The cruelties we have inflicted on children under Covid-19 are unethical and immoral, we’re devastating a whole generation

Posted on April 8, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Eva Bartlett

A year of lockdowns, mask-wearing, isolation and depriving youngsters from seeing friends and grandparents has caused a surge in kids committing suicide, self-harming and suffering other mental health issues. It needs to end.

Scrolling through Twitter the other day, I came across a tweet about a worrying increase in the numbers of children and youths having suicidal thoughts.

It mentioned that Boston Children’s Hospital had reported a 47% increase “in kids needing to be hospitalized for suicidal ideation or attempts,” between July and October 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.

So I started to research, and in doing so tried to contact organizations concerned with the mental health of young people.

One UK suicide prevention organization that I emailed for information on the correlation between lockdown restrictions and the rise in child (and adult) suicides instead played down the effects of lockdowns and warned against writing about children being affected.

Its media spokesperson told me: “We’re really keen to avoid any media narratives that suggests that suicide is an inevitable consequence of the pandemic and its restrictions, as this can be harmful to vulnerable readers and induce a sense of hopelessness during these uncertain times.”

Although I am not saying suicide is an inevitable consequence of Covid-19 restrictions, clearly there are strong correlations between a year of lockdowns, isolation, depriving children from seeing friends, classmates and grandparents, making them wear masks and other measures, and a sharp rise in child suicides, self-harm and increased mental health issues in general.

The UK organization (whose name I will leave out because, while I am critical of their perspective on these issues, I don’t want to tarnish their reputation for the possibly life-saving work they otherwise do), deflected on the matter of the correlation, saying:

“Currently there is no evidence of a national rise in suicide rates, real-time data is not yet available to determine the true impact on particular population groups or geographic areas.”

But that simply is not true.

As was reported in January 2021, the UK Centre for Mental Health revealed, “500,000 children under 18 in England, with no previous problems, will need mental health care due to the devastating economic, health and family pressures caused by the ongoing coronavirus crisis. This has manifested itself in children as young as five reporting self-harm and suicidal thoughts to counsellors and a tripling in the number of eating disorders reported by adolescents.”

An article the following month, citing a UK doctor’s diary, revealed: “Children in mental health crisis used to be brought to A&E about twice a week. Since the summer it’s been more like once or twice a day. Some as young as 10 have cut themselves, taken overdoses, or tried to asphyxiate themselves.”

The rise in children committing suicide, having suicidal thoughts and self-harming is happening around the world. A December 2020 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics found, “a significantly higher rate of suicide ideation in March and July 2020 and higher rates of suicide attempts in February, March, April, and July 2020, as compared with the same months in 2019.”

A January 20, 2021 article cited the executive director of the Youth Services Bureau of Ottawa as saying, “We’re seeing about a 30-40 percent increase in those who are contacting mental health crisis services. We’re seeing a doubling of the calls that are young people calling or their family is calling because they’re worried about suicide.”

A UNICEF Canada March 2021 press release noted: “The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that have disrupted every aspect of a child and young person’s childhood is a grim reminder of the sacrifices made by young people over the last year. For children experiencing violence, neglect or abuse at home, lockdowns have left many stranded without the support of teachers, extended families and communities.”

A March 15 article on the McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton, began, “Pandemic safety measures have had a negative impact on some aspects of children’s and teens’ health.”

It cited a threefold increase of youths admitted for medical support after a suicide attempt, with youngsters reporting a “lack of social interaction, increased conflict at home, and the inability to rely on friends as main contributors” as factors contributing to their plight.

The article also noted an increase in substance abuse admissions (“doubled compared to last year”) and “unprecedented” rates of eating disorders, with referrals up “90% in a four month period, compared to last year.”

In France, doctors have reported children as young as 8 years old, “deliberately running into traffic, overdosing on pills and otherwise self-harming.”

The same article said that a doctor working in a northern England infirmary “used to treat one or two children per week for mental health emergencies, including suicide attempts. The average now is closer to one or two per day, sometimes involving children as young as 8.”

In March, the Foundation for Economic Education published an article that stated: “When it comes to lockdowns, we’ve extensively documented the unintended consequences at FEE, including isolation, depression, suicidality, unemployment, drug abuse, domestic violence, and more.”

The evidence is overwhelmingly clear: there is a serious rise in child suicide, suicide attempts and thoughts, self-harm and mental health issues that can be attributed directly to the result of Covid-19 measures enforced on children, including many with no previous history of mental health issues.

Lifting lockdown measures would help children heal

The lockdowns are based both on the premise that they are necessary in order to “flatten the curve,” as was said one year ago, and to protect people.

Now (goalposts moved), they are apparently needed until everyone is vaccinated (with rushed vaccines that have raised concerns they may cause blood clots or deaths).

The different stages of lockdowns are largely based on the incessant reports of rising “cases” of Covid-19.

Cases are determined by Covid-19 tests, which have proved to be unreliable and inaccurate, giving false positives and creating a false picture of reality. This faulty testing is exacerbating the media hype over “rising cases.”

Even Ontario’s associate chief medical officer of health in July 2020 admitted, “… if you’re testing in a population that doesn’t have very much Covid, you’ll get false positives almost half the time. That is, the person actually doesn’t have Covid, they have something else, they may have nothing.”

Or as noted in December 2020, even the World Health Organization, “released a guidance memo on December 14th, warning that high cycle thresholds on PCR tests will result in false positives.”

The 24/7, sensationalist media we have been subjected to for the past year is a major cause for anxiety, fear, depression and hopelessness.

Talking honestly about the negative impacts of lockdowns, isolation, masking and the resulting mental health issues is something we need to be doing.

A Canadian initiative, Save Our Youth, has produced a series of short videos of parents speaking about how lockdowns are affecting their children. The coalition encourages others to submit their own clips.

Journalist Robert Bridge recently wrote: “Children have been taught to look at each other warily, like walking chemical factories capable of infecting and even killing, as opposed to fellow human beings that can provide love, comfort and support.

“We did the most unconscionable thing imaginable, forcing young children – at the most momentous times of their lives – to adhere to social distancing rules while shutting down their schools and imprisoning them in their homes. That is simply cruel and unusual punishment. In a word, it is child abuse.”

The UK suicide prevention organization which deflected the correlation between lockdowns and rising child suicides and self-harm does children a disservice with its stance.

The lockdowns and related measures are, in my and many others’ opinions, the core reasons for childrens’ suffering. The sooner we return to normal and lift lockdowns and end the masking of children, the sooner our young will start to heal and live in ways beneficial to their physical and mental health.

I do, however, agree with the organization’s guidance to “remind people that suicide is preventable by encouraging help-seeking and including sources of help.” And for parents and loved ones to pay close attention to any changes in behaviour in children (or adults) who might be silently suffering.

Recently, the editor of the Toronto Sun said: “Keeping children under lockdown so much in quarantine, not letting them just interact with their natural environment as much as they would normally be doing is actually going to stand a risk of harming their immune system, develop allergies, asthma, and even autoimmune diseases later in life because they’re not having a natural exposure to to the microbial atmosphere out there.

“It’s unethical, it’s immoral, to ignore the harms that are being done to our children to the degree that we are ignoring them as a society.”

I wholeheartedly agree. We should be doing everything we can to protect children from lockdowns, potentially toxic masks, isolation and the spiralling mental health issues that result from them.

After a Year Under Lockdown, Will Our Freedoms Survive the Tyranny of COVID-19?

Posted on April 7, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The remedy is worse than the disease.”—Francis Bacon

One way or another, the majority of Americans will survive COVID-19.

It remains to be seen, however, whether our freedoms will survive the tyranny of the government’s heavy-handed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Indeed, now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., we may all be long-haulers, suffering under the weight of long-term COVID-19 afflictions.

Instead of dealing with the headaches, fatigue and neurological aftereffects of the virus, however, “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

Therein lies the danger of the government’s growing addiction to power.

What started out a year ago 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 our own) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents.

Until recently, the police state had been more circumspect in its power grabs, but this latest state of emergency has brought the beast out of the shadows.

It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security.

This coronavirus pandemic has been no exception.

Not only have the federal and state governments unraveled the constitutional fabric of the nation with lockdown mandates that sent the economy into a tailspin and wrought havoc with our liberties, but they have almost persuaded the citizenry to depend on the government for financial handouts, medical intervention, protection and sustenance.

This past year under lockdown was a lesson in many things, but most of all, it was a lesson in how to indoctrinate a populace to love and obey Big Brother.

