March 18, 2024: The Censorship Regime Goes to Court
The USAID censorship primer; Did college students run the EIP?; Hamas #3 confirmed dead
The Big Story
On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), a landmark case challenging the government’s ability to pressure Big Tech companies to censor the speech of American citizens under the guise of fighting “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Last July, a federal judge in Louisiana issued a sweeping injunction severely limiting the practice; an appeals court narrowed that ruling in September but concluded that the government likely had violated the First Amendment in its communications with Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, setting up the ongoing case before the Supreme Court.
At issue is the legality of the “counter-disinformation complex” or “censorship regime” described by Jacob Siegel, Jenin Younes (a lawyer in the current case), and others in the pages of Tablet and elsewhere. This regime operates not through direct government censorship, but through government pressure on private platforms and through the use of cutouts such as the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a “non-partisan coalition” of academic and other nongovernmental researchers that quietly worked in consultation with the Department of Homeland Security to protect Americans’ “cognitive infrastructure” by flagging, and requesting the removal of, “misleading” information—as defined by spooks, political operatives, activist journalists, and the White House.
Plus, as we now know, much of the censored “misinformation” was true. For example, in an August 2023 essay for Tablet, Younes relayed this internal conversation from high-ranking Meta employees regarding COVID-19-related censorship, which makes clear that the censorship was informed by governmental pressure:
In July of 2021, Meta’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, emailed a Facebook vice president in charge of content policy, asking why the company had removed from Facebook, rather than demoted or flagged, claims that COVID-19 was “man-made.” The vice president responded, “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more and it was part of the ‘more’ package.” He concluded his reply to Clegg with an acknowledgment of error: “We shouldn’t have done it.”
In May 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray acknowledged that the pandemic was “most likely” the result of a lab leak in Wuhan, China—i.e., “man-made,” exactly as the removed posts claimed. Twitter also flagged as “misleading” an April 2021 tweet by the world-renowned epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff stating that children, and people who had immunity from a prior infection, did not need the COVID-19 vaccine. The World Health Organization officially adopted the same position in March 2023, as have several European governments. False, misleading, and inflammatory information that supported the government’s preferred narrative, on the other hand, was never censored or removed.
A writeup of today’s oral arguments in The Wall Street Journal noted that the justices seemed “doubtful” that the government’s takedown requests had violated the Constitution, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh offering, as an analogy, a government request to a newspaper not to publish a national security story on the grounds that will “harm the war effort and put Americans at risk.” That serves as a good introduction to our closing quote from Siegel’s “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” which describes in detail the inner workings of the counter-disinformation complex at issue in Murthy v. Missouri:
The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.
What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning. The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.
Read Jenin Younes on Missouri v. Biden here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/americas-censorship-regime-goes-on-trial-missouri-biden
And here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/disinfo-has-its-day-in-court-jenin-younes
IN THE BACK PAGES: Ph.D student Daniel Solomon offers a first-hand account of how UC-Berkeley became a bastion of mob intimidation and antisemitic hate
The Rest
→A February 2021 U.S. Agency for International Aid and Development “Disinformation Primer,” recently released in response to a lawsuit from America First Legal, “proposes censorship action items for virtually every governmental, non-governmental and private sector commercial actor across society to both individually and collectively take action against disfavored speech online,” according to a write-up from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO). Among the primer’s recommendations for fighting disinformation:
The Redirect Method, which uses online ad services such as Google AdWords to redirect users seeking “mis/disinformation online” to “curated” content that “debunks” the misinformation
Debunking and Discrediting, which is recommended by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center—the “lead government agency coordinating the war against disinformation,” per Tablet’s “Disinfo Dictionary.” This tactic seeks to attack the “credibility and reputation” of alternate sources of information by “changing the frame from the false allegation to the misdeeds and lack of credibility of those spreading disinformation,” including by fomenting “moral outrage” against them. In other words: character assassination.
Prebunking, an “offensive strategy” that involves training audiences to dismiss so-called disinformation out of hand by disseminating approved talking points in advance. Prebunking is the brainchild of former Harvard professor Joan Donovan, who is cited 10 times in the primer. Donovan sits on the board of Check My Ads, which lobbies for digital advertisers to demonetize conservative websites such as Fox News to “defund hate and disinformation.” The co-founders of Check My Ads also serve on the advisory committee of Good Information Inc., an anti- disinformation “civic incubator” funded by George Soros and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. At Harvard, Donavan headed the True Costs of Misinformation project, funded by the Arabella Advisors-controlled New Venture Fund.
