Category Archives: surveillance state

Fiscal Insanity: The Government Borrows $6 Billion a Day, and We’re Stuck with the Bill

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

We’re not living the American dream.

We’re living a financial nightmare.

The U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card.

The government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are the ones being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity.

According to the number crunchers with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the government is borrowing roughly $6 billion a day.

As the Editorial Board for the Washington Post warns:

“The nation has reached a hazardous moment where what it owes, as a percentage of the total size of the economy, is the highest since World War II. If nothing changes, the United States will soon be in an uncharted scenario that weakens its national security, imperils its ability to invest in the future, unfairly burdens generations to come, and will require cuts to critical programs such as Social Security and Medicare. It is not a future anyone wants.”

Let’s talk numbers, shall we?

The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) is $31 trillion and will grow another $19 trillion by 2033. That translates to roughly $246,000 per taxpayer or $94,000 for every single person in the country.

The bulk of that debt has been amassed over the past two decades, thanks in large part to the fiscal shenanigans of four presidents, 10 sessions of Congress and two wars.

It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens).

In other words, the government is spending more than it brings in.

The U.S. ranks as the 12th most indebted nation in the world, with much of that debt owed to the Federal Reserve, large investment funds and foreign governments, namely, Japan and China.

Interest payments on the national debt are estimated to top $395 billion this year, which is significantly more than the government spends on veterans’ benefits and services, and according to Pew Research Center, more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.

According to the Committee for a Reasonable Federal Budget, the interest we’ve paid on this borrowed money is “nearly twice what the federal government will spend on transportation infrastructure, over four times as much as it will spend on K-12 education, almost four times what it will spend on housing, and over eight times what it will spend on science, space, and technology.”

In ten years, those interest payments will exceed our entire military budget.

This is financial tyranny.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods by politicians promising to pay down the national debt, jumpstart the economy, rebuild our infrastructure, secure our borders, ensure our security, and make us all healthy, wealthy and happy.

None of that has come to pass, and yet we’re still being loaded down with debt not of our own making while the government remains unrepentant, unfazed and undeterred in its wanton spending.

Indeed, the national deficit (the difference between what the government spends and the revenue it takes in) remains at more than $1.5 trillion.

If Americans managed their personal finances the way the government mismanages the nation’s finances, we’d all be in debtors’ prison by now.

Despite the government propaganda being peddled by the politicians and news media, however, the government isn’t spending our tax dollars to make our lives better.

We’re being robbed blind so the governmental elite can get richer.

In the eyes of the government, “we the people, the voters, the consumers, and the taxpayers” are little more than pocketbooks waiting to be picked.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

Consider: The government can seize your home and your car (which you’ve bought and paid for) over nonpayment of taxes. Government agents can freeze and seize your bank accounts and other valuables if they merely “suspect” wrongdoing. And the IRS insists on getting the first cut of your salary to pay for government programs over which you have no say.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but we’re being forced to pay through the nose, anyhow.

We have no real say, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

If you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your property and your money, you’re not free.

It wasn’t always this way, of course.

Early Americans went to war over the inalienable rights described by philosopher John Locke as the natural rights of life, liberty and property.

It didn’t take long, however—a hundred years, in fact—before the American government was laying claim to the citizenry’s property by levying taxes to pay for the Civil War. As the New York Times reports, “Widespread resistance led to its repeal in 1872.”

Determined to claim some of the citizenry’s wealth for its own uses, the government reinstituted the income tax in 1894. Charles Pollock challenged the tax as unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Pollock’s victory was relatively short-lived. Members of Congress—united in their determination to tax the American people’s income—worked together to adopt a constitutional amendment to overrule the Pollock decision.

On the eve of World War I, in 1913, Congress instituted a permanent income tax by way of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Revenue Act of 1913. Under the Revenue Act, individuals with income exceeding $3,000 could be taxed starting at 1% up to 7% for incomes exceeding $500,000.

It’s all gone downhill from there.

Unsurprisingly, the government has used its tax powers to advance its own imperialistic agendas and the courts have repeatedly upheld the government’s power to penalize or jail those who refused to pay their taxes.

While we’re struggling to get by, and making tough decisions about how to spend what little money actually makes it into our pockets after the federal, state and local governments take their share (this doesn’t include the stealth taxes imposed through tolls, fines and other fiscal penalties), the government continues to do whatever it likes—levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly—with little thought for the plight of its citizens.

To top it all off, all of those wars the U.S. is so eager to fight abroad are being waged with borrowed funds. As The Atlantic reports, “U.S. leaders are essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

Of course, we’re the ones who have to repay that borrowed debt.

For instance, American taxpayers have been forced to shell out more than $5.6 trillion since 9/11 for the military industrial complex’s costly, endless so-called “war on terrorism.” That translates to roughly $23,000 per taxpayer to wage wars abroad, occupy foreign countries, provide financial aid to foreign allies, and fill the pockets of defense contractors and grease the hands of corrupt foreign dignitaries.

Mind you, that’s only a portion of what the Pentagon spends on America’s military empire.

The United States also spends more on foreign aid than any other nation, with nearly $300 billion disbursed over a five-year period. More than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance, with most of the funds going to the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That price tag keeps growing, too.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Most recently, the U.S. has allocated nearly $115 billion in emergency military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine since the start of the Russia invasion.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in a 1953 speech, this is how the military industrial complex continues to get richer, while the American taxpayer is forced to pay for programs that do little to enhance our lives, ensure our happiness and well-being, or secure our freedoms.

This is no way of life.

Yet it’s not just the government’s endless wars that are bleeding us dry.

We’re also being forced to shell out money for surveillance systems to track our movements, money to further militarize our already militarized police, money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts, money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply, and on and on.

There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people. Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?

What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

What if, instead of quietly sending in our tax checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we don’t have the right to decide what happens to our hard-earned cash, then we don’t have any rights at all.

Technology and a Tyranny Worse than Prison 

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By Bert Olivier

Source: Brownstone Institute

In an outstanding piece of political-theoretical writing, titled ‘The Threat of Big Other’ (with its play on George Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’) Shoshana Zuboff, succinctly addresses the main issues of her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism – The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, Hachette, 2019), explicitly linking it to Orwell’s 1984. 

Significantly, at the time she reminded readers that Orwell’s goal with 1984 was to alert British and American societies that democracy is not immune to totalitarianism, and that “Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere” (Orwell, quoted by Zuboff, p. 16). In other words, people are utterly wrong in their belief that totalitarian control of their actions through mass surveillance (as depicted in 1984, captured in the slogan, “Big Brother is watching you”) could only issue from the state, and she does not hesitate to name the source of this threat today (p. 16):

For 19 years, private companies practicing an unprecedented economic logic that I call surveillance capitalism have hijacked the Internet and its digital technologies. Invented at Google in 2000, this new economics covertly claims private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Some data are used to improve services, but the rest are turned into computational products that predict your behaviour. These predictions are traded in a new futures market, where surveillance capitalists sell certainty to businesses determined to know what we will do next. 

By now we know that such mass surveillance does not merely have the purpose – if it ever did – of tracking and predicting consumer behaviour with the aim of maximising profits; far from it. It is generally known among those who prefer to remain informed about global developments, and who do not only rely on the legacy media for this, that in China such mass surveillance has reached the point where citizens are tracked through a myriad of cameras in public places, as well as through smartphones, to the point where their behaviour is virtually completely monitored and controlled. 

Small wonder that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (WEF) does not let an opportunity pass to praise China as the model to be emulated by other countries in this respect. It should therefore come as no surprise that investigative reporter, Whitney Webb, also alluding to Orwell’s prescience, draws attention to the striking similarities between mass surveillance that was developed in the United States (US) in 2020 and Orwell’s depiction of a dystopian society in 1984, first published in 1949. 

In an article titled “Techno-tyranny: How the US national security state is using coronavirus to fulfil an Orwellian vision,” she wrote:

Last year, a government commission called for the US to adopt an AI-driven mass surveillance system far beyond that used in any other country in order to ensure American hegemony in artificial intelligence. Now, many of the ‘obstacles’ they had cited as preventing its implementation are rapidly being removed under the guise of combating the coronavirus crisis.

Webb proceeds to discuss an American government body that focused on researching ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) could promote national security and defence needs, and which provided details concerning the “structural changes” which American society and economy would have to undertake to be able to maintain a technological advantage in relation to China. According to Webb the relevant governmental body recommended that the US follow China’s example in order to surpass the latter, specifically regarding some aspects of AI-driven technology as it pertains to mass surveillance. 

As she also points out, this stance on the desired development of surveillance technology conflicts with (incongruous) public statements by prominent American politicians and government officials, that Chinese AI-technological surveillance systems instantiate a significant threat for Americans’ way of life), which did not, however, prevent the implementation of several stages of such a surveillance operation in the US in 2020. As one knows in retrospect, such implementation was undertaken and justified as part of the American response to Covid-19. 

