People can tell themselves that they didn’t see where things have been heading for the last 17 months, but they did. They saw all the signs along the way. The signs were all written in big, bold letters, some of them in scary-looking Germanic script. They read …
“THIS IS THE ROAD TO TOTALITARIANISM.”
I’m not going to show you all those signs out again. People like me have been pointing them out, and reading them out loud, for 17 months now. Anyone who knows anything about the history of totalitarianism, how it incrementally transforms society into a monstrous mirror image of itself, has known since the beginning what the “New Normal” is, and we have been shouting from the rooftops about it.
We have watched as the New Normal transformed our societies into paranoid, pathologized, authoritarian dystopias where people now have to show their “papers” to see a movie or get a cup of coffee and publicly display their ideological conformity to enter a supermarket and buy their groceries.
We have watched as the New Normal transformed the majority of the masses into hate-drunk, hysterical mobs that are openly persecuting “the Unvaccinated,” the official “Untermenschen” of the New Normal ideology.
We have watched as the New Normal has done precisely what every totalitarian movement in history has done before it, right by the numbers. We pointed all this out, each step of the way. I’m not going to reiterate all that again.
I am, however, going to document where we are at the moment, and how we got here … for the record, so that the people who will tell you later that they “had no clue where the trains were going” will understand why we no longer trust them, and why we regard them as cowards and collaborators, or worse.
Yes, that’s harsh, but this is not a game. It isn’t a difference of opinion. The global-capitalist ruling establishment is implementing a new, more openly totalitarian structure of society and method of rule. They are revoking our constitutional and human rights, transferring power out of sovereign governments and democratic institutions into unaccountable global entities that have no allegiance to any nation or its people.
That is what is happening … right now. It isn’t a TV show. It’s actually happening.
The time for people to “wake up” is over. At this point, you either join the fight to preserve what is left of those rights, and that sovereignty, or you surrender to the “New Normal,” to global-capitalist totalitarianism. I couldn’t care less what you believe about the virus, or its mutant variants, or the experimental “vaccines.” This isn’t an abstract argument over “the science.” It is a fight … a political, ideological fight. On one side is democracy, on the other is totalitarianism. Pick a fucking side, and live with it.
Anyway, here’s where we are at the moment, and how we got here, just the broad strokes.
It’s August 2021, and Germany has officially banned demonstrations against the “New Normal” official ideology. Other public assemblies, like the Christopher Street Day demo (pictured below), one week ago, are still allowed. The outlawing of political opposition is a classic hallmark of totalitarian systems. It’s also a classic move by the German authorities, which will give them the pretext they need to unleash the New Normal goon squads on the demonstrators tomorrow.
In Australia, the military has been deployed to enforce total compliance with government decrees … lockdowns, mandatory public obedience rituals, etc. In other words, it is de facto martial law. This is another classic hallmark of totalitarian systems.
In France, restaurant and other business owners who serve “the Unvaccinated” will now be imprisoned, as will, of course, “the Unvaccinated.” The scapegoating, demonizing, and segregating of “the Unvaccinated” is happening in countries all over the world. France is just an extreme example. The scapegoating, dehumanizing, and segregating of minorities — particularly the regime’s political opponents — is another classic hallmark of totalitarian systems.
We didn’t get here overnight. Here are just a few of the unmistakable signs along the road to totalitarianism that I have pointed out over the last 17 months.
And now, here we are, where we have been heading all along, clearly, unmistakably heading … directly into The Approaching Storm, or possibly global civil war. This isn’t the end of the road to totalitarianism, but I’m pretty sure we are in the home stretch. It feels like things are about to get ugly. Very ugly. Extremely ugly. Those of us who are fighting to preserve our rights, and some basic semblance of democracy, are outnumbered, but we haven’t had our final say yet … and there are millions of us, and we are wide awake.
So pick a side, if you haven’t already. But, before you do, maybe look back at the history of totalitarian systems, which, for some reason, never seem to work out for the totalitarians, at least not in the long run. I’m not a professional philosopher or anything, but I suspect that might have something to do with some people’s inextinguishable desire for freedom, and our willingness to fight for it, sometimes to the death.
This kind of feels like one of those times.
Sorry for going all “Braveheart” on you, but I’m psyching myself up to go get the snot beat out of me by the New Normal goon squads tomorrow, so I’m a little … you know, overly emotional.
Seriously, though, pick a side … now … or a side will be picked for you.
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”– George Orwell 1984
“People will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.” – Frank Zappa
Orwell and Zappa’s words of wisdom have never been truer than they are today. The level of untruth proliferated by the government, mainstream media, central bankers, military leaders, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Corp., and billionaire oligarchs has reached prolific heights. We are lost in a whirlwind of lies, destined to grow into a tornado of tragedy and ultimately result in a cascade of consequences.
Since the installation of the illegitimate dementia patient as president of this dying empire of debt by the Deep State (billionaire oligarchs, surveillance state agencies, military industrial complex, Silicon Valley censorship tyrants, corrupt bought off state politicians, Soros installed bureaucrats, and their propaganda arm – fake news media outlets), the country has further fractured into warring factions.
It has been driven by political party, moral vs. immoral, black vs. white, criminals vs. police, normal vs. abnormal, capitalists vs. communists, Federal Reserve vs. the people, vaxxer sheep vs. natural immunity realists, authoritarians vs. freedom fighters, critical thinkers vs. non-thinking believers, privileged elite vs. common men and women, citizens vs. traitors, powerful vs. powerless, and evil versus good.
As Zappa realized, people believe the narrative they have been conditioned to believe, and no quantity of facts, data or rational arguments will change their minds. Arguing on twitter or facebook is not going to change the mind of those you are arguing against. Our public education indoctrination centers have taught multiple generations to feel rather than think, believe rather than question, obey rather than challenge, and allow their minds to be molded by elitists to follow orders and do as they are told, no questions asked.
This organized effort by men constituting a true invisible government has been a conscious, decades long, manipulation of the minds of the masses, through media propaganda, government cultural indoctrination, and most recently through internet social media platforms.
Those in control have achieved astounding success in exploiting the psychological weaknesses of millions of Americans by inducing them to believe absurd falsities, consume on command, become dependent on government handouts, go into debt, work soul crushing jobs, become addicted to the very technology used to manipulate them and surveil them, and believe anything authority figures tell them to believe. The past seventeen months have proven this to be true.
They convinced an enormous portion of the world’s population a non-lethal virus, for anyone under 80 years old in decent health, was such a threat they agreed to be locked down and masked for a year, destroying the global economy, putting tens of millions out of work, bankrupting hundreds of thousands of small businesses, and benefiting authoritarian government tyrants, mega-corporations, and criminal cabal who stole the presidential election for a senile hair sniffing angry gaffe machine functioning as a Trojan donkey (ass) to implement the Build Back Better, new world order WEF plan.
