Where Have the Voices for Liberty Gone?
By Michael Lesher | Brownstone Institute | January 4, 2023
In early 2020, when American liberals wailed in unison that the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right of free assembly was a prescription for national suicide – and not one significant American civil rights organization protested – I should have known where we were headed.
Still, almost 3three years later, I am dumbfounded by how rapidly a nation that once boasted of its attachment to “liberty” has succumbed to the priorities of totalitarianism. Thought policing on social media, once a dystopian fantasy, is now taken for granted.
So is the massive electronic surveillance system that was hawked to Americans (and others around the world) as a “health” measure, but which actually gives Big Brother a convenient way to monitor people’s whereabouts and which has already been turned against political dissidents in Israel, India and elsewhere. Health care workers – once the heroes of the fear propaganda that rationalized illegal mass quarantines in 2020 – have now been forced from their jobs in alarming numbers for refusing to be injected with experimental drugs that demonstrably protect no one.
Mass media, far from raising questions about all this, are cheering on the juggernaut. CNN’s Michael Smerconish has confessed with chilling directness that the COVID drug experiment is essentially a lesson in Gleichschaltung:
“This is really about which people in this country are going to control virus-related behavior – the unvaccinated or the vaccinated…. [A]llowing the unvaccinated to control virus policy, that’s unjust and unhealthy.”
After all, as Congressman Jamie Raskin put it (in conversation with ex-poisoner-in-chief Deborah Birx), the most important thing for the State is to ensure “social cohesion” – even if it takes some official lying to coax the population into lockstep. Hitler could hardly have put it better.
I might readily fill this column with a catalog of the false statements about COVID-19 that have been peddled to the public over the last three years. But the chicanery of the muzzle-and-lockdown propagandists is not limited to scientific malfeasance.
I do not minimize the importance of demonstrating that we have been fed a steady diet of lies about COVID-19 since the beginning of 2020 (a task that has been ably shouldered by many other Brownstone contributors). But what’s at stake here is not just a debate about medical policy. What is happening involves nothing less than the fundamental reshaping of our body politic, a massive assault on the constitutional system of civil liberties and on the presuppositions undergirding that system.
Add to this the shameful silence of American liberal institutions as the tentacles of a police state wind ever more tightly around us all, and you will understand why my call to the incoming year is: when will I hear more voices raised in resistance?
Or, to put it more bluntly: what are you waiting for, America?
Where were your voices when the suspension of representative democracy made virtual dictators out of some four-fifths of America’s governors in 2020 – an arrangement which, according to Anthony Fauci, could be reimposed at any time?
Where were your voices when state after state discarded the Bill of Rights in favor of some version of the Emergency Health Powers Act – a bill that, when first proposed in 2001, was sharply criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union, along with conservative groups like the Free Congress Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, as “a throwback to a time before the legal system recognized basic protections for fairness?”
Where were your voices when the President of the United States defied the Nuremberg Code by ordering 3.5 million federal employees to submit to the injection of untested drugs, while his administration did its level best to ensure that what little information was available about the safety of those drugs would be concealed from the public for as long as possible? Where were your voices when those who objected to this embrace of a repurposed Nazi war crime were purged from our government?
Where were your voices when the State shuttered your children’s schools, forced muzzles onto two-year-olds, and terrorized young people to the point that fully a quarter of them contemplated suicide? When as many as 23 million children were placed by American school systems under computerized surveillance that monitored their every keystroke and tracked their internet contacts, a 1984-ish scenario for which COVID-driven school closures served as the pretext?
If you ask me, the most important word in the preceding sentence is “pretext:” COVID-19, though in medical terms never nearly as dangerous as we were told it was, has been extremely effective as a battering ram to civil liberties. Once upon a time, government health policy was fashioned to achieve medical goals. Today, factitious medical “goals” are deployed on behalf of a policy aimed at dismantling American democracy.
So please remember: this is not about your health. It’s about your country, whose highest aspirations are under unprecedented assault. If you don’t object now, you may lose your right to object at all.
And don’t think the vaunted liberal media, or civil rights “advocates,” or high-minded academics, or self-aggrandizing “progressive” politicians will speak up for you if you don’t speak up for yourselves.
A few years ago, CNN’s Jim Acosta made his reputation posing as a champion of press freedom (supposedly under mortal threat because Donald Trump had said some unflattering things about American reporters). Yet by the summer of 2021 Acosta was out-Trumping Trump, claiming that Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis had caused the COVID-19 Delta variant and denouncing people who dared to think they had a right to breathe in public.
Have Acosta’s fellow liberals objected to his hypocrisy? On the contrary: his public media profile is a virtual hagiography, even while he’s attacking the free speech rights of press outlets like Fox News for airing commentary he doesn’t agree with. Trusting such people with defending the Bill of Rights is like leaving your wallet with Bernie Madoff.
Nor can you plead a lack of adequate knowledge. Even if you ignore the sources of genuine information about COVID policy – and several are available via internet – there have been epiphanic moments when the propagandists have actually exposed themselves, as when New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul told a megachurch audience that God had commanded Americans to take the COVID-19 “vaccines,” or when an unrepentant Colonel Birx admitted to Congress that she had misrepresented facts when ordering the public to submit to the same experimental drugs.
Do you really need any more evidence of the megalomaniac lust for power driving these democracy-haters, as they dismantle the US Constitution piece by piece?
