America, You’ve Been Blacklisted: McCarthyism Refashioned for a New Age

Posted on July 24, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

“If we confuse dissent with disloyalty—if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox—if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought.”—Edward R. Murrow

For those old enough to have lived through the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something in the air that reeks of the heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian tactics that were hallmarks of the 1950s.

Back then, it was the government—spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee—working in tandem with private corporations and individuals to blacklist Americans suspected of being communist sympathizers.

By the time the witch hunts carried out by federal and state investigative agencies drew to a close, thousands of individuals (the vast majority of them innocent any crime whatsoever) had been accused of communist ties, investigated, subpoenaed and blacklisted. Regarded as bad risks, the accused were blacklisted, and struggled to secure employment. The witch hunt ruined careers, resulting in suicides, and tightened immigration to exclude alleged subversives.

Seventy years later, the vitriol, fear-mongering and knee-jerk intolerance associated with McCarthy’s tactics are once again being deployed in a free-for-all attack by those on both the political Left and Right against anyone who, in daring to think for themselves, subscribes to ideas or beliefs that run counter to the government’s or mainstream thought.

It doesn’t even seem to matter what the issue is anymore (racism, Confederate monuments, Donald Trump, COVID-19, etc.): modern-day activists are busily tearing down monuments, demonizing historic figures, boycotting corporations for perceived political transgressions, and using their bully pulpit to terrorize the rest of the country into kowtowing to their demands.

All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably forward.

This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails.

The silence is becoming deafening.

After years of fighting in and out of the courts to keep their 87-year-old name, the NFL’s Washington Redskins have bowed to public pressure and will change their name and team logo to avoid causing offense. The new name, not yet announced, aims to honor both the military and Native Americans.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, a delegate to the House of Representatives who supports the name change, believes the team’s move “reflects the present climate of intolerance to names, statues, figments of our past that are racist in nature or otherwise imply racism [and] are no longer tolerated.”

Present climate of intolerance, indeed.

Yet it wasn’t a heightened racial conscience that caused the Redskins to change their brand. It was the money. The team caved after its corporate sponsors including FedEx, PepsiCo, Nike and Bank of America threatened to pull their funding.

So much for that U.S. Supreme Court victory preventing the government from censoring trademarked names it considers distasteful or scandalous.

Who needs a government censor when the American people are already doing such a great job at censoring themselves and each other, right?

Now there’s a push underway to boycott Goya Foods after its CEO, Robert Unanue, praised President Trump during a press conference to announce Goya’s donation of a million cans of Goya chickpeas and a million other food products to American food banks as part of the president’s Hispanic Prosperity Initiative.

Mind you, Unanue—whose grandfather emigrated to the U.S. from Spain—also praised the Obamas when they were in office, but that kind of equanimity doesn’t carry much weight in this climate of intolerance.

Not to be outdone, the censors are also taking aim at To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Atticus Finch, a white lawyer in the Jim Crow South who defends a black man falsely accused of rape. Sixty years after its debut, the book remains a powerful testament to moral courage in the face of racial bigotry and systemic injustice, told from the point of view of a child growing up in the South, but that’s not enough for the censors. They want to axe the book—along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—from school reading curriculums because of the presence of racial slurs that could make students feel “humiliated or marginalized.”

Never mind that the N-word makes a regular appearance in hip-hop songs. The prevailing attitude seems to be that it’s okay to use the N-word as long as the person saying the word is not white. Rapper Kendrick Lamar “would like white America to let black people exclusively have the word.”

Talk about a double standard.

This is also the overlooked part of how oppression becomes systemic: it comes about as a result of a combined effort between the populace, the corporations and the government.

McCarthyism worked the same way.

What started with Joseph McCarthy’s headline-grabbing scare tactics in the 1950s about Communist infiltrators of American society snowballed into a devastating witch hunt once corporations and the American people caught the fever.

McCarthyism was a contagion, like the plague, spreading like wildfire among people too fearful or weak or gullible or paranoid or greedy or ambitious to denounce it for what it was: an opportunistic scare tactic engineered to make the government more powerful.

McCarthy, a young Republican senator, grasped the opportunity to make a name for himself by capitalizing on the Cold War paranoia of the time. In a speech in February 1950, McCarthy claimed to have a list of over 200 members of the Communist Party “working and shaping the policy of the U.S. State Department.” The speech was picked up by the Associated Press, without substantiating the facts, and within a few days the hysteria began.

McCarthy specialized in sensational and unsubstantiated accusations about Communist infiltration of the American government, particularly the State Department. He also targeted well-known Hollywood actors and directors, trade unionists and teachers. Many others were brought before the inquisitional House Committee on Un-American Activities for questioning.

“McCarthyism” eventually smeared all the accused with the same broad brush, whether the evidence was good, bad or nonexistent.

The parallels to the present movement cannot be understated.

Even now, with modern-day McCarthyism sweeping the nation and America’s own history being blacklisted, I have to wonder what this sudden outrage and crisis of conscience is really all about.

Certainly, anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to the Trump Administration has not been paying attention.

No matter what the team colors might be at any given moment, the playbook remains the same. The leopard has not changed its spots.

Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that the American police state that is continuing to wreak havoc on the rights of the people under the Trump Administration is the same police state that wreaked havoc on the rights of the people under every previous administration.

So please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle, a tsunami approaches.

While the populace wages war over past injustices, injustice in the here and now continues to trample innocent lives underfoot. Certainly, little of significance is being done to stem the tide of institutional racism that has resulted in disproportionate numbers of black Americans who continue to be stopped, frisked, shot at, arrested and jailed.

I’ve had enough of the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

When you drill right down to the core of things, the policies of a Trump Administration have been no different from an Obama Administration or a Bush Administration, at least not where it really counts.

In other words, Democrats by any other name have been Republicans, and vice versa.

War has continued. Surveillance has continued. Drone killings have continued. Police shootings have continued. Highway robbery meted out by government officials has continued. Corrupt government has continued. Profit-driven prisons have continued. Censorship and persecution of anyone who criticizes the government have continued. The militarization of the police has continued. The devastating SWAT team raids have continued. The government’s efforts to label dissidents as extremists and terrorists has continued.

The more things change, the more they have stayed the same.

We’ve been stuck in this political Groundhog’s Day for so long that minor deviations appear to be major developments while obscuring the fact that we’re stuck on repeat, unable to see the forest for the trees.

This is what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.

It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.

Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.

As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.

The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.

In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:

The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”

Sound painfully familiar yet?

We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. Those who warned against the dangers posed by too many laws, invasive surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids and the like have been silenced and ignored. They stopped teaching about freedom in the schools. Few Americans know their history. And even fewer seem to care that their fellow Americans are being jailed, muzzled, shot, tasered, and treated as if they have no rights at all.

The erosion of our freedoms happened so incrementally, no one seemed to notice. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognized the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry became fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.

Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.

We are on that downward slope now.

The contagion of fear that McCarthy helped spread with the help of government agencies, corporations and the power elite is still poisoning the well, whitewashing our history, turning citizen against citizen, and stripping us of our rights.

What we desperately need is the kind of resolve embodied by Edward R. Murrow, the most-respected newsman of his day.

On March 9, 1954, Murrow dared to speak truth to power about the damage McCarthy was inflicting on the American people. His message remains a timely warning for our age.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ”The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

America is approaching another reckoning right now, one that will pit our commitment to freedom principles against a level of fear-mongering that is being used to wreak havoc on everything in its path.

The outcome rests, as always, with “we the people.” As Murrow said to his staff before the historic March 9 broadcast: “No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”

Take heed, America.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this may be your last warning.

Why Freedom Is Ending

Posted on July 21, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

First, the force that is ending freedom will be identified and described; and, then, the force that they fear and hate the most (and are trying to destroy) will be identified and described.

THE FORCE THAT IS ENDING FREEDOM

The force that is ending freedom is empire.

Every empire is a dictatorship. No nation can be a democracy that’s either heading an empire, or a vassal-state of one. Obviously, in order to be a vassal-state within an empire, that nation is dictated-to by the nation of which it is a colony. However, even the domestic inhabitants of the colonizing nation cannot be free and living in a democracy, because their services are needed abroad in order to impose the occupying force upon the colony or vassal-nation. This is an important burden upon the ‘citizens’ or actually the subjects of the imperial nation. Furthermore, they need to finance, via their taxes, this occupying force abroad, to a sufficient extent so as to subdue any resistance by the residents in any colony.

Every empire is imposed, none is really voluntary. Conquest creates an empire, and the constant application of force maintains it. Every empire is a dictatorship, not only upon its foreign populations (which goes without saying, because otherwise there can’t be any empire), but upon its domestic ones too, upon its own subjects.

Any empire needs weapons-makers, who sell to the government and whose only markets are the imperial government and its vassal-nations or ‘allies’. By contrast, ‘enemy’ nations are ones that the imperial power has placed onto its priority-list of nations that are yet to become conquered.

