Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

The Justice Department Pressured USA Today to Stop Publishing Me

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | June 28, 2022

In 2015, Justice Department press chief Brian Fallon bitterly complained to USA Today editors about my articles walloping Attorney General Eric Holder, including ”Eric Holder’s Lawless Legacy,” [Feb. 3, 2015] and “Eric Holder’s Police Shooting Record? Dismal,” [Aug. 20, 2014]. Fallon (who later became presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s press secretary) protested to USA Today commentary editor David Mastio and another USA Today editor, Brian Gallagher, about my “consistently nasty words about Mr. Holder” and said that Bovard “has never had a kind thing to say about Holder.” (Actually, I praised Holder’s curtailing prosecutions of minor drug possession in a 2013 USA Today column that recounted my experiences working with a convict road gang.)

Fallon caterwauled that I had “authored pieces in various places criticizing [Holder] on civil liberties, relations with law enforcement, civil asset forfeiture and media subpoenas. In the past, Bovard even has articulated a conspiracy theory involving Mr. Holder and the incident at Waco in the 1990s.” (Waco was only “the incident… in the 1990s”? No wonder Fallon loathed me.) Fallon groused, “I don’t understand why USA Today would provide a platform on repeated occasions for his Holder bashing.”

Mastio never flinched. He replied, “As an opinion section, much of what we publish is written by writers with agendas… Just as our door is open to writers who want to say nasty things about the attorney general, our door is wide open to the attorney general when he wants to write about the top issues of the day.”  Mastio also declared, “The guarantor of balance in the opinion section is that we are open to a wide variety of views.”

I acquired Fallon’s messages and Mastio’s responses via a 2019 Freedom of Information Act request, reposted in full PDF form here.

Mastio recently resigned from USA Today and wrote about the changes he saw on its editorial policy last week in the New York Post.

In the years following that pressure from the Justice Department press office, Mastio and USA Today published some of the hard-hitting articles I submitted to them on federal law enforcement outrages, including:

End Federal Agents’ License to Kill” (November 9, 2015)

Comey firing justly knocks FBI off its pedestal” (May 11, 2017)

After the FBI’s Pulse nightclub failure, why should we trust James Comey anymore?” (April 3, 2018)

“Inspector general’s report on FBI and Clinton’s emails shows secrecy threatens democracy” (June 15, 2018)

Don’t count on the FBI to clear up the Kavanaugh-Ford mess. Its record is flawed” (October 2, 2018)

You may have seen him on a prayer candle, but James Comey is no saint” (August 30, 2019).

Inspector General report on FBI’s FISA abuse tells us one thing: We need radical reform.” (December 10, 2019)

Under four presidents, the Feds neglected duty to collect statistics on police killings” (June 11, 2020)

I don’t know how many other publications have been pressured by politicians or federal agencies to not publish or to muzzle my work. Unfortunately, I am unlikely to hear such details when the federal elbows succeed. I know some of the backstory of how the Washington Post caved in 1994 on an article on drug education turning kids into narcs; the Post added six paragraphs to my article and ended up libeling an innocent Georgia couple as drug dealers. The Post paid an undisclosed libel settlement and hushed up the incident. In 1999, Reader’s Digest took a dive after the Clinton White House pressured them not to publish my investigation of AmeriCorps. (My editors at the American Spectator weren’t intimidated, snapping up the piece and running it as a cover story.) There were other articles that were accepted by high-profile publications but then killed, sometimes for bizarre arcane reasons that almost certainly came from insiders at the agency I was whacking.

I don’t know if those cases were the tip of the iceberg of media kowtowing or a few exceptional cases of editorial nerves failing. In prior times, when I filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking to learn of G-men covertly targeting my work, the responses came back so empty that I sometimes burst out laughing. The FBI said they had nothing on me in their files—even though FBI chief Louis Freeh wrote letters to two newspapers in 1995 condemning my articles on Ruby Ridge. When I filed a request for mentions of my name in the records of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (which I often hammered in the 1990s), the official response notified me that they had nothing in their files on “Kevin Bovard.” Ya, well, I wasn’t asking about my cousin.

