The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup: Fighting for our Humanity, Our Liberty and Our Future

Posted on May 29, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

We are being utterly transformed. And the world is being utterly transformed around us.

Ostensibly, this is to tackle a simple virus. In reality, it is to achieve an elite design at staggering cost to humanity and to life generally.

If you have not been carefully following what is taking place, let me highlight some recent developments and what we can do about them.

On 26 March 2020, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) granted Microsoft a world patent. Titled ‘1. WO2020060606 – Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data’, this patent gives Microsoft (that is, Bill Gates) extraordinary power over our lives.

As Professor Vandana Shiva evocatively explains in her latest article, ‘My Earth Journey in defence of Biodiversity, Life and Freedom over 5 decades’, this development is ‘robbing us of our deep humanity’:

The patent is dramatically changing the meaning of being human.

Firstly, it is redefining us as ‘mines’ for data – robbing us of our autonomy, our sovereignty, and control over our bodies and minds…. And just being connected through their ‘server’ is giving consent….

Secondly, it is erasing our humanity – as sovereign, living beings, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings, making our decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part; and to which we are inextricably related. We are being reduced to being ‘users’ of tasks assigned to us by the extractive digital mega machine. A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire. Human creativity and consciousness disappear in the world imagined in #patent060606.

Thirdly, the patent is redefining human values, and the value of being human. Human values include ethical, ecological, spiritual values….

Patent 060606 is aimed at robbing us of our deep humanity. We are being transformed from self organised, conscious, creative, autopoetic beings, into external input “users” whose value will be assigned in cryptocurrency through algorithms, by the very machine that gave us the task in the first place.

But it is not just our humanity that is at stake, horrific though this may be. The world, too, is being transformed so that the humanoids who are not killed off or marginalized into extreme poverty and desperation will perform their assigned roles to serve the global elite within the new techno tyranny that is being created around us.

For just a taste of the evidence in this regard, see ‘Global Capitalism, “World Government” and the Corona Crisis’, ‘The Farce and Diabolical Agenda of A “Universal Lockdown”’ and ‘Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision ’.

And if you would like greater insight into the role that individuals like Bill Gates are playing in all of this, see these three recent documentaries produced by James Corbett: ‘How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health’, ‘Bill Gates’ Plan to Vaccinate the World’ and ‘Bill Gates and the Population Control Grid’. In addition, this article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is instructive: ‘Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination’.

Given the monumental undertaking for global control that this represents, you might wonder how this transformation can be achieved. And, unfortunately, the answer is ‘very simply’. This is because the bulk of the human population has been terrorized into a state of being submissively obedient. And this state is effectively permanent. As a result, mobilizing strategic resistance to what is happening is very difficult.

Why do I write this?

Because the evidence that COVID-19 is a minor health risk, particularly if dealt with appropriately, is overwhelming and extensively documented: ‘According to data from the best-studied countries and regions, the lethality of Covid19 is on average about 0.2%, which is in the range of a severe influenza (flu) and about twenty times lower than originally assumed by the WHO.’ See ‘A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19’.

Having noted that, however, if you want to watch a thoughtful and detailed explanation of why COVID-19 is a ‘fake virus’, try watching molecular biologist Dr Andrew Kaufman’s two hour interview by Brian Rose: ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’. In this interview, Dr Kaufman carefully explains:

The scientific procedures that have been utilized in all of these scientific studies… it wouldn’t be possible using those techniques to isolate the virus and purify it and prove that it exists…. Taking into account all of the evidence I have looked at which has been almost entirely from peer-reviewed scientific papers and official government websites, my opinion is that this entire pandemic is a completely manufactured crisis. In other words there is no evidence of anyone dying from any novel illness…. And so what I think is going on… is in line with what might be known as a globalist agenda…. All of these things seem to be moving towards control of the people.

There is not very much about vaccines that makes a lot of sense because if you actually go back and look for the evidence that vaccines have prevented disease you are not going to find any…. Smallpox is an interesting example…. In the mainstream history books the smallpox vaccine has been touted as a major success but that’s not really accurate. If you go back and look at data from the Royal Academy of Sciences what you will see is that the mortality increased substantially while these vaccines were widely used and then when they stopped being used the numbers went back down again.

So it is really difficult to trust what is in a general textbook or mainstream history book without going and looking at the actual data yourself because all of the textbooks that were in medical schools say that vaccines are responsible for preventing many of these major illnesses that people were suffering from and worried about in the first part of the twentieth century. But if you look at some of the same diseases that did not have a vaccine, such as scarlet fever for example, you will find that scarlet fever also went away with all of the other diseases even though there was no vaccine for it.

And when you look at the number of cases of the various illnesses like polio or measles or diphtheria, you’ll see that the prevalence or incidence of those diseases and mortality from those diseases, which in some was substantial, went down almost to the current levels before a vaccine was even available for use so you couldn’t possibly attribute a vaccine for causing that reduction in the illness if it wasn’t even around at the time that the illness was reduced….

If you create a vaccine for an illness [such as COVID-19] that has not been proven to even exist, then the vaccine couldn’t possibly work. But if you do a clinical study and have an imaginary disease and give the vaccine to people and then they never get the imaginary disease it would give the appearance that its very successful.

So this is a real win-win strategy for anyone making these vaccines and which is why there have been companies all over the world racing to be the first one to have a vaccine that’s been proven to be safe or effective using the limited criteria that they require. Because whoever gets there first, according to the plans or proposed policies, they’re going to be selling billions of vaccines. Billions! So they’re going to make billions of dollars as a result of this. So there is such a strong financial incentive.

Some of the technological strategies that they are using to make these vaccines are quite scary and unprecedented…. But obviously it couldn’t prevent a disease that doesn’t exist so there must be some other purpose for it.

Remember, the words quoted above are taken from a two hour interview. If any of these words leave you wondering, watch the interview to consider the evidence that Dr Kaufman cites or check his website: Dr Andrew Kaufman.

In another video Dr Kaufman explains how early scientific papers on the subject suggested an association (not causation) between a novel coronavirus ‘with human to human transmission and severe human infection’ whereas a subsequent key ‘scientific’ paper that made a claim which helped drive the global response to COVID-19 ‘flat out lied’ about their results: ‘Following the first outbreaks of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, a new coronavirus was identified as the causative agent in January 2020.’ See ‘Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19’. In fact, Dr Kaufman points out: ‘they cannot reference any science to back that up whatsoever’. Moreover, subsequently to this paper, another article – see ‘I study viruses: How our team isolated the new coronavirus to fight the global pandemic’ – declared ‘The emergence of a new coronavirus in a market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 set in motion the pandemic we are now witnessing in 160 countries around the world’. But again, Dr Kaufman counters, ‘no evidence was provided at all’ to support this claim: ‘just flat out lies’. For the details and citation of all the scientific sources for this explanation of how the COVID-19 ‘rumour mill’ got started, see ‘The Rooster in the River of Rats’.

If you wish to watch a more scientifically-oriented lecture, explaining more of the technical detail of what Dr Kaufman argues ‘is really going on’ and which is consistent with the evidence, then you can view it here: ‘Special Report: Humanity is NOT a virus!’

So while the evidence that there is neither a virus nor a pandemic is grounded firmly in the science, the evidence that the global elite is using COVID-19 as ‘cover’ to implement its coup against humanity is rather overwhelming. In addition to the articles cited above, see these two articles which cite many other extensively-documented sources as well: ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ and ‘COVID-19: Breaking the Lockdown, Defeating the Coup, Averting Extinction’.

But while this evidence is readily available, it requires someone who has not lost the capacity to investigate and think for themself. And that is a huge problem.

Of course, little of the evidence in these regards is available through education systems or the corporate media, given that the purpose of these institutions is to serve elite interests. And controlling access to, and manipulating perception of, the evidence is vital in both regards.

So if, for example, you believe that the corporate media is reporting the ‘news’, you might like to reflect on these words of David Rockefeller spoken at the highly secretive elite Bilderberg meeting held in Germany in 1991 but subsequently leaked:

‘We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government…. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.’ See ‘David Rockefeller at Bilderberg meeting in Baden 1991’ and ‘David Rockefeller’s Chilling 1991 Speech at a Bilderberg Meeting’.

The motto of The Washington Post is ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’. What it does not proclaim is that the Post, along with the other corporate media outlets, has long played its part in the global elite’s program to ensure that democracy – and hence any meaningful role in how we are governed – cannot flourish. But for a detailed critique of the corporate media exposing its role in perpetrating elite power by distributing elite propaganda as ‘news’, see Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

Hence, while increasing numbers of people are lamenting the submissive response to elite initiatives to imprison us in our own homes (and strip us of rights and freedoms that it took centuries to win) – see, for example, ‘A Nation of Sheep’ and ‘To All Cowards Who Meekly Succumbed To the Unlawful Lockdown… Hang Your Heads In Shame’ – and some authors have written commentaries illustrating and explaining the ways in which people’s fear is manifesting in response to a simple virus – see Dr. Rudolf Hänsel’s explanation in ‘The Diabolical “Game” with Fear as an Instrument of Domination. The Reflex of Obedience’ and Dr. Pascal Sacré’s thoughts in ‘COVID-19: An Ocean of Fears and Lies’ – my own interest lies in explaining why people are fearfully and submissively obedient in the first place and how we can go about restoring agency to the individual’s life so that they can use their own investigatory and analytical capacities to track down and consider the evidence, and to then act sensibly and powerfully in response.

