By John & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | August 17, 2022
“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”—James Madison
The IRS has stockpiled 4,500 guns and five million rounds of ammunition in recent years, including 621 shotguns, 539 long-barrel rifles and 15 submachine guns.
The Veterans Administration (VA) purchased 11 million rounds of ammunition (equivalent to 2,800 rounds for each of their officers), along with camouflage uniforms, riot helmets and shields, specialized image enhancement devices and tactical lighting.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) acquired 4 million rounds of ammunition, in addition to 1,300 guns, including five submachine guns and 189 automatic firearms for its Office of Inspector General.
According to an in-depth report on “The Militarization of the U.S. Executive Agencies,” the Social Security Administration secured 800,000 rounds of ammunition for their special agents, as well as armor and guns.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) owns 600 guns. And the Smithsonian now employs 620-armed “special agents.”
This is how it begins.
We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil.
This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized, civilian forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.
Mind you, this de facto standing army of bureaucratic, administrative, non-military, paper-pushing, non-traditional law enforcement agencies may look and act like the military, but they are not the military.
Rather, they are foot soldiers of the police state’s standing army, and they are growing in number at an alarming rate.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of federal agents armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment, authorized to make arrests, and trained in military tactics has nearly tripled over the past several decades.
There are now more bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with weapons than U.S. Marines. As Adam Andrzejewski writes for Forbes, “the federal government has become one never-ending gun show.”
While Americans have to jump through an increasing number of hoops in order to own a gun, federal agencies have been placing orders for hundreds of millions of rounds of hollow point bullets and military gear. Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities.
Add in the Biden Administration’s plans to grow the nation’s police forces by 100,000 more cops and swell the ranks of the IRS by 87,000 new employees (some of whom will have arrest-and-firearm authority) and you’ve got a nation in the throes of martial law.
The militarization of America’s police forces in recent decades has merely sped up the timeline by which the nation is transformed into an authoritarian regime.
What began with the militarization of the police in the 1980s during the government’s war on drugs has snowballed into a full-fledged integration of military weaponry, technology and tactics into police protocol. To our detriment, local police—clad in jackboots, helmets and shields and wielding batons, pepper-spray, stun guns, and assault rifles—have increasingly come to resemble occupying forces in our communities.
This standing army has been imposed on the American people in clear violation of the spirit—if not the letter of the law—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the government’s ability to use the U.S. military as a police force.
Unfortunately, the increasing militarization of the police, the use of sophisticated weaponry against Americans and the government’s increasing tendency to employ military personnel domestically have all but eviscerated historic prohibitions such as the Posse Comitatus Act.
The menace of a national police force—a.k.a. a standing army—vested with the power to completely disregard the Constitution, cannot be overstated, nor can its danger be ignored.
Historically, the establishment of a national police force accelerates a nation’s transformation into a police state, serving as the fundamental and final building block for every totalitarian regime that has ever wreaked havoc on humanity.
Then again, for all intents and perhaps, the American police state is already governed by martial law: Battlefield tactics. Militarized police. Riot and camouflage gear. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Drones. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Concussion grenades. Intimidation tactics. Brute force. Laws conveniently discarded when it suits the government’s purpose.
This is what martial law looks like, when a government disregards constitutional freedoms and imposes its will through military force, only this is martial law without any government body having to declare it.
We are sliding fast down a slippery slope to a Constitution-free America.
This quasi-state of martial law has been helped along by government policies and court rulings that have made it easier for the police to shoot unarmed citizens, for law enforcement agencies to seize cash and other valuable private property under the guise of asset forfeiture, for military weapons and tactics to be deployed on American soil, for government agencies to carry out round-the-clock surveillance, for legislatures to render otherwise lawful activities as extremist if they appear to be anti-government, for profit-driven private prisons to lock up greater numbers of Americans, for homes to be raided and searched under the pretext of national security, for American citizens to be labeled terrorists and stripped of their rights merely on the say-so of a government bureaucrat, and for pre-crime tactics to be adopted nationwide that strip Americans of the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty and creates a suspect society in which we are all guilty until proven otherwise.
All of these assaults on the constitutional framework of the nation have been sold to the public as necessary for national security.
Time and again, the public has fallen for the ploy hook, line and sinker.
We’re being reeled in, folks, and you know what happens when we get to the end of that line?
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll be cleaned, gutted and strung up.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | August 11, 2022
ICAN attorneys have obtained annual statements from the five largest insurance companies in the U.S. revealing similar trends showing unexplained increases in non Covid-related death benefit payouts in 2021.
See also:
A simmering outbreak is now racing upwards while a questionable response juggles political correctness, public health, and a vaccine of unknown effectiveness against a population unwilling to ‘fall in line’ for more public health fear tactics.
