Category Archives: police state

Julian Rose: ‘Humanity in Hypnotic Thrall to a Techno-Industrial God’

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By Julian Rose

Source: 21st Century Wire

So here we are. For yes, this is where we are – if by ‘we’ one understands the current materialistically imprisoned post industrial world – driven on by the relentless force of globalisation.

Brussels, still a remarkably human city by today’s standards, has the misfortune of housing the European Union HQ, which is not a very human conglomerate. And what goes on in it is equally devoid of humanity. For it is about being ‘big, central and dominating’.

Big, central and dominating is the future of the planet if you subscribe to the techno-industrial mind’s two dimensional determinism. In the soothing words of Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harari, it is to be an Information Technology/Artificial Intelligence future, in which Schwab tells us “we will have nothing and will be happy”.

The mobile phone tower and mast which tops the temple of techno-industrial prowess, is an ugly, spindly piece of steel which is an expression of dominance in its own right. The vast global infrastructure formed by these Saturnian steel structures carry with them a penetrating EMF amplified soup of toxicity.

It is this ‘network’ which acts as the gateway to the virtual reality world of those who depend on it for their ‘signals’. Signals that have an abstracted kind of dominance and pronounced tendency to thin the blood and blur the brain.

The majority of messages that come through this gateway concern how to get on in ‘the system’.

How to get from A to B faster; news faster; financial reports faster; connections with family and friends faster; everything faster.

Being permanently plugged-in to this hyper electromagnetic crossroads of life is said to be the only way to ‘stay in touch’, to be a participant in the mental matrix; to be part of ‘the programme’.

But already twenty years ago I decided to cut my ties with this programme. Dispensing with the mobile phone turned out to be an act of liberation, soon to be followed by the ousting of the TV.

Big Brother was consigned to the back seat and I saw that a life that belonged to myself still existed, all be it with the proviso that one prioritised one’s values with a solid dose of determination to be true to that which is ‘real’ in life.

Perhaps this is why I can see so clearly how those who continue to participate in the ‘programme’ are running blindly towards an uncompromisingly sheer cliff-face, and how their voracious demands on the natural environment are increasingly undermining her natural resilience.

I can see something particularly shocking – that this frenetic rush to the cliff face and the great consumption of finite resources it involves – has no other purpose than playing-out a quasi demonic fascination with ever more refined toys of distraction. Distraction from the real pulse of life.

Yet this techno-industrial suicide machine is staffed by humans who appear not to recognise that their joint mission is programmed to end in collapse.

On the contrary, they seem to think that by increasing the efficiency and speed of the means of travel, it will somehow consummate its own need to arrive at where it is headed for. Where or what that is – simply never gets asked.

However, the psychotic gods of insentient ‘progress’ who designed the programme have built into it a series of ‘events’ which reach a certain conclusion in something they call the Transhuman. A robotic state of computer connected and controlled brain power for those able to pay for it.

To pay for the right to be dehumanised and rendered devoid of the need – and indeed ability – to think. Freed from emotion and freed from a soul based link to one’s Creator.

Stations on the way to this dark point of human annulment are laid-out under the WEF creed known as ‘The Great Reset’. A ‘Reset’ from human to non human.

Here are some of stations along the Great Reset route to the Transhuman:

The cessation of food grown in soil and the manufacturing of synthetic food produced in laboratories (at least six of which are already in production).

The end of farming the land as we know it and the removal of redundant farmers and country dwellers into 5 and 6G controlled total surveillance ‘smart cities’.

Countryside and farm landscapes redesigned to accommodate ‘rewilding’ projects and gated access to designated ‘leisure sites’ for those who can afford access.

The end of bank notes and coinage, replaced by a centrally controlled digital currency whose availability will depend upon one’s ‘social credit’ a la China.

The confiscation of one’s assets and private property with the option to ‘rent’ aspects of them back from the corporate state that is to become the new owner.

‘Self-autonomous’ 5G guided transportation systems operating between major cities.

100% surveillance via satellite and ‘the internet of everything’ and the profligate use of algorithms to pick-up any signs of resistance in communications.

