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As Democrats destroy democracy, the US becomes a one-party state

By Daniel Miller | TCW Defending Freedom | November 16, 2022

The disappointing results in the US mid-term elections from the point of view of popular opposition shouldn’t have been surprising to anyone. The United States is now effectively a one-party state, and seeking redress through elections is no longer a plausible path.

The critical point was already established in the stolen 2020 US Presidential election as the cardinal distinction between ballots and votes.

Whereas votes are linked to specific individuals, and cannot be cast by people who are no longer alive or no longer live in the area, ballots are harvested, potentially months in advance, by party workers mailing out returns to high population density housing projects and retirement homes, and picking them up again.

Because it lacks any practically enforceable safeguards, the ballot system is fundamentally vulnerable to organised fraud. This is why it was adopted and will remain the system going forward.

We are already beyond any question of rigging elections because the electoral system itself is now fundamentally rigged – that is, fundamentally organised to engineer Democratic Party majorities, which is to say rote acclamations of corruption and oligarchy, because the Democrats control high-population urban voting districts.

Where necessary, voter suppression techniques are applied on election day in the form of a shortage of ballots or malfunctioning voting machines, as happened this year in Arizona and elsewhere.

None of this is especially sophisticated – ultimately it represents a 21st century version of 19th century Democrat urban machine politics associated with the infamous Tammany Hall.  

It should also be recognised that US democracy was never without fraud. Elections were also sporadically fixed in the 20th century, most notably in Illinois in the 1960 Presidential election, when Richard Daley got out the vote in the graveyards of Chicago to deliver a victory for Kennedy.

Nonetheless, the extent to which the new ballot system represents an electoral new normal is an innovation, and one which it is hard to see being reversed. Additionally the new system is fortified by an increasingly vicious security state, which labels everyone asking the most obvious questions as insurrectionists and election deniers.

American democracy is now caught in the vice of a Catch-22. There is no possibility of achieving political change through elections so long as this system remains in place, and therefore no possibility of changing the electoral system. States that retain local control over the legislature, notably Texas and Florida, may be able to hold the line for the moment, but as things stand national democracy is finished in the United States, and it isn’t coming back.

Just as the triumph of the Nazi Party in Germany would not have been possible had the Weimar Republic been healthy, the fact that the Democrats were able to install this new system in the first place is the result of longer-term trends.

In the short term, one can point to the complicity of the Republican Party especially, but also the failure of Trump, whose fateful decisions in the first weeks of the so-called pandemic set the stage for what history will eventually come to understand, unambiguously, as a coup.

The role of the Republican Party in the US political system will also eventually be clearly perceived. In truth, the GOP represents the inverse of a political party, which instead of aiming to reward its supporters by winning political power, robs them to maintain the personal privileges of its leadership. In the UK, the Conservative Party plays a similar role.

The systematic misallocation of funding made this year by the national Republican leadership reveals the party’s priorities with crystalline clarity. Mitch McConnell, one of the richest men in the Senate, withdrew money from tight races in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia to entrench establishment candidates in Alaska and elsewhere more in tune with his essentially larcenous motives. As the Babylon Bee website noted, the Republican Party staved off a red wave.

Seen from the point of view in which one of them is actually imagined to achieve national office, the current discussions about the relative merits of Trump versus DeSantis in 2024 are either completely delusional, or deliberate distractions.

It is inconceivable that the US administrative state which blocked his victory in 2020, and has spent the last two years viciously persecuting his supporters, would allow Trump to return to the White House in 2024. It’s also true that Trump failed in his first term to prevent the Democrats from seizing the power they have, and unclear what he now could do differently.

Given the position of dominance that the Democrats and their allies in the American Securitate occupy, it also seems highly unlikely DeSantis would be allowed to make meaningful changes. The heart of the matter is that US elections no longer mean anything.

November 16, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

“Shared Values and Security Interests?”

Is that what the ‘wag the dog’ US relationship with Israel is all about?

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 15, 2022

Jonathan Greenblatt, the aggressive head of the Jewish advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently attacked some comments on the Israel relationship made by former President Donald Trump, who prefaced his remarks by accurately observing that “No President has done more for Israel than I have.” Greenblatt nevertheless complained in a tweet that “We don’t need the former president, who curries favor with extremists and antisemites, to lecture us about the US-Israel relationship. It is not about a quid pro quo; it rests on shared values and security interests. This ‘Jewsplaining’ is insulting and disgusting.”

Greenblatt’s perpetual whine is also “insulting and disgusting” but he possesses little in the way of introspection or restraint. He and his predecessors in the Jewish lobby have historically been largely successful in selling a load of self-serving nonsense about why the United States has become a client state that has its Middle Eastern foreign policy run out of Tel Aviv by a racist regime. US political and national security interests in the region have been subordinated to those of Israel. Washington provides political cover for anything Israel chooses to do and, the ultimate absurdity, the American taxpayer gifts a relatively wealthy Israel with $3 billion in “aid” per year plus other trade and co-production benefits.

To justify it all, phrases like “the only democracy in the Middle East” and “Israel has a right to defend itself” roll off the lips of a host of bought-and-paid-for congress critters like the chorus in a Greek tragedy every time the Israelis see fit to kill a few more Palestinians, Syrians or Iranians. Even killing American citizens like Rachel Corrie, 34 members of the crew of the USS Liberty and Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh does not draw any censure from Washington. Beyond that, Israel has recently convinced the US government to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which incorporates criticism of the Jewish state as ipso facto the mark of an anti-Semite. And going still further, twenty-six state governments have chosen to penalize their citizens who, in seeking benefits or a job at local level, refuse to sign or swear to a statement that they will not support any boycotts of Israel.

