American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by “liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).
For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of “hate speech” to mean “views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech.” Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.
Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.
When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont’s heating system and Putin’s sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being “Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is “disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID’s origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.
This “disinformation” term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of “disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.
The data proving a deeply radical authoritarian strain in Trump-era Democratic Party politics is ample and have been extensively reported here. Democrats overwhelmingly trust and love the FBI and CIA. Polls show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs but also by the state. Leading Democratic Party politicians have repeatedly subpoenaed social media executives and explicitly threatened them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more aggressively — a likely violation of the First Amendment given decades of case law ruling that state officials are barred from coercing private actors to censor for them, in ways the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly.
Democratic officials have used the pretexts of COVID, “the insurrection,” and Russia to justify their censorship demands. Both Joe Biden and his Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, have “urged” Silicon Valley to censor more when asked about Joe Rogan and others who air what they call “disinformation” about COVID. They cheered the use of pro-prosecutor tactics against Michael Flynn and other Russiagate targets; made a hero out of the Capitol Hill Police officer who shot and killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt; voted for an additional $2 billion to expand the functions of the Capitol Police; have demanded and obtained lengthy prison sentences and solitary confinement even for non-violent 1/6 defendants; and even seek to import the War on Terror onto domestic soil.
Given the climate prevailing in the American liberal faction, this authoritarianism is anything but surprising. For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear — the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again — then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues.
And when it comes to authoritarian tactics, censorship has become the liberals’ North Star. Every week brings news of a newly banished heretic. Liberals cheered the news last week that Google’s YouTube permanently banned the extremely popular video channel of conservative commentator Dan Bongino. His permanent ban was imposed for the crime of announcing that, moving forward, he would post all of his videos exclusively on the free speech video platform Rumble after he received a seven-day suspension from Google’s overlords for spreading supposed COVID “disinformation.” What was Bongino’s prohibited view that prompted that suspension? He claimed cloth masks do not work to stop the spread of COVID, a view shared by numerous experts and, at least in part, by the CDC. When Bongino disobeyed the seven-day suspension by using an alternative YouTube channel to announce his move to Rumble, liberals cheered Google’s permanent ban because the only thing liberals hate more than platforms that allow diverse views are people failing to obey rules imposed by corporate authorities.
It is not hyperbole to observe that there is now a concerted war on any platforms devoted to free discourse and which refuse to capitulate to the demands of Democratic politicians and liberal activists to censor. The spear of the attack are corporate media outlets, who demonize and try to render radioactive any platforms that allow free speech to flourish. When Rumble announced that a group of free speech advocates — including myself, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, comedian Bridget Phetasy, former Sanders campaign videographer Matt Orfalea and journalist Zaid Jilani — would produce video content for Rumble, The Washington Post immediately published a hit piece, relying exclusively on a Google-and-Facebook-aligned so-called “disinformation expert” to malign Rumble as “one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world” and a place “where conspiracies thrive,” all caused by Rumble’s “allowing such videos to remain on the site unmoderated.” (The narrative about Rumble is particular bizarre since its Canadian founder and still-CEO, Chris Pavlovski created Rumble in 2013 with apolitical goals — to allow small content creators abandoned by YouTube to monetize their content — and is very far from an adherent to right-wing ideology).
The same attack was launched, and is still underway, against Substack, also for the crime of refusing to ban writers deemed by liberal corporate outlets and activists to be hateful and/or fonts of disinformation. After the first wave of liberal attacks on Substack failed — that script was that it is a place for anti-trans animus and harassment — The Post returned this week for round two, with a paint-by-numbers hit piece virtually identical to the one it published last year about Rumble. “Newsletter company Substack is making millions off anti-vaccine content, according to estimates,” blared the sub-headline. “Prominent figures known for spreading misinformation, such as [Joseph] Mercola, have flocked to Substack, podcasting platforms and a growing number of right-wing social media networks over the past year after getting kicked off or restricted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube,” warned the Post. It is, evidently, extremely dangerous to society for voices to still be heard once Google decrees they should not be.
This Post attack on Substack predictably provoked expressions of Serious Concern from good and responsible liberals. That included Chelsea Clinton, who lamented that Substack is profiting off a “grift.” Apparently, this political heiress — who is one of the world’s richest individuals by virtue of winning the birth lottery of being born to rich and powerful parents, who in turn enriched themselves by cashing in on their political influence in exchange for $750,000 paychecks from Goldman Sachs for 45-minute speeches, and who herself somehow was showered with a $600,000 annual contract from NBC News despite no qualifications — believes she is in a position to accuse others of “grifting.” She also appears to believe that — despite welcoming convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to her wedding to a hedge fund oligarch whose father was expelled from Congress after his conviction on thirty-one counts of felony fraud — she is entitled to decree who should and should not be allowed to have a writing platform:

This Post-manufactured narrative about Substack instantly metastasized throughout the liberal sect of media. “Anti-vaxxers making ‘at least $2.5m’ a year from publishing on Substack,” read the headline of The Guardian, the paper that in 2018 published the outright lie that Julian Assange met twice with Paul Manafort inside the Ecuadorian Embassy and refuses to this day to retract it (i.e., “disinformation”). Like The Post, the British paper cited one of the seemingly endless number of shady pro-censorship groups — this one calling itself the “Center for Countering Digital Hate” — to argue for greater censorship by Substack. “They could just say no,” said the group’s director, who has apparently convinced himself he should be able to dictate what views should and should not be aired: “This isn’t about freedom; this is about profiting from lies. . . . Substack should immediately stop profiting from medical misinformation that can seriously harm readers.”
The emerging campaign to pressure Spotify to remove Joe Rogan from its platform is perhaps the most illustrative episode yet of both the dynamics at play and the desperation of liberals to ban anyone off-key. It was only a matter of time before this effort really galvanized in earnest. Rogan has simply become too influential, with too large of an audience of young people, for the liberal establishment to tolerate his continuing to act up. Prior efforts to coerce, cajole, or manipulate Rogan to fall into line were abject failures. Shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported in September, 2020 that Spotify employees were organizing to demand that some of Rogan’s shows be removed from the platform, Rogan invited Alex Jones onto his show: a rather strong statement that he was unwilling to obey decrees about who he could interview or what he could say.
On Tuesday, musician Neil Young demanded that Spotify either remove Rogan from its platform or cease featuring Young’s music, claiming Rogan spreads COVID disinformation. Spotify predictably sided with Rogan, their most popular podcaster in whose show they invested $100 million, by removing Young’s music and keeping Rogan. The pressure on Spotify mildly intensified on Friday when singer Joni Mitchell issued a similar demand. All sorts of censorship-mad liberals celebrated this effort to remove Rogan, then vowed to cancel their Spotify subscription in protest of Spotify’s refusal to capitulate for now; a hashtag urging the deletion of Spotify’s app trended for days. Many bizarrely urged that everyone buy music from Apple instead; apparently, handing over your cash to one of history’s largest and richest corporations, repeatedly linked to the use of slave labor, is the liberal version of subversive social justice.
Obviously, Spotify is not going to jettison one of their biggest audience draws over a couple of faded septuagenarians from the 1960s. But if a current major star follows suit, it is not difficult to imagine a snowball effect. The goal of liberals with this tactic is to take any disobedient platform and either force it into line or punish it by drenching it with such negative attacks that nobody who craves acceptance in the parlors of Decent Liberal Society will risk being associated with it. “Prince Harry was under pressure to cut ties with Spotify yesterday after the streaming giant was accused of promoting anti-vax content,” claimed The Daily Mail which, reliable or otherwise, is a certain sign of things to come.
One could easily envision a tipping point being reached where a musician no longer makes an anti-Rogan statement by leaving the platform as Young and Mitchell just did, but instead will be accused of harboring pro-Rogan sentiments if they stay on Spotify. With the stock price of Spotify declining as these recent controversies around Rogan unfolded, a strategy in which Spotify is forced to choose between keeping Rogan or losing substantial musical star power could be more viable than it currently seems. “Spotify lost $4 billion in market value this week after rock icon Neil Young called out the company for allowing comedian Joe Rogan to use its service to spread misinformation about the COVID vaccine on his popular podcast, ‘The Joe Rogan Experience,’” is how The San Francisco Chronicle put it (that Spotify’s stock price dropped rather precipitously contemporaneously with this controversy is clear; less so is the causal connection, though it seems unlikely to be entire coincidental):

It is worth recalling that NBC News, in January, 2017, announced that it had hired Megyn Kelly away from Fox News with a $69 million contract. The network had big plans for Kelly, whose first show debuted in June of that year. But barely more than a year later, Kelly’s comments about blackface — in which she rhetorically wondered whether the notorious practice could be acceptable in the modern age with the right intent: such as a young white child paying homage to a beloved African-American sports or cultural figure on Halloween — so enraged liberals, both inside the now-liberal network and externally, that they demanded her firing. NBC decided it was worth firing Kelly — on whom they had placed so many hopes — and eating her enormous contract in order to assuage widespread liberal indignation. “The cancellation of the ex-Fox News host’s glossy morning show is a reminder that networks need to be more stringent when assessing the politics of their hirings,” proclaimed The Guardian.
