Category Archives: media

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

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By Stephen Parato

Source: Waking Times

“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth–certainly the machine will wear out… but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.” ~Henry David Thoreau

Obedience is the connective tissue of oppression.

In other words, any form of control on a collective level can only be carried out through obedience. A dictator can’t arrest or kill an entire population himself; he needs mindless minions to do the dirty work. This principle applies across all forms and degrees of systematic control, even the most subtle.

The desires of any wannabe controller can only come to fruition through the compliance of others. And that’s been the case throughout recorded history (his-story). The desire for control becomes a virus, driven by fear and infecting more and more people, until there are enough drones to oppress an entire population.

This phenomenon isn’t just the case with large-scale atrocities; it applies to anything which is an impediment to freedom or love; be it a person, group, system or idea.

Everything is held up by belief. Laws are merely words written on paper, only legitimized by collective acquiescence. Laws need people to enforce them. And if laws are unjust (as most are), those who carry them out must unquestioningly submit to authority and go against their own inner knowing.

The only way control or oppression works on any scale is through compliance. Too many people do the work of ‘the man’ for ‘the man.’ That’s the problem. The solution lies in civil disobedience.

Freedom Cannot Be Granted

“Freedom cannot be granted. It must be taken.” ~Max Stirner

Asking for freedom is oxy-moronic. If you have to ask for freedom, you’re already a slave.

How is freedom taken? The simple decision to be the master of your own body and mind.

It really is as simple as that, though difficult to apply. It’s easy to blame problems on others, it’s easy to neglect our health and think “the doctor can fix me.” We’ve been conditioned to externalize our power since childhood. We’ve been taught to not trust ourselves. We’ve been taught to submit to authority without question.

This is a recipe for a control system to stealthily and slowly permeate society (the totalitarian tiptoe).

When you attain a degree of self-mastery, you do not acquiesce to the will of destructive people or disharmonious institutions. Which leads to the next point…

Fear-Based Programming

“The pioneers of a warless world are the youth who refuse military service.” ~Albert Einstein

The covert means by which oppression takes over is through fear-based programming.

If you have people in fear, you can easily control them. Fear activates the part of the brain known as the amygdala (the center for emotional behavior/motivation) and inhibits neocortex function (our “thinking brain”). This means that rationality and intellect are thrown out the window, the perfect storm for brainwashing. There’s even a term for this fear response; amygdala hijack.

The media is one big amygdala hijack, perpetually programming the population with which boogeyman to fear next. This is a massive ritual of fear-based programming that insidiously shifts entire populations into thinking and acting irrationally out of fear. Television is called programming for a reason.

Remember the whole weapons of mass destruction fiasco with Iraq in 2003? US military action in Iraq and massive destabilization of the middle east (which continues to this day) was predicated on that lie. There were no weapons of mass destruction. But lingering fear from 9/11 resulted in a string of irrational behavior and many people blindly believing the hype.

The holocaust took place because German soldiers were thoroughly conditioned to carry out orders. They didn’t carry out orders because they liked doing it, but because they feared the wrath of their higher ranking officers, or even because they were conditioned to fear jewish people. These abominations only occur when fear is the driving force.

Fear is hard to pin down. It’s slippery, and ultimately illusory (False Evidence Appearing Real). Yet it’s the undercurrent of all “negative” emotions. Fear is what stops us from saying no to evil. Fear might actually distort our perceptions to support evil. That’s why it’s so dangerous.

When you cultivate self-mastery, you’re able to break the cycle. The spread of fear stops before you and is transmuted by the omnipotent force of unyielding love.

Love Over Fear

“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.” ~John Lennon

Strive to choose love over fear in every situation. You can never go wrong if you act from a place of compassion. This is the fulcrum of change, and it starts within you.

The change we all yearn to see in the world will only happen in the wake of a fundamental change in consciousness. Everything we see in this world starts in the realms of imagination before coming into manifestation.

The change begins within and ripples outward. Embodying the change is the first step, the prerequisite. Without inner transformation, humanity will be stuck on the same merry-go-round of madness.

When a critical mass of people create positive inner changes, it will open up doors we never could’ve imagined before and will provide possibilities far beyond our current limited perspective. Solutions will spontaneously emerge.

Go within and stop the momentum of fear. Learn to listen to and trust your intuition. Have the courage to follow your heart instead of cowardly bowing to fear.

“Courage is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor – the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant ‘To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.’” ~Brene Brown

Compliance with destruction, hatred, oppression, violence and fear is cowardice, while noncompliance is courageous. In the depths of your being, in your heart of hearts, you know what is right.

Choose love over fear.

Have the courage of heart and freedom of mind to disobey oppressive forces.

Be the change.

Brave New Cancel Culture World

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By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

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

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

Giorgio Agamben has defined it as a new totalitarianism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Concert of Powers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canceling freedom of speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deleting the Reset: The Imminent Struggle Ahead

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By Kevin Smith

Source: Off-Guardian

Awhile ago I wrote an article explaining my journey of learning towards the Great Reset agenda. In that piece I said that I thought this horror show would continue for some time, but ultimately it would fail, but at great cost to our society and to all of us.

More recently I’ve been researching information about the new ‘vaccines’ and like others, now seriously wonder if this is part of something sinister and perhaps even more of a threat our very existence.

For relief from the madness and heavy-reading of the scientific studies, I watch a lot of Ivor Cummins’, Dr Mike Yeadon’s, and Dr Sucharit Bhakdi online presentations which are professional, clear and powerful.  Dr Bhakdi’s recent interview here is brilliant, yet the most terrifying I’ve watched concerning the vaccines.

