Category Archives: Technocracy

“Bipartisan” Washington Insiders Reveal Their Plan for Chaos if Trump Wins the Election

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A group of “bipartisan” neoconservative Republicans and establishment Democrats have been “simulating” multiple catastrophic scenarios for the 2020 election, including a simulation where a clear victory by the incumbent provokes “unprecedented” measures, which the Biden campaign could take to foil a new Trump inauguration.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

A group of Democratic Party insiders and former Obama and Clinton era officials as well as a cadre of “Never Trump” neoconservative Republicans have spent the past few months conducting simulations and “war games” regarding different 2020 election “doomsday” scenarios.

Per several media reports on the group, called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), they justify these exercises as specifically preparing for a scenario where President Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to leave office, potentially resulting in a constitutional crisis. However, according to TIP’s own documents, even their simulations involving a “clear win” for Trump in the upcoming election resulted in a constitutional crisis, as they predicted that the Biden campaign would make bold moves aimed at securing the presidency, regardless of the election result.

This is particularly troubling given that TIP has considerable ties to the Obama administration, where Biden served as Vice President, as well as several groups that are adamantly pro-Biden in addition to the Biden campaign itself. Indeed, the fact that a group of openly pro-Biden Washington insiders and former government officials have gamed out scenarios for possible election outcomes and their aftermath, all of which either ended with Biden becoming president or a constitutional crisis, suggest that powerful forces influencing the Biden campaign are pushing the former Vice President to refuse to concede the election even if he loses.

This, of course, gravely undercuts the TIP’s claim to be ensuring “integrity” in the presidential transition process and instead suggests that the group is openly planning on how to ensure that Trump leaves office regardless of the result or to manufacture the very constitutional crisis they claim to be preventing through their simulations.

Such concerns are only magnified by the recent claims made by the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State under Obama, Hillary Clinton, that Biden “should not concede under any circumstances.” “I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch, and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Clinton continued during an interview with Showtime a little over a week ago. The results of the TIP’s simulations notably echo Clinton’s claims that Biden will “eventually” win if the process to determine the election outcome is “dragged out.”

The Uniparty’s “war games”

Members of the TIP met in June to conduct four “war games” that simulated “a dark 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day” in which “Trump and his Republican allies used every apparatus of government — the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military — to hold onto power, and Democrats took to the courts and the streets to try to stop it,” according to a report from The Boston Globe. However, one of those simulations, which examined what would transpire between Election Day and Inauguration Day in the event of a “clear Trump win,” shows that the TIP simulated not only how Republicans could use every option at their disposal to “hold onto power”, but also how Democrats could do so if the 2020 election result is not in their favor.

While some, mostly right-leaning media outlets, such as this article from The National Pulse, did note that the TIP’s simulations involved the Biden campaign refusing to concede, the actual document from TIP on the exercises revealed the specific moves the Biden campaign would take following a “clear win” for the Trump campaign. Unsurprisingly, these moves would greatly exacerbate current political tensions in the United States, an end result that the TIP claims they were created to avoid, gravely undercutting the official justification for their simulations as well as the group’s official reason for existing.

In the TIP’s “clear Trump win” scenario (see page 17), Joe Biden – played in the war game by John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager and chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton – retracted his election night concession and subsequently convinced “three states with Democratic governors – North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan – to ask for recounts.” Then, the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan “sent separate slates of electors to counter those sent by the state legislature” to the Electoral College, which Trump had won, in an attempt to undermine, if not prevent, that win.

Next, “the Biden campaign encouraged Western states, particularly California but also Oregon and Washington, and collectively known as “Cascadia,” to secede from the Union unless Congressional Republications agreed to a set of structural reforms. (emphasis added)” Subsequently, “with advice from [former] President Obama,” the Biden campaign laid out those “reforms” as the following:

  1. Give statehood to Washington, DC and Puerto Rico
  2. Divide California into five states “to more accurately represent its population in the Senate”
  3. Require Supreme Court justices to retire at 70
  4. Eliminate the Electoral College

In other words, these “structural reforms” involve the creation of what essentially amounts to having the U.S. by composed 56 states, with the new states set to ensure a perpetual majority for Democrats, as only Democrat-majority areas (DC, Puerto Rico and California) are given statehood. Notably, in other scenarios where Biden won the Electoral College, Democrats did not support its elimination.

Also notable is the fact that, in this simulation, the TIP blamed the Trump campaign for the Democrats’ decision to take the “provocative, unprecedented actions” laid out above, asserting that Trump’s campaign had “created the conditions to force the Biden campaign” into taking these actions by doing things like giving “an interview to The Intercept in which he [Trump] stated that he would have lost the election if Bernie Sanders had been nominated” instead of Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate.

The TIP also claimed that the Trump campaign would seek to paint these “provocative, unpredecented actions” as “the Democrats attempting to orchestrate an illegal coup,” despite the fact that that is essentially what those actions entail. Indeed, in other simulations where the Trump campaign behaved along these lines, the TIP’s rhetoric about this category of extreme actions is decidedly different.

Yet, the simulated actions of the Biden campaign in this scenario did not end there, as the Biden campaign subsequently “provoked a breakdown in the joint session of Congress [on January 6th] by getting the House of Representatives to agree to award the presidency to Biden,” adding that this was “based on the alternative pro-Biden submissions sent by pro-Biden governors.” The Republican party obviously did not consent, noting that Trump had won the election through his Electoral College victory. The “clear Trump win” election simulation ended with no president-elect being inaugurated on January 20, with the TIP noting “it was unclear what the military would do in this situation.”

Of course, some TIP members, including its co-founder Rosa Brooks – a former advisor to the Obama era Pentagon and currently a fellow at the “New America” think tank, have their preference for “what the military would do in this situation.” For instance, Brooks, writing less than 2 weeks after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, argued in Foreign Policy that “a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders” was one of four possibilities for removing Trump from office prior to the 2020 election.

Who is behind the TIP?

The TIP was created in late 2019, allegedly “out of concern that the Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process.” It was co-founded by Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman and its current director is Zoe Hudson. Brooks, as previously mentioned, was an advisor to the Pentagon and the Hillary Clinton-led State Department during the Obama administration. She was also previously the general counsel to the President of the Open Society Institute, part of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a controversial organization funded by billionaire George Soros. Zoe Hudson, who is TIP’s director, is also a former top figure at OSF, serving assenior policy analyst and liaison between the foundations and the U.S. government for 11 years.

OSF ties to the TIP are a red flag for a number of reasons, namely due to the fact that OSF and other Soros-funded organizations played a critical role in fomenting so-called “color revolutions” to overthrow non-aligned governments, particularly during the Obama administration. Examples of OSF’s ties to these manufactured “revolutions” include Ukraine in 2014 and the “Arab Spring,” which began in 2011 and saw several governments in the Middle East and North Africa that were troublesome to Western interests conveniently removed from power.

Subsequent leaked emails revealed the cozy ties between Soros and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, including one email where Soros directed Clinton’s policy with respect to unrest in Albania, telling her that “two things need to be done urgently,” which were to “bring the full weight of the international community to bear on Prime Minister Berisha” and “appoint a senior European official as mediator.” Both “urgent” tasks were subsequently performed by Clinton, presumably at Soros’ behest.

In addition to her ties to the Obama administration and OSF, Brooks is currently a scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute, where she focuses on “the relationship between the military and domestic policing” and also Georgetown’s Innovative Policing Program. She is a currently a key player in the documented OSF-led push to “capitalize” off of legitimate calls for police reform to justify the creation of a federalized police force under the guise of defunding and/or eliminating local police departments. Brooks’ interest in the “blurring line” between military and police is notable given her past advocacy of a military coup to remove Trump from office and the TIP’s subsequent conclusion that the military “may” have to step in if Trump manages to win the 2020 election, per the group’s “war games” described above.

Brooks is also a senior fellow at the think tank New America. New America’s mission statement notes that the organization is focused on “honestly confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities those changes create.” It is largely funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, including Bill Gates (Microsoft), Eric Schmidt (Google), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Jeffrey Skoll and Pierre Omidyar (eBay). In addition, it has received millions directly from the U.S. State Department to research “ranking digital rights.” Notably, of these funders, Reid Hoffman was caught “meddling” in the most recent Democratic primary to undercut Bernie Sanders’ candidacy during the Iowa caucus and while others, such as Eric Schmidt and Pierre Omidyar, are known for their cozy ties to the Clinton family and even ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

The Never Trumpers

Aside from Brooks, the other co-founder of TIP is Nils Gilman, the current Vice President of Programs at the Berggruen Institute and, prior to that, worked for Salesforce, a major tech company and government contractor. Gilman is particularly focused on artificial intelligence and transhumanism, recently telling the New York Times that his work at the Berggruen Institute is focused on “building [a] transnational networks of philosophers + technologists + policy-makers + artists who are thinking about how A.I. and gene-editing are transfiguring what it means to be human.” Nicholas Berggruen, for whom the Berggruen Institute is named, is part of the billionaire-led faction, alongside Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman and Eric Schmidt, who seek to develop A.I. and the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in conjunction with the political leaders and economic elite of China.

