Category Archives: freedom of speech

As Facebook Targets ‘Extremism’, Lawsuit Finds Company Benefits from Sex Trafficking of Children

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

Beginning this week, the censorship heavy Facebook rolled out a new warning to users alerting them to the possibility that they may have seen “extremist content” or may be friends with extremists. Every member of the Free Thought Project received one of these warnings — despite years of promoting only peace and freedom for all.

“Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming an extremist?” read one of the messages that some users received. Another read, “you may have been exposed to harmful extremist content recently.” Both included links to “get support” where users can report content they deem extremist.

This move comes after Joe Biden announced last month that they are creating a means for family and friends to snitch on each other. 

In a teleconference three weeks ago, a senior administration official told reporters of a plan that sounds reminiscent of the Minority Report by attacking “pre-crime.”

“We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs,” the official said.

The official went on to explain how this would work, which involves family members and friends snitching on each other.

We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs.  And on that, I would just note that one of the things we’re talking about is the need to do something in this space, like the “See something” — “If you see something, say something” concept that has been promulgated previously by DHS.  This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence.

freestar

The official also announced that the government would be partnering with big tech to achieve “increased information sharing” between tech platforms to help combat this potential for radicalization.

It now appears that it’s here.

On Thursday, Facebook said the extremist warning was a test for a global approach to prevent radicalization on the site.

“This test is part of our larger work to assess ways to provide resources and support to people on Facebook who may have engaged with or were exposed to extremist content, or may know someone who is at risk,” said a Facebook spokesperson in an emailed statement to Reuters. “We are partnering with NGOs and academic experts in this space and hope to have more to share in the future.”

But exactly what Facebook considers “extremism” or “extremist content” remains unclear. What is perfectly clear, however, is that they will undoubtedly crack down on political speech, vaccine safety speech, and all other legal free speech that may challenge the status quo — as this has been their MO from the start.

As Facebook moves the needle on censorship of free speech to an all time high, last week, they were sued in the Texas Supreme Court for allowing child predators to groom and recruit children for sex-trafficking.

The lawsuit, carried out by a group of children who were recruited on Facebook by their abusers, was successful in moving forward last week. The group sued Facebook for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims, according to a report in the Houston Chronicle.

The three victims accused Facebook of “running “an unrestricted platform to stalk, exploit, recruit, groom, and extort children into the sex trade.” One was 15 when an older man contacted her on Facebook, offered her a modeling job, photographed her, posted the pictures on the now-defunct BackPage website, and prostituted her to other men, leading her to be “raped, beaten, and forced into further sex trafficking.” The other two girls were 14, and reported almost identical experiences, with one openly pimped out for “dates” on Instagram, a Facebook subsidiary,” Graham Dockery explained.

Facebook lawyers argued the company was shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not akin to a publisher conveying the same message.

This should totally be the case, but if Facebook can claim Section 230 on child trafficking, then why do they target and eliminate political speech so viciously? If Facebook does not act as a neutral party and removes peaceful anti-establishment content, they have no legal basis to claim entitlement under Section 230.

The court disagreed with Facebook’s lawyers, ruling, “We do not understand Section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking.”

“Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it,” the opinion said. “Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking.”

For years, TFTP has reported on this phenomenon of Facebook attacking political speech while child exploitation goes unchecked. In 2018, Facebook and Twitter — without warning or justification — deleted the pages of Free Thought Project and Police the Police which had over 5 million followers.

During this purge, they also removed hundreds of other pages including massive police accountability groups, antiwar activists, alternative media, and libertarian news outlets. Facebook claimed to remove these pages in the name of fighting disinformation online and creating a safer user experience. But this was a farce. Illustrating just how big of an ostentatious sham this was, just weeks after claiming to keep their community safe, a child was openly sold on their platform.

This was no isolated incident either. The Guardian reported a study in 2020 that suggested Facebook is not fully enforcing its own standards banning content that exploits or endangers children.

According to the study, it examined at least 366 cases between January 2013 and December 2019, according to a report from the not-for-profit investigative group Tech Transparency Project (TPP) analyzing Department of Justice news releases.

Of the 366 cases of child sex abuse on Facebook, the social media giant reported just 9% of them to authorities. Investigations initiated by authorities discovered the other 91% of the cases — not Facebook.

As the great purge of anti-establishment views continues, remember that this company who claims they have your best interests in mind, according to the aforementioned lawsuit, is benefiting from the exploitation and trafficking of children.

‘Rules-Based International Order’ Means Washington-Based International Order

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The US government has shut down multiple news media websites based in the Middle East, including Iran’s state-owned Press TV, and al-Masirah TV which is owned by the Houthi group Ansarullah in Yemen. The Department of Justice said on Tuesday it had seized 36 Iranian-linked websites, claiming without evidence that they were associated with “either disinformation activities or violent organizations” and were shut down for a violation of US sanctions.

This would be the same US government that is imprisoning Julian Assange for journalism which exposed US war crimes, the same US government which paid for the weapons used to destroy more than 20 Palestinian media outlets in Gaza last month, the same US government whose unipolar domination of the planet is made possible by the journalism-destroying propaganda of the media-owning plutocratic class in alliance with sociopathic government agencies.

This would also be the same US government which constantly pays lip service to the need to protect the freedom of the press, as part of the “rules-based international order” it purports to uphold in the world.

The Biden administration has been bleating “rules-based order” so frequently and with such obvious meaninglessness that even The New York Times voiced some criticism of the way that vapid, idiotic phrase is being used instead of the well-defined term “international law”. As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies wrote for Salon last month:

For Blinken, the concept of a “rules-based order” seems to serve mainly as a cudgel with which to attack China and Russia. At a May 7 UN Security Council meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that instead of accepting the already existing rules of international law, the United States and its allies are trying to come up with “other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else.”

…

Today, far from being a leader of the international rules-based system, the United States is an outlier. It has failed to sign or ratify about 50 important and widely accepted multilateral treaties on everything from children’s rights to arms control. Its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and other countries are themselves violations of international law, and the new Biden administration has shamefully failed to lift these illegal sanctions, ignoring UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ request to suspend such unilateral coercive measures during the pandemic.