There are two main reasons to conquer a nation:

One is in order to be enabled to extract, from the colony, oil, or gold, or some other valuable commodity.

The other is in order to control it so as to be enabled to use that land as a passageway for exporting, from a vassal-nation, to other nations, that vassal-nation’s products.

International trade is the basis for any empire, and the billionaires who own controlling blocs of stock in a nation’s international corporations are the actual rulers of it, the beneficiaries of empire, the recipients of the wealth that is being extracted from the colonies and from the domestic subjects.

The idea of an empire is that the imperial nation’s rulers, its aristocracy, extract from the colonies their products, and they impose upon their domestic subjects the financial and military burdens of imposing their international dictatorship upon the foreign subjects.

Some authors say that there is a “Deep State” and that it consists of (some undefined elements within) the intelligence services, and of the military, and of the diplomatic corps, of any given dictatorship; but, actually, those employees of the State are merely employees, not the actual governing power, over that dictatorship.

The actual Deep State are always the aristocrats, themselves, the people who run the revolving door between ‘the private sector’ (the aristocracy’s corporations) and the government.

In former times, many of the aristocrats were themselves governing officials (the titled ‘nobility’), but this is no longer common. Nowadays, the aristocracy are the individuals who own controlling blocs of stock in international corporations (especially weapons-making firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE, because the only markets for those corporations are the corporation’s own government and its vassal states or ‘allies’); and such individuals are usually the nation’s billionaires, and, perhaps, a few of the mere centi-millionaires. A small number, typically less than 100, of these extremely wealthy individuals, are the biggest donors to politicians, and to think tanks, and to other non-profits (these latter being also tax-write-offs to their donors, and so are tax-drains siphoning money away from the general public and paying the actual benefits, such as PR and increased control over the Government, to the billionaires) that are involved in the formation of the national government’s policies; and, of course, these billionaires also are owners of and/or advertisers in the propaganda-media, which sell the aristocracy’s core or most-essential viewpoints to the nation’s subjects, in order to persuade those voters to vote only for the aristocracy’s selected candidates, and not for any who oppose the aristocracy. These few, mainly but not exclusively billionaires, are the actual Deep State — the bosses over the dictatorship, the ultimate beneficiaries in any empire.

In order to maintain this system, of international dictatorship or empire, the most essential tool is deceit, of the electorate, by the aristocracy.

The method of control is: the bought agents of the Deep State (including the major ‘news’-media, etc.) lie to the public about what their polices will be if they win, in order to be able to win power; and, then, once they have won power, they do the opposite, which is what they have always been paid by the Deep State (the aristocracy) to do. Thereby, elections aren’t “democratic” but instead ‘democratic’: they are mere formalities of democracy, without the substance of democracy, because there can be no democracy where truth is suppressed and lies are spread instead. All of the well-financed candidates for the top offices are actually the Deep State’s representatives, and virtually none are the representatives of the public, because the voters have been deceived, and were given (by the DNC and RNC) choices between two or more candidates, none of whom will represent the public, if and when elected. Individuals who want to represent the public instead of the aristocracy get drowned by the aristocracy’s campaign-money.

Here are some recent examples of this system — the imperial system, international dictatorship, in action — as shown by its results:

During Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, he said, “The approach of fighting Assad and ISIS simultaneously was madness, and idiocy. They’re fighting each other and yet we’re fighting both of them. You know, we were fighting both of them. I think that our far bigger problem than Assad is ISIS, I’ve always felt that. Assad is, you know I’m not saying Assad is a good man, ’cause he’s not, but our far greater problem is not Assad, it’s ISIS. … I think, you can’t be fighting two people that are fighting each other, and fighting them together. You have to pick one or the other.” Assad is allied with Russia against the Sauds (who are the chief ally of the U.S. aristocracy), so the U.S. (in accord with a policy that George Herbert Walker Bush had initiated on 24 February 1990 and which has been carried out by all subsequent U.S. Presidents) was determined to overthrow Assad, but Trump said that he was strongly opposed to that policy.

Months before that, Trump had said: “I think Assad is a bad guy, a very bad guy, all right? Lots of people killed. I think we are backing people we have no idea who they are. The rebels, we call them the rebels, the patriotic rebels. We have no idea. A lot of people think, Hugh, that they are ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can’t be fighting ISIS and fighting Assad. Assad is fighting ISIS. He is fighting ISIS. Russia is fighting now ISIS. And Iran is fighting ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can’t go — and I watched Lindsey Graham, he said, I have been here for 10 years fighting. Well, he will be there with that thinking for another 50 years. He won’t be able to solve the problem. We have to get rid of ISIS first. After we get rid of ISIS, we’ll start thinking about it. But we can’t be fighting Assad. And when you’re fighting Assad, you are fighting Russia, you’re fighting — you’re fighting a lot of different groups. But we can’t be fighting everybody at one time.”

In that same debate (15 December 2015) he also said: “In my opinion, we’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now. We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory. It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.”

Did he do that? No. Did he instead intensify what Obama had been trying to do in Syria — overthrow Assad — yes. As the U.S. President, after having won the 2016 Presidential campaign, has Trump followed through on his criticism there, against the super-hawk, neoconservative, Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham? No. Did he instead encircle himself with precisely such super-hawks, such neoconservatives? Yes. Did he intensify the overthrow-Assad effort, as Graham and those others had advocated? Yes. Did America’s war against Syria succeed? Not yet. Did he constantly lie to the voters? Yes, without a doubt. Should that be grounds for impeaching him? A prior question to that one is actually: Would a President Mike Pence be any different or maybe even worse than Trump? If yes, then what would be achieved by removing Trump from office? Maybe it would actually make things a lot worse. But how likely would the U.S. Senate be to remove Trump from office if the House did impeach Trump? Two-thirds of the U.S. Senate would need to vote to remove the President in order for a President to be removed after being impeached by the House. A majority of U.S. Senators, 53 of them, were Republicans. If just 33 of them voted not to convict the President, then Trump wouldn’t be removed, and he wasn’t. In order to remove him, not only would all 47 of the Democrats and Independents have had to vote to convict, but 20 of the 53 Republicans would have needed to join them. That’s nearly 40% of the Republican Senators. How likely was that? Almost impossible. What would their voters who had elected them back home think of their having done such a thing? How likely would such Senators have then faced successful re-election challenges that would have removed those Senators from office? Would 20 of the 53 have been likely to take that personal risk? Why, then, were so many Democrats in the House pressing for Trump’s impeachment, since Trump’s being forced out of the White House this way was practically impossible and would only have installed a President Pence, even if it could have succeeded? Was that Democratic Party initiative anything else than insincere political theater, lying to their own gullible voters, Democratic Party voters, just being phonies who manipulated voters to vote for them, instead of who were actually serving them? Is that what democracy is, now: such insincere political theater? Is that “democracy”? America’s voters are trapped, by liars, so it’s instead mere ‘democracy’. It’s the new form of dictatorship. But it’s actually as ancient as is any empire. There’s nothing new about this — except for one thing: the U.S. regime is aiming to be the ultimate, the last, the final, empire, the ruler over the entire planet; so, it is trying especially hard, ‘to defend freedom, democracy and human rights throughout the world’, as Big Brother might say.

Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, was just as evil, and just as insincere, as Trump, but a far more skillful liar, who deceived his voters to think that he would fight corruption, work to improve relations with Russia, provide a public option in his health-insurance plan, and otherwise work to reduce economic inequality, to improve the economic situation for disadvantaged Americans, and to prosecute banksters. He abandoned each one of those stated objectives as soon as he won against John McCain, on 4 November 2008, and then yet more when he defeated Mitt Romney in 2012. And aren’t some of those promises the same ones that candidate Trump had also advocated and then abandoned as soon as he too was s‘elected’?

THE THREAT TO THE EMPIRE

Empire always depends upon lies; it is always built upon lies; and, so, the biggest threat to it is the truth, and especially the champions of truth, who are the whistleblowers. The whistleblowers are up against two enemies: the aristocracy, and the aristocrats’ agents who censor-out truth and leave only lies which the aristocracy’s agents spread to the public. Censorship always serves liars, because it is imposed from above and serves the aristocracy, against the public. Every dictatorship needs censorship. No democracy does.

The heroic fighters for the freedom of everyone in the world are the whistleblowers, who report to the public the corruption and evil that they see perpetrated by their superiors, their bosses, and perpetrated by people who are on the public payroll or otherwise obtaining increased income by virtue of being selected by the government to become government contractors to serve an allegedly public function. All liars with power hate whistleblowers, and want to make special examples of any part of the press that publishes their truths, their facts, their stolen documents. These documents are stolen because that’s the only way for them to become public and thereby known to the voters so that the voters can vote on the basis of truths as in a democracy, instead of to be deceived as in a dictatorship. Even if the truth is stolen from the liars, instead of being kept private (“Confidential”) for them, are the whistleblowers doing wrong to steal the truth from the liars? Or, instead, are the whistleblowers heroes: are they the authentic guardians of democracy, and the precariously thin wall that separates democracy from dictatorship? They are the latter: they are the true heroes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of such heroes are also martyrs — martyrs for truth, against lies. Every dictatorship seeks to destroy its whistleblowers. That’s because any whistleblower constitutes a threat to The System — the system of aristocratic control.