Democrats are not only the dominant political faction in Washington, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, but liberals in particular are clearly the hegemonic culture force in key institutions: media, academia and Hollywood. That is why it is a mistake to assume that we are near the end of their orgy of censorship and de-platforming victories. It is far more likely that we are much closer to the beginning than the end. The power to silence others is intoxicating. Once one gets a taste of its power, they rarely stop on their own.
Indeed, it was once assumed that Silicon Valley giants steeped in the libertarian ethos of a free internet would be immune to demands to engage in political censorship (“content moderation” is the more palatable euphemism which liberal corporate media outlets prefer). But when the still-formidable megaphones of The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN and the rest of the liberal media axis unite to accuse Big Tech executives of having blood on their hands and being responsible for the destruction of American democracy, that is still an effective enforcement mechanism. Billionaires are, like all humans, social and political animals and instinctively avoid ostracization and societal scorn.
Beyond the personal interest in avoiding vilification, corporate executives can be made to censor against their will and in violation of their political ideology out of self-interest. The corporate media still has the ability to render a company toxic, and the Democratic Party more now than ever has the power to abuse their lawmaking and regulatory powers to impose real punishment for disobedience, as it has repeatedly threatened to do. If Facebook or Spotify are deemed to be so toxic that no Good Liberals can use them without being attacked as complicit in fascism, white supremacy or anti-vax fanaticism, then that will severely limit, if not entirely sabotage, a company’s future viability.
The one bright spot in all this — and it is a significant one — is that liberals have become such extremists in their quest to silence all adversaries that they are generating their own backlash, based in disgust for their tyrannical fanaticism. In response to the Post attack, Substack issued a gloriously defiant statement re-affirming its commitment to guaranteeing free discourse. They also repudiated the hubristic belief that they are competent to act as arbiters of Truth and Falsity, Good and Bad. “Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse,” read the headline on the post from Substack’s founders. The body of their post reads like a free speech manifesto:
That’s why, as we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation. While we have content guidelines that allow us to protect the platform at the extremes, we will always view censorship as a last resort, because we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society.
A lengthy Twitter thread from Substack’s Vice President of Communications, Lulu Cheng Meservey was similarly encouraging and assertive. “I’m proud of our decision to defend free expression, even when it’s hard,” she wrote, adding: “because: 1) We want a thriving ecosystem full of fresh and diverse ideas. That can’t happen without the freedom to experiment, or even to be wrong.” Regarding demands to de-platform those allegedly spreading COVID disinformation, she pointedly — and accurately — noted: “If everyone who has ever been wrong about this pandemic were silenced, there would be no one left talking about it at all.” And she, too, affirmed principles that every actual, genuine liberal — not the Nancy Pelosi kind — reflexively supports:
People already mistrust institutions, media, and each other. Knowing that dissenting views are being suppressed makes that mistrust worse. Withstanding scrutiny makes truths stronger, not weaker. We made a promise to writers that this is a place they can pursue what they find meaningful, without coddling or controlling. We promised we wouldn’t come between them and their audiences. And we intend to keep our side of the agreement for every writer that keeps theirs. to think for themselves. They tend not to be conformists, and they have the confidence and strength of conviction not to be threatened by views that disagree with them or even disgust them.
This is becoming increasingly rare.
The U.K.’s Royal Society, its national academy of scientists, this month echoed Substack’s view that censorship, beyond its moral dimensions and political dangers, is ineffective and breeds even more distrust in pronouncements by authorities. “Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal for combatting harmful scientific misinformation online.” “There is,” they concluded, “little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms” and “such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.”
As both Rogan’s success and collapsing faith and interest in traditional corporate media outlets proves, there is a growing hunger for discourse that is liberated from the tight controls of liberal media corporations and their petulant, herd-like employees. That is why other platforms devoted to similar principles of free discourse, such as Rumble for videos and Callin for podcasts, continue to thrive. It is certain that those platforms will continue to be targeted by institutional liberalism as they grow and allow more dissidents and heretics to be heard. Time will tell if they, too, will resist these censorship pressures, but the combination of genuine conviction on the part of their founders and managers, combined with the clear market opportunities for free speech platforms and heterodox thinkers, provides ample ground for optimism.
None of this is to suggest that American liberals are the only political faction that succumbs to the strong temptations of censorships. Liberals often point to the growing fights over public school curricula and particularly the conservative campaign to exclude so-called Critical Race Theory from the public schools as proof that the American Right is also a pro-censorship faction. That is a poor example. Censorship is about what adults can hear, not what children are taught in public schools. Liberals crusaded for decades to have creationism banned from the public schools and largely succeeded, yet few would suggest this was an act of censorship. For the reason I just gave, I certainly would define it that way. Fights over what children should and should not be taught can have a censorship dimension but usually do not, precisely because limits and prohibitions in school curricula are inevitable.
There are indeed examples of right-wing censorship campaigns: among the worst are laws implemented by GOP legislatures and championed by GOP governors to punish those who support a boycott of Israel by denying them contracts or other employment benefits. And among the most frequent targets of censorship campaigns on college campuses are critics of Israel and activists for Palestinian rights. But federal courts have been unanimously striking down those indefensible red-state laws punishing BDS activists as an unconstitutional infringement of free speech rights, and polling data, as noted above, shows that it is the Democrats who overwhelmingly favor internet censorship while Republicans oppose it.
In sum, censorship — once the province of the American Right during the heydey of the Moral Majority of the 1980s — now occurs in isolated instances in that faction. In modern-day American liberalism, however, censorship is a virtual religion. They simply cannot abide the idea that anyone who thinks differently or sees the world differently than they should be heard. That is why there is much more at stake in this campaign to have Rogan removed from Spotify than whether this extremely popular podcast host will continue to be heard there or on another platform. If liberals succeed in pressuring Spotify to abandon their most valuable commodity, it will mean nobody is safe from their petty-tyrant tactics. But if they fail, it can embolden other platforms to similarly defy these bullying tactics, keeping our discourse a bit more free for just awhile longer.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | CIA, FBI, Human rights, United States |
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Murphy, a practicing surgeon, says the GOP Doctors Caucus is “infuriated” with the White House and its chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, for promoting Covid-19 vaccinations too heavily while ignoring potential therapeutic treatments.
“I’m a vice chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus. We are infuriated – infuriated – that this has all been about vaccination. Fauci has been, ‘Vaccination, vaccination, vaccination,’ rather than therapeutics,” Murphy told Breitbart News on Friday, adding that he believes there is no way for the US to “vaccinate our way” out of the pandemic.
“There should be something that we should be able to write and prescribe that’s not $800 a pill for people who test positive to try to get them better, not only keep them out of the hospital, but get them better, get them back to work, and let society function, I think this is a major problem,” Murphy said. He suggested drugs like ivermectin – most famously taken by podcaster Joe Rogan when he tested positive for Covid – should be studied to find alternate treatments to Covid to avoid continuous vaccines and subsequent booster shots.
Public trust in health officials has deteriorated during the pandemic, Murphy went on to say, and he puts the majority of the blame on Fauci’s “arrogance.”
“Fauci, I’m going to blame [him] as the biggest reason, his arrogance, [that] the trust of the American people in health care, and in doctors, in particular, has plummeted,” the North Carolina Republican said.
The GOP Doctors Caucus is made up of 18 congressional members who are also medical providers, and focuses on policy related to healthcare.
While Fauci has remained popular among Democrats, his approval ratings have plummeted among Independents and Republicans as the infectious diseases expert has become a target of critics of vaccine mandates and pandemic-era lockdown orders.
The GOP Doctors Caucus even previously requested an apology from Fauci for referring to Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) as a “moron” in a hot mic moment following a back and forth about the doctor’s financial disclosures.