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.

June 28, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Reporter who exposed Kiev’s lies about mass rapes branded state enemy

Samizdat | June 28, 2022

Ukrainian journalist Sonya Lukashova ended up on the notorious Mirotvorets (‘Peacemaker’) website after penning an article claiming that a vast majority of Russian military rape allegations produced by the country’s now former human rights chief, Lyudmila Denisova, were false. The Mirotvorets, widely believed to be run by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), lists individuals deemed to be “enemies of Ukraine.”

The bombshell expose was published by the Ukrainskaya Pravda (Ukrainian Truth) newspaper on Monday. According to the piece, citing various official sources, a vast majority of allegations of “sexual atrocities,” purportedly committed by Russian troops amid the ongoing conflict, were false. The allegations have been spread by human rights chief Denisova, who got ousted in late May after a no-confidence vote over her failure to organize humanitarian corridors and prisoner exchanges as well as “inexplicably focusing” on spreading unverified and unsubstantiated claims.

According to the report, Ukrainian law enforcement officials tried to investigate Denisova’s claims but found no evidence to back them up. After interrogating Denisova several times, officials discovered she had been getting all her explosive revelations from her daughter, Alexandra Kvitko, “over tea.” The latter ran a ‘psychological hotline’ for victims of wartime violence,  established in collaboration between Denisova’s office and UNICEF.

The hotline lacked transparency, and while Kvitko reportedly told investigators it received over 1,000 calls in only a month and a half, with some 450 of them detailing the rape of minors, the hotline’s logs suggested it got only 92 calls. The exact nature of the calls remained unclear as well, since Kvitko failed to provide investigators with any details on the alleged victims, according to the report.

Multiple Ukrainian public figures condemned the expose, insisting that reporting on the activities of the disgraced human rights chief and her daughter helps Russia. Political commentator and prominent supporter of ex-president Petro Poroshenko, Taras Berezovets, for instance, bluntly accused the reporter of producing prime material for “Russian propaganda.”

“The author of the Denisova investigation, Sonya Lukashova, who accused the former human rights chief of creating numerous fakes about the rape of Ukrainian children, ended up on the Mirotvorets database. Lukashova’s material has been very heavily cited by Russian propaganda,” Berezovets said in a social media post.

The Mirotvorets listing for Lukashova states that the reporter’s activities are somehow “incompatible with journalist ethics.” The journalist stands accused of actively participating “in special information operations of the Russian aggression against Ukraine,” as well as of “manipulating publicly significant information.” The report published by the newspaper amounts to “concealing evidence of crimes” allegedly perpetrated by the Russian military, according to Mirotvorets.

The Mirotvorets website was created in 2014 as a public database of “pro-Russian terrorists, separatists, mercenaries, war criminals, and murderers.” The website provides links to social media accounts and personal information, such as home addresses, phones, and emails. Over the years, numerous high-profile public figures and politicians have ended up on the Mirotvorets list over actions deemed to be “anti-Ukrainian.” Hungary’s PM Viktor Orban and former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger are among the latest additions to the database.

June 28, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Uvalde Mother Who Rushed Into the Besieged School to Save Her Children Says Police Are Harassing Her

© AP Photo / Eric Gay
Samizdat – 27.06.2022

On May 24, Salvador Ramos entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, with an assault-style rifle. He murdered 19 children and two teachers. Law enforcement waited 77 minutes before confronting Ramos, leading to intense criticism.

The mother who rushed into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, to save her children while a gunman rampaged and police stood by, now says she is being harassed by law enforcement.

Angeli Rose Gomez rushed to the school that her two young boys attend the moment she heard there was an active shooter. While police waited outside, gunshots and the screams of children could be heard by the growing crowd of concerned parents.