In all of U.S. history, the two Presidents who pursued whistleblowers and their publishers the most relentlessly have been Trump and Obama. The public are fooled to think that this is being done for ‘national security’ reasons instead of to hide the government’s crimes and criminality. However, not a single one of the Democratic Party’s many U.S. Presidential candidates is bringing this issue, of the U.S. government’s many crimes and constant lying, forward as being the central thing that must be criminalized above all else, as constituting “treason.” None of them is proposing legislation saying that it is treason, against the public — against the nation. Against the public.

Every aristocracy tries to deceive its public, in order to control its public; and every aristocracy uses divide-and-rule in order to do this; but it’s not only to divide the public against each other (such as between Republicans versus Democrats, both of which are actually controlled by the aristocracy), but also to divide between nations, such as between ‘allies’ versus ‘enemies’ — even when a given ‘enemy’ (such as Iraq in 2003) has never threatened, far less invaded, the United States (or whatever the given imperial ‘us’ may happen to be), and thus clearly this was aggressive war, and an international war-crime, though unpunished as such, because it was done by the empire. The public need to fear and hate some ‘enemy’ which is the ‘other’ or ‘alien’, in order not to fear and loathe the aristocracy itself — the actual source of (and winner from) the systemic exploitation, of the public, by the aristocracy. It’s distract, and divide, and rule.

The pinnacle of the U.S. regime’s totalitarianism is its ceaseless assault against Julian Assange, who is the über-whistleblower, the strongest protector for whistleblowers, the safest publisher for the evidence that they steal from their employers and from their employers’ government. He hides the identity of the whistleblowers, even at the risk of his own continued existence. Right now, the U.S. regime is raising to a fever-pitch and twisting beyond recognition not only U.S. laws but the U.S. Constitution, so as to impose its will against him. President Trump is supported in this effort by the corrupt U.S. Congress, to either end Assange’s life, or else lock him up for the rest of his heroic life in a dungeon having no communication with the world outside, until he does finally die, in isolation, punishment for his heroic last-ditch fight for the public’s freedom and for democracy — his fight, actually, against our 1984 regime. What Jesus of Nazareth was locally to the Roman regime in his region, Assange is to the U.S. regime throughout the world: an example to terrify anyone else who might come forth effectively to challenge the Emperor’s authority.

A key country in this operation is Ecuador, which is ruled by the dictator Lenin Moreno, who stole office by lying to the public and pretending to be a progressive who backed his democratically elected predecessor, Rafael Correa, but then as soon as he won power, he reversed Correa’s progressive initiatives, including, above all, his protection of Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.

On 11 April 2019, RT headlined “Who is Lenin Moreno and why did he hand Assange over to British police?” and reported that:

Following his 2017 election, Moreno quickly moved away from his election platform after taking office. He reversed several key pieces of legislation passed under his predecessor which targeted the wealthy and the banks. He also reversed a referendum decision on indefinite re-election while simultaneously blocking any potential for Correa to return.

He effectively purged many of Correa’s appointments to key positions in Ecuador’s judiciary and National Electoral Council via the CPCCS-T council which boasts supra-constitutional powers.

Moreno has also cozied up to the US, with whom Ecuador had a strained relationship under Correa. Following a visit from Vice President Mike Pence in June 2018, Ecuador bolstered its security cooperation with the US, including major arms deals, training exercises and intelligence sharing.

Following Assange’s arrest Correa, who granted Assange asylum in the first place, described Moreno as the “greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history” saying he was guilty of a “crime that humanity will never forget.”

Despite his overwhelming power and influence, however, Moreno and his family are the subject of a sweeping corruption probe in the country, as he faces down accusations of money laundering in offshore accounts and shell companies in Panama, including the INA Investment Corp, which is owned by Moreno’s brother.

Damning images, purportedly hacked from Moreno’s phone, have irreparably damaged both his attempts at establishing himself as an anti-corruption champion as well as his relationship with Assange, whom he accused of coordinating the hacking efforts.

On 14 April 2019, Denis Rogatyuk at The Gray Zone headlined “Sell Out: How Corruption, Voter Fraud and a Neoliberal Turn Led Ecuador’s Lenin to Give Up Assange

Desperate to ingratiate his government with Washington and distract the public from his mounting scandals, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno has sacrificed Julian Assange – and his country’s independence”, and he described some of the documentation for the accusations that Moreno is corrupt.

On 12 April 2019, Zero Hedge headlined “Facebook Removes Page Of Ecuador’s Former President On Same Day As Assange’s Arrest”, and opened: “Facebook has unpublished the page of Ecuador’s former president, Rafael Correa, the social media giant confirmed on Thursday, claiming that the popular leftist leader violated the company’s security policies.”

On 16 April 2019, Jonathan Turley bannered “‘He Is Our Property’: The D.C. Establishment Awaits Assange With A Glee And Grudge”, and opened:

They will punish Assange for their sins

The key to prosecuting Assange has always been to punish him without again embarrassing the powerful figures made mockeries by his disclosures. That means to keep him from discussing how the U.S. government concealed alleged war crimes and huge civilian losses, the type of disclosures that were made in the famous Pentagon Papers case. He cannot discuss how Democratic and Republican members either were complicit or incompetent in their oversight. He cannot discuss how the public was lied to about the program.

A glimpse of that artificial scope was seen within minutes of the arrest. CNN brought on its national security analyst, James Clapper, former director of national intelligence. CNN never mentioned that Clapper was accused of perjury in denying the existence of the National Security Agency surveillance program and was personally implicated in the scandal that WikiLeaks triggered.

Clapper was asked directly before Congress, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

Clapper responded, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.” Later, Clapper said his testimony was “the least untruthful” statement he could make.

That would still make it a lie, of course, but this is Washington and people like Clapper are untouchable. In the view of the establishment, Assange is the problem.

On 11 April 2019, the YouGov polling organization headlined “53% of Americans say Julian Assange should be extradited to America”.

On 13 April 2019, I headlined “What Public Opinion on Assange Tells Us About the US Government Direction”, and reported the only international poll that had ever been done of opinions about Assange. Its findings demonstrated that, out of the 23 nations which were surveyed, U.S. was the only one where the public were anti-Assange, and that the difference between the U.S. and all of the others was enormous and stark. The report opened:

The only extensive poll of public opinion regarding Julian Assange or Wikileaks was Reuters/Ipsos on 26 April 2011, “WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is not a criminal: global poll”, and it sampled around a thousand individuals in each of 23 countries — a total of 18,829 respondents. The Reuters news-report was vague, and not linked to any detailed presentation of the poll-findings, but it did say that “U.S. respondents had a far more critical view” against Wikileaks than in any other country, and that the view by Americans was 69% “believing Assange should be charged and 61 percent opposing WikiLeaks’ mission.” Buried elsewhere on the Web was this detailed presentation of Ipsos’s findings in that poll. Here are what those findings were:

https://www.slideshare.net/mediapiac/julian-assange-and-wiki-leaks

Oppose Wikileaks:

61% U.S.

38% UK

33% Canada

32% Poland

32% Belgium

31% Saudi Arabia

30% Japan

30% France

27% Indonesia

26% Italy

25% Germany

24% Sweden

24% Australia

22% Hungary

22% Brazil

21% Turkey

21% S. Korea

16% Mexico

16% Argentina

15% Spain

15% Russia

15% India

12% S. Africa

Is the U.S. a democracy if the regime is so effective in gripping the minds of its public, as to make them hostile to the strongest fighter for their freedom and democracy?

On 13 April 2019, washingtonsblog headlined “4 Myths About Julian Assange DEBUNKED”, and here was one of them:

Myth #2: Assange Will Get a Fair Trial In the U.S.

14-year CIA officer John Kiriakou notes:

Assange has been charged in the Eastern District of Virginia — the so-called “Espionage Court.” That is just what many of us have feared. Remember, no national security defendant has ever been found not guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia. The Eastern District is also known as the “rocket docket” for the swiftness with which cases are heard and decided. Not ready to mount a defense? Need more time? Haven’t received all of your discovery? Tough luck. See you in court.

… I have long predicted that Assange would face Judge Leonie Brinkema were he to be charged in the Eastern District. Brinkema handled my case, as well as CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling’s. She also has reserved the Ed Snowden case for herself. Brinkema is a hanging judge.