Indeed, US government officials babble endlessly about “rules”, and the “rules” are literally always tools used for the benefit of the US government, and the US government literally always flouts those “rules” exponentially worse than any other government on earth.

What the phrase “rules-based order” actually means is Washington-based order. It means a world order imposed by the US government and its lackey states on pain of devastation and death, which exists solely to keep the US at the head of a unipolar empire. It means do as I say, not as I do. It means rules for thee but not for me. It means we decide what happens based on what suits our interests.

If you peel away all the narrative spin and outward politeness, the US empire just looks like any other tyrannical force that has ever existed throughout human history, except it kills a lot more people than most of the others. In the old days the thugs with the most effective killing force would dominate everyone else using terror, wearing frightening battle costumes adorned with the body parts of their enemies. Nowadays they still dominate everyone else using terror, except they do it while wearing suits, and while waxing self-righteously about the “rules-based international order”. And they are much better at killing.

There is no other government on earth that is less qualified to impose any “order” upon the world. This is the only government on earth which has killed millions of people and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century, the only government on earth that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates. Yemen alone completely delegitimizes any claim the US may have had to be the arbiter of “order” in the world, to say nothing of Iraq, Vietnam, Libya and all the other innumerable atrocities that this monstrous regime has inflicted upon our species.

The sooner humanity can extract the parasite that is the US empire from its skin, the better off the whole world will be.

US seizes PressTV.com and 32 other Iranian media website domains

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By Kevin Reed

Source: WSWS.org

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DoJ) confirmed on Tuesday that the US had seized 33 websites affiliated with the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU) and three others operated by Kata’ib Hizballah (Hezbollah Brigades), an Iraqi Shia group supported by Iran.

In a press statement, the DoJ stated that the website domains—including the English and French language PressTV.com based in Teheran—were “in violation of US sanctions.” The statement said that the US Office of Foreign Assets and Control (OFAC) had “designated IRTVU as a Specially Designated National (SDN)” during the Trump administration in October 2020 for “being owned or controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force (IRGC).”

The DoJ also said that organizations labeled as SDNs are “prohibited from obtaining services, including website and domain services, in the United States without an OFAC license” and that IRTVU “and others like it” are not news organizations but are used to launch “disinformation campaigns and malign influence operations.” It also claimed that the 33 website addresses were owned in the US by IRTVU which “did not obtain a license from OFAC prior to utilizing the domain names.”

In the case of Kata’ib Hizballah (KH), the DoJ says that it was both designated an SDN by OFAC and as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the Department of State in July 2009. It claims that KH has “committed, directed, supported or posed a significant risk of committing acts of violence against Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces” and also did not obtain an OFAC license prior to acquiring the domain names.

Whatever the public justifications provided for its aggressive act, the transparent political purpose of the Biden administration’s website seizures is the effort to ratchet up pressure on Iran amid ongoing negotiations in Vienna over the 2015 nuclear agreement and following the June 18 selection of the hardline conservative Ebrahim Raisi as the next Iranian president.

Iran’s foreign ministry on Wednesday called the seizure an example of a “systematic effort to distort freedom of speech on a global level and silence independent voices in media.”

One of the seized sites, Al-Masirah, is not owned by Iran, but by Ansarullah, the movement of the Houthis in Yemen, a faction the US has claimed to be “proxies” of Iran. The news outlet is headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon.

In a statement reported by RT, Al Masirah said it was “not surprised” by the seizure, as it “comes from those that have supervised the most heinous crimes against our people.” The website shutdown , “reveals, once again, the falsehood of the slogans of freedom of expression and all the other headlines promoted by the United States of America, including its inability to confront the truth,” the statement said.

Indicating the broader political aims of the website seizures, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the US took over the domain name of the news website Palestine Today, which publishes the views of Gaza-based Islamic militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, redirecting the site to the same takedown notice.

Visits to the seized websites bring up a graphic with the headline, “This website has been seized” and a message that says the domain has been taken offline due to a “seizure warrant” issued under the authority of US code involving civil and criminal forfeiture and special powers given to the president during “unusual and extraordinary threat; declaration of national emergency.”

Some of the websites have been operating for many years, such as PressTV.com which was launched in 2007. The Wikipedia entry for the Iranian news and documentary network says that the annual budget of PressTV was $8.3 million and it had 400 employees worldwide as of 2009.

AP reported that most of the seized domains are .net, .com and .tv domains. The .net and .com domains are considered generic “top level domains” (TLDs) and they are controlled by the global provider of the domain name registry, Verisign, based in Reston, Virginia. The contract with Verisign is managed jointly by the US-based non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the US Department of Commerce.

The domain .tv is “owned by the Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu but administered by the US company Verisign,” according to AP. Other news and media domains which are owned by Iran, such as the website PressTV.ir which also publishes in English, have not been affected by the seizures.

A similar action was taken by the DoJ under the Trump administration in November 2020, when the FBI seized 27 domain names it claimed were used by Iran’s IRGC to spread a “global covert influence campaign.” Coming from the number one worldwide purveyor of “influence campaigns” involving money, murder and military occupation, the unsubstantiated accusations against the Iran-based media outlets must be completely rejected as part of the preparations for further wars of aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Meanwhile, the use by Biden of designations made by both the Obama and Trump administrations makes clear the fundamental agreement over foreign policy between the two parties of Wall Street and the US military-intelligence apparatus regardless of whether it is the Democrats or Republicans that control the executive or legislative branches of government.

The Culture of Vehicular Attacks

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On the Murder of Deona Marie Erickson

By CrimethInc.

On June 13, a driver attacked a demonstration in Minneapolis, killing Deona Marie Erickson. This is the result of years of right-wing efforts to normalize—and even legalize—vehicular attacks. Now the corporate media has ceased to prioritize covering them, paving the way for more killings. In dialogue with our comrades at It’s Going Down and on the ground in Minneapolis, we have prepared the following reflections on the implications of this.

