Category Archives: Technocracy

360 Degree Surveillance: How Police Use Public-Private Partnerships to Spy on Americans

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“We live in a surveillance state founded on a partnership between government and the technology industry.”— Law Professor Avidan Y. Cover

In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.

Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.  

There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.

With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.

Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:

A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality. Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government. Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically. But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.

Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.

Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.

As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.

What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.

It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.

Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.

The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.

The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.

The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.

Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.

Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”

In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.

We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.

Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.

Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.

As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.

As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.

On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.

The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.

After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.

Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”

No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.

It’s George Orwell’s 1984 on a global scale.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, Orwell’s dystopian nightmare has become our looming reality.

How the US is blackmailing countries that buy American weapons

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By Vladimir Platov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Economic sanctions and blackmail have long been the preferred methods of conducting foreign policy and advancing the United States’ own geopolitical interests.

In 2018, the US withdrew from the agreement on Iran’s nuclear program signed in May 2015, following which Washington began to implement the “maximum pressure” strategy on Iran.

In 2019, the US government imposed a slew of restrictions on the Chinese firm Huawei, which is widely regarded as a leader in digital technologies, particularly in the deployment of 5G networks. Following that, Washington began to intercept Huawei’s foreign market as a result of an open competitive struggle.

And Russia’s gas squeeze in Europe, orchestrated by the US, exacerbated an already obvious economic and financial crisis for Europeans, resulting in total population impoverishment against the backdrop of America reaping additional superprofits from the sale of expensive American LNG instead of cheap Russian gas to Europe.

Sanctions, including secondary ones, become a tool for seizing funds and assets and bankrupting competitors, and are used by the United States to strengthen its global dominance.

Although the definition of extortion as a common law crime in US criminal law varies across states, both in wording and substance, it is nevertheless recognized everywhere as a serious offense and prosecuted under domestic law. In recent years, in an effort to introduce “rules” unilaterally favorable to the United States in place of international law, Washington’s policy has begun to carry the principle of “extraterritorial” sanctions into the international arena when the United States imposes them and openly extorts not only US legal subjects but also foreign ones, including independent states.

The fact that under these conditions, the US uses the dominant role of the US dollar, blackmail, and economic sanctions as the main instruments of foreign policy (the use of sanctions almost tripled in 2009-2019 alone) makes many countries think about possible alternatives. One of them is already the increasing use of national currencies in bilateral trade.

Washington’s abuse of such criminal policies and blatantly illegal pressures are causing resentment even among the United States’ allies. It is no coincidence that in 2019 the chairman of the United Kingdom’s central bank, Mark Carney, called for the creation of an international digital currency that would weaken the dominant role of the US dollar in international trade.

Washington is increasingly using outright blackmail, not just in the political, economic, and trade spheres. It is also used in the military sphere, with the sale and subsequent use of American weapons directly threatening the national security of countries that purchase US weapons.

And one of the many egregious examples of this is the events of 2016, when the US attempted to stage a coup in Turkey by killing President Erdoğan with American weapons and preventing Turkish authorities from using US air defenses to prevent them from shooting down F-16 aircraft flying from the US military base at Incirlik. And it was only thanks to the intervention of Russian politician Alexander Dugin (against whom, by the way, Ukrainian accomplices of the United States committed an act of terrorism in 2022 and killed his daughter) and the Russian military at the behest of President Vladimir Putin that this sinister plan of Washington was foiled. The arrested Turkish coup plotters themselves have given detailed accounts of it. In particular, about how the Russian military, using seven Russian fighter jets and two S-400 missile systems in northern Syria, warned the coupist aircraft that if the radar showed any indication of their suspicious or improper actions, they would be hit directly. As a result, the Turkish F-16s could only track Erdoğan’s plane and not attack it. In addition to the testimony of the Turkish participants in this failed American coup attempt, those interested can learn more from a Turkish report published on Odatv.com on September 21, 2016.

This blackmail of Ankara with US weapons continues even now, as pointed out in particular by Bloomberg the other day, which reported that the US will not supply Turkey with F-16s until it agrees to admit Sweden to NATO.

Even if Turkey, under pressure from Washington, agrees to admit Finland and Sweden to NATO, which the United States is trying hard to push into the alliance, Turkey will never be able to use those aircraft or other American weapons unless such use would be advantageous to the White House.

And the US decision in April 2021 to withdraw US Patriot air defense batteries from the Persian Gulf region after the White House deteriorated relations with the Saudi monarchy is proof of that.

The threat from Washington to restrict the use of purchased US weapons has become increasingly serious for many countries recently. Especially considering that it is the US that sells twice as many weapons as Russia and six times as many as China, thus dominating the market for weapons of death, destruction and protection of many states from external threats, the vast majority of which are also initiated by Washington. Here one can also see the recent White House game of supplying Greece with more and more offensive weapons against Turkey, whose relations with both Athens and Washington have recently deteriorated significantly.

Washington has made similar attempts at blackmail in its arms supplies to the other two rival parties to the conflict in South Asia – Pakistan and India. Therefore, despite Washington’s blatant blackmail and intimidation of New Delhi, India continues to focus on buying arms from Russia rather than the United States. In the meantime, India has two important defense needs: the availability of weapons and their quality. In its preferential treatment of Russia on this issue, Indian leaders assume that if the country begins to buy weapons from the West, it will strengthen its autonomy but sacrifice these two needs, since Western systems are many times more expensive but inferior to Russian ones.

The Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy

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Bombs, Bullets, and Bellicosity Instead of Brains

Signe’s second toon du jour SIGN17e Military

By W.J. Astore

Source: Bracing Views

In my latest article for TomDispatch.com, I parse the meaning of America’s latest National Defense Strategy. Hint: It’s not about defense.

More than two millennia ago, in the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounted a disastrous conflict Athens waged against Sparta. A masterwork on strategy and war, the book is still taught at the U.S. Army War College and many other military institutions across the world. A passage from it describing an ultimatum Athens gave a weaker power has stayed with me all these years. And here it is, loosely translated from the Greek: “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.”

Recently, I read the latest National Defense Strategy, or NDS, issued in October 2022 by the Pentagon, and Thucydides’s ancient message, a warning as clear as it was undeniable, came to mind again. It summarized for me the true essence of that NDS: being strong, the United States does what it wants and weaker powers, of course, suffer as they must. Such a description runs contrary to the mythology of this country in which we invariably wage war not for our own imperial ends but to defend ourselves while advancing freedom and democracy. Recall that Athens, too, thought of itself as an enlightened democracy even as it waged its imperial war of dominance on the Peloponnesus. Athens lost that war, calamitously, but at least it did produce Thucydides, a military leader who became a historian and wrote all too bluntly about his country’s hubristic, ultimately fatal pursuit of hegemony.