Police waited 77 minutes after their arrival before confronting and eventually killing the shooter. During that time, Gomez and other parents pleaded with law enforcement to save their children. Gomez was eventually cuffed by police, who told her to cooperate and calm down. She eventually convinced the police to uncuff her and then she ran to the school, hopping a fence and running to the door window of her eldest son’s classroom. She was eventually able to get him and the other students in the class out, but her youngest child was still inside.

Ignoring the danger to her safety and the threats of law enforcement, she then frantically searched the school for her other child, eventually finding and freeing him. 19 third and fourth graders, along with two teachers, were killed in the shooting.

Gomez, who says cops tackled parents trying to do the same thing as her, became a national sensation after telling her story, but now she says law enforcement officers are harassing her and her family.

“The other night we were exercising and we had a cop parked at the corner like, flickering us with his headlights,” she told the local Fox affiliate. The situation has gotten so bad that Gomez has sent her boys away so they don’t have to witness the harassment. “Just so my sons don’t feel like they have to watch cops passing by, stopping, parking.”

Gomez also recently attended a Uvalde city council meeting, where she and other community members held signs demanding that School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo be fired. On Wednesday, Arredondo was placed on administrative leave, but that is not enough for Gomez and others in the Uvalde community; they want Arredondo gone permanently and without pay.

Earlier this year, Arredondo was elected to the Uvalde city council. He was sworn in days after the shooting in a ceremony that was closed to the public. Since that time, Arredondo missed his first two council meetings and his request for a leave of absence was denied. If Arredondo misses another meeting, the council could vote to remove him.

As for Gomez, she says her next plan is to sue the city. She has retained the services of attorney Mark Di Carlo, who says he is representing 15 parents in Uvalde. The lawsuit has not yet been filed and Di Carlo says he wants to wait until they gather as much evidence as possible before bringing it to court.

“The fact that [Arredondo] wasn’t fired immediately based upon whatever it is, hours of video, from testimonies such as Angeli’s, is an indication that there is some sort of what, corruption or wrong-doing,” Carlo explained.

June 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | | Leave a comment

Facebook blocks links to website detailing how users can get class action settlement payout from Facebook

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | June 27, 2022

Facebook is blocking links to the official class action claims page for a lawsuit settlement for users affected by privacy concerns. The page helps users receive their payout from Facebook and Facebook is marketing the page as “spam” or “abusive,” which prevents people from learning about how to claim.

“If you are a person who, between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, inclusive, were a Facebook User in the United States who visited non-Facebook websites that displayed the Facebook Like button, you may be eligible for a payment from a Class Action Settlement,” the website reads.

Reclaim The Net was alerted to the censorship by a reader and was able to confirm with David Strait, a partner at the DiCello Levitt Gutzler law firm, a party litigating the case, that fbinternettrackingsettlement.com is the official page for users to see if they’re eligible for a claim.

When users on Facebook Messenger try to share the link with someone, they’re greeted with a message saying, “(#368) The action attempted has been deemed abusive or is otherwise disallowed,” hindering the sharing of the claim information.

On desktop, Facebook is blocking links to the page under its “spam” policy.

June 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Historical Narratives vs. the Truth about Hong Kong

CGTN | June 21, 2022

Why was there no democracy in Hong Kong under British colonial rule? And why democracy can be developed in an orderly manner in Hong Kong only on the premise of firmly implementing the policy of “One Country, Two Systems” and the Basic Law of the HKSAR. Einar Tangen, our current affairs commentator, tells more.

Subscribe to CGTN on YouTube: https://goo.gl/lP12gA

June 27, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Lockdown Harms Impossible to Cover Up

BY MICHAEL SENGER | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | JUNE 26, 2022

According to a recent study by the World Bank, published in the journal Nature, lockdowns and the response to Covid-19 have pushed an additional 75 million people into extreme poverty, living on less than US $1.90 a day.

In the typical Walter Duranty style that’s become a kind of twisted journalistic norm since March 2020, the World Bank and Nature of course blame this on “the pandemic” rather than lockdowns. I remain baffled as to how seemingly well-meaning people are able to sleep at night repeating such nonsense—are they somehow blind to the role of their own sycophancy in perpetuating these policies?

