Coming COVID Commission Is a Gates-Led Cover-Up
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | April 27, 2021
Having gone as far as he can with the World Health Organization’s cover-up, Bill Gates takes another bite at the apple with his corporate-funded investigation into the origins of COVID-19 to cleverly cover up this massive conspiracy with an “official” investigation.
While the so-called COVID Commission Planning Group — set up to create and support an investigative commission like that for 9/11 — is advertised as a nonpartisan effort, you really couldn’t come up with a more dangerously biased set of participants.
In short, individuals and organizations with some of the most egregious conflicts of interest, and everything to gain by being in charge of analyzing and writing the history of this pandemic, are leading and supporting this effort. This is a classic fox guarding the henhouse scenario.
According to the Miller Center, the planning group will lay out the plans for nine separate task forces, each focused on one of the following topics, to lay “the foundation for a future commission to investigate”:1
- The origins of SARS-CoV-2 and its prevention
- Threat assessment, including the creation of an international network for detection and warning, “biological intelligence” and other data collection
- National readiness and a review of the initial response
- At-risk communities and how to address gaps in public health capacities, worker safety and the responsibilities of private businesses
- State and local readiness, containment and mitigation, including when and how to use lockdowns, mandates and school closings
- Health care challenges surrounding patient care, including those with long-hauler syndrome
- Diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, including the regulatory environment that might benefit or stifle innovation and/or global supply chains
- Telling the stories of COVID-19 victims, frontline workers and public health officials (i.e., propaganda generation)
- Solving data issues
Philip Zelikow — Chief Investigator for the Cabal
The chosen leader of this new planning group is Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission2 and a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel.3,4 While Gates may not be a physical member of this planning group, he’s certainly involved indirectly. Of that we can be virtually assured.
Zelikow, a former director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, is also a current strategy group member of the Aspen Institute,5 a technocratic hub that has groomed and mentored executives from around the world about the subtleties of globalization.
He also directed the Markle Foundation’s Task Force on National Security in the Information Age,6 the focus of which has been to make information relating to potential security threats discoverable and accessible to officials without breaking civil liberty laws.7 As reported by the University of Virginia:8
“The planning group hopes to prepare the way for a potential National COVID Commission set up to help America and the world learn from this pandemic and safeguard against future threats. ‘This is perhaps the greatest crisis suffered by America, if not the world, since 1945,’ said Zelikow … ‘It is vital to take stock, in a massive way, of what happened and why.
These sorts of civilizational challenges may become more common in the 21st century, and we need to learn from this crisis to strengthen our society … Scholars and journalists will do their jobs, but there is also a role for the kind of massive investigation and research effort that only a large-scale commission can provide.’”
Foundations Backing the COVID Commission
As reported by the Miller Center,9 the COVID Commission Planning Group includes more than two dozen virologists, public health personas and former government officials, and is backed by four charitable foundations — all of whom have histories revealing them to be part of the technocratic alliance that for years, in some cases decades, have been plotting and planning for the wealth redistribution and global power grab we’re now experiencing. These foundations include:
•Schmidt Futures,10 founded by Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman of Google and Alphabet Inc., which owns the greatest artificial intelligence (AI) team in the world.11
•The Skoll Foundation, founded by Jeff Skoll, a former eBay president, to “pursue his vision of a sustainable world” by catalyzing “transformational social change.”12 It acts as a support organization to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Skoll has funded pandemic preparedness and prevention since 2009 through the Skoll Global Threats Fund, and his movie production company Participant Media produced the movie “Contagion” and Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”13
•Stand Together Foundation, which is part of the Koch Network, founded by Charles Koch. Its primary focus is criminal justice and poverty issues, and it teaches Koch’s “market based management” philosophy to community leaders.14
•The Rockefeller Foundation, which in April 2020 released the white paper,15 “National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan,” laying out a strategic framework clearly intended to become part of a permanent surveillance and social control structure that severely limits personal liberty and freedom of choice. I wrote about this in “Rockefeller Foundation’s Plan to Track Americans.”