There are some experts out there with real passion, intelligence and an amazing ability to cut through the complexities.  We should all be grateful to have such brave people setting out the facts.

Of course, many of these experts and commentators have limited access to the so-called mainstream. They’ve been censored relentlessly.  It’s easy to become despondent that the now obvious facts over Covid-19, lockdowns and vaccines are still not getting a hearing.

For me, it’s the frustration that the public are still largely oblivious to the impending nightmare about to descend on them and their families.  And the powerlessness to stop it, like a slow-motion car crash.

DR REINER FUELLMICH

Just recently, I’ve become drawn towards some presentations and interviews involving a prominent German lawyer, Reiner Fuellmich. Quite a few readers here may have watched the same material.

He’s well known for previously taking out successful legal actions against huge companies, Volkswagen, over its fraudulent emissions data and also Deutsche Bank over a financial scandal.

Last year his attention was drawn towards the response to the so-called Coronavirus crisis and with several others, set up the German Corona Investigative Committee to look into it. Now, this committee has conducted much of their investigations and are proceeding with legal actions globally.

I think it’s worth summarising some of this here.

Also, although many of us are aware of many of the reasons, motives, timing for the so-called Great Reset, I think Reiner’s insights and thoughts are interesting and collectively provide a more complete understanding of what’s behind it all. And perhaps there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

Below includes my review and some thoughts on the above clips, Reiner’s approach, observations and findings, with some of my thoughts.

BACKGROUND

Reiner set up the investigation committee in July 2020.  This is a good summary of the timeline, concerns and questions raised and conclusions which followed.

They decided the three major questions to be answered in the context of a judicial approach to the coronavirus issues were:

  1. Is there a corona pandemicor is there only a PCR-test pandemic? Specifically, does a positive PCR-test result mean that the person tested is infected with Covid-19, or does it mean absolutely nothing in connection with the Covid-19 infection?
  2. Do the so-called anti-corona measures, such as the lockdown, mandatory face masks, social distancing, and quarantine regulations, serve to protect the world’s population from corona, or do these measures serve only to make people panic so that they believe – without asking any questions – that their lives are in danger, so that in the end the pharmaceutical and tech industries can generate huge profits from the sale of PCR tests, antigen and antibody tests and vaccines, as well as the harvesting of our genetic fingerprints?
  3. Is it true that the German government was massively lobbied, more so than any other country, by the chief protagonists of this so-called corona pandemic, Mr. Drosten, virologist at charity hospital in Berlin; Mr. Wieler, veterinarian and head of the German equivalent of the CDC, the RKI; and Mr. Tedros, Head of the World Health Organization or WHO; because Germany is known as a particularly disciplined country and was therefore to become a role model for the rest of the world for its strict and, of course, successful adherence to the corona measures?

In examining these points and to understand the big picture better, Reiner says that he spoke to over a hundred experts and took testimony.  From scientists, doctors, psychologists and many other experts in their fields, including whistle blowers with knowledge of the Great Reset.

Reiner confidently states in the interview that he has a good case to show that the combine decision making and lockdown measures in response to Covid-19 and PCR tests and other evidence, is a scandal on a massive scale and the biggest crime against humanity, ever.

Without repeating all the events over the last 14 months (which are largely covered within the above links), it’s now obvious that virtually every official western government, scientific narrative and measure has been the complete opposite of how to deal with a genuine public health crises. It’s clear Covid-19 is being used to usher in a regime of complete control over us.

LEGAL OPPORTUNITIES 

Reiner explains in the interview that the legal actions are being planned and will be multi-layered and conducted across jurisdictions internationally.  He believes that in light of favourable judgements in Portugal and Austria regarding the ineffectiveness of the PCR test, this is a good approach. 

He also explains that because the reset agenda is also not limited to one jurisdiction, it makes good sense from this perspective.

It seems to me, on the facts alone, he would have a strong case in any fair court. But I think we’ve all seen examples of European courts issuing inexplicable decisions or ducking out of a judgement on hugely important issues on a point of law or jurisdiction.

Reiner says that perhaps the best chances of legal success are in the US and Canada legal systems he is familiar with, which allow class actions.  Class actions can be joined by individuals who believe they have been disadvantaged by decisions of the state or large company, for example, by fraud, negligence or discrimination.

Reiner states during the interview that the national state systems might not be suitable for this type of case due to the sheer scale of the Covid-19 fraud and ultimately envisages a ‘Nuremberg 2’ scenario.

Some people might feel that the legal process, even if it hasn’t been bought and paid for by the globalists responsible for these crimes, will take too long to stop what’s happening. I think this is a danger, but much work has already been carried out by the German Corona Investigative Committee and much evidence is already in the public domain and cases in the pipeline soon.

In any event, I believe it will be interesting to watch these events, perhaps within the context of the continuing horror of the ongoing health, social and economic destruction and the Great Reset agenda. Such increasing public awareness might determine the outcome, how these cases proceed or are judged, or even if they proceed at all.

THE INTERESTS DRIVING THE GREAT RESET: A LAWYER’S VIEW

What was most interesting from the interview is what Reiner said about the people involved within this agenda and the possible motives behind it.  While I and many of us have a fair idea of what they are, and there seem to be many, I think we struggle to understand the structure behind it all, how it works together and how to apportion responsibility to each moving part (financial and banking, big pharma, world organisations, climate-change agenda, medical profession, judiciary etc)

Reiner’s observations of this are interesting and I think provide some grounds for optimism.

He says from what he’s learned he thinks there are about 3,000 people in the world most directly complicit acting against a population of around 8 billion. He refers to them as the ‘Davos Clique’. He says, however, that he estimates between 10 and 20% of people in the world have woken up to this agenda and possibly many more are on the path to discovery.