Nonetheless, there are signs that the political mainstream is starting to realize lockdowns were a disaster. Today, the Wall Street Journal published an excellent piece titled The Revenge of the Locked-Down Voters, noting the growing political backlash against lockdown politicians from voters at the lower end of the income scale.

This comes shortly after the New York Times quietly acknowledged a study showing that Covid lockdowns and mandates led to over 170,000 excess deaths among young Americans.

Likewise, today the Daily Telegraph, the UK’s centre-right newspaper of record, published an excellent piece titled Basket-case Britain is the definitive proof lockdown was an epic mistake.

And, as in America, this comes shortly after the London Times, the UK’s centre-left newspaper of record, published a cautiously-introspective piece on its support for lockdowns.

These are promising indications that the political mainstream, especially on the right, is coming around to the fact that lockdowns were a policy catastrophe more quickly than some might have worried.

Still, there’s much more to be done. Currently, the mainstream left and right are starting to realize lockdowns were a big mistake, while many career bureaucrats are still stuck pretending lockdowns were the greatest medical breakthrough since penicillin. There really needs to be a bipartisan consensus that lockdowns were an unprecedented policy catastrophe before we can start to see justice and have undue foreign and financial influence taken seriously.

June 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

An Iron Curtain descends on Europe and the USA

By Gilbert Doctorow | June 26, 2022

In recent weeks, I have received a number of complimentary emails from readers of my essays who took note of what they consider my even-handed approach to the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian military conflict which is at variance with the fired-up Russophile and Russophobe positions that we find daily in alternative and mainstream media respectively. Some have gone on to say that they have profited from my reporting on the content and changing views aired on Russian political talk shows these past few months, all of which is rarely featured in mainstream Western news and analysis. My intent in such reporting was to ensure that at least some people here understand what Ukraine and its Western backers are up against, so as to better understand the course of the fighting on the ground and who may be winning.

In this context, I announce with sadness that the job of even-handed reporting has just become much more difficult as a result of Eutelsat’s implementation yesterday of a policy decision announced just over a month ago, but which went unnoticed by most everyone, myself included.

I quote from Google Search:

“Eutelsat to remove banned Russian channels. Eutelsat ready to immediately stop the rebroadcasting of the Russian channels RTR Planeta and Rossiya 24 on its satellites on June 25.  13 May 2022”

Indeed, the main state news channels of the Russian Federation can now no longer be received via satellite antennas here in Belgium or elsewhere on the Continent. They are partially and sporadically accessible on the internet via www.smotrim.ru but the level of interference from Western censors makes such viewing a dismal exercise. “Freezing” of frames seems to be most common with respect to the talk shows “Sixty Minutes” and “Evening with Solovyov,” two programs which I had been following and reporting on most regularly. However, it also is applied against Russian shows which might be characterized as being simply entertainment, such as the currently running historical serial about the life and times of the 18th century tsarina Elizabeth. I dare anyone to get more than a minute or two into the broadcast before the curtain comes down, so to speak.

The curtain in question is an updated Iron Curtain, which this time has been dropped on our heads by the powers that be in Washington. After all, it is Washington that pressured the French controlled Eutelsat rebroadcaster of television channels that dominates the European and other global markets to throw out the Russians.

The argument behind that demand was to exclude “Russian propaganda” from the airwaves.

In the spirit of fairmindedness with which I opened this essay, I agree that Russian state television is practicing propagandistic methods insofar as it withholds certain information from viewers while promoting other information favorable to its paymasters. For example, on Russian state television news you will not find a word about the civilian casualties and damage to residential buildings of Russian artillery and rocket attacks on Kharkov. You are shown only the civilian casualties and damage to residential buildings in Donetsk and towns of the Donbas caused by Ukrainian artillery and rocket strikes.

