Category Archives: Social Control

US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media

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British and American state intelligence agencies are “weaponizing truth” to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced “cyber war” to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives. 

A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved. 

Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.

Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end. 

Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing and for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children (among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company’s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for product safety who covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects.

Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor. 

UK Intelligence’s New Cyberwar Targeting “Anti-Vaccine Propaganda”

On Monday, the UK newspaper The Times reported that the UK’s GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so. In addition, the UK government has ordered the British military’s 77th Brigade, which specializes in “information warfare,” to launch an online campaign to counter “deceptive narratives” about Covid-19 vaccine candidates.

The newly announced GCHQ “cyber war” will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda” but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.”  The effort will also involve GCHQ reaching out to other countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance (US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to alert their partner agencies in those countries to target such “propaganda” sites hosted within their borders.

The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.

It seems that, from the perspective of the UK national-security state, those who question corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and its possible impact on the leading experimental Covid-19 vaccine candidates (all of which use experimental vaccine technologies that have never before been approved for human use) should be targeted with tools originally designed to combat terrorist propaganda. 

While The Times asserted that the effort would target content “that originated only from state adversaries” and would not target the sites of “ordinary citizens,” the newspaper suggested that the effort would rely on the US government for determining whether or not a site is part of a “foreign disinformation” operation. 

This is highly troubling given that the US recently seized the domains of many sites, including the American Herald Tribune, which it erroneously labeled as “Iranian propaganda,” despite its editor in chief, Anthony Hall, being based in Canada. The US government made this claim about the American Herald Tribune after the cybersecurity firm FireEye, a US government contractor, stated that it had “moderate confidence” that the site had been “founded in Iran.” 

In addition, the fact that GCHQ has alleged that most of the sites it plans to target are “linked to Moscow” gives further cause for concern given that the UK government was caught funding the Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative, which falsely labeled critics of the UK government’s actions as well as its narratives with respect to the Syria conflict as being related to “Russian disinformation” campaigns.

Given this precedent, it is certainly plausible that GCHQ could take the word of either an allied government, a government contractor, or perhaps even an allied media organization such as Bellingcat or the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab that a given site is “foreign propaganda” in order to launch a cyber offensive against it. Such concerns are only amplified when one of the main government sources for The Times article bluntly stated that “GCHQ has been told to take out antivaxers [sic] online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda,” which suggests that the targets of GCHQ’s new cyber war will, in fact, be determined by the content itself rather than their suspected “foreign” origin. The “foreign” aspect instead appears to be a means of evading the prohibition in GCHQ’s operational mandate on targeting the speech or websites of ordinary citizens.

This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism. 

Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism,” thereby implying that “anti-vaxxers” might engage in acts of violent extremism. Among the websites cited by Ahmed’s organization as promoting such “extremism” that poses a “national security risk” were Children’s Health Defense, the National Vaccine Information Center, Informed Consent Action Network, and Mercola.com, among others.

Similarly, a think tank tied to US intelligence—whose GCHQ equivalent, the National Security Agency, will take part in the newly announced “cyber war”—argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the US ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”

InfraGard, “a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and members of the private sector,” warned in the paper published last June that “the US anti-vaccine movement would also be connected with ‘social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns’ orchestrated by the Russian government,” as cited by The Guardian. The InfraGard paper further claimed that prominent “anti-vaxxers” are aligned “with other conspiracy movements including the far right . . . and social media misinformation and propaganda campaigns by many foreign and domestic actors. Included among these actors is the Internet Research Agency, the Russian government–aligned organization.”

An article published just last month by the Washington Post argued that “vaccine hesitancy is mixing with coronavirus denial and merging with far-right American conspiracy theories, including Qanon,” which the FBI named a potential domestic terror threat last year. The article quoted Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, as saying “The US anti-vaccination movement is globalizing and it’s going toward more-extremist tendencies.”

It is worth pointing out that many so-called “anti-vaxxers” are actually critics of the pharmaceutical industry and are not necessarily opposed to vaccines in and of themselves, making the labels “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-vaccine” misleading. Given that many pharmaceutical giants involved in making Covid-19 vaccines donate heavily to politiciansin both countries and have been involved in numerous safety scandals, using state intelligence agencies to wage cyber war against sites that investigate such concerns is not only troubling for the future of journalism but it suggests that the UK is taking a dangerous leap toward becoming a country that uses its state powers to treat the enemies of corporations as enemies of the state.

The CIA-Backed Firm “Weaponizing Truth” with AI

In early October, the US Air Force and US Special Operations Command announced that they had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to the US-based “machine intelligence” company Primer. Per the press release, “Primer will develop the first-ever machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation [emphasis added]. Primer will also enhance its natural language processing platform to automatically analyze tactical events to provide commanders with unprecedented insight as events unfold in near real-time.”

According to Primer, the company “builds software machines that read and write in English, Russian, and Chinese to automatically unearth trends and patterns across large volumes of data,” and their work “supports the mission of the intelligence community and broader DOD by automating reading and research tasks to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making.” In other words, Primer is developing an algorithm that would allow the national-security state to outsource many military and intelligence analyst positions to AI. In fact, the company openly admits this, stating that their current effort “will automate the work typically done by dozens of analysts in a security operations center to ingest all of the data relevant to an event as it happens and funnel it into a unified user interface.”

Primer’s ultimate goal is to use their AI to entirely automate the shaping of public perceptions and become the arbiter of “truth,” as defined by the state. Primer’s founder, Sean Gourley, who previously created AI programs for the military to track “insurgency” in post-invasion Iraq, asserted in an April blog post that “computational warfare and disinformation campaigns will, in 2020, become a more serious threat than physical war, and we will have to rethink the weapons we deploy to fight them.” 

In that same post, Gourley argued for the creation of a “Manhattan Project for truth” that would create a publicly available Wikipedia-style database built off of “knowledge bases [that] already exist inside many countries’ intelligence agencies for national security purposes.” Gourley then wrote that “this effort would be ultimately about building and enhancing our collective intelligence and establishing a baseline for what’s true or not” as established by intelligence agencies. He concludes his blog post by stating that “in 2020, we will begin to weaponize truth.”

Notably, on November 9, the same day that GCHQ announced its plans to target “anti-vaccine propaganda,” the US website NextGov reported that Primer’s Pentagon-funded effort had turned its attention specifically to “Covid-19 related disinformation.” According to Primer’s director of science, John Bohannon, “Primer will be integrating bot detection, synthetic text detection and unstructured textual claims analysis capabilities into our existing artificial intelligence platform currently in use with DOD. . . . This will create the first unified mission-ready platform to effectively counter Covid-19-related disinformation in near-real time.”

Bohannon, who previously worked as a mainstream journalist embedded with NATO forces in Afghanistan, also told NextGov that Primer’s new Covid-19–focused effort “automatically classifies documents into one of 10 categories to enable the detection of the impact of COVID” on areas such as “business, science and technology, employment, the global economy, and elections.” The final product is expected to be delivered to the Pentagon in the second quarter of next year.

Though a so-called private company, Primer is deeply linked to the national-security state it is designed to protect by “weaponizing truth.” Primer proudly promotes itself as having more than 15 percent of its staff hailing from the US intelligence community or military. The director of the company’s National Security Group is Brian Raymond, a former CIA intelligence officer who served as the Director for Iraq on the US National Security Council after leaving the agency. 

The company also recently added several prominent national-security officials to its board including:

  • Gen. Raymond Thomas (ret.), who led the command of all US and NATO Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and is the former commander of both US Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
  • Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson (ret.), the former deputy chief of staff for Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance who led the Air Force’s intelligence and cyber forces. She also personally developed “strategic partnerships” between the Air Force and Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM in order “to accelerate the Air Force’s digital transformation.”
  • Brett McGurk, one of the “chief architects” of the Iraq War “surge,” alongside the notorious Kagan family, as NSC Director for Iraq, and then as special assistant to the president and senior Director for Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush administration. Under Obama and during part of the Trump administration, McGurk was the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the State Department, helping to manage the “dirty war” waged by the US, the UK, and other allies against Syria.

In addition to those recent board hires, Primer brought on Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of National Intelligence, as a strategic adviser. Gordon previously “drove partnerships within the US Intelligence Community and provided advice to the National Security Council in her role as deputy director of national intelligence” and had a twenty-seven-year career at the CIA. The deep links are unsurprising, given that Primer is financially backed by the CIA’s venture-capital arm In-Q-Tel and the venture-capital arm of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, Bloomberg Beta.

