The Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DoJ) confirmed on Tuesday that the US had seized 33 websites affiliated with the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU) and three others operated by Kata’ib Hizballah (Hezbollah Brigades), an Iraqi Shia group supported by Iran.
In a press statement, the DoJ stated that the website domains—including the English and French language PressTV.com based in Teheran—were “in violation of US sanctions.” The statement said that the US Office of Foreign Assets and Control (OFAC) had “designated IRTVU as a Specially Designated National (SDN)” during the Trump administration in October 2020 for “being owned or controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC).”
The DoJ also said that organizations labeled as SDNs are “prohibited from obtaining services, including website and domain services, in the United States without an OFAC license” and that IRTVU “and others like it” are not news organizations but are used to launch “disinformation campaigns and malign influence operations.” It also claimed that the 33 website addresses were owned in the US by IRTVU which “did not obtain a license from OFAC prior to utilizing the domain names.”
In the case of Kata’ib Hizballah (KH), the DoJ says that it was both designated an SDN by OFAC and as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the Department of State in July 2009. It claims that KH has “committed, directed, supported or posed a significant risk of committing acts of violence against Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces” and also did not obtain an OFAC license prior to acquiring the domain names.
Whatever the public justifications provided for its aggressive act, the transparent political purpose of the Biden administration’s website seizures is the effort to ratchet up pressure on Iran amid ongoing negotiations in Vienna over the 2015 nuclear agreement and following the June 18 selection of the hardline conservative Ebrahim Raisi as the next Iranian president.
Iran’s foreign ministry on Wednesday called the seizure an example of a “systematic effort to distort freedom of speech on a global level and silence independent voices in media.”
One of the seized sites, Al-Masirah, is not owned by Iran, but by Ansarullah, the movement of the Houthis in Yemen, a faction the US has claimed to be “proxies” of Iran. The news outlet is headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon.
In a statement reported by RT, Al Masirah said it was “not surprised” by the seizure, as it “comes from those that have supervised the most heinous crimes against our people.” The website shutdown , “reveals, once again, the falsehood of the slogans of freedom of expression and all the other headlines promoted by the United States of America, including its inability to confront the truth,” the statement said.
Indicating the broader political aims of the website seizures, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US took over the domain name of the news website Palestine Today, which publishes the views of Gaza-based Islamic militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, redirecting the site to the same takedown notice.
Visits to the seized websites bring up a graphic with the headline, “This website has been seized” and a message that says the domain has been taken offline due to a “seizure warrant” issued under the authority of US code involving civil and criminal forfeiture and special powers given to the president during “unusual and extraordinary threat; declaration of national emergency.”
Some of the websites have been operating for many years, such as PressTV.com which was launched in 2007. The Wikipedia entry for the Iranian news and documentary network says that the annual budget of PressTV was $8.3 million and it had 400 employees worldwide as of 2009.
AP reported that most of the seized domains are .net, .com and .tv domains. The .net and .com domains are considered generic “top level domains” (TLDs) and they are controlled by the global provider of the domain name registry, Verisign, based in Reston, Virginia. The contract with Verisign is managed jointly by the US-based non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the US Department of Commerce.
The domain .tv is “owned by the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu but administered by the US company Verisign,” according to AP. Other news and media domains which are owned by Iran, such as the website PressTV.ir which also publishes in English, have not been affected by the seizures.
A similar action was taken by the DoJ under the Trump administration in November 2020, when the FBI seized 27 domain names it claimed were used by Iran’s IRGC to spread a “global covert influence campaign.” Coming from the number one worldwide purveyor of “influence campaigns” involving money, murder and military occupation, the unsubstantiated accusations against the Iran-based media outlets must be completely rejected as part of the preparations for further wars of aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Meanwhile, the use by Biden of designations made by both the Obama and Trump administrations makes clear the fundamental agreement over foreign policy between the two parties of Wall Street and the US military-intelligence apparatus regardless of whether it is the Democrats or Republicans that control the executive or legislative branches of government.
Last week CE published this piece that demonstrated the obvious spin The Washington Post used to mislead their readers about the status of the unvaccinated, claiming that their rates of infection, death and hospitalization are significantly higher than vaccinated individuals when in fact they never measured these rates. In this article I will once again focus on the Washington Post and their lack of journalistic integrity. This time their propaganda is more egregious because they are targeting the largest pool of unvaccinated individuals: children.
The Washington Post urges the vaccination of adolescents
On May 10, 2021 the Washington Post published this article titled “FDA authorizes Pfizer Coronavirus vaccine for adolescents 12 to 15 years old”. The article begins with a quote from Kawsar R. Talaat, an assistant professor of international health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who says, “A vaccine gives them an extra layer of protection and allows them to go back to being kids.”
This is a fascinating statement. Obviously kids were never not kids during the pandemic. Dr. Talaat is essentially saying that in order to be allowed to enjoy their youth kids must be vaccinated. However the restrictions that have been imposed upon their activity were never based on sound data. Asymptomatic spread could never be quantified or even confirmed. Mask mandates have been empirically demonstrated to have no effect on transmissibility or incidence of infection. The only things preventing kids from going back to being kids are the mandates that remain unsupported by any evidentiary arguments–not their vaccination status.
This statement was then further supported in the article:
”Robert W. Frenck Jr., the researcher who led [an] adolescent trial at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, who said the study was designed to test whether it triggered immune responses, not whether it prevented disease. But because of the number of children who became ill in the placebo arm of the trial, it also became evident the vaccine offered robust protection. He finishes by stating ‘That really points out how much covid there is in the adolescent community.’”