On the other hand, however, European and U.S. newscasts feature the damage caused by Russian strikes on Ukrainian towns while saying not a word about the sufferings of the Donbas population from military assaults by Ukrainian forces. Just as they have been entirely silent about such suffering and death among the Donbas population that Kiev has inflicted on them for the past eight years, since the outbreak of the civil war in 2014.

Each side in the Ukrainian conflict accuses the other side of using cluster bombs and other internationally prohibited weapons against civilian populations.  These accusations are put on air by Russian and Western news programs only as they are set out by their favored respective side.

My point is very simple: by silencing the so-called Russian propagandists, Western propagandists have the field to themselves here in Belgium, in the broader European Union and in North America. The possibilities for the public to form an independent view of what is going on are choked off, and with that there is no basis for informed policy discussion in the expert community. As The Washington Post so nicely puts it: democracy dies in darkness.

And what about the Russian side? Are they also cut off and ignorant as my remarks on coverage of casualties above might suggest?  I commented on this question in my travel report on my six week stay in Petersburg that began in May: Western news channels have been removed from the cable television distributors in the city. For this I blame not Russian government prohibitions but the commercial decisions of Western content providers who terminated their contracts with Russian distributors just as did the Hollywood studios. Meanwhile, Western stations remain accessible on the internet without interference and they remain accessible on satellite television.

At my dacha, I had no difficulty receiving the BBC and Bloomberg for free courtesy of my parabolic antenna. How long this will be the case given the tit-for-tat nature of the relationship between the West and Russia generally I cannot say. But if someone does pull the plug on Western ‘propaganda’ in Russia, it will be in response to the West’s dropping the Iron Curtain on Russia, not the other way around.

It is sad that Western leaders are destroying with their own hands the underpinnings of democracy at home through this censorship. The only likely result will be total shock and surprise throughout the Western world when the Russians complete their liberation of Donbas, take the Ukrainian Black Sea coast including Odessa and declare victory over what will by then be an utterly destroyed Ukrainian army.

In the meantime, under greatly constrained conditions, I will try my best to follow the Russian side of the story on talk shows, on news reports of Russian war correspondents embedded with their forces on the front lines, and to share with readers what appears to be afoot on the other side of the barricades.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

June 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

US CONGRESSMAN SLAMS FDA’S ‘DYSTOPIAN EXPERIMENT’

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | June 24, 2022

Congressman Louie Gohmert discusses his recent comments at the FDA’s VRBPAC meeting demanding answers about the safety of Covid vaccines as well as legislation he’s working on to put liability back on vaccine manufacturers.

June 26, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

EU Commissioner Claims Bloc NEVER Pushed People to Get COVID Vaccine

Save Britain | June 23, 2022

On Tuesday, a senior EU official shocked observers when she asserted that the bloc had never required its citizens to receive a COVID-19 vaccination in order for them to have access to public services and that claims to the contrary had primarily been made by what she called “anti-vaccine activists.”

It happens as the EU gets ready to update its transnational COVID-19 passport system – a tool that allows EU member states to lock down their own people and shows whether or not a bearer is vaccinated and/or boostered against the disease.

Vra Jourová, the EU’s commissioner for “Values and Transparency,” asserted during a meeting of the bloc’s Special Committee on COVID-19 Pandemic that the organisation had never even considered pressuring people to get vaccines, despite the planned renewal of the EU’s COVID passes and the bloc’s prior public interest in implementing a union-wide regime of mandatory vaccination.

The commissioner told the committee that the EU has never even “considered or even set in stone in any regulation or… requirement to get vaccined,” adding that “We were never pressuring the population to acquire the vaccinated as a condition for access to public services or health services.”

Jourová, on the other hand, claimed that those who made the contrary assertion that “if you are not vaccinated you will not get… to the public areas or [get] access to the services (sic)” were primarily “anti-vaccine activists.”

While Jourová seemed rather certain of her assertion, others did not share her confidence. In particular, elected representative Cristian Terhes MEP questioned whether the commissioner was genuinely being “serious” when she made her claim.

“Madame Commissioner I have to tell you — and please look at me — Madame Commissioner, are you serious with what you just said right now?”, posed the politician from Romania.

