Category Archives: elites

“At First I Thought it Was a Joke”: Academic Media Censorship Conference Censored by YouTube

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The entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — was mysteriously disappeared from YouTube say conference organizers.

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

An academic critical media literacy conference warning of the dangers of media censorship has, ironically, been censored by YouTube. The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas 2020 took place without incident online over two days in October and featured a number of esteemed speakers and panels discussing issues concerning modern media studies.

Weeks later, however, the entire video record of the conference — estimated at around 24 hours of material — disappeared from YouTube. Organizer Nolan Higdon of California State University East Bay, began receiving worried messages from other academics, some of which were shared with MintPress, who had been using the material in their classrooms, noting that it had all mysteriously disappeared.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” said Mickey Huff of Diablo Valley College, California. “My initial reaction was ‘that’s absurd;’ there must have been a mistake or an accident or it must have got swept under somehow. There is no violation, there was no reasoning, there was no warning, there was not an explanation, there was no nothing. The entire channel was just gone,” he told MintPress. Huff is also the director of Project Censored, an organization that sponsored the event.

Higdon suspected that it was the content critical of big tech monopolies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter that was the reason why the channel was deleted. “Each video was a different panel and every panel had different people from the other ones, so it is not like there was one theme or person or copyrighted content in all of our videos; this seems to be an attack on the conference, not on a singular video,” he said.

 

“This wasn’t a keg party with Parler users”

The organizers were careful to avoid copyright infringement, with the large majority of their videos in lecture format, essentially a recorded Zoom call. Speakers included some of the best-known names in media studies, with the event sponsored by institutions like Stanford University and UCLA. “This wasn’t a keg party with Parler users: it was an academic conference,” Huff said.

These are pioneering figures in critical media literacy scholarship. It’s mind numbing that all of this was just disappeared from YouTube. The irony is writ large…This is part of a potentially algorithmic way of getting rid of more radical positions that criticize establishment media systems, including journalism.”

Higdon too, suspected YouTube’s action was politicized: “This is the same year we saw big tech trying to influence Prop 22 here in California, so I am not too surprised that they would be aggressive with folks like us who are critical of media corporations.”

Organizers say they attempted to contact YouTube but did not receive a reply.

MintPress spoke to representatives from Google, YouTube’s parent company, who strenuously denied that they would ever remove content from their platforms purely because it was critical of the company, noting that there is a wealth of videos on the website that challenge or attack them.After looking into the matter, Google said they could find only one video and reinstated it (although the video does not appear on the conference’s channel). As for the hours of other footage, that remains an enigma to them, with no record of its existence. Thus, it appears that there will be no closure or a definitive answer to this mystery.

 

Algorithms take aim

Media literacy, big tech power, and censorship are hot topics right now. In the wake of the dramatic storming of the Capitol Building earlier this month, a host of companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, took actions against Donald Trump, limiting his and his supporters’ ability to communicate online. Perhaps most notably, however, Google, Apple, and Amazon Web Services launched a coordinated assault on “free speech app” Parler, a service popular with the far-right for its lax laws on racism. Together, the three effectively took the service offline around the world.

More recently, the Wall Street Bets subreddit, responsible for intentionally sinking a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, has endured retaliation, its communications channels cut by messaging app Discord, amid calls to immediately criminalize their behavior.

While the pros and cons of such decisions can, and have been, debated, the bigger question of should privately-owned companies be allowed to have the power to regulate who can and cannot speak online, has largely been downplayed.

“On the one hand I understand they have the right to deplatform people,” Huff told MintPress. “On a broader level though, I don’t think they should have achieved this kind of power over our communication systems in the first place, and these should be publicly run platforms regulated the same way our government regulates and enforces the First Amendment.”

Higdon was equally worried about the power amassed by the tech giants. “By empowering these tech companies to decide what is and is not appropriate, they are going to look out for their vested interests, and people who are critical of their business model and practices are going to be targets,” he said, predicting that,

These lefties right now who are advocating for censorship…the outcome of this is going to be on them.”

If history is any judge, he will be proven correct. In the wake of the 2016 election and the allegations that Russian disinformation swung the result in Trump’s favor, social media companies changed their algorithms to help halt the spread of fake news. The main result, however, was a throttling of traffic to high-quality alternative news sites and the promotion of corporate media like CNN and Fox News. Overnight, Consortium News’ Google traffic fell by 47%, Common Dreams’ by 37%, Democracy Now! By 36% and The Intercept by 19%. MintPress suffered similar, unrecoverable losses.

Likewise, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally approved the deliberate choking of alternative media, admitting that his company deranked Mother Jones because of its left-wing persuasion (despite Facebook’s assurances that it was doing no such thing). Other, more radical outlets have suffered even greater reductions in traffic.

 

Anti-social media

Whatever decisions big tech companies make reverberate throughout society. 35, 24, and 17% of Americans get their news from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, respectively, with similar numbers worldwide. This enormous user base makes them by far the greatest and most influential news platforms on the planet, with the ability to highlight stories, bury others, and even swing elections. Huff was extremely worried about the power of these new media monopolies.

“We can’t get away from the fact that Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, the whole corporate Alphabet soup of this big tech dystopia have gobbled up the public sphere. This is where people can go to congregate and share their information and it is also where invisible forces decide which voices get heard and which do not. Let’s also not forget that all of this tech was initially funded with taxpayer money.”

Worse still, although we now live in an online world, the public is hopelessly ill-equipped to navigate its waters, displaying a shocking lack of awareness and understanding of how they can be manipulated.

A 2016 study from Stanford University found that two-thirds of college-aged “digital natives” — people who grew up using the Internet — mistook native advertising for a genuine news story, even with the words “sponsored content” displayed prominently. “Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak,” the study concluded, leading to calls for more critical media literacy education in schools. “Since we are not teaching people how to use these technologies, or how these technologies use them, they are more susceptible to propaganda and to disinformation. And ironically our conference was designed to combat exactly that problem,” Huff added.

Perhaps more worrying of all is the increasingly close connections between Silicon Valley and the National Security State. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century…technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Late last year, the CIA signed a partnership deal worth tens of billions of dollars with Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Web Services. Meanwhile, Facebook has partnered with the NATO cutout organization the Atlantic Council to help them curate the world’s news feeds. Reddit has also hired Atlantic Council official Jessica Ashooh as its director of policy.

The Atlantic Council’s board of directors includes eight former CIA chiefs, multiple U.S. Army Generals, and high statespeople like Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, meaning that any decisions big tech companies make are only one step removed from the U.S. government. “This is actually [state] censorship by proxy,” Higdon warned.

“These companies, we know thanks to Edward Snowden and others, have contracts with the Federal government. There is a revolving door between particularly the Democratic Party and big tech, and there are also various loans and government protections given to this industry. So this is not some independent set of entities making this decision.”

“If 1984’s protagonist Winston Smith were a real character today he’d be a fact checker at Facebook or a content curator at YouTube, relegating to the dustbins of history whatever programmers are told to or whatever keywords our conference triggered,” Huff added.

Big tech has repeatedly acted at the behest of the U.S. government to silence its international opponents, suspending the accounts of foreign leaders like Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro or Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei or deranking foreign media outlets like RT and TeleSUR.

It is in this light that the deletion of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas can be seen; not as a deliberate decision by an angry Google employee intent on revenge, but as the result of a powerful and Byzantine algorithm designed by Silicon Valley executives who are intimately intertwined with both the government and the corporate world. There is little oversight of their power or recourse to their decisions, given their enormous influence over public life today.

Huff was particularly sardonic about the whole affair:

There are layers of irony here that are certainly not lost on us. But I don’t know if the public at large is realizing the attack that is happening against the very people that are the intellectual bulwark against such institutional censorship. I’m not trying to make us out to be martyrs here, but my point is that I think it has a particular irony when the very public intellectuals who try to educate the public about how these systems work are silenced,” he said.

Enemies of the Deep State: The Government’s War on Domestic Terrorism Is a Trap

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“This is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends. What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? [The proposed legislation could create] a very dangerous undermining of our civil liberties, our freedoms in our Constitution, and a targeting of almost half of the country.”—Tulsi Gabbard, former Congresswoman

This is how it begins.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties.

Of course, “domestic terrorist” is just the latest bull’s eye phrase, to be used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.

In a déjà vu mirroring of the legislative fall-out from 9/11, and the ensuing build-up of the security state, there is a growing demand in certain sectors for the government to be given expanded powers to root out “domestic” terrorism, the Constitution be damned.

If this is a test of Joe Biden’s worthiness to head up the American police state, he seems ready.

As part of his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to confront and defeat “a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism.” Biden has also asked the Director of National Intelligence to work with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in carrying out a “comprehensive threat assessment” of domestic terrorism. And then to keep the parallels going, there is the proposed Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2021, introduced after the Jan. 6 riots, which aims to equip the government with “the tools to identify, monitor and thwart” those who could become radicalized to violence.