There can be no doubt about where State power is drifting – if we do nothing to stop it. Writing as far back as 1935, Albert Jay Nock predicted the future of the accelerating centralization of authority:
What we… shall see is a steady progress in collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralization; a steadily growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing;… the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income…. Then at some point in this progress, a collision of State interests… will result in an industrial and financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear; and from this the State will be left to “the rusty death of machinery”…
As we enter 2023, we don’t need to read deeply into political theory to understand the threat we face. We only have to review the record of the previous three years.
An accurate assessment of that record, it seems to me, will tell us that we are quite possibly on the cusp of the dissolution of the American republic. Maybe it is already too late to resist the authoritarian Zeitgeist. But I suggest we all ponder the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the failure of the Soviet public to resist the repression that had included his own arrest in the 1940s: “If only we had stood together against the common threat, we could easily have defeated it. So, why didn’t we? We didn’t love freedom enough.”
For us, that “common threat” is much weaker than the one Solzhenitsyn had in mind. We don’t need weapons to fight it; in fact, weapons would only get in the way. What we need are voices – lots of them – raised in protest every time a bureaucrat or a tame Ivy League “expert” or a lying “journalist” or a shyster in sheep’s clothing tries to rob us of one more bit of our human dignity, one more inch of our civil rights.
Then we need to clamor for all we’re worth. While there is still time.
Do we love freedom enough for that?
Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books. He has also published op-ed pieces in such varied venues as Forward, ZNet, the New York Post and Off-Guardian.
January 6 Two Years On: What Dems Would Risk by Trying to Prosecute Trump After Nothingburger Probe
By Ilya Tsukanov – Samizdat – 06.01.2023
Friday marks the second anniversary of the January 6, 2021 riots at the Capitol by an enraged mob convinced the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Donald Trump. Democrats have milked the event for political purposes for two straight years, with President Biden characterizing it as the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
Two years since the 2021 unrest outside the Capitol complex, Democrats have failed to provide any rock-solid evidence of Donald Trump’s planning of an “insurrection” in Washington to try to remain in power; still, the governing party may just prove brazen enough to try to prosecute the former president, notwithstanding the tremendous political risks involved, observers have told Sputnik.
On December 22, the House January 6 Committee Investigating the Attack on the Capitol released its final report, charging Donald Trump with a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the 2020 election and “block the transfer of power,” and accusing him of orchestrating the spectacular riot at the seat of US legislative power.
Several days prior, the nine-member committee voted to refer Donald Trump and several of his allies to the Justice Department on criminal charges including insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States government, and making false statements to the United States government. If an investigation proceeds and Trump is tried, convicted, and locked up, he could spend the rest of his life in jail, and be permanently barred from ever running for office again.
Much Ado About Nothing?
Trump dismissed the probe’s conclusions and the criminal referral, accusing what he dubbed as the “Democratic Bureau of Investigation” of being out to get him, and comparing the year-and-a-half long, $9 million January 6 investigations to his failed twin impeachments.
“The criminal referrals that the January 6 Committee made regarding President Trump are an exercise in political persecution and wish fulfillment,” says Dr. Nicholas Waddy, a political analyst and associate professor of history at the State University of New York’s Alfred State College.
According to the academic, the January 6 probe failed to provide any solid evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Trump ahead of and during the Capitol riots. At the same time, Trump’s complaining about the 2020 election outcome is an expression of free speech, not criminal behavior, the professor believes.
“He did not encourage anyone to use violence or to violate the law. In fact, he specifically advised his supporters to march ‘peacefully and patriotically’ to the Capitol to lodge a protest against the election results. He did not by any means advise them to use violence or criminal means to overthrow the government,” Waddy said.
Even if one were to discount the former president’s election “fraud” claims, “Trump never did anything in reference to the 2020 election except criticize it and complain about it, and poor sportsmanship is not now, nor has it ever been, a violation of the law,” according to the academic.
Skeletons in Your Closet
Sergio Arellano, an advisory board member of Latinos for Trump, told Sputnik that the January 6 investigation has demonstrated itself to be the “political witch hunt” that Trump has repeatedly described it as, and said that the long-promised “smoking gun” evidence of criminal behavior by the former president and his allies never materialized in the year-and-a-half long probe.
Suggesting there were many politicians who truly deserve to be held criminally liable over allegations far more serious than those against Trump – such as Nancy Pelosi and her husband over their alleged insider trading, Hunter and Joe Biden over their suspected pay to play scandal, and Hillary Clinton over her deleted emails, Arellano lamented that Trump, “the one person who called out the politicians and their BS” and “exposed what really happens in politics,” has been targeted instead.
“We saw it with the ‘Dossier’ and we see it with the weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies who are against not only Donald Trump, but against conservatives in general,” Arellano said – referring to the “Steele Dossier” opposition research commissioned by the Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, which would go on to serve as part of the basis of initial US intelligence probes into the Trump campaign’s suspected ties to Russia (claims which have long since been debunked).
Dr. Waddy believes that the Biden Justice Department may move forward with trying to prosecute Trump on the basis of the January 6 Committee’s conclusions, suggesting that for the governing party, the reasoning may be that the more ordinary Americans talk about Trump instead of the substantive issues affecting their lives, the better.
