Twitter is attempting to stop Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s investigation into its moderation practices, calling the probe “retaliation” for its suspension of former president Donald Trump.
“Twitter seeks to stop AG Paxton from unlawfully abusing his authority as the highest law-enforcement officer of the State of Texas to intimidate, harass, and target Twitter in retaliation for Twitter’s exercise of its First Amendment rights,” Twitter said in its court filing on Monday.
Twitter said the investigation comes down to the platform making “editorial decisions” Paxton disagrees with, including suspending Trump’s account following the US Capitol riot on January 6.
On January 13, Paxton, a Republican, announced an investigation into the moderation practices of “Big Tech” companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Amazon.
“First Amendment rights and transparency must be maintained for a free online community to operate and thrive,” he said in a statement about the investigation, adding that the “seemingly coordinated de-platforming” of Trump and other leading conservative voices “not only chills free speech” but “wholly silences those whose speech and political beliefs do not align with leaders of Big Tech companies.”
Twitter has said the investigation requires them to hand over “volumes of highly confidential documents” related to their moderation policies, which they claim could compromise their moderation practices altogether.
The social media platform claimed in their filing that they tried compromising with Paxton and narrowing the scope of his broad investigation, but they could not come to an agreement.
“Instead, AG Paxton made clear that he will use the full weight of his office, including his expansive investigatory powers, to retaliate against Twitter for having made editorial decisions with which he disagrees,” they said in their suit, which was filed in Northern California.
Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter on January 8 due to multiple tweets being deemed by the company as possibly contributing to violence at the Capitol only two days before.
The mainstream media is outraged over President Biden’s decision to not level sanctions on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for his purported assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was a prominent columnist for the Washington Post. The CIA concluded that bin Salman ordered the assassination but U.S. officials have sanctioned only lower-level Saudi officials, choosing to leave bin Salman untouched by U.S. sanctions.
The outrage is a model of the hypocrisy that pervades the mainstream media. After all, these people just block out of their minds that the U.S. national-security state is every bit as brutal as Saudi officials are. Moreover, when it comes to the number of state-sponsored assassinations carried out on an annual basis, bin Salman and Saudi Arabia don’t even come close to matching those carried out by the world’s assassination nation.
Just look at the state-sponsored assassinations that are carried out by the Pentagon and the CIA in the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan every month. They have become so normalized — so much a regular part of American life — that the mainstream press has become totally blasé about them. No moral outrage at all.
Of course, Pentagon and CIA officials, along with their acolytes in the mainstream press, would respond, “Jacob, we are only killing terrorists. The Saudis killed an innocent man.”
Oh? And who exactly is a “terrorist.” Is it someone who criticizes a regime? Or is it someone who actually commits a terrorist act? And who makes that determination? If bin Salman concluded that Khashoggi was a terrorist who was trying to bring down the Saudi regime, would the U.S. mainstream press be coming to his defense?
Let’s consider the U.S. assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman. Both of them were U.S. citizens, just as Khashoggi was a Saudi citizen. Where is the outrage among the mainstream press over those two assassinations of American citizens at the hands of their own government?
Oh yes, U.S. officials and their assets in the mainstream press would say that Anwar al-Awlaki was a terrorist. Really? What does that mean? Does it mean that he criticized the U.S. national-security state for its brutal imperialist policies? Or does it mean that he actually engaged in criminal acts of terrorism? If that is the case, who made that determination? I don’t recall there ever being criminal trial in which an American jury listened to evidence and concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that al-Awlaki was guilty of some act of terrorism. All I recall was that U.S. officials concluded that al-Awlaki was a terrorist and, therefore, needed to have his life snuffed out. I also recall that the U.S. Supreme Court, in its customary deference to the authority of the national-security establishment, affirmed the decision to assassinate this American citizen, which snuffed out his life without any due process of law.
U.S. officials claim that 16-year-old Abdulhahman was the unfortunate collateral damage from the U.S. assassination of someone nearby. Even if that’s true — and it might not be — what was the justification for firing a missile at that person, especially knowing that it would end up killing everyone around him? Who died and made the Pentagon and the CIA the deciders of life and death of other people?
The fact is that U.S. and Saudi officials have no business assassinating anyone. The U.S. mainstream press is good at recognizing the wrongfulness of assassinating Khashoggi. Their loyalty to the Pentagon and the CIA, however, has given them a moral blindness that prevents them from recognizing the wrongfulness of state-sponsored assassinations carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment.
It’s also revealing that the mainstream press is calling for sanctions to be imposed on bin Salman but not calling for terminating the U.S. government’s armed sales to the Saudi regime. Yet, it’s those weapons that help the Saudi regime maintain its brutal tyranny over the Saudi people. And remember: the U.S. mainstream press is always calling for new gun-control measures — except when it comes to the U.S. government’s sales of guns to overseas pro-U.S. tyrants.
Notice also that the U.S. government continues to send U.S. taxpayer-funded foreign aid to brutal and tyrannical regimes, such as to Egypt’s tyrannical military dictatorship. That foreign aid helps to maintain the brutal tyranny that is enforced against the citizens under those regimes. No outrage there among the U.S. mainstream press. On the contrary, they continue to support foreign aid being sent to brutal and tyrannical pro-U.S. regimes.
It’s all just a valuable lesson in what can be called Hypocrisy 101.
Those of us who have been exposing the corruption in Big Pharma, and especially in the vaccine industry, for more than a decade now, knew this day was coming.
It’s been coming for a long time now, but the COVID Plandemic has shifted medical tyranny into high gear, primarily because this time around the masses have complied with the medical tyrants and, so far, voluntarily surrendered their rights all in the name of “public safety.”
Very soon now, the supply of experimental COVID vaccines will exceed the demand for those who have been lining up and begging to be injected with who-knows-what to fight the unseen enemy, the dreaded Coronavirus, and then it will be time to deal with the “vaccine resistant” who are perceived as a threat to public health.
Domestic Terrorists. That’s the new label for those who dare to question the new experimental COVID injections.
Richard Pan is a pediatrician-turned-politician who has spearheaded California’s descent into medical tyranny, since 2015, when he wrote bill SB277 to remove all religious exemptions to childhood vaccines in the State of California, despite widespread public opposition by parents, doctors, lawyers, and educators.
Dr. Pan has a long history of lying to his constituents and selling them out to Big Pharma.
