Governments are using credit card purchase data as “contact tracing’ COVID surveillance
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | July 16, 2021
The ongoing “war on cash” that far preceded the pandemic, whose goal is to steer people towards using traceable forms of payment, is coming in very handy in the COVID era precisely for the reason the policy is criticized in the first place – it makes it easy for authorities to keep tabs on individuals who use card transactions.
Reports now mention instances of Australian residents receiving a mandate to quarantine after using their credit card to pay at an establishment, where somebody known to be infected with the virus had stayed.
Credit card receipts led back to the person that was then forced to self-isolate (although they did not have coronavirus) – and apparently led the person to consider what, if anything, is left of their privacy in a world where more and more people leave long “data trails” behind them.
Stop-gap measures like switching to alternative browsers etc (while probably running it on Windows) aside – the takeaway is that the only way to regain some privacy in the world of mass surveillance and tracking is to turn to alternatives – but do it consistently, and be prepared to pay for the privilege of removing oneself from the closed ecosystems like those ruled with an iron fist by Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
As for using card transactions to do COVID contact tracing, Australia is far from being the only country that is doing it. In fact, those lauded as most successful in even getting their contact tracing efforts off the ground, like South Korea, pioneered the practice. Data surveillance, reports said, was used by authorities there to make sure that people who were either unable or unwilling to share their every move are eventually forced into doing it.
Australia has “distinguished” itself for being willing to jeopardize people’s privacy with a series of COVID surveillance and control measures over the past 18 months, and last November, the National Contact Tracing Review, whose chair is Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel, recommended using consumer credit card data for track and trace purposes.
But what about privacy? Privacy rules will apply – until they don’t, seems to be the gist of it.
“Privacy rules will apply,” the Review said, but then added, “and in some jurisdictions legislative change may be required.”
North Carolina Henderson County Board of Commissioners look for new platform after YouTube censorship
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | July 15, 2021
Once again YouTube has decided that it has the right to silence elected officials in the US in a bid to prevent them from making their policies and decisions known, particularly concerning COVID.
When North Carolina’ Henderson County Board of Commissioners met to discuss whether to spend taxpayer money to promote Covid vaccination, and decided against the idea, passing a relevant resolution, YouTube was quick to delete the video taken during the meeting.
The commissioners’ meeting and vote not to spend county dollars to push for people to get the jab was followed by citizens, vaccine skeptics, expressing their opinion on the issue by saying that they believed the inoculation project was put together by the government, the media, and pharmaceutical companies who have a “hidden agenda.”
The Google company also swiftly rejected the appeal filed by the commissioners, stating that the the content had been reviewed “carefully,” but that YouTube censors still found the video in violation of the medical misinformation policy.
Two days after this happened, the County held another vote and decided to remove YouTube as the video platform its officials use, and look for alternatives.
Vice chair Rebecca McCall and other commissioners called YouTube’s decision an act of censorship, and questioned whether such a widely used platform, even if privately owned, should be allowed to do that – or be the judge of what medical information is acceptable.
YouTube has a long list of things its users are not allowed to utter on the platform, often not even as part of a debate among scientists and doctors, as YouTube believes these things pose “a serious risk of egregious harm.”
This includes recommending Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine for Covid treatment (even though critics of the use of these drugs speak about their inefficacy rather than potential harm), and making claims that Covid vaccines can make people ill. Contradicting local health authorities or the WHO is also prohibited, where it comes to treatment, prevention, transmission, or orders of restrictive measures such as mask wearing and social distancing.
White House admits ‘flagging problematic posts’ for Facebook, says it’s needed to fight medical ‘misinformation’
RT | July 15, 2021
As the Biden administration called “medical misinformation” a public health threat, the White House said it was working with social media to flag “problematic” posts. Critics called it an end-run around the First Amendment.
“We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday. In addition to directing the company to censor people, the government is also working to “get trusted content out there” by putting medical professionals in touch with social media influencers.
Psaki’s admission came after Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring misinformation “an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health.”
“Misinformation takes away our freedom to make informed decisions about our health and the health of our loved ones,” Murthy said at the White House. During just the Covid-19 pandemic, it has led to Americans refusing to wear masks, “turn down proven treatments” and choosing not to get vaccinated, which, he said, cost lives.
Murthy is a “tyrant” who wants “Big Tech to crack down on what amounts to open inquiry and free exchange of ideas,” commented journalist Jordan Schachtel, one of the notable skeptics when it comes to official pandemic narratives.
Looking at the surgeon general’s recommendations, Grabien’s Tom Elliott pointed out that the government is literally instructing private companies to “abridge the freedom of speech, and of the press, and the rights of people to peaceably assemble and petition the gov’t for redresses of grievances” – in other words, violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who helped publish NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about surveillance abuse in 2013, called this union of corporate and state power “one of the classic hallmarks of fascism.”