On 20 May 2019, former British Ambassador Craig Murray (who had quit so that he could blow the whistle) headlined “The Missing Step” and argued that the only chance that Assange now has is if Sweden refuses to extradite Assange to the U.S. in the event that Britain honors the Swedish request to extradite him to Sweden instead of to the U.S. (Sweden, however, subsequently dropped its charge against Assange, and so now only Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are keeping him imprisoned until he will die.)

How can it reasonably be denied that the U.S. is, in fact (though not nominally) a dictatorship? All of its allies are thus vassal-nations in its empire. This means acquiescence (if not joining) in some of the U.S. regime’s frequent foreign coups and invasions; and this means their assisting in the spread of the U.S. regime’s control beyond themselves, to include additional other countries. It reduces the freedom, and the democracy, throughout the world; it spreads the U.S. dictatorship internationally. That is what is evil about what in America is called “neoconservatism” and in other countries is called simply “imperialism.” Under American reign, it is now a spreading curse, a political plague, to peoples throughout the world. Even an American whistleblower about Ukraine who lives in the former Ukraine is being targeted by the U.S. regime.

This is how the freedom of everyone is severely threatened, by the U.S. empire — the most deceitful empire that the world has ever experienced. The martyrs to its lies are the canaries in its coal mine. They are the first to be eliminated.

Looking again at the top of that rank-ordered list of 23 countries, one sees the U.S. and eight of its main allies (or vassal-nations), in order: U.S., UK, Canada, Poland, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Japan, France, Indonesia. These are countries whose subjects (‘citizens’) are already well-controlled by the empire. They already are vassals, and so these nations are ordained (accepted by America’s aristocracy) as being ‘allies’.

At the opposite end (as of 2011, when that poll was taken), starting with the most anti-U.S-regime, were: S. Africa, India, Russia, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, S. Korea, Turkey. These were countries where the subjects were not yet well-controlled by the empire, even though the current government in some of them is trying to change its subjects’ minds so that the country will accept U.S. rule. Wherever the subjects reject U.S. rule, there exists a strong possibility that the nation will become placed on the U.S. regime’s list of ‘enemies’ and be subjected to at least attempts at “regime-change.” Consequently, wherever the residents are the most opposed to U.S. rule, the likelihood of an American coup or invasion is real. The first step toward a coup or invasion is the imposition of sanctions against the nation. Any such nation that is already subject to them is therefore already in severe danger. Any such nation that refuses to cooperate with the U.S. regime’s existing sanctions — such as against trading with Russia, China, Iran, or Venezuela — is in danger of becoming itself a U.S.-sanctioned nation, and therefore officially an ‘enemy’ of today’s version of nazism (as Nuremberg defined it: imperialistic fascism).

And this is why freedom and democracy are ending.

Unless and until the U.S. regime itself becomes conquered — either domestically by a second successful American Revolution (this one to eliminate the domestic aristocracy instead of to eliminate a foreign one), or else by a World War III in which the U.S. regime becomes destroyed even worse than the opposing alliance will — the existing insatiable empire will continue to be on the war-path to impose its dictatorship to everyone on this planet.

The force that is ending freedom is empire, and it’s now being wielded by the U.S.A. Like all empires, it thrives on lies, and therefore its biggest enemies are whistleblowers.

In An Insane World, Madness Looks Moderate And Sanity Looks Radical

Posted on July 12, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

There are no moderate, mainstream centrists in the US-centralized empire. They do not exist.

It’s not that moderate, mainstream centrism is an inherently impossible position. In a healthy world, that’s exactly what the predominant worldview would be. But we do not live in a healthy world.

There are no moderate, mainstream centrists anywhere in the tight alliance of nations which function as a single empire on foreign policy, because that functional empire is built upon murder, terrorism, exploitation, oppression, ecocide and the stockpiling of armageddon weapons.

People who support the status quo of this empire are called “moderates”, but, just like the so-called “moderate rebels” of Syria, they are in fact violent extremists.

This is John Bolton. Actual John Bolton. They brought on actual, literal John Bolton as an expert analyst on intelligence claims about a US-targeted government, AND, ALSO, did NOT inform their audience that this person has built his entire career on lying about these things. https://t.co/r1dRjIv2CK

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 28, 2020

This is the reality of living in a world that is profoundly psychologically unhealthy. If you make a career out of facilitating wars which cause explosives to be dropped from the sky on top of innocent human beings causing their bodies to be ripped to shreds and buried in rubble, then you are treated as an exemplar of ideal leadership and rewarded with prestigious positions in politics, punditry, book publishing and think tankery. If you oppose those same wars, you are marginalized and smeared as at best an extremist whack job and at worst a literal traitor conducting psyops for a foreign government.

Because the plutocratic class owns the political class which advances depraved plutocratic agendas and the media class which normalizes and justifies those agendas, a mainstream consensus has been forcibly manufactured that maintaining the oppressive, exploitative, omnicidal, ecocidal status quo is a good and sane thing to do. Voices which point out that this is bat shit crazy are marginalized and ignored when possible and smeared and demonized when necessary.

The ability of our plutocratic rulers and their lackeys to do this is the only reason why defenders of the status quo get to call themselves “centrists” and “moderates”. It’s not because their position is middle-of-the-road in any way whatsoever, it’s because they stand in alignment with the consensus that has been deliberately artificially manufactured and shoved into the mainstream by sheer force of narrative control.

I Watched Joe Biden Give An Award To George W Bush So You Don’t Have To

“'This is a man who’d been to the darkest places as a crim- uh, a prisoner of war,' Bush said of McCain. He almost said criminal. Okay, I’m glad I kept watching."https://t.co/kUHFARUWzB

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 12, 2018

This consensus manufacturing is then carried home by a glitch in human cognition known as status quo bias, which causes us to tend toward holding to the familiar as a default preference and perceive the risk of losing what we have as far less favorable than the reward gaining something better. Psychology Today explains:

Research from Kahneman and Tversky suggests that losses are twice as psychologically harmful as gains are beneficial. In other words, individuals feel twice as much psychological pain from losing $100 as pleasure from gaining $100. One interpretation is that in order for an individual to change course from their current state of affairs is that the alternative must be perceived as twice as beneficial. This highlights the challenges we may face when considering a change to our usual way of doing things.

When military members are considering their choices as their contract comes to an end, many consider re-enlisting simply because they are unaware of the many opportunities that exist for them. Even when we understand our current path is no longer beneficial or no longer makes us happy, we must still overcome the natural urge to stay on the path unless the alternative is sufficiently attractive. In order for us to readily pursue an alternate path, we must believe that the alternative is clearly superior to the current state of affairs.

The status quo effect is pervasive in both inconsequential and major decisions. Oftentimes we are held back by what we believe to be the safe option, simply because it is the default. Bearing in mind our natural propensity for the status quo will enable us to recognize the allure of inertia and more effectively overcome it.

Status quo bias is further exacerbated in our current predicament by the fact that so many people are now so close to the brink of financial ruin and so terrified of what can happen to them if things change in a sudden and unpredictable way. The result of this is that now you’ve got the majority of people in the most dominant country on earth supporting the “slow incremental change” philosophy of so-called centrism, which in practice has always ended up meaning no change whatsoever. Meanwhile our ecosystem is dying and the US is escalating nuclear tensions with Russia and China and everyone’s getting more and more crazy and miserable under the oppressive and exploitative status quo.

Did you ever climb a tree when you were a kid and get stuck because you were afraid to climb down? It’s a common experience for a lot of us. You get lost in the joy of the climb and so pleased with yourself in how well you’re doing, then suddenly you notice that the branches are getting a lot thinner and the wind is starting to sway you back and forth, and suddenly you look down and get terrified.

Maybe you called out for your mother and she came out and told you to climb down, calling up “Well you can’t stay up there!” And you knew she was right, but in that moment the idea of looking down and letting go of the thin branches you were clinging to felt so much scarier than just staying put in your precarious and unsustainable position.

That’s exactly where we’re at right now with status quo bias in our current predicament. People know things need to change, but they’re in such a precarious position that the risk of change feels far too scary to take the leap and force a deviation from our trajectory toward disaster.

But that is our only choice if we are to survive as a species. We know we were able to climb down from whatever trees we got stuck in as kids, and we know that our mother was as right then as that small inner voice inside us is now: we can’t stay here. We’ve got to wake up from the status quo narrative management and find a way to get down from our precarious and unsustainable position to the stable ground of sanity.

America’s Revolutionary Founders Would Be Anti-Government Extremists Today

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”—Thomas Paine

“When the government violates the people’s rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”—Marquis De Lafayette

Had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

In fact, Attorney General William Barr recently announced plans to target, track and surveil “anti-government extremists” and preemptively nip in the bud any “threats” to public safety and the rule of law.

It doesn’t matter that the stated purpose of Barr’s anti-government extremist task force is to investigate dissidents on the far right (the “boogaloo” movement) and far left (antifa, a loosely organized anti-fascist group) who have been accused of instigating violence and disrupting peaceful protests.

Boogaloo and Antifa have given the government the perfect excuse for declaring war (with all that entails: surveillance, threat assessments, pre-crime, etc.) against so-called anti-government extremists.

