Category Archives: internet freedom

The Facebook Team that Tried to Swing Nicaragua’s Election is Full of U.S. Spies

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A tacit agreement between the government and Facebook appears to have been made: you can keep the profits, but we control the message. As such, a cynic might wonder what functional difference there is between Facebook and the national security state.

By Alan Macleod

Source: Mint Press News

MANAGUA, NICARAGUA — Less than a week before Nicaragua’s presidential election, social media giant Facebook deleted the accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and activists, all of whom supported the ruling left-wing Sandinista government, a top Washington target for regime change.

Facebook claims that these accounts were bots engaged in “inauthentic behavior.” Considering that around half of the country uses the platform for news and entertainment, the decision could barely have been more heavy-handed and intrusive. However, early reports show that if their goal was to swing the result, it has failed badly and the Sandinistas have achieved an overwhelming victory.

“This is appalling interference by Facebook in particular (which is the most popular social media outlet in Nicaragua). They allege that they’ve stopped a government-deployed troll farm but what they have actually done is to close accounts of ordinary Sandinista activists, particularly young people, often with many followers,” John Perry, a journalist living in the city of Masaya, told MintPress.

Worse still, after dozens of Sandinistas took to Twitter to record video messages proving they were real people being censored, their accounts were systematically deleted as well, in what Managua-based journalist Ben Norton described as a Silicon Valley “double-tap strike.”

“These are accounts that average Nicaraguans have come to count on for news and communicating with each other about current events and, in this case, about the election. So it is very troubling that it was obviously targeted against one political group: the Sandinistas,” said Daniel Kovalik, a human-rights lawyer and an observer of this weekend’s elections.

Both Perry and Kovalik were of the opinion that it was no coincidence that Facebook had taken action against precisely the group the U.S. government is trying to overthrow.

Facebook as security-state beard

Perhaps even more worrying from a freedom-of-speech viewpoint is who made the decision at Facebook. The 11-page report detailing the company’s supposed evidence of inauthentic behavior has just two contributors: Luis Fernando Alonso and Ben Nimmo, individuals with deep and long-lasting ties to Western military intelligence. According to his biography on LinkedIn, Alonso was, until last year, working for Booz Allen Hamilton, a shadowy corporation situated in the area around Washington, D.C. colloquially known as “Raytheon Acres.” The national security state farms out much of its most controversial work to the firm, which is technically a private company (and therefore not subject to the same oversight and scrutiny as public agencies). Edward Snowden, for instance, actually worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, not the NSA. Before that, Alonso directly worked for the government at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, a Department of Defense-controlled institution that trains top military and intelligence leaders.

Nimmo’s background is equally spooky. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as NATO’s press officer, moving the next year to the Institute for Statecraft, a U.K. government-funded propaganda operation aimed at spreading misleading information about enemies of the British state. The Institute for Statecraft established a secret network of journalists across Europe who were used to push anti-Russia and pro-establishment talking points, all in coordination.

In 2019, Nimmo played a key role in downplaying the bombshell news that the Conservative government was quietly negotiating to sell off key parts of Great Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) to foreign plutocrats. When the Labour Party publicized this information just days before the election, Nimmo jumped into action, immediately announcing, without evidence, that the documents in question “closely resemble … a known Russian operation.” His supposedly expert conjecture — together with help from allied journalists in the Integrity Initiative — allowed the story to become “Labour’s links to Russia” rather than “Tories privatizing the NHS in secret,” helping the Conservatives make huge electoral gains.

Nimmo also became a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s semi-official think tank.

Facebook — now officially called “Meta” — is extremely secretive about who actually works at their intelligence department. Nowhere can one find a list of names of key figures. However, going back through months of reports and blog posts for names reveals a veritable revolving door between big tech and big government. In short, Facebook is strewn with spies.

For example, a document published in May, entitled “The State of Influence Operations, 2017-2020,” lists five author names in addition to Nimmo’s, at least four of whom have long histories as senior agents in the national security state.

In order, they are:

  • Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Security Policy: Gleicher spent two and a half years at the White House as the National Security Council’s Director of Cyber Security Policy. Before that he also spent five years at the Department of Justice.
  • David Agranovich, Head of Security Communications: Agranovich worked for more than six years in a senior role at the Department of Defense, before, in 2017, moving on to become the Director for Intelligence for the National Security Council at the White House.
  • Olga Belogolova, Influence Operations Product Policy Manager: The most academic of the authors, Belogolova teaches cybersecurity and influence operations to students at Georgetown University, an institution notorious as America’s spy school. Before that, she worked at the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs and on Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian policy at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She has also served on several working groups at government- and military-funded think tanks like The Center for New American Security, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, and The Atlantic Council.
  • Mike Torrey, Threat Intelligence Analyst: From 2010 until 2018, Torrey was a high-level CIA agent, specializing in cyberwarfare against China. Before that, he worked as a global network intelligence analyst for the NSA.

Of the six authors listed, only one, Margarita Franklin, comes from a non-governmental background.

Looking further into Facebook’s official blog, Mike Dvilyanski is described as the company’s Head of Cyber Espionage Investigations. From 2005 until 2018, Dvilyanski was an FBI agent in Washington and New York City, rising to the rank of Supervisory Special Agent, leading teams investigating cyberwafare.

Another official Facebook report from April was authored by the company’s Technical Threat Investigator, Michael Flossman, who spent nearly six years in the Australian Department of Defense.

In 2018, Facebook announced a partnership with The Atlantic Council, whereby it gave an undisclosed amount of control over users’ news feeds to the group, allowing it to help them decide what posts users saw and which ones were suppressed. Given that the council’s board features a plethora of military generals, former cabinet members, and no fewer than seven former CIA directors, this is tantamount to state censorship on a global level. A tacit agreement between the government and Facebook appears to have been made: you can keep the profits, but we control the message. As such, a cynic might wonder what functional difference there is between Facebook and the national security state.

Silicon Valley: tip of US imperial spear

It might be unfair, however, to single Facebook out. Other large platforms are similarly stocked with government plants. Reddit’s Director of Policy, for instance, was formerly a Deputy Director of The Atlantic Council’s Middle East Task Force. Meanwhile, a senior Twitter executive is also an active duty officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare and online propaganda brigade.

Silicon Valley has not only made their peace with this relationship; they actively court it. “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 Larry Cohen in their book, “The New Digital Age,” laying out how they saw Silicon Valley becoming the tip of the American empire’s spear.

Washington has already used social media as a weapon aimed at its enemies. In July, Americans in Miami used Facebook to organize an attempted color revolution in Cuba, while Twitter ignored blatantly obvious bots boosting the anti-government message, even choosing to put it at the top of its “what’s happening” sidebar for 36 hours, meaning every user in the world was alerted to the news. Individuals inside Cuba complained to MintPress that the endless supply of fake news citizens receive from the U.S. via Facebook and WhatsApp is spreading disinformation and rotting Cubans’ brains.

Meanwhile, in 2009, the U.S. government persuaded Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance of its app because of widespread protests it was fomenting in Iran, knowing the platform was being used to coordinate anti-government forces. Last year, Facebook banned all positive references to Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in the wake of his assassination by the Trump administration. “We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and its leadership,” the company said in a statement. Despite the fact that over 80% of the country held positive views towards the general (even before his killing), this meant that even Iranians speaking Farsi with other Iranians online in Iran could not share an overwhelmingly held view. This is but one example of the extraordinary power the U.S. national security state now holds over the means of communication worldwide.

Ineffective interference

The United States has a long history of interfering in Nicaragua, from invasions to propping up the 40-year Somoza family dictatorship. When Sandinista rebels ran them out of town in 1979, Washington began a long campaign of terror against the Sandinistas, including funding, training and arming the infamous Contra death squads. After more than a decade of interference, U.S.-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro won the 1990 election. However, after Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas returned to power in 2006, the U.S. once again began trying to undermine their rule through sanctions and by supporting a 2018 coup attempt. Washington has also unleashed an army of NGOs into the country, each attempting to foment discontent with the ruling government.

In September, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met in New York with the foreign ministers of Mexico and every other Central American country in an attempt to organize a united front against Nicaragua. Last week, the U.S. also announced new sanctions on the country. Kovalik told MintPress:

This is clearly punishment for the fact that they’re going to vote [the wrong way]. And meanwhile, of course the U.S. is putting millions into the country in terms of supporting opposition groups and different propaganda sources. So that continues. Again, what passes for alleged foreign interference in the U.S. …. is nothing compared to what the U.S. is doing here.

Western journalists and election observers whose opinions the U.S. government would rather not be shared have also been targeted. British journalist Steve Sweeney was detained in Mexico en route to Nicaragua. “It is no coincidence that it came just weeks after my ban from the U.S. I fully believe my detention is political and an attack on press freedom,” he wrote, after being released. Meanwhile, Canadian observer Dr. Timothy Bood was barred from sharing his experiences on Facebook, the platform blocking him immediately after he made a comment about U.S. interference in the election.