Dr. Frenck admits that the study he conducted was not designed to tell whether the vaccine prevented disease but whether children in the study developed antibodies. The point he is trying to make is that there is a lot of disease in the adolescent community. How much? In his study 16 out of approximately 1150 unvaccinated kids got Covid, all of whom recovered. That is an absolute risk of 1.4%. Compare that to the risk of getting the flu in a flu season: 8%.
The article goes on to claim that the mortality of COVID is greater than the flu in children. The Post correctly states that of the 581,000 deaths from Covid only 300 adolescents have perished from the disease, an admittedly extremely small percentage but tragic nonetheless. However they state that this number is greater than the number of adolescents that die from the flu which justifies universal vaccinations. The article cites this paper from the CDC that they claim confirms this statistic. In it the CDC states that 188 children died from the flu in the 2017-18 season, indeed less than 300. However the paper then states that “CDC estimates the actual number was closer to 600”. We have caught the Post in what can be fairly called a lie that is being used to make their case that the threat of the disease justifies prevention through vaccination.
Vaccination Risks and what we know about the “Spike Protein”
Every medical intervention has a risk/benefit relationship that must be examined closely. The Washington Post never once addresses the potential risk of the vaccine in children. Despite mainstream media’s dogged refusal to pursue any research into potential harm of the Covid vaccines, some very troubling information has recently surfaced if one is willing to look beyond headlines and CDC reports. Unlike the Washington Post, I will also examine the risk aspect of the vaccine with a look at the role of the infamous “spike” protein.
As is well known, the Spike protein on the SARS-COV2 virus is what allows it to enter a human cell and infect it. It is also the target protein of the mRNA “vaccines” that use a novel approach to teach our immune systems to recognize it by stimulating our own cells to produce this protein ourselves, hopefully triggering our immune system to produce antibodies against it.
The vaccine manufacturers and the FDA who grant them authorization to deploy their product have made an enormous assumption: the virus is dangerous, but the spike protein is not. It is becoming clear that this assumption does not hold true. In this short article published on April 30, 2021 (11 days before the WP published their article) Salk News summarizes one of several scientific publications that demonstrate the danger of the spike protein:
“The paper, published on April 30, 2021, in Circulation Research, also shows conclusively that COVID-19 is a vascular disease, demonstrating exactly how the SARS-CoV-2 virus damages and attacks the vascular system on a cellular level. The findings help explain COVID-19’s wide variety of seemingly unconnected complications, and could open the door for new research into more effective therapies.
‘A lot of people think of it as a respiratory disease, but it’s really a vascular disease,” says Assistant Research Professor Uri Manor, who is co-senior author of the study. “That could explain why some people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of the body. The commonality between them is that they all have vascular underpinnings.’”
The takeaway from these statements is that Covid-19 is a vascular disease more than just a respiratory illness. This was suspected very early on in the pandemic when many people were injured by bleeding, clots, strokes and organ failure. The authors were able to establish its mechanism by an elegant experiment. They designed a “pseudovirus”, one that had the SARS-COV2 spike protein on its surface but without any viral RNA in it. The pseudovirus damaged the lungs and pulmonary vasculature in animal models. They then isolated the molecular pathway by which spike proteins alter the metabolism of vascular endothelial cells causing injury. Conclusion: the spike protein itself causes harm in animal models.
Though we cannot definitively assert, from this study alone, that the spike protein is directly responsible for injury in humans, we must avail ourselves of the reality that this may take a very long time to prove definitively. If it is shown that an intervention is dangerous to animals there is no justification in assuming that it will be safe in a human being. That is why we use animal models in medical research to begin with.
“Fact Checkers” are Taking Notice
As expected, such statements are getting a lot of attention in the media. PolitiFact quickly responded with two articles (one here) “debunking” the theory that spike proteins are dangerous to humans. They quote Dr. Walter Orenstein (associate director of Emory University’s Emory Vaccine Center) and Dr. Paul Offit (director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) who both summarize that they are not aware of any evidence around the danger of spike proteins. Neither, however commented on the study presented in this essay.
PolitiFact also noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called the spike protein “harmless”. Once again, PolitiFact accepted their blanket statement without asking the CDC for their opinion of the evidence cited here. PolitiFact declined to query the CDC for a different explanation of why hospitalized Covid-19 patients commonly expressed systemic disease often with vascular and clotting disorders.
The Danger of an mRNA vaccine that generates spike proteins
If the spike protein is pathogenic, i.e. capable of causing disease, how do we know that when we create antibodies to it we will be completely protected from it? We don’t. How do we know that every person inoculated will mount an antibody response to them? We don’t. This should be sounding alarms in every institution charged with public health. Why? With traditional vaccines there is very little risk, if any, of contracting disease from the vaccine. For example, if a person inoculated with a Hepatitis B vaccine does not mount an immunological response they do not end up getting Hepatitis B.
The situation we may be in is much more concerning. These mRNA vaccines, if they work as intended, are in fact introducing the disease-inducing component of the virus into our bodies. As with most biological processes there will be a wide distribution of responses to the vaccine from people who have little or no side-effects to others who suffer devastating injury. Is that what we are seeing now? Yes it is.
The vaccines migrate throughout the body after injection
More recently, more disturbing information is coming to light. Bioavailability studies of the vaccine were not made public prior to Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). A Pfizer bioavailability study, obtained through the FOIA from a Japanese regulatory agency by a group of international scientists, demonstrates where the vaccine may go once it has been injected into the muscle tissue of our shoulder. Table 2.6.5.5B in this study indicates that the very same Lipid Nanoparticles (LNPs) used in the Pfizer vaccine begin to redistribute throughout the bodies of mice. Within 15 minutes after inoculation LNPs show up in the brain, liver, gastrointestinal tract, heart, lungs and especially in the ovaries and spleen. We can infer that where the LNPs go so do the mRNA that codes for spike protein. That was the purpose behind doing this study. We can also safely say that Pfizer and the other Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers never intended for their product to migrate so far from the site of inoculation.