Operation Warp Speed’s Disinformation Blitzkrieg   

The rapid increase in interest by the US and UK national-security states toward Covid-19 “disinformation,” particularly as it relates to upcoming Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, is intimately related to the media-engagement strategy of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed. 

Officially a “public-private partnership,” Operation Warp Speed, which has the goal of vaccinating 300 million Americans by next January, is dominated by the US military and also involves several US intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as well as intelligence-linked tech giants Google, Oracle, and Palantir. Several reports published in The Last American Vagabondby this author and journalist Derrick Broze have revealed the extreme secrecy of the operation, its numerous conflicts of interest, and its deep ties to Silicon Valley and Orwellian technocratic initiatives. 

Warp Speed’s official guidance discusses at length its phased plan for engaging the public and addressing issues of “vaccine hesitancy.” According to the Warp Speed document entitled “From the Factory to the Frontlines,” “strategic communications and public messaging are critical to ensure maximum acceptance of vaccines, requiring a saturation of messaging across the national media.” It also states that “working with established partners—especially those that are trusted sources for target audiences—is critical to advancing public understanding of, access to, and acceptance of eventual vaccines” and that “identifying the right messages to promote vaccine confidence, countering misinformation, and targeting outreach to vulnerable and at-risk populations will be necessary to achieve high coverage.”

The document also notes that Warp Speed will employ the CDC’s three-pronged strategic framework for its communications effort. The third pillar of that strategy is entitled “Stop Myths” and has as a main focus “establish[ing] partnerships to contain the spread of misinformation” as well as “work[ing] with local partners and trusted messengers to improve confidence in vaccines.”

Though that particular Warp Speed document is short on specifics, the CDC’s Covid-19 Vaccination Program Interim Playbook contains additional information. It states that Operation Warp Speed will “engage and use a wide range of partners, collaborations, and communication and news media channels to achieve communication goals, understanding that channel preferences and credible sources vary among audiences and people at higher risk for severe illness and critical populations, and channels vary in their capacity to achieve different communication objectives.” It states that it will focus its efforts in this regard on “traditional media channels” (print, radio, and TV) as well as “digital media” (internet, social media, and text messaging). 

The CDC document further reveals that the “public messaging” campaign to “promote vaccine uptake” and address “vaccine hesitancy” is divided into four phases and adds that the overall communication strategy of Warp Speed “should be timely and applicable for the current phase of the Covid-19 Vaccination program.” 

Those phases are:

  • Before a vaccine is available
  • The vaccine is available in limited supply for certain populations of early focus
  • The vaccine is increasingly available for other critical populations and the general public
  • The vaccine is widely available

Given that the Covid-19 vaccine candidate produced by Pfizer is expected to be approved by the end of November, it appears that the US national-security state, which is essentially running Operation Warp Speed, along with “trusted messengers” in mass media, is preparing to enter the second phase of its communications strategy, one in which news organizations and journalists who raise legitimate concerns about Warp Speed will be de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.

What the Media Still Isn’t Telling You About Russiagate

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By Ray McGovern

Source: AntiWar.com

Two years ago last Saturday (May 7, 2020) Adam Schiff (D, California), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, was forced to perform what Nixon co-conspirator John Ehrlichman famously called a “modified limited hangout.”

On that day, Schiff released sworn testimony that there was zero technical evidence that Russia – or anyone else – hacked those DNC emails so prejudicial to Hillary Clinton (later published by WikiLeaks).

Now, please, before you put me in Putin’s or Trump’s pocket, read on: The testifier was Shawn Henry, the head of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. For reasons former FBI Director James Comey would never really explain, he deferred to CrowdStrike to do the forensic work on the DNC computers that were supposedly “hacked.” Comey told Congress that CrowdStrike “would share with us what they saw.”

In June 2019, it was revealed that CrowdStrike never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, according to the Justice Department.

Are you starting to smell a rat? What about the “modified limited hangout”?

Well, if some or all of this is news to you, it is because the NY Times and other major media have deep-sixed it for exactly two years now, and counting. It gets worse – much worse.

What Did Schiff Know and When Did He Know It?

Fasten your seatbelts: It was on December 5, 2017 that Shawn Henry gave sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee – see the official transcript. Henry testified that there was no technical evidence that Russia, or any other entity, hacked the DNC emails that were published by WikiLeaks just before the Democratic Convention in July 2016. (The emails showed how the deck had been stacked against Bernie Sanders – in the primaries, for example.)

Shawn Henry is a longtime protégé of former FBI Director Robert Mueller and headed Mueller’s FBI cyber investigation unit. After retiring from the FBI in 2012, he took a senior position at CrowdStrike. At his testimony on Dec. 5, 2017, he had Graham M. Wilson, a partner at Perkins Coie, as well as David C. Lashway of Baker & McKenzie in support.

Falling Silently in the Forest

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, relying on (1) the extensive expertise and professional experience of two members who happened to have been Technical Directors at NSA, (2) the revelations of Edward Snowden, and (3) the immutable principles of physics, had already concluded that the accusation of that Russian hack on the DNC was phony. (That Brennan’s CIA “believed” it to be credible helped not a whit.)

Below is how we began “Allegations of Hacking are Baseless,” our Memorandum of December 12, 2016 (a year before Shawn Henry was forced to choose between telling the truth or perjuring himself). We wrote:

A New York Times report on Monday alluding to “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald J. Trump” is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking – by Russians or anyone else. (See: “US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims.”)

We even included a brief tutorial on the difference between a “hack” and a leak, but we were already, in Dec. 2016 going up against deeply encrusted popular “belief” based on intelligence-corporate media connivance.

‘Modified Limited Hangout’

Schiff was able to hide Shawn Henry’s testimony for two and a half years. Under considerable pressure from a new Director of National Intelligence, who threatened to release the testimony himself, Schiff finally relented and released it (as mentioned above) on May 7, 2020. As for Establishment media, the transcript of Henry’s testimony fell like the proverbial tree in the forest with no one around to hear it.

Did the NY Times, et al. get “The Memo” ordering all to avoid Henry’s testimony like the plague? Actually, in this particular case, corporate media had quite enough incentive of their own to hide from media consumers the fact that “Russian hacking,” the cornerstone of Russia-gate, was a crock, and that viewers and listeners had been had.

When I wrote about the released – well, sort of released – Shawn Henry transcript the following day, there was a wealth of background information to provide context to this sordid affair. I included a four-minute discussion I had had with Schiff just five days after Trump took office, a reminder that the Dems were well into “Russian hacking” as the centerpiece of Russia-gate from the very start. (That clip, and lots else, is embedded here)

So Schiff knew on Dec. 5, 2017 that “Russian hacking” of those DNC emails was bogus. I was recently asked, why do you suppose he did not tell Robert Mueller, the “Inspector Javert” in hot pursuit of “Russian election interference,” whose $32-million investigation of Russia-gate lasted from May 2017 till March 2019? Good question. Did Shawn Henry misplace the telephone number of Mueller, his old boss and mentor? Or did Mueller know, and despite knowing, continued his Javert-like chase until after the mid-terms in November 2018. (That worked for the Democrats; and, not incidentally, Schiff took back the reins of the Intelligence Committee.)

Most of Americans have no idea how they’ve been had on Russia-gate. And the NYTimes, et al. have every reason to keep them in the dark about “Russian hacking.” Most people have little idea as to how the steady drumming on Russian perfidy has conditioned them not only to distrust “the Russians,” but to hate them. (What, after all, could be more hateful than for being responsible for giving us four years of Trump?) Sadly – and admittedly – it cannot be considered unreasonable to be convinced that everything out of Trump’s mouth is a lie and that he would never ever tell the truth about Russia – given what Obama and others call his “bromance” with Putin.

There are, of course, dangerous implications in all this for what Americans may be asked in terms of confronting Russia on Ukraine.

On wider Russia-gate issues over the past five years and my tree-falling-in-forest attempts to expose the malfeasance of our corporate-captive media, readers may wish to review this.

As Food Shortages Loom, US Kids Starve, Biden to Send $33 Billion MORE to Ukraine to Keep War Going

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

In 2019, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was elected to president of Ukraine after running on a platform of ending the conflict in the Donbass region and making peace with Russia. Unfortunately, however, these goals were not in synch with the US hegemony and instead of pushing for peace, the US supported the far right neo-Nazis who promised to kill Zelensky if he sought peace. 

Over the next two years, the United States continued to funnel weapons, money, and training into Ukraine, ensuring a future conflict with Russia by instigating military conflict directly on their border. In February of this year, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced that a line had been crossed and he then invaded Ukraine, kicking off a violent and deadly war.

