By Diana West | OffGuardian | September 23, 2022
On July 30, 2002, President George W. Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a post-Enron law “aimed at fraud in corporations,” as summed up in a headline in the New York Times.
The newspaper elaborated:
The bill, an extensive overhaul of corporate fraud, securities and accounting laws, creates a regulatory board with investigative and enforcement powers to oversee the accounting industry and punish corrupt auditors. It also establishes new standards for prosecuting wrongdoing and gives corporate whistle-blowers broad new protections. Executives who deliberately defrauded investors would face long prison terms.
Did you know that this same bill crafted to stop white-collar-crime is being used as a big stick felony charge against January 6 protestors?
I refer to the provision of the law against “obstruction of an official proceeding.” It’s a crime, the DOJ website tells us, which carries “a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, fine of $250,000 or twice the monetary gain or loss of the offense.”
The financial penalty — that fine of $250,000 “or twice the monetary gain or loss of the offense” — really gives it all away. That is, the crime this law is meant to prohibit is inextricably connected to financial activity, not political protest.
This provision already has an infamous and unjust past.
Perhaps its very first application was by mad-dog-prosecutor Andrew Weissman, who was able to convince a jury to convict and thus bankrupt the accounting firm Arthur Andersen for its business-as-usual, internal-policy-perfect destruction of Enron documents in the period before the company ever received a subpoena.
The Supreme Court overruled the lower court verdict, 9-0.
Now the misbegotten provision is being totally and willfully misapplied to political protest.
Indeed, in President Bush’s brief remarks on signing the bill twenty years ago, he singled out this one section of the lengthy law to reassure the American people that it would not be used to infringe on the People’s right to protest.
As Bush put it:
To ensure that no infringement on the constitutional right to petition the Government for redress of grievances occurs in the enforcement of section 1512(c) of title 18 of the U.S. Code, enacted by section 1102 of the Act, which among other things prohibits corruptly influencing any official proceeding, the executive branch shall construe the term “corruptly” in section 1512(c)(2) as requiring proof of a criminal state of mind on the part of the defendant.
It’s well worth remembering that the right to petition the Government for redress of grievance, as attorney Joseph D. McBride explains, was continually exercised across the country for much of the year 2020 during the George Floyds protests which preceded the January 6 protest.
“January 6 did not happen in a vacuum,” McBride recently told the Blaze’s Daniel Horowitz. “In the year or so that preceded January 6, you had all the BLM and Antifa riots all over the United States of America. We saw the burning down of cities, the attacking of police officers. Members of antifa out there in black bloc covered head to toe in full riot gear going at it with police, the looting of stores—you name it, we saw it.”
As reported by Deborah Heine in American Greatness :
McBride posited that the left-wing agitators got a pass in 2020 because of new and expanded definitions of “civil disobedience, and political protest” which allowed government entities to view even violent riots “as grounded in the First Amendment, not criminality.
In the wake of this, he explained, the pro-Trump protesters showed up in Washington, D.C. on January 6 with the impression there was this “new and modern definition of political protest.” Of course, most of the January 6 rioters came nowhere near the levels of violence the nation saw during the George Floyd riots, McBride was careful to point out.
Because of who they were, however, (that is, mainly white, middle-class, patriotic, pro-Trump Americans) they were targeted, persecuted, and not given the constitutional protections the much more violent and destructive left-wing rioters were routinely given, he argued.
“For the first time in U.S. history, the political party in power is hunting down and jailing members of the opposition party for political dissidence, and not only that, they’re torturing them in jail,” McBride said. “This is the stuff of dictatorships.”
It is also the stuff of dictatorships to twist the law, hold show trials, and criminalize the state of mind of the political opposition.
BY MORGAN BEGG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 22, 2022
The danger in the post-lockdown era is that in our rush to move on we forget the hard lessons that have been learned about this catastrophic public policy failure.
On the basis of alarmist modelling, often commissioned by governments and amplified by sensationalist media, panicked politicians discarded all basic ideas about proportionality and the rule of law to criminalise everyday life and exert unprecedented controls over the citizenry.
From the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, all Australian governments adopted the attitude that any public health mitigation measure was on the table, and little to no consideration was given to the costs of the measures that were adopted.
This is the subject of new research published by the Institute of Public Affairs, which for the first time in Australia calculates many of the costs of the nation’s Covid zealotry up to June 2022. In the report, Hard Lessons: Reckoning the Humanitarian, Economic, and Social Costs of Zero-Covid, we find that the total economic and fiscal cost of the Australian COVID-19 response was no less than A$938.4 billion (£550.6 billion) to June 2022. This report identifies:
The research also calculates how much children suffered in terms of schooling. Despite being the safest cohort in society when it comes to COVID-19, children were routinely sent home to learn remotely or not learn at all. We estimate children in the state of Victoria would have lost about 12 weeks of reading skills and 17 weeks of numeracy skills, something which for many will never be recovered.