Without a doubt, America’s revolutionary founders would have been at the top of Barr’s list.

After all, the people who fomented the American Revolution spoke out at rallies, distributed critical pamphlets, wrote scathing editorials and took to the streets in protest. They were rebelling against a government they saw as being excessive in its taxation and spending. For their efforts, they were demonized and painted as an angry mob, extremists akin to terrorists, by the ruler of the day, King George III.

Of course, it doesn’t take much to be considered an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) today.

If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched by the police, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you’re at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Indeed, under Barr’s new task force, I and every other individual today who dares to speak truth to power could also be targeted for surveillance, because what we’re really dealing with is a government that wants to suppress dangerous words—words about its warring empire, words about its land grabs, words about its militarized police, words about its killing, its poisoning and its corruption—in order to keep its lies going.

This is how the government plans to snuff out any attempts by “we the people” to stand up to its tyranny: under the pretext of rooting out violent extremists, the government’s anti-extremism program will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

The danger is real.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

For example, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists

Incredibly, both reports use the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably

That same year, the DHS launched Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.

These reports indicate that for the government, anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—can be labeled an extremist.

Fast forward a few years, and you have the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which Congress has continually re-upped, that allows the military to take you out of your home, lock you up with no access to friends, family or the courts if you’re seen as an extremist.

Now connect the dots, from the 2009 Extremism reports to the NDAA, the National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance networks, and fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies

Add in tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones that are beginning to blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that will identify and track you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the circle, toss in the real-time crime centers being deployed in cities across the country, which will be attempting to “predict” crimes and identify criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.

Hopefully you’re getting the picture, which is how easy it is for the government to identify, label and target individuals as “extremist.”

And just like that, we’ve come full circle.

Imagine living in a country where armed soldiers crash through doors to arrest and imprison citizens merely for criticizing government officials. Imagine that in this very same country, you’re watched all the time, and if you look even a little bit suspicious, the police stop and frisk you or pull you over to search you on the off chance you’re doing something illegal.

Keep in mind that if you have a firearm of any kind (or anything that resembled a firearm) while in this country, it may get you arrested and, in some circumstances, shot by police.

If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

However, the scenario described above took place more than 200 years ago, when American colonists suffered under Great Britain’s version of an early police state. It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters

No document better states their grievances than the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson.

A document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who laid everything on the line, pledged it all—“our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free.

Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.

Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up when silence could not be tolerated.

Read the Declaration of Independence again, and ask yourself if the list of complaints tallied by Jefferson don’t bear a startling resemblance to the abuses “we the people” are suffering at the hands of the American police state.

If you find the purple prose used by the Founders hard to decipher, here’s my translation of what the Declaration of Independence would look and sound like if it were written in the modern vernacular:

There comes a time when a populace must stand united and say “enough is enough” to the government’s abuses, even if it means getting rid of the political parties in power. Believing that “we the people” have a natural and divine right to direct our own lives, here are truths about the power of the people and how we arrived at the decision to sever our ties to the government:

All people are created equal. All people possess certain innate rights that no government or agency or individual can take away from them. Among these are the right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The government’s job is to protect the people’s innate rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The government’s power comes from the will of the people.

Whenever any government abuses its power, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish that government and replace it with a new government that will respect and protect the rights of the people. It is not wise to get rid of a government for minor transgressions. In fact, as history has shown, people resist change and are inclined to suffer all manner of abuses to which they have become accustomed. However, when the people have been subjected to repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the purpose of establishing a tyrannical government, people have a right and duty to do away with that tyrannical Government and to replace it with a new government that will protect and preserve their innate rights for their future wellbeing.

This is exactly the state of affairs we are suffering under right now, which is why it is necessary that we change this imperial system of government. The history of the present Imperial Government is a history of repeated abuses and power grabs, carried out with the intention of establishing absolute Tyranny over the country.

To prove this, consider the following:

The government has, through its own negligence and arrogance, refused to adopt urgent and necessary laws for the good of the people. The government has threatened to hold up critical laws unless the people agree to relinquish their right to be fully represented in the Legislature.

In order to expand its power and bring about compliance with its dictates, the government has made it nearly impossible for the people to make their views and needs heard by their representatives. The government has repeatedly suppressed protests arising in response to its actions.

The government has obstructed justice by refusing to appoint judges who respect the Constitution and has instead made the Courts march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

The government has allowed its agents to harass the people, steal from them, jail them and even execute them. The government has directed militarized government agents—a.k.a., a standing army—to police domestic affairs in peacetime. The government has turned the country into a militarized police state.

The government has conspired to undermine the rule of law and the Constitution in order to expand its own powers.

The government has allowed its militarized police to invade our homes and inflict violence on homeowners. The government has failed to hold its agents accountable for wrongdoing and murder under the guise of “qualified immunity.”

The government has jeopardized our international trade agreements. The government has overtaxed us without our permission.

The government has denied us due process and the right to a fair trial. The government has engaged in extraordinary rendition. The government has continued to expand its military empire in collusion with its corporate partners-in-crime and occupy foreign nations.

The government has eroded fundamental legal protections and destabilized the structure of government. The government has not only declared its federal powers superior to those of the states but has also asserted its sovereign power over the rights of “we the people.”

The government has ceased to protect the people and instead waged domestic war against the people. The government has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, and destroyed the lives of the people.

The government has employed private contractors and mercenaries to carry out acts of death, desolation and tyranny against other nations, totally unworthy of a civilized nation. The government through its political propaganda has pitted its citizens against each other. The government has stirred up civil unrest and laid the groundwork for martial law.

Repeatedly, we have asked the government to cease its abuses. Each time, the government has responded with more abuse.

An Imperial Ruler who acts like a tyrant is not fit to govern a free people.

We have repeatedly sounded the alarm to our fellow citizens about the government’s abuses. We have warned them about the government’s power grabs. We have appealed to their sense of justice. We have reminded them of our common bonds. They have rejected our plea for justice and brotherhood. Thus, our fellow citizens are equally at fault for the injustices being carried out by the government.

Thus, for the reasons mentioned above, we the people of the united States of America declare ourselves free from the chains of an abusive government. Relying on the Creator’s protection, we pledge to stand by this Declaration of Independence with our lives, our fortunes and our honor.

See what I mean? The abuses meted out by an imperial government and endured by the American people have not ended. They have merely evolved.

Two hundred and forty-four years after a group of anti-government extremists declared their independence from tyranny, the American people have once again managed to work their way back under the tyrant’s thumb.

“We the people” are still being robbed blind by a government of thieves. We are still being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and monsters. We are still being locked up by a government of greedy jailers. We are still being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms. We are still being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers.

We are still being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and corporate pirates. And we are still being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army in the form of a militarized police.

The bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight. It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of—police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.—were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests and by American citizens who failed to heed James Madison’s warning to “take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.”

For too long now, we have suffered the injustices of a government that has no regard for our rights or our humanity.

We’ve suffered in silence for too long.

Frankly, what this country desperately needs is more anti-government extremists willing to take the government to task for its excesses, abuses and power grabs that fly in the face of every principle for which America’s founders risked their lives.

Having Sucked America Dry, Tech Giants Seek New Markets Beyond Reach of US Antitrust Laws

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Reid Mukai

Sept. 27, 2015 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hugs Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi at Facebook in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

An aggressive push to consolidate companies in the tech sector, coupled with the world’s ever-increasing dependence on digital platforms and tools, is quickly leading to a crisis of sovereignty.

By Raul Diego

Source: MintPress News

The American consumer market for big tech gadgets appears to have reached the point of saturation as the novelty of mobile devices and laptops plateau and the persistent lockdown sees savings dwindle and discretionary spending disappear. Apple, which has enjoyed reigning over the smartphone market for more than a decade, has been forced to drop its prices over the last year as a result of a market at full capacity.

Nevertheless, one of the world’s most liquid companies, along with other tech giants like Facebook and Google – whose parent company, Alphabet, Inc. recently overtook Apple as the most cash-rich company in the world – are taking full advantage of their position to gobble up startups in emerging sectors in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) space like Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), in order to solidify their place in other, mostly untapped markets in developing nations.

Big tech’s insatiable appetite, as manifested in this current sprint to further consolidate their assets, is bound to give them even more control over their already substantial access to our data and other digital activities of the population at large. Earlier this year, then Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren led the call to “Break Them Up,” in reference to the big tech companies, declaring that they had “bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.” Her plan to “level the playing field,” however, seems to have gone away with her fleeting candidacy.

Nonetheless, they are all gearing up to face an election-year challenge to their growing power as a year-long House Judiciary subcommittee investigation is set to conclude and will more than likely provide plenty of fodder for the antitrust battles looming on the horizon. Some analysts have speculated that the U.S. government could impose fines on companies like Google in the tens of billions for past violations. But, whether or not this Congress implements measures with any real teeth remains to be seen.