They are critics and rivals of those in the “nationalist” camp with respect to A.I. and China, who instead prefer to aggressively “leapfrog” China’s A.I. capabilities in order to maintain U.S. global hegemony as opposed to a “new order” promoted by Berggreun, Schmidt, Schwarzman and Henry Kissinger, another key member of the “cooperation” faction. The battle over the U.S.’ future A.I. policy with respect to China appears to be a major yet widely overlooked reason for some of the antipathy towards Trump by those in the “cooperation” faction, including those who employ TIP’s founders, given Trump’s tendency to, at least publicly, support “America First” policies and increased tensions with China. In contrast, the Biden family is invested in Chinese A.I. companies, suggesting that Biden would be more willing to pursue the interests of the “cooperation” faction than Trump.

While the identities of the TIP’s founders and current director have been made public, the full member list of the TIP has not. However, the TIP’s “sister” organization, called The National Task Force on Election Crises (NTFEC), does have a public membership list and several of its members are also known to be part of the TIP. Some of these overlapping members include Michael Chertoff, former head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Michael Steele, former chairman of the RNC and Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Chertoff, Steele and Wilkerson, though Republicans, are part of the so-called “Never Trump” Republican faction, as are the TIP’s other known Republican members. Thus, while the “bipartisan” nature of TIP may be accurate in terms of party affiliation, all of known TIP’s members – regardless of party – are united in their opposition to another term for the current president.

Other known members of the TIP include David Frum (the Atlantic), William Kristol (Project for a New American Century, The Bulwark), Max Boot (the Washington Post), Donna Brazile (ex-DNC), John Podesta (former campaign manager – Clinton 2016), Chuck Hagel (former Secretary of Defense), Reed Galen (co-founder of the Lincoln Project) and Norm Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute).

Of their known members, the most outspoken is Lawrence Wilkerson, who has fashioned himself the group’s “unofficial” spokesperson, having done the majority of media interviews promoting the group and its “war games.” In an interview in late June with journalist Paul Jay, Wilkerson notes that the TIP lacks transparency and that, aside from their “war games,” their other activities are largely confidential.

He specifically stated that:

“There is some confidentiality about what we agreed to, and what we’ve put out publicly, and who’s responsible for that, and other aspects of our doing that. The Transition Integrity Project is to this point very, very close, whole, and confidential.”

In that same interview, Wilkerson also noted that the current “combination of events” involving the recent unrest in several U.S. cities, the coronavirus crisis, the national debate over the future of policing, the economic recession and the 2020 election was the foundation for a revolution in the U.S. He told Jay that:

“I want to say this is how things like 1917 and Russia, like 1979 and Tehran, and like 1789 in France. This is how these sorts of things get started. So we’ve got to be very careful about how we deal with these things. And that worries me because we don’t have a very careful individual in the White House.”

Pre-planned chaos – who benefits?

While it certainly is possible that, in the event of a clear Biden win, President Trump could refuse to leave the White House or take other actions that would challenge the faith of many Americans in the national election system. However, while the TIP claims to be specifically concerned about this eventuality and about “safe guarding” democracy without favoring either candidate, that is clearly not the case, as their simulation of a clear Trump win shows that extreme, “undemocratic” behavior, in their view, is permissible if it prevents another four years of Trump. Yet, this clear double standard reveals that an influential group of “bipartisan” insiders are intent on creating a “constitutional crisis” if Trump wins and are planning for such a crisis regardless of the 2020 election’s results.

Well before the TIP or any of their affiliated groups emerged to conduct these doomsday election simulations, other groups were similarly engaged in “war games” that predicted complete chaos in the U.S. on election day as well as the imposition of martial law in the U.S. following the emergence of unprecedented unrest and disarray in the country.

Several of these I detailed in a series earlier this year, which mainly focused on the “Operation Blackout” simulations conducted by the U.S.-Israeli company, Cybereason. That company has considerable ties to the U.S. and Israeli intelligence and its largest investor is Softbank. Notably, Softbank is named by the Eric Schmidt-led National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI) as forming the “backbone” of a global framework of A.I.-driven companies favored by the “cooperation” faction as a means of enacting the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in cooperation with China’s economic and political elite.

In addition to Cybereason, several mainstream media reports and a series of suspect “predictions” from U.S. intelligence and other federal agencies released last year had seeded the narrative that the 2020 election would not only fail spectacularly, but that U.S. democracy “would never recover.” Now, with the TIP’s simulations added to the mix and the advent of the previously predicted chaos throughout the country with the 2020 election just two months away, it is clear that the November 3rd election will not only be a complete disaster, but a pre-planned one.

The question then becomes, who benefits from complete chaos on and following the 2020 election? As the TIP suggested in several of their simulations, the post-election role of the military in terms of domestic policing, incidentally the exact expertise of the TIP’s co-founder Rosa Brooks, looms large, as most of the aforementioned doomsday election simulations ended with the imposition of martial law or the military “stepping in” to resolve order and oversee the transition.

The domestic framework for imposing martial law in the U.S., via “continuity of government” protocols, was activated earlier this year under the guise of the coronavirus crisis and it remains in effect. Now, a series of groups deeply tied to the Washington establishment and domestic and foreign intelligence agencies have predicted the exact ways in which to engineer a failed election and manipulate its aftermath.

Who would stand to benefit the most from the imposition of martial law in the United States? I would argue that one need look no further than the battle within Washington power factions over the future of AI, which has been deemed of critical importance to national security by the public sector, the private sector and prominent think tanks. The Schmidt-led NSCAI and other bodies determining the country’s AI policy plan to implement a series of policies that will be deeply resisted by most Americans – from the elimination of individual car ownership to the elimination of cash as well as the imposition of an Orwellian surveillance system, among other things.

All of these agendas have advanced under the guise of combatting coronavirus, but their advance can only continue to use that justification for so long. For groups like the NSCAI, Americans must welcome these AI-driven advances or else, even if it means Americans face losing their jobs or their civil liberties. Otherwise, these groups and their billionaire backers argue, the U.S. will be “left out” and “left behind” when it comes time to set the new global standards for AI technology, as the U.S. will then be left in the dust by China’s growing AI industry, which is fed by its own implementation of these technologies.

By keeping Americans angry and distracted by the partisan divide through pre-planned election chaos, a “New America” waits in the wings – one that is coming regardless of what happens on election day. That is, of course, unless Americans quickly wake up to the ruse.

Viral Fantasies of Control

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By Russ Bangs

Source: Volatility

It was clear from the start that if SARS-COV-2 really posed an unusual danger which in theory merited aggressive government intervention, there was no good solution since we have only incompetent and malign systems trying to apply fundamentally wrong-headed ideologies and practices against nature at her most assertive, fluid and flexible. It was always clear that the best societies could do was to take precautions to protect the most vulnerable while otherwise letting the bug do what it certainly is going to do anyway regardless of all attempts to violently segregate and suppress it. Lockdowns accomplish nothing but to delay the inevitable while adding immense collateral harms to physical and mental health, human community and culture, and radically accelerate the economic liquidation of the people.

And yet protecting the vulnerable is the one thing most Western societies refused to do, while those same societies acted very aggressively imposing every kind of worthless measure upon the general population which is not in any special danger from the bug and which inevitably must attain herd immunity. SARS-COV-2 already was irretrievably at large long before any measures were undertaken in the West, so any possibility of limiting the range and infection rate went glimmering long ago. The only likely place to have limited the virus was at the bioweapons lab where it was engineered or modified in the first place, whether this lab be in Maryland or Wuhan. Once it was let slip from there, and once it evaded any local quarantine (it was long gone by the time any measures were taken), the game was up, nature took over and the epidemiological cycle was guaranteed to complete itself. Societies never had any option but to let nature take its course toward herd immunity.

What’s been done has been exactly upside down. It’s the vulnerable who should be shielded while nature takes its course among the general population, who go about life as usual. Dominionist-technocratic rigidity can’t prevent the cycling of Gaia in spite of the delusions of the modernist religion which is merely an updated biblical dominionism. This is especially true since Western societies began their measures far too late anyway. From the start it would’ve been best to let herd immunity develop as fast as it naturally will, at which time the virus recedes from lack of hosts and is likely to mutate in a milder direction along the way. This is the only way to bring a safer environment for all including the most vulnerable. Nothing else was going to work, while the lockdowns add a long list of purely gratuitous evils: The very high number of preventable deaths from the lockdown itself, political cover for the most extraordinary Fed interventions yet to prop up the collapsing financial system, political cover for this latest Wall Street plunder expedition empowered by the lockdown’s controlled demolition of the economy, the radical escalation of the police state, the euthanasia campaign the campaign has enabled against the sickly aged, the escalation of anti-China war propaganda, the deep trauma disorienting people into total submission and social conformity, the radical aggravation of the anti-social, anti-human atomization of the people.

Those who can’t or are unwilling to understand these concepts seem motivated by prior police-statist ideology and/or mental collapse into a state of terror caused by the propaganda campaign, but it has nothing to do with rationally deliberated concern for any public health.

Therefore any debate over what in theory would be the best response if the bug was coming but not yet here always was moot. The only rational response was for society to exert itself to protect institutions where the most vulnerable are congregated while letting nature take its course through the general population, just like any regular flu.