Just a few weeks into the war, Russia offered concessions as spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced that Moscow will end the invasion immediately if Ukraine amends its constitution to ensure it stays neutral and doesn’t join NATO, it acknowledges Crimea as Russian territory, and recognizes the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states.

Since then, the United States has recommended that Ukraine not accept a peace deal and instead continue to allow their people to be used as cannon fodder while US taxpayers are fleeced for billions to fight a proxy war with Russia.

Since the war began in February, Biden has authorized more than $14 billion in your tax dollars to arm literal Nazis in the region. This week, because very few people have spoken out against this war, that request more than doubled and Biden asked Congress for a whopping $33 billion more. 

While encouraging Ukraine to take the deal offered by Russia would be far more effective than US tax dollars at ending the suffering and helping Ukrainians, the military industrial complex is uninterested in such a move.

It is no surprise that the stock market associated with the military industrial complex is booming as the rest of the market plummets.

What’s more, as the politically elite send billions to the other side of the world, 3.7 million children have been pushed into poverty here at home.

According to a recently released Columbia University report, by late January 3.7 million U.S. children were plunged back into poverty, as the government ended the child tax credit.

What’s more, the elite have been publicly warning the world of massive food shortages and supply chain issues — yet here we are sending billions Nazis to prevent Ukraine from seeking peace.

Just last month, the extremely creepy yet exceedingly influential Klaus Schwab warned that “History is truly at a turning point. We do not yet know the full extent and the systemic and structural changes which will happen” but he said that “we do know the global energy systems, food systems, and supply chains will be deeply affected.”

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1509246112934289421

It’s not just the real-life version of Dr. Evil making these warnings either. As we reported at the time, the president of the ominously connected multi-trillion-dollar asset fund, BlackRock, Rob Kapito told oil and gas executives the same week that “entitled” Americans are about to deal with shortages of food and other goods, and should prepare accordingly.

“For the first time, this generation is going to go into a store and not be able to get what they want,” Kapito told a meeting of the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association. “And we have a very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice.”

“I would put on your seat belts because this is something that we haven’t seen,” Kapito added, warning that Americans will soon face “scarcity inflation” – or rising prices compounded by shortages of everything from food and consumer goods to oil and gas.

President Joe Biden has been telling Americans for months now that they have to foot the bill for the war in Ukraine and “do their part” by sending billions to Zelensky and paying high prices for oil. Around the same time Schwab and Kapito made their warnings, Biden took his position to a whole new level, telling Americans that food shortages are “gonna be real.”

This week, Goya Foods CEO Bob Unanue has issued a similar warning: “We are on the precipice of a global food crisis.”

In a Wednesday interview, Unanue told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo, “Americans will have to tighten their belts and consume less,” in response to her question about a potential food shortage crisis.

Though the government has been telling us these higher prices and supply chain issues are Russia’s fault, those who have been paying attention have warned since last year that Biden’s policies – which involved spending more in his first eight months than former President Donald Trump did in 2018 and 2019 combined, and throttling domestic energy production – would trigger price spikes and supply chain disruptions for ordinary Americans.

Trump definitely played a role as well by printing nearly 7 trillion in his last year in office. This is why inflation was already at a 40-year high, before the war began and as spending increases, hard times are seemingly inevitable. The Ukraine invasion is most assuredly playing a role in this debacle but it will be the straw that broke the camels back, not the main driver.

Whatever actually sets off this shortage, rest assured that the people warning us about it will be the last to suffer from it. It will be the poor and middle class who suffer the most from these issues.

As Max Blumenthal reminds us, “200,000 small businesses were wrecked and millions left jobless and alone in the name of public health. Now gas and food prices must surge to protect freedom and stand for Ukraine. You will own nothing and be happy and if you don’t like it, you might be a Russian conspiracist.”

Alice Walker and the Price of Conscience

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Alice Walker was disinvited to the Bay Area Book Festival after Zionist groups threatened to carry out protests. The public and presenters are complicit in her blacklisting if they attend.

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

There is a steep price to pay for having a conscience and more importantly the courage to act on it. The hounds of hell pin you to the cross, hammering nails into your hands and feet as they grin like the Cheshire cat and mouth bromides about respect for human rights, freedom of expression and diversity. I have watched this happen for some time to Alice Walker, one of the most gifted and courageous writers in America. Walker, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Color Purple, has felt the bitter sting of racism. She refuses to be silent about the plight of the oppressed, including the Palestinians.

“Whenever I come out with a book, or anything that will take me before the public, the world, I am assailed as this person I don’t recognize,” she said when I reached her by phone. “If I tried to keep track of all the attacks over the decades, I wouldn’t be able to keep working. I am happy people are standing up. It is all of us. Not just me. They are trying to shut us down, shut us up, erase us. That reality is what is important.”

The Bay Area Book festival delivered the latest salvo against Walker. The organizers disinvited her from the event because she  praised the writings of the New Age author David Icke and called his book And the Truth Shall Set You Free “brave.” Icke has denied critics’ charges of anti-Semitism. The festival organizers twisted themselves into contortions to say they were not charging Walker with anti-Semitism. She was banned because she lauded a controversial writer, who I suspect few members of the committee have read. The poet and writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who Walker was to interview, withdrew from the festival in protest.

Walker, a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, has been a very public advocate for Palestinian rights and a critic of Israel for many years. Her friendship with Icke has long been part of the public record. She hid nothing. It is not as if the festival organizers suddenly discovered a dark secret about Walker. They sought to capitalize on her celebrity and then, when they felt the heat from the Israel lobby, capitulated to the mob to humiliate her.

“I don’t know these people,” Walker said of the festival organizers who disinvited her. “It feels like the south. You know they are out there in the community, and they have their positions, but all you see are sheets. That’s what this is. It’s like being back in the south.”

Banning writers because of books they like or find interesting nullifies the whole point of a book festival. Should I be banned because I admire Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s masterpieces Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, and Castle to Castle, despite his virulent anti-Semitism, which even after World War II he refused to relinquish? Should I be banned for liking Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which I recently reread, and which is rabidly misogynistic? Should I be banned for loving William Butler Yeats, who, like Ezra Pound, many of whose poems I have also committed to memory, was a fascist collaborator? Should I be banned because I revere Hannah Arendt, whose attitudes towards African-Americans were paternalistic, at best, and arguably racist? Should I be banned because I cherish books by C.S. Lewis, Norman Mailer and D.H. Lawrence, who were homophobic?

We might as well sweep clean library shelves if the attitudes of writers we read mean we are denied a right to speak. 

And let’s not even get started with the Bible, which I studied as a seminarian at Harvard Divinity School. God repeatedly demands righteous acts of genocide, transforming the Nile into blood so the Egyptians will suffer from thirst. God sends swarms of locusts and flies to torture the Egyptians, along with hail, fire and thunder to destroy all plants and trees. God orders the firstborn in every Egyptian household killed so all will know “that the Lord makes a distinction between Egyptians and Israel.” The killing goes on until “there was not a house where one was not dead.” 

The Bible contains much of this divinely sanctioned slaughtering of non-believers. It endorses slavery and the beating of enslaved people. It condones the execution of homosexuals and women who commit adultery. It views women as property and approves the right of fathers to sell their daughters. But the Bible also remains, with all these contradictions and moral failings, a great religious, ethical and moral document. Even the most flawed books often have something to teach us.

Organizers of the festival attacked Walker for her poem “It is Our Frightful Duty.” They accuse Walker of channeling Icke’s alleged anti-Semitism into her writing, as if Walker is unable to think for herself. The attack on the poem, which is a gross misreading of its intent, exposes the lie that Walker’s position on Israel and Palestine had nothing to do with her being disinvited.

“Unfortunately, Ms. Walker has not only promoted Icke’s ideas widely on her own blog and in interviews, but they may have influenced her own writing,” the festival wrote in a statement. “Ms. Walker’s 2017 poem “It is our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud” encourages people to use Google and Youtube to “follow the trail of “The / Talmud” as its poison belatedly winds its way / Into our collective consciousness. // Some of what you find will sound / Too crazy to be true. Unfortunately those bits are likely / To be true.” A New York Magazine essay by writer Nylah Burton (who identifies as Black and Jewish) describes her reaction to Walker’s support of Icke and this poem.”

The poem calls out these hate-filled religious texts. “All of it: The Christian, the Jewish, The Muslim; even the Buddhist. All of it, without exception, At the root.” Walker reminds us in the poem that these texts have been used throughout millennia to sanctify subjugation, dehumanization and murder. Slave holders defended the enslavement of Blacks by citing numerous passages in the Old and the New Testament, including Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians where, equating slaveholders with God, Paul writes: “Slaves, be obedient to your human masters with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart, as to Christ.”  