It is all about the dual loyalty that many Jews have as relates to Israel. Indeed, one might argue that folks like Greenblatt have something amounting to singular loyalty, and it is at least questionable whether any of that applies to the good old U S of A. Recently Greenblatt and his host of perpetual complainers have been riding hard the alleged surge in anti-Semitism, as defined by them to justify everything they and their Israeli brethren do. They know they can get away with saying and doing almost anything when it comes to Israel, to include the shamelessly hyped alleged sad plight of perpetual Jewish victims worldwide, even in the United States where they enjoy unparalleled and grossly disproportionate privilege, power, status and wealth. Jewish power driven by Jewish money dominates much political interaction while also driving the accompanying media narrative. And the Jewish/Israeli viewpoint defines what are acceptable viewpoints within academia while also shaping the product that comes out of the entertainment industry, as well as the decision making in many business and financial services sectors.

Israel is about to put together its most extreme right-wing government ever, headed for the third time by Benjamin Netanyahu and including probable cabinet level ministers who have been described as “terrorists,” “racists,” and even “fascists.” The pressure on the Palestinians will no doubt intensify with the objective of first fully establishing control on the ground before ethnically cleansing the Arabs to produce an overwhelmingly dominant Jewish state. Settlements will expand and new ones will be planted while armed settlers destroy the livelihoods of the remaining Palestinians, compelling them to flee. And there will also be pressure from Netanyahu to force the United States to take the offensive against Iran, up to and including a military first strike to destroy its fictional nuclear weapons program. President Joe Biden has already committed the United States to do something like that, promising that Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon.

Articles in the Jewish media in particular but also in national publications like the New York Times and Washington Post suggest that many liberal Jews are concerned over the right-wing political shift in Israel, which might be described as being in the grip of “religious nationalism.” Diaspora Jews understand that it will become harder to defend the actions of the Jewish State and to sell the current “tie-that-binds” to both an American and international audience.

The perception that Israel, which in 2018 declared itself to be legally the nation state of the Jews with “exclusive right of self-determination,” is already an apartheid state that casually commits what many would describe as war crimes is growing and will almost certainly impact on the international acceptance of the Israelis. But in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and France in particular, such concerns might be considered overwrought as Jewish hard power and money have effectively bought into and even dominate some aspects of their respective political and economic systems. A clear majority of British Members of Parliament are members of various “Friends of Israel” associations and in the US both parties are heavily dependent on Jewish/Israeli donors for campaign funding and also to ensure a friendly media. Most congressmen have learned the lesson that criticizing Israel is a red line that must not be crossed if one wants to remain in office, so it is most likely that the US love affair with Israel will continue no matter what Netanyahu and company do.

One might reasonably consider two things when it comes to the lopsided Israel-US relationship. First, how accurate is the Greenblatt boast that it rests on “shared values and security interests?” And second, to what extent are ADL, not to mention groups like the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), actually acting as directed agents of the Israeli government and therefore subject to the terms of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 which would open up their books to scrutiny and also require some transparency vis-à-vis their contacts with the Israeli Embassy and the country’s Foreign Ministry and intelligence and security agencies?

First of all, Greenblatt’s claim of shared values is completely a fraud unless one considers corrupt elections to protect the likes of Hunter Biden and Netanyahu, who has been accused of corruption in Israel which the election result will enable him to avoid. Israel is no democracy unless one considers that disenfranchising many of the potential voters in the area that you control is somehow “democratic.” The United States is meanwhile becoming more like Israel. It is turning into a managed democracy where the party in control uses that power to attack and delegitimize the opposition. This occurred in 2016 with Trump vs. Hillary and has been taking place since the 2020 election through Democratic Party apparatchik attempts to link the GOP to the post-electoral January claimed insurrection. Of course, Trump himself has unfortunately hurried this process along through his ill-advised attempts to focus his support among Republicans based on how enthusiastically they support his insinuations, which is at least tactically a bad move.

Security interests? I was in the CIA overseas at a post where we would receive much processed Israeli intelligence. Believe me, it nearly all related to making Muslims look bad. Any “threat” information that Israel is able to collect legitimately the United States NSA and other intelligence organizations are able to do as well or better. The United States could drop Israel as an intelligence partner tomorrow and it would not make any difference vis-a-vis US national security. Greenblatt is as usual blowing smoke to enhance the value of the bilateral relationship, such as it is. In reality it is a rip-off all to the advantage of Israel.

Finally, there is the issue of the Israel/Jewish lobby serving as an active agent for the Jewish State of Israel, which clearly it is and does do. After last week’s election, AIPAC boasted that a pac that it had set up had raised $17 million to defeat candidates critical of Israel, while also supporting those politicians who were friends, 95% of whom were elected. To pretend that the Lobby exists to provide some kind of perspective or balance in foreign policy is a case of who is kidding whom on the issue. As one of my agents in Turkey used to describe it, “It is as the hand fitting into the glove.” The Justice Department should move to investigate and, if necessary, indict all Jewish organizations that have sustained contact with the Israeli government as foreign agents, no exception. Yes, I know, it will never happen, particularly with Attorney General Merrick Garland nee Garfinkel in charge as he is too busy investigating Russia.