The repression of true spirituality in favour of a ‘one world religion’.

Deliberate blurring of sexual delineation ‘man/woman’ and the decline of normal sexual reproduction.

Sperm-counts further reduced due to de-vitaminised synthetic GMO foods, vaccinations and polluted air and water – population control.

Enforced ‘15 minute cities’ as centres of local authority control.

Designer gene-altered babies via laboratory cloning of DNA sequences and cell tissues.

The removal of certain words from the common language, particularly poetic and spiritual ones.

Real art reduced to pseudo art as an expression of the will of the state, including dark-side ritual.

‘Medical health’ seen as the sole domain of Big Pharma with natural medicine outlawed.

Further media/government control over the passing of public information.

There is more, much more. But this is enough to show the basic composition of the stations on the way to ‘Transhumanism’. The arrival point of which is said to be circa 2035.

Behind this in-your-face destruction of hard won human liberties is a vast global propaganda/indoctrination exercise already in existence for more than two decades and built around the now infamous ‘Zero carbon by 2045’ or ‘Net Zero’ in news-speak (Orwell).

When challenged by those still able to question the need for these deadly impositions, the answer is always the same “To save the world from Global Warming.”

This piece of acute brainwashing, initially devised at the Club of Rome in 1972, is key to the whole ‘programme’. As long as enough people buy into it for long enough, the slavery exercise will be irreversible. Based on the current rate of awakening, the discovery that anthropogenic Global Warming is a mega lie will likely be neutralised by the impositions already in place to prevent an uprising.

The techno-industrial god will then have served its purpose. Like the rocket booster that gets the capsule into orbit, it will have taken the majority of mankind over the brink into abject slavery to its hypnotic convenience culture, before imploding in on itself and taking much of humanity and nature’s life sustaining diversity with it.

BUT, all this can be avoided. It doesn’t have to happen. It won’t happen. Our lives do not depend upon adopting the smart technology of tomorrow, today. We won’t any longer be seduced by ‘convenience’ once we recognise it is leading to our self destruction, will we?

We will retain sufficient will-power to get shot of this addiction to the IT/AI life inhibiting distractions that make up the mind controlled road to Armageddon.

The only way to recognise just how diabolical is the trap that has been set for us – and that we have set for ourselves – is to get a grip on our sense of deeper purpose in this life. To make an unbreakable commitment to listen and respond to the call of our souls. The true self. And then pull this true self out of any association with the metaverse mincing machine.

Let no one in possession of a soul ever allow himself/herself to become processed into a sub human product of the techno-industrial behemoth. Stick with what’s solid, what’s real – and ditch the counterfeit virtual world that snares the unweary and turns once healthy minds into casualties of a blind rush to a dystopian digital nowhere land.

Technocensorship: The Government’s War on So-Called Dangerous Ideas

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”—Ray Bradbury

What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.

Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

This is the very definition of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”

Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.

By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.

Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

It’s happening already.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

Little by little, Americans are being conditioned to accept routine incursions on their freedoms.

This is how oppression becomes systemic, what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.

It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.

Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.

As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.

The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.

In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:

The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”

Sound painfully familiar yet?

We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. The erosion of our freedoms has happened so incrementally, no one seems to have noticed. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognize the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry have become fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.

Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are on that downward slope now.

Mental Health Round-Ups: The Next Phase of the Government’s War on Thought Crimes

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity.”—Hannah Arendt

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.

Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

If we don’t nip this in the bud, and soon, this will become yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the First and Fourth Amendments at will.

This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

As the AP reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.

The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union also declared dissidents mentally ill and consigned political prisoners to prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, where they could be isolated from the rest of society, their ideas discredited, and subjected to electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures to break them physically and mentally.

In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:

The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.

Warrantless seizures, surveillance, indefinite detention, isolation, exile… sound familiar?

It should.

The age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) its critics is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these individuals are declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.

These developments are merely the realization of various U.S. government initiatives dating back to 2009, including one dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

Coupled with the report on “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” issued by the Department of Homeland Security (curiously enough, a Soviet term), which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.

