CRAZY 

Premier Danielle Smith announces plan to change Alberta Bill of Rights

TRYING TO MAKE ANTI VAXXERS A PROTECTED CATAGORY LIKE LGBTQ+

Lisa Johnson
Tue, September 24, 2024



EDMONTON — Premier Danielle Smith says she plans to reinforce the right to decide whether to receive a vaccination or other medical procedure in changes to the Alberta Bill of Rights.

In an online video posted Tuesday, Smith said her government aims to amend the document in a few weeks to ensure people have the right to make informed decisions without fear of undue pressure or interference by the government.

"It is my firm conviction that no Albertan should ever be subjected (to) or pressured into accepting a medical treatment without their full consent," she said.


The changes outlined by Smith would also ensure the province respects "the right of individuals to legally acquire, keep and safely use firearms."

Smith says she believes law-abiding gun owners have been targeted by the federal government, and she hopes the changes will better protect farmers, ranchers, hunters and sports enthusiasts.

The legislation would also declare that Albertans can't be deprived of their property without due process of law and fair compensation.

"This is a reaffirmation of your right to own and enjoy the property that you've worked so hard for," said Smith.

United Conservative Party members have been pushing Smith for the recognition of rights that go well beyond the Canadian Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including around guns, parental rights and taxes.

Smith's announcement comes as she faces a party leadership review in early November.

Alberta conservatives have been known to boot their own leaders from the top job, including former UCP premier Jason Kenney.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Sept. 24, 2024.

Lisa Johnson, The Canadian Press

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Austria’s far right woos anti-vaxxers with fund for vaccine ‘victims’


Herbert Kickl, former Austria's Interior Minister and member of FPOe (Austrian Freedom Party) speaks during the 33rd Ordinary Federal Party Congress in the Graz, Austria on September 14, 2019.

Monday, 23 Sep 2024 

VIENNA, Sept 23 — Anti-vaxxer Martin Rutter is delighted he has been able to apply for public funds for “vaccination victims” from his far-right allies who run the province around Vienna.

The controversial project, pushed through by the Freedom Party (FPOe) — which looks set to win this week’s Austrian elections—has raised the ire of other parties but has drawn thousands of applications.

“I have an association that takes care of vaccination victims,” said Rutter, who is known for spreading conspiracy theories online.

The 41-year-old helped organise massive demonstrations against the conservative-led government’s Covid measures, which were also attended by the FPOe’s leader Herbert Kickl.


The far right is tapping into still seething voter anger about restrictions during the Covid pandemic, which it hopes will propel them to power on Sunday.

“The FPOe was the only party that did not support these measures,” Rutter told AFP, describing them as an “orgy” of restrictions.

Cash for jab refuseniks

Rutter—who peddles conspiracy narratives online, including recommending fruits to cure cancer—has applied for money from a €31.3 million (RM146 million) fund set up by the Lower Austria region, which the FPOe co-governs, for “information events” he organises.

The fund was set up last year to “repair” the “poor crisis management” of the pandemic, according to Maximilian Fender-Tarczaly, who works for the FPOe state councillor in charge of the project.

The project is meant to support “victims... who are suffering from the various consequences of the disease, the measures and the vaccination”, he said in a written reply to AFP.

“The spectrum is broad... mental health problems, isolation, vaccination impairments, fines for non-compliance with health measures,” he wrote.

Some 5,700 applications had been approved and €3.7 million paid out by July, but “until now no money has been paid” to Rutter, Fender-Tarczaly said then.

The FPOe is keen to roll out the project nationally, railing in its election manifesto against the government’s “unprecedented indoctrination and brainwashing” during the pandemic.

‘Irresponsible’

Health Minister Johannes Rauch of the Greens party described the project as “irresponsible”, arguing that out of 20 million vaccinations, just 200 people have suffered side effects.

“Vaccination has saved millions of lives, and if the willingness to be vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella also decreases, this jeopardises the lives of children,” he said in May.

The opposition Social Democrats have accused the FPOe of “losing all moral sense” by offering a “bonus” to those who “attack elected officials”, while the opposition liberal NEOS party has slammed the far right for pandering to its base.

The pandemic—and in particular the government’s move to make vaccination mandatory, which was later scrapped—have led to lasting “polarisation” in the Alpine nation of nine million people, according to Julia Partheymueller, a political scientist from Vienna University.

The vaccinations “victims” project was a means to criticise “the government’s mistakes” and has come from a “desire for revenge” rather than reconciliation,” she argued. — AFP

Invisible Rulers: An Establishment Liberal Reads Chomsky, Fights Taibbi and Viral Disinformation

Review of Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality by Renee DiResta

By Chris Green

September 8, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Until recently, Renee DiResta–author of the book under review–was the research manager at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. She has served as a consultant to social media platforms about fighting disinformation relating to Covid vaccines and 2020 election fraud claims. During the Trump years she worked as an advisor to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the topic of Russian disinformation campaigns in the United States.

Her academic research interests have focused heavily on studying how viral disinformation–particularly from MAGA quarters–spreads. She became interested in the topic of viral disinformation while fighting anti-vaxxers as a leader in the successful fight in 2015 to remove the religious faith loophole from the legal requirement that all California school children be vaccinated.

She writes for such forums as The Atlantic and has spoken before the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to entering academia, she spent many years working on Wall Street. As a college undergraduate she interned at the CIA. The blurb page for her new book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality includes praise from such luminaries of the anti-Trump, neoliberal establishment as Professor Francis Fukuyama, Anne Applebaum of the The Atlantic and Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, U.S. Army (Ret).

If this background is unlikely to inspire congenial feeling in a radical leftist, it is highly likely to make the blood of MAGA partisans boil. For some of the latter, DiResta–with her connections to the CIA, Wall Street, Big Tech and academica–has been the embodiment of a sinister anti-Trump establishment conspiring to suppress righteous MAGA populism.

DiResta’s Claim to Fame

Invisible Rulers is mostly a scholarly work exploring the phenomenon of viral disinformation but it also gives space to an account of DiResta being personally targeted by disinformation from MAGA-friendly quarters. When Elon Musk launched a propaganda campaign called the Twitter Files in late 2022–seeking to show that Twitter’s pre-Musk owners had collaborated with academics like DiResta and federal government agents in suppressing MAGA-friendly speech on Twitter–DiResta was presented as a primary villain in the alleged conspiracy. She argues convincingly that Matt Taibbi–one of the journalists Musk handpicked to publicly present Twitter Files documents–seriously misrepresented her work and actions in an effort to prove the conspiracy. Taibbi and his Twitter Files colleague Michael Shellenberger focused on DiResta as a lead villain in the Twitter Files when they testified about them before the US House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in March 2023.

After this testimony went viral in right-wing quarters on social media, a wave of harassment and threats followed against DiResta, her academic colleagues, and students. More importantly from DiResta’s perspective, the testimony spurred the subcommittee chairman, MAGA Republican Jim Jordan, to launch a congressional inquisition into academic anti-disinformation research institutions. It also spurred a major lawsuit against researchers at such institutions (including DiResta) by Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s America First Legal organization, scaring off potential funders and in other ways leading to academic anti-disinformation research currently largely grinding to a halt in the United States.