Instead governments did the radical opposite of this, imposing general lockdowns while doing nothing real, only sham, to protect nursing homes and hospitals. As a result those became slaughterhouses. At the same time the pointless lockdowns are causing tremendous ancillary health harms and will kill more than the bug itself.

Yet even now most still believe that lockdowns and similar measures are worthy and that the bug can be stopped short of cycling thruout the population.

From day one this has been as true of “alternative” types as it is of the mainstream. Both equally heeded the propaganda call to “Stampede!” and joined the technocrat-led chorus howling the imperative, “We Have to DO Something!!” From there it follows as religious doctrine that there must exist a Good Solution when in fact no such thing exists. For most problems and crises the dissenters’ alleged Good Solution is different from that of the mainstream, but in the case of Covid they’re in lock step. Indeed the pre-existing alternative establishment largely has dissolved itself back into the mainstream, very likely permanently. Just as most individual “anti-authoritarians” have their personal fetishes which cause them to metastasize to a tyrannical advocacy, so the Covid Death Cult has proven to be the road back to authoritarian mainstream home for almost all erstwhile “dissidents”. Their regression to the neoliberal mainstream in the cases of Trump Derangement and Brexit were mere rehearsals.

Many among the apostates still cherish the Stalinesque fantasy that from the Covid apocalypse and the ashes of humanity it leaves behind will arise the phoenix day of a new city of social justice and ecological sustainability. According to this vision, the closer the economic civilization comes to totalitarianism and ecological collapse the closer it comes to a utopian transformation from all that’s bad to all that’s good. (Stalin imparted the dogma that the worse the class struggle gets, the closer society is to the communist revolution.) This is one reason why almost all leftists, “anti-authoritarians”, anti-imperialists have ardently embraced the Death Cult and acted as propagandists for it – they believe in doing so they’re speeding the descent of their version of Revelation’s New City.

But there’s no reason to believe in such daydreams. The globalist corporate system deliberately used the Covid propaganda pretext in order to undertake the controlled demolition of the global economy, precisely in order artificially to generate the conditions for a new round of elementary capitalist accumulation. The economic civilization, a metastatic cancer dependent on “growth” in order to sustain itself at all, always needs a bleeding boundary where it is rending and destroying hitherto unassimilated “resources” in order to turn them into commodities. At the limits of the globe, where the civilization has long since found itself, it can only rip open old wounds, destroy parts of itself in order to render them capable of being re-assimilated in new bouts of cancer-growth. This disaster capitalism most often has used war or economic collapse as its agent of destruction, but disasters like Hurricane Katrina or hoax disasters like Covid-19 also serve. This current, most extreme campaign of disaster capitalism is also being called the Great Reset, exactly the right term: Global capitalism, more broadly the economic civilization itself, is collapsing of its own top-heavy parasite finance extrusion and desperately has needed a reset, a vast newly devastated zone where it again can recycle its rampage. This is why the system seized upon the objectively mild Covid-19 epidemic to launch a global propaganda campaign fraudulently depicting it as a lethal pandemic, in order to gain the political pretext to lock down, i.e. deliberately demolish, the global economy which was on the verge of chaotic collapse.

Therefore any economic slowdown effects, and any environmental and social benefits which went along with this slowdown were purely incidental. Nor is there any prospect I can see of any new movement arising to turn these to pivotal social effect. No one, and least of all the leftist alternative types, actually wants any significant degrowth, any significant dismantling of the economic civilization. On the contrary all political factions agree the system must resume with all the ecocidal and mass homicidal violence of which it’s capable. There’s no constituency for any alternative path. On the contrary all system factions which purport to want a more ecologically harmonious path are touting the Green Capitalist, Green New Deal, Green Cancer/”Growth” fraud, which simply means business as usual, albeit with a “green” tone.

So there’s no way to turn the Covid-19 to “progressive” effect. This demolishes the apostates’ only constructive rationale for their adherence to the cult. (How ironic and psychopathic that they accuse Covid skeptics and dissenters of being willing to let people die, when they’re the ones who, in the same breath where they conjure the specter of millions dying also evoke utopian visions of what goodness will come of this. Not to mention that most of the deaths which have transpired were victims of the lockdownists’ own euthanasia campaign.)

There will be no control of the Coronavirus and no control of the destiny of social humanity under the boot of the terror-lockdown campaign other than in the direction of police state tyranny amid general economic devastation. This will be the direction, if the people continue to allow it and continue to embrace or obey the cult.

From Terrorists to Viruses: Dystopian Progress

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

For anyone old enough to have been alive and aware of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and of so-called COVID-19 in 2020, memory may serve to remind one of an eerie parallel between the two operations.  However, if memory has been expunged by the work of one’s forgettery or deleted by the corporate media flushing it down the memory hole, or if knowledge is lacking, or maybe fear or cognitive dissonance is blocking awareness, I would like to point out some similarities that might perk one up to consider some parallels and connections between these two operations.

The fundamental tie that binds them is that both events aroused the human fear of death. Underlying all fears is the fear of death.  A  fear that has both biological and cultural roots. On the biological level, we all react to death threats in a fight or flight manner. Culturally, there are multiple ways that fear can be allayed or exacerbated, purposely or not. Usually, culture serves to ease the fear of death, which can traumatize people, through its symbols and myths. Religion has for a long time served that purpose, but when religion loses its hold on people’s imaginations, especially in regard to the belief in immortality, as Orwell pointed out in the mid-1940s, a huge void is left.  Without that consolation, fear is usually tranquilized by trivial pursuits.

In the cases of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the current corona virus operation, the fear of death has been used by the power elites in order to control populations and institute long-planned agendas.  There is a red thread that connects the two events.

Both events were clearly anticipated and planned.

In the case of September 11, 2001, as I have argued before, linguistic mind-control was carefully crafted in advance to conjure fear at the deepest levels with the use of such repeated terms as Pearl Harbor, Homeland, Ground Zero, the Unthinkable, and 9/11.  Each in its turns served to raise the fear level dramatically. Each drew on past meetings, documents, events, speeches, and deep associations of dread. This language was conjured from the chief sorcerer’s playbook, not from that of an apprentice out of control.

And as David Ray Griffin, the seminal 9/11 researcher (and others), has pointed out in a dozen meticulously argued and documented books, the events of that day had to be carefully planned in advance, and the post hoc official explanations can only be described as scientific miracles, not scientific explanations. These miracles include: massive steel-framed high-rise buildings for the first time in history coming down without explosives or incendiaries in free fall speed; one of them being WTC-7 that was not even hit by a plane; an alleged hijacker pilot, Hani Hanjour, who could barely fly a Piper Cub, flying a massive Boeing 757 in a most difficult maneuver into the Pentagon; airport security at four airports failing at the same moment on the same day; all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies failing; air traffic control failing, etc.  The list goes on and on.  And all this controlled by Osama bin Laden. It’s a fairy tale.

Then we had the crucially important anthrax attacks that are linked to 9/11. Graeme MacQueen, in The 2001 Anthrax Deception, brilliantly shows that these too were a domestic conspiracy.

These planned events led to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, the invasion of Iraq , the ongoing war on terror, etc.

Let us not forget years of those fraudulent color-coded warnings of the terrorist levels and the government admonition to use duct tape around your windows to protect against a massive chemical and biological attack.

Jump to 2020.  Let me start in reverse while color-coded designs are fresh in our minds. As the COVID-19 lockdowns were under way, a funny thing happened as people were wishing that life could return to normal and they could be let out of their cages. Similar color-coded designs popped up everywhere at the same time.  They showed the step-by-step schedule of possible loosening of government controls if things went according to plan. Red to yellow to green. Eye catching. Red orange yellow blue green.  As with the terrorist warnings following September 11, 2001.  In Massachusetts, a so-called blue state where I live, it’s color chart ends in blue, not green, with Phase 4 blue termed “the new normal: Development of vaccines and/or treatments enable the resumption of ‘the new normal.’” Interesting wording.  A resumption that takes us back to the future.

As with the duct tape admonitions after 9/11, now everyone is advised to wear a mask. It’s interesting to note that the 3 M Company, a major seller of duct tape, is also one of the world’s major sellers of face masks.  The company was expected to be producing 50 million N95 respirator masks per month by June 2020 and 2 billion globally within the coming year.  Then there is 3 M’s masking tape…but this is a sticky topic.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, we were told repeatedly that the world was changed forever. Now we are told that after COVID 19, life will never be the same.  This is the “new normal,” while the post-9/11-pre-Covid-19 world must have been the old new normal. So everything is different but normal also.  So as the Massachusetts government website puts it, in the days to come we may be enabled to enact “the resumption of ‘the new normal.’”  This new old normal will no doubt be a form of techno-fascist transhumanism enacted for our own good.

As with 9/11, there is ample evidence that the corona virus outbreak was expected and planned; that people have been the victims of a propaganda campaign to use an invisible virus to scare us into submission and shut down the world’s economy for the global elites.  It is a clear case, as Peter Koenig tells Michel Chossudovsky in this must-see interview, that is not a conspiracy theory but a blatant factual plan spelled out in the 2010 Rockefeller Report, the October 18, 2019 Event 201, and Agenda 21, among other places.