None of this is new, of course – by now it is well-known that Covid was the excuse to establish and implement Draconian measures of control, and that AI has been an integral part of it. The point I want to make, however, is that one should not be fooled into thinking that strategies of control will end there, nor that the Covid pseudo-vaccines were the last, or worst, of what the would-be rulers of the world can inflict upon us to exercise the total control they wish to achieve – a level of control that would be the envy of the fictional Big Brother society of Orwell’s 1984. 

For example, several critically thinking people have alerted one to the alarming fact that the widely touted Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are Trojan horses, with which the neo-fascists driving the current attempt at a ‘great reset’ of society and the world economy aim to gain complete control over people’s lives. 

At first blush the proposed switch from a fractional reserve monetary system to a digital currency system may seem reasonable, particularly in so far as it promises the (dehumanising) ‘convenience’ of a cashless society. As Naomi Wolf has pointed out, however, far more than this is at stake. In the course of a discussion of the threat of ‘vaccine passports’ to democracy, she writes (The Bodies of Others, All Seasons Press, 2022, p. 194):

There is now also a global push toward government-managed digital currencies. With a digital currency, if you’re not a ‘good citizen,’ if you pay to see a movie you shouldn’t see, if you go to a play you shouldn’t go to, which the vaccine passport will know because you have to scan it everywhere you go, then your revenue stream can be shut off or your taxes can be boosted or your bank account won’t function. There is no coming back from this.

I was asked by a reporter, ‘What if Americans don’t adopt this?’

And I said, ‘You’re already talking from a world that’s gone if this succeeds in being rolled out.’ Because if we don’t reject the vaccine passports, there won’t be any choice. There will be no such thing as refusing to adopt it. There won’t be capitalism. There won’t be free assembly. There won’t be privacy. There won’t be choice in anything that you want to do in your life.

And there will be no escape.

 In short, this was something from which there was no returning. If indeed there was a ‘hill to die on,’ this was it. 

This kind of digital currency is already in use in China, and it is being rapidly developed in countries like Britain and Australia, to mention only some.

Wolf is not the only one to warn against the decisive implications that accepting digital currencies would have for democracy. 

Financial gurus such as Catherine Austin Fitts and Melissa Cuimmei have both signalled that it is imperative not to yield to the lies, exhortations, threats and whatever other rhetorical strategies the neo-fascists might employ to force one into this digital financial prison. In an interview where she deftly summarises the current situation of being “at war” with the globalists, Cuimmei has warned that the drive towards digital passports explains the attempt to get young children ‘vaccinated’ en masse: unless they can do so on a large scale, they could not draw children into the digital control system, and the latter would therefore not work. She has also stressed that the refusal to comply is the only way to stop this digital prison from becoming a reality. We have to learn to say “No!”

Why a digital prison, and one far more effective that Orwell’s dystopian society of Oceania? The excerpt from Wolf’s book, above, already indicates that the digital ‘currencies’ that would be shown in your Central World Bank account, would not be money, which you could spend as you saw fit; in effect, they would have the status of programmable vouchers that would dictate what you can and cannot do with them. 

They constitute a prison worse than debt, paralysing as the latter may be; if you don’t play the game of spending them on what is permissible, you could literally be forced to live without food or shelter, that is, eventually to die. Simultaneously, the digital passports of which these currencies would be a part, represent a surveillance system that would record everything you do and wherever you go. Which means that a social credit system of the kind that functions in China, and has been explored in the dystopian television series, Black Mirror, would be built into it, which could make or break you.  

In her The Solari Report, Austin Fitts, for her part, elaborates on what one can do to “stop CBDCs,” which includes the use of cash, as far as possible, limiting one’s dependence on digital transaction options in favour of analog, and using good local banks instead of the banking behemoths, in the process decentralising financial power, which is further strengthened by supporting small local businesses instead of large corporations. 

One should be under no illusion that this will prove to be easy, however. As history has taught us, when dictatorial powers attempt to gain power over people’s lives, resistance on the part of the latter is usually met with force, or ways of neutralising resistance.

As Lena Petrova reports, this was recently demonstrated in Nigeria, which was one of the first countries in the world (Ukraine being another), to introduce CBDCs, and where there was initially a very tepid response from the population, where most people prefer using cash (partly because many cannot afford smartphones). 

Not to be outdone, the Nigerian government resorted to dubious shenanigans, such as printing less money and asking people to hand in their ‘old’ banknotes for ‘new’ ones, which have not materialised. The result? People are starving because they lack cash to buy food, and they do not have, or do not want, CBDCs, partly because they lack smartphones and partly because they resist these digital currencies. 

It is difficult to tell whether Nigerians’ doubts about CBDCs is rooted in their awareness that, once embraced, the digital passport of which these currencies will comprise a part, would allow the government complete surveillance and control of the populace. Time will tell whether Nigerians will accept this Orwellian nightmare lying down.

Which brings me to the significant philosophical point underpinning any argument about resisting the drive for dictatorial power through mass surveillance. As every enlightened person should know, there are different kinds of power. One such variety of power is encapsulated in Immanuel Kant’s famous motto for enlightenment, formulated in his famous 18th-century essay, “What is Enlightenment?” The motto reads: “Sapere aude!” and translates as “Have the courage to think for yourself,” or “Dare to think!” 

This motto may be said to correspond with what contributors to the activities of Brownstone Institute engage in. Hence, the emphasis on critical intellectual engagement is indispensable. But is it sufficient? I would argue that, while speech act theory has demonstrated, accurately – emphasising the pragmatic aspect of language – that speaking (and one could add writing) is already ‘doing something,’ there is another sense of ‘doing.’ 

This is its meaning of acting in the sense one encounters in discourse theory – which demonstrates the interwovenness of speaking (or writing) and acting through the imbrication of language with power relations. What this implies is that language use is intertwined with actions that find their correlate(s) in speaking and writing. This is compatible with Hannah Arendt’s conviction, that of labour, work and action (the components of the vita activa), action – the verbal engagement with others, broadly for political purposes, is the highest embodiment of human activity.

Philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have shed important light on the question of the connection between Kant’s “Sapere aude!” and action. In the third volume of their magisterial trilogy, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2009; the other two volumes being Empire and Multitude), they argue that although Kant’s “major voice” shows that he was indeed an Enlightenment philosopher of the transcendental method, who uncovered the conditions of possibility of certain knowledge of the law-governed phenomenal world, but by implication also of a practical life of dutiful social and political responsibility, there is also a seldom-noticed “minor voice” in Kant’s work. 

This points, according to them, towards an alternative to the modern power complex that Kant’s “major voice” affirms, and it is encountered precisely in his motto, articulated in the short essay on enlightenment referred to above. They claim further that the German thinker developed his motto in an ambiguous manner – on the one hand “Dare to think” does not undermine his encouragement, that citizens carry out their various tasks obediently and pay their taxes to the sovereign. Needless to stress, such an approach amounts to the strengthening of the social and political status quo. But on the other hand, they argue that Kant himself creates the aperture for reading this enlightenment exhortation (p. 17): 

[…] against the grain: ‘dare to know’ really means at the same time also ‘know how to dare’. This simple inversion indicates the audacity and courage required, along with the risks involved, in thinking, speaking, and acting autonomously. This is the minor Kant, the bold, daring Kant, which is often hidden, subterranean, buried in his texts, but from time to time breaks out with a ferocious, volcanic, disruptive power. Here reason is no longer the foundation of duty that supports established social authority but rather a disobedient, rebellious force that breaks through the fixity of the present and discovers the new. Why, after all, should we dare to think and speak for ourselves if these capacities are only to be silenced immediately by a muzzle of obedience? 

One cannot fault Hardt and Negri here; notice, above, that they include ‘acting’ among those things for which one requires the courage to ‘dare.’ As I have previously pointed out in a discussion of critical theory and their interpretation of Kant on the issue of acting, towards the conclusion of his essay, Kant uncovers the radical implications of his argument: if the ruler does not submit himself (or herself) to the very same rational rules that govern the citizens’ actions, there is no obligation on the part of the latter to obey such a monarch any longer. 

In other words, rebellion is justified when authorities themselves do not act reasonably (which includes the tenets of ethical rationality), but, by implication, unjustifiably, if not aggressively, towards citizens. 

There is a lesson in this as far as the ineluctable need for action is concerned when rational argument with would-be oppressors gets one nowhere. This is especially the case when it becomes obvious that these oppressors are not remotely interested in a reasonable exchange of ideas, but summarily resort to the current unreasonable incarnation of technical rationality, namely AI-controlled mass surveillance, with the purpose of subjugating entire populations. 

Such action might take the form of refusing ‘vaccinations’ and rejecting CBDCs, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that one will have to combine critical thinking with action in the face of merciless strategies of subjugation on the part of the unscrupulous globalists.