Thus, what began as a blueprint under the Bush administration has since become an operation manual for exiling those who challenge the government’s authority.

An important point to consider, however, is that the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is locking up individuals trained in military warfare who are voicing feelings of discontent.

Under the guise of mental health treatment and with the complicity of government psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, these veterans are increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs in need of intervention.

For instance, the Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.

One tactic being used to deal with so-called “mentally ill suspects who also happen to be trained in modern warfare” is through the use of civil commitment laws, found in all states and employed throughout American history to not only silence but cause dissidents to disappear.

For example, NSA officials attempted to label former employee Russ Tice, who was willing to testify in Congress about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, as “mentally unbalanced” based upon two psychiatric evaluations ordered by his superiors.

NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had his home raided, and he was handcuffed to a gurney and taken into emergency custody for an alleged psychiatric episode. It was later discovered by way of an internal investigation that his superiors were retaliating against him for reporting police misconduct. Schoolcraft spent six days in the mental facility, and as a further indignity, was presented with a bill for $7,185 upon his release.

Marine Brandon Raub—a 9/11 truther—was arrested and detained in a psychiatric ward under Virginia’s civil commitment law based on posts he had made on his Facebook page that were critical of the government.

Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.

The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.

In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.

Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others), are a perfect example of this mindset at work and the ramifications of where this could lead.

As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”

With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.

While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

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

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

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

Let that sink in a moment.

Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority in order to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, and you’ll understand why some might view these mental health round-ups with trepidation.

No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

We stand at a crossroads.

As author Erich Fromm warned, “At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.”

Julian Assange’s Imprisonment Is The Intellectual Imprisonment of Us All

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Julian Assange has been imprisoned since 2012 because he had provided, to whistleblowers who were in government and who saw and could supply to his WikiLeaks organization, items of evidence which indicated that their government was breaking its own laws, protection of their personal identity, which confidentiality they could then rely upon for their personal safety, to protect those whistleblowers against retaliation by their government. No regular ‘news’-medium could or would reliably do that, but Assange and his WikiLeaks organization could, and they always did. This is why governmental whistleblowers did go to them for this purpose.

The power that a government has to ‘classify’ documents is the power that it has to hide evidence from its public and so to rule its population as being their subjects instead of (authentically) their citizens: it is the ability to BE a dictatorship. (It might arguably be acceptable when a democracy is being invaded by a foreign country, but never — other than that — can there be governmental secrecy to protect itself unless the government is a dictatorship — NOT a democracy — in which case the Government is, itself, being the enemy of its own population.) Without such secrecy against the public, the government would be a democracy, because then the population would be voting in an authentically free information-environment where there exists uncensored information to the public, so that each individual can make one’s OWN individual judgments regarding what is true, and what is false. But, otherwise, a government is a dictatorship.

This power (classifying governmental information) is also a government’s power of legal impunity so that it can violate its own laws and know that the voting public will not know that it did. That routine power of classifying information is the intellectual imprisonment of the nation’s entire population.

Julian Assange is not a subject (‘citizen’) of the U.S. Government, nor is he a subject of the UK Government, nor is he a subject of the other two Governments (Sweden and Ecuador) that have participated in assisting America and Britain to place and keep him in varying forms of (now super-max) imprisonment for over a decade, but they have done it, during all of this time, and never yet has he been tried and convicted of anything other than his having jumped bail in 2012 on a phony rape charge that even its alleged victim admitted had been false; so, in effect, if not in reality, his very imprisonment is an example of those governments’ dictatorships — it has already been long-term imprisonment without trial. ONLY a dictatorship does that. Only a dictatorship can do that.

Assange is instead a subject of the Australian dictatorship, which has done nothing at all to assist him or to protest his being raped by ‘law’ in those foreign lands. The fact that there are not revolutions overthrowing and replacing the Governments in each one of the countries that has participated in this ‘legal’ rape of Assange is testimony to the effectiveness of the intellectual imprisonment of each one of those nations’ populations.