The tracking system it calls for is eerily similar to that already being used in China, where residents are required to enroll in a health condition registry. Once enrolled, they get a personal QR code, which they must then enter in order to gain access to grocery stores and other facilities.16 The plan also demands access to other medical data.
Operation Lockstep
The Rockefellers, like Gates, built an empire around health and medicine despite having no medical expertise whatsoever. Their influence is rooted in money, which is spent in self-serving ways. While Rockefeller and Gates are both known as philanthropists, their donations grow their wealth, as the money they spend on “charity” ultimately ends up benefiting their own investments and/or business interests.
In addition to the COVID-19 Action Plan document cited above — which doesn’t even try to hide its draconian overreach and intent to permanently alter life and society as we know it — the Rockefeller Foundation also published a 2010 report17 titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” in which they laid out their “Lockstep” scenario — a coordinated global response to a lethal pandemic.
While the name and origin of the virus differs, the scenario laid out in this document matches many of the details of our present. A deadly viral pandemic. A deadly effect on economies. International mobility coming to a screeching halt, debilitating industries, tourism and global supply chains. “Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers,” the document reads.
“In the absence of official containment protocols,” the virus spread like wildfire. In this narrative, the U.S. administration’s failure to place strict travel restrictions on its citizens proved to be a fatal flaw, as it allowed the virus to spread past its borders. China, on the other hand, fared particularly well due to its rapid imposition of universal quarantines of all citizens, which proved effective for curbing the spread of the virus.
Many other nations where leaders “flexed their authority” and imposed severe restrictions on their citizens — “from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries of communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets” — also fared well.
These and other reports spell out what the ultimate plan actually is. It’s to use bioterrorism to take control of the world’s resources, wealth and people. It’s to use coordinated pandemic response as a justification for wealth redistribution and the resetting of the global financial system.
What most fail to realize is that the wealth distribution they’re talking about is not distribution from the wealthy to the poor, even though that’s what they want you to believe. It’s to centralize wealth at the top and eliminate private property rights and private business ownership from the lower and middle classes. The “equitable” living standards they’re talking about is poverty for all but themselves. It’s really crucial to begin to grasp this reality now, before it’s too late.
Pieces of a Global Puzzle
The Rockefeller Foundation is also a founding sponsor of The Mojaloop Foundation, set up to “promote digital payments for people outside the financial system, with support from Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”18
Right there we have Google, the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, all in one little nonprofit with a heart set on giving poor people access to digital banking using their cellphones. This is probably the three most dangerous nonprofits on the planet, as they are likely the most powerful and committed to global tyranny.
All-digital banking using a centralized digital currency is a key component of the Great Reset, so this project has little to do with honest philanthropy and everything to do with making sure everyone can be swept into the digital net, which will include round-the-clock surveillance and tracking of physical location and biological data, a digital ID, along with your health data (including but not limited to vaccination status), banking and, ultimately, a social credit system.
All of the pieces needed for the Great Reset are already in place; it’s just a matter of seeing how all the separate pieces fit together. For example, Gavi, the vaccine alliance, set up with funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, partnered with the ID2020 Alliance to launch a digital identity program called ID2020.19
Gates also funded the creation of EarthNow, a project involving 500 satellites equipped with machine learning technology to surveil the entire planet with real-time video.20 As one would expect, AI — a Google specialty — is also a key component of this global surveillance plot.
COVID-19 — A Launch Pad for the Great Reset
Another key player in the COVID Commission Planning Group is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. As you may recall, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security co-hosted the pandemic preparedness simulation for a “novel coronavirus,” known as Event 201, in October 2019 along with the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum.
The event eerily predicted what would happen just 10 weeks later, when COVID-19 appeared. Gates and the World Economic Forum, in turn, are both partnered21 with the United Nations which, while keeping a relatively low profile, appears to be at the heart of the globalist takeover agenda.
The World Economic Forum, while a private organization, works as the social and economic branch of the U.N. and is a key driving force behind modern technocracy and the Great Reset agenda. Its founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, publicly declared the need for a global “reset” to restore order in June 2020.22
Technocratic rule, which is what the Great Reset will bring about, hinges on the use of technology — in particular artificial intelligence, digital surveillance and Big Data collection (which is what 5G is for) — and the digitization of industry, banking and government, which in turn allows for the automation of social engineering and social rule (although that part is never expressly stated).
Beyond pandemic preparedness and response, the justification for the implementation of the Great Reset agenda in its totality will be climate change. The Great Reset, sometimes referred to as the “build back better” plan, specifically calls for all nations to implement “green” regulations and “sustainable development goals”23,24 as part of the post-COVID recovery effort.
But the end goal is far from what the typical person envisions when they hear these plans. The end goal is to turn us into serfs without rights to privacy, private ownership or anything else. In short, the pandemic is being used to destroy the local economies around the world, which will then allow the World Economic Forum to come in and “rescue” debt-ridden countries. The price for this salvation is your liberty.
The Great Reset
While the New World Order was long derided as a “conspiracy theory” that you’d have to be crazy to believe, the Great Reset, which is simply a rebranding of the same old NWO plan that has been in circulation for well over a decade, is now public fact.
Many world leaders have spoken about it in an official capacity, and in June 2020, Zia Khan, senior vice president of innovation at the Rockefeller Foundation penned the article25 “Rebuilding Toward the Great Reset: Crisis, COVID-19, and the Sustainable Development Goals,” reviewing the “social crisis” necessitating the world’s acceptance of a new world order.
The article was co-written with John McArthur, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, which is one of several technocratic think-tanks. Keeping in mind what I’ve just said about what the Great Reset is really all about, and the justifications used to implement the theft of wealth and freedom, read how they posit these changes as being in your best interest:
“Upheaval can yield new understanding and opportunity. Outdated or unjust norms can succumb to society’s pressing need for better approaches. For example, the need for massive and urgent government intervention has drawn fresh attention to social safety nets and the possibility of dramatic policy enhancements.
Tragic consequences of racial discrimination have catapulted awareness of systemic problems and triggered prospects for much-needed social reforms. Rapid environmental improvements linked to economic shutdown have rekindled consciousness of the profound interconnections between ecosystems, economies, and societies …
Rather than passively allowing norms to evolve through inertia or randomness, we can all pursue actions for Response and, soon enough, Recovery in a manner that improve the odds of a Reset toward better long-term outcomes.
Fortunately, we already have a strong starting point for what the world’s economic, social, and environmental outcomes should be. Five years ago, in 2015, all 193 UN member states agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a common set of priorities to be achieved in all countries by 2030.”
Another article titled “The Great Reset,” written by Jimmy Chang, CFA, for the Rockefeller Capital Management blog, reads, in part:26
“Regarding the post-pandemic reconstruction effort, progressives, led by the so-called Davos elites (of the World Economic Forum fame), are advocating an urgent ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism to ensure equality and sustainability. They also call for harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e., Big Tech) to address health and social challenges.
Their vision for the future could be gleaned from a 2016 article penned by a young Danish politician with the title ‘Welcome to 2030. I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, and Life Has Never Been Better.’ This title was so controversial that its posting on the World Economic Forum website was changed to a bland ‘Here’s how life could change in my city by the year 2030.’
The pace of the Great Reset will in part depend on the final outcome of the U.S. election as it will determine whether Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Still, some resets will be unavoidable since COVID-19 has exacerbated some longstanding issues such as the world’s debt dependency and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
There will be elevated levels of bankruptcy and debt restructuring. Governments may further increase their leverage to bail out the economy and placate electorates that demand more generous social contracts.
Riccardo Fraccaro, Italy’s Secretary of the Council of Ministers and a close aide of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, even floated a trial balloon on sovereign debt restructuring by suggesting that the European Central Bank consider ‘canceling sovereign bonds bought during the pandemic or perpetually extending their maturity.’