Not being content with spearheading the movement to remove religious exemptions to childhood vaccines in 2015, in 2019 he spearheaded an effort to remove the medical exemptions also, by going after California doctors who were writing medical exemptions to childhood vaccines as well. See:
Today, if you live in California, it is nearly impossible to get any exemptions to childhood vaccines, which has driven many families out of California, and those that remain who want to protect their children from vaccines must home-educate their children and keep them out of the system (a good thing to do in ANY state!).
So it did not surprise me at all last week when an “Opinion” piece published in Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post titled: Opinion: Anti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism, was written by none other than the California Big Pharma spokesperson, Richard Pan.
I have probably written a couple of dozen of articles on Senator Pan over the years, so if you want to learn more about him, click here.
Kit Knightly, writing for OffGuardian, also picked up on this, relating it back to the January 6th “insurrection” and a way to enact new legislation on “domestic terrorism.”
CALLED IT: WaPo calls anti-vaxxers “domestic terrorists”
BACK IN JANUARY I WROTE ABOUT HOW THE CAPITOL HILL “INSURECTION” WAS LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR BIDEN’S ADMINISTRATION TO INTRODUCE A MUCH-TALKED-ABOUT NEW “DOMESTIC TERRORISM” LAW.
The piece speculated that any definition of “domestic terrorism” will be very loose, and include essentially anybody the state finds problematic. Including those who spread “anti-vaccine misinformation” [emphasis added]:
What will “Domestic Terrorism” mean in this law? The answer to that is pretty much always “whatever they want it to mean.”
It will probably be tied into the Covid “pandemic” in some way, too. After all, what is discouraging people from taking vaccines if not the very definition of “terrorism”, right?
It took less than two months for the mainstream media to prove OffG right. Just last week the Washington Post ran an op-ed piece by California State Senator Richard Pam headlined:
Anti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism
The article goes on to insist that “Laws need to be strengthened” to protect people administering vaccines from being “harassed”. That “Social media companies should not be complicit in this dangerous movement”, and caps it all off with glorious jingoism:
Getting vaccinated is a patriotic act. So is speaking up to support public health efforts. Let’s not allow extremism, division or fear to slow the efforts to end this deadly chapter in our nation’s history.
The message is clear: anyone who questions vaccination, especially the Covid “vaccine”, is a threat to public health and national security. A terrorist.
The WaPo is the first mainstream outlet to make the parallel so blatantly, but they almost certainly won’t be the last.
Be on the lookout for other examples. They’ll probably start building up this narrative quite fast.
And we can likely expect a new false-flag.
Something along the lines of a “lone wolf extremist” who was “radicalised online” by “militant anti-vaxxers” and then allegedly does something crazy like mail Bill Gates a suitcase full of home-made explosives or drives a tanker truck into a vaccination centre.
Of course, that will mean we need to start shutting down and censoring “vaccine misinformation” which is “encouraging violence” and “damaging public health”.
In this interview, which was initially banned by YouTube before it was even published (but now reversed), Spiro is joined by Attorney Ana Garner of New Mexico. Garner represents her client Isaac Legaretta, an officer at the Doña Ana County Detention Center and a military veteran, who is suing the county over its new policy for first responders to receive the COVID-19 vaccinations or face termination.
Attorney Garner explains the significance of this case and what is at stake, as it is the first of its kind and may set a new standard for legal precedent regarding mandatory vaccination. Garner says she is prepared to take this case to the Supreme Court if necessary.
Spiro and Ana Garner also discuss another case of hers that is ongoing currently. A case that challenges not only the Governor of New Mexico, but the emergency itself.
You can see this important interview on the free speech platform BitChute below:
While on the one hand Twitter flexed its muscles when it permanently de-platformed a sitting US president and deactivated tens of thousands of other accounts, with Facebook closely following suit against accounts the two social media giants claimed were “disinformation” concerning the 2020 election results, in practice it was a pyrrhic victory at best. The real power of Facebook, Twitter, other social media lay in their reputation as essentially neutral, impartial platforms where free speech was triumphant and the invisible hand of the marketplace of ideas dictated which accounts would get millions of followers and which would languish in obscurity.
That, of course, was never really true. Twitter and Facebook were no strangers to muting, banning, or at least stealth-banning accounts that promoted ideas inconsistent with whatever dogma, social or political, prevailed in Washington D.C. at the moment. However, this tended to be done in dribs and drabs, not in avalanches which moreover explicitly targeted specific political candidates or parties. Twitter’s knee-jerk panic-induced purge of Trump and Trump-supporting accounts that followed the events of January 6, 2020 on the flimsy pretense that there was a “risk of violence” created by the mere existence of these accounts, showed that @Jack and indeed the entire @TwitterSupport team are not impartial at all, for all the world to see. Naturally, as Twitter and Biden apologists were quick to point out, the First Amendment does not extend to private entities, which means that, legally, US social media giants were in the clear. Unironically defending a mega-corporation’s inherent right to censor speech in a way that US government institutions are prohibited from doing was not exactly a very good position to be in. That is a blow to the foundations of Twitter’s free-speech reputation from which it can never recover. That toothpaste can never be put back in the tube again. Banning accounts, rather than suspending until “offending” material is deleted, is a form of “prior restraint” of free speech that is explicitly prohibited by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Even such Donald Trump non-fans as Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron found themselves decrying Twitter’s decision to muzzle the US president, on the basis of it being a corporate abuse of power that should be reserved only to national governments.
Twitter’s epic self-own became evident within days, in the context of elections in Uganda in which Twitter, no doubt at the behest of US intelligence community failure and/or other political and economic interests, attempted to meddle by locking accounts favoring candidates the US government clearly didn’t favor. Uganda’s retaliation in the form of shutting down Twitter in all of the country led to a predictable Twitter boilerplate reaction concerning the sanctity of free speech that was equally predictably jeered by US Trump supporters who by now were less than impressed with Twitter’s commitment to open political discourse. It seems rather inevitable that other countries will follow suit whenever Twitter-based political meddling becomes too much to tolerate, without exposing themselves to the usual tut-tutting by pearl-clutching Western liberals who praised Twitter’s shut-down of Trump. US social media networks rapidly won reputation as US propaganda and influence instruments will facilitate effective action against them in the future by countries interested in defending their sovereignty and integrity of political institutions.
