Israeli Pegasus spyware ‘used to hack phones of dozens of Al Jazeera journalists’ in large-scale attack – report
RT | December 20, 2020
The personal phones of some 36 Al Jazeera journalists have been hacked by “government operatives” who used a controversial spying tool by Israel’s infamous NSO Group to snoop on them, a report by a Canadian research lab claims.
The report, released on Sunday by Citizen Lab, a research unit at the University of Toronto specializing in cybersecurity, alleged that the phones belonging to the employees of the Qatar-based media network, including journalists, producers, anchors, and executives, had been compromised and hacked with “an invisible zero-click exploit in IMessage” in July and August this year.
The exploit allowed the perpetrators of the attack, which Citizen Lab, “with a medium degree of confidence,” blamed on “government operatives” from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to infect the phones with spyware without the journalists having to click on malicious links themselves.
In its report, Citizen Lab said that the clandestine techniques employed in the attack “were sophisticated” and therefore “difficult to detect,” since the “targets” were often unaware of anything suspicious going on.
The hack might have remained undetected this time as well, were it not for the network’s Arabic language channel reporter Tamer Almisshal, who sounded the alarm that his phone might have been spied-on and let the researchers monitor his online traffic starting from January 2020. Several months after, in July, the researchers saw his personal phone visiting a website where it got infected with NSO’s group Pegasus spyware without Almisshal’s ever clicking on the link.
The discovery has prompted a wide-ranging search for possible other victims among Al Jazeera staff, eventually leading to Citizen Lab and the channel’s IT unit identifying a total of 36 personal phones that had been successfully targeted by the “four NSO group operators.” One of them, who the group nicknamed “Monarchy,” allegedly tapped into 18 phones, while another one – dubbed “Sneaky Kestrel” – spied on 15 phones.
The group said that it believes “Monarchy” was acting on the marching orders from Riyadh, since it “appears to target individuals primarily inside Saudi Arabia,” while “Sneaky Kestrel” focused on those journalists who were “primarily inside UAE.”
The researchers said that the security loophole that facilitated the hack was closed with the IOS 14 update released in September, but noted that, until then, it had likely been taken advantage of on a large scale. “We suspect that the infections that we observed were a miniscule fraction of the total attacks leveraging this exploit.”
Apple, for its part, appeared to throw weight behind Citizen Lab’s allegations of a state-sanctioned hack, saying that the reported attack “was highly targeted by nation states,” but noted that it could verify the findings of the report.
The Israeli group told The Guardian it would “take all necessary steps,” if it is provided with “credible evidence” that its spying tools were abused.
It’s not the first time the producer of Pegasus spyware kit finds itself in the spotlight in connection with allegations that its tech was used against reporters. Amnesty International reported in June this year that an award-winning Morocco-based journalist Omar Radi fell victim to the same spyware in an attack strikingly similar to the one described by Citizen Lab.
Last year, WhatsApp confirmed that dozens of Indian lawyers, journalists, and rights activists were among 1,400 users affected by the snooping software.
Despite the perpetual controversy surrounding the NSO group, an Israeli court in July sided with the firm and the Israeli Ministry of Defense in a case brought by Amnesty International, which demanded a ban on international sales of the software.
Trump’s China tweet ‘destructive & deceitful’ as there isn’t ‘ANY QUESTION’ Russia behind latest hacking scare, Adam Schiff claims
RT | December 20, 2020
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in blaming Russia for a recent massive cyber attack. He also slammed President Donald Trump for the inconvenient suggestion China could have been the culprit.
“Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think there’s any question that it was Russia,” Schiff, who is the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC on Sunday, commenting on the hack.
The hacking operation in question targeted the SolarWinds Orion Platform, a network monitoring tool used by US government agencies and numerous corporations. There has been no evidence presented that Russia was behind the hack, but Pompeo alleged otherwise in a recent interview.
The president broke with his secretary of state on Saturday and called out “fake news media” for their anonymous reports pinning the hack on Russia. He also suggested China may have been behind the hack, tying it to his ongoing allegations of voter fraud in key swing states during November’s election.
Schiff, one of the president’s most vocal critics in the House and a supporter of evidence-free claims Russia colluded to influence the 2016 presidential election, called Trump’s tweets “uniformly destructive and deceitful and injurious” to the country’s “national security.”