Businesses will also need to respond to lasting behavioral changes caused by the pandemic. In sum, there is no going back to the pre-COVID-19 world, and markets will need to adjust.”
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
The Great Reset is not some wild conspiracy theory but a publicly released agenda that is moving forward, whether we like it or not. I believe the only way to stop it is through our collective responses to the various pieces and parts of the plan that are being rolled out. They want you to believe that none of the things being introduced have anything to do with each other but, in fact, they are all pieces of the same puzzle.
The final image is the inside of a prison cell. It may not be a physical prison. It may be largely digital in nature. It may look like the four walls of your own home. But it’s a prison nonetheless.
I believe it would be a tragic mistake to trust Gates, Rockefeller, Google or any of the other players — including Zelikow — that are being brought before us as the saviors of the day. They’re all wolves in sheep’s clothing.
To learn more about the hidden power structure running this global reorganization toward authoritarian control, see “Bill Gates Wants to Realize Global Vision in His Lifetime,” “The Great Reset and Build Back Better,” “Technocracy and the Great Reset” and “Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?”
Be Part of the Answer
The good news is, Americans now have a brand-new weapon in our fight for freedom. I recently interviewed Naomi Wolf about her new digital platform, Daily Clout, that will allow citizens to lobby bills to their legislators.
Many state legislators are not lawyers, and they don’t have lawyers at their beck and call. Daily Clout has hired an attorney who is busy drafting turnkey bills that protect us against the continued erosion of freedom and reestablish rights and liberties. Citizens can now send these model bills to their legislators, knowing that they’ve undergone legal review and are ready to be passed. You can also go even further than that. As explained by Wolf:
“You can tell us the bill you want. We can upload a campaign for that bill. We can hire our lawyer to draft a model bill and then you can pass it. What we’ve been doing is gathering names and zip codes, so that we can add real voters to this piece of model legislation in real states and send it to real state legislators and say, ‘Look, the supporters are all there. All you have to do is pass this.’
It’s a fantastic intervention in the political process, restoring real democracy. It’s why we founded Daily Clout, but it’s beautiful to see hundreds and hundreds of people from all walks of life rushing to give us support and resources, to become members and give us donations, which we appreciate, so that we can keep our lawyer busy creating these draft bills. It’s not just for this issue.
Once we get our rights and freedoms back, whatever [citizens] want, we can draft a bill for you, and you can [call on your legislators to] pass it.”
To get involved, go to dailyclout.io and sign up to become a paying member or free subscriber. You will then receive an email explaining how to use the Five Freedoms Campaign. Presently, there is a model “no vaccination passports” bill that you can send to your state legislator.
There’s a feature called BillCam, where you can see who your state legislator is by entering your zip code. Once you’re a subscriber or member, you’ll get regular updates about happenings around the U.S. and community events.
The Great Reset is at our doorstep, and your freedom, and that of future generations, hinges on you getting involved and fighting for it. The Daily Clout platform can be a major help in this regard, as using legislation to preserve and protect our rights and freedoms is far preferable to more violent alternatives or resigning ourselves to the fate prescribed by our globalist would-be “overlords.”