What started off as an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of this virus, and not overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose the most vulnerable to unavoidable loss of life scenarios quickly became strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

Every day brought a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that were eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

There was talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, 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.

To some, these may seem like small, necessary steps in the war against the COVID-19 virus, but they’re only necessary to the Deep State in its efforts to further undermine the Constitution, extend its control over the populace, and feed its insatiable appetite for ever-greater powers.

After all, whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America healthy again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

The war on drugs turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with SWAT teams and militarized police. The war on terror turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention. The war on immigration turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with roving government agents demanding “papers, please.”

This war on COVID-19 could usher in yet another war on the American people, waged with all of the surveillance weaponry at the government’s disposal: thermal imaging cameras, drones, contact tracing, biometric databases, etc.

Unless we find some way to rein in the government’s power grabs, the fall-out will be epic.

Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has coalesced into this present moment.

The government’s shameless exploitation of past national emergencies for its own nefarious purposes pales in comparison to what is presently unfolding.

It’s downright Machiavellian.

Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been anticipating this moment for years, quietly assembling a wish list of lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.

It should surprise no one, then, that the Trump Administration asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deems it necessary during this coronavirus pandemic and “other” emergencies. It’s that “other” emergencies part that should particularly give you pause, if not spur you to immediate action (by action, I mean a loud and vocal, apolitical, nonpartisan outcry and sustained, apolitical, nonpartisan resistance).

In fact, the Department of Justice (DOJ) started to quietly trot out and test a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution.

We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

These are powers the police state would desperately like to make permanent.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that anything will change for the better under the Biden administration. That’s not how totalitarian regimes operate.

Bear in mind, however, that the powers the government officially asked Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has already unilaterally claimed for itself.

Unofficially, the police state has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

As David C. Unger, observes in The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs:

“For seven decades we have been yielding our most basic liberties to a secretive, unaccountable emergency state – a vast but increasingly misdirected complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs that so define our present world that we forget that there was ever a different America. … Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

This rise of an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security is all happening according to schedule.

The civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters,” the government’s reliance on the armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems, the implicit declaration of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security: the powers-that-be have been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now, not just with active shooter drills and lockdowns and checkpoints and heightened danger alerts, but with a sensory overload of militarized, battlefield images—in video games, in movies, on the news—that acclimate us to life in a totalitarian regime.

Whether or not this particular crisis is of the government’s own making is not the point: to those for whom power and profit are everything, the end always justifies the means.

The seeds of this present madness were sown several decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.

Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives, which do not need congressional approval, provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

Mind you, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose, and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the executive branch and its unelected minions.

The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

The emergency state is now out in the open for all to see.

Unfortunately, “we the people” refuse to see what’s before us.

This is how freedom dies.

We erect our own prison walls, and as our rights dwindle away, we forge our own chains of servitude to the police state.

Be warned, however: once you surrender your freedoms to the government—no matter how compelling the reason might be for doing so—you can never get them back.

No government willingly relinquishes power. If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

That said, we still have rights. Technically, at least.

We should not voluntarily relinquish every shred of our humanity, our common sense, or our freedoms to a nanny state that thinks it can do a better job of keeping us safe.

The government may act as if its police state powers trump individual liberties during this COVID-19 pandemic, but for all intents and purposes, the Constitution—especially the battered, besieged Bill of Rights—still stands in theory, if not in practice.

The decisions we make right now—about freedom, commerce, free will, how we care for the least of these in our communities, what it means to provide individuals and businesses with a safety net, how far we allow the government to go in “protecting” us against this virus, etc.—will haunt us for a long time to come.

At times like these, when emotions are heightened, fear dominates, common sense is in short supply, liberty takes a backseat to public safety, and democratic societies approach the tipping point towards mob rule, there is a tendency to cast those who exercise their individual freedoms (to freely speak, associate, assemble, protest, pursue a living, engage in commerce, etc.) as foolishly reckless, criminally selfish, outright villains or so-called “extremists.”

Sometimes that is true, but not always.

There is always a balancing test between individual freedoms and the communal good.

What we must figure out is how to strike a balance that allows us to protect those who need protecting without leaving us chained and in bondage to the police state.

Blindly following the path of least resistance—acquiescing without question to whatever the government dictates—can only lead to more misery, suffering and the erection of a totalitarian regime in which there is no balance.

Whatever we give up willingly now—whether it’s basic human decency, the ability to manage our private affairs, the right to have a say in how the government navigates this crisis, or the few rights still left to us that haven’t been disemboweled in recent years by a power-hungry police state—we won’t get back so easily once this crisis is past.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government never cedes power willingly. Neither should we.

A year ago, I warned that this was a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—can survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

Nothing has changed on that front.

James Madison, the “father” of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the fourth president of the United States, once advised that we should “take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.”

These COVID-19 restrictions are far from the first experiment on our liberties. Yet if “we the people” continue to allow the government to trample our rights in the name of so-called national security, we can be assured that things will get worse, not better.

Media Pseudo-Debates and the Silence of Leftist Critics The Incompetent, Negligent, Mishandling, Miscalculating Elite Blunderers

Posted on April 5, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

You’ve heard of them, no doubt, the U.S. rulers who can’t rule too well and are always getting surprised by events or fed bad advice by their underlings. Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned. They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence. They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the elites whom allegedly they oppose while ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail. They never see the storm coming, even as they create it. Their incompetence is the retort to all those nut cases who conjure up conspiracy theories to explain their actions or lack thereof. They are innocent. Always innocent.

They and their media mouthpieces offer Americans, who are most eager to accept, what Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed at age thirty-nine by Hitler, called cheap grace: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance…”

These incompetents are, in the immortal words of the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”

Except they could and can.

They’ve actually shot a lot of people, here and abroad. It’s one of their specialties. But they mean well. They screw up sometimes, but they mean well. They care, even while they kill millions with their guns and bombs. But they have their followers.

As another dissident thirty-nine-year-old pastor, executed by the American state, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

Mainstream Media Pseudo-Debates

The U.S. rulers have their defenders. Most are corporate mainstream journalists whose jobs are to defend the ruling elites of both political parties. They will criticize across the political divides depending on their organizations’ political leanings at the moment. But they will never attack the fundamentals of the oligarchic war system since they are part of it. Their jobs depend on it. So CNN and The New York Times will obsessively attack Trump while Fox News will do the same to Obama or Biden. This is a game.

These days such massive media conglomerates are seemingly starkly divided and basically serve as adjuncts of one political party or the other. They are essentially political propagandists for either the Democrats or the Republicans and have abandoned any pretense to be anything else. They speak to their respective audiences in self-enclosed vacuums. They promote the divide that runs down the middle of the USA, a divide they helped to create.

Some have argued that this radical division of the media turf is because of economic and business factors; that the media organizations and their “journalists” have seen this strategy as the path to greater profits. There is probably some truth in this. But it is a small part.

For all sides of the corporate media serve the same overarching political function: to divide and conquer the population; to set the so-called left against right; middle America against the east and west coasts; white against black; working class against middle-class; men against women; husbands against wives, etc. To keep people, who in reality should be allies, fighting with each other. It is a classic strategy of divide-and-conquer that is carried out by the mainstream media pursuant to their unstated mandate. It is not an accident and has been conducted with a vengeance in recent years.

And crucially, it is anchored in the false premise of the myth of left vs. right with a reasonable center somewhere between. Such a center has never existed. While left and right might once have been useful categories, they have long since outlived their usefulness. They now just serve to engender pseudo-debates.

Pseudo-debates are not new but they are highly effective. They are debates based on false premises. In this case, the premise is that the massive corporate media conglomerates are not part of the same system of control and containment of the population, but are genuine opponents in the battle for truth and democracy. Accept this premise and you have entered into endless debates leading nowhere. It is a classic method of intelligence agencies to sow uncertainty and confusion and to have people following Alice down the rabbit hole, tumbling and tumbling into an endless void as they argue continually about nothing.[1]

Dr. E. Martin Schotz has brilliantly explicated this trick in the case of the assassination of President Kennedy (“Certainly no honest person could ever accept the ‘single bullet theory’.”) where people are still debating a false mystery almost sixty years after the fact. He writes:

The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have pseudo-debates. Debates about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously false….Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo-debate is a benign activity. That it simply means that people are debating something that is irrelevant. This is not the case. I say this because every debate rests on a premise to which the debaters must agree, or there is no debate. In the case of pseudo-debate the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo-debate we have the parties to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is all the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting person who is witness to the pseudo-debate does not understand that he is being passed a lie. He is not even aware that he is being passed a premise. It is so subtle that the premise just passes into the person as if it were reality. This premise—that there is uncertainly to be resolved—seems so benign. It is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water. But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds of those who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we mean by mass denial.[2]

The entire corporate media ideological spectrum operates under the umbrella of oligarchic control, something that is not new, just more egregious with every passing day. More in your face. The corporate media serve as the mouthpieces for those oligarchs, but they try to convince their separate audiences that this isn’t so. They give people enemies – false ones. Objects to hate.