Don’t blink or you’ll miss the sleight of hand.

This is the tricky part of the Deep State’s con game that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

It follows the same pattern as every other convenient “crisis” used by the government as an excuse to expand its powers at the citizenry’s expense and at the expense of our freedoms.

As investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald warns:

“The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This New War on Terror—one that is domestic in name from the start and carries the explicit purpose of fighting ‘extremists’ and ‘domestic terrorists’ among American citizens on U.S. soil—presents the whole slew of historically familiar dangers when governments, exploiting media-generated fear and dangers, arm themselves with the power to control information, debate, opinion, activism and protests.”

Greenwald is referring to the USA Patriot Act, passed almost 20 years ago, which paved the way for the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since Sept. 11, 2001.

Some members of Congress get it.

In a letter opposing expansion of national security powers, a handful congressional representatives urged their colleagues not to repeat the mistakes of the past:

“While many may find comfort in increased national security powers in the wake of this attack, we must emphasize that we have been here before and we have seen where that road leads. Our history is littered with examples of initiatives sold as being necessary to fight extremism that quickly devolve into tools used for the mass violation of the human and civil rights of the American people… To expand the government’s national security powers once again at the expense of the human and civil rights of the American people would only serve to further undermine our democracy, not protect it.”

Cue the Emergency State, the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

This is the power grab hiding in plain sight, obscured by the political machinations of the self-righteous elite. This is how the government continues to exploit crises and use them as opportunities for power grabs under the guise of national security. Indeed, this is exactly how the government added red flag gun laws, precrime surveillance, fusion centers, threat assessments, mental health assessments, involuntary confinement to its arsenal of weaponized powers.

The objective is not to make America safe again. That has never been the government’s aim.

Greenwald explains:

“Why would such new terrorism laws be needed in a country that already imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world as the result of a very aggressive set of criminal laws? What acts should be criminalized by new ‘domestic terrorism’ laws that are not already deemed criminal? They never say, almost certainly because—just as was true of the first set of new War on Terror laws—their real aim is to criminalize that which should not be criminalized: speech, association, protests, opposition to the new ruling coalition.”

So you see, the issue is not whether Donald Trump or Roger Stone or MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell deserve to be banned from Twitter, even if they’re believed to be spouting misinformation, hateful ideas, or fomenting discontent.

Rather, we should be asking whether any corporation or government agency or entity representing a fusion of the two should have the power to muzzle, silence, censor, regulate, control and altogether eradicate so-called “dangerous” or “extremist” ideas.

This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose.

The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

Yet where many go wrong is in assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or challenging the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

Eventually, all you will really need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

The groundwork has already been laid.

The trap is set.

All that is needed is the right bait.

With the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents have been busily spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate. Computers by way of AI (artificial intelligence) now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

For instance, police in major American cities have been using predictive policing technology that allows them to identify individuals—or groups of individuals—most likely to commit a crime in a given community. Those individuals are then put on notice that their movements and activities will be closely monitored and any criminal activity (by them or their associates) will result in harsh penalties.

In other words, the burden of proof is reversed: you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.

Dig beneath the surface of this kind of surveillance/police state, however, and you will find that the real purpose of pre-crime is not safety but control.

Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, 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, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

According to one FBI latest report, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories, especially if you “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”

Additionally, according to Michael C. McGarrity, the FBI’s assistant director of the counterterrorism division, the bureau now “classifies domestic terrorism threats into four main categories: racially motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority extremism, animal rights/environmental extremism, and abortion extremism.”

In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.

Again, where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

In fact, U.S. police agencies have been working to identify and manage potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats for some time now.

In much the same way that the USA Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect, the government’s anti-extremism program renders otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.

You will be tracked wherever you go.

You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.

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

The government has been building its pre-crime, surveillance network in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the corporate sector and globally), 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).

If you’re not scared yet, you should be.

Connect the dots.

Start with the powers amassed by the government under the USA Patriot Act, note the government’s ever-broadening definition of what it considers to be an “extremist,” then add in the government’s detention powers under 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.

To that, add tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones and balloons 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 picture, toss in the real-time crime centers being deployed in cities across the country, which will be attempting to “predict” crimes and identify so-called criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.

Hopefully you’re starting to understand how easy we’ve made it for the government to identify, label, target, defuse and detain anyone it views as a potential threat for a variety of reasons that run the gamut from mental illness to having a military background to challenging its authority to just being on the government’s list of persona non grata.

There’s always a price to pay for standing up to the powers-that-be.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.

All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.

Newspeak in the 21st Century: How to Become a Model Citizen in the New Era of Domestic Warfare

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By Cynthia Chung

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

With President Biden’s inauguration many feel that they can finally breathe a deep sigh of relief. At last sanity has been restored and we can all go back to our predictable lives knowing that the future can only get better during these next four years.

Well…not quite.

There still remains the problem that everybody may not be on board with the progressive changes that Biden’s Administration plans to push through. This, of course, is wholly unacceptable.

Disagreement has become an extremely sensitive issue lately; it was once thought that debate was an essential component to a strong and healthy democracy, however, we are now told that it is extremely dangerous, in fact, it may soon be categorised as a form of domestic terrorism.

As early as mid-Nov 2020, Biden was already discussing the need to pass further laws against domestic terrorism. This is interesting since under the 2001 Patriot Act (which was meant to be a temporary enforcement in reaction to 9/11, however, is still in place 19 years later), domestic terrorism is already defined as;

“activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state; (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.”

So, the question begs, what else needs to be added to the Patriot Act, which was recognised at the time of its enforcement as something that should only be temporary since it was understood that it infringed upon civil liberties? Come to think of it, why is the Patriot Act still in place, which allows for the indefinite continuation of human rights violations such as warrantless wiretapping; illegal torture, kidnapping, and detention; mass surveillance; government secrecy; Real ID; no-fly list; political spying; abuse of material witness statutes; and attacks on academic freedom?

As Glenn Greenwald wrote in his formidable paper The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming, “what needs to be criminalized that is not already a crime?”, keeping in mind that as of June 2020, the United States has the highest prisoner rate in the world, followed by El Salvador, Turkmenistan, Thailand and Palau.

Well, the answer is apparently simple and as always for our own good. We have come to a point in time where the enemy is not some radicalized ideology, it is not some foreign despot, it is not even the threat of war (whether it be economic, cyber or nuclear), but rather it is ourselves. We, the people, are the new enemies of the State.

You may protest “Not I! I am a model citizen! I pay my taxes on time, I am never late or call in sick for work, I make sure to be up-to-date with the newest ‘woke’ revelations and I don’t engage with anything outside of the mainstream matrix during my free-time.” People such as yourself think, that when the Biden Administration is calling for tougher laws against domestic terrorism, that it is obviously meant for the ‘other guy,’ those uneducated bigots who are screaming at the top of their lungs “Treason!” and inciting what we are told to be forms of ‘insurrection,’ all in the name of the archaic ideas of ‘patriotism’ and the ‘U.S. Constitution.’

You, unlike so many others, have no problem recognising that the U.S. Constitution is actually part of the problem, that by the standards used today, the U.S. Constitution is itself responsible for ‘inciting violence’ and thus guilty of domestic terrorism, and thus needs to be revoked.

But you see… that’s just not good enough.

Though you are well on your way to becoming a model citizen in the 21st century, you still have a little ways to go. It is for this reason that a guide to 21st century Newspeak has been recently released to make sure that well-intentioned citizens like yourself are fully informed of what is required of you in terms of appropriate behaviour, as well as appropriate thoughts, and though this will take a little more time, appropriate instincts.

21st Century Newspeak

The first alteration that will need to take place is freedom of thought. It has been shown through peer-review studies that individual thoughts are susceptible to forming erroneous beliefs and can lead to dangerous behaviours such as refusal to integrate into a community standard.

Once an individual refuses to integrate into its designated community, it is only a matter of time before this individual shows opposition and even antagonism towards said community. Thus failure to integrate is one of the first signs that an individual is on the path to becoming a domestic terrorist.

Because the individual mind is flawed, it can no longer be trusted to be the standard of its own judgement of what is right and wrong. It is for this reason that we are introducing groupthink. This concept is not new, however, the difference is from now on the individual’s environment will only be allowed to reciprocate the values of groupthink, and all other thoughts outside of groupthink are to be banned and punishable under the new laws.

Even if thoughts outside of groupthink appear as harmless to the collective, they are not, for any thought that is not groupthink threatens to lead to a different outcome than that intended by groupthink and thus is a threat to the security of the collective.

In order to ensure commitment to groupthink, it will be mandatory that every individual engage in at least 2 minutes of Hate every hour throughout the day, every day. This can be achieved either by watching 2 minutes of Hate news, or by engaging in a public 2 minutes of Hate with a colleague, a friend or family member via social media.

It is imperative that an individual watch the 15 minute morning and evening “What to Hate” news provided by the Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue), in order to be the most up-to-date with what are the ongoing and new subjects of Hate, and what were previous subjects of Hate which are no longer deemed to be subjects of Hate.