By Jonathan Turley | August 14, 2022
Fox News is reporting that the FBI seized boxes containing attorney-client privileged and potentially executive privileged material during its raid Mar-a-Lago. When the raid occurred, I noted that the legal team had likely marked material as privileged at the residence and that the collection could create an immediate conflict over such material. Now, sources are telling Fox that the Justice Department not only took attorney-client material but has refused Trump requests for a special master to review the records.
The request for a special master would seem reasonable, particularly given the sweeping language used in the warrant. It is hard to see what material could not be gathered under this warrant.
Attachment B of the warrant has this provision:
“Any physical documents with classification markings, along with any containers/boxes (including any other contents) in which such documents are located, as well as any other containers/boxes that are collectively stored or found together with the aforementioned documents and containers/boxes; b.. Information, including communications in any form, regarding the retrieval, storage, or transmission of national defense information or classified material”
Thus, the agents could not only take an entire box if it contained a single document with classification markings of any kind but could then take all boxes around that box.
It is not surprising that dozens of boxes were seized.
Given that sweeping language (and the various lawsuits and investigations facing Trump), it would seem reasonable to request a special magistrate. That is why the reported refusal is so concerning. What is the harm from such a review? The material is now under lock and key. There is no approaching deadline in court or referenced grand jury.
Moreover, many have accused the Justice Department of using this search as a pretext. While saying that they were seeking potential national security information, critics have alleged that the real purpose was to gather evidence that could be used against Trump in a prosecution over his role in January 6th riot. I have noted that such a pretext would be deeply disturbing given the documented history of Justice Department officials misleading or lying to courts in prior Trump-related investigations. The continuation of such subterfuge could be disclosed in a later oversight investigation.
The use of a special master could have helped quell such claims of a pretextual search. Conversely, the denial of such a protective measure would fuel even greater concerns.
The refusal to take this protective measures is almost as troubling as the sweeping language in the search warrant itself. We need to see the affidavit that led to this search warrant. I am not going to assume that the search was unwarranted until I see that evidence. However, in the interim, Attorney General Merrick Garland could have allowed accommodations for this review to assure not just the Trump team but the public that the search was not a pretext for seeking other evidence like January 6th-related material.
By Mike Campbell | The Counter Signal | August 12, 2022
The CDC has dropped special quarantine recommendations for unvaccinated persons, finally admitting that natural immunity should be considered and that vaccines don’t stop infection.
“CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection,” their update reads.
The CDC removed the recommendation that unvaccinated persons quarantine after they’re exposed to the virus. They now recommend that individuals wear a mask for ten days post-exposure and get tested after five days.
The CDC further acknowledged that the Omicron variant of COVID poses a smaller risk of hospitalization and death than previous variants.
This announcement will likely pressure Canada’s health authorities (and Trudeau) to follow suit. Although numerous countries dropped their medical segregation policies long ago, Canada remains one of the last to do so.
Moreover, each consecutive variant appears to be weakening, with immunity (including natural immunity) being widespread. Although Canada has an abnormally high amount of mask and vaccine fanatics, the remaining medical segregation could soon be a thing of the past.
With that said, Canada’s health authorities have done nothing but warn of a return to restrictions and upcoming waves of COVID, telling Canadians that the pandemic is not over.
Additionally, the University of Toronto recently mandated that young health students living on residence get a 3rd vaccine.
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 12, 2022
Facebook has hidden posts with the “#diedsuddenly” hashtag because it claims that some of these posts violate its far-reaching community standards. When users search for this hashtag, no results are displayed and Facebook shows a message stating that the results are hidden.
While Facebook doesn’t specify which rules these posts allegedly violated, Twitter users have been using the hashtag to share news stories about people who died suddenly. Most of these Twitter posts note that those who died were fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and allude to there being a connection between the vaccines and their deaths.
If Facebook users are posting similar content under this hashtag, the posts are likely to violate the tech giant’s ban on a wide range of COVID-19 vaccine claims. Facebook prohibits claims that “vaccines are toxic, dangerous, or cause autism” and reduces the distribution of “shocking stories” about the vaccines. One of Facebook’s examples of a shocking story is “Uncovered: See the 632 reports made of people who died within a week of having the new COVID-19 vaccine.”
The blocking of this hashtag is the latest of many examples of Facebook censoring content that is critical of or raises questions about the COVID-19 vaccines. Throughout the pandemic, Facebook has also mass censored anti-mask content, anti-lockdown content, and content that said the coronavirus came from a lab (a censorship policy that was suddenly reversed after the Biden admin announced that it would be investigating the origins of COVID).
