The End of Days Is Coming Fast and It’s Ugly

Posted on April 9, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Phil Butler

The average citizen of Earth is all tied up these days. Scarcely anyone has free time to take on one more task, to truly understand what goes on in the world, or glean any meaningful benefit from world affairs. Life goes on, albeit in a more chaotic sense, as it always has. The rich get richer, as they say, and the poor get poorer. There’s a simple reason to explain it all, but humanity is never allowed to come to terms with it. The solution to all our problems is patently simple. But the choice? Well, we’re conditioned to shun revolutions of thought and deed.

Now that I have opened a misty veil into the nebulous unknowing of world affairs, let me reveal once more, the dastardly cause of all our strife. The powers that be, whether, in the north, south, east, or west, want everything for themselves. You knew this since that first overheard conversation between old men, in Athens, Beirut, Charleston, or Dublin. And if you’ve dared to rear your head and lift your voice with the newfound freedom of digital means, beware, for they will soon smash you back down into the dark chamber of servitude, where you and I belong. Today’s case in point? The sister of billionaire Warren Buffett, Roberta Buffett Elliott, and an institution painted philanthropic, to cover a deceitful ghastliness. In this report, I have included Tweets from some of the panel that the Buffett Institute has assembled. The gist of these Tweets will further enlighten you.

In my email this morning there was a message from Annelise Riles, Executive Director of Northwestern University’s Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, a school I was not even familiar with before. The subject of the email was a Foreign Policy – Northwestern broadcast entitled “How to Stop Fake News” The tagline reads:

“Stopping fake news is the big problem we have to solve before we can more effectively address the global challenges facing humanity.”

The story of Roberta, Warren, and her fascinating husband David Elliott, is a subject worthy of a book, but for the sake of brevity, a $100 million dollar gift to create the Northwestern institute in 2015 was no charitable donation. The now-deceased husband David, was head of the largest Peace Corps operating in the world about the time J.F.K. was assassinated. Just to tweak the reader’s interest in how “agents” of liberal change are created.

Returning to the latest Buffett Institute initiative, it’s important to note that like every other supposed philanthropic gift by billionaires, there was a windfall beyond a tax writeoff. And now, with brother Warren and his elite colleagues pressing hard to dominate our world, the rebelliousness of independent thought must be squashed. The elite accomplishes our quietness via the same old methods. They not only own almost all the newspapers and TV stations, they also donate billions to cultivate journalists, scientists, politicians, bureaucrats, educators, and military leaders who will propagate their agendas.

Now, independent traditional and social media are a huge problem for those who want utter control. Now that the term “conspiracy theory” no longer has weight in light of exposed real conspiracies, the danger for the Warren Buffett or George Soros types of the world is acute. This “How to Stop Fake News” should be a wake-up call for every citizen of our world, a call to action to prevent the complete takeover of freedoms and elusive democracy. Make no mistake, the US President declaring war on Russia and Vladmir Putin in recent comments, the hardcore language aimed at Iran, China, and many other “perceived” threats to American hegemony, are the other warning signs.

This new initiative involves high-ranking members of the European Commission, Putin hater Olga Yurkova (Co-Founder, Stopfake.org), Marwan M. Kraidy (Dean and CEO, Northwestern University in Qatar), Justine Isola (Facebook), and others. One look into the backgrounds of these people will tell you the Roberta Buffett Institute is already presenting a narrative to students that is mightily skewed in favor of the liberal order. With Biden in charge now, and after Trump succeeding in destroying conservatism for good, Buffett and his fellows are ready for the push to subdue Russia or anything standing in the way. At least, this is my analysis.

Here in Greece, the Prime Minister just declared social media the “enemy of democracy” because the people are losing confidence in the government’s ability to immunize and protect citizens. This is not “fake news” Prime Minister Mitsotakis is on record saying this. For a few years now, institutions like Freedom House have been trumpeting the notion that social media is rotting democracy from within. The so-called “left’ has blamed this supposed decay on conservatives and the far-right. A Politico piece before the 2020 election suggested that Americans were becoming “superspreaders of misinformation.” At the other end of the spectrum, Annelise Riles, the lady in charge of the Buffett Institute, writes for Times Higher Education (THE); “Universities can help the US retake its seat at the global table.” Must I continue, or is the writing on the wall here? Riles was the recipient of a Marshall Scholarship herself, so what we are seeing is the most effects of replanting neo-colonialism, and the latest in the ongoing war for this world.

We must understand fully what former President Donald Trump’s role was in all this. Trump’s Tweets, the bombastic and often ridiculous content he spread, the sheer callousness and narcissism he foamed at us with, it set the stage for his colleagues to silence all moderators. Now, the liberal order Trump was supposed to expose, the Deep State and the Swamp he was sworn to unseat, has complete control (almost) of media, business, and even academia and medicine.

Currently, there is nothing whatsoever standing in the way of their turning us all into slaves. Putin and Russia represent a huge problem for them because the capitalistic systems they created will soon fail without new resources to leverage. Russia means growth for these people, and without the treasures of Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and other nations, the Warren Buffetts and Rothschilds of Earth cannot go forward. Their empires of Wall Street hot air will collapse within a decade. They must, you see, either command all the world’s mineral and human wealth or control us utterly and completely. The inevitable is unarguable. There is no bottomless vessel, from which to pour milk or honey endlessly. This liberal order that reshaped its power, will transform every freedom into a task that serves them. Much of our life is already dedicated to them, they take a piece of every move we make. It will only get worse. But humanity must be left standing. End of story.

By the way, this is not fake news, it is my real opinion based on decades of study, research, and inside information.

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

With Over $1 Billion Spent, Domestic Dark Money Dwarfs All Foreign Influence on 2020 Election

Posted on April 6, 2021 by Reid Mukai

While unapproved foreign interference is a major scandal, corporations and the ultra-wealthy essentially buying elections is simply (big) business as usual.

By Alan Mcleod

Source: Mint Press News

WASHINGTON — A newly declassified report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC) alleges that a range of U.S. enemies — including Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Hezbollah — all attempted to interfere in the 2020 election.

The scope of the supposed interference was relatively minor, amounting to attempts to push false narratives around Democratic nominee Joe Biden, with state media outlets questioning Biden’s credibility or sending out emails meant to confuse or intimidate American voters.

The report offered no evidence for the allegations, arguing that “doing so could endanger sensitive sources and methods and imperil the intelligence community’s ability to collect foreign intelligence.” However, the NIC insisted, the classified report included such evidence and came to the same conclusions.

Despite the lack of substance, and the fact that the intelligence community has continually published outlandish claims about foreign actors’ nefarious roles (which were later rolled back), the report’s release became a major international story, dominating the news cycle and featuring prominently in The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, The Guardian and many other outlets.

The report generated outrage on social media. Movie director turned political activist Rob Reiner summed up the mood among many: “No surprise. Putin launched a massive disinformation campaign in 2020 to help Trump. This time he failed to get him elected. But he was more than successful at poisoning our Democracy. Evidence: Jan.6. To restore faith, Trump must be prosecuted,” he tweeted.

Home cooking in a big, dark kitchen

Receiving far less attention was a report published at the same time by the Center for Responsive Politics, which revealed enormous election interference from corporate dark money. More than $1 billion worth of secret donations were made during the 2020 election. This included around $660 million in contributions to big-money political groups, more than $300 million in advertising, and $88 million in FEC-reported spending.

Few people, even political junkies, know the names of these organizations. But dark-money groups — organizations trying to influence politics that do not disclose the source of their funding, such as Duty & Honor and America Votes — have considerably more influence over who rules the United States than do any foreign leaders.

Sauce for the goose?