The Davos elite and their henchmen have accomplished more than they probably thought possible, achieving almost universal compliance and obedience to rules and dictates which have proven to be pointless in controlling Covid, but remarkable in controlling the masses. The throngs have demonstrated their willful ignorance and sheeplike qualities by unquestioningly trusting anything their superiors told them and obeying orders like submissive slaves. Those controlling the narrative took the teachings of Edward Bernays to heart and realized repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
The number of provable untruths conveyed by those running this global psy-op have reached colossal heights of deceit. When trusted medical “experts”, politicians, Hollywood stars, sports heroes, government health apparatchiks, and corporate media all relentlessly repeat the same lies, it is difficult for a dumbed down populace to not believe the official narrative. Anyone who presented factual data to counter the untruths has been immediately censored and disappeared by the Silicon Valley social media tyrants Zuckerberg and Dorsey.
When doctors and journalists, with opinions and views contrary to Saint Fauci and his fawning media minions, are banned from Facebook and Twitter, while a media conspiracy to cover up Hunter Biden’s laptop and documented voting fraud in multiple states is beyond doubt, and an unarmed selfie taking joke of an insurrection where a bunch of boobs were ushered into the Capital by the police has been portrayed as the worse attack than Pearl Harbor or 9/11, you realize your government is controlled by men who are actively working against your best interests. They are acting to make sure you remain enslaved in debt, beholden to token government handouts of money they have already taken from you, and locked down physically, mentally, and socially.
The blatant disregard for truth displayed by our overlords during the last two years is either a sign of utter disdain for the intelligence of the common man or an act of desperation as this global Ponzi scheme of debt, deception and delusion is teetering on the brink of collapse. I do know the Big Lie strategy has been utilized at a level of zeal monumental in scope and shameful in application against the citizens of this nation and the world.
I will try to document some of the more egregious falsehoods being perpetuated by those attempting to control the narrative and accomplish their goal of world domination, complete control over our lives, and accumulation of massive wealth, while we will own nothing and be happy. The execution of their plan has been virtually flawless until now.
I’ll address the numerous lies related to the plandemic, where the weaponization of relatively non-lethal flu to anyone under 80 years old not tipping the scales at 275 pounds has been used to steal a presidential election; destroy hundreds of thousands of small businesses while shifting the profits to mega-corps like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target; created division and suspicion among the population making them easier to manipulate and control; effectively implemented authoritarian measures and mandates, putting a final nail in the coffin of our Constitutional rights; unleashed the power of a corporate fascist social media censorship regime designed to silence the truth and punish those who do not comply with the approved narrative; and creating perpetual unfounded fear among the masses in order to make them obey all orders from their oligarch controllers.
One of the biggest lies from the outset has been about masks. All guidance from renowned health organizations prior to 2020, and backed up with scientific studies, unequivocally stated masks DO NOT protect you from viruses. Fauci, the Surgeon General and head of the CDC were not lying in March 2020 when they told the American public masks do not stop the spread of the virus. They have been lying ever since. The manufacturers of the masks even put a warning on the box that they do not work in preventing the spread of Covid-19.
The two charts below prove the point, and I could present fifty more charts from around the world showing the same results. Japan, the most masked country on earth, even when there isn’t a pandemic, was widely lauded early in the pandemic for stopping the spread with masks. Somehow, with 96% mask compliance, they experienced a massive surge in cases in January, another surge in May/June, and now a new surge, just like everywhere. Masks prevented nothing. They are useless against all viruses.
That brings us to the left-wing media whipping boy – Sweden. As the only developed country on earth to not lockdown, close schools, or require masks, they are truly the control group. The NYT, Washington Post and every other left wing fake news outlet wrote numerous fear mongering articles about the disaster in Sweden. They experienced the same exact pattern of cases as every other country in the world, with a surge in April/May 2020 and January 2021.
Their death rate per million people is the 21st highest in the world, with the UK, U.S., Spain, France, and Mexico recording far worse rates despite lockdowns and mask mandates. What becomes self-evident from the graph is they are not experiencing a surge from the Delta variant. Their vaccination rate is in the mid 30% range and virtually no one wears a mask. They have had ZERO deaths “with” covid in the last week. Previously infected people are not catching the Delta variant, while vaccinated people are. It sure looks like Sweden has achieved herd immunity with no lockdowns, masks, or mass vaccinations. But don’t expect the left wing media or Fauci to applaud their undeniable success.
The powers that be are now invoking mask mandates once again. Data and facts are meaningless to these totalitarian tyrants. The masks have never been about safety or stopping the spread. We’ve never been in this together. The point of the masks has been control. They wanted to sow distrust among the masses as nothing but disease spreading parasites. They want to dehumanize us.
They don’t want like-minded people getting together and realizing they are being screwed by their leaders. They want you holed up in your basement, frightened of a flu with a 99.7% survival rate. Smiles don’t exist when you are masked. Giving miserable lonely cat lady Karens a purpose in life is designed to sow discontent, anger, and division. We all become faceless sheep being corralled, shorn, and ultimately sacrificed at the altar of the Build Back Better New World Order.
Again, I could use fifty other charts proving lockdowns did not and do not work, but this chart of the permanently locked down continent of Australia will suffice. The dictatorial lockdowns across Australia didn’t work last July and August, as cases soared, and they have been entirely unnecessary since. A country with 26 million people has recorded less than 5 deaths with Covid since last October. Because the 7- day average of cases (not sick people) in Sydney has “skyrocketed” to 100 (with 1 death of an 80-year-old), the entire city has been locked down.
The propaganda media supports this ridiculous overreach with hyperbolic headlines about super spreader events. At least a portion of their population is fed up and their protests have begun to get violent, clashing with police thugs ordered to silence the discontent. Lockdowns are not for the purpose of keeping you safe. Their purpose is to keep the authoritarian politicians safe, while enriching their corporate and banking benefactors. These politicians and bureaucrats are being bought off to do the bidding of the true masters of the universe – the billionaire class.
This brings us to the big lie about vaccines. It seems both the left and right are in on the vaccine lie. The first lie is this gene altering concoction is actually a vaccine. A vaccine is supposed to trigger your immune system and provide immunity from a disease. This supposed vaccine does nothing of the sort. The polio vaccine didn’t lessen the polio symptoms, it eliminated polio as a disease. The smallpox vaccine didn’t lessen smallpox symptoms, it eradicated smallpox. These covid vaccines were sold to the public as the cure for covid. The CDC’s own website says the vaccine was supposed to keep you from getting the virus. Fact Check – FALSE!!!
Despite the misinformation being promulgated by Dementia Joe and his White House sycophants, vaccinated people are getting covid, being hospitalized, and dying with covid. The vaccine worshipers declared that no one said it was full proof, because its effectiveness was 95%. Of course, there would be a few breakthrough cases. It appears we have a more than a few. The data from Israel, the most vaxxed country on the planet, is proving these “vaccines” to be virtually worthless.