This story is still evolving, however these studies and recently released bioavailability reports help to explain the clinical picture of Covid-19 with its broad effects on the body that are not limited to the respiratory system. Furthermore it may substantiate the numerous reports of injury following vaccinations like strokes, blood clots, bleeding, “brain fog”, Bell’s Palsy, etc.
The spike protein is toxic. The vaccine induces our cells to make spike proteins. The vaccine spreads throughout the body after injection. Until another unifying explanation is found we must assume that these vaccines are potentially far more dangerous than anticipated.
A call to halt vaccinations in the UK
In this advisory letter to Dr. June Raine, chief executive of Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (the UK’s FDA), Dr. Tess Lawrie, the director of an evidence based medicine consulting firm, urges the director to halt the vaccination program in that country after an extensive review of the UK’s adverse reaction data was conducted.
The Takeaway
We know, through the CDC’s own data, that Covid-19 vaccines provide almost no benefit to children and adolescents. The danger of vaccination is yet to be fully understood or quantified. In my opinion, the medical community, the FDA and CDC have no reasonable argument to encourage parents to vaccinate their children at this point. The Washington Post has once again demonstrated sloppy research standards, unbalanced reporting and lack of integrity. In this case adolescents, who are among the least vulnerable to the virus, may be harmed from The Post’s inability or unwillingness to uphold basic journalistic principles.
On June 13, a driver attacked a demonstration in Minneapolis, killing Deona Marie Erickson. This is the result of years of right-wing efforts to normalize—and even legalize—vehicular attacks. Now the corporate media has ceased to prioritize covering them, paving the way for more killings. In dialogue with our comrades at It’s Going Down and on the ground in Minneapolis, we have prepared the following reflections on the implications of this.
Shortly before midnight on June 13, while demonstrators gathered at Lake Street and Girard Avenue to protest the murder of Winston Smith by sheriff’s deputies and US Marshals, a man named Nicholas Kraus drove his SUV into the crowd at high speed, killing Deona Marie Erickson. One Black anti-fascist militant who was on the ground at the time of the attack reports that it was clear to those present that it was an intentional attack: “You heard his engine from three blocks away.”
“Deona Erickson’s car was parked on the side of the street in a way that would protect the people who were gathering. She was sitting down on the sidewalk about 15 feet from her car moments before the perpetrator smashed directly against her car at a very high speed. Witnesses say she was then hit by her car and sent flying. Street medics on the scene resuscitated her but she later died at the hospital.”
Deona Marie Erickson had two daughters. She worked as a program manager at a center for disabled adults. Today would have been her 32nd birthday. She gave her life to protect those who protest police murder.
Demonstrators detained the driver, Nicholas Kraus. Eyewitnesses dispute police allegations that he was “pulled from his car”; reportedly, police did not respond until after the attack, sending riot police to threaten the crowd before an ambulance could arrive. Under the circumstances, the demonstrators’ response was measured, to say the least.
In the immediate aftermath, street medics + protesters jumped into action—apprehending the driver and administering emergency first-aid. By contrast, an ambulance arrived long after police reinforcements in riot gear.
The people took care of one another—the police did not.
Fox News and the Daily Caller circulated a video encouraging their viewers to carry out vehicular attacks against protesters months ahead of the fascist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville at which a self-identified neo-Nazi did exactly that, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 35 people. Afterwards, leaked chats showed other neo-Nazis also planning to use vehicles to attack protesters.
In summer 2020, vehicular attacks surged in response to protests against the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. Over a dozen people were killed in these and other attacks on the movement.
Today, legislators around the United States are taking steps to criminalize protest activity, introducing a wide range of anti-protest bills. Foremost among them, Oklahoma and Florida lawmakers have passed laws guaranteeing civil and criminal immunity to drivers who hit demonstrators with vehicles, effectively granting vigilantes the right to crash cars into demonstrators. At the same time, Florida has introduced penalties of up to 15 years imprisonment for blocking traffic.
The message is clear enough. In short, lawmakers and police seek to crack down on pedestrians acting collectively to oppose state violence, while extending additional privileges to drivers who act individually to support state violence via their own attacks. The official institutions of the state have failed to leverage enough violence to suppress movements against police violence and white supremacy, so they are deputizing others to do so—a longstanding counterinsurgency strategy reflective of the colonial heritage of the United States.
On a fundamental level, the form of subjectivity that these lawmakers are promoting is what we might call a motorist subjectivity: consumerist, individualized, invested in the smooth functioning of the existing order, and regarding all other possibilities as threats. Structurally speaking, for the motorist, all other human beings—traffic as well as pedestrians—are obstacles, and the only imaginable journeys are dictated by the routes established by the state and the economy. The motorist wants to see the laws enforced on others, on the premise that it will reduce the ways that others might inconvenience him, but he doesn’t want the laws enforced on himself. Conceiving of our society as an entirely mapped world—the way that Google Maps does—in which all means of locomotion, all forms of agency, are individualized according to financial means, the motorist cannot imagine why people would assemble, off road or not, to challenge law enforcement itself.
