Political chaos shaking Brazil
By Lucas Leiroz | January 10, 2023
The Brazilian political scene is increasingly tense. Anti-Lula protests grow day by day, with thousands of people taking to the streets in several cities to demand the revocation of the 2022 electoral process. Recently, in an act of vandalism and disdain for the most basic civic values, pro-Bolsonaro militants invaded Brasília, damaging public buildings and the facilities of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. As a result, the Lula government began a tough response to those involved, punishing protesters, and intervening in Brasilia’s regional politics.
The Federal District of Brasilia was the target of scenes of depredation on January 8th. Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters – commonly referred to as “Bolsonarists” – attacked the Parliament, the Supreme Court and the Planalto Palace – the headquarters of the Three Branches of the Republic. Historical pieces of art that were kept on site were also destroyed, creating a true scene of barbarism.
The majority of the militants wore shirts from the Brazilian soccer team and held flags of Brazil, the US and Israel – which has already become commonplace in Bolsonarist demonstrations. As in other protests across the country, Bolsonarists in Brasília demanded the end of the Lula government and called for new elections. Some more radical militants called for military intervention – which is also a common agenda among Brazilian rightists. The invasion lasted a few hours, but the authorities regained control of the situation before the end of the day.
In fact, if the Bolsonarists’ intention was to weaken the Lula government, the plan failed. The president of Brazil, with broad support from the national media and international authorities, took control of the situation with tough measures to guarantee law and order. Not only were the protesters repelled, but hundreds of them were identified and arrested.
Lula signed a decree imposing federal intervention in Brasília’s public security, taking exceptional measures to guarantee order and end the vandalism. Measures to break telephone secrecy and in-depth intelligence investigations are also being operated in order to point out all the culprits for the invasion, including its possible sponsors.
Indeed, mass protests in Brasilia are not common. The Brazilian capital has an urban structure that does not allow for large popular mobilizations to pressure the authorities who work there. The isolation of politicians and government’s facilities was precisely the central objective of the architectural project of Brasilia in the 1960s.
Before, when the capital was in Rio de Janeiro, federal facilities were easily accessible to the population, allowing mass protests and social chaos. Brasilia is built differently, with access routes that are very restricted and easily blocked by the authorities, so that large mobilizations there can only occur in case of negligence or connivance on the part of the police.
This led the Brazilian government to identify the heads of public administration in Brasília as Bolsonarists colluding with the demonstrations, dismissing them from their offices and reformulating the administrative structure of the city with some new allies of the government. The Brazilian media adopted this speech as official and referred to the former police chiefs of Brasilia as Bolsonarists, strengthening the coalition in support of Lula’s measures.
On the other hand, leaders of right-wing parties in Brazil claim that there was some kind of “false flag operation”, where the authorities would have deliberately permitted the vandalism of the angry mass precisely to boost a radicalization of the Lula government. The war of narratives does not seem to end anytime soon.
What is really important, however, is not the political position of the former police chiefs of Brasilia, but what comes next. The Brazilian government and the media formally classified the protesters as “terrorists”, which raises a series of questions. While there has undoubtedly been vandalism and a number of deplorable acts, classifying these acts as “terrorism” is questionable and justifies all sorts of exceptional measures. To combat terrorism, extraordinary actions are valid, thus justifying the breach of the legal-constitutional norms to restore order.
Some critics of Lula fear that the new government will commit abuses and make the January 8 decree a kind of Brazilian “Patriot Act”. This criticism is valid, and the actions must be monitored so that they do not become abuses, but the most important thing, instead of criticizing Lula’s measures, is to find the necessary mechanisms to pacify the country.
Brazil is absolutely divided, polarized and tense. On the one hand, radical Bolsonarists who do not accept the former president’s defeat; on the other, similarly radical pro-Lula militants – who are now even calling for popular mobilization to “stop” the rightist protesters. As a result, Brazil remains inflamed by political partisanship, with no real concern for a project for the Brazilian State that overcomes ideological and partisan antagonisms.