Even on the most basic metric, lockdowns failed. In terms of the number of years of life, the costs of joblessness because of the initial nationwide lockdowns in March and April 2020 were about 31 times more costly than the maximum possible years of life saved by lockdowns throughout 2020 and 2021.
Even in the state of Victoria, whose Labor Government enthusiastically established a world-renowned Covid police state, politicians are no longer touting their pandemic response in the lead up to the state election in November.
Likewise, the former federal Liberal/Nationals Coalition Government, which was voted out of office earlier this year, rarely boasted of its Covid response.
Governments of the Covid era appear to have accepted the failure of the Covid-elimination approach, but rather than confront the reality of this failure are just pretending that it never happened.
This is not about living in the past, because the reality is we are still bearing the costs now. In terms of the resulting mental health crisis, lost learning, shuttered businesses, Government debt and inflation, we are not likely to know the full costs of the Covid response for many years to come.
Our future wellbeing as a society also demands that we remember the hard lessons of the Covid response.
We will need to deal with pandemics in the future, and it is critical to know what went wrong, and how these failures came to be.
Australians were subject to the harshest restrictions on their way of life in their history, and we should be demanding not that it should be forgotten, but that it should be remembered so that it doesn’t happen again.
Morgan Begg is the Director of the Legal Rights Program at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia.
The damage that lockdowns would cause was far too well known, uneven, and catastrophic to assume their chief instigators must have had good intentions.
By Michael P Senger | The New Normal | September 20, 2022
In the United States, some 2,000,000 people—over 1% of adult men—currently reside in prisons and jails. In America’s poorest cities, crime and law enforcement are intertwined with life to such a degree that many children grow up more familiar with the justice system than the education system. For kids who grow up in these circumstances, getting through school while staying out of jail is a feat worth celebrating.
Some of this is, of course, necessary to maintain a peaceful society in a country as open and unequal as the United States. But the American political-prison-industrial complex is also riddled with perverse incentives. As Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch put it: “We live in a world in which everything has been criminalized. And some professors have even opined that there’s not an American alive who hasn’t committed a felony under some state law.” We’ve even developed an Orwellian lexicon for this system; the term “crime of moral turpitude” is a tacit admission that America’s statutes are riddled with crimes that do not actually involve “moral turpitude”—it’s puzzling why these should be considered crimes at all.
Worse yet, an estimated 5% of convicts are actually innocent. That means there are currently some 100,000 Americans in prisons and jails who didn’t even commit the crimes for which they were charged. The sad truth is that just living in one of America’s poorest neighborhoods comes with some risk of incarceration; the more people around who are convicted, the greater the odds of becoming an innocent convict oneself. Juries do their best, but they’re beset by the usual human biases. Judges know all too well that verdicts often come down to such irrelevant factors as the defendant’s charisma, physical attractiveness, or even what the jury had for breakfast that morning.
Mass incarceration is one sad byproduct of inequality and community deterioration in the 21st century. But an even worse byproduct of that inequality is an entire caste of western elites who’ve begun to manipulate the system to exempt themselves and their supporters from the rule of law to a degree not seen since the rise of the fascist regimes of the 1930s. And in no instance has this been made more clear than in the promulgation of Covid lockdowns into policy in early 2020.
Lockdowns, or the shutting of businesses and community spaces with the force of law, were unprecedented in the western world prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan; rather, these pandemic plans suggested only voluntary social distancing measures. While lockdowns bore some facial resemblance to the voluntary social distancing measures contemplated in pandemic plans, this similarity was no coincidence, as the concept of “social distancing” in its origin was lifted by the US CDC straight from the Chinese Communist Party policy of “lockdown” as imposed during SARS in 2003. Further, some leading federal officials have disclosed that at the time they recommended temporary social distancing measures for Covid, they did so with the intent that state governors would enforce them as indefinite forced lockdowns.
As former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur has documented in scrupulous detail, the harms that lockdowns would cause were all well-known and reported at the time they were first adopted as policy in early 2020. These included accurate estimates of mass deaths due to delayed medical operations, a mental health crisis, drug overdoses, an economic recession, global poverty, hunger, and starvation.
Yet regardless, for reasons we’re still only beginning to understand, some key scientists, health officials, national security officials, media entities, international organizations, billionaires and influencers advocated the broad imposition of these unprecedented, devastating policies from the earliest possible date, ostensibly to stop or slow the coronavirus as the CCP claims to have done in Wuhan, while censoring any contrary opinions, spinning a false illusion of consensus amongst an unknowing public. A report later revealed that military leaders saw this as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public, shaping and “exploiting” information to bolster government messages about the virus. Dissenting scientists were silenced. Psyops teams deployed fear campaigns on their own people in a scorched-earth campaign to drive consent for lockdowns.
