after “donating” half a million dollars to the ADL and issuing a public apology.
Many Americans are just now learning about the ADL, thanks to the #BanTheADL campaign. They’re shocked at what they’re discovering from men like Irish YouTuber Keith Woods on Twitter, but trust me, the current scandal is only the tip of the iceberg.
Most Americans under the age of 40 have no idea that “hate crimes” are a novel concept in jurisprudence. They just assume that crimes motivated by “hate” have always received harsher sentences. They would be shocked to learn that there was no such thing as a “hate crime” until the late 1980s when the concept was invented by the ADL. That’s no exaggeration; they boast about inventing the concept of “hate crimes.” It was part of their war on white people. “Hate crime” charges are rarely pursued against non-whites, although they are oftentimes genuinely warranted.
The ADL never stops seeking to portray white people as monsters who are always on the verge of lynching a black person or burning down a synagogue, and are only stymied in their efforts by the constant vigilance of the ADL.
More recently, every time President Trump did anything to restrict immigration, the ADL immediately went to court and filed paperwork seeking to have a federal judge declare his efforts unconstitutional—and they almost always got their way. The ADL paints white Americans who oppose mass immigration as “Nazis,” while at the same time defending Israel’s extremely race-based immigration policies.
The ADL is also a gigantic and Orwellian surveillance outfit. Author Matt Taibbi once described Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The ADL does the same thing to truth, freedom, and Christian culture.
Did you know that for decades, when many U.S. Representatives and Senators received letters from “right-wing conservatives,” they would forward the letters to the ADL so they could “keep an eye on” them? Did you know that many newspaper editors across America used to do the same thing? Even more incredibly, PayPal recently gave the ADL access to its database to search for transactions from groups it doesn’t like. This isn’t a secret; PayPal admits it. Every American should be up in arms over this, but nobody seems to even be aware of it.
The ADL is the #1 enemy of free speech in America. In 2012, after Pat Buchanan appeared for the third time as a guest on my radio program, the ADL demanded that MSNBC fire him, and MSNBC complied. The media-manufactured controversy made national news, and Buchanan was asked by National Public Radio if he regretted associating with someone the ADL refers to as an “anti-Semite” and “white supremacist.”
Buchanan responded, “I think there’s an awful lot of smearing being done by the Anti-Defamation League, frankly, over the years of individuals who simply disagree maybe with U.S. policy towards Israel, and a lot of name calling.”
The ADL’s subversive activities do not stop at smearing its political opponents. They dictate to Amazon what books they’re allowed to sell. They tell Facebook what opinions users are allowed to post. They demanded that Fox News fire Tucker Carlson—the most popular host on the network by far—and Fox News complied shortly thereafter! When Elon Musk bought Twitter, the ADL told big brands to stop advertising on Twitter, and Twitter’s revenue dropped by tens of billions of dollars in a flash.
And one more thing: The ADL says that saying “Christ is Lord” is anti-Semitic, demonstrating their hostility towards Christians and traditional Christianity.
I’m supporting Elon Musk, even though I was banned from Twitter after he took it over, along with several other honorable men, including Paul Fromm, Kevin MacDonald, and Tom Sunic. I am supporting Musk because it was almost certainly to please the ADL that we were banned in the first place. The fact that he’s finally standing up to this powerful hate group bodes well for more free speech in the future for us and other truth-tellers.
I’m also proud to say that I’m a supporter of the man who started the #BanTheADL movement on Twitter, Keith Woods. Keith and I were both speakers at last month’s American Renaissance conference and he is the rarest of combinations—an absolute genius and an effective pro-white activist.
Keith got the #BanTheADL movement started, and he got the attention of the world’s richest man, who has a long and difficult journey ahead if he has the courage to stick to his convictions.
[Maybe that why Dr. Tom Sunic, Dr. Kevin Macdonald, myself and a number of other nationalists who were all purged from Twitter in April have not been reinstated. CAFE retained a lawyer but we’ve had no explanation or satisfaction. As Andrew Torba explains, sadly Elon Musk succumbed to the ADL cenrsors.]
Over the past few days a grassroots campaign popped up on X calling for the platform to ban the ADL. The campaign, united around the hashtag #BantheADL, has been trending on the platform for days with hundreds of thousands of posts.
