Category Archives: Authoritarianism

“Drop a Nuclear Bomb on Gaza”: Israeli Minister Says Using Nukes on Gaza an Option

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Amichai Eliyahu, an Israeli Heritage Minister has admitted to the world that Israel has nuclear weapons ready to be used on the Palestinians.  The Times of Israel reported that “Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said Sunday that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas was to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip, in comments that were quickly disavowed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also suspended the minister from cabinet meetings.” 

Surely, Netanyahu is angry with Eliyahu’s comments since the Israeli government never confirmed nor denied that they have nuclear weapons, so Eliyahu got himself suspended.

Eliyahu was asked in an interview with Radio Kol Berama “whether an atomic bomb should be dropped on the enclave” and he responded with “This is one of the possibilities.”

Eliyahu is a far-right politician who rejects humanitarian aid into Gaza by saying that “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid,” and that “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.”  He also advocates efforts to retake the Gaza Strip and rebuild Israeli settlements before his government decided to unilaterally withdrew in 2005. Eliyahu was also asked about what would happen to the Palestinian population in the aftermath and he said that “They can go to Ireland or deserts; the monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.”

Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, a Moroccan-born Israeli citizen, a former nuclear technician exposed Israel’s nuclear weapons factory located in the Negev Desert, not far from the city of Dimona to The Sunday Times of London in 1986.  Vanunu was drugged and kidnapped by Mossad agents while in Rome and spent more than 11 years out of 18-year prison sentence in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison.

In 2005, The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) published ‘The Release of Mordechai Vanunu and U.S. Complicity in the Development of Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal’ which revealed an important fact that Vanunu’s revelations about how Israel’s nuclear program is “offensive in nature”:

A former strategic analyst at the Rand Corporation observed that Vanunu’s revelations about Israel ’s nuclear program demonstrated that: “Its scale and nature was clearly designed for threatening and if necessary, launching first-use of nuclear weapons against conventional forces.” Prior to Vanunu’s revelations, many suspected that Israel ’s nuclear program was limited to tactical nuclear artillery and naval shells

Mordechai Vanunu exposed Israel’s nuclear weapons program so he is considered a traitor but to Vanunu’s own observation, he sees it differently, “Five million Jews are regarding me as a traitor, but six billion people around the world think me as a hero and a good man who bring the message to all the human beings that we should survive and prevent the use of nuclear weapons and to prevent the nuclear preparations and to prevent nuclear war in the future.” 

Israel says that Iran is building a nuclear weapons program which Tehran has repeatedly denied, but it is Israel who has been exposed for having an arsenal of nuclear weapons ready to be used against the Muslim world. 

The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Seymour M. Hersch wrote, ‘The Sampson Option; Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and America’s Foreign Policy’ and concluded that “America’s policy toward the Israeli arsenal, as we have seen in this book, was not just one of benign neglect: it was a conscious policy of ignoring reality.”   Hersch warned about Israel’s nuclear capabilities including the production of low-yield neutron warheads to exporting nuclear technology:

By the mid-1980s, the technicians at Dimona had manufactured hundreds of low-yield neutron warheads capable of destroying large numbers of enemy troops with minimal property damage. The size and sophistication of Israel’s arsenal allows men such as Ariel Sharon to dream of redrawing the map of the Middle East aided by the implicit threat of nuclear force. Israel also has been an exporter of nuclear technology and has collaborated on nuclear weapons research with other nations, including South Africa.

In September 1988, Israel launched its first satellite into orbit, bringing it a huge step closer to intercontinental missiles and a satellite intelligence capability—no more Jonathan Pollards would be needed to steal America’s secrets. Scientists at Z Division concluded that the rocket booster that launched the Israeli satellite produced enough thrust to deliver a small nuclear war- head to a target more than six thousand miles away.  Israeli physicists are still at the cutting edge in weapons technology and involved, as are their American and Soviet counterparts, in intensive research into nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray lasers, hydrodynamics, and radiation transport—the next generation of weaponry.

None of this has ever been discussed in the open in Israel, or in the Knesset. Meanwhile, Israeli field commanders have accepted nuclear artillery shells and land mines as battlefield necessities: another means to an end

So, would the Israelis be willing to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran? There is no doubt that Russia and other world powers including China would not allow Israel to hit Iran with a nuclear bomb.  

If Israel decided to use a nuclear weapon anywhere in the Middle East, it would unite all Muslims against Israel and that is something Tel Aviv and Washington is not prepared for.      

Hersch concluded that “the basic target of Israel’s nuclear arsenal has been and will continue to be its Arab neighbors. Should war break out in the Middle East again and should the Syrians and the Egyptians break through again as they did in 1973 or should any Arab nation fire missiles again at Israel, as Iraq did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability. Never again. The Samson Option is no longer the only nuclear option available to Israel.” 

Fauci and the CIA: A New Explanation Emerges

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By Jeffrey Tucker

Source: Brownstone Institute

Jeremy Farrar’s book from August 2021 is relatively more candid than most accounts of the initial decision to lock down in the US and UK. “It’s hard to come off nocturnal calls about the possibility of a lab leak and go back to bed,” he wrote of the clandestine phone calls he was getting from January 27-31, 2020. They had already alerted the FBI and MI5. 

“I’d never had trouble sleeping before, something that comes from spending a career working as a doctor in critical care and medicine. But the situation with this new virus and the dark question marks over its origins felt emotionally overwhelming. None of us knew what was going to happen but things had already escalated into an international emergency. On top of that, just a few of us – Eddie [Holmes], Kristian [Anderson], Tony [Fauci] and I – were now privy to sensitive information that, if proved to be true, might set off a whole series of events that would be far bigger than any of us. It felt as if a storm was gathering, of forces beyond anything I had experienced and over which none of us had any control.”

At that point in the trajectory of events, intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic had been put on notice. Anthony Fauci also received confirmation that money from the National Institutes of Health had been channeled to the offending lab in Wuhan, which meant that his career was on the line. Working at a furious pace, the famed “Proximal Origin” paper was produced in record time. It concluded that there was no lab leak. 

In a remarkable series of revelations this week, we’ve learned that the CIA was involved in trying to make payments to those authors (thank you whistleblower), plus it appears that Fauci made visits to the CIA’s headquarters, most likely around the same time. 

Suddenly we get some possible clarity in what has otherwise been a very blurry picture. The anomaly that has heretofore cried out for explanation is how it is that Fauci changed his mind so dramatically and precisely on the merit of lockdowns for the virus. One day he was counseling calm because this was flu-like, and the next day he was drumming up awareness of the coming lockdown. That day was February 27, 2020, the same day that the New York Times joined with alarmist propaganda from its lead virus reporter Donald G. McNeil. 

On February 26, Fauci was writing: “Do not let the fear of the unknown… distort your evaluation of the risk of the pandemic to you relative to the risks that you face every day… do not yield to unreasonable fear.”

The next day, February 27, Fauci wrote actress Morgan Fairchild – likely the most high-profile influencer he knew from the firmament – that “be prepared to mitigate an outbreak in this country by measures that include social distancing, teleworking, temporary closure of schools, etc.”

To be sure, twenty-plus days had passed between the time Fauci alerted intelligence and when he decided to become the voice for lockdowns. We don’t know the exact date of the meetings with the CIA. But generally until now, most of February 2020 has been a blur in terms of the timeline. Something was going on but we hadn’t known just what. 

Let’s distinguish between a proximate and distal cause of the lockdowns.

The proximate cause is the fear of a lab leak and an aping of the Wuhan strategy of keeping everyone in their homes to stop the spread. They might have believed this would work, based on the legend of how SARS-1 was controlled. The CIA had dealings with Wuhan and so did Fauci. They both had an interest in denying the lab leak and stopping the spread. The WHO gave them cover. 

The distal reasons are more complicated. What stands out here is the possibility of a quid pro quo. The CIA pays scientists to say there was no lab leak and otherwise instructs its kept media sources (New York Times) to call the lab leak a conspiracy theory of the far right. Every measure would be deployed to keep Fauci off the hot seat for his funding of the Wuhan lab. But this cooperation would need to come at a price. Fauci would need to participate in a real-life version of the germ games (Event 201 and Crimson Contagion). 

It would be the biggest role of Fauci’s long career. He would need to throw out his principles and medical knowledge of, for example, natural immunity and standard epidemiology concerning the spread of viruses and mitigation strategies. The old pandemic playbook would need to be shredded in favor of lockdown theory as invented in 2005 and then tried in Wuhan. The WHO could be relied upon to say that this strategy worked. 

Fauci would need to be on TV daily to somehow persuade Americans to give up their precious rights and liberties. This would need to go on for a long time, maybe all the way to the election, however implausible this sounds. He would need to push the vaccine for which he had already made a deal with Moderna in late January. 

Above all else, he would need to convince Trump to go along. That was the hardest part. They considered Trump’s weaknesses. He was a germaphobe so that’s good. He hated Chinese imports so it was merely a matter of describing the virus this way. But he also has a well-known weakness for deferring to highly competent and articulate professional women. That’s where the highly reliable Deborah Birx comes in: Fauci would be her wingman to convince Trump to green-light the lockdowns. 

What does the CIA get out of this? The vast intelligence community would have to be put in charge of the pandemic response as the rule maker, the lead agency. Its outposts such as CISA would handle labor-related issues and use its contacts in social media to curate the public mind. This would allow the intelligence community finally to crack down on information flows that had begun 20 years earlier that they had heretofore failed to manage. 

The CIA would hobble and hamstring the US president, whom they hated. And importantly, there was his China problem. He had wrecked relations through his tariff wars. So far as they were concerned, this was treason because he did it all on his own. This man was completely out of control. He needed to be put in his place. To convince the president to destroy the US economy with his own hand would be the ultimate coup de grace for the CIA. 

A lockdown would restart trade with China. It did in fact achieve that. 

How would Fauci and the CIA convince Trump to lock down and restart trade with China? By exploiting these weaknesses and others too: his vulnerability to flattery, his desire for presidential aggrandizement, and his longing for Xi-like powers over all to turn off and then turn on a whole country. Then they would push Trump to buy the much-needed personal protective equipment from China. 

They finally got their way: somewhere between March 10 or possibly as late as March 14, Trump gave the go ahead. The press conference of March 16, especially those magical 70 seconds in which Fauci read the words mandating lockdowns because Birx turned out to be too squeamish, was the great turning point. A few days later, Trump was on the phone with Xi asking for equipment. 

In addition, such a lockdown would greatly please the digital tech industry, which would experience a huge boost in demand, plus large corporations like Amazon and WalMart, which would stay open as their competitors were closed. Finally, it would be a massive subsidy to pharma and especially the mRNA platform technology itself, which would enjoy the credit for ending the pandemic. 

If this whole scenario is true, it means that all along Fauci was merely playing a role, a front man for much deeper interests and priorities in the CIA-led intelligence community. This broad outline makes sense of why Fauci changed his mind on lockdowns, including the timing of the change. There are still many more details to know, but these new fragments of new information take our understanding in a new and more coherent direction. 

Internet Censorship, Everywhere All at Once

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By Debbie Lerman

Source: Activist Post

It used to be a truth universally acknowledged by citizens of democratic nations that freedom of speech was the basis not just of democracy, but of all human rights.

When a person or group can censor the speech of others, there is – by definition – an imbalance of power. Those exercising the power can decide what information and which opinions are allowed, and which should be suppressed. In order to maintain their power, they will naturally suppress information and views that challenge their position.

Free speech is the only peaceful way to hold those in power accountable, challenge potentially harmful policies, and expose corruption. Those of us privileged to live in democracies instinctively understand this nearly sacred value of free speech in maintaining our free and open societies.

Or do we?

Alarmingly, it seems like many people in what we call democratic nations are losing that understanding. And they seem willing to cede their freedom of speech to governments, organizations, and Big Tech companies who, supposedly, need to control the flow of information to keep everyone “safe.”

The locus for the disturbing shift away from free speech is the 21st-century’s global public square: the Internet. And the proclaimed reasons for allowing those in power to diminish our free speech on the Internet are: “disinformation” and “hate speech.”

In this article, I will review the three-step process by which anti-disinformation laws are introduced. Then, I will review some of the laws being rolled out in multiple countries almost simultaneously, and what such laws entail in terms of vastly increasing the potential for censorship of the global flow of information.

How to Pass Censorship Laws

Step 1: Declare an existential threat to democracy and human rights 

Step 2: Assert that the solution will protect democracy and human rights

Step 3: Enact anti-democratic, anti-human rights censorship fast and in unison

Lies, propaganda, “deep fakes,” and all manner of misleading information have always been present on the Internet. The vast global information hub that is the World Wide Web inevitably provides opportunities for criminals and other nefarious actors, including child sex traffickers and evil dictators.

At the same time, the Internet has become the central locus of open discourse for the world’s population, democratizing access to information and the ability to publish one’s views to a global audience.

The good and bad on the Internet reflect the good and bad in the real world. And when we regulate the flow of information on the Internet, the same careful balance between blocking truly dangerous actors, while retaining maximum freedom and democracy, must apply.

Distressingly, the recent slew of laws governing Internet information are significantly skewed in the direction of limiting free speech and increasing censorship. The reason, the regulators claim, is that fake news, disinformation, and hate speech are existential threats to democracy and human rights.

Here are examples of dire warnings, issued by leading international organizations, about catastrophic threats to our very existence purportedly posed by disinformation:

Propaganda, misinformation and fake news have the potential to polarise public opinion, to promote violent extremism and hate speech and, ultimately, to undermine democracies and reduce trust in the democratic processes. –Council of Europe

The world must address the grave global harm caused by the proliferation of hate and lies in the digital space.-United Nations

Online hate speech and disinformation have long incited violence, and sometimes mass atrocities.  –World Economic Forum (WEF)/The New Humanitarian

Considering the existential peril of disinformation and hate speech, these same groups assert that any solution will obviously promote the opposite:

Given such a global threat, we clearly need a global solution. And, of course, such a solution will increase democracy, protect the rights of vulnerable populations, and respect human rights. –WEF

Moreover, beyond a mere assertion that increasing democracy and respecting human rights are built into combating disinformation, international law must be invoked.

In its Common Agenda Policy Brief from June 2023, Information Integrity on Digital Platforms, the UN details the international legal framework for efforts to counter hate speech and disinformation.

First, it reminds us that freedom of expression and information are fundamental human rights:

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and article 19 (2) of the Covenant protect the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, and through any media. 

Linked to freedom of expression, freedom of information is itself a right. The General Assembly has stated: “Freedom of information is a fundamental human right and is the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated.” (p. 9)

Then, the UN brief explains that disinformation and hate speech are such colossal, all-encompassing evils that their very existence is antithetical to the enjoyment of any human rights:

Hate speech has been a precursor to atrocity crimes, including genocide. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide prohibits “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”. 

In its resolution 76/227, adopted in 2021, the General Assembly emphasized that all forms of disinformation can negatively impact the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. Similarly, in its resolution 49/21, adopted in 2022, the Human Rights Council affirmed that disinformation can negatively affect the enjoyment and realization of all human rights.

This convoluted maze of legalese leads to an absurd, self-contradictory sequence of illogic:

  • Everything the UN is supposed to protect is founded on the freedom of information, which along with free speech is a fundamental human right.
  • The UN believes hate speech and disinformation destroy all human rights.
  • THEREFORE, anything we do to combat hate speech and disinformation protects all human rights, even if it abrogates the fundamental human rights of free speech and information, on which all other rights depend.
  • Because: genocide!

In practice, what this means is that, although the UN at one point in its history considered the freedom of speech and information fundamental to all other rights, it now believes the dangers of hate speech and disinformation eclipse the importance of protecting those rights.

The same warping of democratic values, as delineated by our international governing body, is now occurring in democracies the world over.

Censorship Laws and Actions All Happening Now

If hate speech and disinformation are the precursors of inevitable genocidal horrors, the only way to protect the world is through a coordinated international effort. Who should lead this campaign?

According to the WEF, “Governments can provide some of the most significant solutions to the crisis by enacting far-reaching regulations.”

Which is exactly what they’re doing.

United States

In the US, freedom of speech is enshrined in the Constitution, so it’s hard to pass laws that might violate it.

Instead, the government can work with academic and nongovernmental organizations to strong-arm social media companies into censoring disfavored content. The result is the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a vast network of government-adjacent academic and nonprofit “anti-disinformation” outfits, all ostensibly mobilized to control online speech in order to protect us from whatever they consider to be the next civilization-annihilating calamity.

The Twitter Files and recent court cases reveal how the US government uses these groups to pressure online platforms to censor content it doesn’t like:

Google

In some cases, companies may even take it upon themselves to control the narrative according to their own politics and professed values, with no need for government intervention. For example: Google, the most powerful information company in the world, has been reported to fix its algorithms to promote, demote, and disappear content according to undisclosed internal “fairness” guidelines.

This was revealed by a whistleblower named Zach Vorhies in his almost completely ignored book, Google Leaks, and by Project Veritas, in a sting operation against Jen Gennai, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation.

In their benevolent desire to protect us from hate speech and disinformation, Google/YouTube immediately removed the original Project Veritas video from the Internet.

European Union

The Digital Services Act came into force November 16, 2022. The European Commission rejoiced that “The responsibilities of users, platforms, and public authorities are rebalanced according to European values.” Who decides what the responsibilities and what the “European values” are?

  • very large platforms and very large online search engines [are obligated] to prevent the misuse of their systems by taking risk-based action and by independent audits of their risk management systems
  • EU countries will have the primary [oversight] role, supported by a new European Board for Digital Services

Brownstone contributor David Thunder explains how the act provides an essentially unlimited potential for censorship:

This piece of legislation holds freedom of speech hostage to the ideological proclivities of unelected European officials and their armies of “trusted flaggers.” 

The European Commission is also giving itself the power to declare a Europe-wide emergency that would allow it to demand extra interventions by digital platforms to counter a public threat. 

UK

The Online Safety Bill was passed September 19, 2023. The UK government says “It will make social media companies more responsible for their users’ safety on their platforms.”

According to Internet watchdog Reclaim the Net, this bill constitutes one of the widest sweeping attacks on privacy and free speech in a Western democracy:

The bill imbues the government with tremendous power; the capability to demand that online services employ government-approved software to scan through user content, including photos, files, and messages, to identify illegal content. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital world, warns: “the law would create a blueprint for repression around the world.”

Australia

The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 was released in draft form June 25, 2023 and is expected to pass by the end of 2023. the Australian government says:

The new powers will enable the ACMA [Australian Communications and Media Authority] to monitor efforts and require digital platforms to do more, placing Australia at the forefront in tackling harmful online misinformation and disinformation, while balancing freedom of speech.

Reclaim the Net explains:

This legislation hands over a wide range of new powers to ACMA, which includes the enforcement of an industry-wide “standard” that will obligate digital platforms to remove what they determine as misinformation or disinformation. 

Brownstone contributor Rebekah Barnett elaborates:

Controversially, the government will be exempt from the proposed laws, as will professional news outlets, meaning that ACMA will not compel platforms to police misinformation and disinformation disseminated by official government or news sources. 

The legislation will enable the proliferation of official narratives, whether true, false or misleading, while quashing the opportunity for dissenting narratives to compete. 

Canada

The Online Streaming Act (Bill C-10) became law April 27, 2023. Here’s how the Canadian government describes it, as it relates to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC):

The legislation clarifies that online streaming services fall under the Broadcasting Act and ensures that the CRTC has the proper tools to put in place a modern and flexible regulatory framework for broadcasting. These tools include the ability to make rules, gather information, and assign penalties for non-compliance.

According to Open Media, a community-driven digital rights organization,

Bill C-11 gives the CRTC unprecedented regulatory authority to monitor all online audiovisual content. This power extends to penalizing content creators and platforms and through them, content creators that fail to comply. 

World Health Organization

In its proposed new Pandemic Treaty and in the amendments to its International Health Regulations, all of which it hopes to pass in 2024, the WHO seeks to enlist member governments to

Counter and address the negative impacts of health-related misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatization, especially on social media platforms, on people’s physical and mental health, in order to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, and foster trust in public health systems and authorities.

Brownstone contributor David Bell writes that essentially this will give the WHO, an unelected international body,

power to designate opinions or information as ‘mis-information or disinformation, and require country governments to intervene and stop such expression and dissemination. This … is, of course, incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but these seem no longer to be guiding principles for the WHO.

Conclusion

We are at a pivotal moment in the history of Western democracies. Governments, organizations and companies have more power than ever to decide what information and views are expressed on the Internet, the global public square of information and ideas.

It is natural that those in power should want to limit expression of ideas and dissemination of information that might challenge their position. They may believe they are using censorship to protect us from grave harms of disinformation and hate speech, or they may be using those reasons cynically to consolidate their control over the flow of information.

Either way, censorship inevitably entails the suppression of free speech and information, without which democracy cannot exist.

Why are the citizens of democratic nations acquiescing to the usurpation of their fundamental human rights? One reason may be the relatively abstract nature of rights and freedoms in the digital realm.

In the past, when censors burned books or jailed dissidents, citizens could easily recognize these harms and imagine how awful it would be if such negative actions were turned against them. They could also weigh the very personal and imminent negative impact of widespread censorship against much less prevalent dangers, such as child sex trafficking or genocide. Not that those dangers would be ignored or downplayed, but it would be clear that measures to combat such dangers should not include widespread book burning or jailing of regime opponents.

In the virtual world, if it’s not your post that is removed, or your video that is banned, it can be difficult to fathom the wide-ranging harm of massive online information control and censorship. It is also much easier online than in the real world to exaggerate the dangers of relatively rare threats, like pandemics or foreign interference in democratic processes. The same powerful people, governments, and companies that can censor online information can also flood the online space with propaganda, terrifying citizens in the virtual space into giving up their real-world rights.

The conundrum for free and open societies has always been the same: How to protect human rights and democracy from hate speech and disinformation without destroying human rights and democracy in the process.

The answer embodied in the recent coordinated enactment of global censorship laws is not encouraging for the future of free and open societies.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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More Lethal “Aid” for Israel

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Can’t the Israelis Pay for their Own Bullets, Bombs, and Missiles?

What U.S. “aid” to Israel produces: Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza after a bombing that killed dozens 11/1/23

By W.J. Astore

Source: Bracing Views

Apparently the top priority in the U.S. Congress is sending more “aid” to Israel, most of it lethal. It’s more important than health care for Americans, aid for the poor and disadvantaged, or even aid to U.S. schools and cities. Basically, it’s more important than anything.

Why is this? What elevates sending more bullets, bombs, and missiles to Israel above all other matters in the U.S. government? How does this make any sense?

Last time I checked, Israel is a modern country with healthy finances and is capable of buying this “aid” if it really needed to. Why is the U.S. taxpayer footing the bill for more munitions to kill innocent people in Gaza? I don’t want my money going to ethnic cleansing and more death; do you?

Most Americans, roughly two-thirds, support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Our voices are simply ignored by “our” government, which of course shows us that “our” government truly isn’t ours. The owners and donors, the oligarchs, have their own priorities, and they are not ours.

In a note to accompany an article with Medea Benjamin at Common Dreams, Nicolas Davies notes that:

The US media have failed to inform the public how isolated the US is in its support for the massacre taking place in Gaza. 120 countries voted for an immediate ceasefire in the UN General Assembly, while only 12 small countries voted with the US and Israel to oppose the resolution. US and Israeli leaders are not just out of touch with the rest of the world, but with their own people. Only 29% of Israelis wanted a full-scale invasion of Gaza, while 66% of Americans wanted a ceasefire – and that included 80% of Democrats.

Not only that, but new House Speaker Mike Johnson has decided to connect $14.3 billion in aid to Israel to an identical reduction in the budget of the IRS! He wants to cripple the ability of the IRS to go after tax cheats in America while giving a huge handout to America’s weapons makers in the cause of “defending” Israel.

You know the saying about death and taxes being the most certain things we face in life? Obviously in America selling death trumps collecting taxes.

Exterminate All the Brutes

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All settler colonial projects, including Israel, reach a point when they embrace wholesale slaughter and genocide to eradicate a native population that refuses to capitulate.

A Bird in the Hand – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: Rise Up Times

During the siege in Sarajevo, when I was reporting for The New York Times, we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endured hundreds of dead and wounded a day. We never endured the complicity of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We never endured Washington intervening to block ceasefire resolutions. We never endured massive arms shipments from the U.S. and other Western countries to sustain the siege. We never endured press reports from Sarajevo that were routinely discredited and dismissed by the international community, although 25 journalists were killed in the war by the besieging Serbian forces. We never endured Western governments justifying the siege as the right of the Serbs to defend themselves, although the U.N. peacekeepers sent to Bosnia were largely a public relations gesture, ineffective in halting the slaughter until forced to respond following the massacres of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica.

I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares nearly three decades later. But what we suffered – three to four hundred shells a day, four to five dead a day, and two dozen wounded a day – is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, than Sarajevo.

On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity. Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.

Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.

Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth.

The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.

Israel’s distorted, settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated.

Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis”.

Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?

There is an historical analogy here. But it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge.

When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.

“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”

Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong. And they never go away.

Maybe we are fooled by our own lies, but most of the world sees us, and Israel, clearly. They understand our genocidal proclivities, rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They see that Palestinians, largely friendless, without power, forced to live in squalid refugee camps or the diaspora, denied their homeland and eternally persecuted, suffer the kind of fate once reserved for Jews. This perhaps is the final tragic irony. Those who were once in need of protection from genocide now commit it.

Biden Admin Awards Over $4 Million In Grants To Programs That Target “Misinformation”

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Millions of taxpayer dollars being spent on programs that target speech.

By Tom Parker

Source: Reclaim the Net

Since the start of September, the Biden administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF) and State Department have awarded grants totaling more than $4 million to programs, studies, and other initiatives that target “misinformation” — a term that the Biden admin has used to demand censorship of content that challenges the federal government’s Covid narrative.

The NSF has awarded the following nine grants since September 1:

The State Department has awarded the following five grants since September 1:

These awards were granted as the Biden admin faces a major lawsuit for pressuring Big Tech to censor content that it deems to be misinformation.

An appeals court recently stated that the Biden regime violated the First Amendment when pushing social media platforms to censor and in an Independence Day ruling on this case, a judge described the Biden admin’s actions as “Orwellian.” The Supreme Court is now considering whether to hear the case.

While some of the grants focus have been awarded to non-American organizations, whose misinformation targeting efforts don’t fall under the scope of the First Amendment, these types of programs can result in the speech of Americans being targeted.

For example, Biden’s State Department has previously funded foreign think tanks that created “disinformation” blacklists. These blacklists were used to target American conservative media outlets.

Both of the agencies that awarded these grants have been involved in prior censorship controversies.

In addition to funding groups that created disinformation blacklists, Biden’s State Department has flagged thousands of accounts to Twitter, now known as X, for censorship.

Meanwhile, the NSF has been accused of funding programs that develop tech that targets vaccine dissent and has funded research on correcting “false beliefs” online.

Israel Is Now the Greatest Source of Anti-Semitism

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Dissident Voice

On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):

This will be my last official communication to you. …

The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions, are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms [against Arabs] are accompanied by Israeli military units.

Across the land, Apartheid rules.

This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …

We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …

Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.

The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:

Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.

Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).

According to Wikipedia’s article on the “Kingdom of Judah“:

Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3] Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]

and Wikipedia’s “Davidic line” says that,

as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]

If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as here, here, here, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.

Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It’s Time to Recalibrate the Government

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame?”— V for Vendetta

We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta (written and produced by the Wachowskis) provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

With Vendetta, whose imagery borrows heavily from Nazi Germany’s Third Reich and George Orwell’s 1984, we come full circle. The corporate state in V conducts mass surveillance on its citizens, helped along by closed-circuit televisions. Also, London is under yellow-coded curfew alerts, similar to the American government’s color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System.

Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

As director James McTeighe observed about the tyrannical regime in V for Vendetta, “It really showed what can happen when society is ruled by government, rather than the government being run as a voice of the people. I don’t think it’s such a big leap to say things like that can happen when leaders stop listening to the people.”

Clearly, those we appointed to represent our interests have stopped following the Constitution and listening to the American people.

What will it take for the government to start listening to the people again?

In V for Vendetta, as in my novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the subtext is that authoritarian regimes—through a vicious cycle of manipulation, oppression and fear-mongering—foment violence, manufacture crises, and breed terrorists, thereby giving rise to a recurring cycle of blowback and violence.

Only when the government itself becomes synonymous with the terrorism wreaking havoc in their lives do the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny.

V, a bold, charismatic freedom fighter, urges the British people to rise up and resist the government. In Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

Acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

This way lies madness.

Then again, madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

It is time to recalibrate the government.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the farce that is the highly partisan, two-party, bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

The COVID-19 pandemic provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

Crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

This is exactly the kind of concentrated, absolute power the founders attempted to guard against by establishing a system of checks of balances that separate and shares power between three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislative and the judiciary.

“The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes law professor William P. Marshall. “The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”

Unadulterated power in any branch of government is a menace to freedom.

There’s no point debating which political party would be more dangerous with these powers.

The fact that any individual—or branch of government—of any political persuasion is empowered to act like a dictator is danger enough.

So, what we can do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

It won’t be easy.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.

This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.

We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.

We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.

That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

Nothing has changed, and nothing will change unless we insist on it.

How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

That’s their job: make them do it.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.