These early advocates of lockdowns inverted the definitions of key public health principles in sophisticated, Orwellian fashion. While the lockdowns they advocated were deliberately intended to overturn existing public health practices, they instructed the public to “follow the science,” leading the public to believe that their policies were grounded in established scientific practice. They used the rhetoric of equity and vulnerability to advocate policies that disproportionately harmed the most vulnerable and increased existing economic divides. They then retroactively cited the broad public support for lockdowns that had been sown by their own propaganda as justification for their propaganda in support of those lockdowns.
Ultimately, these lockdowns failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and killed tens of thousands of young people in every country in which they were tried. We now know the virus had already begun spreading undetected all over the world by fall 2019 at the latest and had an infection fatality rate under 0.2%.
However, the lockdowns caused the public to believe that the virus was hundreds of times deadlier than it really was. Simultaneously, the World Health Organization issued global PCR testing guidance—using tests later confirmed by the New York Times to have a false positive rate over 85%—pursuant to which millions of cases were soon discovered in every country. Additionally, the WHO issued new guidance on the use of mechanical ventilators to member nations; over 97% of those over age 65 who received mechanical ventilation in accordance with this guidance were killed.
Terrified by this surge of deaths and the psychological terror campaigns deployed by governments on their own people, populations across the western world proceeded to impose an ever-darker swathe of illiberal mandates including forced masking and digital vaccine passes for everyday activities. Young children, who were at virtually no risk from the virus, lost years of primary education in the worst education crisis since the end of the Second World War. An indefinite state of legal emergency was imposed which continues to this day. The global fight for human rights and the end of poverty was set back decades.
Over $3 trillion in wealth was transferred from the world’s poorest to a tiny number of billionaires and their supporters, predominantly in China and in the tech and pharmaceutical industries. Several key early lockdown proponents indicated that they saw Covid as an opportunity to “entrench a new idea of the left … reconstructing a cultural hegemony on a new basis.” Authoritarian regimes grew more autocratic, and democratic governments took on authoritarian characteristics.
Worst of all, a norm was grafted onto western democracy that the fundamental rights to movement, work, association, bodily autonomy, and free expression, for which our forebears fought so tirelessly, can be suddenly and indefinitely suspended, without precedent, analysis, or logic, based on nothing but vague promises that doing so will “save lives” — rendering them all but moot.
Meanwhile, the lockdowns and mandates led to the deaths of over 170,000 Americans and proportionate numbers in countries that imposed them across the western world. By 2021, lockdowns had killed over 228,000 children in South Asia. Studies of excess deaths indicate that lockdowns led to several million deaths in India and proportionate numbers in other developing nations.
A million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking real atrocities.
These numbers do not even begin to count the total damage that will ultimately ensue due to the economic devastation of lockdowns, which we will continue to witness for many years to come. Many early lockdown proponents may never be among the 2,000,000 Americans currently residing in jails and prisons, but we can be sure that thousands more would-be innocent children will one day be added to the prison rolls as a result of the economic destruction their policies unleashed.
Ladies and gentlemen, this case ultimately comes down to whether, unlike the other 2,000,000 Americans currently in state custody, we can be sure that by virtue of their socioeconomic position and the panic over a virus which panic they deliberately stoked with their own policies, this handful of key early lockdown proponents acted in good faith when they convinced the world to adopt these unprecedented, catastrophic policies based on the belief that China eliminated the virus from an entire country by shutting down one city for two months—so sure that the question demands no further inquiry. I leave that for you to decide.
BY TOBY YOUNG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 21, 2022
If you’re a regular donor to the Daily Sceptic and got an email from me in the small hours of the morning telling you that PayPal had closed our account and urging you to set up a new donation with a link to our donate page, don’t panic. It wasn’t a scam. PayPal really has shut down our account and the email really was from me.
I’ll tell you the full story in a moment, but just to be clear – this won’t affect the majority of people making regular donations, just those whose donations are processed by PayPal. So unless you’ve received an email from me with instructions about how to donate without using PayPal, please don’t cancel your recurring donation. I repeat: Please don’t cancel your donation. This just applies to people whose donations are being processed by PayPal and I’ve written to all of you.
The first I heard about this was on Thursday afternoon last week when I received a notification from my personal PayPal account informing me that it was being shut down because I’d violated the company’s ‘Acceptable Use Policy’. I looked at that policy and it covers things like fraud and money laundering so my first thought was it must be a mistake. Then, a few minutes later, I got another notification, this one from the Daily Sceptic’s PayPal account. That, too, had been shut down and for the same reason. Eh? That was odd. Then, another email, this one from the Free Speech Union’s PayPal account. Same story – the Acceptable Use Policy.