Ne Parler Pas
Twitter’s and Facebook’s blowing of own cover, as it were, was quickly followed by the saga of the Parler social media network which revealed a far deeper behind-the-scenes collusion among information technology firms in support of Biden and the Democrats. Parler was a low-budget, low-quality operation set up to cash in on Twitter’s banning and shadow-banning policies. Its sole advantage was the absence of literally any restrictions on political expression, which meant that it quickly became a network with a pronounced GOP lean. The low-budget aspect of the company meant that instead of setting up its own “server farm”, with mirroring and denial of service protections against the inevitable hacking attempts that incidentally also cost real money, it opted to have its operations hosted on servers owned by none other than Amazon, which has extensive dealings with and contracts from many US intelligence agencies, including secret services. A rumor that Donald Trump might react to the Twitter ban by holding court on Parler was enough for Amazon to peremptorily kick Parler off its servers. Other Parler vendors, down to law firms, similarly refused services, all of it happening to a company against which no government investigation or other action has even been initiated. Another piece of evidence, as if one were needed, of the existence of a “deep state” in the US operating outside the official legal framework.
It turns out, however, that Parler is run not only by cheapskates but experts at trolling because in their search for an alternative hosting platform they settled on a provider with servers based in… Russia, where their operations evidently do not break any laws, written or unwritten, and therefore can proceed unimpeded, in stark contrast with the United States. That revelation prompted a furious response from Congressional Democrats who are now demanding an FBI investigation into Parler’s Russia ties and Russia’s involvement in the events of January 6. Again, a panicky knee-jerk reaction that will set a precedent not only for the United States but also for the rest of the world, that social media networks on servers outside one’s country are automatically to be viewed as foreign agents.
War of Words
One way or the other, things will never be the same for social media, in the United States or elsewhere. The idea of a global free speech commons conveniently hosted by US social media networks in cozy collaboration with US intelligence services has been revealed to be a pernicious myth and is now irretrievably dead. Going forward, no self-respecting country will allow its political discourse space to be in the hands of unknown, shadowy, and unaccountable US actors. In practical terms it means demands for transparency and regulation of social media, even in the United States where the Republicans will eventually return to power and settle scores with @Jack and @Zuck. Elsewhere in the world, we are likely to see the creation of social media alternatives, as well as the growth in popularity of existing ones such as Telegram or even VKontakte. Russia’s newly adopted legal framework for hefty fines to be leveled against social media firms for allowing disinformation and other socially undesirable activities will become the norm all over the world.
This may lead to a situation in which the world’s polarization into hostile economic and military blocs is mirrored by the fragmentation of the Internet, including of social media, into national or regional networks, to the detriment of the currently existing global one. China’s early banning of US social media networks from its country, a decision whose wisdom is now plainly evident, may become the global norm. The deepening US political crisis that has not ended with Biden’s inauguration means that the United States is liable to lead the world in restricting the activities of foreign social media firms on its territory, under the guise of “combating domestic terrorism” that is Biden’s actual top priority, thus providing further ammunition for advocates of doing the same in their own countries. Twitter’s continued suppression of speech, such as suspension of a Chinese official government account for supposedly “dehumanizing” the Uyghurs, again ostensibly on the basis of the company’s terms of service rather than US official guidance, will only accelerate process.
Whether matters will deteriorate to such an extent remains to be seen. If US continues to escalate its aggression against countries unwilling to become its client states, social media will not remain unaffected by it. However, Twitter’s and Facebook’s panicky reaction to the January 6 “insurrection” had greatly weakened one of crucial tools of US “hybrid warfare”.
The U.S. ceased to be any kind of representative government in 2020.
And that’s just the way the totalitarians in Europe want it.
The moment the Supreme Court abdicated its responsibility to even recognize Texas’ complaint against Pennsylvania was the moment the veneer of Constitutional authority in D.C. was removed.
With the Court cowed into political subservience and the presidency and the legislature secured there is nothing left of any Constitutional ‘checks and balances’ in D.C.
Now that the Democrat-controlled House is done embarrassing themselves with a sham impeachment of Donald Trump they can get serious about consolidating power such that they never relinquish it.
It’s called H.R. 1 and, in the words of John Fund, “It is the worst piece of legislation I have even seen in my 40 years reporting from Washington.”
I’m not going into the details of it here, Fund does a fine job of outlining them, along with Zerohedge. And whether this abortion of a bill passes through a filibuster in the Senate is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that this bill is a laundry list of changes to the electoral system of the U.S. to ensure single party rule for what’s left of the lifespan of the United States as a 50 entity compact among equals.
Oh, I’m sorry, that isn’t correct because not one of the current members of the Supreme Court believes that’s what the U.S. is anymore, a compact of equals.
If any of them did they would have argued for Texas’ right to sue Pennsylvania for its election law changes and heard the case under the court’s original jurisdiction.
Even if they’d thrown the case out on its merit that would have been somewhat acceptable, but to refuse to hear it was an insult to anyone with a passing acquaintance with the Constitution.
What Speaker Nancy Pelosi has done with this bill is to make manifest for the world to see that D.C. is ruled and operated by a mafia. And that mafia works for its own betterment, not those it rules over.
That’s been the very clear message since the election. Because election outcomes not controlled by the D.C. mafia are verboten.
Especially now that the plan to tear down and ‘Build Back Better’ the global economy is in process. Nothing as tawdry and plebian as democracy and civilian input can be tolerated when such plans are afoot.
Americans are just now getting the memo that Europeans got repeatedly over the past two generations. The words of former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker echo through the corridors of the fabulously ugly EU headquarters in Brussels.
“There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.”
So it was in November and so it will be in 2022 and 2024. If we learned anything from 2020 it is that nothing is off the table in the pursuit of legitimizing a naked grab for power.
The pols in D.C. can tell themselves that Trump was a delusional crackpot all they want. They can have their quislings in the media repeat that lie endlessly in the hope someone would actually believe it. They can issue endless dire warnings about domestic terrorism from those who know in their hearts their voice was stolen from them.
They can convince those too cowardly or naïve to admit the truth of what happened, but they cannot ignore the consequences of their actions.
Ruling through force is a self-negation of the legitimacy of the rule itself. Forcing people to accept your vision of the future literally invalidates the vision. Because if your ideas had any merit you wouldn’t have to force people to abide by them.
This is why the European Union is set up the way it is. There is no power vested in the democratic part of the Union. The EU parliament has no real power, only advisory power.
The real power lies with the unelected EU Commission and the leadership of the European Central Bank. Their decisions are rubber-stamped by the European Court of Justice whose name is, at best, a sick joke.
We have a president taking office under sincere doubts about the election. Steadfast refusals by those who support him to even entertain the idea that there was anything at all wrong with the election results.
If that’s the case, why do we even need these changes? If Pelosi and company won this election fair and square (which they didn’t) then what’s the rush to put forth H.R. 1 in the first place?
I ask these questions knowing full well that H.R.1 will never pass a Senate where the filibuster was recently defended by the controlled opposition known colloquially as the GOP.
But Pelosi’s anchor baby of a bill isn’t intended to pass in its current form. It’s meant to begin the obligatory Straussian Two Step every bad idea in D.C. goes through.
Repeat after me: Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis.
This bill is the Thesis. The GOP will filibuster for the Antithesis and they will eventually agree on something that looks like a compromise but will be fundamentally worse.
If you ever wondered why we get such abysmal legislation on just about every issue, you now know the mechanism.
And it further doesn’t matter that states are passing election law changes to harden their elections against what happened last fall. Eventually D.C. will mandate this is how Federal elections are handled.
And if any state doesn’t comport with these changes there will be asymmetric punishments handed out by withholding funding.
This is the same thing that Hungary fought tooth and nail to stop in the COVID relief agreement in the EU, to keep separate national sovereignty and national laws and funding.
The point, ultimately, is that the Biden administration and the Democrats are moving very quickly to remake this country in Europe’s autocratic image.
Because the Straussian Two Step is too inefficient for The Davos Crowd. The European way is a so much more efficient form of control.
They have to do so through different means, with different language, “protecting voter disenfranchisement,” but the end result is exactly the same — a central government that issues edicts that the vassal states must comply with ignoring the desires or voices of the people it rules over.
A few weeks ago I asked you, “What happens after The Churn?“ What happens when the rules of the game of survival change so rapidly that we have no framework left to make sense of the world we live in.
H.R. 1 represents one of those post-Churn building blocks of a world we will soon barely recognize. The worst part is so many will cheer for it rather than return to the chaos of the old world.
Indian authorities have reportedly given an ultimatum to US social media platforms, threatening jail time for their local employees if the companies continue to ignore official takedown requests against “damaging” information.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter have each received written notices warning their employees could face arrest should the requests be ignored, in some cases citing specific India-based staff by name, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing “people familiar” with the matter.
The reported warnings come as New Delhi faces down Big Tech platforms amid a wave of heated protests over controversial agricultural bills, which have drawn thousands of farmers to rally in the Indian capital, at times descending to violent clashes with security forces. While the government has long wrangled with the social media platforms, the threats of arrest mark a sharp escalation of pressure.
In early February, Twitter blocked access to a litany of accounts for Indian users, among them lawmakers, news outlets, journalists and political commentators. Though the platform quietly reversed those bans some 12 hours later, AFP reporter Bhuvan Bagga, citing a government source, noted the move followed an order from India’s IT ministry to block hundreds of accounts it accused of spreading “factually incorrect” claims and “inflaming passions” around the farmer protests.
The ministry responded harshly to Twitter’s sudden reversal, threatening “penal action” should it continue to rebuff the government’s takedown requests. The warning appears to have worked, as Twitter reinstituted many of the bans within days, though refused to re-block “accounts that consist of news media entities, journalists, activists, and politicians.”
A Facebook spokesperson told the Journal the platform complies with takedown and data requests “in accordance with applicable law and our terms of service,” while its subsidiary WhatsApp said it abides by the orders only when they are consistent with “internationally recognized standards” of human rights and due process. Twitter, meanwhile, was more defiant, insisting it would “continue to advocate for the fundamental principles of the Open Internet.”
As Big Tech firms seek their way into India’s massive market, the country recently imposed new rules to govern social media platforms, requiring them to appoint India-based representatives to coordinate with law enforcement and government agencies. The restrictions can also compel sites to scrub content the state believes to undermine national security or public order. Ravi Shankar Prasad, the minister of electronics and information technology, argued the rules would force the companies to be “more responsible and more accountable,” after previously blasting sites like Twitter for “double standards” in enforcing their policies.
Twice in the last six weeks, warnings were issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless.
First we had the hysteria over the violence we were told was likely to occur at numerous state capitols on Inauguration Day. “Law enforcement and state officials are on high alert for potentially violent protests in the lead-up to Inauguration Day, with some state capitols boarded up and others temporarily closed ahead of Wednesday’s ceremony,” announcedCNN. In an even scarier formulation, NPR intoned that “the FBI is warning of protests and potential violence in all 50 state capitals ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.”
The resulting clampdowns were as extreme as the dire warnings. Washington, D.C. was militarized more than at any point since the 9/11 attack. The military was highly visible on the streets. And, described The Washington Post, “state capitols nationwide locked down, with windows boarded up, National Guard troops deployed and states of emergency preemptively declared as authorities braced for potential violence Sunday mimicking the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump rioters.” All of this, said the paper, “reflected the anxious state of the country ahead of planned demonstrations.”
But none of that happened — not even close. The Washington Postacknowledged three weeks later:
Despite warnings of violent plots around Inauguration Day, only a smattering of right-wing protesters appeared at the nation’s statehouses. In Tallahassee, just five armed men wearing the garb of the boogaloo movement — a loose collection of anti-government groups that say the country is heading for civil war — showed up. Police and National Guard personnel mostly ignored them.
All over the country it was the same story. “But at the moment that Biden was taking the oath of office in Washington, the total number of protesters on the Capitol grounds in Topeka stood at five — two men supporting Trump and two men and a boy ridin’ with Biden,” reportedThe Wichita Eagle (“With Kansas Capitol in lockdown mode, Inauguration Day protest fizzles). “The protests fizzled out after not many people showed up,” reported the local Florida affiliate in Tallahassee. “The large security efforts dwarfed the protests that materialized by Wednesday evening,” saidCNN, as “state capitols and other cities remained largely calm.”
Indeed, the only politically-motivated violence on Inauguration Day was carried out by Antifa and anarchist groups in Portland and Seattle, which caused some minor property damage as part of anti-Biden protests while they “scuffled with police.” CNN, which spent a full week excitedly hyping the likely violence coming to state capitols by right-wing Trump supporters, was forced to acknowledge in its article about their non-existence that “one exception was Portland, where left-wing protesters damaged the Democratic Party of Oregon building during one of several planned demonstrations.”
Completely undeterred by that debacle, Democrats and their media spokespeople returned with a new set of frightening warnings for this week. The date of March 4 has taken on a virtually religious significance for the Q-Anon movement, announced NBC News’ Ben Collins, who was heard on NPR on Thursday speaking through actual, literal journalistic tears as he recounted all the times he called Facebook to plead with them to remove dangerous right-wing extremists on their platform(tears commence at roughly 7:00 minutes in). Valiantly holding back full-on sobbing, Collins explained that he proved to be so right but it pains and sorrows him to admit this. With his self-proclaimed oracle status fully in place, he prophesized that March 4 had taken on special dangers because Q-Anon followers concluded that this is when Trump would be inaugurated.