Fauci argued at the time that all of the information the senator was requesting was publicly available. The White House medical adviser has maintained that vaccines are the best way to combat Covid-19 and to prevent mutations.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | Anthony Fauci, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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Remember the good old days at the beginning of the COVID coup – before the new dogmas started to tangle themselves into self-contradictory knots?
Back then, if you wanted to know what to think, the Infallible Ones always had simple answers.
What was the enemy? A virus called SARS-CoV-2. Where did it come from? Chinese bats and pangolins. When would it end? After a few weeks of “lockdown” and the introduction of “vaccines.” How did you protect yourself from it in the meantime? By isolating yourself at home, wearing a muzzle, obsessively washing your hands, leaving your shoes outside the door, avoiding other human beings, scrubbing the walls and counters – above all, by obeying whatever orders the Infallible Ones gave you.
And if you didn’t obey? You would die.
But “oh, what a tangled web we weave,” as the poet said, “when first we practice to deceive.” The Infallible Ones’ teachings were soon mired in baffling inconsistencies. A “few weeks” of lockdown gave way to months, which in turn gave way to threats of recurring confinements whenever the authorities deemed it expedient. Summertime assurances of the “success” of the national incarceration – which had upended the health care system, educationally crippled a generation of children, and tossed away the livelihoods of millions of innocent people, though the Infallible Ones seldom mentioned any of that – were succeeded by “expert” scoldings to the effect that we Americans had been too selfish to be confined at all.
When randomized clinical trials proved that face masks were useless, the Infallible Ones told us to wear two masks instead of one. When the Infallible Ones abandoned the canard of “asymptomatic transmission” – after it had fulfilled its function of stoking public hysteria – they adopted the equally silly canard that “the unvaccinated” were unique breeding grounds for viral mutations.
Even the virus itself, which the Infallible Ones had originally pronounced so unique, became the very opposite of unique as the Infallible Ones translated it into an ever-enlarging ensemble of similar viral “strains” in which new ones appeared just often enough to offset the gains supposedly made by the “vaccines.”
And meanwhile – most important of all – what was supposed to be a temporary suspension of constitutional government became a “new normal”; the law, or what had always been the law, turned out to be as obsolete as the idea of dealing with an infectious disease by giving medical treatment to the genuinely sick. In the world of the “new normal,” anyone who mentioned “civil rights” was hustled off social media and into First Amendment limbo. Democracy was mocked as a reactionary’s pipe dream – when it was mentioned at all.
That’s the record, in brief, of the past two years. And if we have learned anything from this cavalcade of deceit, it is, or should be, that the COVID coup is fundamentally not about medicine or science. It is not about inflated “case” rates or jiggered statistics or fake news or the pseudo-studies circulated by propaganda outfits like the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yes, all those things have figured in the derangement of constitutional democracy that has characterized the COVID coup. But at bottom it’s not about any of them.
The real nature of the campaign is at once simpler and far more dangerous. What we’re experiencing is an attack on the very foundation of ordered liberty, an assault that is already in the process of submerging democracies beneath what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called a “permanent ‘state of exception.’” To put it bluntly: our ruling classes, in one country after another, have effectively switched off their nations’ constitutions and the whole set of civil liberties that are supposed to accompany them – not by formally abolishing them, mind you, but by adopting the extra-legal mechanisms of a “state of emergency” in place of normal constitutional procedures, with the result that the ordinary rules of democracy and the rights of individuals have, for most practical purposes, been indefinitely suspended.
That’s why the COVID coup began, in my own country, with declarations of an “emergency” in four-fifths of the states – and why, with very rare exceptions, those “states of emergency” remain in effect to this day, nearly two years later. Again, this cannot be explained away as a response to a respiratory virus. When an “emergency” involves suspending constitutional government for two years, it should be obvious that the “emergency” has ceased to be a real emergency (if it ever was one) and has become an extralegal norm – and this is even more emphatically true when virtually no one in the political opposition, the civil rights bar, or the mainstream media so much as mentions this fundamental fact.
My point is that those of us who recognize what is happening are going to have to shift our tactics. We can no longer attack COVID-19 propaganda in piecemeal fashion, challenging one medical falsehood at a time. That approach, I’m afraid, is likely to be self-defeating. As long as we focus on disproving each particular COVID “narrative,” the Infallible Ones can continue to manage the debate in mass media as a conflict between the interpretations of “experts” and those of “conspiracy theorists.”
And that allows them to skirt the real issue. COVID fascism is not a comedy of scientific errors. For all intents and purposes, it is a coup d’état. And it must be resisted accordingly.
Still, if we aren’t going to debunk every lie swirling through mass media or dished out by the “experts,” how can we be sure that we stand on solid factual ground as we resist the coup unfolding all around us – particularly if, as I’m arguing, we must begin by asserting that our struggle is about regaining our freedoms, not about correcting a medical policy?
Actually, there are many reasons we can be sure. And now, as we approach the third year of the coup, I want to offer a short list of them.
1) The COVID coup has consistently relied on unconstitutional methods
The first and most unmistakable clue about the real nature of the coup is its aggressive destruction of constitutional government. Right from the start, it involved suspensions of the legislatures; from there it moved quickly to arbitrary rule by executive fiat (mask “mandates” followed by “vaccine passports”), and then indulged head-on in violations of constitutional rights, as in the imposition of mass “quarantines” without a court order – an illegal act even under “emergency” dispensation.
I have argued this in print for over a year and a half, so I won’t belabor the point now except to stress the complicity of mass media in the unprecedented assault on our basic rights. The most important lie, of course, has been one of omission: the press simply never mentions the absence of any constitutional basis for the repeated attacks on freedom.
But I would like to call attention to a small but very revealing lie that crops up every time the press reports a new COVID-related “order.” Last month’s story about sweeping new muzzling requirements in California was a case in point. “California is ordering a statewide mask mandate for indoor public spaces,” blared the Los Angeles Times. But “California” does not and cannot issue a “mandate.” Promulgations of legal requirements belong to the appropriate organs of government – and that means that an honest report would have necessarily told readers how the mandate in question came to be. What body passed the law? Who signed it? Which agency issued the regulation, if it was a regulation, and what was the statutory authority for it to do so? In my opinion, it was no accident that the Times never informed its readers that the new California “mandate” was a unilateral edict signed by Tomas Aragon, the head of California’s Department of Public Health – an edict that did not even attempt to identify any authority for such an action in California’s statutes or regulatory code.
I repeat: in a constitutional government, health regulations are always grounded in such authority; “mandates” that ignore this are violations of law at best, dictatorial usurpations at worst. And the propagandists in the media, though they know this, obviously do not want you to know it.
The same story – political crime furthered by media complicity – emerges just as clearly from New York’s latest assault on the Nuremberg Code. The fiat recently issued by the state’s dictator – officially, Governor Kathy Hochul – claims to acquire authority for a statewide “vaccine mandate” from New York’s Public Health Law, section 225. But that statutory section does not address vaccination policy at all – and since the COVID-19 “vaccines” do not even prevent person-to-person transmission, there is no legal way the section’s general language about “the preservation and improvement of public health” can be construed to give the state’s governor the power to force 5-year-old children to be injected with experimental drugs, as Ms. Hochul has ordered.
In short, the “governor” – the word really must be put in quotation marks at this point – is acting outside her legal powers. And if we had a political opposition and a functioning court system worthy of the name, she might be facing impeachment instead of routine accolades from the tame “liberal” press, which calls this democracy-wrecking child poisoner “a moderate Democrat.”
Consider, by contrast, the intense debate over the 1985 decision of New York State’s public health council to rewrite its regulations so as to force the closing of gay bathhouses. That decision – taken at the height of the AIDS outbreak – was denounced by liberals at the time and is sharply criticized by students of political history to this day. Imagine the reaction if New York’s governor had simply written a unilateral order closing all gay bathhouses in the state, thumbing his nose at New York’s legislature and the whole existing regulatory system on the grounds that, in his view, New York faced an “emergency” that justified the suspension of democracy!
But that is exactly what has happened in states across the country – New York and my own state of New Jersey among them – for nearly two years: state executives have issued fiats suspending legal processes on the grounds of a hazily-defined “emergency,” and have followed them up with a series of unilateral decrees that drastically altered the lives of their citizenry – in direct defiance of their states’ constitutions. You cannot support that and support constitutional democracy at the same time. The propagandists may not like to admit it, but when they sing the praises of mask “mandates,” they are celebrating dictatorship.