“… we are talking about the fundamental rights of every EU citizen, and we just heard right now that through this green certificate people were not forced to be vaccinated,” he continued. “Are we serious? Can we look people in the eyes, citizens of the European Union telling them that?”

Terhes went on to say that, during periods of lockdown, he had to regularly “fight” with EU security to even get access to the European parliament without a COVID pass, a claim that appears to directly contradict the spirit of the commissioner’s statements.

June 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Video | , , | Leave a comment

EU Renews Digital Covid Pass Despite 99% Negative Public Feedback

BY ROBERT KOGON | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | JUNE 24, 2022

Acting on a proposal of the European Commission, the European Parliament, as expected, voted yesterday to renew the EU Digital Covid Certificate for another year. The vote was 453 for, 119 against and 19 abstentions.

The certificate regulation had been scheduled to expire on June 30. Earlier this month, a delegation from the parliament had already reached a “political agreement” with the Commission on renewing the certificate, thus making yesterday’s vote virtually a foregone conclusion.

The certificate regulation was originally adopted in June of last year, ostensibly to facilitate “safe travel” between EU member states. But the EU digital certificate quickly evolved into the model and sometimes infrastructure for the domestic “health” or Covid passes that would serve to restrict access to many other areas of social life over the following year.

The EU has opted to extend the covid certificate despite the overwhelmingly negative results of a public consultation on the subject that was launched by the European Commission under the heading of “Have Your Say” and that was open to the public from February 3 to April 8. The consultation elicited over 385,000 responses – almost all of which appear to be opposed to renewal!

In a letter to the European Ombudsman that the French member of the parliament Virginie Joron posted on her Twitter feed, Joron writes:

I read hundreds of responses at random with my team. I did not find any in favor of extending the QR code [i.e. the digital certificate]. Based on this large survey, it seems obvious that virtually all the responses were negative.

The overwhelmingly negative tendency of the responses was indeed evident from the outset. The first full page of responses, all of them dating from February 4, is available here. They are, of course, in a variety of European Union languages: French, German, Italian, and also one in English.

To provide readers an idea of the tenor, here is a translation of just the first line or two of the first several responses (starting from the bottom of the page):

I am completely opposed to the establishment of this certificate given what is currently happening with the EU’s disastrous handling of Covid…

I want this cst [probably a reference to Belgium’s “Covid Safe Ticket”] or vaccine passport simply to be eliminated…

There are claims made in the draft document that are not scientifically supported. For example, it is claimed that the Covid certificate represents effective protection against the spread of the virus – what data can support this claim?…

Hello, I am shocked and disgusted by the freedom-killing decisions taken in the EU … as regards this “European certificate” …

The covid certificate or green pass SHOULD BE ABOLISHED immediately as discriminatory and unconstitutional and not supported by any scientific data, because it is exclusively based on PUNITIVE measures for citizens…

I am opposed to the extension of the green pass, which serves no purpose other than creating discrimination…

I never want to be subjected to a discriminatory certificate again…

And, finally, the English-language entry:

The digital Covid certificate should end immediately. There is so much data that supports the fact that digital passports have zero positive impact on transmission rates and in fact in the most vaccinated and highly regulated countries, there [sic.] covid rates are insane…

And so on and so forth through 385,191 responses.

The renewal of the Digital Covid Certificate does not mean that it will be immediately applied, but that the infrastructure will remain in place and that it can be applied if and when member states see fit to do so.

The current rules for holding a valid EU Digital Covid Certificate do not only, needless to say, discriminate against the unvaccinated, but also against natural immunity, which is treated as more ephemeral than vaccine-induced immunity.

Proof of completed primary vaccination makes a certificate valid for 270 days; proof of having received a booster dose confers unlimited validity for the moment. On the other hand, proof of “recovery” – with a positive PCR test being the only accepted proof – only confers 180 days of validity.