Captive market shares

American tech giants are turning their focus to south-east Asia as their original markets in the U.S. can no longer support most of their quarterly profit projections. Apple’s recent acquisition of Seattle-based Xnor.ai, which specializes in “low-power, edge-based artificial intelligence tools” that will help them develop low-cost hardware for things like security cameras using artificial visual intelligence.

The Xnor.ai acquisition is just one of several made by Apple this year. Others include an Irish AI platform called Voysis that enables voice interactions with digital retailers; NextVR, a virtual reality headset company that holds over 40 patents in that space and will help Apple carve out a niche in the burgeoning world of streaming music and sporting events.

Google, which already has a virtual monopoly over Internet search capabilities and related tools, is aggressively pursuing startups in the cloud computing space, healthcare, and advertising market. A salient example is the ongoing $2.1 Billion-dollar acquisition of Fitbit, which has reportedly entered its final stages but has raised calls in some quarters for U.S. antitrust regulators to take a closer look.

The bank of Zuckerberg

Meanwhile, Facebook is continuing its incursion into the virtual entertainment arena with the purchase of Sanzaru Games in February as the social media giant solidifies its VR stake by taking over both hardware and software sides of that emerging market. Zuckerberg has also added to his social media empire with plans to acquire animated gif search engine Giphy for $400 Million, extending his consolidation over two of the most popular social media and communication platforms in its portfolio: Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook’s recent $5.7 Billion-dollar investment in India’s Jio Platforms also reveals how the tech giant is betting on Asia for its future growth. Facebook claims that Jio has “brought more than 388 million people online” and is poised to leverage its ubiquitous presence in the country through WhatsApp, boasting that the chat/call app has become a “commonly used verb across many Indian languages and dialects.”

The Indian telecom, led by that nation’s richest man, also includes a recently launched e-commerce site called JioMart, that further opens the door for Facebook’s digital payments platform and has the very real potential to put the social media company in a new class as a payment processing giant, shaking up the status quo in a space largely controlled by the banking sector.

Breaking out of the virtual gold cage

Having sucked the American market dry, these colossal corporations continue their unfettered growth and are increasingly beyond the reach of national anti-monopoly laws. Their aggressive push to consolidate across sectors in the technology space, coupled with the world’s ever-increasing dependence on digital platforms and tools is quickly leading us into a crisis of sovereignty.

If three companies own or have a stake in virtually all of the apps, gadgets and software that are ultimately responsible for collecting out data, performing our transactions and providing the content we consume, we will effectively become prisoners of these same corporations.

Even if Google were to re-instate the infamous “don’t be evil” motto in its code of conduct, such a state of affairs would render that promise moot. The slew of acquisitions by the world’s top tech companies in the midst of an economic depression for the rest of us does not bode well for a future of greater self-determination as the wealth and knowledge gaps grow larger.

Efforts to bridge these gaps are being undertaken by people like Dion Devow in Australia, an entrepreneur who is on a mission to close the gap between Indigenous Australians and IT. But, how effective can such efforts really be in the long run if the technological infrastructure continues to accumulate in the hands of so very few?

America Has Always Been a Dystopia

Posted on July 5, 2020 by Reid Mukai

Too many of us just haven’t been paying attention

By Bryan Merchant

Source: OneZero

“Trump’s American dystopia has reached a new and ominous cliff,” warns a CNN opinion headline. “The last two and a half months in America have felt like the opening montage in a dystopian film about a nation come undone,” writes New York Times columnist Michele Goldberg, in describing the images of militarized police storming U.S. cities to put down protests in the days following George Floyd’s murder, which came on the heels of two months of pandemic, panic, and widespread economic collapse. A very popular post published elsewhere on Medium was titled, bluntly, “America is a Dystopia.”

There is a lot of dystopia talk getting tossed around right now, for reasons that probably seem obvious. Those images we’ve all spent hours staring at on Twitter and cable TV — the military vehicles patrolling suburban streets, the lines of tactical vested officers cordoned around the Lincoln Memorial, the scenes of tear gas blurring flames as masked protesters clash with armed police — match up reasonably well with the aesthetics and broad strokes of a genre that we’ve spent the last 10 years staring at on Netflix and the other channels on cable TV.

But this is not “Trump’s American dystopia.” It is the continued, if inflamed, dystopian state of play as it has laid for centuries. The montage of horrors did not begin only a few months ago or when a cohort of privileged observers suddenly became aghast at the SWAT howitzers and brutal policing tactics when they were seen on suburban streets.

Years of toothless and profitable pop culture dystopias have primed consumers to ignore race, helping to obscure the fact that the real dystopia arrived long ago.

Comparing America to a dystopia has become something of a national pastime.

If we wanted to get pithy about it, we might say that the 2010s were the dystopia decade, a period that saw both the rise of dystopia as a reliably profitable and uniform entertainment format in mass culture and what appeared to be the IRL manifestation of the images and tropes the genre broadcast by decade’s end. The Hunger Games rose to dominate box offices and spawned a follow-on flotilla of similarly shaped YA dystopian fare. Black Mirror mainstreamed a visual mode of bleak cynicism about technology, and critical darlings like Ex Machina, Her, and Mad Max: Fury Road made apocalypses brought about by artificial intelligence and climate change palatable for the intelligentsia. Meanwhile, Blade Runner, RoboCop, Starship Troopers, and Children of Men became frequent touchstones. Partly because they are good films that offered prescient cultural and political commentary, and partly because their visuals provide handy fodder for comparative screen-grabbing on social media while we’re watching high-tech police forces brutalize popular uprisings, climate change-fueled wildfires spread across cityscapes, and A.I. take on alarming new dimensions, like being racist.

As a result, comparing America to a dystopia has become something of a national pastime; a recurring op-ed framework, a subgenre of Twitter commentary — especially during crisis points and moments of mass upheaval.

But what are we actually talking about when we talk about “dystopia”? Gesturing towards a vague constellation of injustices set to the color palette of a “gritty” summer blockbuster and declaring it dystopian won’t cut it — for dystopia to be useful as a cautionary tool for avoiding bad futures, we need to understand exactly what the ingredients setting a society on the road to ruin are. As it stands, much of the modern dystopian discourse seems content to position dystopia as something that is bad, with an air of futurity. To quote Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s famous mocking of Black Mirror: “What if phones, but too much.” What if high-tech cops, what if sea level rise, etc.

“The adjective dystopian implies fearful futures where chaos and ruin prevail,” writes Gregory Claeys, a historian and professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of Dystopia: A Natural History. Though in a historical and literary sense, he says, dystopia most commonly describes “a regime defined by extreme coercion, inequality, imprisonment, and slavery.”

Because its most popular touchstones are science fiction, modern dystopia discourse tends to fixate on profit- or warfare-accelerating technologies — digital surveillance, facial recognition, automation software, drones, technologized weapons — and their capacity to serve the wealthy and powerful in a time of ecological collapse, health crises, and/or widening inequality. Our current moment fits the bill. The coronavirus, mass unemployment, and police brutality against a racial justice uprising are unfolding to the backdrop of SpaceX rocket launches and tech billionaires like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos rapidly expanding their wealth.

When I noted on Twitter that the SpaceX launch was sending astronauts on a for-profit trip into space as a surge of protests swept the country, it struck a chord. Many responded by comparing the events to Elysium, the 2013 Neill Blomkamp film about a future where the poor toil and swelter on Earth while the wealthy live in luxury in a space station that orbits above the Terran rabble.

Others pointed to the great Gil Scott Heron song, “Whitey’s On the Moon.” The musician and poet released it in 1970, one year after the NASA moon landing, which was itself one year after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination provoked a mass nationwide uprising, perhaps the last at a scale comparable to the one we’re seeing today.

Some of the lyrics:

A rat done bit my sister Nell.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Her face and arms began to swell.

(and Whitey’s on the moon)

I can’t pay no doctor bill.

(but Whitey’s on the moon)

Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.

(while Whitey’s on the moon)

That song was recorded a half-century ago, yet the plight remains the same. It was the same in 1993, when Octavia Butler, in her own magisterial dystopia, Parable of the Sower, set in a mostly Black community in Southern California in the apocalyptic 2020s, described the news of the death of a Mars explorer as eliciting the following reaction: “People here in the neighborhood are saying she had no business going to Mars, anyway. All that money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter.”

Billionaires can afford to send payloads into orbit, to explore space for science and for profit, but we cannot afford to provide health care to the poor or even basic racial equality. That’s what too many of us are missing when we talk about dystopia.