The largest of these groups in terms of political spending is One Nation America, a Republican organization masterminded by former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. The organization spent over $125 million during the last election cycle.

However, it was the Democrats who benefitted the most from dark money sourced from wealthy, shadowy donors. Democrats outraised the GOP by well over two-to-one, with Biden’s bid attracting more than six times the amount of money from anonymous sources than did Trump’s. Given the relatively close race, it is entirely plausible that this massive cash injection swung the balance in favor of the 78-year-old Delawarean and away from the incumbent.

Putting “meddling” in perspective

In 2016, the St. Petersburg-based “troll farm” the Internet Research Agency is said to have spent around $100,000 in online ads targeting American readers. But four years later, the Center for Responsive Politics calculates that opaque non-profits shelled out $132 million on the same thing — more than a thousand times as much.

In politics, money talks. Since 2000, the party spending the most cash has won between 85% and 98% of all House and 71% and 85% of all Senate races, depending on the year. Election 2020 was by far the costliest election in history, coming in at $14.4 billion. That figure is more than double the price of the 2016 election, which cost around $6.5 billion. The six most expensive Senate races of all time occurred in this cycle. Democrats comfortably outraised and outspent Republicans in 2020.

The two Senate elections in Georgia — regular and special, which both went to runoffs that saw Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock elected — wound up with nearly $830 million spent on the two races alone. Democrats relied on hefty donations from tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and AT&T, while Republicans counted on support from financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and from money from the Koch Brothers.

This disparity in coverage between the two reports suggests that, while unapproved foreign interference is a major scandal, corporations and the ultra-wealthy essentially buying elections is simply (big) business as usual.

Media Pseudo-Debates and the Silence of Leftist Critics The Incompetent, Negligent, Mishandling, Miscalculating Elite Blunderers

Posted on April 5, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

You’ve heard of them, no doubt, the U.S. rulers who can’t rule too well and are always getting surprised by events or fed bad advice by their underlings. Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned. They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence. They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the elites whom allegedly they oppose while ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail. They never see the storm coming, even as they create it. Their incompetence is the retort to all those nut cases who conjure up conspiracy theories to explain their actions or lack thereof. They are innocent. Always innocent.

They and their media mouthpieces offer Americans, who are most eager to accept, what Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed at age thirty-nine by Hitler, called cheap grace: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance…”

These incompetents are, in the immortal words of the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

Except they could and can.

They’ve actually shot a lot of people, here and abroad. It’s one of their specialties. But they mean well. They screw up sometimes, but they mean well. They care, even while they kill millions with their guns and bombs. But they have their followers.

As another dissident thirty-nine-year-old pastor, executed by the American state, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Mainstream Media Pseudo-Debates

The U.S. rulers have their defenders. Most are corporate mainstream journalists whose jobs are to defend the ruling elites of both political parties. They will criticize across the political divides depending on their organizations’ political leanings at the moment. But they will never attack the fundamentals of the oligarchic war system since they are part of it. Their jobs depend on it. So CNN and The New York Times will obsessively attack Trump while Fox News will do the same to Obama or Biden. This is a game.

These days such massive media conglomerates are seemingly starkly divided and basically serve as adjuncts of one political party or the other. They are essentially political propagandists for either the Democrats or the Republicans and have abandoned any pretense to be anything else. They speak to their respective audiences in self-enclosed vacuums. They promote the divide that runs down the middle of the USA, a divide they helped to create.

Some have argued that this radical division of the media turf is because of economic and business factors; that the media organizations and their “journalists” have seen this strategy as the path to greater profits. There is probably some truth in this. But it is a small part.

For all sides of the corporate media serve the same overarching political function: to divide and conquer the population; to set the so-called left against right; middle America against the east and west coasts; white against black; working class against middle-class; men against women; husbands against wives, etc. To keep people, who in reality should be allies, fighting with each other. It is a classic strategy of divide-and-conquer that is carried out by the mainstream media pursuant to their unstated mandate. It is not an accident and has been conducted with a vengeance in recent years.

And crucially, it is anchored in the false premise of the myth of left vs. right with a reasonable center somewhere between. Such a center has never existed. While left and right might once have been useful categories, they have long since outlived their usefulness. They now just serve to engender pseudo-debates.

Pseudo-debates are not new but they are highly effective. They are debates based on false premises. In this case, the premise is that the massive corporate media conglomerates are not part of the same system of control and containment of the population, but are genuine opponents in the battle for truth and democracy. Accept this premise and you have entered into endless debates leading nowhere. It is a classic method of intelligence agencies to sow uncertainty and confusion and to have people following Alice down the rabbit hole, tumbling and tumbling into an endless void as they argue continually about nothing.[1]

Dr. E. Martin Schotz has brilliantly explicated this trick in the case of the assassination of President Kennedy (“Certainly no honest person could ever accept the ‘single bullet theory’.”) where people are still debating a false mystery almost sixty years after the fact. He writes:

The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have pseudo-debates. Debates about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously false….Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo-debate is a benign activity. That it simply means that people are debating something that is irrelevant. This is not the case. I say this because every debate rests on a premise to which the debaters must agree, or there is no debate. In the case of pseudo-debate the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo-debate we have the parties to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is all the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting person who is witness to the pseudo-debate does not understand that he is being passed a lie. He is not even aware that he is being passed a premise. It is so subtle that the premise just passes into the person as if it were reality. This premise—that there is uncertainly to be resolved—seems so benign. It is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water. But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds of those who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we mean by mass denial.[2]

The entire corporate media ideological spectrum operates under the umbrella of oligarchic control, something that is not new, just more egregious with every passing day. More in your face. The corporate media serve as the mouthpieces for those oligarchs, but they try to convince their separate audiences that this isn’t so. They give people enemies – false ones. Objects to hate.

But just like symptoms are not the disease, they give people a focus upon which to rivet their attention while the disease goes unattended. As with a drug addict, the taking of drugs is not the fundamental problem, although it becomes one and might kill you. The problem is why one takes drugs; what is it that is one feels needs to be tranquilized and silenced. Or, as the writer William Saroyan once flippantly said regarding the claim that smoking causes cancer: “You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke, not from the smoking itself.”

The corporate mainstream media are the drug that serves to hide the core truth of an oligarchic cancerous warfare state drunk on power and using propaganda to play both sides. Everyone has become pawns in their game.

A recent example serves to illustrate a method in their madness. There is a new, ongoing Spotify podcast – “Renegades: Born in the USA” – featuring Barack Obama and the singer Bruce Springsteen in conversation. Two rebels – it’s of course ridiculous – but there it is. Two super rich celebrities stroking each other’s egos in an upper class setting. One a singer, who rose to prominence out of nowhere as the voice of the small-town beleaguered working class; the other, a mixed-race politician who rose to prominence out of nowhere from a family background redolent of the CIA. Two icons of popular and political culture crossing over with a smooth patina of mixed-arts bullshit telling listeners they we need to return to the good old days when political centrism served the great American ideal that they both share. People are supposed to take this conversation between “buddies” seriously, as the two sit mask-less with their feet seemingly touching at a time when people are told to wear masks and avoid close contact with those outside their households. As Bruce strums his guitar, any half-way sentient person would realize he was being played, even while the meaning of the song was so twisted that he was enjoying it.

Left-wing Gatekeepers

Then, if we switch from the mainstream corporate media to alternative voices, especially prominent ones on the left, we notice something even stranger.

