On Saturday, legal scholar and writer Jonathan Turley laid out the details of a House Judiciary report detailing the efforts of several shadowy organizations to censor right-leaning content on various social media platforms, and those efforts are an affront to anyone who understands the concept of free speech.

Few Americans have ever heard of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, let alone understand how it shapes what they read and hear in news and commentary. That may soon change.

An alarming new report of the House Judiciary Committee details this organization’s work to censor conservative and opposing viewpoints in the media by targeting figures such as Joe Rogan and entire social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter).

It is part of a massive censorship system that a federal court recently described as “Orwellian.” The sophistication of this system makes authoritarian regimes like China’s and Iran’s look like mere amateurs in censorship and blacklisting. //

One of the most insidious efforts has been to strangle the financial life out of conservative or libertarian sites by targeting their donors and advertisers. This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.

This is dangerous. This is using the weight of government to suppress free speech. This isn't about policies made in a vacuum by these social media companies. This is about government actors, as Mr. Turley notes, including the president down to unnamed members of his administration and, we feel certain, members of Congress in effect using these organizations to lean on the social media companies. They are targeting the platform's income streams - advertising - and they are succeeding at it. //

Dutch Letter
3 hours ago
“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness, without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical (imaginary) idea.” - James Madison

We are no longer a virtuous people and we no longer elect virtuous representatives. We vote for who is the lesser of two evils in every contest, and we do not protest but on assigned days when voting is allowed. We have become complicit actors in our own doom.
Of course, we commiserate, and complain to each other, yet closer to the abyss we creep.

The CEO of Germany's leading defense industry corporation escaped assassination by Russian operatives earlier this year thanks to the timely cooperation and information sharing between the United States and Germany. Armin Papperger, the head of the massive Rheinmetall conglomerate, was targeted for death by Russia because of his company's central role in arming and supplying Ukraine.

According to reports, US intelligence uncovered the plot and enabled German counterintelligence and security forces to put Papperger under close protection. The missing part of this story is the German GSG9 hauling the Russian assets off to prison. The assassination operatives and planners are still at large.

This episode is not a one-off. It is part of a campaign of hybrid warfare that is being actively waged against the West by Russia as part of its campaign to eradicate Ukraine.

Hybrid warfare involves blending kinetic and non-kinetic actions to exploit an enemy's weaknesses without crossing the line between peace and war. //

In the current case, Russia wants to keep NATO off balance and damage critical assets, but it doesn't want to tickle that fine line between painful annoyance and an Article 5 consultation.

There are two main characteristics of hybrid warfare. First, the level of violence must fall below the threshold the adversary would consider an attack requiring military response. Second, the source of the attack must remain ambiguous and difficult to definitively attribute to a foreign actor. These two factors make it difficult for a state to develop a coherent response to various lines of attack.

For the past months, the Russian OPTEMPO of hybrid operations in Germany has accelerated: //

Natasha Bertrand @NatashaBertrand
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A senior NATO official said today that Russia's sabotage campaign across Europe is a "more concerted, more aggressive effort, than what we’ve seen certainly since the Cold War...we’re seeing sabotage, assassination plots, arson — real things that have cost human lives.”
1:46 PM · Jul 9, 2024. //

Per-Erik Schulze @PerErikSchulze
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Nothing to see here. Just perfectly normal russian bottom trawling back and forth repeatedly just on top of the main fiber optic internet cable between Svalbard and the Norwegian mainland. From NRK.

4:29 PM · May 26, 2024. //

All of these are examples of hostile action from Russia becoming gradually normalised because nobody is willing or able to deal with it. In this way, Russia pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable, or at least accepted, by doing something that should be outrageous, and then doing it more when there is no response from the West. //

Russia is engaged in a very aggressive hybrid war against Europe that includes propaganda, economic attacks, cyberwarfare, and kinetic operations on the ground. That war's objectives are to increase internal divisions in European countries, damage their economies, and weaken their resolve to resist Russian demands.

In the case of Estonia, Russia is amplifying a border dispute so that it can become a plausible potential casus belli. As I've pointed out before, Estonia is a particularly tempting target for Putin because it is about 24 percent ethnic Russian. If Putin can successfully encroach on Estonia without consequences, NATO will become very unstable. See How Putin Dismembers NATO Without Firing A Shot: A Scenario From the Cold War for more details.

Europe is treating these attacks as individual data points and not as a coherent Russian destabilization campaign. As long as that goes on, Russia is winning this hybrid war, and it has no reason to stop.

Perseid meteors will streak through Earth’s atmosphere starting in mid-July. A first quarter moon won’t interfere with the shower’s peak on the mornings of August 11, 12 and 13.