Question Raised

Viral disinformation can create serious public disturbances: for example, lies about electoral fraud led to the riots of January 6th. Academics like DiResta, election officials, librarians, physicians, scientists, and others have faced extensive campaigns of harassment, threats, doxing and other abuses as a result of online disinformation about issues ranging from the 2020 election to LGBTQ books in school libraries. Viral disinformation can also create serious public health problems as we saw during the Covid pandemic. In her book, DiResta references how viral disinformation launched by the anti-vaccine guru Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his followers played a nefarious role in a measles outbreak that killed 83 children in American Samoa in 2019.

Is there anything that can–or should–be done about viral disinformation spread by MAGA demagogues, anti-vax quacks, or any other source? Is it possible to encourage people to stop believing in stupid things and to encourage them to learn to think critically about information presented to them? How exactly does disinformation go viral? These are questions explored in DiResta’s book although I don’t think she answers them satisfactorily.

Problematic Analysis

DiResta’s book, in multiple places, offers respectful words towards the 1988 classic Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and the late Edward S. Herman. She writes that the book accurately described “colossal deceits” and “unjust wars…Chomsky’s critique of manufacturing consent was trenchant–and true.”

But DiResta holds that while the Chomsky/Herman analysis was true in the 1980s, its portrait of corporate media working to shape the views of the general population in the interests of the ruling class has lost much of its relevance in the social media era. She claims that in the current age, information distribution has been “democratized” through social media and other online platforms. Any ordinary person with charisma, storytelling ability, and, in many cases, a talent for grift–or in some cases people acting collectively in online groups–can manipulate online platform algorithms and go viral. Enormous sources of information–whether credible or not–are at everyone’s fingertips with a simple Google search.

Many people no longer trust traditional establishment sources of information, whether it be the New York Times or an infectious disease expert like Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead, people are increasingly drawn to online influencers for analysis of the world around them. Many ordinary people find the speaking and writing of online influencers charismatic and relatable in ways they don’t with the “shifty pundits and elite academics” of the traditional establishment. For DiResta it is this dynamic that explains why countless numbers of well-intentioned people have believed that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; that Covid vaccines contain snake venom; and that sex-trafficked children are locked in the cabinets pictured in Wayfair furniture catalogs.

She believes that, as a nation, it would be wise for us to consider the expertise and knowledge of academics in the social and hard sciences as American society confronts a dizzying array of serious problems. She suggests that academics organize themselves and have the more charismatic among them jump into the online fray and present information in ways that can appeal to ordinary folk and counter the viral stupidity peddled by certain influencers. She allows that establishment academics and other traditional sources of expertise have been implicated in serious abuses of power and made serious mistakes. However, she asks, is it any better to have demagogic online influencers prey on the “doing my own research crowd” amongst the general population?–the sort of people who think they have incontrovertible evidence to destroy the established scientific consensus on Covid after watching a few YouTube videos and reading one or two articles the algorithms present to them on social media feeds.

It is not totally unreasonable for DiResta to argue for the ideal of foregrounding people who know what they’re talking about in the amplification and distribution of information–however, it is absurd for her to argue that US mass media has been in any way “democratized” since the publication of Manufacturing Consent. It seems to me that while the forms of distribution and amplification of information and opinion have changed significantly since the advent of the internet and social media, the fundamental dynamic described by Chomsky and Herman is still very much in play. In the social media era, the control of the distribution and amplification of information and opinion remains largely set by the interests of different factions of business elites and ruling class politicians. It seems to me that the tools of Marxist political economy might have allowed DiResta to present an infinitely more robust analysis of mass media in the social media age. However, she is an establishment liberal and radical analysis is clearly not much present in her field of vision (her praise of Manufacturing Consent notwithstanding).

Solutions

A problem she mentions constantly throughout the book is what she and others have called “bespoke realities:” Online algorithms process our data to understand our preferences and provide our social media feeds with content that reaffirms our existing prejudices, politically speaking and in other areas of life. Less than ever before are we exposed to alternative points of view in our information consumption. In the case of something like adherence to QAnon, this can have destructive consequences. She worries about Americans walling themselves off into groups of ideological niches, having no contact whatsoever with groups of other niches. She does not offer a clear solution to this problem: except, perhaps obliquely, when she writes that social media companies have already taken numerous reasonable steps to control the dissemination of extremist disinformation. She uses the words “economic inequality” to describe a source of the increasing extremism of American political rhetoric in recent years; she also suggests that online extremism is driven by legitimate grievances at real societal injustices. However, she does not elaborate on these references to structural sources of online political extremism.

In the last third of her book, she presents several solutions to the problems her book presents that are at least on the right track. She praises the decentralized, open-source social media platforms Bluesky and Mastodon: companies that while privately owned are run differently than typical corporate social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. She suggests people fighting extremist disinformation today can learn from the fight in the 1930s to de-platform Father Charles Coughlin, the Nazi-sympathizing talk radio demagogue. She also harkens back to the New Deal era when she praises the work of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA). Founded in the 1930s by journalists and academics, the IPA–before it was redbaited out of existence during the McCarthy era–sought to impart to the general population methods of seeing through propaganda directed at them by powerful forces. The IPA’s ideas about critical thinking skills are sound enough; however, DiResta provides no insight as to specific mechanisms through which the general population might be encouraged to practice those skills.

Final Words

It seems to me that DiResta’s book would have been better if it dropped its pretensions to academic scholarship and instead was a piece of straight reporting about and debunking prominent pieces of viral disinformation. When she adopted the latter course in parts of her book, the results were excellent: for example her dissection of a salient piece of disinformation launched by Dr. David McCullough, a prominent anti-Covid vaccine quack–or going back to the pre-internet era, a belief among evangelical Christians in the 1980s that a particular nuance in Procter & Gamble’s company logo indicated the company’s alignment with satanism. In contrast, in the first half of the book, she spends many words–sometimes ponderously–trying to present a framework for how information spreads and how people trust information sources. It is not always clear in the book’s first half where she is going with her arguments. On the plus side, she does have an engaging writing style (simple and lucid) that kept me reading the book even when I occasionally found the content a little thin.

I personally believe that solutions to the fight against viral disinformation–from MAGA or any other source–have to be predominantly bottom-up in nature as opposed to the top-down solutions offered by DiResta, with all her obsession about academic expertise. One solution might be a revitalized labor movement where unions offer labor education classes that can teach critical thinking skills about propaganda. Another solution could be the removal of all segments of mass media from corporate control. Mass media democratization–not in the bizarre sense that “democratization” is used by DiResta–implies ordinary people thoroughly controlling media institutions at the local level. In exploring steps about how society might reach mass media democratization, I encourage readers to explore such works as Victor Pickard’s 2020 book Democracy Without Journalism and Ben Tarnoff’s 2022 book Internet for the People.

In spite of her book’s limitations and its focus on top-down solutions to viral disinformation, it is clear that DiResta is an intelligent and deeply informed person–and, no doubt, a highly decent one as well. Significant parts of her book present thoughtful analysis. She is clearly nowhere near as villainous as she has been portrayed by Matt Taibbi and Jim Jordan.

In reference to her antagonist Taibbi, Diresta does vaguely at one point in her book give credit to Taibbi and his Twitter Files colleagues for raising a few legitimate concerns about government monitoring of social media content relating to Covid vaccines and alleged 2020 election fraud. Otherwise, she implies that he has become a mere grifter: he was once a progressive, populist investigative journalist but has now moved to the right politically, peddling MAGA-friendly populist nonsense to a large online audience that is receptive to it.