Perry suggested, however, that if Washington thinks that sanctions sanctions or other new measures will dislodge the government and break the people’s will, they are mistaken, and that the plan could backfire:

We had the approval in the U.S. Congress of the RENACER Act a few days ago, which is another threat of U.S. interference during and after the election process. I think opinion polls show that most people reject U.S. interference very strongly. I think in most cases it will strengthen people’s desire to vote and probably to vote for the Sandinista government. So it could have the opposite effect to the one that the U.S. wants to achieve.

Judging by the jubilant Sandinista parades in Managua and other cities today, coupled with the announcement that Ortega won an estimated three-quarters of the vote on a 65% turnout rate, Perry might have been proved right.

Examining the Methods and Means of COVID Propaganda Dissemination

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By Gary Weglarz

Source: Global Research

It is useful to identify and examine the many facets and the all encompassing nature of American/Western propaganda systems in our efforts to better understand why so many people have great difficulty in sorting truth from fiction regarding the “covid pandemic” narratives.  The following outline and commentary are an effort to more clearly identify the ubiquitous nature of Western covid propaganda in order to better understand its impacts on the public mind.

One method of propaganda dissemination during the promotion of the covid narratives has been major medical journals printing false covid related disinformation posing as “science.”  Early in the propaganda operation both The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine had to retract fraudulent articles dismissing the efficacy and falsely inflating the danger of using hydroxychloroquine in treatment of covid patients. (1). MSM widely promoted the fraudulent claims, but of course expressed no interest in their subsequent retractions.

That two of the world’s most widely esteemed medical journals were both guilty of publishing what were essentially disinformation pieces rife with conflicts of interest and essentially constituting what MSM calls “fake news” shines a bright light on the corruption of objective science which has now been captured by powerful monied pharmaceutical and commercial interests.

Print and web based legacy media such as the NYT, WAPO, Guardian, BBC, etc. have all been engaged in credulous daily promotion of the “official” covid narratives. They have done so while refusing to publish counter-narratives even by world renowned scientific experts, and while shaming, demeaning, and ridiculing any who question the “official science” of the CDC and WHO.

The official covid narratives are also promoted daily on all mainstream television news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX, PBS, BBC, etc. as well as on their web-based presence on platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Adding to the seamless nature of public exposure to the official covid propaganda narratives are their constant presence in mainstream print (and web based) specialty and/or alternative media such as  Daily Beast, Politico, TYT, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, National Geographic, Scientific American. (2)

The radio airways provide yet another means for our ingestion of the endless daily repetition of the official covid propaganda narratives.  These include of course all MSM radio affiliates, ubiquitous talk radio, and of course NPR. (3)

As if one has not been subject to enough official covid propaganda by bedtime, the late night comedians continue the daily onslaught often during their monologues.  A standard format in this aspect of propaganda promotion is that one must have properly ingested one’s daily dose of covid propaganda in order to “get the joke” and thus be able to identify with one’s favorite comedian.  Covid propaganda is simply the background “wallpaper” on the shows of the “hip” late night comedians such as Trevor Noah, Steven Colbert, John Oliver, etc.  

However, propaganda as “humor” sometimes moves beyond simple recitation of official narratives and the shaming of the unvaccinated.  In some cases it engages in the more sinister openly proclaimed dehumanization of the unvaccinated as “other” to be shunned, scorned and even denied medical care as evidenced by the recent monologue comments of late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel. (4)

Sports reporting both web and radio based also act as outlets for official covid narratives, including the shaming of those who question such narratives and/or who refuse to be vaccinated.  This is true of sports pundits for a variety of outlets.  Youtube based sports pundit Rich Eisen recently used his platform to confront Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors basketball team because Green dared to defend the right of one of his team-mates Andrew Wiggins to exercise his freedom to make his own decision on rejecting a vaccine.  Wiggins has since succumbed to pressure and accepted the vaccine. (5)  

Escaping the pernicious presence of the official covid narratives is virtually impossible unless one simply swears off all contact with the major forms of Western media. 

Censorship & Demonization of Dissenting Voices 

To insure proper absorption of the official propaganda narratives a regime of outright censorship has become normalized.  This includes the removal of specific  examples of “offending” material from web based platforms like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, etc. This sort of open censorship, of even expert scientific opinion, has become part of the so called “new normal.”  Offenders are often put on notice that further such violations of “community standards” for example, will lead to further sanctions.

Youtube interviews with world renowned scientists have been demonetized and/or  removed due to such scientists simply sharing their own scientific opinion.  This is done should that expert opinion differ from the “official narrative” according to the censors employed by Tech platforms. One of the co-inventors of the mRNA vaccine technology Dr. Robert Malone experienced such censorship several months ago. (6)  Three days after being censored and removed from Youtube for expressing his concerns about the safety of vaccines delivered by technology he helped create, Wikipedia suddenly rewrote Dr. Malone’s biography in the process hiding his contribution to the creation of mRNA technology. (7).  One can be forgiven for wondering if this was done by Wikipedia in a nod to Orwell’s 1984 “Party” maxim – “Ignorance is Strength.”

Complete de-platforming on web based social media of well respected voices is also now becoming normative.  A recent example is the complete removal from Youtube of the site of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s Children’s Health Defense and Dr. Mercola’s medical site, along with others who challenge the official covid narratives. (8).  Similar removal/de-platforming of medical professionals and scientists on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other web based media have also occurred.  

Another area of web based censorship is the removal of user generated Facebook groups created by those wishing to share their negative post-vaccination reactions with others given the silence and lack of support from within the medical community itself for such individuals. (9).  Multiple such user groups have been banned from Facebook for simply providing a forum for users to share their own personal experiences.

The impact of such overt censorship has been to put all who post material and opinions on platforms like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter to consciously engage in self-censorship in order to not risk being de-platformed.  News and analysis sites like Jimmy Dore, Dark Horse Podcast, Joe Rogan, and many others now openly discuss avoiding using or discussing certain words, phrases, or topics related to the official covid narratives that might lead to “warnings” or de-platforming.  Self censorship has become yet another aspect of our new normal.  

An invisible and too seldom discussed stealth method of the censorship of any of us who are questioning the official covid narratives is the Big Tech use of internet search algorithms designed to suppress or completely hide the existence of the material challenging official narratives.  I find my own Google searches for topics such as “covid vaccine adverse reactions” end up providing endless pages of material  simply censoring out and/or debunking the very idea that such adverse events could be anything but “fake news.” 

I have found that the suppression of any articles questioning the official narratives that isn’t presented as “fake news” is almost virtually complete in my own Google searches.  This means one must know before one searches the actual name of the post you are looking for or of the name of an alternative independent media site like Global Research or OffGuardian, because it appears that Google will now routinely use its algorithms to do everything in its power to avoid taking you to anything but articles and sites supporting the official narratives.

We now live in a world in which MSM outlets across all platforms routinely refuse to publish general articles, opinion pieces, video interviews, or even reference peer reviewed scientific journal articles by world renowned scientists if that material diverges from the official CDC/WHO opinion and stated policy.  One cannot help but note the rather seamless nature of this entire propaganda operation.  It is indeed impressive from a prospective of totalitarian narrative control. 

However, even this massive ability to dominate narrative construction and dissemination appears not to be sufficient in the opinion of those at the helm of the oligarch controlled structures of media power.  Thus independent popular media platforms are subject to what appear to be well orchestrated and coordinated attacks from MSM outlets should they report material that questions or in any way challenges MSM covid reporting. 

A recent example of such attacks was the MSM wide disinformation campaign aimed at popular Youtube personality Joe Rogan who self-reported his own positive Ivermectin experience in treating his covid.  His use of Ivermectin was not only widely panned and demeaned across MSM, but was also routinely intentionally and deceitfully distorted to suggest he had used the “animal version” of the drug scornfully referred to in MSM reports as a “horse dewormer.”  This disinformation was widely disseminated even though Rogan had clearly stated he received the Ivermectin prescription from his own doctor. (10).  

Such MSM attacks are designed to intimidate and although they likely did no significant damage to someone with Rogan’s large audience base, they may certainly cause others in independent media who have smaller audiences to hesitate to share their own similar experiences for fear of such negative repercussions. 

Such attacks by MSM, and censorship by Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, are now normative even when reporting the results of peer reviewed scientific journal articles that suggest possible efficacy of Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in covid treatment.  Clearly it is not “the science” that MSM is protecting with such attacks, but the official propaganda narrative.

Medical professional organizations, medical licensing boards, hospitals and related entities are now literally threatening doctors with loss of hospital privileges and/or license to practice for simply having and sharing a medical opinion that diverges from the official narratives. (11)

Newsweek reported “a joint statement issued by the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Board of Family Medicine and the American Board of Pediatrics” pointed out quite clearly exactly what type of “medical opinion” by a practicing physician might endanger his/her license to practice.  “The evidence that we have safe, effective and widely available vaccines against COVID-19 is overwhelming. We are particularly concerned about physicians who use their authority to denigrate vaccination at a time when vaccines continue to demonstrate excellent effectiveness against severe illness, hospitalization and death.” (11)

The need for such an overt threat from these higher levels of the medical establishment makes clear that at least some physicians retain both independence of thought and the moral integrity required to form their own opinion.  However, the issuance of such a ham-handed threat based upon clearly unscientific and unsupported reassurances of “vaccine safety” suggests that these higher echelons of the medical establishment in the United States are now captive to monied interests, thus completely undermining the integrity of American medical practice.