Assange has been in various forms of imprisonment by UK for the last ten years without his ever having been convicted of anything except that in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail (on sexual charges against him that even the alleged accuser denied were true). And yet he remains now in solitary confinement (“23 hours a day locked in their cells”) in a super-max British prison, because the U.S. Government won’t stop its demand that he be extradited to the U.S. (and killed here — imprisoned for up to 175 years — instead of in Britain). His only ‘crime’ was his publishing only truths, especially truths that cut to the core of exposing the U.S. regime’s constant lying. So, this blatant and illegal injustice against an international hero (virtually everywhere except in the United States) is today one prominent disproof of the U.S. and UK lies to the effect that they are democracies. On 26 September 2021, Yahoo News reported (based largely on reporting in Madrid’s El Pais on 5 January 2021) that the Trump Administration felt so embarrassed by some information that had been WikiLeaked, they drew up detailed plans to kidnap Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to “rendition” him for possible execution by America. The plans, including “meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president,” were finally stopped at the National Security Council, as being too risky. “Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration”, even without any legal basis to try him in the United States. So: the Trump Administration then prepared an indictment against Assange (to legalize their extradition-request), and the indictment became unsealed or made public on the same day, 11 April 2019, when Ecuador’s Government allowed UK’s Government to drag Assange out into UK super-max solitary-confinement imprisonment, and this subsequently produced lie-based U.S. & UK tussles over how to prevent Assange from ever again being able to reach the public, either by continuing his solitary confinement, or else by, perhaps, poisoning him, or else convicting him of something and then executing him. On 4 January 2021, a British judge nixed Assange’s defense case: “I reject the defence submissions concerning staying extradition [to U.S.] as an abuse of the process of this court.” Earlier, her handling of Assange’s only ‘trial’, which was his extradition hearing, was a travesty, which would have been expected in Hitler’s courts, and which makes clear that UK’s courts can be just as bad as Nazi courts had been. However, the U.S. regime’s efforts to grab Assange continued on. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the overwhelmingly compliant U.S. Congress, are all to blame for that dictatorial regime’s pursuit against that champion of truth-telling; and the same blame applies to the leadership in UK. On 10 December 2021, BBC bannered “Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules”. Blatantly, both America and England lie in order to refer to themselves as being democracies. In fact, America has the world’s highest percentage of its residents in prisons. It’s the world’s #1 police-state. Is that because Americans are worse than the people in other countries, or is it instead because the thousand or so individuals who collectively control the nation’s Government are, themselves, especially psychopathic? Evidence will now be linked-to on that question: America has been scientifically examined more than any other country has, in regards to whether it is an aristocracy, or instead a democracy, and the clear and consistent finding is that it’s an aristocracy. And it clearly is that at the federal level. (Here is a video summarizing the best single study of that, and it finds America to be an aristocracy, because it’s controlled by the richest few). And Norway’s aristocracy had also been part of this scandal. It is an international scandal, and keeps getting worse.

On June 19th, Chris Hedges headlined “The Imminent Extradition of Julian Assange & the Death of Journalism” and documented that the alleged ‘assurances’ that the U.S. regime had provided to the UK regime on the basis of which the latter dictatorship would be transferring Assange to a super-max prison in the United States, had as many holes in it as a ton of Swiss cheese.

ONLY in barbaric dictatorships is any of this even possible, but here it is real.

Assange’s ‘trial’ will be the trial of ‘democracy’ in whatever nation it will be executed.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

FBI Make-Work Entrapment Schemes: Creating Criminals in Order to Arrest Them

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”— Friedrich Nietzsche

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.

Clearly, this is not a government agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.

Indeed, this same government agency has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

Basically, it works like this: in order to justify their crime-fighting superpowers, the FBI manufactures criminals by targeting vulnerable individuals and feeding them anti-government propaganda; then, undercover agents and informants equip the targeted individuals with the training and resources to challenge what they’ve been indoctrinated into believing is government corruption; and finally, the FBI arrests the targeted individuals for engaging in anti-government, terrorist activities.

This is what passes for the government’s perverse idea of being tough on crime.