Shortly before midnight on June 13, while demonstrators gathered at Lake Street and Girard Avenue to protest the murder of Winston Smith by sheriff’s deputies and US Marshals, a man named Nicholas Kraus drove his SUV into the crowd at high speed, killing Deona Marie Erickson. One Black anti-fascist militant who was on the ground at the time of the attack reports that it was clear to those present that it was an intentional attack: “You heard his engine from three blocks away.”

According to Unicorn Riot,

“Deona Erickson’s car was parked on the side of the street in a way that would protect the people who were gathering. She was sitting down on the sidewalk about 15 feet from her car moments before the perpetrator smashed directly against her car at a very high speed. Witnesses say she was then hit by her car and sent flying. Street medics on the scene resuscitated her but she later died at the hospital.”

Deona Marie Erickson had two daughters. She worked as a program manager at a center for disabled adults. Today would have been her 32nd birthday. She gave her life to protect those who protest police murder.

Demonstrators detained the driver, Nicholas Kraus. Eyewitnesses dispute police allegations that he was “pulled from his car”; reportedly, police did not respond until after the attack, sending riot police to threaten the crowd before an ambulance could arrive. Under the circumstances, the demonstrators’ response was measured, to say the least.

https://twitter.com/aishaforward10/status/1404509174516625408

The Culture of Vehicular Attacks

Let’s put this attack in context.

Fox News and the Daily Caller circulated a video encouraging their viewers to carry out vehicular attacks against protesters months ahead of the fascist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville at which a self-identified neo-Nazi did exactly that, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 35 people. Afterwards, leaked chats showed other neo-Nazis also planning to use vehicles to attack protesters.

In summer 2020, vehicular attacks surged in response to protests against the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. Over a dozen people were killed in these and other attacks on the movement.

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1404699241570705408

https://twitter.com/IGD_News/status/1404699241570705408

Today, legislators around the United States are taking steps to criminalize protest activity, introducing a wide range of anti-protest bills. Foremost among them, Oklahoma and Florida lawmakers have passed laws guaranteeing civil and criminal immunity to drivers who hit demonstrators with vehicles, effectively granting vigilantes the right to crash cars into demonstrators. At the same time, Florida has introduced penalties of up to 15 years imprisonment for blocking traffic.

The message is clear enough. In short, lawmakers and police seek to crack down on pedestrians acting collectively to oppose state violence, while extending additional privileges to drivers who act individually to support state violence via their own attacks. The official institutions of the state have failed to leverage enough violence to suppress movements against police violence and white supremacy, so they are deputizing others to do so—a longstanding counterinsurgency strategy reflective of the colonial heritage of the United States.

On a fundamental level, the form of subjectivity that these lawmakers are promoting is what we might call a motorist subjectivity: consumerist, individualized, invested in the smooth functioning of the existing order, and regarding all other possibilities as threats. Structurally speaking, for the motorist, all other human beings—traffic as well as pedestrians—are obstacles, and the only imaginable journeys are dictated by the routes established by the state and the economy. The motorist wants to see the laws enforced on others, on the premise that it will reduce the ways that others might inconvenience him, but he doesn’t want the laws enforced on himself. Conceiving of our society as an entirely mapped world—the way that Google Maps does—in which all means of locomotion, all forms of agency, are individualized according to financial means, the motorist cannot imagine why people would assemble, off road or not, to challenge law enforcement itself.

As shocking as vehicular attacks are when they occur, they are an extension of the society in which they take place. They are anti-social, but they express and intensify the anti-social premises of our day-to-day relations with each other. Motorist versus pedestrian is a classic class opposition in a society in which transportation and mobility are fundamentally racialized. People who were raised on advertisements depicting jeeps off-roading across the suspiciously vacant landscape of the frontier only to find themselves sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway for an hour every day look around for someone to blame, and—as if by design—blame those with even less power than themselves. Road rage.

Right-wing online chatter in Minneapolis ahead of the attack that took Deona Marie Erickson’s life.

In this context, the chant “Whose streets? Our streets!” asserts another form of life, another way of relating to each other and conceiving of what our lives could be. Rather than framing vehicular attacks as aberrations from an otherwise peaceful social order—to be addressed, for example, by more policing—we have to understand them as one of the ugliest manifestations of a social structure that is fundamentally racist and anti-human, which can only be addressed via new forms of togetherness.

Honoring those whose lives have been taken by police and pro-police vigilantes is a first step towards this, and it is important that people have been doing this through shared presence in particular physical spaces. The internet—the information superhighway—tends to reinforce the motorist mentality of abstract competition and hostility. One of the most basic steps we can take towards creating a new social fabric on egalitarian terms is to encounter each other in person in ways that affirm the specificity of place.

This gives us more perspective on the ongoing efforts of city officials to evict the autonomous zone at the site where George Floyd was murdered, in order to open it up for “the free passage of traffic.” Rhetoric about “culture wars” is usually used to evoke a conflict between those on the fringe of the left and right, but here, we see centrist officials forcibly imposing a particular model for what our lives, relationships, and forms of grieving should be, even as they purport to be neutral.

Far-Right Murderers and Centrist Beneficiaries

Nicholas Kraus, a man with a history of domestic violence and abuse, is representative of the sort of dysfunctional, alienated men that far-right provocateurs aim to weaponize to carry out stochastic attacks on social movements.

This is effectively a watered-down version of the same strategy that ISIS has used in the Mideast in territories it does not control: taking advantage of the desperation, prejudice, and mental health issues of an entitled but disenfranchised population, the far right aims to disrupt popular mobilizations through consistent but deniable terror attacks. Their goal is to raise the risks of public organizing to such an extent that it becomes hard for movements to maintain momentum, in order to support state repression while opening up space for fascist groups to recruit and mobilize. In Turkey, this approach helped the despotic government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to crush what had been powerful social movements. The ultimate beneficiaries of this are not just far-right politicians, but also centrist capitalists who do not wish to see fundamental changes that could threaten their power.

Vigilante attacks are also advantageous for the city officials who would like to present themselves as “neutral” while suppressing the protest movements against the murders that the police they oversee regularly carry out. Vigilante attacks enable these officials to change the subject from the violence of the institutions they represent back to the question of how to “maintain order.”