As shocking as vehicular attacks are when they occur, they are an extension of the society in which they take place. They are anti-social, but they express and intensify the anti-social premises of our day-to-day relations with each other. Motorist versus pedestrian is a classic class opposition in a society in which transportation and mobility are fundamentally racialized. People who were raised on advertisements depicting jeeps off-roading across the suspiciously vacant landscape of the frontier only to find themselves sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway for an hour every day look around for someone to blame, and—as if by design—blame those with even less power than themselves. Road rage.
Right-wing online chatter in Minneapolis ahead of the attack that took Deona Marie Erickson’s life.
In this context, the chant “Whose streets? Our streets!” asserts another form of life, another way of relating to each other and conceiving of what our lives could be. Rather than framing vehicular attacks as aberrations from an otherwise peaceful social order—to be addressed, for example, by more policing—we have to understand them as one of the ugliest manifestations of a social structure that is fundamentally racist and anti-human, which can only be addressed via new forms of togetherness.
Honoring those whose lives have been taken by police and pro-police vigilantes is a first step towards this, and it is important that people have been doing this through shared presence in particular physical spaces. The internet—the information superhighway—tends to reinforce the motorist mentality of abstract competition and hostility. One of the most basic steps we can take towards creating a new social fabric on egalitarian terms is to encounter each other in person in ways that affirm the specificity of place.
This gives us more perspective on the ongoing efforts of city officials to evict the autonomous zone at the site where George Floyd was murdered, in order to open it up for “the free passage of traffic.” Rhetoric about “culture wars” is usually used to evoke a conflict between those on the fringe of the left and right, but here, we see centrist officials forcibly imposing a particular model for what our lives, relationships, and forms of grieving should be, even as they purport to be neutral.
Far-Right Murderers and Centrist Beneficiaries
Nicholas Kraus, a man with a history of domestic violence and abuse, is representative of the sort of dysfunctional, alienated men that far-right provocateurs aim to weaponize to carry out stochastic attacks on social movements.
This is effectively a watered-down version of the same strategy that ISIS has used in the Mideast in territories it does not control: taking advantage of the desperation, prejudice, and mental health issues of an entitled but disenfranchised population, the far right aims to disrupt popular mobilizations through consistent but deniable terror attacks. Their goal is to raise the risks of public organizing to such an extent that it becomes hard for movements to maintain momentum, in order to support state repression while opening up space for fascist groups to recruit and mobilize. In Turkey, this approach helped the despotic government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to crush what had been powerful social movements. The ultimate beneficiaries of this are not just far-right politicians, but also centrist capitalists who do not wish to see fundamental changes that could threaten their power.
Vigilante attacks are also advantageous for the city officials who would like to present themselves as “neutral” while suppressing the protest movements against the murders that the police they oversee regularly carry out. Vigilante attacks enable these officials to change the subject from the violence of the institutions they represent back to the question of how to “maintain order.”
“Some of these people with the megaphones, I guess their role is to get people riled up and get them in a space and march them around and educate them and tell them what their next big plans are and who they’re backing politics-wise and things like that.
“I like community, organic—no microphones, no megaphones, like right now. It’s about fifty people—but fifty people got Lake and Hennepin shut down right now, you know what I’m saying? We’re moving and grooving right now. As opposed to two or three hundred people holding signs, marching around, and then feeling accomplished, patting themselves on the back and then leaving—ain’t shit get shut down really. Police don’t even monitor the marches no more. No change will come from that.”
-Anonymous Black anti-fascist militant in Minneapolis, evening of June 15, 2021
But Who’s Paying Attention?
“You protested because it was trendy and ‘everyone was doing it.’ I protest because people are out here dying!” -Deona Marie Erickson, June 10 In 2021, many liberals and progressives have left the streets, relying on the Biden administration to roll back the policies of the Trump administration. Consequently, the murder of Deona Marie Erickson has attracted considerably less attention than it might have just last year. This withdrawal from social struggles creates the conditions for more attacks like this to take place. This reminds us of the situation before the murder of Heather Heyer made world news, when the far right carried out a series of murders around the United States without drawing the attention of corporate media. Corporate media outlets were only forced to cover the events in Charlottesville because it was not possible to sweep under the rug the fact that a thousand fascists had gathered in one place and killed a white woman. Because the events took news editors—though not anti-fascists—by surprise, they were not prepared to spin the story according to the preferences of their corporate backers; so for a week, fairly honest coverage of the threat represented by the far right suddenly appeared in a variety of news outlets. Subsequently, although this coverage was tempered by efforts to demonize anti-fascists, centrist media outlets continued to report on far-right attacks in order to associate them with the agenda of Donald Trump’s administration. But now that centrists can’t leverage Deona Marie’s death against Trump, they are prepared to treat it as simply another sad facet of American life, to sweep it under the rug once more. This coincides with widespread emotional numbness arising from several years of constant tragedies. The COVID-19 pandemic has already accustomed many people to thinking of human life as expendable. Last weekend saw multiple mass shootings across several states. Poverty has reached the highest levels since the beginning of the pandemic. These are the forces that drive desperate people to adopt far-right politics wherever there are no models for a collective pursuit of liberation, creating a feedback loop that will generate more and more tragedies. “We keep us safe.” “We protect us.” These slogans spread far and wide in the course of the movements that burst onto the world stage in Ferguson, Missouri because it has become eminently apparent that no one else is going to protect us. Deona Marie died doing her best to keep her companions safe—to open up a space in which people can come to know each other on different terms, as part of a community premised on shared consideration for all human beings, not individualized capitalist competition. We should do the same, so that everyone like her, and like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Winston Smith—might live. We should do the same, because the alternative means isolation, means eventually being treated as expendable ourselves. “If the fascists would have run over Deona Marie and we would have not been holding space, not erected the barricades that the city just tried to tear down, then Deona Marie’s voice would be in vain. We’ve got to be out here. That fascist wins—that fascist who drove his car right here, he wins. ‘Oh, I got them off the street. They’re gone now. My fellow white supremacists can enjoy Lake Street now, because I got them fuckers off the street,’ you know what I’m saying? “We’re out here stronger now. We have to be.” -Anonymous Black anti-fascist militant in Minneapolis, June 15, 2021
From an internationalist anarchist woman in Rojava: From half a world away, I hear about this sacrifice, this martyrdom. I use the words sacrifice and martyrdom and not the word “tragedy” because I am hearing about a woman comrade who chose to defend her community, and there are few things more beautiful and free in this world than that choice. She thought beyond herself, felt beyond her own personal safety, to defend those who struggled together side by side with her for freedom. When a life is given and taken in struggle, it’s not an easy thing for those of us left to continue. It would dishonest for me to say this is not something heavy, but we do not have to let the weight of it become a burden—this weight can give us strength and power, and with it, we can continue her struggle. Every martyr is another reason to continue, another example to hold ourselves up to. For every woman whose life they take, for every comrade, for every person who stands up to defend their community, whose light they try to extinguish, we can make sure that a hundred rise up in their place. The time when we could be separated on the basis of race, class and gender is coming to an end. When we sacrifice for each other in this way, as comrades, as people who share a freedom struggle, the methods of our enemies turn to dust. This is the time for us to defend our communities like Deona did. Anything else, and we won’t have risen to her standard. Her choice to defend was a sacred act of love—let us all be led by it. Revolutionary greetings, respect, and love from Rojava.
