Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Explain It to Me, Please

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If you want a war with Iran, Russia, China and Venezuela tell me why and how it would benefit Americans

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

So Honest Joe Biden is now going to give another $1.2 billion to the Ukrainians on top of the sixty or so billion that is already in the pipeline, but who’s counting, particularly as Congress refused to approve having an inspector general to monitor whose pockets will be lined. The money will be printed up without any collateral or “borrowed” and the American taxpayer will somehow have to bear the burden of this latest folly that is ipso facto driving much of the world into recession. And it will no doubt be blamed on Vladimir Putin, a process that is already well under way from president mumbles. But you have to wonder why no one has told Joe that the whole exercise in pushing much of the world towards a catastrophic war is a fool’s errand. But then again, the clowns that the president has surrounded himself with might not be very big on speaking the truth even if they know what that means.

Having followed the Ukraine problem since the United States and its poodles refused to negotiate seriously with Vladimir Putin in the real world, I have had to wonder what is wrong with Washington. We have had the ignorant and impulsive Donald Trump supported by a cast of characters that included the mentally unstable Mike Pompeo and John Bolton followed by Biden with the usual bunch of Democratic Party rejects. By that I mean deep thinkers about social issues who would not be able to run a hot dog stand if that were what they were forced to do to make a living. But they are real good at shouting “freedom” and “democracy” whenever questioned concerning their motives.

Indeed, opinion polls suggest that there is a great deal of unrest among middle and working class Americans who see a reversion to Jimmy Carter era financial instability, at that time caused by the oil embargo. Well, there is a new energy embargo in place brought about by the Biden Administration’s desire to wage proxy war to “weaken” Russia. Analysts predict that the costs for all forms of energy will double in the next several months and surging energy costs will impact the prices of other essentials, including food. Given all that, the fundamental issue plaguing both Democrats and Republicans is their inability to actually explain to the American people why the country’s foreign and national security policy always seems to be on the boil, searching for enemies and also creating them when they do not exist, even when the results are damaging to the interests of actual Americans.

That a serious discussion of why the United States needs to have a military that costs as much as the next nine nations in that ranking combined is long overdue and rarely addressed outside the alternative media. The 2023 military budget has been increased from this year’s, totaling $858 billion, and, if one includes the constantly growing largesse to Ukraine, approaching a hitherto unimaginable trillion dollars. The military budget has become a major driver of the country’s unsustainable deficits. The deaths of millions of people directly and indirectly in the wars started in 9/11 aside, the wars of choice have cost an estimated $8 trillion.

The Constitution of the United States makes it clear that a national army was only acceptable to the Founders when it was dedicated to defending the country from foreign threats. Do Americans really believe that bearing the burden of having something like 1,000 military bases scattered around the world really makes them safer? The recent rapid collapse of the security situation in Afghanistan suggests that having such bases turns soldiers and bureaucrats into potential hostages and is therefore a liability. One might also suggest that the insecurity currently prevailing in the country can in large part be attributed to the government’s depiction of numerous “threats” in order to justify both the commitment and the expense.

So where does all the money go? And what are the threats? Starting with a war that the United States is de facto though not de jure involved in, Ukraine, what was the Russian threat that demanded Washington’s intervention? Well, if one discards the nonsense of a “rules based international order” or a plucky little democracy Ukraine fighting valiantly against the Russian bear, Moscow did not threaten the United States in any way before the missiles starting flying. Putin sought to negotiate a settlement with Ukraine based on a number of perceived existential Russian national security interests, all of which were negotiable, but the US and its friends were uninterested in compromise while also plying the corrupt Zelensky regime with weapons, money and political support. The final result is a conflict that will likely only end when the last Ukrainian is dead and it includes the possibility that a misstep by the United States and Russia could lead to a nuclear holocaust. To put it succinctly, what is going on does not enhance US national security, nor does it benefit Americans economically.

And then there is China. Biden let the cat out of the bag on his recent trip to the Far East. He stated that the United States would defend Taiwan if China were to attempt to annex it. In saying that, Biden demonstrated that he does not understand the strategic ambiguity that the US and the Chinese have preferred over the past fifty years as an alternative to war. The White House for its part quickly issued a correction to the Biden statement, explaining that it was not true that Washington is obligated to defend Taiwan. Some uber hawkish congressmen have apparently found the Biden gaffe appealing and are promoting a firm US commitment to defend Taiwan, coupled with a $4.5 billion military assistance package, of course.

At the same time, some officials in the Pentagon and the usual gaggle of congressmen also keep warning about the over the horizon threat from China as an excuse to boost defense spending. Most recently, there was alarm over Chinese participation in a meeting in May in Fiji to consider a China-Pacific Islands free trade pact! In reality, the only serious current threat from China is as an economic competitor. A trade war with China would be a disaster for the US economy, which is heavily dependent on Chinese manufactured goods, but Beijing, with its relatively small military budget, does not pose a physical threat to the United States.