Like amorphous terrorists and a war against “terrorism,” which is a tactic and therefore not something you can fight, a virus is invisible except when the media presents it as a pale, orange-spiked bunch of floating weird balls that are everywhere and nowhere.  Watch your back, watch your face, mask up, wash your hands, keep your distance – you never know when those orange spiked balls may get you.

As with 9/11, whenever anyone questions the official narrative of Covid-19, the official statistics, the validity of the tests, the effectiveness of masks, the powers behind the heralded vaccine to come, and the horrible consequences of the lockdowns that are destroying economies, killing people, forcing people to despair and to commit suicide, creating traumatized children, bankrupting small and middle-sized businesses for the sake of enriching the richest, etc., the corporate media mock the dissidents as conspiracy nuts, aiding the viral enemy.  This is so even when the dissenters are highly respected doctors, scientists, intellectuals, et al., who are regularly disappeared from the internet. With September 11, there were initially far fewer dissenters than now, and so the censorship of opposing viewpoints didn’t need the blatant censorship that is now growing daily. This censorship happens all across the internet now, quickly and stealthily, the same internet that is being forced on everyone as the new normal as presented in the Great Global Reset, the digital lie, where, as Anthony Fauci put it, no one should  ever shake hands again. A world of abstract images and beings in which, as Arthur Jensen tells Howard Beal in the film, Network, “All necessities [will be] provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”  A digital dystopia that is fast approaching as perhaps the end of that red thread that runs from 9/11 to today.

Heidi Evens and Thomas Hackett write in the New York Daily News:

With the nation’s illusion of safety and security in ruins, Americans begin the slow and fitful process of healing from a trauma that feels deeply, cruelly personal…leaving citizens throughout the country with the frightening knowledge of their vulnerability.

That was written on September 12, 2001.

The Fatal Attraction of Techo-Fascism

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Art work source: audioxide.com

By Mark Petrakis

Source: Off-Guardian

Those who are serious in ridiculous matters will be ridiculous in serious matters.”
Cato the Elder

The enduring beauty of fascism is that it requires so little from us… so little independent thought; just our basic belief and adherence to a limited set of popularly-shared directives and narratives that once fully accepted, relieve us of the need to address stubborn questions or to fret over subtle differences of opinion and feeling.

Propaganda reassures us that we are complete, that we know all there is to know, that we are rational, pragmatic and pure, that the science has been settled and that we are a part of something special.

Such a surrender to reductionist narratives cuts across all classes and income brackets. Neither the most educated nor the least uneducated retain any special advantage in the face of powerful consensus-shaping propaganda.

PROPAGANDA is, of course, the life-blood of fascist control. Maintaining the economic, governmental and scientific frameworks of a technocratic-fascist “operating system” is unthinkable without propaganda and disinformation. When truth is seen as a liability to power, it must always be disallowed, and all instances of it effectively penalized.

Radio and television and their constant enabler, popular “science” – operate today as their own religions, reliant for their success upon the devotion of the masses. As McLuhan told us, the experience of electronic media is always more powerful than the specific messaging it contains.

The currency that we use to pay for the electronic spectacle is our attention, and in such hyper-mediated times as these, the charges mount up exponentially, until we find ourselves saddled with soul-crushing denial and disconnection.

Three defining historical moments (among many) have defined the confluence of fascism, propaganda and technology.

  1. The fundamental principles of propaganda were first defined 100 years ago by Edward Bernays, often referred to as the father of public relations.
  2. Joseph Goebbels served as Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. The stunning successful lessons of his Nazi propaganda programs were not lost on the world’s political and economic leaders in the post-war era, and in the time since then.
  3. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was founded in 1947, for the expressed purpose of conducting secret intelligence operations that could serve political aims at the same time they generated huge and untraceable profits. The extent of the CIA’s illegal enterprises necessitated the creation and maintenance of a permanent ministry of disinformation, managed by our own taxpayer-funded “Shadow Government” and “Deep State.”

In retrospect then, it is clear that these propaganda campaigns have proven SO successful, that even today, few of us ever realize how ongoing, vast and wide-spread they are.

Propaganda’s efficacy is so indisputable, that it is commonly the case that those who are the most certain that they are NOT among the propagandized, are in fact its most overt victims.

Corporate media focuses on those stories they are paid to propagate, i.e., those which support the financial and ideological
agendas of their owners, who themselves are all, without exception, central parts of the larger global ruling oligarchy.

A key part of the propagandist’s handbook is to simply leave unexplored stories that they are NOT given approval to manage and control; stories which, we might assume, do not generate sufficient advantage for the owners. Such calculated sins of omission are essential to keeping the mass of believers unperturbed by the vagaries of complexity in the delivery of their daily dogmas.

If an individual were to insist upon learning more about any of these less-discussed stories, they would soon arrive at the realization that while an abundance of relevant facts can easily be found, and often hidden in plain sight, the truth is that most people simply do not WANT to know, think or talk about any such truths that differ from those accepted by their peers, for whom cognitive dissonance causes such literal pain and disorientation, as to keep them docile and compliant to the dictates of the media.

As McLuhan said:

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”

Perhaps, the grandest illusion of all, and which must be maintained at all costs, is that both the world and the stories we tell of it, must be made to appear as though they are generated randomly. It must always appear that the media’s coverage and the comments of experts are entirely free from any preconceived manipulation.

In the terminology of the media, news must always be “Breaking!” – even though in reality, we know the news more closely resembles a cooking show, where ingredients are chopped and sliced before-hand, after which they are mixed and served up live on camera in ways that keep the public hooked on happy hash-slinging and enticingly-scripted recipes.

Technocratic-Fascism, the advanced fusion of the multinational technology-dominated corporatocracy with the authoritarian global and surveillance state, allows its initiates to believe they are a part of something bigger than themselves. Witness the magical left’s lockstep belief in the pure villainy of Donald Trump, or the magical right’s equally lockstep belief in Trump as a self-sacrificing national hero.

Clearly both parties to the constant heist of human freedom need each other to better manage their greed for consumer profit and civilian control. Such mental assaults secondarily require that all truthful motives remain hidden and obfuscated in a fog of weaponized storytelling.

This accounts of course for the abiding value of bullshit, does it not? Bullshit effectively misleads without upsetting the natural order of things, without irreversibly tearing apart the fabric of credibility. Nothing can stand in the way of the constant flow of messaging, profit and growth, which are after all, the primary justifications for all this deceptive disorder.

This is another aspect of what makes technocratic-fascism so irresistible; in realizing how effective it is at knowing us better than we know ourselves. The assumption is that if we were to know ourselves better than the stories we are told, we would not be seduced by such obvious lies. Since we don’t, our “betters” are left with no choice but to keep up the constant barrage of lies, at least until our thinking eventually locks up and we capitulate and collapse, like a stack of wooden blocks.

If for example, we did not always obey or give our attention to propaganda, we would soon grow alarmed by the many contradictions that we are told exist, say between the Covid monster and the daily vaporous disease statistics, or between maskers and non-maskers, between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, between crushing economic destruction and the mewling need for safety, between the lunatic left and the lunatic right, between black and whites, between males and females… between one piece of orthogonal bullshit and another equally opposing piece of bullshit.

ALL of these dichotomies, of course, are at some fundamental level FALSE… every last one of them, each constructed by skilled media professionals and put in place to overwhelm our critical thinking and that of millions of others from seeing what’s really going on in the limitless background.

In this remarkably cost-efficient way, human energy and intelligence are siphoned off, and directed towards the task of turning us into helplessly confused and easily-controllable “lab rats,” forcibly cut off from each other, lest we experience ourselves as intelligent and sovereign beings. If something like that were to happen, the driving agendas of big business and global governance to keep us marching in lockstep towards a more divided and disempowered fate, would soon disintegrate.

It is in such a state of debilitating surrender that we are divided one subset “targeted” demographic against another; all herded into a wicked mental trap with one side thinking one thing, while the other side thinks something else – such that half of us hate the other and the other half hate the other right back.

At this point, and after so many years of unqualified victories for the industries supported by the propaganda industry, the pathetic truth is that propaganda doesn’t even NEED to be that entertaining anymore. Knowing they have the situation in tow, the purveyors of propaganda can save a ton of money by just being sensational, confrontational and redundant in their narratives.

Recall this quote from the singular Frank Zappa:

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

Once we have learned to carry on absent the need for verifiable truth, or without the need to discern authentic and honest voices from deceitful and manipulative ones, we gradually lose our interest in so-called “truth,” preferring instead to keep splashing about in unsubstantiated speculation, pompous judgments and opinionated fluff.

Let’s be honest…the only people who might actually CARE what any of us think about the blaring big topics of the day (masks or vaccines or climate change or Black Lives Matter, etc.) are other equally thin-skinned victims of propaganda, who much like the majority of us, still believe that the government cares about them and that the mainstream media is telling them the truth.

That is why a growing number of people have given up on the media’s crudely fictional depiction of reality, and are instead trying to figure out how to thrive and to reconnect energetically with others – and with truths that can only exist OUTSIDE the reach of the propaganda ‘spectacle.”

The media, of course, with their sophisticated surveillance tracking tools knows full well when there is an uptick in negative reactions to their toxic narratives, but since it is also aware that it is after all pushing nothing but sugar water bullshit, it is left with little choice but to double-down and turn the levels up even higher… thus ramming even more bullshit at us.