My own medical care is through a large southern California university based consortium.  I recently asked my physician if she would prescribe a prophylactic dose of Ivermectin that I could keep on hand should I begin to develop covid symptoms.  She explained she was not allowed to do so, but that she would forward my request to the consortium’s “infectious disease specialist” who promptly responded that my doctor could not in fact prescribe Ivermectin for me because “the reliable evidence available does not support the use of Ivermectin for treatment or prevention of COVID-19.”  My own research into the available information on Ivermectin suggests this contention is clearly not accurate, but there is of course no recourse to challenge this institutional policy.

I cannot help but reflect on the irony that this same medical practice can and does continue to prescribe statin medications for their patients in spite of the now massive scientific research indicating that “the reliable evidence does not support” statin use for a large percentage of those who will continue to be put on statins, in spite of the many known dangerous side-effects.

Although I have great respect for my own primary care physician, she is literally not allowed to practice medicine independently in treating covid, but must instead seek permission to simply prescribe a globally used medication known to be safe that has clearly shown great efficacy around the world in covid treatment.  Instead the official opinion of the higher-ups controlling my physician’s medical practice appears to be “If you get sick enough show up at the ER, but otherwise we refuse to treat you.” Needless to say even while refusing to issue an Ivermectin script, I continue to receive regular email notices from my medical consortium reminding me to “schedule my covid vaccination.” 

Many doctors are now expressly forbidden from publicly discussing or reporting vaccine adverse reactions, and are forbidden to use their professional expertise in order to treat their own patients should that entail prescribing officially “demonized” medications such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.  Why Do So Many Believe the Official COVID Narratives?

Clearly we have never seen such draconian attempts at controlling the treatment options available to physicians and thus to their patients.  Nor have we seen the professional opinions of highly respected front-line acute-care medical providers who actually “treat” covid on a daily basis overtly demeaned in MSM.  Bedside acute-care physicians are thus being thwarted using overt threats to their licensure in order to enforce such “new normal” Orwellian control. 

Meanwhile, the demonization of the unvaccinated in MSM using these widely varied methods of propaganda dissemination is now ubiquitous.  There are now two relatively new categories of “human beings” inhabiting planet earth – the righteous and obedient “vaccinated” and the unclean, unworthy and dangerous “unvaccinated.”  This represent the latest in oligarchy’s endless efforts at “divide and conquer.”   

Clearly much appears to be at stake in the opinion of said global oligarchy.  The uber-wealthy and their public representatives seem to be pushing all of their chips to the center of the table as they place massive bets on this covid propaganda campaign.  Those bets are wagered against the credibility of what now amounts to almost all Western institutions.  Given the completely fatuous nature of the official covid narratives one can assume a significant level of desperation must exist among our global elites.  They appear to be dedicated to finding some means, any means, that might allow them to maintain their own power and control in the world.  A world in which a literal “house of cards” global economy, combined with ever greater ecosystem degradation and dis-regulation, is able less and less to ensure their continued future dominance.

Manipulation of Data and Definitions to Support the Propaganda Narratives 

One cannot help but notice the importance of language in any propaganda operation.  Words have meaning, as do those sets of words we call “definitions.”  What are we to make of the WHO changing the definition of “herd immunity” so that herd immunity is no longer achieved through a population being exposed to a pathogen and developing a protective immune response, but rather is now to be understood in terms of “vaccines?”(12) 

The new WHO definition reads: “herd immunity,’ also known as ‘population immunity,’ is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” (12)  Since when has this EVER been the definition of herd immunity?  Answer, since the WHO changed the definition during the covid propaganda operation. 

In a public presentation the WHO director general explained this Orwellian decision to change the definition using suitably Orwellian double-speak: “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic.  It is scientifically and ethically problematic.” (12)  

Of course the simple unassailable “reality” here on planet earth is that we have as a species ALWAYS relied historically over endless millennia on the development of herd immunity by surviving whatever pathogen we were collectively exposed to.  It is only at this very moment in time, in the midst of the covid propaganda operation, that it has ever been necessary to “deny” that rather elementary fact of our collective human history.  

Additional examples of changing an official institutionally based definition to support the covid propaganda narratives is the CDC changing its definition of both “immunity” and “vaccine.” (13)

A final example on altering definitions and of data manipulation is the WHO changing how the actual cause of death on death certificates is reported, done clearly in order to inflate covid deaths thus promoting the official “pandemic” narrative. (14) (15). These changes smack of a Three-Stooges level of slapstick absurdity when it comes to simple common sense.  Under the new rules one could have essentially been perfectly healthy one moment, but had just been exposed by proximity to someone with a covid infection the next, or given a false-positive PCR at 45 cycles, and then immediately struck by a bolt of lightening and killed.  Then, by the new definitions, while in defiance of all common sense, the coroner would be given enough wiggle room so that he could still make a case for “death by covid” on one’s death certificate. (16)  “Orwellian” doesn’t quite do justice to this level of unscientific absurdity.

Manipulation of what constitutes a covid ‘case’ has been an essential propaganda tool in creating the “impression” of a pandemic. The pandemic hysteria itself is based more than anything upon fraudulent “false positives” obtained with the PCR test.  MSM quickly shifted early in the propaganda rollout from concern about supposed covid deaths, to focusing more on such false-positive “cases” which they dishonestly portrayed as actual illness. These daily touted “cases” appear to be primarily people registering a false positive on a PCR test given at a grossly inflated and therefore meaningless 35-45 cycles.  

Massive numbers of such false positive or “asymptomatic cases” were thus created out of thin air.  Voila!  Instant proof of a pandemic.  Most of these supposed “cases” were admittedly “asymptomatic,” but not because they had a mild version of the illness. They were most likely asymptomatic because they were not sick at all.  Thus the pandemic narrative has been fueled by simply defining “well people” as “sick people” based upon a known fraudulent testing regime. (17)

How do we know the use of PCR testing at 35-45 cycles was known by authorities to be fraudulent?  Because now that the vaccine program has been rolled out the vaccinated are only given PCR tests at a reasonable 28 cycles, while the unvaccinated continue to be subjected to the fraudulent 35-45 cycle PCR testing. (18). This of course deceptively insures that the unvaccinated continue to generate completely asymptomatic false positives, and can then be made to appear to be driving the spread of the illness.  

Meanwhile the vaccinated are much less likely to test positive given their testing is now, indefensible by any scientific measure, conducted at the lower 28 cycle threshold when compared to the unvaccinated conducted at 35-45 cycles.  The MSM promotion of the “trust the science” phrase has become simply a new addition to Orwellian “double-speak.”  To the Party slogans from Orwell’s book 1984, “War is Peace,” “Love is Hate,” and “Ignorance is Strength,” we can now officially add “Trust The Science.”

Covid death numbers have been even further inflated by the use of false positive PCR tests to label patients who are already terminally ill from other diseases (i.e. cancer, COPD, renal failure, etc) as “covid deaths” in official reporting because they died within 28 days of a meaningless fake ‘false positive’ PCR test.  Even in the complete absence of covid symptoms a hospice patient dying from another illness can be called a “covid” death in official data collection. (19)

Further distortion and manipulation of data in support of the official narratives involves not counting someone as “vaccinated” until 14 days after the “second dose” in two dose vaccines.  Thus someone who dies after the first dose, or within 14 days of the second dose, is “defined” as “unvaccinated” and can be counted fraudulently in that category. (20). This of course further promotes the narrative that it is mainly the “unvaccinated” who are being hospitalized and are dying.  One is hard pressed to imagine a more blatantly corrupt and amoral “public health policy.”  This is a policy which is designed of course to minimize the association between the vaccines and post-vaccination deaths, while simultaneously blaming the unvaccinated as being those who are hospitalized and dying. 

The weekly updated VAERS data from the CDC clearly shows massive numbers of both serious adverse vaccine reactions and deaths though it is known to vastly undercount such events.  However this highly concerning VAERS data is being silently ignored by the CDC itself, the MSM, the political class, and most of the medical establishment. (21). Meanwhile a consistent propaganda theme is one of omission in which the MSM either completely fails to report on such obviously important health data, or dismisses the idea that the VAERS reports themselves justify any further scrutiny.

A party interested in truth rather than in promoting propaganda would surely ask where autopsies are for those who died unexpectedly in close proximity to vaccination.  The MSM in support of the official narrative simply of course never poses such a logical straight forward question, as it would unravel the entire charade.  Clearly if the CDC does not “look for” possible links between vaccinations and unexpected deaths it will certainly be guaranteed “not to find them.”  