This campaign comes after the CEO of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, made a post gloating about his organization’s sheer power to control the platform that Elon Musk purchased for tens of billions of dollars last year. Although the #BantheADL campaign effectively highlighted the significant influence the ADL holds in regulating the flow of information online, it is essential to delve into the reasons why Elon Musk cannot remove the ADL from the platform or hinder their effective management of his company, even if he were inclined to do so.
First we have to understand a bit of the context for how a platform like X actually works and is able to exist on the internet along with the inside baseball of how the ADL flexes its power to control massive corporations without owning a single share.
X is built on the rails of multiple third-party services including, but not limited to the Google Cloud infrastructure among others. X has had a partnership with Google Cloud since 2018, and Bloomberg reports that this collaboration has incurred annual expenses ranging from $200 million to $300 million for the company. Jonathan Greenblatt has openly bragged about the ADL’s partnership with Google, YouTube, Facebook, and X, going so far as to change the algorithms of these companies to meet their demands.
With one phone call to Google the ADL can cripple X. If Google pulls the plug on the cloud hosting deal massive parts of X’s critical infrastructure will be down for a long time, possibly the entire platform would be taken offline with one click. We saw this happen in 2020 with Parler when Amazon AWS pulled the plug and the platform was taken offline. They were never able to fully recover and recently shut the platform down completely after it sold to a third-party.
Going after the cloud hosting providers is just the start for the ADL’s ability to utterly destroy X. Next come the app store bans. With that same phone call to Google the ADL could easily highlight the hundreds of thousands of “antisemitic” posts on the platform and point the the #BantheADL posts as their prime example. Don’t put it past them. They likely have multiple studies going on behind the scenes tracking the “rise in hate” on the platform since Elon took over and will use this to present their case.
Without critical infrastructure and the app stores X would be in serious trouble, but Elon may be able to pull off a miracle and keep the platform online. Next come the advertisers. The ADL has close connections with all of the top Fortune 500 companies and will use their mafia-style power to get these companies to pull their ad dollars from X. This has already been going on since the moment Elon took over the platform. X is operating in a cash flow negative situation and reports claim that ad revenue has fallen by a dramatic 50% since Elon took over.
That’s only the beginning. Next the ADL will contact the sitting members of Congress and the Biden White House. We’ll see Elon be summoned to testify in Congress about the rise in “misinformation” and “hate” on the platform since he took over.
Elon is in a unique position because he’s not only running X. He’s also running several other companies including SpaceX and Tesla, both of which require him to appease the Regime and stay within their favor. The ADL can and will go after not only X, but all of Elon’s companies. It’s no coincidence that the CEO of X is having meetings with the ADL just days after the DOJ announced that they were suing SpaceX.
How do I know all of this? Because I lived it–and survived it by the grace of God.
The ADL has been attacking Gab and me for many years. Their smear campaigns against us successfully lobbied dozens of third-party services to deplatform us and cripple our infrastructure. Despite all of their efforts this didn’t stop us. We were able to rebuild our own servers, payment processing, and so much more in order to keep Gab online. It took many years and it wasn’t easy, but we are still standing.
The ADL has also come after me personally. They pay Google to promote their smear articles about me to the top of search results. They lobbied the DOJ to investigate me after January 6th, even though I wasn’t even in attendance. Jonathan Greenblatt went on national television and called me “one of the most toxic people in public life” effectively painting a target on my back.
None of this stopped me.
I don’t fear the ADL. I don’t answer to the ADL. I fear and answer only to God almighty.
The ADL has NO POWER over Gab which is why they hate us. It’s that simple. There is absolutely nothing they can say or do to get us to censor opinions they don’t like and it’s going to stay that way.
Elon has a choice. He can continue to allow this disgusting organization to run his company by proxy without his approval or he can fight back, take a stand like Gab has, and face the consequences head on. He can continue to have his CEO take groveling phone calls and enforce the ADL’s strategy of freedom of speech but not freedom of reach or he can tell them to pound sand. If he can’t run his own business without permission from some ghoulish vampire at the ADL there’s no sense in running a business at all.
For me it was an easy decision.