“For Democrats… the calculation may be as simple as this: They believe that Trump deserves to be prosecuted and convicted, and they believe that, the longer the nation is talking about Trump rather than the sever problems that afflict [the country] (inflation, crime, the border, etc.), the better it will be for Democrats. Democrats have already ridden Trump-hatred to something like ‘victory’ in three consecutive US elections. Why not, they will reason, try for number four?” Waddy said.
Republican political commentator Marc Little echoed Waddy’s sentiments on the case, accusing the January 6 Committee of having “lost all credibility… after recent records revealed internal email communications that place the January 6 debacle squarely on the doorstep of former Speaker Pelosi, who we know refused the protection of the National Guard. Secondly, former President Trump’s emails, formerly concealed, make clear his intentions were not to promote an ‘insurrection’ – a crime requiring intention, but rather just the opposite. His tweet encouraged peace.”
“There is no solid proof to date that shows President Trump as the chief architect and responsible party of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Look no further than the ‘Twitter Files’ and its exposure of the abrasive, biased and reckless approach toward all conservatives,” Arellano said, referring to the recent media revelations on the chaotic internal debates at the social media company to justify banning Trump after January 6 even though he was not shown to have violated any rules.
Risky Business
Citing Democrats’ desire to see Trump “rot in a jail cell,” even if it means “grasping at straws” to try to prosecute him, Waddy pointed out that there are extreme political risks involved in doing so, even if prosecutors would have a difficult time arguing their case, given the dearth of evidence.
“The evidence that Trump broke the law will revolve around the fact that he allegedly did not take aggressive enough steps to prevent potential violence from threatening lawmakers on January 6, 2021. Prosecutors would have to argue that the events of that day were clearly foreseeable by Trump, and that he sought to achieve them. The problem is that the Capitol riot was foreseen by no one, including Democrats in Congress, who took few if any steps to increase security on what was bound to be a tense day,” Waddy explained. “Prosecutors might also argue that Trump contemplated taking extra-constitutional measures to prolong his term in office, although he did not actually follow through on any of the proposed actions.”
The professor believes the fact that the evidence against Trump is “spectacularly weak” is no guarantee that the justice system will clear him. “The DoJ is populated by Trump haters, and so are large portions of the court system, not to mention the potential pool of jurors in Washington, DC, the most deep blue jurisdiction in America. It is highly questionable whether the most hated man in America, and probably the world, can get a fair trial.”
“Nevertheless,” Waddy notes, prosecuting Trump would carry risks for both the Justice Department and the Democrats, particularly in the event of a trial ending in acquittal or an embarrassing mistrial. Furthermore, a trial would likely increase public sympathy for Trump, including among Republicans who have moved on, “turning him, in effect, into a ‘political prisoner’ and a martyr.”
If Trump is prosecuted and jailed, this would also “effectively reset” the GOP’s field of 2024 candidates, increasing the likelihood of a more electable Republican – like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, taking his place, the professor believes.
“DoJ prosecutors and Democratic Party officials will thus have to ask themselves: is trying to nail Trump to the wall via the justice system truly worth it?” the professor asks.
On the flip side, the president’s party may calculate that a trial would keep Trump occupied “and drag him through the mud – possibly even placing him in prison pending trial,” which would likely limit his effectiveness as a candidate in 2024, and justify the risks.
American Japs Imprisoned
Tales of the American Empire | January 5, 2023
A famous tale from World War II are the heroic deeds of the US Army’s 442nd Infantry Regiment that was manned by nearly all second-generation Japanese Americans. These men served a government that had arrested them and their families for the crime of being Japanese descendants, imprisoned them, and looted their property. The US government then drafted young men in these camps and demanded they fight in its foreign war. Approximately 300 men at various camps refused to join the military were sent to a harsh prison at Tule Lake California. Many stated they would serve if their families were freed, but were still treated as criminals. Hundreds of those who served in the US Army were killed and thousands wounded as the 442nd regiment was ordered to conduct dangerous attacks in Europe. The survivors of the 442nd were deemed heroes after the war, but those who refused to serve their captors showed greater courage.
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“A Time of Unreasoning Hatred”; Eric Niderost; Warfare History Network; https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/202…
“Executive Order 9066”; Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executi…
Related Tale: “FDR’s War to Unite the World”: 
• Roosevelt’s War t…
Related Tale: “The Genocide Called World War I”: • The Genocide Call…
Related Tale: “The Bloody 1944 Crusade in Europe”: • The Bloody 1944 C…
Related Tale: “Everyone Lost in World War II”: • Everyone Lost in …
“The Looting of Japanese-American Assets During World War II”; Thomas Muller; Winter Watch; December 17, 2021; https://www.winterwatch.net/2021/12/t…
Germany’s digital minister meets with Elon Musk, says Musk “agreed” to EU’s censorship laws
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | January 5, 2023
Germany’s Minister for Digital and Transport Volker Wissing said that he is less worried about Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership after meeting with the CEO in San Francisco.
“Thanks @elonmusk for a constructive conversation in San Francisco. My stance is clear: the platforms’ self-commitment against #disinformation must be strictly adhered to until the #DSA comes into force. Elon Musk agreed with me,” Wissing tweeted.
The DSA (Digital Services Act), expected to come into effect in February 2024, requires, among other things, platforms to remove “harmful” content immediately. The legislation aims to protect consumers from content considered harmful as well as illegal content.
In a December interview, Wissing, the General Secretary of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), expressed concerns about Musk’s leadership of Twitter and said that he was undecided on whether he would continue using the platform.