So here we go again. A new government alignment will soon be in place in Washington but nothing changes. Israel’s friends will be firmly in control until someone in power has the guts to go after all the Jewish organizations that are part of the so-called Israeli lobby. Make them register, find out where their money comes from and check out their close and continuing relationships with the Israeli government. And by the way, forget all about that “shared values” and “security interests” nonsense, it’s all a sham. I would like to invite Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden to travel with their families to the Israeli army occupied West Bank and live as Palestinians for a few weeks. They would get a good taste of Israeli “values.” And as for “security interests,” it’s all about Israeli perceptions, isn’t it? Genuine American interests in the Middle East region have long been ground down under the heel of Jewish power in the United States and people like Jonathan Greenblatt will continue to use their bully pulpit to make sure that critics of the process are effectively silenced.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

November 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Midterms Show US Congress Failed to Act to Fix ‘Deeply Flawed’ Voting Process – Think Tank

Samizdat – 14.11.2022

WASHINGTON – The US midterms revealed that politicians have failed to fix a deeply flawed election process which lags behind many other countries, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity Director Daniel McAdams told Sputnik.

The US held its midterm elections on Tuesday, November 8, but the results of the Arizona and Nevada senate races were not known until after several days of ballot counting, largely due to complex mail-in voting rules and technical malfunctions.

US media did not project Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly the winner of the Arizona race until late Friday while Nevada’s Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto was not declared the winner until Saturday. Cortez Masto’s victory allowed the Democratic Party to maintain control of the Senate. Meanwhile, although the Republicans are projected to seize control of the US House, nearly 20 races remain uncalled.

OSCE election observers assessed the US midterm elections as “competitive and professionally managed,” although the group said international monitors were restricted from some areas.

“How is it that in the US, which is supposed to be so technologically sophisticated, that counting the ballots takes days?” McAdams said. “Democrats have perfected harvesting [mass collection of] Democrat ballots while Republicans, under a worthless leadership, have done nothing in two years to correct the deeply flawed voting system in many states.”

The original excuse for mail-in ballots, Adams added, was that people should not be forced to go to vote in person because of Covid, but now the pandemic is over and voting issues continue.

McAdams said in the 1990s he spent several years as an international elections monitor in the former USSR and Eastern Bloc. Western observers would see any failure to produce results on election day as extremely suspicious and worthy of declaring fraud.

However, McAdams said in Belarus in 2006 they watched as paper ballots were openly counted in front of all election observers and observers from political parties.

“Everyone agreed on suspect ballots and the results were delivered to the regional authorities within a half hour,” McAdams said.

McAdams said that Stalin once quipped: “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

That is what can now be seen in the United States, McAdams added.

“Politics in the United States is broken,” McAdams said. “We are ruled by an oligarchy.”

Although Republicans are projected to seize control of the House, they failed to meet expectations as many predicted a “red wave,” would sweep the country. Even former President Donald Trump said he found the results “disappointing,” after seeing mixed results from dozens of candidates he endorsed.

November 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

“I had to stand by idly, watching these people die.”

The crime committed against Dr. Paul Marik and his patients

By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | November 14, 2022

The following post is from The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, by John Leake and Peter A. McCullough. MD, MPH.

Dr. Paul Marik testifying at the US Senate on January 24, 2022

At the same time that Dr. McCullough was stripped of his job and professorships, his colleague and kindred spirit, Dr. Paul Marik, experienced a similar fate. On October 15, 2021, his hospital’s administration circulated a memo to the entire healthcare system stating that its doctors were authorized to administer remdesivir to COVID-19 patients, but not ivermectin or a host of other repurposed drugs. As Dr. Marik read the memo, he marveled at the sheer perfidy of it. Especially grotesque was the inclusion of “Ascorbic acid” (vitamin C) on the list of banned substances.

The administration issued this directive at a time when seven COVID-19 patients were in the ICU, desperately in need of Dr. Marik’s care. He, in turn, desperately wanted to treat them with the drug regimen that he knew would give them a good chance of recovery. Three months later, at the January 24, 2022 panel discussion (COVID-19: A Second Opinion),hosted by Senator Ron Johnson, Dr. Marik recounted his helplessness. His heart-wrenching testimony (starting at 4:19:30) was probably the most dramatic moment in the extraordinary conference.

This system was effectively preventing me from treating my patients according to my best clinical judgement. …  As a clinician for the first time in my entire career, I could not be a doctor. I could not treat patients. I had seven Covid patients [he holds up his hands showing seven digits] including a 31-year-old woman. I was not allowed to treat these people. I had to stand by idly [he clenches and raises his fists with anguish and begins to weep]. I had to stand by idly, watching these people die.

I then tried to sue the system, so then they did something called peer sham review. It is a disgusting and evil concept. They then accused me of seven most outrageous crimes … and [claimed] that I was such a severe threat to the safety of patients, they immediately suspended my hospital privileges because I posed such a threat to these patients—ignoring the fact that under my care, mortality was 50% less than it was under my colleagues. I then went on to this sham peer review. I went to a Kangaroo Court, where they continued this, and the end result was that I lost my hospital privilege and was reported to the National Practitioner Databank. So here I was standing up for my patients’ rights, and this hospital, this evil hospital, ended my medical career.

November 15, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

They Will Lock You Down Again

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | November 14, 2022

The lords of lockdown barely escaped their worst possible fate, namely that the topic would become the national and international source of scandal that it should be. And let’s add the vaccine mandates here too: even if such had been morally justified, which they were not, there is absolutely no practical reason for them at all.

To have imposed both of these within the course of one year – with zero evidence that they achieved anything for public health and vast amounts of unfolding evidence that they ruined life quality for countless millions – qualifies as a scandal for the ages. It was in the US but also in nearly every country in the world but a few.