Israel seeks, in the same way, to legitimize its colonial-settler project by citing the Old Testament and the Talmud, the primary source of Jewish law. Never mind that Palestine was a Muslim country from the 7th century until it was seized by military force in 1948. The Old Testament, in the hands of Zionists, is a deed to Palestinian land.

Walker excoriates this religious chauvinism and mythology. She warns that theocracies, which sacralize state power, are dangerous. In the poem, she highlights  passages in the Talmud used to condemn those outside the faith. Jews must repudiate these sections in the Talmud and the Old Testament, as those of us who are Christians must repudiate the hateful passages in the Bible. When these religious screeds are weaponized by zealots —Christian, Muslim or Jewish — they propagate evil. 

Walker writes:

Is Jesus boiling eternally in hot excrement,

For his “crime” of throwing the bankers

Out of the Temple? For loving, standing with,

And defending

The poor? Was his mother, Mary,

A whore?

Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only

That, but to enjoy it?

Are three year old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse?

Are young boys fair game for rape?

Must even the best of the Goyim (us, again) be killed?

Pause a moment and think what this could mean

Or already has meant

In our own lifetime.

Walker was invited to the festival to interview Honorée Fanonne Jeffers about her work, not to give a lecture on Icke or Palestine — but no matter. She ran afoul of the thought police, who are always vigilant about catering to smear campaigns against Israeli critics but blithely ignore the virulent and overt racism of Israeli politicians, military commanders, writers and intellectuals.

Walker is not the first writer targeted by Israel. Israel banned the author Gunter Grass and demanded the rescindment of his Nobel prize after he wrote a poem denouncing Germany’s decision to provide Israel with nuclear submarines, warning that Israel “could wipe out the Iranian people” if it attacked Iran. Former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who calls for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create a “Greater” Israel, described the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish as “someone who has written texts against Zionism — which are still used as fuel for terror attacks against Israel.” He said honoring Darwish was the equivalent to honoring Adolf Hitler for “Mein Kampf.” Israeli bookstores Steimatzky and Tzomet Sefarim purged Sally Rooney’s novels from some 200 branches and online sites because of her support for BDS. Israeli writer Yehonatan Geffen was beaten outside his home for calling the Israeli prime minister a racist.

Bay Area Book Festival founder and director Cherilyn Parsons defended the board’s decision to disinvite Walker when I requested a comment:  

Our decision to disinvite Ms. Walker had nothing to do with her position on Palestine, her voice as a Black woman writer, or her right to speak her mind freely. We honor all those things. We also do not hold that she is anti-Semitic. (To be pro-Palestinian does not mean a person is anti-Semitic, just as to be Jewish does not mean that one is anti-Palestine.) Our decision was based purely on Ms. Walker’s inexplicable, ongoing endorsement of David Icke, a conspiracy theorist who dangerously promulgates such beliefs as that Jewish people bankrolled Hitler, caused the 2008 global financial crisis, staged the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and more. (See his book “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” available full-text on the Internet Archive.) Icke also regularly promotes “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a fabricated, uber-anti-Semitic text that was widely read during the time of social upheaval in pre-WWII Germany and turned public sentiment against Jews–a truly dangerous document for a populace to embrace. Finally, we note that Ms. Walker provided financial support for, and participation in, a documentary celebrating Icke and his work.

“I do not believe he is anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish,” Walker posted on her website. “I do believe he is brave enough to ask the questions others fear to ask, and to speak his own understanding of the truth wherever it might lead. Many attempts have been made to censor and silence him. As a woman, and a person of color, as a writer who has been criticized and banned myself, I support his right to share his own thoughts.”

“I maintain that I can be friends with whoever I like,” Walker told me. “The attachment to this belief that this person is evil is strange. He’s not.”

I worked for two years as a reporter in Jerusalem. I listened to the daily filth spewed out by Israelis about Arabs and Palestinians, who used racist tropes to sanctify Israeli apartheid and gratuitous violence against Palestinians. Israel routinely orders air strikes, targeted assassinations, drone attacks, artillery strikes, tank assaults and naval bombardments on the largely defenseless population in Gaza. Israel blithely dismisses those it murders, including children, as unworthy of life, drawing on poisonous religious edicts. It is risible that Israel  and its US supporters can posit themselves as anti-racists, abrogating the right to cancel Walker. It is the equivalent of allowing the Klan to vet speakers lists.  

Torat Ha’Melech by Rabbi Yitzhak and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur is one of innumerable examples of the deep racism embedded in Israeli culture. The book provides rabbinical advice to Israeli soldiers and officers in the occupied Palestinian territories. It  describes non-Jews as “uncompassionate by nature” and justifiably exterminated to “curb their evil inclinations.” “If we kill a gentile who has violated one of the seven commandments of [Noah]…there is nothing wrong with the murder.” It assures troops that it is morally legitimate to kill Palestinian children, writing, “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.” The Biblical prohibition on murder, Yitzhak and Elitzur write, “refers only to a Jew who kills a Jew, and not to a Jew who kills a gentile, even if that gentile is one of the righteous among the nations.” They even say it is “permissible” to kill Jewish dissidents. A Jewish dissident, the rabbis write, is a rodef. A rodef, according to traditional Jewish law, is someone who is “pursuing” another person to murder him or her. It is the duty of a Jew to kill a rodef if the rodef is told to cease the threatening behavior and does not. Yigal Amir, who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, argued that the din rodef, or “law of the pursuer,” justified Rabin’s murder.

Walker is the best among us. She is one of our most gifted and lyrical writers. She stands unequivocally with the crucified of the earth. She sees her own pain in the pain of others. She demands justice. She pays the price.

Boycott the Bay Area Book Festival.

That is the least we owe a literary and moral titan.

5 signs they are CREATING a food crisis

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By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

It’s no secret that, according to politicians and the corporate press, “food shortages” and a “food supply crises” have been on the way for a while now. They have been regularly predicted for several years.

What’s really strange is that despite its near-constant incipience, the food shortage never seems to actually arrive and is always blamed on something new.

As long ago as 2012, “scientists” were predicting that climate change and a lack of clean water would create “food shortages” that would “turn the world vegetarian by 2050”.

In 2019, UN “experts” warned that “climate change was threatening the world’s food supply”.

Later the same year, the UK was warned that they could expect a food shortage as a result of “post-Brexit chaos”.

By early March 2020 supermarkets were already “warning” that the government had been too slow to act on the coronavirus outbreak, and they might run out of food. (They never actually did).

A month later, in April 2020 when the “pandemic” was less than three months old, “officials” warned Covid was going to create a global food crisis. Three months later it had ballooned into “the worst food crisis for 50 years”.

In the Summer of 2021 the British press was predicting the “worst food shortages since world war 2” and “rolling power cuts”, allegedly due to a lack of truck drivers blamed equally on Covid and Brexit (neither the shortages nor power cuts ever really materialised).

By September 2021, the UK was told the gas price spike would create a shortage of frozen food, and just a month later, that we may have to ration meat ahead of Christmas, due to the gas crisis. (There never was any rationing)

In January 2022, Australia saw “empty supermarket shelves” blamed on the Omicron variant crippling the supply chain, while the US had the same empty shelves blamed on bad winter weather.

Moving into the spring of 2022, the food crisis is still on its way…only now it’s because of the war in Ukraine, or China’s “Zero Covid” policies, or the bird flu outbreak.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that – since the food crisis is always expected but never arrives, and is always blamed on the current thing – that it doesn’t really exist. That it’s nothing but a psy-op designed to spread panic and give suppliers an excuse to jack up their prices in response to fake “scarcity” created by the press.

However, there are indications that this may be about to change.

In a Brussels press conference on March 25th of this year, Joe Biden said…

Regarding food shortages – yes, we did talk about shortages, and they’re going to be real.”

…which is a decidedly odd thing to say.

Most of the time the only reason to strongly affirm something is “going to be real” from now on, is that up to that point it was not.

Indeed, there are a few signs that the food supply is about to genuinely come under attack.

1. UKRAINE WAR & WESTERN SANCTIONS

It’s well documented that Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine has driven up the prices of oil, gas and wheat. Partly due to disruption on the ground, but mostly due to Western sanctions.

Russia is the largest exporter of wheat and other grains in the world, and these products are used not just for making food for humans, but also as animal feed. Western nations boycotting Russian wheat will therefore potentially drive up the price of a huge variety of foodstuffs.

We have already seen rationing of sunflower oil (a major Ukrainian export), with reports that this could extend to all kinds of other products including sausages, chicken, pasta and beer.

