“Criminalizing Dissent”

How Republican Senators Can Defund Biden’s Dystopic ‘Disinformation Board’

In an apparent homage to George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” — one the rest of us realize is a pointed political allegory but the Biden administration apparently views as a handbook — the Biden White House is establishing a Disinformation Governance Board.

Yes, you read that correctly. The government is going to decide what’s true and what’s false, and punish disseminators accordingly. The bureaucrats who run the Department of Homeland security, where this board will be housed, are going to be parsing fact from fiction, obviously to keep us all safe from the scourge of independent judgment and thought.

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted in"Criminalizing Dissent", "Disinformation", "Joe Sleazebag Biden", Government is never your friend, Thought Crime

Justice minister invokes cabinet secrecy around use of Emergencies Act

Justice Minister David Lametti repeatedly invoked cabinet confidentiality in his appearance before a special committee tasked with investigating the government’s use of the Emergencies Act.

Lametti was asked pointed questions Tuesday evening about federal consultations with provinces and others before declaring an emergency, and when the government received advice to revoke the declaration. On multiple occasions, he responded that he “would not betray cabinet confidence.”

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted in"Criminalizing Dissent", Canada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government, Ottawa, Protest

Ottawa convoy deemed national security threat a week before Emergencies Act: police

Ontario police deemed the so-called “Freedom Convoy” a threat to national security one week before the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act.

Police have described the unprecedented invocation of the legislation as “critical” to their efforts to end the demonstrations, which saw participants encamped in downtown residential streets for three weeks.

Yet it is unclear at this point why it took seven days before the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act, or why it took police an additional week beyond that to begin clearing out the convoy.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China eats weird animals disease", "Criminalizing Dissent", "Surveillance Society"

COVID-19 restrictions are lifting, but unvaccinated Canadians still can’t board planes or trains

Canada’s vaccine mandate — which took effect in November 2021 to boost vaccination rates — prevents unvaccinated Canadians from boarding a commercial plane or train in Canada to both domestic and international destinations. Now that COVID-19 restrictions are fast disappearing, some unvaccinated Canadians question why the federal government still maintains the mandate.

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted in"China eats weird animals disease", "Comply!", "Criminalizing Dissent"

It Is Not Enough To End Vaccine Mandates, They Must Be Banned

Many Canadians are happy to see provincial governments, and now even the federal government ending COVID-19 restrictions, mask mandates, and worst of all, COVID-19 vaccine mandates for certain occupations and activities, but is that really enough?

The fact that the government had the capability to mandate vaccines that did not stop the spread of the virus they were meant to fight is quite troubling. In some provinces like Ontario, they have still not scrapped the digital infrastructure for the mandates, making it so that businesses can still continue discriminating against customers based on vaccine status.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford is tacitly endorsing discrimination, and even if you think businesses should be allowed to deny service to whomever they please (which is a fair argument), it is undeniable that nobody would care about vaccine status if the government did not tell them to care.

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted in"China eats weird animals disease", "Comply!", "Criminalizing Dissent", Canada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government, Totalitarianism, Tyranny!, vaccine controversy

Ontario to introduce new measures to block further blockades

OTTAWA — Ontarians could soon find their driver’s licences and vehicle registration revoked for participating in illegal blockades.

And those vehicles could also find themselves being hauled away by provincially owned tow trucks, preventing future issues with blockade removals hampered by reluctant towing operators.

The National Post has learned Ontario’s PC government will introduce new measures at Queen’s Park on Monday, meant to prevent a repeat of last month’s freedom convoy blockades.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Criminalizing Dissent", "Surveillance Society"

Social media needs to be held accountable for Russian propaganda & any forms of disinformation, Mélanie Joly says … Will they go after Freedolph?

OTTAWA—For Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, there is one tool that’s not only paved the way for, but sustained, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: disinformation.

And she wants to position Canada as a leader in tackling misleading content online, starting with social media.

“Propaganda is not only happening in Russia, it’s happening in new virtual battlegrounds, which are our social media companies,” Joly said Friday in conversation with Janice Stein, founding director of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“So what Canada will be doing, and what I want to make sure that we push even more … is (that) social media companies need to do more to prevent propaganda, and to counter any forms of disinformation,” the minister added.

Disinformation? Would that include Freedolph’s successful effort to have the bought and paid for media white-wash her Nazi scarf photo-op?

The Star is on a roll today HMA is your friend.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Criminalizing Dissent", "Disinformation", "Ukraine - Russia", Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government, Canada's Corrupt Political Class, Canada's Government Owned News Media

Was it really about vaccine mandates — or something darker? The inside story of the convoy protests

For three weeks this winter, a so-called “Freedom Convoy” delivered thousands of demonstrators into downtown Ottawa, turning them into an occupying force that snarled daily life in the nation’s capital and dominated the national conversation.

But who were the demonstrators, really — and what were they after?

Many of them positioned the protest as a fight against vaccination mandates for cross-border truckers. Others saw it as a campaign against pandemic restrictions more broadly. No doubt the occupation was many things to many people. But for several of its organizers, the protest was the culmination of years of work, their best chance yet to coalesce a movement around their preferred conspiracy theories and a violent anti-government ideology.

This Star piece was written by an Hysteric.

HMA it.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Criminalizing Dissent", Canada, WTF?

How vaccination status might predict views on the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Unvaccinated Canadians are about 12 times more likely than those who received three doses to believe Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified, according to a new survey by national polling firm EKOS.

The poll found 26 per cent of those who identified as unvaccinated agreed the Russian invasion is justified, with another 35 per cent not offering an opinion. This compared to only two per cent of surveyed Canadians who said they had three doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and who supported the attack, and four per cent who offered no view.

… The study concludes the results point “to the highly corrosive influences of disinformation.”

… Unvaccinated Canadians are also more likely to have a profound distrust of government, science and professional health experts, Graves said, and are more likely to support the protest convoy that occupied Ottawa for nearly a month.

“So the pattern was really clear that disinformation was not just a curious feature. It was, I think, a causal ingredient of vaccine resistance.”

HMA is your friend.

I conducted my own poll of me and my cat and found journalists were inclined to lie about the Convoy.

h/t Mauser

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China eats weird animals disease", "Criminalizing Dissent", Canada, WTF?

No evidence of terrorist activity during convoy protests: RCMP financial crime director

The Trudeau government has repeatedly claimed that the convoy was foreign-funded and involved terrorist financing. Those claims were in part used to justify the use of the Emergencies Act, which allowed banking institutions to freeze assets of protesters and donors by applying terrorism and money laundering rules.

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by Sarcasticat••0•Posted in"Criminalizing Dissent", "Disinformation", Fake News, Protest, RCMP