This is how apocalyptic cult leaders always function. When the end of the world did not materialize on January 6, Collins insisted that January 20 was the day of the violent reckoning. When nothing happened on that day, he moved the Doomsday Date to March 4. The flock cannot remain in a state of confusion for too long about why the world has not ended as promised by the prophet, so a new date must quickly be provided with an explanation for why this is serious business this time.
This March 4 paranoia was not confined to NBC’s resident millennial hall monitor and censorship advocate. On March 3, The New York Times warned that “the Capitol Police force is preparing for another assault on the Capitol building on Thursday after obtaining intelligence of a potential plot by a militia group.” All this, said the Paper of Record, because “intelligence analysts had spent weeks tracking online chatter by some QAnon adherents who have latched on to March 4 — the original inauguration date set in the Constitution — as the day Donald J. Trump would be restored to the presidency and renew his crusade against America’s enemies.”
These dire warnings also, quite predictably, generated serious reactions. “House leaders on Wednesday abruptly moved a vote on policing legislation from Thursday to Wednesday night, so lawmakers could leave town,” said the Times. We learned that there would be further militarization of the Capitol and troop deployment in Washington indefinitely due to so-called “chatter.” NPRannounced: “The House of Representatives has canceled its Thursday session after the U.S. Capitol Police said it is aware of a threat by an identified militia group to breach the Capitol complex that day.”
Do you know what happened on March 4 when it came to violence from right-wing extremists? The same thing that happened on January 20: absolutely nothing. There were no attempted attacks on the Capitol, state capitols, or any other government institution. There was violent crime registered that day in Washington D.C. but none of it was political violence by those whom media outlets warned posed such a grave danger that Congress has to be closed and militarization of Washington extended indefinitely.
Perhaps the most significant blow to the maximalist insurrection/coup narrative took place inside the Senate on Thursday. Ever since January 6, those who were not referring to the riot as a “coup attempt” — as though the hundreds of protesters intended to overthrow the most powerful and militarized government in history — were required to refer to it instead as an “armed insurrection.”
This formulation was crucial not only for maximizing fear levels about the Democrats’ adversaries but also, as I’ve documented previously, because declaring an “armed insurrection” empowers the state with virtually unlimited powers to act against the citizenry. Over and over, leading Democrats and their media allies repeated this phrase like some hypnotic mantra:
But this was completely false. As I detailed several weeks ago, so many of the most harrowing and widespread media claims about the January 6 riot proved to be total fabrications. A pro-Trump mob did not bash Office Brian Sicknick’s skull in with a fire extinguisher. No protester brought zip-ties with them as some premeditated plot to kidnap members of Congress (two rioters found them on a table inside). There’s no evidence anyone intended to assassinate Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or anyone else.
Yet the maximalist narrative of an attempted coup or armed insurrection is so crucial to Democrats — regardless of whether it is true — that pointing out these facts deeply infuriates them. A television clip of mine from last week went viral among furious liberals calling me a fascism supporter even though it did nothing but point out the indisputable facts that other than Brian Sicknick, whose cause of death remains unknown, the only people who died at the Capitol riot were Trump supporters, and that there are no known cases of the rioters deliberately killing anyone.
(Two FBI operatives have since anonymously leaked that it is looking at a “suspect” who may have engaged with Sicknick in a way that ultimately contributed to his death. But nothing still is known; Sicknick’s mother claims he died of a stroke while his brother says it was from pepper spray; and all of this is worlds away from the endlessly repeated media claim that a bloodthirsty pro-Trump mob savagely bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.)
What we know for sure is that no Trump supporter fired any weapon inside the Capitol and that the FBI seized a grand total of zero firearms from those it arrested that day — a rather odd state of affairs for an “armed insurrection,” to put that mildly. In questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Thursday’s hearing, a senior FBI official, Jill Sanborn, acknowledged this key fact:
(The “one lady” who died referred to by this FBI official was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed Trump supporter who was killed when she was shot point blank in the neck inside the Capitol on January 6 by an armed Capitol Police Officer).
The key point to emphasize here is that threats and dangers are not binary: they either exist or they are fully illusory. They reside on a spectrum. To insist that they be discussed rationally, soberly and truthfully is not to deny the existence of the threat itself. One can demand a rational and fact-based understanding of the magnitude of the threat revealed by the January 6 riot without denying that there is any danger at all.
Those who denounced the excesses of McCarthyism were not insisting that there were no Communists in government; those denouncing the excesses of the Clinton administration’s attempts to seize more surveillance power after the Oklahoma City court bombing were not denying that some anti-government militias may do violence again; those who objected to the protracted and unhinged assault on civil liberties by the Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations after 9/11 were not arguing that there were no Muslim extremists intent on committing violence.
The argument then, and the argument now, is that the threat was being deliberately inflated and exaggerated, and fears stoked and exploited, both for political gain and to justify the placement of more and more powers in the hands of the state in the name of stopping these threats. That is the core formula of authoritarianism — to place the population in a state of such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of power which security state agencies and politicians demand and which they insist are necessary to keep everyone safe.
There is, relatedly, a massive political benefit from convincing the population that the opponents and critics of those in power do not merely hold a different ideology but are coup plotters, insurrectionists, domestic terrorists. That is the same political benefit that accrued from trying to persuade the population that adversaries of the Democratic Party were treasonous Kremlin agents. The more you can demonize your opponents as something monstrous, the more political power you can acquire.
And as Democrats and liberals now gear up to demand a new War on Terror, this one domestic in nature, it should be no surprise that the rhetorical leaders of their effort now are the same lowlife neocon and Rovian slanderers — Bill Kristol, David Frum, Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, Rick Wilson — who demonized everyone who questioned them as part of the first War on Terror as traitors and terrorist-lovers and subversives. It is not a coincidence that neocons are leading the way now as liberals’ favorite propagandists: they are the most skilled and experienced in weaponizing and exaggerating terrorism threats for political gain and authoritarian power.
Ultimately, if this “armed insurrection” and threat of domestic terrorism are so grave, why do media figures and politicians in both parties — from Adam Schiff to Liz Cheney — keep lying about it and peddling fictions? Politicians and media figures do that only when they know that the threat, in reality, is not nearly as menacing as they need it to be to fulfill their objectives of political gain and coercive power.
It’s unacceptable that the EU is pushing big brother authoritarianism on its member states via vaccine passports. French President Emmanuel Macron should stay true to his word and take a stand against this nanny statism.
After all, Macron couldn’t have been more clear when he said in a national address last November that Covid-19 vaccines would not be mandatory. And that’s exactly as it should be.
No one should have the right to dictate what substances you inject into your body – and especially not the state. The rights of the collective end where the rights of the individual begin, and that’s precisely with one’s own physical being. If someone is worried about catching Covid-19, then they have every right to get vaccinated in the interests of self-protection, but no one should have any ability to impose it on anyone else.
Given the debate over the duration of any Covid-19 antibodies, it’s unclear exactly how often people are going to have to pump any vaccine into their body. Will it be every few months? Once a year?
Nor is it clear exactly how the virus will mutate in future, or how fast Covid-19 could become just another banal seasonal virus floating around out there. For those who are in good health, with no pre-existing medical issues, they may consider the injection of a vaccine to be worse than contending with the virus itself. And they should have every right to make that choice.
Yet we’re now being told that the European Commission will table a vaccine passport concept this month, effectively suppressing individual choice over inoculation. It would be required for travel within the European Union or to avoid quarantine upon arrival.
Some countries have already adapted the concept for use on their own territory in the form of a ‘green pass’ required for access to venues such as gyms, theaters, concert venues, movie theaters, and restaurants. The idea seems to have initially taken hold in Israel, where people have to flash a digital pass showing proof of vaccination everywhere they go in order to have any semblance of a normal life.
Now everywhere from Paris to New York, authorities are considering the idea of people having to show that they’ve taken either the vaccine or, alternatively, proof that they’ve had a giant Q-Tip shoved up their nose within the last three days, and have tested negative for Covid.
Any such banalization of Covid PCR testing as a prerequisite for daily living means that every few days, people would have to line up at a testing facility – possibly for hours, given how relatively few PCR testing facilities exist in some countries – all just to prove that they don’t carry this particular virus. The idea is absolutely absurd. Because what about the next virus that overwhelms hospitals, as French newspaper titles suggested already occurred here in France in 2018, in 2017, in 2016 and in 2015? In fact, it seems like there’s barely a flu season that goes by during which French hospitals aren’t overwhelmed.
And yet, the flu shot has always been optional. Every year here in France and in North America, there’s a massive annual push for everyone to run out and get the seasonal flu shot regardless of personal circumstance or susceptibility. The notion of sacrificing domain over one’s own body – which is about the only thing that we ultimately control in our time on this planet – under the pretext of the greater collective has long been the propaganda imposed on society annually for years, even as some doctors privately advise patients who aren’t at risk not to bother with it.
Once freedom is taken away, it’s rarely ever restored – particularly if the populace has grown resigned, complacent, or indifferent. Covid-19 vaccine passports or territorial green passes could very well lead to more impositions that hijack personal autonomy. Because what exactly is stopping any creeping authoritarianism once states accept that they can force individuals into a system whereby everyday life is impossible unless they jump the hoops and tick the boxes dictated by the state?
Covid-19 is just one virus. But what about next year’s flu? Is that going to be added to the vaccine passport, as well, given that every year it seems to overwhelm hospitals? It’s just too tempting for governments not to throw more bricks onto a foundation like a passport or pass that they’ve already created and that citizens have already accepted, lest they find themselves effectively banned from everything that they used to take for granted in their daily life.
In the extreme, such access passes could slide toward something like China’s digital social credit system, introduced in 2014, that pegs everyday access to things like travel and public sector employment to points earned or lost in relation to professional and personal interactions, court records, financial and physical health.
If the European Commission insists on Covid vaccination passes, then it’s up to Macron to keep his promise to voters and safeguard individual French citizens’ right of personal autonomy. Even if that means pulling France out of the European Union.
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
If there were any doubts that a civil war had in fact been waged in the US, and that the side that “fortified” the 2020 election and redefined the republic as “Our Democracy” triumphed, HR1 should dispel the last vestiges of them.
The bill, also named “For The People Act” of 2021, passed in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives in a 220-210 vote on Wednesday. Only one Democrat was opposed.
The 800-page bill basically codifies all the problematic practices of the 2020 election into law. There’s an expansion of mail-in ballots and extended deadlines to count them, but also automatic voter registration, a waiver for voter IDs, and nationwide ballot-harvesting, California-style. It also shifts the authority to draw congressional districts from states, criminalizes broadly defined “interference” in elections, and so much more.
Whatever one may think of the Heritage Foundation, its analysis of the bill is factually accurate. Don’t take my word for it, though, read it and compare it to the actual text.
Naturally, Democrats have denounced any opposition to it as “racist” and “voter suppression.” CNN quickly located and trotted out their vaunted “fact-checker” Daniel Dale to criticize not Heritage’s analysis, but former VP Mike Pence’s op-ed based on it.
Ironically, most of Dale’s fact-check was either Clintonesque quibbles about the meaning of words – which we’ve already established one side can and does change at will – or acknowledgments that Pence was factually correct. The latter was buried at the end and framed otherwise. The Narrative, you see, must be preserved.
Republicans are either whining about how the law is bad, unfair, un-American, what have you – and putting faith in the Senate filibuster to stop it from becoming law. What makes them think the Democrats won’t use this as an excuse to abolish the filibuster, the same way they cited the pandemic to implement the voting changes in 2020?
When Democrats have power they use it, and controlling both legacy and social media means they can easily shape the Narrative. They can just “cancel” and “deplatform” those who disagree.
Nor should anyone put hope in the courts. HR1 has incorporated the same “trick” as Pennsylvania used, narrowly defining how it can be legally challenged to the point of making it almost impossible. If a challenge somehow reaches the US Supreme Court, odds are the Nine will simply wash their hands and look the other way, as they did with the Texas brief.
Meanwhile, thousands of National Guard troops that have been patrolling the Capitol inside a razor-wire perimeter fence are now staying through June, because the Biden administration keeps claiming there is “chatter” from “extremists” online about some kind of insurrection.
When nothing happens, they claim their measures prevented it, of course. That’s how phantom menaces are supposed to work. Feel free to shrug off the ‘Star Wars’ prequels or the ‘Hunger Games’, but there are clearly people in Washington who take their inspiration from them.