This war did not need to happen, it could have been prevented (and could still be stopped) by a simple agreement on Ukrainian neutrality. Combine that with the sweeping nature of the anti-Russian sanctions – unmatched in recent history – and you can reason that the chaos on the ground and concomitant increase in food prices is part of a deliberate policy serving the Great Reset agenda.

2. INCREASING THE PRICE OF OIL

The increased price of oil has natural and obvious knock-on effects for every industrial sector – most especially transport, logistics and agriculture. Despite fears of a cost of living crisis, warnings of food shortages and Russia’s status as the largest exporter of oil and gas in the world, Western nations and their allies have made virtually zero effort to lower the cost of oil.

The high oil price has already seen the Russian ruble bounce back to pre-war strength, and yet Saudi Arabia has been increasing their prices, not flooding the market to tank the price as they did in 2014/15.

Keeping the cost of petroleum high is a deliberate policy decision, and one that shows the cost of living crisis – and any resultant food shortages – are being engineered on purpose.

3. BIRD FLU

The press is claiming there is a major bird flu outbreak going on. As we published last week, the dynamics of “bird flu” seem to be identical to Covid. Birds are tested for the virus using PCR tests, culled if they are “positive”, and these culls are then labelled “bird flu deaths”.

This process has already seen at least 27 million poultry birds destroyed in the US alone, the world’s largest exporter of both chicken and eggs. France, Canada and the UK have also culled millions of birds.

Bird flu has already (allegedly) caused the price of chicken and eggs to skyrocket.

(As a potentially important aside, a new report has also warned that pigs can pass “superbugs” to humans, so pigs may be for the chop sometime soon, too)

4. UK & US PAYING FARMERS TO STOP FARMING

Going back to last May, the Biden administration began pushing farmers to add agricultural land to the “conservation reserve program”, a federally funded program allegedly aimed at preserving the environment. The program is essentially paying farmers not to farm. A very odd policy decision, given the widely predicted food shortages.

A state-level plan in California is going to pay farmers to grow less, this time in the name of saving water.

Interestingly, the UK has a similar program going on for (again, allegedly) totally different reasons. Starting this past February, the British government is paying lump sums of up £100,000 to any farmers who want to retire from farming. Again, a strange policy during a period of geopolitical unrest impacting the food supply.

5. MANUFACTURED FERTILISER SHORTAGES

Russia and Belarus are two of the biggest exporters of fertiliser and fertiliser-related products in the world, accounting for around 10 billion dollars worth of trade manually. So, the war in Ukraine (and the sanctions) are already hitting the fertiliser market hard, with prices hitting new all-time highs in March.

China, the third biggest exporter of fertiliser in the world, has had a self-imposed export ban on the product since last summer, allegedly in an effort to keep domestic food prices low.

Given that, it is very strange that America’s Union Pacific Railway has suddenly placed a limit on the number of fertiliser deliveries it will make, informing fertiliser giant CF Industries they will need to cut their train car use by as much as 20%.

In their public response, CF Industries stated:

The timing of this action by Union Pacific could not come at a worse time for farmers…Not only will fertilizer be delayed by these shipping restrictions, but additional fertilizer needed to complete spring applications may be unable to reach farmers at all. By placing this arbitrary restriction on just a handful of shippers, Union Pacific is jeopardizing farmers’ harvests and increasing the cost of food for consumers.”

BONUS: FIRES AT FOOD PROCESSING PLANTS

This get’s a bonus slot, not an official spot, because of the multiple unknowns in this case.

In the strangest and most ephemeral story on the list, it seems there has been a rash of fires at food processing plants all over the United States in the last six months. Since August 2021 at least 16 major fires have broken out at food processing plants all across the country.

In September last year a meat processor in Nebraska burned down, impacting 5% of the country’s beef supply. In March of this year fire shut down a Nestle frozen food plant in Arkansas and a major potato processing site in Belfast, Maine was almost levelled by a huge fire.

The examples just keep on coming.

In just the last week two different single-engine planes have crashed into two different food plants, causing major fires. One at a potato processing plant in Idaho, another at a General Mills plant in Georgia.

Right now we can’t prove this is a deliberate campaign, or even statistically unusual, but it certainly warrants some further investigation.

There’s a good write-up on this story on Tim Pool’s website, and an in-depth twitter thread covering all the recent events from Dr Ben Braddock here.

*

In summary…

  1. A war which did not need to happen is driving up food and oil prices.
  2. Sanctions which did not need to be put in place are also driving up food and oil prices.
  3. Western allies are intentionally raising their oil prices.
  4. Despite warning of a food crisis, US and UK are paying farmers not to farm.
  5. A “bird flu epidemic” very much like the fake Covid “pandemic” is driving up the price of poultry and eggs.
  6. Western companies are actively making the fertiliser shortages worse.
  7. Bizarre fires are crippling large sections of the US food industry.

Taken individually maybe these points could all be seen as mistakes or coincidences, but when you put them all together it’s not hard to spot the pattern. The press may claim we are “sleepwalking” into a food crisis, but it looks more like they’re running head-first into it.

After years of saying there’s a food shortage on the way, it looks like they might be about to finally actually create one.

A Weird, Stupid Dystopia

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The last few days in the United States have seen a parade of wealthy freaks fellating each other’s egos and preening for the cameras in outlandish garb while ordinary Americans suffer more and more.

The weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner saw a gaggle of media celebrities congregate to congratulate one another on what a great job they’ve been doing bravely telling the truth and holding the most powerful government on earth to account. The host, Trevor Noah of The Daily Show, gushed with enthusiasm about how much freedom the press have in America to say things the powerful don’t like.

“As we sit in this room tonight, people, I really hope you all remember what the real purpose of this evening is,” Noah said. “Yes, it’s fun. Yes, we dress nice. Yes, the people eat, they drink, we have fun. But the reason we’re here is to honor and celebrate the fourth estates and what you stand for — what you stand for — an additional check and balance that holds power to account and gives voice to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one.”

“And if you ever begin to doubt your responsibilities, if you ever begin to doubt how meaningful it is, look no further than what’s happening in Ukraine,” said Noah. “Look at what’s happening there. Journalists are risking and even losing their lives to show the world what’s really happening. You realize how amazing it is. In America, you have the right to seek the truth and speak the truth even if it makes people in power uncomfortable, even if it makes your viewers or your readers uncomfortable. You understand how amazing that is? I stood here tonight and I made fun of the president of the United States, and I’m going to be fine. I am going to be fine, right? Do you really understand what a blessing it is?”

Of course there are people who’ve said things that US presidents don’t like who are not in fact fine. Julian Assange continues to waste away in Belmarsh Prison as the US government continues its efforts to extradite him to he can become the first publisher ever tried under the Espionage Act. Edward Snowden, an American, remains in exile because one US president after another continues to refuse to pardon his heroic whistleblowing about the sinister surveillance practices of the US intelligence cartel. Daniel Hale, also an American, sits in prison for exposing the depravity of America’s monstrous drone program.

Trevor Noah did not mention these people, or the many others who’ve been persecuted, silenced, imprisoned and killed for saying things the powerful individuals who govern the US don’t approve of, because as a member of the mainstream media his job is not to inform but to propagandize.

Far from providing “an additional check and balance that holds power to account and gives voice to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one” as Noah claims, the people in his audience on Saturday night are tasked with manipulating public thought in facilitation of the interests of the powerful. The mainstream news media in America, and throughout all the so-called free democracies of the western world, are propaganda institutions whose first and foremost job is to manufacture consent for oligarchy and empire.

Which is why the President of the United States, when he took the podium that night, had nothing but friendly words for the mainstream press.

“What’s clear, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, is that you, the free press, matter more than you ever did in the last century,” Biden said. “We’ve all seen the courage of Ukrainian people because of the courage of American reporters in this room, and your colleagues across the world who are on the ground taking their lives in their own hands.”

This past weekend also saw a friendly gathering of brave fourth estate truth warriors and political and government operatives of the US empire at a party hosted by the billionaire owner of the neocon war propaganda rag The Atlantic.

Politico reports:

David and Katherine Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs hosted a dinner at the Bradleys’ home. SPOTTED: Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Cabinet Secretary Evan Ryan, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, CIA Director Bill Burns, press secretary Jen Psaki, Deputy A.G. Lisa Monaco, Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-U.S. Virgin Islands), homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Jeffrey Goldberg, Nick Thompson, Peter Lattman, Anne Applebaum, Russell Berman, Franklin Foer, David Frum, Elaine Godfrey, Adam Harris, Mark Leibovich, Jeff Dufour, Heather Kuldell, Kevin Baron, José Andrés, Enes Kanter, Mitch Landrieu, Dafna Linzer, Rachel Martin, Judy Woodruff, Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Jonathan Capehart, Katty Kay, Steve and Jean Case, John Dickerson and Jen Palmieri.