It is most important that an individual never refer to a former subject of Hate as such. Any present subject of Hate must be seen as having always been a subject of Hate and any former subject of Hate must be seen as having never been a subject of Hate.

This may appear as an impossible task, but we assure you it is entirely possible with the use of doublethink, which many of you have already been practising. Doublethink requires that one be both conscious and unconscious of the fact that they are telling deliberate lies while genuinely believing them; to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies. This makes up a part of our new Party slogan: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

Those who excel the most in doublethink will receive the highest stations within our newly organised community, as safe-guards against the renegade, the domestic terrorist.

Another alteration that will need to occur is how we think and refer to the past and the future. With the newly enforced groupthink, the present is what groupthink dictates it to be, which is subject to change, however, must be regarded as having always been.

The past is what the present dictates it to be, if it were not, it could challenge the basis for the present. Thus to preserve the present, the past must serve the present, only justifying why we Hate what we presently Hate and why we Love what we presently Love and can do nothing to contradict these Party lines. There will be permitted no records of an alternative past, there will be no way to prove that the past was ever different from what the present dictates it to be, the only threat to this narrative is the record of the individual mind, and once this ceases to be there will only be the Minitrue record as the recorder of past Truth.

In effect, the model citizen will perceive the past as dead and the future as unimaginable. The future is unimaginable because it is impossible to think of an alternative to the present, in fact, the mere act of thinking of an alternative to the present is considered a challenge to the status quo of the present, and thus is a challenge to groupthink, and thus is a form of domestic terrorism, which we will call from now on thoughtcrime.

Thoughtcrime is essentially any thought pertaining to memory, judgement of right and wrong, thoughts of an alternative reality, and self-reflection, which are now all deemed forms of thoughtcrime. If an individual is to engage in any of these sorts of thoughts, it is only a matter of time before they will come into conflict with groupthink and the Party line, thus private thoughts are banned and punished under the new laws.

It may seem an impossible task at first not to engage in private thoughts, but again, we assure you it is entirely possible using crimestop. Crimestop is the practice of not grasping analogies, failing to perceive logical errors, misunderstanding the simplest arguments, of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop is essentially, protective stupidity.

It is imperative that one practice crimestop during any interaction with another individual, however, it is also imperative that one practice crimestop within their own inner-dialogue, such that even from your own conscience you will be protected from committing a thoughtcrime.

Newspeak will also help dissuade from thoughtcrime. Newspeak is to be the new acceptable vocabulary, anything that references words outside of the most-up-to-date edition of the Newspeak dictionary will be considered Oldspeak and something to be construed as counter to groupthink. It is understood that by reducing the vocabulary to revolve around a few words such as good; which for example can be used as plusgood, doubleplusgood, ungood etc, it will serve to narrow the range of thought an individual is capable of, and thus reduce the capability of committing a thoughtcrime. How wonderful! That in the future we will be unable to commit crime for we will be incapable of its thought! This makes up another part of our new Party slogan: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

In terms of the new laws, in effect, nothing will change. Unacceptable behaviours and thoughts will not be designated as illegal per se; one reason for this is because we do not plan on having any public trials. Anyone who is in violation of conduct will simply be removed either temporarily into a “re-education facility” or will be vaporised. Any subject that has been vaporised will be removed from the collective memory records and can never be referred to as having ever existed.

The reason why no public trials will be held from now on is because, as we have seen, dissent is infectious. Thus, holding public trials risk further encouragement towards dissent. It is for this reason that dissenters must be removed swiftly and quietly in the middle of the night. Such disappearances will occur relatively regularly and will eventually become the new normal, however, it will not be traumatic for the collective. The subject will simply cease to exist as if it were all just a dream, the structure of our daily routine unaffected.

In order to ensure utmost compliance, the collective will be employing the use of children spies, this has already been occurring abroad, and proves to be very effective.

Purges and vaporizations will be a necessary part of the government mechanics and will become the new normal. We have already discussed the necessity for vaporizations, as for the necessity of purges, it is because the community will be built so as to remain in stasis, however, this can only be accomplished through artificial means, for it is not natural that a thing remain the same but rather that it either improves or deteriorates.

However, in order for the Party to maintain absolute control, there can be no change to the present except for that chosen by the Party, thus any change is a challenge to the Party. In order to facilitate an artificial environment of no change, resources must artificially be kept low, and purges need to occur so that this environment of scarcity is tightly controlled and maintained.

In order for us to achieve this, our economy will have to go through stagnation, we will need to decrease the amount of land used for cultivation, we will no longer add capital equipment needed for industrial growth and great blocks of the population will be prevented from working and will be kept half alive by State charity. The wheels of industry cannot be allowed to turn so as to increase the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed, and in practice the only way of achieving this is by continuous warfare.

War will continue under the Old Cold War doctrine. War will always be present, and yet will never be seen by the majority of our citizens, the reason for this being that war will not be about a real threat to security nor about real conquests but rather will be about maintaining the present status quo by exhausting the surplus of consumable goods, while also helping to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.

However, real war will be purely an internal affair, the war waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, with the object of the war as to keep the structure of society intact and unchanging.

A peace that is truly permanent under this new ideology is no different than an invisible permanent war. For peace in our new era will equate to stability through no change. This makes up our first Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.

Conclusion

All of these means are necessary if we are to realise that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism, and that oligarchy is the only means to achieving peace, freedom and strength for the collective.

However, we are still very far from this ideal and there is much that threatens its becoming, namely, the masses, or what we call the proles. So long as the masses believe that they are entitled to freedom of thought, our endeavours cannot succeed.

The individual must voluntarily relinquish this. It cannot be taken from them no matter the degree of control and no matter the threat of physical harm. An individual’s mind is theirs and cannot be taken, instead, the individual must be led to believe that it is in their best interest to relinquish their mind.

Let us do our best then to convince the individual that they are no longer fit to use their mind and let us pray that we are successful, for if we fail, our entire system of control fails with it.

 

“You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity…Reality exists only in the human mind, nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

– O’Brien in George Orwell’s “1984”

Return to the Source: Democracy is Dead

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By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

By what stretch of the imagination can the US be a democracy when ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does?

“The disregard of popular will is obvious for all to see.”

“Return to the Source” is a series in The Black Agenda Review that reprints previously-published interventions by Black Agenda Reportcontributors. Our title is inspired by an address delivered by Amilcar Cabral  on October 15, 1972 at Lincoln University and reprinted in the collection Return to the Source: Selected Speech by Amilcar Cabral  (1973). Cabral’s address was titled “Identity and Dignity in the Context of the National Liberation Struggle.” In it, he argued that a “return to the source” was critical to revolutionary transformation—a return to the ideas, culture, and demands that served as the foundational impetus for the struggle for African liberation. Guided by Cabral’s analysis, we will return to some of the “classic” interventions by Black Agenda Report contributors, revisiting their tremendous insights into the contemporary conditions of the Black World. 

We are launching the series by reprinting BAR columnist and Prejudential  author Margaret Kimberley’s incisive commentary “Democracy is Dead.” Originally published on April 23, 2014, Kimberley describes the domination of the US democratic process by capital, the abandoning of the working classes by the state, and the perplexing tendency of most US citizens to “suspend disbelief” while holding tight to the myth of US exceptionalism. Her analysis is as relevant now as it was when originally written.

Democracy is Dead 

by Margaret Kimberley

“The notion that this country is a democracy has become openly farcical.”

Too many Americans love to boast that the United States is a democracy. That idea is accepted uncritically and celebrated as proof of this country’s superiority. Every public activity and event is an opportunity for the false narrative to be repeated and indulged. Events as disparate as elections, holiday celebrations, advertisements, school commencements and religious worship are all used to propagandize and create false belief about the degree of power the average citizen has vis a vis their government. Of course all evidence shows that this narrative is and always was a lie. Dictionaries define democracy as government representing the citizens through elected representatives, or as majority rule, or a society which provides equal rights to all. The history of this country has rarely lived up to any of those descriptions but in the recent past the notion that this country is a democracy has become openly farcical. We have nothing but meaningless trappings and any power exercised by the people is sadly in short supply.

This state of affairs has been obvious to anyone who has been paying close attention. Americans not only don’t get what they want from the political system, they actually get the opposite of what they want. The pace of the oligarchic state has quickened lately but the dynamic has been evident for quite some time.

“Americans get the opposite of what they want.”

Even elite academia is taking notice and has given official imprimatur to a conversation that had been ignored. Professors Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University are the authors of the study  “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” While their work does not as news stories suggest use the word oligarchy, the authors are quite clear about their findings. Professor Gilens gave this brief summary  of their conclusions:

“I’d say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States [italics mine]. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups – of economic elites and of organized interests.”