But just like symptoms are not the disease, they give people a focus upon which to rivet their attention while the disease goes unattended. As with a drug addict, the taking of drugs is not the fundamental problem, although it becomes one and might kill you. The problem is why one takes drugs; what is it that is one feels needs to be tranquilized and silenced. Or, as the writer William Saroyan once flippantly said regarding the claim that smoking causes cancer: “You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke, not from the smoking itself.”

The corporate mainstream media are the drug that serves to hide the core truth of an oligarchic cancerous warfare state drunk on power and using propaganda to play both sides. Everyone has become pawns in their game.

A recent example serves to illustrate a method in their madness. There is a new, ongoing Spotify podcast – “Renegades: Born in the USA” – featuring Barack Obama and the singer Bruce Springsteen in conversation. Two rebels – it’s of course ridiculous – but there it is. Two super rich celebrities stroking each other’s egos in an upper class setting. One a singer, who rose to prominence out of nowhere as the voice of the small-town beleaguered working class; the other, a mixed-race politician who rose to prominence out of nowhere from a family background redolent of the CIA. Two icons of popular and political culture crossing over with a smooth patina of mixed-arts bullshit telling listeners they we need to return to the good old days when political centrism served the great American ideal that they both share. People are supposed to take this conversation between “buddies” seriously, as the two sit mask-less with their feet seemingly touching at a time when people are told to wear masks and avoid close contact with those outside their households. As Bruce strums his guitar, any half-way sentient person would realize he was being played, even while the meaning of the song was so twisted that he was enjoying it.

Left-wing Gatekeepers

Then, if we switch from the mainstream corporate media to alternative voices, especially prominent ones on the left, we notice something even stranger.

I think most readers would agree that the two seismic events of the last twenty years are the current COVID- 19 issue and the September 11, 2001 attacks. The latter, not only because of all the victims that died that day, but for how it led to so much death and destruction around the world, the endless war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., the ensuing loss of basic liberties and privacy via the Patriot Act, etc. The former for obvious current reasons of death and further loss of basic liberties under the lockdowns as governments throughout the world institute unprecedented measures of control, etc. Clearly these two events stand out over the decades. They bookend twenty years of massive U.S. war crimes, the growth of the national security complex, an obscene increase in wealth for the wealthiest, and the loss of privacy and civil liberties for all.

And as everyone knows, September 11^th and COVID-19 have resulted in great controversies and much debate because of their serious implications and the obvious questions about the official story lines raised by many respectable writers and researchers of varying political perspectives. At the very least, one would expect that leftist/liberal critics of the so-called Deep State and the machinations of the elite’s wars and propaganda would have engaged in these discussions about these two seminal events or written analytic articles about them.

But for a core group of prominent left/liberal critics, these two subjects have been avoided like they are of no importance. No debates, no discussions, no analyses – simply silence, as if they didn’t happen and there was nothing to discuss. Cases closed: the government has spoken. Let us move on to more important matters.

But that is wrong. For example, in about a dozen closely reasoned books of his own and with other international researchers, David Ray Griffin has raised innumerable questions that show that the official September 11 story is full of holes. Canadian writer Graeme MacQueen has written a devastating exposé of the linked anthrax attacks that followed September 11, showing clearly that they were a U.S. government operation. I myself have raised significant questions about what I call the linguistic mind-control associated with the attacks in “Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore.” The dissident literature is enormous.

A few of Griffin’s points are illustrative of the many anomalies in the official account. There are so many, and not just from Griffin but from other researchers, that I will mention just a few about the building collapses, what Griffin calls “miracles of science.” The contradictions about the hijackers are also voluminous.

Here are a few such scientific miracles:

The Twin Towers and WTC 7 were the only steel-framed high-rise buildings ever to come down without explosives or incendiaries. The Twin Towers, each of which had 287 steel columns, were brought down solely by a combination of airplane strikes and jet-fuel fires. WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, so it was the first steel-framed high-rise to be brought down solely by ordinary building fires. These World Trade Center buildings also came down in free fall – the Twin Towers in virtual free fall, WTC 7 in absolute free fall – for over two seconds. Although the collapses of the of the WTC buildings were not aided by explosives, the collapses imitated the kinds of implosions that can be induced only by demolition companies. In the case of WTC 7, the structure came down symmetrically (straight down, with an almost perfectly horizontal roofline), which meant that all 82 of the steel support columns had to fall simultaneously, although the building’s fires had a very asymmetrical pattern. The South Tower’s upper 30-floor block changed its angular momentum in midair. This 30-floor block then disintegrated in midair.

I could go on and on with examples. The simple point is that there are so many absurdities in the official story that to ignore them is an act of intellectual and moral betrayal. Anyone who has closely studied the government’s 9/11 Commission Report knows it is highly fictional.

The same is true for dissenting voices on the COVID-19 issue. Three publications in particular have published an enormous amount of well-reasoned critiques of the official version of the COVID-19 narrative: Global Research, Off-Guardian, and Children’s Health Defense. All present many articles by serious writers who raise innumerable questions and make irrefutable points about this matter.

And again, the point is not simple agreement with the dissenters’ arguments, but the need to engage their critiques. Here too the silence is resounding, for it says “we buy the official account.”

Consider these few:

The man who invented the test used to determine the so-called COVID positive test results, the Nobel Prize winning chemist, Kary Mullis, has said that the test cannot do that, it is not a diagnostic test, and therefore all the test results are meaningless. Additionally, there is serious doubt that the virus called SARS-CoV-2 causes a disease called COVID 19 since there is no evidence that the virus has ever been isolated. Assuming for argument’s sake, however, that the PCR test can detect a specific virus, even Anthony Fauci himself, and the World Health Organization (one hour after Biden was sworn into office), have both said that the PCR test in order to have any accuracy must be performed at cycles below 35 thresholds while for a year those tests have been done at thresholds much higher, resulting in vast numbers of false positives. Cycle thresholds are the level at which the PCR test is said to detect a sample of the COVID-19 virus.

Furthermore, eminent voices such as Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Koenig at Global Research, Robert Kennedy, Jr. at Children’s Health Defense, and Catte Black and Kit Knightly at Off-Guardian have for a long time been vociferously objecting to the official narrative with a vast amount of additional analyses involving the consequences of the wide-spread lockdowns. Such dissidents have had to fight against an organized campaign of censorship that should raise the alarm for anyone who cares about truth.

For leftists who remain silent on these fundamental issues, I can assure them that these critiques of the official explanations of September 11, 2001 and COVID-19 are not right-wing conspiracies but are the work of leftists digging deep for truth.

It is therefore more than odd that certain left/liberal writers completely avoid these issues. One must assume, therefore, that they accept the official explanations for these events, just as this coterie of leftist/liberal critics dismiss the voluminous and detailed critiques of the Warren Commission and the assassination of President Kennedy. From their silence one can assume that these matters are of no importance because the authorities have given us the truth.

One such deceased left-wing writer, who can stand in for the group of living writers I allude to, was the well-known and often brilliant journalist Alexander Cockburn, the founder of Counterpunch Magazine. In Cockburn’s case, however, and to his credit even though he had no idea what he was talking about regarding September 11, 2001 and the JFK assassination, he did not remain silent but expressed his bile in ways he thought piercing but which made him appear quite ignorant. Cockburn had a sharp tongue and liked to ridicule anyone who disagreed with him. He excoriated all who questioned the JFK assassination or September 11 as “conspiracy nuts,” “lunatics” involved with “kookery.”

Echoing the CIA’s conspiracy meme, his name calling was offensive and his ignorance of these matters extraordinary. But he was a star leftist, an untouchable. Few wished to criticize him. He started with the assumption that government stupidity, incompetence, and screw-ups allow these terrible events to happen, and then without a shred of evidence, concluded that is why they happened. All evidence and logic to the contrary, he derisively dismissed as the work of fools. Only Cockburn and a government that admits mistakes were made were right. His arguments on these matters were pseudo-debates based on a premises he conjured out of thin air.