Over 80% of new cases are among the vaxxed and the effectiveness of the vaccines are clocking in at 39%, just a smidge lower than the 95% from the doctored trials. The cognitive dissonance of the vaxxed, rationalizing their stupidity by flailing about with new reasons for why the vaxx works as advertised is fascinating to observe. Just like Zappa said, you cannot change people’s minds, even when their decisions have proven to be asinine.
Now the story-line has changed to it reduces the symptoms and keeps you from being hospitalized or dying. Another Big Lie. The narrative is now 99% of the cases are among the unvaccinated. Untrue once again. They are purposely not testing the vaxxed, but still the data is rolling in day after day of the vaxxed catching covid, being hospitalized and dying. In addition, all the paid off medical “experts”, sports figures, Hollywood stars, and social media influencers appear in the never-ending vaccine marketing blitz commercials, subsidized with your tax dollars, telling you how safe and effective these jabs are. Another huge lie. The VAERS database, which is likely under-counting by a factor of at least three, has recorded 500,000 adverse reactions, 50,000 serious injuries, and over 11,000 deaths from the vaccines.
When the swine flu vaccine killed several people, it was immediately pulled by the FDA as too dangerous. Despite this experimental gene therapy killing and maiming thousands, while not providing the advertised immunity, the powers that be are ramping up the fear volume to 11 in order to sell this Big Pharma profit bonanza (with zero liability for the deaths and injuries caused by this toxic brew) to the public. They have even bought off Republican governors, senators, and the Fox news shills through threats of de-funding or promises of compensation (aka bribes).
They are laboriously ramming the jab as essential for teenagers down out throats, with the assistance of woke leftist university administrators demanding compliance to attend classes. Virtually no one under the age of 19 has died “with” covid in the last 17 months, as the CDC’s own statistics show. The proliferation of myocarditis in young men after getting the jab is being suppressed by the media vaccine complex.
This leads us to the lies required to allow these EUA “vaccines” to be used in the first place. The FDA is only supposed to allow emergency use of non-approved drugs if there are no other treatments deemed capable of providing the same level of success in treating the disease. It was known very early in this scamdemic both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, safe, cheap, and effective drugs, both drastically reduced the symptoms of this flu. Scientific studies and papers were issued.
Many doctors began writing about their effectiveness and life-saving qualities. Even Trump was touting them. Suddenly, the Silicon Valley social media tyrants began censoring doctors, studies, or anyone daring to put forth facts about these cheap, plentiful, safe drugs. Trump stopped talking about them. Only the vaccines could save us. Doctors and hospitals were paid to shut up and deny writing prescriptions for these drugs. There was no money to be made prescribing these life-saving drugs.
How many lives could have been saved if these supposed “do no harm” physicians had not bowed down to Fauci and his Big Pharma co-conspirators. It’s always been about the Benjamins and Fauci has been the Liar-in-Chief during this plandemic, reaping the accolades from the vaccine rollout, keeping the fear flowing, and covering up his role in funding the creation of this virus in the Wuhan bioweapon lab. There are no coincidences when it comes to this engineered and weaponized pandemic. Was it a coincidence Gates, Fauci and Schwab conducted the Event 201 pandemic simulation in October 2019, three months before this bio-engineered virus was released into the world?
Why were Moderna patents for their vaccine obtained before the pandemic began? Why do Fauci and his NIH cronies have financial interests in Moderna? When will Fauci be brought to justice for funding the gain of function research at the Wuhan lab, as he continues to lie to Congress, despite documented proof of his guilt. This troll-like creature is a global mass murderer still lauded by the fake news media and treated like a holy figure by mindless liberal twits across the land. The sheep will bleatingly line up for their Pfizer booster shot, because three must be better than two. The only boost will be to Pfizer’s hundreds of billions of vaccine profits.
Now the latest Big Lie has been revealed, well after the damage has been done. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of the PCR test, had this to say about its use and Fauci:
“The PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody. Those guys have got an agenda which is not what we would like them to have, being that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way. They have a personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go; they change them when they want to. And they (are smug)—like Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.”
His test was misused by Fauci and his financially motivated cohorts across the medical industrial complex to create a global casedemic, by measuring at greater than 35/40 cycles, creating the illusion of a pandemic by producing a huge number of false positives. As CNN and the rest of the propaganda spewing media outlets provided second by second case counts to frighten the masses into lockdown and mask compliance, only a tiny fraction of these cases were actual sicknesses.
There were critical thinking, rational medical professionals, journalists, and bloggers who argued the test was not accurately measuring the level of sickness in the world. The corporate media gave them no platform to speak, and the social media Big Brother entities censored and banned any discussion about the worthlessness of the PCR test and the level of false positives.
If the test had been conducted at 28 cycles, it would have ruined their agenda of removing Trump, destroying the economy, frightening the sheep into mass compliance, and furthering their Build Back Better New World Order. The moment Biden was installed as president, the guidance from the CDC on the PCR test was reduced from 35/40 to 28 cycles. They needed the case counts to drop to make it look like the vaccine was working. There was a narrative to peddle to the plebs.
Now, the vaccines are being revealed to be ineffective and dangerous. In a shocking development (not), late on a Friday night, the FDA put out a little alert that the PCR test is a complete failure and will be pulled from the market. It seems it accomplished its purpose of stoking mass global panic, and now that vaxxed people are testing positive in tremendous numbers, it has outlived its usefulness. And Fauci and his band of incompetent medical “professionals” won’t even blink or admit their devastatingly disastrous mistake of using a faulty test to shut down the entire planet.
Despite all these lies being revealed, the gullible, sheep-like masses breathlessly await the new proclamations and dictates from Fauci and the rest of the medical frauds dancing to the tune of Big Pharma, Gates, Soros, and Schwab. The narrative has devolved into renewed lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine passports, and blaming the unvaxxed healthy people for the “surge” in cases (still 80% below January and 30% below April).
Despite over a year of factual data proving lockdowns and masks do not work, they demand compliance. Despite the fact vaxxed zombies’ contract and spread the virus, they insist on vaccine passports, which would be useless other than as a further control mechanism over the masses.
And lastly if the PCR test is entirely useless, according to the FDA, the surge in “cases” proclaimed by the politicians and compliant media mouthpieces, is a worthless data point and means nothing. What we do know is the entire U.S. is experiencing about 250 deaths per day “with” covid and the vast majority are over 80 with five co-morbidities. This is 93% below the January peak, 60% below the level in May, and 20% below the level in June. For some perspective, 400 people die each day from strokes and 1,650 die each day from cancer in the U.S. This fading faux pandemic is a nothing burger, with a side of fear mongering, and a dessert of permanent lockdowns.