Whacky Joe Biden, Greedy Green Greta, Covid, Aunt Jemima Race Wars and endless offenses… all come at us so fast and so hard as to leave us bent and broke under the weight of it all, as we stumble around like headless chickens desperately trying to win the approval of our friends by looking like we are at least doing the only “acceptable” thing.

Arriving at his frenzied point of screwball hyper-polarization, is the essential endgame of Propaganda… locking us into its agenda, at the same time it demands that we think we are making these choices of our own FREE WILL!

To get us to that point though, they must keep us constantly preoccupied; agitated, offended, attacking each other and defending ourselves against all threats, both real and imagined. The more they can get us ensnared in mind-numbing opinions and outrages, the less energy and attention will be left to notice the deeper more manipulative agendas of techno-fascism.

Mid 20th Century fascism was woefully limited in its capacities and in what it could extract from its victims… and yet still it worked! The new technocratic-fascism is here to mine the population for all the bio-capital commodification it can. Those who can invent the most efficient and ingenious means of converting human confusion, poverty, crime and illness into impact markets will quickly take their place among the prior generations’ titans of technology.

Once you step back far enough though to experience the sheer SCALE of this ongoing and unlimited propaganda WAR on us, it grows a bit easier to see why so few are able to escape the media’s influence. Oh, for a while perhaps, you can rise above it… but eventually, you will get pulled back down into the muck. Even if you kill your TV, unplug yourself from your media feeds, and turn off the Wi-Fi, each of us, at some point, will relapse and fall off the wagon.

This is because propaganda is not just about what’s in the news or in the media. It’s even more importantly about the broadly consensual layers of social hallucination that are created and shared across all of society, which make it difficult for any of us to function socially, absent those commonly shared reference points and signals that we have convinced ourselves are required in order to allay our anxiety, confusion and isolation… all of which are primary raisons d’etres for propaganda in the first place.

I wish there was one simple way to break propaganda’s voodoo spell. There isn’t. I’m not even sure how to do that for myself, or how I can avoid falling prey to it again, just as I and most of us have done for the great majority of our lives.

What seems obvious to me now is that propaganda in the service of a transhumanist-centered technology has become so pervasive and insidiously forceful, that in many ways, our thinking has ceased to be entirely our own, and that the portion of our soul that remains recognizable as uniquely us, is shrinking fast.

The effect of all this leaves our spirits infected, and easily convertible into compliant puppets under the top-down control of truly diabolically puppet masters, who in order to keep us subservient to their untruths, and to doing whatever we are told, have become masterful at pretending to be something they are not.

This is perfectly exemplified in the character of Bill Gates, who working with his Bain and Co. handlers and account managers, (who previously managed the Iraq War for Dick Cheney) have constructed these elaborate biopharma/ biocapital/ vaccine public health/fear narratives and investment pyramids that are then fed to the media and Wall Street, who reheat and serve them to the public, generating criminal profits while making such that Mr. Gates is always portrayed as an altruistic philanthropist and protector of the public… when any fool can see he is nothing of the sort.

NOT seeing just how obvious and laughable propaganda campaigns have become in this one-size fits all era, leaves us painfully vulnerable and ready to be further subsumed by more of the same.

The complexity of today’s master plans for disinformation are unparalleled compared to the past. Looking back to the 1950’s and 60’s, when all the above long-term plans for centralized and technocratic control were slowly being tested, being part of America’s growing middle-class was actually a pretty sweet deal. It is in a return to more bucolic and “normal” times as these that we pin our nostalgic hopes, by the media but especially by politicians.

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in, can hope to escape.”
William S. Burroughs

Looking at our world, we can see that the reach and authority of the transnational global capitalists who run the world’s nation-sized casinos has been cemented. All systems are now in place, up and running LIVE on that criminal syndicate’s vast web of networks. Each one of us has by now been targeted by them for some form of surveillance and financialization – just as “nature” has, just as “disease” has, just as “social justice” has, just as everything will eventually.

The “A.I. control grids” are all active and expanding. The technocratic agendas are now fully ready for prime-time. We have been gradually “shepherded” by propaganda and psychological torture techniques, just as we have also been physically compromised by toxins in the geo-engineered air and water, by disruptive electromagnetic frequency radiation, by weaponized technologies that include the release of nano-particulates inside our bodies (either by way of inhalation or injection) which are then governed by oxygen-absorbing 5G which at the higher millimeter wave frequency, will bring remote alteration of our very DNA under the “persistent” control of A.I., which will guide the process of transmuting us into commodities, into plunderable assets, into digitally-regulated and genetically modified “livestock.”

Sadly, this is where decades of constant acquiescence to propaganda and institutional hypnosis has brought us…bent over, staring at our shoes and bracing for the “BIG ONE.”

I remember in my own youth, being convinced that the evil genius of Hitler and Nazism had somehow transformed the mass of decent German people into BEASTS, possessed by demons, as if in a dark fairy tale… into something less than human.

We know that once we begin to regard others as LESS than us…as something OTHER than us, it is only a short step to unleashing our hate upon them, even to the point of becoming violent and criminal.

Needless to say, these very same psychological imperatives are everywhere apparent today; in how we are instructed by propaganda to regard the Chinese, Russians, Muslims, white supremacist Trumpers, deluded depraved liberals, defective racists, misogynist sexists and quivering face-ists (with their acute disdain for anyone who questions the dogma of e-mask-ulation.)

Same as it ever was, you might say, but as we approach the much-touted singularity with its accompanying convergence of man and machine, how will the media respond in the face of that Huxleyan “solution?” In that light, how might propaganda shift its focus?

I expect it will change-up the pitch and tell us that THIS time, things will be different. This time won’t be like last time. No, this time, things will have changed, so that we will no longer be “brainwashed” by the media as we were before. No, when the coming big change happens to us, it will not be like that. We will rather be transformed into advanced independent humans augmented by perfectly blended combinations of technology, science and engineering.

Our DNA will be carefully crafted by brilliant doctors and scientists to enhance only the “preferred” qualities in their human subjects, and under their wise direction, we will gladly do as we are told. For so great a future, we will willingly offer our support and so grow accustomed to our new life, lest we become like those poor unfortunate souls, so lost in their unreason, that they cannot fully appreciate the wisdom that derives from enthusiastically embracing PROGRESS.

In our leaders inspired and time-tested plans, we will of course have every convenience at our fingertips, such that doors will magically open when we approach. We will be able to download all manner of rich media and data with the blink of an eye. We will be as supermen.

Our definitions of what is valuable and what is not, will fluidly shift to suit changing circumstances. We will see ourselves as the very picture of modernity, and the envy of the world…just as we have always been. We will be as American as our multi-racial forefathers, even though they lived in unenlightened times…long before today’s great social justice transformation allowed us, their proud descendants, to wake each day into this glistening new world.

In such a world, when we ask ourselves what we might be grateful for, we will no longer need to struggle for an answer. We will know exactly what is good, true and beautiful and we will commit ourselves to those lofty ideals each and every day.

Therein too, and most mercilessly, resides the fatal beauty of technocratic-fascism.

The Real Reason Why Blackstone Is Courting The Pentagon

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Photo credit: Financial Times / Flickr (CC BY 2.0) .

The sudden push by Wall Street’s largest private equity firm to heavily lobby the Pentagon and State Department for largely unspecified reasons is part of an increasingly visible conflict within the U.S. establishment regarding how to handle the Artificial Intelligence “arms race.”

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

One of Wall Street’s largest private equity firms, the Blackstone Group, has been making a series of moves that have left mainstream analysts puzzled, with the most recent being Blackstone’s hire of David Urban, a Washington lobbyist with close ties to the Trump administration.

Blackstone’s courting of a Trump ally was not surprising given that the firm’s CEO, Steven Schwarzman, recently donated $3 million to Trump’s re-election efforts and had previously chaired the President’s now-defunct Strategic and Policy Forum of “business leaders” and advisors. The close ties that have developed between Schwarzman and Trump following the latter’s election in late 2016 have led mainstream media to describe Schwarzman as a confidant of the President.

However, what was odd about Blackstone’s hiring of David Urban was its murky reason for doing so, as the firm plans to task Urban with lobbying the Pentagon and State Department on “issues related to military preparedness and training.” This is odd, as CNBC noted, because Blackstone “doesn’t have any publicly listed government contracts, and its known investments don’t appear to have direct links to the defense industry.” However, Urban has extensive experience in dealing with both Departments in addition to his close ties to the current administration and the fundraising apparatus of the Republican Party.

While media reports on Blackstone’s recent hire of Urban were unable to elucidate the motive behind Blackstone’s sudden desire to court the Pentagon and State Department, they did note that Blackstone’s previous hire of a Trump-connected fundraiser lobbyist, Jeff Miller, had been remarkably successful earlier this year, with Miller lobbying Congress specifically on coronavirus relief legislation like the CARES Act. The CARES Act ultimately allowed private equity giants like Blackstone to access funds designated for coronavirus relief, likely thanks to the efforts of Miller and other lobbyists hired by Blackstone as well as other private equity giants like the Carlyle Group.