Might that have huge political implications? One would suppose so. And yet today it appears that truth and justice are further off than ever. The most passionate of the anti-lockdown governors – those who never locked down or opened earlier than the rest of the country – won on their record. Most of the rest joined the entire political establishment in pretending that all of this is a non-issue. Tragically, this tactic seems to have worked better than it should have.

Meanwhile, a few points to consider:

The US government, through the Transportation Safety Administration, has signed yet another order extending the ban on unvaccinated international visitors until January 8, 2023. This means that no person who has managed to refuse the shot is allowed to come to the US for any reason. This is 30% of the world’s population, banned even to enter the US on their own dime. Something like this would have been inconceivably illiberal three years ago, and been a source of enormous controversy and outrage. Today, the extension hardly made the news.

The Biden administration has once again extended the Covid emergency declaration another 90 days, which continues to grant government vast powers without Congressional approval. Under a state of emergency, the Constitutional structure of the US is effectively suspended and the country remains on a wartime footing. This announcement was not controversial, and, like the above, it barely made the news.

Many colleges and universities, and also other schools and public agencies, continue to enforce the vaccine mandate even without any solid science behind the approval of the bivalent shots or any real rationale behind the push, given that most people have long ago been exposed and acquired natural immunity, and, moreover, it is very well established that the shots do not protect anyone from infection nor stop transmission. They just keep doing this anyway.

Masking is not in disrepute because we never really obtained anything like an honest admission of their failure to control the spread. Even today, there is a percentage of people out there permanently traumatized. On travels, I’m seeing perhaps 10-20% but in some Northeastern cities, regular wearing of masks is also very common. Once they became a symbol of political compliance and virtue, that sealed the deal and the culture was changed. Now we face the threat of mask mandates whenever government deems it necessary because the Transportation Safety Authority has been given the go-ahead by the courts.

The end of vaccine mandates in most areas of life, and hence also the drive for a passport to distinguish between clean and unclean people, is a good sign. But the infrastructure is still in place and becoming more sophisticated. It is hardly a final victory. It might only be a temporary respite, while all the ambitions are still extant.

More than that, the Biden administration (and all that it represents, including the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and everything else called the establishment) has its own pandemic plans in place. The idea is not to dial back the mandates or cool it on them. It’s the reverse: centralize all pandemic planning to make a South Dakota, Georgia, and Florida experience impossible the next time. Also, spend tens of billions in more money.

The principle seems to have emerged among the agencies, intellectuals, and politicians who did this. Whatever you do, never admit to having made any major mistakes. And never connect the economic, cultural, health, and educational disasters all around us to anything the govenrment did in 2020 or 2021! That would be nothing but a conspiracy theory.

The pandemic racket is so huge at this point that it is even embroiled in the FTX meltdown over the weekend. Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother Gabe actually founded a nonprofit solely for the purpose of providing “support” for the $30 billion that the Biden administration has allocated to pandemic planning. The institution “Guarding Against Pandemics” is very obviously a honeypot for such funding, complete with on-the-record endorsements from many Democrat Party candidates who won election.

Meanwhile, yes, there have been many successful court challenges to many features of the pandemic response. But not enough. The main machinery that took away liberty and property in the name of virus control is still in place in all its essentials. The CDC to this day brags of its awesome quarantine powers that it can deploy any time government deems it necessary. Nothing about that has changed.

In the big picture and rendered in a philosophical sense, humanity seems to have lost its ability to learn from its own errors. Put in more gritty terms, too many people among ruling-class interests gained financially and in terms of the lust for power during the pandemic to prompt any serious rethinking and reform.

In any case, that rethinking and reform is now put off for another day. Anyone seriously concerned about the future of humanity and the civilizations it built must throw themselves into the long-term battle for truth and reason. That will require that we use every bit of what remains of free speech and what remains of the longing for integrity and accountability in public life. The group we have come to call “they” want a demoralized population and a silent public square.

We cannot allow that to happen.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Obama and Bush to present seminars about tackling online “misinformation”

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 14, 2022

Former US Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama are to hold conferences encouraging more online censorship.

According to Axios, the conferences by the two former presidents will “highlight rising threats from authoritarianism and disinformation — and how to combat them globally and at home.”

On November 16, the George W. Bush Institute will hold a conference called “The Struggle for Freedom.” The conference will address revitalizing democracy globally. The conference’s third panel is titled “Emerging Technology and the Future of Freedom.”

The conference will be attended by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of .

Bush’s conference only subtly hints at tackling “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Obama’s conference, the Democracy Forum, more broadly states disinformation will be a topic.

The first panel of the conference is titled “Tackling Disinformation, Protecting Democracy.” Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch, a platform that claims to be “the friendly place where everyone builds the web, is listed among the key speakers.”

The second panel is titled “Lightning Talk: Dismantling Hate in the Digital Age.” One of the key speakers is Vidhya Ramalingam, CEO of Moonshot, a company dedicated to developing tech solutions to “expose threats, disrupt malicious actors and protect vulnerable audiences online.”

Obama has been a vocal supporter of content moderation and has called “disinformation” a threat to democracy.

“Solving the disinformation problem won’t cure all that ails our democracies or tears at the fabric of our world, but it can help tamp down divisions and let us rebuild the trust and solidarity needed to make our democracy stronger,” Obama said at an event at Stanford University earlier this year.

Despite most Republicans calling for less censorship, Bush has encouraged content moderation.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Did Federal Censors Swing the 2020 Election?

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | November 14, 2022

Did the Russiagate conspiracy entitle the federal government to censor Americans forever? Did federal shenanigans swing the 2020 election? A new report reveals how a new federal agency and federal grantees exploited a 2016 scam to launch the greatest covert censorship campaign in U.S. history.