They have pushed their agenda too far and too fast. The UK, France, Italy and Australia have tried to cross a bridge too far. Their totalitarian lockdowns, mandatory vaccine passport schemes, and generally treating their citizens like cattle has begun to backfire. Violent protests are taking place around the globe against the despotic tyranny of their elected leaders. The psychological manipulation and mass media propaganda worked for over a year. They took their foot off the gas by relaxing lockdowns and mask mandates but think their diabolical heavy-handed schemes will work again amid this faux delta variant charade.
The controllers’ hubris has led them to believe their Bernaysian propaganda mind manipulation techniques will work just as well the 2nd time around. As the mass protests attest, there are millions not buying what they are selling anymore. They want their freedom back. It wasn’t a majority that threw the British tea into the Boston Harbor. It was an irate tireless minority who set the brushfires of freedom in the minds of men. The smell of revolution is in the air.
Orwell’s fiction has become an instruction manual for our Big Brother overlords. He understood what power meant to these evil men. They are trying to remake the world by tearing everything apart and remaking it to their benefit.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your choosing.” – George Orwell
The cascade of consequences created by those wielding power across the globe have only just begun. Their boldness in implementing a plan of global control where we will own nothing, eat bugs, be electronically surveilled 24/7, depend on government for an electronically delivered living stipend, be stripped of our rights to free speech, armed defense, and privacy, while living under constant fear of armed government thugs busting down our doors because we committed thoughtcrime, has rendered them recklessly arrogant.
Despite all their efforts to censor and suppress the truth, the internet is too vast and uncontrollable to shut down – unless this was the true purpose of Schwab’s recent Cyber Polygon simulation. As truth tellers across the world have begun to gain some traction, Huxley’s quote becomes more pertinent.
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.” – Aldous Huxley
People are getting mad. Those in power want us to direct our anger at each other. They want the vaxxed fighting the non-vaxxed, blacks fighting whites, citizens fighting immigrants, men fighting women, young fighting old, and the country fighting Russia and China. What the oligarchs do not want is our ire to be focused on them. But they have pushed the people too far. The top 1% of Americans own $42 trillion of wealth, 16 times as much as the bottom 50%, with most of that wealth concentrated among a few hundred families. This is not accidental. It’s part of their plan. This pillaging campaign is aided and abetted by their puppets at the Federal Reserve. And this is not reserved for just America. Europe is equally controlled by the few.
The consequence of their traitorous deeds is pointing towards civil chaos and global conflict – as anticipated in the later stages of a Fourth Turning. The protests arising across the globe are just the beginning. The way to chip away at their power is mass non-compliance to their mandates and individual acts of heroism, which will inspire more people to resist. Mocking and ridiculing the oligarchs and their minions will contribute to their decline in status. Boycotting corporations and entities supporting the narrative weakens their sway. Shunning those supporting the establishment, whether they be family, friends, or coworkers, will be essential in shifting the balance of power.
Most people have proven to be followers. We need to shift the narrative to the point where they begin following the truth tellers. The enemy have the wealth, power of the media, and politicians in their pockets. They think they have the police and military, but videos of the police joining the protestors in Italy, offer hope they may turn on the oligarchs. They have families at risk too. Our freedom and our future hang in the balance. Critical independent thought, courage, and fortitude in the face of tremendous adversity will be essential in defeating these global tyrants who think of you as a parasite to be crushed under their boot. Remember Carlin’s first rule. Don’t believe anything your government tells you. It’s all lies.
In her September 17 speech to parliament, the Attorney General of the Australian state of Victoria, Jill Hennessy, explained various provisions of the COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) and Other Acts Amendment Bill. Of most interest was the proposal that would dramatically inflate the scope of public health power in ostensibly preventing a spread of COVID-19. “The broader class of persons who may be appointed as authorised officers may include public sector employees from Victoria and other jurisdictions. For example, health services staff, WorkSafe officers such as Inspectors, Victoria Police members and Protective Service Officers.”
The formulation seemed an odd one: health services staff as designated officers to halt transmission perhaps, but unqualified members of the Victoria Police, along with Protective Service Officers? The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was the proposed appointer; the appointees (“authorised officers”) would be anybody deemed to possess appropriate skills, attributes or experience. Such elevated, muscularly vested officers would have the power to detain anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19, or anyone who had been in close contact with a positive case, for a period “reasonably necessary to eliminate a serious risk to public health,” provided it was “reasonably believed” they would fail to comply with a direction of self-quarantine.
Hennessy evaded the severe implications of such a broadly worded provision, arguing for convenience and efficiency, the two traditional hallmarks of the authoritarian mentality. The appointment power would focus upon “individuals with particular attributes, such as connection to particular communities”. “Contact tracing” would be able to take place in “a culturally safe manner.” As for any oversight limitations, these appointments would be subject to a “specific instrument” outlining specific authority and limitations authorised by the Secretary and Chief Health Officer.
This was something that did not escape the notice of some members of the Victorian Parliament. Greens MP Tim Read noted how the Omnibus Bill, in that draft form, gave police, protective services officers and private security guards powers to unilaterally determine who constituted a high risk with little regard to medical expertise. “Currently only public servants with the relevant skills and experience can make that decision”. Enforcing directions was a separate function of law enforcement. “So the bill would allow police to both make health directions on individuals and then to enforce them.”
The Omnibus Bill also saw various legal advocates spring into action. Michael Borsky QC went for understatement in claiming that detaining someone for hypothetical future conduct was a “very unusual legal construct”. The provision was “open to abuse”. Nor did impress the legal heads at the Victorian Bar, where there was much head shaking. The proposed criteria for appointing such officers was deemed too “broad and generic”. Their lack of precision “potentially opened the door for those who are not trained as health professionals to be appointed ‘authorised officers’.”
Granting such individuals unilateral powers of detention against individuals not abiding by a public health direction was another point of concern. An officer’s “reasonable belief” was a “standard of validation” vast and subjective. The Victorian Bar also suggested some measure of accountability: that decisions made by such authorised officers be “reviewed by the Chief Health Officer (or senior delegate) within a short, stipulated period (preferably not longer than 24 hours).”
The talents of Victorian policing have already been found wanting during one of the most extreme lockdown measures in the developed world. Reem Mussa, humanitarian advisor on forced migration to Médicins Sans Frontières, remembered the terror caused by the appearance of five hundred police “on housing estates [in Melbourne], trapping residents inside with no coherent health strategy or plans to keep them safe, fed or with access to medication and essentials.” 23 confirmed cases of COVID-19 had been found on the estates in July. Panic coursed through the various administrative arms of government.
In September, a very public display of policing mismanagement took place with the arrest of Ballarat resident Zoe Buhler, a pregnant mother apprehended in front of her children and husband in their home for a Facebook post inciting protest against the lockdown rules. No police officer thought it necessary to explain the offence of incitement, nor accept her offer to remove the offending post. It was such conduct that prompted Greg Barns of the Australian Lawyers Alliance to argue for limits on police powers when linked to pandemic controls.