Lula is trying to find those responsible for the protests in the capital. He accuses Bolsonaro of being the instigator of the actions and has even received support from key members of the American Democratic Party, who are now asking Washington to “extradite” the former Brazilian president who is in the US since December. However, there is still no legal action that legitimizes such “extradition” and continuing to try to find “culprits” is perhaps just a way to further deepen polarization.
Lula’s great challenge will not be to punish the members of the former government, nor even to put an end to radical rightism in the country. His great task is to overcome social hostility and find a way to pacify Brazil. Perhaps, calling thousands of Brazilian citizens “terrorists” is not the best way to do this. Undoubtedly, vandalism must be punished, but the ultimate goal must be national reconciliation.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
Biden’s Bloated IRS Will Skewer Taxpayers
By James Bovard | FFF | January 5, 2023
The Internal Revenue Service is perhaps the ultimate sacred cow in Washington. It is the “goose that lays the golden eggs” for the city’s power and prestige, delivering trillions of dollars to politicians to work miracles (or at least get reelected). When criticism erupted over the 87,000 new revenooers to be hired thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Washington’s Defenders of Correct Thinking rushed to the ramparts.
The media goes to bat for the IRS
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, in an article headlined “Another Republican Lie is Born,” caterwauled that Republicans’ anti-IRS rhetoric is one of the “hallmarks of authoritarianism” and justified Biden’s condemnation of Republicans for “semi-fascism.” Post columnist Joe Davidson fretted that “attacks on the IRS” are part of Republican efforts “delegitimatizing government.” Another Post article warned that Republicans are “putting federal workers in danger” by “repeating baseless claims” about the IRS. A Post purported humor columnist did a piece headlined, “Farewell, Mother I am off to join the IRS army!” sneering at baseless fears about Biden weaponizing IRS agents.
“Baseless?” At the time the Inflation Reduction Act passed, the IRS was advertising for “special agents” who must “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary” during “execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.” The IRS had recently made massive purchases of new firearms and ammunition. The job notice declared: “No matter what the source, all income earned, both legal and illegal, has the potential of becoming involved in crimes which fall within the investigative jurisdiction of the IRS Criminal Investigation.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) observed, “The IRS has never pointed a gun at a billionaire or his employees, so why does the IRS need 87,000 new agents, AR-15s, and 5 million rounds of ammunition? They’re not gunning for billionaires or their bank accounts.”
Shock brigades of Fact Checkers rushed to rescue the IRS’s reputation. Reuters announced that it is “false” that the IRS “is hiring 87,000 new armed IRS agents” because only a couple thousand IRS agents carry firearms. Similarly, an Associated Press “fact-checking” report derided as “false” the allegation that “all new employees that the IRS intends to hire … will be required to carry a firearm and use deadly force if necessary.” Since not all IRS new hires will be heavily armed, it is “misleading” to pretend that any danger exists.
Controversy also swirled about a film clip of an IRS recruiting program on college campuses. A clip from Utah shows students putting on flak jackets and readying toy guns and handcuffs for “taking down a landscape business owner who failed to properly report how he paid for his vehicles.” “First they came for the tulip bulbs….”
Associated Press Fact Checkers complained that the video is “being misrepresented to falsely claim it shows a new force of IRS special agents being trained as part of agency expansion efforts.” But it is a recruiting video for college students that shows how they will be trained and use their power as IRS agents.
Since not all IRS employees will be carrying Glocks or AR-15s, Americans should presume that every IRS employee is a well-meaning civil servant waiting to assist people tormented by convoluted IRS instruction booklets. And it won’t matter if the new hires abuse their power. An IRS “enforcement operation” won’t count as a raid unless agents shoot at least three people. And then it still won’t matter because anyone who is gunned down will be labeled a suspected tax scofflaw. Regardless, Americans should presume that the IRS is actually less aggressive than a Girl Scout cookie-selling campaign.
There were plenty of “Iron Fist Bellwethers” last year when Biden first announced plans to vastly expand the IRS. The Washington Post reported that “the single biggest source of new revenue in the plan comes from dramatically expanding the clout of the nation’s tax agency.” Slate reported, “Biden wants to fund a massive upgrade to the American welfare state by making the IRS great at audits again.” And there aren’t that many billionaires to go around to finance all the schemes that Team Biden favors.