So that’s 3,000 hardcore criminals against perhaps as many as 1.5 billion, so far.

Reiner also says that these criminals are made up of people with competing interests and where in-fighting takes place. This, he believes, may be an opportunity to push-back just in the same way they have divided us. It seems whistle-blowers have provided information and as this terrifying agenda unfolds, this should gather pace.

Likewise, when asked who these people are and what combined motives are involved, he explains that they are made up of the ‘usual suspects’ of world organisations such as, WHO, WEF, IMF, the billionaire technocrats, pharmaceutical giants, big media platforms, banks and investment funds.

He says the motive is not primarily financial because these people are outrageously wealthy already. He describes it as more about control over humanity.  This operates under the guise of several motives and agendas, self-preservation and consolidation, Covid and vaccines, climate-change ideology but essentially it is about power. But their money is what oils the machinery below them.

I think perhaps the structure Reiner and others have described is like a pyramid.  He says that these elitist cults have filtered money down to grease the various chains of command below them, such as governments, opposition parties, media, scientists, universities, hospital trusts and so on.

Reiner says that he also believes that some individuals in government could have been bribed, coerced or threatened into co-operating.  We’ve seen possible signs of this elsewhere such as Belarus, Tanzania and Burundi.

I guess the lower you go down the pyramid you get the ‘middle managers’ and ‘foot-soldiers. Some who are being bribed with funding grants. Some who suspect something but are too afraid to speak out. Some who are oblivious to what’s going on.

It’s not hard to imagine with all the forces above pulling together, wittingly or otherwise can commence such a huge undertaking of a global coup.  My analogy is similar to Nazi Germany and the command structure looks very similar.

Reiner also mentioned two interesting scenarios which I hadn’t considered as much.  He says that he was told by a whistle-blower that the original plan was to introduce the reset in 2050.  This was brought forward to 2030 and then to now as some elements within this group became impatient.   He says that he believes this being rushed through now is why they are making so many obvious mistakes that can be exploited.

Further Reiner says he was told that Europe is the battleground where they are trying to get control over the most. This is because Europe and the central bank is essentially bankrupt and particularly the big pension funds which for obvious reasons don’t wish people to know.  They figure pushing through their agenda under the guise of pandemics, climate-change, conflict and other crisis will distract the public and by the time they wake up, they will be under full control.

After the same people caused the previous financial crash, they reassured us everything was alright again but since have been printing money and plundering more.

Reiner believes, as the financial system started showing signs of imploding again in 2019, this was when the globalists decided to meet and agreed to push the Coronavirus narrative and towards the Great Reset.

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES OF STOPPING THEIR POWER GRAB?

Reiner is quite hopeful that this could happen and a better world could emerge and away from the globalism which has created the world’s problems.  He says that, if we fail, it could be the end of humanity, so we can’t fail. I share this assessment and cautious optimism.

Personally, I think the globalist cults may have bitten off much more than they can chew at once.  Due to the overall agenda being a shared goal among different interests, but combine with many smaller agendas within these groups (which sometimes conflict), I think it’s hard to pull off.

I believe the courts in theory offer remedies as long as they are independent or there’s a chance at least, the globalists may back off or settle if they see the evidence against them is overwhelming and awareness growing.

Whistle-blowers could start coming forward more, perhaps caused by an unexpected event or opposition which the elites haven’t factored in or further mistakes they make. So, there’s a strong psychological element to this battle.

Likewise, many more people than we realise now could be on the verge of waking up and a spark somewhere, perhaps major civil unrest could cause contagion.  The elites could lose their nerve, become too greedy, divisions and in-fighting could follow leading to self-destruction.

But I believe the elites could double-down with further generated crisis. Food chain problems, power cuts new variants and other distractions.  There could be evil that we have not factored in.

The tragedy for humanity is if people don’t wake up now, they may not realise until they are in the nightmare, where they will own nothing and be expected to be happy, or far worse.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

Reiner says it’s not worth the effort trying to actively persuade the people who seem to have switched off their brain and rolled up their sleeves.  Rather concentrate on spreading the message and connect to like-minded individuals or those who simply have doubts about what’s going on.

In my mind there are two things we need to do as individuals. To win, and cope until we do.

My own thought is to take one day at a time, not to overthink the unthinkable. My view is also to spread the powerful messages, the grave doubts about the vaccines, passports, digital currencies, highlighting the Great Reset and what this will mean to the lives of all of us if we accept full control by a bunch of Bond Villain-style criminals.

Use strong language, call this agenda for what it is.  Communism, fascism, eco-authoritarianism or analogies with Nazi Germany.

Use fear of their real, terrifying agenda, just as they have used fear of a “virus” which is not a threat, against us. When spreading this information use images, ridicule and humour.

Finally, for me, one very compelling part of Reiner’s interview was to do with spirituality which he mentioned in parts of his clip near the end and is worth listening to.

He says that he is not religious but has come to believe that some people have perhaps a gift or ability to see things the majority can’t or won’t.  I guess he was suggesting something beyond researching events. Possibly more a superior perception of events, a spirituality, or a natural instinct well above the general human ability to perceive or rationalise things – which he feels is relevant to this and connecting with each other.

Reiner gave the example of a friend who was describing their child in the company of other children, him being different to the rest.

This is something I can relate to, in the direction of my life from one which was largely aimless and unfulfilled to today fighting injustice wherever I see it.

I feel there is a spiritual dimension there and I sense this with others fighting this and similar causes. Whether it is spiritual or there’s another explanation, I think the essence of what Reiner is saying is very true and will resonate with many people whether it’s opposing foreign wars or fighting against the war the global elites and their puppets have now unleashed on all humanity under the guise of Covid-19.

