Koch lawyers and UK Government seek to protect disinformation on both sides of the pond
Free Speech is a right to profit from disinformation
After two years of very little action to prevent the epidemic of coordinated disinformation, California finally took action at the start of October.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/101008
Unsurprisingly those responsible for disinformation lobbied unsuccessfully to try to prevent the bill being signed into law, claiming the law would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech. Unfortunately there were more respectable individuals who bought into alarmist misrepresentation of the bill.
The bill only applies to those providing direct care to covid patients, it will not prevent Brownstone Institute authors regularly making false claims about vaccines, or prevent Tracy Hoeg and Emily Oster writing about why they believe mask wearing in schools doesn’t reduce transmission. However, it should prevent doctors prescribing unproven drugs in potentially toxic doses.
Disinformation doctors will be moving to Florida which under DeSantis has embraced disinformation as state policy.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s recently released antivax paper by anonymous authors is covered in a previous weekly round up.
While disinformation groups have repeatedly claimed they are not advancing the political agenda of the Council for National Policy and the Koch network, its the Koch funded New Civil Liberties Alliance that is hoping to ride to the rescue with several legal cases.
One is a regarding the new law in California.
Full details are covered in the Misinformation Kills newsletter by Allison Neitzel whose NLFD colleagues are being targeted.
The Brownstone Institute is the “spiritual home” of the Great Barrington Declaration, the organisation has taken the lead in the defence of disinformation.
Another case is against the Biden Administration claiming opposing views were silenced. Walker Bragman has covered the story in detail.
A couple of sections from the article.
The Counter Disinformation Project has previously explained how legal challenges without a hope of success have previously been used in the UK and the US as a form of court room PR to galvanise their base. Losing simply allowed them to claim the establishment and big pharma are stacked against them.
For instance Us For Them, a group that has campaigned against all measures in UK schools launched their organisation across the national media by threatening the government with legal action with the support of a legal team from the third largest law firm in the US who also had contracts with the UK government.
Legal challenges have also been used to raise funding to support organisations and future campaigns.
There is currently outrage in sceptic and anti-vax circles at medical boards after Peter McCullough was stripped of his medical credentials. In February 2020 McCullough was one of the first to claim to have found a cure for covid, he is involved in a number of disinformation groups including Pandata and the Truth for Health Foundation which is linked to the Black Robe Regiment, a religious militia group that has called for civil war in the US. He was also a key member of the Canadian Truckers science council.
More details in the thread.
UK Government vs PayPal
Several Brownstone Institute authors from the UK recently had their own organisation’s accounts blocked by PayPal.
Us For Them was founded by Molly Kingsley, she is also on the executive board of the Together Declaration, the UK equivilent to Defeat the Mandates, however the group has recently btanched out to climate change denial while hosting events on how to prevent the “globalist” Great Reset.
The Free Speech Union and Daily Sceptic were founded by Toby Young. Launched in April 2020 the Daily Sceptic was the original news hub for the covid disinformation network, one of the writers Will Jones is also a member of HART alongside Michael Yeadon and Joel Smalley who are advising America’s Frontline Doctors. Founded in the summer of 2020 with the aid of Peter Thiel’s chief of staff the Free Speech Union offers legal support and online back up against pile ons "(rent an online mob) for individuals embroiled in the culture wars. It is linked to an increasing number of other culture war organisations and campaign groups.
PayPal then reversed the decision after coming under pressure from Conservative MPs including the Business Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg who suggested the government was willing to take action against PayPal.
An amendment has now been tabled to a bill which would force companies like PayPal to provide services on “purely political ground.”
This is entirely disingenuous as PayPal’s action was nothing to do with political views. Claiming vaccines are more deadly than covid should not be a political view, its disinformation, as is climate change denial. Simple facts and truth should not be mutable based on political persuasion.
The UK Government is also looking to amend its Online Harms bill, watering down legislation that was proposed in part to protect children from harmful and misleading content. The pressure to change the bill came from the Free Speech Union and other interlinked organisations and supporting individuals.
This is yet another example of MPs defending disinformation, and in many cases they are actively promoting anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.
This comes after a Higher Education Free Speech Bill was written with the aid of members of the Free Speech Union. It should be a matter of great concern that organisations with clear links to the US radical right including foreign billionaires such as Charles Koch and Peter Thiel are having such influence on UK legislation designed to not just create a safe place for discrimination and disinformation but to actively force these views onto other people.
The same cluster of organisations is also seeking to exert control over what can and can’t be said in UK schools. On one hand they are seeking to go into schools and expose children to contrarian views and alternative facts, while also seeking to police the content of lesson plans to censor views that they deem to be “too woke” such as discussing the threats of climate change, the reality of institutional racism and the rights of people to change their gender.
Thread and article covering several organisations seeking to counter “left wing indoctrination” in education by balancing this out by forcing schools to expose children to right wing narratives.
A look at efforts to police lessons plans.
Clare Page states that she is not a member of DDU, however on the website she is listed as a writer for the organisation.
The culture wars in the UK are being driven by a small but well connected group of individuals, the playbook is identical to what was launched in the US after the creation of the Council for National Policy at the start of the 1980’s.
George Monbiot’s article from 2018 covers his research with Desmog that uncovered some of the direct ties between the Koch Network and the Living Marxism/Spiked Online/ Academy of Ideas network which has been instrumental in poisoning much of the political debate in recent years
ttps://www.monbiot.com/2018/12/10/you-want-it-darker/
The Free Speech Union, Spiked Online, The Academy of Ideas, covid disinformation groups like Us For Them and the Together Declaration, anti-tran, anti-abortion, anti-CRT, anti immigration, nearly all of the groups driving the culture wars in the UK are interlinked and sharing members and organisers.
Now the sham that groups in the UK are not directly linked to the Council for National Policy and the radical right are falling apart as the US and UK culture warriors unite under one roof through organisations like the Brownstone Institute, Peter Thiel’s University of Austin, the Academy of Academic Freedom and the Common Sense Society.
Kathleen Stock of the Free Speech Union resigned her university post after courting controversy around her views on trans people. A few months later she became a founding faculty fellow for Peter Thiel’s “anti woke” University of Austin.
The Common Sense Society has recently launched a UK chapter, those involved are well connected to the Living Marxism/Spiked Online crowd.
While these groups continue to have a disproportionate impact on the government policy and media narratives, their claims to be champions of freedom seem at odds when the US groups they are aligned to are involved in an attack on the very foundations of American democracy.
Its important for those in the UK and other countries to understand the threat posed by the culture wars. Do not get distracted by the heat of the daily outrage headlines, focusing on the underlying agenda of shifting the overton window towards the extreme right while undermining trust in institutions to bring about radical change.
