UK lawmakers use MP murder to call for social media ID verification system
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | October 18, 2021
Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker of UK Parliament’s House of Commons, has supported initiatives to remove anonymity from internet users, linking threatening messages received by politicians online with their general safety, particularly in light of last week’s fatal stabbing of an MP.
Hoyle’s comments came in the wake of the murder of Conservative member of parliament David Amess, that is treated as potentially a terrorist incident, while the suspect’s motives are thought to be linked with Islamist extremism.
The suspect, a British citizen of Somali origins, was several years ago referred to the voluntary Prevent scheme that is devised as a way to combat risk of terrorist radicalization. It’s unknown at this time if the suspect had previously targeted his victim on social media, and why the connection is being made.
But several high ranked officials, including Hoyle and Home Secretary Priti Patel, are using the deadly incident to explore ways to provide better protection to MPs, and one of the things they’re coming up with is stripping online users of their anonymity.
UK media say that Hoyle revealed he received a message from an “offshore account” that a bomb would be put under his car. He criticized tech companies as not doing enough and hinted that he was in favor of new legislation that would make it possible to track people on the internet if they are believed to be sending threats.
Patel, on the other hand, wants social media accounts to be linked to real world identities, and mentioned the controversial upcoming Online Harms Bill, that those behind it say will reduce racism and threats on the internet, while critics fear it may jeopardize free expression in the process.
Under the bill, tech companies could be ordered to pay up to £18 million or 10 percent of annual global turnover in fines, while their executives would be held criminally liable in some cases.
Patel said that it was difficult to remove posts from social media that are found to be offensive or threatening, and suggested unmasking users was a way to tackle the problem.
“Major platforms have to take faster action when councilors and MPs report the kind of behavior that would be illegal in the real world,” said Conservative MP David Warman, adding, “that starts with accepting that anonymity provides cover for language that would never be used to anybody’s face.”
January 6 Could Be Washington’s Part of FBI’s Multi-State Operation Cold Snap, Argues US Observer
Ekaterina Blunova | Sputnik | October 18, 2021
FBI’s involvement in 6 January riots could be bigger than the mainstream media have recently acknowledged, according to US political commentator Julie Kelly. She wonders whether the DC incident was part of the agency’s Operation Cold Snap against Whitmer kidnapping case plotters, unveiled by BuzzFeed in July 2021.
The US Department of Justice announced on 8 October 2020 that six men had been arrested and charged federally with conspiring to kidnap the Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The DoJ’s press release said that “through confidential sources, undercover agents, and clandestine recordings, law enforcement learned particular individuals were planning to kidnap the Governor and acting in furtherance of that plan”.
However, on 12 July 2021, BuzzFeed revealed that the FBI allegedly used at least 12 informants in the Whitmer kidnapping case, who not only kept the agency in the loop, but were allegedly used by the FBI to “induce or persuade” the defendants to go along with the violent scheme. The agency’s operation was called Cold Snap.
According to BuzzFeed, the FBI assets “had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception”.
One of those infiltrators, Stephen Robeson, 57, helped organise a series of meetings around the country “enthusiastically pushing people he knew to attend” and even “paid for some hotel rooms and food as an incentive to get people to come”. At these meetings many of the alleged plotters first met one another.
Another informant, an Iraq War veteran, known as “Big Dan”, rose to the second-in-command of the group, encouraged members to work with other potential suspects and paid for their transportation to meetings. He allegedly urged the supposed mastermind of the Whitmer kidnapping plot to carry his plan out, and then laid the trap that eventually led to the arrest.
The defendants in the kidnapping case later accused the FBI of “entrapment”, saying the infiltrators encouraged the group and even led military-style trainings for the plot.
All these meetings and training were captured on film by FBI agents “to produce major headlines as early voting was underway in the crucial swing state of Michigan”, argued Julie Kelly in her op-ed for American Greatness (AG).
She noted that the blame for the plot was pinned on then-President Donald Trump. “There is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one”, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed on 8 October 2020.
“It also appears that the Whitmer operation was only part of the FBI’s overall plan to infiltrate and perhaps direct the conduct of unsuspecting ‘militia’ men in 2020”, Kelly continued, stressing that the agency’s operation was not limited to Michigan but was a “multi-state” probe.
Citing a testimony by one of the lead FBI special agents in the Whitmer case, the political commentator highlighted that there had been other FBI “domestic terrorism” investigations in Baltimore and Milwaukee and Cincinnati and Indiana involving other militia members.
According to Kelly, “Big Dan” was also ordered by the FBI to convince a man in Virginia to participate in a plan against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. “Just like in the Whitmer plot, ‘Big Dan’ advised his target how to build an explosive device and urged him to attend a training camp in Wisconsin”, she noted.
The AG senior contributor insists that “it’s hard to imagine Operation Cold Snap ended with the arrest of Whitmer’s would-be abductors”. According to her, the 6 January riot, attended by several groups of right-wing militia, could have been a continuation of the same FBI op, this time in Washington, DC.
She suggested that it was hardly a coincidence that FBI chief Christopher Wray promoted Steven M. D’Antuono, special agent in charge of the Detroit Field Office, Michigan, to head of the DC FBI Field office on 13 October 2020 – just five days after the arrest of kidnap plotters and ahead of the November 2020 elections. Apparently, D’Antuono was seen as a man for the job, according to the political commentator.
Citing a New York Times article unveiling FBI infiltrators’ role in 6 January riots, Kelly presumed that the NYT report could only be seen as the start of a slow drip of information about the extent” of the agency’s role in the Capitol breach.
“It’s only a matter of time before we learn how many “Big Dans” or Stephen Robesons were part of January 6,” Kelly believes.
‘Hypocrite’ Joe Biden Caught Violating DC’s Mask Mandate At Georgetown Restaurant
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | October 18, 2021
As children across the country are forced to cover their faces for hours at a time to attend school, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill were caught on camera flouting DC’s mask mandates at an upscale Georgetown restaurant, Fiola Mare (whose mask policy they were also violating).
In a video posted Sunday night, the Bidens can be seen leaving the restaurant as employees in the background are dutifully masked up – a ‘fuck you, plebs’ not seen since the Met Gala event last month.
Wearing masks indoors was made mandatory in DC after Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser reinstated the policy in July after the delta variant began to surge.
“Per CDC guidance and DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s executive order, all individuals over age 2 are required to wear a mask indoors, regardless of vaccination status. Masks must be always worn while in our restaurants, except while eating and drinking. Thank you for understanding,” reads Fiola Mare’s website.
Meanwhile…
Civil liberties are being trampled by exploiting “insurrection” fears. Congress’s 1/6 Committee may be the worst abuse yet.
