“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”—H.L. Mencken
First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers.
In light of the government’s tendency to exploit crises (legitimate or manufactured) and capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state, one has to wonder what so-called crisis it will declare next.
It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.
Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what the nature of the next national emergency might be (terrorism, civil unrest, economic collapse, a health scare, or the environment) as long as it allows the government to lockdown the nation and justify all manner of tyranny in the so-called name of national security.
As David C. Unger writes for the New York Times: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”
Here’s what we know: given the rate at which the government keeps devising new ways to establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems at taxpayer expense, each subsequent crisis ushers in ever larger expansions of government power and less individual liberty.
This is the slippery slope to outright tyranny.
You see, once the government acquires (and uses) authoritarian powers—to spy on its citizens, to carry out surveillance, to transform its police forces into extensions of the military, to seize taxpayer funds, to wage endless wars, to censor and silence dissidents, to identify potential troublemakers, to detain citizens without due process—it does not voluntarily relinquish them.
The lesson for the ages is this: once any government is allowed to overreach and expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. As Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe recognizes, “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable.”
Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.
In this way, every crisis since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government.
Each crisis has also been a test to see how far “we the people” would allow the government to sidestep the Constitution in the so-called name of national security; a test to see how well we have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly we’ll march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance we offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.
Most critically of all, it has been a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—could survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.
Unfortunately, we’ve been failing this particular test for a long time now.
Indeed, the powers-that-be have been pushing our buttons and herding us along like so much cattle since World War II, at least, starting with the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, which not only propelled the U.S. into World War II but also unified the American people in their opposition to a common enemy.
That fear of attack by foreign threats, conveniently torqued by the growing military industrial complex, in turn gave rise to the Cold War era’s “Red Scare.” Promulgated through government propaganda, paranoia and manipulation, anti-Communist sentiments boiled over into a mass hysteria that viewed anyone and everyone as suspect: your friends, the next-door neighbor, even your family members could be a Communist subversive.
By the time 9/11 rolled around, all George W. Bush had to do was claim the country was being invaded by terrorists, and the government used the USA Patriot Act to claim greater powers to spy, search, detain and arrest American citizens in order to keep America safe.
Despite the fact that the breadth of the military’s power to detain American citizens violates not only U.S. law and the Constitution but also international laws, the government has refused to relinquish its detention powers made possible by the NDAA.
Then Donald Trump took office, claiming the country was being invaded by dangerous immigrants and insisting that the only way to keep America safe was to expand the reach of the border police, empower the military to “assist” with border control, and essentially turn the country into a Constitution-free zone.
That so-called immigration crisis then morphed into multiple crises (domestic extremism, the COVID-19 pandemic, race wars, civil unrest, etc.) that the government has been eager to use in order to expand its powers.
Joe Biden, in turn, has made every effort to expand the reach of the militarized police state, pledging to hire 87,000 more IRS agents and 100,000 police officers. Read between the lines and you’ll find that Biden has all but declared war on the American people.
What the next crisis will be is anyone’s guess, but you can be sure that there will be a next crisis.
So, what should you expect if the government decides to declare another state of emergency and institutes a nationwide lockdown?
You should expect more of the same, only worse.
More compliance, less resistance.
More fear-mongering, mind-control tactics and less tolerance for those who question the government’s propaganda-driven narratives.
There’s every reason to worry about what comes next.
Certainly, the government’s past track record and its long-anticipated plans for instituting martial law (using armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems) in response to a future crisis are cause enough to worry about the government’s handling of the next “crisis.”
Mark my words: if and when another nationwide lockdown finally hits—if and when we are forced to shelter in place— if and when militarized police are patrolling the streets— if and when security checkpoints have been established— if and when the media’s ability to broadcast the news has been curtailed by government censors—if and when public systems of communication (phone lines, internet, text messaging, etc.) have been restricted—if and when those FEMA camps the government has been surreptitiously building finally get used as detention centers for American citizens—if and when military “snatch and grab” teams are deployed on local, state, and federal levels as part of the activated Continuity of Government plans to isolate anyone suspected of being a threat to national security—and if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public—then we will truly understand the extent to which the government has fully succeeded in acclimating us to a state of affairs in which the government has all the power and “we the people” have none.
On August 1st, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced the beginning of a new campaign — #ThinkBeforeSharing. Intended to help counter and stop the spread of what it claims is harmful disinformation and conspiracy theories online.
They say, quite matter-of-factly, “The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a worrying rise in disinformation and conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories can be dangerous: they often target and discriminate against vulnerable groups, ignore scientific evidence and polarize society with serious consequences. This needs to stop.”
Later quoting the UNESCO director general who says,
“Conspiracy theories cause real harm to people, to their health, and also to their physical safety. They amplify and legitimize misconceptions about the pandemic, and reinforce stereotypes which can fuel violence and violent extremist ideologies.”
Going on to affirm,
“A new campaign helps you learn how to identify, debunk, react to and report on conspiracy theories to prevent their spread. Check out the infographics and social media pack below and help spread the word that facts matter and no one is to blame. Thinking critically and being informed about conspiracy theories is key to challenging them.
This UNESCO campaign is implemented jointly with the European Commission, Twitter and the World Jewish Congress.”
Surly these would be noble sentiments, if they were genuine. But as you continue to peruse through the infographics it becomes quite apparent that the architects of this campaign only have one interest in mind: stifling public discourse, and discrediting anyone who dares to challenge the status quo narrative.
Indeed, upon browsing through the material provided it quickly establishes an air that only the supposed authorities are to be trusted, they would never lie to you or purposefully peddle false information. No, only those with whom the establishment has deemed fair, just, and honest are to be trusted. While seemingly encouraging critical thinking, they demand that you toss aside any critical thinking skills and blindly trust the figures whom you are told represent the best interests of everyone. While going on to paint anyone who disagrees and/or promotes alleged conspiracy theories as a dangerous bigot, and how one should react if you encounter one these dangerous people and their harmful ideas.
It is a carefully crafted package on how to identify “wrong think”. The latest salvo in the ongoing information war, paired with just enough of a Limited Hangout to appear good natured to the unaware.
In this special edition of The Free Thought Project’s Conspiracy Fact Series, we will dive into this latest propaganda effort to refute some of its key logical fallacies, before providing a number of examples of true conspiracies’ in order to demonstrate exactly why these kind of campaigns are antithetical to their stated purpose.
First of all, let us address the broadest question; What is a conspiracy theory? Put plainly, it is a hypothesis postulating that a conspiracy has or is taking place. And what is a conspiracy? A conspiracy is defined as follows:
An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
A group of conspirators.
An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
Conspiracies happen daily, and most places have laws regarding them within their legal code. Conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to traffic illicit material, etcetera, happen regularly and are charges faced by individuals within the legal system. And technically speaking, until law enforcement gathers enough evidence to prove that individuals participated in such a plot, the allegations against them would be considered conspiracy theories.
Of course the allegation ceases to be a theory when you have evidence. But somewhere along the line in our common discourse the term conspiracy theory has taken on a new meaning, it has become equated with “fake news”, insinuating that the mere postulation that one or more individuals may be involved in a conspiracy is in and of itself preposterous. An idea to be denied and ridiculed outright. This goes against logical thinking and is simply not the case. In reality this is what would be referred to as a thought terminating cliché.
Right at the start, in the second infographic dedicated to how to identify conspiracy theories, we are told one way to determine if a story is a conspiracy theory or not is to check the author. If they are connected to a reputable media outlet or organization then they are to be trusted.
You mean like so-called reputable organizations like the New York Times or the Washington Post who carried stories demonizing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and peddling the unfounded conspiracy theory that it was “Russian disinformation” when it was in fact 100% true? Or those who pushed the thoroughly debunked Russiagate election meddling hoax? Both which we backed by seemingly trustworthy officials in the intelligence community who were then proven to be either incredibly incompetent at their jobs or outright liars.
It then goes on to say that trustworthy authors will use verifiable facts and evidence from academic or scientific research. And yet this flies in the face of corporate media practices during the COVID-19 pandemic when they refused to even consider the research of some of the world’s top virologists, epidemiologists, and other reputable medical professionals from esteemed institutions; such as those of The Great Berrington Declaration or Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis, one of the most esteemed in his field, who critiqued the establishments response to COVID-19 such as lockdown policies. Who in hindsight have clearly been proven right. Or the literal hundreds of medical studies providing evidence that such interventionist policies provided little benefit, while simultaneously carrying with them an incomprehensible amount of suffering and destruction.
Where was the harsh criticism for all those who claimed that should one receive a COVID-19 vaccine they will not catch the virus and will not get sick, which is now a demonstrably false statement. And according to former CDC director Dr. Deborah Birx, a statement in which they knew was false from the beginning.