Since taking over in late October, Musk has made some changes that censorship-lovers some might deem controversial. He rolled back the COVID-19 misinformation policy and reinstated some previously banned accounts, including the account of former US President Donald Trump.
In a letter to the EU Commission, Sven Giegold, the State Secretary for the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs, raised concerns about abrupt changes at Twitter and the relaxation of censorship policies.
Name & Shame – Companies Discriminating Against The Unvaccinated
Time to boycott
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | January 5, 2023
Almost a year ago, I wrote about the companies discriminating against their employees just because they were unvaccinated against Covid-19. I suggested boycotting those companies until they changed their policies.
Hopefully some of this pressure made these companies see sense, as a lot of these discriminatory policies have now been removed.
However, a year on and some companies have found a loop hole, making them appear less discriminatory. Now, they can’t be seen to be discriminating against their unvaccinated employees because they will only employ vaccinated individuals in the first place!
So it’s time to name and shame again. If you know of any companies that are still treating their unvaccinated employees differently or only employing vaccinated individuals, then add their names in the comments sections below (please add a link to their policy for verification).
Below is a list of companies, that I have compiled, that require vaccination for employment. I have only included large companies but there are thousands of examples of small companies that also require vaccination. These are for jobs including administrators, care home workers, chefs, dentists, plumbers, nurses, software engineers and support workers to name but a few.
I find it amusing how many of these companies have equal opportunities sections in their job listing postings. Equal opportunities for anyone except the unvaccinated!
And if anyone from any of these companies reads this post, I would highly recommend that you remove your policies for two reasons. Firstly for discriminatory reasons connected to any future employment law issues and secondly, you don’t want to have pushed vaccination on employees, just in case it turns out that the vaccines weren’t as safe and effective as you thought.
I would also be interested in hearing from anyone who has been turned down from a job or interview if they are unvaccinated.
A selection of companies requiring or encouraging Covid-19 vaccination for employment.
- Accenture (Accenture requires all new employees to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 as a condition of employment);
- Amazon (Workers in New York City who perform in-person work or interact with the public in the course of business must show proof they have been fully vaccinated against COVID or request and receive approval for a reasonable accommodation, including medical or religious accommodation);
- American Red Cross (As a condition of employment with American Red Cross, you are required to provide proof that you are fully vaccinated for COVID 19 or qualify for an exemption, except in states where it is prohibited by law);
- AstraZeneca (AstraZeneca requires all US employees to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 but will consider requests for reasonable accommodations as required by applicable law);
- Carnival UK (To keep everyone on board fit and well, colleagues who visit or work on our ships must be fully vaccinated, including boosters);
- CBS Studios (Must be fully vaccinated to work on-site. (To be considered fully vaccinated: 2 weeks after their second dose in a 2-dose series, such as the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, or 2 weeks after a single-dose vaccine, such as Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine);
- Chainalysis (All employees are required to have or obtain a COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of employment at Chainalysis, unless an exemption has been approved. All employees shall be required to report their vaccine status);
- Citi (Citi requires that all successful applicants for positions located in the United States or Puerto Rico be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment and provide proof of such vaccination prior to commencement of employment);
- Coca-Cola ( all new employees must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and provide Coke Canada with proof of vaccination);
- Coles (As part of that commitment, you will need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before joining the team at Coles, unless you’re medically exempt);
- Fitch Learning (part of Fitch Group) (UNITED STATES ONLY: As part of its continued efforts to maintain a safe workplace for employees, Fitch requires that all employees who receive a written offer of employment on or after October 4, 2021 be fully vaccinated (as defined by the CDC) against the coronavirus by the first day of employment as a condition of employment, to the extent permitted by applicable law);
- Jefferies Group LLC (It is Jefferies’ policy that all employees and visitors be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to enter any Jefferies office or participate in any Jefferies or client event in person. Should an offer of employment be made, your acceptance of that offer means that you will comply with this policy);
- Levi Strauss (LS&CO requires proof of being fully vaccinated for COVID-19 as a condition of commencing employment, except in those jurisdictions where prohibited by law);
- Live Nation (Currently, we strongly encourage employees to be fully vaccinated or have received a negative COVID test within [24] hours of entering an office);
- Marella Cruises (Please note that all applicants must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19).
- Ministry of Defence (We therefore encourage all our employees and prospective ones to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 subject to any exemptions that may apply);
- NHS (Whilst COVID-19 vaccination is not currently a condition of employment, we do encourage our staff to get vaccinated. If you are unvaccinated, there is helpful advice and information available by searching on the ‘NHS England’ website where you can also find out more about how to access the vaccination);
- NSF International (NSF requires all employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment, with exceptions only as required by law);
- OmniAb (New hires based in the US will be required to demonstrate that they have been fully vaccinated and boosted for COVID-19 or qualify for a medical or religious exemption or accommodation to this vaccination requirement);
- Overseas Adventure Travel (All trip leaders are required to be double vaccinated and boosted (as are all of our passengers));
- Paypal (Depending on location, this might include a Covid-19 vaccination requirement for any employee whose role requires them to work onsite);
- Qantas Airways ( It is the intention of the Qantas Group to require employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and this is being explored in all our international locations);
- Universal Music Group (All UMG employees are currently required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or provide proof of a negative PCR or Antigen test before entering any Company offices unless they have been approved for an exemption or unless prohibited by applicable law);
- Visier (As part of this commitment, we require all employees to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 or qualify for an exemption);
- ZE UK (Accordingly, following with provincial and federal vaccination’s approach, we require that all of our employees to be fully vaccinated and provide their proof of vaccination or substantiated grounds for exemption);
Will the War Party Wield the Speaker’s Gavel?