By Glenn Greenwald | October 17, 2021
When a population is placed in a state of sufficiently grave fear and anger regarding a perceived threat, concerns about the constitutionality, legality and morality of measures adopted in the name of punishing the enemy typically disappear. The first priority, indeed the sole priority, is to crush the threat. Questions about the legality of actions ostensibly undertaken against the guilty parties are brushed aside as trivial annoyances at best, or, worse, castigated as efforts to sympathize with and protect those responsible for the danger. When a population is subsumed with pulsating fear and rage, there is little patience for seemingly abstract quibbles about legality or ethics. The craving for punishment, for vengeance, for protection, is visceral and thus easily drowns out cerebral or rational impediments to satiating those primal impulses.
The aftermath of the 9/11 attack provided a vivid illustration of that dynamic. The consensus view, which formed immediately, was that anything and everything possible should be done to crush the terrorists who — directly or indirectly — were responsible for that traumatic attack. The few dissenters who attempted to raise doubts about the legality or morality of proposed responses were easily dismissed and marginalized, when not ignored entirely. Typically, they were vilified with the accusation that their constitutional and legal objections were frauds: mere pretexts to conceal their sympathy and even support for the terrorists. It took at least a year or two after that attack for there to be any space for questions about the legality, constitutionality, and morality of the U.S. response to 9/11 to be entertained at all.
For many liberals and Democrats in the U.S., 1/6 is the equivalent of 9/11. One need not speculate about that. Many have said this explicitly. Some prominent Democrats in politics and media have even insisted that 1/6 was worse than 9/11.
Joe Biden’s speechwriters, when preparing his script for his April address to the Joint Session of Congress, called the three-hour riot “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” Liberal icon Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), whose father’s legacy was cemented by years of casting 9/11 as the most barbaric attack ever seen, now serves as Vice Chair of the 1/6 Committee; in that role, she proclaimed that the forces behind 1/6 represent “a threat America has never seen before.” The enabling resolution that created the Select Committee calls 1/6 “one of the darkest days of our democracy.” USA Today’s editor David Mastio published an op-ed whose sole point was a defense of the hysterical thesis from MSNBC analysts that 1/6 is at least as bad as 9/11 if not worse. S.V. Date, the White House correspondent for America’s most nakedly partisan “news” outlet, The Huffington Post, published a series of tweets arguing that 1/6 was worse than 9/11 and that those behind it are more dangerous than Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda ever were.
And ever since the pro-Trump crowd was dispersed at the Capitol after a few hours of protests and riots, the same repressive climate that arose after 9/11 has prevailed. Mainstream political and media sectors instantly consecrated the narrative, fully endorsed by the U.S. security state, that the United States was attacked on 1/6 by domestic terrorists bent on insurrection and a coup. They also claimed in unison that the ideology driving those right-wing domestic terrorists now poses the single most dangerous threat to the American homeland, a claim which the intelligence community was making even before 1/6 to argue for a new War on Terror (just as neocons wanted to invade and engineer regime change in Iraq prior to 9/11 and then exploited 9/11 to achieve that long-held goal).
With those extremist and alarming premises fully implanted, there has been little tolerance for questions about whether proposed responses for dealing with the 1/6 “domestic terrorists” and their incomparably dangerous ideology are excessive, illegal, unethical, or unconstitutional. Even before Joe Biden was inaugurated, his senior advisers made clear that one of their top priorities was to enact a bill from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — now a member of the Select Committee on 1/6 — to import the first War on Terror onto domestic soil. Even without enactment of a new law, there is no doubt that a second War on Terror, this one domestic, has begun and is growing, all in the name of the 1/6 “Insurrection” and with little dissent or even public debate.
Following the post-9/11 script, anyone voicing such concerns about responses to 1/6 is reflexively accused of minimizing the gravity of the Capitol riot and, worse, of harboring sympathy for the plotters and their insurrectionary cause. Questions or doubts about the proportionality or legality of government actions in the name of 1/6 are depicted as insincere, proof that those voicing such doubts are acting not in defense of constitutional or legal principles but out of clandestine camaraderie with the right-wing domestic terrorists and their evil cause.
When it comes to 1/6 and those who were at the Capitol, there is no middle ground. That playbook is not new. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” was the rigidly binary choice which President George W. Bush presented to Americans and the world when addressing Congress shortly after the 9/11 attack. With that framework in place, anything short of unquestioning support for the Bush/Cheney administration and all of its policies was, by definition, tantamount to providing aid and comfort to the terrorists and their allies. There was no middle ground, no third option, no such thing as ambivalence or reluctance: all of that uncertainty or doubt, insisted the new war president, was to be understood as standing with the terrorists.
The coercive and dissent-squashing power of that binary equation has proven irresistible ever since, spanning myriad political positions and cultural issues. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s insistence that one either fully embrace what he regards as the program of “anti-racism” or be guilty by definition of supporting racism — that there is no middle ground, no space for neutrality, no room for ambivalence about any of the dogmatic planks — perfectly tracks this manipulative formula. As Dr. Kendi described the binary he seeks to impose: “what I’m trying to do with my work is to really get Americans to eliminate the concept of ‘not racist’ from their vocabulary, and realize we’re either being racist or anti-racist.” Eight months after the 1/6 riot — despite the fact that the only people who died that day were Trump supporters and not anyone they killed — that same binary framework shapes our discourse, with a clear message delivered by those purporting to crush an insurrection and confront domestic terrorism. You’re either with us, or with the 1/6 terrorists.
What makes this ongoing prohibition of dissent or even doubt so remarkable is that so many of the responses to 1/6 are precisely the legal and judicial policies that liberals have spent decades denouncing. Indeed, many of the defining post-1/6 policies are identical to those now retrospectively viewed as abusive and excessive, if not unconstitutional, when invoked as part of the first War on Terror. We are thus confronted with the surreal dynamic that policies long castigated in American liberalism — whether used generally in the criminal justice system or specifically in the name of avenging 9/11 and defeating Islamic extremism — are now off-limits from scrutiny or critique when employed in the name of avenging 1/6 and crushing the dangerous domestic ideology that fostered it.
Almost immediately after the Capitol riot, some of the most influential Democratic lawmakers — Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who also now chairs the Select 1/6 Committee — demanded that any participants in the protest be placed on the no-fly list, long regarded as one of the most extreme civil liberties assaults from the first War on Terror. And at least some of the 1/6 protesters have been placed on that list: American citizens, convicted of no crime, prohibited from boarding commercial airplanes based on a vague and unproven assessment, from unseen and unaccountable security state bureaucrats, that they are too dangerous to fly. I reported extensively on the horrors and abuses of the no-fly list as part of the first War on Terror and do not recall a single liberal speaking in defense of that tactic. Yet now that this same brute instrument is being used against Trump supporters, there has not, to my knowledge, been a single prominent liberal raising objections to the resurrection of the no-fly list for American citizens who have been convicted of no crime.