Yep, when you see a shady basketball player/empire propagandist fraternizing with the CIA Director while surrounded by media celebrities and government insiders at a party hosted by a media-owning plutocrat, you know you’re in a country where power is held to account. Right, Trevor?

The orgy of embarrassment was capped off by the 2022 Met Gala, a big weird dystopian parade of rich freaks dressed like Hunger Games aristocracy and laughing in the face of everyone who can’t afford to live.

An honest Met Gala dress would have a corset made from the bones of Yemeni children, draped with a cloth of stolen gold and lithium spun by the tiny hands of child slaves, with a full-length train that leached oil and blood wherever it went.

This while ordinary Americans struggle just to survive. While American women appear to be on the precipice of losing their reproductive sovereignty. While money is poured into a proxy war which threatens to escalate into a conflict that could easily end all life on earth.

This is your dying empire, America. This is your end-stage capitalism. This is your dystopia, in all its weird, phony, stupid glory.

It is horrifying. The longer you look at it, the creepier it gets.

https://twitter.com/kayrosef/status/1520605986259873793

Breathe it all in, folks.

We’re in for a hell of a ride.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Global Pandemic

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By Cindy Sheehan

Source: Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox

“I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

Now that it appears that (for at least the time being) grossly profiting from the coronavirus issue is on the decline (except if anyone buys the “4th booster for Pfizer”) and gross war profiting is once again taking the lead, I want to reflect on MY experience with the Global Pandemic™.

I am a huge fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) universe that was conceived and written by the brilliant Douglas Adams who died (years ago) at a too young age from unrelated coronavirus/vax heart disease.

In reflecting on the past two years, the closest match I came up with is I felt like one of the HHGTTG’s main characters, Arthur Dent.

As written, Arthur was a mild-mannered employee of the BBC who is wrenched out of bed when a construction crew comes to his home to demolish it for a highway overpass. He rushes out of his house and lies down in front of a bulldozer in his “dressing gown.” During this scene, his best friend Ford Prefect comes to “hitchhike” him off of planet Earth which is about to be demolished by the Vogon Construction Fleet aliens who are making a way for an intergalactic bypass. In both instances of demolition, the “plans” were available for view and comment in planning offices and it was too late to change anything.

Arthur goes through most of the five books in the series in a bewildered and befuddled state of mind in his dressing gown. I felt like this during much of the past two years, myself: I spent much of the time in lounging clothes, even when I went out. What was the use of getting dressed up to head to a grocery store just to put a mask on and be in disguise?

To be clear, I wasn’t in an Arthur Dent state because I had a loss of mental, or physical capacity, it was because the propaganda for the Global Pandemic™ (let’s shorten it to GloPan for the remainder of this piece) was SO obviously conflated mis/disinformation and that those around me seemed to be capitulating to it.. I was confused by the compliance, to say the least. For example, if we were told by the GloPan Chief-operating-officer (COO) Dr. Anthony Falsie, that “masks don’t work,” the GloPanBots didn’t wear a mask; When Falsie changed to “masks are mandatory and cloth masks are fine,” that’s what the GloPanBots did. Then it was “wear a surgical mask and a cloth mask over it,” “add a face-shield.” Every seamlessly told lie was shamefully obeyed by the masses without a hint of irony, or question.

To be honest, after the “two-weeks to flatten the curve” period was over and masks were being pushed hardcore in businesses that GloPanCorp allowed to remain open, I would wear a mask into grocery stores—which was the only place I went. However, I NEVER wore one outside, in my home, or in a car. Bollocks to that. Every time I passed a Masked Wonder on the street, they would do a panicked swerve and a few almost fell over trying to avoid me. I would always ask them, “Why did you do that, I am obviously NOT sick?” One woman even retorted “How do you know?” If I had more time to respond because she was already 1/2 block away from me in her rush to avoid proximity to any human not covering their breathing holes, I would have replied, “I think I would know if I were ill—and if I were ill, I’d be home bingeing Netflix.”

DON’T PANIC

In the series, the HHGTTG is an actual, constantly updated book that gives Galactic Hitchhikers information about dining, drinking, avoiding monsters, and backgrounds on each planet. In fact, Ford Prefect, Arthur’s alien best-friend was on Earth working on Earth’s entry in the Guide. However, the only thing written in the Guide under the entry “Earth” says is, “Mostly harmless.” Printed on the cover of each HHGTTG is the advice “Don’t Panic.”

I feel like most of the human race just erased the word “Don’t” and panicked like crazy over a “Mostly harmless” pathogen. Now, don’t stop reading at this point, I will explain myself using science, not $cience.

Sars-CoV-2

“If there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

A real life pandemic has the potential to be VERY frightening—with so many dying, it would be impossible to count them, let alone bury them. There would also be very little immunity to the disease that would have the ability wipe out human-life on our planet. Even though the grossly inflated Cov-19 numbers were purposely significant so you would line up for an untested inoculation, the virus never got to the level of GloPan, nor does it deserve the hysteria and profound destruction that surrounded it.

We also don’t know, and may never know, the origins of Cov-19. Was it a U.S./China lab leak from Wuhan? Did it come from a wet market there? There was early speculation that the U.S. military brought it to China during a sporting event there in late 2019.

Was it intentionally, or unintentionally loosed on the world?

I am not in any of the above camps, but with the revelation of more than two-dozen U.S. bioweapon labs in Ukraine, the plot thickens, doesn’t it?

Coronaviruses have been with us for a long time. The disinfectant Lysol proclaims on its can that it kills 99% of coronaviruses (even before GloPan). As humans, most of us have built natural immunity to corona, but every now and then, a mutant comes to infect us. As observed with Cov-19, most of us develop mild symptoms that have the potential to be dangerous to the elderly and more vulnerable populations: Just like every flu-type pathogen that we’ve previously experienced.

Back in early 2020 when we started hearing about Cov-19, I wasn’t worried about the virus, because I had the attitude that even if I did contract it, I would more than likely be okay. I had a trip to commemorate International Working Women’s Day to several communities on the East Coast planned for early March, but I started to hear talk of quarantines (I don’t think we called it a “lockdown” yet, but prison-talk would gradually start to reveal itself) and I didn’t want to be blocked from returning home if I ventured outside of California. I mean, they forbade cruise ships from docking for days—we knew someone on one of them in the San Francisco Bay—and, then flights started to get cancelled, so I cancelled by activities and we were all hoping to reschedule soon.

“Soon,” became as long as “two-weeks to flatten the curve.” In March, 2020, I was sure that I would be able to travel for May Day; then it was the 4th of July—-Maybe Labor Day would work? It soon became apparent that 2020 was going to be a wash, but perhaps we could schedule some IWWD events for March 2021? Well, at the writing of this it’s April 2022 and I still haven’t been able to leave for the East Coast. Even though travel restrictions have loosened and it’s easier to travel, at this point, the issue for me is masking for half of a day—-I can barely wear one for 10-minutes, let alone 12-15 hours. Being fully un-jabbed is also a problem for some people and groups that I have worked with in the past.

How did my attitude develop towards Cov-19?

Why did I remain adamantly resistant to the agitprop? Why was I inherently immune to both Cov-19 and the coronaprop?

The answer is quite easy and evident: the same people/institutions that have lied and caused enormous harm to the people of this failed-state AND the world were telling me to panic. Literally. I never believed their bullshit about Global Terrorism (GloTerr), so why would I believe this (to me) obvious B.S. of GloPan?

Besides, who knows if I had Cov-19, or not? According to Dr. John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine (Stanford Prevention Research), of Epidemiology and Population Health, over 70% (in cross-age demographics) who were tested positive for Cov-19 had zero, or mild symptoms. The alarming numbers came from comparing test numbers to deaths, instead of using IFR (infection fatality rate) which would have dropped the numbers dramatically. Also, the powers-that-be, have adjusting their ghoulish-death rate down and admitted that those who died had an average of over THREE co-morbidities. Not saying I am happy, nor am I minimizing the pain these deaths caused, but, it seems most people who died of Cov-19 were well on their way to meeting the Grim Reaper, anyway. Some people (like me) work diligently to make our bodies hostile to pathogenic invaders, while most Americans create a very welcoming environment for disease and chronic conditions. This circumstance can be changed, but it takes effort, where taking drugs is practically effortless (if you can afford them).

