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Terrified of Freedom: Why Most Human Beings are Embracing the Global Elite’s Technotyranny

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By Robert J. Burrowes

In early 2020, the Global Elite launched its long-planned coup to capture control of the human population by killing off a substantial proportion and technologically imprisoning those left alive as transhuman slaves. A primary intended outcome of this agenda is to enable the Elite to own and completely control use of the Earth’s remaining resources.

Using the World Economic Forum (WEF) as its primary agent, and with the complicity of key international organizations and all national governments (after some hiccoughs requiring the assassination of five national presidents), the Global Elite has gone about progressively implementing the many components of its plan for a full takeover of Planet Earth. See ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It is “Now or Never” in the Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.

Despite the facts that the horrendous details of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ – which, without consulting any of us, identifies changes to some 200 areas of human life – can be read by anyone on the WEF website and many spokespeople, including the delusional chairperson Klaus Schwab – The fourth industrial revolution ‘is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds… and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.’ – and his equally delusional adviser Yuval Noah Harari – ‘History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.’ – have outlined some key details of what they are doing to us, the bulk of the human population has submissively accepted their fate by burying their heads deeply into the sand and, gullibly believing the Elite’s ‘virus-threat’ narrative, meekly tolerated a long series of encroachments on their rights and freedom, including mask-wearing, social distancing, lockdowns, QR codes, multiple gene-altering (and, in many cases, injury or death-inflicting) injections, as well as the political, economic and social costs of these elite measures. See ‘Great Reset’, ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution, by Klaus Schwab’ and Yuval Noah Harari.

And these encroachments and costs are just the beginning of their very detailed agenda!

Shortly after the Global Elite launched its coup, I wrote an article explaining the psychology of the three primary parties to this conflict: the Elite, their victims and those who resisted. See ‘The Psychology of the COVID-19 Coup: The Elite, their Victims and those who Resist’.

Since that time, some scholars, notably including Professor Mattias Desmet, have offered commentaries on elements of the same subject, particularly in relation to the mass compliance. See, for example, ‘Mass Formation and Totalitarian Thinking in This Time of Global Crisis’ and ‘The Covid-19 Crisis. A Campaign Against Critical Thinking. “Mass Formation Psychosis”’. And you can access a series of commentaries by Dr. Rudolf Hänsel from ‘An Upbringing According to Strict Religious and Military Principles – And the Reflex of Absolute Spiritual Obedience: The Example of Auschwitz Commander Rudolf Höß’.

Other authors, writing in support of the Elite-driven narrative, portray those who resist the dominant narrative as psychologically dysfunctional, in one way or another. See, for example, ‘Adaptive and Dark Personality in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Predicting Health-Behavior Endorsement and the Appeal of Public-Health Messages’, ‘Adaptive and maladaptive behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic: The roles of Dark Triad traits, collective narcissism, and health beliefs’, ‘Compliance with containment measures to the COVID-19 pandemic over time: Do antisocial traits matter?’ and ‘Sociopathic traits linked to non-compliance with mask guidelines and other COVID-19 containment measures’.

Given the value of understanding the psychology underpinning the main categories of actors in this conflict if we are to fully comprehend what has taken place and why, as well as the psychological qualities necessary to resist the Elite agenda effectively, I want to revisit this subject (partly so that the inadequacies of other psychological explanations – including elite critiques of activists – are exposed).

Before proceeding, I wish to acknowledge Erich Fromm’s 1942 classic, The Fear of Freedom, while simply noting that the explanation offered here diverges profoundly in its explanation of the shared thesis: humans fear freedom.

So, let me briefly answer six questions: Why is the bulk of the human population willing to give away the little freedom they have left so readily? Why is the Global Elite so committed to taking over planet Earth and all life on it? Why do all those elite agents collaborate with their masters’ plans? Why are most of those unhappy about the loss of their freedom happy to protest ineffectively rather than resist strategically? Why are psychological critiques of activists by elite agents misconceived? And what psychological qualities are needed to resist effectively?

Before answering these questions in any detail, I will start by briefly explaining why fear or, more accurately, unconscious terror, is the fundamental answer to the first five of the above six questions and then go on to elaborate why this terror manifests differently in the five circumstances. I will then answer the sixth question.

Terrorizing Children into Submission

As I have explained at some length elsewhere, the process of what human beings like to benignly call ‘socialization’ is a process of terrorizing children and adolescents into submissive obedience. Delivered daily by parents, teachers, religious figures and other significant adults in the child’s life as an endless stream of violence – whether ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and/or ‘utterly invisible’ – the child is progressively reduced to a socially constructed delusional identity who is storing a vast amount of suppressed fear, pain, anger, sadness and other feelings that they were not allowed to feel and express throughout childhood (and then adolescence). This individual goes on to lead the life they have been terrorized into leading (with only utterly superficial choices at the margin still allowed). See ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

And because disobedience on the part of a child is almost invariably met with ‘punishment’ – the sanitized word that adults like to use to obscure from themselves and others the fact that they are being violent – it is a rare child who survives into adulthood with much of the unique Selfhood that evolution bequeathed them at birth. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

Hence, as a result of this violence inflicted throughout childhood and adolescence, the typical human being grows into an adult who, perhaps despite complaining at times, is submissively obedient to ‘authority figures’ in a wide variety of contexts: employers, religious figures, doctors, government officials, police and military personnel, legal and prison personnel, and bureaucrats generally. People do not ‘believe’ in authority; they are fearful of being disobedient.

In other words: Virtually all human beings fear the freedom to think for themselves, decide what to believe and choose how to behave. Hence, they think, believe and behave in accord with norms that are determined by Elites and promulgated through Elite-controlled channels including education systems, entertainment outlets and news media.

Devoid of a mind that can critique the structures and processes of the society in which they live (and the role of the actors within them), this compliant individual is also unable to critique Elite propaganda, whether presented as ‘education’, ‘entertainment’ or ‘news’. See ‘Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda and False Flag Attacks?’