Now call me a cynic, but the chances of all three accounts violating the same policy within minutes of one another struck me as a bit implausible. Was something else going on?
I contacted customer services and asked what I’d done, exactly, on my personal account that ran afoul of PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. I’ve had it since 2013 and use it, at most, four times a year, usually to receive money from a Swiss weekly magazine I occasionally write for.
The person I spoke to said she had no idea, but if I wanted I could “escalate“ the matter and someone higher up the food chain would get back to me. I did that, obviously, and a couple of days later received a notification that my appeal has been unsuccessful. No explanation offered beyond the original one. Oh, and by the way, it would be keeping the money in that account for up to 180 days while it decided whether it was entitled to “damages” for my yet-to-be-explained breach of its Acceptable Use Policy.
It was the same story with the other two accounts. The only clue as to what might be going on was a message sent a couple of days ago from PayPal on the now closed Daily Sceptic account. The crucial passage read:
PayPal’s policy is not to allow our services to be used for activities that promote hate, violence or racial intolerance. We regularly assess activity against our long-standing Acceptable Use Policy and carefully review actions reported to us, and will discontinue our relationship with account holders who are found to violate our policies.
That message was a bit weird since it didn’t explicitly accuse the Daily Sceptic of promoting “hate, violence or racial intolerance”, or say that that was how we’d violated its precious policy. But it certainly implied it. To which my response is: How exactly? Or, more profanely: What the f*** are you talking about?
Even if the Daily Sceptic is guilty of that sin – and I defy anyone to point to an article we’ve published that promotes “hate, violence or racial intolerance” – why is that a reason to shut down my personal account or the FSU account? I still haven’t received any indication of why that’s happened. And for what it’s worth, I’ve written to the CEO of PayPal UK – Vincent Belloc, you can email him here – and the Corporate Affairs Department of PayPal US and PayPal UK (you can email them here and here), asking for some kind of explanation. No reply, obviously. Laughably, it says on the media contact page of PayPal‘s website above the email addresses: “Reporter on a deadline? Looking to book an interview or need a comment for a story?” The implication is that someone from its crack Corporate Affairs team will get back to you immediately. But I emailed them last Thursday and still haven’t heard back.
I suspect what’s really going on is that someone at PayPal – possibly the entire C-suite – doesn’t like what the Daily Sceptic or the Free Speech Union stands for. The company has form in this area. As Matt Taibbi wrote earlier back in May:
In the last week or so, the online payment platform PayPal without explanation suspended the accounts of a series of individual journalists and media outlets, including the well-known alt sites Consortium News and MintPress.
Those sites – Consortium News and Mint Press – are both left wing and they’re opposed to the war in Ukraine, which is presumably why PayPal cancelled them. Is the fact that the Daily Sceptic has published articles critical of the mainstream narrative about that war – including one in which we linked to Mint Press – the reason we’ve been cancelled? Seems a bit harsh, given that we’ve also published several articles defending Ukraine and its war effort and debunking some of the criticisms of the current Ukrainian regime.
A number of sites that have raised questions about the Covid vaccines have also been demonetised by PayPal in the past few months, including the U.K. Medical Freedom Alliance. Liz Evans, the head of the UKMFA, also had her personal PayPal account closed at the same time.
Is that fact that we’ve published data suggesting the mRNA vaccines aren’t as efficacious or as safe as we were initially led to believe why we’ve been cancelled?
Colin Wright, a former colleague of mine at Quillette and a staunch critic of trans rights dogma, was deplatformed by PayPal in June, presumably because some people in the company didn’t approve of his gender critical views. We’ve expressed similar views on the Daily Sceptic. Was that the issue?
My hunch is it’s all of the above. PayPal just doesn’t like free speech, which is why it has shut down the FSU account at the same time. There are five issues in particular where it’s completely verboten to express sceptical views and if you do you can expect to be cancelled, not just by PayPal but by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.: the wisdom of the lockdown policy and associated Covid restrictions, the efficacy and safety of the mRNA vaccines, Net Zero and the ‘climate emergency’, the need to teach five year-olds that sex is a social construct and the war in Ukraine. Dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy in any of those areas is no longer permitted.
This is the new front in the ongoing war against free speech: the withdrawal of financial services from people and organisations that express dissenting opinions on those topics. And not just those who express them, but those who defend them, too, like the FSU. That‘s what makes this an escalation in the war on free speech. Until now, companies like PayPal, GoFundMe, Patreon and CrowdJustice have only demonetised individuals and groups whose views they disapprove of. Now, PayPal has closed the account of an organisation that defends people’s right to free speech, without taking sides on the issues they’re speaking about. Even that is no longer allowed, according to this Silicon Valley behemoth.