It also goes on to link so-called conspiracy theories and those who espouse them to hate, racism, and anti-Semitism. While this is certainly true in some circles and such beliefs should be ardently condemned and disavowed, one has to keep in mind that the true purpose of the UN campaign isn’t merely to target untrue conspiracy theories, but rather to discredit ANY dialog dissenting from the status quo. And it has been an emerging tactic in recent years to unfairly and incorrectly link any critique of the establishment to hate and racism as a means of discrediting it without engaging in debate.
The UNESCO diagram then goes on to assert that linking allegations of wrongdoing to Jewish individuals such as the Rothschild family, George Soros, or the state of Israel, is tantamount to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The logical fallacy here is that the majority of criticism towards those such as the aforementioned has nothing to do with the fact that they are Jewish, and everything to do with the fact that they are powerful, notably corrupt, globalist insiders with a known history of manipulating economies and governments.
Similarly with regard to the settler-colonial state of Israel, the crimes of the Zionist regime are apparent for all to see. With reputable human rights organizations such as Amnesty International condemning the nation as an apartheid state for its heinous crimes against humanity committed in occupied Palestine; and whos intelligence service is arguably among the most corrupt in the world right along with our own CIA. Criticisms of such atrocities are not leveled due to the jewishness of the nation’s inhabitants, but rather due to the fact that such heinous acts are abhorrent.
No government should be free from criticism, especially those committing acts of ethnic cleansing. And attempting to dismiss such valid criticisms by exploiting the perpetrators Hebrew lineage is equally as despicable.
Next, in the “prebunking and debunking” portion, the campaign goes on to completely contradict itself. In order to empower people to be more resilient against dastardly conspiracy theories they encourage the use of rational thinking and questioning, while in the very next sentence asserting that a key trait of conspiratorial thinking is the suspicion of official accounts.
They then begin to take aim at COVID-19 specifically, continuing in its overbearingly hubristic tone. Deriding what is described as deceptive conspiracy theories that ignore scientific evidence and falsely blame individuals and groups not responsible for the pandemic. Listing four major red flags that one should look out for.
They include;
Claims that the virus was artificially created (e.g. in a laboratory) by people with a specific interest. (e.g. reducing world population)
Claims that the virus was spread intentionally or its natural spread augmented to harm as many people as possible (e.g. through 5G signals)
Claims that vaccines and cures are intentionally withheld to not disrupt the spread and harm as many people as possible.
Claims that certain sanitary measures to counter the spread of the virus are used to intentionally harm or control society (e.g. vaccines, masks)
This is compounded by what we know regarding gain-of-function research that took place in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in which documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act prove that the United States was in fact funding gain-of-function research on ‘Bat Coronaviruses Likely to Infect Humans’. In direct contradiction to Dr. Fauci’s sworn testimony before Congress.
What’s more, the shady ties and practices of EcoHealth Alliance, who partnered with the USAID and NIH in Wuhan, raises further concerns. Including an EcoHealth whistleblower, former Associate Vice President Dr. Andrew Huff, publicly accusing EcoHealth of being a cutout for the CIA citing a conversation with its President Peter Daszak.
Additionally, asserting that effective treatments for COVID-19 weren’t suppressed by the medical establishment are demonstrably false as well. Look at Ivermectin for example. It is an undeniable fact that as Ivermectin — which has won awards for its effectiveness in treating human ailments and was widely praised as a “wonder drug” in the years prior to COVID — gained more recognition that the medical establishment and mainstream media virtually went to war to discredit it and vilify anyone who promoted it, despite a growing body of evidence it can be effective against COVID-19.
A slew of mainstream press including but not limited to MSNBC and Rachel Maddow, The Hill, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, New York Daily News and others all spread an easily debunkable outright lie about a rural hospital becoming overwhelmed with a flood of ivermectin overdoses. And when the lie was exposed they were not only spared the ire of the “fact checkers”, but refused to retract it at all.
CNN lambasted Joe Rogan for his use of Ivermectin after catching COVID, unfavorably framing the drug as a “horse dewormer”, defaming Rogan and going so far as to alter the lighting of his Instagram video to make him appear more sick than he was.
Following the incident, CNN’s chief medical advisor Dr. Sanjay Gupta joined Joe Rogan on his podcast and was confronted about the defamatory statements. Ultimately conceding that the network made a mistake. However, after the episode aired, CNN’s Don Lemon yet again doubled down on their skewed coverage.
Finally, the assertion that certain measures definitely weren’t utilized as a means of controlling the population is also easily refuted. Again, by the admission of the very same people responsible for doing so.
An article penned in the UK Telegraph on 14th May, 2021 by the papers Associate Editor Gordon Rayner titled Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists specifically details the accounts from several doctors in the UK governments Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour lamenting their overt use of fear as a means of controlling the population and enforcing lockdown mandates.
Similar techniques were also carried out elsewhere such as in Canada. Where documents from the Canadian Joint Operations Command revealed how the military saw the pandemic as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques against the domestic citizenry without the approval of the presidential cabinet, utilizing some of the same information warfare tactics deployed in Afghanistan.
Reported by the Ottawa Citizen;
The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for “shaping” and “exploiting” information. CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.
In Israel, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz was caught on a hot mic admitting that restrictions such as the ‘Green Pass’ vaccine passport is meant to incentivize compliance with vaccine mandates on the population, touting the inaccurate “pandemic of the unvaccinated” trope. This was weeks after a major Israeli study confirmed once again that natural immunity is just as if perhaps not more effective than the jab. Now more than a year later and the social consequences of such policies have played a major role in tearing the country apart.
Fast forward to today and justification for vaccine passports and forced vaccination has been completely demolished, as in the United States the CDC has once again updated their guidelines now instructing policy to make no differentiation between vaccinated and unvaccinated. Creating quite the awkward situation for the thousands of people who were fired from their jobs, removed from school, harassed, and otherwise segregated and discriminated against for exercising bodily autonomy.
Speaking of the United States, rest assured much of the aforementioned manipulations apply here as well. Such as when A study from the US National Library of Medicine found that researchers at Yale University were testing propaganda messaging for the COVID-19 vaccine six months prior to its rollout. This was the exact same kind of messaging that was later adopted by media and government officials using some of the most classic propaganda tactics of shame, fear, anger, and embarrassment to coerce individuals into injecting themselves with the experimental shot.
Corroborated by a batch of emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in March of this year which reveals clearly a conspiracy of collaboration between the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and various mainstream media outlets to push a jab propaganda campaign.
With all this talk of state and corporate collusion conspiring to commit propaganda campaigns, it seems no better time than to transition into the final portion of this treatise. It has been shown above that the UN’s latest initiative is at best logically inconsistent and full of holes, and at worst deliberately disingenuous.
Yet further still to exemplify the true insidious nature of what is fundamentally at its core a campaign which implores individuals to abandon their faculties of rumination and trust only the official approved version of events as recounted to them by persons and institutions with perhaps the most sordid track record of dishonesty known to man.
So we will provide a few examples of so-called conspiracy theories that are now accepted common fact. Truths that, if the UN had their way with this model of thinking, would still be relegated to the realm of tinfoil hat nonsense despite the veracity behind them.
1.) Mockingbird Media
Of course having just mentioned propaganda operations we would be remiss not to mention first and foremost one of the most notable, far reaching, and still active conspiracies of the last several decades — Operation Mockingbird. As detailed in part one of this series, titled How Truth Was Destroyed So Americans Would Crave Propaganda, we concisely outline in great detail the hard evidence proving the United States corporate media apparatus is subservient to the intelligence community. Fully infiltrated by and under the influence of the Central Intelligence Agency.
From the early days of ad manipulation in the 1920s and the father of propaganda himself Dr. Edward Bernays, to the Nazi origins of CIA media influence operations imported to the US via Project Paperclip; To the 1975 Church and Pike congressional committees, and the explosive investigation by renowned journalist Carl Bernstein, and even a myriad of leaked and declassified documents through to the modern day. The empirical evidence establishes the irrefutable fact that the mainstream corporate media by and large operates at the behest of state interests exerting undue influence on the public as purveyors of propaganda.
2.) Provocation Operations
Governments are, by their very nature, two things incontrovertibly; pathological liars, and monopolies on violence. Nowhere is this better seen than with warfare. Nations concocting untrue narratives to manufacture consent and justify military assaults on their adversaries is almost as old as time itself. Though only recently was the concept of false flag attacks ushered from the realm of tinfoil hat lunacy to the accepting arms of the mainstream.
For the longest time if you claimed that the government staged an attack against itself and framed its rival in order to justify military intervention abroad you would be considered crazy, “They would never do that!” detractors would exclaim. However as pointed out in Part two of this series, in the midst of the fervor of US/ NATO backed warmongering in Eastern Europe, government officials through their own accusations outright confirmed that false flag attacks indeed do happen.
But of course us “conspiracy theorists” didn’t need the pontifications of Jake Sullivan to know that. The historical proof of false flag operations has been out in the open for anyone willing to research for decades. As we elaborated in our article, whether it be the Nazis’ Operation Himmler to justify the invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War Two; The Israeli military blunder in Egypt known as The Lavon Affair; Or the infamous Operation Northwoods. In which officially declassified documents prove the CIA had planned to orchestrate a campaign of terror attacks against innocent Americans to justify an invasion of Cuba at the height of the Cuban missile crisis — the official admission of false flag operations by government officials is but the most recent example of conspiracy theory becoming openly acknowledged as conspiracy fact. But one that was a fact all along.
3.) Mass Surveillance
One of the more tame yet no less prolific conspiracy theories that has been around since at least the 1930’s is the allegation that the government is spying on you. For decades accusations abound that the feds were able to track every conversation and know everything we do. And for decades such an argument would have one labeled as a paranoid lunatic.
But in the spring of 2013 everything changed. That’s when a young contractor by the name of Edward Snowden leaked explosive documents to journalist Glenn Greenwald revealing the scope of an illegal mass surveillance program conducted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) known as PRISM.
Since then, Snowden has become a household name, as well as the various real life conspiracies of warrantless mass spying that he helped to uncover. In the years since, various other spying scandals have occurred which have vindicated Snowden even further, Now, the government can even spy on you through your TV. But it was Snowden’s revelations in and of themselves that vindicated all who came before him. The so-called conspiracy theorists who had for so long tried to expose the government’s longstanding practice of spying on their own citizens. Whether it be PRISM, The Echelon Affair of the late 1990s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation (or it’s modern counterpart), going as far back as 1895, as revealed by renowned journalist Meyer Berger in a 1938 article for The New Yorker, and again in a 1955 New York Times exposé on wiretapping. Evidence abounds proving the conspiracy theories were conspiracy facts.
4.) Inhumane Experiments
Throughout the entirety of the coronavirus pandemic proponents of mandatory medical intervention have constantly made the case that the experimental injection is 100% safe, and the oh so virtuous multinational pharmaceutical corporations who stand to make billions upon billions of dollars off of it, who certainly don’t have a long documented track record of corruption, would never mislead the public about their health. That it is a ridiculous conspiracy theory to ever question whether or not the federal government and their corporate cohorts would engage in such malfeasance as to put our health at risk, or even worse, to deliberately endanger the public’s well-being.
Despite this however, as The Free Thought Project reported in January of 2021, there are a myriad of facts stretching back decades exemplifying precisely why blind trust for these authorities either federal or corporate is ill advised. They can and often have put citizens at great risk for their own benefit.
In this comprehensive analysis, we outlined hundreds of instances corroborated by official government documents of blatant wrongdoing. Including but not limited to, unethical radiation experiments on handicapped children and infants; Clandestine military operations exposing Americans to carcinogenic substances; Eugenics based forced sterilization; Knowingly allowing the spread of syphilis throughout African American communities; Kidnapping and torturing American citizens during the MK ULTURA program; hundreds of germ warfare tests on the unconsenting public; Agrochemical corporations deliberately exposing Americans to cancer causing herbicides; Distributing contaminated doses of polio vaccine; and much, much more.
But if the UN had their way, you wouldn’t know any of this. It would be dismissed as wrong think and censored, leaving us all none the wiser.
There are so many more examples of alleged conspiracy theories throughout the decades to mention that were once ridiculed and now openly accepted as fact. The Business Plot of the mid-1930’s literally conspired to overthrow the Roosevelt presidency and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. The CIA trafficking drugs into urban communities is such a widely known fact now that that it’s featured as a key plot point in movies and prime time FX dramas and no one bats an eye. You get the point.
The notorious saga of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is perhaps one of the most egregious examples. Before the case became public knowledge if you were to try to have a serious conversation about high level government officials, up to and including intelligence agencies, the President of the United States, end even royalty, being tied to an international child trafficking and pedophilia ring you would run the risk of being institutionalized. But since the Epstein saga has unfolded so dramatically the whole world is now well aware of that fact. And for the astute observer, the conspiracy theorist, they were already well aware of it. Looking at instances such as Jimmy Savile in the UK, The Finders, the NXIVM cult, the Catholic church, and so on just to name a few all point to a very deep rooted and sadistic web of child trafficking and abuse among the world’s most powerful.
If we went by the United Nations advice, blissfully believing the official story, completely credulous and entirely dependent on the proper authorities, how much of this information would we actually know? How much of the world would still be secreted away from us? There is no virtue in being willfully ignorant. No matter how much the social engineers of civilization attempt to convince you otherwise. The lesson remains the same — always question authority.
Throughout your lifetime, you or someone you trusted has unwittingly given up many aspects of your biometric and other personal data so that your digital identity can be created. Over time, this digital identity is being progressively defined and is replacing your actual physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual identity. What you are allowed to do, and not do, will increasingly depend on your technological identity rather than your moral character, intellectual and/or physical abilities, your emotional suitability, religious beliefs and the many other attributes that define your unique personality.
Starting with your birth certificate, which identifies your name, birth date and birth location, as well as parenting, an endless series of details about your personal life has been accumulated and stored, sometimes with your knowledge and consent. Far more often it has been done without either.
Do you remember having your photo taken for a student and/or employee identity card, your vehicle license and/or a passport? Do you remember being finger and/or palm-printed, submitting to an iris scan, agreeing to a recording of your voice, offering data for ‘two-factor’ authentication, and requesting an ancestry search by submitting a sample of your DNA? Most often you had no choice: It was ‘legally required’. Other times, you were probably offered something in return, such as admission to an educational institution, ‘secure’ access to an account or information you wanted. But whatever other price you paid, you also paid an ‘identity cost’.
Moreover, none of that information has ceased to exist and there is a lot more interest in it now than there was when you, or someone, innocently agreed to tender it all those years ago. And it is being added to all of the time with information you have surrendered or that has been obtained about you, up until this morning. In addition, it will be added to by information gathered about you tomorrow.
Your bank account(s), academic and employment records, health records (including vaccination record), legal record (including traffic violations), internet search history, and any other information compiled by or submitted to a government authority, corporation or other entity has been recorded, compiled and systematically stored in data banks of which you have never even heard. And they are being used to generate your ‘social credit score’ which, depending on the country in which you live, is already or will be soon, used to determine what you can, and cannot, do.
In addition, facial recognition technology is vastly expanding the capacity of the surveillance state, and those corporations and entities that work with it, to identify and track you. And it is doing this already in the most obvious places such as on the street and in shopping centres. See, for example, ‘Microsoft partners with banks to introduce facial recognition: More invasive technology’.
Beyond that, of course, existing technologies already enable many aspects of your unique identity to be imitated precisely. Think you voice is unique? Not once they clone it so they can present some technological imitation as your voice. See ‘Voice Cloning for Content Creators’.
And you are no doubt well aware of simple ways that photos of you can be replicated. Or altered by ‘photoshopping’, to put you in an entirely different context or location.
Does this matter?
This has all been done, fundamentally, so that one day soon now you can be locked in the technological prison that is being created around you. This technological prison, being promoted under the guise of ‘smart cities’, is being built around you as cities are converted to ‘smart’ by installing 5G and the other technologies necessary for comprehensive surveillance and control. But the Saudis are building a ‘smart city’ in the desert too. You can watch their promotional video here: Neom.
Despite the positive spin endlessly put on these projects by governments and corporations – see ‘Smart cities: The cities of the future’ – the fundamental outcome is that you will require a digital ID to do those particular things that the elite has decided you will be allowed to do. And you won’t be able to do anything else. This is usually called ‘slavery’ except that, in this new technological world, virtually all of the slaves will be transhuman with no independent will of their own.
How has this happened?
In a report published by the World Economic Forum in 2016, the authors wrote ‘Consistent with the World Economic Forum’s mission of applying a multi‐stakeholder approach to address issues of global impact, the creation of this report involved extensive outreach and dialogue with the financial services community, innovation community, technology community, academia and the public sector…. The mandate of this project was to explore digital identity and understand the role that Financial Institutions should play in building a global standard for digital identity. Identity is a critical topic in Financial Services today. Current identity systems are limiting Fintech innovation (as) well as secure and efficient service delivery in Financial Services and society more broadly. Digital identity is widely recognized as the next step in identity systems. However, while many efforts are underway to solve parts of the identity challenge and create true digital identity, there is a need for a concerted and coordinated effort to build a truly transformational digital identity system.’
By 2018, another report by the World Economic Forum was proclaiming ‘Our identity is, literally, who we are, and as the digital technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution advance, our identity is increasingly digital. This digital identity determines what products, services and information we can access – or, conversely, what is closed off to us.’
But one primary motivation for their interest in digital identity was reported in a World Economic Forum article in August 2022. Citing research conducted by the consultancy Cebr – see ‘The digital trust index’ – the World Economic Forum noted that ‘our global digital economy can unleash trillions of dollars of opportunities. But if we don’t know for certain who we are interacting with online, we cannot have trust. Digital identity must therefore be the foundational element to our digital economy….’ Moreover, according to the WEF: ‘Consumers also told us they would trust banks and financial services firms the most to create and maintain an identity system.’
Of course, the World Economic Forum is not the only institution planning our digital identity prison. In a 2019 report, the United Nations stated ‘We recommend that by 2030, every adult should have affordable access to digital networks, as well as digitally-enabled financial and health services, as a means to make a substantial contribution to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.’
In addition, that long-standing bastion of economic exploitation known as the World Bank has had a long-running involvement in digitizing identity, publishing a report on the subject in 2017 which was updated in 2021 and, unsurprisingly, linked to its notion of ‘sustainable development’: ‘Every person has the right to participate fully in their society and economy and to be recognized as a person before the law. Yet, as many as 1 billion people across the world do not have basic proof of identity, which is essential for protecting their rights and enabling access to services and opportunities.’
This report goes on to outline a set of ten principles – universal access, accuracy, security, privacy… – to guide the nature of digital identity, in various categories, that sound wonderful.
But fundamental issues are left unaddressed.
Why the rights to participation in society and the economy, and recognition before the law, suddenly requires ‘basic proof of identity’ and is ‘essential for protecting their rights and enabling access to services and opportunities’ is not explained. Nor is it explained why those same rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 – on which the world has so spectacularly failed to deliver since that time (and particularly for those billions of people marginalized by the global capitalist economy) – will now be magically delivered by a digitized identity.
As is often the case, the delusional rhetoric sounds good despite being a vast distance from the truth.
But the World Bank continues its rhetoric in a more recent report: ‘Vulnerable and marginalized groups are often the least likely to have proof of their identity, but also the most in need of the protection and services linked to identification.’
Moreover, according to the World Bank, experience has supposedly ‘shown that there are key actions countries can take to unlock their own paradigm shift towards building digital ID and G2P [government-to-person] payments ecosystems that empower people and support sustainable development outcomes’.
Of course, the documents go on to outline why identity is important to access certain rights and services – banking, voting, owning property, particular transactions… – but do not specify why a digital version of identity is necessary. A sleight of hand made necessary by the complete absence of any genuine reason for moving beyond long-accepted means of establishing identity, where they are appropriately useful.
Beyond international organizations such as these, major Non-Government Organizations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, as well as corporations, are predictably behind the moves to digitize identity for reasons explained in the ID2020 Manifesto. For example, as Peggy Johnson of Microsoft Corporation noted: ‘… it’s exciting to imagine a world where safe and secure digital identities are possible, providing everyone with an essential building block to every right and opportunity they deserve.’
Again, why rights and opportunities, theoretically long-ago enshrined in a multitude of human rights laws, should now somehow be accessed through a digitized identity is, obviously, not explained.
With such a predatory list of sponsors – the World Economic Forum, World Bank, United Nations, major corporations, particular NGOs – clearly endorsing digital identity and the complete absence from any consultation process of those of us who might identify (not digitally, of course) as ‘ordinary’ people, it is obvious why those who understand the rapidly advancing technocratic agenda have issued a multitude of warnings about participating in the ongoing efforts to digitize your identity.
What, precisely, is at stake?
Your identity itself. Your freedom. Your privacy. Your human rights generally, including the right to choose what you eat and how you obtain it. And everything else that matters to you. Gone forever, if this global push is successful.
And while digitizing your identity in this way might appear to be technologically savvy and even more convenient – after all, opening a door without a key is a pretty slick move hey? – the problem is that once your identity is linked to other more important functions, control of your life is soon easily taken from you.
As John Adams noted in a recent interview by Martin North, once you link a microchipped identity with the soon-to-be-introduced Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), the Central Bank can simply reprogram your personal chip (or the chips of millions of people) to prevent you from engaging in a particular type of commerce if you do not comply with whatever mandatory requirements are in force at the time. Beyond this, of course, what else will the chip be used to control? Do you know? Watch ‘Australia’s banks want you MICROCHIPPED!’
And what if, as planned, your identity chip is linked to your driver’s licence and your car? How far do you think you will be able to travel from home? To go shopping for food? To travel to work? Will you be allowed to go on holiday?
Beyond these simple examples, what if your digital identity is linked to your health records (including vaccination status), your legal records, and anything else they decide to add – such as carbon credits – so that you can be given a ‘social credit score’? Perhaps you will be deemed unsuitable to be a parent and have your children taken away.
But the answers to these questions, as well as others, are already known and you can watch a fuller explanation of just how securely you are already locked in this digital ID prison in this video presentation by technology expert Aman Jabbi – see ‘Facial Recognition: Digital ID or Digital Dictatorship?’ – who spells it out in gruesome detail.
By the end of 2022, there will be more than twenty billion data collection (not just simple surveillance) cameras (of many types) in the world keeping track of the nearly eight billion people on Earth. As Jabbi observes: Under the guise of privacy, security and convenience, ‘We are being monitored everywhere and all the time’ by the ‘Internet of Eyes and Ears’ linked to artificial intelligence and a vast array of technological devices, such as smart street poles and lights which gather data via facial recognition cameras and environmental sensors, display digital signage, use speakers to instruct the immediate population how to behave, include ‘drone charging stations’ because drones ‘are going to be the new aerial police’ with everything wirelessly connected to each other and the Internet of Things (IoT). This comprehensive network will be used to collect your data and control your behaviour, including by use of LED (light-emitting diode) incapacitators (which Jabbi calls ‘puke guns’) which emit high-intensity beams of different frequencies that can make you vomit or inflict other forms of behavioural control. In short, behavioural compliance will be enforced not by human guards, but by artificial intelligence and electromagnetic weapons.
The digital identity they say is a new chapter in the social contract. It’s a social contract that nobody signed up for and nobody wants. But they are… going to force this on us.
Every entity, person, device and thing is going to have a digital identity and once you sign on to a digital identity, the only way you can access healthcare or your bank finances, ability to travel, ability to access the internet, to go to social platforms or do anything in your life, to buy food, you need a digital identity. And how will that digital identity be authenticated? Through your face. So your face is the key to unlocking access to life.
And this key is going to be linked to a new type of financial system which is going to be a combination of carbon credits, your social credits or social score… ‘reputation capital’, and then of course your status with respect to vaccines and boosters…. And if you don’t have enough carbon score and you don’t have enough social score or you haven’t taken your latest booster, your face will not be able to unlock your digital identity and therefore you cannot access stuff.
You’ll be locked out of the whole new matrix system. And this is what they call central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)….
This is essentially the key to understanding what sort of a new world that is going to be upon us once the final switches are turned on….
Your digital identity is really a digital prison and your face is used to unlock the digital prison if you behave well….
And how are they going to implement this? There is a new protocol called ‘Zero Trust in Cyber Security’… so by default we are going from a world of implicit ‘allow’ to default ‘deny’.
So as an example, when you log into your computer you type in a password… and you have access to your browser, your files, your applications but now this zero trust is about ‘default deny’ which means ‘we don’t trust you and for everything you need to do you’ll be denied initially until you can prove that you’re trustworthy’ and that trust will come from face recognition and from digital identity. (If you want to read more about ‘digital trust’, here is the Callsign report: ‘The digital trust index’.)
Beyond the above, by using ‘geofencing’ (both digitally and geographically), your access to everything, including who you can contact, how you can travel and how far, what media you can access or book you can read… can be controlled through your digital identity. ‘So the goal is to lockdown humanity in these smart cities and not allow them to move anywhere…. So the digital identity is inside the Trojan horse of security and privacy. I can’t stress this enough…. And this will result in total control of humans because people will comply in order to unlock access to life.’ In addition, ‘they can even be monitoring the emotional state of a child and the algorithms can decide whether child abuse is happening at home and then they can come for the children, which they will.’
Jabbi also points out that in late April 2022, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations took over the internet which means that, soon enough, ‘If you don’t accept a digital ID, you cannot get onto the internet and you cannot open your phone’. And he emphasizes that ‘Banning facial recognition means nothing because neither your government, nor your state or local officials are doing facial recognition so banning it is pointless because facial recognition is going to be done in the cloud on Amazon and Google servers with artificial intelligence algorithms, with cameras installed by private companies on public lands which are now owned by private corporations.’
Apart from Aman Jabbi, other scholars have also thoughtfully researched what is happening regarding digital identity and how it relates to other features of the overall elite plan.
As outlined in this primer, and as many of our partners and colleagues have documented, the World Bank and a wider network of global actors are promoting a specific model of digital ID. This model privileges economic identity, is disconnected from legal status, and steers attention away from civil registration. Contrary to the human rights and inclusive development language used to promote this vision of digital ID, this model threatens a range of fundamental rights, from the right to social security to the right to privacy. The purported benefits remain mostly unsubstantiated in the absence of serious baseline studies, cost-benefit and value for money analyses, and impact assessments. Meanwhile, researching and revealing the impacts of these systems has mostly been outsourced to an already overburdened and under-resourced community of human rights organizations, advocates, scholars, journalists, and other civil society actors.
The report includes three recommendations for addressing concerns about digital ID, given the transformational nature of the change intended: 1. detailed investigation and research, consideration (particularly of possible harms and their mitigation), cost-benefit analysis and impact assessments; 2. thorough discussion in democratic fora based on detailed knowledge of plans, actors involved in the scheme and roles played by foreign governments and international organizations; and 3. engagement of all stakeholders, including us, not just ‘technical experts’ in the deliberations.
Researcher Lynn Corey has also written an insightful four-part series of reports which are published on her website and as a book. In the second report – see ‘The Global Landscape on Vaccine ID Passports Part 2: How Your Digital Identity is Moving to The Blockchain for Full Control Over Humans’ – Corey identifies key players driving the long-term plan that is currently being implemented, particularly noting the importance of central banks but also other key elite agencies such as the World Economic Forum and United Nations. Their aim is to institute ‘complete digital control… over the world and all human beings’ and Corey observes that different agents ‘have their areas of expertise when it comes to building the digital identities, which is the key to making this all happen.’
Investigative journalist Jesse Smith bluntly observes:
With the evidence being provided openly, there is little reason to doubt that humanity is being ushered into a new era of surveillance and control through digital ID systems. This effort is being pushed by governments, banks, multinational corporations, and global governance organizations like the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, and the United Nations.
But digital IDs only represent one aspect of the digital revolution….
A whole world is being created to enslave us in a perpetual digital panopticon including the metaverse, digital currency (CBDCs), mass surveillance, AI and biometrics, and body implants while blockchain technology records everything we do.
Beyond these scholars and organizations, there are other fine analysts who have explained why digital ID promises to inflict great harm on humanity. You can watch, for example, the excellent video report by James Corbett: ‘The Global Digital ID Prison’ and read the critique by Derrick Broze ‘Exposing The “Digital ID Is A Human Right” Scam’.
In addition, we also have the experience of India to consider, as documented in the report ‘Busting the Dangerous Myths of Big ID Programs: Cautionary Lessons From India’ which offers this summary before going on to expose how India’s digital ID system, introduced some years ago, has spectacularly failed to deliver gains for ‘ordinary’ people in twelve key areas, noting that ‘ID systems often promise a technological solution for a political problem’.
Around the world, the quickly expanding ‘Big ID’ industry has driven the adoption of centralized digital identity programs that severely undermine human rights. Governments, companies, and international agencies sell the idea of implementing a Big ID project as the silver bullet for solving a host of problems…. without ever presenting evidence that these tools will actually be effective at meeting people’s needs.… Aadhaar, India’s flagship Big ID project, is a clear example of this approach. Despite all the positive propaganda in its favor, Aadhaar has had a disastrous impact.
Despite the solidly documented negative experiences in relation to digitized identity and the many expert warnings against it, a range of powerful elite agents has a comprehensive program to impose this technocratic nightmare upon us. Consequently, it will require many people resisting strategically if it is to be defeated.
The bottom line is simple: Every time you submit to participation in some technological convenience, you give up some control over your own life. And there is no easy way to reclaim it, assuming that you even can.
This does not mean that we do not face a profound threat. We do. But it means that we cannot rely on reason or thoughtfulness alone to get us out of this mess: You cannot reason with insanity. And because the Global Elite controls international and national political processes, the global economy and legal systems, efforts to seek redress through those channels must fail.
Moreover, if we are going to defeat this long-planned, complex and multifaceted threat, we must defeat its foundational components, not delude ourselves that we can defeat it one threat at a time or even by choosing those threats we think are the worst and addressing those first.
This is because the elite program, whatever its flaws and inconsistencies, as well as its potential for technological failure at times, is deeply integrated so we must direct our efforts at preventing or halting those foundational components of it that make everything else possible. This is why random acts of resistance will achieve nothing. Effective resistance requires the focused exercise of our power. In simple terms, we must be ‘strategic’.
If you are interested in being strategic in your resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.
In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 20 languages (Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish & Slovak) with several more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here:
If this strategic resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).
And if you want to organize a mass mobilization, such as a rally, at least make sure that one or more of any team of organizers and/or speakers is responsible for inviting people to participate in this campaign and that some people at the event are designated to hand out the one-page flyer about the campaign.
If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here:
Finally, while the timeframe for this to make any difference is now in doubt, if you want to raise children who are powerfully able to investigate, analyze and act, you are welcome to make
Resisting the digitization of your identity is an important element of effective resistance to the Elite’s ‘Great Reset’ program.
While there are some elements of this that are very difficult to avoid, such as facial recognition cameras that are virtually everywhere, it certainly includes not signing up for a digital identity or participating unthinkingly in those programs, such as using a QR code, getting a ‘vaccine passport’ or willingly submitting to efforts to palm-print or microchip you, that are linked to it.
But, as I have already noted, just resisting digitization of your identity is not enough.
We must strategically resist the foundational components of the Elite program.
The alternatives are death or slavery.
Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) was founded by the BBC in July 2019. While TNI claims to promote democracy and freedom, its purpose for being is global information control
Partners in the initiative include global media outlets such as The Washington Post, Reuters, The Associated Press, AFP, the Financial Times and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and Big Tech partners such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft
TNI was formed mere weeks after a Reuters Institute report revealed trust in U.S. media had slipped to an all-time low of just 29% — the lowest of the 46 countries included. Clearly, people were going elsewhere for the facts, and that probably had everything to do with the creation of TNI. They have no control over alternative media, so they needed a comprehensive way to shut them all down
By suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the COVID shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the converse of “trusted news.” It is the very “fake news” it claims to combat
In addition to TNI, Google also has a similar program going on, called the Google News Initiative, which includes a $300 million funding commitment to the future of the news industry. The Google News Initiative is partnered with advertising agencies in a program called Trusted News for Trusted Advertising (TNTA), to ensure advertisers don’t have their ads associated with “false or misleading news,” thereby allowing them to “regain control of the media on which they publish the advertising”
What is the Trusted News Initiative (TNI)? As you may have discovered, Orwellian doublespeak is rampant these days, and many organizations are named in complete opposition to their intended purposes. Such is the case with the TNI as well.
As explained in the video above, created by Steve Kirsch’s Vaccine Safety Research Foundation (VSRF), TNI is an organization created for the purpose of global information control. It was founded by the BBC in July 2019,1,2,3 mere months before the COVID pandemic shattered all semblance of free speech rights.
Partners in the initiative include global media outlets such as The Washington Post, Reuters, The Associated Press, AFP, the Financial Times and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and Big Tech partners such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft, just to name a few.4,5
TNI Formed as Trust in Mainstream Media Hit Rock Bottom
As astutely noted by Elizabeth Woodsworth in The Liberty Beacon,6 TNI was formed mere weeks after a Reuters Institute report revealed trust in U.S. media had slipped to an all-time low of just 29% — the lowest of the 46 countries included. Canadians trust in mainstream media was only slightly better at 45%.
Also supporting the distrust in the media is an even more appalling recent Gallup Poll.7 Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Jimmy Dore goes into more details below.
This massive slip “can only mean that people are going elsewhere for their news,” Woodsworth said. And that probably had everything to do with the creation of TNI. They realized people didn’t trust mainstream media anymore and were looking elsewhere for the facts.
This presented a serious problem, as they had no control over alternative media. How then would they shut down undesirable facts and theories that might jeopardize the smooth transition into the New World Order? Enter TNI and a new cadre of “fact checking” organizations to wrangle the unruly masses back into the brainwashing line.
Promoting ‘Freedom and Democracy’ Through Censorship
According to TNI, its first order of business was to “promote freedom and democracy” by preventing foreign interference in the 2020 election. However, TNI’s mission didn’t end there. Its Big Pharma backers had a vaccination agenda right from the start, and TNI has been instrumental in promoting that agenda and upholding their financial interests.