Axios, Jan. 12, 2021
With more than 600 people now charged in connection with the events of 1/6, not one person has been charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government, incite insurrection, conspiracy to commit murder or kidnapping of public officials, or any of the other fantastical claims that rained down on them from media narratives. No one has been charged with treason or sedition. Perhaps that is because, as Reuters reported in August, “the FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result.” Yet these defendants are being treated as if they were guilty of these grave crimes of which nobody has been formally accused, with the exact type of prosecutorial and judicial overreach that criminal defense lawyers and justice reform advocates have long railed against.
Dozens of the 1/6 defendants have been denied bail, thus being imprisoned for months without having been found guilty of anything. Many are being held in unusually harsh and bizarrely cruel conditions, causing a federal judge on Wednesday to hold “the warden of the D.C. jail and director of the D.C. Department of Corrections in contempt of court,” and then calling on the Justice Department “to investigate whether the jail is violating the civil rights of dozens of detained Jan. 6 defendants.” Some of the pre-trial prison protocols have been so punitive that even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — who calls the 1/6 protesters “domestic terrorists” — denounced their treatment as abusive: “Solitary confinement is a form of punishment that is cruel and psychologically damaging,” Warren said, adding: “And we’re talking about people who haven’t been convicted of anything yet.” Warren also said she is “worried that law enforcement officials are deploying it to ‘punish’ the Jan. 6 defendants or to ‘break them so that they will cooperate.”
The few 1/6 defendants who have thus far been sentenced after pleading guilty have been subjected to exceptionally punitive sentences, the kind liberal criminal justice reform advocates have been rightly denouncing for years. Several convicted of nothing more than trivial misdemeanors are being sentenced to real prison time; last week, Michigan’s Robert Reeder pled guilty to “one count of parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building” yet received a jail term of 3 months, with the judge admitting that the motive was to “send a signal to the other participants in that riot… that they can expect to receive jail time.”
Meanwhile, long-controversial SWAT teams are being routinely deployed to arrest 1/6 suspects in their homes, and long-time liberal activists denouncing these tactics have suddenly decided they are appropriate for these Trump supporters. That prosecutors are notoriously overzealous in their demands for harsh prison time is a staple of liberal discourse, but now, an Obama-appointed judge has repeatedly doled out sentences to 1/6 defendants that are harsher and longer than those requested by DOJ prosecutors, to the applause of liberals. In sum, these defendants are subjected to one of the grossest violations of due process: they are being treated as if they are guilty of crimes — treason, sedition, insurrection, attempted murder, and kidnapping — which not even the DOJ has accused them of committing. And the fundamental precept of any healthy justice system — namely, punishment for citizens is merited only once they have been found guilty of crimes in a court of law — has been completely discarded.
Serious questions about FBI involvement in the 1/6 events linger. For months, Americans were subjected to a frightening media narrative that far-right groups had plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, only for proof to emerge that at least half of the conspirators, including its leaders, were working for or at the behest of the FBI. Regarding 1/6, the evidence has been clear for months, though largely confined to right-wing outlets, that the FBI had its tentacles in the three groups it claims were most responsible for the 1/6 protest: the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters. Yet last month, The New York Times acknowledged that the FBI was directly communicating with one of its informants present at the Capitol, a member of the Proud Boys, while the riot unfolded, meaning “federal law enforcement had a far greater visibility into the assault on the Capitol, even as it was taking place, than was previously known.” All of this suggests that to the extent 1/6 had any advanced centralized planning, it was far closer to an FBI-induced plot than a centrally organized right-wing insurrection.
Despite this mountain of abuses, it is exceedingly rare to find anyone outside of conservative media and MAGA politics raising objections to any of this (which is what made Sen. Warren’s denunciation of their pre-trial prison conditions so notable). The reason is obvious: just as was true in the aftermath of 9/11, people are petrified to express any dissent or even question what is being done to the alleged domestic terrorists for fear of standing accused of sympathizing with them and their ideology, an accusation that can be career-ending for many.
Many of the 1/6 defendants are impoverished and cannot afford lawyers, yet private-sector law firms who have active pro bono programs will not touch anyone or anything having to do with 1/6, while the ACLU is now little more than an arm of the Democratic Party and thus displays almost no interest in these systemic civil liberties assaults. And for many liberals — the ones who are barely able to contain their glee at watching people lose their jobs in the middle of a pandemic due to vaccine-hesitancy or who do not hide their joy that the unarmed Ashli Babbitt got what she deserved — their political adversaries these days are not just political adversaries but criminals and even terrorists, rendering no punishment too harsh or severe. For them, cruelty is not just acceptable; the cruelty is the point.
The Unconstitutionality of the 1/6 Committee
Civil liberties abuses of this type are common when the U.S. security state scares enough people into believing that the threat they face is so acute that normal constitutional safeguards must be disregarded. What is most definitely not common, and is arguably the greatest 1/6-related civil liberties abuse of them all, is the House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
To say that the investigative acts of the 1/6 Committee are radical is a wild understatement. Along with serving subpoenas on four former Trump officials, they have also served subpoenas on eleven private citizens: people selected for interrogation precisely because they exercised their Constitutional right of free assembly by applying for and receiving a permit to hold a protest on January 6 opposing certification of the 2020 election.
When the Select 1/6 Committee recently boasted of these subpoenas in its press release, it made clear what methodology it used for selecting who it was targeting: “The committee used permit paperwork for the Jan. 6 rally to identify other individuals involved in organizing.” In other words, any citizen whose name appeared on permit applications to protest was targeted for that reason alone. The committee’s stated goal is “to collect information from them and their associated entities on the planning, organization, and funding of those events”: to haul citizens before Congress to interrogate them on their constitutionally protected right to assemble and protest and probe their political beliefs and associations:
List of 11 private citizens who received subpoenas from the 1/6 Congressional Committee for deposition testimony and records
Even worse are the so-called “preservation notices” which the committee secretly issued to dozens if not hundreds of telecoms, email and cell phone providers, and other social media platforms (including Twitter and Parler), ordering those companies to retain extremely invasive data regarding the communications and physical activities of more than 100 citizens, with the obvious intent to allow the committee to subpoena those documents. The communications and physical movement data sought by the committee begins in April, 2020 — nine months before the 1/6 riot. The committee refuses to make public the list of individuals it is targeting with these sweeping third-party subpoenas, but on the list are what CNN calls “many members of Congress,” along with dozens of private citizens involved in obtaining the permit to protest and then promoting and planning the gathering on social media.