Andrew Torba CEO, Gab.com Jesus Christ is King of kings
Just when everyone thought that the combination of two and a half years of bat flu paranoia, online streaming services, and new film releases consisting mostly of the double digit latest instalments in series that everyone had grown tired of at least a decade ago had finally killed off the cinema, Barbenheimer – the simultaneous release of the films Barbie and Oppenheimer -brought the teetering industry back from the brink of bankruptcy, as both films broke box office records their opening weekend. The meme itself, which encouraged people to watch both as a double feature, probably had something to do with it. I don’t know who exactly came up with it. There is a well-known phenomenon in which rival film studies release similar films around the same time – think Deep Impact and Armageddon in 1998, for one example. This is obviously the exact opposite of that, two movies that could hardly be more different from each other being released at the same. Of course this is not exactly an unusual phenomenon. Arguably, it occurs every weekend. In this case, however, the difference between the two seems to have struck someone, or rather a whole lot of someones as the popularity of the meme attests, as being much larger than is usual. Or maybe it was just the catchiness of the portmanteau. The first is a live action comedy featuring Margot Robbie as the fashion doll upon which Mattel built its toy empire. The second is a three hour biopic starring Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist from Berkeley who was led the Manhattan Project in uncorking the bottle and releasing the genie of nuclear weapons into the world. With Barbie being only an hour shorter than Oppenheimer, bringing the total running time of the two to five hours, it would have been a long night at the movies for anyone who took the meme literally. Not, “watch the entire Ring cycle in one sitting” long, but a step in that direction.
Barbie proved to be the bigger hit of the two, taking in almost twice as much as Oppenheimer. Since it is a highly politicized movie, a fact the filmmakers made no attempt to hide prior to release, some have jumped on this as debunking the maxim “go woke, go broke”. An op-ed cartoon in the Baltimore Sun, for example, depicts Ron DeSantis as saying “go woke go broke” as he is trampled by a mob rushing into a theatre showing Barbie. Tori Otten wrote an editorial for The New Republic maintaining that the Barbie opening weekend sales debunk the saying that she dubs “far right”. Perhaps she has never heard of the other saying “the exception that proves the rule”. That might be what we are seeing here. Then again, the rule may simply not apply. The implications of “go woke go broke” are that companies that were originally apolitical and sold their products to a general consumer base will lose a lot of customers if they start injecting politics, especially of the obnoxious, preachy, ultra-left kind that is now called “woke”, into their brand. What happened with Bud Light earlier this year is the textbook example. Or, and this is particularly the case when it comes to pop culture, if a story or character originally created to appeal to the kinds of people the woke hate is suddenly given a woke makeover, it is not likely to go over well. If someone were to film a remake of Dirty Harry, for example, telling the story from the perspective of the liberal mayor and police commissioner, with Inspector Callahan breaking down into tears, coming around to their point of view, throwing away his .44 Magnum instead of his star, and hugging Scorpio and begging his forgiveness, then I would expect that movie to do exceptionally poorly in the box office. A movie, on the other hand, about the doll that has been associated with the Helen Gurley Brown “you can have it all, girl” type feminism from pretty much the day Ruth Handler ripped her off from a more risqué German doll marketed for adult males and repackaged her in a pink box for girls, is not likely to be harmed at the box office by its having a feminist message.
Amusingly, the film preaches feminism in such a way as to completely undermine its message. *spoiler alert* The title character, a feminist of the Cosmo type her brand has long represented, lives in a world inhabited by her multiple versions, and the other characters of the franchise. That world is a complete gynocracy. Most people would probably call it a matriarchy but none of the females who rule the place seem to have any maternal instincts – except discontinued pregnant Midge – so gynocracy makes more sense. To “stereotypical Barbie” this is a utopia. It is also a mirror-image parody of what feminists think the world looked like before feminism and would still look like without feminism. Barbie thinks that due to her influence the real world is like hers. Then she has to visit it and discovers that it is not. In the real world she is verbally dressed down by a young girl who spouts the extra crazy version of feminism that thinks that women are all oppressed “A Handmaid’s Tale” style in the Western world today and that Barbie is the “fascist” enabler of said oppression. This girl and her mother end up going back with Barbie to Barbieland, where they discover that it has been taken over by Ryan Gosling’s Ken, who had gone to the real world with Barbie, read about “patriarchy” in a library, went home and easily replaced the gynocracy with what he thought “patriarchy” was. Note that patriarchy is the term feminists use for a society ruled by men qua men, who oppress women qua women, basically the Marxist concept of haves oppressing have nots, with the sexes taking the place of the economic classes. The same objection that I made to matriarchy earlier apply to this usage of patriarchy. The term logically suggests the traditional authority belonging to fathers which is a good thing not a bad thing. Androcracy would be a better word for what the feminists are talking about. It is not likely to catch on, but then as the thing it would denote only exists – and only ever has existed – in the fevered brains of feminists, it is not really needed.