If the goal of those who seek to encourage vigilante attacks is to discourage movements based in direct action, this dovetails with the goals of city officials who seek to use the Non-Profit Industrial Complex to buy off a layer of activists to oppose and undermine effective strategies from within the movement. In that regard, one of the most important ways to prevent the attackers from achieving their goals is to preserve the horizontal, grassroots structure of movements against police, while continuing to emphasize systemic forms of white supremacist violence alongside vigilante attacks.
Despite Joe Biden running on a platform of unity to bring Americans back together, before he was even sworn in, he reneged on this promise by alienating tens of millions of Trump supporters — essentially declaring them the enemy.
“Don’t dare call them protesters,” Biden said after the largely peaceful march on DC which ended with a few hundred goons out of tens of thousands of peaceful protesters raiding the capitol. “They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”
While some of the folks certainly thought they were part of some coup, the reality of the situation was nothing at all as serious as the media and establishment has reported since.
Just like Trump used Antifa violence to bolster the police state and add stricter penalties for protests, Biden is using the riot at the Capitol to do the same. We predicted this outcome in January, and now it is escalating even further.
In February, using the DHS National Terrorist Advisory System — or NTAS — the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that anger “fueled by false narratives,” including unfounded claims about the 2020 presidential election, could lead some inside the country to launch attacks in the coming weeks.
This was the first time we could find that this warning was issued over a domestic terror threat. And, although that warning was issued in February, four months later, we’ve yet to see anything materialize. There have been no protests, no “attacks” on the Capitol, nothing. In spite of Americans largely returning to normal, the White House is doubling down.
This week, President Joe Biden’s administration announced their plans to create a means for family and friends to snitch on each other — to fight the non-existent threat of domestic terrorism.
In a teleconference on Monday, a senior administration official told reporters of a plan that sounds reminiscent of the Minority Report by attacking “pre-crime.”
“We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs,” the official said.
The official went on to explain how this would work, which involves family members and friends snitching on each other.
We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs. And on that, I would just note that one of the things we’re talking about is the need to do something in this space, like the “See something” — “If you see something, say something” concept that has been promulgated previously by DHS. This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence.
Notice how they use the word “potentially” to imply that certain completely legal political speech has the ‘potential’ to incite violence. Then, as if big tech censorship and spying wasn’t enough, the official mentioned “increased information sharing” between tech platforms to help combat this potential for radicalization.
“Any particular tech company often knows its own platform very well,” the official noted. “But the government sees things — actually, threats of violence — across platforms. They see the relationship between online recruitment, radicalization, and violence in the physical world.”
Closing out the conference, the official encouraged Americans to come together with their government rulers to combat the non-existent threat in a line that sounded like it was uttered directly from Heinrich Himmler himself.
“We are investing many agencies of the government and resourcing them appropriately and asking our citizens to participate,” the official said. “Because, ultimately, this is really about homeland security being a responsibility of each citizen of our country to help us achieve.”
The state asking family members to snitch on each other is the exact same scheme out of every totalitarian regime throughout history. When you sever the trust between children and their parents or friends and family, you can easily mold the children and other state-dependent shills into obedient pawns of the regime who will have no problem outing their subversive family members and friends to authorities.
In Soviet Russia, there was a famous story used to inspire children to inform on their parents. It was the story of Pavel Trofimovich Morozov — a Soviet youth who was praised by the state run media as a martyr. According to the story, which has very little evidence of actually happening, Pavlik denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family.
Regardless of whether or not the story was true, it became the subject of reading, songs, plays, a symphonic poem, a full-length opera and six biographies — all which pushed the idea that opposing the state was selfish and reactionary, and state was more important than family. The apotheotic cult had a huge impact on the moral norms of generations of children, who were encouraged to inform on their parents.
Those who fail to see history repeating itself are ensuring that it indeed will. Totalitarian regimes thrive off pitting citizens against each other, and this is ultimately the last step before complete despotism. Time to pay attention America.
Over the last twelve months, social media’s expurgation of any and all information pertaining to Covid-19, not part-and-parcel to the mainstream status quo, has become ineffaceable.
Everywhere we look now, we see embedded links to the Covid-19 Information Center on any post that dares even utter the words “vaccine” or “covid”. More pervasive still, are the notices of “this content is no longer available”, having been unceremoniously expunged for allegedly violating the ministry of truth’s “community guidelines”. Being so brazen as to even brand one hundred percent authentic facts as “misinformation”.
Facebook is now permeated with warnings pinned upon post after post indicating “this information has been disputed by independent fact-checkers”.
Ahh yes, the same “independent fact-checkers” that only recently had their financial biases uncovered. Confirming the very conflicts of interest many of us had suspected in the first place, along with their counterparts in the mainstream media.
Now, as the Overton window begins to shift it appears the MSM is left with egg on their face yet again.
On May 26th, as new research alleging the supposed origins of Covid-19 began to surface, Facebook announced that it would no longer be deleting posts claiming that the virus may have been man-made. What the company did not announce, of course, was recompense or at the very least an apology for all of the people whose free-speech it had infringed upon over the last year and a half.
On June 1st reports began to surface calling out the Washington Post for stealthily editing a 15 month old headline in which they had preemptively “debunked” the Wuhan lab origin theory of SARS-CoV-2.
Now, headlines, pundits, and politicians have done a complete one-eighty and are running amok propagating this as a part of the new mainstream narrative — with zero regard for the civil liberties they spent months trampling by vilifying those who postulated this plausibility.
A recent Bloomberg opinion piece lays out quite concisely the very argument that we and many others have carried for years — Transparency, as opposed to obscurity, is always the best course of action;
The author states at various points —
“Labelling misinformation online is doing more harm than good. The possibility that Covid-19 came from a lab accident is just the latest example. Social media companies tried to suppress any discussion of it for months. But why? There’s no strong evidence against it, and evidence for other theories is still inconclusive. Pathogens have escaped from labs many times, and people have died as a result.
Social media fact-checkers don’t have any special knowledge or ability to sort fact from misinformation. What they have is extraordinary power to shape what people believe. And stifling ideas can backfire if it leads people to believe there’s a “real story” that is being suppressed” …..
“It’s much better to provide additional information than to censor information” …..
“Even without the power of censorship, social media culture encourages the facile labelling of ideas and people as a way of dismissing them — it’s easy to call people deniers or as anti-science because they question prevailing wisdom.”
Concluding the piece by stating —
“The fiasco was the media’s propagation of the lie that the issue was settled and that anyone questioning it might be deemed an idiot or conspiracy theorist.”…
“What helped was not taking away information but giving people additional information. Censoring information — or what one deems “misinformation” — isn’t as helpful as it seems. The best we can do is keep questioning, and give people the most complete story we can.”
With these facts in mind, there are a few points important to note however. While this may in some ways come as a form of vindication for those that were previously silenced, it is necessary to recognize that this is not a confirmation of the lab origin theory. Nor should a narrative being adopted by the mainstream be seen as a form of validation or legitimacy. Rather, it is a demonstration of their blatant hypocrisy and stifling of discourse and objective critical analysis.
As always, the corporate media–intelligence–apparatus of the United States, who functions as a state disseminator of propaganda have been thoroughly documented in TFTP’s most recent investigative series installment — One should always question the motives of the media when they adopt a story, as almost always they possess an ulterior agenda.
Already, we see the neoliberal and neoconservative talking heads twisting this rhetoric to better fit their aims of demonizing their geopolitical opposition in China.
Fervent warmonger Senator Tom Cotton, who has championed the idea of the Wuhan lab leak against China from the very beginning; has been frothing at the mouth at this revitalized opportunity to capitalize upon these sentiments for his own nefarious incentives, as elaborated in a recent account by journalist and political commentator Caitlin Johnstone.
That’s not to say that if the virus did originate in the Chinese lab, if it were or wasn’t released deliberately, or any of the other yet to be confirmed uncertainties, that any crimes committed by the CCP regime should not be held to account. But the American government, in all of its imperialist machinations and blatant hypocrisies are the last ones that should be doling out recompense to that regard.
In any case, as Miss Johnstone explains, it is because of the US’s imperialist influence over the international community that any truly unbiased and independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19 is likely impossible. And this is largely due to the increasing tempo with which the US State Department is ramping up its new Cold War propaganda against its geopolitical adversaries in the east.
Despite these points, it is evident in this latest flip-flop fiasco that one thing is certain. Suppressing genuinely open public dialogue with regard to this or any other prevailing issue is not only an affront to the right of free speech. It is an affront to intelligence itself.
It should be held among the most basic of principles that for any society to be intellectually competent, and therefore be aptly informed and capable of rendering the most logical decisions; encouraging communication and free expression of ideas throughout the public sector is of the utmost preeminence.
Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us. Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us. Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us. And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.
Slips are double-edged.
It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, and more so since the corona virus lockdowns and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control. Or at least it should be obvious, especially since this push has been accompanied by massive censorship by technology companies of dissenting voices and government crackdowns on what they term “domestic terrorists.” Dissent has become unpatriotic and worse – treasonous.
Unless people wake up and rebel in greater numbers, the gates of this electronic iron cage will quietly be shut.
In the name of teleological efficiency and reason, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalist elites, operating from within the shadows of bureaucratic castles such as The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank (WBG), The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google, Facebook, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, etc., – run by people whose faces are always well hidden – have been using digital technology to exert increasing control over the thoughts and actions of people worldwide. They have been doing this not only by diktats but by manufacturing social habits – customary usages – through which they exert their social power over populations. This linguistic and ideational propaganda is continually slipped into the daily “news” by their mainstream media partners in crime. They become social habits that occupy people’s minds and lead to certain forms of behavior. Ideas have consequences but also histories because humans are etymological animals – that is, their ideas, beliefs, and behaviors have histories. It is not just words that have etymologies.
