News Round-Up: Scottish Court on Men Who Can Be Women, Poll Showing Widespread Covid Vaccine Damage and Musk on Why He Decided to Buy Twitter
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:
Poll: a quarter of Americans say they know someone who died from Covid vaccine.
Scottish court: men who are certified as women must be treated as women.
What made Elon Musk buy Twitter?
Facebook censoring again: shadowbanning a publication deemed "inappropriate".
Swedish bank closes the client's account for depositing cash on his account.
Poll: a quarter of Americans say they know someone who died from Covid vaccine
According to a recent survey by US polling company Rasmussen Reports, 24% of Americans say someone they personally knew died as a result of receiving the Covid vaccine. In addition, 42% of survey respondents said that if a major class action lawsuit was brought against the drug companies that produced the vaccines given their side effects, they would likely join it.
69% of survey respondents say they do not know anyone who has died as a result of a coronavirus vaccination and 47% say they would not join a class action against the drug companies. 11% would be unsure about joining a class action.
The survey was conducted in late October among 1,110 adult Americans.
When it comes to vaccines, this is by no means the first study to reach a similar conclusion. For example, economist and University of Michigan professor Mark Skidmore also tried to find out the extent of vaccine harm in society. Skidmore is an expert in conducting surveys and designed the survey for his study, which was published in January 2023. 2,840 people took part in the survey, 34% of whom said they knew someone who had experienced a significant health problem following the vaccination. 22% of respondents said they knew someone who had a serious health problem following the vaccination. Based on the survey data, he estimated that the number of vaccine-induced deaths in the United States could be as high as 278,000. His work was initially published in the prestigious scientific journal BMC Infectious Diseases but immediately came under criticism from the ones denying the harmful side effects of those vaccines. The journal's editors decided to retract it, noting that the study's methodology had subsequently been found to be inappropriate.
Scottish court: men who are certified as women must be treated as women
A Scottish court ruled on Wednesday that men who claim to be women and have received a gender recognition certificate from the state must be treated as women, The Independent reports. It does not matter whether these men have undergone gender reassignment operations or not, the certificate issued to them is sufficient.
The issue of being a woman was brought before the court by the Scottish women's rights movement For Women Scotland and was linked to the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018, which requires half of all people on public boards to be women.
The dispute started back in 2021 when For Women Scotland challenged in court the Scottish Government's interpretation that so-called transwomen, or men who call themselves women, could be treated as women for the purposes of this act. In that case, the court at first ruled that the government had acted correctly, but the decision was overturned on appeal.
However, the government subsequently amended the act so that men who have been certified as women could also be called women.
Women's rights activists also challenged this interpretation in court but now had to accept defeat. According to the court, the person holding the gender recognition certificate is legally the representative of the gender shown on the certificate. So if a man obtains a certificate of being a woman, he is legally a woman, according to the court. Persons who do not have such a certificate are, in the court's view, the sex into which they were born, i.e. they must be treated as representatives of their true sex. It is understood that this interpretation by the court does not only concern the appointment of persons to public office but that by referring to it, holders of gender identity cards can claim special rights for themselves more broadly - for example, access to services or premises for women.
What made Elon Musk buy Twitter?
Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, was a guest on the Joe Rogan podcast this week to talk at length about a variety of topics. One of Rogan's questions was about the purchase of Twitter and whether Musk's life would have been easier without it. It is recalled that Musk bought Twitter at the end of October last year for $44 billion (€41.4 billion). The entrepreneur who attaches great importance to freedom of expression stopped suppressing it on the platform, which had been done consistently under pressure from the US government, among others – we have written about this over various articles in the past (see for example here). This change of direction has led to a lot of criticism in the press, and the company has also found itself in financial straits, as many big companies have pulled their advertising from the platform, in response to boycott calls from pro-censorship activists. To date, the company's market value has more than halved to around $19 billion (€17.86 billion).
So why did Musk make the purchase? "This is going to sound somewhat melodramatic, but I was worried that it was having a corrosive effect on civilization," he explained to Rogan.