While, regrettably, this cannot be done quickly, it is an essential component of any strategy to effectively resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedoms and economic security while also acting powerfully to deal with the genuine threats to human survival such as those posed by war, the environmental and climate catastrophes, biodiversity loss and the deployment of 5G, among others. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ and, for astute insight into the disastrous impact that the global industrial shutdown is having on the aerosol masking effect and hence the global climate, see ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’

This is because fear suppresses (other) emotional responses (including the anger that would mobilize resistance), distorts sensory perception (so that people disbelieve, rather than consider carefully, evidence that contradicts the elite-driven narrative), inhibits analytical capacity, falsifies memory (to conform with explanations that are less frightening) and thwarts powerful behavioural responses. As a consequence of being victims of their own fear, most people live in a world of delusion and projection and are quite incapable of being anything but submissively obedient.

In brief, fear makes people want to believe, and hence to actually believe, that there is ‘nothing wrong’ with elite directives distributed by international organizations (such as the World Health Organisation), governments, the medical industry, education systems and the corporate media. This means that they do not have to feel and think for themselves, consult their conscience or change their own behaviour, each of which is particularly frightening when their fear and the (unconscious) imperative to obey already have them paralyzed.

So how have we ended up with a population of ‘individuals’ who are so devoid of any sense of Selfhood that they are submissively obedient as Drs Hänsel and Sacré discussed above and which we are now witnessing on a global scale as people are imprisoned in their own homes?

Fundamentally, this has occurred because our parenting and education models are based on terrorizing children into obedience using a combination of ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence. For the details of how we do this, see ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

Hence, while we pay lip service to the notion of ‘the individual’, the reality is that we prefer ‘individuals’ who follow the orders of ‘the authorities’, whether at home, school, work, in the military, at a religious gathering or as ‘citizens’ in society generally. After all, our definition of ‘individuality’ long ago ceased to mean any more than that the person clothes themself differently and has their own combination of interests to while away their spare time.

The genuine individual who has an integrated mind, trusts their own (emotional and intellectual) judgment, articulates the truth and behaves powerfully in accord with their conscience, whatever the cost, is only supposed to appear as a fictional character in novels or films. We certainly do not want them in real life. Just ask Mahatma Gandhi, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, for example. Shot dead or imprisoned for having the qualities of a genuine individual.

For further explanations of how we systematically destroy the individuality in our children, see ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’, ‘Most Attitudes and Beliefs are Outcomes of Fear’ and ‘The Psychology of Projection in Conflict’.

So here we are at the most important moment in human history. At the brink of precipitating our own extinction – again, see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ and ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’ – and now imprisoned in our own homes (for those who have them) while the global elite implements more of its plan to reduce us from human individuals to digital identities that are readily tracked and controlled while playing our robotic role in the techno tyranny that is almost upon us.

Even those two writers of the classic dystopian novels of the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, would be horrified that we participated so obediently, so submissively, in the destruction of our ‘free’ world (whatever its limitations). And I doubt they would get any solace from knowing just how well they truly understood the terrified and submissive nature of the human condition.

So with virtually everyone ‘distracted’ from the ‘main game’ – the coup in which the global elite is taking vastly greater control of our lives and even dramatically increasing the risk of imminent human extinction – while we sit back, or even ask for, greater restrictions on our rights and freedoms, the only important question remaining is this:

Can we mobilize sufficient people, even at this late moment, to strategically defend our humanity, defeat the elite coup and avert the imminent threats to human survival?

Unfortunately, as recent evidence clearly indicates, with even most activists obviously deceived by the use of COVID-19 as ‘cover’ for the coup and oblivious to its catastrophic environmental consequences, this is proving far more difficult than I originally hoped.

Nevertheless, in the hope that we can build on the existing resistance, such as that being documented by Professor Chenoweth and her colleagues – see ‘The global pandemic has spawned new forms of activism – and they’re flourishing’ – while sharpening its focus for greater strategic impact, let me reiterate a previously outlined strategy below, particularly taking into account the insanity of the global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – and the emotional health issues (including anxiety and depression) that are arising during the lockdown that are now complicating people’s existing compulsion to be obedient in the belief that compliance with COVID-19 (that is, coup) measures will make them ‘safe’.

A Nonviolent Strategy to Fight for our Humanity, Liberty and Future

So, if you wish to address your own emotional health issues arising during the COVID-19 coup, consider ‘Putting Feelings First’ and/or, if you wish to support others, including children, to do so effectively, see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

In relation to the coup itself, I have identified the appropriate political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’ – and set out a basic list of (now) 28 strategic goals for achieving this purpose (which will also play a vital role in tackling key threats to human survival). The first thirteen of these strategic goals are as follows:

(1) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by wearing a global symbol of human solidarity, such as an image of several people of different genders/races/religions/abilities/classes holding hands.

(2) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting all corporate media outlets (television, radio, newspapers, Google, Facebook, Twitter…) and by seeking news from progressive news outlets committed to telling the truth.

(3) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by refusing to download the COVID-19 ‘contact tracing’ surveillance app.

(4) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by ending their ownership and use of a mobile (cell) phone. See ‘EchoEarth: End Cell Phones on Earth’ and ‘Cancel Your Cellphone Account Day, 20-21 June 2020’.

(5) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by withdrawing all funds from the corporate banks that are supporting the coup and to deposit their money in local community banks or credit unions.

(6) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting the medical and pharmaceutical industries – including by conscientiously refusing to submit to vaccination – and by seeking health advice and treatment from natural therapists. (If you are unfamiliar with the different philosophies underpinning these approaches, and hence why many natural therapies are so much more effective, there is a straightforward explanation here: ‘Pasteur vs. Bechamp: An Alternative View of Infectious Disease’.)

(7) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting corporate supermarkets and by supporting small and family businesses, and local markets.

(8) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in other locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For this item and many subsequent, see the list of possible nonviolent actions in the document ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.

(9) To cause the workers [in trade unions or labor organizations T1, T2, T…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include withdrawing labor from an elite-controlled bank, media, pharmaceutical or other corporation operating in your country.

(10) To cause the small farmers and farmworkers [in organizations F1, F2, F…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include distributing farm produce through (existing or created) grassroots networks to small and family businesses as well as local markets rather than through corporate supply chains.

(11) To cause the indigenous peoples [in organizations IP1,IP2, IP…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include utilizing indigenous knowledge to improve local self-reliance in food production and in other ways.

(12) To cause the soldiers and military police [in army units AU1, AU2, AU… and MP1, MP2, MP…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

(13) To cause the police [in police units P1, P2, P…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

You can read all 28 of the ‘Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity’ by scrolling down the page at ‘Strategic Aims’.

Given the complexity of the configuration of this conflict, however, which involves the need to fight simultaneously to retain our ‘deep humanity’, defeat the elite coup and avert near-term human extinction, it is important that our tactical choices are strategically-oriented (as the examples I cite in the thirteen strategic goals above illustrate). Hence, three further considerations assume importance.

First, choose/design tactics that have strategic impact, that is, they fundamentally and permanently alter, in our favor, the power relationship between the elite and us.

Second, when tactical choices are made, focus them on undermining the elite coup, not just features of it, such as ‘social distancing’ or the lockdowns. At its most basic, this can be achieved by using tactical choices that mobilize people to act initially, as is happening, but then inviting them to consider taking further, more focused, action as well (such as those nominated in the 28 strategic goals listed or referenced above). This is important because existing actions will have little impact on key underlying measures, such as those being taken by the elite to advance the fourth industrial revolution, which includes reducing us to a ‘digital identity’.

Third, I would choose/design tactics that also have strategic impact on the greatest threats to human survival, including the collapsing biodiversity on Earth, the threat of nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and the deployment of 5G. Given the incredibly short timeframe in which we are now working to avert human extinction, while people are mobilizing it is important to use this opportunity to give them the chance to perceive the ‘big picture’ of what is taking place – beyond lockdowns and other measures supposedly being used to tackle COVID-19 – and to act powerfully in response.

Equally importantly, the Nonviolent Strategy website explains how to prepare, frame and conduct any nonviolent action to minimize the risk of violent repression and, as some nonviolent activists are concerned, to contain any risk of damage to their cause by association with, or disruption by, those groups and provocateurs with a very different and possibly violent agenda. See ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

Fortunately, as more people become aware of the deeper strands of what is taking place, the energy to break the lockdowns and resist the coup will gather pace. As I have previously outlined, using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist.

In addition, as I mentioned above, given the pressing (and, possibly, now uncontainable) threat of human extinction but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider accelerated participation in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

And for those nonviolent activists concerned about tackling the climate and/or other threats to human survival – including those in relation to the environment and war – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Strategic Aims.

Or, if you want something simpler, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Using COVID-19 as ‘cover’, the global elite is conducting a coup to take vastly greater control of our lives and, in fact, to neutralize our humanity. This is being made very easy by the compulsion to obey that most people acquire in response to the ‘socialization’ experience they suffered as a child.