The Police Accountability Project, based at the Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre in Melbourne, has also been alarmed by the aggressive, untutored policing formula pursued in the state. “The policing we have seen in Victoria to date and the scale of the policing we have seen [on July 4] and today in Flemington & North Melbourne, has caused and continues to do harm.”
Over the course of the lockdown, the PAP project has noted ten concerns about how harsh Stage 4 restrictions have been enforced. A few are worth noting. Police, for instance, were ill trained to make complex assessments about exemptions requiring health expertise. “Police ignored genuine health based exemptions and continually resorted to lock-down responses because it more closely aligned with their training.” They had failed to comprehend the public health impacts of their work, and that most pressing of points that policing “undermines public health responses.” The policing of curfews had been “applied in a discriminatory, abusive and harmful manner.” With such a stunning resume of faults and blunders, it is a wonder how the drafters in the Attorney-General’s department took leave of their senses.
On October 8, the Victorian government quietly trimmed parts of the proposed bill dealing with detention. Finding themselves in retreat, a flutter of qualifications were made. “We have always said we would negotiate in good faith,” claimed a less than chastened Hennessy. Giving little away, the Attorney-General claims to have made such amendments that will continue “to deliver the temporary, necessary changes we need to respond to the challenges the pandemic presents”.
According to Guardian Australia, the proposed table of changes will still preserve the power to appoint police and protective services officers as authorised officers, but with fewer powers. They will still be able to exercise considerable discretion in, for instance, searching property without a warrant if “necessary for the purpose of investigation, eliminating or reducing the risk to public health”. The daft dangers of making police and security personnel pseudo-health officers remain.
On at least 3 or 4 occasions in the past week we’ve had to smash the windows of people in cars and pull them out of there so they could provide their details – because they weren’t telling us where they were going; they weren’t adhering to the chief health officer’s guidelines, they weren’t providing their name and their address.” Shane Patton, Victorian Chief Police Officer 04/08/2020
On Saturday 5th of September a national day of protest occurred in cities around Australia against the unnecessary and draconian lockdowns that have been occurring across the country and which are still occurring in Victoria. Similar protests have occurred in cities around the world, most especially in Europe.
These protests are a legitimate and rational response to despotic and often unconstitutional laws that unscientifically characterize every member of society as a bio-security risk to everyone else. They are also a protest against law enforcement bureaucracies that identify responsible, civic-minded citizens as criminals if they dare to question such laws or even worse, step out of their homes in defiance of the lockdown to register their dissent.
The Australian protests occurred peacefully and without incident in most places, including Brisbane where I participated. But it was not the case in Victoria where a State of Disaster has been declared due to the ‘extraordinarily high’ number of active Covid cases there.
On the eve of the nationwide protests, mainstream news reported on the harrowing state of affairs in Victoria which was suffering from hundreds of active cases but, as it turns out, had only 20 people in intensive care suffering from covid-related illnesses. This is in a state of 6.35 million people that has 58 metropolitan hospitals and 69 rural hospitals and District Health services.
Despite the ‘extraordinarily low’ incidence of people who were actually sick from Covid 19, the Victorian Premier decided that new case numbers (>100 per day) were just too high to tolerate anyone leaving their homes for any reason other than the four exemptions provided by the government.
What he neglected to mention when insisting on preserving his lockdown was that most new cases are occurring in the under-30 age bracket: a demographic that is almost always asymptomatic to SARS CoV-2 and which has more chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident than of Covid19.
Undeterred by inconvenient truths like this, the Premier announced he had to protect the public from the potentially catastrophic medical emergency that would doubtless result from masked people walking down St Kilda Road to the Cenotaph in a socially distanced manner, so he banned all participation in the national day of protest.
Just days earlier the Assistant Police Commissioner for the North West Metro Region, Luke Cornelius, warned everyone in Victoria against participating in the Saturday protests. He referred to people who planned to protest against lockdowns as “boof heads”, calling them an “anti-vax, anti-mask, tinfoil hat-wearing brigade who were batshit crazy”.
This oddly extreme language from one of the State’s most senior police officers is not accidental. It serves a specific purpose.
In order to get ordinary well-adjusted police officers – who may have joined the force out of a desire to be of public service – to brutalize a population whose only crime is that they object to being locked in their homes for 23 hrs a day for months on end, you need to demonize dissent. If your officers on the ground can identify in any way with the people they are being told to terrorize, they might not follow orders.
This is a perennial problem for martial leaders everywhere. It’s particularly problematic when the rules being enforced are arbitrary or unjust. Hence the need to malign.
As Saturday rolled around, the police were out in force across Victoria on horseback with cuffs, batons, tasers and guns ready to intimidate, arrest and fine anyone unfortunate enough to attract their attention within the vicinity of a protest in any town in the State – even those towns where not a single case of Covid-19 has been recorded.
And here we get to the crux of the SARS-CoV-2 scam. Sure, there’s a virus out there. It’s real and it certainly kills people but we know enough about it now to know that the draconian response taken by Premier Danial Andrews is scientifically indefensible. So why is he persisting with the lockdowns?
My personal opinion is that the global program of lockdowns is a mechanism for reorganizing societies around the world along the lines of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset” agenda and all that this entails. It seems Daniel Andrews is fully on board with this agenda. But make no mistake, its coming to your state and country next.
I believe that sustained lockdowns are a “Stanley Milgram-style” experiment designed to see just how far bureaucrats in authority will exceed the moral limits of their power and how much abuse the Australian public will tolerate before they push back.
As part of this experiment, the algorithms that once monitored every nuance of our social media interactions to make frighteningly accurate predictions about us have been extended to track and predict our off-line experience as well. It should come as no surprise that both the Azure and AWS cloud eco-systems have expanded by 50% since the beginning of the pandemic.
The purpose of all this surveillance is not to better understand us as potential marketing targets (the standard explanation) but rather to better control us as victims in a system of profound inequality. Such a system is already in place across much of the world and under the guise of a health pandemic, it is rapidly being expanded to developed countries as well.
So far as I can see the whole experiment is going spectacularly well for the globalists, billionaires, and authoritarians, and very poorly for free citizens everywhere: mostly due to the effectiveness of media propaganda in driving public passivity.
A SCIENTIFIC DICTATORSHIP
Many medical practitioners are aware that Victoria’s management of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic is based on highly selective medical advice which doesn’t stand up to serious scientific scrutiny.
Recently a group of doctors wrote an excellent letter to the Premier advocating an alternative response to disease management, noting that more than 41,000 people die every year in Victoria, roughly 10,000 each from cardiovascular disease and cancer, yet in 7 months of a supposed pandemic less than 600 Victorians have died of Covid-19: 90% of them over 65 years of age and most with multiple co-morbidities.
