Tag Archives: COVID mandates

They are making an example of Novak Djokovic. Here’s why.

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By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

Tennis star Novak Djokovic is being deported from Australia, after losing his final appeal the WTA’s top-ranked player will not be allowed to defend his Australian Open title.

It was reported this morning that an Australian court had refused Djokovic’s appeal against the cancellation of his visa, and as such he’s being put on a plane and flown out of the country.

To be clear: This is all because he’s not “vaccinated” against Covid19, and vocally speaks out against the practice. The government have clearly and publicly admitted as much…but we’ll get to that.

The rejection of Djokovic’s medical exemption and subsequent deportation has been accompanied by a wave of vitriol in the press the likes of which we have rarely seen.

One Australian sports presenter was “accidentally” recorded calling him a “lying, sneaky arsehole” in a video that was later “leaked” to the press.

The Spectator has one piece which is nothing more than a slew of ad hominem and mockery, against not just Djokovic but all “anti-vaxxers” and “conspiracy theorists”, calling the Serbian a “conspiracy super-spreader”. They have another blaming his “arrogance for his downfall”.

The Daily Mail ran a story headlined: “Welcome to the Wacky World of Novak Djokovic… and meet his equally wacky wife!”, and two more opinion pieces claiming his arrogance has “trashed his reputation” and calling him “a loser”.

The Guardian‘s Australian Political Correspondent Sarah Martin defends the decision and jokingly refers to it as a “no dickheads” immigration policy, attacking Djokovic’s “anti-science god complex” and calling him an “all-round jerk”.

The childish name-calling just doesn’t end. Even his fellow players are sticking the boot in.

Stefanos Tsitsipas attacked Djokovic for attempting to “play by his own rules”, adding “A very small minority chose to follow their own way. It makes the majority look like they are all fools”, which is at least true, but not in the way he means it.

Spanish star Rafael Nadal said Djokovic should just follow the rules like everyone else, perhaps flashing the kind of attitude which allowed a fascist dictator to stay in power in his country for 40 years.

Some players, at least, have come to Djokovic’s defense, including Australia’s own Nick Kyrgios, who has said he is “ashamed” of the way Australia has handled the situation and chastised other players for not showing solidarity with Djokovic.

But why is this happening? Why are they trying to punish such a public figure, and why now?

Well, firstly, I’m not sure it is about punishing Djokovic, and not just because getting to leave Australia is an odd thing to be considered any kind of punishment these days.

Rather, it’s about the performance of punishing him. It’s about making an example of him. Not so much preventing him from playing, as much as denying him a platform.

The Australian government basically admits that in their legal justification for cancelling the visa.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Djokovic had been barred from entry for “breaching the rules…it’s as simple as that.” But he is either mistaken or lying, as he directly contradicts the case presented to the appeal court by the government.

Yes, the visa was first cancelled on a technicality about incorrect information but, a judge overruled that decision, allowing Djokovic to enter the country.

That’s when Immigration Minister Alex Hawke stepped in to personally revoke the visa under section 133 of the Immigration Act 1958.

Under this (worryingly vague) legislation, the Immigration Minister is granted the power to cancel any visa at all, if:

the Minister is satisfied that it would be in the public interest to cancel the visa.

This was the argument put to the appeals court, that the minister can expel anyone, for anything, if he believes it to be in the best interests of the public.

That’s public interest, NOT public health.

Hawke admits in his written statement that Djokovic presents a “negligible risk of Covid19 infection” to those around him. So it’s nothing to do with protecting people from infection or stopping the spread of the virus.

Public statements from officials suggest that they consider any “anti-vaxxer” to be a threat to the public interest by undermining the vaccination programme. Thus they can justify barring entry to Djokovic (or, it should be said, any other “anti-vaxxer”) under the guise of “public interest”.

It’s about control, it almost always is.

In short, the government are scared that Djokovic’s very presence in the country is a threat to their neo-fascist lockdown.

If you look closely at the media messaging, there’s more than a little fear behind the wall of abuse and mockery.

Article after article is at pains to point out that “the majority of normal Australians want the Joker gone”, or some variation on that sentiment. Somewhat desperately selling the line that nobody agrees with, or supports, Djokovic’s position.

A statement which is given the lie by the regular huge protests taking place all across Australia’s major cities (like this one, just this weekend, in Sydney).