For example, undercover FBI agents pretending to be associated with ISIS have been accused of seeking out online and befriending a 16-year-old with brain development issues, persuading him to secretly send them small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and then the moment Mateo Ventura, turned 18, arresting him for providing financial support to an Islamic terrorist group.

If convicted, the teenager could spend up to 10 years in prison.

Yet as The Intercept explains, “the only ‘terrorist’ he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old… This law enforcement tactic has been criticized by national security researchers who have scrutinized the FBI’s role in manufacturing terrorism cases using vulnerable people who would have been unable to commit crimes without prolonged government assistance and encouragement… the Ventura case may indicate that authorities are still open to conjuring terrorists where none existed.”

In another incident, the FBI used an undercover agent/informant to seek out and groom an impressionable young man, cultivating his friendship, gaining his sympathy, stoking his outrage over injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government, then enlisting his help to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Despite the fact that Shahawar Matin Siraj ultimately refused to plant a bomb at the train station, he was arrested for conspiring to do so at the urging of his FBI informant and used to bolster the government’s track record in foiling terrorist plots. Of course, no mention was made of the part the government played in fabricating the plot, recruiting a would-be bomber, and setting him up to take the fall.

These are Machiavellian tactics with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings, but it is especially dangerous for anyone whose views could in any way be characterized as anti-government.

As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”

For instance, it was reported that the FBI had been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.

All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.

What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.

Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.

This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.  

To go after terrorists, they become terrorists.

To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers.

To go after thieves, they become thieves.

For instance, when the FBI raided a California business that was suspected of letting drug dealers anonymously stash guns, drugs and cash in its private vaults, agents seized the contents of all the  safety deposit boxes and filed forfeiture motions to keep the contents, which include millions of dollars’ worth of valuables owned by individuals not accused of any crime whatsoever.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy. 

This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.

Some days, it feels like the FBI is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.

In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.

In a stunning development reported by The Washington Post, a probe into misconduct by an FBI agent resulted in the release of at least a dozen convicted drug dealers from prison.

In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.

For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”

Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.

The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”

The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.

Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

The powers-that-be are not acting in our best interests.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.

The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms. It is, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the source of the threats to our freedoms.

How Did Someone Like Me Get Shadow-Banned?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

It seems there are many reasons to get shadow-banned, but unfortunately we’re never told what “crime” we committed nor are we given a chance to defend ourselves from the “indictment” in whatever “court” found us “guilty.” As in a nightmarish tale right out of Kafka, the powers making the charges, declaring the verdict “guilty as charged” and imposing the penalty are completely obscured.

Those found “guilty” discover their secret “conviction” and “sentence” when their livelihood is destroyed (i.e. they’re demonetized) and their online presence suddenly diminishes or vanishes.

I call this being sent to Digital Siberia. As with the real gulag, most of those convicted in the secret digital Star Chamber are innocent of any real crime; their “crime” was challenging the approved narratives.

Which leads to my question: why was little old marginalized-blogger me shadow-banned? Those responsible are under no obligation to reveal my “crime,” the evidence used against me, or offer me an opportunity to defend myself against the charges, much less file an appeal.

My astonishment at being shadow-banned (everyone in Digital Siberia claims to be innocent, heh) is based on my relatively restrained online presence, as I stick to the journalistic standards I learned as a free-lancer for mainstream print media: source data, excerpts and charts from mainstream / institutional sources and raise the questions / build the thesis on those links / data.

I avoid conspiracy-related topics (not my interest, not my expertise) and hot-button ideological / political cleavages (us vs. them is also not my interest). My go-to source for charts and data is the Federal Reserve database (FRED) and government agencies such as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, IRS, etc., and respected non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Pew Research Center, RAND, investment banks, etc.

Given my adherence to journalistic standards, I wonder: how did someone like me get shadow-banned?

The standard cause (or excuse) for being overtly banned is “distributing misinformation.” This charge is never specific; something you posted “violates our community standards,” or equivalent broad-brush language.