The problem with the doctor’s alternative advice is that it assumes the government is merely mistaken or misinformed in its policymaking and implementation. The idea that the exercise of political power in Victoria has become pathological never seems to occur to them – despite a wealth of evidence supporting such a notion.
When governments pass laws that are extreme or unjust or which by-pass constitutional constraints, it is rarely by accident. As doctors they ought to be the first to appreciate what a pathological exercise of power means to the cultural and institutional bonds that hold a society together:
As bio-security increasingly substitutes for health care, doctors will find that the personal confidences of their patients are no longer inviolate and that the Hippocratic obligations they once held so dear can be easily compromised by legal mandates to force-medicate people regardless of need or consequence.
When politicians rule by executive decree the police force morphs from a public service comprised of citizens in uniform to the enforcement arm of a political clique. When this happens, public trust in the police is lost and this loss of legitimacy results in a loss of respect. Eventually this loss of respect becomes mutual and the police start to despise the people they victimize and abuse the power they have. The opening quote being a perfect example.
Similarly with the military: when the exercise of our democratic rights is pathologized by those in power, our servicemen and women eventually find they’re being asked to apply, at home, the counter-insurgency training and urban warfare tactics they learned for battlefields abroad. This is something that has occurred since the time of Thucydides and it’s happening again.
Even the tools we use to make sense of the world, such as the scientific method, cease to function properly when our governments become toxic. Once everyone in a society has been force-vaccinated by government decree, it will become legally impossible to prove a link between mandated vaccines and any potential vaccine-related injury. Not because the manufacturers will have immunity from liability (they will), but because there will no longer be a non-vaccinated control group left against which randomized double-blind control studies can be conducted.
Not one of these developments is accidental. All of them are known, predictable outcomes of policy decisions being taken today. And these policy decisions rob everyone of their integrity; health workers, academics, the police and the military.
When those in power have a pathological relationship to the people they rule, you know you are on a road to perdition. We can see such a pathology evolving among our politicians most clearly in Victoria with its home invasions, curfews and lock downs but it is also evident in the overreach of governments around the country.
Western Australia’s recent dispute with mining magnate, Clive Palmer, over the State’s Covid border closure is a case in point. According to the WA Law Society the Government’s anti-Palmer legislation violates several of the fundamental legal principles that underpin the rule of law in a civilized society. Such overreach is also apparent in the ASIO Amendment Act 2020, introduced into Federal Parliament by Peter Dutton in May this year – right at the height of the Covid panic while most members were not even in Canberra.
This legislation is the latest in a succession of Bills that have been passed by our Federal government since 9/11 (85 and counting) which have vastly expanded the powers of law enforcement and security agencies in Australia while limiting public oversight. The legislation effectively criminalizes the free exercise of our basic democratic freedoms.
The Dutton amendment extends powers normally applied to terrorists, to any group or person engaged in any kind of civil disobedience or protest that could possibly result in ‘politically motivated violence’. That would include the anti-lock down protests that I participated in last week.
Among a raft of frightening provisions this bill allows police and intelligence agencies to track, apprehend and question children as young as 14 yrs of age as though they were terrorists. It suspends the rules of habeas corpus and allows the State to arbitrarily restrict a defendant’s access to legal representation.
This is the sort of legislation you’d expect to find in China or Saudi Arabia, not Australia.
The permanent changes to our society that are now in place in Australia following the SARS CoV-2 pandemic mean we qualify as proto-fascist State by any measure of political freedom. This thought is anathema to most Australians and would be vociferously denied by paid-off mainstream media pundits – but probably not constitutional lawyers – because the legislative reality is that we are now much closer to full-blooded fascism than we are to the liberal democracy that existed when I was born in 1963. And we are a very far cry from the nation our diggers returned to in 1945.
The only way we will arrest and/or reverse this trend is if we all take direct, non-violent, physical (not digital) action to exercise our civic and democratic rights at every opportunity we can. The time to speak up and stand up is now. It will be too late tomorrow.
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 7thAustralian 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.
Establishment media are in cahoots with US/UK ruling regimes against Assange for the “crime” of truth-telling journalism abhorred in the West — totalitarian rule where these societies are heading.
In mid-October, UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer denounced Assange’s judicial lynching and egregious mistreatment, saying the following:
“What has the man done? He has disclosed an enormous amount of information that governments want to remain secret, most infamously the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which, in my view, is evidence for war crimes.”
“What is the scandal in this case is that everyone focuses on Julian Assange. Here is someone who exposes evidence for war crimes, including torture and murder, and he is under this constant pressure.”
“I am absolutely convinced he will not receive a fair trial in Virginia, and he will remain in prison under inhumane conditions for the rest of his life.”
Tulsi Gabbard is the only US presidential aspirant expressing support for journalist Assange, as well as whistleblowers Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and others like them, opposing their “prosecution like criminals.”
If elected president, she’d drop charges against them, she said, calling for greater “protect(ion) (of) our civil liberties,” adding:
Assange’s arrest in Britain “poses a great threat to our freedom of the press and to our freedom of speech” — the same true about how Chelsea Manning, Snowden, and other whistleblowers are mistreated.
What happened to them “could happen to you. It could happen to any of us,” she stressed.
Bipartisan politicians in the US and UK, along with establishment media, refuse to support Assange’s struggle for justice.
On Monday, he appeared in London’s Westminster Magistrates Court. Showing the effects of egregious mistreatment since unlawfully dragged from the city’s Ecuadorian embassy and imprisoned under harsh conditions, he was too physically and emotionally shattered to participate in his defense.
He’s an investigative journalist/whistleblower, publishing material supplied by sources believed to be credible, unidentified for their protection.
WikiLeaks is not an intelligence operation. Nor it it connected to Russia or any other country. Claims otherwise are fabricated.
Assange earlier explained that WikiLeaks has the right “to publish newsworthy content. Consistent with the US Constitution, we publish material that we can confirm to be true,” he stressed.
US charges against him are fabricated and malicious, what no legitimate tribunal would accept.
Justice Department lawyer James Lewis falsely accused him of “spying,” lied saying he’s “not a journalist,” turned truth on its head claiming his actions were “criminal in both the US and UK” — the above Big Lies how all fascist police states operate.
Assange attorney Mark Summers called for dismissal of Washington’s illegitimate extradition request, saying:
According to the 2003 UK/US extradition treaty, it “shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense,” adding:
The unjustifiable persecution of Assange and Chelsea Manning is “part of an avowed war on whistleblowers to include investigative journalists and publishers.”
Summers requested a three-month delay of Assange’s February 25 extradition hearing because “we need more time” to prepare a proper defense, given the “enormity” of issues involved, requiring “evidence gathering that would test most lawyers.”