In a previous tweet, Schiff called the president’s China accusation “another scandalous betrayal of our national security.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also pushed back against the president on Sunday, accusing him of having a “blind spot” when it comes to Russia.
“What Russia has done is put in place a capacity to potentially cripple us in terms of our electricity, our water, our communications,” the senator told CNN’s Jake Tapper.
The Republican called for the cyber attack to be “met with a very strong response, not just rhetorical, important as that is, but also with a cyber response of like magnitude or greater.”
Similarly to 2016, the claim of a major Russian cyber attack on the US comes amid the expected transition of power at the White House – although President Trump continues his legal efforts disputing the election result over the alleged mass-scale voter fraud. When Trump assumed his post in January 2017, the stage had already been set for the worsening of relations with Moscow, which included dozens of Russian diplomats getting expelled by the Obama administration over the allegations of meddling in US affairs and over “hacking” of the election. As Trump’s term progressed, overshadowed by the failed ‘Russiagate’ investigation, initial hopes of a detente with Moscow have all but faded.
Trust the Science: There is Undeniable Scientific Evidence of Widespread Voter Fraud
The Red Elephants – November 27, 2020
Believe the Science
As the American media continues to claim that no evidence for widespread voter fraud exists, many independent forensic data analysts, who have analyzed data scrapes from Edison Research found quite the opposite.
Since November 4th, there have been dozens of statistical analyses completed by data scientists, showing statistical impossibilities in hundreds of counties across the country.
One thorough scientific analysis published calls into question the legitimacy of Biden victories in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia.
This analysis was a through review of 8,954 vote updates and highlighted four decisive updates, which were the most anomalous updates in the entire data set. The experts found that each of the vote updates do not follow the generally observed pattern, and the anomalous behavior of those updates is particularly extreme.
Another scientific analysis by data scientists revealed How Pennsylvania Democrats Used Fake Voter Registration “Birthdays” to Commit Voter Fraud.
The analysts constructed a new metric of potential voter fraud using suspicious distributions of birthdays in Pennsylvania voter registration data. Under this metric, a number of counties in Pennsylvania have extremely unlikely distributions of voter birthdays. Seven counties representing almost 1.4 million votes total (Northumberland, Delaware, Montgomery, Lawrence, Dauphin, LeHigh, and Luzerne) have suspicious birthdays above the 99.5th percentile of plausible distributions, even when using conservative assumptions about what these distributions should look like.
Another statistical analyst recently revealed a scenario of how Democrats pulled off massive fraud in Montgomery county, Pennsylvania with ballot harvesting on a massive scale.
Another scientific analysis looked at the shift in voting patterns that occurred between the 2016 and 2020 elections to identify suspicious counties. The two with the largest shifts were Oakland and Wayne in Michigan.
Experts analyzed the election data from the two Michigan counties, and concluded that there are major statistical aberrations that are extremely unlikely to occur naturally. Using more conventional statistical analyses, they identified nine total different counties in Michigan alone with abnormal results.
Their expert recommendation was that those Michigan counties should have an audited recount for every ballot and signature.
According to another analysis by William M Briggs, PhD, approximately 154,000 votes have gone missing across several states. In Pennsylvania alone, there were around 30,000 Republican ballots not accounted for.
According to yet another expert analysis by Dr. Kershavarz-Nia who has a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D in various areas of computer engineering, Dominion memory cards with cryptographic key access to the systems were stolen in 2019.
Kershavarz-Nia has also trained with the CIA, NSA, and DHS office of Intelligence & Analysis. He is arguably the best and most experienced cyber security expert in the world. His technical expertise was touted by the New York Times and he has been described as a hero in the Washington Monthly. The findings in his nine-page affidavit is summed up as follows:
“I conclude with high confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states resulting in hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump to be transferred to Vice President Biden. These alterations were the result of systemic and widespread exploitable vulnerabilities in DVS, Scytl/SOE Software and Smartmatic systems that enabled operators to achieve the desired results. In my view, the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible.”