Hence the typical human being spends their life as a victim of those structures, processes, individuals and information they learned to fear as a child. And, for example, the idea that they could be responsible for their own health by consulting relevant evidence, information and personnel before making their own informed decision is simply preposterous. After all, as the propaganda they believed taught them, we have ‘experts’ who will tell us what is best for us. And while they accept that this expertise might involve a financial cost, the true cost of this belief in experts is immeasurable: A mind that has been robbed of its capacity for unique and powerful investigation, analysis and action.

So let us return to the six questions above, answering each briefly in turn.

  1. Why is the bulk of the human population willing to give away the little freedom they have left so readily?

Obviously, the answer to this first question is simple: As explained above, terrorized in childhood, the typical person simply adopts obedience as their way of life. Of course, they might powerlessly complain and they might resist a little at the margins (by being ‘a bit late’ or not doing exactly as expected, for example) but, apart from this, they will invariably comply as directed. The idea of genuinely disputing any ‘authority’ is out of the question. Paradoxical though it might seem, plenty of these people will end up in relative positions of authority and expect those in their charge to obey them. Of course, there is no real paradox. They have ‘learned’ throughout childhood that people in higher positions of authority are obeyed, and that includes them in very limited contexts. But there is always a wide range of higher authorities to keep them in line too, and they submit readily.

Consequently, told there is a ‘virus’, they believe it. Investigating and considering the heavily documented evidence that exposes this lie is beyond them. For just a taste of this evidence, see ‘COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’, ‘Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI)’ and ‘189 health/science institutions globally all failed to cite even 1 record of “SARS-COV-2” purification, by anyone, anywhere, ever’.

And told they need to take four or more injections to combat the ‘virus’, they submit. Obedience is all. Although, of course, they will usually characterize their belief and behaviour more favourably – such as ‘I am doing the right thing by the community’ – to (unconsciously) avoid any risk of exposing the terror driving both their belief and behaviour.

Moreover, despite a monumental and mounting death toll from the injectables – for the briefest sample of the extensive documentation of ‘vaccine’ deaths, see ‘The Vaccine Death Report: Evidence of millions of deaths and serious adverse events resulting from the experimental COVID-19 injections’, ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Massacre: 68,000% Increase in Strokes, 44,000% Increase in Heart Disease, 6,800% Increase in Deaths Over Non-COVID Vaccines’ and ‘Dear Friends, Sorry to Announce a Genocide: It’s Really True: They Know they are Killing the Babies’ – which is concealed by elite agents including governments and the corporate media, awareness of this remains low, not so much because of the censorship, but because any temptation to even investigate would suggest an inclination to disobey. And our compliant citizen cannot do that.

Another important way in which their fear works is to suppress awareness of bigger, more profound threats – which might trigger enormous and paralysing (conscious) terror – in favour of focusing on something much smaller (even if untrue) that feels ‘manageable’; that is, the person feels able to exercise sufficient control to navigate or neutralize the threat. So in this current context, most of the population is focusing on more narrow and imminent threats – whether or not these are true and particularly those ‘threats’ (‘SARS-CoV-2’, its ‘variants’ and now ‘Monkeypox’) heavily promoted by governments, the corporate media and other elite agents – because this enables people to participate in the delusion that their cooperation is helping to contain the smaller (delusional) threat.

But the idea of considering the real threat – in this case, a coup by the Global Elite to kill off or control the vast bulk of the human population while capturing full control of Earth’s resources – is simply too terrifying so it is easier to suppress awareness of it and ignore, dismiss or dispute this deeper agenda as unfounded, a ‘conspiracy theory’ or simply non-existent. Delusion, denial and other psychological aversion techniques are extremely common human behaviours among those who are (unconsciously) terrified. See ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’ and ‘The Limited Mind: Why Fear Is Driving Humanity to Extinction’.

  1. Why is the Global Elite so committed to taking over planet Earth and all life on it?

So what about the Global Elite? Why is it committed to killing off so many of us and enslaving those left alive? See ‘The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security’.

Well, at the superficial level, there are various explanations offered, notably including the fact that the Earth’s resources are depleted and so conserving the bulk of what is left for elite use, shared only minimally with the remaining population of transhuman slaves, is their plan. But there is a deeper and more truthful explanation. Members of the Global Elite have been so utterly terrorized that they are insane. For a careful explanation of this point, see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

  1. Why do all those elite ‘agents’ (international organizations, governments, corporate media, medical and legal systems, industries, professional groups) collaborate with their masters’ plans?

Well, again, in simple terms, they are too terrified not to collaborate but because their terror is unconscious to them they will characterize their obedience as ‘the right thing to do’, ‘just doing my job’, ‘I’ve got a family to support’ or an equivalent. However they characterize their behaviour, it is simply to mask from themselves the fear that drives their submissive behaviour.

For collaborators, the importance of obedience also far outweighs any sense of personal moral choice. Obviously, it is their fear that generates this attitude and behaviour. If you are scared to resist ‘authority’, then you must make a virtue out of submission and obedience. In essence: the collaborator will dogmatically defend their behaviour as ‘right’ in the circumstances as the means of suppressing their own awareness of the terrifying and painful tangle of feelings (suppressed fear, pain and anger…) in their own unconscious.

You can read a great deal more detail in the section headed ‘People Who Pretend to be Your Friend: The Emotional Profile of Collaborators and Traitors’ in ‘Why Violence?’

  1. Why are most of those unhappy about the loss of their freedom happy to protest ineffectively rather than resist strategically?

Once again, as already mentioned, because they are unconsciously terrified. While able to penetrate the superficial layer of the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative, they are unlikely to perceive the far-reaching and horrific agenda – and those responsible – beyond this.

Moreover, by ‘pretending’ to resist – by attending a rally, for example, in which freedom is powerlessly ‘demanded’ from an elite agent (a government) – they can delude themselves and those around them that they are powerful in defence of their freedom when, of course, they have fearfully passed off responsibility for fighting for it, as Anita McKone noted, by powerlessly asking others to change their behaviour and demanding that others give them freedom.

But freedom given is freedom that can be taken away.

Consequently, such events have zero strategic value – and would only have it if used to promote strategically-focused actions designed to defeat the Elite coup – and so those attending such events can obscure their fear of doing something effective. By engaging in these powerless acts of rebellion, they can minimize (and often eliminate) the risk of incurring the cost of disobedience (that will often accompany powerful acts of resistance), by hiding in a crowd whose actions are well known to have no impact. After all, protest rallies are notoriously ineffective as the extensive record demonstrates.