What makes these secret notices especially pernicious is that the committee requested that these companies not notify their customers that the committee has demanded the preservation of their data. The committee knows it lacks the power to impose a “gag order” on these companies to prevent them from notifying their users that they received the precursor to a subpoena: a power the FBI in conjunction with courts does have. So they are relying instead on “voluntary compliance” with the gag order request, accompanied by the thuggish threat that any companies refusing to voluntarily comply risk the public relations harm of appearing to be obstructing the committee’s investigation and, worse, protecting the 1/6 “insurrectionists.”
Worse still, the committee in its preservation notices to these communications companies requested that “you do not disable, suspend, lock, cancel, or interrupt service to these subscribers or accounts solely due to this request,” and that they should first contact the committee “if you are not able or willing to respond to this request without alerting the subscribers.” The motive here is obvious: if any of these companies risk the PR hit by refusing to conceal from their customers the fact that Congress is seeking to obtain their private data, they are instructed to contact the committee instead, so that the committee can withdraw the request. That way, none of the customers will ever be aware that the committee targeted their private data and will thus never be able to challenge the legality of the committee’s acts in a court of law.
In other words, even the committee knows that its power to seek this information about private citizens lacks any convincing legal justification and, for that reason, wants to ensure that nobody has the ability to seek a judicial ruling on the legality of their actions. All of these behaviors raise serious civil liberties concerns, so much so that even left-liberal legal scholars and at least one civil liberties group (obviously not the ACLU) — petrified until now of creating any appearance that they are defending 1/6 protesters by objecting to civil liberties abuses — have begun very delicately to raise doubts and concerns about the committee’s actions.
But the most serious constitutional problem is not the specific investigative acts of the committee but the very existence of the committee itself. There is ample reason to doubt the constitutionality of this committee’s existence.
When crimes are committed in the United States, there are two branches of government — and only two — vested by the Constitution with the power to investigate criminal suspects and adjudicate guilt: the executive branch (through the FBI and DOJ) and the judiciary. Congress has no role to play in any of that, and for good and important reasons. The Constitution places limits on what the executive branch and judiciary can do when investigating suspects . . . . .
COVID Vaccine Mandates Are Killing Aviation, Healthcare, Other Critical Services. Is It Intentional?
The Defender | October 15, 2021
The widespread hemorrhaging of experienced public- and private-sector employees — a “man-made disaster of historic proportions,” according to former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul — is hollowing out some of the most important public-facing professions in the country.
Although many factors are at play, COVID vaccine mandates are a significant contributor, with employers refusing to honor the option to refuse Emergency Use Authorization COVID vaccines that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) supposedly guaranteed.
The result has been the threatened or actual mass firing and resignation of thousands of unvaccinated workers in critical sectors like healthcare, policing, firefighting, education and aviation, with skilled and experienced workers prepared to “leave if that’s what it comes to” rather than take the risky shots.
Even though these departures are “drastically overwhelming employers’ ability to replace them,” many of the politicians and corporate executives pushing the mandates seem weirdly at ease with their policy.
This complacency begs the question: Is the sabotage of air travel, high-quality healthcare, first-responder capability and other core services an intentional step designed to further weaken Americans’ resilience and expand authoritarian controls?
Flying the friendly skies
In one of the most widely publicized recent examples of workforce havoc, Southwest Airlines had to ground 35% of its scheduled flights this past holiday weekend, less than a week after the carrier mandated COVID vaccines for all employees.
The airline’s feeble explanation — bad weather and other problems — left many stranded passengers “confounded … because weather was clear over most of the country, particularly near airports that had lots of delays and cancellations.”
As Paul wryly noted, “the weather problems that Southwest claims to be experiencing seem unique to that carrier.”
In “methinks they doth protest too much” fashion, the airline, the pilots union and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are telling the public that the flight upheaval had nothing to do with employee ire over the vaccine edict.
However, one news report indicated that on the Friday in question, only three of 35 pilots showed up for work at Southwest’s Jacksonville hub, suggesting the pilots — at least 50% of whom are unvaccinated — are “drawing a line in the sand.”
Other major airlines that have imposed mandates — JetBlue, American, United, Alaska, Frontier and Hawaiian Airlines — are also facing fierce employee pushback.
The Southwest Airlines Pilots Association has gone so far as to criticize the company’s mandate as a “bad move,” stating pilot fatigue is already at triple its historic levels, with flights “operating at a higher than normal operational risk.”
Seeking to reassure its employees, Southwest CEO Gary Kelly told ABC News in an interview after the travel kerfuffle, “we’re not going to fire any employees over this [vaccine mandates].” Kelly said Southwest would urge unvaccinated employees to “seek an accommodation.”
Certainly, further outflows of competent personnel unwilling to be jabbed would exacerbate understaffing problems — and increase airline customer risks.
Adverse events in mid-air?
Commercial airline executives and pilots would be well-advised to read the affidavit submitted in late September by Lt. Col. Colonel Theresa Long, M.D., brigade surgeon for the 1st Aviation Brigade in Ft. Rucker, Alabama. Long is “responsible for certifying the health, mental and physical ability and readiness for … nearly 4,000 individuals on flight status.”
The affidavit highlights serious concerns about vaccinated pilots’ fitness for duty in light of myocarditis and other cardiac risks linked to COVID injections — problems that potentially could cause pilots to die in mid-flight.
Military aviators, Long points out, must meet “the most stringent medical standards” in the entire military to be eligible for flight status. In the private sector, heart problems can cause pilots to lose their commercial airline license.
In Long’s view, it is highly likely that “all persons who have received a COVID-19 Vaccine are damaged in their cardiovascular system in an irreparable and irrevocable manner.”
Noting that she has ascertained development of “significant and aggressive systemic health issues” in multiple flight crew members within 48 hours of vaccination, Long described one particularly alarming case:
“I personally observed the most physically fit female soldier I have seen in over 20 years in the Army, go from collegiate-level athlete training for Ranger School, to being physically debilitated with cardiac problems, newly diagnosed pituitary brain tumor [and] thyroid dysfunction within weeks of getting vaccinated.”
Other military physician-colleagues, Long said, are also reporting “firsthand experience with a significant increase in the number of young soldiers with migraines, menstrual irregularities, cancer, suspected myocarditis and reporting cardiac symptoms after vaccination.”
For young and fit pilots, the conclusion is obvious: COVID vaccines “are more risky, harmful and dangerous than having no vaccine at all,” Long said.
Many members of the military have apparently reached similar conclusions. With only 62 deaths attributed to COVID during the entire pandemic — out of 2.1 million troops — hundreds of thousands of service members are not in compliance with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Nov. 2 deadline to be fully vaccinated.
In February, a poll found that 53% of active-duty personnel, spouses and veterans had no plans to get injected.
Long said military flight crews present “extraordinary risks,” not just to themselves, but also to others “given the equipment they operate, munitions carried thereon and areas of operation in close proximity to populated areas.”
Her recommendations? “[A]ll pilots, crew and flight personnel in the military service who … received any COVID-19 vaccination [should] be grounded” and the “[c]ompulsory SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination program should be immediately suspended.”
Where are we headed?
Far from being receptive to the attempts by Long and at least 15 of her colleagues to share their disturbing observations with military superiors, the physicians say they are being ignored, rejected, ostracized or met with “threats of punishment.”
Long therefore issued her affidavit under the Military Whistleblower Protection Act, fully cognizant of the “horrific repercussions” her whistleblowing may have on her “career, [her] relationships and life as an Army doctor.”
The Ft. Rucker brass’s lack of interest in the impact of the experimental vaccines on pilot health is puzzling in light of Government Accountability Office (GAO) analyses showing there are already acute shortages of military pilots.
In late September, Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw reminded the secretary of defense that military readiness is subpar and tweeted, “are you really willing to allow a huge exodus of experienced service members just because they won’t take the vaccine?”
With the U.S. mired in “the worst … healthcare labor crisis in memory,” the same question could be directed to hospital CEOs who seem willing to let go of sizeable proportions of employees — even if it means adopting drastic measures such as refusing patients, closing departments or leaving beds empty.
Fed up, 96% of union members working at Kaiser Permanente in California and Oregon just voted to go out on strike.
Notably, hospitals earned record windfall profits last year from COVID federal stimulus and Medicare add-ons for ventilator intervention, even as they furloughed, laid off or cut the pay of frontline health workers in the midst of a “pandemic.”
And this year, politicians like New York’s unelected governor seem blithely willing to let the experienced health workers who took those furloughs and pay cuts go, bringing in pinch-hitting National Guard members or imported foreign workers.
It may still be too soon to untangle the full array of corporate and political interests driving the counterproductive policies that are chasing out large swaths of competent health workers, first responders, aviation workers and service members — while demoralizing (or sickening via COVID injection) those who comply with mandates and remain.
One thing is for sure, however: COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of blood clots and so does air travel, which could make flight personnel especially vulnerable. Members of the public who take to the skies would surely rather have an experienced unvaccinated pilot who is of the caliber of a Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in the cockpit — rather than a “second-string” vaccinated pilot who could be at higher risk of dying in mid-flight.
© 2021 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
The truth is still in lockdown
The first cross-party report says we didn’t lockdown early enough. The truth is, lockdowns don’t work.
By Laura Dodsworth | October 15, 2021
We now move, work, socialise, worship and meet around the UK with relative freedom.* Sadly, truth remains in strict lockdown.
Information is infectious and its transmissibility must be suppressed if it is deemed inconvenient, even if truthful. If it escapes, it can travel faster on social media than an airborne virus and must be captured, quarantined and sanitised to prevent onward infection. Most recently, in a long list of examples, a speech made by MP David Davis about vaccine passports was temporarily suspended from Youtube. Many videos and articles from reputable sources have been labelled misinformation if they run counter to WHO or governmental policy. Social media giants, governments and public health authorities are petrified of outbreaks of misinformation and even, sometimes, the truth.
So it was no surprise that the first cross-party report into the management of the epidemic in the UK, Coronavirus: lessons learned to date was unwilling to tackle certain truths.
One of the main inferences is that lockdown should have been implemented earlier. The truth is that lockdowns don’t work and cause great harm.
The report’s conclusions are assumptions. Opinions are not backed up with evidence. There is an unwillingness to interrogate the modelling that provides the foundations for the conclusions. The only thing that matters in this report is Covid and deaths by Covid. It is almost as if there are no other societal losses to put in the balance. There is no quantifiable cost benefit analysis of lockdown.
I spoke to Professor Simon Wood, Chair of Computational Studies at the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh about the report. Wood authored a peer-reviewed paper published in Biometrics, which found that Covid-19 levels were probably falling before each of the three lockdowns. A separate paper, with colleague Ernst Wit, came to the same conclusion for the first two lockdowns, by the alternative approach of re-doing Imperial College’s major modelling study of the epidemic.
In summary he told me,
“The whole report is written within the framework that the only thing that counts is avoiding deaths from Covid, and that full lockdowns were essential. Evidence for the latter seems to be entirely absent. The closest we seem to get to actual evidence on lockdown efficacy is Neil Ferguson’s opinion in paragraph 77. The extent to which the committee is really able to weigh scientific evidence, as opposed to opinion, is questionable if paragraph 94 is any guide. This is such a gross misrepresentation of what the cited paper said, that it could have appeared on Twitter, rather than a parliamentary report.”
I asked him what he thought about the reliance on modelling throughout the epidemic. There are multiple flaws (expanded on in more detail in my book A State of Fear, and it’s appendix, “Lockdowns Don’t Work” and in many articles and papers online, some listed here) but one key flaw is that the Infection Fatality Rate in the initial modelling was 0.9%. By autumn 2020, a peer-reviewed paper by the WHO had put the IFR at 0.23%, and in the UK it is currently (albeit post-vaccination) at 0.096%. Wood generously told me it was,
“difficult to get the IFR right at the outset. We did the analysis thinking Imperial were very on the high side, but it in fact it wouldn’t have been assessed as less than 0.6% at the outset.” He went on: “The main error is to put too much emphasis on modelling not on measuring. Often models are being used for prediction purposes they were not designed or validated for.”
I put it to Wood that, in circular and fallacious reasoning, the modelling is being used to measure the success of lockdown by deaths ‘saved’ against those predicted by the unsubstantiated and flawed simulated forecasts of the modelling. He agreed: “the post hoc justification for the measures using modelling often looks like bending the model to the conclusion you want to achieve.”
There is a growing body of evidence that light interventions and voluntary behaviour changes – ie not lockdowns – are sufficient to reduce the R. Real world examples support this, namely Sweden, South Dakota and Florida. Conversely, as economist Professor David Paton reported, early and strict lockdowns did not always work. Czechia’s did not stop subsequent surges of the virus and further lockdowns. Czechia currently has the sixth highest death rate per million in the world. Peru, another country which enforced very strict and early lockdown, has the worst death rate in the world.