In 2016, top FBI officials and the Obama administration fueled a conspiracy that the Trump presidential campaign was colluding with the Russian government. Numerous false FBI claims spurred a massive wiretapping operation approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The allegations led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who spent two years investigating before admitting that there was nothing to prosecute for his primary charge. But by that point, Trump had been irredeemably tainted and the Democrats had exploited the controversy to capture control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.

Thanks to Russiagate, Congress created a new federal agency in 2018—the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CISA was purportedly intended to fight foreign threats to election security and U.S. infrastructure. But the agency quickly shifted its target to American citizens. As a report last week from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) revealed, “Any U.S. citizen posting what DHS considered misinformation’ online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure.”

CISA and DHS realized that they could not directly muzzle Americans so they colluded with a number of federal grantees who comprised the Election Integrity Project, a coalition formed in mid-2020. The result was “censorship by proxy,” as law professor Jonathan Turley observed, bludgeoning social media companies into submission. The DHS-spurred crackdown in 2020 resulted in the suppression of “22 million tweets labeled ‘misinformation’ on Twitter” and “hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted” thanks to changes that would not have occurred without “‘huge regulatory pressure’ from government,” FFO reported.

Once the government claims a prerogative to censor “misinformation,” the definition of misinformation mushrooms to serve political purposes. The Election Integrity Partnership bragged about how social media posts were targeted that were merely purportedly guilty of offenses such as “exaggerate issue,” “misleading stats” and “out of context.” Many of those alleged factual infractions were piddling compared to the sweeping falsehoods continually uncorked by presidential candidates Trump and Biden.

Prior to the 2020 election, “the censorship focus was always and consistently foremost targeted at speech casting doubt on mail-in ballots,” FFO reported. Democrats exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to push through electoral changes that opened the floodgates to unverified mail-in ballots. Some states like Michigan sent absentee ballots to all voters, violating the Election Clause of the Constitution (which specifies that state legislatures make the rules for federal elections).

Election regimes that scrutinized mail-in ballots routinely had a high rejection rate.  New York City relied on mail-in ballots for a June 2020 primary that the New York Daily News derided as a “dumpster fire.” Up to 20% of ballots “were declared invalid before even being opened, based on mistakes with their exterior envelopes,” The Washington Post noted, thanks largely to missing postmarks or signatures. Trump claimed that the shift to mail-in ballots could result in “the most corrupt vote in our nation’s history.”

But federal string-pulling minimized controversies. FFO noted, “Pre-censoring U.S. citizen debate about mail-in ballots five months before an election has the impact of devastating the ability of concerned citizens to pressure their state representatives to take legal action on changing voting procedures.” Rather than the traditional scrutiny for mail-in ballots, many locales defaulted to accepting practically any piece of paper with a mark. Mail-in ballots determined the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump received more votes on Election Day but 43,000 mail-in ballots in three states sealed Biden’s victory—a minuscule portion of the tens of millions of mail-in votes he received.

In a July 28, 2020 article for the American Institute for Economic Research, I warned that the controversies over mail-in ballots could lead to “the death of political legitimacy…Deep State federal agencies are a Godzilla that have established their prerogative to undermine if not overturn election results.”

Until I read the new FFO report, I did not realize that “the biggest category for [2020] censorship was  ‘delegitimization’… defined to mean any speech that ‘casts doubt’ on any kind of election process, outcome or integrity issues [which] made all conservative and populist criticism of the administration of the election pre-banned at the narrative level, five months in advance of Election Day.” Damn, no wonder that article of mine got so little traction on Twitter and Facebook! “Delegitimization” resulted in “72% of its censorship tickets and targeted over 99% of the posts throttled by narrative during the 2020 election.”

The entire process looks like a Monty Python parody of democracy. As Mike Benz, the former State Department official who heads FFO, observed, “The same obscure DHS subagency tasked with election security also gained the power to censor any questions about election security.”

How much impact did federal censorship and suppression have on the most recent elections? The Election Integrity Project browbeat tech companies to accept “that social media posts about the 2022 elections be censorable under a low bar of simply ‘misleading,’” according to FFO. For the midterm elections, “the Election Integrity Project is tightly monitoring and working to censor ‘discussions surrounding the delays in counting ballots’ being ‘framed as fraud,’” FFO reported. Damned convenient considering the debacle in Arizona—which was foreseen if not foreordained. In a Washington speech just before the election, President Biden told listeners that “in some cases we won’t know the winner…until a few days after the election. It takes time to count all legitimate ballots in a legal and orderly manner.” Biden stressed that citizens must be “patient. That’s how this is supposed to work.”

But it never consistently worked that way before in American history. Arizona’s voting machines dismally failed on Election Day and Democrats are vehemently resisting a hand recount of all ballots.

The real goal is to control Americans’ minds—and not just on Election Day. Jen Easterly, the NSA honcho who Biden chose to run CISA, declared that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation… is incredibly important.” And the most important cognitive “fix” is to train Americans to never doubt Uncle Sam. In a March 2022 meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI official Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government,” The Intercept recently reported. The FBI has 80 agents on a task force to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.”

“Disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods. If the feds can censor most if not almost all of their online critics, their cons become almost irrefutable. Perhaps that is the only way that many federal policies can retain any shard of legitimacy. As Mike Benz warns, “DHS is carrying out an official state policy that if public trust is not earned, it must be installed.” That is a recipe for the death of democracy.

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. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.

November 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Eventbrite could face lawsuit after banning debate on trans ideology

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | November 13, 2022

A British lawyer plans to sue US-based ticket-selling firm Eventbrite for banning her from selling tickets to a debate event because it alleged the event would create a platform for “dangerous” views.