While this study has however briefly changed public discourse, it is important to note that the disregard of popular will is obvious for all to see. If this were not true, the minimum wage would be higher, there would be no cuts to entitlement programs, and Americans would have a single payer health care system. There would be no NAFTA or TPP free trade agreements which force a race to the bottom for workers, destroy entire eco-systems and violate national and popular sovereignty. If this country were truly democratic, the city of Detroit would not have filed for bankruptcy for the simple reason that voters in Detroit and in the state of Michigan voted to repeal the emergency manager law which brought bankruptcy into being.

“Disregard of popular will is obvious for all to see.”

Americans don’t want the increasingly frequent interventions abroad forced upon by them by president after president yet that is what they get. We want to address the problems created by human made climate change. We don’t want hydraulic fracturing, or the pollution or earthquakes that come with it, but that is what we have. We don’t want rich people to control the political process but the Supreme Court has said time and again that money equals speech and those decisions prove the point of the study. Simply put, money talks and those without money have no voice.

If that were not the case, American workers would not be poorer than their counterparts in the rest of the world. The so-called middle class  workers in this country had the distinction of being better off than their peers around the world. That is no longer the case with stagnating wages and job loss and a country that does not practice income distribution that would keep people out of poverty. In a democratic country, Walmart and its low wages would not be the largest employer. The manufacturing that once dominated the economic landscape would still employ the bulk of the work force with its higher wages and other benefits that provide economic security.

In a democracy, the financial services industry that created the worldwide economic meltdown would not have been bailed out. Workers would be bailed out. Corporations wouldn’t get tax breaks and other government subsidies. Workers would get them. And if the average person had any say in the matter, the big time banksters would now be behind bars.

“In a democratic country, Walmart and its low wages would not be the largest employer.”

The myth of American democracy is just one of many that are cherished out of ignorance and suspension of disbelief but that is not a reason to continue the confusion and self-delusion. The only time we get any taste of democracy is when we proclaim that we don’t have it but assert plainly and loudly that we intend to get it.

The phony narrative wears thin as the quality of life diminishes. The United States of America is not a democratic nation if the only right that citizens have is to go to a polling place every few years. It is time to stop fetishizing what clearly does not work for the majority of people and start talking about something new. After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. The only result we have to show is rule by the elites and if that is acceptable then the people have gone truly insane.

Raskolnikov’s Dream Come True

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

“Something is happening here,
But you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones?”
— Bob Dylan, Ballad of A Thin Man

It’s hard.

Life today seems like a dream, doesn’t it?  Surreal to the point where everything seems haunted and betwixt and between, or this against that, or that and this against us.

Something.

Or a Luis Buñuel film.  The logic of the irrational. Surrealistic.  A film made to draw us into an ongoing nightmare.  Hitchcock with no resolution. Total weirdness, as Hunter Thompson said was coming before he blew his brains out.  A life movie made to hypnotize in this darkening world where reality is created on screens, as Buñuel said of watching movies:

This kind of cinematographic hypnosis is no doubt due to the darkness of the theatre and to the rapidly changing scenes, lights, and camera movements, which weaken the spectator’s critical intelligence and exercise over him a kind of fascination.

Here we are in Weirdsville, USA where most people, whether of the left, right, or center, are hypnotized by the flickering screens.

That’s what movies do.

That’s what long planned psychological operations do.

That’s what digital technology allows corrupt rulers and the national security state with its Silicon Valley partners in crime to do.

We now live in a screen world where written words and logic are beside the point. Facts don’t matter. Personal physical experience doesn’t matter.  Clear thinking doesn’t matter. Hysterical reactions are what matter.  Manipulated emotions are what matter.  Saying “Fuck You” is now de rigueur, as if that were the answer to an argument.

It’s all a movie now with the latest theatrical performance having been the January 6, 2021 stage show filmed at the U.S. Capital.  A performance so obvious that it isn’t obvious for those hypnotized by propaganda, even when the movie clearly shows that the producers arranged for the “domestic terrorists” to be ushered into the Capital.  They let the “Nazis” in on Dr. Goebbels orders.  Thank God Almighty they were beaten back before they seized power in their Halloween costumes.

Now who could have given that order to the Capital and D.C. police, Secret Service, National Guard, and the vast array of militarized Homeland Security forces that knew well in advance of the January 6 demonstration?

Who gave the stand-down orders on September 11, 2001, events that were clearly anticipated and afterwards were described by so many as if they were a movie?  Surreal. Dreamlike.

As with the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the recently staged show at the Capital that the mainstream media laughingly call an attempted coup d’état will result in a new “Patriot Act” aimed at the new terrorists – domestic ones – i.e. anyone who dissents from the authoritarian crackdown long planned and underway; anyone who questions the vast new censorship and the assault on the First Amendment; anyone who questions the official narrative of Covid-19 and the lockdowns; anyone who suggests that there are linkages between these events, etc.

Who, after all, introduced the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act in 1995 that became the template for the Patriot Act in 2001 that was passed into law after September 11, 2001?  None other than former Senator Joseph Biden. Remember Joe?  He has a new plan.

Of course, the massive Patriot Act had been written well before that fateful September day and was ready to be implemented by a Senate vote of 98-1, the sole holdout being Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.  In the House of Representatives the vote was 357-66.

For those familiar (or unfamiliar)  with history and fabricated false flags, they might want also to meditate on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 that gave Lyndon Johnson his seal of approval to escalate the war against Vietnam that killed so many millions. The vote for that fake crisis was 416-0 in the House and 88-2 in the Senate.

In the words of Mark Twain:

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

Harry Houdini, the magical performer who was able to escape from any trap, any nightmarish enclosure, any lockdown, once said, “It’s still an open question, however, as to what extent exposure really hurts a performer.”

The question has been answered.  It doesn’t hurt at all, for phony events still mesmerize millions who are eager to suspend their disbelief for the sake of a sad strand of hope that their chosen leaders – whether Biden or Trump – are levelling with them and are not playing them for fools. To accept that Trump and Biden are scripted actors in a highly sophisticated reality TV movie is a bit of “reality” too hard to bear.  Exposing them and their minions doesn’t hurt at all.  There’s no business but show business.

Houdini knew well the tricks used to deceive a gullible audience hypnotized by theatrics. “A magician is only an actor,” he said, “an actor pretending to be a magician.”  This is a perfect description of the charlatans who serve as presidents of the United States.

Life today seems like a dream, doesn’t it?

“Will wonders ever cease,” said Houdini, as he closed his shows.

When I was a child I had a repetitive dream that I was trapped in a maze.  Trying to escape, all I could hear as I tried desperately to find an exit was a droning sound.  Droning without end.  The only way I could escape the maze was to wake up – literally.  But this dream would repeat for many years to the point where I realized my dreams were connected to my actual family and life in the U.S.A.

Then, when I was later in the Marines and felt imprisoned and was attempting to get out as a conscientious objector, the dream changed to being trapped in the Marines, or the prison I was expecting if they didn’t let me go. Even when I got out of the Marines and was not in prison, the dreams that I was continued.

It took me years to learn how to escape.

I mention such dreams since they seem to encapsulate the feelings so many people have today. A sense of being trapped in a senseless social nightmare. Prisoners. Lost in a horror movie like Kafka’s novel The Castle in which the protagonist K futilely seeks to gain access to the rulers who control the world from their castle but can never reach his goal.

But these are dreams and The Castle is fiction.

On a conscious level, however, many people continue to rationalize their grasp of what is going on in the United States as if what they take to be reality is not fiction. Trump supporters –despite what are seen by them as his betrayals when he said on January 7 that “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy….My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power. This moment calls for healing and reconciliation.” – still cling to the belief that he is the man they believe in and was going to “clean the swamp” but was sabotaged by the “deep state.” Biden supporters, driven by their obsessive hatred for Trump and the ongoing delusions that the Democratic Party, like the Republican, is not thoroughly corrupt, look forward to the Biden presidency and the new normal when he can “build back better.”  For both groups true faith never dies. It’s very touching.

As I have written before, if the Democrats and the Republicans are at war as is often claimed, it is only over who gets the larger share of the spoils. Trump and Biden work for the same bosses, those I call the Umbrella People (those who own and run the country through their intelligence/military/media operatives), who produce and direct the movie that keeps so many Americans on the edge of their seats in the hope that their chosen good guy wins in the end.

It might seem as if I am wrong and that because the Democrats and their accomplices have spent years attempting to oust Trump through Russia-gate, impeachment, etc. that what seems true is true and Trump is simply a crazy aberration who somehow slipped through the net of establishment control to rule for four years.  A Neo-Nazi billionaire who emerged from a TV screen and a golden tower high above the streets of New York.

This seems self-evident to the Democrats and the supporters of Joseph Biden, and even to many Republicans.

For Trump’s supporters, he seems to be a true Godsend, a real patriot who emerged out of political nowhere to restore America to its former greatness and deliver economic justice to the forgotten middle-Americans whose livelihoods have been devastated by neo-liberal economic policies and the outsourcing of jobs.

Two diametrically opposed perspectives.