He was a master incompetent of the incompetence theory, one that many prominent leftists follow today, such as a recent passing comment by one of them on the COVID-19 matter as a mishandling by the ruling elite. The implicit assumption being that the basic government and mainstream media tale is correct and all would be far better if the Trump administration hadn’t screwed up. Nothing further is forthcoming or necessary. Let us proceed on the assumption that the official account is true and that the government’s inept response is the problem. Failure of leadership. Government negligence. Incompetence.

And anyone who even harbors a suspicion that there may be more to the story is engaging in conspiratorial thinking. Of course this is the same response given to those who for twenty years have researched and questioned the government’s account of September 11, 2001. The 9/11 omission story. The fictional account that will dominate the news as the twentieth anniversary approaches this September. Will any of those liberal/leftists who have remained silent all these years let it pass as truth? I suspect so but hope not.

The Need for Dialogue

So we have pseudo debates on one hand and silence on the other when what is required is not self-censorship but open critical dialogue on these fundamental matters. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” said Martin Luther King from the pulpit of Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 when he condemned the Vietnam War and broke his own silence in opposition to many of his advisers. A year later to the day, like JFK, he was murdered by the warfare state he condemned. Like Senator Robert Kennedy two months later. They were killed by very competent people.

Dr. Martin E. Schotz wrote twenty-six years ago in History Will Not Absolve US that those he had in mind for their defense of the Warren Commission were “such individuals as Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, the editors of The Nation magazine, and, if everyone remembers, I.F. Stone as well. I think the positions of these individuals are very important because in their surprising (to us) dishonesty and willingness to cooperate with the warfare state in covering up the crime, there is obviously something to be learned.”

Yes, there is. It is time for all people of good will to stop finding excuses for the ruling elites, whether through incompetence theories or the silent refusal to publicly engage the government and its critics on the most important issues of our time – September 11, 2001 and COVID-19. Those Schotz names above are heroes for many on the liberal/left today who follow in their stead. It’s as though they have found it necessary to mimic their teachers’ lessons. Better logic would have them analyzing the premises of September 11 and COVID-19. Start with the basics. Be explicit. Tell us why you are silent.

It’s time to graduate from this school of denial.

[1] https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/HWNAU/letterToVJS.html#partIa

[2] https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/FalseMystery/COPA1998EMS.html#s2

Stand Up to Tyranny: How to Respond to the Evils of Our Age

Posted on April 4, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”—Martin Luther King Jr. (A Knock at Midnight, June 11, 1967)

In every age, we find ourselves wrestling with the question of how Jesus Christ—the itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist who died challenging the police state of his time, namely, the Roman Empire—would respond to the moral questions of our day.

For instance, would Jesus advocate, as so many evangelical Christian leaders have done in recent years, for congregants to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do?

What would Jesus do?

Study the life and teachings of Jesus, and you may be surprised at how relevant he is to our modern age.

A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire, and providing a blueprint for standing up to tyranny that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Those living through this present age of government lockdowns, immunity passports, militarized police, SWAT team raids, police shootings of unarmed citizens, roadside strip searches, invasive surveillance and the like might feel as if these events are unprecedented. However, the characteristics of a police state and its reasons for being are no different today than they were in Jesus’ lifetime: control, power and money.

Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day was characterized by secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state.

A police state extends far beyond the actions of law enforcement. In fact, 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.”

Indeed, the police state in which Jesus lived (and died) and its striking similarities to modern-day America are beyond troubling.

Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the increasingly militarized police forces across the country.

Widespread police presence. The Roman Empire used its military forces to maintain the “peace,” thereby establishing a police state that reached into all aspects of a citizen’s life. In this way, these military officers, used to address a broad range of routine problems and conflicts, enforced the will of the state. Today SWAT teams, comprised of local police and federal agents, are employed to carry out routine search warrants for minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud.

Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.

Perpetual wars and a military empire. Much like America today with its practice of policing the world, war and an over-arching militarist ethos provided the framework for the Roman Empire, which extended from the Italian peninsula to all over Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, extending into North Africa and Western Asia as well. In addition to significant foreign threats, wars were waged against inchoate, unstructured and socially inferior foes.

Martial law. Eventually, Rome established a permanent military dictatorship that left the citizens at the mercy of an unreachable and oppressive totalitarian regime. In the absence of resources to establish civic police forces, the Romans relied increasingly on the military to intervene in all matters of conflict or upheaval in provinces, from small-scale scuffles to large-scale revolts. Not unlike police forces today, with their martial law training drills on American soil, militarized weapons and “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset, the Roman soldier had “the exercise of lethal force at his fingertips” with the potential of wreaking havoc on normal citizens’ lives.

A nation of suspects. Just as the American Empire looks upon its citizens as suspects to be tracked, surveilled and controlled, the Roman Empire looked upon all potential insubordinates, from the common thief to a full-fledged insurrectionist, as threats to its power. The insurrectionist was seen as directly challenging the Emperor. A “bandit,” or revolutionist, was seen as capable of overturning the empire, was always considered guilty and deserving of the most savage penalties, including capital punishment. Bandits were usually punished publicly and cruelly as a means of deterring others from challenging the power of the state. Jesus’ execution was one such public punishment.

Acts of civil disobedience by insurrectionists. Starting with his act of civil disobedience at the Jewish temple, the site of the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council, Jesus branded himself a political revolutionary. When Jesus “with the help of his disciples, blocks the entrance to the courtyard” and forbids “anyone carrying goods for sale or trade from entering the Temple,” he committed a blatantly criminal and seditious act, an act “that undoubtedly precipitated his arrest and execution.” Because the commercial events were sponsored by the religious hierarchy, which in turn was operated by consent of the Roman government, Jesus’ attack on the money chargers and traders can be seen as an attack on Rome itself, an unmistakable declaration of political and social independence from the Roman oppression.

Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers. Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas. Acting as a government informant, Judas concocted a kiss as a secret identification marker, hinting that a level of deception and trickery must be used to obtain this seemingly “dangerous revolutionist’s” cooperation.

Torture and capital punishment. In Jesus’ day, religious preachers, self-proclaimed prophets and nonviolent protesters were not summarily arrested and executed. Indeed, the high priests and Roman governors normally allowed a protest, particularly a small-scale one, to run its course. However, government authorities were quick to dispose of leaders and movements that appeared to threaten the Roman Empire. The charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious. To the Romans, any one of these charges was enough to merit death by crucifixion, which was usually reserved for slaves, non-Romans, radicals, revolutionaries and the worst criminals.

Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.” After Jesus is formally condemned by Pilate, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.” The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry. After being ruthlessly whipped and mocked, Jesus was nailed to a cross.

As Professor Mark Lewis Taylor observed:

The cross within Roman politics and culture was a marker of shame, of being a criminal. If you were put to the cross, you were marked as shameful, as criminal, but especially as subversive. And there were thousands of people put to the cross. The cross was actually positioned at many crossroads, and, as New Testament scholar Paula Fredricksen has reminded us, it served as kind of a public service announcement that said, “Act like this person did, and this is how you will end up.”

Jesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state. Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.

Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics.

Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.

Ultimately, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.

After all, there is so much suffering and injustice in the world, and so much good that can be done by those who truly aspire to follow Jesus Christ’s example.

We must decide whether we will follow the path of least resistance—willing to turn a blind eye to what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the “evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence”—or whether we will be transformed nonconformists “dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.”

As King explained in a powerful sermon delivered in 1954, “This command not to conform comes … [from] Jesus Christ, the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of mankind.”

Furthermore:

We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world. Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right. Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ… The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!
…Honesty impels me to admit that transformed nonconformity, which is always costly and never altogether comfortable, may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering, losing a job, or having a six-year-old daughter ask, “Daddy, why do you have to go to jail so much?” But we are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way that comes only through suffering.
In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth. We must make a choice. Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds? Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul saving music of eternity?

We Are Human, We Are Free – Building Worldwide Nonviolent Resistance to the Great Reset

Posted on April 2, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Anita McKone

In late 2020 Robert J. Burrowes and myself were asked by some Melbourne activists protesting against the lockdowns and Covid vaccinations to help them develop more effective strategy. Many of the protesters were new to activism, and those with an inclination towards following a nonviolent approach wanted education in this area.

In February, Robert and I ran two Introduction to Nonviolent Action workshops, and one Nonviolent Strategy weekend, and with the inspiration and input of this great group of participants, I have now put the basics of a worldwide nonviolent campaign strategy to defeat the Great Reset on a website. We have named this campaign We Are Human, We Are Free.

The website is designed as a resource that activists anywhere in the world can use to develop effective local nonviolent campaigns.