Operating as an imperial tool, judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the request, saying the extradition hearing will proceed as schedule on February 25 at Woolwich Magistrates Court near Belmarsh Prison.
Its public gallery has three seats, assuring Assange’s judicial lynching will be virtually closed to public scrutiny.
Barely able to stand and speak after months of barbaric mistreatment, when asked if there’s “anything (he) would like to say, he replied barely audibly that he doesn’t “understand how this is equitable,” adding:
Imperial USA “had 10 years to prepare (its judicial lynching). I can’t remember anything. I can’t access any of my written work.”
“It’s very difficult to do anything with such limited resources against a superpower intent on” an illegitimate crucifixion. “I can’t think properly” from the barbaric ordeal he’s endured.
Baraitser dismissively replied that “conditions of your detainment are not the subject of this court.”
Following the hearing, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson called for the case against Assange to “be thrown out immediately,” adding:
“Not only is it illegal on the face of the (extradition) treaty, the US has conducted illegal operations against Assange and his lawyers which are the subject of a major investigation in Spain.”
John Pilger witnessed Monday’s spectacle, saying “(t)he whole thing is a grotesque absurdity. There is an extradition law between this country and the United States.”
“It states specifically that someone cannot be extradited if the offenses are political.”
“The source of this is a rogue (US) state — a state that ignores its own laws and international laws and the laws of this country.”
Summers called Assange’s crucifixion “a political attempt to signal to journalists the consequences of publishing information” ruling regimes want suppressed.
“It’s legally unprecedented…part of an avowed war on (truth-telling) whistleblowers to include investigative journalists and publishers.”
In cahoots with the Trump regime, police state Britain is killing Assange slowly, wanting him, whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, and other truth-tellers silenced.
What’s going on is the hallmark of totalitarian rule – controlling the message, eliminating what conflicts with it, notably on major geopolitical issues.
Losing the right of free expression endangers all others. When truth-telling and dissent are considered threats to national security, free and open societies no longer exist – the slippery slope America and other Western societies are heading on.
Protestors line up at courthouse Monday morning. (Gordon Dimmack)
A judge at a hearing in London has denied the WikiLeaks’ publisher more time to prepare his defense, while a group of Australian politicians coalesce around a demand to return Julian Assange home.
The judge in Julian Assange’s extradition process on Monday denied his lawyer’s appeal for more time to prepare his case as the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher weakly told the court he was unable to “research anything” in the conditions under which he is being held in high-security Belmarsh Prison.
Assange appeared in person at Westminster Magistrate’s Court in London Monday morning for a case management hearing on the request by the United States for Assange to be sent to Virginia to face 18 charges, including allegedly violating the U.S. Espionage Act for possessing and disseminating classified information that revealed prima facie evidence of U.S. war crimes.
Mark Summers, Assange’s lawyer, told the court the charges were “a political attempt” by the U.S. “to signal to journalists the consequences of publishing information.” The Espionage Act indictment against Assange by the Trump Administration is the first time a journalist has been charged under the 1917 Act for publishing classified material.
“It is legally unprecedented,” Summers told Judge Vanessa Baraitser. He argued that President Donald Trump was politically motivated by the 2020 election to pursue Assange.
Summers also argued before Baraitser that the U.S. “has been actively engaged in intruding into privileged discussions between Assange and his lawyers.” It was revealed this month that the Central Intelligence Agency was given access to surveillance video shot by a private Spanish company of all interactions Assange had with lawyers, doctors and visitors.
“This is part of an avowed war on whistleblowers to include investigative journalists and publishers,” Summers said. “The American state has been actively engaged in intruding on privileged discussions between Mr Assange and his lawyer.”
Because of this surveillance, including “unlawful copying of their telephones and computers” as well as “hooded men breaking into offices,” Assange’s lawyers needed more time to prepare his defense, Summers argued. But Baraitser refused the request, and ordered Assange back in court for a second management hearing on Dec. 19. The full extradition hearing is scheduled to begin on Feb. 25 next year.
Not Equitable
As the hearing ended Monday, Baraitser asked Assange if he understood what had just transpired. “Not really. I can’t think properly,” he said.
“I don’t understand how this is equitable. This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I can’t access my writings. It’s very difficult where I am to do anything but these people have unlimited resources. They are saying journalists and whistleblowers are enemies of the people. They have unfair advantages dealing with documents. They [know] the interior of my life with my psychologist. They steal my children’s DNA. This is not equitable what is happening here.”
The Guardian quoted WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson as saying that Assange’s case should be thrown out because of interference with preparing his defense. “Not only is it illegal on the face of the treaty, the U.S. has conducted illegal operations against Assange and his lawyers which are the subject of a major investigation in Spain,” Hrafnsson said.
According to witnesses in the courtroom, Assange appeared physically and mentally enfeebled after months in isolation in prison. Tristan Kirk, correspondent for the London Evening Standard, tweeted: “Julian Assange struggled to say his own name and date of birth as he appeared in the dock. He claimed to have not understood what happened in the case management hearing, and was holding back tears as he said: ‘I can’t think properly.’”
In response to Kirk’s message, Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, tweeted: “This breaks my heart! They are breaking my beautiful bright, brave journalist son, the corrupt bastards!”
Assange’s supporters swarmed the van in which Assange was driven away from the courthouse back to his dreary isolation in the hospital ward at Belmarsh.
Speaking outside the courthouse after the hearing, journalist John Pilger called the legal assault on Assange a “deliberate action of a rogue state, a state that ignores its own laws and international law.”
“There were people crying in the gallery,” said Assange supporter Emmy Butlin. “He is like a ghost. He could hardly talk. He’s dying.”
Australian MPs Back Assange
Meanwhile in Assange’s native Australia, members of Parliament have demanded that Assange be returned to his country.
MP Andrew Wilkie told the House of Representatives last week that Assange is “an Australian citizen and must be treated like any other Australian. He was not in the U.S. when he provided evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq. He can’t possibly have broken their laws.”
If Assange is extradited, Wilkie said he
“faces serious human rights violations including exposure to torture and a dodgy trial. And this has serious implications for freedom of speech and freedom of the press here in Australia, because if we allow a foreign country to charge an Australian citizen for revealing war crimes, then no Australian journalist or publisher can ever be confident that the same thing won’t happen to them. Put simply, he must be allowed to return to Australia.”
Wilkie, an Australian former intelligence officer who resigned because of the falsehoods about WMD in Iraq before the 2003 invasion, is reportedly working to set up a parliamentary committee that crosses party lines to demand that the Liberal government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison opposes Assange’s extradition.
The Australian TV program “The Project” reported on Sunday that up to 10 politicians were ready to join the committee.
“It’s important that parliamentarians learn the facts of this matter,” Wilkie told the program. “There’s so much naiveté and ignorance and disinformation swirling around that it’s no wonder that a lot of people are wary or even dislike Julian, but I reckon that when people find out the facts of the matter they will get behind him.