By Dan McKnight | The Liberarian Institute | January 5, 2023
We’re witnessing a fascinating thing: Congress is actually debating and voting on something.
Remarkable!
For the first time in a century—and only the second time since the Civil War—the vote for the next Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives has entered multiple ballots.
To replace Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats have put forward Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a walk-the-line party man.
Jeffries has supported curtailing the war on Yemen and has cautiously questioned the the American military occupation of Syria. But he’s a reliable yes-man for every Pentagon budget, and he’s committed to U.S. military intervention in Ukraine (the springboard for World War III).
This vote was intended to be a shoe-in for Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican House Minority Leader.
McCarthy—who already tried and failed to become Speaker in 2015—is bought and paid for shill of the War Party and military-industrial complex.
When Kevin McCarthy hears about a new country we’re bombing illegally, he gets dollar signs in his eyes. He has no saving grace when it comes to an America First foreign policy.
For pete’s sake, four years ago his nominating speech for Minority Leader was given by the reptile Liz Cheney herself!
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a small cadre of Freedom Caucus members are opposing his coronation to the speakership.
On Tuesday, on the first vote, there were an assortment of names put forward. The one with the strongest showing in opposition was Andy Biggs of Arizona.
Rep. Biggs is a patriot, and principled defender of the U.S. Constitution. He’s a signer of my organization’s Congressional War Powers Pledge, where he swore to not support a war that was not first explicitly authorized by a vote of Congress.
He has kept that pledge.
Just a few weeks ago, Rep. Biggs told Judge Andrew Napolitano, “These AUMFs, which I believe are unconstitutional to begin with, the AUMFs are being bastardized as we speak and they’re being used in every which way. And effectively, I gotta put it this way. We are fighting a proxy war with Russia today in the Ukraine. And there is absolutely no authority for that…”
That’s the sort of America First perspective that’s never entered Kevin McCarthy’s tiny mind.
On the second and third vote, the dissenters coalesced around conservative workhorse Jim Jordan of Ohio, who’s officially supporting McCarthy for the speakership.
Now, as I write, the House has finalized its sixth round of voting and has adjourned until noon today.
Twenty determined members have settled on Byron Donalds of Florida as their choice.
Rep. Donalds has only served one-term in the U.S. House, so it’s difficult to ascertain a full-scope view of his foreign policy.
He has voted to repeal the 2002 AUMF against Iraq, but last year supported giving even more military supplies to Ukraine than Joe Biden countenanced. Over the summer, like dozens of other Republicans, he flip-flopped and now opposes further aid.
Personally, I find the legislative process refreshing. This is how the people’s house is supposed to function!
(Maybe the whole country would be better off if they just vote on the Speakership a couple thousand times for the next two years).
In the meantime, while Beltway organizations sit on their hands waiting to see who they’ll be taking out to lunch in the new session, Bring Our Troops Home has continued our labor to pass Defend the Guard.
With this bill, we will prevent our National Guard’s deployment into illegal, undeclared wars and starve imperial Washington of manpower.
State Senator Eric Brakey of Maine, one of our most intelligent and committed supporters, has introduced Defend the Guard and is waiting to receive a formal bill number.
We’ve had Defend the Guard presented before a Maine House committee back in 2021, which you can watch.
I’ll let you in to a little secret: whoever becomes the next Speaker of the U.S. House, the swamp is not going to get drained. The War Party will not be kicked off its roost so easily.
But in state governments, closer to voters and the beating heart of our once proud republic, we can make real progress. We can fix our broken foreign policy.
Bring Our Troops Home is not working around the clock just for a dog and pony show. We’re meeting with legislators, gathering veterans, and educating the public to pass actionable legislation to end our endless wars.
When we go to committee again, and hopefully a floor vote—not just in Maine but in over thirty states in 2023—I need to know that we have your support.
To find out what you can do to defend the integrity of your state’s National Guard, visit DefendTheGuard.US
Editor-in-chief of Russian news outlet arrested in Latvia
Marat Kasem from Sputnik Lithuania has been accused of espionage and could face up to 20 years behind bars
Journalist, editor-in-chief of Sputnik Lithuania Marat Kasem © Sputnik / Nina Zotina
RT | January 5, 2023
Latvia has arrested the editor-in-chief of the Lithuanian branch of the Russian Sputnik news agency. Marat Kasem was taken into custody on a court order, his lawyer announced on Thursday.
The journalist is accused of breaching EU sanctions and charged with espionage, Sputnik reports.
Kasem’s lawyer, Imma Jansone, has not yet been able to review his case materials, according to the news outlet. Jansone asked the court to release the journalist on bail but a judge decided to leave him in custody. Kasem was immediately transferred to Riga’s central jail on Thursday.
Kasem is a Latvian citizen, although he has been living in Moscow for several years working for the Rossiya Segodnya media group, with Sputnik Lithuania being a part of it. Before the New Year’s Eve, the journalist returned to Latvia for family reasons.
Moscow would request assistance of international organizations over Kasem’s arrest, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said. She also blasted the move as a violation of Latvia’s international commitments in the field of freedom of speech protection.