Here are some excerpts from the website:

We Are Human, We Are Free is a worldwide nonviolent resistance movement to free ourselves from Elite control and resist the forces of fear and dehumanisation.

Our aim is to build a mass civil resistance movement to undermine the power of the Global Elite to control us, and to regain the freedoms that make our lives worth living. Because we are human, we are free to make choices. The time has come to choose – are we on the side of love, life and freedom or fear, self-imprisonment and tyranny?…

What is happening in our world?

Do you have a gut feeling that there is something ‘wrong’ with the way this supposed pandemic is being presented, and with planetary wide lockdowns as a response? Are you being negatively impacted by lockdowns, or vaccines, in ways that make you feel the ‘cure’ is worse than the original ‘problem’? If what is going on doesn’t make sense to you, is there another, reasonable way to explain what is happening?…

The supposed pandemic and the planetary lockdown response are key tools in achieving the Global Elite’s aims – psychologically designed to dramatically increase people’s fear of the unknowable, and justify greater and greater loss of freedoms and human rights…

What is The Great Reset?

In brief, the Global Elite is in the process of establishing:

A Monopolised Corporate Dictatorship of the economy, including all natural, agricultural, human, technological and financial resources, destroying any attempt of ordinary people to achieve economic self-reliance through independent farming, small and medium sized business, organic food production or local trade. The full digitisation of money (the end of currency altogether), will leave people with no control over currencies they can use to trade in ways they see fit. The advent of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ is expected to lead to at least one-third of jobs now performed by humans being replaced by software, robots, and smart machines by 2025, leaving at least 30% of people permanently unemployed. In a short video, the WEF predicts that by 2030, ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’.
A Medical Dictatorship by profit-driven pharmaceutical medicine and psychiatry for social control, that denies the true value of natural and holistic physical and mental health, disallows use of non-patented or previously patented medicines, and forces damaging and experimental medical treatments and procedures on people without informed consent. These include vaccines involving genetic engineering and nanotech which have the potential to fundamentally change the way we exist as independent biological entities.
National/State Government Dictatorships (intended to become a Global Government Dictatorship) controlled by elite ‘advice’ and interests, that destroy privacy through mass surveillance and restrict freedom of thought, speech, work, finances and movement.
A Monopolised Media Dictatorship that uses censorship and propaganda for social control.
A Technocratic Dictatorship run by pseudoscientific ‘experts’, involving the fourth industrial revolution (AI, satellites, robotics, drones and the Internet of Things); the surveillance, control and attempted ‘robotisation’ of our biological selves through nanotech implants and connection to AI through 5G technology; the control and destruction of the natural environment through technologies such as 5G and genetically modified crops; and the denigration of genuine scientific methods and principles, which are non-authoritarian by nature…

What can we do? Why choose nonviolent resistance?

We Are Human, We Are Free recognises that to defend our human needs and rights it is necessary to noncooperate with the forces of fear, and this involves many types of courageous and conscientious individual and collective action. While legal and political challenges within the system help raise awareness of the unhealthy nature of tyranny, we need to trust ourselves to make the final decisions about how to meet our own needs when existing political and legal systems are corrupted and fail. When we cannot defend ourselves according to legal or conventional political rules, we must step outside these rules and draw upon the more natural and fundamental powers of human solidarity, conscience and courage.

Some powerful acts of nonviolent noncooperation, such as boycotts, will remain legal and risk free. Increasingly, however, noncooperation will require civil disobedience, as the forces of fear attempt to reign us in ever more tightly. The Global Elite and their agents have already used arrests, fines, imprisonment, psychiatric committal, property seizure and direct violence against pro-freedom activists in different countries to try to intimidate us into giving up. They will continue to use violence against us. In these challenging circumstances, nonviolent processes and interactions provide the greatest degree of physical and psychological/emotional safety possible for activists and will help build the greatest number of participants in our growing movement…The Covid-19 Crisis: Defending Humanity Against the Elite Coup

Everyone is Welcome

Everyone is welcome to take action under the We Are Human, We Are Free banner if they agree with the three fundamental points that unify this movement:

That whatever the level of illness occurring in the community, and whatever its causes, there is no genuine evidence of the existence of a contagious pandemic that is killing statistically significant numbers of people, and therefore no justification for any of the measures which are supposedly a response to this ‘crisis’.
That the false pandemic is one tool being used by the Global Elite to achieve The Great Reset, which is designed to gain total control over the world’s natural resources and the entire human population. The various elements of The Great Reset must be collectively resisted if we are to gain back the freedoms that make our lives worth living.
All participants in this movement are willing to abide by the code of nonviolent discipline detailed on We Are Human, We Are Free in their campaigns.

We hope to build an easily recognisable worldwide movement against Elite dictatorship, which will unite us as we enact the many locally organised nonviolent campaigns necessary to win back our freedom.

Many nonviolent actions and campaigns are already occurring – we invite local campaigns to consider adding the We Are Human, We Are Free banner to their existing identities as a worldwide unifying element in their campaign…

What Sort of Actions Will Make a Real Difference to the Situation?

Public protests where we show our discontent and connect with the many others who feel as we do are a first step in addressing the problem. But effectively undermining attempted global dictatorship requires more than this – we need to take actions of strategic significance that transfer power from the hands of the Elite to ordinary people…

Choose messaging that clearly asks ordinary people to noncooperate in specific ways. For example “Choose Natural Health. Say No to Experimental Vaccines”; “Provide No Excuse for Lockdowns. Don’t Get Tested”; “Don’t Buy Censorship. Boycott Facebook”; “Use Your Own Eyes and Ears. Turn off Your TV”; “Don’t Buy 5G Upgrades”; “Don’t Feed the Monsters. Boycott Amazon…

And here are a few examples from the website of 29 ‘Strategic Goals’ which will contribute to achieving our overall purpose of defeating the Global Elite’s attempted takeover:

(1) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by wearing a global symbol of human solidarity.

Asking people and groups all around the world to wear an orange ribbon, wristband or armband showing their solidarity as part of this worldwide nonviolent movement is a key way to increase people’s courage to take action. Can you think of particular groups of people to whom you might make this suggestion, or ways in which you might spread this message to the general public?…

(8) To cause people and groups all around the world to conscientiously refuse to submit to vaccination, which is likely to include nanotechnology that will subvert your individual identity, freedom, dignity, volition and privacy; including through a ‘digital vaccine passport’ (possibly delivered via a microneedle platform using fluorescent microparticles called ‘quantum dots’, which can deliver vaccines and at the same time invisibly encode vaccination history directly in the skin).

How can we best encourage people not to receive Covid vaccinations (experimental injectables), regardless of whether or not they are made legally mandatory by your national government? Can you organise picketing or boycotts of businesses that are coercing their workers into having vaccinations as a condition of employment?

Can you ask all air traffic controllers, and pilots and drivers of air, land and water transport (including military transport), and construction machinery such as cranes, to refuse to take vaccinations on account of the potentially catastrophic dangers to the community if they have a negative reaction to these experimental injectables while working?

Can you organise nonviolent protests or interventions at any education, healthcare (such as nursing homes) or travel related sites that have been targeted as priority vaccination sites to convince the management not to go ahead?

Can you organise a strike by workers at your workplace or in your industry in support of your right to choose not to be used as part of a medical experiment?

Can you organise a strike or ‘refusal to act on vaccine related punishment’ by public servants if they are ordered to cut off people’s government benefits for not taking a vaccine?

Can you ask GPs to resist performing Covid vaccinations by stating they are already overworked and have no further time for this ‘health’ campaign? Can you ask GPs to take positive responsibility for the health of their patients by presenting those patients who ask to be vaccinated with information regarding the exact contents of the vaccine and data regarding the known negative effects of the vaccine, and the data that is still unavailable because of its experimental nature, so that patients can make a genuinely informed choice?

(9) To cause people and groups all around the world to organize or participate in a collective event that conscientiously resists the Covid lockdowns.

This could be, for example, a cultural, religious or sporting event, a nonviolent action for another cause, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a celebration or a return to work.

This is all about showing its okay to live our normal lives. The more people involved in a mass ‘dispersed’ event, the less likely we are to be arrested or receive fines. If you are just organising locally, with a small number of people involved, police liaison is crucial for the best possible outcomes to occur. You must be prepared personally for the risk of arrest, and think about how you can make this process as dignified as possible to show your courage and commitment, and your willingness to engage with the police as individual human beings. Then, they may arrest you today, but decide that they don’t wish to do so tomorrow.