Sarah Philimore is fundraising legal fees to sue Eventbrite for pulling tickets to the launch of her book “Transpositions: a personal journey into gender criticism.” Comedy writer Graham Linehan co-authored the book.

Philimore argued that Eventbrite has to obey UK laws, adding that gender critical belief should be respected in a democratic society. She sent several letters asking for clarification on why her event violated Eventbrite’s terms. She has not received any meaningful reply, so she decided to sue.

“I want the court to confirm that what Eventbrite have done is unlawful.

“I think there is a clear breach of the Equality Act here, in that my event was removed from the platform because it was decided it promoted ‘violent’ or ‘hateful’ content.

“It does not. It was removed because people complained – falsely – that it was ‘transphobic,’” Philmore told The Telegraph.

She added: “My point is simple. If Eventbrite wishes to operate in the UK, it must obey UK laws.

“In particular it cannot ignore the will of Parliament which has made it clear via the Equality Act and the EAT decision in Forstater, that ‘gender critical’ belief is worthy of respect in a democratic society.

“I believe my claim raises interesting and important issues that go beyond just the Equality Act.

The event will go ahead as scheduled, on December 2, and tickets will be sold at the door.

Linehan, a critic of gender ideology and is also scheduled to speak at the book launch, said: “This is the latest attempt to make feminism a hate crime. For some time, people have been attempting to reframe feminist statement as hate crimes; as attacks on transgender people.’

“The companies just follow along because they are cowards, or because they are in the grip of ideological capture, and believe truly in this stuff. The problem is we’re having our morality dictated to us by companies in the US according to their prevailing obsessions.”

November 13, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

How the British royals overthrew Australian democracy

By Kit Klarenberg | Press TV | November 13, 2022

This week marked the 47th anniversary of the dismissal of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam by the country’s British-appointed governor-general John Kerr.

The role and power of governors-general is little known, let alone understood today, but they wield enormous clout over many countries that once comprised the British Empire.

Appointed by a royal decree, they serve as the reigning British monarch’s local representatives, appoint government ministers, judges and ambassadors, grant royal assent to laws passed by parliament, bestow state honors, and are commanders-in-chief of the respective nation’s armed forces, among other things.

The unceremonious dismissal of Whitlam and his elected government is largely forgotten today, but the sordid episode detonated the myth that constituents of the British Commonwealth are independent, sovereign states, free from control or influence of their former imperial master – however briefly.

Elected in 1972 on a wave of popular upheaval, Whitlam was an upstart social democrat who made clear his country would not be dominated by the interests of foreign powers.

Within months, he abolished royal patronage, recognised the People’s Republic of China, drew up plans for Aboriginal land rights, ended conscription, and withdrew all Australian troops from Vietnam, with his ministers referring to the US war as “corrupt and barbaric.”

Fast forward to November 1975, and he was thrown out of office upon the request of governor-general John Kerr. When that fateful day came, Queen Elizabeth II’s deputy private secretary William Heseltine, an Australian citizen, stated that “the palace was in a state of total ignorance.”

Secret communications between Buckingham Palace and Kerr, recently reported on in forensic detail by Declassified Australia, prove Helestine’s professions to be an outright lie, beyond doubt.

Doing the monarchy ‘good’

In a series of letters, starting in September 1975, Kerr openly discussed ways in which Whitlam could be removed from power in a bloodless coup with both the Queen and Prince Charles, now King of Great Britain, and Australia.

This was despite vice-regal convention dictating that a governor-general must “advise, counsel and warn” an elected prime minister about their planning and thinking, even in the event of potential dismissal, the British monarch theoretically being duty-bound to remain disinterested and politically neutral, and Australian High Court justice Anthony Mason warning Kerr that his behavior was “deceptive”.

Both he and the palace were unfazed, no doubt confident that “royal secrecy” laws would conceal their activities forever.

Among the earliest communications are notes from a meeting between Prince Charles and Kerr during Papua New Guinea’s 1975 independence celebrations. The governor-general made clear what he was plotting, but expressed anxiety that Whitlam, if he caught wind of the conspiracy, would dismiss him first.

“The Queen should not have to accept advice that you should be recalled at the very time, should this happen, when you were considering having to dismiss the government,” Kerr cited Charles as saying.

Upon returning to Britain, Charles informed the Queen of the plan in motion. Charteris then wrote to Kerr outlining how he would be protected in the event Whitlam requested that the palace recall the governor-general.

Should that “contingency” arise, Charteris said, Elizabeth II would “try to delay things” rather than responding promptly according to protocol, allowing Kerr to plunge the dagger first.

While the Queen took the lead role in consulting with Kerr on legal and regulatory routes to oust Whitlam, Prince Charles was also intimately involved, actively encouraging and counseling the governor-general.

In order to legitimize his sinister scheme, Kerr sought the advice of Australia’s two most senior law officers as to whether Whitlam could be dismissed under “reserve powers”. This authority, only usable in specific, adverse circumstances such as crises, would allow the governor-general to act unilaterally, without governmental or parliamentary approval.

Kerr knew that it was likely no legitimate grounds for such an extraordinary intervention would be identified, and accordingly warned the palace in early November, although made clear he would move ahead anyway.

In a series of letters, Charteris variously reassured Kerr, “that you have powers is recognised,” “those powers do exist,” and “if you do, as you will, what the constitution dictates, you cannot possibly do the monarchy any avoidable harm. The chances are you will do it good.”