Talking to the RIA Novosti news agency, the head of the Rossiya Segodnya media group, Dmitry Kiselyov, branded Kasem’s arrest “absurd” and “lawless.” He also called such actions a “dangerous tendency” affecting all of the EU. Kiselyov said that Kasem previously frequently spoke of a feeling of being politically persecuted.
Kasem had already faced persecution in the Baltic States before his arrest. Back in 2019, he was detained on arrival to the Vilnius airport and labeled “a threat to the national security” of Lithuania. He was then deported to Latvia. At that time, it was revealed that the journalist was put on a blacklist of people barred from entering Lithuania altogether.
In 2018, another Russian journalist, Sputnik Latvia’s editor-in-chief, Valentin Rozentsov, was detained at Riga airport. He was held in police custody and interrogated for 12 hours before being released. In 2021, Moscow slammed persecution of Russian journalists in the Baltic States as a “flagrant attack on democracy” and considered what it called degradation of media freedoms there “concerning.”
The developments come as the three Baltic nations keep one of the most hardline stances on Moscow’s actions amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Last month, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, as well as Poland and Slovakia all lodged a formal protest against French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal that NATO should offer Russia security guarantees, according to Reuters.
Rep. Adam Schiff’s office asked Twitter to ban New York Post columnist Paul Sperry — Twitter Files
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | January 4, 2023
An internal Twitter email claims that the office of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, requested that Twitter ban New York Post columnist Paul Sperry and others and heavily censor information about House Committee Staffers.
The November 2020 email was published by journalist Matt Taibbi as part of a Twitter Files thread detailing censorship pressure and requests from the federal government and other elected officials.
According to the email, Schiff’s office had claimed that Sperry and “many” other accounts had “repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies,” accused these accounts of harassing an unnamed staffer, and requested that the accounts be banned from Twitter.
The email also notes that Schiff’s office had requested that Twitter:
- “Remove any and all content” about House Intelligence Committee staffers from Twitter including quotes, retweets, and reactions to any content about them
- “Suppress any and all search results” about House Intelligence Committee staffers
- “Stop the spread of future misinformation” about House Intelligence Committee staffers and “other Committee staff who are not public figures and who were not central actors in impeachment inquiry or the 2020 presidential election”
- “Label and reduce the visibility of any content” about an unnamed staffer that isn’t removed
Twitter declined most of the censorship requests by stating “no” or “we don’t do this” and Sperry wasn’t banned at the time. However, in August 2022, Twitter banned Sperry after he criticized the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort.
Schiff made these purported censorship requests after Sperry had published several articles that named Eric Ciaramella, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower whose complaint started the first impeachment inquiry against former President Trump. In one article, Sperry reported that Ciaramella was overheard talking to Sean Misko, a staffer from former President Barack Obama’s administration, in the White House. Sperry also reported that Misko subsequently left the White House to join the Schiff-led House Intelligence Committee.
In a statement to the New York post, Sperry wrote: “I have never promoted any ‘QAnon conspiracies.’ Ever. Not on Twitter. Not anywhere. Schiff was just angry I outed his impeachment whistleblower and tried to get me banned. I challenge Schiff to produce evidence to back up his defamatory remarks to Twitter.”
Sperry also questioned whether Schiff’s office was behind his August 2022 Twitter ban.
“Looks like Schiff’s office initially got friction from Twitter gatekeepers. Still, I was banned just a few months after this ‘request,’” Sperry said. “Were there subsequent demands from Schiff? May explain why Twitter would never give me a reason for banning me.”
Transmission Denied
The perils of state-sanctioned censorship laid bare
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | December 24, 2022
How will we look back on 2022? For all but the most die-hard Zero Covid addicts (who had to wait until China punctured this illusion only a few weeks ago), victory was declared over Covid early in the piece when the government backed down from its obscene NHS injection mandate in February and ‘Plan B’ restrictions were also subsequently rescinded.
Yet peace, of course, was subsequently shattered by a confected – albeit shockingly deadly and costly – crisis in Eastern Europe, providing a helpful smokescreen for those that wished to obscure the obvious fallacies propping up the mainstream Covid narrative.
Of course, for most lockdown sceptics, Covid-19 should never have had a name, nor should it have been a ‘thing’. Had we had our way, the UK might now have the financial muscle to invest in schools, hospitals, updating creaking infrastructure, … this list feels endless, not dissimilar to the climb we face to reclaim the lost ground since society leaped off the cliff and into the abyss of draconian non-pharmaceutical interventions in March 2020.
These days, of course, it is fashionable to decry the harms of the over-zealous response, almost as if there had been no dissenting voices or opinions at the time. Unfortunately this is another convenient smokescreen, as the true scale of falsehoods shared by official information campaigns – or should we call them disinformation campaigns co-ordinated by officials – is now becoming impossible for even the most ardent Covidean Cultists to ignore.
We have previously reported on very strange goings-on in the upper echelons of the institutions co-ordinating various aspects of the ‘pandemic response’. Senior personalities and shadowy nameless characters that populated government committees such as SAGE – riven with conflicts of interest and serving many masters, the precise opposite of the ‘public servants’ they were portrayed as – favoured both corporate tyranny and crony capitalism. Actions speak louder than words: achieving good outcomes for people they are meant to be serving seem not to have been the top of their agenda.