Though CNBC was left looking for answers as to Blackstone’s sudden interest in aiding the Pentagon with “military preparedness” and wooing the State Department, the likely motive may be related to other recent moves made by the company, such as the hire of former Amazon and Microsoft executive Christine Feng. Feng, who was hired by Blackstone on August 3, previously led data and analytics mergers and acquisitions at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a contractor to the U.S. intelligence community and other U.S. federal agencies. Previously, Feng was a senior member of Microsoft’s Corporate Development team. Microsoft recently won lucrative contracts for information technology (IT) services and cloud computing for the State Department and Pentagon, respectively.

According to Blackstone executives, the decision to hire Feng was made due to her “deep relationships in Silicon Valley” and “her experience working at Amazon and Microsoft.” They also added that her hire was motivated by Blackstone’s push to “identify new opportunities to invest and partner with innovative companies reshaping the world” and Blackstone’s recent effort to “double down” on tech sector investments. Notably, Feng’s hire came just a few months after Blackstone had hired Vincent Letteri, another tech-focused investor experienced with growth-stage tech companies, and amid a series of recent investments by Blackstone in tech firms, including HealthEdge software and Chinese data center provider 21Vianet, among others.

Schwarzman’s Push for “Common Governance”

It strongly appears that Blackstone’s recent moves, including Urban’s hire, are part of the firm’s bid to become one of the top “innovative companies reshaping the world” as the Artificial Intelligence (AI) arms race becomes a key driver in the “reshaping” of the global economy. Blackstone’s Steven Schwarzman is a key part of the relatively tight-knit group of billionaires and influential political figures, like Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt, that are working to create a “global compact on the research, introduction, and deployment of AI,” and Schwarzman has heralded the coming age of AI as representing a “fourth revolution” for humanity.

Schwarzman argued for greater global collaboration on AI-driven technologies, particularly between the U.S. and China, in a July 2020 Op-Ed for Yahoo! Finance where he wrote that the establishment of “common governance structures” for the research, introduction and deployment of AI is necessary if “we are to avoid the negative consequences of AI,” ultimately comparing the current pace of development of AI to that of past arms races, such as those involving nuclear and biological weapons. Per Schwarzman, these “common governance structures” would produce “explicit global commitments, agreements, and eventually international laws with consequences for violation” that relate directly to AI and its use.

Blackstone’s head is convinced that these “common governance structures” should be built between the U.S. and China, hence his heavy investment in universities and artificial intelligence education in both countries. For instance, Schwarzman created the Schwarzman Scholars program in 2016 where around 100-200 students from around the world pursue a Master’s Degree in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing annually. The official goal of the program, which was modeled after the Rhodes Scholars program, is to “create a growing network of global leaders that will build strong ties between China and the rest of the world.” The program’s advisors include former Secretary of States Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as former World Bank President James Wolfensohn and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and Goldman Sachs executive Henry Paulson. Schwarzman has also donated hundreds of millions of dollars to create an AI-focused institute at Oxford University.

Then, in the U.S., Schwarzman gave $350 million to MIT, prompting the school to create the Schwarzman College of Computing, which aims to specifically “address the global opportunities and challenges presented by the ubiquity of computing — across industries and academic disciplines — and by the rise of artificial intelligence.” MIT News later noted that “the impulse behind the founding of the college came from trips he [Schwarzman] had taken to China, where he observed intensified Chinese investment in artificial intelligence, and wanted to make sure the U.S. was also on the leading edge of A.I.” The college’s inauguration also featured Henry Kissinger as a speaker, where Kissinger mulled the potential impacts of AI and stated that “AI makes it technically possible, easier, to control your population.”

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, credits Schwarzman’s lead to invest in AI education in the U.S. and abroad as determining “the future of American philanthropy.” “Steve’s donation triggered an arms race among all the universities to match him. This is the next trend in philanthropy, in my view,” Schmidt told Axios regarding Schwarzman’s MIT donation last May. Schmidt also stated that his own investment in Princeton University’s Computer Science department had been prompted by Schwarzman’s previous acts of “AI philanthropy.”

Last May, a federal commission that Schmidt chairs, called the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI), produced a document that was obtained by a FOIA request earlier this year. One particularly important page made a point that was essentially repeated in Schwarzman’s July Op-Ed regarding a “global AI compact.” Titled “The Importance of a US/China AI Cooperation,” it begins with a quote from Kissinger, a key advisor to and “great friend” of Schmidt, about the need for “arms control negotiation” for AI and then states that “the future of [AI] will be decided at the intersection of private enterprise and policy leaders between China and the US.” In other words, the Schmidt-chaired NSCAI argues that the future of AI will be determined by the political leaders and business leaders of China and the U.S. The page also adds that “we [The United States] risk being left out of the discussions where norms around AI are set for the rest of our lifetimes. Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, and Microsoft will not be.”

This is particularly significant given the NSCAI is tasked with making recommendations to the federal government regarding how to move forward with AI regulations within the context of “national security” and its members include key members of the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence community and Silicon Valley behemoths that double as contractors to the U.S. military, U.S. intelligence or both. One of the NSCAI’s interests, per the FOIA-obtained document, is the use of “AI in diplomacy,” suggesting that it also seeks to explore potential State Department uses for AI. Notably, earlier this year, and a year after the aforementioned NSCAI document was written, the State Department saw key aspects of its IT infrastructure privatized and given over to NSCAI-linked companies like Microsoft.

The Establishment Divide over AI

Given Schwarzman’s views on AI, his AI-focused “philanthropy,” and Blackstone’s recent pivot towards technology, it becomes easier to understand why Blackstone has recently hired David Urban to lobby the Department of Defense and the State Department. Over the last few years, Schwarzman ally Eric Schmidt has “reinvented himself as the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the national security community” through his chairing of the NSCAI and other positions and has been lobbying “to revamp America’s defense forces with more engineers, more software and more A.I.” Blackstone’s plans to use David Urban to woo the Pentagon are likely directly related to these efforts to speed up and determine not just when but how the U.S. military adopts A.I-driven technologies, particularly regarding the degree of collaboration with China.

Schwarzman, Schmidt, Kissinger and their allies, as pointed out above, appear to favor direct collaboration with China regarding A.I., seeing it as better for business and the best way to avert “catastrophe.” This is particularly true for Schwarzman who has close business ties to China and has been described as “Trump’s China whisperer” by mainstream media. Indeed, Schwarzman and Blackstone have completed numerous, multi-billion dollar deals in China, with a Hong Kong-based publication even claiming that “Schwarzman has become the go-to man for Chinese buyers.” In addition, Schwarzman has a strong personal relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and is credited with softening Trump’s rhetoric and stance on certain issues related to China since 2017. Part of the reason for this, per Henry Kissinger, owes to Schwarzman’s “unique standing” in China where Schwarzman has “done so many useful things.”

Despite his close ties to Schwarzman, Trump has sent mixed signals regarding how much of Schwarzman’s advice regarding China he will take. Trump’s tendency, in public anyway, has been to bolster the nationalist rhetoric of the cadre of neoconservatives and other figures who compose the Committee on the Present Danger, China (CPDC), chief among them former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

Bannon and other CPDC figures have described Schwarzman as a “rival,” with Bannon specifically singling Schwarzman out, asserting that the Blackstone founder threatened to “undo his efforts” at guiding the President towards more nationalist policies popular with his base, such as fighting an “economic war” with China. Bannon’s concerns are also echoed by some hardliners in the Trump administration and the Pentagon who, like Bannon, view China as an existential threat to U.S. hegemony and, therefore, “national security.”

Ultimately, with David Urban’s hire, Schwarzman and Blackstone appear to be taking their efforts to shape AI’s future by lobbying the Pentagon and State Department directly in the event that Trump’s nationalistic tendencies threaten their vision of U.S.-China collaboration in AI in the post-Coronavirus world.

From Lockdown to Police State: The “Great Reset” Rolls Out

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By Ellen Brown

Source: EllenBrown.com

Mayhem in Melbourne

On August 2, lockdown measures were implemented in Melbourne, Australia, that were so draconian that Australian news commentator Alan Jones said on Sky News: “People are entitled to think there is an ‘agenda to destroy western society.’”

The gist of an August 13th article on the Melbourne lockdown is captured in the title: “Australian Police Go FULL NAZI, Smashing in Windows of Civilian Cars Just Because Passengers Wouldn’t Give Details About Where They Were Going.”

Another article with an arresting title was by Guy Burchell in the August 7th Australian National Review: “Melbourne Cops May Now Enter Homes Without a Warrant, After 11 People Die of COVID — Australia, This Is Madness, Not Democracy.” Burchell wrote that only 147 people had lost their lives to coronavirus in Victoria (the Australian state of which Melbourne is the capital), a very low death rate compared to other countries. The ramped up lockdown measures were triggered by an uptick in cases due to ramped up testing and 11 additional deaths, all of them in nursing homes (where lockdown measures would actually have little effect). The new rules include a six week curfew from 8 PM to 5 AM, with residents allowed to leave home outside those curfew hours only to shop for food and essential items (one household member only), and for caregiving, work and exercise (limited to one hour).