With many of the swing states ending in razor thin margins, many republicans have called for an audit to determine exactly how many non-citizens voted in the election. In an election where the difference in results is within 1% in key states, this is a legitimate concern considering their turnout has been confirmed to swing elections in the past.
One scientific study from 2014 concluded that participation in US election by non-citizens has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and Congressional elections.
Despite the media consistently claiming that there is no evidence, endless scientific analyses, countless anomalies, and hundreds of affidavits exist that say otherwise.
Scientifically Analyzing Vote Spikes
In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major vote spikes that substantially and decisively improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia.
Much skepticism and uncertainty in the scientific community surrounds these vote spikes. Suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates’ vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, casts doubt on the legitimacy the spikes.
Pennsylvania
In Pennsylvania, there were multiple very questionable vote spikes. In the early morning hours of November 4th, one particular vote spike of 337,000 votes, almost all for Joe Biden appears in the data. Approximately only 3,000 of those votes were for President Trump.
There was also a major vote spike in Georgia of approximately 107,000 votes for Joe Biden, while only a few thousand votes in the batch went for for President Trump. There were numerous other similar vote spikes in Michigan and Wisconsin, at similar times and dates, with similar results.
No forensic data scientist can provide an explanation for this phenomenon, other than potential illegal ballot harvesting and other forms of fraud at a massive scale. The likelihood of these early morning vote spikes in mail-in ballots legitimately breaking for Joe Biden at the margin they did, is statistically 0% in these states.
Georgia
Michigan:
Wisconsin:
The Red Mirage?
Many point to the ‘red mirage’ hypothesis to explain why these vote spikes favored Joe Joe Biden in key swing states. The red mirage scenario predicted that at the end of election day, it would erroneously appear that President Trump won the election because most states would count the ballots cast in-person on election day first. The hypothesis concluded that after tallying the mail-in ballots, Joe Biden would pull ahead because mail-in ballots tend to favor the democrats more than the republicans.
Outside of the impossibility that these vote spikes favored Joe Biden at margins they did – some as high as 99% – this explanation is particularly impossible considering republicans led in mail-in ballots requested and mail-in and early in-person ballots returned.
According to NBC News on election day, in Michigan Republicans led 41% to 39% in mail-in ballots requested. Republicans also led 42% to 39% with mail-in and early in-person ballots returned.
In Wisconsin on election day , Republicans led in mail-in ballots requested 43% to 35%, and mail-in and early in-person ballots returned 43% to 35%.
Historic Low Mail-in Ballot Rejection Rate
In a normal election year in any given state, hundreds or even thousands of mail-in ballots get tossed out for everything from late postmarks to open envelopes.
North Carolina rejected 546 ballots for just missing witness signatures in the 2012 presidential race. Virginia tossed 216 ballots in the 2018 midterms because they arrived in an unofficial envelope. Arizona discarded 1,516 ballots for non-matching signatures the same year.
In October, USA Today predicted that absentee ballot rejection totals would reach historic levels.
“At least 1.03 million absentee ballots could be tossed if half of the nation votes by mail. Discarded votes jump to 1.55 million if 75% of the country votes absentee. In the latter scenario, more than 185,000 votes could be lost in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – states considered key to capturing the White House.”
In Georgia alone, it was predicted that over 100,000 absentee ballots would be rejected based on the normal percentage that are rejected in an average year.
That’s not what happened.
Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania specifically have been accepted at almost 30 times the rate compared to historical norms. This raises serious questions in a swing state in which Democratic challenger Joe Biden is the projected to be the winner.
Reports about the rejection rate for mail-in ballots in the general election suggest that it was a fraction of a percent, which is up to 30 times lower than absentee ballots in an election without mass vote-by-mail.
The below graph shows the estimated rejectable votes vs the Biden margin of victory in key swing states.
Pennsylvania Impossibilities
In Pennsylvania since 2016, Democrats have lost over 50,000 registered voters. During the same time period, Republicans have gained over 150,000 registered voters statewide.
Not only did President Trump lose this state after leading by almost 800,000 votes on election day, but Joe Biden also annihilated Barack Obama’s 2012 numbers, as well as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals by 500,000 each.
While President Trump dominated in Ohio, Indiana, and Florida – flipping blue counties that haven’t been red for decades – he also lost in several demographically identical counties in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and is projected to lose those states.