But if that is so, why, despite Trump and Biden’s superficial differences – and Obama’s, Hillary Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s for that matter – have the super-rich gotten richer and richer over the decades and the war on terror continued as the military budget has increased each year and the armament industries and the Wall Street crooks continued to rake in the money at the expense of everyone else?  These are a few facts that can’t be disputed. There are many more. So what’s changed under Trump?  We are talking about nuances, small changes.  A clown with a big mouth versus traditional, “dignified” con men.

Trump’s followers were betrayed the day he was sworn in, as Biden’s will be shortly unless they support a crackdown on civil rights, the squelching of the First Amendment, and laws against dissent under the aegis of a war against domestic terrorism.

I’m afraid that is so.  Censorship of dissent that is happening now will increase dramatically under the Biden administration.

Now we have the “insurrection,” also known as an attempted “coup d’état,” with barbarians breaching the gates of the sacred abode of the politicians of both parties who have supported bloody U.S. coups throughout the world for the past seventy plus years. Here is another example of history beginning as tragedy and ending as farce.

But who is laughing?

If you were writing this script as part of long-term planning, and average people were getting disgusted from decades of being screwed and were sick of politicians and their lying ways, wouldn’t you stop the reruns and create a new show?

Come on, this is Hollywood where creative showmen can dazzle our minds with plots so twisted that when you leave the theater you keep wondering what it was all about and arguing with your friends about the ending. So create a throwback film where the good guy versus the bad guy was seemingly very clear, and while the system ground on, people would be at each other’s throats over the obvious differences, even while they were fabricated or were minor. This being the simple and successful age-old strategy of divide and conquer

I realize that it is very hard for many to entertain the thought that Trump and Biden are not arch-enemies but are players in a spectacle created to confound at the deepest psychological levels.  I am not arguing that the Democrats didn’t want Hillary Clinton to win in 2016.  I am saying they knew Trump was a better opponent, not only because they could probably defeat him and garner more of the spoils, but because if he possibly won he was easily controlled because he was compromised.  By whom?  Not the Democrats, but the “Deep State” forces that control Hillary Clinton and all the presidents.  A compromised and corrupt lot.

The Democrats and Republicans were not in charge in 2016 or in 2020.  Their bosses were.  The Umbrella people.  Biden will carry out their orders, and while everyone will conveniently forget what actually happened during Trump’s tenure, as I previously mentioned, they will only remember how the Democrats “tried” to oust this man in the black hat, while Biden will carry on Trump’s legacy with minor changes and a lot of PR. He will seem like a breath of fresh air as he continues and expands the toxic policies of all presidents.  So it goes.

Throughout these recent days that the corporate mainstream media have devoted to this Trump/Biden saga, Julian Assange, a truth teller if ever there were one, remains tortured and locked up in an English high-security prison cell.  His plight has been a minor note at best for the corporate media that is focused on the American “coup d’état.” The spectacle rolls on as an innocent journalist who exposed the vast murderous crimes of the American government is left to slowly die in a horrible prison cell. A man who, if free, could report the truth of this current charade and expose the bloody underside of this magic show.

Long ago in Russia, another dissident, Fyodor Dostoevsky, was also sentenced on trumped up charges to prison and exile in Siberia for being “freethinking” and a socialist enemy of the state. When he was finally released, he wrote a novel that was published in 1866.  It was Crime and Punishment, a masterpiece about a man named Rodian Romanovich Raskolnikov who, like Dostoevsky, is sentenced to exile and imprisonment in Siberia.  In Raskolnikov’s case, it was for killing an old woman pawnbroker to see if he was “above the common ruck.” The story explores Raskolnikov’s dual consciousness and the right to murder; prideful intellect versus compassion; rationalism versus spiritual values; freedom versus determinism; the individual versus the state.

Like Nietzsche twenty years later, Dostoevsky sent out a warning long ago about the terrifying consequences that would follow in the wake of certain forms of thinking that would result in nihilism. To be “above the common ruck” and murder at will; to play with people as though they were what Raskolnikov calls the woman he murders – “louses”; to create divided minds in a game of social schizophrenia through antitheses that conceal the magician’s devious truths.

At the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, while still in Siberian prison exile, feels that he, like Lazarus, has been raised from the dead.  He realizes that there is a solution to his split mind and that he has found it as he transitions “from one world into another…his initiation into a new, unknown life.”

But such a resolution that I will not divulge is preceded by a very strange dream, one that rings a bell today when life seems like a dream with something happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

When he [Raskolnikov] was better, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish and delirious.  He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible strange new plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia.  Everyone was to be destroyed except a few chosen ones.  Some sort of new microbe was attacking people’s bodies, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will.  Men attacked by them became instantly furious and mad.  But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.  Whole villages, whole towns and peoples were driven mad by the infection.  Everyone was excited and did not understand one another.  Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands.  They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know who to blame, who to justify….The alarm bells kept ringing all day long in the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was summoning them no one knew….The plague spread and moved further and further.  Only a few men could be saved in the whole world.  They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.

Have you?

Another Mega Group Spy Scandal? Samanage, Sabotage, and the SolarWinds Hack

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By Whitney Webb

Source: The Unz Review

The devastating hack on SolarWinds was quickly pinned on Russia by US intelligence. A more likely culprit, Samanage, a company whose software was integrated into SolarWinds’ software just as the “back door” was inserted, is deeply tied to Israeli intelligence and intelligence-linked families such as the Maxwells.

In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies, major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.

The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were “likely Russian in origin,” but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.

Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets began reporting the intelligence community’s “likely” conclusion as fact right away, with the New York Times subsequently reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the “Russian hackers.” Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the evidence-free report from US intelligence on “likely” Russian involvement, is said to be the reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds’ contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.

Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election, when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of “Russian hackers” in that event.

There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.

Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.

Orion’s Fall

In the month since the hack, evidence has emerged detailing the extent of the damage, with the Justice Department quietly announcing, the same day as the Capitol riots (January 6), that their email system had been breached in the hack—a “major incident” according to the department. This terminology means that the attack “is likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people,” per NextGov.

The Justice Department was the fourth US government agency to publicly acknowledge a breach in connection to the hack, with the others being the Departments of Commerce and Energy and the Treasury. Yet, while only four agencies have publicly acknowledged fallout from the hack, SolarWinds software is also used by the Department of Defense, the State Department, NASA, the NSA, and the Executive Office. Given that the Cyber Unified Coordination Group stated that “fewer than ten” US government agencies had been affected, it’s likely that some of these agencies were compromised, and some press reports have asserted that the State Department and Pentagon were affected.

In addition to government agencies, SolarWinds Orion software was in use by the top ten US telecommunications corporations, the top five US accounting firms, the New York Power Authority, and numerous US government contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and the Federal Reserve. Other notable SolarWinds clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, and several mainstream news outlets including the Economist and the New York Times.

Based on what is officially known so far, the hackers appeared to have been highly sophisticated, with FireEye, the cybersecurity company that first discovered the implanted code used to conduct the hack, stating that the hackers “routinely removed their tools, including the backdoors, once legitimate remote access was achieved—implying a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to operational security.” In addition, top security experts have noted that the hack was “very very carefully orchestrated,” leading to a consensus that the hack was state sponsored.

FireEye stated that they first identified the compromise of SolarWinds after the version of the Orion software they were using contained a back door that was used to gain access to its “red team” suite of hacking tools. Not long after the disclosure of the SolarWinds hack, on December 31, the hackers were able to partially access Microsoft’s source code, raising concerns that the act was preparation for future and equally devastating attacks.

FireEye’s account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is one of FireEye’s clients, and FireEye was launched with funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth being skeptical of the “free tool” FireEye has made available in the hack’s aftermath for “spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems.”

In addition, Microsoft, another key source in the SolarWinds story, is a military contractor with close ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, especially Unit 8200, and their reports of events also deserve scrutiny. Notably, it was Unit 8200 alumnus and executive at Israeli cybersecurity firm Cycode, Ronen Slavin, who told Reuters in a widely quoted article that he “was worried by the possibility that the SolarWinds hackers were poring over Microsoft’s source code as prelude to a much more ambitious offensive.” “To me the biggest question is, ‘Was this recon for the next big operation?’” Slavin stated.

Also odd about the actors involved in the response to the hack is the decision to bring on not only the discredited firm CrowdStrike but also the new consultancy firm of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer of Facebook and Yahoo, to investigate the hack. Chris Krebs is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was previously a top Microsoft executive. Krebs was fired by Donald Trump after repeatedly and publicly challenging Trump on the issue of election fraud in the 2020 election.

As head of CISA, Krebs gave access to networks of critical infrastructure throughout the US, with a focus on the health-care industry, to the CTI League, a suspicious outfit of anonymous volunteers working “for free” and led by a former Unit 8200 officer. “We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an industry leading secure software development company,” a SolarWinds spokesperson said in an email cited by Reuters.