“Some of these people with the megaphones, I guess their role is to get people riled up and get them in a space and march them around and educate them and tell them what their next big plans are and who they’re backing politics-wise and things like that.

“I like community, organic—no microphones, no megaphones, like right now. It’s about fifty people—but fifty people got Lake and Hennepin shut down right now, you know what I’m saying? We’re moving and grooving right now. As opposed to two or three hundred people holding signs, marching around, and then feeling accomplished, patting themselves on the back and then leaving—ain’t shit get shut down really. Police don’t even monitor the marches no more. No change will come from that.”

-Anonymous Black anti-fascist militant in Minneapolis, evening of June 15, 2021

But Who’s Paying Attention?

“You protested because it was trendy and ‘everyone was doing it.’ I protest because people are out here dying!”
-Deona Marie Erickson, June 10
In 2021, many liberals and progressives have left the streets, relying on the Biden administration to roll back the policies of the Trump administration. Consequently, the murder of Deona Marie Erickson has attracted considerably less attention than it might have just last year. This withdrawal from social struggles creates the conditions for more attacks like this to take place.
This reminds us of the situation before the murder of Heather Heyer made world news, when the far right carried out a series of murders around the United States without drawing the attention of corporate media. Corporate media outlets were only forced to cover the events in Charlottesville because it was not possible to sweep under the rug the fact that a thousand fascists had gathered in one place and killed a white woman. Because the events took news editors—though not anti-fascists—by surprise, they were not prepared to spin the story according to the preferences of their corporate backers; so for a week, fairly honest coverage of the threat represented by the far right suddenly appeared in a variety of news outlets. Subsequently, although this coverage was tempered by efforts to demonize anti-fascists, centrist media outlets continued to report on far-right attacks in order to associate them with the agenda of Donald Trump’s administration.
But now that centrists can’t leverage Deona Marie’s death against Trump, they are prepared to treat it as simply another sad facet of American life, to sweep it under the rug once more.
This coincides with widespread emotional numbness arising from several years of constant tragedies. The COVID-19 pandemic has already accustomed many people to thinking of human life as expendable. Last weekend saw multiple mass shootings across several states. Poverty has reached the highest levels since the beginning of the pandemic. These are the forces that drive desperate people to adopt far-right politics wherever there are no models for a collective pursuit of liberation, creating a feedback loop that will generate more and more tragedies.
“We keep us safe.” “We protect us.” These slogans spread far and wide in the course of the movements that burst onto the world stage in Ferguson, Missouri because it has become eminently apparent that no one else is going to protect us. Deona Marie died doing her best to keep her companions safe—to open up a space in which people can come to know each other on different terms, as part of a community premised on shared consideration for all human beings, not individualized capitalist competition. We should do the same, so that everyone like her, and like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Winston Smith—might live. We should do the same, because the alternative means isolation, means eventually being treated as expendable ourselves.
“If the fascists would have run over Deona Marie and we would have not been holding space, not erected the barricades that the city just tried to tear down, then Deona Marie’s voice would be in vain. We’ve got to be out here. That fascist wins—that fascist who drove his car right here, he wins. ‘Oh, I got them off the street. They’re gone now. My fellow white supremacists can enjoy Lake Street now, because I got them fuckers off the street,’ you know what I’m saying?
“We’re out here stronger now. We have to be.”
-Anonymous Black anti-fascist militant in Minneapolis, June 15, 2021

https://twitter.com/TigerWorku/status/1404329351211016192

“Concerning Deona Marie”

From an internationalist anarchist woman in Rojava:
From half a world away, I hear about this sacrifice, this martyrdom. I use the words sacrifice and martyrdom and not the word “tragedy” because I am hearing about a woman comrade who chose to defend her community, and there are few things more beautiful and free in this world than that choice. She thought beyond herself, felt beyond her own personal safety, to defend those who struggled together side by side with her for freedom.
When a life is given and taken in struggle, it’s not an easy thing for those of us left to continue. It would dishonest for me to say this is not something heavy, but we do not have to let the weight of it become a burden—this weight can give us strength and power, and with it, we can continue her struggle.
Every martyr is another reason to continue, another example to hold ourselves up to. For every woman whose life they take, for every comrade, for every person who stands up to defend their community, whose light they try to extinguish, we can make sure that a hundred rise up in their place. The time when we could be separated on the basis of race, class and gender is coming to an end. When we sacrifice for each other in this way, as comrades, as people who share a freedom struggle, the methods of our enemies turn to dust.
This is the time for us to defend our communities like Deona did. Anything else, and we won’t have risen to her standard. Her choice to defend was a sacred act of love—let us all be led by it.
Revolutionary greetings, respect, and love from Rojava.

If the goal of those who seek to encourage vigilante attacks is to discourage movements based in direct action, this dovetails with the goals of city officials who seek to use the Non-Profit Industrial Complex to buy off a layer of activists to oppose and undermine effective strategies from within the movement. In that regard, one of the most important ways to prevent the attackers from achieving their goals is to preserve the horizontal, grassroots structure of movements against police, while continuing to emphasize systemic forms of white supremacist violence alongside vigilante attacks.

Biden Admin Tells Americans to Report Family and Friends Who Have the “Potential” for Radicalization

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By Matt Agorist

Source: Activist Post

Despite Joe Biden running on a platform of unity to bring Americans back together, before he was even sworn in, he reneged on this promise by alienating tens of millions of Trump supporters — essentially declaring them the enemy.

“Don’t dare call them protesters,” Biden said after the largely peaceful march on DC which ended with a few hundred goons out of tens of thousands of peaceful protesters raiding the capitol. “They were a riotous mob. Insurrectionists. Domestic terrorists. It’s that basic. It’s that simple.”

While some of the folks certainly thought they were part of some coup, the reality of the situation was nothing at all as serious as the media and establishment has reported since.

Just like Trump used Antifa violence to bolster the police state and add stricter penalties for protests, Biden is using the riot at the Capitol to do the same. We predicted this outcome in January, and now it is escalating even further.