As comparatively radical as a dystopia like Elysium (or, say, Snowpiercer) is — in terms of summer blockbusters, anyway — its critique is limited to class. It glosses over race. It’s Matt Damon versus Sharlto Copley and Jodi Foster and the other white orbital techno-authoritarians. Take a scan through any of the most popular dystopian cinema products of the last decade or so, and you’ll find the same thing; matters of race are omitted almost entirely from the big screen eschatologies. Not only are the genre’s prime exports — Hunger Games, Divergent, Blade Runner, Elysium, RoboCop, the list goes on — written and directed by white people, the protagonists, actors, and even antagonists are nearly uniformly white. And despite many of these being imagined, written, and made in a nation whose founding arrangement was the most dystopian system conceivable, race is never even a component of the conversation in mainstream dystopian cinema, much less what the uprisings are predicated upon. Even the Handmaid’s Tale, which exploded in the wake of Trump’s misogyny-lined ascendency to the presidency, relegates any matter of racial politics deep into the background.

The most influential dystopia of the 21st century, I would argue, is not ‘1984,’ but ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ which alone is responsible for a generation of greed-is-good Republican policymaking.

Angelica Jade Bastién points all this out in “Why Don’t Dystopias Know How to Talk About Race?”, where she explains how this in effect allows white viewers to cosplay as the oppressed, without actually interrogating in any meaningful way what oppression might actually entail or who gets oppressed and why.

“Race is relegated to inspiration, coloring the towering cityscapes of these worlds, while the white characters toil under the hardships that Brown and Black people experience acutely in real life,” Bastién writes. “In this way, dystopias become less fascinating thought experiments or vital warnings than escapades in which white people can take on the constraints of what it means to be the other.”

And in so doing, these popular dystopias appropriate the other’s struggles while conveniently ignoring the actual roots of said struggle. I do still think there’s utility in dystopias and trying to heed their warnings, but only if we recognize what’s being warned against, and only, especially, if we manage to understand that many of the looming “dystopias” perceived by more affluent entertainment consumers have been the realities of plenty of communities who have faced deep inequalities, technologized surveillance, and state oppression for generations already.

There’s a tweet that’s gone viral a number of times over the dystopian decade, each time in slightly different variation. Its most recent iteration came just this January, before the pandemic and the uprising came to dominate dystopia discourse:

https://twitter.com/ElleOnWords/status/1218693768339251200

White dystopia fanboys like me, pundits, columnists, and social media users need to get this through our skulls. To invert a notorious quote attributed to William Gibson, the dystopia has always been here; it just hasn’t been evenly distributed.

The “dystopia” lens too often fixes conditions like those — heavily policed communities, invasive surveillance, state oppression — in the future, and it glosses over the realities of the present and the long histories of oppression of Black communities and bodies, plenty of which was technologically abetted. The writer Anthony Walton noted in a 1999 Atlantic piece, “Technology Versus African Americans,” that from “the caravel to the cotton gin, technological innovation has made things worse for Blacks.” Western technologies, he writes, formed the infrastructure that gave rise to Black slavery:

Arab and African slave traders exchanged their human chattels for textiles, metals, and firearms, all products of Western technological wizardry, and those same slavers used guns, vastly superior to African weapons of the time, in wars of conquest against those tribes whose members they wished to capture… The slave wars and trade were only the first of many encounters with Western technology to prove disastrous for people of African descent. In the United States, as in South America and the Caribbean, the slaves were themselves the technology that allowed Europeans to master the wilderness.

What better fits Claeys description of dystopia — “a regime defined by extreme coercion, inequality, imprisonment, and slavery” — than actual chattel slavery? America was founded as a dystopia.

Yet for white and affluent consumers, the constant generation of novel and fantastic apocalyptic scenarios serves to extend the horizon for the arrival of the hellish conditions contained in dystopia — if oppression is a nebulous but ever-approaching threat, it’s perpetually obscured, lifted away into a sub-fictional ether. It needs not be interrogated, not now, anyway. Which is how power prefers it.

That’s the other thing about dystopia: In many of its guises, it’s a plainly conservative enterprise. The most influential dystopia of the 21st century, I would argue, is not 1984, but Atlas Shrugged, which alone is responsible for a generation of greed-is-good Republican policymaking. The 600,000-page book, which I have (regrettably) read, positions a handful of great white men and women as the only thing keeping society together and inveighs against the millions of working-class “moochers” with a barely veiled racist subtext. (Its author was also openly racist.) Many dystopias are less flagrant but similarly conservative: They highlight the fear that we might all end up like the poor unwashed masses if we are not careful to uphold the social order, not the fear that the poor might never be liberated. And that, in fact, includes the ur-dystopia.

“Visions of the apocalypse are at least as old as 1000 B.C.,” according to the dystopian historian Claeys. “The triumph of chaos over order defined the Egyptian ‘Prophecies of Neferti’ foretold the complete breakdown of society.” In it, the “great no longer rule the land,’ the ‘slaves will be exalted.’” The first dystopia, in other words, was a cautionary tale for the haves against sliding into the world of the have-nots. It’s hard not to shake that vibe from a lot of the Twitter commentariat, pointing at the protests from afar, going “man it’s so dystopian” and moving on to whatever the central animating conflict is in their own personal heroic narratives.

There are still useful deployments of dystopian language — it can certainly be effective shorthand for “this is fucked in a new way, pay attention.” A good example is this series of viral tweets that chronicle a day of peaceful protest where demonstrators were in turn greeted with the creepy electrified visage of Gov. Andrew Cuomo on a towering billboard, beaming down the newly instated curfew. A couple hours later, many protesters would be beaten.

NYC Has Become A Dystopian Novel: What Happened After 8pm Curfew

I’ve been to many protests and marches during my life, but I’ve never seen anything like what we experienced last night.

I think everyone around the country and world needs to understand what’s happening here. pic.twitter.com/kWdgdLxZ6M

— Frederick Joseph (@FredTJoseph) June 3, 2020

And dystopias can still jolt the politically uninvolved to wake up — this podcaster even pointed to Elysium as an entry point into radical politics. But the surfeit of commentary that amounts to “wow, this is like Blade Runner send tweet” needs an upgrade. White viewers like me need to rethink and reevaluate what it means to watch and read popular dystopian fiction, how those products are shaping our perspectives and critiques of the futures and what they’re missing. And many more Black voices clearly need to be added to the mainstream canon and the broader discussion — there’s tons of great Black dystopian fiction; Dhalgren by Samuel Delany, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, Zone One by Colson Whitehead, pretty much anything by Ishmael Reed. Who Fears Death is in development for a TV series, which is a start, but these voices need to be better foregrounded and made central to modern dystopia discourse.

A lack of diversity has been a problem in science fiction since the genre’s inception, and it persists. When I went to the Nebulas, a high-profile sci-fi awards conference last year, attendees were overwhelmingly white. The fact that Octavia Butler’s magisterial Parable of the Sower — a dystopia that actually and skillfully manages to interrogate climate change, total economic collapse, privatization, and racist oppression — is somehow not a film or a limited series yet is as scathing an indictment of Hollywood’s insistence on whitewashing dystopias as anything. The book absolutely rips.

This is not to disparage anyone who feels like they’re living in a certain kind of almost-future hell. The number of people who genuinely experience the world as an impending or current dystopia is almost certainly rising in tandem with trends of still-increasing inequality. A decade of jobless recovery ended in 2019 with the highest levels of income inequality in 50 years, and record numbers of people of all backgrounds, even whites, are sliding into poverty and despair, and our encounters with climate change, technological surveillance, conservatism’s hard drift toward authoritarianism, and all of the above being increasingly mediated through digital devices. Our current socioeconomic system is now ideally structured to be a dystopian protagonist generator. It is rewarding elites with unprecedented wealth and luxury, equipping the agents of the state with increasingly advanced weapons and technology, exacerbating ecological collapse, and positioning us all to experience the devastation alone, blinking into a screen, hoping for tiny units of validation from a pithy comment or two about the state of the morass on social media. It is us versus [gestures wildly] all of that, out there.

Which makes it all the more imperative that white fans, pundits, and observers stop ignoring what it has historically meant to experience actual dystopian conditions. It means acknowledging and working to improve the material conditions for those who are surviving the current iteration, and not glibly waving off dystopia as some always-approaching, faceless Empire without zeroing in on the nation’s institutional prejudices, its targets for violence, its specific hatreds. It means we have to stop LARPing in appropriated fictions. It means understanding that this has always been a dystopia — and that those who have always resisted it are at the center of the story.

Globalists Reveal That The “Great Economic Reset” Is Coming In 2021

Posted on June 25, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

For those not familiar with the phrase “global economic reset”, it is one that has been used ever increasingly by elitists in the central banking world for several years. I first heard it referenced by Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF at the time, in 2014. The reset is often mentioned in the same breath as ideas like “the New Multilateralism” or “the Multipolar World Order” or “the New World Order”. All of these phrases mean essentially the same thing.

The reset is promoted as a solution to the ongoing economic crisis which was triggered in 2008. This same financial crash is still with us today, but now, after a decade of central bank money printing and debt creation, the bubble is even bigger than it was before. As always, the central bank “cure” is far worse than the disease, and the renewed crash we face today is far more deadly than what would have happened in 2008 if we had simply taken our medicine and refused to prop up weak parts of the economy artificially.