Most people listened to the $cience of those who were paid to come up with supporting $cience and feed it to the public through the stenographer media class. One of the most egregious examples of this is when the current director of the CDC Rachel Walensky said: “I first heard of the efficacy of the Covid vaccine from CNN.” What!? Part of her job is to literally investigate the safety and efficacy of medicines and they operate the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS).

Pfizer spends millions of dollars sponsoring the legacy media and people like Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Falsie have carte blanche to promote the propaganda that brings them fame and fortune. The $cience has become a cult of devotees called $cientism. Dr. Anthony (“If you attack me, you’re attacking science”) Falsie is the Pope of this new religion that still has a lot of fanatical adherents who pay a steep tithe for their fake sense of safety with their health and freedoms.

Recently, Pope Falsie has made another infallible (until it’s not) proclamation that the adherents of $cientism, and we heretics, now have to evaluate our own risk to viruses and proceed with our lives. Just like other religions who believe that with fear, sin can be eliminated, the High Priests of $cientism believe that viruses can also be wiped out. Neither view is healthy or productive.

I listened to the science of epidemiologists, MDs, virologists, and other researchers that not only didn’t profit from their truth-spreading, but got banned from social media, ridiculed by the profiteers, and, in some cases lost their jobs or their licenses to practice medicine. If you know the way propaganda works, you know that the voices of those who lie are most often elevated and the ones that go against those lies are silenced.

9/11 and GloPan

Were four buildings (three WTC and one Pentagon) hit by airplanes on 9/11/2001?

There are many narrative discrepancies with the official story that day. In the midst of the terror, confusion and manufactured nationalism, the Bush regime was already busy with its ultimate goal of invading Iraq (for the oil), by way of Afghanistan. Of course, neither country/leader had anything to do with the awful events of that day, but that didn’t matter to the oil-garchy. One ironic difference between the GloTerr response and GloPan was that Bush told us to travel and shop until we drop. During GloPan we could buy groceries, but all of our other purchases needed to come from Amazon, or other online options. So, while Bezos was hoarding enormous wealth and building space rockets during that time period, Main Street businesses struggled and a couple hundred-thousand of them were collateral damage.

Despite how Cov-19 came to the world and no matter what you believe: Deadly pandemic, or mostly bullshit, I think most of us can recognize that the PTB used it to deliver unbelievable and unconscionable profits to a very few. As the diminutive Rahm Emanuel famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” We can argue “Made it happen,” or “Let it happen” all day for the rest of our lives, but the bottom line is, whether we speak about 9/11 or GloPan, anyone with two-eyes can see that the response was destructive to the majority, and profitable for the few.

The Effects of GloPan on Children

The initial decision to close schools came as a not unwelcome measure to my grandchildren who were happy for a break. If they, and most other students, had known that the closures would extend to over a year and that the horrors of Zoom “learning” would be in their future, I am not sure they would have been so happy.

From the beginning of this “pandemic” we were hearing that Cov-19 did not affect children the same way that it was affecting adults. However, as the closures extended, we were hearing from studies in places like Sweden that decided to take a more measured (and more successful) response to Cov-19, that even if children tested positive, they were not ill, nor were they infecting other children or adults. In fact, the children acted like a sponge, soaking up the virus without it going anywhere else. If things were done naturally here, the students could have put a brake on infection rates.

Yet, the lockdowns and school closures dragged on, month after month. It seemed to my grandchildren and other students that no one in the government, or at their schools, cared much for their mental or physical health. Suicides and attempted suicides skyrocketed in this time period to a level which was a legitimate health emergency.

Recently, a survey delivered the sad news that 44% of teenagers report being depressed, or hopeless. If this stat doesn’t damn the management of GloPan straight to the burning depths of hell, I don’t know what does (maybe the Eldercide).

Milestone activities like prom, graduations, and sports were also taken away from the unlucky ones who happened to be of that age. Playgrounds were illogically and tragically roped off and beaches were closed. Anything that could actually enhance the natural immunity of children (and others) like fresh air, sunshine, sand, salt water, sports, and socialization were taken away. Instead of prescribing more vitamin C, zinc, and vitamin D, we were told to isolate and quarantine. Here in California, to the credit of some Democratic lawmakers, they forced the lockdown fascist Newsom to reopen playgrounds making the correct claim that lower-income families and children suffered most from this misguided policy.

One thing the diseased ruling-class knows, and WE need to understand is that life is more than about avoiding germs (which is a ridiculous notion, anyway), but it’s about connections and health. The health of our children was negatively impacted by the Stasi-like measures that never made any sense from a logical or even public health standpoint.

Take two neighboring countries that took two different approaches, Sweden and Finland.

Sweden did not close schools, and Finland did. The infection rate of children 1-19 years of age were exactly the same: 0.005% The closures had zero affect on the children of either country.

The Hidden Tragedy of Eldercide

“They claimed it was for the sake of their grandparents and grandchildren, but it was of course for the sake of their grandparent’s grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandparents.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

As stated above, the justification for the flatten the curve bullshit was also put on the backs of the elders.

Andrew Cuomo of New York was one of the first governors to institute a policy of putting ill people in nursing homes, after first absolving said nursing homes from any legal liability if anything went wrong. Of course, this was for a price and an already greedy and shady businesses agreed to take in sick people to further put their elders at risk.

Cuomo is in some hot water now for hiding the nursing home deaths in his state. As of this writing over 15, 000 residents of nursing homes have allegedly died of C19, many due to Cuomo’s policies. But how awful it must be to die alone gasping for breath while no family members are allowed to visit? What? Sick people could be admitted to your family member’s room, but you can’t go visit your grandma?

Cuomo was not the only governor/health officer that took the “crisis” of GloPan to kill its elderly citizens. We identified at least a dirty-half dozen that did so: Newsolini of my state, California; and the governors of: Pennsylvania; New Jersey; Minnesota; and the liberal Republican in Massachusetts. Interestingly, DeSantis of Florida refused to do this and he is under fire for having a more measured response to GloPan.

Who or what were really “killing Meemaw?” Obviously, the policies of the lockdown regime, not your family members. There are many state governors, public health officials and random bureaucrats that need to be tried, convicted, and punished for crimes against humanity!

Alternate Realities

“Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

In about June of 2020, I began to see a very disturbing trend among my anti-capitalist/empire colleagues, friends, and comrades: they were uncritically following and promoting the establishment lockdown policies and propaganda. Not only were they mesmerized by propaganda, many of them began to attack people who had legitimate questions.

Even though I have had heaps of shit piled on me for not supporting the criminal likes of Obama, Clinton, or Biden, I was surprised by the vitriol heaped on me when I started to question the obvious lies and contradictions of the Cov-19 narrative. I thought that if someone was a friend of mine by the GloPan, they would have more trust in me. I went from being a principled critic of US Empire to being a “Qanon, proud-boy, Trumper.” It was hurtful because I thought my remaining friends were more high-quality than to become uncritical supporters of the media and government.

“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

Suddenly, I (and many like me) were ridiculed and even being wished death from the GloPan. These virtue-signaling, do-gooders were all about no one dying from Cov-19, but it was apparently fine and dandy for people to die from being incarcerated in a nursing home with ill patients, or from having other health conditions deferred or denied. For two years (before “I Stand With Ukraine” became THE thing), “Covid” deaths were the only deaths that literally counted: EVERY DAMN DAY by the ghouls in the media and governments.

Professor Christian Parenti stated it much better in his article (original link), How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy

The socialist left, which wants to use state power to discipline capital has instead accepted the negative image of its goal: state power used to bully, harass, and discipline workers. The left’s embrace of Covid hysteria makes a mockery of the left’s goals of planning, industrial policy, economic redistribution, worker empowerment, and environmental sustainability. This leftwing self-harm will have deleterious consequences for years to come. Indeed, the situation is worse than a mere political fumble. The left is now actively helping its own enemies. In its unwavering support for mandates, passports, punitive lockdowns, and censorship, the organized left has sided with technocratic elites, the one percent, and the repressive state apparatus everywhere. 

The Aftermath

Children are suffering the most of the policies of a government that have never given any shits about your health—or the well-being of its children. We can’t let our guard down now because this episode was just too profitable, even though it seems like we are getting back to “normal.” You know, that normal where gas is almost $6/gallon and you have to get a payday loan to buy groceries—FYI, despite what CNN and MSNBC say, this is not Putin’s doing, it’s the hyper-inflation from lockdowns and creating trillions in “wealth” backed up by nothing.

The future is bleak, but we are still here. Whether we are jabbed, or not; whether we bought the BS, or not; we are all in the same boat; and that boat is sinking.