When Weber said “a polar night of icy darkness” was coming in the future, he was referring to what is happening today. Fascism usually comes on slowly as history has shown. It slips in when people are asleep.
John Berger, commenting on the ghostly life of our received ideas whose etymology is so often lost on us, aptly said:
Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.
And the teleology in use today is digital technology controlled by wealthy elites and governments for social control. For years they have been creating certain dispositions in the general public, as Jacques Ellul has said, “by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination” that makes the public receptive to the digital life. This is accomplished slowly in increments, as permanent dispositions are established by slipping in regular reminders of how wonderful the new technology is and how its magical possibilities will make life so free and easy. Efficient. Happiness machines. A close study of the past twenty-five years would no doubt reveal the specifics of this campaign. In The Technological Society, Ellul writes:
… the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definite adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a long-range vacuity of the individual. The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything. Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.
Once this softening up has made people “available,” the stage is set to get them to act impulsively. Ellul again:
It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary). Of course, this dissociation can be effective only after the propaganda technique has been fused with the popular mores and has become indispensable to the population. This stage may be reached quickly, as, for example, in Germany in 1942, after only ten years of psychic manipulation.
The end result, he argues, is the establishment of an abstract universe, in which reality is completely recreated in people’s minds. This fake reality is truer than reality as the news is faked and people are formed rather than informed.
In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses. This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness. To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.
Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.” First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution to the fearful problem built in from the start by the same people creating the problem. A slippery slope indeed.
But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today in a digital screen life world where algorithms often prevent creative breakthroughs, and the checking of hourly weather reports from cells is a commonplace fix to ease the anxiety of being trapped in a seemingly uncontrollable nightmare. It seems you now do need computer generated weather reports to know which way the wind blows.
In our culture of the copy, new thoughts are difficult and so the problems that plague society persist and get rehashed ad infinitum. I think most people realize at some level of feeling if not articulation that they are caught in a repetitive cycle of social stasis that is akin to addiction, one that has been imposed on them by elite forces they sense but don’t fully comprehend since they have bought into this circular trap that they love and hate simultaneously. The cell phone is its symbol and the world-wide lockdowns its reality. Even right now as the authorities grant a tactical reprieve from their cruel lockdowns if you obey and get experimentally shot with a non-vaccine vaccine, there is an anxious sense that another shoe will drop when we least expect it. And it will. But don’t say this out loud.
So repetition and constant change, seemingly opposites, suffuse society these days. The sagacious John Steppling captures this brilliantly in a recent article:
So ubiquitous are the metaphors and myths of AI, post humanism, transhumanism, et al. that they infuse daily discourse and pass barely noticed. And there is a quality of incoherence in a lot of this post humanist discourse, a kind of default setting for obfuscation….The techno and cyber vocabulary now meets the language of World Banking. Bourgeois economics provides the structural underpinning for enormous amounts of political rhetoric, and increasingly of cultural expression….This new incoherence is both intentional, and unintentional. The so called ‘Great Reset’ is operationally effective, and it is happening before our eyes, and yet it is also a testament to just how far basic logic has been eroded….Advanced social atomization and a radical absence of social change. Today, I might argue, at least in the U.S. (and likely much of Europe) there is a profound sense of repetitiveness to daily life. No matter one’s occupation, and quite possibly no matter one’s class. Certainly the repetitiveness of the high-net-worth one percent is of a different quality than that of an Uber driver. And yet, the experience of life is an experience of repetition.
A kind of flaccid grimness accompanies this sensibility. Humor is absent, and the only kind of laughter allowed is the mocking kind that hides a nihilistic spirit of resignation – a sense of inevitability that mocks the spirit of rebellion. Everything is solipsistic and even jokes are taken as revelations of one’s personal life.
The other day I was going grocery shopping. My wife had written on the list: “heavy cream or whipping cream.” Not knowing if there were a difference, I asked her which she preferred. “I prefer whipping,” she said.
I replied, “But I don’t have a whip nor do they sell them at the supermarket.”
We both laughed, although I found it funnier than she. She slipped, and I found humor in that. Because it was an innocent slip of the tongue with no significance and she had done the slipping, there was also a slippage between our senses of humor.
But when I told this to a few people, they hesitated to laugh as if I might be revealing some sado-masochistic personal reality, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.
It’s harder to laugh at yourself because we get uptight and are afraid to say the “wrong” things. Many people come to the end of their lives hearing the tolling for their tongues that never spoke freely because of the pale cast of thought that has infected them. Not their own thoughts, but thoughts that have been placed into their minds by their controllers in the mass media.
Freud famously wrote about slips of the tongue and tried to pin them down. In this he was a bit similar to a lepidopterist who pins butterflies. We are left with the eponymous Freudian slips that sometimes do and sometimes don’t signify some revelation that the speaker does not consciously intend to utter.
It seems to me that in order to understand anything about ourselves and our present historical condition – which no doubt seems very confusing to many people as propagandists and liars spew out disinformation daily – we need to develop a way to cut through the enervating miasma of fear that grips so many. A fear created by elites to cower regular people into submission, as another doctor named Anthony Fauci has said: “Now is the time to just do what you are told.”
But obviously words do matter, but what they matter is open to interpretation and sometimes debate. To be told to shut up and do what you’re told, to censor differences of opinion, to impose authoritarian restrictions on free speech as is happening now, speech that can involve slips of the tongue, is a slippery slope in an allegedly democratic society. Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. He was right.