In February, using the DHS National Terrorist Advisory System — or NTAS — the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning that anger “fueled by false narratives,” including unfounded claims about the 2020 presidential election, could lead some inside the country to launch attacks in the coming weeks.

This was the first time we could find that this warning was issued over a domestic terror threat. And, although that warning was issued in February, four months later, we’ve yet to see anything materialize. There have been no protests, no “attacks” on the Capitol, nothing. In spite of Americans largely returning to normal, the White House is doubling down.

This week, President Joe Biden’s administration announced their plans to create a means for family and friends to snitch on each other — to fight the non-existent threat of domestic terrorism.

In a teleconference on Monday, a senior administration official told reporters of a plan that sounds reminiscent of the Minority Report by attacking “pre-crime.”

“We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs,” the official said.

The official went on to explain how this would work, which involves family members and friends snitching on each other.

We will work to improve public awareness of federal resources to address concerning or threatening behavior before violence occurs.  And on that, I would just note that one of the things we’re talking about is the need to do something in this space, like the “See something” — “If you see something, say something” concept that has been promulgated previously by DHS.  This involves creating contexts in which those who are family members or friends or co-workers know that there are pathways and avenues to raise concerns and seek help for those who they have perceived to be radicalizing and potentially radicalizing towards violence.

Notice how they use the word “potentially” to imply that certain completely legal political speech has the ‘potential’ to incite violence. Then, as if big tech censorship and spying wasn’t enough, the official mentioned “increased information sharing” between tech platforms to help combat this potential for radicalization.

“Any particular tech company often knows its own platform very well,” the official noted. “But the government sees things — actually, threats of violence — across platforms. They see the relationship between online recruitment, radicalization, and violence in the physical world.”

Closing out the conference, the official encouraged Americans to come together with their government rulers to combat the non-existent threat in a line that sounded like it was uttered directly from Heinrich Himmler himself.

“We are investing many agencies of the government and resourcing them appropriately and asking our citizens to participate,” the official said. “Because, ultimately, this is really about homeland security being a responsibility of each citizen of our country to help us achieve.”

The state asking family members to snitch on each other is the exact same scheme out of every totalitarian regime throughout history. When you sever the trust between children and their parents or friends and family, you can easily mold the children and other state-dependent shills into obedient pawns of the regime who will have no problem outing their subversive family members and friends to authorities.

In Soviet Russia, there was a famous story used to inspire children to inform on their parents. It was the story of Pavel Trofimovich Morozov — a Soviet youth who was praised by the state run media as a martyr. According to the story, which has very little evidence of actually happening, Pavlik denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family.

Regardless of whether or not the story was true, it became the subject of reading, songs, plays, a symphonic poem, a full-length opera and six biographies — all which pushed the idea that opposing the state was selfish and reactionary, and state was more important than family. The apotheotic cult had a huge impact on the moral norms of generations of children, who were encouraged to inform on their parents.

Those who fail to see history repeating itself are ensuring that it indeed will. Totalitarian regimes thrive off pitting citizens against each other, and this is ultimately the last step before complete despotism. Time to pay attention America.

MSM ADMITS FACT CHECKERS WERE WRONG — TRUTH WILL NEVER BE FOUND THROUGH CENSORSHIP

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By Don Via Jr.

Source: Waking Times

Over the last twelve months, social media’s expurgation of any and all information pertaining to Covid-19, not part-and-parcel to the mainstream status quo, has become ineffaceable.

Everywhere we look now, we see embedded links to the Covid-19 Information Center on any post that dares even utter the words “vaccine” or “covid”. More pervasive still, are the notices of “this content is no longer available”, having been unceremoniously expunged for allegedly violating the ministry of truth’s “community guidelines”. Being so brazen as to even brand one hundred percent authentic facts as “misinformation”.

Facebook is now permeated with warnings pinned upon post after post indicating “this information has been disputed by independent fact-checkers”.

Ahh yes, the same “independent fact-checkers” that only recently had their financial biases uncovered. Confirming the very conflicts of interest many of us had suspected in the first place, along with their counterparts in the mainstream media.

Ironically, just as a recent report has demonstrated how censorship backfires — Indicating excessive “fact-checking” actually contributed to the spread of misinformation.

Now, as the Overton window begins to shift it appears the MSM is left with egg on their face yet again.

On May 26th, as new research alleging the supposed origins of Covid-19 began to surface, Facebook announced that it would no longer be deleting posts claiming that the virus may have been man-made. What the company did not announce, of course, was recompense or at the very least an apology for all of the people whose free-speech it had infringed upon over the last year and a half.

On June 1st reports began to surface calling out the Washington Post for stealthily editing a 15 month old headline in which they had preemptively “debunked” the Wuhan lab origin theory of SARS-CoV-2.

Now, headlines, pundits, and politicians have done a complete one-eighty and are running amok propagating this as a part of the new mainstream narrative — with zero regard for the civil liberties they spent months trampling by vilifying those who postulated this plausibility.

A recent Bloomberg opinion piece lays out quite concisely the very argument that we and many others have carried for years — Transparency, as opposed to obscurity, is always the best course of action;

The author states at various points —

“Labelling misinformation online is doing more harm than good. The possibility that Covid-19 came from a lab accident is just the latest example. Social media companies tried to suppress any discussion of it for months. But why? There’s no strong evidence against it, and evidence for other theories is still inconclusive. Pathogens have escaped from labs many times, and people have died as a result.

Social media fact-checkers don’t have any special knowledge or ability to sort fact from misinformation. What they have is extraordinary power to shape what people believe. And stifling ideas can backfire if it leads people to believe there’s a “real story” that is being suppressed” …..

“It’s much better to provide additional information than to censor information” …..

“Even without the power of censorship, social media culture encourages the facile labelling of ideas and people as a way of dismissing them — it’s easy to call people deniers or as anti-science because they question prevailing wisdom.”

Concluding the piece by stating —

“The fiasco was the media’s propagation of the lie that the issue was settled and that anyone questioning it might be deemed an idiot or conspiracy theorist.”…

“What helped was not taking away information but giving people additional information. Censoring information — or what one deems “misinformation” — isn’t as helpful as it seems. The best we can do is keep questioning, and give people the most complete story we can.”