Advertiser Outreach, which focuses on lobbying advertisers to defund alleged “disinformation”
As FFO notes, the USAID primer identifies as the primary drivers of disinformation “alternative media spaces,” including “message board and digital distribution platforms” and, yes, “gaming sites.”
Read more here: https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/usaid-internal-documents-reveal-government-plot-to-promote-censorship-initiatives/
→Quote of the Day:
The idea [for the Election Integrity Partnership] came from a group of college interns at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA. The students suggested that research institutions could help track and flag posts that might violate the platforms’ standards, feeding the information into a portal open to the agency, state and local governments and the platforms.
The project ultimately involved Stanford University, the University of Washington, the National Conference on Citizenship, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and Graphika, a social media analytics firm. At its peak, it had 120 analysts, some of whom were college students.
That’s from a Sunday article in The New York Times, “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.” As the title suggests, the article depicts the Murthy v. Missouri case as pitting far-right MAGA ghouls, who want to defend their right to spread “lies” and “false information,” against the Biden administration’s well-meaning attempts to strike “a delicate balance between the First Amendment and social media’s rising power over public opinion.” The article is also a handy demonstration of the GEC-recommended tactic of “Debunking and Discrediting,” attempting to tie all criticism of the government censorship regime in eyes of Times readers to Trump-connected figures such as Stephen Miller and Mike Benz, while ignoring left-wing and civil libertarian critics such as Jenin Younes and Glenn Greenwald.
As for the highlighted passage: We’re not sure if it’s simply CYA from higher-ups trying to obscure their responsibility, or if it’s true, and the U.S. counter-disinformation complex is run by literal—and not merely figurative—children.
→At a government meeting on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to go forward with the IDF’s invasion of Rafah in Gaza despite “international pressure” and shot back at Sen. Chuck Schumer’s White House-endorsed call for new elections in Israel, saying that they would “halt the war and paralyze the country for at least six months.” “No international pressure will stop us from realizing all of the goals of the war: Eliminating Hamas, freeing all of our hostages, and ensuring that Gaza never again constitutes a threat to Israel,” the prime minister said. “In order to do this, we will operate in Rafah.”
→In a Friday NBC report mentioning that the United States had asked Israel to provide security the floating pier that the U.S. plans to construct off the coast of Gaza, a “senior [Biden] administration official” told NBC that it’s “hard to imagine a large-scale distribution without the involvement of United Nations agencies like the World Food Program and UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).” In our Post of the Day, Richard Goldberg explains why that’s a terrible idea:
→An illegal immigrant from Lebanon detained while crossing the U.S. southern border earlier this month told Border Patrol that he was an active member of Hezbollah who was traveling to New York City to “make a bomb,” according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents reviewed by the New York Post. Basel Bassel Ebbadi, detained while crossing near El Paso on March 9, told authorities that he had “trained with Hezbollah for seven years” and that the focus of his training was “jihad” and killing “people who are not Muslim,” though he later changed his story and said he was trying to “flee Lebanon and Hamas.” The detention of a terrorist coming across the southern border comes only a few days after journalist James O’Keefe released hidden-camera footage of Jason Beck, the associate director for Total Force Requirements & Sourcing Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, asking “Why not just have open borders?” and “When has a terrorist ever come in?” In January, ICE arrested a member of Al-Shabaab terrorist group in Minneapolis, where he had been living for nearly a year after illegally crossing the southern border in March 2023.
→U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan confirmed Monday that Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’ military wing and the group’s No. 3 commander in Gaza, was killed in an Israeli strike last week. The IDF believed it had struck Issa, and briefed the Israeli security cabinet on Friday that “all signs” pointed to him being dead, but had not publicly confirmed his death prior to Sullivan’s statement. Issa is the highest-ranking Hamas official killed by the IDF since Oct. 7.
→The IDF also announced that it had killed Faiq Mabhuoch, the head of the Operations Directorate of Hamas’ Internal Security, in a Monday raid on the Shifa Hospital Complex in Gaza City. According to a report in The Times of Israel, the raid followed Israeli intelligence reports that Hamas operatives and commanders had gathered at the hospital to use it as a “command center to manage the fighting against IDF troops and conduct ‘terror activity.’” One Israeli soldier was killed in a gun battle with Hamas operatives during the predawn raid.