“If you don’t find it deeply disturbing that the White House is ‘flagging’ internet content that they deem ‘problematic’ to their Facebook allies for removal, then you are definitionally an authoritarian,” said Greenwald.
“This is ‘Ministry of Truth’ level malfeasance. They’re literally admitting to colluding with [the] media to control the narrative. This is censorship,” tweeted Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), adding that such tactics befit dictatorships and that throttling speech with which the government disagrees crosses a line.
Conservative columnist Stacey Lennox argued that censorship would actually make Americans question the White House’s narrative even more.
“If your ideas are the best, they can stand on their own. Censorship will make people question it more. Every. Single. Time,” she tweeted.
Democrats have clamored for social media to censor “misinformation” ever since the 2016 election, which resulted in the surprise victory of Republican Donald Trump over mainstream media favorite Hillary Clinton. The Trump campaign had bypassed corporate gatekeepers by reaching out to Americans directly via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.
Four years later, under the pretext of fighting misinformation and “Russian interference,” thousands of users had been purged from the platforms, while Twitter and Facebook suppressed a newspaper for publishing a story about Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the information found on his laptop. They also cracked down on any questions about new electoral practices, such as mass mail-in voting, labeling them “misinformation.”
The Biden campaign actually demanded Facebook censor Trump himself for “misinformation,” which the platform initially refused to do.
Eventually, however, Trump was banned from all social media platforms – while he was still the sitting president – as much for allegedly “inciting violence” over the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, as for continuing to argue the 2020 election wasn’t honest.
Biden & DNC want to censor text messages to stop ‘misinformation’ – ‘if it saves just one life’
Who needs privacy?
By Helen Buyniski | RT | July 14, 2021
The White House is tying itself in knots to silence anyone questioning the mainstream Covid-19 narrative, and, whatever you think of vaccines, its latest plans are only the first step toward making thoughtcrime a reality.
The US government is done playing “good cop” with regard to the “vaccine hesitant.” The Biden administration, which recently opted to send ‘volunteer’ vaccinators door to door in what may be the most ill-thought-out public health campaign in US history, doesn’t just want to meddle with your body anymore – its plans to control “misinformation” you may send by SMS text message indicate it’s intent on controlling your mind as well.
White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci is leading the crusade, blaming “Fox News or whomever” for crafting the vision of “a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you’ve got to do something that you don’t want to do.” Fauci clarified that it wasn’t government officials, but “trusted messengers who are part of the community”. Noticeably, he didn’t address the “doing something you don’t want to do” part – a telling oversight in the minds of those who are convinced the campaign is indeed a coercive one and those who’ve been paying closer attention to who makes up the door-to-door vax packs.
While Politico insisted on Monday that these teams talked up by Biden and Psaki were merely delivering information on vaccination, not administering the jabs, a Tuesday report from a local TV network in Mecklenburg, North Carolina showed precisely the opposite, proudly announcing one man was so excited by the visit he chose to get the shot right then and there on his porch.
Who are you going to believe, then, America? The TV or your lying eyes?
And this campaign is far from a single-pronged strategy. According to Politico, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and “Biden-allied groups” – whatever that last phrase means – have plans to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively” and “work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.”
Yes, you read that correctly. The White House plans to interfere with people’s ability to send text messages if it doesn’t like what they say. This is not a question of whether one supports or rejects the Covid-19 vaccine campaign, or what one thinks about vaccines at all; this is the curtain being yanked back on the police state the US has long insisted it isn’t (but that all its enemies are). It’s Washington rearing up with bared teeth, concealing its scabrous pelt in a lab coat, and hoping you don’t see the claws grasping the syringe. The US gave up its moral authority regarding freedom of the press somewhere between the Pentagon Papers and the revelations of Operation Mockingbird, but interfering with the content of individual text messages sent between innocent civilians brings the nation much deeper into the thickets of fascism than it has ever dared venture before, to a spot where it seems intent on setting up shop permanently.
Shots in the Hood ‘Strike Force’
Ultimately, the issue goes far beyond the pandemic to how much power Americans are willing to cede to a government that – based on statistics, at least – less than a quarter actually supported in the last election, a result framed as an accomplishment that speaks more to apathy. This is why the narrative managers don’t replace Fauci. When they really need credibility, they deputize trusted community members – a tactic they’ve been quite open about using, recently to middling success in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, where a local barber shop participated in Biden’s “Shots at the Shops” campaign to flood some of the city’s most dangerous, crime-plagued black neighborhoods with what were portrayed as clever, street-smart vaccination teams eager to save the lives of their fellow man.