With these facts in mind, there are a few points important to note however. While this may in some ways come as a form of vindication for those that were previously silenced, it is necessary to recognize that this is not a confirmation of the lab origin theory. Nor should a narrative being adopted by the mainstream be seen as a form of validation or legitimacy. Rather, it is a demonstration of their blatant hypocrisy and stifling of discourse and objective critical analysis.

As always, the corporate media–intelligence–apparatus of the United States, who functions as a state disseminator of propaganda have been thoroughly documented in TFTP’s most recent investigative series installment — One should always question the motives of the media when they adopt a story, as almost always they possess an ulterior agenda.

Already, we see the neoliberal and neoconservative talking heads twisting this rhetoric to better fit their aims of demonizing their geopolitical opposition in China.

Fervent warmonger Senator Tom Cotton, who has championed the idea of the Wuhan lab leak against China from the very beginning; has been frothing at the mouth at this revitalized opportunity to capitalize upon these sentiments for his own nefarious incentives, as elaborated in a recent account by journalist and political commentator Caitlin Johnstone.

That’s not to say that if the virus did originate in the Chinese lab, if it were or wasn’t released deliberately, or any of the other yet to be confirmed uncertainties, that any crimes committed by the CCP regime should not be held to account. But the American government, in all of its imperialist machinations and blatant hypocrisies are the last ones that should be doling out recompense to that regard.

In any case, as Miss Johnstone explains, it is because of the US’s imperialist influence over the international community that any truly unbiased and independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19 is likely impossible. And this is largely due to the increasing tempo with which the US State Department is ramping up its new Cold War propaganda against its geopolitical adversaries in the east.

Despite these points, it is evident in this latest flip-flop fiasco that one thing is certain. Suppressing genuinely open public dialogue with regard to this or any other prevailing issue is not only an affront to the right of free speech. It is an affront to intelligence itself.

It should be held among the most basic of principles that for any society to be intellectually competent, and therefore be aptly informed and capable of rendering the most logical decisions; encouraging communication and free expression of ideas throughout the public sector is of the utmost preeminence.

Brave New Cancel Culture World

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By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

In 2020, we saw the enshrinement of techno-feudalism – one of the overarching themes of my latest book, Raging Twenties.

In lightning speed, the techno-feudalism virus is metastasizing into an even more lethal, wilderness of mirrors variant, where cancel culture is enforced by Big Tech all across the spectrum, science is routinely debased as fake news in social media, and the average citizen is discombobulated to the point of lobotomy.

Giorgio Agamben has defined it as a new totalitarianism.

Top political analyst Alastair Crooke has attempted a sharp breakdown of the broader configuration.

Geopoliticallly, the Hegemon would even resort to 5G war to maintain its primacy, while seeking moral legitimization via the woke revolution, duly exported to its Western satrapies.

The woke revolution is a culture war – in symbiosis with Big Tech and Big Business – that has smashed the real thing: class war. The atomized working classes, struggling to barely survive, have been left to wallow in anomie.

The great panacea, actually the ultimate “opportunity” offered by Covid-19, is the Great Reset advanced by Herr Schwab of Davos: essentially the replacement of a dwindling manufacturing base by automation, in tandem with a reset of the financial system.

The concomitant wishful thinking envisages a world economy that will “move closer to a cleaner capitalist model”. One of its features is a delightfully benign Council for Inclusive Capitalism in partnership with the Catholic Church.

As much as the pandemic – the “opportunity” for the Reset – was somewhat rehearsed by Event 201 in October 2019, additional strategies are already in place for the next steps, such as Cyber Polygon, which warns against the “key risks of digitalization”. Don’t miss their “technical exercise” on July 9th, when “participants will hone their practical skills in mitigating a targeted supply chain attack on a corporate ecosystem in real time.”

A New Concert of Powers?

Sovereignty is a lethal threat to the ongoing cultural revolution. That concerns the role of the European Union institutions – especially the European Commission – going no holds barred to dissolve the national interests of nation states. And that largely explains the weaponizing, in varying degrees, of Russophobia, Sinophobia and Iranophobia.

The anchoring essay in Raging Twenties analyzes the stakes in Eurasia exactly in terms of the Hegemon pitted against the Three Sovereigns – which are Russia, China and Iran.

It’s under this framework, for instance, that a massive, 270-plus page bill, the Strategic Competition Act , has been recently passed at the US Senate. That goes way beyond geopolitical competition, charting a road map to fight China across the full spectrum. It’s bound to become law, as Sinophobia is a bipartisan sport in D.C.

Hegemon oracles such as the perennial Henry Kissinger at least are taking a pause from their customary Divide and Rule shenanigans to warn that the escalation of “endless” competition may derail into hot war – especially considering AI and the latest generations of smart weapons.

On the incandescent US-Russia front, where Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sees the lack of mutual trust, no to mention respect, as much worse than during the Cold War, analyst Glenn Diesen notes how the Hegemon “strives to convert the security dependence of the Europeans into geoeconomic loyalty”.

That’s at the heart of a make-or-break saga: Nord Stream 2. The Hegemon uses every weapon – including cultural war, where convicted crook Navalny is a major pawn – to derail an energy deal that is essential for Germany’s industrial interests. Simultaneously, pressure increases against Europe buying Chinese technology.

Meanwhile, NATO – which lords over the EU – keeps being built up as a global Robocop, via the NATO 2030 project – even after turning Libya into a militia-ridden wasteland and having its collective behind humiliatingly spanked in Afghanistan.

For all the sound and fury of sanction hysteria and declinations of cultural war, the Hegemon establishment is not exactly blind to the West “losing not only its material dominance but also its ideological sway”.

So the Council on Foreign Relations – in a sort of Bismarckian hangover – is now proposing a New Concert of Powers to deal with “angry populism” and “illiberal temptations”, conducted of course by those malign actors such as “pugnacious Russia” who dare to “challenge the West’s authority”.