The Plight of a Woman Who Questioned Vaccine Safety in Malaysia

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By Simay B

Source: TrialSite News

Since 2021, a legal tussle has persisted between a single mother, Liyana Razali, and the Malaysian government. This is due to her statements concerning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines for 12-17 year-olds. The government outlawed Razali’s statement for fear that the public would develop negative perceptions of the vaccine, which could jeopardize the vaccination program. She was allegedly subjected to police harassment, media defamation, and a 30-day detention at Ulu Kinta Mental Hospital. TrialSite is following the controversial issue of vaccinating children against COVID-19, as well as the medical community’s perspective on this topic.

Razali made her speech on September 28, 2021, in front of the Ministry of Higher Education. She said, “Here I would like, on behalf of today’s parents who are present at the Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia … to express our solidarity with parents.” She went on to name three families whose children were experiencing side effects following COVID-19 vaccinations, or had passed away shortly after receiving the vaccines. She also referred to three other children who had died after being vaccinated: two students at Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Tasik Damai in Ipoh, and one teenager in Lahad Datu, Sabah.

As well as expressing solidarity, she called on listeners to report side effects through the proper channels. “Report it to the authorities,” she said. “Do not just post them on social media. Come forward, and send your information, and we will try to fight for your rights.”

Police Intervention and Possible Misinterpretation of Razali’s Speech in Mainstream Media

Five days later (October 3), Razali was called to the police station for questioning. They asked her, without having official paperwork, to appear at a magistrates court. When she was asked to appear at Ipoh Magistrates Court on November 30, 2021, they cancelled the court appointment.

Meanwhile, the news of the police looking for Razali was published in mainstream media, including her photograph and home address. The reports stated that she had made “false COVID vaccine claims,” and that her allegations that students had died after receiving the vaccine were untrue.

The police returned on May 20, 2022, with an arrest warrant from Putrajaya Magistrates Court. They took Razali to court, where she refused to enter a plea for lack of a verified criminal complaint against her. The deputy public prosecutor (DPP) proposed a 30-day observation in Ulu Kinta Mental Hospital, to which the magistrate agreed.

Lawyers’ attempts to get Razali out were rejected. The DPP took a long time in building a case against her, and the trial began on November 22, 2022.

Exception in Penal Code 505

Razali has been charged under Penal code 505 (b), which states, “Whoever makes, publishes, or circulates any statement, rumor, or report with intent to cause, or which is likely to cause, fear or alarm to the public, or to any section of the public whereby any person may be induced to commit an offense against the State or against the public tranquility.” This implies that the government is claiming that her words were intended to cause public distress, which might incite the public to rally against the state.

Razali’s lawyers petitioned the DPP to apply the exception to penal code 505 (b), which reads, “It does not amount to an offense within the meaning of this section, when the person making, publishing, or circulating any such statement, rumor, or report has reasonable grounds for believing that such statement, rumor, or report is true and makes, publishes or circulates it without any such intent as aforesaid.”

Based on this exception, if Razali had reasonable grounds to believe her statement was true at the time she said it, her actions were not against the law. Her representation was rejected without reason, and the case was motioned to continue.

The Appearance of Seven Witnesses in Razali’s Case

After Razali’s speech, over a period of almost one year, the DPP arranged for a range of people to testify against her. Seven of them have since appeared in court to testify and under cross-examination they have admitted that their previous statements had been influenced rather than being their own stand.

Two Ministry of Health (MOH) workers participating in the vaccine rollout claimed that they had been ordered to write their reports. Two MOH doctors and Ipoh school’s headmaster said that they had filed reports with the police out of fear of jeopardizing the vaccination program. Fathers of the two deceased Ipoh children had been summoned and instructed to testify that their children had died before vaccination.

The witnesses helped to shed some light on Razali’s case and how the public had perceived her speech, and the failure to stand their ground for fear of the government.

Doctors’ Testimonies

The doctors who have so far testified have claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine’s side effects were not severe and included allergies, Bell’s palsy, and myocarditis.

At least one witness for the government, a medical doctor, also said that when seeking consent from parents or guardians, there was no need to spend time on obtaining fully informed consent because it was all too complex for most people to understand, so there was no point wasting time like this. These witnesses also stated, however, that once consent had been given, patients must be responsible for any negative effects.

Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective at preventing severe illness, hospitalization, or death.

Several studies have further demonstrated the effectiveness of these vaccines. One such study is a Hong Kong population-based observational study conducted in 2022. Results from this study revealed that two doses of the CoronaVac or BNT162b2 vaccines offered protection against severe illness or death within 28 days of a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.

Another study previously reported by TrialSite on COVID-19 vaccines for teens 12-17 years old has been carried out and continues in various regions globally. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines are indicated by the vaccine companies to be safe and effective at preventing severe infections for this age bracket.

Furthermore, in 2021, the Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS) resolved that the benefits of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines far outweighed their risks.

The Risk of COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects

There is data from around the world showing safety warning signals following the COVID-19 vaccine (including severe disability and death). However, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) there are only a few cases of very rare adverse severe events, namely myocarditis and pericarditis, that have been reported so far. These conditions were mainly observed in younger men aged 16-24 years and occurred after the second dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. Generally, the conditions appeared within a few days after vaccination. The WHO indicates that these injuries were mild and responsive to conservative treatment.

The Malaysian Ministry of Health (KKM) informed the media in January 2023 that over 94% of reported vaccine reactions to Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty had been mild, but that “a small number” amounting to 1,162 serious cases of effects such as anaphylaxis, acute facial paralysis, myocarditis, and intravenous thrombosis had been recorded. This followed more than one year of claims by KKM that there had been no serious post-vaccine injuries reported in Malaysia.

These figures are similar to those reported by the CDC for teen vaccine reactions, which found 91.6% of cases were nonserious, and only 8.4% were severe. Common side effects after vaccination include headaches, muscle or joint soreness, fever, nausea, and vomiting. The injected area may redden, swell, itch, or have some pain. Most people recover quickly from the side effects, including the rare myocarditis and pericarditis cases reported after vaccination, which are claimed to be not as severe as those caused by COVID-19 infection.

These claims have been contested by world-leading cardiologists, such as Dr. Peter McCullough in the U.S. and Dr. Aseem Malhotra from the UK, who cite research showing that identified myocarditis and pericarditis from the vaccines is more severe than COVID-19-induced cardiac effects. The CDC continues to investigate the long-term effects of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination.

In addition, results from randomized control trial data from Pfizer, released under a court order in the U.S., demonstrated that over 1228 deaths occurred after the administration of the Pfizer vaccine. Additionally, 42,086 individuals reported 158,893 adverse events within a 3-month period.

A study done in Thailand in mid-2022 showed that 3.5% of boys showed evidence of pericarditis or myocarditis after the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

Research from other countries, such as that done on 12th-grade South Korean students, has shown a low rate of serious adverse events and no vaccine-related deaths. Other studies that targeted Israeli adolescents 16-19 years old put the risk of myocarditis at 1.34 per 100,000 within twenty days after the first dose and 15.07 per 100,000 after the second dose. In the U.S., the rates were 12 cases per million people (12-39 years) who received the second dose of the mRNA vaccine.

However, in March 2023, the Israeli Ministry of Health covertly released a new study showing large numbers of deaths within 60 days of receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

In December 2021, health officials in Vietnam had to suspend the use of the Pfizer vaccine after the hospitalization of over 120 children following a group vaccination at school. Additionally, three children died from an overreaction to the vaccine in Bac Giang, a province near Hanoi, and Binh Phuoc, a province in the south.

The Case Continues

Despite the Malaysian Ministry of Health’s firm stance that the COVID-19 vaccines are perfectly safe, Razali is not the only person flagging potential adverse reactions. In the same week that Razali delivered her speech, a vaccination program in Malaysia’s Kajang prison resulted in 18 serious adverse events and two deaths in under 2,500 people. The prison director’s letter to the regulatory department and health office went viral after being leaked.

The health minister claimed that there were no deaths in Malaysia linked to the COVID-19 vaccine while confirming that 535 deaths reported as adverse events “were not directly linked to the vaccines” according to postmortem results. However, an autopsy of 40 people who died within two weeks of vaccination conducted at the University of Heidelberg in Germany showed that specific techniques and stains are required to detect the effect of the vaccine at a cellular level on postmortem. The head of the autopsy project, Peter Schirmacher, concluded that between 30 to 40% of the deaths his team examined had resulted from the vaccination, and might have been missed by regular postmortem protocols.

As with anyone accused of breaking the law, Razali deserves a fair hearing before a court of law to establish whether or not her public statements were in any way a violation of Penal code paragraph 505 (b), especially given the exception that is an integral part of that clause.

As research on COVID-19 vaccine administration to teens between 12-17 years continues, organizations urge parents or guardians to report serious cases for further assessment.

A Fed-Issued Digital Currency: The Mark of the Beast

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A Fed-issued digital currency would be no more in our interests than the current dollar system.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: Jeremy R. Hammond Blog

China’s ‘Social Credit’ System

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” — Revelation 13:16-17

In China, as you have likely heard, the government has been experimenting with a “social credit” system aimed at giving politicians even greater control over people’s behavior. China was, of course, also the country whose authoritarian “lockdown” response to the outbreak of SARS‑CoV‑2—the coronavirus that causes COVID‑19 and was likely engineered in a Chinese lab with US government funding—was pointed to as a model for the rest of the world to follow by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO has since been aiming to acquire even more centralized global authority to issue diktats in the event of another pandemic, such as implementation of “lockdown” measures that might include travel restrictions, prevention of employment, and vaccine mandates or passport systems.

As of December 2020, around the time of the initial outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, China, social credit laws and regulations had been implemented in an estimated 80 percent of the country.

Naturally, the system is characterized by its proponents as a benevolent means to reward socially responsible people while denying privileges to unsavory and untrustworthy characters and businesses. But you and I both recognize the grave threat posed by politicians wielding this type of power and control over the population. It is an obvious threat to privacy and liberty.

The people of China regrettably but unsurprisingly appear to have welcomed this system, although the perception of public approval might be largely an artifact of people being afraid to publicly criticize the system lest their names be placed on one of the government’s “blacklists”.

As with any law or government policy, we should view it through the lens of how such power could be used as opposed to how politicians say they intend to use it.

A glimpse of how it could be used is the city of Rongcheng’s prohibition on “spreading harmful information”, violations of which could result in subtraction of points off residents’ social credit scores.

Such prohibitions must be seen in light of how governments are in the habit of interpreting “harmful information” as any information that does not align with the adopted political agenda. In the US during the COVID‑19 pandemic, there has been no greater purveyor of misinformation than the US government itself.

According to MIT Technology Review, the central government actually pressed the city to scale back the threat to individual liberty posed by its social credit system, such as enabling residents to opt-out. “The Chinese government did emphasize that all social-credit-related punishment has to adhere to existing laws,” the Review states, “but laws themselves can be unjust in the first place.”

The takeaway from that article is that “the social credit system does not (yet) exemplify abuse of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence”. But that’s no reason for the citizenry to consent to the implementation of systems that are conducive to extreme governmental abuses of authority.

A July 2019 article in Wired magazine related the example of Liu Hu, a journalist who was arrested, fined, and blacklisted, reportedly for writing about censorship and government corruption. He found himself on a “List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People’s Court as ‘not qualified’ to buy a plane ticket, and banned from travelling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan.”

A more recent Newsweek article appropriately describes the system this way:

On an individual level, the government seeks to instill in the public an increased sense of morality to discourage everything from fraud and plagiarism to counterfeit goods and petty crime. But a system to make individual actions more transparent would necessitate the creation of tools to monitor all aspects of life. Social control, if not the original aim, could be an inevitable consequence, researchers say.

. . . While China’s vision of the system has yet to emerge as a dystopian tool for control driven by big data, there are real concerns about the way personal information is to be collected and processed to create social credit profiles, which could have lasting implications for individuals.

An untrustworthy government has no place dictating to its citizens what types of behaviors should be regarded as creating or breaking trust.

Human Rights Watch provides the example of lawyer Li Xioaolin, who was denied a plane ticket home while away on a work trip inside China because his name was on a blacklist of “untrustworthy” people in relation to a years-old court-related issue that he thought he had resolved.

According to Human Rights Watch, journalist Liu Hu was punished not for criticizing the government and exposing corruption but for having offered an apology that the government deemed “insincere” after losing a defamation case for publishing an article alleging that someone was an extortionist. Still, the organization notes, in both cases, “penalties were exacted in wildly arbitrary and unaccountable manners.” Additionally, “the courts failed to notify them, leaving them no chance to contest their treatment.”

According to the human rights organization, between 2013 and 2017, the Chinese government imposed more than seven million punishments to people for failing to carry out local court orders, which punishments have included publicly naming and shaming individuals and barring them from flights and trains.

After experiencing the totalitarianism of the disastrously harmful lockdown regimes and the accompanying efforts to coerce the population into accepting COVID‑19 vaccines and to censor truths countering the government’s incessant lies (I was permanently banned from LinkedIn, for example, for accurately reporting that the CDC’s claim that COVID‑19 vaccines provide greater protection against SARS‑CoV‑2 infection than natural immunity was a bald-faced lie), it should not be too difficult to imagine such a system being dangerously used to silence critics and punish dissenters so that whatever ruling regime can continue its crimes against humanity unobstructed.

The idea of a “social credit” score, of course, is inherently tied to the idea of central banking. In the US, the central bank is the Federal Reserve, a government-legislated private monopoly over the supply of currency. Increasingly, there is talk of a central bank digital currency, heightening concerns about the government having the means to exercise power over us and control our behavior.

“Project Hamilton”

As an example of how the Fed is exploring the idea of adopting a digital currency, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has teamed up with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston under the appropriately named “Project Hamilton”.

Alexander Hamilton, of course, was instrumental in the adoption of central banking by the US government, famously at odds with Thomas Jefferson, who rightly opposed the idea and warned about the dangers inherent in such an institution. Jefferson appeared to hold the view that the means of exchange and interest rates ought to be determined by the market as opposed to being determined by fiat by a roomful of central planners.

Jefferson accurately foresaw how the government would use the central bank to pay for its spending as an alternative to raising taxes directly, and how the debt that would consequently be incurred by this uncontrolled spending would ultimately be borne by future generations.

In a letter to John Wayles Eppes in 1813, for example, Jefferson wrote:

I have said that the taxes should be continued by annual or biennial re-enactments; because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse, is a salutary restraint, from which an honest government ought not to wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free. No tax should ever be yielded for longer than that of the Congress granting it, except when pledged for the reimbursement of a loan.

. . . Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs. . . . Treasury bills, bottomed on taxes, bearing, or not bearing interest, as may be found necessary, thrown into circulation, will take the place of so much gold & silver, which last, when crouded, will find an efflux into other countries, and thus keep the quantum of medium at its salutary level.

In a letter to John Taylor in 1816, Jefferson described central banking as rightly “reprobated” and as “a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction”. He wrote, “And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; & that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale”.

Jefferson viewed the federal government as having no authority to institute a central banking system. As he wrote in 1791, “The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States, by the Constitution.”

The stated aim of Project Hamilton “is to investigate the technical feasibility of a general purpose central bank digital currency (CBDC) that could be used by an economy the size of the United States and to gain a hands-on understanding of a CBDC’s technical challenges, opportunities, risks, and tradeoffs.”

The project is part of MIT’s “Digital Currency Initiative”, which is aimed at bringing minds together “to conduct the research necessary to support the development of digital currency and blockchain technology.”

The aim of the collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has been “to develop a hypothetical CBDC.” MIT describes the possibility of a “central-bank-issued digital currency” as “a unique opportunity to address challenges in our existing payments system and design an economy that is more resilient, participatory, and open.”

We can reasonably assume that Thomas Jefferson, were he alive today, would disagree and view the idea as anathema to both a sound economy and a free society.

Noting that it was Alexander Hamilton “who laid the foundation for a U.S. central bank”, a project white paper published in February 2022 concluded that it is “critical” for research to continue for “achieving goals for a CBDC.” That is, it is not a question of whether the Fed should adopt a digital currency but how and when.

Biden’s Executive Order and Project Lithium

In January 2022, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors similarly published a paper titled “Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation”, the aim of which was “to foster a broad and transparent public dialogue about CBDCs in general, and about the potential benefits and risks of a U.S. CBDC.”

Then in March 2022 President Joe Biden signed an “Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets”, which declares the supposed need for the US government to “regulate” digital assets, including for the purpose of preventing circumvention of its sanctions regimes—in which context we might remember the US government’s criminal sanctions regime against Iraq in the 1990s and how Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted that the “price” of half-a-million dead Iraqi children was “worth it”.

The executive order, number 14067, describes how the government has an interest in maintaining the US dollar’s “central role” in “the global financial system”, which refers to the use of the dollar as a reserve currency. To that end, the order states, the Biden administration “places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC.”

The White House is intent on determining what actions would be required to launch such a currency “if doing so is deemed to be in the national interest”. Of course, as the example of half a million excess childhood deaths in Iraq due to sanctions once again illustrates, determining just what is in the “national interest” is not a task that government policymakers seem particularly good at.

The lockdown measures, which utterly failed to project those at highest risk from COVID-19 while causing devastating harms globally, are another useful example of the ineptitude of policymakers when it comes to making decision that are in our best interests.

Following Biden’s executive order, in April 2022, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced “the development of the first prototype to explore how a CBDC might operate”. This endeavor was given the name “Project Lithium”, on which the DTCC is collaborating with The Digital Dollar Project (DDP), an organization that advocates US leadership “in advancing a CBDC” and encourages the executive branch of government “to support appropriate legislation” to authorize further research and development of such a currency.

The DDP published a white paper in May 2020 concluding that the US government “should, and must, take a leadership role in this new wave of digital innovation” and preserve the dollar’s role as “the world’s primary reserve currency” by working toward “the launch of a tokenized digital dollar”.

End the Fed!

Naturally, advocates of a central bank digital currency describe the aims of such a development as benign, just as the Federal Reserve system was originally established on the pretext that having a more centrally controlled economy would benefit all.

In truth, the Federal Reserve system serves the interests of the financially and political elite at the expense of the rest of us. Central banking itself, whatever the form of currency issued, is harmful to the economy because central banks essentially exist to effect a transfer of wealth upward. Schools of economic thought like Keynesianism and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which I like to refer to as “Keynesianism 2.0”, exist to justify the existence of central banks.

The Fed, a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply, enables the government to spend on whatever, including endless wars (euphemistically called “defense” spending), but the means of paying for it all, the creation of “money” out of thin air, results in upward wealth transfer. The elite classes who receive the newly created dollars first are able to spend it for purchasing assets prior to the resulting devaluation that manifests in the form of higher prices for goods and services.

Monetary inflation robs us of our purchasing power and so serves as a hidden tax. It also causes widespread malinvestment and major economic distortions like the housing bubble that burst in 2007 and precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, not to mention the current housing bubble and general asset inflation. (For more on that, see my book Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis.)

We are meant to believe we need centralized control over the currency supply for economic growth, but central banks instead serve to impede real economic growth in favor of enabling the government’s endlessly wasteful and harmful spending.

The chief appeal of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is that it is a decentralized medium of exchange that serves to compete with central-bank-issued currency and potentially enables people to opt-out of the exploitative dollar system. The idea of a “legal tender” digital currency in the hands of the bankers and politicians is anathema to the whole concept of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

One might argue that the replacement of print dollars with a centrally controlled cryptocurrency is just a natural evolution from the current system, in which exchange of actual cash is becoming less frequent and most transactions occur digitally anyway. We should keep up with the times and adapt to advancements in technology, the argument goes.

However, this overlooks the more fundamental issue that we should not have central banks in the first place. The way I see it, the movement towards replacing the US dollar with a Fed-issued cryptocurrency is far from benign. We have seen in the past few years just how far government policymakers are willing to go to exercise authoritarian control over us.

To illustrate, remember how businesses deemed “non-essential” were shut down by clueless bureaucrats under threat of punishment, and how coercive measures including mandates and travel restrictions were used to get people to accept COVID‑19 vaccinations?

With the World Economic Forum (WEF) having announced its “Great Reset” agenda, which ties directly into the global mass vaccination agenda, the advocates of greater centralized control over society do not deserve the benefit of our doubt about their intentions. It would be naïve to think that if the authoritarians in government had even greater means to penalize citizens for disobedience to the regime that they would not attempt to use it. It is safer to assume that if they can utilize a digital currency to control our behavior, they will.

It seems therefore imperative to oppose a centralized digital currency, but we also need to go further than that and oppose the existence of the Federal Reserve altogether. Whatever the form of currency, centralized economic planning is an abomination and anathema to the principle of a free market.

“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” — Revelation 18:4

It Is The Mass Media’s Job To Help Suppress Anti-War Movements

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In a new article titled “European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates,” The Grayzone’s Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal document the many large demonstrations that have been occurring in France, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and elsewhere opposing the western empire’s brinkmanship with Russia and proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Pabst and Blumenthal conclude their report with a denouncement of the way the western media have either been ignoring or sneering at these protests while actively cheerleading smaller demonstrations in support of arming Ukraine.

“When Western media has not ignored Europe’s antiwar protest wave altogether, its coverage has alternated between dismissive and contemptuous,” they write. “German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle sneeringly characterized the February 25 demonstration in Berlin as ‘naive’ while providing glowing coverage to smaller shows of support for the war by the Ukrainian diaspora. The New York Times, for its part, mentioned the European protests in just a single generic line buried in an article on minuscule anti-Putin protests held by Russian emigres.”

This bias is of course blatantly propagandistic, which won’t surprise anyone who understands that the mainstream western media exist first and foremost to administer propaganda on behalf of the US-centralized empire. And chief among their propaganda duties is to suppress the emergence of a genuine peace movement.

As we’ve discussed previously, it has never in human history been more urgent to have a massive, forceful protest movement in opposition to the empire’s rapidly accelerating trajectory toward a global conflict against Russia and China. Other peace movements have arisen in the past in response to horrific wars which would go on to claim millions of lives, but a world war in the Atomic Age could easily wind up killing billions, and must never be allowed to happen.

And yet the public is not treating this unparalleled threat with the urgency it deserves. A few protests here and there is great, but it’s not nearly enough. And the reason the people have not answered the call is because the mass media have been successfully propagandizing them into accepting the continuous escalations toward world war that we’ve been seeing.

People aren’t going to protest what their government is doing if they believe that what their government is doing is appropriate, and the only reason so many people believe what their government is doing with regard to Russia and China is appropriate is because they have been propagandized into thinking so.

The mass media are not telling the public about the many well documented western provocations which led to the war in Ukraine and sabotaged peace at every turn; they’re just telling everyone that Putin invaded because he’s an evil Hitler sequel who loves killing and hates freedom. The mass media are not telling the public about the way the US empire has been encircling China with war machinery in ways it would never permit itself to be encircled while deliberately staging incendiary provocations in Taiwan; they’re just telling everyone that China is run by evil warmongering tyrants. The mass media are not reminding the public that after the fall of the Soviet Union the US empire espoused a doctrine asserting that the rise of any foreign superpower must be prevented at all cost; they’re letting that agenda fade into the memory hole.

Because people believe Russia and China are the sole aggressors and the US and its allies are only responding defensively to those unprovoked aggressions, they don’t see the need for a mass protest movement against their own governments. If you tell the average coastal American liberal that you’re holding a protest about the war in Ukraine, they’re going to assume you mean you’re protesting against Putin, and they’ll look at you strangely if you tell them you’re actually protesting your own government’s aggressions.

The narrative that Russia and China are acting with unprovoked aggression actually prevents peace, because if your government isn’t doing anything to make things worse, then there’s nothing it can change about its own behavior to make things better. But of course there is a massive, massive amount that the western power alliance can change about its own behavior with regard to Russia and China that would greatly improve matters. Instead of working to subordinate the entire planet to the will of Washington and its drivers, they can work toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.

We’re not going to get de-escalation, diplomacy and detente unless the people use the power of their numbers to demand those things, and the people are not going to use the power of their numbers to demand those things as long as they are successfully propagandized not to. This means propaganda is the ultimate problem that needs to be addressed. Ordinary people can only address it by waking the public up to the fact that the political/media class are lying to them about what’s happening with Russia and China, using whatever means we have access to.

So that’s what we need to do. We need to fight the imperial disinformation campaign using information. Tell people the truth using every medium available to us to sow distrust in the imperial propaganda machine, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you.

Our rulers are always babbling about how they’re fighting an “information war” against enemy nations, but in reality they’re fighting an information war against normal westerners like us. So we must fight back. We need to cripple public trust in the propaganda machine and begin awakening one another from our propaganda-induced sleep, so that we can begin organizing against the horrific end they are driving us toward.

A Nanny State Idiocracy: When the Government Thinks It Knows Best

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher

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

For instance, an animal welfare bill introduced in the Florida state legislature would ban the sale of rabbits in March and April, prohibit cat owners from declawing their pets, make it illegal for dogs to stick their heads out of car windows, force owners to place dogs in a harness or in a pet seatbelt when traveling in a car, and require police to create a public list of convicted animal abusers.

A Massachusetts law prohibits drivers from letting their cars idle for more than five minutes on penalty of a $100 fine ($500 for repeat offenders), even in the winter. You can also be fined $20 or a month in jail for scaring pigeons.

This overbearing Nanny State despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

The government’s bureaucratic attempts at muscle-flexing by way of overregulation and overcriminalization have reached such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.

Consider, for example, that businesses in California were ordered to designate an area of the children’s toy aisle “gender-neutral” or face a fine, whether or not the toys sold are traditionally marketed to girls or boys such as Barbies and Hot Wheels. California schools are prohibited from allowing students to access websites, novels or religious works that reflect negatively on gays. And while Californians are free to have sex with whomever they choose (because that’s none of the government’s business), removing a condom during sex without consent could make you liable for general, special and punitive damages.

It’s getting worse.

Almost every aspect of American life today—especially if it is work-related—is subject to this kind of heightened scrutiny and ham-fisted control, whether you’re talking about aspiring “bakers, braiders, casket makers, florists, veterinary masseuses, tour guides, taxi drivers, eyebrow threaders, teeth whiteners, and more.”

For instance, whereas 70 years ago, one out of every 20 U.S. jobs required a state license, today, almost 1 in 3 American occupations requires a license.

The problem of overregulation has become so bad that, as one analyst notes, “getting a license to style hair in Washington takes more instructional time than becoming an emergency medical technician or a firefighter.”

This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.

As policy analyst Michael Van Beek warns, the problem with overcriminalization is that there are so many laws at the federal, state and local levels—that we can’t possibly know them all.

“It’s also impossible to enforce all these laws. Instead, law enforcement officials must choose which ones are important and which are not. The result is that they pick the laws Americans really must follow, because they’re the ones deciding which laws really matter,” concludes Van Beek. “Federal, state and local regulations — rules created by unelected government bureaucrats — carry the same force of law and can turn you into a criminal if you violate any one of them… if we violate these rules, we could be prosecuted as criminals. No matter how antiquated or ridiculous, they still carry the full force of the law. By letting so many of these sit around, just waiting to be used against us, we increase the power of law enforcement, which has lots of options to charge people with legal and regulatory violations.”

This is the police state’s superpower: it has been vested with the authority to make our lives a bureaucratic hell.

That explains how a fisherman can be saddled with 20 years’ jail time for throwing fish that were too small back into the water. Or why police arrested a 90-year-old man for violating an ordinance that prohibits feeding the homeless in public unless portable toilets are also made available.

The laws can get downright silly. For instance, you could also find yourself passing time in a Florida slammer for such inane activities as singing in a public place while wearing a swimsuit, breaking more than three dishes per day, farting in a public place after 6 pm on a Thursday, and skateboarding without a license.

However, the consequences are all too serious for those whose lives become grist for the police state’s mill. A few years back, police raided barber shops in minority communities, resulting in barbers being handcuffed in front of customers, and their shops searched without warrants. All of this was purportedly done in an effort to make sure that the barbers’ licensing paperwork was up to snuff.

In this way, America has gone from being a beacon of freedom to a locked down nation. And “we the people,” sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, have allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.

We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

We increasingly find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes. 

The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; community-wide lockdowns and health mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.

In exchange for the promise of an end to global pandemics, lower taxes, lower crime rates, safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to lockdowns, militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, overcriminalization, overregulation and government corruption.

In the end, such bargains always turn sour.

We relied on the government to help us safely navigate national emergencies (terrorism, natural disasters, global pandemics, etc.) only to find ourselves forced to relinquish our freedoms on the altar of national security, yet we’re no safer (or healthier) than before.

We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.

We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.

A special report by CNBC breaks down the national numbers:

One out of 100 American adults is behind bars — while a stunning one out of 32 is on probation, parole or in prison. This reliance on mass incarceration has created a thriving prison economy. The states and the federal government spend about $74 billion a year on corrections, and nearly 800,000 people work in the industry.

We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”

According to the Washington Post, these funds have been used to buy guns, armored cars, electronic surveillance gear, “luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles.” Police seminars advise officers to use their “department wish list when deciding which assets to seize” and, in particular, go after flat screen TVs, cash and nice cars.

In Florida, where police are no strangers to asset forfeiture, Florida police have been carrying out “reverse” sting operations, where they pose as drug dealers to lure buyers with promises of cheap cocaine, then bust them, and seize their cash and cars. Over the course of a year, police in one small Florida town seized close to $6 million using these entrapment schemes.

We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras—used in 24 states and Washington, DC—are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash.

One small Florida town, population 8,000, generates a million dollars a year in fines from these cameras. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in heft fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is what happens when the American people get duped, deceived, double-crossed, cheated, lied to, swindled and conned into believing that the government and its army of bureaucrats—the people we appointed to safeguard our freedoms—actually have our best interests at heart.

The problem with these devil’s bargains is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.

We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all: the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.”

Was the Pentagon and CIA Behind the COVID-19 Pandemic?

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By Jeremy Kuzmarov

Souce: Covert Action

Bioterrorism expert and whistleblower alleges that CIA secretly collaborated in supporting unethical gain of function research that resulted in the manufacture of the COVID-19 virus, which was then leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Dr. Andrew G. Huff is an Iraq War veteran and infectious disease epidemiologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota who, in September 2014, went to work for EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO that received over $118 million in grants from federal agencies whose mission was to protect the public from infectious diseases.

In a new book, The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History (New York: Skyhorse Press, 2022), Huff claims that his boss at EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Peter Daszak, was working with the CIA and that beginning in 2012, he oversaw the development of the biological agent known as SARS-CoV-2 that results in the disease COVID-19.

The development occurred through gain-of-function research funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).[1]

According to Huff, Dr. Daszak and Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until his retirement in December 2022, along with other colleagues, “behaved like a pseudoscience mafia entrenched in the halls of the medical military industrial complex.”[2]

They not only engineered the COVID-19 pandemic but “criminally conspired to smear” anyone who did not support their narrative—including Huff who was subjected to a campaign of FBI surveillance and harassment that nearly resulted in his death.

Engineering a Deadly Virus—and a Vaccine to Allegedly Combat It

One of the first tasks that Dr. Huff undertook while working at EcoHealth Alliance was to review an NIH proposal titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” written by Dr. Daszak with Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and some other scientists.

The study had the support of “the grandfather of Gain-of-Function research,” Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Public Health, which ranks third in NIH funding. (According to Huff, “Fauci has been [the school’s] de facto Don for decades.”[3])

The proposal advocated for studying people in rural China who may have come into contact with bats that spread the Coronavirus among humans and to screen for the virus with the goal of being able to better predict Coronavirus transmission. It further aimed to develop new Coronavirus strains and perform experiments that would enhance the ability of bat coronavirus to infect human cells and laboratory animals using techniques of genetic engineering.[4]

This study fit the definition of Gain-of-Function research, whose aim is to “purposefully enhance the pathogenicity, infectivity, virulence, survivability or transmissibility of an infectious agent,” as Huff defines it, or put more simply, “make an infectious agent more dangerous.”[5]

On October 17, 2014, the Obama administration declared a moratorium on Gain-of-Function research related to influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) after an accident at the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Dr. Fauci subsequently outsourced the Gain-of-Function research to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving U.S. government funding. The moratorium on Gain-of-Function research was lifted by the Trump administration in December 2017, and Dr. Fauci sent $3.7 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to restart the coronavirus bat project.

By trying to make bats capable of infecting human cells, Huff came to believe that his employer was involved not only in unethical Gain-of-Function but also bioweapons research. Its end result was “the creation of SARS-CoV-2,” which “causes the disease known as COVID-19.”[6]

According to Huff, the infectious agent SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine—which Huff characterizes as gene therapy—were co-developed under the same research program.[7]

Huff writes that EcoHealth Alliance used Dr. Baric’s work for testing experimental vaccines, treatments and therapeutics against the newly engineered SARS-CoV-2 strain years before COVID-19 was known to the public to determine which countermeasures would be most effective at mitigating the disease in humanized mice.[8]

EcoHealth Alliance Rebuttal

Upon publication of The Truth About Wuhan, EcoHealth Alliance issued a statement asserting that “Andrew Huff is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.” According to EcoHealth Alliance, the actual truth about Wuhan is:

1) Mr. Huff was employed by the EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016. However, reports that he worked at or with the Wuhan Institute of Virology during that time are untrue. He was assigned to a completely different project working on computer-based algorithms to assess emerging disease threats.

2) Mr. Huff alleges that EcoHealth Alliance was engaged in Gain-of-Function research to create SARS-CoV-2. This is not true. 

3) Mr. Huff makes a number of other speculations and allegations about the nature of the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Given that he never worked at or with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, his assertions along these lines cannot be trusted.

4) Mr. Huff claims that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology based on research conducted there on bat coronaviruses and, further, that this research was related to U.S. intelligence gathering efforts. This is not true.

The EcoHealth Alliance statement went on to quote from Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the NIH, who said in December 2021 that “analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.”

The EcoHealth Alliance statement continued: “The scientific evidence to date indicates that the virus is likely the result of viral evolution in nature, potentially jumping directly to humans or through an unidentified intermediary animal host. Historically, many viruses have emerged from animals to cause epidemics and pandemics, including influenza, Ebola, Zika, West Nile fever, SARS, and more. Importantly, after an intensive investigation, agencies in the U.S Intelligence Community agreed that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon and most agencies assessed that SARS-CoV-2 most likely was not genetically engineered.”

Higher Hand?

A key qualifier in this latter statement is “most,” which leaves the possibility that some assessed otherwise. In a one page summary, the intelligence community, which was asked to assess the origins of COVID-19 by the Biden administration, made clear that it could not rule out the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) emerged from a laboratory.

Sampling by Chinese authorities of animals in Wuhan wet markets and in the wild significantly found not a single wild animal harboring the SARS-CoV-2 virus, with Wuhan being 1,000 miles away from the nearest wild bats that carry the type of SARS-related coronaviruses that caused the pandemic.

A small group of virologists queried by the NIH in February, 2020 told the NIH leadership that SARS-CoV-2 might have arisen from laboratory research, noting that the virus has “unusual features that virologists in the U.S. have been using in experiments for years–often with support from the NIH.”

These unusual features include a sequence of eight amino acids identical to those found in cells that line human airways, according to Columbia University Professors Jeffrey Sachs and Neil Harrison, indicating that the virus could have been genetically manufactured from humans in a laboratory.

Suspiciously, Huff discovered that someone edited the NIH proposal after it was submitted on April 15, 2014; he also observed heavy micromanagement of the project by USAID personnel, U.S. Embassy staff, and other employees of the State Department.[9]

A leading subcontractor was Metabiota, which was partially owned by Rosemont Seneca, a venture capital firm partially owned by Hunter Biden and the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, which invests in companies that make technology of national security interest.[10]

Huff concluded that EcoHeath Alliance was in the business of collecting intelligence on foreign laboratories and personnel while involved in the development of the Coronavirus. Dr. Daszak even told him that the CIA had approached him and was interested in “the places we’re working, the people that we are working with, and the data that we are collecting.”[11]

The CIA had in the past been involved in cultivating deadly viruses as bioweapons at the secret U.S. Army facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and history appeared to be repeating itself.

EcoHealth Alliance Executive Vice President William Karesh was linked directly to the top of the U.S. bio-defense establishment as a member of an Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) blue-ribbon panel on bio-defense.[12]

Huff points out that, traditionally, bioweapons are released to demoralize, incapacitate or force the use of vast medical resources in treating the wounded, and this all could be a motive for the alleged leak of the coronavirus after its manufacture at the Wuhan lab.

According to Huff, Pfizer and Moderna could make billions of dollars from the vaccine, and the global economic and political elite could advance their idea of the “Great Reset” in which they would further empower large corporations in an environment where the public was too bewildered to fight back.

COVID as Global Coup d’État

The latter is the scenario advanced by Michel Chossudovsky in his new book, The Worldwide Corona Crisis: Global Coup D’état Against Humanity: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression (Montreal, Canada: Global Research Publishers, 2022).

An economist at the University of Ottawa, Chossudovsky is President and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG), which runs the website globalresearch.ca that has published important cutting edge articles challenging the official narrative about COVID-19.

According to Chossudovsky, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a de facto coup d’état by the billionaire class, which spread panic among the population so they would suspend rational judgment and sign away their civil liberties with the imposition of medically unnecessary lockdowns, distancing and masking requirements, and vaccine passports.

Chossudovsky writes that “the Coronavirus provides a pretext and justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire world into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair…Entire national economies have been placed in jeopardy, martial law was declared in some cases, and all aspects of love and life were banned.”

According to Chossudovsky, the manufactured fear campaign was very similar to those adopted by the ruling class to obtain public support for illegal overseas military interventions.

Like with war dissenters, those who opposed the lockdowns were publicly ostracized, fired from their jobs, banned from social media, or branded as psychopaths.

In France, a doctor and retired university professor who opposed the vaccines, Jean-Bernard Fourtillan was arrested and placed in solitary confinement and in the psychiatric hospital of Uzes. And in Maine, Dr. Meryl Nass had to undergo a psychological exam before she was allowed a hearing with the state’s medical board to challenge the removal of her medical license after forty years on spurious grounds.[13]

According to Chossudovsky, the evidence amply documented is that the mRNA vaccine has not curtailed the spread of COVID-19—a Harvard study looking at COVID-19 in 68 countries and 2,947 U.S. counties in August and September 2022 found that the countries and counties with the highest vaccination rates had higher rates of new COVID-19 cases per one million people.[14]

Other studies detailed how the mRNA vaccine has resulted in an upward trend in mortality and morbidity, with the highest excess of deaths above normal being experienced by teenagers. A European mortality monitoring organization reported shocking increases in deaths of children under 14 after the vaccine was introduced. According to data from EuroMOMO, excess deaths among children in Europe surged 554% in 2021 following the European Medicines Agency’s approval of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for children.[15]

A cheaper and more effective way of treating COVID-19 patients is with hydroxychloroquine, which Dr. Fauci made sure would not be widely distributed.

In July 2020, Dr. Marcus Zervos, the chief epidemiologist in the Henry Ford Medical System and a board certified infectious disease specialist, conducted a study that found that COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine within twenty-four hours of admission to the hospital reduced risk of death by about half.[16]

Nass also points to the effectiveness of Ivermectin, an off-patent drug from which Big Pharma could not make a profit. Dr. Fauci branded it as a “horse medicine,” even though two scientists who developed it, William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015 for developing a therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites.[17]

Scare Tactics and Lies

The deceit by America’s scientific establishment was apparent in the fact that, according to Chossudovsky, a secret Pfizer report detailed that Pfizer, previously convicted of “fraudulent marketing” of another product, received more than 1,200 reports of deaths allegedly caused by its vaccine between mid-December 2020 and the end of February 2021.

There were also tens of thousands of reports of “adverse events,” including 23 cases of spontaneous abortions out of 270 pregnancies and more than 2,000 reports of cardiac disorders.

According to Chossudovsky, a flawed Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test was established by national governments to generate fake data with a view to justifying excessive and socially repressive policy mandates.

The RT-PCR test produces a high volume of false positives, with the test having been set up to detect a small segment of the nucleic acid which is part of a virus—not necessarily the COVID-19 one or any other specific viruses, according to Dr. Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR technique, who said this about the tests before he died in August 2019.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 94% of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 have co-morbidities, or deaths due to other causes. In only 6% of deaths was COVID-19 the only cause mentioned.

According to Chossudovsky, had the CDC used criteria in its Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting, COVID-19 fatalities would have been 90.2% lower than the officially reported totals.[18]

On March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a worldwide pandemic, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 outside China was of the order of 44,279, with 1,440 deaths.

The use of scare tactics had been previewed during the phony H1N1 “swine flu” scare of 2009-2010—one of the “greatest medical scandals of the century,” according to Wolfgang Wodarg, then head of health at the European Council—where billions of vaccines were ordered by national governments but then destroyed.

Wodarg is currently involved with Dr. Michael Yeadon, a former Pfizer Vice President, in the campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines, whose rushed introduction without proper testing was criminally negligent in their view.[19]

The main drivers of governmental policy have been corporate foundations like the Rockefeller, Soros, Ford and Gates Foundations.[20]

Their goal was to a) boost the profits of pharmaceutical companies in which they had investments; b) establish more authoritarian forms of global governance and a digital tyranny; and c) advance the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Great Reset, whose aim is to restructure the global economy in the interests of select corporate monopolies by effectively shutting down huge sectors of the pre-COVID economy and driving certain older enterprises into bankruptcy.[21]

A War and Not Health Response—With the Usual Gamut of Corruption and Lies

Sasha Latypova, a former pharmaceutical executive, has exposed that the Pentagon, which controlled the COVID-19 program from the beginning, adopted shady contracting practices while shielding Big Pharma from liability.

The latter benefited from changes in informed consent rules under the Obama administration to carry out unethical human experimentation and introduce vaccines that were never properly tested or regulated—and which Latypova describes as bio-weapons that “behave like shrapnel in the body; causing recipient cells to inadvertently destroy themselves.”

Latypova explained that the U.S. National Security Council is responsible for COVID-19 policy. This department represents defense and intelligence, and has no health representation. Health and Human Services are managing information but not setting policy, and Latypova concludes that consecutive U.S. governments have therefore treated COVID-19 as a war response, not a health response, whilst deliberately deceiving the public.

The planning for this started as early as 2012, as evidenced by a “pandemic enterprise”, which she describes as a public-private partnership involving ten heads of federal agencies. Secret meetings have been held between these leaders to discuss pandemic countermeasures, and how to maintain utmost secrecy and confidentiality of discussions and plans. Latypova questions why an alleged health event needs to be kept secret from the public.

According to Latypova, the pharmaceutical industry and “investor world” have been taken over by the Pentagon and military intelligence agencies. “A lot of money [pretends] to be venture funds while actually being funded by CIA,” Latypova says.

More Suggestions of Foreknowledge

The discovery of a contract awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense to Labyrinth Global Health for “COVID-19 Research” in November 2019 has raised further suspicion about government foreknowledge of the novel coronavirus.

The contract was part of a larger project for a “Biological threat reduction program in Ukraine,” suggesting that elements in the U.S. Government was at the very least aware of the alleged virus before it spread through Wuhan, China in December 2019, or had a hand in its creation through lab based Gain-of-Function research, as Andrew G. Huff suggests.

How else would they have known the name of the novel coronavirus disease three months prior to the WHO officially naming it Covid-19 in February 2020. And it may also explain why Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID had a confidentiality agreement for an mRNA Coronavirus vaccine candidate in early December 2019, which was developed and jointly owned by Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID.

Coordinated Propaganda Effort

According to Dr. Robert W. Malone, an expert in bio-defense and vaccinology, the Gates Foundation—which was granted a non-exclusive license to the Moderna mRNA Covid-19 injection, and therefore profited from its use—paid more than $319 million to control the mainstream media narrative about COVID-19.