And the democracy-busters are everywhere. In New York City, outgoing Mayor Bill DeBlasio slapped a “vaccine mandate” on all municipal employees, topping off the outrage by extending the same requirement to 184,000 private business and organizations. The mayor’s constitutional authority to order this assault on bodily integrity was so obviously shaky that a local judge promptly stayed his order. But that didn’t bother DeBlasio, who said, “I hope [this measure] will be emulated all over the country because it’s time to get even tougher to end the COVID era.” Got it? When you’re being “tough,” who cares about the law?
2) The one thing no one in the mainstream wants to mention is the biggest thing of all: that our civil liberties are evaporating
DeBlasio and Hochul are both Democrats, and it’s tempting to focus on the hypocrisy at the leftward end of the mainstream political spectrum. But it’s not just the “liberals” who have betrayed the Bill of Rights. We’re constantly told that the U.S. Supreme Court is dominated by “conservatives,” but when New York’s rampaging governor decreed that healthcare workers must submit to COVID-19 vaccination – even if they have religious objections to the experimental drugs (she claimed personal knowledge that God doesn’t support exemptions for these particular drugs) – only three justices out of nine were prepared to offer any relief. I don’t always agree with Neil Gorsuch, but the ominous conclusion of his dissenting opinion in that case (Dr. A. v. Hochul) deserves to be committed to memory:
[I]n America, freedom to differ is not supposed to be “limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.” [Citation omitted.] The test of this Court’s substance lies in its willingness to defend more than the shadow of freedom in the trying times, not just the easy ones…
Still, it seems the old lessons are hard ones. Six weeks ago, this Court refused relief in a case involving Maine’s healthcare workers. [Citation omitted.] Today, the Court repeats the mistake by turning away New York’s doctors and nurses. We do all this even though the State’s executive decree clearly interferes with the free exercise of religion – and does so seemingly based on nothing more than fear and anger at those who harbor unpopular religious beliefs. We allow the State to insist on the dismissal of thousands of medical workers – the very same individuals New York has depended on and praised for their service on the pandemic’s front lines over the last 21 months. To add insult to injury, we allow the State to deny these individuals unemployment benefits too… [H]ow many more reminders do we need that “the Constitution is not to be obeyed or disobeyed as the circumstances of a particular crisis… may suggest”? [Citation omitted.]
How many, indeed?
Business elites are pursuing the COVID agenda as viciously as the politicians, if not more so. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has stated publicly that he will fire every employee in New York who doesn’t submit to the “vaccine” experiment, even those who attempt to work from home. Wouldn’t it be nice if the erstwhile champions of “free enterprise” actually stood up for freedom when it’s being robbed from the people who work for them? But I don’t see any criticism of Dimon from the business press, which has fallen as silent as the civil-rights crowd.
And please don’t let anyone tell you that these “vaccines” aren’t experimental, or that pressuring people into taking them doesn’t violate the Nuremberg Code’s prohibition against human medical experimentation without informed consent. The case for applying the terms of the Code is simply overwhelming. As we all know, the drugs in question were rushed through privately-administered trials that did not include the animal testing protocols normally required by the Food and Drug Administration. The data from those trials – the only ones ever conducted – remain sealed from public view, and we already know from Brook Jackson about serious irregularities in the limited tests performed by the manufacturers while they were conveniently insulated from public view. That means that these drugs remain untested, and their massive use is the first real experimental trial they have ever had.
In fact, the manufacturers insisted on – and received – blanket legal immunity before they would issue their drugs to the public. This unprecedented action – one that protected the drug makers rather than the public – resulted directly from the manufacturers’ awareness that, given the lack of prior testing, no one could predict the results of the drugs until they had actually been tried out on large numbers of people. You cannot have it both ways. If you insist that you haven’t safety-tested your products before issuing them – and that’s what Pfizer, Moderna and J&J all did insist when they developed the drugs in 2020 – you can’t deny that the people you inject with them over the following year are participating in an experiment.
Besides, the propagandists themselves are giving away the game: they openly refer to the massive vaccination program now under way as “proof” that the drugs are safe. But this means that they are relying on the results of actual use as a substitute for a clinical trial.
“The vaccine does work,” Dr. Mark Sawyer, who served on the FDA advisory committee that approved the drugs in 2020, told CNBC. “[T]hat’s been clearly shown by both death rates and hospitalization rates when comparing vaccinated people to unvaccinated people.” Mind you, the propagandists really have no choice about saying this; the United States, like other countries, is actively vaccinating whole groups of people – pregnant woman and young children – who were completely excluded from the manufacturers’ trials. But to cite that experience as evidence of the drugs’ safety means – again – that people now getting their jabs are actually being herded into an enormous human medical experiment. And of course they’re not being told the truth about this.
Human medical experimentation without informed consent is not just another legal lapse. It is a crime against humanity. Think of that when you read the next op-ed singing the praises of the “vaccination” campaign.
3) The “facts” fed to the public are manifestly worthless
Yes, I know: I began this essay with the statement that we can’t fight COVID fascism one lie at a time. But even a quick sampling is enough to confirm – for anyone who still needs proof – that we’re all eye-deep in propaganda so deceitful that none of it can be taken seriously.
Take the latest fear porn to emerge from New York, always a reliable bellwether for gathering trends in COVID-19 propaganda. The day after Christmas, a deafening chorus of mass media belted out a claim of the New York State Health Department that “the number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 is rising” in New York, adding some gloating if irrelevant details about the police-state measures to be imposed on anyone reckless enough to attempt the traditional New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. (For the record, the official harassment included: mandatory muzzles outside as well as inside; required proof of “vaccination” plus personal ID for everyone over 5 years old; a police blockade around the area which banned people from entering until after 3:00 p.m.; and a sharp limit on total crowd size even afterwards. Must have been a delightful party.)
The ghouls responsible for this “alert” clearly wanted us to believe that New York’s children are keeling over in droves from the “deadly virus,” and that if we don’t immediately get every single kid injected with experimental drugs they’re all going to die.
But what does the evidence actually show? Well – nothing.
First, although the headlines made it sound as though all “children hospitalized with COVID-19” were hospitalized because of COVID-19, the fine print in the database linked from the articles told a different tale. In fact, the figures reflected the “number of patients hospitalized, and number of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) among patients with lab-confirmed COVID-19 disease”: in other words, they included all hospitalizations, due to any cause, for patients who had merely generated one positive test result for COVID-19 during the relevant period. Since those tests usually consist of a PCR assay at an unspecified amplification cycle threshold, and since such “tests” are notoriously unreliable, the number of “positive” test results in children hospitalized for causes that included, for all we know, broken arms, strep throat, measles, concussions, etc., tells us virtually nothing about how COVID-19 has been affecting New York’s children.
Second, there’s the question of absolute as opposed to relative numbers. How many actual pediatric hospitalizations had occurred in New York when the Health Department sounded its alarm? The ghouls never told us that – and once again, the fine print contradicted their arm-waving headlines. The Health Department’s press release noted parenthetically that a total of 30 children between 12 and 17 had yielded a positive COVID-19 test result in New York hospitals during the preceding week, and that “roughly half” of the total number involved children under 5. True, that left open the question of how many were between 5 and 11, but I think it’s safe to assume that if children between those ages had been admitted to hospitals in larger numbers than their older contemporaries, the Health Department would have said so.
So let’s say, for argument’s sake, that we’re talking about 60 hospital admissions for children over 5, yielding a week-long total of about 120. Given that there are nearly 4.2 million children in the state of New York, 120 positive tests for COVID-19 (via dubious methods) in New York hospitals over a seven-day period hardly seems cause for panic.
And this was just one of a whole string of similar fabrications.
The CDC has been claiming for months that “unvaccinated people who had previously recovered from a coronavirus infection” are “five times as likely to get Covid as people who had received both shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.” Because this result directly contradicted a much-publicized study from Israel, I took the trouble to review the actual data. And it turned out that the numbers not only don’t support the CDC’s claim; they demonstrate the exact opposite of what the “experts” claim they do.
Setting to one side the methods used to determine who had “previously recovered” from a COVID-19 infection, and to ensure that “vaccinated” subjects had not also previously recovered from such an infection (both of which are questionable), the paper’s authors recorded 6,328 hospitalizations “among fully vaccinated and previously uninfected patients,” while among unvaccinated patients who had previously recovered, the total number of hospitalizations was only 1,020.