So how can we break out of this deeply imbedded impasse?
This is the hard part, for digital addiction has penetrated deep into our lives.
I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today.
We need to slip away for a while. Leave our cells. Let their doors clang shut behind. Abandon television. Close the computer. Step out without any mask, not just the paper kind but the ones used to hide from others. Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away. Find a park or some natural enclave where the hum and buzz quiets down and you can breathe. Recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the only place Winston Smith can escape the prying eyes and spies of Big Brother, the only place he can grasp the truth, was not in analyzing Doublethink or Crimestop, but “in a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and bluebells bloomed and a thrush sang madly. Here he meets his lover and they affirm their humanity and feel free and alive for a brief respite. Here in the green wood, the green chaos, new thoughts have a chance to grow. It is an old story and old remedy, transitory of course, but as vital as breathing. In his profound meditation on this phenomenon, The Tree, John Fowles, another Englishman, writes:
It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.
I am not proposing that such a retreat is a permanent answer to the propaganda that engulfs us. But without it we are lost. Without it, we cannot break free from received opinions and the constant mental noise the digital media have substituted for thought. Without it, we cannot distinguish our own thoughts from those slyly suggested to us to make us “available.” Without it, we will always feel ourselves lost, “shipwrecked upon things,” in the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset. If we are to take a stand against the endless lies and a world-wide war waged against regular people by the world’s elites, we must first take “a stand within the self, ensimismamiento,” by slipping away into contemplation. Only then, once we have clarified what we really believe and don’t believe, can we take meaningful action.
There’s an old saying about falling or slipping between the cracks. It’s meant to be a bad thing and to refer to a place where no one is taking care of you. The saying doesn’t make sense. For if you end up between the cracks, you are on the same ground where habits hold you in learned helplessness. Better to slip into the cracks where, as Leonard Cohen sings, “the light gets in.”
It may feel like you are slipping away, but you may be exploring your roots.
This attention-grabbing documentary directed by Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper) centers on the dramatic story of a legal case that has dragged on for years: Aginda vs Chevron-Texaco. The plaintiffs are 30,000 individuals, including members of five indigenous tribes and colonial settlers in Ecuador who allege that over the course of its quest for oil, Texaco dumped over 18 billion gallons of toxic waste and formation water directly into streams, river, and jungle floor of the Amazon rainforest. In addition, the company is said to have spilled 18 million gallons of crude oil from pipelines, burned more than 235 billion cubic feet of natural gas into the atmosphere, and built nearly 1000 unlined toxic waste pits in the region — an area approximately the size of the state of Rhode Island. Berlinger manages to broaden the documentary out beyond what has been called the “Amazon Chernobyl case” to include material on global politics, celebrity causes, environmental activism, human rights advocacy, the role of the media in controversial trials, the power and wealth of multinational corporations, and the unconscionable treatment of rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures.
At the center of this David vs Goliath struggle is Pablo Farjardo, the lead attorney for the Aguinda plaintiffs. He grew up in poverty in the Amazon region and attended college and law school under the sponsorship of the Catholic Church. In his first case, which has been running since November 1993, Farjardo is seen making his points during the judicial inspections of the affected regions, rallying support of indigenous tribes, and visiting with families who are suffering with cancer, skin conditions, and birth defects. In 2008, he received the Goldman Environmental Prize in San Francisco honoring his work along with Luis Yanza, President of the Amazon Defense Fund, who has been managing the day-by-day operations of the case. A large role has also been played by Steven Donziger, a New York-based attorney, who has provided invaluable strategy advice and seems to be very savvy about the importance of media coverage (the cover story about the case in Vanity Fair and the involvement of Trudie Styler, the co-founder of the Rainforest Foundation with her husband, the musician Sting).
The cause of Farjardo and associates is helped in 2007 when the new President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, tours the toxic areas and lends his support. The case for Chevron in the documentary is presented by Ricardo Reis, the Managing Counsel for Chevron Latin America; Sara McMillan, Chevron’s Environmental Scientist who denies any connection between the company’s operations and the deaths and health issues of the indigenous tribes; and Adolfo Callejas and Diego Larrea, the two attorneys representing Chevron.
The proceedings reach a climactic point when the findings of Richard Cabrera, an independent expert, are released. He was appointed by the court to conduct a “global assessment” of the region, evaluating the plaintiffs’ claims and calculating the cost to repair any alleged damages. He found Chevron to be liable for up to $16 billion in damages (later amended to $27 billion) as compensation for health care, environmental remediation, reparations for loss of indigenous culture, cancer deaths, and the oil company’s “unjust enrichment” from its operations. Chevron has rejected the report calling it biased and unqualified. And so, the case continues and we recall that the Exxon Valdez judgment took nearly two decades to appeal.
Update:
Corporate Tyranny: How Chevron Conspired with US Courts to Destroy a Human Rights Lawyer
Human rights lawyer Steven Donziger has been thrust into an epic battle with one of the biggest oil companies in the world. He helped win a multi billion dollar lawsuit against the Oil Giant Chevron for polluting the Amazon in Ecuador and poisoning the indigenous community who lives there.
Ever since then Chevron has waged a relentless and global campaign to avoid accountability and to punish Doziger. In what reads like a Hollywood thriller, a US judge with ties to Chevron has conspired with the oil giant to destroy Donziger’s life. As a result of the case, he has been confined to his home on house arrest since 2019. And there’s a corporate media blackout!
Donziger spoke to Rania Khalek on Dispatches from house arrest in New York City, not too far from the New York Times, which has ignored the story.
After the Crash 