Not only does Facebook mass censor content that goes against or questions government guidance and the legacy media narrative on COVID but it also partnered with the Pfizer-backed CDC Foundation to increase “vaccine uptake” and maintained a close relationship with US federal agencies on COVID messaging.
The tech giant has previously used hashtag blocking to censor many other topics including “#buchamassacre” (a block that it later said was a mistake), “#Revolution” (which was blocked on a July 4th weekend), and “#SaveTheChildren.”
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 12, 2022
Newly released internal messages between Twitter staff show them discussing an April 2021 meeting with the White House where the Biden administration reportedly pushed for journalist and author Alex Berenson to be booted from the platform before Twitter banned him.
Berenson was banned from Twitter for violating its “COVID-19 misinformation” rules four months later in August 2021. Berenson responded by suing Twitter in December 2021, with the lawsuit accusing the tech giant of acting “on behalf of the federal government in censoring and barring him from access to its platform.” Berenson’s account was subsequently reinstated in July 2022 after both parties settled the censorship lawsuit.
These internal messages were published by Berenson and show April 22, 2021 discussions between Twitter employees on the business messaging app Slack. Berenson said he obtained the messages as part of his lawsuit against Twitter.
In one of the Slack messages, a Twitter employee says their meeting with the “WH [White House]” was “pretty good” but “they had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform.”
In another Slack message, a Twitter employee says that the White House “really wanted to know about Alex Berenson” and that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator, “suggested they had seen data viz that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.”
Berenson said that in another Slack message, a Twitter employee said: “I’ve taken a pretty close look at his account and I don’t think any of it’s violative.”
Berenson noted that the message about White House officials questioning why he hadn’t been banned from the platform “make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech.”
He added: “If the companies are acting on behalf of the federal government they can become ‘state actors’ that must allow free speech and debate, just as the government does.”
Berenson also noted that previous censorship lawsuits accusing the government and social media companies of colluding to ban users have failed because the courts have “universally held that people who have been banned have not shown the specific demands from government officials that are necessary to support state action claims.”
However, in this case, Berenson argues that “federal officials appear to have gone far beyond generically encouraging Twitter to support Covid vaccines or discourage ‘misinformation’ (i.e. information that the government does not like). Instead, top officials targeted me personally.”
Berenson said he intends to sue the Biden administration for violating his First Amendment rights by pressing Twitter to ban him and that there will be “more to come soon.”
Jenin Younes, an attorney for the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), who has worked on two lawsuits that accuse the Biden administration of violating Americans’ First Amendment rights by coercing tech companies to censor “misinformation,” said that the revelations in the Slack messages released by Berenson are “a virtual smoking gun, and along with myriad circumstantial evidence proves our contention beyond any doubt.” Younes added that despite initial setbacks, she is confident that the NCLA’s lawsuits will be successful.
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 12, 2022
New York Post columnist and investigative journalist Paul Sperry was suspended from Twitter following tweets criticizing the FBI’s raid on President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago.
The tweet that was widely shared when Sperry got suspended read: “Funny, don’t remember the FBI raiding Chappaqua or Whitehaven to find the 33,000 potentially classified documents Hillary Clinton deleted. And she was just a former secretary of state, not a former president.”
However, speaking to MRC’s News Busters, Sperry said that he received a notice from Twitter saying that his account had been permanently suspended. He added that Twitter did not give a reason or explanation for the suspension.
“This is outrageous censorship,” Sperry told MRC. “Yes, Twitter is a private entity, but it has become the [dominant] public town square for political information and debate and it also enjoys a monopoly as the site where government agencies and corporations first post their releases and statements to the press. Denying a veteran working journalist access to this platform restricts my ability to cover events and issue[s].”
Sperry went on to criticize the Biden administration for its involvement in censorship on social media, saying the suspension “amounts to state censorship by proxy.”
The Biden administration has encouraged social media censorship. Last year, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden administration was “regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media.”
Samizdat – 12.08.2022
Former US President Donald Trump dismissed on Friday a report that the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago residence in order to search for classified nuclear weapons documents.
“Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a Hoax, two Impeachments were a Hoax, the Muller investigation was a Hoax and much more. Same sleazy people,” Trump wrote. He also questioned why the FBI would not allow his lawyers to be present during the agency’s inspection, suggesting that they “planted” evidence.
The Washington Post had reported Thursday that the intention of the raid at Trump’s Florida resort was to recover nuclear weapons documents that the former president illegally removed from the White House.
The Justice Department also requested the same day for a judge to unseal the FBI search warrant in order to refute Republican claims of a political attack. Attorney General Merrick Garland also revealed that he had personally approved the search.
On Monday, the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida as part of a probe focused on classified materials the former president allegedly took with him after leaving office.