Now, and this is the point, nobody with an IQ over ten who watches this movie is going to think that the actual world around them either a) resembles Barbieland with the sex/gender roles reversed or b) resembles Kendom, the weird caricature that the idea of “patriarchy” inspired Ken to create. Especially since in the movie, Barbie herself, after restoring her world to the way it was, sort of, opts to leave Barbieland for the real world and become a real girl with the help of the ghost of Ruth Handler, played by Rhea Perlman, who for some unexplained reason has the same powers as the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio.
Something similar can be said about the movie’s man-bashing, which Piers Morgan and others have criticized. (1) Yes, the movie does depict its male characters as stupid, incompetent, clumsy and boorish. I can’t imagine anyone, however, who has not already been thoroughly brainwashed by feminism, watching the movie, and thinking that this is an accurate depiction of men. Nor, I suspect, are many likely to be persuaded to think that the film’s portrayal of men accurately depicts how men see women, which is obviously the point it is, at least on the surface, trying to make. It is simply too much of a caricature to be taken seriously. The film comes across as pretending to promote feminism while actually satirizing it. Except that this does not mesh well with anything else I have ever heard about filmmaker Greta Gerwig, I would be inclined to say this must be intentional.
Many have criticized Barbie as being far too political for a children’s movie and this criticism would be accurate regardless of whether it is the woke, feminist, propaganda that on the surface it can be read as or whether it is actually the most brilliant, satirical, takedown of the same ever made. Except, of course, that it is obviously not a children’s movie as ought to be evident from the rating. Like G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) and its sequel, and the more successful Transformers film series, also based on children’s toys, this film’s target audience is not children playing with the toys today, but the children who played with the toys decades ago and are today adults, if only in the sense of having passed the age of majority.
Oppenheimer seems set to become Christopher Nolan’s most successful film yet. It would probably have done even better if he had not insisted on shooting it only in IMAX, forcing moviegoers to either pay the steep price of an IMAX ticket or watch it in a theatre for which it is not really formatted. It is a very timely film. I suspect that a lot of people would agree with that statement because, due to the war between Russia and Ukraine and NATO’s involvement in said conflict on Ukraine’s side, we are closer to nuclear war than we have been since the Cold War ended. That is certainly a valid reason for thinking the film to be timely It is not the reason behind my statement, however. Before looking at that reason a few remarks about the movie are in order.
The film does not just cover the period in which the atomic bomb was being developed. It also looks at Oppenheimer’s revulsion at the destructive fruit that his efforts produced, his unsuccessful attempts to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle and the ensuing falling away between him and his former colleagues. The movie zig-zags between this latter part of Oppenheimer’s life, the period in which he led the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory, and an even earlier, pre-war period of his career. In this earlier period he apparently identified as Snow White’s evil stepmother. Or, at any rate, he tried to dispatch his tutor, Lord Patrick Blackett, played in the film by James D’Arcy, in the same manner employed by the witch in her final attempt on Snow White’s life. Since the apple went uneaten, neither dwarves nor prince were needed. Pity. They would have been available for the movie since Disney kicked them out of its new ultra-woke live action remake of Snow White.