Whatever Taibbi’s exact motivations, it is relevant to note certain things. Both he and DiResta seemingly share the assumption that it is legitimate for all parts of American mass media to be under corporate control. While Taibbi grandstands before right-wing audiences as a free speech warrior defending MAGA’s constitutional liberties against deep state machinations–and Renee DiResta wrings her hands about declining trust in academic experts–the dynamic of bipartisan ruling class oppression carries on in much the same way as Chomsky and Herman described it in the 1980’s. Social movements representing traditionally oppressed communities continue to bear the brunt of state surveillance and repression. We have seen this recently with activists opposing Cop City in Atlanta–and also activists on college campuses opposing Israel’s Gaza genocide. Earlier this year independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on how Biden’s intelligence community was surveilling anti-genocide student protestors; he also reported that the Biden administration was pressuring social media platforms to censor “pro-Hamas” i.e. anti-genocide social media posts.

The work of Renee DiResta contains value but it is going to take people much more radical than her–and much more serious than Matt Taibbi–to seriously address the issues raised by her writing.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov detained in judicial investigation involving 12 criminal counts, French prosecutors say

The Insider

26 August 2024

The investigation that led to the recent detention of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov this past Saturday was originally opened on July 8, 2024 against an “unnamed person.” It involved suspicion on 12 counts, including refusal to cooperate with law enforcement, complicity in drug distribution, child pornography, cybercrime, and fraud, according to a statement from the French public prosecutor's office released earlier today.

“Pavel Durov, founder and director of the Telegram instant messaging platform, was arrested and placed in police custody at 8 p.m. on Saturday, August 24, 2024 at Le Bourget [airport]. This measure was taken as part of a judicial investigation opened on July 8, 2024, following a preliminary investigation initiated by the J3 section (JUNALCO — National Jurisdiction for Combating Organized Crime) of the Paris public prosecutor's office,” the statement read.

The charges against the “unnamed person” in the case include:Complicity in administering an online platform to facilitate illegal transactions within an organized group.
Refusal to provide information or documents necessary for lawful interceptions at the request of competent authorities.
Complicity in the possession of pornographic images of minors.
Complicity in distributing, offering, or providing pornographic images of minors within an organized group.
Complicity in the purchase, transportation, possession, offer, or sale of narcotic substances.
Complicity in offering, selling, or providing, without lawful justification, equipment, tools, programs, or data designed to gain unauthorized access to and impair the operation of automated data processing systems.
Complicity in organized group fraud.
Criminal conspiracy to commit a crime or offense punishable by five or more years of imprisonment.
Laundering proceeds from crimes or offenses committed by an organized group.
Providing cryptographic services for privacy without a certified statement.
Providing a cryptographic tool that does not exclusively offer authentication or integrity control without a prior declaration.
Importing a cryptographic tool that provides authentication or integrity control without a prior declaration.

Durov notably holds multiple passports. He is a citizen of France, the United Arab Emirates, and the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. The independent Russian publication Agentstvo.Novosti, citing data from Russian government services portal Gosuslugi, reported on Sunday that Durov still holds a valid Russian passport.

In mid-April 2022 — several months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine — Durov asked Forbes not to call him a Russian billionaire, joining the likes of Revolut co-founder Nikolay Storonsky, tech investor Yuri Milner, and Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh. “Pavel left Russia many years ago with no intention to return,” his spokesperson told the publication.

Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov earlier today told reporters that the Kremlin “does not know what exactly Durov is accused of,” which meant “it would be wrong to make any statements,” as per a report by the Russian news agency Interfax.

“We haven't heard any official statements to that effect yet. And before saying anything, we need to wait for the situation to be clarified: what exactly they are trying to charge Durov [with],” Peskov said.

He added that Vladimir Putin did not meet with Durov during his recent visit to Azerbaijan. Earlier, the Telegram channel Baza, which is reportedly affiliated with the Russian authorities, quoted a source as saying that the Russian president refused to meet with the Telegram founder while in Baku.

In a statement published on X on August 26, French President Emmanuel Macron took the position that Durov's detention was not politically motivated:
“The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation. It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”

Macron’s tweet also stressed that “France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship. It will remain so.”

However, Macron did not specify the exact nature of French law enforcement's concerns regarding the Telegram founder. Durov was detained at the Le Bourget airport outside Paris shortly after landing on a private jet late on Saturday. The arrest reportedly came in connection to the lack of moderation on Telegram and the platform's refusal to cooperate with French security services.

Pavel Durov, alongside his brother Nikolai, launched Telegram in August 2013, with Nikolai responsible for developing the technology behind the cloud-based messaging platform. Telegram, headquartered in Dubai, now boasts over 950 million active users worldwide, according to the company. Forbes estimates Pavel Durov's net worth at $15 billion.

The platform remains among the few avenues available to Russian citizens looking to bypass government censorship amid an increasingly stringent crackdown on the country’s information space.

Telegram is also extensively used by the Russian military for its internal communications, and the arrest of its founder led to a flurry of angered reactions among pro-war bloggers, including Alexander Sladkov.

“Pavel Durov was arrested. This attack on the owner of [Telegram], on which half of the communications in the [war] are held, was expected. Now we urgently need to create a Russian military messenger,” Sladkov wrote.

The Russian Telegram channel Rybar, founded by Mikhail Zvinchuk, a former employee of Russia's Defense Ministry, similarly noted that Telegram “has now become almost the main means of controlling units in the [special military operation] zone.”
“It will be very sad and funny at the same time if it is Pavel Durov's arrest that will be the catalyst for changes in the approaches to communication and control means in the Russian Armed Forces. And not the purely military problems that have piled up over the past two years, which for some reason [the Russian Defense Ministry] preferred to turn a blind eye to.”

Cover image: A screenshot from Durov’s April 2024 interview with former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. Source: YouTube / Tucker Carlson

French police have arrested the founder of Telegram. What happens next could change the course of big tech

PTI |
Aug 27, 2024 


Sydney, When Pavel Durov arrived in France on his private jet last Saturday, he was greeted by police who promptly arrested him. As the founder of the direct messaging platform Telegram, he was accused of facilitating the widespread crimes committed on it.

The following day, a French judge extended Durov’s initial period of detention, allowing police to detain him for up to 96 hours.

Telegram has rejected the allegations against Durov. In a statement, the company said:

It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.

The case may have far-reaching international implications, not just for Telegram but for other global technology giants as well.

Who is Pavel Durov?

Born in Russia in 1984, Pavel Durov also has French citizenship. This might explain why he felt free to travel despite his app’s role in the Russia-Ukraine War and its widespread use by extremist groups and criminals more generally.

Durov started an earlier social media site, VKontakte, in 2006, which remains very popular in Russia. However, a dispute with how the new owners of the site were operating it led to him leaving the company in 2014.

It was shortly before this that Durov created Telegram. This platform provides both the means for communication and exchange as well as the protection of encryption that makes crimes harder to track and tackle than ever before. But that same protection also enables people to resist authoritarian governments that seek to prevent dissent or protest.