Trump condemned the raid and characterized it is as a continuation of the political witch hunt by Democrats and the establishment to prevent him to run in the 2024 US presidential election and reverse their policies.
Trump also said the raid shows that the US justice system has been weaponized to act against the Democrats’ political opponents and added that investigators have not found any wrong doing despite probing him for years.
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | August 11, 2022
Twitter will start censoring “disputed claims,” “potentially harmful and misleading information,” and “false” information about the 2022 US midterms from today under its “Civic Integrity Policy.”
Tweets that fall foul of this policy will be removed or labeled with links to “credible information” or “helpful context.” Labeled tweets aren’t amplified or recommended by Twitter and the platform also dissuades or prevents users from liking and sharing labeled tweets. Twitter also noted that its latest label design reduces likes by 10%, reduces replies by 13%, and reduces retweets by 10%.
Users who have tweets removed or labeled under this policy are subject to Twitter’s five strikes system. The account owner is given two strikes if their tweet is deleted and one strike if their tweet is labeled. 2-4 strikes results in a temporary account lock and five strikes results in a permanent account suspension.
In addition to censoring tweets, Twitter will also start artificially boosting content that it deems to be “reliable” by displaying this content prominently on the “Home” and “Search” tabs and promoting it in the “Explore” tab.
Twitter’s Civic Integrity Policy resulted in mass censorship in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election. The rule banning “disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, such as unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results” was used to justify much of this censorship with users that discussed election discrepancies often targeted.
Many of former President Trump’s statements about the election were censored under this policy before he was permanently banned. This same policy was also used to mass censor other users and tweets before and after the 2020 election.
By Igor Chudov | August 11, 2022
The World Economic Forum is becoming a little concerned. Unapproved opinions are becoming more popular, and online censors cannot keep up with millions of people becoming more aware and more vocal. The censorship engines employed by Internet platforms, turned out to be quite stupid and incapable. People are even daring to complain about the World Economic Forum, which is obviously completely unacceptable.
So, WEF author Inbal Goldberger came up with a solution: she proposes to collect off-platform intelligence from “millions of sources” to spy on people and new ideas, and then merge this information together for “content removal decisions” sent down to “Internet platforms”.
To overcome the barriers of traditional detection methodologies, we propose a new framework: rather than relying on AI to detect at scale and humans to review edge cases, an intelligence-based approach is crucial.
By bringing human-curated, multi-language, off-platform intelligence into learning sets, AI will then be able to detect nuanced, novel abuses at scale, before they reach mainstream platforms. Supplementing this smarter automated detection with human expertise to review edge cases and identify false positives and negatives and then feeding those findings back into training sets will allow us to create AI with human intelligence baked in. This more intelligent AI gets more sophisticated with each moderation decision, eventually allowing near-perfect detection, at scale.
What is this about? What’s new?
The way censorship is done these days is that each Internet platform, such as Twitter, has its own moderation team and a decision making engine. Twitter would only look at tweets by any specific twitter user, when deciding on whether to delete any tweets or suspend their authors. Twitter moderators do NOT look at Gettr or other external websites.
So, for example, user @JohnSmith12345 may have a Twitter account and narrowly abide by Twitter rules, but at the same time have a Gettr account where he would publish anti-vaccine messages. Twitter would not be able to suspend @JohnSmith12345’s account. That is no longer acceptable to the WEF because they want to silence people and ideas, not individual messages or accounts.
This explains why the WEF needs to move beyond the major Internet platforms, in order to collect intelligence about people and ideas everywhere else. Such an approach would allow them to know better what person or idea to censor — on all major platforms at once.
They want to collect intelligence from “millions of sources”, and train their “AI systems” to detect thoughts that they do not like, to make content removal decisions handed down to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and so on. This is a major change from the status quo of each platform deciding what to do based on messages posted to that specific platform only.
For example, in addition to looking at my Twitter profile, WEF’s proposed AI would also look at my Gettr profile, and then it would make an “intelligent decision” to remove me from the Internet at once. It is somewhat of a simplification because they also want to look for ideas and not only individuals but, nevertheless, the search for wrongthink becomes globalized.
This sounds like an insane conspiracy theory from hell: WEF collecting information on everyone everywhere, and then telling all platforms what posts to remove, based on a global decision-making AI engine that sees everything and can identify individual people and ideas beyond any given platform.
If someone ever told me that it would be contemplated, I would probably think that this person is insane. It sounds like a sick technological fantasy. Unfortunately, this crazy stuff is real, is in a WEF agenda proposal that is officially posted on their website’s “WEF Agenda” section. And WEF is not messing around.
You will have no voice and you will be happy!
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By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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