In 2019 — before we knew anything about the COVID shots to come — TNI warned that “anti-vaxxers are gaining traction” and that online platforms would need to intervene using algorithms to suppress the growing anti-vaccine movement.
In addition to suppressing undesirable vaccine content, TNI also floods online users with pro-vaccine messages to drown out what little opposition is left. As noted by VSRF, from the start, TNI sought to normalize the use of this experimental gene transfer technology, despite a mountain of unanswered questions about the safety and efficacy of mRNA technology.
Suppressing early treatment successes was also part of the vaccine agenda, as early treatment options posed a direct threat to the Emergency Use Authorization of these experimental shots.
To that same end, TNI also fueled hatred against the unvaccinated, and hired so-called “fact checkers” to publish false fact checks and hit pieces on those who questioned the sanity and safety of pandemic countermeasures, such as masks and lockdowns, or raised concerns about the experimental shots.
We’re Made to Pay for Our Own Destruction
Hundreds of outspoken doctors and scientists — including experts from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford — have been banned and deplatformed over the past two and a half years.
No matter how prestigious their careers, they’ve been labeled “dangerous” and targeted for neutralization. Many have lost their careers. They’ve been ousted from professional associations and stripped of their medical licenses.By suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the very ‘fake news’ it claims to combat.
Thousands of vaccine-injured people have also been accused of spreading “misinformation” and have been targeted for elimination from social media, while mainstream media (MSM) have roundly ignored their plight and pleas for recognition and help.
As noted by VSRF, by suppressing information about early treatment and the adverse effects suffered from the shots, TNI partners have played a direct role in the destruction of lives. In short, TNI is the converse of “trusted news.” It actually creates and promotes mis- and disinformation. It is the very “fake news” it claims to combat.
And “Who’s paying for this harmful suppression of science?” VSRF asks. The answer: YOU are. We all are, through our taxes. Government has spent billions of tax dollars to promote the experimental COVID jabs, which benefits no one but Big Pharma, various patent holders and investors.
Legacy Media Is on the Wrong Side of History
In a June 25, 2021, article, unidentified staff at TrialSite News commented on the shocking censorship that was already becoming apparent:8
“Since time immemorial, those with power have used it to control those without. In the modern world, big government and big tech represent the seats of power when it comes to who is allowed to say what. Of course, many think that ‘private companies’ can regulate speech in any way they see fit. But from either an ethical or legal point of view, this is false …
Legally, the Supreme Court has long held that when a private company creates something that functions as a public square (think of a company town), the First Amendment comes into play.
Way back in April 2020, it was already clear that the then-existing online socio-political censorship was going to expand into the world of science, medicine, and academia in the new COVID-19 era. On April 1 of that year, early in the pandemic, Foreign Policy took a look at these questions in a piece titled, ‘Coronavirus Has Started a Censorship Pandemic’9 …
[D]isallowing good-faith medical information because the public can’t be presumed to properly weigh claims is infantilizing said public, along with dismantling the free speech culture …
The efforts now underway to completely suppress positive data associated with early-onset treatment prospects such as ivermectin or the squelching of any discussion of vaccine safety issues is completely unacceptable in a civilized, democratic market-based society. Those perpetuating such offenses are in fact on the wrong side of history.”
And who are the ones perpetuating these offenses? The TNI, for sure. TNI partners have censored and tried to ruin the reputations and careers of fully qualified and licensed public health experts, doctors and scientists — all in the name of protecting you, the audience, from the life-saving information these experts are trying to share. In her closing remarks, Woodsworth says:10
“Regarding COVID-19, Dr. Piers Robinson, co-director of the Organization for Propaganda Studies, has judged, ‘It wouldn’t be an underestimation to say that this is probably one of the biggest propaganda operations that we have seen in history,’ concluding ‘what happens is down to how people resist and how much force and coercion the authorities use.’
Indeed, the very foundation of democracy is that public wisdom should be consulted and given its head in self-rule. The public has the constitutional right to full information to form and express its own conclusions and does not need a coordinated TNI to corral and contain it.
It is utterly outrageous that the voices the public needs from the top public health figures at its best universities are being denied to its hearing. A far superior job of investigative reporting is being done by the hard-working alternative media researchers without Big Pharma’s blood-stained advertising dollars.”
Organized Control
The reason the TNI has been so effective in shutting out opposing views is because all of the partners work together in a highly-organized manner. When one identifies a piece of “misinformation,” the order to quash it is shared across platforms. The same goes for the official narrative. Everyone supports and promotes it, no matter how illogical.
A debunking piece by one legacy media partner is used as “proof” by another, and Big Tech platforms, of course, have unprecedented ability to suppress unwanted content and push “official” or approved content to the front using algorithms alone.
As for who actually decides what the official narrative is supposed to be, your guess is as good as mine. What we do know is that wealthy and powerful interests control media worldwide.
Two major media controllers are BlackRock and the Vanguard Group, which combined own a vast majority of the world’s assets, including media companies. Another is Bill Gates, whose self-serving “donations” ensure media treat him like a medical expert (or climate expert, or nutritional expert, or agricultural expert) when, in reality, he’s just promoting ideas that will make him a ton of money.
TNI’s Not-so-Trustworthy Sources
And what about TNI’s “trusted sources”? Aside from other TNI partners and their fact checkers, trusted sources are the public health agencies, such as the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Every one of these agencies has a long “rap sheet” when it comes to corruption and errors in judgment, and their unreliability have been highlighted time and again over the course of the COVID pandemic. They’ve broken a long list of rules and regulations intended to ensure public safety, and rewritten others on the fly — again without following proper protocols.
Time and again, people have scratched their heads, saying, “How can they do that? That’s not lawful. They CAN’T do that!” Well, the reality is, they used to be merely corrupt, but now they’re completely lawless. And no one is stopping them.
Decisions made by the FDA, CDC, NIH and the WHO over the course of the pandemic have been downright shocking in their absolute absence of any moral compass. They’ve repeatedly deferred to Big Pharma and blatantly ignored even the most basic of safety protocols, putting even babies lives at risk.
In the past, we’d expect the Fourth Estate — journalists with integrity — to expose the kind of fraud and lawlessness these agencies are engaging in. But sadly, legacy media, just like nearly every federal regulatory agency, has been captured by the military industrial complex.
Legacy media is no longer the “free press.” It certainly is in no way shape or form your trusted source of news. Those days are long gone. They are completely captured; hardly a sentence is uttered that isn’t directed to them by the government and repeated parroting by all of legacy media in all their varied forms.
Google News Initiative
In addition to TNI, Google also has a similar program going on, called the Google News Initiative, which includes a $300 million funding commitment to the future of the news industry.
The Google News Initiative is partnered with advertising agencies in a program called Trusted News for Trusted Advertising (TNTA),11 to ensure advertisers don’t have their ads associated with “false or misleading news,” thereby allowing them to “regain control of the media on which they publish the advertising.”
This is wrong on so many levels. Advertising and news/editorial departments are not supposed to be mixed, period. They are intended to operate independently, not as complements or supporting helpmates. The very fact that newspapers are failing and ad revenue is dropping makes the entire press corps susceptible to doing whatever the advertisers want.
And, online, advertisers include the CDC and NIH, as evidenced by their many ads on social media. So, the TNTA program is really all about building revenue. It has nothing to do with providing trustworthy news.
Several other copycats also exist that have nearly the same name as TNI. There’s the Trusting News Initiative, the Trust Project, the News Integrity Initiative, the Journalism Trust Initiative, you get the idea.12 Some share partners with the TNI, further widening the media network of controlled news.
Add to that NewsGuard and scores of fact-checking organizations, all of whom work in tandem to promote the official narrative while suppressing opposing views. As I’ve stated before, NewsGuard received startup funds13 from the Publicis Groupe, one of the largest PR companies in the world, which serves the needs of several of the largest drug companies in the world.
Last but not least, there’s a tightly woven web of interlocking “fact-checking” agencies that work for advertisers in an effort to manipulate the news in favor of the advertisers or other entities with vested interests, such as governments and health organizations.
This web of fact-checkers is funded by hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars. I believe this was planned long before the pandemic, and their goal is to steer the news into a second horn for advertisers. Not surprisingly, the drug industry has one of the largest advertising budgets, which is part of why you can’t get the truth about drugs and health from the legacy media or any of these fact-checkers.
TNI and Hitler’s Principles
In his Substack article, “Propaganda, Corporatism and the Hidden Global Coup,” Dr. Robert Malone describes the TNI thus:14
“The TNI uses advocacy journalism and journals to promote their causes. The Trusted News Initiative is more than this though; if you go back to Hitler’s basic principles, the members of the TNI are using these core principles to control the public.”