Fear not, comrades. I may not be able to use PayPal again in a personal capacity, but I’m confident the Daily Sceptic and the Free Speech Union will survive. Yes, we’ll take a hit, but I hope people who still believe in free speech and the importance of casting a sceptical eye over the prevailing orthodoxy will show their support by joining or donating.
To join the FSU, click here. To donate to the FSU, click here. And to donate to the Daily Sceptic, click here.
And rest assured, PayPal has been expunged from all our payment systems. There‘s zero risk that if you give money to either of those organisations it will be pocketed by the fintech Death Star.
I thought about launching a campaign to get PayPal to restore its services to the three accounts, but then decided I didn’t want to have anything more to do with the wretched company. Even if it did a reverse ferret, what guarantee is there it won’t demonetise us again? No, from now on I will have nothing more to do with PayPal and if you’re a customer of the company I hope you’ll follow suit. (Here is a handy YouTube video explaining how to close your PayPal account.)
Stop Press: If anyone reading this is a donor to the Daily Sceptic or a member of the FSU based in Texas, please get in touch. In Texas, it’s illegal for large social media companies to ban users’ posts based on their political viewpoints. Is PayPal a social media company? Users can send messages to each other so… maybe. Worth exploring.
Samizdat | September 23, 2022
The EU has “tools” to respond if the political situation in Italy goes in a “difficult direction,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Thursday. She hinted that the country could face punishments such as those recently leveled against Hungary and Poland if the upcoming election results in the predicted right-wing sweep.
“My approach is that whatever democratic government is willing to work with us, we’re working together,” she said in response to a question over whether she had “concerns” about Sunday’s Italian parliamentary vote, in which the conservative Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) are projected to take first place.
“If things go in a difficult direction, I’ve spoken about Hungary and Poland, we have tools,” von der Leyen explained.
While EC spokesman Eric Mamer was quick to clarify that von der Leyen was merely “stressing the role of the Commission as guardian of the [European] treaties with regard to the rule of law,” not everyone interpreted her words that way.
Matteo Salvini, leader of the populist League party, denounced von der Leyen’s “shameful arrogance” and called on the EC to “respect the free, democratic and sovereign vote of the Italian people!” In the last round of polls earlier this month, the League was projected to take home 12% of the vote.
The EC earlier this month recommended suspending €7.5 billion ($7.5 billion) in funding to Hungary – a third of the money it receives from Brussels – over alleged “erosion of the rule of law.” Brussels leveled a similar punishment at Poland last year after the country’s constitutional tribunal found that some Polish laws override those of the EU.
Italy’s snap parliamentary election was triggered by the resignation of PM Mario Draghi in July after his partners in the ruling coalition abandoned him. As of September 9, when the blackout on publishing election polls took effect, the Fratelli d’Italia were estimated to take 25% of the vote. In addition to the League’s 12%, coalition partner Forza Italia is predicted to garner 8%, meaning a victory for the conservative bloc is easily within reach. Fratelli d’Italia barely won 4% of the vote in 2018.
Like the rest of the EU, Italy has been wrestling with a cost-of-living crisis exacerbated by bloc-wide sanctions on Russian oil and gas. A general election had previously been set for next year.
By Eamon McKinney | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 22, 2022
European unity was always a questionable concept between a collection of diverse countries who have historically distrusted and disliked each other. The strength of that always questionable unity is now being tested as the EU is facing its greatest challenge. The initial enthusiasm among EU leaders for the conflict with Russia has waned considerably in recent months as the reality of its ludicrous and self-destructive war on Russia continues to backfire spectacularly on them.
With the long hot European summer now behind them the citizens of Europe are rising up in protest against their governments in huge numbers. While national leaders continue to lecture their people on the necessary sacrifices they must make to support Ukraine, fewer and fewer agree with them. With rapidly rising costs of living and the prospect of a winter without heat, anger against national governments is rapidly reaching breaking point. Germany, France, The Czech Republic, Austria and Italy have witnessed immense angry demonstrations that are seriously panicking their governments. To the extent that many are now trying to backtrack and seek solutions outside of EU directives, Hungary and Serbia have refused to tow the party line and have secured their energy interests with Russia. While the EU has demanded an energy sharing scheme among its member states, only energy-starved Germany seems keen.
Germany was the main economic beneficiary of the EU and it used its considerable influence to impose harsh conditions on the weaker EU states, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain in particular. Understandably these countries are reluctant to share their energy reserves with a country that showed little compassion for them following the 2008 financial crisis. German industries have benefited from low-cost energy from Russia for years which has greatly contributed to their global competitiveness. It was enthusiastically looking forward to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline until America intervened and forced its cancellation. Now German energy giants are seeking government bailouts to avoid bankruptcy, the once dominant manufacturing sector is facing complete destruction unless a rapid rapprochement with Russia is made. Even in that unlikely event, the damage to the German economy is done and any recovery could take years.