This just replicated what happened across the Western world. Consider the treatment meted out on three ‘centrist’ senior academics (hailing from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard, no less) behind the Great Barrington Declaration, an attempt to promote a rational response to the grand panic so as to minimise collateral damage. A senior honcho within US National Institutes of Health smeared them as ‘fringe epidemiologists’ and stated that there “needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises”:
Various such rent-a-quote ‘take downs’ duly appeared in the following days, and a rival rallying flag – the John Snow Memorandum – was hastily erected, receiving the blessing of various official mouthpieces such as Rochelle Walensky, the head of the CDC, as well being promoted in The Lancet. The John Snow Memo was merely a totem – a weak document that has laughably failed to stand the test of time – and it was correctly critiqued at the time. It is littered with hostage to fortune statements such as “Japan, Vietnam, and New Zealand, to name a few countries, have shown that robust public health responses can control transmission, allowing life to return to near-normal, and there are many such success stories”. Oops.
But despite these clangers, the ‘women and children last’ brigade were given a free pass by the mainstream press to use the John Snow Memorandum as a stick to beat — and silence — those that fought to limit collateral damage. Mission accomplished: pharma profits maximised.
This all came to light back in 2021… it is old news, though it is noteworthy that even lockdown sceptic Isabel Oakeshott recently mislabelled the centrist creed as the ‘Barrington Declaration’ (perhaps assuming the ‘Great’ was self-aggrandisement, rather than the more prosaic fact of being a geographical label referring to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where the Declaration was signed).
A new development is that Anthony Fauci, head of the NIA, is now unable to recall these matters when providing an ‘on the record’ legal deposition, stating that he didn’t “have time to worry about things like the Great Barrington Declaration”… despite writing a few days after the above email from Collins that he had “come out very strongly against the Great Barrington Declaration”.
And following on from confirmation of the active suppression and censorship of the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors, the new owner of a recently acquired social media company seems to have unearthed information that led to this exchange:
This is not merely playground politics – it is a matter of life and death. As fashionable as it is to subsequently admit that lockdowns – and the associated excesses which led to such terrible collateral damage – were a mistake, this was known before they were enacted. The shenanigans cost lives, livelihoods, and robbed families of last goodbyes.
It is tempting to see the debacle of recent years as a great misadventure – part of life’s rich tapestry that contributes to the furtherment of human knowledge. Lockdowns – ah, a failed experiment, but we didn’t know any better!
The sad – if unpalatable – truth is that not only should that experiment never have happened, it was known to very many powerful people that the experiment – and its compounding consequences and associated harms – should never have been promoted. It was a grand self-immolation that happened to enrich various characters that were not necessarily acting in your best interests. As more painful truths come to light, we owe it to our children and children’s children to continue to dissect these discredited lockdown policies, and those that promoted them. Watch this space.
Documents reveal how ‘Russiagate’ was used for Twitter censorship
RT | January 4, 2023
Internal documents from Twitter made public on Tuesday show how the social media platform was pressured to follow the US intelligence community’s lead on censorship back in 2017. Key Democrats in the US Congress, a British university and two media outlets – Politico and BuzzFeed – played a major role in the process, which revolved around the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory, according to research by Matt Taibbi.
In a pattern established in just six weeks, from August to October 2017, Twitter went from being on nobody’s radar to agreeing to take orders from US spies as to whom to censor, Taibbi wrote on Substack.
“Threats from Congress came first, then a rush of bad headlines (inspired by leaks from congressional committees), and finally a series of moderation demands coming from the outside,” he added.
In a 30-tweet thread, Taibbi showed emails and other internal documents he obtained, thanks to Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk.
Democrats had accused Russia of helping Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. Their claim that Trump had ties with Moscow was a “dossier” fabricated by a British spy. From there, they insinuated that WikiLeaks publishing internal DNC documents and personal emails of Clinton’s campaign had something to do with Moscow, while “Russian bots and trolls” posted “misinformation” on social media that somehow undermined the elections.
By August 2017, Facebook was purging accounts accused of being “linked to Russia.” Unconcerned, Twitter sent over a list of 22 “possible” Russian accounts to the Senate Intelligence Committee, only to be denounced by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat.
By the end of September, Twitter VP for Public Policy Colin Crowell was warning that “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and [the] rest of industry to keep producing material for them.” Crowell also noted the Democrats were “taking cues from Hillary Clinton,” and that only Warner and his House counterpart Congressman Adam Schiff were seeking any comments from social media companies.
Meanwhile, as Taibbi put it, “a torrent of stories sourced to the [committee] poured into the news,” while several Senators – including Warner but also John McCain, an anti-Trump Arizona Republican – proposed bills that would have cracked down on social media.
A “Russia Task Force” set up by Twitter on October 2 found “no evidence of a coordinated approach” by October 13. The final report on October 23 found “32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia.” Of those, only two spent anything close to $10,000 on advertising – and one of them was RT.
Policy Director Carlos Monje admits in an October 18 memo that “our ads policy and product changes are an effort to anticipate congressional oversight.” One of these changes was the October 26 ban on advertising by RT and Sputnik.
A November 22 internal email accuses the Senate Intelligence Committee of leaking Twitter’s internal report to the media. A Politico story accusing Twitter of deleting files is followed by a BuzzFeed article alleging a German-language bot network with “signs of being connected to Russia.” The committee demands a report based on the story, which Twitter’s Yoel Roth dutifully writes up.
“You can see how the Russian cyber-threat was essentially conjured into being, with political and media pressure serving as the engine inflating something Twitter believed was negligible and uncoordinated to massive dimensions,” Taibbi wrote.
All of this results in the internal instructions to ban anything “identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” It was the first step in the process that would eventually lead to the FBI and the Biden White House telling Twitter exactly whom to censor.
Injury on ‘Monday Night Football’ prompts 20 vaccine observations …
An uncomfortable question: Could one death save many lives?
Aaron Rodgers was right on vaccines and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was wrong.
By Bill Rice, Jr. | January 3, 2023
By now, millions of Americans (who can still find somewhere to practice free speech) have commented on the apparent heart attack of Buffalo Bills’ safety Damar Hamlin, which occurred last night on “Monday Night Football.”
The extreme interest in this case further confirms that millions of Americans understand a giant elephant has been sitting in our family rooms for more than two years.
Since I now have my own Substack site, I can offer a few of thoughts on this potentially very important (if tragic) news event.
- We don’t know if Hamlin’s cardiac event was related to him getting a vaccine, which he almost certainly has received as probably 99 percent of NFL players have been vaccinated.
- But his cardiac event could be related to the vaccine. This is the “elephant in the room.”
- People began receiving Covid “vaccines” in December 2020 – more than two years ago. In those two years, I have not heard one American announcer broach the subject that vaccines could be dangerous to young, healthy athletes. No announcer has mentioned the thousands of possible vaccine-related injuries and fatalities that have now happened to people around the world (whether these people were playing organized sports, weekend sports, running in a 5k or rock-climbing).
- This “radio silence” is strange as every time a current or recently-retired athlete “dies suddenly” throngs of people comment on this (again, at the sites that still allow uncensored comments).
- For two years, I’ve been saying that the only thing that might change the “safe and effective” vaccine narrative is if some U.S. athlete died on national television … probably in a game with tens of millions of viewers … a game like “Monday Night Football.”
- But even if, God forbid, such a tragedy occurred, I’m no longer certain this would be enough to change the narrative enough to cease all future vaccinations.
- Too many groups are now “stakeholders” in the vaccine narrative for these people and organizations to admit they were wrong.
- For example, the NFL Players Association could probably go a long way towards challenging the “safe” narrative by simply voting to not play football again until these vaccine demands are stopped. However, this union – created to look out for the well-being of its members (today and in the future) – actually supports Covid vaccines … and supported masking requirements and mandatory testing of non-sick players.
- If this union belatedly decided the vaccines might be dangerous to its members, it would be admitting it was wrong (on a life-or-death matter) for three years, something the Union’s leadership will NOT do.
- Nor will any announcer or journalist covering sports leagues admit one incredibly-relevant Covid fact: No college or pro sports athlete in the world has died from Covid in the past three years. This means there has been zero mortality risk to these athletes from Covid, according to three years of observable data. This means there was no reason any of these athletes should have been vaccinated in the first place.
- Everyone in the world also now knows that the vaccines neither prevent infection nor spread so there is absolutely no evidence that vaccines produce any important benefit for these athletes.
- Aaron Rodgers, Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving and tennis superstar Novak Djokovik were right and smart to refuse vaccination.
13. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and every other sports league commissioner was wrong to mandate these vaccines (or to bully, penalize and coerce athletes into doing this). So too was every college sports league and all their member colleges and all the esteemed science department faculty members who comprised these leagues’ “expert” safety panels.
14. Every fine that commissioners have levied against athletes and coaches who didn’t wear masks, or salaries that were withheld because non-vaxxed athletes couldn’t play in certain games, should be returned with interest and punitive damages for discrimination.
15. Every journalist or TV talking head who refused to acknowledge the above facts are cowards who refused to do their jobs and present any of these facts. This, or they are simply obtuse and the public should know our “watchdog” journalists are too ignorant to add two and two together.
16. We’ll never definitively know if the vaccines killed or harmed young athletes because the autopsies that might determine this will either never be performed or the autopsies that are performed won’t look for the right clinical markers. And/or the cause of death will be listed as a medical issue which the vaccines might have caused.
17. Still, a tiny chance (maybe 0 to 1 percent) exists that some officials will rule a high-profile death as being vaccine-caused. If, by some miracle, such an official determination was made, many more people would then have to acknowledge that, at least for pro athletes, Covid vaccines are more deadly than Covid-19 (a disease the vaccines don’t prevent). Such a finding would perhaps qualify as a narrative-changer.
18. … Which, alas, is why this can’t happen.
19. Pfizer is actually a corporate sponsor of the SEC and pays the league untold millions of dollars. In a recent media campaign, the SEC and Pfizer joined forces to “encourage everyone to get their boosters.” The NFL, NBA, MLB, Big-10, Pac-12, etc. are also firmly on the record of endorsing vaccines … just like all the networks that televise the sporting events of these leagues.
20. Question: Are any of these institutions now going to admit they were wrong and were putting the health and lives of athletes at risk all along?
At one time I thought if one prominent American athlete died on national TV in front of 20 million people such a tragedy might save many lives .. so such a death would actually have a silver lining. But now I doubt this would even be the case.
When you’ve reached the conclusion that one death might need to happen to save many more lives, something’s gone terribly wrong with our society.
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Tell Me Again, Who Made The Desert Bloom?
Lawrence of Cyberia | March 19, 2010
In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine, in support of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The results were published in the Survey of Palestine, which has been scanned and made available online by Palestine Remembered; all 1300 pages can be read here.
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