In the storyline about the post-war part of his life the dominant theme is the growing animosity between him and US Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss, portrayed in the film by Robert Downey Jr. The film is shot partly in black and white, partly in colour, with the colour parts depicting when the story is told from Oppenheimer’s point of view, the black and white depicting when it is told from Strauss’ point of view. It is best to know that going into the theatre because otherwise the natural assumption would be to think it had something to do with the different timeframes the movie keeps switching between. The contest between Oppenheimer and Strauss culminated in the 1954 AEC hearings in which Oppenheimer was asked about his Communist associations (before the war his social circle included several Communists, including his pre-war girlfriend Jean Tatlock, portrayed by Florence Pugh in the movie, Katherine “Kitty” Puening, portrayed by Emily Blunt in the movie, who became his wife, and his younger brother Frank, portrayed by Dylan Arnold) and stripped of his security clearance. Strauss’s purpose in these hearings was more to publicly humiliate Oppenheimer than to harm him professionally – the clearance was set to expire the day after he was stripped of it. Ultimately, it cost Strauss his own appointment to Eisenhower’s cabinet as Secretary of Commerce when the US Senate voted against confirmation of the appointment in part because of the lobbying of scientists looking to avenge Oppenheimer. In depicting these events Nolan does not stray from the Hollywood party-line on “McCarthyism”, which is not surprising since if any film since John Wayne starred in Big Jim McLain in 1952, two years before the Oppenheimer hearings, has dared to tell the other side of the story I am not aware of it. Accordingly the film’s precise historical accuracy fails somewhat on this point. That Strauss in hauling Oppenheimer before the AEC’s Personnel Security Board was carrying out a personal vendetta is accurate enough. That the charges against him were bogus, well, that is not as clear as the film suggests and as many people think. That J. Brandon Magoo took it upon himself, last December, to indulge in the empty gesture of voiding the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, suggests there might have been more to the charges than meets the eye.
The reason, however, that I said that Oppenheimer is a very timely film, is not the Russia-Ukrainian War and the renewed threat of nuclear annihilation that the repentant Oppenheimer felt to be the inevitable outcome of his work nor does it have anything to do with Communism. A notable moment in the film is when the title character quotes “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” upon his realization of just what he had unleashed, a line which earlier he had translated upon request from his pre-war Commie girlfriend during an, ahem, intimate moment. The classical Sanskrit original of the quote comes from the Bhagavad Gita, an important section of the sixth parva or book of the Mahabharata, the longest epic poem still extent and one of the principal Hindu scriptures. In its original context, the line is spoken by Krishna, avatar of the Hindu supreme deity Vishnu, to Prince Arjuna, the hero of the epic, and its intent is to convince Arjuna to go to war. When Oppenheimer took to quoting this line in his post-war life it was rather to the opposite effect of this. Another contrast, however, jumps out. Oppenheimer in his testimony before the USAEC Personnel Security Board in 1954 said:
When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
George Grant, the greatest thinker my country, the Dominion of Canada, has ever produced, was as fond of quoting these words, especially the first part up to the words “do it”, as Oppenheimer himself was of quoting the line from the Gita. Grant believed that in these words Oppenheimer had captured the spirit that animates Modern technological progress and had also expressed in the same words, the very thing that was objectionable, or at the very least problematic from a Christian, ethical, and philosophical point of view, in said progress. The question of whether or not something should be done is made subordinate to the question of whether or not something can be done and postponed until it is too late to ask the question because the damage has already been done. Given what has already been noted about Oppenheimer’s thoughts, later in life, towards the atomic bomb, his words have the force of a mea maxima culpa.
As the trailers for Barbie and Oppenheimer were released and the hype for these movies grew we began to hear story after story about another technological genie in the process of being released from its bottle. That is the genie of artificial intelligence or AI.
That AI poses a threat to mankind as great or greater than that of the Manhattan Project’s invention is something that even Elon Musk, the last person on earth one would suspect harboured technoskeptical sentiments, suggested that the brakes be applied. Indeed, the man behind Tesla has been issuing these warnings for quite some time. The AI threat that he has been talking about is a lot more serious than the threat to their careers that the striking Hollywood actors began to perceive about the time AI channels began to flood Youtube offering us artificially generated covers of every song ever written by every artist that never covered it. About five years ago he warned that AI was like “summoning the devil”, that it needed to be proactively regulated, because “By the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it will be too late”, that it could produce an “immortal dictator from which we would never escape” and posed “a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization”.
Of course when it comes to warning about AI, Musk was beaten to the punch by decades by a film maker. As you have probably deduced from the title of this essay I am talking about James Cameron. In Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, when he was asked by CTV News Chief Political Correspondent Vassy Kapelos to comment about recent warnings regarding AI he said “I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn’t listen.”