And let’s not ignore Iran which has been hammered by economic sanctions and also through the covert killing of its officials and scientists. The US/Israeli war on Iran has also spilled over into neighboring Syria, where Washington actually has troops on the ground occupying the country’s oil producing region and stealing the oil. Iran’s possible expansion of its nuclear program to produce a weapon was effectively impeded through monitoring connected to a multilateral 2015 agreement called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) but Donald Trump, unwisely and acting against actual American interests, withdrew from it. Joe Biden has been warned by Israel not to re-enter the agreement, so he will no doubt comply with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s determination to have Washington continue to apply “extreme pressure” on the Islamic Republic. Does either Iran or its ally Syria threaten the United States in any way? No. Their crime is that they are in the same neighborhood as the Jewish state, which finds the US government easy to manipulate into acting against its own interests.

Finally, in America’s own hemisphere there is Venezuela, which has been elevated to the status of Washington’s most hated nation in the region. Venezuelans have been subjected to increasingly punitive US sanctions, including some new ones just last week, which hurt the poorer citizens disproportionately but have not brought about regime change. Why the animosity? Because the country’s leader Nicolas Maduro is still in power in spite of a US assertion that the country’s opposition leader Juan Guaido should rightfully and legitimately be in charge after a possibly fraudulent election in 2018. The latest therapy applied by the United States on Caracas consisted of blocking the country as well as Nicaragua and Cuba from participating in the recent meeting of the Ninth Summit of the Americas which was held in Los Angeles. A State Department spokesman explained that the move was due to the three countries “lacking democratic governances.” Mexican President Lopez Obrador protested against the move and removed himself from his country’s delegation, saying “There can’t be a Summit of the Americas if not all countries of the American continent are taking part.” The despicable US Senator Robert Menendez of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee then felt compelled to add his two cents, criticizing the Mexican president and warning that his “decision to stand with dictators and despots” would hurt US-Mexico relations. So where was the threat from Venezuela (and Cuba and Nicaragua) and why is the US involved at all? Beats me.

What all of this means is that there is absolutely no standard of genuine national security that motivates the US’s completely illegal aggression in many parts of the world. What occurs may be linked to a desire to dominate or a madness sometimes described as “exceptionalism” and/or “leadership of the free world,” neither of which has anything to do with actual security. And the American people are paying the price both in terms of decline in standards of living due to the upheaval created in Ukraine and elsewhere as well as a completely understandable loss of faith in the US system of government. By all means, let us shrink the US military until it is responsive to actual identifiable threats. Let’s elect a president who will follow the sage advice of President John Quincy Adams, who declared that “Americans should not go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of spreading democracy.” At this point, one can only imagine an America that is at peace with itself and with what it represents while also being considered a friend to the rest of the world.

America, Meet Your New Dictator-in-Chief: The President’s Secret, Unchecked Powers

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“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.”— David C. Unger, The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs

America, meet your new dictator-in-chief.

As the New York Times reports, “Newly disclosed documents have shed a crack of light on secret executive branch plans for apocalyptic scenarios—like the aftermath of a nuclear attack—when the president may activate wartime powers for national security emergencies.”

The problem, of course, is that we have become a nation in a permanent state of emergency.

Power-hungry and lawless, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

The seeds of this present madness were sown almost two 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 (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20) provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

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 president.

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

Essentially, the president would become a dictator for life.

It has happened already.

As we have witnessed in recent years, 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.

The emergency powers that we know about which presidents might claim during such states of emergency are vast, ranging from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, including implementing an internet kill switch, and restricting travel.

Yet according to documents recently obtained by the Brennan Center, there may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public.

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.

The war on COVID-19, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration: all of these programs started out as responses to pressing national concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

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 planning and preparing for such crises for years now, quietly assembling a wish list of presidential lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.

Indeed, the Trump Administration even asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deems it necessary during the COVID-19 crisis and “other” emergencies. The Department of Justice (DOJ) went so far as 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.

In such a climate, the American president becomes dictator with permanent powers: imperial, unaccountable and unconstitutional.

Bear in mind 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 with the president at its helm 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.

Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.

The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.

As law professor William P. Marshall explains, “every extraordinary use of power by one President expands the availability of executive branch power for use by future Presidents.”

Moreover, it doesn’t even matter whether other presidents have chosen not to take advantage of any particular power, because “it is a President’s action in using power, rather than forsaking its use, that has the precedential significance.”

In other words, each successive president continues to add to his office’s list of extraordinary orders and directives, expanding the reach and power of the presidency and granting him- or herself near dictatorial powers.

All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama and George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were inherited by Donald Trump and passed along to Joe Biden.

These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

These are the powers that continue to be passed along to each successive heir to the Oval Office, the Constitution be damned.

This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.

From Clinton to Bush, Obama to Trump, and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same abuses over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but “we the people” are paying the price for it now.

We are paying the price every day that we allow the government to continue to wage its war on the American People, a war that is being fought on many fronts: with bullets and tasers, with surveillance cameras and license readers, with intimidation and propaganda, with court rulings and legislation, with the collusion of every bureaucrat who dances to the tune of corporate handouts while on the government’s payroll, and most effectively of all, with the complicity of the American people, who continue to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by their politics, distracted by their pastimes, and acclimated to a world in which government corruption is the norm.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

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

After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history about how easy it is for freedom to fall and tyranny to rise, and it often begins with one small, seemingly inconsequential willingness on the part of the people to compromise their principles and undermine the rule of law in exchange for a dubious assurance of safety, prosperity and a life without care.

Unfortunately, the process of unseating a dictator and limiting the powers of the presidency is far from simple but at a minimum, it must start with “we the people.”

For starters, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we must recalibrate the balance of power.

Start locally—in your own communities, in your schools, at your city council meetings, in newspaper editorials, at protests—by pushing back against laws that are unjust, police departments that overreach, politicians that don’t listen to their constituents, and a system of government that grows more tyrannical by the day.

What we desperately need is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—answer to and are accountable to “we the people.”

This will mean that Americans will have to stop letting their personal politics and party allegiances blind them to government misconduct and power grabs.

It will mean holding all three branches of government accountable to the Constitution (i.e., vote them out of office if they abuse their powers).

And it will mean calling on Congress to put an end to the use of presidential executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements as a means of getting around Congress and the courts.

In other words, we’ve got to start making both the president and the police state play by the rules of the Constitution.

On Censorship and Disinformation

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By W.J. Astore

Source: Bracing Views

The best way to combat disinformation is with more and better information.  Censorship isn’t the answer.

The Biden administration has reached a different conclusion, creating a “Disinformation Governance Board” under the Department of Homeland Security. This “board” is headed by Nina Jankowicz, an unelected official and an apparent partisan hack. One example: she dismissed the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story as a “fairy tale” involving a “laptop repair shop”; it’s now been confirmed that Hunter’s laptop was real, and so too was that repair shop.

Democrats, of course, don’t have exclusive rights to censorship. Republicans always seem to be calling for books to be banned or education to be policed. But the real problem is much larger than partisan hackery and bickering. Efforts at censorship are all around us, couched as a way of protecting us from harmful lies and other forms of disinformation. Yet, as the comedian Jimmy Dore points out, the government isn’t that concerned about protecting you from lies; it is, however, deeply concerned with denying you access to certain truths, truths that undermine governmental authority and the dominant narrative.

As a retired U.S. military officer and as a historian, the most insidious lies and disinformation I’ve encountered have come from the government. Consider the lies revealed by Daniel Ellsberg and his leak of the Pentagon Papers. Consider the war crimes revealed by Chelsea Manning, aided by Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Consider the lies revealed in the recent Afghan War Papers. Consider the lies about the presence of WMD in Iraq, lies that were used to justify the disastrous Iraq War. The government, in short, is a center of lies and disinformation, which is precisely why we need an adversarial media, one that is willing to ferret out truth. Instead, we’re being offered a governmental Ministry of Truth in the form of a “Disinformation Governance Board.”

All things being equal, a democratic society thrives best when speech is as free as possible, trusting in the people to sort fact from fiction, and sound theories from blatant propaganda. And there’s the rub: trusting in the people. Because the government doesn’t trust us (remember Hillary Clinton’s comment about all those irredeemable deplorables), even as the government is often at pains to mislead and misinform us. As maverick journalist I.F. “Izzy” Stone said, all governments lie. It’s truly nonsensical, then, to allow the government to police what is true and what is “disinformation.”

But don’t we need some censorship in the name of safety or security or mental health or whatever? Sorry: censorship is rarely about safety, and it most certainly doesn’t serve the needs of the vulnerable. Instead, it serves the needs of the powerful, those who already possess the loudest megaphones in the public square.

But doesn’t someone like Donald Trump deserve to be censored because he spreads disinformation? Which is the bigger problem: Trump or censorship? I happen to think Trump is a divisive con man, but it was a bad precedent for Twitter to have banned him from tweeting. The bigger problem wasn’t Trump’s tweets but the media’s obsessive coverage of them in pursuit of ratings. The way to combat a blowhard like Trump is to ignore him, and to correct him when needed. To combat his lies with the truth. We don’t need a governmental Ministry of Truth to police the tweets of a former president. Not when the government is often the biggest liar.

The solution isn’t censorship but an active, engaged, and informed citizenry, assisted by a fourth estate, the press, that is truly independent and adversarial to power. But the weakening of education in America, combined with a fourth estate that is deeply compromised by the powerful and often in bed with the government, means that these democratic checks on power are less and less effective. Hence calls for quick yet dangerous “solutions” like censorship, where the censors (governmental boards, private corporations) are opaque and almost completely unaccountable to the people.

Unless your goal is to give the already powerful a monopoly on speech, censorship is not the answer.

What the Media Still Isn’t Telling You About Russiagate

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By Ray McGovern

Source: AntiWar.com

Two years ago last Saturday (May 7, 2020) Adam Schiff (D, California), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, was forced to perform what Nixon co-conspirator John Ehrlichman famously called a “modified limited hangout.”

On that day, Schiff released sworn testimony that there was zero technical evidence that Russia – or anyone else – hacked those DNC emails so prejudicial to Hillary Clinton (later published by WikiLeaks).

Now, please, before you put me in Putin’s or Trump’s pocket, read on: The testifier was Shawn Henry, the head of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. For reasons former FBI Director James Comey would never really explain, he deferred to CrowdStrike to do the forensic work on the DNC computers that were supposedly “hacked.” Comey told Congress that CrowdStrike “would share with us what they saw.”

In June 2019, it was revealed that CrowdStrike never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, according to the Justice Department.

Are you starting to smell a rat? What about the “modified limited hangout”?

Well, if some or all of this is news to you, it is because the NY Times and other major media have deep-sixed it for exactly two years now, and counting. It gets worse – much worse.

What Did Schiff Know and When Did He Know It?

Fasten your seatbelts: It was on December 5, 2017 that Shawn Henry gave sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee – see the official transcript. Henry testified that there was no technical evidence that Russia, or any other entity, hacked the DNC emails that were published by WikiLeaks just before the Democratic Convention in July 2016. (The emails showed how the deck had been stacked against Bernie Sanders – in the primaries, for example.)

Shawn Henry is a longtime protégé of former FBI Director Robert Mueller and headed Mueller’s FBI cyber investigation unit. After retiring from the FBI in 2012, he took a senior position at CrowdStrike. At his testimony on Dec. 5, 2017, he had Graham M. Wilson, a partner at Perkins Coie, as well as David C. Lashway of Baker & McKenzie in support.

Falling Silently in the Forest

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, relying on (1) the extensive expertise and professional experience of two members who happened to have been Technical Directors at NSA, (2) the revelations of Edward Snowden, and (3) the immutable principles of physics, had already concluded that the accusation of that Russian hack on the DNC was phony. (That Brennan’s CIA “believed” it to be credible helped not a whit.)

Below is how we began “Allegations of Hacking are Baseless,” our Memorandum of December 12, 2016 (a year before Shawn Henry was forced to choose between telling the truth or perjuring himself). We wrote:

A New York Times report on Monday alluding to “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” leading the CIA to believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin “deployed computer hackers with the goal of tipping the election to Donald J. Trump” is, sadly, evidence-free. This is no surprise, because harder evidence of a technical nature points to an inside leak, not hacking – by Russians or anyone else. (See: “US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims.”)

We even included a brief tutorial on the difference between a “hack” and a leak, but we were already, in Dec. 2016 going up against deeply encrusted popular “belief” based on intelligence-corporate media connivance.

‘Modified Limited Hangout’

Schiff was able to hide Shawn Henry’s testimony for two and a half years. Under considerable pressure from a new Director of National Intelligence, who threatened to release the testimony himself, Schiff finally relented and released it (as mentioned above) on May 7, 2020. As for Establishment media, the transcript of Henry’s testimony fell like the proverbial tree in the forest with no one around to hear it.

Did the NY Times, et al. get “The Memo” ordering all to avoid Henry’s testimony like the plague? Actually, in this particular case, corporate media had quite enough incentive of their own to hide from media consumers the fact that “Russian hacking,” the cornerstone of Russia-gate, was a crock, and that viewers and listeners had been had.

When I wrote about the released – well, sort of released – Shawn Henry transcript the following day, there was a wealth of background information to provide context to this sordid affair. I included a four-minute discussion I had had with Schiff just five days after Trump took office, a reminder that the Dems were well into “Russian hacking” as the centerpiece of Russia-gate from the very start. (That clip, and lots else, is embedded here)

So Schiff knew on Dec. 5, 2017 that “Russian hacking” of those DNC emails was bogus. I was recently asked, why do you suppose he did not tell Robert Mueller, the “Inspector Javert” in hot pursuit of “Russian election interference,” whose $32-million investigation of Russia-gate lasted from May 2017 till March 2019? Good question. Did Shawn Henry misplace the telephone number of Mueller, his old boss and mentor? Or did Mueller know, and despite knowing, continued his Javert-like chase until after the mid-terms in November 2018. (That worked for the Democrats; and, not incidentally, Schiff took back the reins of the Intelligence Committee.)

Most of Americans have no idea how they’ve been had on Russia-gate. And the NYTimes, et al. have every reason to keep them in the dark about “Russian hacking.” Most people have little idea as to how the steady drumming on Russian perfidy has conditioned them not only to distrust “the Russians,” but to hate them. (What, after all, could be more hateful than for being responsible for giving us four years of Trump?) Sadly – and admittedly – it cannot be considered unreasonable to be convinced that everything out of Trump’s mouth is a lie and that he would never ever tell the truth about Russia – given what Obama and others call his “bromance” with Putin.

There are, of course, dangerous implications in all this for what Americans may be asked in terms of confronting Russia on Ukraine.

On wider Russia-gate issues over the past five years and my tree-falling-in-forest attempts to expose the malfeasance of our corporate-captive media, readers may wish to review this.

Re-Visiting Russiagate In Light Of The Ukraine War

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.

A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists. But what’s getting lost in all this, largely because Trumpites have been using their mainstream numbers to loudly amplify criticisms of the role of the Obama and Biden administrations in this mess, is what happened between those two presidencies which was just as crucial in getting us here.

Though it’s been scrubbed from mainstream liberal history, it was actually the Trump administration that began the US policy of arming Ukraine in the first place. Obama had refused forceful demands from neocons and liberal hawks to do so because he feared it would provoke an attack by Russia.

In a 2015 article titled “Defying Obama, Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine“, The New York Times reported that “So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.”

It wasn’t until the Trump presidency that those weapons began pouring into Ukraine, and boy howdy are we looking at some “further incursions” now. This change occurred either because Trump was a fully willing participant in the agenda to ramp up aggressions against Moscow, or because he was politically pressured into playing along with that agenda by the collusion narrative which had its origins at every step in the US intelligence cartel, or because of some combination of the two.

In all the world-shaping news stories we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.

The most important thing to understand about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is that it began with western intelligence agencies, was sustained by western intelligence agencies, and in the end resulted in cold war escalations against a government long targeted by western intelligence agencies. It was the US intelligence cartel who initiated the still completely unproven and severely plot hole-riddled claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. It was a “former” MI6 operative who produced the notorious and completely discredited Steele Dossier which birthed the narrative that Trump colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. It was the FBI who spied on the Trump campaign claiming it was investigating possible ties to Russia. It was the US intelligence cartel which produced, and then later walked back, the narrative that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill allied occupiers in Afghanistan which was leveraged by Democrats to demand Trump escalate further against Putin. It was even a CIA officer who just so happened to be in the right place at the right time that kicked off the flimsy impeachment narrative that Trump had suspended arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Every step of the way the mass media was fed reports by intelligence operatives and by elected officials sharing pieces of information they’d been told by intelligence operatives about potential indications of a conspiracy between Trump’s circle and the Russian government, which often faceplanted in the most humiliating ways as subsequent revelations debunked them. Day after day some new “BOMBSHELL” media report would surface tying some obscure Trump underling so some Russian oligarch in some way, the outlet which published it would be rewarded with millions of clicks, only to have it fizzle into a flat nothing pizza within a few days.

Day after day mainstream liberals were promised major revelations which would lead to the entire Trump family being dragged from the White House in chains, and day after day those promises failed to deliver. But what did happen during that time was a mountain of US cold war escalations against Moscow, a very good illustration of the immense difference between narrative and fact.

Trump supporters like to believe that the Deep State tried to remove their president because he was such a brave populist warrior leading a people’s revolution against their Satanic globalist agendas, and surely there were some individual goons within their ranks who would have loved to see him gone. But in reality the major decision makers in the US intelligence cartel never intended to remove Trump from office. They’d have known from their own intel that the Mueller investigation wouldn’t turn up any evidence of a conspiracy with the Russian government, and they’d have known impeachment wouldn’t remove him because they know how to count Senate seats. Russiagate was never about removing Trump, it was about making sure Trump played along with their regime change plans for Moscow and manufacturing mainstream consent for the escalations we’re seeing today.

And now here we are. Joe Lauria has an excellent new article out for Consortium News titled “Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War” which lays out the evidence that the Ukraine invasion was deliberately provoked to facilitate the longstanding agenda to oust Putin and “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.” The US could easily have prevented this war with a little bit of diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but instead it chose to provoke a war that could then be used to manufacture international consensus for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against Russia with the goal of effecting regime change.

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

This was all planned years in advance. Long before Biden’s presidency, and long before Trump’s. It is not a coincidence that we spent years being bombarded with anti-Russia propaganda in the lead-up to a massive confrontation with that same government. There’s no connection between the discredited allegation that Trump was a secret Kremlin agent and Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, yet the mainstream anti-Russia hysteria manufactured by the former is flowing seamlessly into mainstream opposition of the latter.

This is because this was all planned well in advance. We’re where we’re at now because the US empire brought us here intentionally.

Joe Rogan shows us the real purpose of cancel culture

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By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

Joe Rogan has just been cancelled. Again. It’s not about covid “misinformation” this time.

No, now he’s a racist.

Some enterprising young mind combed through 13 years and hundreds of episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience, and cut together around twenty instances of Rogan using “the n-word”.

This video was shared by award-winning musician India Arie, and used to explain her pulling her music from Spotify’s platform in protest of Rogan’s continued presence there.

Rogan claims that these clips are all taken out of context in his recent apology video, and none were ever intended to be racist. This may well be true…we can’t check for ourselves, because Spotify removed all the episodes.

These important bits of context were, naturally, removed from the viral video. Besides, it has since been said that context doesn’t even matter.

And you know what, they’re right. The context doesn’t matter, perhaps the intention doesn’t even matter, what matters is “Why now?”

Some of these clips are over twelve years old, and yet there have never been any calls to boycott Spotify or cancel his show until just the last couple of days.

Were they not racist before? Or was everyone just OK with the racism? Could there be something else behind this?

…but why bother pausing the hate-fest to ask questions, right?

The only message that matters is – Joe Rogan is a racist now, and streaming giant Spotify have pulled over seventy episodes of his show from their platform as a result.

Of course the cyber-torches and internet-pitchforks coming for Joe Rogan is nothing new. Having preached the tenets of a healthy lifestyle, promoted alternate Covid treatments, and invited dissenting experts onto his show, Rogan has obviously been on the establishment’s hit list for a while.

This reached a peak in January when ageing rock royalty Neil Young gave Spotify an ultimatum: Remove Joe Rogan’s “misinformation”, or take my music down.

Despite adding a weasely disclaimer to the beginning of the podcast’s episodes, Spotify essentially sided with Rogan, probably because they couldn’t be seen to bow to that kind of pressure, and because they figured most people had forgotten Neil Young was still alive.

In short, and despite other musicians like Joni Mitchell adding their voices to Young’s, the gambit failed and Rogan remained on the air.

Then, just last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki added fuel to the fire by announcing the President would like to see “more done” by tech companies to “limit the amount of misinformation” on their platforms.

Within days of that press conference, the viral video compilation of racial slurs had appeared, and Rogan is now a racist as well as an “anti-vax covidiot” or whatever they are calling us these days.

He’s also an object lesson in the entire purpose of cancel culture, and extreme identity politics in general.

I don’t know how many of our readers are gamers, or remember Half Life 2, but go with me here…

Around two-thirds of the way through the game you encounter giant insect-like aliens called Ant Lions, and soon afterwards get a special attack: The ability to “paint” enemies with pheromones which cause an unending swarm of Ant Lions to attack them.

Of course, the giant insects don’t know WHY they are attacking your enemies, they don’t sympathise with your aims and are not capable of understanding your plans, all they know is the chemical signals driving them to fits of rage.

You probably don’t need me to explain the metaphor.

This is the purpose of rampant, hysterical identity politics. You can paint your enemies as a target and watch the mindless swarm do its work.

As much as “cancel culture” is portrayed as a totally organic process, without any top-down control, this is simply not the case.

It is almost NEVER organic, and seemingly ALWAYS contrived.

If you need to be persuaded of that, simply look at who is immune to it.

Both Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau have got enough racist (or at least racist-seeming) scandals to get them cancelled if the process really was anything but a covert tool of maintaining the status quo. And yet still they stand.

To show how selective it is, we have examples of the same exact behaviour eliciting complete opposite responses depending on the person involved.

When Gina Carano compared the hatred of the unmasked and unvaccinated to the way Jews were treated in Nazi Germany, she lost her job and her agent.

When Margaret Hodge made similar comments about Corbyn’s Labour party, there was no rebuke at all.

It seems only people outside the establishment, or promoting the ‘wrong’ opinions, are ever in real danger of falling victim to ‘organic’ cancellation.

Indeed, one can be a totally white-bread member of the entertainment industry for years and be safe in the knowledge your racism/homophobia/misogyny etc will never really come to light, but step out of line on the wrong subject at the wrong time, and you will suddenly find yourself facing a tidal wave of past “sins” about to wash over you.

Look at Donald Trump, an insider to the bone when he was just a billionaire reality TV host, but then he ran against Hillary and became “literally Hitler” overnight.

Rogan is a perfect examplar of this phenomenon. Spend ten years going on about legalising weed, taking DMT and talking about martial arts and you can say “the n-word” as much as you want and nobody notices or cares. But the minute you even mildly interrogate an important media narrative, then the mob ‘organically’ remembers you were a racist the whole time.