The senior Australian legal officers’ opinion arrived on November 6, 1975 – and as expected, they warned Kerr he had no legal or constitutional grounds for overthrowing the Whitlam government. Five days later, he did so anyway.

In March 1976, Prince Charles wrote to Kerr, praising him for his actions and stellar work as Buckingham Palace’s man Down Under more generally.

“I wanted you to know that I appreciate what you do and admire enormously the way you have performed in your many and varied duties. Please don’t lose heart. What you did last year was right and the courageous thing to do,” the King-in-waiting fawned.

Web of lies and connivance

The public would be utterly in the dark about this web of lies and connivance, were it not for a bitter four-year-long High Court battle in Australia to secure declassification of these highly incriminating papers.

Within hours of the release of letters, Buckingham Palace issued a public statement, denying the dark reality so amply exposed by the disclosure: “Neither Her Majesty nor the Royal Household had any part to play in Kerr’s decision to dismiss Whitlam.”

The High Court decision was a landmark development, marking the first time the concept of “royal secrecy” had been overturned anywhere in the British Commonwealth.

It has remained unchallenged in every other constituent country ever since, meaning the obvious question of whether similar chicanery was undertaken against troublesomely independent figures elsewhere in the political association remains an open one.

This is particularly relevant to consider given that the new British King has a dual history of directly pressuring state officials at home to structure policy and action domestically and internationally according to his personal will, and doggedly attempting to keep such lobbying hidden from public view.

In May 2015, over two dozen private communications between then-Prince Charles and British ministers were published after a 10-year-long legal struggle, which cost successive governments hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The contents of these letters showed Charles – again in breach of conventions on “political neutrality” – petitioning elected representatives on subjects ranging from the Iraq War to alternative medicines.

In some, then-heir to the British throne openly warned a health secretary that “chickens will come home to roost” in their government department if redevelopment of a hospital – in which the Prince’s architecture charity was involved – was not accelerated.

It’s clear though that Charles didn’t typically need to rely on threats – government officials were usually willing to obsequiously roll over how and when he requested them to.

In response to one royal intervention, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair unctuously stated: “I always value and look forward to your views.” In another, an education secretary signed off: “I have the honour to be Your Royal Highness’s most humble and obedient servant.”

The letters were released at a time when speculation was rife in the mainstream media that Charles intended to rule in a far more outspoken way than his publicly taciturn mother.

Since taking the throne, there is little sign publicly of this – although that could in part be attributed to the British government amending the Freedom of Information Act to provide an “absolute exemption” on all requests relating to the royal family since.

Now that more and more countries are choosing to unbridle themselves from the yoke of British rule and secede from the Commonwealth, it’s surely never been more important for the royal family to maintain an intensive cloak of secrecy around their political influence.

And the temptation to employ “reserve powers” to displace upstart governments in the manner of Gough Whitlam’s has surely never been higher.

November 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Name-Calling, ‘Fact-Checking’ and Censorship in the Covid Era

BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | NOVEMBER 11, 2022

One novel feature of the pandemic, from the standpoint of public debate, is the fact that so much name-calling, ‘fact-checking’ and censorship was aimed not just at random dissidents but at credentialed scientists.

Academics who’d reached esteemed positions within their field were denounced as ‘Covid deniers’, accused of spreading ‘misinformation’, and subjected to multiple forms of censorship.

Renowned scholars had warning labels attached to their tweets, and found their articles blacklisted on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. In one particularly egregious case, the Great Barrington Declaration was downranked by Google, so that when users searched for it, articles critical of the Declaration appeared above the Declaration itself.

Somehow, Big Tech firms felt they were in position to adjudicate complex scientific debates. This would be like two scientists having an argument at speaker’s corner in Hyde Park, but the groundskeeper keeps blasting an airhorn every time one of them speaks.

And it wasn’t just Big Tech that restricted one side’s freedom of speech. Academics who questioned the mainstream view on Covid faced sanctions from their universities, journals and professional associations.

In a recent paper, Yaffa Shir-Raz and colleagues analysed the tactics that were used against dissenting scientists, based on semi-structured interviews with some of the targets. Their findings have already been summarised by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, but it’s worth pulling out a few anecdotes from the paper.

One interviewee recounted that he/she was even censored on Google docs – a program for creating documents and spreadsheets (like Microsoft Office):

Google Docs started restricting and censoring my ability to share documents… This is not Twitter throwing me off like they did. This is an organisation telling me that I cannot send a private communication to a colleague or to a friend, or to a family member.

Another interviewee explained that his/her employment contract was re-written after he/she deviated from the narrative:

They offered me a new contract… we got some new terms for you, because my old contract was not restricted. The new one basically had like seven or eight restrictions of my First Amendment rights… basically I couldn’t talk to the press, I couldn’t speak in public… unless I said, these are my opinions not that of my employer… It was a relatively short conversation. I said that’s never going to happen, I’m never going to sign that thing.

A third interviewee described how he/she was cancelled by several organisations without any due process:

There was a whole series of actions taken again with no due process and no explanation… I received a notice from the [medical association] that I was being stripped from a committee position… I received a letter from a journal…where I was the Editor-in-Chief, being stripped of the editorship, again with no due process, no phone calls no, tractable explanation… I received a letter from the National Institutes of Health being stripped from a longstanding committee position.

Remember, these were all “established doctors and scientists”, not foreign spies engaged in subversion.

The point isn’t that dissenting scientists were right about everything (although they were right about a lot). It’s that we can’t have a proper debate if one side faces a barrage of name-calling, ‘fact-checking’ and censorship. Enforcing a narrative around Covid shouldn’t be the role of Big Tech companies. And it certainly shouldn’t be the role of academic institutions.