I think most readers would agree that the two seismic events of the last twenty years are the current COVID- 19 issue and the September 11, 2001 attacks. The latter, not only because of all the victims that died that day, but for how it led to so much death and destruction around the world, the endless war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., the ensuing loss of basic liberties and privacy via the Patriot Act, etc. The former for obvious current reasons of death and further loss of basic liberties under the lockdowns as governments throughout the world institute unprecedented measures of control, etc. Clearly these two events stand out over the decades. They bookend twenty years of massive U.S. war crimes, the growth of the national security complex, an obscene increase in wealth for the wealthiest, and the loss of privacy and civil liberties for all.

And as everyone knows, September 11^th and COVID-19 have resulted in great controversies and much debate because of their serious implications and the obvious questions about the official story lines raised by many respectable writers and researchers of varying political perspectives. At the very least, one would expect that leftist/liberal critics of the so-called Deep State and the machinations of the elite’s wars and propaganda would have engaged in these discussions about these two seminal events or written analytic articles about them.

But for a core group of prominent left/liberal critics, these two subjects have been avoided like they are of no importance. No debates, no discussions, no analyses – simply silence, as if they didn’t happen and there was nothing to discuss. Cases closed: the government has spoken. Let us move on to more important matters.

But that is wrong. For example, in about a dozen closely reasoned books of his own and with other international researchers, David Ray Griffin has raised innumerable questions that show that the official September 11 story is full of holes. Canadian writer Graeme MacQueen has written a devastating exposé of the linked anthrax attacks that followed September 11, showing clearly that they were a U.S. government operation. I myself have raised significant questions about what I call the linguistic mind-control associated with the attacks in “Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore.” The dissident literature is enormous.

A few of Griffin’s points are illustrative of the many anomalies in the official account. There are so many, and not just from Griffin but from other researchers, that I will mention just a few about the building collapses, what Griffin calls “miracles of science.” The contradictions about the hijackers are also voluminous.

Here are a few such scientific miracles:

The Twin Towers and WTC 7 were the only steel-framed high-rise buildings ever to come down without explosives or incendiaries. The Twin Towers, each of which had 287 steel columns, were brought down solely by a combination of airplane strikes and jet-fuel fires. WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, so it was the first steel-framed high-rise to be brought down solely by ordinary building fires. These World Trade Center buildings also came down in free fall – the Twin Towers in virtual free fall, WTC 7 in absolute free fall – for over two seconds. Although the collapses of the of the WTC buildings were not aided by explosives, the collapses imitated the kinds of implosions that can be induced only by demolition companies. In the case of WTC 7, the structure came down symmetrically (straight down, with an almost perfectly horizontal roofline), which meant that all 82 of the steel support columns had to fall simultaneously, although the building’s fires had a very asymmetrical pattern. The South Tower’s upper 30-floor block changed its angular momentum in midair. This 30-floor block then disintegrated in midair.

I could go on and on with examples. The simple point is that there are so many absurdities in the official story that to ignore them is an act of intellectual and moral betrayal. Anyone who has closely studied the government’s 9/11 Commission Report knows it is highly fictional.

The same is true for dissenting voices on the COVID-19 issue. Three publications in particular have published an enormous amount of well-reasoned critiques of the official version of the COVID-19 narrative: Global Research, Off-Guardian, and Children’s Health Defense. All present many articles by serious writers who raise innumerable questions and make irrefutable points about this matter.

And again, the point is not simple agreement with the dissenters’ arguments, but the need to engage their critiques. Here too the silence is resounding, for it says “we buy the official account.”

Consider these few:

The man who invented the test used to determine the so-called COVID positive test results, the Nobel Prize winning chemist, Kary Mullis, has said that the test cannot do that, it is not a diagnostic test, and therefore all the test results are meaningless. Additionally, there is serious doubt that the virus called SARS-CoV-2 causes a disease called COVID 19 since there is no evidence that the virus has ever been isolated. Assuming for argument’s sake, however, that the PCR test can detect a specific virus, even Anthony Fauci himself, and the World Health Organization (one hour after Biden was sworn into office), have both said that the PCR test in order to have any accuracy must be performed at cycles below 35 thresholds while for a year those tests have been done at thresholds much higher, resulting in vast numbers of false positives. Cycle thresholds are the level at which the PCR test is said to detect a sample of the COVID-19 virus.

Furthermore, eminent voices such as Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Koenig at Global Research, Robert Kennedy, Jr. at Children’s Health Defense, and Catte Black and Kit Knightly at Off-Guardian have for a long time been vociferously objecting to the official narrative with a vast amount of additional analyses involving the consequences of the wide-spread lockdowns. Such dissidents have had to fight against an organized campaign of censorship that should raise the alarm for anyone who cares about truth.

For leftists who remain silent on these fundamental issues, I can assure them that these critiques of the official explanations of September 11, 2001 and COVID-19 are not right-wing conspiracies but are the work of leftists digging deep for truth.

It is therefore more than odd that certain left/liberal writers completely avoid these issues. One must assume, therefore, that they accept the official explanations for these events, just as this coterie of leftist/liberal critics dismiss the voluminous and detailed critiques of the Warren Commission and the assassination of President Kennedy. From their silence one can assume that these matters are of no importance because the authorities have given us the truth.

One such deceased left-wing writer, who can stand in for the group of living writers I allude to, was the well-known and often brilliant journalist Alexander Cockburn, the founder of Counterpunch Magazine. In Cockburn’s case, however, and to his credit even though he had no idea what he was talking about regarding September 11, 2001 and the JFK assassination, he did not remain silent but expressed his bile in ways he thought piercing but which made him appear quite ignorant. Cockburn had a sharp tongue and liked to ridicule anyone who disagreed with him. He excoriated all who questioned the JFK assassination or September 11 as “conspiracy nuts,” “lunatics” involved with “kookery.”

Echoing the CIA’s conspiracy meme, his name calling was offensive and his ignorance of these matters extraordinary. But he was a star leftist, an untouchable. Few wished to criticize him. He started with the assumption that government stupidity, incompetence, and screw-ups allow these terrible events to happen, and then without a shred of evidence, concluded that is why they happened. All evidence and logic to the contrary, he derisively dismissed as the work of fools. Only Cockburn and a government that admits mistakes were made were right. His arguments on these matters were pseudo-debates based on a premises he conjured out of thin air.

He was a master incompetent of the incompetence theory, one that many prominent leftists follow today, such as a recent passing comment by one of them on the COVID-19 matter as a mishandling by the ruling elite. The implicit assumption being that the basic government and mainstream media tale is correct and all would be far better if the Trump administration hadn’t screwed up. Nothing further is forthcoming or necessary. Let us proceed on the assumption that the official account is true and that the government’s inept response is the problem. Failure of leadership. Government negligence. Incompetence.

And anyone who even harbors a suspicion that there may be more to the story is engaging in conspiratorial thinking. Of course this is the same response given to those who for twenty years have researched and questioned the government’s account of September 11, 2001. The 9/11 omission story. The fictional account that will dominate the news as the twentieth anniversary approaches this September. Will any of those liberal/leftists who have remained silent all these years let it pass as truth? I suspect so but hope not.

The Need for Dialogue

So we have pseudo debates on one hand and silence on the other when what is required is not self-censorship but open critical dialogue on these fundamental matters. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” said Martin Luther King from the pulpit of Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 when he condemned the Vietnam War and broke his own silence in opposition to many of his advisers. A year later to the day, like JFK, he was murdered by the warfare state he condemned. Like Senator Robert Kennedy two months later. They were killed by very competent people.

Dr. Martin E. Schotz wrote twenty-six years ago in History Will Not Absolve US that those he had in mind for their defense of the Warren Commission were “such individuals as Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, the editors of The Nation magazine, and, if everyone remembers, I.F. Stone as well. I think the positions of these individuals are very important because in their surprising (to us) dishonesty and willingness to cooperate with the warfare state in covering up the crime, there is obviously something to be learned.”