→Data from the Federal Select Agent Program reveals that there have been more than 600 accidental releases of controlled pathogens in U.S. labs between 2015 and 2022, the Daily Mail reports. Little information is available about the nature of these releases due to national security concerns, but a “release” is defined as when a pathogen escapes its primary containment area (such as a test tube or ventilated unit), and “controlled” pathogens include anthrax, tuberculosis, Ebola, and smallpox. The Daily Mail reports on one incident in 2016, when a medical student in St. Louis accidentally pierced herself with a needle infected with the chikungunya virus and spent four days interacting with others before realizing she was sick, and another in 2018, when smallpox might have been released in Fort Detrick, Maryland, when a room containing the virus was flooded in a storm.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Deep Roots of Nowruz, by Maggie Phillips
How a Zoroastrian celebration of the Persian New Year grew into a broad symbol of cultural resilience and political resistance
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Berkeley Is a Safe Space for Hate
Thuggish intimidation of Jewish students and teachers is the new normal as leftist brownshirts topple once-heralded free speech bastion
By Daniel Solomon
If graduate school has any function, it is as a preserve of a serious clash of ideas. But the UC Berkeley campus is the stage for a confrontation of a different kind. Last month, ahead of a lecture by Ran Bar-Yoshafat, a reserve combat officer in the Israel Defense Forces and a regular on the lecture circuit, Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine promised a reprise of the Hamas pogrom, hanging from the campus’ main entrance a pledge to “Flood Sather Gate”—a reference to “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the code name for Hamas’ rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
On the night of the lecture, the group’s undergraduate fellow travelers, Bears for Palestine, made good on that vow, disrupting a pro-Israel event in a protest and quickly escalating into a riot. The mob smashed windows, shouted antisemitic chants, and sent at least one student to urgent care. The attendees, this author included, had to be evacuated, ironically, via a tunnel. We, the Jewish students, had forfeited our right to security after coming to hear Bar-Yoshafat’s lecture. The university had assured the campus Jewish organizations behind the event that police officers would fend off disruptive protest and uphold our First Amendment rights. The administration did little to protect the safety of the speaker and audience, and even less to protect their free speech rights.
The antisemitic riot capped months of harassment, terror apologia, and occasional outbursts of violence from the campus "Free Palestine" movement. The university’s response has been consistently craven. Meanwhile, some faculty members, such as in the history department, where I am a Ph.D. student, have justified and covered for this behavior. My department has been a microcosm of a larger institutional failure, in which "equity" and "anti-colonialism" act as shields for rank antisemitism.
Leading a coterie of Ph.D. students in the UC Berkeley history department is professor Ussama Makdisi, the chapter president of what Harold Bloom labeled the school of resentment. Makdisi wrote his first books on sectarianism in the late Ottoman Empire, and his latest volume rhapsodizes about a 19th-century convivencia in the Levant that Zionism supposedly ruined. Even before the Hamas pogrom, he told a lecture hall full of students that Jews should have founded their state in postwar Germany. The university press office rewarded him for this in an article in which he was lauded, including by Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and inclusion, for creating a "learning space" that exemplifies "what's possible when we imagine, create and actualize the conditions that support thriving for every member of our campus community."
On the day of the Hamas pogrom, Makdisi posted a thinly veiled justification of the slaughter: “Just waking up to the news. Go read CLR James, Black Jacobins, on the violence of the oppressed. And then try to ignore the utterly racist double standard of Western politicians and media when it comes to questions of resistance and occupation and international law.” His online verbiage has since become more florid: He has accused Israel of “hunting” Palestinian children “in the name of Anne Frank,” and mocked diaspora Jews as “narcissists” for fretting over their security. He has addressed the crowds that have gathered on campus for “Free Palestine” marches and participated in a slew of events with Bears for Palestine.
Since the UC Berkeley Feb. 26 riot, Makdisi has defended the campus malefactors in a flurry of posts on X. Lavishing praise on an op-ed in The Daily Californian that attempted to “contextualize” the incident, he charged the whole brouhaha was no more than an attempt to distract from “the genocide” in Gaza. In a missive dispatched on the same day, he hit out at “the campaign of bullying, intimidation, and narcissistic gaslighting occurring across our campuses … all designed to make sure we don’t talk about Israel’s appalling genocide of Palestinians.”