Sources and References
- 1, 9 Miller Center, COVID Commission Planning Group
- 2 The Last American Vagabond September 7, 2016
- 3 Source Watch Philip Zelikow
- 4, 6 Miller Center, Philip Zelikow
- 5 Aspen Institute, Philip Zelikow
- 7 Markle.org
- 8 University of Virginia April 14, 2021
- 10 Schmidt Futures
- 11 TechCrunch January 26, 2014
- 12 Skoll Foundation
- 13 Forbes How the Billionaire Behind “Contagion” is working to stop this pandemic
- 14 Influence Watch, Stand Together Foundation
- 15 The Rockefeller Foundation, National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our Communities, April 21, 2020 (PDF)
- 16 Berggruen Institute March 6, 2020
- 17 Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development
- 18 Techxplore.com May 6, 2020
- 19 Biometric Update September 20, 2019
- 20 Technology Review April 18, 2018
- 21 Canadian Truths, COVID-19 Bill Gates, United Nations and World Economic Forum
- 22 Technocracy.news June 29, 2020
- 23 Canadian Post, World Economic Forum Wheel of Evil
- 24 Intelligence.weforum.org COVID-19
- 25 Rockefeller Foundation June 19, 2020
- 26 Rockefeller Capital Management December 1, 2020
Executive Order Canceling the Constitution
By Leo Goldstein | American Thinker | April 20, 2021
On April 15, Preident Biden signed an Executive Order on Blocking Property with Respect to Specified Harmful Foreign Activities of the Government of the Russian Federation. Contrary to its title, this EO is not about Russia. It is designed to allow the Biden administration to deprive American citizens and organizations of their rights and property by arbitrarily linking those persons to real, imagined, or vaguely defined activities of the Russian government.
The Biden administration unilaterally makes the determination and requires neither criminal acts nor intent. The punishment is blocking assets and a prohibition on any dealing with the accused person. Spouses and adult children of individuals found guilty by accusation under this EO are punished, too.
The EO was preceded by some distracting maneuvers, both diplomatic (hostile rhetoric toward Russia) and military (sending naval ships toward the Black Sea and recalling them back, as if dealing with Russian threats). Thus, many people assumed that the EO was directed at Russia, and completely missed the fact that it is directed at dissent here, at home.
Over the past four years, the Democrat Party, Fake News, and Big Tech have been frequently portraying their opponents as Russian trolls or Russian misinformation operators. The Russian collusion narrative, initially invented to overthrow the Trump administration, has been used to smear many conservative movements. Now this effort has been crowned by an Executive Order.
Biden’s administration has been recently pushing so many other radical changes, such as packing the Supreme Court, eliminating the filibuster, restricting Second Amendment rights, etc., that the real ramifications of this new EO went completely unnoticed. In my opinion, this EO is the most dangerous of them all. It allows the Biden regime to eliminate its opposition, quickly and quietly.
Section 1 of the EO enumerates prohibited activities and defines guilty persons as those “determined” by the Secretary of Treasury and/or Secretary of State in consultation with the Attorney General to be:
(a)(ii) responsible for or complicit in, or to have directly or indirectly engaged or attempted to engage in, any of the following for or on behalf of, or for the benefit of, directly or indirectly, the Government of the Russian Federation:
(A) malicious cyber-enabled activities;
(B) interference in a United States or other foreign government election;
(C) actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad;
(D) transnational corruption;
Some of the language in this EO borrows from another: EO-13224 – Blocking Property and Prohibiting Transactions With Persons Who Commit, Threaten To Commit, or Support Terrorism. George W. Bush signed EO-13224 on September 23, 2001, in response to 9/11.
However, Biden’s EO is as similar to Bush’s EO as an atomic bomb is to a sniper rifle. Bush’s EO targeted financing terrorism. It defined terrorism clearly and narrowly. It minimized legal jeopardy to US persons. It did not strip away the standard for criminal liability requirements of action and intent. It did not target spouses or children of accused individuals. Additionally, Bush made a legally meaningful promise to use it with due regard to culpability and the Bush administration used it with restraint. Even so, Democrats criticized it harshly, opposed it, and fought it in courts.
In contrast, Biden’s new EO is directed mostly at US persons. It criminalizes speech and political activities, based on whimsical and arbitrary definitions. The Biden administration can define “malicious activities,” “democratic processes or institutions,” and the activities that undermine them as it wants.
The Biden administration is also free to interpret what constitutes “interests of the Russian Government.” Such broad and vague language allows the Biden regime to select US citizens and political organizations arbitrarily, and then deprive them of their property and rights without anything reminiscent of due process. The EO does not even require that anybody commit an actual crime somewhere. False cyber-attribution or fake bounty claims are sufficient. Biden’s remarks to the EO showed no regard to the culpability of any targeted US citizens or other persons.