The Future

There is a moment in ever dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.” HHGTTG, Douglas Adams

My dream would be for people to never forget that the establishment is always at war with the working-class: their wars and pandemics and distractions are designed to divide us so we fight each other and not them. Why would anyone figuratively sign up to do the bidding of diseased capital? Especially those who understood this before GloPan?

Big pHARMa (reaping tens of billions of dollars in profit) and the Imperialists do not need your uncritical support when that support is detrimental to life on this planet.

For Bob’s sake, DON’T PANIC!

Never again!

Analysis of ‘The Great Reset’ Must Lead to Practical Action to Defeat It – The We Are Human, We Are Free Campaign

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By Anita McKone

Millions of people worldwide are aware that their lives, and their children’s lives, are being threatened by lockdowns. vaccine mandates and loss of free speech.

And there is a growing awareness that these immediate and obvious threats are merely parts of a complex overall plan to implement a technocratic system of world governance that can be described as a neo-feudal system that seeks to increase and consolidate the power and wealth of the world’s billionaire individuals and families by destroying any possibility of autonomous individual behaviour. The intention of these psychopathic elitists is that we ‘the people’ become literal extensions of their will, through technological invasion of all aspects of our lives which will lead to the total loss of our capacity to feel, think and act for ourselves.

Their obsession with total control of all nature and life means they have no genuine awareness of what it means to be alive, and they see everything around them as something to be monetised, numbered and controlled to create a ‘perfect’ state of existence. Because they are so fundamentally insecure, and know that individuals do not willingly give up their existence to become slaves, their most powerful weapon to gain control is lying –  they try to con us into believing that giving them control is in our interests, or indeed that we are in fact in control of our own lives when we make superficial, meaningless choices, such as voting for political parties that inevitably end up doing the bidding of the financial power elite.

These elitists have become masters at co-opting all movements of self-respect, self-care and solidarity – their use of double speak means they claim to be supportive of community, fair wealth distribution, truth in the media, ecological sustainability, diversity, racial equality, women’s equality, freedom and nonviolence (for example) while working to implement an agenda that supports none of these things. And their increasing use over the past 70 years of NGOs that sound ‘friendly’ and ‘independent’, but which in fact pursue corporate, imperialist and other elitist agendas, has led to enormous numbers of ordinary ‘concerned’ people putting their money and energy into organisations and movements that dissipate their capacity to genuinely act in their own interests and the interests of life on the planet as a whole.

To take just a few examples – the environment movement has become dominated by the demand for a massive ‘green’ tech revolution that requires further rape and pillage of the peoples and natural environment of Africa and anywhere else rare minerals are found, union movements around the world have become utterly neutered and no longer act in the interests of their working members, medical ‘science’ is most likely to be a profit-making anti-scientific enterprise rather than one designed to further people’s health through use of genuine scientific methodology, and (particularly close to my heart) campaigns using nonviolent tactics have been used to simply achieve ‘regime change’ in centralised states, furthering the interests of transnational corporations, even though this was never the intention of the majority of activists involved.

While it does feel demoralising at times to realise that it is necessary to question everyone and everything, and not take things at face value, ever (!), there are a number of  (genuinely) independent researchers (including those I have referenced above) who expose the goings on of the Global Elite, historically and currently, through detailed research, logical analysis and referencing, who make the work of deciding who definitely not to trust a little easier for the average person. Although they do not always agree on every angle, and bring different areas of research to the table, they put together a picture of the real world elitist actors, from all countries (Russia and China – here, here and here –  included), that have shaped and continue to shape the world through their particular philosophies (eg. technocracy, eugenics), plans (eg. the New World Order/Great Reset/UN Agenda 30) and organisations.

These researchers’ particular concern is looking beyond the ‘conflict and alliances between nation states’ narrative as an explanation for political and economic behaviour in the world, to expose the transnational and transcultural nature of global finance and elitist philosophies, and the fundamental war being continually waged by the Global Elite on ordinary people (people who are content with a relatively small scale, localised frame of reference for exercising control in their lives, and who value the autonomy of others, and therefore do not feel that they have to be in control in all situations). These researchers expose the megalomaniacs who crave to rule the world, who deem every bit of control exercised by others to be a threat to their security, and whose conflicts with each other pale in comparison to their disregard, disrespect and disgust for those not of their psychopathic, criminal ‘superclass’.

From Analysis to Action

Gaining a thorough analysis is extremely important, and a key part of activism involves research, self-education and information sharing, but if we want to change the situation, it is equally important that we come up with self-empowering actions that take this deeper analysis into account. So, when the historical, real world analysis shows that the Elite (because they are elitist!) do not have any interest in listening to those ‘below’ them, and when we know the extent to which they have corrupted (or even invented) mainstream politics and legal structures, we need to stop pretending 1) that political ‘leaders’ will listen if we complain a bit louder and longer and 2) that we must wait for our corporate oppressors and their political/legal enablers to give us permission to act in defence of our own lives and fundamental existence.

We have mostly been trained to be ‘polite’ or ‘law-abiding’ or ‘respectful of authority’ as children and unfortunately this psychological structuring makes us vulnerable to abusers who falsely claim to be authorities with our interests at heart. And our childhood fear of punishment for ‘disobedience’, including social abandonment when we think or feel differently to others,  gets in the way of us trusting our own capacity to feel, think, make decisions and act for ourselves. Often it helps to pay conscious attention to this fear, so that it can cease to rule us unconsciously. It is unfortunately the case that many freedom activists are still putting their faith in some leader, political party or system to save them, because they feel powerless as individuals, as they were trained to feel by the many forces for domination in the world.

We become powerful when we trust that we, ourselves, will do a pretty good job of getting things right, and even if we make mistakes, we can keep learning and successfully negotiating a path forward in life without being mindlessly obedient to someone who ‘knows better’. We become powerful when we take the initiative to act. We become powerful when we act on our own conscience, and face our fear of unjust punishment. We become powerful when we know that even an experience of pain is our experience to feel, and that we exist, fundamentally, no matter how hard someone tries to con us into believing that we are ‘nothing’. And when we experience solidarity and kindness from other activists as part of a resistance campaign it feels real and powerful, and worth so much more than any friendship that relies on pretending ‘everything is okay’ as we sleepwalk into slavery.

The We Are Human, We Are Free worldwide nonviolent campaign to resist ‘The Great Reset’ is based on both an analysis of the many different components of the Reset, and an analysis of the elitist power structures that further the Reset agenda by disempowering individuals so that they cease to believe they have the responsibility or capacity to take effective action for themselves.

There are so many things that people can do to practically defend themselves, and while it takes a bit of time and commitment to identify and change elements of our lives that contribute to Elite control, it is these ‘small’ things that add up to genuine change in one’s own life and in society as a whole.  Change and standing up for the truth as you see it sometimes takes courage, and there will be times when your resistance may be ‘dramatic’, but it is vital to remember that everyday sensible, practical actions are what grounds an effective resistance movement in reality.

Following is a poster available in 15 languages that presents grassroots noncooperation and constructive actions for people to take in 7 different areas: Pharma, Tech, Media, Banks, Business, Human Social Interactions and Non Payment of Fines (+ Surveillance is thrown in as an added bonus!). The campaign is explained more fully on the We Are Human, We Are Free website.

So, as an example, I’m increasing the amount of organic food I grow, I pay in cash whenever possible, I boycott Youtube, Facebook, Google and all mainstream media (ie. I don’t pay directly for any of these media or engage in ‘free’ use that encourages advertisers or data mining), I shop at small businesses and boycott Amazon,  I stay healthy via natural health modalities rather than using pharmaceuticals, I don’t use 5G technology or ‘smart’ home gadgets, and I am willing to accept imprisonment if necessary rather than act against my conscience, trusting that the universe will take me where it wills for a productive purpose.

I do these things not to be ‘virtuous’ but because I reckon they are the most effective way that I can be myself, undermine the power of the Elite to dysfunctionally control us, and live a life worth living. I don’t judge others according to whether or not they are participating in all aspects of the campaign, particularly when I know that it takes time to reorient from ‘standard’ life to deliberate existence, and that the pressure of fear is always present and it sometimes forces us in directions we would rather not go.

I encourage everyone interested in freedom to begin freeing themselves to take the actions that directly transform their lives, and give them greater functional control without asking permission from a ‘leader’, a ‘representative’ or even ‘the majority’. It’s okay to just get on with it yourself! I believe in YOU.

Anita McKone is a nonviolent activist, researcher and philosopher and one of the founders of We Are Human, We Are Free.