1984, in addition to being the title of George Orwell’s novel warning about a totalitarian dystopia, was the year that Cameron released The Terminator. Directed and co-written by Cameron, this film starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role as a cyborg assassin, sent back in time to assassinate Sarah Connor, the character played by Linda Hamilton. The Terminator was sent by Skynet, an Artificial Intelligence designed by Cyberdyne Systems and placed in charge of nuclear defences that would declare war on humanity in the future and eventually be defeated by a resistance led by Sarah Connor’s son John. The future John Connor, to protect his mother and his own existence from the Terminator, sends one of his men, Kyle Reese, portrayed by Michael Biehn back in time to protect Sarah. Reese, over the course of the movie, becomes John Connor’s father, and he and Sarah eventually defeat the Terminator at the cost of his own life. Before the Terminator is destroyed it loses an arm, however, which in the first of many sequels it is revealed falls into the hands of the creators of the future AI enemy of mankind, becoming the means by which they learn how to develop that technology in the first place.
Throughout the Terminator movie franchise both sides are constantly struggling to prevent an outcome that proves to be inevitable. Skynet is constantly fighting against its own future defeat at the hands of the resistance, the Connors and their allies are constantly trying to prevent the rise of Skynet. The fatality both are fighting a losing battle against arises out of the dilemma attached to the concept of time travel, that if you go back in time to change something, after having changed it you lose the motive to have gone back in time to begin with. The present attempt to prevent AI from becoming the threat already visible on the horizon of the future often seems similarly futile but it is not. The battle is not against a future that cannot be changed because it is the fixed reference point for everyone working to change it in the past as in the movies. It is against a future that is only inevitable if we continue to accept the idea that when it comes to science and technology, we must first find out if something can be done, and, after having done it, only then ask the question whether we should have done it or not. We must reject, in other words, the Oppenheimer ethic, and in its place firmly establish – or re-establish – the idea that we must first ask the question of whether or not something should be done, and not bother at all with the question of whether it can be done unless the answer to the first question is firmly determined to be yes.
If we don’t, we are at risk of unleashing a technological threat that would render the “battle of the sexes” type controversy surrounding the first of the movies discussed here moot. For if soulless, sexless, machines take over the world, this would indeed be an end to any sort of “patriarchy”, real or imagined, but it would also be “Hasta la vista, Barbie”.
(1) I find it hilarious that Piers Morgan has been taking this both personally and far more seriously than I have. Morgan is liberal on most social and moral issues, albeit liberal in the sense of thirty years ago rather than today. Indeed, the question he posed in ranting about Barbie’s man-bashing was “why does empowering women have to be about trashing men?” He framed it in that way to indicate his support for “empowering women”. Frankly, I think there is far too much “empowering” going on in this day and age. While people who talk about empowerment generally conceive of it in terms of self-fulfillment, in reality power is the ability to coerce others to do your will. It is something that is very dangerous and needs to be constantly held in check and under control. What is sorely needed today is not for more people of more types to have more power, as the left thinks, but a restoration and revival of authority, the respected right to lead, vested by prescription – the quality of having been tested and proven since time immemorial – in traditional institutions, the only thing capable of containing power and bending it to serve the ends of civilization, rather than unleashing it in a destructive manner. The terms “patriarchy” and “matriarchy” if they were used to mean what their component parts suggest, which neither of them is, would denote fatherly and motherly authority respectively, both good things, -archy being the suffix corresponding to authority as –cracy is the suffix corresponding to power. As far as “empowering women” specifically goes, I am unapologetically of the same mind as Dr. Johnson, “nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little”, and Stephen Leacock, “women need not more freedom but less”, and think that every wave of feminism, including the first, was based on a fundamentally erroneous miscalculation of how little power women already had in the world, but did not take offense at this movie the way Morgan did. — Gerry T. Neal
My Twitter Account Was Suspended; CAFE Retains Legal Help
The new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, has made a name for himself opposing censorship and promised to free Twitter from political censorship. He now has a chance to prove it. On April 24, I learned that my Twitter account which I have had for over a decade had been suspended. I quickly learned that mine was not the only one. Accounts belonging to fellow nationalists broadcaster James Edwards, authors Professor Kevin MacDonald and Dr. Tom Sunic, and the American Freedom Party were suspended the same day, interestingly the same day popular populist broadcaster Tucker Carlson was purged from Fox News.