Leftist pseudo-elites have been eager to ban speech based on allegations that such speech may be beneficial to Russia. Such ideation has been present among Big Tech influencers for a long time. This EO effectively gives Big Tech, banks, and credit card companies a new pretext to deplatform conservatives and anyone else who opposes the Biden regime by claiming that they are now engaged in illegal activity.
Biden’s EO appears to allow the Democrat party to deny Americans the right to advocate against it in future federal elections. This might be accomplished through a “determination” that Russia is interfering in elections against democratic candidates. Thus, any US citizens who also oppose Democrats could be found to be acting for Russia’s benefit, directly or indirectly.
The list of prohibited activities justifying a Biden administration “determination” to deprive American persons of their property and other rights (referred to here as a “Deprived Person”) states:
[a] (iii) to be or have been a leader, official, senior executive officer, or member of the board of directors of:
… (C) an entity whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order;
For comparison, Bush’s EO only covered the leaders of terrorist-supporting entities, not multiple officials, executives, or directors.
Unprecedently, Biden’s EO targets children and spouses:
[a] (v) to be a spouse or adult child of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to subsection (a)(ii) or (iii) of this section;
and countless associations:
[a] (vi) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of:
(A) any activity described in subsection (a)(ii) of this section; or
(B) any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order …
[a] (vii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, … any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.
Notice the infinite reach these subsections afford. Those connected to a “Deprived Person” can receive the same designation, and so on. There is no limit to the number of iterations.
“Deprived Persons” essentially become untouchables, as dealing with them in any way is expressly prohibited without additional determinations:
Sec. 2. The prohibitions in section 1 of this order include:
(a) the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; and
(b) the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.
Giving legal representation, hosting the website, selling food, and giving medical care to a “Deprived Person” is automatically prohibited. Section 4 prohibits transactions that “cause a violation” of this EO, even absent intent or knowledge. This serves as a hint to pre-emptively cut ties with anyone the Biden regime targets.
Section 9 exempts UN bodies and “related organizations” (NGOs) from any responsibility for interfering in US elections and other activities under this order.
The Russian Federation is mixed into the EO only for distraction and as a primer, triggering expanding layers of culpability.
I do not expect any putative human rights organizations or large media outlets to hold the Biden regime accountable for how it applies this EO or to defend its victims. So far, these outlets have either ignored it or defended it.
Parents, Please Read This. It Could Save Your Child’s Life.
By Richie Allen | April 29, 2021
Public Health England has admitted that it did not consider’ the negative health impacts of requiring children to wear face masks during lessons. Parents, read that again. And again.
In documents seen by The Telegraph newspaper, the watchdog acknowledged that it; “expressly did not consider any potential disbenefits of the policy.”
I’ll put it more plainly. The organisation charged with looking after the health and wellbeing of children, didn’t give a fuck about whether masks might harm them. Mind-boggling isn’t it?
Christine Brett, the co-founder of the parent group UsForThem told The Telegraph :
“It beggars belief that the Government has recommended secondary school children wear face coverings for up to eight hours a day without the usual rigour of an public health intervention imposed on a healthy population.
There is increasing evidence of masks being harmful to children’s health, welfare and impacting on their ability to learn, develop and communicate.”
The evidence is overwhelming, not increasing. There isn’t a shred of data, to support the claim that wearing a mask reduces transmission. The government and its scientific advisers have known this from day one.
When you accept that they know facemasks are both useless and highly dangerous, you must then ask, why have they mandated them? That’s a place most people don’t want to go.
I’m telling you now, that if you are a parent and you consent to your children wearing a mask at school or anywhere else for that matter, you are putting them in grave danger.
The government doesn’t give a shit about the welfare of your children. Public Health England couldn’t be bothered to investigate the possible harms before claiming that kids should wear masks.