Shadow-banning is even more pernicious because you’re not even notified that your visibility to others has been restricted or dropped to zero. You see your post, but nobody else does.

What are the precise standards for declaring a link or statement as “misinformation?” As the twitter files revealed, what qualifies as “misinformation” is constantly shifting as a sprawling ecosystem of censors share information and blacklists. This report is well worth reading: The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Top 50 Organizations To Know (Zero Hedge).

Not only do we not know what qualifies as “misinformation,” we also don’t know what Big Tech algorithms are flagging and what their response is to whatever’s been flagged. My colleague Nate Hagens, who is equally scrupulous about using authoritative sources, posted this comment last year:

“It’s both funny and scary. It was explained to me today that the new Facebook/Meta algorithm downrates users who have cookies w evidence of visiting non-mainstream news sources/blogs. Even when one uses proxy servers and incognito mode, if you frequent e.g. Aljazeera or other news sites instead of CNN or FOX the algorithms categorizes your FB content (even if it’s a chicken soup recipe) as ‘non-mainstream’.
Big brother is watching (and not even thinking).
Those ideas/voices outside the status quo aren’t on equal footing- and the status quo (material growth/cultural values) is what’s leading us down the current path, without a map or plan.”

The systems that shadow-ban us are completely opaque. Who’s to say that a knowledgeable human reviews who’s been banned or shadow-banned? Given the scale of these Big Tech platforms and Search Engines, is that even possible?

It’s well known that YouTube constantly changes its ranking algorithms so they are harder to game, i.e. manipulate to advance one’s visibility.

It’s also known that simply posting a link to a site flagged as “misinformation” is enough to get your post excommunicated and your site flagged in unknown ways with unknown consequences.

What I do know is that Of Two Minds was publicly identified as “Russian Propaganda” by a bogus organization with no supporting data, PropOrNot in 2016. This front’s blacklist was prominently promoted by the Washington Post on page one in 2016, more or less giving it the authority of a major MSM outlet.

One might ask how a respected, trusted newspaper could publish a list from a shadowy front without specifying the exact links that were identified as “Russian Propaganda.” Standard journalistic protocol requires listing sources, not just publishing unverified blacklists.

Clearly, the Washington Post should have, at a minimum, demanded a list of links from each site on the blacklist that were labeled as “Russian Propaganda” so the Post journalists could check for themselves. At a minimum, the Post should have included inks as examples of “Russian Propaganda” for each site on the list. They did neither, a catastrophic failure of the most fundamental journalistic standards. Yet no one in the media other than those wrongfully blacklisted even noted or questioned this abject failure.

In effect, the real propaganda was the unsourced, un-investigated blacklist on the front page of the Washington Post.

How did I get on a list of “Russian Propaganda” when I never wrote about Russia or anything related to Russia?

There are two plausible possibilities. One is “guilt by association.” I’ve been interviewed by Max Keiser since 2011, and Max and his partner Stacy Herbert posted their videos on RT (Russia Today) and an Iranian media outlet. Needless to say, these sources were flagged, as was anyone associated with them. So perhaps merely having a link to an interview I did with Max and Stacy was enough to get me shadow-banned. (Shout-out to Max and Stacy in El Salvador.)

Alternatively, perhaps questioning the coronation of Queen Hillary in any way also got me on the blacklist.

Once on the blacklist, then the damage was already done, as the network of censors share blacklists without verifying the “crime”–a shadowy “crime” without any indictment, hearing or recourse, right out of Kafka.

Shadow-banning manifests in a number of ways. Readers reported that they couldn’t re-tweet any of my tweets. Another reader said the Department of Commerce wouldn’t load a page from my site, declaring it “dangerous,” perhaps with the implication that it was a platform for computer viruses and worms–laughable because there is nothing interactive on my sites and thus no potential source for viruses other than links to legitimate sources and adverts served by Investing Channel.

Users of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have probably noticed that your feed is populated by the same “friends” or “folks you follow.” In other words, the feed you’re presented with is curated by algorithms which sort and display posts / tweets / search results according to parameters that are invisible to users and regulators.