He said that part of this was due to the location of the company’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco, California, which he said is a very beautiful city. "If you walk around downtown San Francisco, right near the X, a.k.a. Twitter, headquarters, it’s a zombie apocalypse," he said, referring to the city's serious problem of intertwined homelessness, drug addiction, and the theft that goes with it. In addition, a large number of shops in the city centre have been closed down due to persistent theft.
Musk asked what is the philosophy that has led to such a result, and called this philosophy ‘a mind virus’. And the situation on the streets of San Francisco is the result of this mind virus, he said.
Twitter, Musk added, was an information weapon to propagate this mind virus and this weapon was used to suppress the opposing viewpoint. "I mean, you’ve felt the virus,” Musk told Rogan. “People have tried to cancel you so many times.”
The reasoning is no doubt a little complex. It would probably have been easier to point to the propaganda and state censorship on Twitter that destroyed society from within. In the course of the programme, he also pointed out the fact that, across the political parties in the United States, Republican freedom of expression on Twitter was curtailed ten times more than that of the Democrats, as the platform was controlled by the far left. On the other hand, with his story of a zombie apocalypse, he referred to the serious anxiety that such homelessness and drug problems bring to the daily lives of people living in big cities in the United States every day.
Musk also explained his views on environmental protection and commented on extreme environmentalist views that claim there are simply too many people on Earth. "If you take environmentalism to an extreme, you start to view humanity as a plague on the surface of the Earth, like a mold or something. But this is actually false. The earth could take probably 10 times the current civilization. You could 10x the population without destroying the rainforest,” he said. "The environmental movement, and I am an environmentalist, has gone too far. They've gone way too far. If you start thinking that humans are bad, the natural conclusion is humans should die out," he added, linking this in turn to the development of artificial intelligence. "If AI gets programmed by extinctionists, its utility function will be the extinction of humanity,” he noted.
Facebook censoring again: shadowbanning a publication deemed "inappropriate"
Remix News reports that they have been targeted by Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg's social media platform, and that it has started to shadow-ban them.
The publication has set its sights on providing news and commentary from Central European countries, notably Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. However, it does not limit itself to these countries and also provides information on other European countries, as well as on the policies and functioning of the European Union. They have, for example, been continuously reporting on immigration-related issues of concern in various countries.
The publication writes that the videos they have published and shared have been very successful on various platforms, particularly Facebook. "Over the last year, Remix News’ video views on that platform grew 2,500 percent, reaching 100 million," they note. The publication describes that in terms of views, they have already surpassed publications with far greater resources in terms of both funding and people - such as Politico or Euronews. "This explosive growth, we assumed, would eventually catch the attention of Facebook’s censors. That time has finally come," they write.
Three weeks ago, Facebook sent a notice to the publication saying that they were engaged in what the platform considered to be promoting hate groups and stopped recommending their page. In essence, this means a complete restriction of circulation on Facebook. Facebook also accused them of sharing spam. The publication filed a complaint with Facebook, but so far it has gone unanswered.
For Remix News, this is by no means the first case of harassment and censorship. In the past, their account has also been shut down by pre-Musk Twitter, now X, which has been reopened under new ownership. They have not been able to use Google Ads either, which is a platform through which such small publications can sell advertising and make money with less hassle.
Swedish bank closes client's account for depositing cash on his account
A Swedish man, Christian Utbult, received an unexpected notice from his long-time bank Länsförsäkringar Bank, giving him two weeks to empty his bank accounts, reports The Nordic Times. "It came as a complete shock. I have been a customer at the bank for over 30 years, never had a payment remark in my entire life, nor have I ever appeared in a criminal record – and then I am portrayed as a criminal money launderer in this way," Utbult said.
The reason for the move was that Utbult made cash deposits into his bank account. These amounted to between SEK 10 000 and SEK 30 000 per month (EUR 1 000 and EUR 3 000) and were related to the sale of his company in installments. As the buyer owns a shop which is still very much a cash-based business, the payments were also made in cash. According to the parties of the transaction, the payments are fully compliant with the rules and are recorded and audited in the accounts. Although Utbult provided all the required documentation for its cash deposits to the bank, the bank claimed that it did not receive answers to its questions and asked the customer to find a new bank.