And while government authorities might outlaw such events and even precipitate police engagement to prevent or disrupt them (as has been happening in the past two years), this only obscures the reality that such actions, in themselves, are ineffective anyway and simply distract the bulk of those resisting from taking (different) action powerfully. See ‘Why Activists Fail’.

In essence, the fear of the typical activist makes them incapable of analysing and critiquing the true depth of the crisis and then identifying and taking strategic action in response.

Consequently, this fear then makes them unwilling to offer deeper analyses and more powerful action to those they perceive as only just ‘awakening’. They project their own fear onto others.

  1. Why are psychological critiques of activists by elite agents misconceived?

As noted earlier in this article, several authors in the past two years have purported to show that those opposing the elite agenda are suffering from one or another psychological disorder.

However, these articles are either written by elite agents working in psychiatry or other authors who are too terrified to critique their own submissiveness in the context and, often enough, well paid to discredit, one way or another, those individuals courageous enough to have a mind of their own.

In relation to the first category, while there is no scientific basis to psychiatry, the tragic reality is that there is an extensive and well-documented history that psychiatry has long been used to inflict violence on targeted populations, particularly those resisting an elite-driven narrative. In other words, psychiatric violence is just another elite tool for silencing and discrediting those who resist elite imperatives. See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’.

So when certain authors label those resisting the elite-driven narrative as suffering from a psychological dysfunctionality, they are merely continuing what has been a long-term effort to marginalize those who offer serious critiques of, and resistance to, elite behaviour. Another recent effort has been the labeling of those people who resist as suffering from ‘oppositional defiance disorder’. See ‘Psychiatrists now say non-conformity is a mental illness: only the sheeple are “sane”’.

And while many other authors are paid to promote an elite-driven narrative designed to discredit opponents for this or other reasons, it is also the case that all of these authors have been so terrorized by their own ‘socialization’ experience that any concept that each individual has a unique Self is not only incomprehensible but also both terrifying and ‘wrong’. Hence, the person who is truly an individual is dangerous because they have not ‘learned’ to obey – parents, teachers, employers… and elites – as directed.

In essence, for these individuals especially, disobedience of authorities is simply ‘wrong’: not in a moral sense, however, but simply in the sense that they have been terrorized into believing that disobedience reflects improper ‘learning’ and, hence, inadequate punishment to ‘induce’ social conformity. So activists should be pejoratively labeled and punished for not conforming to elite-driven norms.

  1. What psychological qualities are needed to resist effectively?

Mainly, just one: Courage. The courage to investigate what is happening until the truth is uncovered, the courage to analyze what is driving it, and the courage to act powerfully in response.

Easy to type; not so easy to find.

Defeating the Global Elite’s Agenda

If you have the courage to strategically resist the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.

In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 16 languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish & Slovak) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.

If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).

Finally, while the timeframe for this to make any difference is now in doubt, if you want to raise children who are powerfully able to investigate, analyze and act, you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’.

Conclusion

Human freedom is on the verge of being lost. Forever.

If the Global Elite is successful in implementing its ‘Great Reset’ agenda, everything that humans value will be taken from us including, in many cases, our life.

The evidence on this issue is now overwhelming and it is virtually impossible to keep track of all of it once you start to investigate it.

And given the rapidly advancing technological elements of the Elite coup, as well as the ongoing destruction of food and energy supply chains, time is now very short.

Do you have the courage to act on this by resisting strategically?

Robert Burrowes, Ph.D. is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of Why Violence? Websites: (We Are Human, We Are Free) (Charter)  (Flame Tree Project)  (Songs of Nonviolence) (Nonviolent Campaign Strategy) (Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy) (Robert J. Burrowes) (Feelings First) Email: flametree@riseup.net

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.

The Illusion of Freedom: We’re Only as Free as the Government Allows

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“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.”— George Carlin

We’re in a national state of denial.

For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

Case in point: on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court appeared inclined to favor a high school football coach’s right to pray on the field after a game, the high court let stand a lower court ruling that allows police to warrantlessly track people’s location and movements through their personal cell phones, sweeping Americans up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

Likewise, although the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for a death row inmate to have his pastor audibly pray and lay hands on him in the execution chamber, it refused to stop police from using hidden cameras to secretly and warrantlessly record and monitor a person’s activities outside their home over an extended period of time.  

For those who have been paying attention, there’s a curious pattern emerging: the government appears reasonably tolerant of those who want to exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner that doesn’t challenge the police state’s hold on power, for example, by praying on a football field or in an execution chamber.

On the other hand, dare to disagree with the government about its war crimes, COVID-19, election outcomes or police brutality, and you’ll find yourself silenced, cited, shut down and/or branded an extremist.

The U.S. government is particularly intolerant of speech that reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. For instance, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the latest victim of the government’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers, is in the process of being extradited to the U.S. to be tried under the Espionage Act for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Even political protests are fair game for prosecution. In Florida, two protesters are being fined $3000 for political signs proclaiming stating “F—k Biden,” “F—k Trump,” and “F—k Policing 4 Profit” that violate a city ban on “indecent” speech on signs, clothing and other graphic displays.

The trade-off is clear: pray all you want, but don’t mess with the U.S. government.

In this way, the government, having appointed itself a Supreme and Sovereign Ruler, allows us to bask in the illusion of religious freedom while stripping us of every other freedom afforded by the Constitution.

We’re in trouble, folks.

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 militarized police 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.

My friends, we’re being played for fools.

On paper, we may be technically free.

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

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

Truth be told, 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.

With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

Government surveillance, police abuse, SWAT team raids, economic instability, asset forfeiture schemes, pork barrel legislation, militarized police, drones, endless wars, private prisons, involuntary detentions, biometrics databases, free speech zones, etc.: these are mile markers on the road to a fascist state where citizens are treated like cattle, to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.

Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction. The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

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

Dystopia Disguised as Democracy: All the Ways in Which Freedom Is an Illusion

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

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

We are no longer free.