Many alternative economists often wrongly attribute the Fed’s habit of making things worse to “hubris” or “ignorance”. They think the Fed actually wants to save the financial system or “protect the golden goose”, but this is not reality. The truth is, the Fed is not a bumbling maintenance man, the Fed is a saboteur, a suicide bomber that is willing to destroy even itself as an institution in order to explode the US economy and clear the path for a new globally centralized one world system. Hence, the “Global Reset”.

In 2015 in my article ‘The Global Economic Reset Has Begun’, I stated:

“The global reset is not a “response” to the process of collapse we are trapped in today. No, the global reset as implemented by central banks and the BIS/IMF is the cause of the collapse. The collapse is a tool, a flamethrower burning a great hole in the forest to make way for the foundations of the globalist Ziggurat to be built….economic disaster serves the interests of elitists.”

Now in 2020 we see the globalist plan coming to fruition, with the elites revealing what appears to be their intent to launch their reset in 2021. The World Economic Forum officially announced the Great Reset initiative as part of their Covid Action Platform last week, and a summit is scheduled in January 2021 to discuss their plans more openly with the world and the mainstream media.

The WEF also posted a rather bizarre video on the Reset, which consists of a series of images of the world falling apart (and images of factories releasing harmless carbon emission into the air which I suppose is meant to scare us with notions of global warming). The destruction is then “reset” at the push of a button, with everything reversing back to a pristine human-less world of nature and the words “Join Us”.

The reset, according to discussions by the IMF, is basically the next stage in the formation of a one-world economic system and potential global government. This seems to fall in line with the solutions offered during the Event 201 pandemic simulation; a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic that was held by the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum only two months before the REAL THING happened at the beginning of 2020. Event 201 suggested that one of the top solutions to a pandemic would be the institution of a centralized global economic body that could handle the financial response to the coronavirus.

Is it not convenient that the events of the real coronavirus pandemic fall exactly in line with the Event 201 simulation, as well as directly in line with the global reset plans of the IMF and the World Economic Forum? As they say, let no crisis go to waste, or, as is the motto of the globalists “Order Out Of Chaos”.

With civil unrest about to become a way of life for many parts of the world including the US, and the pandemic set for a resurgence of infections after the “reopening”, creating a rationale for a second wave of lockdowns probably in July, the economy as we know it is being destroyed. The last vestiges of the system, hanging by a thin thread after the crash of 2008, are now being cut.

The goal is rather obvious – Terrify the population with poverty, internal conflicts and a broken supply chain until they lobby the establishment for help. Then, offer the “solution” of medical tyranny, immunity passports, martial law, a global economic system based on a cashless digital society in which privacy in trade is erased, and then slowly but surely form a faceless “multilateral” global government which answers to no one and does whatever it pleases.

I remember back in 2014 when Christine Lagarde first began talking about the reset. That same year she also made a very strange speech to the National Press Club in which she started rambling gleefully about numerology and the “magic number 7”. Many within the club laughed, as there was apparently an inside joke that the rest of us were not privy to. Well, I would point out that the World Economic Forum meeting on the global reset in 2021 will be held exactly 7 years after Lagarde gave that speech. Just another interesting coincidence I suppose…

The new world order, the global reset, is a long running scheme to centralize power, but in a way that is meant to be sustained for centuries to come. The elites know that it is not enough to achieve global governance by force alone; such an attempt would only lead to resistance and eternal rebellion. No, what the elites want is for the public to ASK, even beg for global governance. If the public is tricked into demanding it as a way to save them from the horrors of global chaos, then they are far less likely to rebel against it later. Problem – reaction – solution.

The pandemic is not going away anytime soon. Everyone should expect that state governments and the federal government will call for renewed lockdowns. With these new lockdowns, the US economy in particular will be finished. With 40 million people losing their jobs during the last lockdowns, many states only partially reopened, and only 13% to 18% of small businesses receiving bailout loans to survive, the next two months are going to be a devastating wake-up call.

The real solution will be for people to form more self reliant communities free of the mainstream economy. The real solution should be decentralization and independence, not centralization and slavery. The globalists will seek to interfere with any effort to break from the program. That said, they can do very little if millions of people enact localization efforts at the same time. If people aren’t reliant on the system, then they cannot be controlled by the system.

The real test will come with the final collapse of the existing economy. When stagflation spikes even harder than it is right now and prices of necessities double or triple yet again, and joblessness skyrockets even further, how many people will clamor for the globalist solution and how many will build their own systems? How many will be bowing in submission and how many will be ready to fight back. It is a question I still don’t have an answer to even after 14 years of analysis on the issue.

What I suspect is that many people will fight back. Not as many as we might hope for, but enough to defend the cause of liberty. Maybe this is overly optimistic, but I believe the globalists are destined to lose this war in the long run.

Facebook using “fact-checkers” to censor dissent on Covid19

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Reid Mukai

Familiar tactics of obfuscation and weasel-words deployed to block access to articles

By Off-Guardian.org

Facebook has flagged our article “It’s all bullshit”: 3 links sinking the Covid narrative” as ‘false information’, based on nothing but a single ‘fact check’ website, which does not even claim the information is ‘false’, but merely quibbles over terminologies to justify claiming the information is ‘misleading.’

This is what you see today if you try to access that article on Facebook:

And if you click on the ‘see why’ button you get taken here, to the website of Health Feedback, an “independent fact-checker”.

Of course, they’re not independent – they’re actually funded by Facebook. They are also funded by the “Credibility Coalition”, an NGO focused on “common standards for information credibility”.

The Credibility Coalition are also funded by Facebook. And twitter. And google. And a whole host of unsavoury sounding NGOs.

So, with the idea that “health feedback” are anywhere close to “independent” firmly debunked, let’s see what they have to say.

Firstly, it’s important to note what is actually being “fact-checked” here.

It is not that the three documents were leaked. It is not the accuracy of the quotes used. It is not the statistics cited. In fact, not a single factual claim is being called “false”.

In short, Facebook is well aware that 90% of the article is perfectly provably true.

In fact, it’s not our article they’re allegedly fact-checking, it’s another article in the publication NewsPunch, which relies on one of the same sources we do.

The “fact-check” is entirely devoted to just one of three leaks we describe – the report from German Interior Ministry employee – and even then focuses solely on its provenance rather than its content. In essence, what is being “fact-checked” is not the report itself, but where it came from.

Nowhere in this ‘rebuttal’ does it claim the ‘German Ministry employee’ was lying or making provably false statements. Neither does it challenge the credentials, competence or honesty of the “independent scientists” who co-authored the report.

Instead, it uses diversionary language claiming the document’s main author, Stephan Kohn, was simply sharing his “private opinion” and was not authorised to speak for the government.

The author of the document is Stephan Kohn, a politologist and employee of Germany’s Interior Ministry in the KM 4 department for the Protection of Critical Infrastructures. However, Kohn’s analysis was not requested by the Interior Ministry, as the article claims. On 10 May, Germany’s Interior Ministry issued a press release stating that the employee had disseminated his “private opinion on the corona crisis management” and that the “elaboration was carried out outside the area of responsibility as well as without assignment and authorization”.

This approach should be hauntingly familiar to anyone who has been following the OPCW whistleblower story. Where expert witnesses contradicting the official narrative on Douma were claimed to merely be “disgruntled ex-employees” who were in Syria of their own accord and “never part of the fact-finding mission”.

All these claims have since been shown to be lies.

In addition to these irrelevant obfuscations, the article uses weasel words to construct a flimsy counter-argument:

According to EuroMOMO, the number of excess deaths coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic was twice the number that occurred during the unusually deadly flu seasons of 2017, 2018, and 2019 (Figure 1).

Note that they only back three years in time, and not all the way to 2000 or 1998, both of which had very similar excess death numbers.

Note also they say “coinciding with”, and not “caused by”. This allows them to cite all the excess deaths in Europe, despite statistics showing that huge numbers of the excess deaths were due to other causes – including the lockdown limiting access to healthcare and increasing poverty.

They are using excess deaths caused by the lockdown, to argue against the accuracy of a report warning that the lockdown will cause excess deaths.

It is going full Orwell. And it is utterly disgusting.

This article simply does not offer any justification for dismissing our article reporting Kohn’s words as ‘false information’. The information is NOT demonstrably false, it is merely contentious, in that the data is open to multiple interpretations.

In fact, the article admits that itself – only able to label the claim as “misleading” or “unsupported”. Nowhere do they use the word “disinformation” or “misinformation” or “false information”. Not once.

And yet that is the label facebook has stuck on it.

Facebook is not suppressing this article because it contains false information at all, it is censoring it because it offers an interpretation of facts that does not support the current mainstream dogma.

This is censorship, pure and simple.

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After the Crash

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

Category Archives: Dystopia

America Has Always Been a Dystopia

Too many of us just haven’t been paying attention