At the end of the interview, the interviewer asks Reiner if history would look back fondly on him and others who took part in this fight now.  Reiner replied “absolutely, of course”

Reiner is clearly a person of much integrity, passion and intelligence. One of many excellent people we have fighting for us.

Coronavirus – Buying a Single Version of the Truth

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By Iain Davis

Source: UK Column

The UK Column recently reported a £320 million media buy-in contract awarded to OMD Group, the brief for which was redacted from the publicly available information on the UK government’s Contract Finder website. This represents just 20% of the £1.6 billion in media buy-in contracts the government has awarded to Omnicom since 2018.

Headquartered in Manhattan New York, Omnicom is a global media, marketing and corporate communications holding company. It is currently considered the second largest advertising agency in the world, eclipsed only by WPP.

Omnicom is an advertising giant which specialises in public relations, lobbying, communications strategy, and the planning and purchasing of targeted advertising space. It builds comprehensive media campaigns for its extensive client list. Omnicom heads a North American-based network of prominent advertising and public relations agencies with a world wide collective reach.

Omnicom has been awarded a number of sizeable contracts by the UK government. These have included a December 2018 advertising campaign contract for the Cabinet Office, worth up to £184 million, a £119 million October 2020 media buy-in contract with a £230 million extension clause, and a £112 million media contract for the Ministry of Defence.

According to the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), media buying enables the government to:

buy media channels (for example, advertising space, partnerships, events and sponsorship) regionally, nationally and internationally across off and online channels.

Omnicom is the single supplier for these public relations campaigns and their UK OMD Group operations are run by Manning Gottlieb OMD (MG-OMD).

Manning Gottlieb OMD was dissolved in 2011 and struck off the companies register. It isn’t entirely clear, therefore, what the current legal status of MG-OMD is. Their website appears to be their only visible presence and it does not clarify their status. However the CCS has stated that MG-OMD is a division of OMD Group Ltd.

The CCS claim there are a number of advantages to be gained by having one US multinational corporation overseeing the UK government’s entire communication strategy, including robust pricing, neutrality and transparency. Putting aside Omnicom’s obvious monopoly, as mentioned above, when the UK Column looked at the client brief for the recent £320 million media buy-in, it was entirely redacted. We might question the CCS notion of transparency.

Who is the dominant partner in this arrangement?

Media buying is the process of acquiring space on media platforms (online and offline) to get a PR message out. In this case the UK government is the client and MG-OMD (Omnicom) is the sole supplier, often referred to as the Agent.

The supplier (Agent) is largely responsible for conducting market research and devising campaigns that will delver best value to the client. They are given a brief and then advise the client how they can achieve the client’s PR objectives.

As we have stated, it is not possible to examine the brief for the most recent contract. But the brief is available for the £112 million MoD contract. It raises some concerns.

Omnicom will agree the key performance indicators by which the efficacy of their campaigns are measured; they will evaluate and measure campaign performance and will be proactive and innovative; the Agent has the expertise to advise how to deliver all aspects of the service and it is MG-OMD (Omnicom) who deploy resources, implement the plan and collect and store the data generated by their PR campaigns on the client’s (MoD’s) behalf.

It seems that Omnicom, in the guise of MG-OMD, not only agrees what constitutes campaign efficacy, they plan, resource and operate the UK government’s communications strategy. It is not unreasonable to suggest that Omnicom is leading this process.

In 2018 the UK government awarded a four year £800 million contract to Omnicom’s OMD Group for media buy-ins. The CCS stated that the purpose of the contract was to:

Provide the best possible outcomes for communication campaigns … The successful media buying agency … will work in partnership … to deliver … fully integrated campaigns for government.

This contract is set to expire in May 2022.

Omnicom were running government PR campaigns when the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a global Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.

In an effort to maintain transparency, the signatories to the contract have been redacted as have the pricing criteria, Omnicom protected confidential commercial information and much of the Framework Agreement. However, the contract brief stated:

The Government Communication Plan is updated annually and CCS shall ensure that the Agency is notified when the plan is updated … The Agency will (if required) co-operate and work with agencies on any of the other Crown Commercial Service agreements. This includes other Framework Agencies … provision of specific single services and products including media planning and Campaign Solutions … The Agency shall manage and deliver fully integrated campaigns, either by delivering services in-house or through Sub-Contracts.

Omnicom was in place, ready and able to adapt to the UK government’s communication plans as they emerged.

Providing a “single version of the truth”

Omnicom was awarded the contract on 21st May 2018. On the 9th June (less than three weeks later), then UK Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the G7 had agreed to her Rapid Response Mechanism. Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, the US and the EU agreed that they would assert a common narrative.

Omnicom responded almost immediately.

In early 2019 they launched their Learn Fast & Act Fast communications strategy. This was perfect for the Rapid Response Mechanism needs of their clients.

As the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded, Omnicom was able to help the UK government to “navigate the road to a new normal.” They said they had deepened their “rapid response capabilities” which enabled their client, the UK government, to make “more informed decisions while providing a single version of the truth.”

With operations in all of the G7 countries, and in both Russia and China, where they are discovering new opportunities for growth, Omnicom is well placed to deliver fully integrated campaigns. Whenever a rapid response is required to assert the common G7 narrative, Omnicom will provide the approved single version of the truth.

In September 2019, three months after the Rapid Response Mechanism announcement, the BBC convened the Trusted News Summit. To aid transparency, then BBC Director General Tony Hall said that the meeting was held behind closed doors. The BBC effectively formed a global media cartel with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Facebook, the Financial Times, First Draft, Google, The Hindu, The Wall Street Journal, AFP, CBC/Radio-Canada, Microsoft, Reuters and Twitter.