Hitler’s basic principles are described in the book, “Propaganda and Persuasion,” and are listed as:15
Avoid abstract ideas — appeal to the emotions
Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases
Give only one side of the argument
Continuously criticize your opponents
Pick out one special “enemy” for special vilification
I believe Dr. Malone is onto something. These principles have certainly become media norms over the past couple of years. Who knows — perhaps I was picked to be a “special enemy for special vilification” because the TNI and those who pull their puppet strings are all Nazis. I didn’t expect it to be that simplistic, but who knows?
We’re all getting an education in psychopathy these days, and there’s nothing normal about psychopathic logic. Their brains are wired differently and you won’t be able to understand their motivations no matter how hard you try. Is this perhaps why so many decisions handed down to us make no rational sense, either from a scientific, medical or humanitarian perspective?
If it’s true that many of those who are trying to take over the world in a global coup are in fact on the psychopathic spectrum, then our response needs to be suitably appropriate.
Appropriate responses when faced with a psychopath include keeping your emotions in check (as they seek to manipulate your emotions); standing your ground in an assertive manner; not buying into their stories (especially not victim stories); and paying attention only to their actions, not their words.16,17
To be more precise, most experts have one primary suggestion for dealing with a psychopath, and that is, “Don’t.”18 Since we’re talking about media here, that’s a fairly simple action item. Just turn them off, and find alternative news sources that aren’t tainted by blood money and an overt attempt for global slavery.
You owe it to yourself and your family to take control of your health and avoid these propaganda tools and restrict your information to truly trusted and vetted sources.
The authors: “the CDC Emergency Response Team” consisting of “Greta M. Massetti, PhD; Brendan R. Jackson, MD; John T. Brooks, MD; Cria G. Perrine, PhD; Erica Reott, MPH; Aron J. Hall, DVM; Debra Lubar, PhD;; Ian T. Williams, PhD; Matthew D. Ritchey, DPT; Pragna Patel, MD; Leandris C. Liburd, PhD; Barbara E. Mahon, MD.”
It would have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall in the brainstorming sessions that led to this little treatise. The wording was chosen very carefully, not to say anything false outright, much less admit any errors of the past, but to imply that it was only possible to say these things now.
“As SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, continues to circulate globally, high levels of vaccine- and infection-induced immunity and the availability of effective treatments and prevention tools have substantially reduced the risk for medically significant COVID-19 illness (severe acute illness and post–COVID-19 conditions) and associated hospitalization and death. These circumstances now allow public health efforts to minimize the individual and societal health impacts of COVID-19 by focusing on sustainable measures to further reduce medically significant illness as well as to minimize strain on the health care system, while reducing barriers to social, educational, and economic activity.“
In English: everyone can pretty much go back to normal. Focus on illness that is medically significant. Stop worrying about positive cases because nothing is going to stop them. Think about the bigger picture of overall social health. End the compulsion. Thank you. It’s only two and a half years late.
What about mass testing?
Forget it: “All persons should seek testing for active infection when they are symptomatic or if they have a known or suspected exposure to someone with COVID-19.”
Oh.
What about the magic of track and trace?
“CDC now recommends case investigation and contact tracing only in health care settings and certain high-risk congregate settings.”
Oh.
What about the unvaccinated who were so demonized throughout the last year?
“CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”
Remember when 40% of the members of the black community in New York City who refused the jab were not allowed into restaurants, bars, libraries, museums, or theaters? Now, no one wants to talk about that.
Also, universities, colleges, the military, and so on – which still have mandates in place – do you hear this? Everything you have done to hate on people, dehumanize people, segregate people, humiliate others as unclean, fire people and destroy lives, now stands in disrepute.
Meanwhile, as of this writing, the blasted US government still will not allow unvaccinated travelers across its borders!
Not one word of the CDC’s turgid treatise was untrue back in the Spring of 2020. There was always “infection-induced immunity,” though Fauci and Co. constantly pretended otherwise. It was always a terrible idea to introduce “barriers to social, educational, and economic activity.” The vaccines never promised in their authorization to stop infection and spread, even though all official statements of the CDC claimed otherwise, repeatedly and often.
You might also wonder how the great reversal treats masking. On this subject, there is no backing off. After all, the Biden administration still has an appeal in process to reverse the court decision that the mask mandate was illegal all along. “At the high COVID-19 Community Level,” the CDC adds, “additional recommendations focus on all persons wearing masks indoors in public and further increasing protection to populations at high risk.”
The problem from the beginning was that there never was an exit strategy from the crazy lockdown/mandate idea. It was never the case that they would magically cause the bug to go away. The excuse that we would lock down in wait for a vaccine never made any sense.
People surely knew early on of the social, economic, and cultural devastation that would ensue. If they did not, they never should have been anywhere near the control switches of public health. Badges and bureaucracies do not terrify a virus destined to spread to the whole planet. And not one person with even the most casual passing knowledge of coronaviruses could have sincerely believed that a vaccine would magically appear to achieve something never before achieved in the whole history of medicine.
When the Great Barrington Declaration appeared on October 4, 2020, it caused a global frenzy of fury not because it said anything new. It was merely a pithy restatement of basic public-health principles, which pretty much instantly became verboten on March 16, 2020, when Fauci/Birx announced their grand scheme.
The GBD generated mania because the existing praxis was based on preposterously unproven claims that demanded that billions of people buy into complete nonsense. Sadly many did simply because it seemed hard to believe that all world regimes but a handful would push such a damaging policy if it was utterly unworkable. When something like that happens – and there never was the hope that it could work – the regime imperative becomes censorship and shaming of dissent. It’s the only way to hold the great lie together.
So finally, nearly two years later the CDC has embraced the Great Barrington Declaration rather than doing a “quick and devastating takedown” as Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci called for the day after its release. No, they had to try out their new theory on the rest of us. It did not work, obviously. For the authors of the GBD, they knew from the time they penned the document that it was a matter of time before they were vindicated. They never doubted it.
Dr. Rajeev Venkayya is widely credited with coming up with the idea of lockdowns while he was working for the Bush administration back in 2005. He had no training at all in public health or epidemiology. He later marveled that it fell to him, a young desk-dwelling White House bureaucrat, to “invent pandemic planning.” Maybe he should have demurred that day that George W. Bush asked him to lead the charge to inaugurate a new war on pathogens.
Somehow his views gained converts, among whom was Bill Gates, the foundation for whom he worked for years. The rest is history.
In April 2020, Venkayya called me to explain why I needed to stop attacking lockdowns. He said that the planners need a chance to make their scheme work.
On the phone, I asked the same question over and over: where does the virus go? The first two times, he did not respond. I pressed and pressed. Finally he said there will be a vaccine.
It’s hard to appreciate just how preposterous that sounded at the time, and I said something along those lines: it would be a medical miracle never before seen to have a shot for a coronavirus that was sterilizing against wild type and all inevitable mutations, and to do it in a reasonable time so that society and economy had not completely fallen apart.
The whole approach was clearly millienarian at best and utter madness at worst. And here I was, in the thick of global lockdowns, on the phone with the architect of the whole idea, an idea that had reduced billions to servitude, wrecked schools and churches, and sent communities and countries into complete upheaval. I wondered at the time what it would be like to be Dr. Venkayya that day. After all this ended in disaster, would he take responsibility? His LinkedIn profile today says otherwise: he is prepared to “tackle current and future epidemic & pandemic threats as the CEO of Aerium Therapeutics.”
There never was an exit strategy from lockdowns and mandates but they eventually did find an exit nonetheless. It came in the form of a heavily footnoted and opaquely written reversal, published by the main bureaucracy responsible for the disaster. It amounts to a repudiation without saying so. And thus does the great experiment in mass compulsion come to an intellectual end. If only the carnage could be cleaned up by another posting on the CDC’s website.
By the way, the Biden administration has extended the declaration of Covid emergency. And my unvaccinated friends in the UK still can’t board a plane to come for a visit.
All of this gives rise to the great question: what was the point? Maybe it was all a mistake and now it is gone forever but that’s unlikely. The intellectuals who pushed this project on the world have a view of the world that is fundamentally ill-liberal. They differ among themselves on the details but the general approach is technocratic central planning rooted in deep suspicion of basic tenets of freedom.
How many people on the planet have now been acculturated to top-down control, socialized to live in fear, accept whatever comes down from above, never to question an edict, and expect to live in a world of rolling man-made disasters? And was that the point after all, to cultivate low expectations for life on earth and relinquish the soul’s desire for a full and free life?
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman
This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.
This is the language of force.
This is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who speak out against government corruption, misconduct and abuse.
These overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear.
We didn’t know it then, but what happened five years ago in Charlottesville, Va., was a foretaste of what was to come.
At the time, Charlottesville was at the center of a growing struggle over how to reconcile the right to think and speak freely, especially about controversial ideas, with the push to sanitize the environment of anything—words and images—that might cause offense. That fear of offense prompted the Charlottesville City Council to get rid of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had graced one of its public parks for 82 years.
In attempting to err on the side of political correctness by placating one group while muzzling critics of the city’s actions, Charlottesville attracted the unwanted attention of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and the alt-Right, all of whom descended on the little college town with the intention of exercising their First Amendment right to be disagreeable, to assemble, and to protest.
That’s when everything went haywire.
When put to the test, Charlottesville did not handle things well at all.
On August 12, 2017, government officials took what should have been a legitimate exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turned it into a lesson in authoritarianism by manipulating warring factions and engineering events in such a way as to foment unrest, lockdown the city, and justify further power grabs.
On the day of scheduled protests, police deliberately engineered a situation in which two opposing camps of protesters would confront each other, tensions would bubble over, and things would turn just violent enough to justify allowing the government to shut everything down.
In fact, as the Washington Post reports, police “seemed to watch as groups beat each other with sticks and bludgeoned one another with shields… At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatings before eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured.”
In other words, the government failed to uphold its constitutional mandates.
The police failed to carry out their duties as peace officers.
And the citizens found themselves unable to trust either the police or the government to do its job in respecting their rights and ensuring their safety.
This is not much different from what is happening on the present-day national scene.
Indeed, there’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.
Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Tensions rise, violence escalates, police stand down, and federal armies move in. Meanwhile, despite the protests and the outrage, the government’s abuses continue unabated.
It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the police state. The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.
They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another.
They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces.
They want us silent, servile and compliant.
They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting politically correct efforts to whitewash the past, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.
And they definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
Why else do you think Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continues to molder in jail for daring to blow the whistle about the U.S. government’s war crimes, while government officials who rape, plunder and kill walk away with little more than a slap on the wrist?
This is how it begins.
We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties.
Of course, “domestic terrorist” is just the latest bull’s eye phrase, to be used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”
This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.
For starters, we need to remember that we’ve all got rights, and we need to exercise them.
Most of all, we need to protect the rights of the people to speak truth to power, whatever that truth might be. Either “we the people” believe in free speech or we don’t.
Fifty years ago, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas asked:
“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet… [A]t the constitutional level, speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive… [A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”
In other words, the Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials. Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).
Somehow, the government keeps overlooking this important element in the equation.
The Establishment’s determination to close down narrative-challenger Alex Jones has put Sandy Hook back in the news. As First Amendment protection is fading, I checked to see what I had written about Sandy Hook. I was relieved to see that I had only reported on the skepticism and asked questions.
My search of the IPE archives brought up my articles on other controversial shootings–Las Vegas and Orlando–and the Oklahoma City Bombing. The common thread in all of these incidents is that the narrative is established the minute the news is reported, and officials and media never vary from the narrative. As soon as it happens, the government and the media already know what happened. No investigation ever takes place. It was the same for President Kennedy’s assassination, his brother’s assassination, 9/11, the Gulf of Tonkin, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, etc.
Legitimate questions about the narratives are ignored by officials and media who seem to be involved in a conspiracy to bury the truth. Skeptics, no matter how prominent or fact-based are demonized as “conspiracy theorists” unworthy of attention.
Clearly, America no longer has a media watchdog. America has a propaganda ministry for official narratives.
What this tells us should shock every American, every US puppet government, and Washington’s chosen enemies–Russia, China, and Iran–respect for truth is hard to find in the American media and the American government.
In the not distant future, it will become actionable to doubt the presstitues and the government on the grounds that doubt implies disbelief and disbelief is a crime or proves that you are a foreign agent. Slander and libel will evolve to apply to media and government as institutions. As we are so gullible, so trusting, we are going to be reduced to silence or praise. Silence will bring official suspicion. Praise of the false narratives will bring career success and rewards. This is the stark situation that we face.
It is unclear that anything can be done to rectify this situation. Older Americans generally are comfortable with the idea that government and media have integrity. This is their picture of the bygone world that they grew up in. Younger people have been indoctrinated in schools that government and media protect blacks, homosexuals, and transgendered from racist, homophobic and transphobic white people who use normality as an illegitimate standard of approval. Sodom and Gomorrah are approved, but not the white family unit.
Can we believe that there is a future for freedom in America when Democrats, media, CIA, FBI, and NSA can create a narrative of President Donald Trump as a Russian agent?
Can we believe that there is a future for freedom in America when the same collection of schemers can create a show trial of the President of the United States planning a coup by a couple of hundred unarmed supporters seizing the government of the United States by walking around in the Capitol and sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s chair?
Can we believe that Americans sufficiently stupid to believe such implausible narratives have any possibility of holding on to their freedom?
“There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.” ― Philip K. Dick
Nothing is private.
We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.
While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all.
Nothing that was once private is protected.
We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable.
AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.
Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer.
Governments and corporations alike have heedlessly adopted AI surveillance technologies without any care or concern for their long-term impact on the rights of the citizenry.
As a special report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “A growing number of states are deploying advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground.”
Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
Cue the rise of digital authoritarianism.
Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”
The seeds of digital authoritarianism were planted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the passage of the USA Patriot Act. A massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA, the Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens.
It sounded the death knell for the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth Amendment, and normalized the government’s mass surveillance powers.
Writing for the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen observed that “before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”
Who could have predicted that 50 years after George Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel 1984, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.
Yet that is exactly what has come to pass.
After 9/11, Rosen found that “people were happy to give up privacy without experiencing a corresponding increase in security. More concerned about feeling safe than actually being safe, they demanded the construction of vast technological architectures of surveillance even though the most empirical studies suggested that the proliferation of surveillance cameras had ‘no effect on violent crime’ or terrorism.”
In the decades following 9/11, a massive security-industrial complex arose that was fixated on militarization, surveillance, and repression.
Surveillance is the key.
We’re being watched everywhere we go. Speed cameras. Red light cameras. Police body cameras. Cameras on public transportation. Cameras in stores. Cameras on public utility poles. Cameras in cars. Cameras in hospitals and schools. Cameras in airports.
It’s estimated that there are upwards of 85 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. alone, second only to China.
On any given day, the average American going about his daily business is monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
Yet it’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.
We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, microbiomes, scent, gait, heartbeat, breathing, behaviors—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.
This is the slippery slope that leads to the thought police.
The technology is already being used “by border guards to detect threats at border checkpoints, as an aid for detection and diagnosis of patients for mood disorders, to monitor classrooms for boredom or disruption, and to monitor human behavior during video calls.”
For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government: the surveillance state.
This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.
The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.
“From cameras that identify the faces of passersby to algorithms that keep tabs on public sentiment online, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools are opening new frontiers in state surveillance around the world.” So begins the Carnegie Endowment’s report on AI surveillance note. “Law enforcement, national security, criminal justice, and border management organizations in every region are relying on these technologies—which use statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, and big data analytics—to monitor citizens.”
China, the role model for our dystopian future, has been a major force in deploying AI surveillance on its own citizens, especially by way of its social credit systems, which it employs to identify, track and segregate its “good” citizens from the “bad.”
While countries with authoritarian regimes have been eager to adopt AI surveillance, as the Carnegie Endowment’s research makes clear, liberal democracies are also “aggressively using AI tools to police borders, apprehend potential criminals, monitor citizens for bad behavior, and pull out suspected terrorists from crowds.”
Moreover, it’s easy to see how the China model for internet control has been integrated into the American police state’s efforts to flush out so-called anti-government, domestic extremists.
According to journalist Adrian Shahbaz’s in-depth report, there are nine elements to the Chinese model of digital authoritarianism when it comes to censoring speech and targeting activists: 1) dissidents suffer from persistent cyber attacks and phishing; 2) social media, websites, and messaging apps are blocked; 3) posts that criticize government officials are removed; 4) mobile and internet access are revoked as punishment for activism; 5) paid commentators drown out government criticism; 6) new laws tighten regulations on online media; 7) citizens’ behavior monitored via AI and surveillance tools; 9) individuals regularly arrested for posts critical of the government; and 9) online activists are made to disappear.
You don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship and AI surveillance.
The danger posed by the surveillance state applies equally to all of us: lawbreaker and law-abider alike.
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.
As Orwell wrote in 1984, “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.”
In an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whomever we wanted, buy whatever we wanted, think whatever we wanted, go wherever we wanted, feel whatever we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants, sold to government agencies, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
After the Crash 