It is also worth noting that the SolarWinds hack did benefit a few actors aside from the attackers themselves. For instance, Israeli cybersecurity firms CheckPoint and CyberArk, which have close ties to Israeli intelligence Unit 8200, have seen their stocks soar in the weeks since the SolarWinds compromise was announced. Notably, in 2017, CyberArk was the company that “discovered” one of the main tactics used in an attack, a form of SAML token manipulation called GoldenSAML. CyberArk does not specify how they discovered this method of attack and, at the time they announced the tactic’s existence, released a free tool to identify systems vulnerable to GoldenSAML manipulation.

In addition, the other main mode of attack, a back door program nicknamed Sunburst, was found by Kaspersky researchers to be similar to a piece of malware called Kazuar that was also first discovered by another Unit 8200-linked company, Palo Alto Networks, also in 2017. The similarities only suggest that those who developed the Sunburst backdoor may have been inspired by Kazuar and “they may have common members between them or a shared software developer building their malware.” Kaspersky stressed that Sunburst and Kazuar are not likely to be one and the same. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Unit 8200 is known to have previously hacked Kaspersky and attempted to insert a back door into their products, per Kaspersky employees.

Crowdstrike claimed that this finding confirmed “the attribution at least to Russian intelligence,” only because an allegedly Russian hacking group is believed to have used Kazuar before. No technical evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking has yet been presented.

Samanage and Sabotage

The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was “compiled, signed and delivered through the existing software patch release management system,” per reports. This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had “a high degree of familiarity with the software.” While the way the attackers gained access to Orion’s code base has yet to be determined, one possibility being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.

US investigators have been focusing on offices of SolarWinds that are based abroad, suggesting that—in addition to the above—the attackers were likely working for SolarWinds or were given access by someone working for the company. That investigation has focused on offices in eastern Europe, allegedly because “Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted” in those countries.

It is worth pointing out, however, that Israeli intelligence is similarly “deeply rooted” in eastern European states both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, ties well illustrated by Israeli superspy and media tycoon Robert Maxwell’s frequent and close associations with Eastern European and Russian intelligence agencies as well as the leaders of many of those countries. Israeli intelligence operatives like Maxwell also had cozy ties with Russian organized crime. For instance, Maxwell enabled the access of the Russian organized crime network headed by Semion Mogilevich into the US financial system and was also Mogilevich’s business partner. In addition, the cross-pollination between Israeli and Russian organized crime networks (networks which also share ties to their respective intelligence agencies) and such links should be considered if the cybercriminals due prove to be Russian in origin, as US intelligence has claimed.

Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in 2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government. Israel is deemed by the NSA to be one of the top spy threats facing US government agencies and Israel’s list of espionage scandals in the US is arguably the longest, and includes the Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s to the Larry Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2009.

Though much reporting has since been done on the recent compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, little attention has been paid to Samanage. Samanage offers what it describes as “an IT Service Desk solution.” It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage’s products could be added to SolarWinds’ IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying that it is an American company, Samanage is actually an Israeli firm. It was founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked for several years at MAMRAM, the Israeli military’s central computing unit.

Samanage was SolarWinds’ first acquisition of an Israeli company, and, at the time, Israeli media reported that SolarWinds was expected to set up its first development center in Israel. It appears, however, that SolarWinds, rather than setting up a new center, merely began using Samanage’s research and development center located in Netanya, Israel.

Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed SolarWinds Service Desk, became listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition’s announcement in April of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time. Samanage’s automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the now-compromised software during that period.

Samanage appears to have had access to Orion following the announcement of the acquisition in April 2019. Integration first began with Orion version 2019.4, the earliest version believed to contain the malicious code that enabled the hack. In addition, the integrated Samanage component of Orion was responsible for “ensuring the appropriate teams are quickly notified when critical events or performance issues [with Orion] are detected,” which was meant to allow “service agents to react faster and resolve issues before . . . employees are impacted.”

In other words, the Samanage component that was integrated into Orion at the same time the compromise took place was also responsible for Orion’s alert system for critical events or performance issues. The code that was inserted into Orion by hackers in late 2019 nevertheless went undetected by this Samanage-made component for over a year, giving the “hackers” access to millions of devices critical to both US government and corporate networks. Furthermore, it is this Samanage-produced component of the affected Orion software that advises end users to exempt the software from antivirus scans and group policy object (GPO) restrictions by providing a warning that Orion may not work properly unless those exemptions are granted.

Samanage, Salesforce, and the World Economic Forum

Around the time of Samange’s acquisition by SolarWinds, it was reported that one of Samanage’s top backers was the company Salesforce, with Salesforce being both a major investor in Samanage as well as a partner of the company.

Salesforce is run by Marc Benioff, a billionaire who got his start at the tech giant Oracle. Oracle was originally created as a CIA spin-off and has deep ties to Israel’s government and the outgoing Trump administration. Salesforce also has a large presence in Israel, with much of its global research and development based there. Salesforce also recently partnered with the Unit 8200-linked Israeli firm Diagnostic Robotics to “predictively” diagnose COVID-19 cases using Artificial Intelligence.

Aside from leading Salesforce, Benioff is a member of the Vatican’s Council for Inclusive Capitalism alongside Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, and members of the Lauder family, who have deep ties to the Mega Group and Israeli politics.

Benioff is also a prominent member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and the inaugural chair of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), making him one of the most critical players in the unfolding of the WEF-backed Great Reset. Other WEF leaders, including the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, have openly discussed how massive cyberattacks such as befell SolarWinds will soon result in “even more significant economic and social implications than COVID-19.”

Last year, the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity, of which Salesforce is part, simulated a “digital pandemic” cyberattack in an exercise entitled Cyber Polygon. Cyber Polygon’s speakers in 2020 included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, and IBM executive Wendi Whitmore, who previously held top posts at both Crowdstrike and a FireEye subsidiary. Notably, just months before the COVID-19 crisis, the WEF had held Event 201, which simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that crippled the world’s economy.

In addition to Samanage’s ties to WEF big shots such as Marc Benioff, the other main investors behind Samanage’s rise have ties to major Israeli espionage scandals, including the Jonathan Pollard affair and the PROMIS software scandal. There are also ties to one of the WEF’s founding “technology pioneers,” Isabel Maxwell (the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister of Ghislaine), who has long-standing ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus and the country’s hi-tech sector.

The Bronfmans, the Maxwells, and Viola Ventures

At the time of its acquisition by SolarWinds, Samanage’s top investor was Viola Ventures, a major Israeli venture-capital firm. Viola’s investment in Samanage, until its acquisition, was managed by Ronen Nir, who was also on Samanage’s board before it became part of SolarWinds.

Prior to working at Viola, Ronen Nir was a vice president at Verint, formerly Converse Infosys. Verint, whose other alumni have gone on to found Israeli intelligence-front companies such as Cybereason. Verint has a history of aggressively spying on US government facilities, including the White House, and created the backdoors into all US telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook, on behalf of the US’ NSA.

In addition to his background at Verint, Ronen Nir is an Israeli spy, having served for thirteen years in an elite IDF intelligence unit, and he remains a lieutenant colonel on reserve duty. His biography also notes that he worked for two years at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, which is fitting given his background in espionage and the major role that Israeli embassy has played in several major espionage scandals.

As an aside, Nir has stated that “thought leader” Henry Kissinger is his “favorite historical character.” Notably, Kissinger was instrumental in allowing Robert Maxwell, Israeli superspy and father of Ghislaine and Isabel Maxwell, to sell software with a back door for Israeli intelligence to US national laboratories, where it was used to spy on the US nuclear program. Kissinger had told Maxwell to connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to US national laboratories, which directly enabled this action, part of the larger PROMIS software scandal.

In addition, Viola’s stake was managed through a firm known as Carmel Ventures, which is part of the Viola Group. At the time, Carmel Ventures was advised by Isabel Maxwell, whose father had previously been directly involved in the operation of the front company used to sell bugged software to US national laboratories. As noted in a previous article at Unlimited Hangout, Isabel “inherited” her father’s circle of Israeli government and intelligence contacts after his death and has been instrumental in building the “bridge” between Israel’s intelligence and military-linked hi-tech sector to Silicon Valley.

Isabel also has ties to the Viola Group itself through Jonathan Kolber, a general partner at Viola. Kolber previously cofounded and led the Bronfman family’s private-equity fund, Claridge Israel (based in Israel). Kolber then led Koor Industries, which he had acquired alongside the Bronfmans via Claridge. Kolber is closely associated with Stephen Bronfman, the son of Charles Bronfman who created Claridge and also cofounded the Mega Group with Leslie Wexner in the early 1990s.

Kolber, like Isabel Maxwell, is a founding director of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Maxwell, who used to chair the center’s board, stepped down following the Epstein scandal, though it’s not exactly clear when. Other directors of the center include Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad. Kolber’s area of expertise, like that of Isabel Maxwell, is “structuring complex, cross-border and cross industry business and financial transactions,” that is, arranging acquisitions and partnerships of Israeli firms by US companies. Incidentally, this is also a major focus of the Peres Center.