That way, when whatever health campaign (or other government initiative) those barber shops (or other incursion on constitutional freedoms) have tied their credibility to suffers a hit – and the Englewood appearance wasn’t anything to write home about – it’s the trusted local institution that takes the blame. The overarching public-private partnership – that Faustian (Faucian?) pact between business and government – is one of the defining elements of fascism. But it’s become so common and normalized under Biden’s Covid-19 “Build Back Better” project that the average American thinks nothing about seeing all their local businesses getting into bed with the private equity firms such as BlackRock and Blackstone that have quietly bought up their neighborhoods during the pandemic – or as far back as the 2008 crash. After all, these groups know enough to shroud themselves in rainbows and climate-babble, and that’s all most people care about these days when vetting who they will allow to own them.
Search and Stick
More importantly, if White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki can look Americans in the eye and claim no one’s being vaccinated on the search-and-inoculate missions in North Carolina, while the next TV channel shows exactly that happening, a seed of cognitive dissonance is successfully sown that allows a person to believe two mutually exclusive “truths.” Even if we know at some basic level the government is lying to us, we don’t want to believe our trusted neighborhood fixtures are also doing so. The Biden administration’s recently declared scorched-earth campaign thus has the potential to sabotage trust in as many ways as there are trusting relationships in a community, and it doesn’t care what happens to those people as long as it gets control of the American mind at the end of the road. Families might be shredded and homes torn apart over the FBI’s recent announcement that we must snitch on our fellow man lest ill-defined “extremism” take root somewhere, but Blackstone and Vanguard turned record profits this year, and that’s what matters.
Americans seem to believe the Covid-19 pandemic is winding down – a Gallup poll early last month suggested nearly three in five Americans believe their lives are either “somewhat” or “completely” back to normal after 18 months of being put through their Pavlovian paces in what the World Economic Forum admits was the world’s largest-ever psychological experiment. But the narrative managers have only begun declaring war – not on the virus, or even so much on how we think about it, but how we think about them.
Former George W. Bush administration official John Bridgeland warned Politico on Tuesday that “lies” (not necessarily about vaccines, but that create “communities already wary of the vaccines”) are “potentially a death sentence.” Now what kind of government official would he be if he allowed some family who just wanted to be left alone with their “death sentence” to go back to their dinner? Not a very effective one, that’s for sure! Bridgeland didn’t say what kind of “lies” made people more susceptible to death by Covid-19, but no doubt he’d like to spend a long time digging through your phone to make sure you’re not harboring any.
Humanity must be primed for the next crisis, after all. Whether that’s a “climate lockdown” or a fake alien invasion, we’re being primed for another metaphysical gut punch meant to turn us against ourselves. At that point, resistance will no longer be optional, it will be a matter of survival – but your phone won’t let you text that to anybody.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Telegram
YouTube censors New Jersey Senate hearing about kids’ mask mandates
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | July 14, 2021
As YouTube continues to censor a wide array of topics, not least those around the Covid pandemic, so it’s independent competitors like Rumble continue to attract more creators.
The trend was unbroken last week when Google’s video giant censored a video showing a New Jersey Senate hearing on the topic of forcing school children to wear masks, which concluded the policy may be harmful.
New Jersey-based talk show host and former chair of the College Republican National Committee Bill Spadea announced this, accusing the Democratic majority in the state’s capital, Trenton, of shunning the official event, and YouTube of eventually “not liking” the content of the discussion, and for that reason removing the video.
However, as Spadea explained, the video can still be found on his new channel on Rumble.
Scientists, doctors, lawyers and senators who chose to participate were there to debate the validity of one of the more controversial topics relating to Covid mandates in the US – masking children.
Like most other rules around masks and their efficacy in preventing infection, these have been changing over the past 18 months – but the consensus seems to be that children are least at risk of contracting and spreading the virus.
However, YouTube’s pro-masking, pro-distancing censorship algorithms aren’t very sophisticated so it appears that even to this day, even a discussion of the issue, let alone directly opposing the policy of masking children, will get content banned – even if the source is an official gathering of experts and lawmakers.
Spadea himself has little doubt that masks should not be mandated, because after covering the topic for over a year, he sees no proof that masks protect children.
This, however, runs contrary to what the US political and medical establishment thinks, and those doctors and scientists who disagree with official narratives and are willing to speak their mind are also often getting censored by Big Tech – the New Jersey Senate hearing, that concluded forcing children to wear masks could be dangerous, being no different.
Spadea blasted these acts of suppression of information as “the aggressive and immoral efforts of the social media oligarchs,” at the same time referring to Rumble as “a sliver of free speech” left out there.
Spain’s Top Court Rules That Lockdown Was Unconstitutional
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | July 14, 2021
Spain’s top court has ruled that the country’s national COVID-19 lockdown was unconstitutional following a lawsuit filed by the populist Vox party.
“While leaving intact most of the state of emergency’s terms, the court said that the key articles ordering the population off the streets except for shorts trips for shopping and unavoidable commutes for work and other official business were unconstitutional,” reports the Associated Press.
“According to TVE, the ruling said that the limitations on movement violated citizens´ basic rights and therefore the state of emergency was insufficient to give them constitutional backing. The six magistrates said that a state of exception, which does allow the government to suspend basic rights, would have been necessary.”
During the first six weeks of the lockdown, stay at home measures were so strict that Spaniards weren’t even allowed to go outside to exercise or walk their dogs.
In one case, police were called after a neighbor spotted two brothers playing soccer in their own back yard.
As we previously highlighted, Spain’s lockdown laws were so draconian that at one point authorities briefly told citizens that wearing masks while swimming in the sea was mandatory.
For many months during hot weather, wearing masks in every outdoor setting, even on beaches, was compulsory.
People were also issued fines of €2,000 euros for “disrespecting” a police officer during lockdown.
Numerous instances of police beating people for not wearing masks also emerged, while protesters at one point freed a woman from police arrest while cops were trying to handcuff her for not wearing a face covering.
Early on during the first lockdown, police helicopters fitted with loudspeakers were also used to aggressively order beachgoers to go home.
The Spanish government many now face multiple lawsuits as a result of the lockdown being declared unlawful.
Court Document Shows FBI Used At Least 12 Informants to Entrap Men In Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Plot
By Eric Striker | National Justice | July 12, 2021
Defense lawyers yesterday filed a brief detailing the FBI’s extensive role in a Michigan militia’s plot to supposedly kidnap Gretchen Whitmer.
The document, obtained by National Justice, severely undermines the narrative prosecutors and FBI agents have constructed against the six defendants in USA v. Fox, et al, who are accused of multiple serious crimes related to organized terrorism.
In a motion to compel disclosure, lawyers for Kaleb Franks are asking the court to force the government to identify their informants by name, their criminal and mental health histories, and how much money they were rewarded for infiltrating and setting up the defendants.
According to the brief, prosecutors have already identified at least 12 paid informants who were involved in driving the kidnapping plot forward by their Confidential Human Source (CHS) numbers. These informants worked in conjunction with undercover FBI agents, revealing that the small Wolverine Watchmen militia had over a dozen government infiltrators pressuring them into engaging in violent criminal activity.
In the case of Franks, his lawyers cite exculpatory evidence showing that when presented with the idea of kidnapping the Governor, he told government agents that he was “not cool” with the idea and that he only attended a training camp — which was also organized by the FBI — just for the fresh air, fellowship and training.
Franks, who previously struggled with heroin addiction but provided help to his community by getting clean and becoming a professional drug counselor, never intended to break the law. Lawyers accuse the FBI of setting a “hide and seek” standard, where Franks is guilty simply because he was unable to avoid FBI informants that were committing crimes and working together to pressure individual men into doing illegal things.
According to the testimony of Special Agent Hank Impola, who led the investigation, the men in the Wolverine Watchmen expressed negative feelings when Adam Fox, a homeless man informants convinced to think kidnapping Governor Whitmer was a good idea, broached the subject. An informant put on the stand even testified that the men alleged to be at the center of the plot stressed that they did not want to break the law.
Lawyers for the defense have been able to identify payment to at least one infiltrator for his work in propelling the plot forward, a whopping sum of $54,000 dollars. Some of the other informants, mostly ex or current criminals, have been employed as government snitches for decades, including one man who became an informant in 1985 after obtaining information that was later used against his cellmate in prison.
With federal snitches having already confessed to hosting the “training” events where the plot was allegedly concocted, the entrapment defense is growing stronger by the day.
Prosecutors are already scrambling to save their case, primarily by withholding evidence, conscripting the mainstream media to meddle in the case, and even indicting one of their own crucial informants.
Lawyers are also complaining that the FBI and US Attorney are engaging in malicious compliance in the discovery process by deliberately overwhelming them with countless copies of the same pieces of audio and video evidence in hopes of wasting their time and running up the legal fees of the accused.
In another court filing, lawyers are asking for a change of venue due to the media’s role in poisoning the public against the defendants. The defense is also working to suppress a number of pieces of evidence that were outside of the scope of the FBI’s search warrants.
What is now clear is that the Michigan militia plot was not an act of legitimate law enforcement, but instead a political stunt to aid Democrats in a swing state a month before a presidential election.
The Approaching Storm
By CJ Hopkins | Consent Factory Inc. | July 14, 2021
So, it looks like GloboCap isn’t going to be happy until they have fomented the widespread social unrest — or de facto global civil war — that they need as a pretext to lock in the new pathologized totalitarianism and remake whatever remains of society into a global pseudo-medicalized police state, or that appears to where we’re headed currently. We appear to be heading there at breakneck speed. I don’t have a crystal ball or anything, but I’m expecting things to get rather ugly this Autumn, and probably even uglier in the foreseeable future.
Yes, friends, a storm is coming. It has been coming for the last 16 months. And GloboCap is steering right into it. I, and many others like me, have been tracking its relentless advance like a self-appointed International Pathologized-Totalitarian Hurricane Center (you know, like the one in Miami, except all the meteorologists are “conspiracy theorists”). We have documented all the propaganda, the lies, the manipulation of statistics, the abrogation of constitutional rights, the New Normal goon squads, the corporate censorship, and all the rest of the roll-out of the new official ideology and the totalitarian measures deployed to enforce it.
Our efforts have not been in vain, but they have not been successful enough to change the course events are now taking … a course of events that has always been clear, a course that every totalitarian movement needs to take to get where it’s going. You can’t remake entire societies into quasi-totalitarian systems without civil unrest, chaos, rioting, war, or some other form of cataclysm. Brainwashing the masses is all fine and good, but, at some point, you need to goad the people who are resisting your new totalitarian “reality” into getting unruly, so you can crack down on them, and transform them into official enemies, which appears to be what is happening currently.
GloboCap is dialing up the totalitarianism, and they are rubbing it in our faces. Here in New Normal Germany, government officials are openly barking out Goebbelsian slogans like “NO FREEDOM FOR THE UNVACCINATED!” and “THE UNVACCINATED ARE A DANGER TO SOCIETY!” All over Europe, including the UK, where “Freedom Day” is fast approaching, pseudo-medical social-segregation systems are being implemented. In France, Greece, and many other countries, people who refuse to be “vaccinated” are being stripped of their jobs and otherwise punished. In the USA, where the Unvaccinated are also being segregated, New Normal goon squads are going door-to-door, bullying “vaccine hesitant” families into conforming to the new official ideology.
And so on … I’m tired of citing the facts. They do not make the slightest difference to the vast majority of New Normals, anyway. As I’ve noted in several previous columns, these people have surrendered their rationality, and have been subsumed into a totalitarian movement, which has become their perceptual and social “reality,” which their “sanity” now depends upon defending, so the facts mean absolutely nothing to them.
And you already know the facts.
Yes, you. Us. The others. The Unvaccinated. The “Covid deniers.” You don’t really think any hardcore New Normals have made it this far into this column, do you? They haven’t. If they stumbled into it on the Internet and accidentally started to read it, their brains switched off in the opening paragraph … literally, neurologically, switched off. They recognized it as a threat to their “reality” and instantly erased it from their consciousness, or they reported it to the proper authorities, perhaps the FBI, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Facebook, or some other global corporation.
This is what it has come to, folks … people are reporting other people’s “thoughtcrimes” to global corporations and the law enforcement agencies of “democratic” governments in the hopes of destroying or damaging their lives, or, at the very least, getting them censored, or otherwise erased from public view.
As I noted in my previous column, our societies have been torn apart. We’re living in two mutually hostile “realities,” a state which cannot continue indefinitely. The problem for us (i.e., the Unvaccinated) is, we probably constitute somewhere around 20 to 25 percent of the population, so we are massively outnumbered by New Normals. The problem for the New Normals is that 20 to 25 percent of the population is way too many people to imprison or otherwise remove from society.
Thus, their plan is to make our lives as miserable as possible, to segregate us, stigmatize us, demonize us, bully, and harrass us, and pressure us to conform at every turn. They are not going to put us on the trains to the camps. GloboCap is not the Nazis. They need to maintain the simulation of democracy. So they need to transform us into an underclass of “anti-social conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxer disinformationists,” “white-supremacist election-result deniers,” “potentially violent domestic extremists,” and whatever other epithets they come up with, so that we can be painted as dangerously unhinged freaks and cast out of society in a way that makes it appear that we have cast out ourselves.
This process is already well underway, and it’s only going to get more intense, which will inevitably lead to social unrest. The hardcore “Unvaccinated” are not going to go quietly. Again, this isn’t Nazi Germany. There are too many of us who are already resisting. They can segregate us, ban us from travelling, blackout our protests, censor us, deplatform us, cancel our bank accounts, and otherwise harass us, but they cannot forcibly disappear us. So, they are going to keep goading us until we lose it. We have demonstrated incredible discipline so far, but eventually, we’re going to run out of patience. It’s going to get messy. People will get hurt.
Which, of course, is exactly what GloboCap wants. Nothing will make them happier than if we turn ourselves into the “violent extremists” they have been conjuring into existence for the last five years. They desperately need us to become those “extremists” before we “embolden” too many others with our “disinformation,” “vaccine hesitancy,” “election result denial,” and general distaste for the whole global-capitalist ideological program.
Unfortunately, they are probably going to get their wish.
What we need is an organized, global campaign of classic, non-violent civil disobedience, but they are not going to give us time to organize that. They are going to keep the pressure on, and crank up the pace, and the official propaganda, and the absurdity, and the confusion, and the ever-changing rules, and the mass hysteria, and the blatant lies, until we start flipping out in restaurants, and in pubs, and schools, and on public transportation, and segregated New Normal establishments start getting nocturnally vandalized, or worse, and other forms of “direct action” are taken.
At which point, game over, because they will have won. We will be the “extremists” they warned themselves about, and they’ll be able to do whatever they want with us, and our former (now New Normal) friends will applaud, or just look away in silence.
Or … I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe some New Normals are still reading this essay, and can still, at this late stage, regain their senses. Maybe we can still avoid the storm, and the full implementation of “New Normal Reality.” I know, I’m probably a hopeless idealist, but let me tell you a quick anecdote before I let you go.
I’ve been kind of nudging, or politely badgering, Glenn Greenwald, who I respect, and have always respected, to grow a pair and at least speak out against the totalitarian features of the New Normal movement. Glenn is totally on board with the official Covid narrative, and has made it clear that he has no interest in using his investigative-journalism skills to investigate that official narrative. Despite that, I have continued to nudge him, and politely prod him, and otherwise urge him, to maybe post a few critical words, or raise a few investigative-journalist questions, about the most flagrant official propaganda campaign in the history of official propaganda campaigns and the blatantly totalitarian actions of governments all over the world.
For example, I posted this on Twitter recently.
Shortly thereafter — and I’m sure this was just a coincidence, because Glenn doesn’t follow the Consent Factory — he tweeted this bit of New Normal blasphemy:
So, apparently, it is, in fact, still possible for people who believe the official Covid narrative as if it were the Word of God to speak out against some aspect of it, or just politely question the logic of it, or otherwise stop behaving like a bunch of mindlessly obedient “Good Germans” as a new iteration of totalitarianism is rolled out right in front of their eyes.
Yes, I know. I’m clutching at straws, but I have this crazy faith in people. On top of which, I’m getting old, so I am not looking forward to the street-fighting part of this as much as I would have 30 or 40 years ago.
Oh, and, I almost forgot, to all my friends in the New Normal UK … have a lovely Freedom Day!
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France’s mandatory ‘health pass’ with government-issued QR codes is the start of a dystopian nightmare
A police officer checks a woman’s self-certified note for being out near the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris on April 15, 2020. © THOMAS COEX / AFP
By Rachel Marsden | RT | July 14, 2021
President Macron’s announcement that citizens must adhere to a Covid-19 vaccination schedule, or pay for nose-swab tests every 2-3 days to live any semblance of a normal life, is the final nail in the coffin of civil liberties.
In the dead of summer, just a couple of days before the July 14 Bastille Day national holiday, when many French citizens had tuned out and left the big cities for some respite from a long stretch of sanitary restrictions – including months of curfews – French President Emmanuel Macron took advantage of the lull to drop a bomb on their lives that few were expecting.
From July 21, a health pass including a government QR code will be necessary for those over the age of 12 to access bars, restaurants, cinemas, gyms, swimming pools, museums, shopping centers, and any other venues capable of holding at least 50 people. Employees of these venues are included, if they want to keep their jobs.
The government will issue people a QR code to activate the pass by only two means: pricey PCR or antigenic nose-swab tests that Macron says will have to be paid out of pocket starting in October, or a full course of two jabs of the Covid-19 vaccination, which he also said will be the subject of a new round of third doses, starting in September.
What’s particularly stunning is that there is little recognition of acquired immunity – as though our immune systems are virtually useless. There is no way for someone who has recovered from Covid-19 to obtain a QR code as the result of a blood test proving the presence of adequate post-infection antibodies conferring immunity. The government considers their naturally acquired protection invalid and wants those who already have proven antibodies to take at least one dose of the vaccine.
The system does allow those who have a QR code from a positive Covid-19 PCR test up to six months old to obtain the health pass, after which they are then expected to take the shot as well – all this despite ample research indicating lasting immunity in previously infected individuals.
By shoehorning everyone into just two government-defined camps – compliant vaccinated individuals who will be allowed to live normally, and the unvaccinated non-compliant who will be denied access, despite the fact that both are capable of catching and transmitting the disease – it feels like the public health crisis is being used to implement a new dystopian system that permits tracking of everyone who wants to participate in everyday life.
And, as of September 15, healthcare workers who aren’t fully vaccinated “won’t be able to work and won’t be paid,” according to health minister Olivier Veran.
So much for France’s motto of “Liberty, equality, fraternity.” Liberty no longer exists when the government decides with a flash of a QR code generated at its whim whether you can live normally or not.
And while Macron was adamant about maintaining solidarity and equality among citizens by not singling out either the most vulnerable fatsos or the elderly for restrictions at the height of the pandemic – choosing instead to lock down the entire country – he now has no qualms about treating Covid victims with natural immunity, and those who simply don’t think that vaccination is the right decision for them, as second-class citizens who can rot at home with no access to daily life.
Fraternity? Pitting the vaccinated against the anti-vaccinated – with Macron treating the former as the ‘good’ citizens and the other as the ‘bad’ in his official narrative – has been adopted far too easily and uncritically by many. These people fail to see that vaccination status is a false dichotomy that effectively herds every single citizen into a single camp: those with a QR code issued and mandated by the government. It just so happens that those who refuse the QR code have to be unvaccinated by definition. Therefore, anyone who is resistant to the implementation of this new government tracking system should oppose any attempt to divide society by personal medical decisions and support individual choice of all – including the unvaccinated.
This destruction of fundamental freedoms is all the more striking at a time when Covid deaths and hospitalizations are incredibly low. First this crisis was about saving the hospitals, then it was about saving lives, then it became about reducing cases, and now that sound you hear are the goalposts being dragged again to make it all about preventing some potential future event.
It all seems like a system is now being implemented that will last well beyond Covid-19. If that thought doesn’t wake up the French, who last hit the streets en masse for months on end to protest a rise of a few cents in the price of gas, then it’s because the government they so distrusted has now successfully managed to co-opt and neutralize them.
Now is the time to take a stand against this continuing erosion of our freedoms. But how many French are even still awake?
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com
Tennessee vaccinations turn political: Dems denounce state halting programs that Republicans say bypassed parents
RT | July 14, 2021
After Republican lawmakers voiced concerns that Tennessee health authorities were directly targeting schoolchildren for Covid-19 vaccinations, the state halted the program – and came under fire from outraged Democrats.
The state Department of Health (TDH) is halting “adolescent outreach” for all vaccines, not just Covid-19, the Tennessean daily newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing “internal report and agency emails” they obtained. This includes Covid-19 vaccination drives on school property and reminders for teens to get their second dose of the jab.
Postcards and reminder emails will be sent to parents, so that they won’t be “potentially interpreted as solicitation to minors,” according to a TDH report cited by the Nashville-based daily.
The decision was reportedly made by Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey personally, and comes after the Monday firing of Dr. Michelle Fiscus, which the paper described as “Tennessee’s former top vaccine official.”
Fiscus claimed the decision was due to pressure from Republican state lawmakers who had embraced “misinformation” about Covid-19 vaccines. She also complained to CNN about a “toxic” environment at work.
At a legislative hearing in June, some GOP lawmakers accused TDH of circumventing parents and pressuring minors to get the vaccine using the school environment. Some conservatives said Fiscus was pushing to vaccinate teens without parental knowledge or approval, using what is known as the Mature Minor Doctrine, which typically says children 15 or older can consent to medical treatment.
According to the Tennessean, TDH Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tim Jones told staff they should conduct “no proactive outreach regarding routine vaccines” and “no outreach whatsoever regarding the HPV [Human papillomavirus] vaccine.” All school vaccination information should come from the Department of Education instead.
The paper’s report caused widespread outrage among Democrats. Former first daughter turned public health advocate Chelsea Clinton called the policy change “horrifying” with potentially “tragic consequences,” and insisted there was “no reasonable or moral defense” of it.
“Trumpism and right-wing anti-science extremism is harming and killing Americans,” declared Mother Jones writer David Corn, while Howard Fineman of the Yale School of Medicine called Republicans “pro-death & anti-science.”
“Does Tennessee really want kids not to be vaccinated against measles, mumps or meningitis,” Congressman Ted Lieu (D-California) wondered on Twitter.
“We’ve governed by nut-jobs with the intellectual skill sets of five year olds on sugar highs,” lamented Obama administration staffer and Democrat candidate for Congress Christopher Hale, who pointed out the halting of outreach applies to polio vaccines as well.
“They’re now, like, pro-polio?” tweeted MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
However, the CDC recommends polio vaccinations starting at two months, with subsequent doses through age six. Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccines are typically given starting at 12 months, while the CDC recommends meningitis shots starting at age 11. None of these would apply to school outreach to teens.
The Tenneseean report did include a statement by TDH spokesperson Sarah Tanksley, who said the agency was responding to “an intense national conversation that is affecting how many families evaluate vaccinations in general.”
“Tennessee is on solid footing when it comes to childhood immunizations and will continue to keep information and programming in place for parents,” Tanksley said. “We are simply mindful of how certain tactics could hurt that progress.”
Covid-19 vaccinations at schools are being discontinued in part because of low demand, she added, but also “out of an abundance of caution” because they were “perceived by some to give the wrong impression regarding parental consent.”
“While the location may change, the effort to vaccinate individuals who choose to receive it continues,” Tanksley said.
YouTube censors public Lake Forest School District board meeting where parents opposed mask mandates
By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | July 13, 2021
YouTube has scrubbed a public Lake Forest High School District 115 board meeting from its platform after numerous parents at the meeting spoke out against required masking.
Ben Bradley, a news anchor and investigative reporter for WGN TV News, tweeted: Our understanding is that people reported the content to youtube as a violation of its terms, which triggered the removal while youtube reviews.”
Twitter user Harriet Smith Martin said “numerous parents spoke against required masking” at the meeting and added that the video was removed before she had finished listening to it.
“The video was up as of 10:30 or so last night (I was watching it.),” she tweeted. “When I went back to finish listening this morning, it was gone.”
Under its far-reaching “medical misinformation” policy, YouTube prohibits a wide range of claims about masks including claims that “wearing a mask is dangerous or causes negative physical health effects,” that “wearing a mask causes oxygen levels to drop to dangerous levels,” or that “masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of COVID-19.”
As a result of this policy, numerous public debates and meetings on mask mandates have been censored by the tech giant.
In May, a public Shawnee Mission School District board meeting was removed under similar circumstances. The meeting was open to public comment and parents urged the district to remove mask mandates. YouTube flagged these comments as “misinformation” and removed the video.
A few days after this video was removed, YouTube deleted a Georgia mom’s testimony against mask mandates during a school board meeting. YouTube again claimed that the video violated its medical misinformation rules.
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Diplomacy is Now a Crime in Britain / Ian Proud
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From the Archives
Genetic baloney in thick slices
MAYBE COULD BE INC.
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | July 8, 2021
Gene research companies tend to come and go. They start out banging and popping like fireworks in the sky, and then they fade out—selling themselves to larger outfits who’ve hired better liars…
Once upon a time, it sounded easy. Start with a disease, find the gene responsible for the disease, and correct the problem.
Then, researchers wondered, was disease the result of one gene or a group of genes acting together?
Either way, the proof would be in devising cures for diseases using gene therapy. “Not yet, but soon…”
And regardless, the major need was: money. Lots and lots of money.
This need required good PR people. “We have to pump up the idea that we’re on the edge of tremendous breakthroughs. We’re always on that edge…”
This hype also needed to obscure the fact that there wasn’t (and isn’t) ANY gene cure for ANY disease. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Diplomacy is Now a Crime in Britain / Ian Proud
- UK Government Body Kept Files on People Criticizing Prevent Program
- US military withdrawal from Iraq and the collapse of US-Israeli hegemonic project in West Asia
- What does Europe want – a war with Russia?
- She Followed the Actual Data on COVID Vaccines and Masks — Her Career Took a Huge Hit
- Florida AG Sues Pfizer, Bourla Over Deceptive Marketing of COVID Vaccines
- Von der Leyen gifts her spin doctor a job for life
- 10K More U.S. Troops Deploy as Trump Weighs New Iran Strikes /Suliaman Ahmed
- Iranian crew declared Dena training vessel ‘unarmed’ to US warship before deadly torpedo strike: Report
- Iran’s NPT debate moves beyond parliament
- If Americans Knew
- Israel is squeezing the life out of Palestinians – Daily Update
- The Israeli Right Portrays Islam as Murderous. It Serves a Political Purpose
- Jordan Has Had Enough: King Abdullah’s Scathing Warning to Israel
- Israeli Colonizers (i.e. Settlers) Kill Palestinian Man Near Salfit
- New Google Maps images reveal massive scale of devastation in Gaza
- Jewish supremacy, anti-Palestinian bigotry on display in Israel – Daily Update
- Israeli Soldiers Abduct At Least 22 Across Occupied West Bank
- Eight Palestinians Killed in Israeli Attacks on Gaza
- Israeli former leaders and security chiefs threaten legal action over ‘Jewish terrorism’
- Israel map in LA Times ad includes all land from the river to the sea
- No Tricks Zone
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