Makdisi had put the light to the touchpaper in our department in the days after the Hamas pogrom. Canceling a mandatory course for first-year Ph.D. students that he taught, he urged the class to attend his “teach-in" (organized with BFP), in which he would “historicize” and “contextualize” the events of Oct. 7. The event was then promoted on our graduate student listserv, on the same email chain as a union organizing session. When I balked at this, pointing out the campus Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter’s vehement defense of the Hamas pogrom, a group organized a letter to the department chair directed at me. “We reject the assertions made, within our very community, that learning the history of Palestine is tantamount to terrorism or terror apologism,” the signatories, numbering about half of the graduate students, wrote. The signatories, who were mounting a defense of their mentor, spiced the letter with the customary accusation of lack of departmental engagement on “white supremacy ... within our community” (that is, those who had deplored the Hamas pogrom), and intoned about our "obligation to listen to the scholars whose research and lived experiences center these issues [Palestine and the Palestinians], and an equal responsibility to ensure that their voices are heard.” Hostage posters in our academic building were soon ripped down by fellow graduate students. Around this time, some members of the department started Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that posted the “Flood Sather Gate” sign.
Jewish students’ repeated attempts, over email and in-person, to explain to department administrators and colleagues how these actions were offensive and off-base soon met with escalating ostracism from others and a progressive withdrawal of Jewish students from departmental spaces and events. Antisemitism has battered a Jewish friend out of this department, after the majority of his first-year cohort claimed that “all resistance is justified to anyone with morals.” Another friend told me she would no longer come to our graduate library because “people there want my family dead.” Despite the department’s concern about the situation, administrators have maintained that academic freedom and institutional procedures prevent them from adopting a clear stance against the antisemitism in our midst and the primary instigator thereof. The same administrators have also consistently misrepresented the matter as a question of upholding civility in the course of intense political discord. Jewish students have sometimes felt like we are talking to a brick wall in explaining that this is not the case.
One faculty member who has taken a public stand in solidarity with Jewish students is Ron Hassner, a professor in the political science department. Hassner began a lock-in in his office in the Social Sciences Building and is now teaching, eating, sleeping, (and not showering) in his tiny seventh-floor space. “Our Jewish students don't feel safe walking across the campus so I won't walk across it either,” Hassner told The Daily Californian. His goal, he said, “is to provide a quiet home on campus for students who want to hold their heads high. And perhaps gently persuade our campus leaders that it's time for decisive action against anti-Semitism.”
***
SJP’s antisemitic onslaught began on the same day as the Hamas pogrom. On that day, Bears for Palestine released a statement praising its “comrades in blood and arms” for their operations “in the so-called ‘Gaza envelope.’” The same organization then mounted demonstrations at which participants, wearing masks and Palestinian headscarves, clamored to “globalize the intifada” and “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” The demonstrations sometimes spilled over into minor altercations, such as when an SJP member attempted to rip an Israeli flag from a counterprotester’s hands. The protests took place on the university’s main plaza, right next to the academic building where in the fall I was teaching a freshman seminar on Holocaust memory. I was so concerned for my students’ safety that I moved our meetings to the campus Hillel.
The university’s response to these events was tepid and laden with false equivalencies. UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ acknowledged in early November that “fear is being generated by the rhetoric used at some of the recent protests on campus”—a turn of phrase that was telling in its use of the passive voice and refusal to name names. She mentioned worries about antisemitism, which she nullified in the same breath with a condemnation of the “harassment, threats and doxxing that have targeted our Palestinian students and their supporters.” She even noted that one ought not to equate pro-Palestinian campus protests with support for terrorism (which seems at odds with the declarations of these self-same protesters). Christ closed her statement with a lofty call to honor the institution’s “long-lived and unwavering” dedication to free speech.
At UC Berkeley, this supposedly principled stand on the First Amendment has included allowing pro-Palestinian groups to block campus entrances for hours at a time, for weeks on end, as disabled students (including me as someone who is legally blind) have been forced to walk around the illicit obstacle through dirt and puddles. Even after the antisemitic riot, this installation has not been removed, even though the university has said it violates campus rules.
Pro-Palestinian activists often lament a supposed “Palestine exception” when it comes to respect for the First Amendment. But on Berkeley’s campus last month, the “Israel exception” was in full view. Bears for Palestine called on students to shut down the event with Bar-Yoshafat, plastering his photo on social media, describing him as a “dangerous” "genocide denier" who has "committed crimes against humanity." In an ominous threat to others on campus, Bears for Palestine exclaimed: “GENOCIDAL MURDERS [sic] OUT OF BERKELEY.”
The event was almost impossible to locate; the venue had been changed at the last minute to try to avoid clashes. When I arrived there, a few anxious undergraduates were checking IDs at the door. A sparse police cordon was also present at the entrance. Ultimately, only about two dozen attendees were able to enter the building prior to the disturbances. Before the event could begin at 6:30 p.m., the “Free Palestine” mob smashed the glass at the entrance, pried open a door to let in more of their comrades and then broke into the auditorium. The police, no doubt hindered by the university’s restrictive rules of engagement, attempted only briefly to block the rioters’ way. I saw one of the trespassers refuse to remove her mask and provide an ID when a police officer ordered her to do so. She instead pulled out her phone, began filming, and alleged that the officer was “in my face.” She was not arrested.
The police capitulated to the mob in a grand total of five minutes. Scanner recordings since released have shown the department head telling them not to use their riot gear and that the event was being canceled. A dean arrived to escort us out via a subterranean tunnel; I accompanied a former student of mine outside as she broke down in tears. I was not aware of this at the time, but we soon learned that several students had been assaulted and one had been spat on and called “a dirty Jew.”
The mob savored its win in a triumphal march through the campus and a series of now-since deleted online posts. The university dispatched this email to the entire campus: “The event is canceled; when exercising your right to free speech, please take care of yourself and others.” The message could not have been clearer: Intimidation and the specter of mob violence carry the day at this institution. In one evening, the university contradicted four months of official rhetoric.
A week after the riot, the university finally denounced the antisemitic violent protest. But the administration has done nothing to halt continued harassment and intimidation on the campus. The organizations behind the mob still operate an installation at Sather Gate, the university’s main entrance and iconic landmark. The barricade, obstructing most of the path, is a mashup between blockade and listening post. Festooned with inflammatory placards accusing UC Berkeley of having “blood on its hands,” it comes complete with an AI-generated recording of an “Israeli” woman boasting about bombing Gaza. Pro-Palestine activists also use the encampment to film students opposed to their presence.
In response to the university’s inaction, UC Berkeley’s Jewish students and allies have raised their voices, organizing a march last Monday to demand that the university clear the blockade and dissolve the groups that fomented the riot.
***
The antagonism between progressive dogmas like “equity” and the battle against antisemitism has become almost axiomatic. Audre Lorde, the godmother of intersectionality and contemporary grievance politics, once proclaimed there was “no hierarchy of oppressions.” In the activist left’s worldview, however, Jews, read as white or even “super-white,” are relegated to the bottom of the new pecking order. Antisemitism rates at best as a minor concern and at worst the excusable indiscretion of subalterns.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs also take direct aim at the dominant political ethos of most Jews in the post-emancipation West—which has not been socialism so much as liberalism. Emancipation in 18th- and 19th-century Europe was premised on the notion that Jews ought to be seen first and foremost as individuals, not as members of an amorphous, indigestible mass. Despite the ambivalence at the heart of emancipation, the liberal ethos enabled European Jewry to reach the fore of the continent’s commerce, culture, and politics in a few generations. Antisemites, then and now, count heads: How many Jews are in this profession or that institution.
Jewish organizations have wrongly responded to the rise in hate against our community in seeking inclusion into the DEI framework, incorporating education about antisemitism into their anti-bias trainings. At UC Berkeley, the diversity dean now sends out emails for Jewish Heritage Month, these having been added to the rotation of other vital communications about “Transgender and Nonbinary Empowerment Month” and “Becoming a LatinX-Thriving Institution.” Presumably, the diversity office would agree its mission of “perpetuating beauty in the center of injustice” through “actionable solutions that lead to transformative change” encompasses battling antisemitism. But only a fool would take them at their word: Anti-antisemitism and “anti-racism” have been made to rest on mutually exclusive predicates.
The disparity in DEI’s treatment of antisemitism and anti-Black racism gives up the game, if nothing else. DEI and “decolonization” also reinforce one another in a shared assertion that historically disenfranchised groups have more moral value and greater rights than others—including the “right” to commit senseless violence. The entire “equity” edifice must be demolished; to do otherwise nourishes a parasitic bureaucracy that traduces academic freedom, contributes to antisemitism, and spreads a poisonous anti-liberalism into wider society.
SCOTUS's decision in Murthy v Misssouri will tell us whether Big Tech Wall and the Deep State will be stopped in their joint venture to destroy the First Amendment
“ The entire “equity” edifice must be demolished; to do otherwise nourishes a parasitic bureaucracy that traduces academic freedom, contributes to antisemitism, and spreads a poisonous anti-liberalism into wider society.”
~ Amen and Amen!