As much as this geopolitical proposal may be couched in benign rhetoric, the endgame remains the same: to “restore US leadership”, under US terms. Damn those “illiberals” Russia, China and Iran.

Crooke evokes exactly a Russian and a Chinese example to illustrate where the woke cultural revolution may lead to.

In the case of the Chinese cultural revolution, the end result was chaos, fomented by the Red Guards, which started to wreak their own particular havoc independent of the Communist Party leadership.

And then there’s Dostoevsky in The Possessed, which showed how the secular Russian liberals of the 1840s created the conditions for the emergence of the 1860s generation: ideological radicals bent on burning down the house.

No question: “revolutions” always eat their children. It usually starts with a ruling elite imposing their newfound Platonic Forms on others. Remember Robespierre. He formulated his politics in a very Platonic way – “the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, the reign of eternal justice” with laws “engraved in the hearts of all men”.

Well, when others disagreed with Robespierre’s vision of Virtue, we all know what happened: the Terror. Just like Plato, incidentally, recommended in Laws. So it’s fair to expect that the children of the woke revolution will eventually be eaten alive by their zeal.

Canceling freedom of speech

As it stands, it’s fair to argue when the “West” started to go seriously wrong – in a cancel culture sense. Allow me to offer the Cynic/Stoic point of view of a 21st century global nomad.

If we need a date, let’s start with Rome – the epitome of the West – in the early 5th century. Follow the money. That’s the time when income from properties owned by temples were transferred to the Catholic Church – thus boosting its economic power. By the end of the century, even gifts to temples were forbidden.

In parallel, a destruction overdrive was in progress – fueled by Christian iconoclasm, ranging from crosses carved in pagan statues to bathhouses converted into churches. Bathing naked? Quelle horreur!

The devastation was quite something. One of the very few survivors was the fabulous bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback, in the Campidoglio/ Capitoline Hill (today it’s housed in the museum). The statue survived only because the pious mobs thought the emperor was Constantine.

The very urban fabric of Rome was destroyed: rituals, the sense of community, singin’ and dancin’. We should remember that people still lower their voices when entering a church.

For centuries we did not hear the voices of the dispossessed. A glaring exception is to be found in an early 6th century text by an Athenian philosopher, quoted by Ramsay MacMullen in Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eight Centuries.

The Greek philosopher wrote that Christians are “a race dissolved in every passion, destroyed by controlled self-indulgence, cringing and womanish in its thinking, close to cowardice, wallowing in all swinishness, debased, content with servitude in security.”

If that sounds like a proto-definition of 21st century Western cancel culture, that’s because it is.

Things were also pretty bad in Alexandria. A Christian mob killed and dismembered the alluring Hypatia, mathematician and philosopher. That de facto ended the era of great Greek mathematics. No wonder Gibbon turned the assassination of Hypatia into a remarkable set piece in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (“In the bloom of beauty, and in the maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples; the persons most illustrious for their rank or merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher”).

Under Justinian – emperor from 527 to 565 – cancel culture went after paganism no holds barred. One of his laws ended imperial toleration of all religions, which was in effect since Constantine in 313.

If you were a pagan, you’d better get ready for the death penalty. Pagan teachers – especially philosophers – were banned. They lost their parrhesia: their license to teach (here is Foucault’s brilliant analysis).

Parrhesia – loosely translated as “frank criticism” – is a tremendously serious issue: for no less than a thousand years, this was the definition of freedom of speech (italics mine).

There you go: first half of the 6th century. This was when freedom of speech was canceled in the West.

The last Egyptian temple – to Isis, in an island in southern Egypt – was shut down in 526. The legendary Plato’s Academy – with no less than 900 years of teaching in its curriculum – was shut down in Athens in 529.

Guess where the Greek philosophers chose to go into exile: Persia.

Those were the days – in the early 2nd century – when the greatest Stoic, Epictetus, a freed slave from Phrygia, admirer of both Socrates and Diogenes, was consulted by an emperor, Hadrian; and became the role model of another emperor, Marcus Aurelius.

History tells us that the Greek intellectual tradition simply did not fade away in the West. It was a target of cancel culture.

The Criminalization of Dissent

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By CJ Hopkins

Source: Consent Factory

One of the hallmarks of totalitarian systems is the criminalization of dissent. Not just the stigmatization of dissent or the demonization of dissent, but the formal criminalization of dissent, and any other type of opposition to the official ideology of the totalitarian system. Global capitalism has been inching its way toward this step for quite some time, and now, apparently, it is ready to take it.

Germany has been leading the way. For over a year, anyone questioning or protesting the “Covid emergency measures” or the official Covid-19 narrative has been demonized by the government and the media, and, sadly, but not completely unexpectedly, the majority of the German public. And now such dissent is officially “extremism.”

Yes, that’s right, in “New Normal” Germany, if you dissent from the official state ideology, you are now officially a dangerous “extremist.” The German Intelligence agency (the “BfV”) has even invented a new category of “extremists” in order to allow themselves to legally monitor anyone suspected of being “anti-democratic and/or delegitimizing the state in a way that endangers security,” like … you know, non-violently protesting, or speaking out against, or criticizing, or satirizing, the so-called “New Normal.”

Naturally, I’m a little worried, as I have engaged in most of these “extremist” activities. My thoughtcrimes are just sitting there on the Internet waiting to be scrutinized by the BfV. They’re probably Google-translating this column right now, compiling a list of all the people reading it, and their Facebook friends and Twitter followers, and professional associates, and family members, and anyone any of the aforementioned people have potentially met with, or casually mentioned, who might have engaged in similar thoughtcrimes.

You probably think I’m joking, don’t you? I’m not joking. Not even slightly. The Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (“Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz”) is actively monitoring anyone questioning or challenging the official “New Normal” ideology … the “Covid Deniers,” the “conspiracy theorists,” the “anti-vaxxers,” the dreaded “Querdenkers” (i.e., people who “think outside the box”), and anyone else they feel like monitoring who has refused to join the Covidian Cult. We’re now official enemies of the state, no different than any other “terrorists” … or, OK, technically, a little different.