The 50,000 restaurants in Italy that opened in defiance of lockdown restrictions in January 2021 are a great example of a mass, dispersed action of noncompliance. Many religious services have been held in defiance of lockdowns. What cultural events matter most in your local community? Sport? Music? How about a ‘Football for Freedom’ match or a ‘Band Together for Freedom’ music event? You may be arrested before completing your event, but if you go with police with dignity, the absurdity of the police’s actions will be made all the more clear.

(10) To cause people and groups all around the world to organize or participate in events that conscientiously refuse to maintain social distance.

Are you a grandparent? Is it possible to organise ‘Grandparents for Freedom’ days, where grandparents visit their grandchildren against lockdown regulations, and take photos of themselves hugging and kissing their grandchildren to post online, or to print off and letterbox drop around their local community? This would work directly against the Elite narrative of having to ‘protect’ our older people by keeping them in isolation, showing that older people have courage and volition of their own.

To give people non-arrestable and arrestable options for showing their support for the campaign, public nonviolent actions could be organised where some of the group abides by social distancing and mask wearing (the masks could have a question mark drawn on them, or lips that appear to be speaking), and holds banners with clear messages encouraging acts of noncooperation, while others remove masks and hold hands or hug one another, accepting arrest in a dignified manner if the police decide to take that course. These actions will work best if you have done solid police liaison beforehand. To discourage use of water cannons and teargas to clear crowds, many smaller public actions could be organised around a city on a particular day, rather than one mass action in a centralised location.

(15) To cause people all around the world fined for breaking ‘pandemic’-related health laws or regulations (mask wearing, social distancing and lockdown restrictions, including curfews, local and wider travel restrictions, ‘non-essential’ work bans and business closures) to refuse to pay their fines and continue to conscientiously break these laws or regulations, accepting time in jail as a prisoner of conscience if necessary.

The legal system as it exists in any country does not have the resources to put large numbers of people through the court and prison system. If people refuse to pay fines, and do not deliver themselves up to the legal system voluntarily, it will take enormous resources to send police to locate and arrest all those with a warrant, put them in front of a magistrate, and then imprison them for a number of days, weeks or months in lieu of paying the fine. Already, in Victoria, Australia, for example, many unpaid fines have been withdrawn by the government, presumably for this reason, and the 50,000 restaurant owners in Italy who reopened against lockdown restrictions cannot possibly all be imprisoned for their actions.

It will be necessary to morally and practically support anyone who is targeted for prosecution as a ‘public example’ – if these people can be supported well through a prison experience, they can understand their important role in remaining courageous and patient for the benefit of the movement as a whole. The more of us who refuse to pay fines, the less chance there is of anyone being prosecuted, until the point where the authorities simply give up trying to enforce the laws or regulations.

(16) To cause the police to refuse to obey orders from the Global Elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of your country.

There are already some great nonviolent initiatives happening with the police, which you may like to copy in your local area. Check out Police for Freedom, for example. Talking to police at stations in your area, to get to know them as individuals, and when you are planning actions, is vital to the success of this movement. We need the police, security personnel and military personnel on our side and need to give them every opportunity to see us as people they respect and want to stand with. Obviously when people have had very bad experiences with police and other security forces, this can make it difficult for them to feel confident or willing to do this. Choose people who do have confidence to liaise with security forces, and work out ways to support and provide extra protection for those who have been previously abused.

We hope that the We Are Human, We Are Free website will provide a user friendly resource for developing a worldwide nonviolent campaign against the Global Elite’s Great Reset, encouraging many acts of noncooperation from ordinary, empowered people. We look forward to your participation!

Much love to you all from Victoria, Australia.

Anita McKone has been a nonviolent activist, educator and researcher since 1993. She has been arrested and imprisoned on a number of occasions for her activism. She has written many articles on different aspects of nonviolent activism, psychology and philosophy. Her website is at Songs of Nonviolence.

The New Normal “Reality” Police

Posted on April 1, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By CJ Hopkins

Source: Off-Guardian

So, according to Facebook and the Atlantic Council, I am now a “dangerous individual,” you know, like a “terrorist,” or a “serial murderer,” or “human trafficker,” or some other kind of “criminal.” Or I’ve been praising “dangerous individuals,” or disseminating their symbols, or otherwise attempting to “sow dissension” and cause “offline harm.”

Actually, I’m not really clear what I’m guilty of, but I’m definitely some sort of horrible person you want absolutely nothing to do with, whose columns you do not want to read, whose books you do not want to purchase, and the sharing of whose Facebook posts might get your account immediately suspended. Or, at the very least, you’ll be issued this warning:

Now, hold on, don’t click away just yet. You’re already on whatever website you’re reading this “dangerous,” “terrorist” column on (or you’re reading it in an email, probably on your phone), which means you are already on the official “Readers of Mass-Murdering Content” watch-list. So you might as well take the whole ride at this point.

Also, don’t worry, I’m not going to just whine about how Facebook was mean to me for 2,000 words … well, all right, I’m going to do that a little, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate how “reality” is manufactured and policed by global corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the corporate media, of course, crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and PayPal, and “think tanks” like the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”).

First, though, let me tell you my Facebook story.

What happened was, I made a Facebook post, and a lot of people tried to share it, so Facebook and the DFRLab suspended or disabled their accounts, or just prevented them from sharing it, and sent them the above warning. Facebook didn’t suspend my account, or censor the post on my account, or contact me to let me know that they have officially deemed me a “dangerous individual.”

Instead, they punished anyone who tried to “boost” my “dangerous” post, a tactic anyone who has been through boot camp or in prison (or has watched this classic scene from Full Metal Jacket) will be familiar with.

Here’s the “dangerous” post in question. (If you’re particularly sensitive to “terrorist” content, you may want to put on your “anti-terrorism” glasses, or take some other type of prophylactic measures to protect yourself from “offline harm,” before you venture any further.)

The photo, which I stole from Gunnar Kaiser, is of an art exhibit in Düsseldorf, Germany. My commentary is self-explanatory. As you can see, it is extremely “dangerous.” It literally radiates “offline harm.”

OK, before you write to inform me how this was just the work of a dumb Facebook algorithm, think about what I described above. If an algorithm was preventing sharing and suspending people’s accounts based on keyword spotting, it would have censored my original post, and presumably suspended my account.

Or, if Facebook has an algorithm that recognizes certain “dangerous” phrases, and then censors or suspends the accounts of people who share a post including those phrases, but doesn’t censor the original post or suspend the account of the author of the post…well, that’s kind of strange, isn’t it?

In any event, shortly after I posted it, I started seeing reports like this on Facebook:

Those are just a few examples, but I think you get the general idea.

The point is, apparently, the Corporatocracy feel sufficiently threatened by random people on Facebook that they are conducting these COINTELPRO-type ops. Seriously, think about that for a minute. I am not Stephen King or Margaret Atwood. I’m not even Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi.

I’m a midlist-level author of unusual literature, and a political satirist, and a blogger, basically, and yet Facebook, and their partners at the Atlantic Council, and AstraZeneca, and Pfizer, and Moderna, and who knows which other global corporations and transnational, non-governmental entities like the WEF and WHO, consider someone of my lowly status enough of a threat to their “New Normal” narrative to warrant the attention of the Reality Police.

Now, let me be clear about who I’m talking about when I’m talking about the “Reality Police.” Facebook’s partnership with the Atlantic Council is only one example, but it is a rather good one. Here’s a quick profile of the Atlantic Council…

The Atlantic Council of the United States was founded in 1961 as a think tank and anticommunist public relations organization to prop up support within the US for NATO in the post-World War II era … [its] current, honorary and lifetime directors list reads like a bipartisan rogues gallery of American war-criminals, including Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz, Frank Carlucci, James A. Baker, R. James Woolsey, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta. Among the former Atlantic Council chairman have been Obama administration officials James L. Jones, (national security advisor) and Chuck Hagel (secretary of defense).

The chairman of the council is Brent Scowcroft, the retired US Air Force officer who held national security and intelligence positions in the Nixon, Bush I and Bush II administrations. [It] is funded by substantial government and corporate interests from the financial, defense and petroleum industries.

Its 2017 annual report documents substantial contributions from HSBC, Chevron, The Blackstone Group, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Ford Motor Company, among many others. Also listed is Google Inc. in the $100,000 to $250,000 donor category. Among the largest council contributors are the US State Department, The Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the UK, and the United Arab Emirates. Other contributors include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Boeing, BP, Exxon and the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

– Kevin Reed, World Socialist Website

These are the folks that are policing “reality” (the “reality” they have manufactured, and are manufacturing moment by moment), deciding what officially happened, and didn’t happen, and what it means, and who qualifies as an “authoritative news source,” and “fact-checking” everything we see on the Internet. It’s not a bunch of pimply-faced IT nerds writing sloppy code in Menlo Park. It’s GloboCap and the Military-Industrial Complex.