The below graph depicts these highly questionable results.
According to data scientists, there were also over 200,000 ballots either returned a day before they were mailed out, returned on the same day, or one day
More than 20,000 absentee ballots in Pennsylvania have impossible return dates and more than 80,000 have marked return dates that raise questions, according to a researcher’s analysis of the state’s voter database.
“Over 51,000 ballots were marked as returned just one day after they were sent out, while nearly 35,000 were marked returned on the same day that they were mailed out.”
Another more than 23,000 have a return date earlier than the sent date. More than 9,000 have no sent date.
A screenshot of publicly available mail ballot data in Pennsylvania showing the date when ballots were sent out (3rd column from right) and received (2nd column from right) only one day apart. (Data source: Pennsylvania Secretary of State)
According to Politico, it was the ballots found in postal facilities that put Biden over the top in Pennsylvania. Postal workers found thousands of ballots in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh facilities Thursday after election day.
There also happens to be a record number of 90-year-olds registered to vote – in one year – than at any point in Pennsylvania history.
Another analysis of voting data in Pennsylvania shows that even if Joe Biden won 95% of returned Democrat mail-in votes, 21% of returned Republican votes, and 80% of returned independent votes, he would still have come up short of his margin of victory reported in the unofficial tally.
Exit polls showed Biden getting just 8% of the GOP vote overall. While the 95% number for Democrat mail-ins is closer (exits showed him getting 92%), the notion that 80% of mail-in ballots from independents went to Joe Biden is impossible. Exit polls showed Joe Biden winning around 52% of the independents vote overall.
Arizona Impossibilities
In Arizona, Joe Biden completely blew Barack Obama’s 2008 totals out of the water by approximately 700,000 votes. This is despite the fact that republicans gained 30,000 more registered voters than democrats this year in the state. Republicans also led in registered voters by over 100,000 voters in Arizona.
Even after adjusting for the voter registration increase – which republicans led in by a wide margin – a massive gap of hundreds of thousands of votes remains.
Nevada Impossibilities
A recent analysis of Nevada vote tallies uncovered an unprecedented jump in ‘problem voter’ registrations, which will likely prove the Trump legal team with another avenue to challenge Joe Biden’s victory in another state.
In an affidavit filed in the state, a data scientist found a questionable surge of incomplete voter registrations, and those giving casinos and temporary RV parks as “their home or mailing addresses.”
The expert, Dorothy Morgan, said that her initial study of the records showed a ‘historically strange’ jump in voter registrations missing the sex and age of the voter, making any confirmation by poll workers impossible.
She found that in the presidential election of 2016, there were 68 voter registrations missing this particular critical data. In the 2020 election, it was 13,372.
Additionally, over 70% of the incomplete registrations took place between July and September of this year.
In her two-page affidavit, Morgan wrote, “This investigation found over 13K voters whose voter registration information revealed no sex or date of birth. Not only does this mean we cannot verify whether these voters are old enough to vote, it is also historically strange: While one does not expect voter registration information to be perfect, it is very strange that there were very, very few of these kinds of imperfect records with missing or invalid information until this year – when there are 13,372 of them.”
Several addresses were odd too, she wrote.
Sworn Affidavits and Testimonies of Fraud
According to an affidavit in one Michigan lawsuit, one one particular township in the state had a voter turnout of 781.91%
According to the lawsuit, the townships of Zeeland Charter and Grout had 215% and 460% respectively, while ten others had 100% turnout.
In 3,000 precincts in Michigan voter turnout was reported at anywhere between 90% and over 700%.
Another election lawsuit filed in Michigan alleges there was massive voter fraud in vote-counting procedures in Wayne County, a Democratic stronghold and home to the city of Detroit.
Witnesses filing sworn affidavits under oath allege that Wayne County elections officials encouraged fraud, including changing legal names and dates on ballots, ballot-harvesting, voter intimidation, and preventing poll watchers from challenging irregularities in the vote-counting process.
“This type of widespread fraud in the counting and processing of voter ballots cannot be allowed to stand. Michigan citizens are entitled to know that their elections are conducted in a fair and legal manner and that every legal vote is properly counted,” said David A. Kallman, an attorney with the Great Lakes Justice Center.