Shortly after the January 6 riot at the Capitol, I suggested that a second US civil war has already been fought and won, basing it not on some hard evidence in my possession but simply on the way the Democrats were behaving. Then came the infamous TIME magazine article about how there really was a “conspiracy” by Democrat operatives and neocons to “fortify” the election by changing rules, recruiting poll workers and getting social media companies to ban anything they labeled “disinformation.”
What else does one need to understand that the old America, the Republic defined in the Constitution of 1789, has ceased to exist? It has been replaced by something everyone calls Our Democracy. You can hear the words capitalized when they say it. And in this new society, inspired by the intersectionality of dystopian fiction, the old rules simply no longer apply.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator
Some politicians can’t stop coming up with new ways of bossing people around and preventing the return of normal life, all in the name of countering coronavirus. A prime example of such coronavirus tyrants is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
This week, Cuomo, who has been imposing on people in New York for a year some of the harshest coronavirus-related restrictions in America, announced he is rolling out yet another rights abuse. Cuomo is requiring in a new “pilot program” that people obtain and present vaccination passports to gain entrance to certain places and take part in various activities that have been curtailed by government over the last year.
Cuomo calls the vaccination passports Excelsior Passes. No matter the name the state’s vaccination passports are marketed under, they are a mechanism for government tracking people’s movements, pressuring people into taking experimental coronavirus vaccines that carry risk of serious injury and death, and implementing a vaccinations-based caste system.
Elizabeth Elizalde writes at the New York Post that in the New York state pilot program people are being required to present their vaccination passports “in order to enter sports arenas, theaters and other businesses.” To receive a vaccination passport, Elizalde writes, a person must prove he has received one of the experimental coronavirus vaccines or that he has recently tested negative for coronavirus.
With time — after the experimental coronavirus vaccines have become more widely available — expect Cuomo to adjust the program so proof of injection with one of the not-really vaccines will be the only means to receive an Excelsior Pass and, thereby, the ability to take part legally in many activities.
The mounting Democratic assault on free speech is finally producing blowback – most lately, from a bill proposed by California State Senator Melissa Melendez to protect diversity of political belief and affiliation. Her much-overdue legislation (Senate bills 238 and 249) are together known as the Diversity of Thought Act, which seeks to modify both California Government and Education Codes, ensuring citizens cannot be discriminated against based on political views. That such a bill is needed speaks loudly to the sad deterioration of American political culture. In an age of multiculturalism, wokism, and identity-politics mania it appears that every known human property has been legally protected but one: that of political belief.
In the supposed land of freedom and democracy, Californians – like other Americans – do in 2021 require special legislation to protect free speech. A brief glance at U.S. history reveals a tortured legacy of political repression directed against those daring to hold unpopular beliefs: suffragists, anarchists, socialists, Communists, antiwar and civil rights activists to name some. Now? Well, after years and decades of free-speech activism in defense of First Amendment rights, the country has once again descended into a reign of bigotry and censorship – this time orchestrated by sanctimonious Democratic elites and their shills in the media and Big Tech.
Melendez notes that “it is unfathomable to me that corporations and members of the public would ruin a person’s career, business, and family because of their political ideology. A free society should not allow thoughts and ideas to be censored. Free speech covers all speech –not just that with which you agree.” But thanks to small-minded Democratic politicians, censorship has indeed been the order of the day, and it’s getting steadily worse in schools, on college campuses, in businesses, in the political system, across Silicon Valley and the corporate media. Though scarcely necessary, the Senator added: “A climate of intolerance has been established and has stifled healthy and normal debate.”
As if to immediately validate Melendez’ claims, Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzales, based in San Diego, fired back on Twitter: “I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but your racist, pro-domestic terrorism, xenophobic, misogynist views do not warrant protection from discrimination. Your choice to hate does not make you part of a protected class.” If this crude outburst happened to be directed specifically at Melendez, then charges of racism and misogynism, not to mention “domestic terrorism”, could be nothing more than another mindless episode of hate speech. In fact Gonzales never identified any concrete example related to Melendez, so best to assume she has in mind some larger targeted collective.
Xenophobia? Can Gonzales be taken seriously? She is a fiercely partisan member of a party that has spent five years promoting the nonstop Russiagate hoax – probably the most disgraceful episode of media-fanned xenophobia in American history. Here was an entirely contrived hatred that brought the U.S. and Russia, heavily-armed nuclear states, disturbingly close to military conflict. There is no sign that Gonzales ever spoke out against such national outrage, which continues into the present. Further, if she has condemned the months of ongoing domestic terrorism carried out by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, still visible in a few cities, we have no record of it.
Being free to speak one’s political mind, without fear of retribution, has deep psychological meaning for me. I happened to be one of those students who occupied Sproul Hall to protest crackdowns on free speech at U.C., Berkeley in fall 1964. I still own the original hand-painted button that spells “FSM”. Later, for the crime of political deviance (as a Gramscian Marxist) I was purged from my reputedly safe job as professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Calling the shots for the university were three giant corporations – Monsanto, McDonnell-Douglas, Ralston-Purina. Aside from my activism against the Vietnam War during the early 1970s, I helped organize the infamous McDonnell-Douglas Project as well as the local underground newspaper, The Outlaw. Any right to combat political repression I had was strictly formal – and my fate was hardly unusual.
It turned out that this personal experience would soon intersect with the life and work of Frank Wilkinson – for decades known as “Mr. First Amendment” – lasting more than 30 years. We were close friends. As visiting professor at Carleton University in Ottawa during 1985, I invited Frank (a spellbinding orator on behalf of free speech) for a lecture tour of Ontario. Wilkinson passed away in January 2006 after a prolific career of speaking, writing, and activism dedicated to First Amendment rights. Knowing him as I did, he would be outraged today at the despotic attitude of Lorena Gonzales and other Democratic admirers of Big Brother.
For more than 50 years, Wilkinson was indefatigable and uncompromising: he knew that, without free speech, efforts to challenge any power structure were doomed. So too were any prospects for personal freedom. At the time of his death, ACLU president Nadine Strossen would describe Wilkinson as “a towering and inspiring figure throughout his entire career, starting from when he was a young person advocating for equal rights for the poor and racial minorities.” She added: “He was constantly challenging governmental power to restrict First Amendment freedoms of belief, speech, and association, as well as privacy, which continues to be relevant today.” For his tireless work, Wilkinson was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joe McCarthy, and the same intelligence agencies that Democrats today have come to embrace.
In 1958, during a visit to Atlanta in support of civil-rights activists called before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, Wilkinson was subpoenaed and then cited for contempt of Congress when asserting his own First Amendment right to refuse to testify. He was sentenced to one year in federal prison, serving nine months.