Less than two weeks after the WHO declared the global pandemic, the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group in Emergencies (SAGE) issued some key advice. They outlined how our behaviour could be changed to ensure it was in line with the single version of the truth.

SPI-B (SAGE’s behaviour change experts) stated:

Guidance now needs to be reformulated to be behaviourally specific … A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened. The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging … Messaging needs to emphasise and explain the duty to protect others … Consideration should be given to use of social disapproval.

SPI-B recommended that the UK government should:

  1. Use the media (MSM) to increase sense of personal threat.
  2. Use the media (MSM) to increase sense of responsibility to others.
  3. Use social disapproval for failure to comply.

A free, plural and independent media could not be “used” to terrorise the population in this fashion. Only a controlled propaganda machine could possibly be instructed to do so. The Trusted News cartel was available. Omnicom, in the form of MG-OMD, was tasked with using it to do the hard hitting.

In doing so Omnicom has been supporting the mainstream media to stay afloat by pumping millions into their failed business models. The taxpayer funded government buy-ins directly finance the UK’s so called independent mainstream media. Like the banks, it seems they are too big to fail, and so once again the tax payer is being forced to bail them out.

OmniGOV = Fusion Doctrine

MG-OMD has given their propaganda operation the Orwellian sounding name of OmniGOV. They say they are very proud of it and recognise their responsibility as the “the single cross-HM Government agency partner.”

OmniGov were behind the snappy slogans used to change our behaviour throughout the pandemic. Phrases like “flatten the curve”, “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives” and “rule of six” all rely on a psychological mechanism called the rule of three. The £119 million Omnicom contract to modify our behaviour was in discussion long before the WHO made their pandemic declaration.

The hard hitting media campaigns designed to strike fear into the public imagination were OmniGOV public relations strategies. The now notorious “look into my eyes” campaign being another OmniGOV campaign.

“Look into my eyes” was pure propaganda. The UK government was the client and they wanted to increase the sense of personal threat and use social disapproval to compel compliance. OmniGOV created a campaign which presented a low mortality disease as some sort of plague. Covid-19 risks primarily affect older people and mortality distribution is indistinguishable from normal mortality.

OmniGOV ignored scientific and statistical evidence and presented a population scale threat that did not exist. They claimed, without evidence, that lockdowns, mask wearing and social distancing could stop the spread of a viral respiratory illness. They misled the public and suggested that following the rules would save lives.

The insinuation was clearly that those who did not obey were guilty of killing people and that their behaviour was wrong. While appearing to advocate social conscience and shared community responsibility the product was baseless fear and social division — as requested by OmniGov’s client.

OmniGOV are also proud of the other projects that have been engaged with during the pandemic. For example, they have been working with the NHS and Snapchat to encouraging young people to think differently about donating their organs, introducing them to the concept of body-tracking Augmented Reality.

A Green New Deal

If we ignore the obvious risk of having a single US corporation in apparent control of the UK government’s communication strategy, and if we set aside concerns about the vast sums we have paid them to propagandise us, some may still feel, given the claimed seriousness of Covid-19, that there is nothing to be concerned about and OmniGOV has acted in good faith.

But for that to be the case, they also have to overlook that the OmniGov led response to Covid-19 is transitioning us into a new global financial and economic model which, at the most senior level, Omnicom has being trying to engineer for years.

Omnicom is not a disinterested third party merely seeking to meet their contractual obligations. They have a significant conflict of interest. The post-Covid-19 recovery they are helping to define is in their interest, not ours.

The Chairman and CEO of Omnicom is John D. Wren. His personal Omnicom bio reads:

Mr. Wren was part of the team that created Omnicom Group in 1986. Mr. Wren is a member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum and is active in a number of philanthropic endeavors.

In 2012, Wren was a contributor and co-author of the World Economic Forum’s publication More with Less: Scaling Sustainable Consumption and Resource Efficiency. The report stated:

The need for rapid action to shift towards a resource-efficient economy is high … change is now urgently required at scale and greater pace than current initiatives, policies or strategies are likely to achieve … Business can catalyse scale through transforming interactions with citizens.. and playing an active role in shaping the policies and investments that define the rules of the game … The right rules of the game can catalyse citizen behaviour … and create new markets … The private sector needs to be involved in most phases of policy-making … such collaboration should be forged as a productive adjunct to more traditional inter-governmental arrangements.

Omnicom is undoubtedly delighted that the public private partnership they have forged with the UK, and many other governments, has allowed them to help define the rules of the game. Certainly they have been busy catalysing citizen behaviour and seem to be fully involved in most phases of policy making.

In 2020 the WEF’s International Business Council (IBC), with Wren as a member, released their Measuring Stakeholder Capitalism report.

Speaking about the need to shape the recovery, they noted that the global pandemic was a fantastic opportunity. They wrote:

We must mobilize all constituencies of our global society to work together and seize this historic opportunity … The principles of stakeholder capitalism, championed by the World Economic Forum … have never been so important. In 2017, the IBC spearheaded a commitment from more than 140 CEOs to align their corporate values and strategies with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) … The IBC has been leading the way in this initiative to deliver on the promise of stakeholder capitalism.

With the UK contingent of the Trusted News cartel being supported by OmniGOV, tax-avoidant members like Google can look forward to some tax payer subsidised profits. They will be free, alongside Omnicom, to spread the single version of the truth in line with the G7’s wishes.

This is stakeholder capitalism in operation. It has nothing to do with us; we merely pay for it. Nor will we be allowed to object or even question the asserted common narrative.