Yes, there is. It is time for all people of good will to stop finding excuses for the ruling elites, whether through incompetence theories or the silent refusal to publicly engage the government and its critics on the most important issues of our time – September 11, 2001 and COVID-19. Those Schotz names above are heroes for many on the liberal/left today who follow in their stead. It’s as though they have found it necessary to mimic their teachers’ lessons. Better logic would have them analyzing the premises of September 11 and COVID-19. Start with the basics. Be explicit. Tell us why you are silent.

It’s time to graduate from this school of denial.

[1] https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/HWNAU/letterToVJS.html#partIa

[2] https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/FalseMystery/COPA1998EMS.html#s2

Stand Up to Tyranny: How to Respond to the Evils of Our Age

Posted on April 4, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”—Martin Luther King Jr. (A Knock at Midnight, June 11, 1967)

In every age, we find ourselves wrestling with the question of how Jesus Christ—the itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist who died challenging the police state of his time, namely, the Roman Empire—would respond to the moral questions of our day.

For instance, would Jesus advocate, as so many evangelical Christian leaders have done in recent years, for congregants to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do?

What would Jesus do?

Study the life and teachings of Jesus, and you may be surprised at how relevant he is to our modern age.

A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire, and providing a blueprint for standing up to tyranny that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Those living through this present age of government lockdowns, immunity passports, militarized police, SWAT team raids, police shootings of unarmed citizens, roadside strip searches, invasive surveillance and the like might feel as if these events are unprecedented. However, the characteristics of a police state and its reasons for being are no different today than they were in Jesus’ lifetime: control, power and money.

Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day was characterized by secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state.

A police state extends far beyond the actions of law enforcement. In fact, a police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

Indeed, the police state in which Jesus lived (and died) and its striking similarities to modern-day America are beyond troubling.

Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the increasingly militarized police forces across the country.

Widespread police presence. The Roman Empire used its military forces to maintain the “peace,” thereby establishing a police state that reached into all aspects of a citizen’s life. In this way, these military officers, used to address a broad range of routine problems and conflicts, enforced the will of the state. Today SWAT teams, comprised of local police and federal agents, are employed to carry out routine search warrants for minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud.

Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.

Perpetual wars and a military empire. Much like America today with its practice of policing the world, war and an over-arching militarist ethos provided the framework for the Roman Empire, which extended from the Italian peninsula to all over Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, extending into North Africa and Western Asia as well. In addition to significant foreign threats, wars were waged against inchoate, unstructured and socially inferior foes.

Martial law. Eventually, Rome established a permanent military dictatorship that left the citizens at the mercy of an unreachable and oppressive totalitarian regime. In the absence of resources to establish civic police forces, the Romans relied increasingly on the military to intervene in all matters of conflict or upheaval in provinces, from small-scale scuffles to large-scale revolts. Not unlike police forces today, with their martial law training drills on American soil, militarized weapons and “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset, the Roman soldier had “the exercise of lethal force at his fingertips” with the potential of wreaking havoc on normal citizens’ lives.

A nation of suspects. Just as the American Empire looks upon its citizens as suspects to be tracked, surveilled and controlled, the Roman Empire looked upon all potential insubordinates, from the common thief to a full-fledged insurrectionist, as threats to its power. The insurrectionist was seen as directly challenging the Emperor. A “bandit,” or revolutionist, was seen as capable of overturning the empire, was always considered guilty and deserving of the most savage penalties, including capital punishment. Bandits were usually punished publicly and cruelly as a means of deterring others from challenging the power of the state. Jesus’ execution was one such public punishment.

Acts of civil disobedience by insurrectionists. Starting with his act of civil disobedience at the Jewish temple, the site of the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council, Jesus branded himself a political revolutionary. When Jesus “with the help of his disciples, blocks the entrance to the courtyard” and forbids “anyone carrying goods for sale or trade from entering the Temple,” he committed a blatantly criminal and seditious act, an act “that undoubtedly precipitated his arrest and execution.” Because the commercial events were sponsored by the religious hierarchy, which in turn was operated by consent of the Roman government, Jesus’ attack on the money chargers and traders can be seen as an attack on Rome itself, an unmistakable declaration of political and social independence from the Roman oppression.

Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers. Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas. Acting as a government informant, Judas concocted a kiss as a secret identification marker, hinting that a level of deception and trickery must be used to obtain this seemingly “dangerous revolutionist’s” cooperation.

Torture and capital punishment. In Jesus’ day, religious preachers, self-proclaimed prophets and nonviolent protesters were not summarily arrested and executed. Indeed, the high priests and Roman governors normally allowed a protest, particularly a small-scale one, to run its course. However, government authorities were quick to dispose of leaders and movements that appeared to threaten the Roman Empire. The charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious. To the Romans, any one of these charges was enough to merit death by crucifixion, which was usually reserved for slaves, non-Romans, radicals, revolutionaries and the worst criminals.

Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.” After Jesus is formally condemned by Pilate, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.” The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry. After being ruthlessly whipped and mocked, Jesus was nailed to a cross.

As Professor Mark Lewis Taylor observed:

The cross within Roman politics and culture was a marker of shame, of being a criminal. If you were put to the cross, you were marked as shameful, as criminal, but especially as subversive. And there were thousands of people put to the cross. The cross was actually positioned at many crossroads, and, as New Testament scholar Paula Fredricksen has reminded us, it served as kind of a public service announcement that said, “Act like this person did, and this is how you will end up.”

Jesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state. Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.

Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics.

Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.

Ultimately, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.

After all, there is so much suffering and injustice in the world, and so much good that can be done by those who truly aspire to follow Jesus Christ’s example.

We must decide whether we will follow the path of least resistance—willing to turn a blind eye to what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the “evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence”—or whether we will be transformed nonconformists “dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.”

As King explained in a powerful sermon delivered in 1954, “This command not to conform comes … [from] Jesus Christ, the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of mankind.”

Furthermore:

We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world. Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right. Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ… The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!
…Honesty impels me to admit that transformed nonconformity, which is always costly and never altogether comfortable, may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering, losing a job, or having a six-year-old daughter ask, “Daddy, why do you have to go to jail so much?” But we are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way that comes only through suffering.
In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth. We must make a choice. Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds? Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul saving music of eternity?

We Are Human, We Are Free – Building Worldwide Nonviolent Resistance to the Great Reset

Posted on April 2, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Anita McKone

In late 2020 Robert J. Burrowes and myself were asked by some Melbourne activists protesting against the lockdowns and Covid vaccinations to help them develop more effective strategy. Many of the protesters were new to activism, and those with an inclination towards following a nonviolent approach wanted education in this area.

In February, Robert and I ran two Introduction to Nonviolent Action workshops, and one Nonviolent Strategy weekend, and with the inspiration and input of this great group of participants, I have now put the basics of a worldwide nonviolent campaign strategy to defeat the Great Reset on a website. We have named this campaign We Are Human, We Are Free.

The website is designed as a resource that activists anywhere in the world can use to develop effective local nonviolent campaigns.

Here are some excerpts from the website:

We Are Human, We Are Free is a worldwide nonviolent resistance movement to free ourselves from Elite control and resist the forces of fear and dehumanisation.

Our aim is to build a mass civil resistance movement to undermine the power of the Global Elite to control us, and to regain the freedoms that make our lives worth living. Because we are human, we are free to make choices. The time has come to choose – are we on the side of love, life and freedom or fear, self-imprisonment and tyranny?…

What is happening in our world?