The report’s authors state we should learn lessons internationally, but fail to explain what they think happened in Sweden, for instance. In science it’s generally a good idea to have a control treatment and, to a limited extent, Sweden provided that. Surely it deserves some discussion if weighing up the evidence on what should have happened. It seems the report’s accusation of “British exceptionalism” only travels in one direction.
When data proves that lockdowns cannot be credited with controlling the virus, why does the argument persist? Why is truth still locked down?
Ironically, the authors accuse the government of groupthink, but they might still be under its sway themselves. It will be hard for the enactors and supporters of the lockdown to admit it was a brutal, ineffective and harmful policy. Far easier to assert the main problem is that it wasn’t imposed early and hard enough.
The harms of lockdown only get passing mentions. I can’t weight this article with the full burden of harms, but in brief: In the first year of lockdown the government borrowed £229 billion, the highest figure since records began in 1946. The pain of broken tax pledges, fiscal drag, inflation, and unemployment won’t be felt in full for months and years to come. The NHS waiting list is now 5.74 million and 7.5 million fewer people were referred for routine hospital care between January 2020 and July 2021.
These problems should not appear unexpected – they were foretold by the UK’s most eminent disaster and recovery planners.
In this 145 page report, the world “children” is mentioned a mere three times, but the impact of the lockdown on them is not mentioned at all. On World Mental Health Day, the ONS released data on children’s mental health and the impact of restrictions. A quarter of 11 to 16 year olds with a probable mental disorder in 2021 said Covid restrictions had made their lives much worse. And the number of young people aged 0 to 18 years old referred to mental health services between April and June 2021 increased by 93% from the same period in 2020, and 41% on 2019 in England.
Another word that is only mentioned three times is “obesity” alongside the other pre-existing health conditions which are known to be associated with poor outcomes for Covid-19. This really is the elephant in the room. The truth is, Covid-19 death rates are ten times higher in countries where more than half the adult population is overweight. In that sense, perhaps our pandemic preparedness should have started many years earlier with better health and dietary advice. Not only does lockdown not tackle the underlying chronic co-morbidities which lead to severe Covid-19 illness and deaths, but lockdown caused British people to gain weight, cease normal exercise and drink more alcohol.
The UK had multiple pandemic plans, including for SARS/MERS outbreaks. The authors of this report claim that we didn’t abandon the plans earlier in the crisis because of “groupthink”. This is a bizarre subversion – crisis management plans are not supposed to be abandoned during a crisis. If the government were guilty of groupthink, it was in following other countries in implementing an experimental policy. As Professor Ferguson put it,
“It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
The report does not mention Exercise Alice, a pandemic simulation exercise for MERS that has only been released after persistent Freedom of Information requests. It’s not clear that the authors are aware of it.
We will need a more wide-ranging inquiry that establishes whether lockdowns work, if they are sensible, proportionate and moral. Essentially, we must be truthful about what the costs are. We need to balance the losses.
Truth is infectious. Eventually it will peek around the doorframe, dare to stroll outside, evade quarantine and someone will catch a glimpse. Then another. Soon, everyone will be queueing up to greet our old friend Truth with hail-fellow-well-met and a hearty slap on the back. Then we must clutch Truth to us and never again lock it down.
* Although mandatory vaccine passports are a concerning development in Scotland and Wales.
US Treasury deputy sec warns unvaxxed Americans that shortages will continue until EVERYONE is jabbed
RT | October 15, 2021
The deputy secretary at the US Treasury has put Americans on notice that the only way to end the plague of empty shelves around the country is for every resident to be vaccinated. The frank warning came off as a threat to many.
Wally Adeyemo, the Biden administration’s second-highest official in the Treasury Department, appeared to publicly blackmail the still-sizable portion of Americans who have not been vaccinated against Covid-19 during a Thursday ABC interview, seemingly blaming them for the ongoing shortages of consumer goods that have led many to mock the president as ‘Empty Shelves Joe’.
Despite viral photos depicting thousands of cargo ships lined up at the Port of Los Angeles ready to unload their goods, Adeyemo claimed that the supply chain issues plaguing so many US retailers are an international issue and will only let up when a sufficient percentage of the country has been vaccinated.
Describing the disastrous economic conditions as “an economy that’s in transition,” Adeyemo acknowledged that “we are seeing high prices for some of the things that people have to buy.” While he praised the administration’s stimulus payments, he also pinned the blame squarely on the unvaccinated.
“The reality is that the only way we’re going to get to a place where we work through this transition is if everyone in America and everyone around the world gets vaccinated.”
While the ABC reporter repeatedly suggested that the country’s shortages of toilet paper and other panic-buy items could be traced to international supply chain disruptions, a growing number of Americans are demanding answers regarding the weirdly specific nature of certain products missing from store shelves. Some have even voiced doubt concerning whether the shortages are being introduced deliberately, either to gin up hatred against the unvaccinated or keep Americans economically off-balance as they grow accustomed to the wild disruptions of the pandemic.
Adeyemo did the Biden cabinet no favors by adding fuel to the conspiratorial fire, explaining the primary reason Biden continued to push for everyone to be vaccinated was that only then could the White House “provide the resources the American people need to make it to the other side” of the supply chain problem.
Despite blaming the international shipping industry for empty shelves in the US, the media establishment has acknowledged that the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach – which together process 40% of the nation’s imports – had their busiest years on record last year, giving the lie to the notion that the products missing from American shelves simply don’t exist. However, many truckers working for shipping companies have balked at the idea of mandatory vaccination, leaving their firms’ fleets woefully understaffed, and others have gone on strike to demand better working conditions.
The Biden administration has attempted to address the supply chain problem by calling for the Port of Los Angeles to run 24 hours, but while he praised his own promised move as a “game changer,” the executive director of the port has made it clear that there is no timetable in place for the promised schedule shift. Meanwhile, Biden’s cabinet has come across as woefully out of touch – White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, for example, pooh-poohed the issue of empty shelves as a “high class” problem earlier this week, eliciting criticism from both Left and Right. And Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been quietly vacationing on paternity leave since mid-August, leaving the country without even a semblance of logistical oversight as the cargo clog shows no signs of dissipating.
Labor shortages are being felt far beyond the US, though often for similar reasons. In Italy, thousands of protesters turned out to block cargo ships from unloading their bounty earlier this week. The demonstrators were outraged over the country’s adoption of a mandatory vax-to-work policy similar to that threatened by the Biden administration. And the UK government has begged lorry drivers to return to work, even luring foreign drivers in with temporary visas as the country frets over its own empty shelves issues.