Dissent will not be tolerated

The UK Digital Secretary, Oliver Dowden, recently convened a meeting of G7 technology ministers who signed a ministerial declaration on “Internet safety principles.” The declaration was based upon the UK’s Online Harms white paper and, as such, there is no specific definition of “harm.” It simply means whatever the G7, the Trusted News cartel and other stakeholders like Omnicom want it to mean.

The G7 commit to “work together towards a trusted, values-driven digital ecosystem.” They declare:

Our collective recovery from COVID-19 must be rooted in a desire to build back better. Leaders … signed a declaration containing a series of shared principles on how to tackle the global challenge of online safety, including that online firms should have systems and processes in place to reduce illegal and harmful activity.

As the UK government is contractually obliged to update Omnicom on their communications strategy, and seeing as OmniGOV are their sole media campaign managers, the 2020/2021 strategy must have been agreed with Omnicom.

Given Omnicom’s long-standing commitment to creating sustainable market opportunities, they presumably welcome the fact that it is entirely based upon the rule of three with the “Build Back Better” slogan at its heart.

Parliamentary Secretary to the Cabinet Office Julie Lopez MP announced that control of government information campaigns will be centralised further. We can only speculate which stakeholder partner will win the 2022 contract bid.

In the meantime, practically everything we are told about Covid-19 and the allegedly inescapable global economic and monetary transformation forced upon us, will be fed to us by the Trusted News cartel, guided and financed by OmniGOV. Omnicom and their stakeholder partners have a bright future.

Vaccine hustlers can’t keep their story straight; evangelicals, black people, Trumpers; who’s “hesitating?”

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By Jon Rappoport

Source: Jon Rappoport’s Blog

First, let’s get this straight. The term “hesitancy” would apply to your pasty-faced nephew, who plays video games 19 hours a day, who’s dragged to the beach one summer afternoon, and is reluctant to stick his toe in the water as he stands near the last little gasp of foam breaking on the sand.

Most of the people who aren’t taking the COVID vaccine aren’t hesitant at all. They’re determined to reject the shot.

Most of the people who don’t want the COVID vaccine are quite sure they want to forego genetic damage, blood clots, and death.

So…who are the “hesitant” ones the vaccine hustlers are going after?

According to an old desiccated man who could play a mortician in an Abbott and Costello movie without a minute of rehearsal, and who happens to be the director of the largest medical research facility in the world—the US National Institutes of Health—Dr. Francis Collins…

According to Collins, the prime target of pro-vaccine propaganda is the dastardly evangelical/Trumper crowd.

Last week, Collins spoke with NBC’s Chuck (aging-wonder-boy) Todd, who made his original journalistic bones deftly pointing a wand at maps of voting districts on Election Night.

Collins intoned, in the manner of a funeral home director expressing condolences to customers over the accident that took the life of their beloved family member, who was driving while drunk and steered his car over a cliff:

“Particularly white evangelicals seem to be resistant to the idea that vaccines are something they want to take advantage of.”

“…certainly Republican men in particular seem to less likely to be interested in the vaccine.”

But wait. NIH head Collins—playing politics—forgot to mention that, according to a recent Harris poll, a whopping 42% of black Americans don’t want the vaccine.

Oops.

Well, no doubt “systemic racism” must be the reason black people are failing to see how glorious the vaccine is. They’re being kept in ignorance by white people.

Actually, that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. A COVID Collaborative poll discovered black Americans have shockingly low levels of trust in the FDA (29%) and drug companies (19%). I’d say those numbers reveal acute intelligence, not ignorance, on medical issues.

Any group that distrusts the FDA at the rate of 71% is medically on the ball.

On the other hand, white Americans are the victims of systemic “safe and effective” lying by The New York Times, CNN, NBC, etc.

White Republicans are also being lied to by Donald Trump, Mr. Warp Speed, who is pushing the COVID vaccine like a lifeboat on the Titanic.

Trump is fronting for the COVID shot with a fervor matched only by Biden and Fauci and Bill Gates.

In an April 16 mass email to his followers (no doubt written by an aide), Trump, a major propaganda whore for Pharma, states:

Vaccine resistance is “deranged pseudo-science.”

“The federal pause on the J&J shot makes no sense. Why is the Biden White House letting insanely risk-averse bureaucrats run the show?”

It’s “sheer lunacy” for Biden “to delay millions of vaccinations and feed fears among the vax-resistant.”

“Indeed, this moronic move is a gift to the anti-vax movement.”

I spoke with a born-again Christian the other day. I asked him whether God had told him not to take the vaccine. He laughed. He said, “God told me to trust my research.”

“When did He say that?”

“I like to think it was just before I wrote to Trump telling him to wake up.”

We’re seeing hustlers on all points of the political spectrum pushing the COVID vaccine—the gene therapy that was designed, in clinical trials, to prevent nothing more than a cough, or chills and fever.

The gene therapy that has never been launched on the public before. The genetic injection that has only gained FDA certification for emergency use—a far lower and looser classification than full approval.

These criminal vaccine promoters deploy outrage and sob stories—whatever they think will play well—as they target various demographics.

Thousands of serious adverse effects from the shot are being reported. You can multiply those figures by 10 or 100 to gain a truer estimate of what is happening; and there are NO data on long-term effects.

You bet your ass people are “hesitant.” Medical authorities are telling them to accept an genetic injection that causes their cells to manufacture a protein they would never make under ordinary conditions.

Speaking of gene therapy, Dr. Francis Collins, the head of NIH, made his career on the back of discovering “genes associated with various diseases.”

In all the years of NIH’s existence, with a total budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars, show me ONE genetic cure for ANY disease across the board.