As a result, there is very little resistance to the coup, and none of which I am aware that is strategically focused. Consequently, the coup is readily measured by the destruction of our rights, freedoms, emotional health, political participation and economic security as well as its devastating impact on the Earth, further complicating the already grave series of interrelated threats to our survival and that of vast numbers of other species with which we share this planet.

As you ponder your response to this coup and the vastly increased threat to our survival, it might be worth remembering the words of David Rockefeller in his autobiography Memoirs, published in 2003:

Some even believe [the Rockefeller family is] part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as “internationalists” and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.

If you believe that Rockefeller’s vision is benign from the viewpoint of people like you and me, it might be worth reading more about the Rockefeller family’s interests in our well-being, starting with the report from 2010 titled ‘Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development’ which discusses four scenarios for the human future in which one is based on ‘Lock Step’ following a pandemic: ‘A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback’.

Hence, if you share my concern that the time to act powerfully in defence of our humanity, to defeat this elite coup and to fight vigorously and strategically on the many interrelated crises that threaten human extinction, then you are welcome to become involved in one or more of the ways suggested above.

Whatever we do, however, it is vitally important that we do not submissively obey the global elite and its agents such as international organizations, governments, corporations and the mainstream media. The elite and its agents might wear a benign smile at times but their loyalty is not to us or to the Earth. They are too insane to have loyalty to either; their loyalty is to themselves exclusively and we are expendable.

So I gently encourage you to have a good look at the evidence for yourself and to act while we still have some personal autonomy and political space to do so. If we do not act now, we will not have this autonomy and space for much longer and human extinction will follow imminently.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Virus of Mass Destruction

Posted on May 25, 2020 by Reid Mukai

Medical personnel arrive to perform COVID-19 coronavirus infection testing procedures at Glen Island Park, Friday, March 13, 2020, in New Rochelle, N.Y. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

By CJ Hopkins

Source: Consent Factory, Inc.

There comes a point in the introduction of every new official narrative when people no longer remember how it started. Or, rather, they remember how it started, but not the propaganda that started it. Or, rather, they remember all that (or are able to, if you press them on it), but it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because the official narrative has supplanted reality.

You’ll remember this point from the War on Terror, and specifically the occupation of Iraq. By the latter half of 2004, most Westerners had completely forgotten the propaganda that launched the invasion, and thus regarded the Iraqi resistance as “terrorists,” despite the fact that the United States had invaded and was occupying their country for no legitimate reason whatsoever. By that time, it was abundantly clear that there were no “weapons of mass destruction,” and that the U.S.A. had invaded a nation that had not attacked it, and posed no threat to it, and so was perpetrating a textbook war of aggression.

These facts did not matter, not in the slightest. By that time, Westerners were totally immersed in the official War on Terror narrative, which had superseded objective reality. Herd mentality had taken over. It’s difficult to describe how this works; it’s a state of functional dissociation. It wasn’t that people didn’t know the facts, or that they didn’t understand the facts. They knew the Iraqis weren’t “terrorists.” At the same time, they knew they were definitely “terrorists,” despite the fact that they knew that they weren’t. They knew there were no WMDs, that there had never been any WMDs, and still they were certain there were WMDs, which would be found, although they clearly did not exist.

The same thing happened in Nazi Germany. The majority of the German people were never fanatical anti-Semites like the hardcore N.S.D.A.P. members. If they had been, there would have been no need for Goebbels and his monstrous propaganda machine. No, the Germans during the Nazi period, like the Americans during the War on Terror, knew that their victims posed no threat to them, and at the same time they believed exactly the opposite, and thus did not protest as their neighbors were hauled out of their homes and sent off to death camps, camps which, in their dissociative state, simultaneously did and did not exist.

What I’m describing probably sounds like psychosis, but, technically speaking, it isn’t … not quite. It is not an absolute break from reality. People functioning in this state know that what they believe is not real. Nonetheless, they are forced to believe it (and do, actually, literally, believe it, as impossible as I know that sounds), because the consequences of not believing it are even more frightening than the cognitive dissonance of believing a narrative they know is a fiction. Disbelieving the official narrative means excommunication from “normality,” the loss of friends, income, status, and in many cases far worse punishments. Herd animals, in a state of panic, instinctively run towards the center of the herd. Separation from the herd makes them easy prey for pursuing predators. It is the same primal instinct operating here.

It is the goal of every official narrative to generate this type of herd mentality, not in order to deceive or dupe the public, but, rather, to confuse and terrorize them to the point where they revert to their primal instincts, and are being driven purely by existential fear, and facts and truth no longer matter. Once an official narrative reaches this point, it is unassailable by facts and reason. It no longer needs facts to justify it. It justifies itself with its own existence. Reason cannot penetrate it. Arguing with its adherents is pointless. They know it is irrational. They simply do not care.

We are reaching this point with the coronavirus narrative. It is possible that we have already reached it. Despite the fact that what we are dealing with is a virus that, yes, is clearly deadly to the old and those with medical conditions, but that is just as clearly not a deadly threat to the majority of the human species, people are cowering inside their homes as if the Zombie Apocalpyse had finally begun. Many appear to believe that this virus is some sort of Alien-Terrorist Death Flu (or weaponized Virus of Mass Destruction) that will kill you the second you breathe it in.

This is not surprising at all, because, according to the official narrative, its destructive powers are nearly unlimited. Not only will it obliterate your lungs, and liquidate all your other major organs, and kill you with blood clots, and intestinal damage, now it causes “sudden strokes in young adults,” and possibly spontaneous prostate cancer, and God knows what other medical horrors!

According to all the “scientists” and “medical experts” (i.e., those that conform to the official narrative, not all the other scientists and medical experts), it is unlike any other virus that has ever existed in the history of viruses. It certainly doesn’t follow the typical pattern of spreading extensively for a limited period, and then rapidly dying down on its own, regardless of what measures are taken to thwart it, as this Israeli study would seem to indicate.

Also, “we have no immunity against it,” which is why we all have to remain “locked down” like unruly inmates in a penitentiary until a vaccine can be concocted and forced onto every living person on earth. Apparently, this mandatory wonder vaccine will magically render us immune to this virus against which we have no immunity (and are totally unable to develop immunity), which immunity will be certified on our mandatory “immunity papers,” which we will need to travel, get a job, send our kids to school, and, you know, to show the police when they stop us on the street because we look like maybe we might be “infected.”

Germany (where I live) is way out in front of this. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the federal government plans to introduce a coronavirus “immunity card” as part of its “Infection Protection Law,” which will grant the authorities the power to round up anyone “suspected to be contagious” and force them into … uh … “quarantine,” and “forbid them from entering certain public places.” The Malaysian authorities have dispensed with such niceties, and are arresting migrant workers and refugees in so-called “Covid-19 red zones” and marching them off to God knows where.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot … the germ and chemical warfare researchers at DARPA (i.e., the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have developed some new type of fancy blood test that will identify “asymptomatic carriers” (i.e., people who display no symptoms whatsoever). So that will probably come in handy … especially if the “white supremacists,” “Red-Brown extremists,” and “conspiracy theorists” keep protesting the lockdown with their wives and kids!

And these are just the latest additions to a list of rather dystopian examples of the “brave new normal” official narrative that GloboCap is rolling out, right before our very eyes (which the OffGuardian editors have streamlined here and here, and which continues on Twitter). It’s all right there in black and white. They aren’t hiding the totalitarianism … they don’t have to. Because people are begging for it. They are demanding to be “locked down” inside their homes, forced to wear masks, and stand two meters apart, for reasons that most of them no longer remember.

Plastic barriers are going up everywhere. Arrows on the floor show you which way to walk. Boxes show you where to stand. Paranoid Blockwarts are putting up signs threatening anyone not wearing a mask. Hysterical little fascist creeps are reporting their neighbors to the police for letting their children play with other children. Millions of people are voluntarily downloading “contact tracing applications” so that governments and global corporations can monitor their every movement. In Spain, they bleached an entire beach, killing everything, down to the insects, in order to protect the public from “infection.” The Internet has become an Orwellian chorus of shrieking, sanctimonious voices bullying everyone into conformity with charts, graphs, and desperate guilt-trips, few of which have much connection to reality. Corporations and governments are censoring dissent. We’re approaching a level of manufactured mass hysteria and herd mentality that not even Goebbels could have imagined.

Meanwhile, they’re striking the mostly empty “field hospitals,” and the theatrical “hospital ship” is now gone, and despite their attempts to inflate the Covid-19 death count as much as humanly possible, the projected hundreds of millions of deaths have not materialized (not even close), and Sweden is fine, as is most of humanity, and … just like there were no WMDs, there is no Virus of Mass Destruction.

What there is, is a new official narrative, the brave new, paranoid, pathologized “normal.” Like the War on Terror, it’s a global narrative. A global, post-ideological narrative. It’s just getting started, so it isn’t yet clear how totalitarian this show will get, but, given the nature of the pilot episode, I am kind of dreading the rest of the series.

America’s Super-Rich See Their Wealth Rise by $282 Billion in Three Weeks of Pandemic

Posted on May 21, 2020 by Reid Mukai

America’s billionaires have accrued more wealth in the past three weeks alone than they made in total prior to 1980.