As The New York Times reported last week (German Intelligence Puts Coronavirus Deniers Under Surveillance), “the danger from coronavirus deniers and conspiracy theorists does not fit the mold posed by the usual politically driven groups, including those on the far left and right, or by Islamic extremists.” Still, according to the German Interior Ministry, we diabolical “Covid deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “anti-vaxxers” have “targeted the state itself, its leaders, businesses, the press, and globalism,” and have “attacked police officers” and “defied civil authorities.”

Moreover, back in August of 2020, in a dress rehearsal for the “Storming of the Capitol,” “Covid-denying” insurrectionists “scaled the steps of Parliament” (i.e., the Reichstag). Naturally, The Times neglects to mention that this so-called “Storming of the Reichstag” was performed by a small sub-group of protesters to whom the German authorities had granted a permit to assemble (apart from the main demonstration, which was massive and completely peaceful) on the steps of the Reichstag, which the German police had, for some reason, left totally unguarded. In light of the background of the person the German authorities issued this “Steps-of-the-Reichstag” protest permit to — a known former-NPD functionary, in other words, a neo-Nazi — well, the whole thing seemed a bit questionable to me … but what do I know? I’m just a “conspiracy theorist.”

According to Al Jazeera, the German Interior Ministry explained that these querdenking “extremists encourage supporters to ignore official orders and challenge the state monopoly on the use of force.” Seriously, can you imagine anything more dangerous? Mindlessly following orders and complying with the state’s monopoly on the use of force are the very cornerstones of modern democracy … or some sort of political system, anyway.

But, see, there I go, again “being anti-democratic” and “delegitimizing the state,” not to mention “relativizing the Holocaust” (also a criminal offense in Germany) by comparing one totalitarian system to another, as I have done repeatedly on social media, and in a column I published in November of 2020, when the parliament passed the “Infection Protection Act,” which bears no comparison whatsoever to the “Enabling Act of 1933.”

This isn’t just a German story, of course. As I reported in a column in February, The “New Normal” War on Domestic Terror is a global war, and it’s just getting started. According to a Department of Homeland Security “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” (and the “liberal” corporate-media propaganda machine), “democracy” remains under imminent threat from these “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” and other such “grievances fueled by false narratives” including “anger over Covid-19 restrictions.”

These Covid-denying “violent extremists” have apparently joined forces with the “white-supremacist, Russia-backed, Trump-loving “Putin-Nazis” that terrorized “democracy” for the past four years, and almost overthrew the US government by sauntering around inside the US Capitol Building without permission, scuffling with police, attacking furniture, and generally acting rude and unruly. No, they didn’t actually kill anyone, as the corporate media all reported they did, but trespassing in a government building and putting your feet up on politicians’ desks is pretty much exactly the same as “terrorism.”

Or whatever. It’s not like the truth actually matters, not when you are whipping up mass hysteria over imaginary “Russian assets,” “white-supremacist militias,” “Covid-denying extremists,” “anti-vax terrorists,” and “apocalyptic plagues.” When you’re rolling out a new official ideology — a pathologized-totalitarian ideology — and criminalizing all dissent, the point is not to appear to be factual. The point is just to terrorize the shit out of people.

As Hermann Goering famously explained regarding how to lead a country to war (and the principle holds true for any big transition, like the one we are experiencing currently):

“[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”

Go back and read those quotes from the German Interior Ministry and the DHS again slowly. The message they are sending is unmistakeably clear. It might not seem all that new, but it is. Yes, they have been telling us “we are being attacked” and denouncing critics, protesters, and dissidents for twenty years (i.e., since the War on Terror was launched in 2001, and for the last four years in their War on Populism), but this is a whole new level of it … a fusion of official narratives and their respective official enemies into a singular, aggregate official narrative in which dissent will no longer be permitted.

Instead, it will be criminalized, or it will be pathologized.

Seriously, go back and read those quotes again. Global capitalist governments and their corporate media mouthpieces are telling us, in no uncertain terms, that “objection to their authority” will no longer be tolerated, nor will dissent from their official narratives. Such dissent will be deemed “dangerous” and above all “false.” It will not be engaged with or rationally debated. It will be erased from public view. There will be an inviolable, official “reality.” Any deviation from official “reality” or defiance of the “civil authorities” will be labelled “extremism,” and dealt with accordingly.

This is the essence of totalitarianism, the establishment of an inviolable official ideology and the criminalization of dissent. And that is what is happening, right now. A new official ideology is being established. Not a state ideology. A global ideology. The “New Normal” is that official ideology. Technically, it is an official post-ideology, an official “reality,” an axiomatic “fact,” which only “criminals” and “psychopaths” would deny.

I’ll be digging deeper into “New Normal” ideology and “pathologized totalitarianism” in my future columns, and … sorry, they probably won’t be very funny. For now I’ll leave you with two more quotes. The emphasis is mine, as ever.

Here’s California State Senator Richard Pan, author of an op-ed in the Washington Post: “Anti-vax extremism is akin to domestic terrorism,” quoted in the Los Angeles Times:

“These extremists have not yet been held accountable, so they continue to escalate violence against the body public … We must now summon the political will to demand that domestic terrorists face consequences for their words and actions. Our democracy and our lives depend on it … They’ve been building alliances with white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and [others] on the far right …”

And here’s Peter Hotez in Nature magazine:

“The United Nations and the highest levels of governments must take direct, even confrontational, approaches with Russia, and move to dismantle anti-vaccine groups in the United States. Efforts must expand into the realm of cyber security, law enforcement, public education and international relations. A high-level inter-agency task force reporting to the UN secretary-general could assess the full impact of anti-vaccine aggression, and propose tough, balanced measures. The task force should include experts who have tackled complex global threats such as terrorism, cyber attacks and nuclear armament, because anti-science is now approaching similar levels of peril. It is becoming increasingly clear that advancing immunization requires a counter-offensive.”

We’ll be hearing a lot more rhetoric like this as this new, more totalitarian structure of global capitalism gradually develops … probably a good idea to listen carefully, and assume the New Normals mean exactly what they say.