Even the small proportions of those patients who subsequently tested “positive” for COVID-19 were heavily weighted in favor of the vaccinated: 324 as opposed to 89. Now, take a moment to consider how devastating those numbers are for the claim made by the CDC: namely, that vaccination alone gives you far more protection from COVID-19 than natural immunity. The study’s own data prove this to be a lie. In fact, if the numbers are taken seriously, they suggest that you are more than six times as likely to be hospitalized after being “vaccinated” than after recovering from a COVID infection – and that you are more than three times as likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19. When was the last time you heard that explained in mainstream media?
So don’t waste your time on the latest COVID-19 “study” touted in the New York Times to bludgeon more gullible citizens into compliance. Just assume you’re being lied to, and you’ll be right often enough that the exceptions won’t matter.
4) The “experts” cannot be taken seriously
And then there are the “experts.” How many times do these mouthpieces of the Infallible Ones have to contradict themselves before we stop listening to them? At first they told us (correctly) that face masks offer no real obstacle to the spread of a respiratory virus. Then, reversing themselves without explanation, they insisted that wearing a mask – any sort of mask – provided an essential layer of protection. (Right on cue, the media set up a howl about “maskless” people being sighted at Trump rallies – or similarly disreputable places – as if they had been caught cavorting down Main Street without any clothes on.)
Now the “experts” have outdone themselves by telling us that if we want real protection, we’ve got to “upgrade” to N95 or KN95 respirator masks. Doesn’t that mean that they’ve been lying to us for over a year and a half when they assured us that wearing a cloth or paper mask was the submissive citizen’s way of “doing his part”? Of course it does, but don’t expect the mainstream press to raise that uncomfortable question.
And what about the “vaccines”? When those experimental drugs were first released, I was one of many critical writers who observed that the two-shot regime demanded by the authorities was only the beginning: that soon we’d be ordered to have a third shot, then a fourth, and that eventually we’d be told that “real” vaccination was an unending process, like the “new normal” itself. Nonsense, scoffed the Infallible Ones.
But now Anthony Fauci himself is saying that the very definition of “fully vaccinated” is up for grabs, so that “it’s going to be a matter of when, not if,” that definition changes. Take a moment to wrap your mind around the enormity of this idea. In the future, your medical status won’t be based on objective facts but on the arbitrary pronouncements of the powers that be. No matter which shots you’ve had, or how many, or how recently, or whether you’re sick, or likely to become sick, or what sort of antibodies you’ve got, or what medical treatments you have or haven’t undergone in the past, if Dr. Fauci and his fellow ghouls decide to rewrite the definition of “vaccinated” you may find yourself suddenly among that demonized underclass that, according to the editorialists of the New York Times, are responsible for all the world’s troubles.
And when that happens, there won’t be anything you can do about it except to obey the latest orders of the Infallible Ones. Not even your “vaccine pass” will help you.
So it’s not even a matter of the experts constantly contradicting themselves, feeding us one false story after another – though of course they’ve done that. Now they’ve taken Newspeak to an altogether different level, arrogating to themselves the power to change the meanings of actual medical terms. In the future there won’t be any contradictions from the experts because, whenever they find it convenient, the experts will simply redefine a word or two in order to render their past pronouncements consistent with their current ones.
And who are these “experts”? Most media reports about COVID-19 statistics cite the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, directly or indirectly, as their key source of information. But they rarely mention that Johns Hopkins’ coronavirus information arm is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, both of which have significant ties to the pharmaceuticals industry – a fact that should have disqualified it long ago as a source of “objective” data.
As for the Center for Health Security itself, I have pointed out in a previous article its close links with the American Enterprise Institute, the folks who led the way to the Iraq invasion of 2003. The lies behind that invasion unraveled pretty quickly. But that was because the propagandists at AEI were careless enough to make claims – mostly about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” – that could be publicly verified. Their partners at Johns Hopkins have been more discreet: when they claimed there would be “no summertime lull” in 2020, insisting that COVID-19 deaths were not seasonal and that lockdowns would continue, off and on, for “several years,” those lies could be explained away afterward as over-pessimistic projections – projections that might still come true, for all we know, if everyone doesn’t obey Big Brother.
(By the way, I’m not the only one to notice the disturbing history of the blandly-named Center for Health Security. The German lawyer Paul Schreyer has detailed its long-term involvement in bioterror “simulations” at which subjects like the imposition of martial law and other police-state tactics have often been discussed by the high-level participants.)
So these high-profile “experts” are nothing but the lying professional mouthpieces of a lying political class.
Do you really need to know more about them?
5) The COVID coup involves a radical redefinition of human value
Finally, we must realize that the perversions of the past two years have not only been political and legal. The Infallible Ones have been tampering with basic terms of humanity and morality – and that should have all of us up in arms.
Let’s start with the obvious. A policy that deliberately discourages doctors from treating sick patients – that, in fact, causes the deaths of countless people who could otherwise have been saved – is not a medical policy at all; it is a crime.
Yet this was exactly the policy pursued by Fauci, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, which for nearly two years did their level best to prevent the use of empirically-proven therapies for COVID-19. As a result, according to Dr. Scott Atlas (whose dissenting voice on Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force was generally buried under noisy media slanders), “urgently needed clinical trials by the NIH and FDA were never performed,” while “[i]n another unprecedented move, doctors were blocked from prescribing [hydroxychloroquine], even though prescribing any other approved drug for an off-label use was routine.” And anyone who tried to tell the truth on social media about drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin was likely to run head-on into social media censorship.
But the evil runs even deeper than that. Today we are being sold a premise never before embraced by a civilized society: the notion that every human being is a public menace by definition, that people are sick until proven healthy and dangerous until proven otherwise, that the mere act of breathing – that is, of living – requires some sort of moral and political justification. And the terms of that justification can only be determined by the powers that be; you and I are not given a say in what relieves us of the status of a public danger.
Just consider how radically incompatible such an idea is with any sort of open or democratic society. If people are defined as public menaces, how can they simultaneously constitute the ultimate public authority – a status that is the defining characteristic of a democracy? How can enemies of the people be “the people”? If a human being’s right to breathe (unless he’s been injected with experimental drugs, wears a muzzle and doesn’t write anything objectionable on social media) may be arbitrarily curtailed, what rights can a human being possibly be said to possess? It hardly needs to be said that the traditional notion of “citizenship” is no longer intelligible in such a context.
Meanwhile, we must be honest with ourselves. No political party is going to save us from the COVID coup. In the U.S., with rare exceptions, Republicans are sniping at their rivals about “cultural” issues and ignoring the most massive attack on freedom in modern American history. And even when the incumbent Democrats do badly at the polls, they stubbornly refuse to get the point.
A “half-dozen Democratic governors” recently told Politico what they thought the trouble was: “The party,” they said, “needs to find a message that acknowledges voters’ exasperation with the virus and its economic and societal impacts.” Such comments tell us all we need to know about these professional frauds, who still hope we’ll believe that “the virus” closed our businesses, stole our performing arts, wrecked our health care, tortured our kids and turned loose a batch of untested drugs on our immune systems, with more mandatory shots on the way even as the death toll of this ghastly experiment rises and rises. But of course “the virus” didn’t do any of that. The bosses did. And if we don’t stop them, they’ll go right on doing it.
And if we needed any more evidence of just how much is at stake, we got it this month from a major life insurance company in Indiana, which announced as the new year began that “the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people” between 18 and 64 years old. This “unheard of” increase cannot be attributed to COVID-19; the insurance executives themselves say that death rates have sharply declined for that illness.
What then? Might the soaring death rates have something to do with the “vaccines” that have been foisted on hundreds of millions of Americans? Or the health consequences of police-state tactics that have ravaged our society? It’s high time we demanded answers to those questions.
With what methods? Addressing fellow academics on December 8, Giorgio Agamben questioned whether it made sense any longer “to fight or act in the name of principles and concepts such as democracy, the constitution, law” and so forth; after all –
What sense would it make to invoke rights to Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini?… We are facing a government that has abandoned all legality. If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the situation we are in….
What we have before us is an adversary, an uncivilization at its end, and this seems to be confirmed by the extreme measures this adversary has chosen. How could a government choose such infamous, extreme, destructive measures as this government has done?… Therefore, I believe, we have to invent new strategies; facing such an adversary we have to invent new strategies.