One is reminded how NIST proclaimed there were no explosives involved in the demolition of the three World Trade Center buildings, only to have to admit that they NEVER LOOKED for any evidence of explosives.  The CDC is taking the same tack in simply refusing to do autopsies on the many thousands who have died post-vaccination while the MSM pretends any discussion of such deaths is “fake news” by “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-vaxxers.”

Another rather telling mode of propaganda promotion is the complete fabrication out of thin air of “news” that supports the covid narrative. This involves the subsequent spreading of such fabricated stories throughout MSM, and even failing to retract them once they are proven completely false. A recent such fabricated article in the magazine Rolling Stone that was widely repeated throughout MSM is a case in point. (22).  The story was that ERs in Oklahoma were overrun with people over-dosed on the livestock version of Ivermectin, thus denying even gunshot wound victims access to emergency care.  The story was shown to be a complete fabrication.  It was an obvious disinformation piece, yet was credulously repeated throughout MSM.  

This episode in blatant “fake news” propaganda, since it supported the official narratives demonizing Ivermectin, of course aroused no noticeable concern among those who proclaim to find such fake news unacceptable. The MSM pundits and the big tech platforms supposedly devoted to censoring “fake news,” appeared to have no problem with this blatantly fabricated disinformation piece posing as news.  Clearly fake news in support of the propaganda operation is simply standard operating procedure.  Another example of “the new normal.”  

Invisible Psychological Operations 

In a previous article I discussed the implications of Terror Management Theory (TMT) in promoting and assisting the public’s unconscious acceptance of the official covid propaganda. (23)  I continue to think that TMT offers an important window into understanding how the manipulation of our natural fears of death makes us more vulnerable to being propagandized.  It does so by over-riding one’s normal ability to think critically and rationally when such death fears are being repeatedly triggered day after day. 

Reminders of death and our mortality, delivered both consciously and unconsciously, have shown in hundreds of TMT experiments to increase unconscious support for, and greater compliance with, our underlying cultural norms.  This drives the population toward an unconscious position of becoming more trusting of institutional authorities, causing people to engage in more compliant behavior with the dictates of such authorities.

When recalling the initial propaganda images out of China depicting people standing in public places who suddenly simply fell over dead I am reminded of the astute observation made by Daniel Boorstin in his 1962 book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.”  As Boorstin explained, “Strictly speaking, there is no way to unmask an image.  An image, like any other psuedo-event, becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.”

Are those being propagandized more likely to believe the images they see with their own eyes?  Or to believe those of us who are trying to “unmask” and “debunk” those images?  The power of such covid propaganda images should not be underestimated, in part because they seamlessly trigger the TMT “death fears” that so effectively short-circuit our ability to think clearly and critically.  Images of people falling over dead, images of piles of bodies, images of hospitals over-run, images of the faceless masked, are immensely powerful propaganda tools because of their deep psychological impacts often experienced not only consciously, but also at quite unconscious levels. 

Lastly, and perhaps the most frightening aspect of these psychological propaganda operations comes from large segments of the population being vulnerable to the covert behavioral modification techniques associated with simply “being connected” in our modern web-based world.  Professor Shoshana Zuboff provides a very detailed and chilling examination of the operant/instrumental conditioning techniques now routinely used by what she terms “surveillance capitalism” in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” (24)  

Professor Zuboff painstakingly outlines the almost unimaginable extent to which big tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are surreptitiously capturing (“rendering” as Zuboff calls it) vast amounts of our personal data from literally all electronic web based devices.  However, it is not the loss of privacy that is of greatest concern in her analysis.  Rather, it is the ever increasing ability of big tech companies to compile, aggregate and with ever more powerful AI tools to utilize that data in order to shape and change our behavior through means that are literally beyond our own conscious awareness.  

Behavioral change is accomplished utilizing these ever more powerful AI tools in conjunction with continuously analyzing the behaviors and responses of billions of people across the globe. It is the ability to analyze personal opinions, then provide a new psychological “reward” or “punishment,” and then again measure those opinions, over and over with ever more powerful tools, in close to real-time, that poses the most dangerous threat to our ability to resist propaganda.  This level of “shaping” and “manipulating” the public mind both for the profit of corporations which Zuboff refers to as surveillance capitalism, and in service to the hidden agendas of the State intelligence apparatus, is not part of some future sci-fi world, but is an invisible aspect of our current reality, whether we are aware of that reality or not.

Already surveillance capitalism has shown the ability to surreptitiously modify and shape human thinking and behavior in marketable ways in pursuit of profit.  These operations are being conducted by the same big tech companies Edward Snowden outed almost a decade ago for their deep cooperation with and connections to the Western intelligence apparatus.  These were intelligence agencies engaged in propaganda operations aimed at Western citizenry. (25)  Much has changed in the world since Snowden shed light on these operations, including the development of ever more powerful AI based programs that capture our personal data, monitor our behavior, AND then shape our behavior beyond our human awareness. 

Zuboff’s book, Snowden’s revelations, and the implications of that convergence deserve a much more thorough detailing and discussion in the future.  However, I will for today end with what I feel is perhaps the most insidious aspect of what is implied through this coalescence of unseen forces.  Which is that we can be both surreptitiously monitored, and our thinking and behavior shaped, in what increasingly approaches close to real-time fashion.  Connected to the ubiquitous “web,” our thoughts and behaviors are no longer our own.  They can be, and are being, manipulated and modified outside of the realm of our conscious awareness.  This is not being done to meet our needs, but rather to meet the agendas of those who comprise a new class of “surveillance capitalists” who work in conjunction with the massive power of the Western intelligence gathering services.

In spite of all the wide-ranging aspects of the covid propaganda promotion I detailed earlier, I don’t think any of them alone or in combination hold as much potential to control and shape public consciousness as the ever more powerful tools of surveillance capitalism combined with the means and methods of the intelligence services.  

It is inconceivable to me that these tools are somehow not in continuous use 24/7, monitoring real-time public responses on web platforms and social media, to our searches, to what we read, to what we share with others, to our comments, spanning everything from new lockdown measures in a particular city, to the loosening of restrictions somewhere else, from responses to various forms of vaccination mandates in one part of the country compared to another, etc. 

No doubt there is consistent monitoring and evaluation examining which AI based interventions are most effective in “tuning, herding, nudging and shaping” (24) our perceptions and behaviors toward the propaganda ends of the oligarchic system of control.   For a very simple unsophisticated example it is child’s play for Facebook using the tools already at its disposal to insure you see nothing but posts from your Facebook “friends” who have gotten the vaccine, and no material from anyone who refused it.  This can be done in an effort to shape your behavior toward the desired end of you “making your own decision” to eventually do what you are being manipulated to do, to get the vaccine.  Why wouldn’t you submit to the vaccine since literally “all of your ‘friends’ are doing so” and since not doing so will put you in the cognitively uncomfortable position of now being in a publicly demonized “out group.”

I fear however that Zuboff’s and Snowden’s revelations portend something much darker and more sinister than my simple and rather obvious example touches upon.  A world in which much of humanity is manipulated, shaped, and controlled in both thought and behavior 24/7 without conscious awareness that this is happening.  Our thoughts someone else’s, but experienced as our own.  We don’t really need more information or another whistleblower like Edward Snowden to know where we stand.  What we do need is a much deeper familiarity and understanding of these hidden tools and processes in order to unmask them, publicize them, and resist their ever growing impacts.

*

Gary Weglarz retired in 2014 from practice as a clinical social worker.  He worked with, and learned from, Alaskan Native peoples who were attempting to heal the damage inflicted by the collective ongoing intergenerational trauma of colonization.  Currently he is engaged in research and writing regarding the relationship between past mass trauma in Western societies, and the subsequent colonial violence that has characterized the behavior of Europe and her colonies. He was actively involved in Central American solidarity efforts throughout the 1990’s, traveling with human rights delegations to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Colombia. 