Other connections to Isabel Maxwell, aside from her espionage ties, are worth noting, given that she is a “technology pioneer” of the World Economic Forum. As previously mentioned, Salesforce—a major investor in Samanage—is deeply involved with the WEF and its Great Reset.

The links of Israeli intelligence and Salesforce to Samanage, and thus to SolarWinds, is particularly relevant given the WEF’s “prediction” of a coming “pandemic” of cyberattacks and the early hints from former Unit 8200 officers that the SolarWinds hack is just the beginning. It is also worth mentioning the Israeli government’s considerable ties to the WEF over the years, particularly last year when it joined the Benioff-chaired C4IR and participated in the October 2020 WEF panel entitled “The Great Reset: Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Start Up Nation Central, an organization aimed at integrating Israeli start-ups with US firms set up by Netanyahu’s longtime economic adviser Eugene Kandel and American Zionist billionaire Paul Singer, have asserted that Israel will serve a “key role” globally in the 4th Industrial Revolution following the implementation of the Great Reset.

Gemini, the BIRD Foundation, and Jonathan Pollard

In addition to Viola, another of Samange’s leading investors is Gemini Israel Ventures. Gemini is one of Israel’s oldest venture-capital firms, dating back to the Israeli government’s 1993 Yozma program.

The first firm created by Yozma, Gemini was put under the control of Ed Mlavsky, who Israel’s government had chosen specifically for this position. As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, Mlavsky was then serving as the executive director of the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, where “he was responsible for investments of $100 million in more than 300 joint projects between US and Israeli high-tech companies.”

A few years before Gemini was created, while Mlavsky still headed BIRD, the foundation became embroiled in one of the worst espionage scandals in US history, the Jonathan Pollard affair.

In the indictment of US citizen Pollard for espionage on Israel’s behalf, it was noted that Pollard delivered the documents he stole to agents of Israel at two locations, one of which was an apartment owned by Harold Katz, the then legal counsel of the BIRD Foundation and an adviser to Israel’s military, which oversaw Israel’s scientific intelligence-gathering agency, Lekem. US officials told the New York Times at the time that they believed Katz “has detailed knowledge about the [Pollard] spy ring and could implicate senior Israeli officials.”

Subsequent reporting by journalist Claudia Wright pointed the finger at the Mlavsky-run BIRD Foundation as one of the ways Israeli intelligence funneled money to Pollard before his capture by US authorities.

One of the first companies Gemini invested in was CommTouch (now Cyren), which was founded by ex-IDF officers and later led by Isabel Maxwell. Under Maxwell’s leadership, CommTouch developed close ties to Microsoft, partially due to Maxwell’s relationship with its cofounder Bill Gates.

A Coming “Hack” of Microsoft?

If the SolarWinds hack is as serious as has been reported, it’s difficult to understand why a company like Samanage would not be looked into as part of a legitimate investigation into the attack. The timing of Samanage employees gaining access to the Orion software and the company’s investors including Israeli spies and those with ties to past espionage scandals where Israel used back doors to spy on the US and beyond raises obvious red flags. Yet, any meaningful investigation of the incident is unlikely to take place, especially given the considerable involvement of discredited firms like CrowdStrike, CIA fronts like FireEye and a consultancy firm led by former Silicon Valley executives with their own government/intelligence ties.

There is also the added fact that both of the main methods used in the attack were analogous or bore similarities to hacking tools that were both discovered by Unit 8200-linked companies in 2017. Unit 8200-founded cybersecurity firms are among the few “winners” from the SolarWinds hack, as their stocks have skyrocketed and demand for their services has increased globally.

While some may argue that Unit 8200 alumni are not necessarily connected to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, numerous reports have pointed out the admitted fusion of Israeli military intelligence with Israel’s hi-tech sector and its tech-focused venture capital networks, with Israeli military and intelligence officials themselves noting that the line between the private cybersecurity sector and Israel’s intelligence apparatus is so blurred, it’s difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. There is also the Israeli government policy, formally launched in 2012, whereby Israel’s intelligence and military intelligence agencies began outsourcing “activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber technologies.”

Samanage certainly appears to be such a company, not only because it was founded by a former IDF officer in the military’s central computing unit, but because its main investors include spies on “reserve duty” and venture capital firms linked to the Pollard scandal as well as the Bronfman and Maxwell families, both of whom have been tied to espionage and sexual blackmail scandals over the years.

Yet, as the Epstein scandal has recently indicated, major espionage scandals involving Israel receive little coverage and investigations into these events rarely lead anywhere. PROMIS was covered up largely thanks to Bill Barr during his first term as Attorney General and even the Pollard affair has all been swept under the rug with Donald Trump allowing Pollard to move to Israel and, more recently, pardoning the Israeli spy who recruited Pollard during his final day as President. Also under Trump, there was the discovery of “stingray” surveillance devices placed by Israel’s government throughout Washington DC, including next to the White House, which were quickly memory holed and oddly not investigated by authorities. Israel had previously wiretapped the White House’s phone lines during the Clinton years.

Another cover up is likely in the case of SolarWinds, particularly if the entry point was in fact Samanage. Though a cover up would certainly be more of the same, the SolarWinds case is different as major tech companies and cybersecurity firms with ties to US and Israeli intelligence now insist that Microsoft is soon to be targeted in what would clearly be a much more devastating event than SolarWinds due to the ubiquity of Microsoft’s products.

On Tuesday, CIA-linked firm FireEye, which apparently has a leadership role in investigating the hack, claimed that the perpetrators are still gathering data from US government agencies and that “the hackers are moving into Microsoft 365 cloud applications from physical, on-premises servers,” meaning that changes to fix Orion’s vulnerabilities will not necessarily deny hacker access to previously compromised systems as they allegedly maintain access to those systems via Microsoft cloud applications. In addition to Microsoft’s own claims that some of its source code was accessed by the hackers, this builds the narrative that Microsoft products are poised to be targeted in the next high-profile hack.

Microsoft’s cloud security infrastructure, set to be the next target of the SolarWinds hackers, was largely developed and later managed by Assaf Rappaport, a former Unit 8200 officer who was most recently the head of Microsoft’s Research and Development and Security teams at its massive Israel branch. Rappaport left Microsoft right before the COVID-19 crisis began last year to found a new cybersecurity company called Wiz.

Microsoft, like some of Samanage’s main backers, is part of the World Economic Forum and is an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Great Reset agenda, so much so that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote the foreword to Klaus Schwab’s book “Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” With the WEF simulating a cyber “pandemic” and both the WEF and Israel’s head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate warning of an imminent “cyber winter”, SolarWinds does indeed appear to be just the beginning, though perhaps a scripted one to create the foundation for something much more severe. A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning. Yet, if such a hack does occur, it will inevitably serve the aims of the Great Reset to “reset” and then rebuild electronic infrastructure.

The Deep State’s Stealthy, Subversive, Silent Coup to Ensure Nothing Changes

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country…why in the name of God don’t you have any faith in the system of government you’re so hell-bent to protect? You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with—its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.”—Seven Days in May (1964)

No doubt about it: the coup d’etat was successful.

That January 6 attempt by so-called insurrectionists to overturn the election results was not the real coup, however. Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to swoop in and take control.

It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned.

This new order didn’t emerge into being this week, or this month, or even this year, however.

Indeed, the real coup happened when our government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations.”

We’ve been mired in this swamp for decades now.

Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State’s tune.

Enter Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

Joe Biden will be no different: his job is to keep the Deep State in power.

Step away from the cult of personality politics and you’ll find that beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.

Follow the money.  It always points the way.

As Bertram Gross noted in Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, “evil now wears a friendlier face than ever before in American history.”

Writing in 1980, Gross predicted a future in which he saw:

…a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion…

This stealthy, creeping, silent coup that Gross prophesied is the same danger that writer Rod Serling envisioned in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

Incredibly enough, almost 60 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the Constitution. Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today’s current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May, which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain.

The premise is straightforward.

With the Cold War at its height, an unpopular U.S. President signs a momentous nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Believing that the treaty constitutes an unacceptable threat to the security of the United States and certain that he knows what is best for the nation, General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidential hopeful, plans a military takeover of the national government.  When Gen. Scott’s aide, Col. Casey (Kirk Douglas), discovers the planned military coup, he goes to the President with the information. The race for command of the U.S. government begins, with the clock ticking off the hours until the military plotters plan to overthrow the President.

Needless to say, while on the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is saved in a matter of hours, in the real world, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past half century.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That’s a done deal, but martial law disguised as national security is only one small part of the greater deception we’ve been fooled into believing is for our own good.

How do you get a nation to docilely accept a police state? How do you persuade a populace to accept metal detectors and pat downs in their schools, bag searches in their train stations, tanks and military weaponry used by their small town police forces, surveillance cameras in their traffic lights, police strip searches on their public roads, unwarranted blood draws at drunk driving checkpoints, whole body scanners in their airports, and government agents monitoring their communications?