“But the piece de resistance,” writes Burchell, “has to be that now police officers can enter homes with neither a warrant nor permission. This is an astonishing violation of civil liberties…. Deaths of this kind are not normally cause for government action, let alone the effective house arrest of an entire city.” He quoted Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews, who told Victorians, “there is literally no reason for you to leave your home and if you were to leave your home and not be found there, you will have a very difficult time convincing Victoria police that you have a lawful reason.” Burchell commented:

[U]nder this new regime you can’t even remain in your house unmolested by the cops, they can just pop ‘round anytime to make sure you haven’t had Bruce and Sheila from next door round for a couple of drinks. All over a disease that is simply not that fatal….

Last year more than 310,000 Australians were hospitalised with flu and over 900 died. By all metrics that makes flu a worse threat than COVID-19 but police weren’t granted Stasi-like powers during the flu season. Millions of people weren’t confined to their homes and threatened with AUS$5,000 fines for not having a good reason for being out of their homes.

At an August 19th press conference, Australia’s second most senior medical officer said the government would be discussing measures such as banning restaurants, international travel, public transport, and withholding government programs through “No Jab No Pay” in order to coerce vaccine resisters.

An August 13 article on LifeSiteNews quoted Father Glen Tattersall, a Catholic parish priest in Melbourne, who said the draconian provisions “simply cannot be justified on a scientific basis”:

We have a curfew from 8 pm to 5 am, rigorously enforced including by the use of police helicopters and search lights. Is the virus a vampire that just comes out at night? Or the wearing of masks: they must be worn everywhere outside, even in a park where you are nowhere near any other person. Why? Does the virus leap hundreds of metres through the air? This is all about inducing mass fear, and humiliating the populace by demanding external compliance.

Why the strict curfew? Curfews have been implemented recently in the US to deter violence during protests, but no violence of that sort was reported in Melbourne. What was reported, at least on social media, were planes landing in the night from ‎the Chinese province of Guandong carrying equipment related to 5G and the Chinese biometric social credit system, which was reportedly being installed under a blanket of secrecy.

Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus at Boston University, concluded in an August 13th article, “We are living through a coup d’état based on the oldest of ploys: declaring emergencies, suspending law and rights, and issuing arbitrary rules of behavior to excuse taking ‘full powers’.”

Questioning the Narrative

Melbourne has gone to extremes with its lockdown measures, but it could portend things to come globally. Lockdowns were originally sold to the public as being necessary just for a couple of weeks to “flatten the curve,” to prevent hospital overcrowding from COVID-19 cases. It has now been over five months, with self-appointed vaccine czar Bill Gates intoning that we will not be able to return to “normal” until the entire global population of 7 billion people has been vaccinated. He has since backed off on the numbers, but commentators everywhere are reiterating that lockdowns are the “new normal,” which could last for years.

All this is such a radical curtailment of our civil liberties that we need to look closely at the evidence justifying it; and when we do, that evidence is weak. The isolation policies were triggered by estimates from the Imperial College London of 510,000 UK deaths and 2.2 million US deaths, more than 10 times the actual death rate from COVID-19. A Stanford University antibody study estimated that the fatality rate if infected was only about 0.1 to 0.2 percent; and in an August 4th blog post, Bill Gates himself acknowledged that the death rate was only 0.14 percent, not much higher than for the flu. But restrictive measures have gotten more onerous rather than less as the mortality figures have been revised downward.

A July 2020 UK study from Loughborough and Sheffield Universities found that government policy over the lockdown period has actually increased mortality rather than reducing it, after factoring in collateral damage including deaths from cancers and other serious diseases that are being left untreated, a dramatic increase in suicides and drug overdose, and poverty and malnourishment due to unemployment. Globally, according to UNICEF, 1.2 million child deaths are expected as a direct result of the lockdowns. A data analyst in South Africa asserts that the consequences of the country’s lockdown will lead to 29 times more deaths than from the coronavirus itself.

Countries and states that did very little to restrict their populations, including Sweden and South Dakota, have fared as well as or better overall than locked down US states. In an August 12th article in The UK Telegraph titled “Sweden’s Success Shows the True Cost of Our Arrogant, Failed Establishment,” Allister Heath writes:

Sweden got it largely right, and the British establishment catastrophically wrong. Anders Tegnell, Stockholm’s epidemiologist-​king, has pulled off a remarkable triple whammy: far fewer deaths per capita than Britain, a maintenance of basic freedoms and opportunities, including schooling, and, most strikingly, a recession less than half as severe as our own.

Not restraining the populace has allowed Sweden’s curve to taper off naturally through “herd immunity,” with daily deaths down to single digits for the last month. (See chart.)

The Pandemic That Wasn’t?

Also bringing the official narrative into question is the unreliability of the tests on which the lockdowns have been based. In a Wired interview, even Bill Gates acknowledged that most US test results are “garbage.” The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology used in the nasal swab test is considered the “gold standard” for COVID-19 detection; yet the PCR test was regarded by its own inventor, Nobel prize winner Kary Mullis, as inappropriate to detect viral infection. In a detailed June 27th analysis titled “COVID-19 PCR Tests Are Scientifically Meaningless,” Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter conclude:

Without doubt eventual excess mortality rates are caused by the therapy and by the lockdown measures, while the “COVID-19” death statistics comprise also patients who died of a variety of diseases, redefined as COVID-19 only because of a “positive” test result whose value could not be more doubtful.

The authors discussed a January 2007 New York Times article titled “Faith in Quick Test Leads to Epidemic That Wasn’t,” describing an apparent whooping cough epidemic in a New Hampshire hospital. The epidemic was verified by preliminary PCR tests given to nearly 1,000 healthcare workers, who were subsequently furloughed. Eight months later, the “epidemic” was found to be a false alarm. Not a single case of whooping cough was confirmed by the “gold standard” test – growing pertussis bacteria in the laboratory. All of the cases found through the PCR test were false positives.

Yet “test, test, test” was the message proclaimed for all countries by WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom at a media briefing on March 16, 2020, five days after WHO officially declared COVID-19; and the test recommended as the gold standard was the PCR. Why, when it had already been demonstrated to be unreliable, creating false positives that gave the appearance of an epidemic when there was none? Or was that the goal – to create the appearance of a pandemic, one so vast that the global economy had to be brought to a standstill until a vaccine could be found? Recall Prof. Codevilla’s conclusion: “We are living through a coup d’état based on the oldest of ploys: declaring emergencies, suspending law and rights, and issuing arbitrary rules of behavior to excuse taking ‘full powers’.”

People desperate to get back to work will not only submit to a largely untested vaccine but will agree to surveillance measures that would have been considered a flagrant violation of their civil rights if those rights had not been overridden by a “national emergency” justifying preemption by the police powers of the state. They will agree to get “immunity passports” in order to travel and participate in group activities, and they will submit to quarantines, curfews, contact tracings, social credit scores and informing on the neighbors. The emergency must be kept going to justify these unprecedented violations of their liberties, in which decision-making is removed from elected representatives and handed to unelected bureaucrats and technocrats.

A national health crisis also a necessary prerequisite for relief from liability for personal injuries from the drugs and other products deployed in response to the crisis. Under the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREPA), in the event of a declared public health emergency, manufacturers are shielded from tort liability for injuries both from the vaccines and from invalid or invasive tests. Compensation for personal injuries is a massive expense for drug companies, and the potential profits from a product free of that downside are a gold mine for pharmaceutical companies and investors. The liabilities will be borne by the taxpayers and the victims.

All this, however, presupposes both an existing public health emergency and no effective treatment to defuse it. That helps explain the otherwise inexplicable war on hydroxychloroquine, a safe drug that has been in use and available over the counter for 65 years and has been shown to be effective in multiple studies when used early in combination with zinc and an antibiotic. A table prepared by the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (below) found that the US has nearly 30 times as many deaths per capita as countries making early and prophylactic use of hydroxychloroquine.

The latest international testing of hydroxychloroquine treatment of coronavirus shows countries that had early use of the drug had a 79% lower mortality rate than countries that banned the use of the safe malaria drug. Lowering the US mortality rate by 79% could have saved over 100,000 lives. But an effective, inexpensive COVID-19 treatment would mean the end of the alleged pandemic and the vaccine bonanza it purports to justify.

The need to maintain the appearance of a pandemic also explains the inflated reports of cases and deaths. Hospitals have been rewarded with increased fees for reclassifying cases as COVID-19. As deaths declined in the US, the numbers of cases reported by the Centers for Disease Control were also gamed to make it appear that America was in a “second wave” of a pandemic. The reporting criterion was changed on May 18 from people who tested positive for the virus only to people who tested positive for either the virus or its antibodies. The exploding numbers thus include people who have recovered from COVID-19 as well as false positives. The Loughborough and Sheffield researchers found that when controlling for other factors affecting mortality, actual deaths due to COVID-19 are 54% to 63% lower than implied by the standard excess deaths measure.

Ushering in “The Great Reset”

Forcing compliance with global vaccine mandates is one obvious motive for maintaining the appearance of an ongoing pandemic, but what would be the motive for destroying the global economy with forced lockdowns? What is behind the “agenda to destroy Western society” suspected by Australian commentator Alan Jones?