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, America’s ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $282 billion in just 23 days. This is despite the fact that the economy is expected to contract by 40 percent this quarter. The report also noted that between 1980 and 2020 the tax obligations of America’s billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased by 79 percent. In the last 30 years, U.S. billionaire wealth soared by over 1100 percent while median household wealth increased by barely five percent. In 1990, the total wealth held by America’s billionaire class was $240 billion; today that number stands at $2.95 trillion. Thus, America’s billionaires accrued more wealth in just the past three weeks than they made in total prior to 1980. As a result, just three people – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet – own as much wealth as the bottom half of all U.S. households combined.

The Institute for Policy Studies’ report paints a picture of a modern day oligarchy, where the super-rich have captured legislative and executive power, controlling what laws are passed. The report discusses what it labels a new “wealth defense industry” – where “billionaires are paying millions to dodge billions in taxes,” with teams of accountants, lawyers, lobbyists and asset managers helping them conceal their vast fortunes in tax havens and so-called charitable trusts. The result has been crippled social programs and a decrease in living standards and even a sustained drop in life expectancy – something rarely seen in history outside of major wars or famines. Few Americans believe their children will be better off than they were. Statistics suggest they are right.

Billionaires very theatrically donate a fraction of what they used to give back in taxes, making sure to generate maximum publicity for their actions. And they secure positive coverage of themselves by stepping in to keep influential news organizations afloat. A December investigation by MintPress found that Gates had donated over $9 million to The Guardian, over $3 million to NBC Universal, over $4.5 million to NPR, $1 million to Al-Jazeera, and a staggering $49 million to the BBC’s Media Action program. Some, like Bezos, prefer to simply outright purchase news organizations themselves, changing the editorial stance to unquestioning loyalty to their new owners.

The spike in billionaire wealth comes amid an unprecedented economic crash; 26.5 million Americans have filed for unemployment over the last five weeks, and that number is expected to continue to rise dramatically. While the super-rich are holed up in their mansions and yachts, the 49-62 million Americans designated as “essential workers” must continue to risk their lives to keep society functioning, even as many of them do not even earn as much as the $600 weekly increase in unemployment benefits the CARES act stipulates. Many low paid workers, such as grocery store employees, have already fallen sick and died. The mother of one 27-year-old Maryland worker who contracted COVID-19 and died received her daughter’s last paycheck. It amounted to $20.64.

Amazon staff, directly employed by Bezos, also risk their lives for measly pay. One third of all Amazon workers in Arizona, for example, are enrolled in the food stamps program, their wages so low that they cannot afford to pay for food. The vast contrast in the effect that COVID-19 has had on the super wealthy versus the rest of us has many concluding that billionaires’ wealth and the poverty of the rest of the world are two sides of the same coin: that the reason people working full-time still cannot afford a house or even to eat is the same reason people like Bezos control more wealth than many countries. Bezos’ solution to his employees’ hunger has been to set up a charity and ask for public donations to help his desperate workers.

The majority of millennials, most of them shut out from attaining the American dream, already prefer socialism to capitalism, taking a dim view of the latter. The latest news that the billionaire class is laughing all the way to the bank during a period of intense economic suffering is unlikely to improve their disposition.

Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

Corporate Looting as ‘Rescue Plan,’ Robber Barons as ‘Saviors’

Posted on May 20, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Joshua Cho

Source: FAIR.org

For a perfect illustration of how corporate media function as ruling class propaganda, watch how they spin a titanic upward redistribution of wealth as a “rescue plan” for the US economy, and paint a robber baron like US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as a “savior” of the American public.

In discussions of the (officially) estimated $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act—the largest government spending program in US history—before it was signed into law on March 27, corporate media largely abandoned the pretense of serving as watchdogs on behalf of the public in order to advocate for protecting and enriching the fortunes of their owners.

Instead of scrutinizing the bill as the robbery in progress that it is—as an understandable story with identifiable victims and victimizers—corporate media sold the CARES Act as an urgent necessity required to combat the coronavirus pandemic for everyone. Like the previous corporate bailout during the Great Recession (Extra!, 1/09), corporate media avoided raising questions about the necessity of having the government bail out large corporations, or whether the bill could be restructured to serve people rather than profits.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, while the CARES Act dedicated $290 billion in direct payments to people and $260 billion in expanded unemployment benefits, it dedicated $300 billion in tax breaks and $875 billion in loans to big and small businesses—more than two dollars for corporations for every dollar for people, in other words.

When corporate media reported on negotiations and deliberations over the CARES Act, they either hailed it as a bipartisan achievement, or else shamed politicians who accurately pointed out that it overwhelmingly benefited corporations at the expense of workers. On the day the CARES Act was signed into law, NPR (3/27/20) praised the bill as “the largest rescue package in American history and a major bipartisan victory for Congress.”

Reporting in real-time, the Washington Post (3/24/20) spun the CARES Act as an attempt to “address the coronavirus crisis,” with the aim of “flooding the economy with capital to revive businesses and households.” When there was Democratic pushback over the Senate GOP bill for being “disproportionately tilted toward helping companies,” the Post described this as “partisan rancor and posturing on Capitol Hill” that blocked “the rescue bill.” The Post concern-trolled those who supported better legislation, and derided House Democrats’ putative attempts to chart their own “competing piece of legislation,” because “it could take even longer to arrive at a bipartisan consensus that can pass both chambers and get signed into law.”

The New York Times (3/22/20) made it clear that protecting workers and imposing conditions on handing out trillions in taxpayer dollars were frivolous reasons to oppose the legislation, as the Times cast Senate Democrats as villains for ostensibly opposing the bill because it “failed to adequately protect workers or impose strict enough restrictions on bailed-out businesses.” The Times described the “party-line vote” as a “stunning setback” for both the Trump administration’s “ambitious timeline” and “the rescue package,” and warned Democrats that they “risked a political backlash” if “they are seen as obstructing progress on a measure that is widely regarded as crucial to aid desperate Americans and buttress a flagging economy.”

The Times also drew parallels to the “spectacle in 2008,” when the House defeated a “$700 billion Wall Street bailout that aimed to stabilize the financial system amid a global meltdown.” Even in 2020, the Times is still spinning the upward redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to the big banks that caused the crisis as an ostensible success that saved what corporate media consider to be “the economy” (Extra!, 10/10).

Days later, the Times’ “As Coronavirus Spread, Largest Stimulus in History United a Polarized Senate” (3/26/20) spun the 96-to-0 Senate vote in favor of the bill as a heroic bipartisan compromise on legislation “intended to get the nation through the crippling economic and health disruptions being inflicted on the world by the coronavirus.” The Times leaned into corporate media’s civility fetish designed to demobilize opposition to the Trump regime (FAIR.org, 8/1/18, 12/22/19) when it depicted Democratic opposition to Senate Republicans’ “corporate giveaway” legislation as politically reckless and harmful to the country’s interests:

It was a shocking and politically perilous decision in the middle of a paralyzing national crisis, a moment when lawmakers are traditionally expected to put aside differences for the good of the country, or face a political backlash.

By contrast, in the false balance endemic in news coverage in the Trump era, the Times portrayed Senate Republicans as reasonable leaders who were “willing to momentarily abandon their small-government zeal” in the interest of “sealing a quick deal with Democrats” (GQ, 12/10/19; Washington Post, 4/27/12). Though the legislation didn’t include a necessary suspension of rent, utility and mortgage payments, or guarantee monthly payments, as advised by many economists, the Times spun it as a legislative victory for Senate Democrats:

In the end, Democrats won what they saw as significant improvements in the measure through their resistance, including added funding for healthcare and unemployment, along with more direct money to states. A key addition was tougher oversight on the corporate bailout fund, including an inspector general and congressionally appointed board to monitor it, disclosure requirements for businesses that benefited, and a prohibition on any of the money going to Mr. Trump’s family or his properties — although they could still potentially benefit from other provisions.

The problem with this triumphant Democratic Resistance^TM narrative is that it happens to be false. Politico’s report (3/26/20) on the negotiations over what it also hailed as a “rescue package” revealed that the final bill largely reflected the Senate Republicans’ “unemployment insurance and direct payments schemes” as “originally outlined,” with Sen. Mitch McConnell claiming that the CARES Act was a bill that was “largely, not entirely but largely, produced by Republicans in consultation with the Democratic minority.”

The Democratic leadership’s lack of concern with proper oversight of the bailout funds was also exposed when Speaker Nancy Pelosi chose her first-term congressmember friend Donna Shalala as part of the five-member oversight panel, despite her numerous conflicts of interest, evident lack of expertise or reported interest in the job (American Prospect, 4/18/20).

The American Prospect’s David Dayen has done some of the best reporting on the CARES Act, and he’s observed (3/25/20) how means-testing the $1,200 stimulus payments by basing it off IRS data in 2018 and 2019 was designed to limit the number of Americans who can receive it. The miserly one-time $1,200 stimulus payment will primarily reach Americans who already have direct deposit information on file with the IRS, with the unbanked (who happen to be the poorest) having to wait up to four months for paper checks, and who will be lucky to remain at the same address during that time without a suspension of rent payments.