In a widely distributed talk, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock (who no surprise is another WEF graduate) said that she will stand with Ukraine regardless of what the German voters think. A more honest translation would be that she stands with the WEF Globalists’ agenda and that the German people’s interests are not a consideration. If she gave a damn about the Ukrainian or the German people she would be trying to stop the war, but peace and the preservation of European lives are not the objectives. However repulsive her statement, it echoed exactly the sentiments of all the EU leaders, she represents her constituency perfectly, but that constituency is not the German people, it’s the Globalists.
An example of just how ridiculously inept and detached from reality the EU is can be found in their call for a price cap on Russian energy imports. Exactly how they think Russia will respond to that requires us to credit them with thinking at all, as several nations rightly pointed out, Russia will just stop all energy supplies. Many, among them France’s Macron has called for a price cap on all energy imports, not just the Russian ones. While America is fine with a European price cap on Russian energy, it strongly opposes it on U.S. energy imports. The destruction of its valued friend and ally Europe is just fine with America as long as there is a buck in it from them.
While increasingly angry citizens are demanding that their governments put national interests above those of Ukraine, they are largely missing the point. The interests of the Ukraine were never a consideration, the conflict was always about America’s obsession with the destruction of a rising Russia. The people of the Ukraine are just collateral damage in what is essentially just another bankers’ war for the interests of the Globalist financial powers. As Europeans are now belatedly beginning to understand, they are also just being considered more collateral damage in the furtherance of that Globalist agenda. None of the European leaders have any solutions to the crisis which they so enthusiastically led their countries into just a few months ago. Cold showers and Spartan energy rationing are not the solutions to the problem that the people want to hear. Preaching that they must sacrifice their futures for the Ukraine works better in the hot summer months than in the imminent cold, very cold European winter. Platitudes from Klaus Schwab’s puppet leaders are not going to placate cold hungry European people any longer. A brutal winter of discontent is inevitable for Europe, as temperatures drop the heat will rise against the politicians who sold out their countries’ interests to the Globalists. We can expect to see governments falling across Europe as public anger becomes uncontrollable.
The panic is not just being felt in European circles, The U.S. is also deeply concerned about the strength of European unity, or rather the lack of it. Biden has on more than one occasion called for Europeans to stay united in its proxy war against Russia. Biden is worried that any diversion from its sanctions against Russia will cause a split in the bloc. A rare moment of clarity from the senile U.S. President. The U.S. is very closely monitoring the unrest in Europe. While examining the results of its handiwork it might notice that while among the Western puppet leaders fractures are indeed increasing, unity among the peoples of the European nations is only growing stronger in common cause. The recent farmers’ protest in Holland was supported by farmers from all the European nations in a demonstration of true unity against the Globalist agenda. A unified cross border, anti-government movement is not the European unity Biden or the NATO warmongers had in mind. They will find that controlling corrupt Globalist European politicians is easier than controlling millions of angry, cold and hungry citizens.
Demonising Putin as the author of all Europe’s woes may have worked at the outset of the conflict, but no more. None of the many demonstrations being witnessed are aimed at Putin or Russia, the target of the ire is firmly against the governments that sold out their nations sovereignty to a globalist/U.S. elite. It is likely that Putin is more popular among Europeans in the know than the incompetent puppets running their own countries into the dirt. While Putin has now stopped the energy flow into Europe he has more cards yet to play. Uranium, fertilisers and foodstuffs among many other essentials are all still supplied to Europe, for now. The destruction of Europe is not in Russia’s interests, Putin doesn’t blame the people, he just hopes that they will wake up and recognise the true enemy.
The coming months will be a time of immense turmoil in Europe, great suffering is inevitable for millions of people sacrificed by their governments on the altar of globalisation. How long the EU can keep it together is the big question, few in Europe would be sad to see its demise. What many first considered a noble enterprise has now been exposed as an undemocratic institution that answers not to the people, but to a corporate oligarchy that owes no affiliation to any nation. In the tragedy that is the Ukrainian conflict some good may yet emerge. If European countries can restore their national sovereignty by exiting the widely despised EU they would be liberated from globalist control and be free to peacefully pursue their own legitimate national self-interest. The way it is supposed to be, the way the majority of European people want it to be. Strong “Exit” movements have existed in all of the member nations for years, Italy and Holland’s movement in particular had huge public support. The UK’s “Brexit” showed it can be done despite immense anti-Brexit propaganda, in a referendum, the people voted to leave. In light of more recent events, a referendum on exiting the EU would likely succeed in most countries.