Evidently it is this: destroying the old is necessary to usher in the new. Global economic destruction paves the way for the “Great Reset” now being promoted by the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Monetary Fund and other big global players.

Although cast as arising from the pandemic, the “global economic reset” is a concept that was floated as early as 2014 by Christine Lagarde, then head of the IMF, and is said to be a recharacterization of the “New World Order” discussed long before that. It was promoted as a solution to the ongoing economic crisis triggered in 2008.

The World Economic Forum – that elite group of businessmen, politicians and academics that meets in Davos, Switzerland, every January – announced in June that the Great Reset would be the theme of its 2021 Summit. Klaus Schwab, founder of the Forum, admonished:

The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.

No country will be allowed to opt out because it would be endangering the rest, just as no person will be allowed to escape the COVID-19 vaccine for the same reason.

Who is behind the Great Reset and what it really entails are major questions that need their own article, but suffice it to say here that to escape the trap of the globalist agenda, we need a mass awakening to what is really going on and collective resistance to it while there is still time. There are hopeful signs that this is happening, including massive protests against economic shutdowns and restrictions, particularly in Europe; a rash of lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the lockdowns and of police power overreach; and a flood of alternative media exposés despite widespread censorship.

Life as we know it will change. We need to ensure that it changes in ways that serve the people and the productive economy, while preserving our national sovereignty and hard-won personal freedoms.

_______________

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute and author of thirteen books, including her latest, Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

 

P Is for Predator State: The Building Blocks of Tyranny from A to Z

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business

While America continues to fixate on the drama-filled reality show scripted by the powers-that-be, directed from the nation’s capital, and played out in high definition across the country, the American Police State has moved steadily forward.

Nothing has changed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a convenient, traumatic, devastating distraction.

The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State.

Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton: they have all been complicit in carrying out the Deep State’s agenda. Unless something changes to restore the balance of power, the next president—the new boss—will be the same as the old boss.

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter what you call the old/new boss—the Deep State, the Controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the corporate elite, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that no matter who occupies the White House, it is a profit-driven, an unelected bureaucracy that is actually calling the shots.

If our losses are mounting with every passing day—and they are—it is a calculated siege intended to ensure our defeat at the hands of a totalitarian regime.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, media, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more are casualties in the government’s war on the American people.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized federal police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms are being steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.

None of these dangers have dissipated in any way.

They have merely disappeared from our televised news streams.

It’s time to get educated on what’s really going on. Thus, in the interest of liberty and truth, here’s an A-to-Z primer that spells out the grim realities of life in the American Police State that no one seems to be talking about anymore.

A is for the AMERICAN POLICE STATE. A police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

B is for our battered BILL OF RIGHTS. In the militarized police culture that is America today, where you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is rarely held accountable for violating your rights, the Bill of Rights doesn’t amount to much.

C is for CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE. This governmental scheme to deprive Americans of their liberties—namely, the right to property—is being carried out under the guise of civil asset forfeiture, a government practice wherein government agents (usually the police and now TSA agents) seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then, whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property and it’s virtually impossible to get it back.

D is for DRONES. It was estimated that at least 30,000 drones would be airborne in American airspace by 2020, part of an $80 billion industry. Although some drones will be used for benevolent purposes, many will also be equipped with lasers, tasers and scanning devices, among other weapons—all aimed at “we the people.”

E is for EMERGENCY STATE. From 9/11 to COVID-19, we have been the subjected to an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security. The government’s ongoing attempts to declare so-called national emergencies in order to circumvent the Constitution’s system of checks and balances constitutes yet another expansion of presidential power that exposes the nation to further constitutional peril.

F is for FASCISM. A study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere economic units or databits.

G is for GRENADE LAUNCHERS and GLOBAL POLICE. The federal government has distributed more than $18 billion worth of battlefield-appropriate military weapons, vehicles and equipment such as drones, tanks, and grenade launchers to domestic police departments across the country. As a result, most small-town police forces now have enough firepower to render any citizen resistance futile. Now take those small-town police forces, train them to look and act like the military, and then enlist them to be part of the United Nations’ Strong Cities Network program, and you not only have a standing army that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution but one that is part of a global police force.

H is for HOLLOW-POINT BULLETS. The government’s efforts to militarize and weaponize its agencies and employees is reaching epic proportions, with federal agencies as varied as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration stockpiling millions of lethal hollow-point bullets, which violate international law. Ironically, while the government continues to push for stricter gun laws for the general populace, the U.S. military’s arsenal of weapons makes the average American’s handgun look like a Tinker Toy.

I is for the INTERNET OF THINGS, in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free. The key word here, however, is control. This “connected” industry propels us closer to a future where police agencies apprehend virtually anyone if the government “thinks” they may commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

J is for JAILING FOR PROFIT. Having outsourced their inmate population to private prisons run by private corporations, this profit-driven form of mass punishment has given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep their privately run prisons full by jailing large numbers of Americans for petty crimes.

K is for KENTUCKY V. KING. In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers can break into homes, without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home as long as they think they may have a reason to do so. Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between the citizenry and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by law enforcement officials.

L is for LICENSE PLATE READERS, which enable law enforcement and private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants, all across the country. This data collected on tens of thousands of innocent people is also being shared between police agencies, as well as with government fusion centers and private companies. This puts Big Brother in the driver’s seat.

M is for MAIN CORE. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation. As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. There are at least 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

N is for NO-KNOCK RAIDS. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for routine police matters. In fact, more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and all in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually possession of some small amount of drugs.

O is for OVERCRIMINALIZATION and OVERREGULATION. Thanks to an overabundance of 4500-plus federal crimes and 400,000 plus rules and regulations, it’s estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. As a result of this overcriminalization, we’re seeing an uptick in Americans being arrested and jailed for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room.

P is for PATHOCRACY and PRECRIME. When our own government treats us as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police and other government agents, mistreated, and then jailed in profit-driven private prisons if we dare step out of line, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.” Couple that with the government’s burgeoning precrime programs, which will use fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics in order to identify and deter so-called potential “extremists,” dissidents or rabble-rousers. Bear in mind that anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is now viewed as an extremist.

Q is for QUALIFIED IMMUNITY. Qualified immunity allows police officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing. Conveniently, those deciding whether a cop should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all cronies with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.

R is for ROADSIDE STRIP SEARCHES and BLOOD DRAWS. The courts have increasingly erred on the side of giving government officials—especially the police—vast discretion in carrying out strip searches, blood draws and even anal and vaginal probes for a broad range of violations, no matter how minor the offense. In the past, strip searches were resorted to only in exceptional circumstances where police were confident that a serious crime was in progress. In recent years, however, strip searches have become routine operating procedures in which everyone is rendered a suspect and, as such, is subjected to treatment once reserved for only the most serious of criminals.

S is for the SURVEILLANCE STATE. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of the electronic concentration camp in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

T is for TASERS. Nonlethal weapons such as tasers, stun guns, rubber pellets and the like have been used by police as weapons of compliance more often and with less restraint—even against women and children—and in some instances, even causing death. These “nonlethal” weapons also enable police to aggress with the push of a button, making the potential for overblown confrontations over minor incidents that much more likely. A Taser Shockwave, for instance, can electrocute a crowd of people at the touch of a button

U is for UNARMED CITIZENS SHOT BY POLICE. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, often attributed to a fear for their safety. Yet the fatality rate of on-duty patrol officers is reportedly far lower than many other professions, including construction, logging, fishing, truck driving, and even trash collection.

V is for VIRUSES AND FORCED VACCINATIONS. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including the U.S.) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. With millions of dollars in stimulus funds being directed towards policing agencies across the country, the federal government plans to fight this COVID-19 virus with riot gear, gas masks, ballistic helmets, drones, and hi-tech surveillance technology. The road we are traveling is paved with lockdowns, SWAT team raids, mass surveillance and forced vaccinations. Now there’s talk of mobilizing the military to deliver forced vaccinations, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dare to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their  businesses without the government’s say-so.

W is for WHOLE-BODY SCANNERS. Using either x-ray radiation or radio waves, scanning devices and government mobile units are being used not only to “see” through your clothes but to spy on you within the privacy of your home. While these mobile scanners are being sold to the American public as necessary security and safety measures, we can ill afford to forget that such systems are rife with the potential for abuse, not only by government bureaucrats but by the technicians employed to operate them.

X is for X-KEYSCORE, one of the many spying programs carried out by the National Security Agency that targets every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. This top-secret program “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”

Y is for YOU-NESS. Using your face, mannerisms, social media and “you-ness” against you, you are now be tracked based on what you buy, where you go, what you do in public, and how you do what you do. Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country.

Z is for ZERO TOLERANCE. We have moved into a new paradigm in which young people are increasingly viewed as suspects and treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, often for engaging in little more than childish behavior or for saying the “wrong” word. In some jurisdictions, students have also been penalized under school zero tolerance policies for such inane “crimes” as carrying cough drops, wearing black lipstick, bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades. The lesson being taught to our youngest—and most impressionable—citizens is this: in the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (politician, police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the reality we must come to terms with is that in the post-9/11 America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age.

You can call it the age of authoritarianism. Or fascism. Or oligarchy. Or the American police state.

Whatever label you want to put on it, the end result is the same: tyranny.