Just one.

I’m waiting.

It turns out that the history of genetics reveals the following: they can ALTER humans with it, but they can’t CURE humans.

Israel, the Big Lie

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Smoke rises following Israeli airstrikes on a building in Gaza City, Thursday, May 13, 2021. Weary Palestinians are somberly marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, as Hamas and Israel traded more rockets and airstrikes and Jewish-Arab violence raged across Israel. [AP Photo/Hatem Moussa]

Israel is not exercising “the right to defend itself” in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost

Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie.  Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime. 

Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than that of 2014.” The current attacks have already targeted several residential high rises including buildings that housed over a dozen local and international press agencies, government buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a mosque.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage. 

I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror.  And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.

The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia.  Those of us in the besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding Israel.  

The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” 

This is the truth.  Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.

Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy.  Saudi Arabia, a country that  produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups such as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.  

Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges.  The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions. 

Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people.  From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land.  The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.  Israel is not defending the rule of law.  Israel is not a democracy.  It is an apartheid state. 

That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves. 

The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that “demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double standards” for Israel; statements that “delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.  

The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country.  The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series “The Lobby.” Israel managed to block “The Lobby” from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement.  Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.  

The investment by Israel and its backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East.  These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.   

The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel.  This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites. 

Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous.  It is not only bad for the Jews.  It is bad for everyone.  It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes.  Netanyahu’s racist government has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off of each other.  They divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the language of violence.  The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its violence.  These extremists are ideological twins.  

This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society.  It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties in the name of national security.  Israel runs training programs for militarized police, including from the United States.  It is a global player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and the United States.

It oversees hundreds of cybersurveillance startups whose espionage innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel.” 

Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land.” Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there “Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.

Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” Israel’s educational system, starting in primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims.  This victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military. 

There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the United States.  The two countries are moving at warp speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic democracies.  The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own society.  We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading down.  It will be devastating for the Palestinians.  It will be devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously show us, will only come from the street.    

Is It Still Unconstitutional If the Govt. OUTSOURCES Spying on Citizens? After All, They’re Only Surveilling “Extremists.”

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Brian Stauffer

By Robert Wheeler

Source: The Organic Prepper

In 2021, there is no denying that the United States is a full-on surveillance state. The Biden Administration attempts to remove all pretense of privacy with its new consideration to use outside firms to track “extremist” chatter by American citizens online. But what exactly is an “extremist?” According to Tulsi Gabbard, recent efforts essentially criminalize half the country:

“It’s so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends,” Gabbard said.

She continued: “When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he’s spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they’ve seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians.” (source)

(So basically, if you’re reading this website, you’re probably an “extremist” in someone’s point of view.)

New efforts to spy on Americans

Their effort would expand the ability of intelligence agencies to gather information (spy) on American citizens.

Currently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is limited on how it can monitor citizens online. For example, it is banned from assuming false identities to gain access to private messaging apps used by citizens without justification.

Instead, according to the law (but not necessarily in practice), federal agencies can only browse through unprotected information on social media sites. A source familiar with Biden’s effort said it is not about decrypting data. Instead, it is about using outside entities to access these private groups legally to gather large amounts of information that would help DHS identify “key narratives as they emerge.”

Note: Some of these outside entities are used by what the administration considers “extremists.” (Such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.) 

The Department of Homeland Security claims they are doing no such thing

According to multiple sources cited by CNN, the plan would allow the DHS to make an end-run around those limits. In response to CNN, DHS said it “is not partnering with private firms to surveil suspected domestic terrorists online” and “it is blatantly false” to suggest that it would do so.

“All of our work to address the threat of domestic terrorism is done consistent with the Constitution and other applicable law, and in close coordination with our privacy and civil liberties experts,” the DHS statement added.

But the department has considered partnering with research firms that have more visibility and reach in this area. However, it has not done so yet, according to the sources. And do recall that they recently wanted to outlaw encrypted apps.

Suppose that does happen (and we have every reason to suspect it already has). In that case, DHS could produce information that would be helpful to it and the FBI, CIA, and NSA in its ability to spy on American citizens not committing any crimes.

“Narratives” that might lead to violence justify domestic spying?

CNN unintentionally explains the reason for the Biden Admin’s new focus on these messaging platforms when it writes:

Much of the planning for the Capitol Hill riot appeared out in the open on social media platforms and encrypted apps available to anyone with an internet connection. The DHS is trying to get a better sense of “narratives” that might lead to violence as they emerge across those channels, according to two DHS officials.

But tracking those narratives, particularly in the wake of January 6, increasingly requires access to private groups on encrypted apps as extremist groups migrate from more forward-facing sites like Facebook.

By the time narratives appear on Facebook, it is usually too late, one DHS official told CNN.

“Domestic violent extremists are adaptive and innovative. We see them not only moving to encrypted platforms but obviously couching their language so they don’t trigger any kind of red flag on any platforms,” the official added.

Outsourcing some information gathering to outside firms would give DHS the benefit of tactics that it isn’t legally able to do in-house, such as using false personas to gain access to private groups used by suspected extremists, sources say. Of course, China is already spying on millions of Americans.

Isn’t domestic spying a violation of our Constitutional Rights?

CNN continues by writing:

The department is also working on expanding its ability to collect information from public-facing social media sites where users’ posts offered clear warning signs about potential violence ahead of the January 6 attack, but were either ignored or underestimated by security officials prior to that date.

But any effort by the intelligence community to wade into the murky area of domestic spying is fraught with political risks, current and former officials say.