We are living in a world carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy, but it’s an illusion.

We think we have the freedom to elect our leaders, but we’re only allowed to participate in the reassurance ritual of voting. There can be no true electoral choice or real representation when we’re limited in our options to one of two candidates culled from two parties that both march in lockstep with the Deep State and answer to an oligarchic elite.

We think we have freedom of speech, but we’re only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners allow.

We think we have the right to freely exercise our religious beliefs, but those rights are quickly overruled if and when they conflict with the government’s priorities, whether it’s COVID-19 mandates or societal values about gender equality, sex and marriage.

We think we have the freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. Punitive programs strip citizens of their passports and right to travel over unpaid taxes.

We think we have property interests in our homes and our bodies, but there can be no such freedom when the government can seize your property, raid your home, and dictate what you do with your bodies.

We think we have the freedom to defend ourselves against outside threats, but there is no right to self-defense against militarized police who are authorized to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, and granted immunity from accountability with the general blessing of the courts. Certainly, there can be no right to gun ownership in the face of red flag gun laws which allow the police to remove guns from people merely suspected of being threats.

We think we have the right to an assumption of innocence until we are proven guilty, but that burden of proof has been turned on its head by a surveillance state that renders us all suspects and overcriminalization which renders us all lawbreakers. Police-run facial recognition software that mistakenly labels law-abiding citizens as criminals. A social credit system (similar to China’s) that rewards behavior deemed “acceptable” and punishes behavior the government and its corporate allies find offensive, illegal or inappropriate.

We think we have the right to due process, but that assurance of justice has been stripped of its power by a judicial system hardwired to act as judge, jury and jailer, leaving us with little recourse for appeal. A perfect example of this rush to judgment can be found in the proliferation of profit-driven speed and red light cameras that do little for safety while padding the pockets of government agencies.

We have been saddled with a government that pays lip service to the nation’s freedom principles while working overtime to shred the Constitution.

By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect the constitutional rights of the citizenry while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.

Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants.

We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth—in terms of profit and resale value—to our “owners.”

Under the new terms of this revised, one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and “we the people” have none.

Only in our case, sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, we’ve allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.

The problem with these devil’s bargains, however, is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.

We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all: the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.” In exchange for the promise of safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, lower taxes, lower crime rates, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, overcriminalization and government corruption.

In the end, such bargains always turn sour.

We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.

We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.

We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”

We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red-light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in hefty fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.

We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, “we the people” are being reminded that we possess no rights except for that which the government grants on an as-needed basis.

Indeed, there are chilling parallels between the authoritarian prison that is life in the American police state and The Prisoner, a dystopian television series that first broadcast in Great Britain more than 50 years ago.

The series centers around a British secret agent (played by Patrick McGoohan) who finds himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic retirement community known only as The Village. While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.

Much like the American Police State, The Prisoner’s Village gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

Described as “an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia,” The Prisoner is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of mankind to meekly accept his lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of his own making.

The Prisoner is an operations manual for how you condition a populace to life as prisoners in a police state: by brainwashing them into believing they are free so that they will march in lockstep with the state and be incapable of recognizing the prison walls that surround them.

We can no longer maintain the illusion of freedom.

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 the people” have become “we the prisoners.”

DHS Suggests Those Who Spread ‘Misleading Narratives’ That ‘Undermine Trust in US Gov’t’ are Terrorists

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By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday issued a bulletin warning of a heightened terrorism alert in the United States. One of the “key factors” for the heightened threat, which the DHS considers terrorism, is “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions.”

Naturally, this has many folks concerned, especially considering the examples cited in the bulletin which include “false or misleading narratives” about “unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.”

While parts of the memo cite calls for violence and attacks by foreign terrorist organizations — which are actual terror threats — as cause for concern, the idea that the government’s definition of misinformation could potentially earn you the label of “terrorist,” is shocking.

The bulletin is titled, “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland” and reads as follows (emphasis added):

The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation. While the conditions underlying the heightened threat landscape have not significantly changed over the last year, the convergence of the following factors has increased the volatility, unpredictability, and complexity of the threat environment: (1) the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions; (2) continued calls for violence directed at U.S. critical infrastructure; soft targets and mass gatherings; faith-based institutions, such as churches, synagogues, and mosques; institutions of higher education; racial and religious minorities; government facilities and personnel, including law enforcement and the military; the media; and perceived ideological opponents; and (3) calls by foreign terrorist organizations for attacks on the United States based on recent events.

As stated above, reasons 2 and 3 are obvious threats of terror and make sense. However, given the government’s tendency to paint with a broad brush, undermining public trust could make millions of people terrorists, including the Free Thought Project.

It is the job of a true journalist to undermine trust in the government and given the shifting goal posts on what is defined as “misinformation” over just the last two years, literally anyone could find themselves subject to this definition. To hammer their point home, DHS specifically calls out misinformation on COVID-19.

Key factors contributing to the current heightened threat environment include:

  1. The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions:
    • For example, there is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.

Remember in 2020, when any talk of a potential lab leak theory was considered “misinformation”? By this definition, everyone who talked about the lab leak theory was a potential terrorist.

Doctors like Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, who challenge the vaccination mandate, are now, according to this bulletin, terrorists. Given the fact that the government is urging Spotify to censor Joe Rogan for “misinformation,” according to this bulletin, Rogan is also a terrorist. Their information and discussions on Covid-19 have certainly sown discord and undermined public trust — and rightfully so — but does this make them a terror threat?

Obviously, it does not. The only people who would be threatened by healthy, science-based skepticism as espoused by doctors like these two, are tyrants who wish to control the narrative.

Given the extremely broad definition of what the government considers “misinformation,” this bulletin is one of the most worrisome documents to come from the feds in recent history. What’s more, the mere act of releasing such a document, actually “undermines public trust in U.S. government institutions” by threatening those who would dare question the status quo.

Make no mistake, this is a move to criminalize free speech by allowing the executive to declare anyone who disagrees with their dictates, a terrorist. With declarations like this, the government doesn’t need terrorist organizations to “sow discord” — they are doing it themselves.

Medical Tyranny the New Abnormal

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: The Stephen Lendman Blog

State-sponsored/MSM supported medical tyranny is the new abnormal throughout the US/West and elsewhere worldwide.

I’m greatly indebted to numerous truth-telling medical and scientific experts for teaching me what I’ve learned about all things flu/covid — a medical education I never imagined getting pre-2020 but got since then on this most cutting edge of all issues.

To my great dismay, intelligent people I know are oblivious to reality on what’s crucial to know — believing rubbish fed them daily from official, MSM, and other disreputable sources instead of what’s scientifically indisputable.

Protecting and preserving public health and freedom depend on enough committed people rising up against what’s going on — slaying it before it slays us.

Relief won’t come judicially or legislatively.

On all issues mattering most, positive change never comes top down, only bottom up by committed people demanding no less.  

The anti-public health/anti-freedom scheme was planned well before its rollout early last year. 

As explained time and again, it’s all about wanting maximum numbers of unwanted people eliminated worldwide, along with transforming free and open societies into ruler/serf ones for survivors.

It’s a draconian new world order fit only for privileged interests at the expense or all others.

It’s what no one anywhere should tolerate, a tyrannical world that’s unsafe and unfit to live for the vast majority worldwide — the worst of all possible worlds.

Things don’t have to be this way.

Ordinary people have power to rise up against injustice, defy unjustifiable rules, disrupt best laid plans of dark forces and achieve positive change by their actions.

History proves it. Years of anti-war activism helped end a decade of US aggression in Southeast Asia — a pyrrhic victory as things turned out because anti-war activism waned.

The same applies to moving from chattel to wage slavery, from Jim Crow to its modern-day version, from freedom to mass incarceration, from healthcare as it should be to toxic mass-jabbing with unparalleled genocide in mind.

Governance of, by and for entrenched interests in the US/West and elsewhere is too debauched to fix.

The same goes for MSM guardians of wealth, power and privilege.

Scattered reforms won’t work. Transformational change is needed.

The only solution is popular revolution. Anything less assures no change of unacceptable same old, same old.

Wealth, power and privileged interests are enemies of ordinary people everywhere.

Collective defiance is needed to turn things from what’s destructive of the general welfare to what’s beneficial.

Former Pfizer vice president, its chief scientist for allergy and infectious diseases, co-founder of Doctors for (flu/covid) Ethics, Dr. Michael Yeadon, is on the right side of history for this most crucial of all issues.

Commenting on what’s gone on since early last year, he said the diabolical scheme has nothing to do with protecting us, everything to do with establishing “totalitarian control.”

Fundamental freedoms are being abolished incrementally.

Things began by denying refuseniks free access to restaurants and other places where large numbers gather.

Widespread use of freedom-destroying health passports may follow as a requirement to stay free from societal isolation altogether.

Yeadon compared the above to “dropping a cancerous cell into your body (that) grows and metastasizes and then it kills you.” 

“(T)hat’s what” health passports are all about if instituted. 

“So don’t tolerate them anywhere,” Yeadon stressed.

Once instituted, metastasizing will “regulate access to essential services like food, money, fuel, trains and things like that.”

“You’ll never get rid of (them). We’ve got to stop (what’s going on) beforehand.”

Otherwise we’ll “lose the ability to decide where to be at any time.” 

Health passports will “regulate entry and exit from almost any controlled space, possibly even including your own home.”

“You’ll be required to keep your  passport up to date by being fully jabbed” — meaning forever-jabbed one or more time annually.

The more toxic jabs gotten, the sooner your end time will arrive, most likely very unpleasantly from painful and/or debilitating disease(s).

Getting informed from reliable independent sources, getting motivated and enraged enough to no longer tolerate what’s going on is the only way to halt it once and for all.

“(I)t’s us” on our own against the diabolical scheme. We alone can and must stop it.

The alternative is deeply entrenched tyranny, a permanent new abnormal, dystopia no one should tolerate.

Jabs are vehicles of mass-extermination.

Pharma profiteers and Big Government backers “are the most ruthless of all corporate entities,” Dr. Vernon Coleman stressed, adding:

It’s been known since last year that mass-jabbing “cause(s) heart trouble, strokes, neurological problems,” and other serious health issues.

Coleman believes that most jabbed individuals will be “lucky to last five years.”

Individuals taking them “should be considered suicidal or certified insane.” 

“Life expectation is going to fall dramatically – and not just because the quality of health care is deteriorating daily.”

“I honestly find it difficult to believe that there are people around who are so brainwashed and so terrified by the lies they’ve heard that they will accept as many jabs as they are offered.”

The power of repetition, especially on propaganda TV, gets most people — including intelligent ones — to believe almost anything no matter how scientifically or otherwise untrue.

With minimal effort, anyone connected online can learn enough about what’s going on from reliable, independent sources to know we’re being scammed by US/Western and other governments, Pharma and their MSM press agents.

Getting mad as hell, rising up and refusing to take it any more is the only way to beat the diabolical scheme.

Nothing else can work.

The Empire of Lies Breaks Down: Ugly Truths the Deep State Wants to Keep Hidden

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”—Albert Einstein

America is breaking down.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, racism, classism, fascism, fear-mongering, political correctness, cultural sanitation, virtue signaling, a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing government corruption and brutality, a growing economic divide that has much of the population struggling to get by, and militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment)—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long.

In New York City, for example, a 200-year-old statue of Thomas Jefferson holding the Declaration of Independence will be removed from the City Council’s chambers where it has presided since 1915. Despite Jefferson’s many significant accomplishments, without which we might not have the rights we do today, he will be banished for having been, like many of his day, a slaveowner. Curiously, that same brutal expectation of infallibility has yet to be applied to many other politically correct yet equally imperfect and fallible role models of the day.

In Washington, DC, a tribunal of nine men and women spoke with one voice to affirm that the government and its henchmen can literally get away with murder and not be held accountable for their wrongdoing. The Supreme Court’s latest rulings are yet another painful lesson in compliance, a reminder that in the American police state, “we the people” are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”

All across the country, from California to Connecticut and every point in between, men and women who have worked faithfully and diligently at their jobs for years are being terminated for daring to believe that they have a right to bodily integrity; that they should not be forced, against their conscience or better judgment, to choose between individual liberty and economic survival; and that they—and not the government, or the FDA, or the CDC, or the Corporate State—have dominion over their bodies. Conveniently enough, this COVID-19 pandemic has created yet another double standard in how “we the people” navigate this country: while “we the middling classes” are subjected to vaccine mandates and denied even the right to be skeptical about the origins of the COVID virus, let alone the efficacy of the so-called cure, the government, corporations and pharmaceutical companies have been shielded from liability with blanket immunity laws that ensure we are little more than guinea pigs for their questionable experiments.

And then in Pennsylvania, a man traveling on a commuter train harassed, assaulted and then raped a woman over the course of 40 minutes and more than two dozen train stops while fellow travelers, watching and filming the attack, did nothing. Not a single witness called 911. Not a single bystander intervened to help the woman. Despite the fact that the man was outnumbered and could have been overwhelmed by those on the train, no collective effort was made to ward off the attack. Only when it was too late, when the damage had been done and the train had pulled into its last stop, did police show up to intervene.

There is an allegory here for what is happening to our country and its citizens, who have also been waylaid by a madman (the Deep State), stripped of their safety nets (their rights undermined and eroded), and savaged out in the open by a fiend (the American Police State and its many operatives—the courts, the legislatures and their various armies) that is devoid of humanity while those not in the immediate crosshairs watch safely from a distance without making a move to help.

This is madness, yet there is a method to this madness.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

Remember, authoritarian regimes begin with incremental steps: overcriminalization, surveillance of innocent citizens, imprisonment for nonviolent—victimless—crimes, etc. Bit by bit, the citizenry finds its freedoms being curtailed and undermined for the sake of national security. And slowly the populace begins to submit.

No one speaks up for those being targeted.

No one resists these minor acts of oppression.

No one recognizes the indoctrination into tyranny for what it is.

Historically this failure to speak truth to power has resulted in whole populations being conditioned to tolerate unspoken cruelty toward their fellow human beings, a bystander syndrome in which people remain silent and disengaged—mere onlookers—in the face of abject horrors and injustice.

Time has insulated us from the violence perpetrated by past regimes in their pursuit of power: the crucifixion and slaughter of innocents by the Romans, the torture of the Inquisition, the atrocities of the Nazis, the butchery of the Fascists, the bloodshed by the Communists, and the cold-blooded war machines run by the military industrial complex.

We can disassociate from such violence. We can convince ourselves that we are somehow different from the victims of government abuse. We can continue to spout empty political rhetoric about how great America is, despite the evidence to the contrary.

We can avoid responsibility for holding the government accountable.

We can zip our lips and bind our hands and shut our eyes.

In other words, we can continue to exist in a state of denial. Yet there is no denying the ugly, hard truths that become more evident with every passing day.

  1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”
  2. Our so-called government representatives do not actually represent us, the citizenry. We are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests whose main interest is in perpetuating power and control.
  3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.
  4. The lesser of two evils is still evil.
  5. Some years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?” The answer, then and now, remains the same: None. There is virtually no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
  6. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us
  7. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance.
  8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.
  9. America’s shadow government—which is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now and operates beyond the reach of the Constitution with no real accountability to the citizenry—is the real reason why “we the people” have no control over our government.
  10. You no longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class—that is, the citizenry—of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.
  11. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
  12. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes. Likewise, private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. 
  13. We now find ourselves caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, and “we the people” are losing.
  14. All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.
  15. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.
  16. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
  17. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
  18. Finally, freedom is never free. There is always a price—always a sacrifice—that must be made in order to safeguard one’s freedoms.

We cannot remain silent in the face of the government’s ongoing overreaches, power grabs, and crimes against humanity.

Evil disguised as bureaucracy is still evil. Indeed, this is what Hannah Arendt referred to as the banality of evil.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, such evil happens when bureaucrats (governmental and corporate) unquestioningly carry out orders that are immoral and inhumane; obey immoral instructions unthinkingly; march in lockstep with tyrants; mindlessly perpetuate acts of terror and inhumanity; and justify it all as just “doing one’s job.”

Such evil prevails when good men and women do nothing.

By doing nothing, by remaining silent, by being bystanders to injustice, hate and wrongdoing, good people become as guilty as the perpetrator.

There’s a term for this phenomenon where people stand by, watch and do nothing—even when there is no risk to their safety—while some horrific act takes place (someone is mugged or raped or bullied or left to die): it’s called the bystander effect.

It works the same whether you’re talking about kids watching bullies torment a fellow student on a playground, bystanders watching someone dying on a sidewalk, passengers on a train filming a fellow traveler be raped without intervening to help, or citizens remaining silent in the face of government atrocities.

We need to stop being silent bystanders.

It’s time to stand up for truth—for justice—for freedom—not just for ourselves but for all humanity. Tomorrow may be too late.

The Anonymous Executioners of the Corporate State

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Imprisoning the David to Chevron’s Goliath is the latest outrage by a US judiciary now engineered to always favor the interests of capital.

by Chris Hedges

By Chris Hedges

Source: Mint Press News

Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.

Preska’s caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law” — capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant, “You really are a lousy piece of trash!”

Donziger, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has been fighting against polluting American oil companies for nearly three decades on behalf of indigenous communities and peasant farmers in Ecuador. His only “crime” was winning a $9.5 billion judgment in 2011 against Chevron for thousands of plaintiffs. The oil giant had bought Texaco oil company holdings in Ecuador, inheriting a lawsuit alleging it deliberately discharged 16 billion gallons of toxic waste from its oil sites into rivers, groundwater, and farmland. Since the verdict, Chevron has come after him, weaponizing litigation to destroy him economically, professionally, and personally.

The sentencing came a day after Donziger petitioned the court to consider an opinion by the United Nations human rights council that found his house arrest a violation of international human rights law. The U.N human rights council said his house arrest counted as detention under international law and it was therefore illegal for Judge Preska to demand an additional six months in jail. Amnesty International also called for Donziger’s immediate release.

Donziger and his lawyers have two weeks to appeal the judge’s order that Donziger be sent immediately to jail. Preska denied Donziger bail claiming he is a flight risk. If the Federal Court of Appeals turns down Donziger’s appeal he will go to jail for six months. The irony, not lost on Donziger and his lawyers, is that the higher court may overturn Preska’s ruling against him, but by the time that decision is made he will potentially have already spent six months in jail.

“What Judge Preska is trying to do is force me to serve the entirety of my sentence before the appellate court can rule,” Donziger told me by phone on Monday. “If the appellate court rules in my favor, I will still have served my sentence, although I am innocent in the eyes of the law.”

Donziger, his lawyers have pointed out, is the first person under U.S. law charged with a “B” misdemeanor to be placed on home confinement, prior to trial, with an ankle monitor. He is the first person charged with any misdemeanor to be held under home confinement for over two years. He is the first attorney ever to be charged with criminal contempt over a discovery dispute in a civil case where the attorney went into voluntary contempt to pursue an appeal. He is the first person to be prosecuted under Rule 42 (criminal contempt) by a private prosecutor with financial ties to the entity and industry that was a litigant in the underlying civil dispute that gave rise to the orders. He is the first person tried by a private prosecutor who had ex parte communications with the charging judge while that judge remained (and remains) unrecused on the criminal case.

“No lawyer in New York for my level of offense ever has served more than 90 days and that was in home confinement,” Donziger told the court. “I have now been in home confinement eight times that period of time. I have been disbarred without a hearing where I have been unable to present factual evidence; thus, I am unable to earn an income in my profession. I have no passport. I can’t travel; can’t do human rights work the normal way which I believe I am reasonably good at; can’t see my clients in Ecuador; can’t visit the affected communities to hear the latest news of cancer deaths or struggles to maintain life in face of constant exposure to oil pollution. In addition, and this is little known, Judge [Lewis A.] Kaplan has imposed millions and millions of dollars of fines and courts costs on me. [Kaplan is the judge for Chevron’s lawsuit against Donziger; Preska is his handpicked judge for the contempt charges.] He has ordered me to pay millions to Chevron to cover their legal fees in attacking me, and then he let Chevron go into my bank accounts and take all my life’s savings because I did not have the funds to cover these costs. Chevron still has a pending motion to order me to pay them an additional $32 [million] in legal fees. That’s where things stand today. I ask you humbly: might that be enough punishment already for a Class B misdemeanor?”

Judge Preska was unmoved.

“Mr. Donziger has spent the last seven years thumbing his nose at the U.S. judicial system,” Preska said at his sentencing hearing. “Now it’s time to pay the piper.”

The six-month sentence was the maximum the judge was allowed to impose; she ruled that his house arrest cannot be counted as part of his detention. From start to finish, this has been a burlesque. It is emblematic of a court system that has been turned over to lackies of corporate power, who use the veneer of jurisprudence, decorum, and civility to make a mockery of the rule of law.

When the law is neutered, judges become the enforcers of injustice. These corporate judges, who epitomize what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, now routinely make war on workers, civil liberties, unions, and environmental regulations.

Preska sent Jeremy Hammond to prison for a decade for hacking into the computers of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011, Hammond released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some three million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum Preska could impose under a plea agreement in the case. I sat through the Hammond trial. I watched Preska spew her bile and contempt at Hammond from the bench with the same vitriol she used to attack Donziger.

Preska is also infamous for her long judicial crusade to force New York public schools to provide tax-subsidized free space for evangelical churches based on blatantly illogical readings of the Constitution.

The persecution of Donziger fits a pattern familiar to millions of poor Americans who are coerced into accepting plea deals, many for crimes they did not commit, and sent to prison for decades. It fits the pattern of the judicial lynching and prolonged psychological torture of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. It fits the pattern of those denied habeas corpus and due process at Guantánamo Bay or in CIA black sites. It fits the pattern of those charged under terrorism laws, many held at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan, who cannot see the evidence used to indict them. It fits the pattern of the widespread use of Special Administrative Measures, known as SAMs, imposed to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media, and people outside the jail. It fits the pattern of the extreme sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation used on those in our black sites and prisons, a form of psychological torture, the refinement of torture as science. By the time a “terrorist” is dragged into our secretive courts the bewildered suspect no longer has the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves. If they can do this legally to the demonized they can, and one day will, do it to the rest of us. The Donziger case is an ominous warning that the American legal system is broken.

Ralph Nader, who graduated from Harvard Law School, has long decried the capture of the courts and law schools by corporate power, calling the nation’s attorneys and judges “lucrative cogs in the corporate wheel.” He notes that law school curriculums are “built around corporate law, and corporate power, and corporate perpetration, and corporate defense.”

Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, astutely noted how at first the Nazis “changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system. They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittle], at once the most public and most secret.” And, Klemperer noted, as the redefinition of old concepts took place the public was oblivious.

This redefinition of words and concepts has, as Klemperer witnessed during the rise of fascism, allowed the courts to twist the law into an instrument of injustice, revoking our rights by judicial fiat. It has seen the courts permit unlimited dark money into political campaigns under Citizens United, defending our money-saturated elections as the right to petition the government and a form of free speech. The courts have revoked our right to privacy and legalized wholesale government surveillance in the name of national security. The courts grant corporations the rights of individuals, while rarely holding the individuals who run the corporations accountable for corporate crimes.

Very few of the legal rulings that benefit corporate power have popular support. The corporate disemboweling of the country, therefore, is increasingly given cover by Christian fascists, who energize their base around abortion, prayer in schools, guns and breaking down the separation of church and state. These issues are rarely addressed in cases before federal courts. But they distract the base from the slew of pro-corporate rulings that dominate most court dockets.

Corporations such as Tyson Foods, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam’s Warehouse have poured millions into institutions that indoctrinate these Christian fascists, including Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. They fund the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which campaigned for Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Barrett opposes abortion and belongs to People of Praise, a far-right Catholic cult that practices “speaking in tongues.” She and the other far-right ideologues are hostile to LGBTQ rights. But this is not why she is so beloved by corporations, who are not interested in abortion, LGBTQ equality or gun rights.