Durov also has connections with famed tech figures Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and enjoys broad support in the vocally libertarian tech community. But his platform is no stranger to legal challenges – even in his birth country.


An odd target

Pavel Durov is in some ways an odd target for French authorities.

Meta’s WhatsApp messenger app is also encrypted and boasts three times as many users, while X’s provocations for hate speech and other problematic content are unrepentantly public and increasingly widespread.

There is also no suggestion that Durov himself was engaged with making any illegal content. Instead, he is accused of indirectly facilitating illegal content by maintaining the app in the first place.

However, Durov’s unique background might go some way to suggest why he was taken in.

Unlike other major tech players, he lacks US citizenship. He hails from a country with a chequered past of internet activity – and a diminished diplomatic standing globally thanks to its war against Ukraine.


His app is large enough to be a global presence. But simultaneously it is not large enough to have the limitless legal resources of major players such as Meta.

Combined, these factors make him a more accessible target to test the enforcement of expanding regulatory frameworks.

A question of moderation

Durov’s arrest marks another act in the often confusing and contradictory negotiation of how much responsibility platforms shoulder for the content on their sites.

These platforms, which include direct messaging platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp but also broader services such as those offered by Meta’s Facebook and Musk’s X, operate across the globe.

As such, they contend with a wide variety of legal environments.

This means any restriction put on a platform ultimately affects its services everywhere in the world – complicating and frequently preventing regulation.


On one side, there is a push to either hold the platforms responsible for illegal content or to provide details on the users that post it.

In Russia, Telegram itself was under pressure to provide names of protesters organising through its app to protest the war against Ukraine.

Conversely, freedom of speech advocates have fought against users being banned from platforms. Meanwhile political commentators cry foul of being “censored” for their political views.

These contradictions make regulation difficult to craft, while the platforms’ global nature make enforcement a daunting challenge. This challenge tends to play in platforms’ favour, as they can exercise a relatively strong sense of platform sovereignty in how they decide to operate and develop.

But these complications can obscure the ways platforms can operate directly as deliberate influencers of public opinion and even publishers of their own content.


To take one example, both Google and Facebook took advantage of their central place in the information economy to advertise politically orientated content to resist the development and implementation of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code.

The platforms’ construction also directly influences what content can appear and what content is recommended – and hate speech can mark an opportunity for clicks and screen time.

Now, pressure is increasing to hold platforms responsible for how they moderate their users and content. In Europe, recent regulation such as the Media Freedom Act aims to prevent platforms from arbitrarily deleting or banning news producers and their content, while the Digital Services Act requires that these platforms provide mechanisms for removing illegal material.

Australia has its own Online Safety Act to prevent harms through platforms, though the recent case involving X reveals that its capacity may be quite limited. Future implications


Durov is currently only being detained, and it remains to be seen what, if anything, will happen to him in coming days.

But if he is charged and successfully prosecuted, it could lay the groundwork for France to take wider actions against not only tech platforms, but also their owners. It could also embolden nations around the world – in the West and beyond – to undertake their own investigations.

In turn, it may also make tech platforms think far more seriously about the criminal content they host. AMS

The crazy life and times of Pavel Durov, Russia’s Elon Musk

Is the arrested Telegram CEO a free speech martyr or a shadowy criminal?


Pavel Durov likes to frame himself as the patron of the individual citizen against government snooping. | Michelle Rohn for POLITICO

August 26, 2024

By Eva Hartog

Pavel Durov loves a good show.

The first glimpse many Russians caught of the current Telegram CEO — now languishing in Paris police custody — was in May 2012 when a small fleet of paper airplanes made out of cash descended on St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, the city's main thoroughfare.

His face half hidden by a black cap, cameras captured a young Durov hanging out by an upstairs window, clearly enjoying himself as an agitated crowd scrabbled for more 5,000 ruble notes which the young tech prodigy was raining down from above.

At the time, Durov was the head of VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, which had skyrocketed to success aided by the near-total absence of online regulation.

A self-professed libertarian, Durov likes to frame himself as the patron of the individual citizen against government snooping. Authorities in France, however, are now probing him for his defense of a far less noble group of people, including pedophiles, drug dealers and gangsters.

Free speech martyr or shadowy criminal? Durov's reality is much more complex.
Durov's revenge

Authority and Durov have never been best friends.

As a student, Durov hacked his school’s computer network so it would show a photo of his least favorite teacher with the text "must die" as a screen saver.

Now in his late thirties, he still combines the nerdy reclusiveness of Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg — taking after his brother Nikolai, who was a child math prodigy and is rumored to be the real brain behind the Durovs’ success — with the contrarian eccentricity and narcissism of Elon Musk.

Not long after the money-throwing episode, VKontakte began experiencing serious trouble. In the wake of large anti-Kremlin protests, Russia’s security service, the FSB, demanded greater control over the social media platform.

Under pressure, Durov sold his shares in the company and fled Russia in 2014, announcing his departure with a picture of dolphins and a line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

Pavel Durov was the head of VKontakte, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook. | Nadine Rupp/Getty Images

For the Kremlin it was a case of good riddance. VKontakte was rebranded VK and co-opted, with the children of Russian President Vladimir Putin's acolytes appointed to key positions.

But like the heroes in his favorite films, Durov soon got his revenge. From Dubai, he doubled down on Telegram, an encrypted messaging service whose significance and success far outgrew that of his first company.
Who uses Telegram?

Today, Telegram is among the most popular messenger apps in Russia and in other post-Soviet countries, as well as in India and in a handful of autocracies such as Iran.

For people living in countries where they risk jail for an injudicious word or opinion, the app promises a safe means of communication.

What sets it apart from rival messengers, however, is that Telegram is also a media platform in its own right. Think: WhatsApp, Facebook and X, all in one.

That hybrid quality has made it a core platform for more uses than just texting, and more users than just government critics.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Telegram became a primary mode of communication on both sides of the front lines. A new group of military bloggers, some with more than a million followers, have also made it their preferred platform.

Seeming to hold no grudge against Durov, top Russian Kremlin figures and propagandists also have channels on Telegram.

But Telegram, along with YouTube, has provided a refuge on the other side of the political divide for media outlets that were blocked by Russian authorities under wartime censorship laws.

“It’s become a replacement for independent media which have been squeezed out of the public space,” Lev Gershenzon, the Russian founder of news aggregator The True Story, told POLITICO. Gershenzon previously served as head of news at Russia's Yandex search engine, but resigned in protest of censorship at the company.

Telegram pushed back strongly against any suggestion of wrongdoing in an online statement. | Leon Neal/Getty Images

But in Europe, where citizens face fewer dangers from their democratically elected governments, Telegram’s function is “an altogether different story,” Gershenzon said.

Here it is used mostly by groups on the margins of society, such as anti-vaxxers, or by those with a vested interest in secure communications. More ominously, it has also become a mirror dark web for terrorists and those dealing in drugs, weapons and child pornography.

“In Russia, Telegram is a safe haven [from] the government’s fight against civil society,” Russian opposition politician Maxim Katz said in a livestream Monday. “In Europe, Telegram is a safe haven for criminals.”

Telegram pushed back strongly against any suggestion of wrongdoing in an online statement Sunday, saying it abides by all EU laws and that its founder “has nothing to hide.”