While Democratic leaders like Pelosi opposed emergency universal basic income—and delayed payments to set up a bureaucracy ostensibly dedicated to make sure wealthy Americans don’t get anything—the richest Americans are in fact receiving an average stimulus payment of $1.7 million in the form of a millionaire tax cut.

Dayen has noted how the official “$500 billion” provided by the CARES Act to bailout large corporations is actually underreporting the enormity of the federal government’s corporate giveaway, as Trump regime officials like Larry Kudlow and Steve Mnuchin admitted their intent to leverage the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending authority to turn $500 billion into a $4.5 trillion money cannon aimed at large corporations.

What was in actuality a $6 trillion spending package had few conditions attached to the largesse given to large corporations, as the money can still go to mergers, executive compensation and paying dividends to shareholders, with no requirement that they keep employing workers to receive this handout.

It’s hard to overstate the injustice and scale of this upward redistribution of wealth. Commenting on 2008’s bailout, economist Richard Wolff (Guardian, 11/4/13) pointed out how funding the bailout through borrowing money effectively transfers wealth upward from regular taxpayers to rich bondholders, because the government is borrowing money from—and paying interest to—large corporations and the rich that it could have taxed them for instead. Rather than letting shareholders be wiped out first, according to the ostensible rules of capitalism—where they are supposed to bear the risk, instead of the government—the government is shoveling money to tax-dodging corporations like Boeing who admit to not needing these funds.

By borrowing the money for a program that prioritizes saving the rich, rather than printing money to fund an emergency universal basic income for the people like Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s proposal, the government is effectively paying the rich for saving them. The fact that these viable alternative stimulus proposals weren’t enacted is inexcusable. Especially when the Federal Reserve is hinting its willingness to increase the money supply by buying unlimited debt to fund the CARES Act, the fact that the necessary funds magically appear to fund corporate bailouts instead of necessary social programs (like Medicare for All) exposes the “How are you going to pay for it?” talking point as a fraud (Extra!, 6/12).

Pam and Russ Martens of Wall Street on Parade (3/26/20) observed how the CARES Act also allows the Fed to create “Special Purpose Vehicles” and hide this money from their balance sheets, allowing them to avoid the FOIA requests used to the expose the enormity of the $29 trillion bailout from 2008, in addition to repealing public meeting and recordkeeping requirements for Fed-related programs. This allows the Fed to evade transparency and accountability by holding meetings in secret.

But when corporate media aren’t busy spinning massive corporate robbery of taxpayer money as a rescue package for “the economy,” they’re busy spinning robber barons like Mnuchin as heroic “saviors” instead. Reuters’ “This Is No 2008: Mnuchin Borrows From Paulson’s Economic Crisis Playbook” (3/20/20) depicted Mnuchin as an unlikely hero thrust into the role of solving the US’ economic woes, as they reported:

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has stepped into the breach as the Trump administration’s point man to rescue the economy from coronavirus devastation, taking on the role his former Goldman Sachs boss, Hank Paulson, played over a decade ago.

Mnuchin has closely followed the financial crisis playbook used by Paulson when he led the Treasury Department in 2008, reactivating Federal Reserve credit market backstops and asking Congress for $1 trillion to prop up companies and consumers as the economy grinds to a halt due to the spread of the virus.

Apparently, for Reuters, there is only one “playbook” to be followed for all economic crises: massive taxpayer-funded giveaways to large corporations, and crumbs for everyone else. The report contained praise from official sources praising Mnuchin for being “pragmatic” and “rising to the occasion,” with few questions beyond whether he can succeed in his noble mission, as Reuters wondered whether Mnuchin can “strong-arm executives or influence President Donald Trump to take the drastic steps the unprecedented crisis may demand.” Whether Mnuchin and the Trump regime are actually trying to “rescue the economy” is apparently unquestionable, even though Mnuchin would dismiss record-breaking levels of unemployment as “not relevant” only a few days later (Common Dreams, 3/26/20).

The Wall Street Journal’s “How Mnuchin Became Washington’s Indispensable Crisis Manager” (3/31/20) also peddled this fictitious savior narrative when it reported that “Mnuchin has become Washington’s indispensable deal-maker in trying to keep the crisis from throwing the world’s largest economy into the deepest downturn since the Great Depression,” while shepherding “a pair of rescue bills through Congress.”

The Journal depicted Mnuchin’s ability to retain Trump’s confidence while working with Democrats as something that will be “all the more needed in the weeks ahead as the pandemic is expected to worsen,” in order to “get things done in partisan Washington.” Those “skills” didn’t seem to manifest when additional funding for state and local governments, and expanded food stamp benefits needed to rescue people, were left out of the “Phase 3.5” coronavirus legislation last week (Intercept, 4/22/20).

The Washington Post’s “The Dealmaker’s Dealmaker: Mnuchin Steps In as Trump’s Negotiator, but President’s Doubts Linger With Economy in Crisis” (3/27/20) also praised Mnuchin’s efforts to “bridge divides” and forge bipartisan “agreements.” While to the Post’s credit, the piece noted how the “Treasury Department’s demands have often appeared to represent the interests of big business rather than workers,” its overall thrust was encapsulated by its subhead: “Can his economic rescue plan quickly stabilize an economy headed toward calamity?”

The New York Times’ “How Powell and Mnuchin Became the Duo in Charge of Saving the Economy” (3/31/20) reported on Mnuchin’s “vital partnership” with Fed chair Jerome Powell, echoed the “unlikely hero” narrative, and described their efforts as “critical not only to workers and businesses,” but also to Trump’s “re-election” chances:

The coronavirus poses the most significant economic threat since at least 2008, thrusting Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Powell into key roles in determining whether the United States economy suffers a short, manageable slowdown or enters a deep and painful recession.

When the Times briefly acknowledged concerns about the massive concentration in power and newfound influence in Powell and Mnuchin’s hands, and questions about the integrity of the “oversight” process, it treated the CARES Act favoring big corporations over workers as a hypothetical scenario, rather than a plain fact.

In a unique situation where workers and small business owners have the shared interest in not being wiped out by the pandemic, how else does one characterize the disproportionately stricter conditions placed on small businesses to retain workers to receive bailout money—while big corporations have no such limitations—except as a plan to save big corporations over workers? The Times’ later reports (4/22/20, 4/26/20) on big corporations receiving bailout money intended for small businesses, and receiving concierge service for coronavirus aid at their expense, should’ve been predictable—as it was to some observers in real time (American Prospect, 3/25/20).

Throughout this coverage, it’s quite telling who counts as “the economy” and what measures are considered “necessary” or “adequate,” because it reveals who corporate media consider to be disposable (working class America), and who needs “saving” (large corporations and the American oligarchy). With the CARES Act, corporate media reversed the narrative in a truly Orwellian fashion, portraying corporate looting of the Treasury as necessary to “rescue the economy,” while the main questions regarding “savior” officials like Mnuchin are whether his plans to “save the economy” can succeed. When 26 million Americans lost their jobs between March 18 and April 22, while the wealth of US billionaires increased by $308 billion (more than 10%), there’s no other way to look at corporate media spin as anything but ruling class propaganda to legitimize saving capital while letting people die (In These Times, 4/6/20).

Technofascism: Digital Book Burning in a Totalitarian Age

Posted on May 18, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices—taking advantage of our freedom of speech—who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.”—Nat Hentoff

We are fast becoming a nation—nay, a world—of book burners.

While on paper, we are technically free to speak—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—in reality, however, we are only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow.

That’s not a whole lot of freedom. Especially if you’re inclined to voice opinions that may be construed as conspiratorial or dangerous.

Take David Icke, for example.

Icke, a popular commentator and author often labeled a conspiracy theorist by his detractors, recently had his Facebook page and YouTube channel (owned by Google) deleted for violating site policies by “spreading coronavirus disinformation.”

The Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which has been vocal about calling for Icke’s de-platforming, is also pushing for the removal of all other sites and individuals who promote Icke’s content in an effort to supposedly “save lives.”

Translation: the CCDH evidently believes the public is too dumb to think for itself and must be protected from dangerous ideas.

This is the goosestepping Nanny State trying to protect us from ourselves.

In the long run, this “safety” control (the censorship and shadowbanning of anyone who challenges a mainstream narrative) will be far worse than merely allowing people to think for themselves.

Journalist Matt Taibbi gets its: “The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda.

These internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns about COVID-19, a virus whose source and behavior continue to elude medical officials. They’re laying the groundwork now, with Icke as an easy target, to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

This is how freedom dies.

It doesn’t matter what disinformation Icke may or may not have been spreading about COVID-19. That’s not the issue.

As commentator Caitlin Johnstone recognizes, the censorship of David Icke by these internet media giants has nothing to do with Icke: “What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory.”

Welcome to the age of technofascism.

Technofascism, clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem. As journalist Chet Bowers explains, “Technofascism’s level of efficiency and totalitarian potential can easily lead to repressive systems that will not tolerate dissent.”

The internet, hailed as a super-information highway, is increasingly becoming the police state’s secret weapon. This “policing of the mind: is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of hat will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

We’re almost at that point now.