Wilkinson helped form the National Committee to Abolish HUAC in 1960, later renamed the National Committee against Repressive Legislation (NCARL) in 1975, when HUAC was finally disbanded. Wilkinson took serious personal risks to ensure political dissent would be protected — the same protection Gonzales and her righteous party hacks now want to destroy. The dark, repressive side of American history associated with Hoover and McCarthy, the FBI and CIA, is now being revived with sanctimonious fury by current defenders of unfettered corporate-state power.
For Wilkinson – in stark contrast to the bigoted, iron-fisted Gonzales – the Bill of Rights was a living document in need of constant renewal. In 1986 he filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the FBI and eventually was sent 132,000 pages of files spanning 38 years of federal surveillance and espionage. The story of Wilkinson’s ordeal would find its way into Robert Sherrill’s appropriately-titled biography, First Amendment Felon, in 2005.
In the 15 years since Wilkinson’s death, matters have only gotten worse; the Gonzales diatribe, unfortunately, perfectly fits the Democratic modus operandi. Ordinary conservatives are denounced as “white supremacists”, “Nazis”, and “domestic terrorists”, many targeted for personal ruin even where evidence of such transgression is nowhere to be found. Collective guilt is blithely imputed to broad groups of people simply going about their everyday lives. Medical professionals daring to veer from official narratives are smeared and cancelled, their jobs and careers jeopardized. Vaccine doubters can encounter a similar fate. Questionable opinions expressed years in the past nowadays come back to haunt, if not destroy. Anyone brazen enough to criticize the actual domestic terrorism of Antifa and BLM — spanning several months, not a few hours — will be smeared as a vile “white nationalist”.
While Red Scares of earlier years originated from the pathetic schemes of Hoover and McCarthy, today the threats are far more pervasive, cloaked (as before) in the language of moral enlightenment. Dissidents are nowadays savaged as wretched haters, extremists, terrorists – not to mention, in a period of extreme Russiaphobia, as “foreign agents” or “traitors”. CNN pundits, typically at the forefront, routinely parrot blind hate when referring to Russians, oblivious to meaningful facts and context. Centers of power work to impose ideological conformity: corporate media, Wall Street, deep state, Big Tech, academia, military-industrial complex. Stripped of binding protections, individuals and groups targeted are much too weak and isolated to effectively fight back.
In earlier days dissent was said to be the work of “heretics” or “subversives”, marginal Commies readily hunted down by the Feds. (In American society, the CPUSA was always something of a joke, yet still targeted for years as a major threat.) Nowadays the morality police, backed by the usual oligarchs and billionaires, are ready to pounce on sinful transgressions large and small: white supremacy, transphobia, Covid denial, scheming with the Russians. Those stepping outside the ideologically-vetted discourses of CNN, Washington Post, and New York Times will be identified, demeaned, censored, and (where possible) punished. Reality cops guard against the evils of “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “conspiracy theories” that undermine “our democracy”. In the case of California, the bill proposed by Melendez will be seized upon by Gonzales and identity-politics fanatics as a sign of guilt, of sinful deviance.
Recently two California members of the U.S. Congress, Democrats Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, sent letters to twelve cable, satellite, and streaming companies – AT&T, Verizon, Apple, Alphabet among them – urging management to shut down centers of “misinformation”, starting with FOX TV. These ideological guardians believe media outlets are contributing to a “polluted environment”, spewing lies that lead to “seditious behavior” and, worse, Covid “science denial”. The problem for Eshoo and McNerney, however, is that pandemic tropes advanced by their favorite corporate-media outlets veer toward fear-rattling propaganda more than established medical science: false computer projections, wildly-inflated death rates, unscientific lockdown orders, needless school closings, mixed signals on facemasks, over-hyping of vaccines. Eshoo and McNerney are best advised to look closer to home, to their own conduits of false information.
Could liberal Democrats, in past years known as champions of free speech and civil rights, have now become so embedded in the power structure that their authoritarian impulses reflect a new-found hubris? Could Gonzales and her anointed elites be imbued with the level of political certitude their censorship zeal seems to imply? Could the party that has carried out years of witch hunts linked to debunked tales of Putin-Trump collusion actually believe in its political integrity? My guess is that Democratic righteousness really masks insecurity and deceit: those responsible for the endless lies and myths must know those lies and myths cannot survive the test of open debate. Easier to denounce your critics as “white nationalists”, cancel their speech platforms, then close off discussion. The shutting down of oppositional speech reflects acute intellectual weakness, not strength.
In the end, the “diversity” and “inclusion” that Gonzales and Democrats piously celebrate is nothing but a sham. Those words have relevance only within a single narrative – a tightly-regulated, fiercely-guarded worldview consistent with elite agendas. Where real diversity should matter most – regarding conflict over how power is exercised, over economic policy and job concerns, over matters of war and peace – genuine debate is largely absent, overridden by an ensemble of authoritarian codes, norms, and practices. Corporate-state rulers manage what is truly important. As with earlier lies and myths about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or “humanitarian crises” in Serbia and Libya, years of Russiagate tales of a stolen election would never be “fact-checked”, but instead repeated monotonously by liberals and their stable of media propagandists. According to Gonzales, all this deceitful manipulation at the hands of Democrats must fall into the category of “protected speech”.
Oligarchical power rules American society more thoroughly than ever, its conformist ideology the true measure of political speech. Identity politics furnishes an opportune facade behind which those in control can expand their power, wealth, and technological advantage never having to worry about anti-system insurgency (keeping mind that January Sixth was no more than a primitive revolt). Supposedly progressive figures like Gonzales, fearing real diversity, serve as valuable instruments of such rule and its legitimation, which those figures always embellish with an ethos of righteous arrogance.
In years past the break with political orthodoxy was denounced as un-American, disloyal, a fifth-column menace, targeted now and then for blacklisting. Nowadays even moderate dissidents are accused of “domestic terrorism” – a charge dutifully repeated by Gonzales. Contemporary dissidents are in fact no better than Nazis, or at least neo-Nazis, meaning they are eligible to be “de-platformed”, sent before a “Reality Czar”. Yet it is Gonzales and her power-mongering ideologues who wind up closer to the monolithic, hateful spirit of fascism than their hapless targets of collective guilt owing to mere association with a political party or outlook. Those ideologues turn out to be the biggest threats to “our democracy”. As Wilkinson had long ago recognized, the struggle against such malevolence is not simply legal but cultural and political – and is never finished.
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
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