It’s easy to send flagged accounts to Digital Siberia, and trouble-free to leave them there until the trouble-maker goes broke.

It’s impossible to chart the extent of the shadow-banning, or who’s doing it, sharing blacklists, etc. This entire ecosystem of censorship is invisible. Recall that in the Soviet gulag, having an “anti-Soviet dream” was enough to get you a tenner (10-year sentence) in the gulag. Here, posting a flagged link will get you a tenner in Digital Siberia.

When Your Own Government Confirms It Paid Censors To Silence You…

In today’s zeitgeist, merely mentioning the possibility that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab resulted in an instant ban in 2020. How could the possibility that it escaped from a nearby lab dedicated to viral research be labeled as “disinformation” when the facts were not yet known?

The answer is of course that the lab-escape theory was “politically sensitive” and therefore verboten.

You see the problem: what’s deemed “politically sensitive” changes with the wind, and so the boundaries of what qualifies as “misinformation” have no visible or definable edge. Virtually anything consequential can suddenly become “politically sensitive” and then declared “misinformation.” When the guidelines of what’s a “crime” and the processes of “conviction” are all opaque, and there is no hearing or recourse to being “convicted” of a shadow-“crime,” we’ve truly entered a Kafkaesque world.

How did someone like me get shadow-banned? There is no way to know, and that’s a problem for our society and our ability to solve the polycrisis we now face.

I joke that what got me shadow-banned was using Federal Reserve charts. Perhaps that’s not that far from reality.

Traitor to the Constitution: The U.S. Government Is the Real Criminal

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”—H.L. Mencken

And so it continues.

This entire fiasco—indicting Donald Trump for allegedly violating both the Espionage Act and obstructing justice by improperly handling classified records—is merely the latest in a never-ending series of distractions, distortions, and political theater aimed at diverting the public’s attention from the sinister advances of the American Deep State.

Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, diverted or mesmerized by the cheap theater tricks.

This indictment spectacle is Shakespearean in its scope: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nothing is the key word here.

Despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, this is all just smoke and mirrors.

Mark my words: the government is as corrupt and self-serving as ever, dominated by two political factions that pretend to be at odds with each other all the while moving in lockstep to maintain the status quo.

If you really want to talk about who’s guilty of treason, set your sights higher: indict the government for overstepping its authority, abusing its power, disregarding the rule of law, and betraying the American people.

When we refer to the “rule of law,” that’s constitutional shorthand for the idea that everyone is treated the same under the law, everyone is held equally accountable to abiding by the law, and no one is given a free pass based on their politics, their connections, their wealth, their status or any other bright line test used to confer special treatment on the elite.

When the government and its agents no longer respect the rule of law—the Constitution—or believe that it applies to them, then the very contract on which this relationship is based becomes invalid.

This abuse of power has been going on for so long that it has become the norm, the Constitution be damned.

There are hundreds—make that thousands—of government bureaucrats who are getting away with murder (in many cases, literally) simply because the legislatures, courts and the citizenry can’t be bothered to make them play by the rules of the Constitution.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

For too long now, the American people have played politics with their principles and turned a blind eye to all manner of wrongdoing when it was politically expedient, allowing the government to wreak havoc with their freedoms and act in violation of the rule of law.

“We the people” are paying the price for it now.

We are paying the price every day that we allow the government to continue to wage its war on the American People, a war that is being fought on many fronts: with bullets and tasers, with surveillance cameras and license readers, with intimidation and propaganda, with court rulings and legislation, with the collusion of every bureaucrat who dances to the tune of corporate handouts while on the government’s payroll, and most effectively of all, with the complicity of the American people, who continue to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by their politics, distracted by their pastimes, and acclimated to a world in which government corruption is the norm.

It’s the nature of the beast: power corrupts.

Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

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

The republic has fallen.

The Deep State’s plot to take over America has succeeded.

The American system of representative government has been overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, corporate oligarchy bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad.

Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).

These are dangerous times.

These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime or terrorism or illegal immigration.

No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.

The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.

This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.

This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.

This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.

Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

  • Americans have no protection against police abuse.
  • Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state.
  • Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty.
  • Americans no longer have a right to private property.
  • Americans no longer have a say about what their children are exposed to in school.
  • Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police.
  • Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity.
  • Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy.
  • Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.
  • Americans no longer have a representative government.

I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.

Indictments, impeachments and elections will not save us.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

From Clinton to Bush, then Obama to Trump and now Biden, it’s as if we’re caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

There can be no denying that the world is indeed a dangerous place, but it’s the government that poses the gravest threat to our freedoms and way of life, and no amount of politicking, parsing or pandering will change that.

It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by political circuses and entertainment spectacles.

What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where “we the people” are at a distinct disadvantage in the face of the government elite’s power grabs, greed and firepower.

The Constitution doesn’t stand a chance against a federalized, globalized standing army protected by legislative, judicial and executive branches that are all on the same side.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, no matter what political views they subscribe to: suffice it to say, they are not on our side or the side of freedom.

That is the real betrayal.

The Twilight of Freedom

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By Craig Murray

Source: CraigMurray.org.uk

Three British journalists I know personally – Johanna Ross, Vanessa Beeley and Kit Klarenberg – have each in the last two years been detained at immigration for hours on re-entering their own country, and questioned by police under anti-terrorist legislation.

This is plainly an abuse of the power to detain at port of entry, because in each case they could have been questioned at any time in the UK were there legitimate cause, and the questioning was not focused on their travels.

They were in fact detained and interrogated simply for holding and publishing dissident opinion on foreign policy, and in particular for supporting a more collaborative approach to Russia – with which, lest we forget, the UK is not at war.

These detentions have taken place over the period of a couple of years. All were targeted for journalism and this is plainly a continuing policy of harassment of dissident British journalists.

I have three times in that same period been questioned by police in my own home in Edinburgh for journalism, over three separate matters. I spent four months in jail for publicising essential information to show that a high level conspiracy was behind the false accusations against Scottish Independence leader Alex Salmond.

Julian Assange remains in maximum security jail for publicising the truth about war crimes. Meanwhile a new National Security Bill goes through the Westminster parliament, which will make it illegal for a journalist possess or publish classified information.

This has never been illegal. The responsibility has always lain with the whistleblower or leaker, not the journalist or publisher. It seeks to enshrine in UK law precisely what the US Government is seeking to achieve against Assange using the US 1917 Espionage Act. This is a huge threat to journalism.

It is also worth pointing out that, if Evan Gershkovich was indeed doing nothing more than he has claimed to have been doing in Russia, that action would land him a long jail sentence in either the USA or the UK under the provisions which both governments are attempting to enforce.

On top of that, you have the Online Safety Bill, which under the excuse of protecting against paedophilia, will require social media gatekeepers to remove any kind of content the government deems as illegal.

When you put all this together with the new Public Order Act, which effectively gives the police authority to ban any protest they wish to ban, there is a fundamental change happening.

This is not just a theoretical restriction on liberty. Active enforcement against non-approved speech is already underway, as shown by those detentions and, most strongly of all, by Julian’s continued and appalling incarceration.

To complete the horror, there is no longer a genuine opposition within the political class. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party opposes none of this wave of attacks on civil liberties. The SNP has been sending out identical stock replies from its MPs on Julian Assange, 100% backing the UK government line on his extradition and imprisonment.

I feel this very personally. I know all of these people affected – Julian, Alex, Kit, Vanessa, Johanna, and view them as colleagues whose rights I defend, even though I do not always agree with all of their disparate views.

Two other people I know personally and admire are under attack. The campaign of lies and innuendo against Roger Waters this last few weeks has been astonishing in both its viciousness and its mendacity, recalling the dreadful attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.

More mundane but also part of the same phenomenon, my friend Randy Credico has had his Twitter account cancelled.

To be a dissident in the UK, or indeed the “West”, today is to see, every single day, your friends persecuted and to see the walls close in upon yourself.

A unified political class, controlled by billionaires, is hurtling us towards fascism. That now seems to me undeniable.