“This is about the right of person not to be extradited to another country based on a whim or the politics of it. The whole thing stinks quite frankly, I think he should be allowed to come to Australia.”
Julian Assange returns to court in London tomorrow – where his lawyers will outline their case against his extradition to the United States, on spying charges. As he sits in a cell, Aussie MPs from across the political spectrum are banding together, in a bid to bring him home. pic.twitter.com/SdwKu2yBRH
Wilkie called the ability for Morrison to stand up to Trump, with whom he’s said to be close, “a test for the prime minister.”
“It’s one thing to be mates with someone, but it’s another thing entirely to agree to do something which is entirely improper. I mean ScoMo is the prime minister of Australia, he’s not the vice president of the United States I hope. And this is an opportunity for Australia to say we stand for the rule of law and we stand behind people who stand up and speak about war crimes. Australian politicians kowtow to the U.S. all the time without realizing that our alliance would be even stronger if sometimes we said, ‘No.’ Because if ScoMo just rolls over on this and is happy for Julian Assange to be extradited from Belmarsh Prison in the UK to the U.S., well that just means Australia can be taken for granted. You actually lose leverage bizarrely by having a really close relationship that Scott Morrison seems to have with Donald Trump. Rather than putting Australia in a better position it can put Australia in a weaker position because the U.S. knows it can be taken for granted.”
Wilkie joined right-wing MP Barnaby Joyce who the previous week came out in Assange’s defense. “Whether you like a person or not, they should be afforded the proper rights and protections and the process of justice,” Joyce said.
Wilkie told “The Project,” “When someone like Barnaby Joyce thinks there’s an issue here then people should pay attention.”
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.comand followed on Twitter@unjoe.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) called a news conference on Thursday to justify its raids targeting journalists at two media organisations this week.
Police spent seven hours ransacking a News Corp political reporter’s home in Canberra on Tuesday, and eight hours poring over and seizing files at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Sydney headquarters on Wednesday.
In an extraordinary admission, the AFP’s acting commissioner Neil Gaughan blurted out that the real reason for the raids was to protect the information that the Australian police and intelligence agencies receive from their “Five Eyes” counterparts. Five Eyes is a top-level network of intelligence agencies dominated by the US that also includes Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
“The Australian government, or particularly the Australian enforcement and intelligence communities, rely on secret and top-secret information from our international partners, particularly our Five Eyes partners,” the police chief said. “If we can’t be seen to protect our own internal information, [then] we are concerned that the information flow to us dries up.”
Citing government demands for investigations into leaks of secret information, Gaughan said the AFP received “numerous referrals to us [of leaks] and to be honest we get too many. But the premise of investigating these matters is to ensure the international community knows that we take the leaking of information, sensitive information, seriously.”
In other words, the AFP is under pressure not just from Canberra, but from Washington, to ensure that information, including about criminal actions of governments and its agencies, is kept from public view. This takes place amid the Trump administration’s mounting threats of war against Iran and Venezuela, as well as its escalating confrontation with China.
The AFP search warrants related to leaked documents exposing war crimes perpetrated by the Special Air Service (SAS) in Afghanistan and plans to legalise domestic mass surveillance by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), which are both central to Five Eyes operations.
Gaughan’s remarkable declaration went virtually unreported throughout the establishment media in Australia and internationally. His admission vindicates the analysis made by the WSWS on Thursday:
“[I]t is inconceivable that the Australian government would have instigated and pursued the investigation of the ABC and Murdoch media journalists without the agreement, if not urging, of Washington. Both the SAS and the ASD surveillance agency are closely integrated into all the wars and war preparations of the US.”
Gaughan’s statement also underscores the warnings made by the WSWS that the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for exposing the war crimes, mass spying and regime-change operations of Washington and its allies, including Australia, is setting a precedent for the criminalisation of journalism.
By specifically targeting journalists, as well as whistleblowers, the Australian government is following the lead of the Trump administration. The US has charged Assange, a journalist and publisher, with multiple counts under the Espionage Act, for which he faces life imprisonment.
At his press conference, Gaughan refused to rule out laying charges against News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst or ABC reporters Dan Oakes and Sam Clark for publishing alleged “national security” secrets. Such charges against journalists would be without precedent in Australia since World Wars I and II.
In a pointed warning, Gaughan said “no sector of the community should be immune” from police investigations into alleged law-breaking. Gaughan said the police are probing the “publication” of documents marked “secret” and “top secret,” placing journalists and publishers squarely under threat of prosecutions.
The AFP is investigating breaches of the Crimes Act, which criminalises unauthorised disclosures by public servants, and also contains offences that apply to journalists. Journalists, as well as alleged leakers, can be jailed for up to seven years. Dating back to World War I, the legislation outlaws “receiving” information that “prejudices the security or defence” of Australia.
But, asked what was the harm of revealing wrongdoing by Australian troops or plans to extend spying laws, Gaughan said the substance of the reports was “irrelevant.” The mere disclosure of protected information was a crime. He bluntly stated: “The issue of whether or not the public has the right to know is really not an issue that comes into our investigation process.”
The Crimes Act provisions were recently replaced by even more far-reaching measures embedded in the “foreign interference” legislation that the Liberal-National government pushed through parliament at Washington’s urging late last year, supported by the Labor Party. The maximum penalties were increased to 10 years’ imprisonment. However, the new laws could not be applied to the current cases, because the alleged leaks occurred in July 2017 and April 2018.
Gaughan tried to refute accusations that the AFP was acting at the government’s behest. He denied that the police had waited until after the May 18 federal election to execute warrants and claimed no contact had been made with the government since the AFP informed Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton when the investigations first began.
These claims fly in the face of the facts. The government itself instigated both AFP investigations, and the Labor Party fully supported it in doing so. And Dutton and other government ministers immediately defended the raids. When Prime Minister Scott Morrison was asked at a press conference if he was bothered by police raiding journalists’ homes, he replied: “It never troubles me that our laws are being upheld.”
Above all, as Gaughan himself revealed, the raids were mounted to satisfy the Five Eyes powers, which means the US above all. Successive governments, both Liberal-National and Labor, have committed Australia to be a key partner in this network as part of its military alliance with the United States.
The police raids are part of a global crackdown on freedom of speech, including in the US and other countries, such as France, where governments are taking the Trump administration’s repressive lead.
This assault is targeted directly at the basic right of the working class to know the crimes, war plans and conspiracies of the capitalist ruling elites and the state apparatuses they control. It is being mounted amid growing struggles by workers around the world against soaring social inequality and declining living and working conditions.
The Australian police chief’s open threats highlight the urgency of the worldwide campaign being waged by the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Parties for the defence of Julian Assange and the jailed whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Their plight is a test case in the struggle against the lurch toward war and dictatorial forms of rule.