The EU is a failed Globalist experiment, it never offered more than the pretence of a true democracy, at the unelected top, it was always a technocracy of hand-picked corporate frontmen. It has destroyed the economies of all its members through incompetence and corruption. It has caused chaos and social unrest in communities through forcing mass immigration on unwilling countries. It has interfered in the internal affairs of member states way beyond any powers granted them. It has presumed to write new laws which take primacy over a nation’s own justice system. It has created absurd new layers of bureaucracy and regulations which make European business’s largely uncompetitive globally. It is now dominated by the WEF and Klaus Schwab’s minions who are pushing the Great Reset and consider the Ukraine conflict as a step towards it. Statements made, such as that delivered by Annalena Baerbock on where her loyalties lie, should outrage all Europeans, it should also enlighten them.
Events this winter may well determine the future of Europe for the next century. Whether it is a Europe united with Russia as a peaceful trading partner, or a Globalist Third World hell hole, the European peoples’ actions in the coming months will decide which.
By Ekaterina Blinova – Samizdat – 23.09.2022
Referendums on territorial affiliation are taking place in the Donbass, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions on September 23-27. Earlier, surveys showed that a majority of residents supported the idea of joining Russia as subjects of the Russian Federation.
Voting in referendums on joining Russia began on September 23. Earlier, on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered an address to the nation to ensure security at the forthcoming plebiscites, and announced partial mobilization in the country. Putin’s speech was met with hostility by the US and its NATO allies, who branded the self-determination right of the referendum participants as a “sham” and vowed to never recognize the outcome of the votes.
“Europe fears that during the referendum even more regions of present-day Ukraine will want to distance themselves from the imposed European policy and request Russia’s help,” says Mehdi Khorsand, head of the Department of Economic Diplomacy of the Municipality of Tehran and expert on Eurasia. “At the same time, it will become a kind of threat to Europe, which for two centuries has been putting pressure on countries seeking to gain independence.”
The collective West, in particular Europeans and Americans, wants to keep an unquenchable long-term conflict in the region in order to weaken Russia, according to Khorsand. However, the ongoing referendums could create the conditions for bringing the conflict to an end, he underscores.
“Russia started its special [military] operation in Ukraine only for security reasons,” the Iranian expert notes. “If the government of Ukraine, after the tensions of 2014, had adhered to its obligations under the Minsk agreements, we would have never witnessed these hostilities, this conflict. It would have never begun in the first place.”
Donbass’ Thorny Way to Independence
After the US-backed February 2014 coup d’etat, Ukraine’s eastern regions called for autonomy resisting the rule of the military junta in Kiev. In response, Kiev started a “counter-terror operation” seeking to suppress “separatists” in the east. The Normandy Four, a format comprising Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine, worked out a roadmap, the Minsk accords, to stop the bloodshed in Donbass and provide the breakaway regions with an autonomous status. Nevertheless, Kiev’s successive governments routinely sabotaged the provisions of the Minsk agreements preventing Donbass from gaining legitimate autonomy. In addition to that, the Ukrainian nationalist leadership made NATO membership the centerpiece of its policy, ramping up military training and resorting to the weaponization of the country.
“After 2014, Russia tried to negotiate with Ukraine about its demilitarization, not joining NATO, about the independence and autonomy of the eastern regions: Lugansk and Donetsk. But the Ukrainian government after 2014 committed a real genocide of the [ethnic] Russian population in the east of Ukraine, they began to literally ‘slaughter’ the Russians there,” Khorsand says.
Moscow repeatedly called on the other guarantors of the Minsk agreements, Paris and Berlin, to pressure Kiev to observe the accords. As these attempts failed, Russia came up with draft security agreements requesting guarantees of Ukraine’s non-admission to NATO. Moscow handed the drafts to the US and the transatlantic alliance in December 2021, reminding them of Western leaders’ pledge to not expand NATO to Russia’s doorstep. The Russian leadership made it clear that it takes its national security seriously and would resort to military-technical options if the West were to ignore the drafts. Nonetheless, the US, the EU, and NATO rejected key provisions of Moscow’s proposals.
“Russia, given the seriousness of the topic of Ukraine’s accession to NATO, did not see any other solution than the start of a special [military] operation to resolve the security problem,” Khorsand says.
Referendums as Path to Get Protection From Yoke of Kiev Regime
“We expect the referenda to end up with the majority of the inhabitants of these regions voting in favor of joining Russia. I do not rule out that the hostilities will end after the referendum,” Khorsand notes.
Russia recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics on February 22; still, this decision made the regions merely a “buffer zone” between Russia and Ukraine, which did not guarantee their safety, the Iranian expert explains.