Imperial military ambitions contributed disastrously to Athens’s exhaustion and ultimate collapse, a lesson completely foreign to U.S. strategists. Not surprisingly, then, you’ll find no such Thucydidean clarity in the latest NDS approved by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. In place of that Greek historian’s probity and timeless lessons, the NDS represents an assault not just on the English language but on our very future. In it, a policy of failing imperial dominance is eternally disguised as democratic deterrence, while the greatest “strategic” effort of all goes (remarkably successfully) into justifying massive Pentagon budget increases. Given the sustained record of failures in this century for what still passes as the greatest military power on the planet — Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, of course, but don’t forget Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and indeed the entire $8 trillion Global War on Terror in all its brutality — consider the NDS a rare recent “mission accomplished” moment. The 2023 baseline “defense” budget now sits at $858 billion, $45 billion more than even the Biden administration requested.

With that yearly budget climbing toward a trillion dollars (or more) annually, it’s easy to conclude that, at least when it comes to our military, nothing succeeds like failure. And, by the way, that not only applies to wars lost at a staggering cost but also financial audits blown without penalty. After all, the Pentagon only recently failed its fifth audit in a row. With money always overflowing, no matter how it may be spent, one thing seems guaranteed: some future American Thucydides will have the material to produce a volume or volumes beyond compare. Of course, whether this country goes the way of Athens — defeat driven by military exhaustion exacerbated by the betrayal of its supposedly deepest ideals leading to an ultimate collapse — remains to be seen. Still, given that America’s war colleges continue to assign Thucydides, no one can say that our military and future NDS writers didn’t get fair warning when it comes to what likely awaits them.

Bludgeoning America with Bureaucratese

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS.

That’s a saying I learned early in my career as an Air Force officer, so I wasn’t exactly surprised to discover that it’s the NDS’s guiding philosophy. The document has an almost Alice in Wonderland-like quality to it as words and phrases take on new meanings. China, you won’t be surprised to learn, is a “pacing challenge” to U.S. security concerns; Russia, an “acute threat” to America due to its “unprovoked, unjust, and reckless invasion of Ukraine” and other forms of “irresponsible behavior”; and building “combat-credible forces” within a “defense ecosystem” is a major Pentagon goal, along with continuing “investments in mature, high-value assets” (like defective aircraft carriers, ultra-expensive bombers and fighter jets, and doomsday-promising new ICBMs).

Much talk is included about “leveraging” those “assets,” “risk mitigation,” and even “cost imposition,” a strange euphemism for bombing, killing, or otherwise inflicting pain on our enemies. Worse yet, there’s so much financial- and business-speak in the document that it’s hard not to wonder whether its authors don’t already have at least one foot in the revolving door that could, on their retirement from the military, swing them onto the corporate boards of major defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon.

Perhaps my favorite redefined concept in that NDS lurks in the word “campaigning.” In the old days, armies fought campaigns in the field and generals like Frederick the Great or Napoleon truly came to know the price of them in blood and treasure. Unlike U.S. generals since 1945, they also knew the meaning of victory, as well as defeat. Perish the thought of that kind of campaigning now. The NDS redefines it, almost satirically, not to say incomprehensibly, as “the conduct and sequencing of logically-linked military initiatives aimed at advancing well-defined, strategy-aligned priorities over time.” Huh?

Campaigning, explains the cover letter signed by Secretary of Defense Austin (who won’t be mistaken for Frederick II in his bluntness or Napoleon in his military acuity), “is not business as usual — it is the deliberate effort to synchronize the [Defense] Department’s activities and investments to aggregate focus and resources to shift conditions in our favor.”

Got it? Good!

Of course, who knows what such impenetrable jargon really means to our military in 2023? This former military officer certainly prefers the plain and honest language of Thucydides. In his terms, America, the strong, intends to do what it will in the world to preserve and extend “conditions in our favor,” as the NDS puts it — a measure by which this country has failed dismally in this century. Weaker countries, especially those that are “irresponsible,” must simply suffer. If they resist, they must be prepared for some “cost imposition” events exercised by our “combat-credible forces.” Included in those are America’s “ultimate backstop” of cost imposition… gulp, its nuclear forces.

Again, the NDS is worthy of close reading (however pain-inducing that may be) precisely because the secretary of defense does claim that it’s his “preeminent guidance document.” I assume he’s not kidding about that, though I wish he were. To me, that document is to guidance as nuclear missiles are to “backstops.” If that last comparison is jarring, I challenge you to read it and then try to think or write clearly.

Bringing Clarity to America’s Military Strategy

To save you the trauma of even paging through the NDS, let me try to summarize it quickly in my version — if not the Pentagon’s — of English:

  1. China is the major threat to America on this planet.
  2. Russia, however, is a serious threat in Europe.
  3. The War on Terror continues to hum along successfully, even if at a significantly lower level.
  4. North Korea and Iran remain threats, mainly due to the first’s growing nuclear arsenal and the second’s supposed nuclear aspirations.
  5. Climate change, pandemics, and cyberwar must also be factored in as “transboundary challenges.”

“Deterrence” is frequently used as a cloak for the planetary dominance the Pentagon continues to dream of. Our military must remain beyond super-strong (and wildly overfunded) to deter nations and entities from striking “the homeland.” There’s also lots of talk about global challenges to be met, risks to be managed, “gray zone” methods to be employed, and references aplenty to “kinetic action” (combat, in case your translator isn’t working) and what’s known as “exploitable asymmetries.”

Count on one thing: whatever our disasters in the real world, nobody is going to beat America in the jargon war.

Missing in the NDS — and no surprise here — is any sense that war is humanity’s worst pastime. Even the mass murder implicit in nuclear weapons is glossed over. The harshest realities of conflict, nuclear war included, and the need to do anything in our power to prevent them, naturally go unmentioned. The very banality of the document serves to mask a key reality of our world: that Americans fund nothing as religiously as war, that most withering of evils.

Perhaps it’s not quite the banality of evil, to cite the telling phrase political philosopher Hannah Arendt used to describe the thoughts of the deskbound mass-murderers of the Holocaust, but it does have all of war’s brutality expunged from it. As we stare into the abyss, the NDS replies with mind-numbing phrases and terms that wouldn’t be out of place in a corporate report on rising profits and market dominance.

Yet as the military-industrial complex maneuvers and plots to become ever bigger, ever better funded, and ever more powerful, abetted by a Congress seemingly lustful for ever more military spending and weapons exports, hope for international cooperation, productive diplomacy, and democracy withers. Here, for instance, are a few of the things you’ll never see mentioned in this NDS:

  1. Any suggestion that the Pentagon budget might be reduced. Ever.
  2. Any suggestion that the U.S. military’s mission or “footprint” should be downsized in any way at all.
  3. Any acknowledgement that the U.S. and its allies spend far more on their militaries than “pacing challengers” like China or “acute threats” like Russia.
  4. Any acknowledgment that the Pentagon’s budget is based not on deterrence but on dominance.
  5. Any acknowledgement that the U.S. military has been far less than dominant despite endless decades of massive military spending that produced lost or stalemated wars from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.
  6. Any suggestion that skilled diplomacy and common security could lead to greater cooperation or decreased tensions.
  7. Any serious talk of peace.

In brief, in that document and thanks to the staggering congressional funding that goes with it, America is being eternally spun back into an age of great-power rivalry, with Xi Jinping’s China taking the place of the old Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin’s Russia that of Mao Zedong’s China. Consistent with that retro-vision is the true end goal of the NDS: to eternally maximize the Pentagon budget and so the power and authority of the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Basically, any power that seeks to push back against the Pentagon’s vision of security through dominance is defined as a threat to be “deterred,” often in the most “kinetic” way. And the greatest threat of all, requiring the most “deterrence,” is, of course, China.

In a textbook case of strategic mirror-imaging, the Pentagon’s NDS sees that country and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as acting almost exactly like the U.S. military. And that simply cannot be allowed.

Here’s the relevant NDS passage:

“In addition to expanding its conventional forces, the PLA is rapidly advancing and integrating its space, counterspace, cyber, electronic, and information warfare capabilities to support its holistic approach to joint warfare. The PLA seeks to target the ability of the [U.S.] Joint Force to project power to defend vital U.S. interests and aid our Allies in a crisis or conflict. The PRC [China] is also expanding the PLA’s global footprint and working to establish a more robust overseas and basing infrastructure to allow it to project military power at greater distances. In parallel, the PRC is accelerating the modernization and expansion of its nuclear capabilities.”

How dare China become more like the United States! Only this country is allowed to aspire to “full-spectrum dominance” and global power, as manifested by its 750 military bases scattered around the world and its second-to-none, blue-water navy. Get back to thy place, China! Only “a free people devoted to democracy and the rule of law” can “sustain and strengthen an international system under threat.” China, you’ve been warned. Better not dare to keep pace with the U.S. of A. (And heaven forfend that, in a world overheating in a devastating way, the planet’s two greatestgreenhouse gas emitters should work together to prevent true catastrophe!)

Revisiting the Oath of Office

Being a retired U.S. military officer, I always come back to the oath of office I once swore to uphold: “To support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Naturally, if China, Russia, or any other country or entity attacks or otherwise directly menaces the U.S., I expect our military to defend this country with all due vigor.

That said, I don’t see China, Russia, or weaker countries like Iran or North Korea risking attacks against America proper, despite breathless talk of world “flashpoints.” Why would they, when any such attack would incur a devastating counterattack, possibly including America’s trusty “backstop,” its nuclear weapons?

In truth, the NDS is all about the further expansion of the U.S. global military mission. Contraction is a concept never to be heard. Yet reducing our military’s presence abroad isn’t synonymous with isolationism, nor, as has become ever more obvious in recent years, is an expansive military structure a fail-safe guarantor of freedom and democracy at home. Quite the opposite, constant warfare and preparations for more of it overseas have led not only to costly defeats, most recently in Afghanistan, but also to the increasing militarization of our society, a phenomenon reflected, for instance, in the more heavily armed and armored police forces across America.

The Pentagon’s NDS is a classic case of threat inflation cloaked in bureaucratese where the “facts” are fixed around a policy that encourages the incessant and inflationary growth of the military-industrial complex. In turn, that complex empowers and drives a “rules-based international order” in which America, as hegemon, makes the rules. Again, as Thucydides put it, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer as they must.

Yet, to paraphrase another old book, what does it profit a people to gain the whole world yet lose their very soul?  Like Athens before it, America was once a flawed democracy that nevertheless served as an inspiration to many because militarism, authoritarianism, and imperial pretense didn’t drive it. Today, this country is much like Thucydides’s Athens, projecting power ever-outwards in a misbegotten exercise to attain mastery through military supremacy.

It didn’t end well for Athens, nor will it for the United States.

The Digitization Of Humanity Shows Why The Globalist Agenda Is Evil

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

In recent weeks I’ve been seeing an interesting narrative fallacy being sold to the general public when it comes to the designs of globalists. The mainstream media and others are now openly suggesting that it’s actually okay to be opposed to certain aspects of groups like the World Economic Forum. They give you permission to be concerned, just don’t dare call it conspiracy.

This propaganda is a deviation from the abject denials we’re accustomed to hearing in the Liberty Movement for the past decade or more. We have all been confronted with the usual cognitive dissonance – The claims that globalist groups “just sit around talking about boring economic issues” and nothing they do has any bearing on global politics or your everyday life. In some cases we were even told that these groups of elites “don’t exist”.

Now, the media is admitting that yes, perhaps the globalists do have more than just a little influence over governments, social policies and economic outcomes. But, what the mainstream doesn’t like is the assertion that globalists have nefarious or authoritarian intentions. That’s just crazy tinfoil hat talk, right?

The reason for the narrative shift is obvious. Far too many people witnessed the true globalist agenda in action during the pandemic lockdowns and now they see the conspiracy for what it is. The globalists, in turn, seem to have been shocked to discover many millions of people in opposition to the mandates and the refusals to comply were clearly far greater than they expected. They are still trying to push their brand of covid fear, but the cat is out of the bag now.

They failed to get what they wanted in the west, which was a perpetual Chinese-style medical tyranny with vaccine passports as the norm. So, the globalist strategy has changed and they are seeking to adapt. They admit to a certain level of influence, but they pretend as if they are benevolent or indifferent.

The response to this lie is relatively straightforward. I could point out how Klaus Schwab of the WEF savored the thrill of the initial pandemic outbreak and declared that covid was the perfect “opportunity” to initiate what the WEF calls the “Great Reset.”

I could also point out that Klaus Schwab’s vision of the Reset, what he calls the “4th Industrial Revolution”, is a veritable nightmare world in which Artificial Intelligence runs everything, society is condensed into digital enclaves called “smart cities” and people are oppressed by carbon taxation. I could point out that the WEF actively supports the concept of the “Shared Economy” in which you will “own nothing, have no privacy” and you will supposedly be happy about it, but only because you won’t have any other choice.

What I really want to talk about, however, is the process by which the elites hope to achieve their dystopian epoch, as well as the globalist mindset which lends itself to the horrors of technocracy. The common naive assumption among skeptics of conspiracy is that the globalists are regular human beings with the same drives and limited desires as the rest of us. They might have some power, but world events are still random and certainly not controlled.

This is a fallacy. The globalists are not like us. They are not human. Or, I should say, they despise humanity and seek to do away with it. And, because of this, they have entirely different aspirations compared to the majority of us which include aspirations of dominance.

What we are dealing with here are not normal people with conscience, ethics or empathy. Their behavior is much more akin to higher functioning psychopaths and sociopaths rather than the everyday person on the street. We saw this on full display during the covid lockdowns and the vicious attempts to enforce vaccine passports; their actions betray their long game.

Take a look at comments by New Zealand’s prime minister and WEF attendee, Jacinda Ardern, from a year ago. She admits to the deliberate tactic of creating a two-tier class system within her own country based on vaccination status. There is no remorse or guilt in her demeanor, she is proud of taking such authoritarian actions despite numerous studies that prove the mandates are ineffective.

Beyond the covid response, though, I suggest people who deny globalist conspiracy take a deeper dive into the philosophical roots of organizations like the WEF. Their entire ideology can be summed up in a couple words – Futurism and godhood.

Futurism is an ideological movement which believes that all “new” innovations, social or technological, should supplant the previous existing systems for the sake of progress. They believe that all old ways of thinking, including notions of principles, heritage, religious belief systems, codes of conduct, etc. are crutches holding humanity back from greatness.

But what is the greatness the futurists seek? As mentioned above, they want godhood. An era in which the natural world and human will is enslaved by the hands of a select few. Case in point – The following presentation from 2018 by WEF “guru” Yuval Harari on the future of humanity as the globalists see it:

Harari’s conclusions are rooted in elitist biases and ignore numerous psychological and social realities, but we can set those aside for a moment and examine his basic premise that humanity as we know it will no longer exist in the next century because of “digital evolution” and “human hacking.”

The foundation of the WEF vision is built on the idea that data is the new Holy Grail, the new conquest. This is something I have written about extensively in the past (check out my article ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Secular Look At The Digital Antichrist’) but it is good to see it expressed with such arrogance by someone like Harari because it is undeniable evidence – The globalists think they are going to build a completely centralized economy and society based on human data rather than production. In other words, YOU become the product. The average citizen, your thoughts and your behaviors, become the stock in trade.

Globalists also believe that data is most valuable because it can be exploited to control people’s behaviors, to hack the body and mind in order to create human puppets, or create super-beings. They dream of becoming little gods with omnipotent knowledge. Yuval even proudly proclaims that intelligent design will no longer be the realm of God in heaven, but of the new digitized man.

While Harari pays lip service to “democracy” vs “digital dictatorship”, he goes on to assert that centralization may become the defacto system of governance. He says this not because he fears dictatorship, but because that has always been the WEF’s intent. The globalist argues that governments cannot be trusted to hold a monopoly on the digital wellspring and that someone needs to step in to regulate data; but “who would do this?”, he asks.

He already knows the answer. The UN, a globalist edifice, has consistently said it should be the governing body that takes control of AI and data regulation through UNESCO. That is to say, Harari is playing coy, he knows that the people who will step in to control the data are people just like him.

At no point in Harari’s speech does he suggest that that any of these developments should be obstructed or stopped. At no point does he offer the idea that the digitization of humanity is wrong and that there are other better ways of living. He actually mocks the concept of “going back” to old ways; only the future and the Tabula Rasa (blank slate) hold promise for the globalists, everything else is an impediment to their designs.

But here’s the thing, what the globalists are trying to accomplish is a fantasy. People are not algorithms, despite how much Harari would like them to be. People have habits, yes, but they are also unpredictable and are prone to sudden awakenings and epiphanies in the moment of crisis.

Psychopaths tend to be robotic people, acting impulsively but also very predictably. They lack imagination, intuition and foresight, and so it’s not surprising that organizations of psychopaths like the WEF would place such an obsessive value on AI, algorithms and a cold technocratic evolution. They don’t view their data Shangri-La as humanity’s future; they see it as THEIR future – The future of the non-humans, or the anti-humans as it were.

Who will produce all the goods, services and necessities required in this brave new world? Well, all of us peons, of course. Sure, the globalists will offer grand promises of a robot driven production economy in which people no longer need to engage in menial labor, but this will be another lie. They’ll still need people to plant the crops, maintain infrastructure, take care of manufacturing, do their fighting for them, etc., they’ll just need less of us.

At bottom, an economy built on data is an economy dependent on illusion.

Data is vaporous and oftentimes meaningless because it is subject to the biases of the interpreter. Algorithms can also be programmed to the biases of the engineers. There is nothing inherently objective about data – it is all dependent on the intentions of the people analyzing it.

For example, to use Harari’s anecdote of an algorithm that “knows you are gay” before you do; any twisted group of people could simply write code for an algorithm that tells the majority of easily manipulated kids that they are gay, even when they are not. And, if you are gullible enough to believe the algorithm is infallible, then you could be led to believe that numerous falsehoods are true and be convinced to behave against your nature. You have allowed a biased digital phantom to dictate your identity, and have made yourself “hackable.”

In the meantime, the elitists entertain delusions of surpassing their mortal limitations by “hacking” the human body, as well as reading the minds of the masses and predicting the future based on data trends. This is an obsession which ignores the unpredictable wages of the human soul, that very element of conscience and of imagination which psychopaths lack. It’s something that cannot be hacked.

The legitimacy of the data based system and the hacking of humanity that the WEF aspires to is less important than what the masses can be convinced of. If the average person can be persuaded to implant their cell phone in their skull in the near future, then yes, humanity might become hackable in a rudimentary way.

The algorithms then supplant conscience, empathy and principles.  And, without these things all morality becomes relative by default.  Evil becomes good, and good becomes evil. 

By the same token, if humanity can be persuaded to set down their cell phones and live a less tech focused life, then the digital empire of the globalists comes crashing down quite easily. There is no system the elites can impose that would make their digital consciousness a reality without the consent of the public at large.

Without a vast global framework in which people willingly embrace the algorithms rather than their own experience and intuitions, the globalist religion of total centralization dies. The first step is to accept that the conspiracy does indeed exist. The second step is to accept that the conspiracy is malicious and destructive. The third step is to refuse to comply, by whatever means necessary.

Don’t Trust the Government with Your Privacy, Property or Your Freedoms

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

How do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.