The evidence of contrivance is obvious. Simply ask yourself: where did this video compilation of racial slurs actually come from? Who made it?

Rogan’s uses of “the n-word” are not new. They are all several years old and from 23 separate episodes, all multiple hours long. And there are almost 1800 episodes of the show to plough through if you decide to go searching. So making this video is at least two days’ work of simply watching the episodes – and that’s assuming you know where to start looking.

And that’s before editing or trying to make it “go viral”.

Was all this done on a whim by some bored pro-vaxxer?

Does that sound likely?

Far more likely is that it was created and deployed to discredit Rogan’s COVID-questioning without having to engage with the Covid sceptic evidence or arguments.

It’s even possible the video may even have already existed before the current controversy. After all, why create this climate of stifling sensitivity if you don’t have the tools to use it?

Perhaps most authors, actors, comedians etc. have a “tape” in the vault somewhere. A database of racism, homophobia or transphobia just waiting to be released when needed. A collection of neo-kompromat that works best as a deterrent, but is always ready to be loosed if needed.

Those people who do step too far out of their box are taken down, and act as an example to others. Ensuring everyone on the public stage is singing from the same hymn sheet.

Because that, it seems, is what cancel culture is for.

Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

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REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.

In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.

I myself had already written many, many articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world. 

We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.

“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the social media giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten progressively more intimate, so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the will of the most powerful government on earth.

The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.

It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this. I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, hate them. They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so they’d often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn’t really be more opposed.

When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating. I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and, if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing. But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I personally receive from their absence.

I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.

This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn’t require a lot of maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare in some circles.

Covid Authoritarians Are The Cause Of America’s Problems, Not The Unvaccinated

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(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

It’s an odd dynamic – One would think that if the covid vaccines were a generally benevolent program that actually “followed the science” then there would be no need to pile drive the public with an endless barrage of vax propaganda. After all, if science and morality are on the side of the covid cult then the rest would naturally take care of itself and the overwhelming majority of Americans would have already voluntarily taken the experimental mRNA cocktail without any threats required. And, if some people still refused, then the science would dictate that it doesn’t matter, because if the vax actually works then those people present no threat whatsoever to the rest of society.

It is highly revealing that this is not the case, and the more resistance the establishment encounters on mandates the more aggressive they become and the more they lie about the facts and evidence.

Remember when Fauci and company said they only needed 70% of the population vaccinated to hit herd immunity? That concept was thrown down the memory hole and now they want 96% (really 100%) of the population vaccinated.

They claimed that the vaccination programs were a success with between 70% to almost 80% of the public taking the double jab, and that was a lie as state numbers continue to contradict federal and CDC numbers.

They claimed that the only pandemic still ongoing was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, and this was of course a lie as we have seen studies from multiple states and mostly vaccinated countries showing that the vaccinated now make up the bulk of infections and hospitalizations.

They said the vaccines offered more reliable protection when compared to natural immunity, yet medical studies from around the world show that this was a lie and that natural immunity offers up to 27 times more protection than the vaccines do. And, they said that the vaccines were “safe and effective”, yet there is no long term data to prove they are safe, and multiple studies show that vaccine effectiveness is questionable to say the least.

Lie after lie after lie. If the vaccines actually worked, there would be no need for so much deceit, and if their true intention was to “protect public health” then the establishment would be promoting treatment programs and natural immunity, not untested vaccines that continue to disappoint.

Numerous fully vaccinated people including political figures like Colin Powell have died from covid but the mainstream media STILL claims this doesn’t disprove the efficacy of the jab. At the same time, unvaccinated alternative media figures like Joe Rogan beat covid in 3 days using treatments like Ivermectin, and the MSM attacks him relentlessly as some kind of charlatan merely because he dared to not die. The elitists think that the public doesn’t notice massive contradictions like this, but we do. We are not dumb, we see everything.

In Washington State, for example, studies show that there have been at least 51,000 “breakthrough cases” of covid in the past 10 months. Breakthrough cases are people who are fully vaccinated but were still infected with covid. Of those 51,000 people, 493 people died. When calculating the percentage of dead vs infected, we get around 0.96%. The median death rate of covid among unvaccinated people is only 0.27% according to dozens of peer reviewed medical studies. This means that the death rate of fully vaccinated people in Washington is actually HIGHER than that of unvaxxed people.

We have seen similar results in states like Massachusetts, where there were 5100 breakthrough cases in a single month and 80 deaths of fully vaccinated people, which is a 1.5% death rate for the vaxxed as opposed to 0.27% for the unvaxxed. Studies on death rates are going to have to take into account vaccinated deaths vs unvaccinated deaths from now on.