What you are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.

Today, the forces of political correctness, working in conjunction with corporate and government agencies, have managed to replace actual book burning with intellectual book burning.

“Free speech for me but not for thee” is how my good friend and free speech purist Nat Hentoff used to sum up this double standard.

This is about much more than free speech, however. This is about repression and control.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

The upshot of all of this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state.

Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.

The end result is control.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind lest they find themselves ostracized or placed under surveillance.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.

It’s political correctness disguised as tolerance, civility and love, but what it really amounts to is the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing: this is how you turn a nation of free people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.

Tread cautiously: Orwell’s 1984, which depicts the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism, has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

In fact, our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. And privacy and bodily integrity have been utterly eviscerated.

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot.

The government requires an accomplice.

Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide.

The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.

Money, power, control.

There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price?

“We the people,” of course. Not just we Americans, but people the world over.

We have entered into a global state of tyranny.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devices—especially cell phones—has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one’s every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.

In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us—the proverbial “needle in a haystack,” as one official termed it—the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. This data is being fed through fusion centers across the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children.

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint.

When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any “threatening” words are detected—no matter how inane or silly—the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent.

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.

We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has designed an artificial intelligence system that can anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA feeds vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer then uses to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents.

Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy is at an end.

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.

So how do you survive this global surveillance state?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re running out of options.

We’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited: “Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”

Which brings me back to this technofascist tyranny being meted out on David Icke and all those like him who dare to voice ideas that diverge from what the government and its corporate controllers deem to be acceptable.

The problem as I see it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we’ve allowed ourselves to become so timid in the face of offensive words and ideas that we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean.

The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

In this way, we have become our worst enemy.

You want to reclaim some of the ground we’re fast losing to the techno-tyrants?

Start by thinking for yourself. If that means reading the “dangerous” ideas being floated out there by the David Ickes of the world—or the John Whiteheads for that matter—and then deciding for yourself what is true, so be it.

As Orwell concluded, “Freedom is the right to say two plus two make four.”

Death: A Simple Idea with a Powerful Punch

Posted on May 17, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Off-Guardian

Since death is one idea that has no history except as an idea and not a reality any of us have experienced, it is the most frightening idea there is and also quite simple. It is the ultimate unknown. It has always haunted human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously.

It lies at the root of war, violence, religion, art, love, and civilization. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, why we like to win and not lose, pass and not fail, “pass on” and not die. It is so funny and so sad. We would be lost without it, even when we feel lost when thinking about it. And it is fundamental for understanding the action and reaction to Covid-19.

Societies have always been people banded together in the face of death. And since people are not just physical beings but symbolic creatures who can think and imagine the past and the future, societies are necessarily mythic symbol systems whose job is not only to protect people physically, but symbolically as well.

Sometimes, however, the protection is a protection racket with racketeers holding people hostage to fabricated fears that keep them locked in a living-death.

Thus death, this most potent imaginative idea and reality that doesn’t exist except as a mystery about which anything we say is speculation, can be used for good and evil, depending on who controls society.

Death is the great fear, the human haunting that hangs by a thread over life like the sword of Damocles.

In 1944 in a newspaper column, George Orwell made an astute remark:

There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. If death ends everything, it becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you are defeated…. I would say that the decay in the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.

Beliefs, of course, like “personal immortality” and all others, such as the recent rise in the belief in atheism, which is as much a belief as belief in God, are, partially at least, relative to time and place, and develop out of social storytelling. The “hard facts” on which many feel their lives and security rest are themselves dependent upon the symbols which give them legitimacy.

Reality is indeed precarious with society suspended by a web of myths and symbols. It is through cultural and social symbol systems that society’s meaning is transmitted to individuals, and it is within the symbol systems that the control and release of action resides.

In today’s electronic mass media world, those who control the mass media that control the narrative flow – the storytelling – control the majority’s beliefs and actions.

Since society is held together by this myth system – the beliefs and values people live for and live by – that sustains it, societies have always had to offer symbolic “answers” to death. For without a meaningful symbolic for coming to terms with death, human action would be stymied and people would be reduced to what the psychiatrist Allan Wheelis termed “intense, preoccupying yearning.”

Today we can hear such yearning everywhere.

Shortly after Orwell made his prescient comment in The Tribune, nuclear weapons were developed and used by the United States to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians. With those weapons and their use, the ages-old symbolic narrative of life and death was transformed in a flash.

“The significance of the possibility of nuclear death is that it radically affects the meaning of death, of immortality, of life itself,” wrote Hans Morgenthau.

The traditional symbolic sources that once served to allow humans to transcend death were fundamentally undercut, and the search for new modes of death transcendence was carried on beneath the portentous covering of the nuclear umbrella.

A qualitative transformation in the meaning of human existence was thus brought about as humans, who had the weapons, replaced the belief in God as the holder of the power over life and death, since nuclear war could result in the extinction of human life, leaving no one left to die.

This is our world today, and it is where the Covid-19 story takes place. A world not just of nuclear fear, but a host of other fears constantly inflamed by the mass media that hypnotize people through the conjuring of death-fear.

In his great work on group psychology, Freud showed us how it was not just mental contagion and the herd instinct that got people to join in group behavior. People could be induced to become little children and obey their leaders because they have “an extreme passion for authority.”

When leaders speak, the children hear the inner voices of their parents telling them to be careful, be very careful, the bogeyman is everywhere, so listen and obey. Freud, the Jewish atheist, and Dostoevsky, the Russian Orthodox Christian, were in agreement about people’s desire to give up their freedom to authority figures who would allegedly shelter them within their warm embrace.

The easiest way to do this is to convince people that death is stalking them, for the bogeyman is always death in one form or another.

It works to get people to support the terrifying sadism of wars against fabricated “others,” who are always portrayed as aliens who are out to kill the good people.

It works to get people to give up their freedoms out of fear of “terrorists,” who are said to slide and hide in the interstices of everyday life, ready to pounce and kill at any moment.

And it works to get people to obey orders to protect themselves from terrifying viruses that are lying in wait everywhere to strike them dead.

In his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky said that people want miracles, mystery, and authority, not freedom. His Grand Inquisitor, while a fictional creation, lives on in reality.

For the Grand Inquisitor represents those power elites across the world who wish to cower people into accepting their dicta on Covid-19 as truth without questioning its logic or rationale.

To question has become an act of insubordination deserving death by censorship or the defiling of one’s name via the term “conspiracy theorist,” a name used by the CIA to dismiss anyone questioning its murder of President Kennedy. Death comes in many forms, and the fear of it has always been used by the powerful to render the common people speechless and obedient.

How can any thinking person, anyone not totally crippled by fear, not question what is going on with the coronavirus disaster when reading what Peter Koenig, a thirty-year veteran economist of the World Bank and World Health Organization, writes in his article The Farce and Diabolical Agenda of a ‘Universal Lockdown’:

The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.

There is no coincidence. There were a number of preparatory events, all pointing into the direction of a worldwide monumental historic disaster. It started at least 10 years ago – probably considerably earlier – with the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report, which painted the first phase of a monstrous Plan, called the “Lock Step” scenario. Among the last preparatory moves for the “pandemic” was Event 201, held in NYC on 18 October 2019.

The event was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), the club of the rich and powerful that meets every January in Davos, Switzerland. Participating were a number of pharmaceuticals (vaccine interest groups), as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s of the US and – of China.

One of the objectives of Event 201 was a computer simulation of a corona virus pandemic. The simulated virus was called SARS-2-nCoV, or later 2019-nCoV. The simulation results were disastrous, killing 65 million people in 18 months and plunging the stock market by more than 30% — causing untold unemployment and bankruptcies. Precisely the scenario of which we are now living the beginning.

The Lock Step scenario foresees a number of ghastly and disturbing events or components of The Plan to be implemented by the so called Agenda ID2020, a Bill Gates creation, fully integrated into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) – target date for completion – 2030 (also called Agenda 2030, the hidden agenda unknown to most of the UN members), the same target date for completion of the Agenda ID02020.

I ask the question but I am afraid I know the answer: miracle, mystery, and authority usually defeat evidence and simple logic. Fear of death and free thought scare children. The Grand Inquisitor lives on:

But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it.

Death: A simple idea with such a powerful punch.

What Did U.S. Intel Really Know About the ‘Chinese’ Virus?

Posted on May 14, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Pepe Escobar

Source: Information Clearing House

Hybrid War 2.0 on China, a bipartisan U.S. operation, is already reaching fever pitch. Its 24/7 full spectrum infowar arm blames China for everything coronavirus-related – doubling as a diversionist tactic against any informed criticism of woeful American unpreparedness.

Hysteria predictably reigns. And this is just the beginning.

A deluge of lawsuits is imminent – such as the one in the Southern District of Florida entered by Berman Law Group (linked to the Democrats) and Lucas-Compton (linked to the Republicans). In a nutshell: China has to shell out tons of cash. To the tune of at least $1.2 trillion, which happens to be – by surrealist irony – the amount of U.S. Treasury bills held by Beijing, all the way to $20 trillion, claimed by a lawsuit in Texas.