Notes

(1) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giuseppe-Calcaterra/publication/343379182_An_expression_of_concern_on_research_misconduct_during_the_corona_virus_disease-2019_pandemic/links/5f7037c492851c14bc9a53e5/An-expression-of-concern-on-research-misconduct-during-the-corona-virus-disease-2019-pandemic.pdf

(2) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/breakthrough-infections-do-not-mean-covid-vaccines-are-failing/

(3) https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/

 (4) https://nypost.com/2021/09/08/jimmy-kimmel-says-unvaxxed-americans-dont-deserve-icu-beds/

(5) https://www.nbcsports.com/video/rich-eisen-warriors-draymond-green-wrong-about-covid-19-comments

(6) https://www.yahoo.com/now/single-most-qualified-mrna-expert-173600060.html

(7) https://thebl.com/us-news/wikipedia-censors-real-inventor-of-mrna-technology-over-vaccine-warnings.html

(8) https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2021/09/29/youtube-is-banning-prominent-anti-vaccine-activists-and-blocking-all-anti-vaccine-content/

(9) https://twitter.com/peterrowen_/status/1376798789097377792?lang=en

(10) https://www.yahoo.com/now/joe-rogan-considers-suing-cnn-190606533.html

(11) https://www.newsweek.com/medical-boards-threaten-doctors-spreading-covid-misinformation-decertification-1629157

(12) https://www.abc10.com/article/news/verify/verify-changes-who-definition-herd-immunity-not-secret/507-f90c0199-c88e-4c66-8313-b4ae6e2a72ad

(13) https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html

(14) https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/02/counting-covids-deceptive-deaths/

(15) https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/Guidelines_Cause_of_Death_COVID-19.pdf

(16) https://cbs12.com/news/local/man-who-died-in-motorcycle-crash-counted-as-covid-19-death-in-florida-report

https://www.globalresearch.ca/anyone-any-disease-alberta-counted-covid-case/5757739

(17) https://off-guardian.org/2021/08/03/repeat-after-me-the-pcr-tests-dont-work/

(18) https://off-guardian.org/2020/12/18/who-finally-admits-pcr-tests-create-false-positives/

(19) https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/questions-over-the-accuracy-of-how-the-state-tracks-covid-deaths/283-0b1b7b6c-695e-4313-92cf-a4cfd7510721

(20) https://www.globalresearch.ca/cdc-allows-hospitals-classify-dead-vaxxed-people-unvaccinated/5757502

(21) https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vaers-cdc-deaths-injuries-covid-vaccines/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=9470f062-0cf2-4251-ae09-99ed0c9dbe0d

(22) https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/rolling-stones-botched-ivermectin-story-raises-questions-about-the-nature-of-misinformation/

(23) https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-do-so-many-believe-official-covid-narratives/5752602

(24) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future At The New Frontier Of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019.

(25) https://theintercept.com/collections/snowden-archive/

Without admitting it, we are already converted to transhumanism

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On October 18, 2019, i.e. before the alert was issued against Covid-19, a few personalities participated in a role-playing game simulating this epidemic. This event was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: Voltairenet.org

The world is changing very fast. During the Covid epidemic, money has been concentrated in a few hands. The new oligarchs are transhumanists. Without realising it, we have already accepted their ideology and are beginning to put it into practice. Western doctors have given up trying to cure this disease and it seems obvious to us to bet everything on messenger RNA. It does not matter that this strategy is fatal. Henceforth, this is how we think.

The containment, due to the political reaction to Covid-19, favoured a global redistribution of wealth in favour of a few Internet players (Microsoft, Alphabet…). At the same time, investment funds (Vanguard, Blackrock, etc.), which were already managing astronomical sums and could impose their interests on states, became the property of a few families. There are now stratospheric wealth gaps between a few super-billionaires and the people.

The middle classes, which had been slowly eroding since the fall of the USSR and the beginning of economic globalisation, are gradually disappearing. In practice, democratic systems cannot withstand these sudden and gigantic wealth gaps.

As always in periods of change in political systems, the social class that aspires to power imposes its point of view. In this case, transhumanism. The idea that scientific progress will enable a transformation of human biology to the point of overcoming death. Almost all of the world’s fifty largest fortunes seem to subscribe to this fantasy. For them, technology will replace many people in the same way that science has replaced superstition.

In order to impose their new Doxa, these very large fortunes are starting to control what we think and to force us to act according to this new ideology. The most recent phenomenon is precisely our reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic. Historically, in all previous epidemics without exception, doctors sought to cure the sick. That was the old world. In the new transhumanist world, no one is to be cured, all are to be protected with a new technology, messenger RNA. Most developed states forbid their doctors to treat their patients and their pharmacists to sell drugs that might help them (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc.). A leading medical journal, The Lancet, even published an article claiming that an old drug used by millions of people was killing Covid patients who took it. The Internet giants censor accounts that promote it. Everything must be done to make messenger RNA the one and only option.

I am not a doctor. I don’t know what these products are worth. I’m just a man who observes the way in which a debate is closed before it has begun. I am not interfering in the scientific debate, but I am observing the closure of the debate.

The messenger RNA case against doctors is not over, however. President Joe Biden held a virtual global summit on September 22, 2021 to distribute 500 million packets of messenger RNA ’vaccine’. To everyone’s surprise, the states that were to be the recipients of this gift boycotted the summit. They do not believe that messenger RNA is a solution for them [1].

To understand them, all you need is a calculator: the states that went all in on messenger RNA had 20 to 25 times more deaths per million population than those that allowed care by doctors.

Transhumanism already fascinates us because we don’t ask about the ban on Covid care. It does not have the same influence outside the West.

In the past, vaccination consisted of inoculating a small portion of a disease so that the body learns to defend itself against it. Since Covid-19, messenger RNA has been equated with vaccination, yet it is not a vaccine in the classical sense.

PROPAGANDA

History has shown us that in order to impose a new regime, you must first get people to act in accordance with a new ideology. Once the subjects have started to comply, it becomes very difficult for them to back down. The game is up. This is called propaganda. Propaganda is not about controlling discourse, but about using it to change behaviour [2].

As we have all given up on experimenting with Covid care, we have all signed up to messenger RNA and now the health pass. We are ripe to enter this new regime. It is absurd to call it a “dictatorship”; an old world concept. We do not yet know what this new regime will be, yet we are already building it.

States are threatened by the very large fortunes mentioned above, which are generally much more powerful than they are. States have mainly fixed costs and very little room for manoeuvre. On the contrary, the new very large fortunes can withdraw their investments here at any time and take them there. Very few Sovereign Wealth Funds can compete with them and thus still be independent of them.

The corporate media refuse to question the ban on care for Covid-19. They devote all their energy to promoting messenger RNA.

THE CORPORATE MEDIA

The corporate media have been very active in this project. For a long time, but especially since the end of the Cold War, journalism has defined itself as a search for ’objectivity’, even though it is known to be impossible.

In court, witnesses are not asked to be ’objective’. But they are required to “tell the Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth”. It is known that each person has only perceived a part of the Truth according to his or her own condition. Thus, in an accident involving a pedestrian and a car, most of the pedestrian witnesses agree with the pedestrian, while most of the motorist witnesses say that the car was in the right. It is only the sum of the evidence that tells us what happened.

The corporate media reacted to the influx of new actors into their profession (blogs and social networks) first by trying to disqualify them: these people are touching, but they are not trained enough to compare themselves to us. Professional journalists have made a distinction between freedom of expression (for all) and freedom of the press (for them alone). One thing leading to another, they have set themselves up as schoolmasters, the only ones capable of giving good and bad marks to those who try to imitate them. To do this, they imagined that they would check their assertions (fact check) as if their work were comparable to a television game show.

Worried that politicians would side with their constituents rather than the very rich, the corporate media have extended fact checking to their political guests. There are countless programmes where a leader is subjected to editorial fact-checking. Political discourse, which should be an analysis of society’s problems and how to solve them, is reduced to a series of figures that can be checked against statistical yearbooks.

The corporate media have asserted themselves first as a ’Fourth Estate’ and then, after absorbing the others, as the main Estate. This notion comes from the 18th century British politician and philosopher, Edmund Burke. The ’Fourth Estate’ was constituted alongside the Spiritual, the Temporal and the Commons (the simple people). Burke, in the name of his liberal conservatism, did not dispute its legitimacy. Today everyone can see that it is not based on a value, but on the money of its owners.

The choice of subjects covered by the corporate media is constantly shrinking. It is slowly moving away from analysis and concentrating on verifiable data only.

Twenty years ago, for example, newspapers that challenged my work would present it summarily and then immediately disqualify it as ’conspiratorial’. Today, they no longer dare to summarise my theses, because they have no way of ’fact-checking’ them. So they just classify me as ’unreliable’. Faced with younger, non-professional journalists, the corporate media limit themselves to insults. As a result, there is a growing gap between them.

This phenomenon is particularly evident with the ’yellow vests’, ordinary citizens who were protesting against this sociological evolution of the world even before containment allowed it to triumph. I remember a debate on a 24-hour news channel where a member of parliament asked a yellow vest what allowance would satisfy the protesters, while the yellow vest replied, “We don’t need allowances, we want a fairer system.” The corporate media quickly removed individuals who, like this lady, were thinking about the problems of society and replaced them with others who were making concrete and immediate demands. They did everything to censor their thinking.

In the past, the Church published a list of books that were forbidden to the faithful. Today, on the contrary, they try to publish a list of reliable sources, even to determine a priori the Truth.

GOOD AND BAD GRADES

Another solution envisaged by the new ruling elite is to re-establish the Index librorum prohibitorum. In the past, the Church – which was not only a community of believers but also a political power – published a list of books that were censored for all but its clerics. It wanted to protect the People from the errors and lies of the protesters. This only lasted for a while. In the backlash, the believers deprived the Church of its political power.

Former Nato and Bush Administration officials set up a New York-based company, NewsGuard, to compile a list of unreliable websites (including ours) [3]. Or NATO, the European Union, Bill Gates and a few others have created CrossCheck, which finances, among other things, Les Décodeurs du Monde [4]. It seems that the exponential multiplication of information sources has ruined this project.

A more recent method consists in defining a priori, not who is reliable, but what the Truth is.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has just set up a “Mission against disinformation and conspiracy”, its president, the sociologist Gérald Bronner, considers that the State should set up a body to establish the Truth on the basis of “scientific consensus”. He considers it unacceptable that the word of “a university professor is equivalent to that of a yellow vest” [5].

This method is not new. In the 17th century, Galileo claimed that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way round. Gérald Bronner’s predecessors opposed him with various passages from the Holy Scriptures, which were then considered a revealed source of knowledge. Then the ’scientific consensus’ led to his condemnation by the Church.

The history of science is full of examples of this type: almost all the great discoverers were opposed by the ’scientific consensus’ of their time. Most of the time their ideas were not able to triumph with demonstrations, but with the death of their opponents: the leaders of the “scientific consensus”.

Translation:
Roger Lagassé

Which Is Worse, the Tech Giant Censors or the Stuff You Want Censored?

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By David Swanson

Source: War is a Crime

The communications system we live in is highly complex, mostly driven by greed and profit, in part semi-public, full of filth I know we’d be better off without, and increasingly openly censored and monitored by defenders of accepted good thinking.

Fascist nutcases are spreading dangerous nonsense, while billionaire monopolists are virtually disappearing critics and protesters. It’s easy to get confused about what ought to be done. It’s difficult to find any recommendation that isn’t confused. Different people want different outrages censored and censored by different entities; what they all have in common is a failure to think through the threats they are creating to the things they don’t want censored.

A 1975 Canadian government commission recommended censoring “libel, obscenity, breach of the Official Secrets Act, matters affecting the defense of Canada, treason, sedition, or promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence.” This is a typical muddle. Half of those things were almost certainly already banned, as suggested by their identification through legal terminology. A few of those things probably should be banned, such as incitement of violence (though not promulgating information that “leads” to incitement of any crime or violence). Of course I would include as incitement of violence a speech by the Prime Minister advocating the shipping of Canadian “Peace Keepers” to Africa, but the Prime Minister (who would have more say than I) would no doubt have just identified me as commenting on a matter affecting the defense of Canada — plus, if he or she were in the mood, I’ve probably just promulgated something that will lead to inciting some crime or other, even if it’s just the crime of more people speaking on matters affecting the “defense” of Canada. (And it shouldn’t matter that I’m not Canadian, since Julian Assange is not from the United States.)

Well, what’s the solution? A simplistic and surprisingly popular one is to blame philosophers. Those idiot postmodernists said there was no such thing as truth, which allowed that great student of philosophy Donald Trump to declare news about him “fake” — which he never could have thought of doing without a bunch of leftist academics inspiring him; and the endless blatant lies about wars and economies and environmental collapse and straight-faced reporting of campaign promises can’t have anything at all to do with the ease people have in distrusting news reporting. So, now we need to swing the pendulum back in the direction of tattooing the Ten Commandments on our foreheads before morality perishes at the hands of the monster relativism. We can’t do that without censoring the numbskulls, regrettably of course.

This line of thinking is dependent on failing to appreciate the point of postmodern criticism. That the greater level of consensus that exists on chemistry or physics as opposed to on what should be banned as “obscenity” is a matter of degree, not of essential or metaphysical substance, is an interesting point for philosophy students, and a correct one, but not a guide to life for politicians or school teachers. That there is no possible basis for declaring some law of physics permanent and incapable of being replaced by a better one is not a reason for treating a law of physics as a matter of opinion or susceptible to alteration via fairy dust. If Isaac Newton not being God, and God also not being God, disturbs you and you’re mad at philosophers for saying it, you should notice what follows from it: the need for everyone to support your right to try to persuade them of their error. And what does not follow from it: the elimination of chemistry or physics because some nitwit claims he can fly or kill a hurricane with his gun. If that idiot has 100,000 followers on social media, your concern is not with philosophy but with stupidity.

The tech-giant censors’ concern is — in part — also with stupidity, but it’s not clear they have the tools to address it. For one thing, they just cannot help themselves. They have other concerns too. They are concerned with their profits. They are concerned with any challenges to power — their power and the power of those who empower them. They are concerned, therefore, with the demands and national bigotry of national governments. They are concerned — whether they know it or not — with creative thinking. Every time they censor an idea they believe crazy, they risk censoring one of those ideas that proves superior to existing ones. Their combination of interests appears to be self-defeating. Rather than persuade people of the benefits of their censorship, they persuade more and more people of the rightness of what was censored and of the arbitrary power-interests of those doing the censoring.

Our problem is not too many voices on the internet. It is too much concentration of wealth and power in too few media outlets that are too narrowly restricted to too few voices, relegating other voices to marginal and ghettoized corners of the internet. Nobody gets to find out they’re mistaken through respectful discourse. Nobody gets to show someone else they’re right. We need to prioritize that sort of exchange, before a flood of misguided good intentions drowns us all.

The “promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence” bit of that proposed law seems to have had a surprisingly good intention, namely benevolent parental concern with all the “action-filled” (violence-filled) children’s entertainment on television, the violence-normalizing enter/info-tainment programming for all ages that studies and commonsense suggest increase violence. But can we ban all that garbage, or do we have to empower people who actually give a damn to produce and select programming, and empower families to turn it all off, and schools to be more engaging than cartoons?

The difficulty of censoring such content should be clear from the fact that discussions of it tend to stray into numerous unrelated topics, including the supposed need to censor wars for the protection of, not children, but weapons dealers. Once you allow a corporation to censor damaging news — poof! — there go all negative reports on its products. Once you tell it to put warning labels over recommendations to drink bleach as medicine, it starts putting warning labels on anything related to climate collapse or originating outside the United States of Goddamn Righteousness. You can imagine whether that ends up helping or hurting the supposed target, stupidity.

Censoring news, and labeling news as “factual,” seems to me a cheap fix that doesn’t fix. It’s a bit like legalizing bribery and gerrymandering and limited ballot access and corporate airwaves domination and then declaring that you’ll institute term limits so that every rotten candidate has to be quickly replaced by an even more rotten one. It’s a lovely sounding solution until you try it. Look at the “fact-checker” sections of corporate media outlets. They’re as wrong and inconsistent as any other sections; they’re just labeled differently.

The solutions that will work are not easy, and I’m no expert on them, but they’re not new or mysterious either. We should democratize and legitimize government. We should use government to break up media monopolies. We should publicly and privately facilitate and support numerous independent media outlets. We should invest in publicly funded but independent media dedicated to allowing a wide range of people to discuss issues without the overarching control of the profit interest or the immediate interests of the government.

We should not be simplistic about banning or allowing censorship, but highly wary of opening up any new types of censorship and imagining they won’t be abused. We should stick to what is already illegal outside of communications (such as violence) and censor communications only when it is actually directly a part of those crimes (such as instigating particular violence). We should be open to some limits on the forces empowered by our choice through our public dollars to shape our communications; I’d be happy to ban militaries from having any role in producing movies and video games (if they’re going to bomb children in the name of “democracy,” well, then, that’s my vote for the use of my dollars).

At the same time, we need — through schools and outside of them — radically better education that includes education in the skills of media consumption, BS-spotting, propaganda deciphering, fact-verification, respect, civility, decency, and honesty. I hardly think it’s entirely the fault of youtube that kids get less of their education from their classrooms — part of the fault lies with the classrooms. But I hardly think the eternal project of learning, and of learning how to learn, can be restricted to classrooms.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky: Truthteller Extraordinaire

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

History teaches us that eventually the fog of propaganda, no matter how thick and unrelenting, is dissipated by the sun of truth.

Not really: By truthtellers such as Michel Chossudovsky.

It often takes decades or much longer for that to happen and even then it takes openness of mind and spirit to accept it in all its disturbing reality, for propaganda often enters into the deepest recesses of the mind and soul and many find they must forever defend it even when it is patently exposed.  Even if the truth is finally accepted, however, the damage has been done.

Presently, we are far along the path to worldwide totalitarianism as a result of the corona crisis, what is euphemistically called the “New Normal.”  As C. J. Hopkins, a wise analyzer of this pathological development, has said:

We have watched as the New Normal transformed our societies into paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian dystopias where people now have to show their “papers” to see a movie or get a cup of coffee and publicly   display their ideological conformity to enter a supermarket and buy their groceries.

This crackdown on freedom and the growth of elite control has dramatically accelerated in recent days and only those blind to history refuse to see it.  It’s an old story with a new twist; create enough fear – this time with a virus – and many people will bow to the authorities. Censor dissenting voices and many will make believe it isn’t happening and that their freedoms are not at risk.  The great psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm called this refusal the “escape from freedom.”  This perennial human tendency to submit to authority whose lust for power is equally never-ending is only thwarted by the unquenchable thirst for freedom exhibited by courageous freedom fighters.

Michel Chossudovsky is a freedom fighter.

In the case of the corona crisis propaganda campaign, the truth has been available nearly from the start, and Chossudovsky, with his website Global Research, has been one of the most unrelenting voices of sanity and freedom.

Global Research has for decades been on top of the most important issues of our times, from the events of September 11, 2001 through the Iraq War, the endless so-called war on terror, the U.S. wars on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Serbia, Palestine, Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, etc., the multiple financial crises, CIA coups and assassinations of domestic and foreign leaders, the new Cold wars against Russia and China, right up to today’s world-wide covid propaganda war.

Started by Michel Chossudovsky on September 9, 2001, the website is part of The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which is an independent research and media organization based in Montreal, Canada.

Global Research has been a beacon of light for twenty dark years.  It has ignored no topic, no matter how controversial.  It has published an enormous amount of writing and research by many writers, exploring matters from multiple viewpoints, including conflicting ones.  Like any website that posts an enormous amount to engender debate, the quality of the articles varies, but on average it is very high.  Chossudovsky’s own writing has been outstanding and comprehensive.

Starting in January 2020, at the start of the corona crisis, he has been assiduously tracking its development in article after article. (Other contributors, such as Peter Koenig, et al., have also published very important work on the crisis at GR.)  Michel’s work (he is my friend and colleague and I am a long-time contributor) on this is similar to what he has done for twenty years since the murderous events of September 11, 2001 and the official propaganda about them. Global Research is a deep repository of research and writing exposing the official lies about those attacks.

In December 2020, he released a free E-Book of his corona crisis writings and has continually updated it, the last being on July 27, 2021.  In addition, he continues to write regular powerful articles on the corona propaganda and other matters.

What follows is a short quasi-review of Chossudovsky’s extraordinary contribution to exposing the vast official lies surrounding COVID-19. I say quasi because it will serve no purpose to repeat much of what he writes. Like all true gifts, his E-Book is given freely, but in the spirit of genuine gift exchange, readers of it should pass it on to others, for we are at a world-wide turning-point that has few if any precedents.  If you doubt that, a reading of his work will disabuse you of your reticence in recognizing its reality.  He introduces the book with these words:

We are at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in World history. We are living history, yet our understanding of the sequence of events since January 2020 has been blurred.  Worldwide, people have been misled both by their governments and the media as to the causes and devastating consequences of the Covid-19 “pandemic”. The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair. More than 7 billion people Worldwide are directly or indirectly affected by the corona crisis.

It’s the powerful financiers and billionaires who are behind this project which has contributed to the destabilization (Worldwide) of the real economy. And there is ample evidence that the decision to close down a national economy (resulting in poverty and unemployment) will inevitably have an impact on patterns of morbidity and mortality. 

Since early February 2020, the Super Rich have cashed in on billions of dollars.

Amply documented, it’s the largest redistribution of global wealth in World history, accompanied by a process of Worldwide impoverishment. 

Those are strong words, but they are accurate.  Perhaps even an understatement.  For we have now entered the phase of this crisis where the authorities have tripled their efforts at intimidation and fear-mongering to coerce those whom Anthony Fauci recently called “the recalcitrant ones” to submit to their control.

Obey or else is being shouted daily from the corporate media’s headlines, even as they report a mélange of facts that contradict their own claims in a stupefying display of intentionally created chaos.  Their method is to fragment and polarize populations while openly announcing their intentions to mock the public who can still think and choose to do their own research.  Those who fail to do so now and simply accept the authorities propaganda will bear a heavy burden of guilt in the years to come.

Chossudovsky’s E-Book will be an eye-opener for those who have not yet faced the facts.  He chronicles the historical evolution of the corona crisis from its start and provides a timeline; explains clearly what Covid-19 and SARS-CoV-2 are, how they are allegedly identified and estimated; lays out its devastating mental, economic and financial consequences; shows how its lockdowns have produced mass worldwide poverty and unemployment and enriched billionaires, etc.

All this based on fraudulent PCR tests, fake statistics of “cases” and deaths from Covid-19, and the promotion of experimental and unapproved so-called vaccines that are in reality very dangerous “messenger” mRNA shots that are being mandated across the board.

To what end?  A high-tech digital dystopia controlled by and for the interests of the world’s wealthiest ruling elites.  Regular people need to reject their seductive lies, for they will find that they themselves, if they have bought into the vaccine propaganda, have already seen their numbers reduced by a demonic plan created by evil nihilists.

A reading of – and a watching of the videos included – in this E-Book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined.

Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place.  And if you find what I say here to be true, support Global Research in its twentieth anniversary year. It was right about 9/11, Iraq, the war on terror, etc., and is right again about the Corona Crisis.

That is quite a legacy in twenty young years.

Biden Gives “Five Eyes” What It Always Wanted: Access To Everyone’s Social Media

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By MassPrivate

For years, Americans have largely ignored corporate social media surveillance. But all of that is about to change, thanks to President Biden.
No one has taken the White House’s plan to turn Big Tech into a quasi-Five Eyes censorship program seriously despite repeated warnings from journalists and news websites. 
Journalist Caitlin Johnstone warned, the White House is pushing for Facebook and Microsoft to censor any social media stories the Feds don’t like.

“After Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted on Thursday that the administration has given Facebook a list of accounts to ban for spreading misinformation about the Covid vaccine, she has now doubled down saying that people who circulate such materials online should be banned from not just one but all social media platforms.”

The Feds want Big Tech to ban stories and people they do not approve of from social media.  

“You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there,” Psaki told the press on Friday.

Reuters revealed some of America’s biggest tech companies will let “Five Eyes” and the U.N. decide whose stories the “Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism” should censor.

“Until now, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s (GIFCT) database has focused on videos and images from terrorist groups on a United Nations list and so has largely consisted of content from Islamist extremist organizations such as Islamic State, al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

Big Tech’s GIFCT is essentially a Five Eyes censorship program, masquerading as a Big Tech social media forum to stop terrorism and extremism. 

“Over the next few months, the group will add attacker manifestos — often shared by sympathizers after white supremacist violence — and other publications and links flagged by U.N. initiative Tech Against Terrorism. It will use lists from intelligence-sharing group Five Eyes, adding URLs and PDFs from more groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and neo-Nazis.”

Twitter and YouTube are also helping Five Eyes spy on the world’s social media.

“The firms, which include Twitter and YouTube, share “hashes,” unique numerical representations of original pieces of content that have been removed from their services. Other platforms use these to identify the same content on their own sites in order to review or remove it.”

Other companies that have access to the GIFCT database are Reddit, Snapchat, Instagram, Verizon Media, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Mailchimp and Airbnb.

Three years ago the mass media warned us about Five Eyes demanding that tech companies give them backdoors to users’ encrypted data, and now they finally got their wish.

The dangers of Big Tech giving URLs, PDFs and personal information to a global intelligence agency will allow governments to secretly track and ID people and organizations they deem a threat.

Radio New Zealand said if one government has access to this information, then other government’s will request it as part of doing business with another country. 

New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner also warned that there is nothing stopping governments’ from abusing their access to people’s social media posts. And that is the real danger of letting Big Tech, Five Eyes and the U.N. decide who is a terrorist or extremist.

“Even then you don’t solve the technical challenge of allowing access for legitimate purposes while maintaining a secure network, and people in the tech industry tell me this is impossible” Privacy Commissioner John Edwards said.

The GIFCT claims to “bring together the technology industry, government, civil society, and academia to foster collaboration and information-sharing to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity online.” But what it does not tell you is how they decide to brand someone a terrorist or extremist.

GIFCT admits that Big Tech has been secretly compiling a database of “hashes” or unique digital fingerprints of suspected terrorist/extremist social media posts since 2016.

Big Tech also uses their in-house “Content Incident Protocol” (CIP) to justify sharing hashes of an extremist’s video, and other related content with Big Tech companies, Five Eyes and the U.N.

If the GIFCT’s secret social media database and CIP sounds familiar, that’s because it is. 

The United States Postal Service and Fusion Centers across the country have been secretly spying on Americans social media for years.

Earlier this week, PayPal announced that they are working with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to investigate how extremist and hate movements in the United States take advantage of financial platforms to fund their criminal activities.

PayPal is basically setting up its own version of GIFCT to justify monitoring people’s transactions under the terrorist/extremist umbrella. As the article mentioned, PayPal and the ADL will “uncover and disrupt the financial flows of anti-government and white supremacist organizations” on their own!

“The information collected through the initiatives will be shared with other firms in the financial industry, law enforcement and policymakers, PayPal said.”

It is only a matter of time before GIFCT censorship will be used to monitor and stop protests that corporations and the White House disapprove of.

As Caitlin Johnstone so eloquently put it:

  • They said we need internet censorship because of Russia.
  • They said we need internet censorship because of COVID.
  • They said we need internet censorship because of election security.
  • They said we need internet censorship because of the Capitol riot.
  • They said we need internet censorship because of domestic extremism.
  • Pretty sure they just want internet censorship.

Using the GIFCT to allow corporations and Five Eyes to ban and censor whoever they want, put’s everyone’s freedom at risk.

Criticism of Fraudster/Profiteer Fauci a Hate Crime?

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephenLendman.org

Toxic mass-jabbing fraudster/profiteer Fauci operates in cahoots with US dark forces and Pharma for self-enrichment and other diabolical aims.