And what about studies from highly vaccinated countries like Israel, which show that the majority of infections and hospitalizations are among vaccinated people, with infections spiking well after the vaccines were introduced. Right after Israel became one of the most vaccinated nations on the planet, it also had one of the highest infection rates on the planet.

It should also be noted that the peak of US infections in 2020 ended well before the vaccine rollout even started in early 2021. Meaning, the vaccines did NOTHING to reduce infection rates. They dropped off on their own. This is a scientific fact that the mainstream avoids, just as they avoid admitting that the median death rate of covid is a mere 0.27%.

The solution that the establishment offers is not surprising – They claim we need MORE vaccines through booster requirements. As the old saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And so the demented propaganda machine continues into infinity.

The public is growing tired of the games as is evident in mass walkouts, sick-outs and other protests against Biden’s vaccine mandates for companies with more than 100 employees as well as most government institutions. We are seeing up to 50% of employees and government workers in many cases refusing to take the experimental jab despite the fact that they are being threatened with losing their jobs. This dynamic seems to have bewildered the covid cult and the globalists; they can’t wrap their heads around this level of resistance to their agenda.

It’s not a new thing, but I have noticed an increasing number of vax propaganda commercials and articles featuring Donald Trump in the past month. All of them herald Trump’s pro-vaccination stance, which is odd because leftists spent most of 2020 saying they would not take any vaccine that Trump was responsible for producing.

I was recently doing some research on YouTube and was annoyed to have to watch yet another vax ad, but this one had an odd tone. It showed clips of Trump making favorable statements on the mRNA vaccines, he and his wife taking the vaccines with dramatic music, and then a message at the end which said “There’s A Covid Vaccine Waiting For You, Too.”

The bizarre commercial was clearly aimed at conservatives, but it displays an obvious disconnect that the covid cult and the media have when it comes to conservative thinking and principles.

Leftists, collectivists and globalists function according to majority rule and herd mentality. They have gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers set the agenda and dictate decision making responsibilities for the group. Leftist herds wait patiently for top-down orders from their designated gatekeepers and most of them obey without question. This is how they operate.

Liberty minded people operate in the opposite fashion. Our “leaders” are always under scrutiny, and this includes political mascots like Donald Trump. This is why, during a recent speech in Alabama, Trump was booed by a crowd of supporters after he called for them to get the covid vaccine. Conservatives generally don’t care about the person promoting the message, they only care if the message passes the smell test.

Leftists and globalists are incapable of grasping conservative principles or the conservative mindset. This fact is hilariously evident in the style of propaganda they have consistently used to try to intimidate or pressure the conservative public into compliance with the mandates. We don’t view Trump as a philosophical leader; in fact, there were so many underlying issues with his cabinet and his policies that his leadership became suspect. At most, conservatives enjoyed Trump’s administration simply because his presence in the White House drove leftist authoritarians to greater madness.

We definitely don’t care what Trump has to say on the vaccines.

There is further evidence of the disconnect I describe in the actions of leftists and the establishment when it comes to vax mandates in the workplace. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard the argument from covid cultists that conservatives “Might say we will refuse to comply, but when our livelihoods are threatened we will submit.” They believe this because that’s how THEY would respond. They are cowardly weaklings with no heart, no principles and no morals. They think that since they would cave in to the pressure, the rest of us would cave in as well.

The past month has proven them oh so wrong as millions of people stage protests and walk outs across the country. There is even refusal among around 25% of the armed forced averaged across all branches, as well as up to 50% of city police forces. Most employers and government offices can barely function as is; there is zero chance they will be able to cope with a 10% loss of workforce, let alone a 25% to 50% loss. They would crumble.

This was obviously not the plan; the globalists were not prepared for this level of resistance in the US and this is evident in their pathetic propaganda scramble. That does not mean they don’t have contingencies in place. I am already seeing a fledgling narrative in the media which is implanting the idea that any breakdown of the system in the US will actually be the fault of the unvaccinated.

Biden has been a fervent culprit behind the narrative that everything from economic instability and supply chain problems to social divisions should be blamed on unvaccinated Americans. That’s right, the majority of these disasters started on Biden’s watch and because of his policies, but somehow WE are the real danger. Yes, the draconian mandates are illegal and unconstitutional and yes, mandates are not laws in any form, and yes, Biden and his handlers are acting like dictators and there is no reason to do anything they say. But, we are the bad guys. This is classic communist gaslighting.

Here’s an idea: Stop trying to enforce covid mandates and vaccine passports. Stop paying people to stay home from work with covid welfare bribes. Stop generating trillions of dollars in fiat stimulus from thin air to pay for even more useless programs we don’t need. Then watch how quickly stagflation, economic instability, the workforce shortages and most other problems in the US suddenly disappear. The unvaccinated are not the source of American distress, the globalists and errand boys like Biden and blue state governors are the cause. Remove them from the equation and America’s future looks much brighter.