If you’re one of my “New Normal” ex-friends and colleagues (or one of my Facebook or Twitter trolls) who, for some unknown reason, is still reading this column, perhaps on your way to get experimentally “vaccinated” or report one of your neighbors for not wearing a mask or being outdoors without a valid reason, this is who has manufactured your “reality” and the so-called “science” you claim I am “denying,” even as reality stares you in the face…

This did not begin with the “New Normal,” of course. Every system of power manufactures its own “reality” (totalitarian systems more fanatically than others). No, I’ve been writing about the manufacturing of “normality,” and the War on Dissent and Populism that GloboCap has been relentlessly waging on anyone and everyone opposing its hegemony or refusing to conform to its ideology, since back when I was still writing heretical columns like this for CounterPunch…before the editors saw which way the wind was blowing and ideologically purged its roster to get back into the good graces of GloboCap (following which ideological purge, Google restored it to the ranks of “real news”).

And that is how reality-policing works. It’s a bullying operation, basically. The entire “cancel culture” phenomenon is. “Cancel culture” is a silly name for it. We are talking about a global empire imposing total ideological conformity (or, in simpler terms, its version of “reality”) on the entire planet through fear and force. The Nazis referred to this process as Gleichschaltung.

Global capitalism has reached the stage where it no longer needs to tolerate dissent (any kind of dissent, from any quarter) to maintain the illusion of “freedom and democracy,” because there is no alternative to global capitalism. It is everywhere. There is nowhere to run or hide. When the Reality Police find you, and threaten to “cancel” you, you have two choices … obey or be vaporized.

If you’re a Palestinian, a Syrian, a Yemeni, the president of an uncooperative African country, or some other type of non-Western person, you might very well be physically vaporized. For Westerners, vaporization is less dramatic and final. You will simply be disappeared from the Internet, fired from your job, socially ostracized, deemed a “dangerous individual,” a “racist,” an “anti-Semite,” a “conspiracy theorist,” a “white supremacist,” a “domestic terrorist,” an “anti-vaxxer,” a “Covid denier.”

If you’re a member of the independent media, or a prominent activist, or a lawyer, or doctor, or just someone with a big social media platform, and have not seen the “New Normal” light, you will be demonized, demonetized, deplatformed, censored, and subjected to the type of creepy COINTELPRO-type tactics I described above.

If you don’t believe me, just ask Robert F. Kennedy, Rainer Fuellmich, Vanessa Beeley, Whitney Webb, James Corbett, Ken Jebsen, Cory Morningstar, The Last American Vagabond, Geopolitics & Empire, The Centre for Research on Globalization, OffGuardian, and countless other people and outlets that have challenged the official “New Normal” narrative.

Or have a look at this “warning” you get on Twitter if you attempt to read anything published by OffGuardian …

I could go on and on with this, and I’m sure I will in future columns. It’s kind of the only story at the moment, the changeover from simulated democracy to pathologized-totalitarianism as the governing structure of global capitalism. For now, I’ll just leave you with one more image in this already overly pictorial column. Don’t worry, it’s been thoroughly “fact-checked,” so there’s no need to read or question the fine print (even though I have a feeling you will)…

Do watch out for those “unrelated coincidences.” Some of them, I hear, can be rather nasty.

Is Real-World Activism Part of our Spiritual Journey?

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Richard Enos

Source: Collective Evolution

We are living through a time that is shaking us down to our foundations. This ‘Pandemic’ has led to actions being taken by our governments that seem to completely disregard the rights of citizens and the rule of law. And there is mounting evidence that the severe measures being employed have not had any positive impact on our collective health and safety, and in fact are only serving an agenda to strengthen the grip of control enjoyed by the ruling class.

I don’t begrudge people who still believe that all we have to do to return to some form of normalcy is continue obeying protocols, but support for that idea is dwindling, as more people start to wonder if compliance is really the answer or if it is actually the problem itself. Questions surrounding these measures are being asked everywhere we turn: Why are small businesses being shut down, while multinational corporations that pose just as much ‘risk’ are able to open? Why are children being forced to wear masks and distance within schools when the science and statistics indicate that such measures are unnecessary and even harmful? Why are our governments trying to convince us that the Covid vaccine will solve the problem, while telling us that we will still have to wear masks after receiving it?

A Spiritual Battle

It is healthy to question things that don’t make sense to us, and we deserve answers. We have every right to defy commands we feel are unjustified–especially when our government oversteps and ignores the very laws it is supposed to uphold. And rather than heeding the growing discontent, and giving even the faintest impression that they are trying to ‘serve the public,’ the government is pushing back on our defiance like never before.

Let there be no doubt: we are in the midst of a spiritual battle.

But have courage. I believe that everything that is happening around us, as nefarious as it may be at some level, is being guided by a higher intelligence. And that higher intelligence has brought forth a situation that gives us an opportunity to begin to take charge of what is happening on the planet.

At this moment in history humanity is emerging from a state of adolescence and moving into adulthood, where we are starting to take responsibility, individually and collectively, for the condition the world is in. It is when a critical mass of people adopt this mindset that we will be able to turn this ship around, and get out from under the thumb of the ‘father figure’ of our adolescence, the current self-serving ruling class.

Confronting Our Fear

Indeed, one of the major stumbling blocks many of us face in standing up against what is going on is overcoming our fear of authority. Most of us first experienced a fear of authority at the hands of our parents, and as Edward Snowden explains in the short clip below, the ruling class has created a system that continues to stoke this fear and force our compliance from the time we enter school until we die.

As individuals, it is certainly worthwhile to ask ourselves if any trust we still have in our authority figures is justified, or if our compliance is just fear-based programming. Do we feel afraid to stand out or speak out, are we worried that we will be shamed by family, shunned by friends, unable to fit in at work or school? To truly act as free individuals we need to become still and grounded when we ask these questions, so that we can hear the quiet but reassuring voice of our higher self, reminding us of who we really want to be and what we want to do. This is the only authority you really need to follow.

Now certainly I don’t presume to tell anyone what ‘right action’ is for them. In fact it is no longer a time for you to blindly follow anyone, as I illustrated in my documentary ‘The Leaderless Movement.’ So we shouldn’t be guilted or shamed into defiance any more than we should be guilted or shamed into compliance. It’s time for each of us to find our center. From there, you do whatever feels right to you. That might very well mean doing nothing at the moment. But if you happen to notice, when you get into a state of stillness, that your inner voice has been gently coaxing you to stand up for your principles and be active in the world, then you owe it to yourself (and the rest of humanity, I might add) to overcome whatever fear you might have and follow through.

What is Real-World Activism?

When we think of real-world activism the first thing that often comes to mind is our right to assemble and protest. Some may dismiss this out of hand because it evokes unpleasant images of fighting and violence. But that is not an inherent quality of standing up for our personal rights and freedoms. The vast majority of gatherings and demonstrations in Canada and around the world regarding pandemic measures have been peaceful, and that’s the only way they are going to be effective. Certainly the time for pitchforks and streetside guillotines has long passed us by. If we decide that our only objective is to tear down the ruling class and subject them to bloody retribution then we are just perpetuating the division that the ruling class has used this whole time to keep their small elite group running the show.

Real-world activism does not actually require you to stand against anything. Of course many of us are angry about what we see going on in the world and we don’t like it. And that is a healthy thing. Our anger awakens us out of complacency and into action. But once we are activated, it’s important to move on to the next emotional stage, which is a firm resolve to stand for something, like the basic principles of personal freedom and human dignity that we all share. This opens us up to our connection with each other and fuels our desire to improve not only our own lives but those of our fellow human beings as well. This eventually leads us to looking at the way the entire planet is being governed and wondering why we are continuing to give our consent to it.

And of course real-world activism is not limited to participating in demonstrations and protests. It could simply be the way we conduct ourselves in our daily lives when we deal with those in some position of authority. Usually it is something that affects us personally that spark us to action. In my case, I remember the day clearly, when I read that my grade 1 son would be required to wear a mask in school. That is the day I jumped out of my chair and put the time and effort into researching the matter and then contacting those involved. This eventually led to a string of frustrating and uncomfortable conversations with people of authority from a principal to a director of education, documented in my article ‘How I Obtained a Conscientious Exemption From Mask-wearing at School for my Child.’ Early on, I had a sense that the whole exercise was not only done for my son, as I had decided after losing trust in the system that I was not willing put him through a single day at school; I also felt I wanted to learn how to stand up for my rights so that I could help others who were in the same situation.