Do you have a gut feeling that there is something ‘wrong’ with the way this supposed pandemic is being presented, and with planetary wide lockdowns as a response? Are you being negatively impacted by lockdowns, or vaccines, in ways that make you feel the ‘cure’ is worse than the original ‘problem’? If what is going on doesn’t make sense to you, is there another, reasonable way to explain what is happening?…

The supposed pandemic and the planetary lockdown response are key tools in achieving the Global Elite’s aims – psychologically designed to dramatically increase people’s fear of the unknowable, and justify greater and greater loss of freedoms and human rights…

What is The Great Reset?

In brief, the Global Elite is in the process of establishing:

A Monopolised Corporate Dictatorship of the economy, including all natural, agricultural, human, technological and financial resources, destroying any attempt of ordinary people to achieve economic self-reliance through independent farming, small and medium sized business, organic food production or local trade. The full digitisation of money (the end of currency altogether), will leave people with no control over currencies they can use to trade in ways they see fit. The advent of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ is expected to lead to at least one-third of jobs now performed by humans being replaced by software, robots, and smart machines by 2025, leaving at least 30% of people permanently unemployed. In a short video, the WEF predicts that by 2030, ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’.
A Medical Dictatorship by profit-driven pharmaceutical medicine and psychiatry for social control, that denies the true value of natural and holistic physical and mental health, disallows use of non-patented or previously patented medicines, and forces damaging and experimental medical treatments and procedures on people without informed consent. These include vaccines involving genetic engineering and nanotech which have the potential to fundamentally change the way we exist as independent biological entities.
National/State Government Dictatorships (intended to become a Global Government Dictatorship) controlled by elite ‘advice’ and interests, that destroy privacy through mass surveillance and restrict freedom of thought, speech, work, finances and movement.
A Monopolised Media Dictatorship that uses censorship and propaganda for social control.
A Technocratic Dictatorship run by pseudoscientific ‘experts’, involving the fourth industrial revolution (AI, satellites, robotics, drones and the Internet of Things); the surveillance, control and attempted ‘robotisation’ of our biological selves through nanotech implants and connection to AI through 5G technology; the control and destruction of the natural environment through technologies such as 5G and genetically modified crops; and the denigration of genuine scientific methods and principles, which are non-authoritarian by nature…

What can we do? Why choose nonviolent resistance?

We Are Human, We Are Free recognises that to defend our human needs and rights it is necessary to noncooperate with the forces of fear, and this involves many types of courageous and conscientious individual and collective action. While legal and political challenges within the system help raise awareness of the unhealthy nature of tyranny, we need to trust ourselves to make the final decisions about how to meet our own needs when existing political and legal systems are corrupted and fail. When we cannot defend ourselves according to legal or conventional political rules, we must step outside these rules and draw upon the more natural and fundamental powers of human solidarity, conscience and courage.

Some powerful acts of nonviolent noncooperation, such as boycotts, will remain legal and risk free. Increasingly, however, noncooperation will require civil disobedience, as the forces of fear attempt to reign us in ever more tightly. The Global Elite and their agents have already used arrests, fines, imprisonment, psychiatric committal, property seizure and direct violence against pro-freedom activists in different countries to try to intimidate us into giving up. They will continue to use violence against us. In these challenging circumstances, nonviolent processes and interactions provide the greatest degree of physical and psychological/emotional safety possible for activists and will help build the greatest number of participants in our growing movement…The Covid-19 Crisis: Defending Humanity Against the Elite Coup

Everyone is Welcome

Everyone is welcome to take action under the We Are Human, We Are Free banner if they agree with the three fundamental points that unify this movement:

That whatever the level of illness occurring in the community, and whatever its causes, there is no genuine evidence of the existence of a contagious pandemic that is killing statistically significant numbers of people, and therefore no justification for any of the measures which are supposedly a response to this ‘crisis’.
That the false pandemic is one tool being used by the Global Elite to achieve The Great Reset, which is designed to gain total control over the world’s natural resources and the entire human population. The various elements of The Great Reset must be collectively resisted if we are to gain back the freedoms that make our lives worth living.
All participants in this movement are willing to abide by the code of nonviolent discipline detailed on We Are Human, We Are Free in their campaigns.

We hope to build an easily recognisable worldwide movement against Elite dictatorship, which will unite us as we enact the many locally organised nonviolent campaigns necessary to win back our freedom.

Many nonviolent actions and campaigns are already occurring – we invite local campaigns to consider adding the We Are Human, We Are Free banner to their existing identities as a worldwide unifying element in their campaign…

What Sort of Actions Will Make a Real Difference to the Situation?

Public protests where we show our discontent and connect with the many others who feel as we do are a first step in addressing the problem. But effectively undermining attempted global dictatorship requires more than this – we need to take actions of strategic significance that transfer power from the hands of the Elite to ordinary people…

Choose messaging that clearly asks ordinary people to noncooperate in specific ways. For example “Choose Natural Health. Say No to Experimental Vaccines”; “Provide No Excuse for Lockdowns. Don’t Get Tested”; “Don’t Buy Censorship. Boycott Facebook”; “Use Your Own Eyes and Ears. Turn off Your TV”; “Don’t Buy 5G Upgrades”; “Don’t Feed the Monsters. Boycott Amazon…

And here are a few examples from the website of 29 ‘Strategic Goals’ which will contribute to achieving our overall purpose of defeating the Global Elite’s attempted takeover:

(1) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by wearing a global symbol of human solidarity.

Asking people and groups all around the world to wear an orange ribbon, wristband or armband showing their solidarity as part of this worldwide nonviolent movement is a key way to increase people’s courage to take action. Can you think of particular groups of people to whom you might make this suggestion, or ways in which you might spread this message to the general public?…

(8) To cause people and groups all around the world to conscientiously refuse to submit to vaccination, which is likely to include nanotechnology that will subvert your individual identity, freedom, dignity, volition and privacy; including through a ‘digital vaccine passport’ (possibly delivered via a microneedle platform using fluorescent microparticles called ‘quantum dots’, which can deliver vaccines and at the same time invisibly encode vaccination history directly in the skin).

How can we best encourage people not to receive Covid vaccinations (experimental injectables), regardless of whether or not they are made legally mandatory by your national government? Can you organise picketing or boycotts of businesses that are coercing their workers into having vaccinations as a condition of employment?

Can you ask all air traffic controllers, and pilots and drivers of air, land and water transport (including military transport), and construction machinery such as cranes, to refuse to take vaccinations on account of the potentially catastrophic dangers to the community if they have a negative reaction to these experimental injectables while working?

Can you organise nonviolent protests or interventions at any education, healthcare (such as nursing homes) or travel related sites that have been targeted as priority vaccination sites to convince the management not to go ahead?

Can you organise a strike by workers at your workplace or in your industry in support of your right to choose not to be used as part of a medical experiment?

Can you organise a strike or ‘refusal to act on vaccine related punishment’ by public servants if they are ordered to cut off people’s government benefits for not taking a vaccine?

Can you ask GPs to resist performing Covid vaccinations by stating they are already overworked and have no further time for this ‘health’ campaign? Can you ask GPs to take positive responsibility for the health of their patients by presenting those patients who ask to be vaccinated with information regarding the exact contents of the vaccine and data regarding the known negative effects of the vaccine, and the data that is still unavailable because of its experimental nature, so that patients can make a genuinely informed choice?

(9) To cause people and groups all around the world to organize or participate in a collective event that conscientiously resists the Covid lockdowns.

This could be, for example, a cultural, religious or sporting event, a nonviolent action for another cause, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a celebration or a return to work.

This is all about showing its okay to live our normal lives. The more people involved in a mass ‘dispersed’ event, the less likely we are to be arrested or receive fines. If you are just organising locally, with a small number of people involved, police liaison is crucial for the best possible outcomes to occur. You must be prepared personally for the risk of arrest, and think about how you can make this process as dignified as possible to show your courage and commitment, and your willingness to engage with the police as individual human beings. Then, they may arrest you today, but decide that they don’t wish to do so tomorrow.