Barrett and the Christian fascists embrace an ideology that believes that God will take care of the righteous. Those who are poor, those who are sick, those who go to prison, those who are unemployed, those who cannot succeed in society do so because they have failed to please God. In this worldview there is no need for unions, universal health care, a social safety net or prison reform. Barrett has ruled consistently in favor of corporations to cheat gig workers out of overtime, green-light fossil fuel extraction and pollution and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. The watchdog group Accountable.US found that as a circuit court judge, Barrett “faced at least 55 cases in which citizens took on corporate entities in front of her court and 76% of the time she sided with the corporations.”

The Christian fascists, allied with organizations such as the Federalist Society, under the Trump administration gave lifetime appointments to nearly 200 judges, roughly 23 percent of all federal judgeships. That included 53 to the nation’s appellate courts, the court immediately under the Supreme Court. The American Bar Association, the country’s largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers, has rated many of these appointments as unqualified. There are currently six Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, who Nader calls “a corporation masquerading as a human being.” Two Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, who was an original faculty advisor to the organization founded by conservative law students in 1982, were supported in the nomination process by Joe Biden.

The stacking of the courts with corporate puppets, however, began long before Trump. It was carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Preska was appointed by Republican President G.W. Bush. However, the judge who preceded Preska in the Donziger case, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former lawyer for the tobacco industry who had undisclosed investments in funds with Chevron holdings, according to his public financial disclosure statement, was appointed by Democratic President Clinton.

The targeting of the courts was one of the key goals of Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer later elevated to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. In Powell’s 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce, a blueprint for the slow-motion corporate coup that has taken place, he called on business interests to pack the judiciary with corporate-friendly judges.

The courts in all tyrannies are dominated by mediocrities and buffoons. They make up for their intellectual and moral vacuity with a zealous subservience to power. They turn courtroom trials into opera buffa, at least until the victim is shackled and pushed out the door to a prison cell. They fulminate in caustic tirades at the condemned, whose sentence is never in doubt and whose guilt is never in question.

“It started when Texaco went into Ecuador in the Amazon in the 1960s and cut a sweetheart deal with the military government then ruling Ecuador,” Donziger told me for a column I wrote about his case a year ago. “Over the next 25 years, Texaco was the exclusive operator of a very large area of the Amazon that had several oil fields within this area, 1500 square miles. They drilled hundreds of wells. They created thousands of open-air, unlined toxic waste pits where they dumped the heavy metals and toxins that came up from the ground when they drilled. They ran pipes from the pits into rivers and streams that local people relied on for their drinking water, their fishing, and their sustenance. They poisoned this pristine ecosystem, in which lived five indigenous peoples, as well as a lot of other nonindigenous rural communities. There was a mass industrial poisoning.”

“The verdict came down, about $18 billion in favor of the affected communities, which is what it would take at a minimum to clean up the actual damage and compensate the people for some of their injuries,” Donziger told me. “That eventually got reduced on appeal in Ecuador to $9.5 billion, but it was affirmed by three appellate courts, including the highest court of Ecuador. It was affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court, where the Ecuadorians went to enforce their judgment in a unanimous opinion in 2015.”

Chevron promptly sold its assets and left Ecuador. It refused to pay the fees to clean up its environmental damage. It invested an estimated $2 million to destroy Danziger. Chevron sued him, using a civil courts portion of the federal law famous for breaking the New York Mafia in the 1970s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO Act. Chevron, which has more than $260 billion in assets, hired an estimated 2,000 lawyers from 60 law firms to carry out its campaign, according to court documents. But the oil giant, which did not want a jury to hear the case, dropped its demand for financial damages, which would have allowed Donziger to request a jury trial. This allowed Judge Kaplan to decide the RICO case against Donziger alone. He found credible a witness named Alberto Guerra, an Ecuadorian judge, relocated to the US by Chevron at a cost of some $2 million, who claimed the verdict in Ecuador was the product of a bribe. Kaplan used Guerra’s testimony as primary evidence for the racketeering charge, although Guerra, a former judge, later admitted to an international tribunal that he had falsified his testimony.

John Keker of San Francisco, one of Donziger’s lawyers on that case, said he was up against 160 lawyers for Chevron and during the trial he felt “like a goat tethered to a stake.” He called the court proceedings under Kaplan “a Dickensian farce” and a “show trial.”

In the end, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in the Ecuadorean court against Chevron was the result of fraud. He also ordered Donziger to turn over decades of all client communication to Chevron, in effect eradicating attorney-client privilege, a backbone of the Anglo-American legal system with roots dating to ancient Rome. Donziger appealed what was, according to legal experts following the case, an unprecedented and illegal order. While Donziger’s appeal was pending, Kaplan charged him with misdemeanor criminal contempt for this principled stance — carrying a maximum sentence of six months — as well as his refusal to turn over his passport, his personal electronics and to refrain from seeking the collection of the original award against Chevron. When the U.S. attorney’s office declined for five years to prosecute his criminal contempt charges against the environmental lawyer, Kaplan, using an exceedingly rare judicial maneuver, appointed the private law firm of Seward & Kissel, to act in the name of the government to prosecute Donziger. Neither the judge nor the law firm disclosed that Chevron has been a client of Seward & Kissel.

Kaplan also violated the established random case assignment protocol to personally assign Preska, who had served on an advisory board of the Federalist Society, a group to which Chevron has been a lavish donor, to hear the case. Kaplan had Preska demand Donziger post an $800,000 bond on the misdemeanor charge. Preska placed him under house arrest and confiscated his passport, which he has used to meet with attorneys around the world attempting to enforce the judgment against Chevron. Kaplan managed to have Donziger disbarred. He allowed Chevron to freeze Donziger’s bank accounts, slapped Donziger with millions in fines without allowing him a jury, forced him to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day and effectively shut down his ability to earn a living. Kaplan allowed Chevron to impose a lien on Donziger’s apartment in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and teenage son.

None of this would surprise those targeted by the tyrannies of the past. What would be surprising, perhaps, to many Americans is how advanced our own corporate tyranny has become. Donziger never stood a chance. Neither does Julian Assange. These judges are not, in the end, focused on Donziger or Assange, but on us. The show trials they preside over are meant to be transparently biased. They are designed to send a message. All who defy corporate power and the national security state will be lynched. There will be no reprieve because there is no justice.