When you consider all the ways “we the people” are being bullied, beaten, bamboozled, targeted, tracked, repressed, robbed, impoverished, imprisoned and killed by the government, one can only conclude that you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, your property, your life, or your freedoms.

Consider for yourself.

Don’t trust the government with your privacy, digital or otherwise. In the two decades since 9/11, the military-security industrial complex has operated under a permanent state of emergency that, in turn, has given rise to a digital prison that grows more confining and inescapable by the day. Wall-to wall surveillance, monitored by AI software and fed to a growing network of fusion centers, render the twin concepts of privacy and anonymity almost void. By conspiring with corporations, the Department of Homeland Security “fueled a massive influx of money into surveillance and policing in our cities, under a banner of emergency response and counterterrorism.” For instance, all across the country, police are installing Flock Safety license plate readers as part of a public-private partnership program between police and the surveillance industry. These cameras, which upload data in real time to fusion crime centers, signal a turning point in the transition from a police state to a police-driven surveillance state.

Don’t trust the government with your property. In yet another effort to legitimize warrantless searches, police are employing “hit-and-hold” tactics in which police enter a home, carry out an initial sweep of the property, handcuff the occupants, then wait for official search warrants to be secured and applied retroactively. In the meantime, police have managed to bypass the Fourth Amendment. The rationale, to prevent possible destruction of evidence, is the same one used to deadly effect with no-knock raids. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.

Don’t trust the government with your finances. The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity. The national debt is $31.3 trillion and growing, and we’re paying more than $300 billion in interest every year on that public debt, yet there seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the government’s fiscal insanity. According to Forbes, Congress has raised, extended or revised the definition of the debt limit 78 times since 1960 in order to allow the government to essentially fund its existence with a credit card.

Don’t trust the government with your health. For all intents and purposes, “we the people” have become lab rats in the government’s secret experiments, which include MKULTRA and the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. Indeed, you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins. Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.

Don’t trust the government with your life: At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences. The number of Americans killed by police continues to grow, with the majority of those killed as a result of police encounters having been suspected of a non-violent offense or no crime at all, or during a traffic violation. According a report by Mapping Police Violence, police killed more people in 2022 than any other year within the past decade. In 98% of those killings, police were not charged with a crime.

Don’t trust the government with your freedoms. For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people. Freedom no longer means what it once did. This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” On paper, we may be technically free, but in reality, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

Remember the purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.

Unfortunately, what we have been saddled with is, in almost every regard, the exact opposite of an institution dedicated to protecting the lives and liberties of its people.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

3 QUESTIONS YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO ASK ABOUT LIFE IN A SICK SOCIETY

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By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

In a society this controlling, it’s no wonder so many people can’t let go of their grip on false realities, and pressure others to conform to their point of view. In my work as a self-mastery coach I help people see what false realities they’ve made for themselves, and help them let go of their grip on useless beliefs.  ~Dylan Charles

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” ~J. Krishnamurti

Society is directed by a never-ending mainstream narrative which is always evolving, and always reaching new dramatic peaks in sensationalism and hype. They fill your mind with topics they select, they keep your attention on these topics, and they invite and encourage you to argue amongst each other about these topics. In this way our collective attention is permanently commandeered, preventing us from diving too deeply into matters which have more than a superficial impact on day-today life.

Free-thinking is the ability and willingness to explore of ideas and areas of the mind which are yet undiscovered or are off-limits. It is a vanishing art that is deliberately being stamped out by a control system which demands conformity, acquiescence and obedience of body, mind, and spirit.

For your consideration, here are three questions you’re not supposed to ask about life in our profoundly sick society.

1. Who owns the money supply, and the world’s debt?

Pretty much the entire world is in financial debt, an insidious form of slavery which enables the exploitation of human beings and of all things in nature. It’s maddening when you think about it. The United States alone supposedly owes some $20 trillion, while the world at large owes a shocking $215 trillion?

But to whom, precisely?

Money is just a medium of exchange which facilitates transactions between people. In and of itself it has no intrinsic value as we could just as easily use sea shells instead of dollar bills and still be able to get things done. But today’s money is the property of private third-parties who rent it out to national governments, who then use the labor of their citizens as collateral against these loans. This is a highly refined form of slavery, which has already put future unborn generations of human beings in debt.

But who, exactly does the human race owe? Who are our debt-slave masters?

2. Who owns your body?

Ownership means having the explicit right to use, control and dispose of something in the manner of your choosing. The one thing you are born with that you take with you to your death is your own body, but do you own it? If not you, then who does own your body?

If this question were already settled in our society then there wouldn’t be ever-increasing pressure on those who choose to refuse vaccines. Children battling cancer and other serious illnesses wouldn’t be forced to take chemo and radiation under penalty of law and under threat of being taken from their parents. Water wouldn’t be fluoridated without our consent. Natural medicines wouldn’t be outlawed under threat of fines and prison time.

We are rapidly approaching a time when people will be required by law to take psychotropic medications as citizens were in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian classic, Brave New World.

Do you own your body, or does it belong to the state?

3.  Why is the exploration of consciousness restricted and illegal?

The most effective prisons are not material, but are constructed inside the mind. Perception, opinion and understanding are all dynamic concepts, not at all static. These can all change in the blink of an eye just because a new idea or experience resonates with you in a special way. Our evolution depends on our ability to expand the frontiers of what’s possible, and when the mind is held in confinement by an entrenched system and powerful cultural paradigm, progress, even happiness, is stunted.

In this societal trap you are given free rein to debase your consciousness and your spirit with alcohol, dangerous drugs, pharmaceuticals, television, pornography, theatrical violence, and then some, yet many natural medicines which elevate consciousness and provide a window into the soul are illegal.

“This is the way freedom is hijacked—not all at once, out in the open, but stealthily, little by little, behind closed doors, and with our own agreement. How will we be able to resist when so many of us have already willingly handed over the keys to our own consciousness to the state and accepted without protest that it is OK to be told what we may and may not do, what we may and may not explore, even what we may and may not experience, with this most precious, sapient, unique, and individual part of ourselves?

If we are willing to accept that then we can be persuaded to accept anything.” ~Graham Hancock

Why Orwell matters

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His defence of freedom flies in the face of all that is woke and regressive today.

George Orwell aka Eric Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950)

By Bruno Waterfield

Source: Spike Online

Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.

He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.

And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.

Totalitarianism in Orwell’s time

The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union represented something new and frightening for Orwell. Authoritarian dictatorships, in which power was wielded unaccountably and arbitrarily, had existed before, of course. But what made the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century different was the extent to which they demanded every individual’s complete subservience to the state. They sought to abolish the very basis of individual freedom and autonomy. They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.

Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’

Totalitarianism may have reached its horrifying zenith in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. But Orwell was worried about its effect in the West, too. He was concerned about the Sovietisation of Europe through the increasingly prominent and powerful Stalinist Communist Parties. He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.

Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. They therefore saw it as desirable to force people to conform to certain prescribed behaviours and attitudes. This threatened the everyday freedom of people who wanted, as Orwell put it, ‘the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above’.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.

Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.

Moreover, Orwell’s antipathy towards this new elite type was long-standing. He had bristled against the rigidity and pomposity of imperial officialdom as a minor colonial police official in Burma between 1922 and 1927. And he had always battled against the top-down socialist great and good, and much of academia, too, who were often very much hand in glove with the Stalinised left.

The hostility was mutual. Indeed, it accounts for the disdain that many academics and their fellow travellers continue to display towards Orwell today.

The importance of words

Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. Just think, for example, of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have turned ‘fascism’ from a historically specific phenomenon into a pejorative that has lost all meaning, to be used to describe anything from Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Tory government – a process Orwell saw beginning with the Stalinist practice of calling Spanish democratic revolutionaries ‘Trotsky-fascists’ (which he documented in Homage to Catalonia (1938)).

Or think of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview. Through exerting power over ideas, they seek to shape reality. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing’, says O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull… You must get rid of these 19th-century ideas about the laws of nature.’

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime tries to subject history to similar manipulation. As anti-hero Winston Smith tells his lover, Julia:

‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’

As Orwell wrote elsewhere, ‘the historian believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.’

This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.

But it is language that is central to Orwell’s analysis of this form of intellectual manipulation and thought-control. Take ‘Ingsoc’, the philosophy that the regime follows and enforces through the linguistic system of Newspeak. Newspeak is more than mere censorship. It is an attempt to make certain ideas – freedom, autonomy and so on – actually unthinkable or impossible. It is an attempt to eliminate the very possibility of dissent (or ‘thoughtcrime’).

As Syme, who is working on a Newspeak dictionary, tells Winston Smith:

‘The whole aim… is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

The parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision of totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset of today, in which language is policed and controlled, should not be overstated. In the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project of eliminating freedom and dissent, as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, was backed up by a brutal, murderous secret police. There is little of that in our societies today – people are not forcibly silenced or disappeared.

However, they are cancelled, pushed out of their jobs, and sometimes even arrested by the police for what amounts to thoughtcrime. And many more people simply self-censor out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Orwell’s concern that words could be erased or their meaning altered, and thought controlled, is not being realised in an openly dictatorial manner. No, it’s being achieved through a creeping cultural and intellectual conformism.

The intellectual turn against freedom

But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.

Interestingly, his concerns about an intellectual betrayal of freedom were reinforced by a 1944 meeting of the anti-censorship organisation, English PEN. Attending an event to mark the 300th anniversary of Milton’s Areopagitica, Milton’s famous 1644 speech making the case for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, Orwell noted that many of the left-wing intellectuals present were unwilling to criticise Soviet Russia or wartime censorship. Indeed, they had become profoundly indifferent or hostile to the question of political liberty and press freedom.

‘In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats’, Orwell wrote, ‘but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all’.

Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.

An individual speaking freely and honestly, wrote Orwell, is ‘accused of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege’.

These are insights which have stood the test of time. Just think of the imprecations against those who challenge the consensus. They are dismissed as ‘contrarians’ and accused of selfishly upsetting people.

And worst of all, think of the way free speech is damned as the right of the privileged. This is possibly one of the greatest lies of our age. Free speech does not support privilege. We all have the capacity to speak, write, think and argue. We might not, as individuals or small groups, have the platforms of a press baron or the BBC. But it is only through our freedom to speak freely that we can challenge those with greater power.

Orwell’s legacy

Orwell is everywhere today. He is taught in schools and his ideas and phrases are part of our common culture. But his value and importance to us lies in his defence of freedom, especially the freedom to speak and write.

His outstanding 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, can actually be read as a freedom manual. It is a guide on how to use words and language to fight back.

Of course, it is attacked today as an expression of privilege and of bigotry. Author and commentator Will Self cited ‘Politics and the English Language’ in a 2014 BBC Radio 4 show as proof that Orwell was an ‘authoritarian elitist’. He said: ‘Reading Orwell at his most lucid you can have the distinct impression he’s saying these things, in precisely this way, because he knows that you – and you alone – are exactly the sort of person who’s sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the very essence of what he’s trying to communicate. It’s this the mediocrity-loving English masses respond to – the talented dog-whistler calling them to chow down on a big bowl of conformity.’

Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:

‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’

Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.

THE WEF AND WHO – ARE THEY RUNNING A DEATH CULT?

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By Peter Koenig

Source: The 4th Media

A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest
A Tibetan proverb
Let’s hope the silently growing forest represents a mass-awakening.
—-

From the looks and evidence – ever more visible to even the ignorant – we are living in a Death Cult – a Cabal-driven Death Cult, with a key objective to do away with – eliminate – a large segment, if not the majority of the world population.

Who is executing this Death Cult? And on behalf of whom?
Three entities come to mind.

  1. The World Economic Forum (WEF), is a Cologny (lush suburb of Geneva, Switzerland)-registered NGO; a never-voted-for “influencer” organization, that has amassed power and money in the hundreds of millions of dollars, like no other NGO around the word. Its founder and eternal Chairman, Klaus Schwab (84), is an engineer cum economist, with origins linked to the former Third Reich Nazi-leadership.By the way – the WEF is holding their annual Davos conference from 16-20 January 2023. The pathology of this outfit and of those elitist billionaires and corporate honchos attending, is reflected in this year even more dystopian agenda. Have a look at the official program https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2023/about/meeting-overview?gclid=CjwKCAiA8OmdBhAgEiwAShr402rG_ShAgll-Pwx4MjDBTbmhgZDg29ii18ztf-yKlsvgQqdSrVerIBoCCvIQAvD_BwE

This is only the visible agenda. None of us, the commons, know what’s going on behind closed doors in special secretive sessions. We feed on leakages, and as Globalism is fading, they become ever more abundant.

  1. The World Health Organization – WHO – goes as a specialized UN Agency – which in reality it isn’t. It was founded in 1948 by Rockefeller, a eugenist and obsessed globalist, who was (and still is) aiming at controlling the world population through health (and death), and who is hellbent to make the Mother Earth a better place through a One World Order. WHO was then “bought” into the UN system.

At that time, Rockefeller with Standard Oil, had also a monopoly on petrol. He decided that pharmaceuticals, up to the 1950’s, mostly based on plants and plant chemistry – could be made from petro-chemicals.