The prosecution’s case, as Scott Ritter memorably reminded us, is straight out of Monty Python. It works exactly like this:

“If she weighs the same as a duck…

…she’s made of wood!”

“And therefore…”

“A witch!!!!!”

In Hybrid War 2.0 terms, the current CIA-style narrative translates as evil China never telling us, the civilized West, there was a terrible new virus around. If they did, we would have had time to prepare.

And yet they lied and cheated – by the way, trademark CIA traits, according to Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo himself. And they hid everything. And they censored the truth. So they wanted to infect us all. Now they have to pay for all the economic and financial damage we are suffering, and for all our dead people. It’s China’s fault.

All this sound and fury forces us to refocus back to late 2019 to check out what U.S. intel really knew then about what would later be identified as Sars-Cov-2.

“No such product exists”

The gold standard remains the ABC News report according to which intel collected in November 2019 by the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), a subsidiary of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was already warning about a new virulent contagion getting out of hand in Wuhan, based on “detailed analysis of intercepted communications and satellite imagery”.

An unnamed source told ABC, “analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event”, adding the intel was “briefed multiple times” to the DIA, the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even the White House.

No wonder the Pentagon was forced to issue the proverbial denial – in Pentagonese, via one Col. R. Shane Day, the director of the DIA’s NCMI: “In the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists.”

Well, if such “product” existed, Pentagon head and former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper would be very much in the loop. He was duly questioned about it by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Question: “Did the Pentagon receive an intelligence assessment on COVID in China last November from the National Center for Medical Intelligence of DIA?”

Esper: “Oh, I can’t recall, George,” (…) “But, we have many people who watch this closely.”

Question: “This assessment was done in November, and it was briefed to the NSC in early December to assess the impact on military readiness, which, of course, would make it important to you, and the possible spread in the United States. So, you would have known if there was a brief to the National Security Council in December, wouldn’t you?”

Esper: “Yes (…) “I’m not aware of that.”

So “no such product exists” then? Is it a fake? Is it a Deep State/CIA concoction to trap Trump? Or are the usual suspects lying, trademark CIA style?

Let’s review some essential background. On November 12, a married couple from Inner Mongolia was admitted to a Beijing hospital, seeking treatment for pneumonic plague.

The Chinese CDC, on Weibo – the Chinese Twitter – told public opinion that the chances of this being a new plague were “extremely low.” The couple was quarantined.

Four days later, a third case of pneumonic plague was identified: a man also from Inner Mongolia, not related to the couple. Twenty-eight people who were in close contact with the man were quarantined. None had plague symptoms. Pneumonic plague has symptoms of respiratory failure similar to pneumonia.

Even though the CDC repeated, “there is no need to worry about the risk of infection”, of course there was plenty of skepticism. The CDC may have publicly confirmed on November 12 these cases of pneumonic plague. But then Li Jifeng, a doctor at Chaoyang Hospital where the trio from Inner Mongolia was receiving treatment, published, privately, on WeChat, that they were first transported to Beijing actually on November 3.

The key point of Li Jinfeng’s post – later removed by censors – was when she wrote, “I am very familiar with diagnosing and treating the majority of respiratory diseases (…) But this time, I kept on looking but could not figure out what pathogen caused the pneumonia. I only thought it was a rare condition and did not get much information other than the patients’ history.”

Even if that was the case, the key point is that the three Inner Mongolian cases seem to have been caused by a detectable bacteria. Covid-19 is caused by the Sars-Cov-2 virus, not a bacteria. The first Sars-Covid-2 case was only detected in Wuhan in mid to late December. And it was only last month that Chinese scientists were able to positively trace back the first real case of Sars-Cov-2 to November 17 – a few days after the Inner Mongolian trio.

Knowing exactly where to look

It’s out of the question that U.S. intel, in this case the NCMI, was unaware of these developments in China, considering CIA spying and the fact these discussions were in the open on Weibo and WeChat. So if the NCMI “product” is not a fake and really exists, it only found evidence, still in November, of some vague instances of pneumonic plague.

Thus the warning – to the DIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and even the White House – was about that. It could not possibly have been about coronavirus.

The burning question is inevitable: how could the NCMI possibly know all about a viral pandemic, still in November, when Chinese doctors positively identified the first cases of a new type of pneumonia only on December 26?

Add to it the intriguing question of why the NCMI was so interested in this particular flu season in China in the first place – from plague cases treated in Beijing to the first signs of a “mysterious pneumonia outbreak” in Wuhan.

There may have been subtle hints of slightly increased activity at clinics in Wuhan in late November and early December. But at the time nobody – Chinese doctors, the government, not to mention U.S. intel – could have possibly known what was really happening.

China could not be “covering up” what was only identified as a new disease on December 30, duly communicated to the WHO. Then, on January 3, the head of the American CDC, Robert Redfield, called the top Chinese CDC official. Chinese doctors sequenced the virus. And only on January 8 it was determined this was Sars-Cov-2 – which provokes Covid-19.

This chain of events reopens, once again, a mighty Pandora’s box. We have the quite timely Event 201; the cozy relationship between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the WHO, as well as the World Economic Forum and the Johns Hopkins galaxy in Baltimore, including the Bloomberg School of Public Health; the ID2020 digital ID/vaccine combo; Dark Winter – which simulated a smallpox bio-attack on the U.S., before the 2001 anthrax attack being blamed on Iraq; U.S. Senators dumping stocks after a CDC briefing; more than 1,300 CEOs abandoning their cushy perches in 2019, “forecasting” total market collapse; the Fed pouring helicopter money already in September 2019 – as part of QE4.

And then, validating the ABC News report, Israel steps in. Israeli intel confirms U.S. intel did in fact warn them in November about a potentially catastrophic pandemic in Wuhan (once again: how could they possibly know that on the second week of November, so early in the game?) And NATO allies were warned – in November – as well.

The bottom line is explosive: the Trump administration as well as the CDC had an advance warning of no less than four months – from November to March – to be properly prepared for Covid-19 hitting the U.S. And they did nothing. The whole “China is a witch!” case is debunked.

Moreover, the Israeli disclosure supports what’s nothing less than extraordinary: U.S. intel already knew about Sars-Cov-2 roughly one month before the first confirmed cases detected by doctors in a Wuhan hospital. Talk about divine intervention.

That could only have happened if U.S. intel knew, for sure, about a previous chain of events that would necessarily lead to the “mysterious outbreak” in Wuhan. And not only that: they knew exactly where to look. Not in Inner Mongolia, not in Beijing, not in Guangdong province.

It’s never enough to repeat the question in full: how could U.S. intel have known about a contagion one month before Chinese doctors detected an unknown virus?

Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo may have given away the game when he said, on the record, that Covid-19 was a “live exercise”. Adding to the ABC News and Israeli reports, the only possible, logical conclusion is that the Pentagon – and the CIA – knew ahead of time a pandemic would be inevitable.

That’s the smokin’ gun. And now the full weight of the United States government is covering all bases by proactively, and retroactively, blaming China.

COVID-19: Breaking the Lockdown, Defeating the Coup, Averting Extinction

Posted on May 11, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

Using its fora such as the World Economic Forum – see ‘Strategic Intelligence ’ – and its agents (particularly the World Health Organization, the pharmaceutical industry, governments, the medical industry and corporate media) the global elite continues to tighten its grip on the human population, bombarding us with COVID-19 propaganda to heighten people’s fear while introducing new and/or extending existing restrictions to conceal the many measures being taken to execute their ongoing coup against humanity. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’.

Simultaneously, the lengthy list of honest health professionals explaining the truth about COVID-19’s threat to our health – ‘the lethality of Covid19 is between 0.1% and 0.37%, which is in the range of a severe influenza (flu)’ – and the modest measures that should have been taken, and might still be taken, to deal with it are given no exposure in the ‘occupied’ public space controlled by the corporate media. See, for example, ‘A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19’, ‘Global Covid-19 Case Fatality Rates’, ‘12 Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic’, ‘Swedish expert: why lockdowns are the wrong policy’, ‘Censored Doc Doubles Down’ and ‘Top Italian Researcher Reveals the Global Fraud of COVID-19’.

And those analysts describing the ongoing encroachments on our rights, freedoms, political participation and economic security (with the adverse impacts on the latter now imminently threatening the death of millions of people in the global south due to the collapse in the global economy), and what we can do about these encroachments, are similarly excluded. After all, the corporate media serves its master, the global elite, not those who consume its propaganda presented as ‘news’. See, for example, ‘COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker’, ‘Coronavirus – The Aftermath. A Coming Mega-Depression…’, ‘Video: COVID-19: Closing Down the Economy Is Not the Solution’, ‘The COVID-19 “Economic Holocaust”… Bankrupting the Nation. “The Shut-In Economy”’ and ‘WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’.

Among the elite measures taken, the lockdowns have been the most damaging with far-reaching adverse psychological, social, political and economic consequences including rapid rises in the incidence of anxiety, depression, alcoholism, violence against children and women in the home, unemployment, poverty and many thousands more deaths, not from COVID-19, than would have otherwise occurred. For thoughtful consideration of the issues in relation to the Lockdowns that questions the official narrative and response, and explains the excess death rate precipitated among vulnerable people that they are causing, see ‘Coronavirus Lockdown and What You Are Not Being Told – Part 1’, ‘Coronavirus Lockdown and What You Are Not Being Told – Part 2’ and ‘LOKIN-20: The Lockdown Regime Causes Increasing Health Concerns’.