Australian ‘truckies’ have united with other unions to exert pressure on the government, which has kept cities like Melbourne under lockdown for months despite vanishingly few reported cases of Covid-19. The government was already floating policies like ‘no jab, no job’ over a year ago and has led the way in leveraging the pandemic to turn Five Eyes ‘democracies’ into police states.
2020 election was ‘bought by Zuckerberg’, researcher claims, citing $420mn turnout-boosting work
RT | October 14, 2021
Two nonprofits funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his allies spent $419.5 million to boost turnout in the 2020 presidential election – and “likely” secured a victory for Joe Biden, according to a study of the national vote.
The NGOs called the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR) claim they are working to make democracy stronger, more secure, and better at engaging civic participation in polling.
A new analysis of the 2020 election argues that the nonprofits are partisan vehicles to pump private money into the election system, a phenomenon previously unknown in the country’s politics. Their impact may have flipped the election for Joe Biden and potentially created fertile ground for manipulating election outcomes in favor of the Democratic Party.
“The massive influx of funds essentially created a high-powered, concierge-like get-out-the-vote effort for Biden that took place inside the election system, rather than attempting to influence it from the outside,” William Doyle, a researcher at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas, wrote regarding his team’s work.
“We call this the injection of structural bias into the 2020 election, and our analysis shows it likely generated enough additional votes for Biden to secure an Electoral College victory in 2020.”
According to an overview of the analysis, which was published by The Federalist this week, CTCL and CEIR pumped $419.5 million into local government election offices. The grants – which were funded by donors like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan – are comparable in volume to the $479.5 million that federal and state matching funds allocated for Covid-19-related election expenses during the 2020 campaign.
A large portion of the money went into various programs that directly boosted election turnout, by promoting mail-in voting or paying workers participating in outreach programs. Proponents of these investments argued that the millions of dollars were necessary to plug holes in election budgets left by the pandemic and a shortage of public funding from the federal government.
While both NGOs insisted they were acting in a non-partisan way, Doyle says the effect of their actions was staggeringly in favor of the Democratic candidate.
“Of the 26 grants CTCL provided to cities and counties in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia that were $1 million or larger, 25 went to areas Biden won in 2020,” he wrote. “The only county on this list won by Donald Trump (Brown County, Wisconsin) received about $1.1 million – less than 1.3 percent of the $85.5 million that CTCL provided to these top 26 recipients.”
The team is still in the process of crunching the numbers for all battleground states, but their preliminary analysis of Texas showed that the nonprofits’ per capita spending in the state overwhelmingly went to Biden-supporting counties. It wasn’t enough to swing the state blue, but researchers believe the NGOs may have flipped Georgia and Wisconsin for Biden, based on the preliminary analysis.
“We have good reason to anticipate that the results of our work will show that CTCL and CEIR involvement in the 2020 election gave rise to an election that, while free, was not fair. The 2020 election wasn’t stolen – it was likely bought with money poured through legal loopholes,” Doyle said.
He also noted that partisan private financing of the election system posed questions about its integrity. “Big CTCL and CEIR money” opened local election offices to “infiltration… by left-wing activists,” he said, citing as an example the hiring of workers from Happy Faces Personnel Group by Fulton County, Georgia. The firm was linked by some people to Georgia progressive politician Stacey Abrams, though claims that she partially owned it were reportedly false.
“CTCL drove the proliferation of unmonitored private dropboxes (which created major chain of custody issues) and opportunities for novel forms of ‘mail-in ballot electioneering,’ allowed for the submission of numerous questionable post-election-day ballots, and created opportunities for illegal ballot harvesting,” Doyle said.
The WEF and the Pandemic
How is the Davos World Economic Forum involved in the coronavirus pandemic?
Swiss Policy Research | October 6, 2021
The Davos World Economic Forum (WEF) is a premier forum for governments, global corporations and international entrepreneurs. Founded in 1971 by engineer and economist Klaus Schwab, the WEF describes its mission as “shaping global, regional and industry agendas” and “improving the state of the world”. According to its website, “moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does.”
The WEF has been involved in the coronavirus pandemic in several ways.
First, the WEF was, together with the Gates Foundation, a sponsor of the prescient “Event 201” coronavirus pandemic simulation exercise, held in New York City on October 18, 2019 – the same day as the opening of the Wuhan Military World Games, seen by some as “ground zero” of the global pandemic. China itself has argued that US military athletes may have brought the virus to Wuhan.
Second, the WEF has been a leading proponent of digital biometric identity systems, arguing that they will make societies and industries more efficient, more productive and more secure. In July 2019, the WEF started a project to “shape the future of travel with biometric-enabled digital traveler identity management”. In addition, the WEF collaborates with the ID2020 alliance, which is funded by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations and runs a program to “provide digital ID with vaccines”. In particular, ID2020 sees the vaccination of children as “an entry point for digital identity.”
Third, WEF founder Klaus Schwab is the author of the book COVID-19: The Great Reset, published in July 2020, which argues that the coronavirus pandemic can and should be used for an “economic, societal, geopolitical, environmental and technological reset”, including, in particular, advancing global governance, accelerating digital transformation, and tackling climate change.
Finally, the WEF has been running, since 1993, a program called “Global Leaders for Tomorrow”, rebranded, in 2004, as “Young Global Leaders”. This program aims at identifying, selecting and promoting future global leaders in both business and politics. Indeed, quite a few “Young Global Leaders” have later managed to become Presidents, Prime Ministers, or CEOs (see below).
During the coronavirus pandemic, several WEF Global Leaders and Global Shapers (a junior program of the Global Leaders) have played prominent roles, typically promoting zero-covid strategies, lockdowns, mask mandates, and ‘vaccine passports’. This may have been a (largely failed) attempt to protect public health and the economy, or it may have been an attempt to advance the global transformation agenda outlined above, or perhaps both.
In this regard, some notable Young Leaders include Jeffrey Zients (US White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator), Stéphane Bancel (CEO of Moderna), Jeremy Howard (founder of influential lobby group “Masks for All”), Leana Wen (zero-covid CNN medical analyst), Eric Feigl-Ding (zero-covid Twitter personality), Gavin Newsom (Governor of California, selected in 2005), Devi Sridhar (British zero-covid professor), Jacinda Ardern (Prime Minister of New Zealand), French President Emanuel Macron (selected one year prior to his election in 2017), Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (selected back in 1993), German Health Minister Jens Spahn, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (a leading proponent of ‘global vaccine passports’).
To get a full overview of their members, see Global Leaders for Tomorrow and Young Global Leaders on WikiSpooks (a Wiki focusing on covert power structures) as well as the official Young Global Leaders website. For an overview of some notable members in politics and the media, see below.