Another sworn statement from Detroit indicates that several boxes of ballots were brought in through the back door of the TCF center at 9pm on Wednesday. Election rules state that all ballots needed to be inputted into the system by 9pm on Tuesday, November 3rd.
Election workers inputted the entire batch into the QVF system and manually added each voter to the list after 9pm.
Another part of the statement claims election workers assigned ballots to random names already in the Qualified Voter File to people who haven’t voted in the 2020 election. The sworn statement alleges that election workers systematically used false information in order to be able to process the absentee ballots, such as false birthdays.
“Election workers assigned ballots to random names already in the QVF to a person who had not voted. Defendants systematically used false information to process absentee ballots, such as using incorrect of false birthdays. Many times the election workers inserted new names into the QVF after the election and recorded these new voters as having a birthdate of 1/1/1900”
Outperforming Election Norms
Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in every urban county in the United States, yet he outperformed her in only the metropolitan counties of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Biden is set to become the first president in six decades to lose Ohio and Florida, yet win the presidential election. For over 100 years, these states have consistently predicted the national outcome of the election.
Joe Biden lost almost every historic bellwether county across the country, yet is on his way to becoming the 46th president of the United States. The Wall Street Journal recently analyzed the results of 19 counties around the United States that have almost perfect presidential voting prediction records over the last four decades. President Trump won every single county, except Clallam County in Washington state.
Additionally, Joe Biden received more votes than any other candidate in history, despite Democrats’ massive and widespread losses in the House of Representatives.
Donald Trump was the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his re-election while his own party gained seats in the House of Representatives.
Confirmed Errors
On and after election day, there were several confirmed reporting errors that were fixed upon being revealed by journalists as they watched the numbers roll in.
• Arizona
In Arizona according to Politico, an error found in Edison Research data that was identified by a journalist showed that 98% of the vote had been counted on November 4th in Arizona when in fact only 84% of the vote had been counted. Officials corrected this mistake when it was pointed out.
• Georgia
In Georgia, Voters were unable to cast machine ballots for a couple of hours in Morgan and Spalding counties after the electronic devices crashed, state officials said.
The companies “uploaded something last night, which is not normal, and it caused a glitch,” said Marcia Ridley, elections supervisor at Spalding County Board of Election. That glitch prevented poll workers from using the pollbooks to program smart cards that the voters insert into the voting machines.
“That is something that they don’t ever do. I’ve never seen them update anything the day before the election,” Ridley said. Ridley said she did not know what the upload contained.
Additionally in four Georgia counties, there were misplaced memory cards with votes that officials forgot to upload and tally. When the memory cards were discovered, the uncounted voted decreased the margin in the state by a few thousand votes.
• Michigan
There was also something suspicious about the vote reporting in Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016. Initial vote totals there showed Biden ahead of Trump by 29 points, a result that can’t possibly be accurate, as plenty of journalists noted.
When NY Times journalist Ben Rothenberg pointed this out on Twitter, they corrected the totals and called this an ‘error.’
According to the Detroit Free Press, a USA Today affiliate, officials further investigated the wonky election results in Antrim County.
Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy said results on electronic tapes and a computer were somehow scrambled after the cards were transported in sealed bags from township precincts to county offices and uploaded onto a computer.
In 2016, Trump won Antrim County with about 62% of the vote, compared with about 33% for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Trump beat Clinton by about 4,000 votes.
The day after election day, Antrim results showed Democrat Joe Biden leading Trump by slightly more than 3,000 votes, with 98% of precincts reporting.
These results were of course reversed.
In Oakland County’s 15th county commission district, a fixed computer glitch turned a losing Republican into a winner. A computer error led election officials in Oakland County to hand an upset victory Wednesday to a Democrat, only to switch the win back to an incumbent Republican a day later. The incumbent, Adam Kochenderfer appeared to lose by a few hundred votes, an outcome that seemed odd to many in his campaign. After the apparent computer error was found and fixed, Kochenderfer ended up winning by over 1,000 votes.
There were many other confirmed errors, including in Virginia where 100,000 extra votes were tallied for Joe Biden, and more may be revealed as the weeks go on.