Gathering information on US citizens — no matter how abhorrent their beliefs — raises instant constitutional and legal challenges. Civil liberties advocates and privacy hawks have long criticized any efforts to collect even publicly available information on Americans in bulk as a violation of Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.

The growing surveillance state and expanding government spying is the ultimate issue

Notice what is being considered “extreme” by the administration and DHS. It is not BLM or Antifa who have been tearing apart and burning American cities to the ground but right-leaning and even “Constitutionalist” groups targeted.

In the hands of the radical left, the US government is moving once again against one side in the American culture war, empowering the opposing side. (The same side that terrorized innocent Americans.)

For those on the left who support the crackdown on the right-wing and what they see as white supremacy, they need only wait until they have outlived their usefulness. Or until a right-wing administration takes over. When one gets purged it leads the way for others to be purged. Then they will come to realize why government overreach is a danger to everyone and not a force to be wielded lightly. 

How much more intense do you expect the spying to become?

Do you think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg for government surveillance? What do you think they’re doing that we don’t yet know about? Are you taking any steps to protect yourself from being spied upon? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

Silicon Valley Algorithm Manipulation Is The Only Thing Keeping Mainstream Media Alive

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The emergence of the internet was met with hope and enthusiasm by people who understood that the plutocrat-controlled mainstream media were manipulating public opinion to manufacture consent for the status quo. The democratization of information-sharing was going to give rise to a public consciousness that is emancipated from the domination of plutocratic narrative control, thereby opening up the possibility of revolutionary change to our society’s corrupt systems.

But it never happened. Internet use has become commonplace around the world and humanity is able to network and share information like never before, yet we remain firmly under the thumb of the same power structures we’ve been ruled by for generations, both politically and psychologically. Even the dominant media institutions are somehow still the same.

So what went wrong? Nobody’s buying newspapers anymore, and the audiences for television and radio are dwindling. How is it possible that those same imperialist oligarchic institutions are still controlling the way most people think about their world?

The answer is algorithm manipulation.

Last month a very informative interview saw the CEO of YouTube, which is owned by Google, candidly discussing the way the platform uses algorithms to elevate mainstream news outlets and suppress independent content.

At the World Economic Forum’s 2021, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that while the platform still allows arts and entertainment videos an equal shot at going viral and getting lots of views and subscribers, on important areas like news media it artificially elevates “authoritative sources”.

“What we’ve done is really fine-tune our algorithms to be able to make sure that we are still giving the new creators the ability to be found when it comes to music or humor or something funny,” Wojcicki said. “But when we’re dealing with sensitive areas, we really need to take a different approach.”

Wojcicki said in addition to banning content deemed harmful, YouTube has also created a category labeled “borderline content” which it algorithmically de-boosts so that it won’t show up as a recommended video to viewers who are interested in that topic:

“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources that we’re recommending are authoritative news, medical science, et cetera. And we also have created a category of more borderline content where sometimes we’ll see people looking at content that’s lower quality and borderline. And so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. So that’s a content that stays on the platform but is not something that we’re going to recommend. And so our algorithms have definitely evolved in terms of handling all these different content types.”

Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski has a good video out reacting to Wojcicki’s comments, saying he believes his (entirely harmless) channel has been grouped in the “borderline” category because his views and new subscribers suddenly took a dramatic and inexplicable plunge. Kulinski reports that overnight he went from getting tens of thousands of new subscriptions per month to maybe a thousand.

“People went to YouTube to escape the mainstream nonsense that they see on cable news and on TV, and now YouTube just wants to become cable news and TV,” Kulinski says. “People are coming here to escape that and you’re gonna force-feed them the stuff they’re escaping like CNN and MSNBC and Fox News.”

It is not terribly surprising to hear Susan Wojcicki admit to elevating the media of the oligarchic empire to the CEO of a neoconservative publication at the World Economic Forum. She comes from the same elite empire management background as all the empire managers who’ve been placed in charge of mainstream media outlets by their plutocratic owners, having gone to Harvard after being literally raised on the campus of Stanford University as a child. Her sister Anne is the founder of the genetic-testing company 23andMe and was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Google itself also uses algorithms to artificially boost empire media in its searches. In 2017 World Socialist Website (WSWS) began documenting the fact that it, along with other leftist and antiwar outlets, had suddenly experienced a dramatic drop in traffic from Google searches. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal confirmed WSWS claims, reporting that “Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results.” In 2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to censoring WSWS at a Senate hearing in response to one senator’s suggestion that Google only censors right wing content.

Google, for the record, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA. It pours massive amounts of money into federal lobbying and DC think tanks, has a cozy relationship with the NSA, and has been a military-intelligence contractor from the beginning.

Then you’ve got Facebook, where a third of Americans regularly get their news. Facebook is a bit less evasive about its status quo-enforcing censorship practices, openly enlisting the government-and-plutocrat-funded imperialist narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to help it determine what content to censor and what to boost. Facebook has stated that if its “fact checkers” like The Atlantic Council deem a page or domain guilty of spreading false information, it will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

All the algorithm stacking by the dominant news distribution giants Google and Facebook also ensures that mainstream platforms and reporters will have far more followers than indie media on platforms like Twitter, since an article that has been artificially amplified will receive far more views and therefore far more clicks on their social media information. Mass media employees tend to clique up and amplify each other on Twitter, further exacerbating the divide. Meanwhile left and antiwar voices, including myself, have been complaining for years that Twitter artificially throttles their follower count.

If not for these deliberate acts of sabotage and manipulation by Silicon Valley megacorporations, the mainstream media which have deceived us into war after war and which manufacture consent for an oppressive status quo would have been replaced by independent media years ago. These tech giants are the life support system of corporate media propaganda.