“New” in this context does not have to mean unprecedented. We are accustomed to limiting ourselves to a secular political vocabulary. But when the essence of humanity is under assault, we need to think of other and more basic sorts of expression. What we’re engaged in is a spiritual struggle. It’s a battle for the survival of the human soul, and in that battle our main weapons are likely to be spiritual ones: courage, hope, self-sacrifice, faith.
Remember, the enemies of humanity have a weak point: they do not believe in human beings, and consequently they do not understand the power contained in each soul that refuses to be duped. Listen to any of their recent pronouncements, and you will notice at once that the Infallible Ones think that they are talking to children. “How to Think About Covid Data Right Now,” reads an actual headline in the New York Times for January 7 – as if it were perfectly natural for the Times to teach its readers “how to think.”
But I suspect that far more people are offended by such condescension than the Times and its fellow propagandists have yet realized. And woe to the swindler who underestimates his mark! The propagandist who believes he is lying to children might do well to recall one famous man’s warning to the effect that “it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” But I will leave my readers to draw their own conclusions about this.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, Human rights |
2 Comments
Until Stew Peters asked me about the possibility of being locked up on a psychiatric ward, it had honestly never occurred to me that such a thing could happen.
Which just goes to show how much in denial I could be. Because I happen to know a cardiologist in Switzerland, Thomas Binder, who got locked up on a psych ward over his views on COVID last year. He is perfectly sane and measured in his speech, very smart guy, no reason to doubt his sanity. That didn’t save him.
And I knew of Mel Bruchet, a retired doctor from Vancouver, BC, Canada, who was locked up for 25 days and injected with antipsychotic drugs, after he blew the whistle on large numbers of stillbirths occurring in women who had received COVID vaccines during pregnancy. I believe it took a lawsuit from his physician friends to get him out.
BTW, the facts about pregnancy loss are still fuzzy, but there are plenty of reasons to suspect there are problems, as chronicled by Celeste McGovern. There was that strange, incomprehensible NEJM article (which should have been unpublishable) by CDC’s Shimabukuro et al. Read the comments to my post.
And recently there was the Scottish study that I wrote about, which omitted the data on vaccine safety in pregnancy. These papers just raise red flags.
Pregnancy is the canary in the coal mine: if there are going to be safety problems with a vaccine, you will almost invariably see them first in women vaccinated, usually inadvertently, during early pregnancy. So it is particularly important for agencies like CDC, which are committed to the “safety and efficacy” meme, to hide these problems. And Eric Rubin, a) editor in chief of the NEJM, b) temporary member of the FDA advisory committee that voted for expanded use of COVID vaccine in children despite lack of evidence, and c) former colleague of Rochelle Walensky, has obliged in this effort.
Doesn’t anyone care that the quality and reputation of Nature, the Lancet, the NEJM, the FDA, the CDC and the bloated medical nonprofits have been trashed by their current leaders? Hasn’t anyone asked why, and turned over a few rocks? Don’t these editors have a fiduciary responsibility to their owners or shareholders?
Rochelle’s hubby got a sweet deal from NIH. What about the rest of them?
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
1 Comment
State-owned CBC suggests that ‘Russian actors’ may have instigated massive protest convoy that shut down nation’s capital

A cross-country convoy of truckers that has jammed the streets of Canada’s capital in protest against Covid-19 vaccine mandates might seem like grass-roots pushback against government overreach, but broadcaster CBC Television has offered a more sinister explanation: Russia did it.
Speaking in an interview on Friday with Canada’s public safety minister, Marco Mendicino, CBC host Nil Koksal suggested that possible Kremlin meddlers might have brought about the massive “Freedom Convoy.” “Given Canada’s support of Ukraine in this current crisis with Russia, I don’t know if it’s far-fetched to ask, but there is concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as this protest grows, but perhaps even instigating it from the outset,” she said.
Koksal didn’t offer any evidence to back up the theory or say who has raised such concern. Mendicino replied, “I’m gonna defer to our partners in the public safety, the trained officials and experts in that area.”
The interview came just before disgruntled truckers began to arrive in Ottawa on Friday night. Thousands of convoy participants and other protesters massed in the city on Saturday, bringing traffic to a standstill and sending Prime Minister Justin Trudeau into hiding. State-owned CBC said Trudeau and his family had been moved from his official residence to a “secure location.”
As many as 50,000 trucks were reportedly expected to flood into Ottawa, and traffic was snarled through much of the city. Some trucks were emblazoned with “F**k Trudeau” signs across their trailers, while other protesters demanded, “Mandate freedom.”
Government restrictions that went into effect on January 15 require unvaccinated Canadian drivers to quarantine for 14 days when they cross the border back into their country. Trudeau has condemned the angry truckers as holding “unacceptable views.”
Prior to floating the theory of a Russian bogeyman, Canadian media outlets have made other claims that appeared to smear the protesters, such as suggesting they are racist or extremist.
The Toronto Star said the convoy became a “magnet” for such undesirable elements as “conspiracy nuts, Western separatists, far right-wingers and worse.” Others have suggested that some participants want to carry out their own version of last year’s US Capitol riot.
A counter-protester was seen on Saturday saying, “F**k your white nationalist agenda,” while Canadian television reporter Mackenzie Gray was quick to post a Twitter message proclaiming “our first Confederate flag of the day here on Parliament Hill.” Multiple observers replied that Gray had spotted the “first fed of the day,” meaning a federal agent seeking to discredit the protest.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Canada, CBC, Human rights |
3 Comments
Suddenly Washington wants something from Hungary, after seeking to isolate and humiliate Budapest…

Viktor Orbán via Reuters
It’s been revealed that the United States approached Hungary this week to ask the country to host a temporary troop deployment related to the Russia-Ukraine crisis. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto “received an American request about temporary deployment of troops” – CNN reports.
Hungary’s Defense Ministry is said to be discussing the formal request; however, given the tense US administration relationship with the Viktor Orbán government since Biden took office – centered on seeking to isolate the conservative prime minister known for his unapologetic ‘Hungary first’ policies – the prospect remains highly unlikely. This comes as Biden announced Friday that he’ll be sending a small number of American forces to Eastern Europe: “I’ll be moving troops to eastern Europe in the NATO countries in the near term.” He qualified in the remarks reporters at Joint Base Andrews after returning from Pittsburg that this will be “not too many” troops.
A mere less than two months ago, Biden tried to humiliate Hungary’s “human rights backsliding” leader:
On Thursday and Friday, U.S. President Joe Biden will gather leaders from over 100 countries to a virtual “Summit for Democracy.” He invited rule-of-law troublemaker Poland. He invited Serbia, despite some questionable democratic credentials. He invited every EU member but one.
That one was Hungary.
CNN further reports that Romania and Bulgaria are also mulling the acceptance of additional US deployments. Both eastern European NATO countries are typically much more amenable to US security requests, and Romania already provocatively hosts coastal defense missiles on the Black Sea.
Among the security guarantees Russia is currently seeking from Washington and Brussels is precisely that NATO forces leave Bulgaria and Romania.
Thus when it comes to Hungary, from the point of view of officials in Budapest they are unlikely to want to see their country thrust into the middle of the tense escalating Russia vs. West standoff.
“The deployments would number approximately 1,000 personnel to each country and would be similar to the forward battle groups currently stationed in the Baltic States and Poland,” CNN notes of the numbers under initial discussion – though without doubt this would be ramped up in the instance of any potential Russian incursion into Ukraine.
Meanwhile, in a Russian media interview FM Sergey Lavrov said Friday “If it’s up to the Russian Federation, there will be no war. We do not want wars. But we won’t allow the West to grossly ignore our interests, either,” according to Sputnik.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Hungary, Joe Biden, NATO, United States |
4 Comments
Later this week, England is scheduled to drop its problematic mask mandate for shops and public transport, along with its highly unpopular vaccine passport regime. Up north, Scotland says it will “relax” so-called ‘work from home guidance,’ and reopen nightclubs, as well as ending venue capacity limits.
While the UK and Ireland gingerly roll-back their highly disruptive COVID restriction policies, other European countries are now leading the way by scrapping the entire ‘pandemic’ regime altogether.
Financial Times reports…
Denmark said it would lift almost all Covid-19 restrictions and stop designating it a “societally critical” disease on Wednesday in the latest sign that western European countries are easing or even eradicating strict measures brought in to combat the Omicron coronavirus variant.