June 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Everybody’s Guilty: To the Police State, We’re All Criminals Until We Prove Otherwise

By John W. Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | June 23, 2022

The burden of proof has been reversed.

No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.

Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

Thought crimes. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.

Security checkpoints and fusion centers. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes. Fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

Surveillance, precrime programs. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts.

Threat assessments and AI algorithms. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

Militarized police. America is overrun with militarized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.

Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

Asset forfeiture schemes. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme.

Bodily integrity. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level. The groundwork being laid is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.

The Security-Industrial Complex. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn. As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.

The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

In effect, you will disappear.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute.

June 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Is “Roe v. Wade” REALLY about abortion?

By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | June 24, 2022

A few hours ago the Supreme Court of United States (SCOTUS) confirmed their ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, the case which set the precedent for abortion as a human right in the US back in the 1970s.

As soon as this decision was first “leaked” a few months ago it became the trending topic all across the US and to a certain extent the rest of the anglosphere. Since it was confirmed this afternoon, the already supercharged dialogue has reached new heights.

Pro-choice pundits, politicians and celebrities have been flooding the cyber public square with comparisons to the Handmaid’s Tale and other forced memes. They argue abortion-on-demand is a fundamental right, and take up the rather unsettling position that having an abortion is a point of pride.

On the other side of the divide Christians, traditionalists and republican politicians argue for the sanctity of all life, regardless of context or complication.

Both sides are entrenched to the point of hysteria, and not really looking like budging.

As with most things, the reasonable ground is somewhere in the middle.

Regardless of the law, women will sometimes seek out abortions, and it’s probably best they have access to safe, clean places to do so. That said, the use of abortions as a form of contraception is both obscene and impractical, and aborting viable mid or late term babies is revolting – both in concept, and in practice.

None of that really matters though, because the Roe v Wade finding isn’t even about abortion, it’s about Federal overreach. The Justices made that clear.

Though it has gotten lost in 250 years of ever-expanding centralization, the USA originated as a loose federation of quasi-independent states, with the central federal government having strictly limited powers to overrule local legislation.

Simply put, the Constitution lays out all the powers of the federal government, and anything not specifically mentioned therein is de facto a matter for states on an individual basis.

For decades federal governments used SCOTUS decisions to get around these limitations, relying on precedents rather than actual legislation in order to control state laws from Washington DC.

Roe v Wade is a classic example of this, and reversing it changes only one thing: abortion law will revert to a state-level matter, not a federal one.

… but is it even really just about that?

On a deeper level, there seems to be a prolonged campaign in place to violently divide the United States, perhaps to the point of outright civil war.

From Black Lives Matter to January 6th, the 2nd amendment to Roe v Wade, there is an increasing supply of hot-button issues accompanied by a deluge of divisive rhetoric.

Both sides are being encouraged to take to the streets, protest, mock, yell and scream without any search for common ground.

The office of the Presidency is degraded more every term, with a crass blowhard followed by a jittering dementia patient.

Some states are even openly talking about seceding.

At the end of the Cold War, Russia was economically raped and globally humiliated. It came within inches of shattering into a dozen or more failed states. As the big money players head East, and the hegemonic powers turn from the US Empire to a new globalist powerbase, you have to wonder if the US is destined for the same fate.

Just as the USSR had to fail, and be seen to fail pour encourager les autres, perhaps the US – with its history of individualism and personal liberty – is considered surplus to requirements in the new age of faux collectivism.

Whatever America became at its Imperial zenith, its constitutional foundation has always arguably been the most egalitarian on Earth. Could it be that those ideas enshrined in the Bill of Rights are considered an impediment to the “progressive” New World Order?

The US falling into failed statehood could even act as a moral lesson to the rest of the world, and be held up as a warning about what can happen when “liberty is taken too far”, or when people are allowed to “selfishly put their own rights ahead of the public good”.

Perhaps the US being torn apart – or encouraged to tear itself apart – is key to bringing about the next stage of the great reset.

One thing is for sure, no matter the endgame, US politics are dry tinder piled high, waiting for a spark.

June 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment