The Constitution of the United States represents the classic solution to one of humankind’s greatest political problems: that is, how does a small group of states combine into a strong union without the states losing their individual powers and surrendering their control over local affairs?
Although the Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, a “bill of rights” was demanded and became an eventuality in order to protect the citizenry’s fundamental rights or “first liberties” against usurpation by the newly created federal government.
Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments of the Constitution—was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.
Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, post-9/11 and in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic.
The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone. Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault.
The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against SWAT team raids and government agents armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited to the battlefield.
The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or invading you, unless they have some evidence that you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise) and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.
The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.
The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears.
The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.
The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.
As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and the courts.
If there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.
Yet those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.
It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.”
In other words, we have the power to make and break the government. We are the masters and they are the servants. We the American people—the citizenry—are the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.
Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.
No longer content to go just after bots and trolls, Facebook has established a new category of “social harm” posted by genuine users, starting with purging pages and Instagram accounts of a German anti-lockdown group Querdenken.
Facebook’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher announced the action on Thursday, saying that his team has been working for months to “expand our network disruption efforts so we can address threats that come from groups of authentic accounts coordinating on our platform to cause social harm.”
The closest his post comes to defining “social harm” is content that “calls for violence or to discredit medical science.”
Gleicher says his group has removed a network of Facebook and Instagram accounts, pages and groups “for engaging in coordinated efforts to repeatedly violate our Community Standards, including posting harmful health misinformation, hate speech and incitement to violence.”
Sharing their domains on Facebook and Instagram has been blocked as well, he added, but noted that “we aren’t banning all Querdenken content.”
The Querdenken – German for “lateral thinking” – movement is “linked to off-platform violence and other social harms,” Gleicher wrote, adding that the content posted on the banned pages “primarily focused on promoting the conspiracy that the German government’s [Covid-19] restrictions are part of a larger plan to strip citizens of their freedoms and basic rights.”
According to Facebook, the group “typically portrayed violence as the way to overturn the pandemic-related government measures limiting personal freedoms.” The group “engaged in physical violence against journalists, police and medical practitioners in Germany,” Gleicher claimed citing “public reporting.”
There have been multiple mass protests against coronavirus lockdowns in Germany, with the authorities denouncing them as the work of the “far-right,” neo-Nazis and other extremists. While the UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer raised concerns about police brutality in dispersing the demonstrations, last month, Berlin police responded that violence is “still part of our legal system.”
“Direct enforcement is violence. Violence harms. Violence hurts. Violence looks violent,” Berlin police spokesperson Thilo Cablitz told DPA last month.
Facebook has cracked down hard on “debunked” and “false” claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, loosely defined as anything that contradicts the guidance by the World Health Organization or national health authorities. It stopped censoring the claim that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China back in May, however, citing “new facts and trends” that emerged.
How significant is it that the two top FDA officials responsible for vaccine research resigned last week and this week signed a letter in The Lancet that strongly warns against vaccine boosters? This is a remarkable sign that the project of government-managed virus mitigation is in the final stages before falling apart.
The booster has already beenpromoted by top lockdown advocates Neil Ferguson of Imperial College and Anthony Fauci of NIH, even in the face of rising public incredulity toward their “expert” advice. For these two FDA officials to go on record with grave doubts – and their perspective is certainly backed by the unimpressive booster experience in Israel – introduces a major break in the narrative that the experts in charge deserve our trust and deference.
What’s at stake here? It’s about more than the boosters. It’s about the whole experience of taking away the control of health management from individuals and medical professionals and handing it over to modelers and government officials with coercive power.
From the first week of March 2020, the US embarked on a wild experiment in virus mitigation, deploying a series of measures with a sweep and scope that had never previously been attempted, not in modern times and not even in ancient times. The litany of controls and tactics is long. Many of these measures survive in most parts of the US. The retail landscape is still filled with plexiglass. We are still invited to sanitize ourselves when going indoors. People still mask up in proximity to others. The “Karens” of the world are still actively shaming and denouncing anyone suspected of non-compliance.
The vaccine push has been particularly divisive, with President Biden actively encouraging “anger” at those who don’t get the jab, even as he refuses to acknowledge the existence of infection-induced immunities. In several cities, people who refuse vaccines are being denied active participation in civic life, and a populist movement is rising up that scapegoats the refuseniks as the only reason that the virus continues to be a problem.
All these measures were deployed in waves of controls. It all began with event cancellations and school closures. It continued with travel bans, most of which are still in place. Sanitization and plexiglass were next. Masks were rolled out and then mandated. The principle of forced human separation governed social interactions. Capacity limits indoors were a common feature. The US example inspired many governments around the world to adopt these NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) and take away the liberties of the people.
At each stage of control, there were new claims that we’ve finally found the answer, the key technique that would finally slow and stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Nothing worked, as the virus seemed to follow its own course regardless of all these measures. Indeed there was no observable difference anywhere in the world based on whether and to what extent any of these measures were deployed.
Finally came the pharmaceutical interventions, voluntary at first but gradually mandatory, just as with each previous protocol began as a recommendation until it was mandated.
At no point in these 19 months have we seen a clear admission of failure on the part of government officials. Indeed, it’s mostly been the opposite, as the agencies double down, claiming effectiveness while citing no data or studies, while social media companies backed it all by taking down contrarian posts and brazenly deleting accounts of people who dare cite dissenting science.
The vaccine was the biggest gamble of all simply because the program was so expensive, so personal, and so wildly oversold. Even those of us who opposed every other mandate had hopes that the vaccines would finally end the public panic and provide governments a way to back out of all the other strategies that had failed.
That did not happen.
Most people believed that the vaccine would work like many others before them to block infection and spread. In this, people were merely believing what the head of the CDC said. “Our data from the C.D.C. today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick,” Rochelle Walinsky told Rachel Maddow. “And that it’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s also in real-world data.”
“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,”President Biden said, reflecting what was the common view in the summer of 2021.
That of course turned out not to be the case. The vaccines appear to have been helpful in mitigating against some severe outcomes but it did not achieve victory over the virus. Israel’s surge in infections in August was among the fully vaccinated. The same happened in the UK and Scotland, and that precise result began to hit the US in September. Indeed, we all have vaccinated friends who caught the virus and were sick for days. Meanwhile, team natural immunity has received a huge boost from a large study in Israel that demonstrated that recovered Covid cases gain far more protection than is conferred by the vaccine.
The fallback position then became the booster. Surely this is the answer! Israel was first to mandate them. Here again, the problems began to show, as yet another magic bullet of disease mitigation failed. Then the inevitable headline came: Israel preparing for possible fourth COVID vaccine dose. So think about this because there is a sense in which the vaccines rank among the biggest failures: in a matter of a few short months, we’ve gone from the claim that they fully protect to they are pretty okay provided you get regularly scheduled boosters forever.
Now to the striking resignation of two top officials at the FDA who were in charge of vaccine safety and administration. It was the Director and Deputy Director of the Office of Vaccines Research, Marion Gruber and Phillip Kause. They gave no reason for their departure, which is scheduled for October and November.
The case is fascinating because 1) people rarely resign cushy government jobs unless a higher-paying, higher-prestige job in the private sector awaits, or 2) they are being pushed out. It’s rare for anyone in a position like that to resign over a principled matter of science. When I first read that they were going, I figured something else was up.
These days, extremely weird things are going on within the Biden administration. Even though his approval ratings are sinking, the president has to pretend that he has all the answers, that the science behind his mandates and virus war is universally settled, that anyone who disagrees with him is really just a political enemy. He has gone so far as to denounce, demonize, and legally threaten red-state governors who disagree with him.
This is a deep problem for actual scientists working within the bureaucracy because they know for sure that all of this is a pretense and that the government cannot win this war on the virus. They simply cannot preside over more false promises, especially when the whole of their professional training is about assessing the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
So what can they do? In this case, it appears they had to get away before they dropped a bombshell.
The bombshell is called “Considerations in boosting COVID-19 vaccine immune responses.” It appears in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet. The two top officials are among the authors. The article recommends against the Covid booster shot that the Biden administration, following Fauci’s advice, is suggesting as the key to making the vaccines work better and finally fulfill their promise.
Fauci and company are pushing boosters because they know what is coming. Essentially we are going the way of Israel: most everyone is vaccinated but the virus itself is not being controlled. More and more among those hospitalized and dying are vaccinated. This same trend is coming to the US. The boosters are a means by which government can save face, or so many believe.
The trouble now is that the top scientists at the FDA disagree. Further, they think that the push for boosters is courting problems. They think the current regime of one or two shots is working as well as one can expect. Nothing is gained on net from a booster, they say. There just isn’t enough evidence to take the risk of another booster, and another and another.
The authors knew this article was appearing. They knew that signing it under the FDA affiliation would lead to a push for their resignations. Life would get very difficult for both of them. They got ahead of the messaging and resigned before it came out. Very smart.
The signed article goes even further to warn of possible downsides. They point out that boosters might seem necessary because “variants expressing new antigens have evolved to the point at which immune responses to the original vaccine antigens no longer protect adequately against currently circulating viruses.” At the same time, there are possible side effects that could discredit all vaccines for a generation or more. “There could be risks,” they write, “if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines, or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines.”)
Bringing up such side effects is essentially a taboo topic. That this was written by two top FDA officials is nothing short of remarkable, especially because it comes at a time when the Biden administration is going all in on vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, studies are showing that for teenage boys, the vaccine poses a greater risk to them than Covid itself. “For boys 16-17 without medical comorbidities, the rate of CAE is currently 2.1 to 3.5 times higher than their 120-day COVID-19 hospitalization risk, and 1.5 to 2.5 times higher at times of high weekly COVID-19 hospitalization.”
From the beginning of these lockdowns – along with all the masks, restrictions, bogus health advice from plexiglass to sanitizer to universal vaccine mandates and so on – it was clear that there would someday be hell to pay. They wrecked rights and liberties, crashed economies, traumatized a whole generation of children and other students, ran roughshod over religious freedom, and for what? There is zero evidence that any of this has made any difference. We are surrounded by the carnage they created.
The appearance of The Lancet article by two top FDA vaccine scientists is truly devastating and revealing because it undermines the last plausible tool to save the whole machinery of government disease management that has been deployed at such enormous social, cultural, and economic cost for 19 months. Not in our lifetimes has a policy failed so badly. The intellectual and political implications here are monumental. It means that the real Covid crisis – the task of assigning responsibility for all the collateral damage – has just begun.
In 2006, during the early years of the birth of lockdown ideology, the great epidemiologist Donald Henderson warned that if any of these restrictive measures were deployed for a pandemic, the result would be a “loss of trust in government” and “a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.” Catastrophe is exactly what has happened. The current regime wants to point the finger toward the noncompliant. That is no longer believable. They cannot delay the inevitable for much longer: responsibility for this catastrophe belongs to those who embarked on this political experiment in the first place.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
The UK government’s ‘Winter Plan’ for Covid is likely to mean the attempted introduction of vaccine passports and more lockdowns. It’s all a far cry from the freedom we were promised would come with mass vaccination.
Suppose someone had told you back in March 2020, that, 18 months later, despite two-thirds of the population being double-vaccinated, Britain would be facing the prospect of another depressing autumn and winter of Covid restrictions and lockdowns?
Well, there were people back then who warned such things would happen, that life would never be allowed to get back to the ‘old’ normal and that the governing, globalist elite was working to a different plan that had little to do with countering a virus. These people were denounced as ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘crackpots’. Yet, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s unveiling of yesterday’s ‘Winter Plan’ for England, it seems the ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘crackpots’ have got it right once again.
Plan A is learning to live with Covid. But this doesn’t mean living totally normally. There will still be border restrictions. We’ll still be urged – some would say coerced – to get the booster jab and to have our kids vaccinated too (even though, less than a fortnight ago, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation didn’t recommend it). We’ll still be encouraged to wear masks in certain settings.
Yet for all its downsides, life under Plan A is still better than the alternative, Plan B. This “toolkit” includes the return of mandatory masks, and the introduction of jab-only vaccine passports for large events, which could be extended to other gatherings too. And, most revealingly of all, further lockdowns are not ruled out, despite the disastrous impact they have had on both the economy and on society.
Let’s be clear what we are dealing with here: it’s psychological warfare on an industrial scale. The semblance of normality that Plan A gives us can be withdrawn at very short notice and Plan B – or parts of it – will be put into operation if ‘cases’ surge and the NHS comes under “unsustainable pressure.” But the NHS comes under pressure every winter, meaning Plan B is actually Plan A. Plan B is clearly what the government really wants to implement, but Johnson knows that, to keep disgruntled Tory backbenchers on side, he can’t do so straightaway.
Hospitals are nearly always close to capacity in December and January. Inevitably, once the flu/cold season starts up again in October, and with mass testing still in place, we’ll see a rise in ‘cases’, which will then see Johnson reach for his “toolkit.” That will be preceded by the usual doomladen and ludicrously over-the-top predictions from ‘modellers’ and ‘advisers’ of what will happen if the Prime Minister fails to ‘act’.
‘Something must be done!’ will be the cry from those who will lose nothing financially from another lockdown.
In fact, the calls for an immediate return of restrictions have already begun. A headline on the BBC News website reads, “Hospital Covid cases may see big jump, say experts.” The piece refers to how the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) committee modelling “suggested” hospitalisation could reach 2,000 to 7,000 per day next month.
We’ve been here before. Lots of times. Only a few months ago, there were dire predictions from ‘modellers’ and ‘experts’ of what would happen if restrictions were lifted in England in July. A member of Independent SAGE – which is even more hardline than SAGE – said the UK could face cases of more than 100,000 a day if lockdown easing went ahead. Well, lockdown easing did go ahead, and guess what? Cases fell. From 43,910 cases (on a seven-day average) on July 16 to 23,002 by the end of the month.
We’re meant, though, to have the memory of a gnat and to have forgotten how wrong the ‘modellers’ have consistently been, and to be terrified once again by their latest ‘predictions’, which make Private Frazer of 1970s sitcom ‘Dad’s Army’ fame – whose catchphrase was “We’re doomed!” – sound like the world’s greatest optimist.
With all the sensationalist ‘cases set to surge this autumn unless restrictions are re-imposed’ headlines, I expect that, straight after next month’s Tory Party conference – and after the Coronavirus Act has been renewed for another six months – Johnson will reach for his “toolkit” and bring back mandatory masks. Then, a few weeks after that, it’ll be ‘accept jab-only vaccine passports or we’ll have to do another lockdown’.
But hang on a minute… weren’t the vaccines meant to put an end to all of this? “15 million jabs to freedom” was the famous headline in the Daily Mail last 27 December. Yet with 66% of the population double-vaxxed – and around 90% of those deemed the most ‘vulnerable’ having had their jabs – we have more ‘cases’ and deaths with Covid than we did this time last year, when no one was vaccinated. How come?
On ‘Good Morning Britain’, Richard Madeley, a proper ‘old-school’ journalist asked this emperor’s new clothes question to Dr Hilary Jones. Jones struggled to answer and kept muttering about cases being higher this year. But if the vaccines work so well, and so many people have been vaccinated, why are we even talking of having more restrictions this autumn and winter? Either the vaccines work or they don’t. If they work, then there’s no need to discuss restrictions. If they don’t, then why push them?
The government line is we need more jabs and a “toolkit” of restrictions too. More lockdowns as a “last resort,” if cases surge, “to protect the NHS.” And vaccine passports too – without a negative-test or prior-infection option – even though we know the vaccines don’t prevent transmission.
Like the autumn and winter of 2020-21, this coming ‘winter of discontent’, of fear and dread, and restrictions being imposed or re-imposed at a moment’s notice, is meant to be our ‘new normal’. Which means this will only end when people realise it’s never meant to end.
Richard Sharp, BBC Chairman, is likely to back proposals to increase regulation of the world’s largest social networks and platforms to combat “fake news” and “disinformation.”
It is pertinent to ask “urgent questions” about these platforms, since platforms have allowed lies, conspiracy theories, and falsehoods to spread rapidly, the chairman claimed in a speech to the Royal Television Society convention.
Since assuming office in February, Sharp will make his first significant public statement, calling for an update to outdated Communications Act of 2003, calling for a crackdown on speech online.
He continued stating that he wants the BBC “to define itself globally as a pre-eminent purveyor of facts in the disinformation age.”
Sharp also claimed that “The pandemic and ‘infodemic’ that has spread alongside have left us in no doubt of how vulnerable we all are. But it has also suggested that some are more vulnerable than others…. The magnetic draw of conspiracy theories in our societies is getting stronger. And we can no longer pretend it doesn’t have real-life consequences – whether it’s pulling down 5G masts, driving down vaccine take up, or leaving the results of democratic elections in doubt, ” Televisual reported.
Even though the provision of fact-checking services and coordinating efforts between platforms and credible news organizations to detect misinformation is important, Sharp alleged more needed to be done.
“There are urgent questions to be answered about the future media world we want to live in. We need to rethink the regulatory environment in this country – and replace a Communications Act that predates Facebook with one that can deliver on a clear vision,” the chairman said.
“But we also need to look at where the digital world comes up against the fundamental rights, freedoms and privacies we sign up to as societies and individuals. Does the principle of media freedom need to be redefined and re-enshrined for the digital age? Do we need to claim our personal data as a human right, rather than an asset to be bought and sold?”
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Senator Elizabeth Warren is demanding Amazon censor best-selling books because they contain information that challenges the official narrative on coronavirus.
Warren wrote a letter asserting that Amazon was complicit in spreading “COVID-19 misinformation” because it allows people to buy books authored by people like Dr. Joseph Mercola, who has been targeted by the mainstream media as a purveyor of “dangerous” fake news about COVID and vaccines.
“During the week of August 22, 2021, my staff conducted sample searches on Amazon.com of pandemic-related terms such as ‘COVID-19,’ ‘COVID,’ ‘vaccine,’ ‘COVID 19 vaccine,’ and ‘pandemic,’” Sen. Warren wrote in a letter addressed to Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy. “The top results consistently included highly-ranked and favorably-tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures.”
Of course, the claim that these are “falsehoods” is a completely arbitrary assertion made by Warren and her staff, with no objective standard of proof required.
Mercola was again singled out for condemnation.
“[Dr. Mercola] has posted over 600 articles on Facebook casting doubt on COVID-19 vaccines and been subject to multiple federal investigations (with one false- advertising investigation leading to a $2.95 million consumer settlement). But Amazon’s algorithms promoted ‘The Truth About COVID-19’ as a best seller and top result in response to common pandemic-related search terms,” Warren wrote.
As Cindy Harper highlights, Warren’s efforts to have Amazon ban books follows a similar effort by Rep. Adam Schiff, who claimed that 10 per cent of Amazon search results related to vaccines returned “misinformation” (a description again solely determined by Schiff and his staff).
At what point did we enter an era where the very thing that drove scientific progress for hundreds of years – challenging the official orthodoxy – is now treated as heresy?
Putting people on lists with terrorists and sex traffickers before deplatforming them from social media sites is not enough.
Erasing information published by actual doctors and scientific experts that dares to question the ever-shifting goalposts of what “the science” says is also insufficient.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has reportedly rejected a Republican complaint claiming Twitter gave Democrats an in-kind contribution by blocking a New York Post story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter ahead of the 2020 vote.
The New York Times, which broke the news of the FEC decision on Monday, editorialized by describing the story as “unsubstantiated.” The commission has yet to officially publish the ruling or any explanations.
Twitter executives “credibly explained” that they had commercial reasons for blocking the distribution of an article revealing the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents, and had not coordinated with his father’s presidential campaign to do so, according to the Times. The decision “provides further flexibility to social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat to control what is shared on their platforms regarding federal elections,” the paper opined.
The Republican National Committee, which had accused Twitter of making a de facto contribution to the Democrats by banning the distribution of the article, said it was “weighing its options for appealing this disappointing decision.”
Editorializing by the Times was met with derision from commenters across the political spectrum, who pointed out that the Biden laptop had been confirmed as authentic. After the election, Hunter himself said it “could have been” his, and admitted to “losing” another.
“[We]’ve all seen the videos from the laptop of him smoking crack with our own eyes,” tweeted Donald Trump Junior. “This is why the corporate media has lost all credibility.”
“The only ‘unsubstantiated article’ that was circulating on Twitter at the time was the one from Politico declaring Hunter Biden’s laptop was ‘Russian disinformation’,” Fox News media reporter Joseph Wulfsohn pointed out.
“We all remember when Twitter blocked every major media outlet from sharing unsubstantiated articles about Trump being a Russian asset/blackmail victim virtually every day for 3+ years,” noted the Grayzone’s Aaron Mate – sarcastically, because that never actually happened.
After the New York Post revealed the existence of a laptop Biden abandoned in a Delaware repair shop, and quoted some emails from it suggesting he was trading on the family name overseas, Twitter first blocked the story from being shared under its newly established “hacked materials” policy, then locked the Post’s account. The lockout lasted for over two weeks and was only lifted a few days before the election.
The Biden campaign responded to the story by calling it “Russian disinformation,” citing a letter by former intelligence officials – the same ones behind the original ‘Russiagate’ assessment – and denying the laptop’s authenticity.
Twitter appears to have used stories about a “hacker” threat, seeded by the FBI, to justify their reaction. According to the Times, the company told the FEC they had “received official warnings throughout 2020 from federal law enforcement that ‘malign state actors’ might hack and release materials associated with political campaigns and that Hunter Biden might be a target of one such operation.”
At least four FEC commissioners had to have voted to reject the RNC complaint. While it is currently chaired by a Democrat, three of the commissioners are Republicans appointed by President Donald Trump, and one is an independent appointed by President George W. Bush.
Speaking in the House of Commons this morning, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said that a consultation has been launched over making Covid and flu vaccinations mandatory for front-line healthcare and social care workers in England.
Javid said that while he’s keeping an open mind until he sees the results of the consultation, he believes that:
“It is highly likely that front-line NHS staff and those working in wider social care settings will also have to be vaccinated to protect those around them and this will be an important step in protecting those at greatest risk”.
Tyranny just rolls off the tongues of these fascists doesn’t it? Nobody cares though. There wasn’t so much as a murmur from the Labour Party benches, the so-called party of the working man and woman.
The Health Secretary had just threatened hundreds of thousands of people who work in the nation’s hospitals and care homes, that if they don’t take his medicine, they’ll be out of a job. Not a peep from Labour.
Javid was laying out his plans for tackling covid and flu this Winter. On flu, he said that in the next few weeks we will see the launch of the largest flu vaccination campaign the country has ever seen.
He said that people will also be encouraged to meet outdoors where possible, and try to let in fresh air when meeting indoors.
He also said that people will be encouraged to wear face masks in crowded areas where they can come into contact with others they don’t normally meet. This was greeted by jeers from his Tory colleagues on the backbenches.
I never believed for a moment, that we would ever see the back of the arbitrary measures introduced to tackle covid. I said many times on The Richie Allen Show that we’d be living with these measures and more forever. I hate being right.
DOCTORS yesterday warned Euro MPs that they will be held personally responsible for harm and death caused by Covid vaccines.
Doctors for Covid Ethics, a group of doctors and scientists from 30 countries, sent letters to all European Parliament members giving notice of liability.
They sent the same letter to Emer Cooke, executive director of the European Medicines Agency.
Their action came as the parliament resumed business with a debate on health and prevention of disease, which will be voted on today.
The notice, served with supporting documentation, read: ‘The rush to vaccinate first and research later has left you in a position whereby Covid-19 vaccination policy is now entirely divorced from the relevant evidence-base.
‘As you consider your next steps in mandating a vaccine that is contra-indicated by science, we draw your attention to recently published Freedom of Information requests, which reveal gross negligence in the Covid vaccine authorisation process, including misleading the Commission on Human Medicines as to whether any independent verification of vaccine trial data had occurred.’
Its website says: ‘We have written three letters to the European Medicines Agency, urgently warning of short term and long term dangers from Covid-19 vaccines, including clotting, bleeding and platelet abnormalities. We first began warning of blood-related risks before media reports of clotting led to vaccine suspensions around the world.
‘In the absence of crucial safety data, we are demanding the immediate withdrawal of all experimental gene-based Covid-19 vaccines.
‘We oppose vaccine passports, which threaten public health and violate Nuremberg and other protections. We are warning that “health passes” place coercive pressure on citizens to submit to dangerous medical experimentation, in return for freedoms that once were human rights.’
IN HER INTRODUCTION to ‘A State Of Fear’, Laura Dodsworth writes, “We don’t like to believe we can be manipulated, let alone that we have been manipulated – this book may hurt.”
Hurt it will, pitilessly exposing by turns the damage that fear has done to us over the past year, the way that terror eclipses reason or common-sense, and the way it has been weaponised to control us by the Government’s behavioural scientists. If you care about the future of liberty and democracy in the UK, this book will not help you sleep at night. It may however find a place at the top the pile on your bedside table: its hard-hitting chapters read once with shock and maybe, for some, a degree of incredulity, but then referred to again with increasing belief and conviction as a new revelation, campaign or headline brings home a key theme or passage.
It’s well researched and rigorously factual, but passion and anger shine through every page. They turn it from a dry analysis into a page-turning thriller in which we repeatedly discover ourselves as protagonist, victim, or supporting cast. The anecdotes and observations resonate with moments from our own lives over the past eighteen months, making personal the revelations about the polished levers and engines which generated them.
In a book about fear, perhaps the most frightening point of all is just how easy it now is to control a democratic society through the levers of behavioural science. Without debate or public consent, the Government has built capabilities in department after department to control how we think, feel, and act subliminally using cutting-edge psychology, research and communication. The advent of Covid-19 turbocharged these teams, which were headed by the SPI-B behavioural science committee and handed almost unlimited power and money. As the discipline with the greatest representation on SAGE, behavioural scientists carried more weight in the pandemic even than virologists and medical experts.
Likely anticipating the charge that she has succumbed to the dark theories of those who smell conspiracy in every action of Government, Dodsworth has rigorously researched and checked her claims. What emerges is comprehensive, informative and authoritative: page after page rings true and makes one nod as an anecdote of the past year strikes a chord.
Dodsworth vividly illuminates not just the effects fear has had, but how it influences us and why we are so prone to these extreme reactions. The expert insight and personal testimony show both how fear was created and how it took control of the population, often driving victims to extremes of behaviour that they view in hindsight as totally out of character.
Little here is speculative: the book deals in what we can see and know of events over the past year. It draws on highly-placed sources, though sadly many of those with real inside knowledge are quoted anonymously as they were too frightened of losing their careers to go on the record. This inevitably raises questions over the credibility of their claims, but it’s impossible to dismiss what they say because the substantiation is robust, the evidence convincing, and it so often chimes with personal experience.
At one point, a source in Government is quoted as saying,
“Hancock is quite paranoid and a total ‘wet’. He’s a real panicker.”
This will surprise few people – we can all see Hancock’s shortcomings – but these moments of recognition are important in building our understanding of the way in which politicians moved so quickly from championing freedom to enforcing repression. ‘The fear spread from the health department to the other departments and they all fell under the spell of the SAGE scientists foretelling doom’.
This was a different kind of fear to that felt by the public: fear not of the illness itself, but of its political fall-out. Politicians were terrified of failing in any step which might later be found to have saved lives. The virus might not represent a deadly threat to the vast majority of British people, but it could certainly be lethal to their own prospects for electoral success.
An insider tells Dodsworth that ministers fear ‘they’ll get hauled through the press for their own mistakes and that’s worse for them than ruining people’s businesses.’
This spectre still stalks Whitehall. I’m told that from March 2020 onwards, any Civil Servant minded to reject tough restrictions has simply been asked, ‘what will you tell the Inquiry?’ Few are brave enough to resist that threat. Yet it only works one way – deaths and suffering from Covid-19 may bring retribution. Deaths and suffering caused by restrictions are so unimportant to the decision-makers that they have not even bothered to consider whether the harm of measures may outweigh the benefits. Recovery has been campaigning since its launch for the coming Covid-19 inquiry to be comprehensive, investigating the full impact of the measures taken, positive and negative: this is why it’s so important.
We now know beyond question that the consequences of the Government action will be devastating for many, from the thousands who have not been treated or diagnosed with cancers over the past year to the millions whose livelihoods have gone. The mental health impact alone has been enormous and experts warn that some will bear the scars for life – including many children. This is vividly brought to life via the personal experiences which preface each chapter of the book.
Yet fear sells above all else. Broadcasters have enjoyed unprecedented viewing figures while Covid-19 has raged. An Ofcom report in September found that the average UK adult spent 6 hours 25 minutes watching content in April 2020 – up by an hour and a half from 2019.
That kind of power over eyeballs brings huge influence and profits, so broadcasters who gorge on drama and sensation grow fat. The reporters who provide it win pay rises and awards. For them, the best scientist is not the most accurate or eminent expert, but the one who produces the most wild and exciting prediction: the one which will really get viewers scared.
Reporters rush from No.10 conference to Covid ward with breathless anticipation of a child at a theme park racing from the dodgems to a rollercoaster. It’s what happens next that matters: the next scary number, the next variant. Checking whether the last prediction came true is dull. Boring old cancer and heart disease may be the bigger killers, but they’re old news. No-one has pushed a camera in the face of the grieving relatives of a cancer patient who was turned away for treatment or a worried oncologist. If you want to be heard, you have to talk Covid.
The pressure on Government is no longer to do what is best for the country, but what is best for the story. Over and over again, this leads to poor decision-making. Leaders are rewarded not for good policy, but for media-friendly sound-bites. Today, the business of Government has become less about doing what is right and more about doing what will play out best on the airwaves. Managing the opinion of the country has become more important than managing the country. Behind closed doors, our leaders have taken the logical next step.
Dodsworth reveals how successive governments have assembled a vast interconnected machine for producing and weaponizing fear with the explicit aim of controlling behaviour. Those who operate it argue that their intentions are good.
It’s the old paternalist thinking with a high-tech upgrade. People can’t be trusted to make the correct choices if they are given access to information and left to decide for themselves. So they must be subliminally ‘nudged’ in the right direction (or, during Covid-19, bludgeoned). Information which might disrupt the narrative is suppressed. Those who choose for us won’t admit the possibility that they could get it wrong. We, the ordinary people, are fallible; they are not. As Dodsworth says,
“Nudge is clever people in government making sure the not-so-clever people do what they want.”
All this was already happening prior to Covid-19. Yet it was little studied. A colossal machine was assembled out of public sight without any consideration as to the ethics and consequences, since those involved saw their goals as good and the ends as justifying the means.
As Dodsworth finds, its workings are wrapped in shadow. Attempting to dissect its component parts, she identifies some of the departments involved, but beyond confirming their existence, no-one in Government will answer her questions. In a book which contains many shocks, not least is how much of all this is being hidden from us in our supposedly free and democratic society. Not only are our strings to be pulled without our conscious knowledge, the details of how and why we are being manipulated must be hidden from us, lest we see through the tricks and hold the puppet-masters to account.
Behavioural science regards the mass of humanity as no more than rats in a maze, to be prodded down one alley and forbidden another. The scientists wish to control the rats: they do not accept that the rats should have any control over them.
These are disturbing claims, but the more they are researched, the more substantiation can be found. For example, she refers to the questionable role of Ofcom in enforcing a distorted narrative across the broadcast media, citing the guidance issued to broadcasters on 23 March 2020. This says that any report featuring content around Covid-19 which ‘may be harmful’ will be subject to statutory sanction.
As she points out, these comparatively innocuous words in practice force broadcasters to censure a huge amount of critical content, even where it is accurate, especially where it tends to calm fears or reassure people, since fear has been used to maximise compliance with restrictions.
An online search reveals that this was followed by additional Ofcom guidance on 27 March 2020, which is chillingly explicit. For example, it prohibits the broadcasting of ‘medical or other advice which… discourages the audience from following official rules and guidance.’ There’s no ambiguity here. Ofcom is telling broadcasters that they cannot allow informed, expert opinion, no matter how accurate or important, if it conflicts with the official guidance. This is extraordinary.
It gives added bite to her central point: ‘any regulator charged with upholding freedom of expression – as is the case with Ofcom – should proceed to restrict that freedom only on a closely reasoned basis. That is something Ofcom has manifestly failed to do.”
In the process, it has turned our theoretically impartial broadcasters into mere cheerleaders for restrictions. She argues that what they report is no longer news: “There is a word for only sharing information which is biased and used to promote a political cause: propaganda.”
Could the BBC have done more to preserve its integrity? When reporting restrictions were imposed on it during the Gulf War, it prefaced reports with a reminder that restrictions were in place. It could have done the same here, alerting viewers to the controls on pandemic reporting. It chose not to do so and therefore the public is unaware that anything has changed.
Her interview with Piers Robinson, Co-Director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, concludes with the stark warning, ”It is not inconceivable that we are walking into an absolute nightmare in which freedom of speech and debate become significantly curtailed.”
It’s one of many moments in the book where you catch yourself thinking, ‘can this really be happening?’ It’s hard to believe that we have lost so many freedoms without a whisper from the supposed parliamentary Opposition, or that a leader who has championed our liberties so loudly in the past has moved so decisively to remove them.
‘A State Of Fear’ is essential reading if you want to understand how majority backing for the uniquely repressive response to Covid-19 was engineered so quickly. It’s a deeply troubling tale. However, it raises broader concerns about a world in which the combined power of psychology, technology, media and research are increasingly being used to dictate our choices without our knowledge or consent.
These questions go to the heart of our humanity and the kind of world we want for ourselves and our children. How many of us really want to live in fear, even if it means we are protected from our own misjudgements? Can governments be trusted with subliminal tools so powerful that they can instruct us what to think? With ‘A State Of Fear’, Laura Dodsworth has launched a vital debate.
Recovery formed last October to campaign for the Five Reasonable Demands for good government during Covid-19, a moderate, balanced alternative to the Government’s damaging approach to Covid-19, which experts have warned will end up costing many more lives than it saves and the Government itself says has already cost the country as much as the entire Second World War.
Jon Dobinson, is a co-founder and Campaign Director of Recovery, and MD of award winning advertising agency Other. He is a former D&AD judge and Chair of the Creative Jury of the International Business Awards.
MMR Vaccine (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) Is It Safer Than Measles, Mumps and Rubella?
Physicians for Informed Consent | December 2024
… It has not been proven that the MMR vaccine is safer than measles, mumps, and rubella. The vaccine package insert raises questions about safety testing for cancer, genetic mutations, and impaired fertility. Although VAERS tracks some adverse events, it is too inaccurate to measure against the risk of measles, mumps, and rubella. Clinical trials do not have the ability to detect less common adverse reactions, and epidemiological studies are limited by the effects of chance and possible confounders. Safety studies of the MMR vaccine are particularly lacking in statistical power. A review of more than 60 MMR vaccine studies conducted for the Cochrane Library states, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.”19 Because permanent sequelae (aftereffects) from measles, mumps, and rubella are so rare (especially in children with normal levels of vitamin A and infected after birth),6,15-17 the level of accuracy of the research studies available is insufficient to rule out the possibility that the MMR vaccine causes greater death or permanent disability than measles, mumps, and rubella. – Read full article
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