The Department of Health and Human Services and Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) paid more than one billion to control the media narrative.[22]

Even late night comedians have been enlisted in the propaganda campaign: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel called for denying ICU beds to unvaccinated people.[23]

In 2021, a Facebook whistleblower revealed that Facebook censors vaccine-related content based on a secret “vaccine hesitancy” algorithm, which determines whether and to what extent the content (even if completely accurate) could induce vaccine hesitancy in viewers.[24]

Dr. Malone believes that British intelligence assets have been involved in smearing medical professionals like him who question the dominant COVID-19 narrative on Wikipedia, and that the “five eyes” spy alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and U.S.) has been exploited during the COVID-19 crisis to enable reciprocal domestic propaganda activities by participant states against the citizens of other member states that otherwise forbid their intelligence agencies from domestic propaganda activities.[25]

The coordinated propaganda effort and repressive political climate is reminiscent of the World War I era when the Wilson administration set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI) to sell U.S. military intervention in Europe at a time when anti-war dissenters were being spied upon, demonized and jailed.[26]

In his book, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, Dr. Malone emphasizes how the “cancel culture” encourages censorship as does the prevalence of tribal tendencies and a cognitive dissonance where people have trouble accepting viewpoints that differ from their entrenched beliefs and reject those willing to speak out against inconvenient truths.

These trends, are behind what amounts to a modern-day witch-hunt that threatens to stifle the advancement of scientific and medical knowledge and has given a criminal elite free reign to carry out nefarious social experiments that have altered human life as we know it.

Science for Hire

Dr. Malone and Michel Chossudovsky’s analysis is reinforced in a new documentary, Science for Hire, produced by WBAI radio host Gary Null, which exposes the corruption of America’s scientific elite.

Null concurs with Huff’s assessment that, in supporting Gain-of-Function research, Dr. Fauci and his colleagues were “fooling with mother nature;” creating super-viruses so that pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer could emerge as heroes for developing vaccines that made them billions of dollars in profits.

COVID-19, however, was more like a seasonal flu so hospital administrators had to manipulate data to give the impression of a mass pandemic that required everyone to be vaccinated. Hospice patients with terminal illnesses like end-stage renal failure and congestive heart failure were put on the COVID death list to pad the numbers.[27]

COVID-19 patients at the same time were sent home without treatment because of the reliance on vaccines that yielded unreported adverse health effects, such as a rise in myocarditis, blood clots, infertility, and heart attacks among healthy young people.

According to Null, Dr. Fauci was following the playbook of the HIV-AIDS pandemic in the 1980s where a fear campaign he presided over was followed up by the introduction of untested drugs such as AZT that wound up killing tens of thousands of gay men.

cientists who challenged the dominant paradigm were deprived of NIH funding that Fauci controlled, and marginalized with the advent of a “Medical McCarthyism” reflective of the societal slide toward corporate autocracy.

The only way to overcome the latter is to build a worldwide movement against Corona tyranny that outlaws Gain-of-Function research and would restore the integrity of science and real democracy through a socialist transformation.

  1. Andrew G. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2022), 190. ↑
  2. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 191. ↑
  3. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 137. ↑
  4. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 177; Fred Guterl, “Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab With U.S. Dollars For Risky Coronovirus Research,” Newsweek, April 28, 2020. By identifying unknown viruses before they spilled into humans, or “finding them before they find us,” Shi Zhengli claimed that “researchers could hope to find an early-warning system. Columbia professors Jeffrey Sachs and Neil Harrison point out that “the precise nature of the experiments that were conducted [in Wuhan], including the full array of viruses collected from the field and the subsequent sequencing and manipulation of those viruses, remains unknown.” Sharon Lerner, “Jeffrey Sachs Presents Evidence of Possible Lab Origin of COVID-19,” The Intercept, May 19, 2022.
  5. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 94. Dr. Richard Ebright, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers quoted as an expert in a Newsweek article on the topic, along with many other scientists, has been a vocal opponent of Gain-of-Function research because of the risk it presents of creating a pandemic through accidental release from a lab. Dr. Fauci, however, has expressed belief that “determining the molecular Achilles’ heel of these viruses can allow scientists to identify novel antiviral drug targets that could be used to prevent infection in those at risk or to better treat those who become infected,” and that “decades of experience tells us that disseminating information gained through biomedical research to legitimate scientists and health officials provides a critical foundation for generating appropriate countermeasures and, ultimately, protecting the public health.”
  6. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 95, 178, 179; Christina Lin, “Why U.S. Outsourced Bat Virus Research to Wuhan,” April 22, 2020. ↑
  7. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 178, 185. Gene therapy is a technique where doctors alter someone’s genes to help treat them for a disease. ↑
  8. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 182, 185. ↑
  9. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 183. Huff believes that EcoHealth Alliance was engaged in irregular financial transactions regarding U.S. government grants, specifically time-card fraud. He observed what appeared to be double dipping on contracts, or material support, between government organizations and private donors (e.g., Skoll Foundation, Google Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Welcome Trust). ↑
  10. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 183. ↑
  11. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 142. ↑
  12. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 187. ↑
  13. On the latter case, see Dr. Robert Malone, “The Extraordinary Story of a Truth Warrior Persecuted for Advocating and Providing Life Saving Treatment,” in Lies My Gov’t Told Me: And the Better Future Coming (New York: Skyhorse, 2022), ch. 3. Nass is a former contributor to CovertAction Information Bulletin [predecessor to CovertAction Magazine] who documented the Southern Rhodesian government’s use of biological warfare against the Black population in modern Zimbabwe during its liberation war. ↑
  14. Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 116. ↑
  15. See also Ed Dowd, with foreword by Robert Kennedy Jr. “Cause Unknown:” The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022 (New York: Skyhorse, 2023), which points out that during the third and fourth quarters of 2021, coinciding with a period of mass vaccination, death in people of working age (18–64) was 40 percent higher than it was before the pandemic, with the majority of deaths not attributed to COVID. ↑
  16. Huff, The Truth About Wuhan, 152. See also Malone, “The Extraordinary Story of a Truth Warrior Persecuted for Advocating and Providing Life Saving Treatment,” in Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 70. ↑
  17. Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 117. The drug has been made available to poor people around the globe for pennies per dose. ↑
  18. See also Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, which presents similar data, including a study which found that, even among hospitalized COVID-19 patients who were 90 years or older, nearly 90% survived. Most COVID deaths were of the very elderly—in Canada, the total was around 70%. In Italy, 100 percent of COVID deaths had another fatal condition whereas in South Korea as many as 99 percent of active COVID-19 cases in the general population did not require any medical treatment. A study of 3,300 inmates in U.S. state prisons found that 96% who tested positive for COVID-19 had no symptoms. See also Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins, The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal, foreword by Robert Kennedy Jr. (White River Junction Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2021), 56 which emphasizes that many alleged COVID deaths died actually from medical errors, including in parts of New York that were designated as being at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. ↑
  19. Dr. Yeadon initially raised concerns that the COVID-19 vaccine could cause fertility issues in young women. ↑
  20. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations have long and deep connections to the CIA. ↑
  21. The plan is for the jobless to be placed on a universal basic income. Some have suggested that another goal is depopulation because of concern about overpopulation and a belief in an extreme Social Darwinian philosophy (“survival of the fittest”) and eugenics by Gates and others. ↑
  22. Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 42. ↑
  23. Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 113. ↑
  24. Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 170. Facebook openly states that it blocks content “which public health experts have advised us could lead to COVID-19 vaccine rejection.” ↑
  25. Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 279. ↑
  26. Malone, Lies My Gov’t Told Me, 53. ↑
  27. In 2020, CDC director Robert Redfield admitted that hospital incentives likely elevated hospitalization rates and death toll statistics around the U.S. In Mercola and Cummins, The Truth About COVID-19, 57. ↑

Don’t Bow Down to a Dictatorial Government. America Is a Prison Disguised as Paradise

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.”— President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The government wants us to bow down to its dictates.

It wants us to buy into the fantasy that we are living the dream, when in fact, we are trapped in an endless nightmare of servitude and oppression.

Indeed, with every passing day, life in the American Police State increasingly resembles life in the dystopian television series The Prisoner.

First broadcast 55 years ago in the U.S., The Prisoner—described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned in a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious, the Village’s inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked by militarized drones, and stripped of their individuality so that they are identified only by numbers.

“I am not a number. I am a free man,” is the mantra chanted in each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role of Number Six, the imprisoned government agent.

Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.

Number Six refuses to comply.

In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two, the Village administrator a.k.a. prison warden. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.

Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.”

Still, he refuses to give up.

“Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”

Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.

As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”

The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

As Thill noted, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”

The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State, which is rapidly transitioning into a full-fledged Surveillance State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

The American Surveillance State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.

Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be while funding its existence.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

Government eyes are watching you.

They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between bowing down in obedience to the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.

When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”

This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.

It is a prison from which there will be no escape. Certainly not if the government and its corporate allies have anything to say about it.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

None of this will change, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House, because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, we’ll still be prisoners of the Village.

So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to conform to a group mind and the tyranny of mob-think as controlled by the Deep State.

Think for yourself. Be an individual.

As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”

You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until you come to terms with the fact that the government is the problem (no matter which party dominates), you’ll never stop being prisoners.