The Australian government are worried they’ve turned their country into a powder keg of public resentment, and that the slightest social spark could set it off. Increasing the size of the (already huge) protests against the lockdowns and vaccine mandates, maybe even tipping the country into full-blown chaos.

One of the Spectator articles mentions that Australians have been living in a “police state” for two years, and then vaguely references the subsequent public anger, even whilst attempting to downplay it, misrepresent its cause, and turn it against the unvaccinated.

Australia has fallen. Peace, prosperity and freedom have been sacrificed on the altar of “safety”, and Covid “vaccination” has become a quasi-religious rite in their country, even more so than the rest of the world.

As such, the unvaccinated are slandered, punished, threatened and othered at every turn. Locked down, locked up and locked out.

Can you only imagine what could happen if people found out it was all for nothing? Or that the heaven-sent vaccines aren’t the magical solution to all that ails us?

In this kind of political climate they simply can’t afford to have an “anti-vaxxer” on national television, healthy and athletic and winning championships against a field of vaccinated rivals.

Especially when three vaccinated players have already dropped out with “breathing difficulties”

Before anyone accuses me of a surfeit of cynicism, let’s review the actual words of Alex Hawke from the appeal procedure [our emphasis]:

I consider that Mr Djokovic’s ongoing presence in Australia may lead to an increase in anti-vaccination sentiment generated in the Australian community, potentially leading to an increase in civil unrest of the kind previously experienced in Australia

Elsewhere Djokovic is described as a “talisman of a community of anti-vaccine sentiment”.

This kind of brutal treatment of publicly unvaccinated famous faces will likely only intensify. It’s already spreading from country to country, with France announcing Djokovic will not be allowed to defend his French Open title unless he gets vaccinated.

It seems pretty clear that the public shaming of Djokovic is a power-play to secure what they perceive as their own tenuous grip on the narrative, one that could have far-reaching consequences moving forward.

Consider, Djokovic is not barred from entry just for being unvaccinated, but also because he has publicly spoken out against vaccination.

Australia is now not only requiring you be “fully vaccinated” to enter the country, but has barred someone for even expressing anti-vaccine sentiment.

It’s no longer enough to conform by action, you must now conform by speech.

Next is thought, but even they would never try to legislate against that…right?

Freedom from Fear: Stop Playing the Government’s Mind Games

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”—Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist

America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.

The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.

Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.

This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live and the constantly shifting crises that keep the populace in a state of high alert.

Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.

We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of a virus, fear of the unmasked, fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government. The list goes on and on.

The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.

Fear makes people stupid.

Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.

Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology, endless wars, COVID-19 mandates, etc., hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.

All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police, marauding SWAT teams, and egregious assaults on the rights of the citizenry.

America has already entered a new phase, one in which communities are locked down, employees are forced to choose between keeping their jobs or exercising their freedoms, children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents, and law-abiding Americans are finding their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented and their communications monitored.

These threats are not to be underestimated.

Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.

Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.

So far, these tactics are working.

An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America.

Each successive crisis in recent years (a COVID-19 pandemic, terrorism, etc.)—manufactured or legitimate—has succeeded in reducing the American people to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”

Sanchez continues:

“I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…

“I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…

“Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.”

As history makes clear, fear leads to fascistic, totalitarian regimes.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.

The following are a few of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state:

·       The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).

·       The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.

·       The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.

·       The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.

·       The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.

·       The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.

·       The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.

·       The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.

·       The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.

·       The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.

The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.

“Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized,” writes Jeffrey Tucker. “Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect.”

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.

Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring.

It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences.

For example, neuroscientists have observed how quickly fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports:

In the experiment, researchers taught male mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by associating the scent with mild foot shocks. Two weeks later, they bred with females. The resulting pups were raised to adulthood having never been exposed to the smell. Yet when the critters caught a whiff of it for the first time, they suddenly became anxious and fearful. They were even born with more cherry-blossom-detecting neurons in their noses and more brain space devoted to cherry-blossom-smelling.

The conclusion? “A newborn mouse pup, seemingly innocent to the workings of the world, may actually harbor generations’ worth of information passed down by its ancestors.”

Now consider the ramifications of inherited generations of fears and experiences on human beings. As the Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, fear, trauma and compliance can be passed down through the generations.

Fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it now operates in our contemporary world—all of which raises fundamental questions about us as human beings and what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.

In the words of psychologist Erich Fromm:

[C]an human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love—that is to say, can man forget he is human? Or does human nature have a dynamism which will react to the violation of these basic human needs by attempting to change an inhuman society into a human one?