Magnus Heunicke, Denmark’s health minister, wrote to parliament on Wednesday saying that he would remove all Covid-19 restrictions on February 1, except for testing on arrival from abroad. Just as the Danish government did in September, when it lifted all restrictions, it will also stop calling Covid-19 a “societally critical disease”, meaning that it will no longer have the legal basis to introduce wide-ranging curbs.
“Tonight we can begin to lower our shoulders and find our smiles again,” said Mette Frederiksen, Danish prime minister, on Wednesday evening. “The pandemic is still here, but with what we know now, we can dare to believe we are through the critical phase.”
Denmark is the latest European country in recent days to announce it is dropping most or nearly all measures as it follows in the footsteps of the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands…
Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets like Politico report this latest development with the accompanied fear-mongering over the latest “subvariant” – allegedly on the loose:
The announcement comes as a new subvariant of Omicron, BA.2, is gaining a foothold in Denmark and driving infections up, with 46,000 new COVID-19 cases recorded on Wednesday.
“Recent weeks have seen very high infection rates, in fact the highest in the entire pandemic,” Frederiksen said. “Therefore, it may seem strange and paradoxical that we are now ready to let go of the restrictions.”
Some 82 percent of Denmark’s population is fully vaccinated with two doses, of whom 50 percent are boosted with a third dose, according to the Danish Health and Medicines Authority.
However, as the FT points out, with this alleged rise in “cases” (aka PCR positive tests) promoted in the media – there is no corresponding rise in serious illness as a result COVID-19:
Denmark still has one of the highest number of Covid-19 cases per capita in the world, currently more than 10 times its previous peak as Omicron causes tens of thousands of daily infections. But the number of patients in intensive care continues to fall and, even with Omicron, never hit the peaks reached from April 2020 and January 2021.
Elsewhere in Scandinavia, Sweden, Norway and Finland have all announced they will also be easing their restrictions in the coming weeks.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Covid-19, Denmark, Finland, Human rights, Norway, Sweden, UK |
1 Comment
LAST week several readers alerted me to the government’s reply to a Freedom of Information request as to the number of Covid only deaths. Even to hardened sceptics of the pandemic ‘crisis’ such as myself the answer came as something of a shock. The number of those dying of Covid alone – that is with no coexisting illness or condition – are by any standards low compared with other causes of death. The figures show a total (all age) mortality rate over two years of just 17,500. The figure for the under 65s is very much lower. As one reader put it to me, did we really lock an entire country down in 2020 for just 1,550 under-65s dying?
The real public health threat, as with other diseases, is the country’s dietary and lifestyle choices – obesity and insufficient exercise and vitamin D.
What struck me perhaps even more forcibly was the comparison with the reported number of the MHRA vaccine deaths, 1,954 as of their last publication (see below). It raises the question of whether vaccine deaths have, within one year, outpaced two years of Covid deaths for the under-65s?
That is a genuine question to which I don’t know the answer. It will require a further FOI demanding the publication of an age breakdown of the reported vaccine fatalities. As it stands on the main reporting page with Annex One documents there is no overall total fatality age breakdown provided. This is simply unacceptable. We need to know the ages of the people dying following the vaccines.
The only fatality age breakdown given is for thrombo-embolic (blood clotting) events with concurrent low platelets. Scroll down to about halfway through the long report page link above and see table 6:
Number of UK suspected thrombo-embolic events with concurrent thrombocytopenia ADR cases received for the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca by patient age up to and including 19 January 2022.

By far the largest number of these otherwise preventable deaths are of people under 70, the highest proportion being in the 40-60 category. These may also of course have been people vulnerable to Covid, but given that by far the largest majority of Covid deaths remain in the 70-plus age groups and the absolute majority in the over-80 group, it really makes you wonder at the recklessness of the government’s totally uncompromising and determined vaccine roll out to all age groups, not just the vulnerable ones.
As far as I’m aware, there is no further breakdown available. As far as age related adverse event data reporting goes it is shockingly limited. The only information given about children injected can be found slightly above the half way scroll mark on the above link, ‘Suspected side effects reported in individuals under 18 years old’. There is very limited information offered. The number of children injected rounded to estimate numbers, and number of Yellow Cards filed are listed per brand but no specific adverse event data. It is unclear if the child adverse events reactions listings are included in the overall total and document brand pdfs.
It feels almost futile to say it is not good enough, but it is not. It is nothing short of negligent. Meanwhile the overall number of fatalities and adverse events continue to rise.
The latest MHRA Yellow Card combination reporting summary up to January 12, 2022 (data published January 20, 2022) follows.
Adult – Primary & Booster/Third Dose, Child Administration
Pfizer – 25.5million people – 47.7m doses – Yellow Card reporting rate – 1 in 160 people impacted
AstraZeneca – 24.9m people – 49.1m doses – Yellow Card reporting rate – 1 in 103 people impacted
Moderna – 1.6m people – 3m doses – Yellow Card reporting rate – 1 in 48 people impacted
Overall 1 in 119 people injected experiences a Yellow Card Adverse Event, which may be less than 10 per cent of actual figures according to MHRA.
Adult Booster or 3rd Doses = 36,079,875 people
Booster Yellow Card Reports – 26,076 (Pfizer) + 399 (AZ) + 14,457 (Moderna) + 128 (Unknown) = 41,060
Reactions – 454,881 (Pfizer) + 857,702 (AZ) + 112,011 (Moderna) + 4,477 (Unknown) = 1,429,071
Reports – 158,933 (Pfizer) + 242,148 (AZ) + 33,630 (Moderna) + 1,462 (Unknown) = 436,173 people impacted
Fatal – 696 (Pfizer) + 1,190 (AZ) + 30 (Moderna) + 38 (Unknown) = 1,954
Blood Disorders – 16,320 (Pfizer) + 7,743 (AZ) + 2,317 (Moderna) + 63 (Unknown) = 26,443
Pulmonary Embolism & Deep Vein Thrombosis – 832 (Pfizer) + 2,997 (AZ) + 83 (Moderna) + 25 (Unknown) = 3,937
Anaphylaxis – 624 (Pfizer) + 868 (AZ) + 76 (Moderna) + 2 (Unknown) = 1,572
Acute Cardiac – 11,141 (Pfizer) + 10,855 (AZ) + 2,642 (Moderna) + 86 (Unknown) = 24,724
Pericarditis/Myocarditis – 1,091 (Pfizer) + 417 (AZ) + 276 (Moderna) + 6 (Unknown) = 1,790
Infections – 10,834 (Pfizer) + 19,774 (AZ) + 1,968 (Moderna) + 139 (Unknown) = 32,715
Blindness – 144 (Pfizer) + 312 (AZ) + 25 (Moderna) + 4 (Unknown) = 485
Eye Disorders – 7,452 (Pfizer) + 14,685 (AZ) + 1,350 (Moderna) + 81 (Unknown) = 23,568
Deafness – 272 (Pfizer) + 418 (AZ) + 43 (Moderna) + 5 (Unknown) = 738
Spontaneous Abortions – 438 including 4 miscarriage related deaths + 1 premature baby death / 15 stillbirth/foetal deaths (11 recorded as fatal) (Pfizer)…. + 227 + 2 miscarriage related deaths + 5 stillbirth (AZ)…. + 53 + 1 stillbirth (not recorded as fatal) (Moderna)…. + 4 (Unknown) = 722 miscarriages
Psychiatric Disorders – 9,493 (Pfizer) + 18,171 (AZ) + 2,181 (Moderna) + 105 (Unknown) = 29,950
Headaches & Migraines – 34,083 (Pfizer) + 93,643 (AZ) + 8,681 (Moderna) + 326 (Unknown) = 136,733
Nervous System Disorders – 76,294 (Pfizer) + 181,290 (AZ) + 18,227 (Moderna) + 819 (Unknown) = 276,630
Dizziness – 11,675 (Pfizer) + 24,942 (AZ) + 3,240 (Moderna) + 109 (Unknown) = 39,966
Strokes and CNS haemorrhages – 713 (Pfizer) + 2,262 (AZ) + 40 (Moderna) + 13 (Unknown) = 3,028
Guillain-Barré Syndrome – 84 (Pfizer) + 483 (AZ) + 10 (Moderna) + 6 (Unknown) = 583
Seizures – 1,030 (Pfizer) + 2,032 (AZ) + 240 (Moderna) + 17 (Unknown) = 3,319
Paralysis – 470 (Pfizer) + 857 (AZ) + 88 (Moderna) + 7 (Unknown) = 1422
Respiratory Disorders – 20,042 (Pfizer) + 29,289 (AZ) + 3,708 (Moderna) + 186 (Unknown) = 53,225
Reproductive/Breast Disorders – 28,503 (Pfizer) + 20,324 (AZ) + 4,479 (Moderna) + 185 (Unknown) = 53,491
Children & young people special report
Suspected side effects reported in individuals under 18yrs old
Pfizer – 3,000,000 children (1st doses) plus 900,000 second doses resulting in 2,591 Yellow Cards (up 120 since last week)
AZ – 12,400 children (1st doses) plus 9,000 second doses resulting in 250 Yellow Cards – Reporting rate 1 in 50
Moderna – 1,900 children (1st doses)* and 1,100 second doses resulting in 16 Yellow cards – Reporting rate 1 in 119
Brand Unspecified – 11 Yellow Cards
Total = 3,014,300 children injected
Total Yellow Cards Under 18s = 2,868
*MHRA state: ‘Figures for vaccinations by age group in previous weekly summary reports were based on the person’s age calculated at 31 March 2021. From this week onwards, the age definition will move to a new definition, person’s age calculated at the time of vaccination.’