Try to ram such a state of affairs down the throats of the populace, and you might find yourself with a rebellion on your hands. Instead, you bombard them with constant color-coded alerts, terrorize them with shootings and bomb threats in malls, schools, and sports arenas, desensitize them with a steady diet of police violence, and sell the whole package to them as being for their best interests.

This present military occupation of the nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next is telling.

This is not the language of a free people. This is the language of force.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Meanwhile, the police have been transformed into extensions of the military while the nation itself has been transformed into a battlefield. This is what a state of undeclared martial law looks like, when you can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized and in some cases killed merely for not complying with a government agent’s order or not complying fast enough. This hasn’t just been happening in crime-ridden inner cities. It’s been happening all across the country.

And then you’ve got the government, which has been steadily amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

So you see, January 6 and its aftermath provided the government and its corporate technocrats the perfect excuse to show off all of the powers they’ve been amassing so assiduously over the years.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.

Brace yourself.

There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we are at our most vulnerable right now.

All of those dastardly seeds we have allowed the government to sow under the guise of national security are bearing demon fruit.

The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

How Billionaires Transfer Blame to Others

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

In a two-Party dictatorship, the important truths are kept away from being publicized on either side, Eric Zuesse writes.

Throughout history, aristocrats, and their flaks such as their ‘news’-media, cast blame downward, away from themselves who collectively control the government, and onto, instead, some minority or other mass group, who can’t even plan or function together so as to be able to control the government.

The U.S. has a two-Party aristocracy, as is clear from the “Open Secrets” list of the 100 biggest political donors in the 2020 U.S. Presidential and congressional campaigns, the “2020 Top Donors to Outside Spending Groups”. Those are only these individuals’ publicly acknowledged expenditures, none of the dark political money, which, of course, is donated secretly. At the top there, of the donors’ lists, is Sheldon Adelson (who just died, on January 11th in California, and was buried in Israel), who spent far more than anyone in all of U.S. history had ever spent in any campaign cycle, $215 million, which amount far exceeded even the $82 million that he had spent in 2016, which in 2016 was second only to Thomas Steyer’s $92 million (the previous all-time highest amount donated in any campaign year). Adelson gave exclusively to Republicans, whereas Steyer gave exclusively to Democrats. Steyer in 2020 gave $67 million, which — though he was running for President in 2020, and hadn’t been running in 2016 — was only 73% of his 2016 donations, in that year, when he had been the nation’s top political donor. He was only the 5th-biggest donor in 2020, instead of #1.

The second-biggest donor in 2020 was the liberal Republican Michael Bloomberg, who ran in the Democratic Presidential primaries in order to defeat the only progressive in that contest, who was Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg spent $151 million of his own funds for that purpose. In 2016, he had spent $24 million in order to help Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, and then try to beat Donald Trump.

The third-biggest in 2020 was Timothy Mellon, the son of Paul Mellon and grandson of Andrew Mellon. Timothy Mellon gave $70 million, all to Republicans.

In 2020, the top ten donors, collectively, spent $776 million to own their chunk of the U.S. Government. The second group of ten (#s 11-20) donated only $187 million; and, so, the top twenty together donated $963 million, just shy of $1 trillion. All 80 of the other top-100 donors, together, gave around $370 million, so that the total from all 100 was around one-and-a-third trillion dollars. 47 gave to Republicans; 53 gave to Democrats.

The smallest publicly acknowledged donor among the top 100, Foster Friess, gave $2.4 million, all to Republicans.

Most of these 100 donors are among America’s approximately 700 billionaires; and, even the ones who aren’t are serving and doing business with the billionaires, and therefore are to some extent dependent upon having good relations with them, not being enemies of any billionaire. All of these 100 are, obviously, also dependent upon the governmental decisions that the public officials whom they have purchased will be making, not only regarding regulations and laws, but also regarding foreign policies. For example, Friess merged his company into Affiliated Management Group, which “is a global asset management firm” that “has grown to approximately $730 billion.” Virtually all of the top 100 political donors are internationally invested, and their personal wealth is therefore affected by American foreign policies, in ways that the personal wealth of the rest of the population is not.

When the U.S. invades a foreign country, or issues sanctions against a foreign country, it benefits some American investors, not only in corporations such as Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil, but even in some foreign-headquartered corporations. America’s spending around half of the entire world’s military expenses gives an enormous competitive boost to America’s billionaires, which is paid for by all U.S. taxpayers. It takes away money that would otherwise go toward the rest of the U.S. population — people who might even become crippled or killed by their military service for the benefit of America’s billionaires. Marketing this military service to the public, as “national defense” — even at a time when no nation has invaded or even threatened to invade America after 1945 — is good PR for America’s wealthiest families, regardless of whether it’s of any benefit whatsoever to other Americans. Because of the success of this PR for the military, Americans consider the U.S. military to be America’s best institution — far higher than any other part of the U.S. Government or any non-governmental institution, such as churches, the press, or the medical system. The U.S. Department of Defense is, also, by far, the most corrupt of all Departments of the U.S. federal Government. This fact is carefully hidden from the U.S. public, so as to keep the public admiring the military.

Billionaires use their media, and their scholars, to point the finger of blame, for the problems that the public does know about, anywhere else than against themselves; and, though the billionaires have political differences amongst themselves, they are unified against the public, so as to continue the gravy train that they all are on.

In order for the aristocracy not to be blamed for the many problems that they cause upon the public, their first trick is to blame some minority or some other vulnerable mass within the public. Or else to blame some ‘enemy’ country. But if and when such a strategy fails, then, they and their media blame the middle class or “bourgeoisie,” in order to fool the leftists, and also they blame the “communists” and the poor, in order to fool the rightists. That’s a two-pronged PR strategy — one to the left, and the other to the right. Since the aristocracy is always, itself, fundamentally conservative, they would naturally rather blame the leftists as being “communists,” than to blame the middle class and poor, because to do the latter would place the public’s ideological focus on economic class, which then would threaten to expose the billionaires themselves as being the actual economic “elite” who are the public’s real enemy (and as being the elite against which the propaganda should instead be focused). Blaming the middle class and poor might work amongst their fellow-aristocrats, but if tried amongst the public, it would present the danger of backfiring. Consequently, there is a return to the days of Joseph R. McCarthy, but this time without communism. Thus, here is how the White House correspondent for a Democratic Party ‘news’-site, CNN, closed his ‘news’-analysis, on January 14th, under the headline “Washington’s agony is a win for autocrats and strongmen”:

Mission accomplished

Nice work, Mr. Putin.

According to a US intelligence community report, Russia’s chief goal in interfering in the 2016 election in support of Trump against Democrat Hillary Clinton was to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process.” Four years on, there have been two impeachments and an insurrection against the US legislature. Millions believe Trump’s lies that he was illegally ejected from power, and doubt Biden’s legitimacy.

Conspiracy theorists have seats in Congress. There are serious questions about whether one of the country’s great political parties is now anti-democratic. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in a federal system that grants vast power to the states. And America’s self-appointed role as an exceptional nation and beacon of democracy is in the gutter.

Most of the disorienting events of the last few years can be blamed directly on Trump and his particular skill at tearing at the social, racial and political divides that are just below the nation’s surface. So the ex-KGB man in the Kremlin hardly deserves all the credit. But Russia, China and other autocratic nations are gaining much from Washington’s agony. They’re already using it to promote their own closed and totalitarian societies as models of comparative order and efficiency — and to beat back brave local voices calling for democracy and human rights.

In an effective declaration of victory for Russia’s espionage offensive against the US more than four years ago, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower house of the Russian Parliament, slid home the knife. “Following the events that unfolded after the presidential elections, it is meaningless to refer to America as the example of democracy,” he said.

“We are on the verge of reevaluating the standards that are being promoted by the United States of America, that is exporting its vision of democracy and political systems around the world. Those in our country who love to cite their example as leading will also have to reconsider their views.”

That’s propaganda from “leftist” (i.e., Democratic Party) billionaires. A good example of an independent American journalist who has been fooled by Republican Party billionaires to blame some amorphous mass of “leftists” is Sara A. Carter’s 12 January 2021 youtube “Rudy Giuliani talks big tech censorship”, blaming America’s problems on “the government,” or “the bureacracy,” and, of course, especially on Democrats. At 10:15 there, she said “My mother fled from Cuba.” Carter, as a conservative, is so obsessed with her visceral hatred of “communism,” that she interpreted America’s dictatorship as being communists, instead of as being billionaires — of both Parties: actually, fascists. In a two-Party fascist dictatorship, she fears the leftists. This is typical of propagandists on the conservative side. But propagandists on the liberal side (such as the CNN correspondent exemplified) are no better, just different.

Both propaganda-operations cast blame away from the real culprits.

In a two-Party dictatorship, the important truths are kept away from being publicized on either side. What the public sees and hears, instead, is political theater, merely tailored to different audiences.