This was Twitter’s message: “After careful review, wedetermined your account broke the Twitter Rules. Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t Tweet, Retweet, or Like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts. If you think we got this wrong, you can submit an appeal.”All five of us appealed. Mr. Edwards and I sent in threeappeals. Both Mr. Edwards and I have had our accounts for over a decade and encountered no troubles. We asked what Twitter Rules we had broken. My appeal read: “My suspension came as ashock. I am not aware of breaking any Twitter rules. I wish to know how I offended and ask that my account be restored. I protest the denial of due process, any sort of a hearing or dialogue or proper notice of exactly in what way I broke Twitter rules.” There has been no response from Twitter to the various appeals.
Accordingly, CAFE reached out and obtained the assistance of a prominent California lawyer to take our appeals further up the food chain and, hopefully, directly to Elon Musk. — Paul Fromm
“Censor not, lest ye be censored,” Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, tweeted recently. Since purchasing Twitter, Musk has been vilified by the far left and liberal activist community for pledging to restore free speech on the platform, ostensibly allowing more conservative and right-wing voices space on one of the world’s largest and most influential social media sites.
That very same day, Monday, April 24, several notable right-wing dissidents were unceremoniously deplatformed and banned on Twitter with no explanation given. Popular talk radio personality James Edwards, the longtime host of The Political Cesspool, Dr. Kevin MacDonald, one of the leading dissident intellectuals who edits The Occidental Observer, Dr. Tom Sunic, a Croatian-American former diplomat, academic, and author, along with countless others had their increasingly popular Twitter accounts permanently banned.
Edwards explained to this reporter:
I had been on Twitter since 2016 and never once received a prior warning or reprimand. This wasn’t my second or third strike. This was an online assassination that went straight to a permanent ban. No reason was given.
I conduct myself professionally and have always been sure to responsibly present our arguments. I don’t quarrel with individuals on social media and have never even used profanity or crude rhetoric.
Simply put, by no reasonable standard of measurement could it be argued that I violated even the most ambiguous terms of service. This was just another case of naked censorship.
Dr. Kevin MacDonald noted he simply received an email with a subject line that read: “Your account is permanently suspended.”
The email continued:
After careful review, we determined your account broke the Twitter Rules. Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t Tweet, Retweet, or Like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts. If you think we got this wrong, you can submit an appeal.
No reason was provided for the permanent ban, and no explanation was provided detailing in what specific way any Twitter Rules were violated.
“No reason was given and that’s also the case with James,” MacDonald told this reporter referring to the permanent ban. “We have appealed, asking for reasons but I rather doubt anything good will happen.”
Sunic, meanwhile, noted that the Twitter ban didn’t surprise him at all, arguing “that the censorship in the U.S. is continuing where the Soviet Union left off.”
Sunic wrote following his ban:
I know what I am talking about. My family and I were all proscribed in communist ex-Yugoslavia for several decades. My father, an ex-lawyer, even served prison time for “hostile anti-communist literature.”
Now we are witnessing the same intellectual purges, albeit adorned with fancy and demonic euphemisms such as “hate speech” and “ethnic sensitivity training” in the U.S. and EU—akin to the ex-Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, i.e., the NKVD.
Several other dissident commentators were purged recently as well, including Andrew Anglin, editor and lead writer for The Daily Stormer, easily one of the most censored websites in the world. Paul Fromm, a Canadian free speech activist and occasional contributor to this newspaper, was also banned. It remains unclear what specific rules any of these activists, writers, and commentators broke, if any.
In addition to the recent censoring of popular dissidents, many other content creators and political activists have been permanently banned for months now. Mike Peinovich, Joseph Jordan, Warren Balogh, and others associated with the National Justice Party (NJP), a burgeoning political movement dedicated to advocating “for White civil rights, the working and middle class, and the traditional family against our corrupt and illegitimate institutions,” have been shut down and censored on Twitter. Links to the organization’s website are also banned from even being shared on the platform.