The 50,000 restaurants in Italy that opened in defiance of lockdown restrictions in January 2021 are a great example of a mass, dispersed action of noncompliance. Many religious services have been held in defiance of lockdowns. What cultural events matter most in your local community? Sport? Music? How about a ‘Football for Freedom’ match or a ‘Band Together for Freedom’ music event? You may be arrested before completing your event, but if you go with police with dignity, the absurdity of the police’s actions will be made all the more clear.

(10) To cause people and groups all around the world to organize or participate in events that conscientiously refuse to maintain social distance.

Are you a grandparent? Is it possible to organise ‘Grandparents for Freedom’ days, where grandparents visit their grandchildren against lockdown regulations, and take photos of themselves hugging and kissing their grandchildren to post online, or to print off and letterbox drop around their local community? This would work directly against the Elite narrative of having to ‘protect’ our older people by keeping them in isolation, showing that older people have courage and volition of their own.

To give people non-arrestable and arrestable options for showing their support for the campaign, public nonviolent actions could be organised where some of the group abides by social distancing and mask wearing (the masks could have a question mark drawn on them, or lips that appear to be speaking), and holds banners with clear messages encouraging acts of noncooperation, while others remove masks and hold hands or hug one another, accepting arrest in a dignified manner if the police decide to take that course. These actions will work best if you have done solid police liaison beforehand. To discourage use of water cannons and teargas to clear crowds, many smaller public actions could be organised around a city on a particular day, rather than one mass action in a centralised location.

(15) To cause people all around the world fined for breaking ‘pandemic’-related health laws or regulations (mask wearing, social distancing and lockdown restrictions, including curfews, local and wider travel restrictions, ‘non-essential’ work bans and business closures) to refuse to pay their fines and continue to conscientiously break these laws or regulations, accepting time in jail as a prisoner of conscience if necessary.

The legal system as it exists in any country does not have the resources to put large numbers of people through the court and prison system. If people refuse to pay fines, and do not deliver themselves up to the legal system voluntarily, it will take enormous resources to send police to locate and arrest all those with a warrant, put them in front of a magistrate, and then imprison them for a number of days, weeks or months in lieu of paying the fine. Already, in Victoria, Australia, for example, many unpaid fines have been withdrawn by the government, presumably for this reason, and the 50,000 restaurant owners in Italy who reopened against lockdown restrictions cannot possibly all be imprisoned for their actions.

It will be necessary to morally and practically support anyone who is targeted for prosecution as a ‘public example’ – if these people can be supported well through a prison experience, they can understand their important role in remaining courageous and patient for the benefit of the movement as a whole. The more of us who refuse to pay fines, the less chance there is of anyone being prosecuted, until the point where the authorities simply give up trying to enforce the laws or regulations.

(16) To cause the police to refuse to obey orders from the Global Elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of your country.

There are already some great nonviolent initiatives happening with the police, which you may like to copy in your local area. Check out Police for Freedom, for example. Talking to police at stations in your area, to get to know them as individuals, and when you are planning actions, is vital to the success of this movement. We need the police, security personnel and military personnel on our side and need to give them every opportunity to see us as people they respect and want to stand with. Obviously when people have had very bad experiences with police and other security forces, this can make it difficult for them to feel confident or willing to do this. Choose people who do have confidence to liaise with security forces, and work out ways to support and provide extra protection for those who have been previously abused.

We hope that the We Are Human, We Are Free website will provide a user friendly resource for developing a worldwide nonviolent campaign against the Global Elite’s Great Reset, encouraging many acts of noncooperation from ordinary, empowered people. We look forward to your participation!

Much love to you all from Victoria, Australia.

Anita McKone has been a nonviolent activist, educator and researcher since 1993. She has been arrested and imprisoned on a number of occasions for her activism. She has written many articles on different aspects of nonviolent activism, psychology and philosophy. Her website is at Songs of Nonviolence.

The New Normal “Reality” Police

Posted on April 1, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By CJ Hopkins

Source: Off-Guardian

So, according to Facebook and the Atlantic Council, I am now a “dangerous individual,” you know, like a “terrorist,” or a “serial murderer,” or “human trafficker,” or some other kind of “criminal.” Or I’ve been praising “dangerous individuals,” or disseminating their symbols, or otherwise attempting to “sow dissension” and cause “offline harm.”

Actually, I’m not really clear what I’m guilty of, but I’m definitely some sort of horrible person you want absolutely nothing to do with, whose columns you do not want to read, whose books you do not want to purchase, and the sharing of whose Facebook posts might get your account immediately suspended. Or, at the very least, you’ll be issued this warning:

Now, hold on, don’t click away just yet. You’re already on whatever website you’re reading this “dangerous,” “terrorist” column on (or you’re reading it in an email, probably on your phone), which means you are already on the official “Readers of Mass-Murdering Content” watch-list. So you might as well take the whole ride at this point.

Also, don’t worry, I’m not going to just whine about how Facebook was mean to me for 2,000 words … well, all right, I’m going to do that a little, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate how “reality” is manufactured and policed by global corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the corporate media, of course, crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and PayPal, and “think tanks” like the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”).

First, though, let me tell you my Facebook story.

What happened was, I made a Facebook post, and a lot of people tried to share it, so Facebook and the DFRLab suspended or disabled their accounts, or just prevented them from sharing it, and sent them the above warning. Facebook didn’t suspend my account, or censor the post on my account, or contact me to let me know that they have officially deemed me a “dangerous individual.”

Instead, they punished anyone who tried to “boost” my “dangerous” post, a tactic anyone who has been through boot camp or in prison (or has watched this classic scene from Full Metal Jacket) will be familiar with.

Here’s the “dangerous” post in question. (If you’re particularly sensitive to “terrorist” content, you may want to put on your “anti-terrorism” glasses, or take some other type of prophylactic measures to protect yourself from “offline harm,” before you venture any further.)

The photo, which I stole from Gunnar Kaiser, is of an art exhibit in Düsseldorf, Germany. My commentary is self-explanatory. As you can see, it is extremely “dangerous.” It literally radiates “offline harm.”

OK, before you write to inform me how this was just the work of a dumb Facebook algorithm, think about what I described above. If an algorithm was preventing sharing and suspending people’s accounts based on keyword spotting, it would have censored my original post, and presumably suspended my account.

Or, if Facebook has an algorithm that recognizes certain “dangerous” phrases, and then censors or suspends the accounts of people who share a post including those phrases, but doesn’t censor the original post or suspend the account of the author of the post…well, that’s kind of strange, isn’t it?

In any event, shortly after I posted it, I started seeing reports like this on Facebook:

Those are just a few examples, but I think you get the general idea.

The point is, apparently, the Corporatocracy feel sufficiently threatened by random people on Facebook that they are conducting these COINTELPRO-type ops. Seriously, think about that for a minute. I am not Stephen King or Margaret Atwood. I’m not even Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi.

I’m a midlist-level author of unusual literature, and a political satirist, and a blogger, basically, and yet Facebook, and their partners at the Atlantic Council, and AstraZeneca, and Pfizer, and Moderna, and who knows which other global corporations and transnational, non-governmental entities like the WEF and WHO, consider someone of my lowly status enough of a threat to their “New Normal” narrative to warrant the attention of the Reality Police.