WHO, according to its bylaws, a disease-preventive health organization, became, thus, largely a curative pharma-based and pharma-pushing organization.

While the bulk of the budget from other UN agencies stems from member countries’ contribution, WHO is funded at least to two thirds or more by the private sector, mostly the pharma industry, as well as the Bill Gates Foundation.

A conflict of interest is more than evident. WHO should not be a UN agency.

WHO – against its scientific staff’s better knowledge, has declared Covid as a deadly pandemic, spreading fear, imposing lockdowns, face masks, social distancing – and more human-denigrating measures.

Eventually, WHO, strongly nudged by the WEF (and the powers behind the WEF), was coercing governments to “vaccinate” their populations with never-before tested genetically modifying mRNA injections, of which nobody but the producing pharma-industry knows the composition – contents that has turned out deadly for tens of millions of people – and mounting.

By the end of 2022, excess mortality in western countries amounts to between 15% and 25% – in some countries even higher.

All of the western used so-called vaccines are, in fact, bioweapons.

This horrendous Vaxx-fraud was also a multi-billion, if not trillion, bonanza for the pharmaceuticals.

The covid jabs also contain sterilization agents for both men and women, resulting already by now in drastically falling birth rates in western countries.

The term “Western Countries” means all of Europe and the worldwide Anglosaxonia. So far, all fits well within the Rockefeller, Gates, Soros et al – eugenist agenda.

WHO is truth censuring through social platforms – NewsGuard, an organization of “True Journalism”, tracking credibility of news and information websites and online misinformation, provides WHO regularly with lists of the most important “influencers” of “misinformation” in matters of health, alias conspiracy theorists; people who do not conform with the official narrative.

WHO forwards this list to the different Social Media Platforms, requesting them to block the accounts of the “perpetrators”, or to clandestinely hide or limit their social media inputs. This is called “shadow banning”.

WHO works closely with the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida. The IFCN has a databank with more than 10,000 “fact-checked false information”, most of them related to WHO dictates.

IFCN is mainly funded by the US State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Soros Open Society Foundation, Google and Facebook. Coincidentally, the Gates Foundation and the US Government are also the biggest donors of WHO.

This WHO censuring information can be read in full in German, under Point 5 of https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=92120#h05 .

To top it all off, WHO is currently preparing a so-called Pandemic Treaty. Under this Treaty, if approved, WHO’s DG would have the power to declare worldwide pandemics as he, alias the ruling class, sees fit to control the masses.

Compulsory vaccinations could be military enforced. This would be an authority above each of the member countries’ National Constitution. So far trial votations have not succeeded, as several country blocks, for example, in Africa, do not agree.

But the beat goes on with coercing and potentially bribing of country delegates. A final vote should take place in the course of 2023. If approved, the lawless Pandemic Treaty rule should enter into effect at the beginning of 2024.

If so, this is a call on each WHO member to leave WHO.

  1. NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – has long ceased being a defense alliance of North Atlantic countries. It has become a worldwide war machine with access and use of some 850 US military bases around the world.

NATO is not only a multi-billion-dollar income generator largely for the US Military Industrial Complex (MIC), but it is also an important US GDP engine, contributing an estimated 30% of the US GDP, counting all NATO-related and dependent industries and services.

NATO is the provoker, funder and main executer of the Ukraine-Russia war – the US – Russia proxy-war. Its expansionism has become a monster octopus, stretching its tentacles completely and all-controlling around Mother Earth.

Other than non-stop provoking Russia, NATO also fulfills a role in the Great Reset / UN Agenda 2030 eugenist agenda, as killing is one of its chief purposes.

NATO enters any territory where the “conventional” media lie-machine, and social engineering are failing or not completing their people-ordaining goals fast enough.

Russia, by far the largest and resources-richest country of our planet, was in the US hegemon’s cross-hairs for over a century. The 2014 Maidan Coup, engineered by EU / NATO, was a planned prelude to a war with Russia.

The without scruples NATO war machine would not shy from a hot WWIII – which could easily turn nuclear, all-destructive – and – all-killing.

Playing with Russian ethics, knowing that President Putin has no intention to annihilate a country that up to recently and for over 300 years in the past was an integral part of the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union. Ukraine is inherently, and historically a part of Russia, even as an ally after it became independent in 1991.

Ukraine was forcefully and viciously detached from Russia by western aggression for greed and pathological grandeur.

Now western aggressions may backfire, as President Putin may soon have no other choice than to obliterate what’s left of Ukraine, to finally stop the war – and the senseless killing, the misery of the hapless and suffering population.

Be aware, NATO is ready for weaponized interference wherever a “human-conflict” cannot be resolved by the WEF / WHO oppressive tyrannical means.

——-
We, the People, of the world have largely only little or no saying in how our world, our countries, even our communities are run. And this already for

In the last three years the common People’s exclusion form what is still sold as a democratic process, has reached a pinnacle. With the onset of a fake plandemic at the beginning of 2020 – the beginning of an agenda long ago planned – the UN Agenda 2030 – the beginning of the larger Agenda 21 (all of the 21st Century), officially decided at the UN Environment Conference in Rio in June 1992 – the so-called United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the ‘Earth Summit‘.

The long-haul precursor to his was the 1968 Rockefeller founded Club of Rome’s book “Limits to Growth” (LTG) of 1972. The concepts and principles of this book, LTG, are the blueprint for what is currently – and probably at least for the coming ten to fifty years – being implemented.

LTG is the basis for the Great Reset, the 4th Industrial Revolution — and the UN Agenda 2030, also called WHO’s Decade of Vaccination. Following are the main life-curtailing threats we are facing today – listed not necessarily in order of priority. Remember, they are all inter-linked and inter-acting.

  • Population reduction, a massive genocide, through fake covid “vaxxes” – that are carefully engineered as gene-modifying mRNA killer-injections.
  • The US / EU / NATO provoked war between Russia and Ukraine; a US – Russia proxy-war, pumped up to the tune of about 155 billion dollars-worth of western weaponry and “budget-support” money in less than a year – more than Ukraine’s entire GDP for 2020 ($151 billion).
    Some US$112 billion from the US, the rest from Europe and other western countries.