More importantly, the lockdowns have provided exceptional ‘cover’ to conceal the many measures being taken to advance the elite coup, which I have summarized previously – see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ and ‘The Psychology of the COVID-19 Coup: The Elite, their Victims and those who Resist’ – and for which the evidence simply continues to accumulate. See, for example, ‘Criminal Big-Pharma Put in Charge of Covid-19 “Vaccine”’, ‘PM says COVIDSafe app is Australia’s “ticket” to ending virus rules’ and ‘Coronavirus tracing app COVIDSafe released by Government to halt spread of COVID-19 in Australia’.

In addition, the lockdowns have interrupted a vast range of ongoing nonviolent resistance campaigns directed at tackling one or more aspects of the interrelated threats to human survival. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’.

Tragically, too, these threats have been inadvertently exacerbated by COVID-19. But it is not the virus itself that has exacerbated the threat. It has been the ill-advised responses to COVID-19 that have resulted in a sudden and dramatic reduction in industrial activity. As Professor Guy McPherson explains in his just-published peer-reviewed paper ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’:

Coincident with industrial activity adding to greenhouse gases that warm the planet, industrial activity simultaneously cools the planet by adding aerosols to the atmosphere. These aerosols block incoming sunlight, thereby keeping cool our pale blue dot. Reducing industrial activity by as little as 35 percent is expected to cause a global-average temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius within a few weeks, according to research on the aerosol masking effect…. The ongoing reduction in industrial activity as a result of COVID-19 almost certainly leads to loss of habitat for human animals, hence putting us on the fast track to human extinction.

Responding Powerfully

Given this triple-fronted assault – the lockdowns (and associated measures), the coup and the sudden and dramatic reduction of industrial activity coupled with the interruption of activist campaigns to address the imminent threats to human survival – let me now identify how people are increasingly resisting and how we can make this resistance more strategically effective, with any outcome subject to one enormous proviso.

Whether or not we have enough time is now certainly beyond our control.

One response has been to gather the evidence of what is happening in relation to COVID-19 and to present this in various (mainstream and progressive) news fora so that the evidence can be more widely shared, even if sometimes these articles and videos are removed by the elite’s censoring agents such as Youtube. For just one example of this, see ‘Censored Doc Doubles Down’.

Another response has been to compile some of the carefully researched evidence of what form an appropriate response to COVID-19 should take and to present this to governments. See the UK Free People Alliance’s ‘An open letter to the Prime Minister’.

A third response has been to take nonviolent action to resist the lockdown and act out some of those rights and freedoms – such as the rights to freedom of assembly and movement – that we previously took for granted.

While there has already been considerable nonviolent resistance to some COVID-19 measures taken by governments, particularly in relation to the national lockdowns – see ‘Protesting the Lockdowns is Getting Going – #endthelockdown’, ‘Lockdown Protest in North Carolina Called “non-essential activity” by Raleigh Police’ in which it is recorded that the ‘ReopenNC’s Facebook group is now approaching 40,000 members’ and ‘Protest or Silence of the Lambs – Protest Update for May 2, 2020’ – many of these actions have been categorized and documented by Professor Erica Chenoweth and her colleagues. See ‘The global pandemic has spawned new forms of activism – and they’re flourishing’, ‘Methods of Dissent & Collective Action Under COVID – A Crowdsourced List’ and ‘Collective Action & Dissent under COVID’.

While I am fully supportive of these efforts to resist, I would like to enhance them by adding three related dimensions for consideration by those activists planning what to do.

First, when tactical choices are made, I would focus them on undermining the elite coup, not just features of it, such as ‘social distancing’ or the lockdowns. At its most basic, this can be achieved by using tactical choices that mobilize people to act initially, as is happening, but then inviting them to consider taking further, more focused, action as well. This is important because existing actions will have little impact on key underlying measures, such as those to advance the fourth industrial revolution – see, for example, ‘Meet The Companies Poised To Build The Kushner-Backed “Coronavirus Surveillance System”’ and ‘Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision ’ – being taken by the elite.

Second, I would choose/design tactics that have strategic impact, that is, they fundamentally and permanently alter, in our favor, the power relationship between the elite and us.

Third, I would choose/design tactics that also have strategic impact on the greatest threats to human survival, including the collapsing biodiversity on Earth, the threat of nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and the deployment of 5G. Given the incredibly short timeframe in which we are now working to avert human extinction, even if we trust that we have more time than Professor McPherson and his colleagues suggest, while people are mobilizing it is important to use this opportunity to give them the chance to perceive the ‘big picture’ of what is taking place – beyond lockdowns and other measures seemingly being used to tackle COVID-19 – and to act powerfully in response.

To that end, I have identified the appropriate political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’ – and set out a basic list of 26 strategic goals for achieving this purpose (which will also play a vital role in tackling key threats to human survival). The first eleven of these strategic goals are as follows:

(3) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by withdrawing all funds from the corporate banks that are supporting the coup and to deposit their money in local community banks or credit unions.

(4) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting the medical and pharmaceutical industries – including by conscientiously refusing to submit to vaccination – and by seeking health advice and treatment from natural therapists. (If you are unfamiliar with the different philosophies underpinning these approaches, and hence why many natural therapies are so much more effective, there is a straightforward explanation here: ‘Pasteur vs. Bechamp: An Alternative View of Infectious Disease’.)

(5) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting corporate supermarkets and by supporting small and family businesses, and local markets.

(6) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in other locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For this item and many subsequent, see the list of possible nonviolent actions in the document ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.

(7) To cause the workers [in trade unions or labor organizations T1, T2, T…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include withdrawing labor from an elite-controlled bank, media, pharmaceutical or other corporation operating in your country.

(8) To cause the small farmers and farmworkers [in organizations F1, F2, F…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include distributing farm produce through (existing or created) grassroots networks to small and family businesses as well as local markets rather than through corporate supply chains.

(9) To cause the indigenous peoples [in organizations IP1,IP2, IP…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include utilizing indigenous knowledge to improve local self-reliance in food production and in other ways.

(10) To cause the soldiers and military police [in army units AU1, AU2, AU… and MP1, MP2, MP…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

(11) To cause the police [in police units P1, P2, P…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

You can read all 26 of the ‘Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity’ by scrolling down the page at ‘Strategic A ims ’.

Remaining pages on the website fully explain the twelve components of the strategy, as illustrated by the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel, as well as articles and videos explaining all of the vital points of strategy and tactics, such as those to help you understand ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’ and how to prepare, frame and conduct any nonviolent action to minimize the risk of violent repression. See ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

Importantly, too, as more people become aware of the deeper strands of what is taking place, such as the more intrusive surveillance that is already occurring under the guise of keeping us ‘safe’ from COVID-19 – see, for example, ‘PM says COVIDSafe app is Australia’s “ticket” to ending virus rules’ and ‘Coronavirus tracing app COVIDSafe released by Government to halt spread of COVID-19 in Australia’ – the energy to break the lockdowns and resist the coup will gather pace. As I have previously outlined, using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist.

Equally importantly however, as I mentioned above, given the pressing (and, possibly, now uncontainable) threat of human extinction but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider accelerated participation in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’. This project also explains how to take full advantage of non-monetary forms of community where goods and services are exchanged directly, without money as a medium of exchange. Money only has value in certain types of economy and these types of economy must be superseded if humans are to survive.

In addition, for those nonviolent activists concerned about tackling the climate and/or other threats to human survival – including those in relation to the environment and war – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Strategic Aims.

Or, if you want something simpler, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Humanity has reached the most critical point in its history. Using COVID-19 as ‘cover’, the global elite is conducting a coup to take vastly greater control of our lives.

However, because the global elite is insane, it cannot perceive, in any meaningful way, the extent of the damage it is inflicting on us but also the Earth (which, of course, has equally profound consequences for them). See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ and, for more detail, ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

It has done this, at phenomenal cost – in lost rights, freedoms and economic security – to people all over the world. And it has done it precisely at the time when humanity faces the gravest series of interrelated threats to its survival which will drive us to extinction, absent a powerful response (and possibly even with one), very soon now.

Perhaps, as some highly respected commentators have suggested, the coup has been conducted now because the elite expects to survive on a heavily degraded but substantially depopulated Earth. See, for example, ‘Bill Gates talks about “vaccines to reduce population”’ and ‘Coronavirus – The Aftermath. A Coming Mega-Depression…’.

As Peter Koenig reports it: ‘Population reduction is among the goals of the elite within the WEF, the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Morgans – and a few more. The objective: fewer people (a small elite) can live longer and better with the reduced and limited resources Mother Earth is generously offering.’ See ‘The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020”’.

However, if those scientists who are concerned about the diminished aerosol masking effect caused by the global industrial shutdown are right, the coup is also triggering a rapid increase in global temperature (which, among other adverse outcomes, will accelerate the release of methane from the Arctic) and even the elite will have no habitable Earth on which to survive.

The fight for human survival has entered its final stage.

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

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