Now, let me be clear about who I’m talking about when I’m talking about the “Reality Police.” Facebook’s partnership with the Atlantic Council is only one example, but it is a rather good one. Here’s a quick profile of the Atlantic Council…

The Atlantic Council of the United States was founded in 1961 as a think tank and anticommunist public relations organization to prop up support within the US for NATO in the post-World War II era … [its] current, honorary and lifetime directors list reads like a bipartisan rogues gallery of American war-criminals, including Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz, Frank Carlucci, James A. Baker, R. James Woolsey, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta. Among the former Atlantic Council chairman have been Obama administration officials James L. Jones, (national security advisor) and Chuck Hagel (secretary of defense).

The chairman of the council is Brent Scowcroft, the retired US Air Force officer who held national security and intelligence positions in the Nixon, Bush I and Bush II administrations. [It] is funded by substantial government and corporate interests from the financial, defense and petroleum industries.

Its 2017 annual report documents substantial contributions from HSBC, Chevron, The Blackstone Group, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Ford Motor Company, among many others. Also listed is Google Inc. in the $100,000 to $250,000 donor category. Among the largest council contributors are the US State Department, The Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the UK, and the United Arab Emirates. Other contributors include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Boeing, BP, Exxon and the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

– Kevin Reed, World Socialist Website

These are the folks that are policing “reality” (the “reality” they have manufactured, and are manufacturing moment by moment), deciding what officially happened, and didn’t happen, and what it means, and who qualifies as an “authoritative news source,” and “fact-checking” everything we see on the Internet. It’s not a bunch of pimply-faced IT nerds writing sloppy code in Menlo Park. It’s GloboCap and the Military-Industrial Complex.

If you’re one of my “New Normal” ex-friends and colleagues (or one of my Facebook or Twitter trolls) who, for some unknown reason, is still reading this column, perhaps on your way to get experimentally “vaccinated” or report one of your neighbors for not wearing a mask or being outdoors without a valid reason, this is who has manufactured your “reality” and the so-called “science” you claim I am “denying,” even as reality stares you in the face…

This did not begin with the “New Normal,” of course. Every system of power manufactures its own “reality” (totalitarian systems more fanatically than others). No, I’ve been writing about the manufacturing of “normality,” and the War on Dissent and Populism that GloboCap has been relentlessly waging on anyone and everyone opposing its hegemony or refusing to conform to its ideology, since back when I was still writing heretical columns like this for CounterPunch…before the editors saw which way the wind was blowing and ideologically purged its roster to get back into the good graces of GloboCap (following which ideological purge, Google restored it to the ranks of “real news”).

And that is how reality-policing works. It’s a bullying operation, basically. The entire “cancel culture” phenomenon is. “Cancel culture” is a silly name for it. We are talking about a global empire imposing total ideological conformity (or, in simpler terms, its version of “reality”) on the entire planet through fear and force. The Nazis referred to this process as Gleichschaltung.

Global capitalism has reached the stage where it no longer needs to tolerate dissent (any kind of dissent, from any quarter) to maintain the illusion of “freedom and democracy,” because there is no alternative to global capitalism. It is everywhere. There is nowhere to run or hide. When the Reality Police find you, and threaten to “cancel” you, you have two choices … obey or be vaporized.

If you’re a Palestinian, a Syrian, a Yemeni, the president of an uncooperative African country, or some other type of non-Western person, you might very well be physically vaporized. For Westerners, vaporization is less dramatic and final. You will simply be disappeared from the Internet, fired from your job, socially ostracized, deemed a “dangerous individual,” a “racist,” an “anti-Semite,” a “conspiracy theorist,” a “white supremacist,” a “domestic terrorist,” an “anti-vaxxer,” a “Covid denier.”

If you’re a member of the independent media, or a prominent activist, or a lawyer, or doctor, or just someone with a big social media platform, and have not seen the “New Normal” light, you will be demonized, demonetized, deplatformed, censored, and subjected to the type of creepy COINTELPRO-type tactics I described above.

If you don’t believe me, just ask Robert F. Kennedy, Rainer Fuellmich, Vanessa Beeley, Whitney Webb, James Corbett, Ken Jebsen, Cory Morningstar, The Last American Vagabond, Geopolitics & Empire, The Centre for Research on Globalization, OffGuardian, and countless other people and outlets that have challenged the official “New Normal” narrative.

Or have a look at this “warning” you get on Twitter if you attempt to read anything published by OffGuardian …

I could go on and on with this, and I’m sure I will in future columns. It’s kind of the only story at the moment, the changeover from simulated democracy to pathologized-totalitarianism as the governing structure of global capitalism. For now, I’ll just leave you with one more image in this already overly pictorial column. Don’t worry, it’s been thoroughly “fact-checked,” so there’s no need to read or question the fine print (even though I have a feeling you will)…

Do watch out for those “unrelated coincidences.” Some of them, I hear, can be rather nasty.

The American Terror State

Posted on March 30, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Donald Monaco

Source: Global Research

On February 26, 2021, imperial President Joe Biden ordered the bombing of “Iranian backed militias” in Syria. Biden’s action was rationalized as “retaliation” for rocket attacks on American troops in Iraq that killed a mercenary contractor and injured a U.S. soldier.

Missing from coverage in the corporate media was any mention of the illegal U.S. military occupation of Iraq and Syria. The occupation was simply airbrushed from discussion. By so doing, reality is inverted. Victim is portrayed as aggressor and aggressor as victim.

From the standpoint of international law, aggressive military action taken by occupation forces cannot be termed self-defense. Yet political elites and media propagandists finesse basic truths by detaching U.S. forces from the context of illegal invasion and occupation. They assume the military has a ‘right’ to be deployed anywhere in the world.

Paradoxically, the militias assaulted by the United States have been fighting ISIS, once again exposing the ‘war on terror’ as a massive lie. The same militia forces Biden attacked were once led by Iranian General Soleimani, who was assassinated by Trump, further demonstrating the genuine purpose of military deployment which is to destabilize regimes targeted as unfriendly, meaning not subservient to the Washington.

Almost simultaneously, the Biden administration signaled that there would be no punishment of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was identified by the CIA as having given the order to assassinate Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

Also, unsurprisingly, the Biden administration announced that it would appeal a British magistrate’s decision not to extradite Julian Assange to the United States for prosecution under the espionage act. Assange languishes in a British prison pending the appeal. His transgression? Exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

The pattern is clear. Any action that supports U.S. global hegemony is justified, while any opposition is criminalized and repressed.

The core mission of the American terror state is to make the world safe for U.S. corporate profiteering. A corollary imperative is to prevent any challenge to U.S. global domination.

First, the United States is a permanent warfare state that fights perpetual wars for perpetual profits. The profits accrue to the “merchants of death” who sell their wares within the iron triangle of a military-industrial-complex that guarantees a massive return on capital investments. The process is known as “military Keynesianism.” Corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing provide the arms for a global military empire to defend the global corporate empire. Profits also flow to members of congress who own stock in the defense industry.

The permanent warfare state also allows profits to accumulate for corporations that exploit the world’s land, labor, and resources by protecting their access to foreign markets. Corporations such as World Mineral Inc, Peabody Energy, Rio Tinto, General Motors, Lithium Americas, AES, and Blackberry Ltd in the mineral extraction industry, Exxon Mobile, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron in the energy industry, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft in the technology industry, General Motors, Ford, and Tesla in the automotive industry, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer in the pharmaceutical industry, and Walmart, Amazon, and Costco in the retail industry all operate in the global market.

Commercial banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America in the banking industry, Wall Street investment firms led by JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley in the financial industry, and private equity firms such as The Blackstone Group, The Carlyle Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Co, and TPG Capital in the investment management industry finance global corporate transactions.