Effective activism always has a spiritual component. It requires us to look at ourselves in the mirror and do the inner work that builds self-responsibility and changes the way we show up in the world. It requires us to look at the world with more discernment and a devotion to truth. We have long been divided by deception, but the singularity of truth unites us, and the sharing of truth empowers us and sets us free.

The Takeaway

What is unprecedented about the events that we are living through right now is that we are all personally affected one way or another. Nobody has been left untouched, and that makes it more difficult for people to continue sitting this one out. We are all being called to some form of engagement, and it’s likely that things in the world will keep getting worse until enough of us are involved. And this is why I believe that higher intelligence is orchestrating this. For when we reach a critical mass and the behemoth that I call the ruling class finally falls, we will have learned how to take responsibility for the condition of the world, we will be more educated in the deceptive ways of power, and we will have begun to connect to each other and unite at a deep level. This will put us in a position where we will already have the tools to start creating a world that serves us all.

The Government’s War on Free Speech: Protest Laws Undermine the First Amendment

Posted on March 25, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”— George Washington

It’s a given that the government is corrupt, unaccountable, and has exceeded its authority.

So what can we do about it?

The first remedy involves speech (protest, assembly, speech, prayer, and publicity), and lots of it, in order to speak truth to power.

The First Amendment, which is the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights, affirms the right of “we the people” to pray freely about our grievances regarding the government. We can gather together peacefully to protest those grievances. We can publicize those grievances. And we can express our displeasure (peacefully) in word and deed.

Unfortunately, tyrants don’t like people who speak truth to power.

The American Police State has shown itself to be particularly intolerant of free speech activities that challenge its authority, stand up to its power grabs, and force it to operate according to the rules of the Constitution.

Cue the rise of protest laws, the police state’s go-to methods for muzzling discontent.

These protest laws, some of which appear to encourage violence against peaceful protesters by providing immunity to individuals who drive their car into protesters impeding traffic and use preemptive deadly force against protesters who might be involved in a riot, take intolerance for speech with which one might disagree to a whole new level.

Ever since the Capitol protests on Jan. 6, 2021, state legislatures have introduced a broad array of these laws aimed at criminalizing protest activities. Yet while the growing numbers of protest laws cropping up across the country are being marketed as necessary to protect private property, public roads or national security, they are a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a thinly disguised plot to discourage anyone from challenging government authority at the expense of our First Amendment rights.

It doesn’t matter what the source of that discontent might be (police brutality, election outcomes, COVID-19 mandates, the environment, etc.): protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, etc., aim to muzzle every last one of us.

However, as Human Rights Watch points out, these assaults on free speech are nothing new. “Various states have long-tried to curtail the right to protest. They do so by legislating wide definitions of what constitutes an ‘unlawful assembly’ or a ‘riot’ as well as increasing punishments. They also allow police to use catch-all public offenses, such as trespassing, obstructing traffic, or disrupting the peace, as a pretext for ordering dispersals, using force, and making arrests. Finally, they make it easier for corporations and others to bring lawsuits against protest organizers.”

Make no mistake: while many of these laws claim to be in the interest of “public safety and limiting economic damage,” these legislative attempts to redefine and criminalize speech are a backdoor attempt to rewrite the Constitution and render the First Amendment’s robust safeguards null and void.

For instance, there are at least 205 proposed laws being considered in 45 states that would curtail the right to peacefully assemble and protest by expanding the definition of rioting, heightening penalties for existing offenses, or creating new crimes associated with assembly.

No matter how you package these laws, no matter how well-meaning they may sound, no matter how much you may disagree with the protesters or sympathize with the objects of the protest, these proposed laws are aimed at one thing only: discouraging dissent.

In Alabama, lawmakers are pushing to allow individuals to use deadly force near a riot. Kentucky, Missouri and New Hampshire are also considering similar stand your ground laws to justify the use of lethal force in relation to riots.

In Arizona, legislators want to classify protests involving seven or more people as felonies punishable by up to two years in jail. Under such a law, traditional, nonviolent forms of civil disobedience—sit-ins, boycotts and marches—would be illegal.

In Arkansas, peaceful protesters who engage in civil disobedience by occupying any government property after being told to leave could face six months in jail and a $1000 fine.

In Minnesota, where activists continue to protest the death of George Floyd, who was killed after police knelt on his neck for eight minutes, individuals who are found guilty of any kind of offense in connection with a peaceful protest could be denied a range of benefits, including food assistance, education loans and grants, and unemployment assistance.

Oregon lawmakers wanted to “require public community colleges and universities to expel any student convicted of participating in a violent riot.” In Illinois, students who twice infringe the rights of others to engage in expressive activities could be suspended for at least a year.

Proposed laws in at least 25 states, including Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Florida, would give drivers the green light to “accidentally” run over protesters who are preventing them from fleeing a riot. Washington wants to levy steeper penalties against protesters who “swarm” a vehicle, punishing them for a repeat offense with up to 40 years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

Responding to protests over the Keystone Pipeline, South Dakota enabled its governor and sheriffs to prohibit gatherings of 20 or more people on public land if the gathering might damage the land. At least 15 other states have also adopted or are considering legislation that would levy harsher penalties for environmental protests near oil and gas pipelines.

In Iowa, all it takes is for one person in a group of three of more people to use force or cause property damage, and the whole group can be punished with up to 5 years in prison and a $7,500 fine.

Obstruct access to critical infrastructure in Mississippi and you could be facing a $10,000 fine and a seven-year prison sentence.

A North Carolina law would have made it a crime to heckle state officials. Under this law, shouting at a former governor would constitute a crime.

In Connecticut, you could be sentenced to five years behind bars and a $5,000 fine for disrupting the state legislature by making noise or using disturbing language.

Indiana lawmakers wanted to authorize police to use “any means necessary” to breakup mass gatherings that block traffic. Lawmakers have since focused their efforts on expanding the definition of a “riot” and punishing anyone who wears a mask to a peaceful protest, even a medical mask, with 2.5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Georgia wants to ban all spontaneous, First Amendment-protected assemblies and deny anyone convicted of violating the ban from receiving state or local employment benefits.

Virginia wants to subject protesters who engage in an “unlawful assembly” after “having been lawfully warned to disperse” with up to a year of jail time and a fine of up to $2,500.

Missouri made it illegal for public employees to take part in strikes and picketing, only to have the law ruled unconstitutional in its entirety.

Oklahoma created a sliding scale for protesters whose actions impact or impede critical infrastructure (including a telephone pole). The penalties range from $1,000 and six months in a county jail to $100,000 and up to 10 years in prison. And if you’re part of an organization, that fine goes as high as $1,000,000.

Talk about intimidation tactics.

Ask yourself: if there are already laws on the books in all of the states that address criminal or illegal behavior such as blocking public roadways, trespassing on private property or vandalizing property—because such laws are already on the books—then why does the government need to pass laws criminalizing activities that are already outlawed?

What’s really going on here?

No matter what the politicians might say, the government doesn’t care about our rights, our welfare or our safety.

Every despotic measure used to control us and make us cower and comply with the government’s dictates has been packaged as being for our benefit, while in truth benefiting only those who stand to profit, financially or otherwise, from the government’s transformation of the citizenry into a criminal class.

In this way, the government conspires to corrode our core freedoms purportedly for our own good but really for its own benefit.

Remember, the USA Patriot Act didn’t make us safer. It simply turned American citizens into suspects and, in the process, gave rise to an entire industry—private and governmental—whose profit depends on its ability to undermine our Fourth Amendment rights.

In much the same way that the Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect, the government’s anti-extremism program criminalizes otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities such as peaceful protesting.

Clearly, freedom no longer means what it once did.

This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from soldiers invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

Yet the unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment is the right to think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.

In other words, if we no longer have the right to voice concerns about COVID-19 mandates, if we no longer have the right to tell a Census Worker to get off our property, if we no longer have the right to tell a police officer to get a search warrant before they dare to walk through our door, if we no longer have the right to stand in front of the Supreme Court wearing a protest sign or approach an elected representative to share our views, if we no longer have the right to protest unjust laws or government policies by voicing our opinions in public or on social media or before a legislative body—no matter how politically incorrect or socially unacceptable those views might be—then we do not have free speech.

What we have instead is regulated, controlled speech, and that’s what those who founded America called tyranny.

On paper, we may be technically free.

In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

As the great George Carlin rightly observed: “Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”

In other words, we only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

Remember: if the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

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