Most of the money flows right back into the western, mostly US, Military Industrial Complex (MIC), and into the pockets of corrupt politicians (see this interview with Col. Doug Macgregor https://rumble.com/v21yohy-real-america-dan-ball-w-col.-doug-macgregor-zelensky-begs-congress-for-more.html

  • It is about fake “climate change”, fake biodiversity See this https://www.globalresearch.ca/big-hoax-from-climate-change-to-biodiversity/5803442 .
  • Manipulated energy shortages, a proven combined manipulation of “sanctions” on Russia, and the worst western government sponsored terror sabotage act in recent history, the torpedoed Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. Russian hydrocarbons, mostly gas, provided at least 40% of all of Europe’s energy uses.
  • Engineered food shortages, leading to famine – and a new artificial toxic way of food production; geoengineered crop destroying weather catastrophes; food staple speculations; forced supply-chain disruptions and more are responsible for “food shortages”. The world can produce enough food for at least ten billion people, see this https://www.google.com/search?q=fao%3A+there+is+enough+food+in+the+world+to+aliment+12+billion+people&oq=fao%3A+there+is+enough+food+in+the+world+to+aliment+12+billion+people&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.18476j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8; it’s a mere question of banning speculation and introducing a just food distribution system;
  • Compromised banker’s engineered hyper-inflation, leading more rapidly to poverty; crisis after crisis caused demolition of the western economy, bankruptcies, unemployment, poverty, unaffordable food and / or housing, disease and death – genocidal death.
  • Worldwide network of 5G microwaves – and would you believe, and soon to come all-controlling, potentially deadly Sixth Generation – 6G, whose target date is coverage of the entire planet by 2030.
  • Absolute control – via the all-invasive QR-code. See this https://www.globalresearch.ca/beware-qr-code-remember-agenda-id2020/5769266
  • Digitization of everything, the objective of Klaus Schwab’s designed 4th Industrial Revolution (see this https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Industrial-Revolution-Klaus-Schwab/dp/1524758868 ), including
  • Digitization of money – may result in turn-on, turn-off money, expiring money, blocked or canceled money for misbehavior, potentially resulting in lack of sustenance for non-behaviors, no food, no energy, no housing – disease – death
  • Digitization of your brain – transhumanization, robotization – social engineering of the masses, as well as the individual (see Daniel Estulin’s “Tavistock Institute – Social Engineering of the Masses”https://www.amazon.com/Tavistock-Institute-Social-Engineering-Masses/dp/163424043X )
  • Universal Basic Income – (UBI) – can be controlled and is slated to become “You own nothing but are happy” – Klaus Schwab’s glorious ending of the Great Reset, and finally
  • A WHO / pharma controlled worldwide tyrannical “health system” (sic), through a so-called Pandemic Treatywhich – if approved by the World Health Assembly – would overreach every UN / WHO member country’s Constitution, putting the Director General of WHO in charge of health (and death) issues worldwide, in each country.
    It might amount to compulsory vaccination, enforced by the military, for whatever WHO decides is or might be a worldwide threat to health. Even the common flu.

If approved in 2023, the Pandemic Treaty would become effective at the beginning of 2024.

This would be an absolutely lawless rule against the will of ALL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD.

If the Pandemic Treaty is approved – and even if it is not approved – this is a call on all nations to EXIT WHO,which has become a biased pharma-led eugenist-funded terror organization.

The world is faced with a multi-disaster scenario caused by ultra-rich neo-Nazi multi-billionaire elitists and the international data / IT and finance system that controls some 25 to 30 trillion-dollar equivalent of the world’s assets, maybe more – and can leverage every country of this planet to do their bidding.

These are the dark Cult Masters, acting from the shadows of supra-governments, like the US and the European Union, mainly via their well-funded executive, or implementing, instruments – WEF, WHO, NATO.

This is what happened at the beginning of the 2020 covid hoax. The 2010 Rockefeller Report called this first phase – The Lockstep Scenario – see thishttps://www.nommeraadio.ee/meedia/pdf/RRS/Rockefeller%20Foundation.pdf

Indeed, in unison, all 193 UN member countries (194 WHO members) – their corrupted leaders and media blasted the same fear-imposing message – lockdown, obligatory people-demeaning face masks, social distancing, working from home – so you would lose personal contact with your friends and colleagues.

Today, all these above-mentioned Limits to Growth measures are wrapped in a constant and permanent fear campaign, to demoralize and subjugate people into submission. A fear campaign carried out by mainstream media, all owned by 13 media conglomerates who own 90% of the media worldwide.

In unison they slam down these fear messages in lockstep 24 / 7 / 52 on the world populations. See this https://www.google.com/search?q=13+intenatonal+media+corprations+control+90%25+of+western+world+news&sxsrf=AJOqlzUv_RLeZ5NCjDRAsGdFNNl80bU9AA%3A1673310255329&ei=L7C8Y4rWE4bs1sQPj_G-6AI&ved=0ahUKEwjKqfi63rv8AhUGtpUCHY-4Dy0Q4dUDCA8&oq=13+intenatonal+media+corprations+control+90%25+of+western+world+news&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQDDoKCAAQRxDWBBCwA0oECEEYAEoECEYYAFCqClihC2CFIWgBcAF4AIABjAKIAaEDkgEFMC4xLjGYAQCgAQHIAQjAAQE&sclient=gws-wiz-serp

These corrupt media moguls are paid billions of dollars to comply with the power-money psychopaths’ request, to spread the world with lies – with deadly lies. They are party to the mass-murderers, as they know what they are doing. Their management must face the laws of justice.

Just as a parenthesis, looking at what these US Treasury generated dollars really are: They are worthless, unbacked money – dollars that are simple debt for the US Treasury; debt that is never paid back.

Or as the former FED Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 2011, “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that”. See this  https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=AJOqlzVj6Us4MQ0TkbEiXYVK4DJ_Yg09Ew:1673221297413&q=greenspan+to+a+journalist:+we+will+never+pay+back+our+debt.+we+will+just+print+new+money&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi8gMCIk7n8AhW1HLkGHRJsAC4QBSgAegQIBxAB&biw=877&bih=412&dpr=2.19#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:7d32db1c,vid:Ck3FuTzZvhI

Therefore, money dished out to corrupt organization is worthless for the “spender”- the creator of the money, the US of A, but they buy the world for the recipients.

We are living in the midst of a Cabal-directed Death Cult.

The majority of the people haven’t noticed yet.

But the awakening has begun.

Remember the Tibetan Proverb of the silently growing forest. And as trees connect with each other, so do humans by their spirituality – not transhumans, but humans what we still are.

And let us never an abject power-hungry non-elected criminal like Klaus Schwab, with his roots in the Third Reich, and his by nobody desired NGO, the World Economic Forum – WEF – dominate humanity.

May the forest grow to a critical mass – that can by its sheer solidarity, togetherness of thought and will power overcome the pathological objectives of the psychopaths wish for power and money dominance.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020) Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.