Meanwhile, Durov himself has remained elusive. He’s notoriously hard to reach for media, and reportedly also for governments; nor is much known about his personal life or the way his company is run. He is a citizen of the United Arab Emirates and, for reasons that remain murky, France.

When he has emerged from the shadows, it has usually been to cause a splash — to show off his six pack, to example, or to announce in a fit of TMI that he has fathered 100 children.

Is Telegram really safe?

In the months leading up to his arrest, Durov had been more visible. In a rare interview, with conservative media personality Tucker Carlson, he claimed he’d been pressured by the intelligence services of various countries to give them backdoor access to Telegram — singling the U.S. out for special mention — but that had always refused.

Many independent Russian internet experts, however, point to a number of cases when channels linked to the opposition were restricted for no clear reason. While Telegram also complied with European sanctions against propaganda network RT, Gershenzon said it seemed to suggest Durov was more open to negotiating with governments than he would have his followers believe.

In 2020, for example, Telegram’s Vice President Ilya Perekopsky met with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Mishustin аt a tech panel in the Russian city of Kazan.

Before being arrested in Paris this weekend, Durov was in Azerbaijan where, according to speculation, he tried to secure a meeting with Putin, who happened to be visiting at the same time. (The Kremlin’s spokesperson said Monday that the two did not meet.)

Regardless of the nature of his ties to Russia, Durov’s arrest is a coup for the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.

In the months leading up to his arrest, Pavel Durov had been more visible.

 | Olga Maltseva/Getty Images

Initial reactions from Moscow suggest it will frame Durov’s arrest as an example of Western hypocrisy on free speech. At the same time, propagandists are also likely to argue Moscow was right to clamp down on Durov, first with VKontakte and more recently in 2018 when it tried unsuccessfully to block Telegram.

They're unlikely to mention, however, that in Russia, such moves have been motivated primarily by a desire to silence the voices of political critics, rather than those of criminals. That trend has recently spread to curbing YouTube, nudging Russia in the direction of a Chinese-style firewall.

Durov’s legal team will likely argue that he can't be held responsible for the actions of a few rotten apples, unsavory though they may be, or prioritize targeting them over the interests of some billion other users.

"Our right to privacy is more important than the fear of terrorism," Durov said in 2016, defending Apple’s right to resist FBI access to the encrypted iPhone of a man involved in a mass shooting.

Regardless of the facts, the detained Durov has two elements playing in his favor. The first is that his case is taking place in France, where it is still possible to get a fair trial, unlike in Russia (where the acquittal rate is 0.03 percent). The second is that his case will play out partly in the informational sphere and in the court of public opinion.

Judging by his past, that's an arena for which Durov, the showman, has been preparing his entire adult life.

EXPLAINER

Is RFK Jr truly independent?

A leaked video of a call with Donald Trump has reopened a debate on where the Kennedy scion stands ahead of the November US election.

Supporters of independent US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr protest against his exclusion from the first presidential debate, outside CNN's West Coast headquarters in Burbank, California [File: Mike Blake/Reuters]

By Lorraine Mallinder
Published On 17 Jul 2024
AL JAZEERA

Robert F Kennedy Jr, a member of America’s most famous – and Democratic – political family, is running as an independent candidate in this year’s presidential election. But his independence was called into question this week after the leaking of a conversation between him and Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Last October, Kennedy dropped out of the Democratic primary race against incumbent President Joe Biden to launch what appeared to be a quixotic independent bid for the presidency.

Both Biden and Trump were eager to crush the freewheeler’s bid, depicting him as a dangerous ally of the opposite camp, both lobbing accusations of him being an election “plant” or “spoiler”.

Now, Democrats are alleging that the leaked conversation proves an alliance between RFK and Trump. So what’s going on? Is RFK working with Team Trump or is he truly independent? Where does he stand on key issues – and does he align more with Republicans or with Democrats?

What happened during the call?

During the chat, which took place following an assassination attempt on Trump over the weekend, the Republican nominee appeared to be coaxing Kennedy to join his campaign.

“I would love you to do something – and I think it would be so good for you and so big for you,” said Trump, audible over speakerphone. “We’re gonna win.”

“Yeah,” replied Kennedy.

Aside from references to bringing Kennedy onto his side – “We’re way ahead of the guy,” Trump said, referring to Biden – the Republican nominee also appeared to be playing to Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer views.

“When you feed a baby, Bobby,” Trump said, “a vaccination that is like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a, you know, 10-pound or 20-pound baby … and then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change radically.

“And then you hear that it doesn’t have an impact, right? But you and I talked about that a long time ago.”

Trump also spoke to Kennedy about Saturday’s assassination attempt, saying that the bullet that hit his ear “felt like a giant – like the world’s largest mosquito”.

(SOME SAY IT WAS SHARDS OF THE TELEPROMPTER)

But what was the call really about?

The call was an attempt to “neutralise or co-opt RFK so he doesn’t syphon off potential Trump voters”, Steffen Schmidt, professor emeritus in the department of political science at Iowa State University told Al Jazeera. “He’s using The Art of the Deal tactic to gain that small but important political ground.”

Melissa Smith, author of the 2022 book, Third Parties, Outsiders, and Renegades, agreed.

“The video seemed to be more of Trump trying to sway Kennedy to endorse his campaign,” she said.

“Kennedy is focusing his attention on fundraising and trying to get his name on the ballot in all 50 states, which is a very expensive task. His fundraising has been slow recently, and that makes him look more vulnerable to the other campaigns,” Smith said.
Did Trump and RFK Jr also meet?

They did, apparently on Monday, before the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, hours before the Republican nominee announced Ohio Senator JD Vance as his pick for vice president.

Politico reported the meeting that day, with claims from sources that Trump had discussed the possibility of Kennedy supporting his campaign.

Seeking to dispel reports, Kennedy came clean on Monday about his “meeting this morning” with Trump, underlining that they had discussed “national unity” and that he hoped to also meet Democratic leaders to discuss the same topic.
Advertisement

“No, I am not dropping out of the race,” he said.

Who is RFK Jr?

A member of the Kennedy family, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr is a son of US Attorney General and Senator Robert F Kennedy, and a nephew of US President John F Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy ditched the Democrats last year after it became clear that his long-shot primary bid was unlikely to succeed.

Since then, he has campaigned as an independent, hawking a mind-bending brand of left- and right-wing politics – largely liberal on issues like abortion, while endorsing libertarian free-market solutions on the environment, and peddling conspiracy theories on vaccines.

Amid a national mood of political disenchantment, the longtime environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist has projected himself as a political outsider, blasting “corporate kleptocracy”.

Could he be teaming up with Trump?

“He could be or not … I don’t think he has a road map,” said Schmidt, speaking about Kennedy. “He’s a ship in search of a port and at this point, I don’t think he himself even knows where he wants to tie up and disembark.”

Unlike many other politicians who ultimately need to fall in line with either Democrats or Republicans, Kennedy “is both dependent on his own cult following of anti-vaxxers and environmentalists and independent in that he has lots of cash and doesn’t have to be accountable to anyone”, Schmidt said.

Smith, the author, said Kennedy would not join Trump at this point.

“It’s somewhat predictable that Trump did all the talking, and you only see Kennedy respond in a monosyllable one time,” she told Al Jazeera.
What are Kennedy’s views?