Georgia Chaos
In just three counties, Joe Biden’s campaign was able to surpass Barack Obama’s historic 2008 performance by a combined 302,576 votes.
This is nearly 24 times more than the current margin of 12,670 votes, in a state Trump won in 2016. The results defy reason.
There were also many processing delays, specifically in Fulton county Georgia where a pipe suddenly ‘burst’ in the processing center.
On November 4th, at approximately 6:07 a.m., the staff at State Farm Arena notified Fulton County Registration and Elections of a burst pipe affecting the room where absentee ballots were being tabulated.
As of 7 p.m. on Wednesday Fulton County Elections officials said 30,000 absentee ballots were not processed due to a pipe burst. Officials reassured voters that none of the ballots were damaged and the water was quickly cleaned up.
But the emergency delayed officials from processing ballots between 5:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m.
Officials in Georgia have not been able to produce any invoices or work orders related to a “burst pipe” at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena that was blamed for an abrupt pause in vote counting on election night.
According to Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer, a third county in Georgia discovered a memory card with uncounted votes, a majority of which were cast for President Donald Trump.
“Our monitors tell us that Walton County election officials have found a memory card that was apparently not uploaded. The number of uncounted votes is not as large as in Floyd or Fayette but the President will pick up votes,” Shafer said on Twitter.
Previously, in Georgia’s Floyd and Fayette Counties, memory cards were also discovered with uncounted votes, mostly for President Trump. Of the roughly over 5,000 total votes discovered, approximately two thirds of those votes were for President Donald Trump.
The memory cards unearthed in the three counties add up to over 1,400 net votes for Trump, closing his gap with Biden from 14,156 minus 12,753.
Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger blamed the problem on Floyd County election officials failing to upload votes from a memory card in a ballot-scanning machine.
Former Data Chief and Strategist for Trump for President, Matt Braynard also recently discovered an alarming trend happening in Georgia.
Postal facilities like UPS and FedEx were apparently used to cast votes, with their addresses disguised as apartments.
According to Braynard, in Georgia nearly 100% of the voters who disguised a postal facility as their residential address voted absentee, with nearly zero voting on Election Day.
Under federal law, it is illegal to use a post office mailing address to cast your ballot. According to section 2 of this federal document, you cannot use a post office box mailing address.
Even if it was legally allowed under federal law to use a PO box as a residential address for your ballot, most of the postal facilities found in the data do not even have post office boxes at their facilities.
Thus far, Braynard and his team have discovered nearly 1400 early and absentee voters who have registered their residential addresses to postal facilities.
Massive Enthusiasm Gap:
Joe Biden with almost record low enthusiasm, underperformed across many major cities compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
In New York City, Chicago, and Miami, he was down 201,408, 260,835, and 6,945 respectively.
However, in the states Biden needed to overtake Trump in 2020, he gained massively. According to the Associated Press vote total data, in Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Pittsburg, he was up 76,518, 67,630, and 29,150 respectively.
According to polling, The difference in enthusiasm for the candidates is significant. Trump leads 52.9 percent to 45 percent among the 51.2 percent of registered Rust Belt voters who say they are “Extremely Enthusiastic” about voting for their preferred candidate. Among likely voters who are extremely enthusiastic, the president enjoys a double-digit advantage—60.5 percent to 44.9 percent.
Less than half of the supporters of former vice president Joe Biden, (46.9 percent) said they were voting for Joe Biden because they like the candidate. Approximately 8 in 10 voted for President Trump because they wanted his as President.
2020: The Year we Let Ourselves be Infantilised and Dehumanised
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | December 17, 2020
I recently wrote a satirical speech by our Prime Minister, in which I imagined him coming up with all sorts of absurd rules for the Christmas season. It was really hard. Not because I was unable to come up with hundreds of such rules, were I minded to do so, but because the whole point of satire is to raise the absurdities up a step or two, in order to highlight the ridiculousness of what is happening. But how do you do this when the real-life absurdities have already been turned up to 11 on the amplifier? I kid you not when I tell you that my original list included a rule against playing certain board games over Christmas — which I rejected — only to see a few days later SAGE coming out and advising against the playing of board games.