Full reports including 344 pages of specific reaction listings are here.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
2 Comments
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
You’ve been waiting for it all year. So stop waiting. It’s here! The 5th Annual Fake News Awards! Bringing you the worst in dinosaur media lies, smears and outright fiction from the past year. Join your host Bent Krockman for a whirlwind tour of fake photos, fake fact checks, fake politicians and of course the fake story of the year. Also, stay tuned for a musical performance by the new pop hit supergroup, KABAAL . . . and a word from our corporate sponsor!
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds / Odysee or Download the mp4
For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.
For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).
Fakest Photo or Video of the Year
AND THE RUNNERS-UP ARE:
The photoshopped photo from Norwegian newspaper Sunnmørsposten of a “masked” Olav Mestad, the chief medical officer of Ålesund, who was in fact maskless
Biden “driving” an electric F-150
Fake videos of the Kabul evacuation, including a video of a man allegedly hanging out on the engine of a departing plane (although massive props to the Vietnamese graphic designer who originally posted the video, including a whole series of such fakes)
AND THE LOSER IS…
“Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says” a September 2021 article from Rolling Stone that manages a rare triple play: not only is all of the information presented in the story factually incorrect, and not only did they fail to retract the story when it was debunked (instead opting for the lying “update”), but even the picture they used to illustrate the article was fake news!
See “The Media Fell for a Viral Hoax About Ivermectin Overdoses Straining Rural Hospitals” for more on this truly galling display of faux jounalism.
Fakest Politician or Health Official
AND THE RUNNERS-UP ARE:
AOC showing up maskless among a sea of masked servants in a “tax the rich” dress to the $35,000 a ticket Met Gala, a dress designed by a tax evader
Justin Trudeau for “anti-vaxxers are racist misogynists”
Trump for calling the Warp Speed MAGA jabs his “greatest achievement” and bragging that “I’m boosted”
AND THE LOSER IS…
Fauci for “attacks on me are attacks on science.”
Is this real life? Did he actually just say that? That is straight up, comic book, Palpatine-level “I am the Senate!” energy right there.
See my episode on Science Says! for a point-by-point deconstruction of this fundamentally anti-scientific idea and read The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for a point-by-point takedown of Fauci’s entire career.
Fakest Fact Check of the Year
AND THE RUNNERS-UP ARE:
PolitiFact for their “Pants on Fire” “debunking” of the laboratory origins of SARS-COV-2 . . . which they later had to update with a note to say that since the “experts” they relied on for their “fact check” had changed their mind, they were “removing this fact-check from our database pending a more thorough review” (…we’re still waiting, Poynter!)
CTV News for No, COVID-19 vaccines do not violate the Nuremberg Code, which incorrectly states that the COVID vaccines are “long past the experimental stage”
IFLScience (a website with a checkered history of stealing other people’s work, for “Fact Check: Will We Be Microchipped With Vaccine Passports?” which uses the very real story of how a Swedish company has devloped a mircrochip that can showcase your vaccine passport status to argue that it’s a “public relations nightmare for scientists and a gift to anti-vaxxers,” who are obviously still crazy even when they are demonstrably right.
AND THE LOSER IS…
ALL OF THEM! That’s right, in a bombshell story late last year Facebook admitted that ‘fact checks’ are nothing more than opinion
Fakest Climate Change Story
AND THE RUNNERS-UP ARE:
The Lancet for “The 2021 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: code red for a healthy future” which was immediately picked up and regurgitated by the lying corporate media despite the fact that its central assertion that rising temperatures are leading to rising death tolls is directly contradicted by the published research demonstrating that deaths caused by non-optimum temperatures are declining by tens of thousands of people each year.
The Victoria Times-Colonist for “B.C. doctor clinically diagnoses patient as suffering from ‘climate change’
,” in which they fall for the transparent publicity stunt of Dr. Kyle Merritt of Kootenay Lake Hospital in Nelson, B.C. who clinically diagnosed a patient with diabetes and heart failure with “climate change.” Not only did the Times-Colonist “reporter” not seek any alternative viewpoint to Dr. Merritt’s nonsensical non-diagnosis, it neglected to inform its readers of University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass’ exhaustively documented work showing that the “Great Northwest Heatwave” last summer was not climate change but merely weather (because, as we all know, Weather is not Climate!…except when it suits the narrative).
The usual gaggle of climate hypocrites who flew their private jets to the COP26 conference in Scotland to lecture the little people about how they need to reduce their carbon footprint
AND THE LOSER IS…
The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero for their scheme to get the world’s population on board with the creation of a $130 trillion investment trough to be stewarded over by the organized crime syndicate of crooks, criminals, con artists and eugenicists in international finance in the name of “saving the earth!”
For more on this supergroup of evildoers, see:
Whitney Webb Exposes How Green Finance is Monopolizing the Planet
Absolute Zero: The Global Agenda Revealed
Welcome to the New Economy
FAKE NEWS STORY OF THE YEAR
“100% safe and effective!”
Because we HAVE to go with a single story, we’ll give this dino to … ohhh, I dunno …
Rachel Maddow for “the vaccines will get us to the end of this.”
. . . but to be fair, she wasn’t the only one spreading that fake news.
Of course, none of this was surprising to anyone who was paying attention. Viewers of The Future of Vaccines already knew the truth about these non-vaccines way back in December of 2020.
To be sure, there are any number of ancillary fake news stories that deserve to share in this award:
Like the NBC opinion piece, “The Covid vaccine is safe, whatever anti-vaxxers say. Here’s why we can trust it,” which dovetails with the Milken Institute talk on a “universal flu vaccine” that took place in October of 2019 and featured Tony Fauci and Rick Bright discussing the need for a crisis to speed up development of mRNA vaccines (2019). (More on that aspect of the scam from the Unlimited Hangout series on Moderna: Part I and Part II.)
Also, there was the fake news narrative about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” That propaganda fairy tale has been utterly smashed over the past year by Ryan Cristian of The Last American Vagabond, who has amply demonstrated that the truth is the polar opposite. In fact, there is a pandemic of the injected.
Then there are the “mystery heart attack” stories, like “Mystery rise in heart attacks from blocked arteries,” which miraculously fails to even mention the word “vaccine” despite the fact that the experimental mRNA injection are scientifically proven to “dramatically increase inflammation on the endothelium and T cell infiltration of cardiac muscle” and “Up to 300,000 people facing heart-related illnesses due to post-pandemic stress disorder, warn physicians,” which cites “two London physicians” claiming (without evidence) that “as many as three million people in Britain are already suffering from Post-Pandemic Stress Disorder” before bizarrely pivoting into the one and only health condition they attribute to the disorder: heart related problems . . . without ever once mentioning (you guessed it!) the scientifically-proven link between the experimental COVID injections and the increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis among otherwise healthy young men. (And that’s not even mentioning the 278% increase in heart attack deaths among soccer players this past year.)
There’s also Brianne Dressen and all the other people with life-altering injuries from the injections who have been censored, suppressed and marginalized over and over this past year.
And then there’s the Noam Chomskys of the world saying that the unvaxxed will have to be segregated from society and starve to death if necessary and the Neil Youngs of the world clamouring for the suppression of information on this subject.
Truly, many many people have contributed to this, the fakest story of the year (if not the century) and the largest ongoing uncontrolled medical experiment in the history of the human species.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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