Patriotic Alternative, a similar right-wing political movement based in the UK, and its leadership and affiliated organizations are also permanently banned on Twitter. Additionally, Nick Fuentes, a leading political commentator and organizer based in Chicago, is also banned on the platform.
Laura Towler, a leader with Patriotic Alternative, recently pointed out:
Twitter censorship is worse under Elon Musk than it ever was before. Not only are most of our accounts suspended still/again, but so are URLs to websites like Patriotic Alternative and NJP. This makes it almost impossible to share any [public] activism, direct people to solutions, or even recruit people to sign up. People are able to lie about us and we have no ability to defend ourselves.
Warren Balogh also powerfully argued that censorship under Musk is even more extreme than it was previously, noting that Musk purchased “the most important social media platform in the world for political discourse, with the promise to restore free speech, then [has made] it more restrictive than it ever was for dissident individuals and parties in the West at the wishes of the ADL [Anti-Defamation League.—Ed.].”
Balogh explained:
This is what we get living under the arbitrary rule of an oligarchy of degenerate billionaires. This whole system has to go, including oligarchs like Musk who think they are gods, and the world and all our most fundamental freedoms are their playthings, that they can amuse themselves with or discard when they get bored.
Shortly after purchasing Twitter, which was a long, drawn-out process fraught with controversy and conflict, Musk openly stated that, under his watch, the platform would allow all speech that the First Amendment specifically protects.
“By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law,” Musk tweeted on April 26, 2022. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
Musk’s mixed messaging and outright schizophrenic thinking on free speech matters continues to grow. While denouncing censorship on his personal Twitter account, which receives millions of views, his underlings at the social media behemoth censor legitimate and responsible right-wing dissidents that have long been in the crosshairs of organized special interest groups like the ADL, who work overtime to cancel and shut down their opposition.
NB: This article was originally published by American Free Press on May 17, 2023. Subscribe to America’s last real newspaper today!
Climate Activists Alarmed That Twitter Under Musk Allows More Dissenting Views on Global Warming
Figurines with smartphones and computers in front of the Twitter logo in an illustration on Nov. 28, 2022. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters) By Bryan JungJanuary 22, 2023Updated: January 23, 2023 biggersmallerPrint 0:003:17
An organization that says it is a coalition of “climate and anti-disinformation organisations” says Twitter under CEO Elon Musk is allowing more dissenting views on climate change.
Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), released a Jan. 19 study (pdf), accusing Musk of allowing misinformation about the climate crisis to spread on the social media platform.
The study accused Twitter of boosting the hashtag “#ClimateScam” to users when searching the word “climate,” as its top search result.
The hashtag has suddenly spiked on Twitter search results since July 2022, with its appearance increasing ever since, according to CAAD.
The report said that “in 2022, denialist content made a stark comeback on Twitter in particular.”
Twitter Search
CAAD alleged that at least 91,000 Twitter users reported the #ClimateScam hashtag more than 362,000 times by December.
“The source of its virality is entirely unclear, and re-emphasises the need for transparency on how and why platforms surface content to users,” said the study’s authors.
They said that term appeared to be trending despite “data that shows more activity and engagement on other hashtags such as #ClimateCrisis and #ClimateEmergency.”
The research team claimed that the rise of the term in search results could not be explained by user personalization, the volume of content, or popularity.
“A basic search for ‘climate’ on Facebook did not autofill with overtly sceptic or denialist terms; searching explicitly for #ClimateScam only showed 1.5k users mentioning the term, versus 72k for #ClimateEmergency and 160k for #ClimateCrisis.”
CAAD complained that the source of the #ClimateScam hashtag was unclear and that there was a need for transparency on how the search result came up.
“Equally, TikTok returned no search results for #ClimateScam, but instead suggested the phrase ‘may be associated with behaviour or content that violates our guidelines.’”
Interest Groups
The authors said that not enough of the content was labeled as misinformation by Twitter’s new management and claimed that it could not find a comparable trend or uptick in “#ClimateScam” on other platforms.
CAAD is partially funded by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank, which is heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The ISD said it is working with social media platforms to explore radicalization online, to minimize the impact of extremist recruitment by groups in Europe and North America.
Since buying Twitter in October, Elon Musk has reduced the social media team’s staff by 50 percent and cut down its content moderation team to protect freedom of expression.