If admitted to the Russian Federation, the aforementioned regions, including Kherson and Zaporozhye, will have security guarantees as inalienable parts of Russia. The Donbass republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regional authorities announced on September 19 and 20 their intent to simultaneously hold referendums to join Russia. In his Wednesday speech, President Putin made it clear that Russia would protect its territorial integrity and sovereignty by all modern military means, adding that he wasn’t “bluffing.”
“As for the legality of the referendums, it is worth noting that the autonomy of the regions of Donbass (LPR and DPR) was fully accepted in the 2014 agreement (Minsk agreements) and mentioned in the terms of this document, respectively, this referendum, reflecting the will and desire of the people of the autonomous and sovereign republics of Donbass to join Russia is a legitimate action,” Khorsand says.
Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explained in an interview with Newsweek that the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions used their sacred right to self-determination, which is codified in the UN Charter, when they announced their intention to join Russia.
“Of course, the US and Europe will be forced to take some other position after these legal referendums, because these referendums create an opportunity to remove tension between Russia and Ukraine, and to stop hostilities,” Khorsand concludes.
Samizdat | September 20, 2022
The US Department of Justice would like Congress to amend laws governing asset forfeiture, so money confiscated from Russian “kleptocrats” can be given to Ukraine, the head of the interagency sanctions task force Andrew Adams told the Senate on Tuesday while testifying at a hearing called “Tightening the Screws on Russia.”
Adams, formerly a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), is the head of the interagency Task Force KleptoCapture, a sanctions enforcement outfit created in February. The “scope, intended impact, and international alignment” of the anti-Russia sanctions are “without precedent,” he told senators.
Among the proposals he listed at the hearing was a pitch for Congress to amend the existing US asset forfeiture laws, in order to allow the government to “remediate harms caused to Ukraine by Russia’s war of aggression,” as Adams put it.
The departments of justice, treasury and state would like the ability to give the funds seized from Russia and Russians to the government in Kiev, but doing so “requires amendments to multiple statutes governing the use of forfeited funds,” he said.
Earlier in his testimony, Adams mentioned that the measures implemented by the US and its allies “have included immobilizing the Russian Central Bank’s assets, held in coffers around the world.” It was not clear, however, whether these funds would fall under the scheme to transfer money to Ukraine – something the government in Kiev has demanded for months, both of the US and of the EU.
Asset forfeiture is a controversial practice in US law, which proponents have defended as a “key tool” for weakening organized crime and funding law enforcement. Critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have called it “policing for profit” and described it as “egregiously at odds with our due process rights.”
Samizdat | September 20, 2022
Senior officials in Kiev have dismissed as irrelevant plans for a number of current and former Ukrainian regions to hold referendums on whether to join Russia.
Andrey Yermak, President Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff, described the proposed votes as “blackmail” by Moscow.
“This is what fear of defeat looks like. The enemy is afraid and uses primitive manipulations,” he said in a post on social media on Tuesday.
Yermak added that “Ukraine will solve the Russian question,” insisting this could be done “only by force.”
Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba also downplayed news of the upcoming referendums, dismissing the move as a “sham.”
“Ukraine has every right to liberate its territories and will keep liberating them whatever Russia has to say,” he tweeted.
The condemnations and threats came in response to bids by the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, to hold referendums on the question of joining the Russian Federation. The votes could take place as early as this week.
Kiev previously threatened any person who takes part in such a plebiscite with criminal prosecution. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said participants could be sent to prison for up to 12 years.
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | September 15, 2022
Sometimes police will be given quotas for ticketing drivers. Results of the pressure put on cops to meet their ticket targets tend to include that many drivers are pulled over and ticketed for minor infractions that would be better overlooked or based on dubious or fabricated grounds. Is a similar quota system, with expectable similar results, developing now in regard to “domestic terrorism” and “white supremacy” related crime at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)?
A Wednesday Washington Times article by Kerry Picket and Joseph Clark, referencing information provided by current and former FBI agents, suggests that is the case. Picket and Clark write:
Current and former FBI agents tell The Washington Times that the perceived threat has become overblown under the administration. They say bureau analysts and top officials are pressuring FBI agents to create domestic terrorist cases and tag people as White supremacists to meet internal metrics.
“The demand for White supremacy” coming from FBI headquarters “vastly outstrips the supply of White supremacy,” said one agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We have more people assigned to investigate White supremacists than we can actually find.”
The agent said those driving bureau policies “have already determined that White supremacy is a problem” and set agencywide policy to elevate racially motivated domestic extremism cases as priorities.
“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”
The Gadsden flag is a historical American flag with a yellow field showing a timber rattlesnake and the words: “Don’t Tread on Me.” It is often used as a symbol of liberty.
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Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
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