U.S. Fortune 500 companies made $14.2 trillion in revenues during 2020 and held an estimated $2.6 trillion offshore to avoid paying taxes. The largest American corporations made billions of dollars in profits while laying off thousands of workers during the coronavirus lockdown. Billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and their cohorts increased their net worth by half a trillion dollars during a pandemic that saw 8 million people join the ranks of 38.1 million poor Americans. Another 93.6 million live close to the poverty level in the richest nation on earth.

Second, any country that wants to control its own land, labor, and resources by implementing an agenda of economic nationalism becomes a barrier to free trade, globalization, and the neoliberal economic paradigm that emphasizes privatization and deregulation of economies for the benefit of private capital. Countries that do not throw themselves open to foreign investment are punished by crippling economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. Department of Treasury.

Third, the neoliberal economic agenda of free market privatization drives the neoconservative political agenda of American global hegemony as justified by Bush Jr.’s “Preemptive War on Terror,” Obama’s “Humanitarian Intervention,” Trump’s “America First,” and Biden’s “Advancement of Democracy” ideologies.

Neoconservatives dominate the foreign policy establishment. Besides protecting U.S. empire, they are rabidly pro-Israel. The neocons conflate the interests of the United States with the interests of Israel, ignoring George Washington’s admonition to avoid “foreign entanglements.” They want the United States to go to war with Iran, as they understand that the destruction of resistance to Zionist colonization in Palestine can only be accomplished by defeating Tehran.

Other Middle Eastern and North African countries that supported the Palestinian cause and had large reserves of oil coveted by empire, were decimated by implementation of a neoconservative plan to attack seven Muslim countries in five years, beginning with Iraq and ending with Iran.

George W. Bush, the Texas oil man, Dick Cheney, former Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton, and a rat’s nest of neoconservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and I. Lewis Libby decimated Iraq.

Barack Obama, the University of Chicago law professor and Nobel Peace Prize winner and neoconservative Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, destroyed Syria and turned Libya into a failed state that resulted in the enslavement of Black Africans.

Donald Trump, the real estate mogul and celebrity show host and Mike Pompeo, neoconservative war hawk and Secretary of State, continued the occupations of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, supported Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen, recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, moved the U.S. embassy to the occupied city of Jerusalem and offered the Palestinians the “Deal of the Century” that was promptly rejected.

Despite his rhetoric, Trump failed to stand-up to the military-industrial-complex by ending ongoing U.S. wars.

Finally, Joe Biden, a self-professed Zionist, supported every U.S. war to come down the pike during his tenure as U.S. senator and vice-president, making him a warmonger.

The policies of empire are planned in the corridors of the Council on Foreign Relations, Heritage Foundation, Rand Corporation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, American Enterprise Institute and a myriad array of pro-war institutes that function within the policy formulation network financed by the corporate rich.

The matrix of power in the United States is strikingly transparent. The corporate rich own the country. The political class protects their property and their empire by pursuing the interests of oligarchic masters as defined by ‘experts’ in the policy formulation network. Academic and media elites rationalize the need for an empire that is never called by its proper name.

The costs of empire paid by the American people are staggering.

A study conducted by the Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs at Brown University concluded that the United States has spent $6.4 trillion on war since 9/11.

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 allocated $740 Billion for the military and prohibited President Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Joseph Biden works within in the same institutional framework that enmeshed his predecessor. The Biden administration is considering troop re-deployment to confront Russia and China. But no return of troops to the United States is contemplated.

The United States currently has over 1.3 million active-duty troops, with 450,000 stationed on over 800 military bases in 70 countries around the world. Special military operations are being conducted in 141 countries. U.S. global military presence escalated under both the Obama and Trump administrations.

As U.S. military presence increases around the world, so do the crimes of empire. Obama prosecuted drone warfare that killed approximately 5,000 innocent civilians. Trump escalated drone strikes. Obama launched 1,878 attacks during his eight years in office. Trump ordered 2,243 strikes during his four-year tenure in the White House while concealing deaths that occurred as the result of attacks.

Since 9/11 the U.S. has killed an estimated 6 million people in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen. At least 37 million people have been displaced by U.S. wars. The U.S. has bombed 9 countries since 9/11 adding to the list of 24 other nations it bombed after World War II. Exactly 80 countries have been subjected to U.S. counter-terrorism operations during the “war on terror.” Behind the statistics lies an ocean of human suffering.

The monumental questions of peace and war in the United States will not be decided by an election. They will ultimately be decided by a revolt. The shell-game of American politics wherein populist rhetoric is used to conceal plutocratic governance is bankrupt.

The United States is a militarized terror state. The magnitude of violence perpetrated by the U.S. government has become so routine that perpetual war is normalized. The question remains, how long will the American people continue to be slaves of a terror state?

The Native Land of the Hypocrite

Posted on March 29, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By M. Reza Behnam

Source: Information Clearing House

“And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.” ~ Oscar Wilde

In a recent TV interview, President Joseph Biden was asked if he believed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a killer. In a display of foreign policy bravado and with little hesitation he replied, “yes.” It is telling that commentators rarely question the violent behavior of America’s presidents.

The United States has assumed the role of arbiter of good and evil, casting itself inevitably as a most decent nation with the right to condemn and punish others.

History has demonstrated that America’s belief in exceptionalism has bred an arrogance that has accustomed its leaders to believe they have the right to use their political and military power destructively around the world.

Before condemning the behavior of other nations, America needs a national truth and reconciliation reckoning with its own violent past and present. For a country to chart a new course it must make its injustices visible.

Putin is undoubtedly a ruthless autocrat, but he is not the only member of the “killer’s club.” One has only to consider the recent murders ordered by a U.S. president, former president, Donald Trump.

In violation of international law and existing U.S. executive orders, Trump ordered the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. In addition to Soleimani, nine others died in the attack at the Baghdad International Airport. And in November 2020, Trump, with Israel as the conduit, assassinated Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

America’s pattern of violence was ramped up with President George W. Bush’s war on terror – military assaults on Afghanistan, Iraq, rendition, CIA black sites (secret prisons), Guantanamo and the use of torture.

When President Barack Obama took office he expanded Bush’s use of “kill lists” – lists of human targets. Obama authorized hundreds of military drone strikes, which killed countless non-combatant civilians, including children. Without trial, he imposed the death sentence on alleged terror suspects. Trump continued his predecessors’ practices, with even fewer safeguards. The Biden administration is currently reviewing whether it wants to continue the policy of secretly killing people in countries around the world.

American presidents have ordered coups, invasions and wars in which millions have died. Some of the most obvious cases include Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iran, Iraq (1991and 2003), Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and U.S. support for Saudi Arabia as it bombs civilians in Yemen.

Murder is not the only form of violence the United States has used to get its way.

Economic sanctions that deprive people of food, medicine and the ability to make a living have become the primary weapon of U.S. foreign policy. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died as a result of U.S. embargoes and economic sanctions on countries such as Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, countries that have refused to acquiesce to U.S. demands.

The United States has been playing the role of global policeman since the Second World War. The people of one region in particular, the Middle East, have suffered immensely from Washington’s bluster, bullying, military aggression and financial pressures.

Since the attacks of 9/11, the Middle East has overwhelmingly come under U.S. control. American warships, bombers, drones and missile batteries and over 100,000 American troops blanket the region. Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen are among the regional holdouts. Because of their refusal to bow to U.S.-Israeli pressure, they have faced devastating economic and military assaults.

To cement its hegemony, Washington has enlisted despotic Arab regimes and apartheid Israel as regional satraps. Despite the abysmal human rights records of its Arab Gulf allies, the United States provides them with access to the most lethal weapons to crush internal dissent. To maintain its imperial partnership with Israel,

America’s leaders have acquiesced to the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, and they have made certain that the Palestinians will continue to suffer and die in their own country.

Quite a record.

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The Native Land of the Hypocrite