Throughout his public life, he’s been indifferent toward public health, welfare and safety.

More con artist than medical professional, his agenda since flu was deceptively renamed covid is all about harming public health, not protecting and preserving it. 

A modern-day angel of death Josef Mengele, he wants billions of unwanted people eliminated with health destroying flu/covid jabs.

As National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director since 1984, he overseas a multi-billion dollar annual budget.

When clinical studies reach a certain point, he sells or transfers drugs to Pharma, cashing in big by splitting royalties.

The extent of his profiteering is unrevealed publicly. 

He likely made tens of millions of dollars — perhaps stashing his hidden wealth in overseas tax havens to give none of it back to the IRS.

Instead of serving the public interest by combatting infectious diseases and allergies, he prioritizes self-enrichment — along with scamming the public about all things flu/covid.

On his watch at NIAID, Americans use more drugs than others abroad.

They pay twice as much or more for them than consumers in other developed countries.

Robert F. Kennedy called Fauci “a mix between (con man) Bernie Madoff, (defender of powerful interests at the expense of ordinary people) J. Edgar Hoover,” and a mafia crime boss — instead of defender of public health.

Analyst Helen Buyniski called him “avatar of medical totalitarianism.”

Cashing in from years of NIAID funding in cahoots with Fauci, Baylor College of Medicine’s Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology and Microbiology Peter Hotez defends him indefensibly.

Promoting toxic mass-jabbing, he earlier called for “confront(ing) anti-vax aggression (sic),” saying:

“(A)nti-vaccine (proponents) ha(ve) hundreds of websites and perhaps 58 million followers on social media.” 

“The bad guys (sic) are winning, in part because health agencies either underestimate or deny the reach of anti-science forces (sic), and are ill-equipped to counter it (sic).”

“Russian intelligence organizations seek to discredit Western (covid) vaccines (sic).” 

“Global anti-vaccine messaging…means that more people will die and the pandemic will be prolonged (sic).”

He called for a UN “counteroffensive” against anti-flu/covid jabbing truth-tellers — opponents of health-destroying jabs. 

He wants critics of Fauci and other toxic mass-jabbing proponents prosecuted for hate crimes.

On July 28, his Plos Biology paper, titled “Mounting Antiscience Aggression in the United States (sic)” slammed congressional members and other critics of Fauci and likeminded fraudsters of “disinformation (sic) designed to portray (them) as enemies.”

Calling legitimate criticism “antiscience intimidation (and) aggression,” he wants individuals involved criminalized and prosecuted for “science” defying “hate crimes.”

Law Professor Jonathan Turley explained the following:

“(F)ederal hate crime laws focus on basis of a person’s characteristics of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

Turley opposes adding law enforcement personnel to the above because it would have “a direct and inimical impact on free speech…”

“(I)t would create a slippery slope as other professions (would likely) demand inclusion from reporters to ministers to physicians.”  

“Hate crimes would quickly apply to a wide array of people due to their occupations.”

If supporters of medical tyranny like Hotez get their way, toxic flu/covid mass-jabbing could be mandated in the US and West.

It would endanger the health and well-being of everyone wanting what’s most precious of all protected and preserved.

Refuseniks could be denied their Nuremberg Code and constitutional right to reject toxic jabs.

Turley slammed Hotez’s “lack of analytical balance.”

He ignored state-sponsored/conventional and social media suppression of truth-telling about all things flu/covid — endorsing the fabricated official narrative that pushes destruction of public health.

Hotez and likeminded toxic mass-jabbing proponents either support maximum harm to maximum numbers of people or turned a blind eye to what’s going on.

Either way, truth-telling on this most important cutting-edge issue of our time is vital to challenge and stop medical tyranny before it’s too late to matter.

The War on Free Speech Continues

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Government and social media move to block platforms for those promoting “misinformation”

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

The Biden Administration’s effort to withdraw nearly all US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq before the end of the year is commendable and it is hoped that a departure from Syria will follow soon thereafter, but one must nevertheless be concerned that the overseas moves are being made to concentrate government resources on the domestic war that has already begun. I am, of course, referring to the ongoing efforts being made to extirpate “extremists” among American citizens who have been further identified as largely consisting of “white supremacists.”

As part of the new war, ideas or even demonstrable facts that are considered to be undesirable are being targeted by the government working together with internet resources, most particularly the social media, to attack critics. It is being argued that the alleged provision of “misinformation” is doing actual harm to the country and the American people. Recently, much of the focus has been on the COVID virus, in support of the government’s intention to have all Americans vaccinated and, increasingly, again compelled to be masked when inside buildings that are accessible to the public. These efforts are being supported by media including Facebook, which features pop-ups directing the reader to a “safe” site whenever a piece appears that challenges the government orthodoxy on the spread of the virus.

One might reasonably argue that there is a national public health crisis that is part of a global problem which requires coordinated government intervention, but the actual statistics that reveal the existing low levels of infection and death in most states would not support that contention. And one might also observe that the growing problem involving the regulation of speech and even ideas by government working in cooperation with large corporations is potentially more serious than COVID or any other virus.

If the United States government and its corporate partners were in an honest way trying to protect the American people one might at least be sympathetic regarding the efforts being made, but both government and businesses have proven to be serial liars and purveyors of egregious untruths to serve their own agendas. Recently, the White House spokesman Jen Psaki suggested that those spreading false information about COVID vaccinations might well be banned from spreading such lies on social media. The implication was that the government could compile lists of such “extremists” and use its regulatory authority to compel companies on the internet to censor individuals and groups in compliance with orders coming from the White House. The justification would be that government in this case gets a pass on limiting free speech and association due to a national health crisis.

Psaki has undoubtedly discovered a certain benevolence in big government which few Americans have noted before. Foreigners, however, being on the receiving end of wars resulting from the stream of lies emanating from Washington might well have a different viewpoint. President Bill Clinton relied on a false narrative to go to war in the Balkans and then used unprovoked attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan to draw attention away from an affair he was having with an intern. George W. Bush and his pack of neocon scoundrels, most of whom are still holding prestigious positions, used what was known to be fake information to justify destroying Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama lied to overthrow the governments in Libya and Ukraine while also attempting to do the same in Syria.

All lies, all the time, and now we Americans are supposed to believe that the Biden Administration is seeking to benefit us? Online one wag quipped that “The party that believes that men can get pregnant now wants to control ‘misinformation’ on the internet?” Never forget that policies that compel all Americans to behave in certain ways, no matter how innocent in appearance, can also be used and expanded upon to mandate something more sinister.

And what about the social media companies? Facebook has long had a censorship group headed by a former Israeli government official. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted to Congress that Facebook suppresses nearly all so-called “hate speech” automatically using computer algorithms that rely on word associations to determine what is allowed on the site. Pieces that are considered borderline are allowed only limited exposure, having their distribution among contacts automatically restricted and disabling sharing. Google search uses similar algorithms to make sure that sites and individuals that it does not approve of do not appear among search results. It also uses software to actually “re-direct” users away from sites that it does not approve.

And now PayPal, owned by online auction service eBay and an essential tool for small public interest groups’ support, has now announced that it will henceforth be working with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to “fight hate” by cutting off financing of extremist groups. But its definition of “hate,” criticized as highly subjective and inclined to condemn groups disliked by ADL for political reasons, has prompted legitimate concerns about where this all is going. ADL has often been criticized for finding hate virtually everywhere, particularly among conservative white groups. RT cites a recent example of such fervor “in response to an article published in Canada’s National Post, which was denounced by the ADL because its author mentioned that one of the 32 US lawmakers supporting a tax reform belonged to a Jewish fraternity.” In short, any discussion of Israel or of the behavior of Jewish individuals and groups in anything but a positive context will be considered “hate” by ADL and PayPal.

Indeed, PayPal and ADL issued a self-serving statement last week which said “PayPal and ADL will focus on further uncovering and disrupting the financial pipelines that support extremist and hate movements,” adding that they would also go after “actors and networks spreading and profiting from all forms of hate and bigotry against any community.”

The joint venture will also include the “launch[ing] of a research effort” to determine how “extremist and hate movements throughout the US are attempting to leverage financial platforms to fund criminal activity.” The negative information collected will be shared with police, financial services, and the government, presumably to create an environment where such groups will be marginalized and shut out of the public space completely, to include possibly having their supporters arrested, charged and convicted.

The growing collusion between big government and large public-accessible online information and opinion services is not a good thing. It permits those well-funded and politically connected organizations to work together to limit what the public is allowed to know. Its zeal to eliminate “misinformation” is misplaced, replacing dissident voices that have limited access to a wider audience with massive agenda driven public-private organizations that will essentially determine what is acceptable and what is not. If allowed to continue, it will be the death of free speech in this country as everything that disagrees with the approved narrative will be labeled “hateful” or “extremist,” eventually to include criminal penalties for those who disagree. It is not too much to suggest that we are witnessing the first steps in the creation of a totalitarian de facto one-party state. Perhaps that is the intention.