We have now had nearly nine months of being treated like utter imbeciles. A once great country with a once free people has been reduced to the level of being governed by pathetic, childish slogans. And for some reason we have allowed ourselves to be infantilised.
I am utterly baffled as to how people can have sat through some of these slogans being introduced without responding with howls of laughter.
“Stay Alert. Control the Virus. Save Lives.”
What on earth is this actually supposed to mean? Stay Alert? For what? Are we supposed to be on our guard for a virus that is approximately 120 nanometres, or around 1,000th the width of a human hair? Are we to carry an electron microscope around with us wherever we go, just in case? One of my favourite signs is an electronic one I sometimes see on my occasional drives into the office. On one day, it says, “Stay Alert. Control the Virus.” On another, it says, “Stay Alert. Watch out for Cyclists.” It should be noted that cyclists are considerably bigger than 120nm and even often wearing the kind of hi-vis jackets that coronaviruses refuse to wear.
Control the Virus? Say what? You mean they actually think we’re stupid enough to think they’re clever enough to devise schemes that can actually control those little invisible 120 nm virus particles that are in the air and on surfaces. Apparently so.
Save Lives? I am yet to hear a convincing argument as to how I and my family, not having any symptoms and thus not being infected by the virus, can possibly stop the spread of said virus that we don’t have by staying at home or wearing a piece of cloth over or respiratory passages, such that we save lives.
More recently, it has been decided that the slogans were maybe a bit too high-brow and needed to be simplified further, this time into monosyllables: “Hands. Face. Space.” Although I tend to avoid watching Comrade Johnson and Co as they spout this nonsense at their regular stand-ups, on the occasions when I have had that misfortune, it has felt eerily like suddenly being thrust into the world’s largest Kindergarten with teacher talking down to his little charges as if they were really, really stupid.
I won’t sport with your intelligence by mentioning all the other mind-numbing slogans we’ve been fed this year, suffice it to say that phrases such as “social bubble” and “Covid-secure” would be deeply funny were it not for the seriousness of the situation into which those coming up with such tripe have placed us (as an aside, are such buildings for which it is claimed that they are “Covid-secure” also “Flu-Secure” and “Cold-Secure”?)
But the infantilising of an entire population is by no means the worst thing they have done to us. Worse by far has been the dehumanising of millions of people, which has been done via a number of enormously destructive methods.
Chief of them is the idea that we must all avoid each other. I cannot even begin to think how destructive this has become. In a normal society, if you or I have symptoms of a particularly nasty seasonal respiratory illness, which is what Covid-19 is, we would avoid one another. Obviously. But the idea of perfectly healthy people avoiding other perfectly healthy people must qualify as one of the most absurd concepts ever dreamt up. Not only is it self-evidently unnecessary, it is bound to have long-term consequences for the way we view one another, the way we relate to one another, the way we behave around one another. It turns us from seeing one another as humans, made in the Image of God, to walking virus carriers and a potential risk. Some people now literally behave as if they are navigating their way through a crowd of potential terrorists, rather than simply walking through a group of fellow humans.
People avoidance is not just deeply destructive from a psychological and social perspective, it is also deeply cruel. The idea that a grandparent cannot have contact with their children or grandchildren is just obscene. And the very thought of the elderly being left to fester away in care homes, rather than being allowed contact with their families is sick. Yet that’s what we’ve done, or allowed to be done.
And of course, I cannot leave off talking about dehumanisation without mentioning masks. These wretched things were introduced in the Summer, long after the epidemic had waned, at a time when they could not possibly have done any good, even if they had been capable of doing any good. Why were they introduced? Partly to keep the fear-narrative going, even though there was extraordinarily little risk of dying of a seasonal respiratory virus at that time of the year. But even more important, they are a sign of submission. They are a, “we can do with you what we like moment.” They are nothing to do with health. They are a psychological mask, and even more than the social distancing, they have served to alter the way we see one another and are seen by others.
Millions of people humiliated by the Marketing Team of Covid-19 and their infantile slogans. Millions of people dehumanised by having their faces, their smiles, their laughter, their thoughtfulness etc covered to make them into expressionless drones. That was the year we just lived through. Will 2021 be the year a critical mass try to escape the Kindergarten and return to being human?