While Fact Checkers zealously squelch nitwit comments from random dudes on Facebook, they are ignoring far bigger howlers from the White House. On August 19, the White House promised that “No one making under $400,000 per year will pay a penny more in taxes” thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. Team Biden effectively insists that “those who have nothing (or at least no income) to hide have nothing to fear.” According to Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), “If you’re not cheating on your taxes, you have nothing to worry about.” But the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that “between 78% and 90% of the estimated additional $200 billion the IRS will collect [over the next decade] will come from small businesses making less than $200,000 annually,” the New York Post reported.
Biden and his media allies pretend that the federal tax code is as lucid as the Ten Commandments and that depravity and/or iniquity are the only reasons people underpay taxes. But Americans are confounded by the four million words in the tax code and by the IRS’s failure to answer more than 90 percent of phone calls from taxpayers. Did the IRS need an $80 billion bribe to answer the phones? Actually, only 4 percent of the new $80 billion in funding will be devoted to customer service while 58 percent will go to turbo-charge enforcement.
IRS a law unto itself
Biden is acquiring a new army of IRS enforcers at the same time the agency obliterates unlucky taxpayers with deluges of penalties —which have increased tenfold since the 1950s. Sen. David Pryor (D-AR) complained that the IRS used penalties “as a weapon, as a whip over the innocent and the guilty taxpayer’s head, and as a point of leverage.” IRS enforcement policies have been travesties of due process for longer than Joe Biden has been in Washington.
IRS bureaucrats don’t even need to file a criminal charge before snaring citizens’ life savings. Consider IRS depredations under the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which required banks to file a federal report for any cash transaction exceeding $10,000. The IRS “enforced” the law by presuming that anyone who deposited slightly less than $10,000 was a criminal. The IRS seized a quarter billion dollars because it disapproved of how businesses and individuals structured their bank deposits and withdrawals.
Between 2005 and 2012, the number of IRS seizures rose more than fivefold, but the vast majority of victims were never criminally prosecuted for structuring offenses. IRS criminal investigators simply looked at banking records and then confiscated hundreds of accounts. Most of the victims were “legal businesses such as jewelry stores, restaurant owners, gas station owners, scrap metal dealers, and others.” The IRS targeted businesses with legal sources of income, according to a 2017 Inspector General report, “to engage in ‘quick hits,’ where property was more quickly seized … rather than pursuing cases with other criminal activity (such as drug trafficking and money laundering), which are more time-consuming.” The IG found no evidence in 91 percent of the seizure cases that the money came from illegal activities. The IG noted, “Interviews with the property owners were conducted after the seizure to determine the reason for the pattern of banking transactions and if the property owner had knowledge of the banking law and had intent to structure.”
The IRS is menacing in part because federal courts have been shamelessly docile. As David Burnham, author of A Law Unto Itself: The I.R.S. and the Abuse of Power, noted, “Over and over again, federal judges have found ways either to ignore or actually to legitimize the growing reach of the tax collectors,” a “pattern of judicial tenderness … partly the product of the natural sympathy that those in power always feel toward the tax collectors.”
In U.S. Tax Court, IRS determinations of what citizens owe are “presumed correct,” with taxpayers bearing the burden to prove the feds wrong. Corporations with hefty legal departments routinely defeat the IRS in court, but few citizens can afford to fight a federal agency that appears to hold all the cards. Tax expert Daniel Pilla estimates that the “IRS’s audit results are incorrect between 60 and 90 percent of the time.”
The Supreme Court will soon hear the case of Romanian-American businessman Alexandru Bittner, who voluntarily notified the IRS that he was late filing reports on his foreign bank accounts (he was unaware of his duty to file). The IRS hit him with $2.72 million in fines, penalties, and interest — even though at least one federal court believed he should owe only $50,000. The difference between $2.72 million and $50,000 is a dramatic gauge of the arbitrary power that the IRS possesses over Americans.
The IRS agenda
The power to tax has long conferred the power to destroy political opponents. But in the glorious era of President Joe Biden, all previous cases of government abuse of power are being expunged, at least by the media and Biden supporters. The stunning political bias of Obama’s IRS vanished into the Memory Hole, never to be seen again (at least by respectable media outlets). But in 2014, a report by Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee concluded that the IRS’s Lois Lerner, who masterminded the blockade of conservative nonprofit applications, “believed the political participation of tax-exempt organizations harmed Democratic candidates, she believed something needed to be done, and she directed action from her unit at the IRS.”
The Inflation Reduction Act will pay for new IRS computer systems. It has received billions of dollars from Congress to fix its computers since the 1980s, but the system is still a total mess (relying in part on 1960s-era computer technologies that are no longer widely taught in computer science classes).
How bad is the IRS information management system? An Inspector General report revealed that the IRS had destroyed 30 million tax information returns in 2021 without processing them because it was overwhelmed by the accumulating paper. Bloomberg News noted, “The IRS explained the documents were destroyed because the agency’s ‘antiquated’ information technology systems could no longer handle them.” Texas CPA Brian Streig groused, “To see the IRS just destroy these [returns] is almost like the IRS admitting they don’t really care.” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) denounced the document destruction as a “scandal” and lamented that “all the American people see at the IRS is incompetence and catastrophe.” Pascrell called for Biden to fire IRS chief Charles Rettig.
The IRS also sought to cover up the fact that it had failed to process tens of millions of tax returns in 2020 and 2021, continually misleading Congress and the media about the size of the backlog. Citizens faced harsh penalties for not filing their 1040 on time, but the IRS faced no penalty for making false statements about millions of tax returns it had failed to process.
The Inflation Reduction Act should have been named the Boarhawging Taxpayers Again Act. The Internal Revenue Service has perennially been the authoritarian means to paternalistic ends. Since politicians worship revenue above all other gods, don’t expect the Biden administration or Congress to stand up for average Americans unfairly caught in the revenue crosshairs.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.
Sweden to Nearly Double Annual Number of Military Conscripts
Samizdat – 09.01.2023
The Swedish government has decided to nearly double its annual number of military recruits to 10,000 to boost the country’s defense capabilities amid the Ukrainian conflict, Americain news agency reported on Monday.
In March 2017, Sweden resumed compulsory military conscription, which was abolished in 2010, citing the deteriorating security situation in the region.
As part of the plan to increase the number of conscripts, the government will ask the emergency agency to prepare training for young people who do not want to undergo military training, the report said, citing Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, adding that in the event of a military conflict, the conscripts will be asked to serve in municipal emergency services.
“The experiences from Ukraine paint a very clear picture, as emergency services face severe pressure in their work to protect civilians. Considering the security situation, this is an urgent measure to strengthen total defense capabilities,” Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told reporters.
On May 18, three months after Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine, Sweden and Finland applied for NATO membership. Their accession protocols have already been ratified by all NATO members except Hungary and Turkey.
Elon Musk agreed to EU’s censorship laws, France’s digital minister says
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | January 8, 2023
French digital transition minister Jean-Noel Barrot visited Twitter owner Elon Musk to discuss compliance with European censorship rules.
Barrot tweeted that he visited Musk after attending CES in Las Vegas on Saturday. The French minister claimed that Musk said Twitter would comply with EU laws.
“At Twitter headquarters, Elon Musk confirmed to me his intention to comply with European rules, and his commitments on content moderation, the fight against disinformation, and the protection of children,” he wrote in a tweet that included a photo of himself and the Twitter CEO.
Since Musk took over Twitter in late October, he has made several changes, including rolling back Covid censorship policies and laying off members of staff.
Shortly after Musk took over, European Commissioner Thierry Breton warned that the platform had to adhere to the bloc’s speech rules.
Last year, the EU passed the Digital Services Act (DSA), a regulation that will require online platforms to take down harmful content immediately and suspend users who repeatedly violate the rules.
The law will take effect in 2024.
Time to Rethink the Core Question: What Is Health Care?
By Alan Lash | Brownstone Institute | January 5, 2023
By now we’ve all heard many stories of health policy makers, medical institutions, and even doctors seemingly act against the best health interests of the people and their patients. Doctors ignoring the real facts that Covid was never that dangerous for large swaths of the population, and equally ignoring that the vaccinations may cause serious harm. “Safe and effective,” they keep repeating.
Last month Alex Berenson provided details of yet another example of a 14-year-old girl named Yulia Hicks. Duke University surgeons took her off of the kidney transplant list because she is not vaccinated. We were horrified in hearing such examples a full year ago, but incredibly they continue.
Most of us have personal stories of close friends and family acting in equally peculiar ways. In my case, a doctor very close to me advised my daughter to get vaccinated in the summer of 2021 without talking to me at all. He didn’t know anything about her medical history or circumstances that would have potentially made the vaccine dangerous for her.
I challenged him, and he apologized, but he essentially shrugged off anything I said about the relative unnecessity for her to even take the vaccine, given that Covid was not dangerous for her. My facts didn’t seem to matter. He also shrugged off any potential long-term effects, even as I pointed out the obvious, that many such effects could not even be known at that time.
These stories go on and on, and extend to opinions of friends and family outside of health care. “You just have to take it,” we are told.
What is this disconnect? Why are there so many people who believe that it is ok to demand that a girl be vaccinated before she receives other life-saving treatment? Surely, they do not wish her harm. Why are potential risks of the vaccines just ignored by a large part of the medical community? How can they see significant numbers of cases of myocarditis in young men, and not pause for a moment to consider the impact that the vaccine might have on their lives and families?
I do not believe that all of these doctors think that when they advise these young men to take the vaccine, that they are intentionally trying to cause them harm. In fact, these doctors themselves believe that they are doing what is best for their patients.
But how is this possible? How can one group of doctors prescribe the opposite as another group of doctors and both believe that they are acting in the best interests of their patients, when all the same data points are there for everyone to see? I believe that the answer to these questions lies in the central definition of health care itself, and the worldviews that create this definition.
One worldview, the one I possess, is that health care is at essence an individual doctor/patient relationship. The doctor assesses the individual needs of the patient, whether physical or psychological, and plans treatment based on that. In Yulia’s case, my answer is obvious: the doctors must ignore their vaccination policy in the best health interests of one specific patient. It doesn’t even matter to me whether she had Covid before. Her parents’ refusal to get the vaccine, for whatever reason, is all I need to know. Clearly this worldview means there is a different treatment for each individual.
The other worldview, seemingly held by so many inside the healthcare system, does not rely on an individual assessment to understand health care. They view health care as being a general policy that applies to the entire population. If they have determined that in general vaccination is better than not being vaccinated, then they must require that everyone be vaccinated.
They say that if their policy choice is correct, then they must just accept that there are some people who will not benefit or even be harmed by the policy. The statistics are all that matter. If they follow those, then they are in fact doing what is best for everyone. Doctors can claim that they are in fact working to help people. Their statistics prove it to them.
This worldview has been brought into stark relief in the past two years with the various policies around Covid, but it has been taking root for quite some time. My father died in 2010, but in the years before his death, doctors had him on a wide variety of medications, so that every day he literally swallowed a handful of pills.
What were they for? High blood pressure, blood clot prevention, predisposition to diabetes. Note that none of these are conditions from which he suffered in his life, they are all numbers, measurements, and statistics. He wasn’t being treated as an individual with a specific problem that needed to be addressed. He fit in this category, and that other category, and so the solution is a handful of pills every day, just like everyone else in those categories.
But what happens when the statistics don’t bear out the policy decision? We have an immediate example with the Covid vaccinations. All-cause mortality has been on a frightening rise, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore the possibility that the vaccines could have actually caused this. Assuming that there is a connection, surely this flies in the face of the worldview that the vaccination program has been good for all of society. If the overall numbers of deaths have increased, doesn’t that mean that the vaccination program was a failure? Isn’t that the very definition of a public health policy failure? Again, in this case, many doctors seem to be unaware of this fact. How can that be?
As baffling as this is, I think this too fits well within the worldview. When the medical community completely controls all health care decisions, that defines the success. Another way to think about it is to say that the overarching grand scheme is precisely to remove all decision-making from the individual about their own health care. In this sense, the vaccination program has been a success, regardless of myocarditis, nervous disorders, or even excess mortality.
Of course things will not go perfectly well all the time, and there may be more harm than good in a particular campaign. But overall, if people just trust what they are told to do by the medical establishment, we will all be better off over the long run. They will just have to do better next time.
But here we are now at a problem that cannot be solved. There is no reconciliation of the two worldviews.
The health policy worldview determines its success only in the fact that they have controlled the individual health decisions. Any mistakes in policy will be taken into account in the next decision. There never is a policy failure as long as the decision-makers remain in charge to tell us what is best.
The individual worldview requires that each patient be treated uniquely, with a personal relationship with a doctor viewing their needs and desires as important and unique. This attitude is wholly counter to centralized control of all health care decisions.
Where are we going? As much as I’d like to think people will ultimately reject top down control of their health care, that’s not what we’ve seen happen. The trend has been in place for at least several decades, and the emotional reaction against personal choice and individual care has been shockingly powerful in the past two years. This is despite solid and growing evidence that the vaccination campaign has been a failure in improving the health of the population. My hope is that there will be some change in attitude or some big event to get us back to health care for individuals, but I can’t think of what that will be.
Alan Lash is a software developer from Northern California, with a Masters degree Physics and a PhD in Mathematics.
Masks – again
Despite the absence of evidence, governments want us to mask up again. Why?

By Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan | Trust the Evidence | January 3, 2023
Those who thought they had seen the last mask mandates were badly mistaken.
It starts with the message on masking, and let’s see how the public reacts. It won’t be long before governments resort to reintroducing compulsory mask use to address the “winter crisis”. They say masks will decrease the number of respiratory infections that are the major cause of the recurring winter crisis.
Readers will recall that in early December, we challenged the evidence base cited by Lord Markham as proof that masks work. We wrote:
‘According to the UKHSA, the official scientific rationale for mask mandates in the community is based on a review last updated in the summer of 2021 of 28 studies, two of which are trials and the rest studies of abysmal quality. The review, identified through a Parliamentary Question, is in two parts: the main body and supplementary tables reporting the data. The problem is that the review is full of errors: the two parts do not match and appear to have been written separately and not even proofread.’
Most of the studies in the review are observational, making claims such as an 80 per cent reduction in cases after mask introduction – making masks use a miracle, not a human intervention. If that were the case, SARS-CoV-2 had been sent packing years ago, and with it, all the other respiratory viruses.
We also cited the co-author of Mr Hancock’s pandemic memoir, revealing that Johnson, Whitty and Hancock knew from the start that masks do not do the job, and yet they went ahead and coerced Britons to wear them.
The reality is different. Clinical trials in various settings – across vastly different ranges of circulation rates – from low influenza-like illness to pandemics have failed to show any effect. Which tallies with everyone’s personal experience of mask “protection”. So, why the sudden reintroduction?
Something odd is happening. We live in a world with more information and reactive media that fails to grasp the reality of the problem. Managing the message becomes more important than fixing the problem, particularly when you know you won’t be in your job much longer. Masks are a distraction.
The reality is a merry-go-round as new ministers, advisors, and experts pop up. They look to a simple solution to gloss over rather than fixing the long-term structural problems in the NHS.
We learnt this painful lesson with Tamiflu in the Swine flu Pandemic. Ministers reiterated, as did public health officials, that what mattered is they needed to be seen to be doing something. Whether it was evidence-based or not was immaterial. A complex problem requires a simple fix – a highly visible one: masking fits the bill perfectly.
Part of the problem is officials go unchallenged, no one asks for the evidence, and if they do, they feel intimidated – as an anonymous BBC reporter disclosed. You can virtually state anything in this modern era. By tomorrow the media will have moved on.
However, for now, let’s follow the jungle cry: do something! What? It does not matter; we have to be seen to be doing something!!!!
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.
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.