November 13, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Much Ado About Nothing

By Todd Hayen | OffGuardian | November 12, 2022

Do any of you think we are over-reacting? I don’t think so, but the sheep-folk certainly do. They claim they are willing to let bygones be bygones and just put it all in the past and get on with life.

I am sure everyone reading this is aware of the bombshell editorial The Atlantic dropped recently with their amnesty nonsense. I don’t think I have been more livid reading an article since the days of seeing piece after piece about how effective masks are against viral transmission.

I won’t comment on The Atlantic blather directly here, as there have been many fine responses to it, but wow, what a piece. So typical of a bully trying to pretend he loved his victims all along when he knows he is cornered and about to be punished. One last punch disguised as a kiss.

I just got back from a little cruise. Major ports were Barcelona, Rome, Florence, Monaco, and a smattering of little French and Italian hideaways. I had mixed feelings about going, but realized that if this tsunami we all see coming a few miles off the shore has the potential of wiping out most travel in the foreseeable future, I figured I might as well get something in before the onslaught.

It was nice in a lot of ways, as would be expected, but in other ways unusually disconcerting. For one thing, very, very few people had masks, and thus there was a palatable scent in the air of “Covid is a thing of the past.”

One would think this was a good thing, but instead it exuded a very clear vibe of denial.

Oddly enough, not wearing masks, and believing Covid to be over, to me is just another example of compliance to authority.

I know that seems a stretch, but if Covid were real, coupled with the truth that the vaccines do not work, and we were told again and again that there would be no natural herd immunity without a working vaccine, and we still hear of infections rising, variants being created, and hospitals becoming over crowded, why would people think the disease just died and disappeared? The reason is because we were told it was over.

We were told we suddenly didn’t need masks, that we could party with friends, vaxxed or unvaxxed, that we could gather in huge crowds, get on cruise ships (no one even cared that I was unvaccinated.) We were told what was true, what was real and what to worry or not worry about. And like sheep, most people blindly followed.

So shouldn’t I be happy? If I were, it would be for all of the wrong reasons. It is true we are all happy when the slave owner puts down the whip. Whip or not, however, we are still slaves.

I, too, bask in the sun of my controlled freedom—I went on a cruise didn’t I? After two years of not being “allowed to” — so I am just as guilty of this sort of compliance. I am one step closer to truth though; I know this offer of freedom is a tactic, a ploy, and a ruse.

I’ll take a scrap of bread when it is offered, but I will not succumb to complacency and forgive my master for his cruelty when he behaves, albeit for just a moment, as my friend. Most everyone else seems fine to let bygones be bygones.

I am not, and I suspect most of you reading this are not as well.

The great danger I see here in the masses just carrying on in complacent forgiveness is that they are encouraged to stay blind. Surely if they speak out against the atrocities that the world has experienced over the past three years they would quickly be categorized as a trouble maker, a pariah, and a misfit.

“Just get over it, man, it’s all over.”

Is it? No, of course not, you and I know that, and it is all still going on in various ways under the covers now, in the dark recesses of the culture: persecutions, continued efforts to vaccinate, and particularly vaccinate children, warnings of an “upcoming dark winter” where restrictions will come back into the mainstream. On and on, you know what I am speaking of.

However, the mass attitude now, as per The Atlantic piece, is “nothing all that much really happened.”

No one died unnecessarily due to the Covid response, no one got sick, no one lost their job or their livelihood, no one suffered socially (particularly children wearing masks in school), no one suffered educationally, nothing bad really happened.

If you are still pissed about all that DID happen, then you are overreacting… much ado about nothing.

So get over it, forget and forgive.

Not everyone in the world has read that article, but what I saw in Europe, it seems that most people, at least on physical observation, are basically taking on that attitude.

It breaks my heart.

I think about the countless mothers sitting by their children in countless hospitals nurturing them through a totally unprecedented heart incident.

I think of the countless families standing together at the funeral of a loved one, dead prematurely from a heart attack, blood clotting, or cancer—cause unknown, unless you want to apply the newly created diagnoses, “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.” What the hell is that?

A novel disease and now a common cause of death? Easy peasy explanation, eh? I think of the countless numbers of people suffering from a myriad of strange afflictions, which suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

I think again of countless people having suffered unconscionably, and pointlessly, after losing their jobs, their businesses, their life savings, and their livelihood—the countless children with lower IQs, and those who have suffered social retardation due to the mask mandates, social distancing, and mandatory online teaching at home with no socialization at all.

I could write 100 pages describing all of this—but most people don’t know, and if they do, don’t care, or just attribute all of this horror to the “cost of living—some are lucky in life, some are not.”

During my recent cruise not a word was uttered about any of this, thousands of people were encountered walking the streets of Rome, Florence, Barcelona, all laughing, eating, drinking, playing. While just beneath their feet, hidden a foot underground, there are skulls and bones of the fallen—all forgotten, and the perpetrators all forgiven.

When I was occasionally shaken from my self-induced and compliant vacation reverie, my heart ached talking to all of the young vibrant crewmembers on our ship.

I would hear of their plans to be married, create families, further their careers and live fully their vibrant lives—followed with the admission that they all had to be vaccinated to get their current jobs on the ship.

What really lies ahead for these beautiful children of God so innocent and full of life? I would shake my head, “maybe none of this is true, and maybe I am making more of it than it really is. Maybe they are right, and it really wasn’t that bad, just a mistake made here and there that we really could get over. It is all fine… let’s move on.”

Then a bone cracks under my foot—just a few inches from the surface of awareness—the truth. And I slip back into reality.

November 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

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