News Round-Up: Germany's Desire to Ban a Parliamentary Party, Research Study on the Effects of Ivermectin and Facebook Censoring Again
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
Germany debates banning the parliamentary party Alternative for Germany (AfD)
Facebook censors again – you must not say offshore wind farm development puts whales at risk
US hands out billions to climate companies, Bill Gates among the beneficiaries
Research shows ivermectin's effectiveness against Covid
Britain wants to protect women's rights by restricting the construction of gender-neutral toilets
Germany debates banning the parliamentary party AfD
Opinion polls show that the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has been described as an extremist party, already has the support of 21% of the country's voters. The party also won its first ever victory in local elections in June – in Sonneberg in the state of Thuringia. Although it is not a large municipality, the success marks a significant development for the party. The party's successes have come from its earlier opposition to the EU and immigration and now from its criticism of plans for a green revolution. They have also called for an end to arms aid to Ukraine. Instead, they would like to steer Ukrainians toward peace talks with Russia.
In Thuringia, the party's popularity had risen to 34% by July, and so they are predicted to continue to win at a local level.
Against this backdrop, however, Germany has begun to discuss banning the AfD, acclaimedly in order to "defend democracy". German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a speech to the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz - BfV), the intelligence agency responsible for internal security, that "we all have it in our hands to put those who despise our democracy in their place ".
The head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, has also said that "we see a considerable number of protagonists in this party that spread hate against all types of minorities here in Germany".
The party has also been accused of using 'Nazi' slogans and symbols, which are always particularly condemned in Germany. In July, for example, the party made a Twitter post depicting an upside-down triangle in rainbow colours. The post called for an end to the misuse of language in universities, where special forms of address are created alongside the masculine and feminine to address people who call themselves 'non-binary' or similar gender. The upside-down pink triangle, however, was used by the Nazis in the concentration camps to signify homosexual men. While the LGBT movement has adopted the upside-down triangle in its own campaigns and made it its own symbol, the AfD has now been accused of using a Nazi symbol.
The well-known magazine Der Spiegel wrote a very blunt editorial a week ago entitled 'Ban the enemies of the constitution!' ("Verfassungsfeinde verbieten!"). "The AfD has become increasingly radical. It is time to defend democracy with better weapons," it said.
There have also been voices in favour of a ban from within the ranks of incumbent Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). This is in case the intelligence agency categorises the AfD as far-right extremism.
The Christian Democrats (CDU), on the other hand, do not think a ban is a good idea. Party leader Friedrich Merz warned that banning political parties has never solved any political problems.
Facebook censors again – you must not say offshore wind farm development puts whales at risk
Journalist Michael Shellenberger writes that Facebook is censoring information linking increased deaths of whales, dolphins, and other large marine animals to the development of large offshore wind farms. This specifically concerns a marine area in the North Atlantic off the east coast of the United States. Shellenberger made a post related to Jonah Markowitz's new documentary film "Thrown To The Wind", which shows how whale deaths in the area have increased since 2016. The film establishes the link between the deaths and offshore wind farm development. Shellenberger is also one of the producers of the film.
The film shows how powerful sonar is used to map the marine area, with powerful sound waves that confuse whales, can separate mothers from calves, and put younger individuals at risk. This can lead them into areas with heavy shipping traffic or to poorer feeding grounds. Whales and other marine animals are also at risk from the heavy shipping traffic that has started in the previously quiet areas where the wind farms are now being built. In other words, the documentary directly links the increased deaths of whales to the development of wind farms.
However, Shellenberger's posts on Facebook and Instagram were declared false by the platforms. The decision was based on an article published by the fact-check portal FactCheck.org in March this year, which relies entirely on sources linked to the US government. It confirms that whales have had an unusually high mortality rate off the Atlantic coast since 2016, but that the reasons for this should instead be sought in whale collisions with ships and entanglements in fishing gear. The article does not see a link between their deaths and wind farm development, although it acknowledges that the issue needs to be investigated.
This kind of censorship is not unusual on Facebook, and we have written about such examples repeatedly. For example, the company's founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted some time ago that during the Covid pandemic, officials asked Facebook to censor posts which later turned out to be true. Despite this admission, the platform is still implementing Covid censorship.
US hands out billions to climate companies, Bill Gates among the beneficiaries
The US Department of Energy is giving $1.2 billion (€1.1 billion) to two companies to tackle global warming by capturing CO2 from the air, CNBC reports. Climeworks, which is developing technology to capture carbon and turn it into rocks, and its partners and an oil company Occidental Petroleum will project large air-sucking fans and equipment that will then filter the carbon out of the captured air as part of their process. The carbon will be buried, turned into stone, or used to produce other materials – there is even talk of diamonds. The projects would remove a total of two million tonnes of carbon a year from the air, and the US government plans to set up two more similar projects, bringing the total funding to $3.5 billion (€3.22 billion).
The longer-term plan is to use the technology to remove billions of tonnes of carbon from the air each year. This is despite the fact that these billions of tonnes are a tiny fraction of the man-made and microscopically tiny part of the naturally occurring and circulating CO2. It, therefore, looks like there will continue to be good government aid and business opportunities for the involved companies in the future. This will certainly make investors happy. One of the investors in Climeworks, for example, is Bill Gates, founder of the software company Microsoft and now also a climate activist, who in February this year justified the use of his private jet by investing in the company. He said he could fly in a private jet because he was looking for solutions to climate problems and investing heavily in climate projects like Climeworks.
This news suggests that such a search for climate solutions could indeed be quite profitable. Whether this climate investment in the right company by Gates is linked to his possibly good business sense or is a lucky chance or something else is, of course, difficult to say. However, it is worth recalling that Gates has also made unexpectedly good investments in the recent past. In September 2019, for example, his fund invested $55 million (€50.6 million) in BioNTech, which later made billions as Pfizer's vaccine partner.
Two years later, he sold most of the shares, generating a profit of $242 million (€222.6 million).
Research shows the efficacy of ivermectin against Covid
A peer-reviewed article published in the medical journal Cureus concludes, based on Peruvian data, that ivermectin, a drug used against parasites, is also effective against Covid-19.
The researchers specifically studied the excess deaths of people over the age of 60 in 25 regions of Peru between 2020 and 2021. While some regions distributed ivermectin to people, others restricted its use. In the 10 regions that used ivermectin the most, excess mortality dropped by as much as 74% within 30 days of reaching the peak. However, there was a correlation between ivermectin use and reductions in excess mortality in all 25 regions of the country. During the four months of ivermectin use in 2020, excess mortality in the country fell 14-fold. However, when the health policy was changed in November after the inauguration of a new president and ivermectin’s use was discontinued, excess mortality increased 13-fold in the following two months.
The fact that ivermectin has a clear effect on Covid has been shown in most of the studies done on the issue.
Britain wants to protect the rights of women by restricting the construction of gender-neutral toilets
Britain’s women and equalities minister, as well as business and trade secretary, Kemi Badenoch proposed last Sunday that developers of non-residential and public buildings must design separate toilets for men and women in new buildings, Politico reports. According to Badenoch, the move towards gender-neutral toilets will deprive women and girls of their fundamental right to privacy and dignity. Under the proposal, developers would have to build separate and/or individual toilets for men and women in the buildings.
Such a plan does not appeal to trans-activist groups such as Stonewall, which argues that gender-neutral toilets in workplaces allow "non-binary employees to have access to facilities without fear of discrimination ".