In conclusion, the Davos World Economic Forum has indeed been involved in the strategic management of the coronavirus pandemic, with a major emphasis on using the pandemic as a catalyst for digital transformation and the global introduction of digital identity systems.
Digital Identity: The vision of the World Economic Forum (WEF, 2018)
WEF “Young Global Leaders”
An overview of some WEF Young Global Leaders (2005-2021) and Global Leaders for Tomorrow (1993-2003) in politics and the media. The list is not exhaustive.
Sources: Global Leaders for Tomorrow and Young Global Leaders on WikiSpooks.
United States
Politics and Policy
Jeffrey Zients (White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator since 2021, selected in 2003), Jeremy Howard (co-founder of lobby group “masks for all”, selected in 2013), California Governor Gavin Newsom (selected in 2005), Pete Buttigieg (selected in 2019, candidate for US President in 2020, US secretary of transportation since 2021), Chelsea Clinton (Clinton Foundation board member), Huma Abedin (Hillary Clinton aide, selected in 2012), Nikki Haley (US ambassador to the UN, 2017-2018), Samantha Power (US ambassador to the UN, 2013-2017, USAID Administrator since 2021), Ian Bremmer (founder of Eurasia Group), Bill Browder (initiator of the Magnitsky Act), Jonathan Soros (son of George Soros), Kenneth Roth (director of “Human Rights Watch” since 1993), Paul Krugman (economist, selected in 1995), Lawrence Summers (former World Bank Chief Economist, former US Treasury Secretary, former Harvard University President, selected in 1993), Alicia Garza (co-founder of Black Lives Matter, selected in 2020), Stéphane Bancel (Moderna CEO).
Media
CNN medical analyst Leana Wen (selected in 2018), CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, Covid Twitter personality Eric Feigl-Ding (a ‘WEF Global Shaper‘ since 2013), Andrew Ross Sorkin (New York Times financial columnist), Thomas Friedman (New York Times columnist, selected in 1995), George Stephanopoulos (ABC News, 1993), Lachlan Murdoch (CEO of Fox Corporation).
Technology and Social Media
Microsoft founder Bill Gates (1993), former Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer (2000-2014, selected in 1995), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (1998), Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (2002/2005), former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (2001-2017, selected in 1997), Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales (2007), PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel (2007), eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar (1999), Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (2009), Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (2007).
Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand
Professor Devi Sridhar (a leading ‘zero covid’ proponent, selected in 2020/21), former British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (both selected in 1993), BBC World Service journalist Dawood Azami, Lynn Forester de Rothschild (co-owner of The Economist), Nathaniel Rothschild (son of Lord Rothschild), historian Niall Ferguson (selected in 2005), William Hague (Foreign Secretary, 2010-2014), Charles Allen (CEO of ITV, 2004-2007; Chairman of EMI, 2008-2010).
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (since 2017, selected in 2014), Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland (selected in 2001; former managing director of Reuters). Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a WEF participant, but is not a confirmed Young Global Leader.
Germany
Chancellor Angela Merkel (selected in 1993, 12 years before becoming Chancellor), current Health Minister Jens Spahn and former Health Ministers Philipp Roesler and Daniel Bahr, current co-chair of the Green Party and failed Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock (selected in 2020), former co-chair of the Green Party Cem Özdemir (selected in 2002), media mogul and Axel Springer CEO Mathias Doepfner (selected in 2001), talk show host Sandra Maischberger, late Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor Guido Westerwelle (1997), former German President Christian Wulff (selected in 1995, 15 years before becoming President), Reto Francioni (former CEO of Deutsche Boerse).
European Union
EU Commission Presidents Jose Manuel Barroso (2004-2014, selected in 1993) and Jean-Claude Juncker (2014-2019, selected in 1995), French President Emanuel Macron (since 2017, selected in 2016), former French President Nicolas Sakozy (2007-2012, selected in 1993), Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi (2014-2016, selected in 2012), former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar (1996-2004, selected in 1993), Klaus Regling (CEO of the European Financial Stability Mechanism since 2012), Guy Verhofstadt (former Belgian Prime Minister, Chair of the Brexit Steering Group), Danish Minister for the Environment Lea Wermelin, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, former Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb, and Mark Leonard (founding director of the Soros-funded European Council on Foreign Relations).
Switzerland
Natalie Rickli (Director of Health of the Canton of Zurich, selected in 2012), former Presidents of the Swiss National Council Christa Markwalder (selected in 2011) and Pascale Bruderer-Wyss (selected in 2009), Geneva politician Pierre Maudet (selected in 2013), NZZ media group CEO Felix R. Graf (selected in 2007), former Swiss Justice Minister Ruth Metzler (selected in 2002), former Swiss television CEO Roger de Weck (2011-2017, selected in 1994), former UBS CEOs Peter Wuffli (selected in 1994) and Marcel Rohner (selected in 2003), former Credit Suisse CEO Tidjane Tiam (1998).
Video Annex
1) Bill Gates demanding “digital immunity proof” in March 2020
2) Edward Snowden warning of the “destruction of rights” (March 2020)
3) The Chinese “social credit” system (May 2019)
Further reading
- All Roads Lead to Dark Winter (Whitney Webb, April 2020)
See also
More stories about staffing problems and lawsuits over the mandates
By Meryl Nass, MD | October 14, 2021
Massachusetts may lose 40-50% of its corrections officers to the mandate, and the governor is talking about bringing in the National Guard. The Guard is already driving school buses. Massachusetts is possibly the bluest state in the nation. It was the only state that voted for McGovern in 1972.
Massachusett’s State Police union has filed for an injunction against the clot shot mandate. So has the corrections officers’ union.
If this is what is happening in the bluest state, just think how many clot shot refusers there are everywhere else. The society can’t run if the workers can’t work. Are the bosses trying to create chaos as a pretext for something else, or are they only trying to bluff and coerce us into submission?
———————
Dr. Peter McCullough said doctors are now being hunted for refusing to go along. One day after an affidavit I wrote was filed in court in Maine against our health department’s mandate for healthcare workers, I got a letter from the secretary of the medical board telling me I had to respond to a complaint. What was the complaint? Someone who never met me and does not know any of my patients didn’t like a video interview he saw, and said so to the board. Not a single specific complaint or allegation was made against anything I said.
I will keep you all updated regarding this business. I am dismayed but simultaneously amused at how a medical board or its secretary can ask me to defend myself against a charge of being disliked. Is this America’s COVID jurisprudence?
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From the Archives
Secret document reveals plans for civil war in Lebanon, Israeli false flags, and invasion
By Randi Nord | Geopolitics Alert | April 5, 2019
Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.
Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue
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