They’re a mixed bag. Once named a “Hero of the Planet” by Time magazine, he has threatened to repeal Biden’s signature climate legislation, which pushes for a transition to a green economy, calling for a market-led approach – a stance closer to Trump’s on the environment.

On immigration, he supports Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, forcing asylum seekers to wait south of the border for immigration hearings – a policy the Biden administration tried to end. This said, he is calling for the use of technology, such as cameras and detectors, in places where a physical wall is not necessary.

He has pitched himself as an antiwar candidate opposing aid to Ukraine and blaming the US and NATO for creating a “proxy war” with Russia – echoing a position taken by sections of the conservative right. Trump too has opposed aid to Ukraine.

Yet, RFK has staunchly defended Israel’s no-limits war on Gaza, bringing him into alignment with Biden.

Kennedy’s position on abortion has shifted during the campaign, but he is closer to Democrats on the issue. Having endorsed federal restrictions on abortion after the first trimester, he later issued a statement that abortion should be unrestricted until “the baby is viable outside the womb”.

He is perhaps best known for his anti-vaxxer views, abundantly aired during the COVID-19 pandemic when he accused the US government’s then-chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, of “a historic coup d’etat against Western democracy”.
Advertisement

How was the video leaked?

The video was first posted by Kennedy’s son, Robert F Kennedy III, with the message: “I am a firm believer that these sorts of conversations should be had in public. Here’s Trump giving his real opinion to my dad about vaccinating kids – this was the day after the assassination attempt.”

The video call spread like wildfire on social media, with Kennedy apologising to Trump on Tuesday on social media platform X.

“When President Trump called me, I was taping with an in-house videographer,” he wrote. “I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted,” he said.

Where is Kennedy in this race?

No third-party candidate has won the presidency in more than a century and a half, and the latest polls show Kennedy with about 8 percent support.

However, Kennedy has what pundits are calling the “X factor”. Polls back in May showed that his use of social media and appeal among younger voters could give him unpredictable sway in key swing states like North Carolina. The state’s election board voted Tuesday to certify the We The People party that supporters of Kennedy are using as a vehicle for him to run in a handful of states.

Not including North Carolina, Kennedy’s campaign has said he is officially on the ballot in nine states and that signatures have been submitted in 14 more.
A threat to the big two?

Both the Democrats and the Republicans see Kennedy as a threat, said Smith.

“So it makes sense that Trump was asking Kennedy to endorse him. Trump would like to have Kennedy’s voters [many of them young] supporting him, as that is a demographic that any presidential candidate would like to win,” she said.

Indeed, an NBC poll in April found that Kennedy was cutting deeper into Trump’s support.

Republican voters viewed him much more favourably (40 percent positive, 15 percent negative) than Democratic voters (16 percent positive, 53 percent negative).

Still, Democrats are mindful of what happened in 2000, when Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was blamed for Al Gore’s loss of Florida – and the presidency – to George W Bush.

The Democratic Party has been fighting hard to neutralise Kennedy, filing Federal Election Commission complaints against him and his allies to try to keep him off the ballot in several states. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has also sponsored advertisement campaigns attacking Kennedy.

Democrats claim that Kennedy is being funded by MAGA donors, notably the reclusive Tim Mellon, who has reportedly contributed $20m to Kennedy’s campaign.

As the leaked video of the conversation between Kennedy and Trump went viral, Democratic National Committee spokesperson Matt Corridoni posted on X: “When people show you who they are, believe them”.

How does Kennedy view his former party?

Kennedy’s campaign hasn’t been going well in recent days.

This month, Vanity Fair revealed the independent candidate had allegedly groped babysitter Eliza Cooney in the late 90s. While Kennedy later apologised to Cooney by text, she later told The Washington Post that she found the message from Mr Kennedy “disingenuous and arrogant”.

For his part, Kennedy claims that the Democrats are out to get him, suggesting that they are in cahoots with the media.

“The [Democratic National Convention] media’s garbage pail journalism may distract us from President Biden’s cognitive deficits but it does little to elevate the national debate or reduce the price of groceries,” he said on X.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES

Column: This GOP-leaning political polling firm has turned into a purveyor of anti-vaccine propaganda

By Michael Hiltzik

Business Columnist 

 Los Angeles Times.

June 19, 2024 

Rasmussen Reports used to be a fairly creditable and credible political polling organization, good enough to be included among the pollsters relied on by services such as FiveThirtyEight to give a broad-spectrum gauge of voter sentiment in the run-up to state and federal elections.

It’s true that Rasmussen had a detectable pro-Republican “house effect,” in polling parlance — but one that was consistent enough to compensate for in published polling averages.

But something has happened to Rasmussen in recent years. Not only have its results become more sharply partisan, favoring Republican and conservative politicians, but it also has increasingly promoted right-wing conspiracy theories on topics such as race relations, election results and — perhaps most troubling — COVID vaccines and COVID origins.

By random chance alone...there will be a large number of people who die within, say, 30 days of being vaccinated even if the vaccine has absolutely nothing to do with their deaths.

— Pseudoscience debunker David Gorski, MD

Earlier this month, Rasmussen tweeted the results of polls it conducted in June 2023 and last month, claiming to find that 1 in 5 Americans believe they know someone who died from a COVID vaccine.

There are many reasons to disregard any such poll asking people what they think about a scientifically validated fact — in this case, that the record shows overwhelmingly that the COVID vaccines widely used in the U.S. are safe and effective.

When was the last time you did something that profoundly changed your life? Volunteering is always impactful and there is a myriad of causes worthy of our time, but the act of aiding youth in foster care can be truly transformational – for both...

But Rasmussen has doubled down on its findings. In a series of tweets on June 9, it declared, first: “If the numbers implied by our COVID polling are correct, the vaccines killed more people worldwide than Jews killed in the Holocaust.”

Then it tweeted: “China lied. Fauci lied. People died.” And followed that with: “The government take over of medicine was as deadly as always predicted.”

In other words, Rassmussen has morphed from a quantifier of public opinion into a participant in the spread of noxious propaganda. It still tries to validate its results by claiming that they’re “relevant, timely and accurate,” citing its “track record.”

But that track record has been sprouting gray hairs. The most recent election polling cited by the web page documenting its track record is from 2010.



BUSINESS
Column: Two Rutgers professors are accused of poisoning the debate over COVID’s origins. Here’s why
March 20, 2024

More recently, 538, now owned by ABC News, dropped Rasmussen from its polling averages in March. ABC took that step after Rasmussen failed to respond suitably to a questionnaire 538 submitted asking Rasmussen to explicate its polling methodology. Rasmussen published ABC’s query on its website under the headline, “ABC News: ‘Answer Our Questions -- Or Else!’”

I asked Rasmussen Reports by phone and email to comment on its tweet and its polling, but received no response.

Rasmussen’s veer to the far right has been noticeable for several years. Founded in 2003 by pollster Scott Rasmussen, the firm’s forecasts received high marks for accuracy in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. But it fell short in 2012, predicting victories for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in several states that Obama won.

As my colleague James Rainey observed in the aftermath, the Rasmussen polls had been used by conservative media outlets “to prop up a narrative in the final days of the campaign that Romney had momentum and a good chance of winning the White House.”

In 2013, Scott Rasmussen left the firm due to unspecified business disagreements with its owner, the private equity firm Noson Lawen Partners.

In recent years, the firm has resembled a pollster-for-hire appealing to conservative organizations and authors. During the Trump administration, it became known for “a social media presence that embraced false claims that spread widely on the right,” Philip Bump of the Washington Post observed in March.

The firm’s treatment of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, in which Democrat Katie Hobbs defeated Republican Kari Lake, is a good example. In March 2023, Rasmussen reported the results of a poll it had conducted four months after the election, purportedly finding (according to a headline on its website) that “most Arizona voters believe election ‘irregularities’ affected outcome.”


BUSINESS
Column: Disinformation is a public health crisis. Here’s how scientists and doctors are fighting it
Feb. 22, 2024

According to Rasmussen, 51% of Arizona voters chose Lake and only 43% voted for Hobbs. The poll placed the election turnout at 92%; actually it was 62.6%.

On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen’s lead pollster, said its results showed that “people in Arizona, by and large, think that cheating happened.” That unsupported assertion, of course, is the core of the long, fruitless campaign to overturn the election by Lake — who gleefully cited the Rasmussen results.

Rasmussen polls on COVID vaccines and other such topics aren’t entirely worthless. They may not tell us anything useful about scientific research or electoral results, but they do offer a window into how propaganda and claptrap have penetrated deeply into our political discourse, at least within the right-wing fever swamp.

That brings us back to its polling on COVID and COVID vaccines. Rasmussen’s methodology seems to include wording its questions as if they are stating a fact, no matter how dubious. For its May 2024 poll of 1,250 American adults, for instance, it asked, “Do you know someone personally who died from side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine?” Rasmussen reported that 19% replied in the affirmative; the poll had a margin of error of 3%.

Such questions have obvious flaws. The most important is that most respondents have no way of knowing whether an acquaintance’s death was related to the vaccine; nor does Rasmussen, which conducts its polls with robot calls, have any way of authenticating the respondent’s answer.

Blaming the COVID vaccines for a tide of undocumented injuries and deaths is a popular theme in the anti-vaccine community.

For them, it has the virtue of being suggestive and unverifiable; with nearly 700 million doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines having been administered in the U.S. alone, the law of large numbers implies that “by random chance alone ... there will be a large number of people who die within, say, 30 days of being vaccinated even if the vaccine has absolutely nothing to do with their deaths,” in the words of veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski.

It’s not unusual for the death or illness of a prominent entertainer or athlete to provoke swarms of anti-vaxxers to assert that the victim must have been recently vaccinated. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who I earlier identified as “the most dangerous quack in America” and a “card-carrying member of the anti-vaccine mafia,” misrepresented published research to claim that the COVID vaccine presented an elevated threat of cardiac problems for young men.


Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, seen here with his political patron Gov. Ron DeSantis, has promoted the long-debunked idea that the COVID vaccines are more dangerous than the disease.
(Chris O’Meara / Associated Press)

BUSINESS
Column: Meet the most dangerous quack in America
Jan. 9, 2024

The research said no such thing; on the contrary, it said that the risk of cardiac death from the vaccines was statistically nonexistent and, indeed, lower than the risk of cardiac death resulting from catching COVID-19 itself.

Despite all that, conjectures by laypersons that the illness or death of acquaintances can be traced to the vaccines are legion. One promoter of the idea, economist Mark Skidmore of Michigan State University, even concluded from an anonymous database of 2,840 respondents compiled by a third-party survey firm that the number of respondents who said they knew someone who had died from the vaccine meant that the number of deaths from the vaccine in the U.S. “may be as high as 278,000.”

Skidmore’s paper citing that statistic was retracted last year by the peer-reviewed journal that had published it.

Rasmussen’s promotion of its vaccine-related balderdash is replete with weasel words, as if the firm is opting for plausible deniability.

In its tweet stating that “If the numbers implied by our COVID polling are correct, the vaccines killed more people worldwide than Jews killed in the Holocaust,” for instance, the word “if” carries a lot of baggage — not that its invocation of the Holocaust is defensible under the circumstances.

Similarly, its tweet, “China lied. Fauci lied. People died” refers to a question on its June 23 poll about COVID, in which it asks respondents to agree or disagree with that phrase. (This is known as “JAQing,” for “just asking questions.”)

As for its tweet stating, “The government take over of medicine was as deadly as always predicted,” that’s cast as a comment on a tweet by the former CBS and Fox reporter-turned-conspiracy-monger Lara Logan. She had written, “Pointing out how [Anthony] Fauci was seen by many as one of the worst mass killers in history — is what got me taken off the air at Fox. It was true then — and it is true now.”

Leave aside that the U.S. government has not staged a “take over of medicine,” much less that government action in healthcare has been “deadly.”

Make no mistake: Rasmussen is responsible for these tweets, and deserves blame helping to foment a mass delusion about the vaccines that may have cost the lives of vaccine resisters. If it ever had a reputation for trustworthiness, it doesn’t have it any longer.

Michael Hiltzik
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik has written for the Los Angeles Times for more than 40 years. His business column appears in print every Sunday and Wednesday, and occasionally on other days. Hiltzik and colleague Chuck Philips shared the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry. His seventh book, “Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America,” was published in 2020. His forthcoming book, “The Golden State,” is a history of California. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/hiltzikm and on Facebook at facebook.com/hiltzik.

 

Fighting Dragons

Review of Naomi Klein's Doppelganger

by Eric Walberg / April 28th, 2024

I love Naomi Klein. Strong, courageous, principled. In her latest, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), willing to open her life for us to see for ourselves what makes her tick. A world of doppelgangers, shadow selves of many varieties from our repressed inner Other, to an AI construct of who you are in public.

Your social media profile is constructed by the ad world, which creates our ‘Others’ worlds, which become our online ghosts. We like a certain level of automated customization (suggest music, books, people) but the computer doesn’t know when to stop! Before the cell phone, we moved through world like phantoms, no trace, no algorithms, cloud. Free. Now there has been a radical shift in what our lives are for and it’s not pretty. We are all mine sites now, despite the intimacy of what’s mined. It’s done ‘behind factory doors’ by unaccountable mine operators. We have outsourced the management of our critical informational pathways to algorithms run by for-profit companies and govts. It (rightly) bothers Klein that protests of this are mostly far right, and our response is hate-speech laws.

We can bear unbearable realities only if we work to change them. She is not afraid to label the culprits. We must name the systems that have carved out the shadow lands, deemed them erasable: capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy. Struggle helps us see each other, to break from the peculiarities of our identities. John Berger remarks on the power of mass protest. It can disrupt the smooth flow of business, and it lets you feel solidarity with your ‘class’ (e.g., peacenik, environment-nik), not just as individuals.

Klein nails her media doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, who flipped from liberal feminist to far right wacko after a brief flirtation with pro-Palestinian views. Big mistake. She was purged from academia after that and it seems her worldview as a liberal feminist collapsed with nothing to replace it, leading her down rabbit holes, antivaxxer conspiracies, cabals. Yes! Liberalism is a deadend.

But Klein was and still is a feminist. Her evils include patriarchy. She wants no truck with the far right. Speaking of trucks, she slams the antivaxxers categorically, accusing all who kicked up a fuss over masks and vaccines as anti-social individualists.

Agreed. Wolf’s problem was liberalism—the individual is good/bad, so victim/perp is the focus, not the structures lurking in the shadows. ‘America is not entirely enslaved like Australia or Shanghai or Canada because [of the] millions of owners of guns. It is harder to subjugate an armed population.’ (p 310.) No! It’s our corrupt colonial institutions, stupid! Based on genocide and denial, so there is no trust. Guns only make things worse.

But wait a minute. The cabalists surely have a point. It’s the Faucis who threaten us with totalitarianism, vaccine passports, loss of sovereignty to unelected global elites (WHO, EU corporations). Klein falls on her own sword there. She didn’t know the damning results of the various parliamentary committees investigating Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act, who unloaded the stinking pile earlier this year. In February 2024, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association announced it was suing the federal government, stating that the Emergencies Act must be reserved for national emergencies, which they argued was a “legal standard that has not been met, that the normalization of emergency legislation threatens our democracy and our civil liberties.” Ouch. The truckers’ anger was not just selfish liberalism, and the government acted like a dictator. The other Naomi has a point.

I suspect Wolf’s errors (and her correct view of the truckers) spring not just from her liberalism but her earlier feminism (which she seems to have dumped). Her claim to fame is her bestseller The Beauty Myth (1991), which Klein damns with faint praise. She was a pretty face saying troubling things about anorexia when that was fashionable. We don’t know where Wolf stands on feminism now though I suspect she’s moved on after marrying a beefy body guard and falling in love with guns.

Klein may have lost her illusions about liberalism, but she’s still a feminist, the kind that denounces truckers, promotes transgenderism as well as the usual unqualified access to abortion. But these are very much focused on individualism, not social solidarity, let alone socialism, and public shaming and the censorship of #MeToo, built on militant feminism, is as ugly as you can get.

And Klein’s solution is totally secular. While she is not a doctrinaire workers-of-the-world Marxist, there is no hint that the key to transforming society may have a lot to do with spirituality, religion. She does embrace her ‘Naomi confusion’ as an ‘unconventional Buddhist exercise in annihilating the ego,’ but as a fillip. The thrill of being part of a mass protest that she finds transcendent (as do I) is a spiritual feeling. The high, the awe. The ‘class’ the protesters belong to is not so much a Marxian materialist one, but, especially now, a spiritual one, welling up from that part of our being, our ghost, our good doppelganger, the inner Holy Fool. It is the same feeling I get as a Muslim in communal prayer, which is always a protest against our sinful world, and a thanks for our conscious ability to change it.

Klein is conflicted. She buys into abortion, trans/ feminism, so wants laws to force acceptance and outlaw criticism. The nightmare of parents with flighty, confused teens hating themselves, with an aggressive state trying to settle the issue with force, is ongoing. Klein dismisses anti-vaxxers as selfish, refusing cooperation. But masks were 90% useless in 1918 and again in 2020. They should be recommended only (i.e., protect yourself with a good mask worn properly), and it was right to dispute and refuse dubious vaccines. Klein has no use for global corporations, but fails to at least consider WHO, Big Pharma, 9/11 (?) as conspiracies leading to fascism.

She does see capitalism as the underlying conspiracy. So I repeat: I love Naomi. She nails Israel too. In Israel post-1967, anti-semitism came to be treated not as a question in need of historically informed answers, but rather as something eternal. The spectral Shylock, the eternal Jew that is the shadow-double of all Jews. Israel made its own doppelganger, the sunbaked muscle-bound machine-gun-toting New Jew. With its own anti-self: the Palestinians, a eternal threat inside Israel and on its borders. Remembering genocide is a quest for wholeness. Retraumatizing freezes you in the shattered state. (p 296)

Searching for ways to fight our collapsing world, our collapsing worldview, she digs up wonderful nuggets from the past. Red Vienna 1919-34, when social democrats swept the elections: ‘He who builds children’s palaces tears down prison walls.’ (p 209. Socialist educator Otto Felix Kanitz, 1925.) Then the Nazis took the socialist policies and refashioned them for their racial supremacist project.

So nations have doppelgangers too! How apparently easy it was for Germany to flip into its shadow self in 1933. We witnessed this today, when Russia finally moved against the increasingly fascist Ukraine in 2022, egged on by US-NATO. We flipped overnight. Our programmed Russophobia clicked in. Kill, kill, kill as many Russians as possible. All the while, ignoring the massive slaughter of Ukrainians for no real reason, as Russia won’t lose, with its nuclear trump card.

We witness it in the flip in Israel to genocide after October 7, 2023. Though it seems that this genocidal bent was already there, just better hidden. Klein’s insight: we have both selves built in and can flip between them. Unless we become aware and ‘not lose the thread’.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are archetypes for people and nations. We can live with our inner monster only by repressing, ignoring it.

As a parent of an autistic child, Klein is sensitive to the subtleties of that disability. An autistic person is inwardly forcused, lacking social norms. The archetypes are the hyperfocused artist, absent-minded professor. In Red Vienna, they were treated as different, requiring understanding, not as a disease, a pathology. Enter Hans Asperger, who started out a nice Viennese liberal, working with Georg Frankl, diagnosing young patients displaying autistic traits.

But much like Wolf, he flipped from nice liberal to Nazi executioner (of innocent children!), his own doppelganger shadow self. The autistic child shows a ‘poverty of gemut (group bonding)’, making them unsuitable to the eugenist program of creating a master race. They were transformed into diseased psychopaths. A small subset, little professors, were an exception, saved for Nazi use as codebreakers etc. The others were killed as defects. Asperger’s work will be remembered as the epitome of Nazism, double-sided atrocities in the name of collective health and wellness.

Like Asperger, Wolf flipped from liberal feminist to far right. Asperger flipped willingly to fit the new zeitgeist, as did Wolf, whose collapsed worldview had nothing to replace it with, leading her down rabbit holes. Asperger and his eugenist ideology lives on. Parents live through their children. They want them to have a ‘competitive edge’ to thrive in a world falling apart, rather than making a world where everyone can thrive.

Systemic forces buttress the ‘core capitalist imperative to expand and grow by seeking new frontiers to enclose. (p 228) I would add my own scaled-down feminism: this is all from the male aggression instinct, which capital has harnessed, and which needs to be controlled both at the individual and societal levels.

No question I prefer Klein to her Other. The social issues (feminism, gaylib) are secondary and will sort themselves out in due course. We can all agree that human behavior is still a mystery. The real issue is fighting capitalism/ imperialism. Klein didn’t lose the thread like her Other, because she had a good training in Marx and Jewish socialism. She settles on the Bund as her model belief, that Jews can only be free when everyone free, not by building a militarized ghetto. Bundists saw nationalism as the enemy, leading inevitably to race hatred.

As for autism, Klein questions whether it has increased or is just better diagnosed. But the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder has continued to rise consistently and dramatically since the 1990s. What’s the explanation? How about capitalism? That is the conclusion of another (brilliant, Jewish female) academic, Liah Grenfeld, whose Mind, Madness and Modernity (2013)  argues that madness in its new form—the big three of contemporary psychiatry—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression—was brought about by nationalism, the cultural framework of modernity, our secular, egalitarian, essentially humanistic and democratic world.FacebookTwitter

RedditEmail

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to Imperialism. Read other articles by Eric, or visit Eric's website.