Only you can stand up for your child. Do it. Today. What are you waiting for?
US’ new Foreign Malign Influence Center is just official cover for politicized intelligence interference in domestic politics
By Scott Ritter | RT | April 28, 2021
The Director of National Intelligence has ostensibly created a new “center” for the sharing and analysis of information and intelligence about foreign interference in US elections. Its real focus is much more nefarious.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) announced in a statement on Monday that it was creating a new intelligence “center” focused on tracking so-called “foreign malign influence,” reported Politico. This new entity, known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, was mandated in the recent intelligence and defense budget authorization acts, representing the reality that the impetus for its creation came from Congress, and not the intelligence community.
For example, the most recent defense expenditure authorization required that the ODNI establish a “social media data analysis center” to coordinate and track foreign social media influence operations by analyzing data voluntarily shared by US social media companies. Based upon this analysis, the ODNI would report to Congress on a quarterly basis on trends in foreign influence and disinformation operations to the public. As envisioned by Congress, the intelligence community would determine jointly with US social media companies which data and metadata will be made available for analysis.
In short, the intelligence community, using data obtained from the social media accounts of American citizens, will report to Congress how this data influences the political decision making of these same American citizens.
If this does not make the most ardent defender of the US Constitution ill, nothing will.
It is not as if the US intelligence community wasn’t trending in this direction on its own volition. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was the publication in March 2021 of an intelligence community assessment entitled ‘Foreign Threats to the US 2020 Presidential Election’. In this document, the US intelligence community assessed that “Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US.”
But the most damning portion of this assessment came when it delved into the specific methodology employed by Russia to achieve these nefarious aims. “Throughout the election cycle”, the assessment declared, “Russia’s online influence actors sought to affect US public perceptions of the candidates, as well as advance Moscow’s long standing goals of undermining confidence in US election processes and increasing sociopolitical divisions among the American people. During the presidential primaries and dating back to 2019, these actors backed candidates from both major US political parties that Moscow viewed as outsiders, while later claiming that election fraud helped what they called ‘establishment’ candidates. Throughout the election, Russia’s online influence actors sought to amplify mistrust in the electoral process by denigrating mail-in ballots, highlighting alleged irregularities, and accusing the Democratic Party of voter fraud.”
As an American citizen who is politically engaged, I read the intelligence community assessment with a combination of interest, concern, and outrage. The notion of “Russian online influence actors” affecting “US public perceptions of the candidates” is as intellectually vacuous as it is factually unsustainable. The stupidity encapsulated by such analysis can only be excused by the fact that the intelligence community assessment is a document produced more for the benefit of domestic political consumption than a genuine effort at identifying and quantifying legitimate threats to the US.
The assessment itself is short on hard data. However, the House Intelligence Committee has documented some 3,000 social media ads bought by Russian “troll farms” between 2015-2017, at a cost of some $100,000. These ads were in addition to so-called “organic posts,” some 80,000 of which were published on US social media, free of charge, by alleged Russian “bots” resulting in 126 million “views” by Americans. These ads were crude, unfocused, and simply inane in terms of their content.
To put the alleged Russian influence campaign into perspective, one need only reflect on the fact that during his short bid for the Democratic nomination, Michael Bloomberg spent nearly $1 billion underwriting the single most sophisticated public relations campaign, including hundreds of millions of targeted social media ads put together by the most brilliant political minds money could buy. All this money, time and effort, however, could not change the reality that, to the American public, Michael Bloomberg was an unattractive candidate – in the end his $1 billion bought him exactly two delegates.
The fact is, the political opinions of most American citizens are formed based upon a lifetime of exposure to issues that matter for them the most, whether it be education, right-to-life, gun control, social justice, agriculture, energy, environment, law enforcement, or any other of the multitude of sources of causation that impact the day-to-day existence of the American electorate.
Some of these beliefs are inherited, such as the working-class attachment to unions. Some are driven by current affairs, such as the growing awareness of climate change. But all are derived from the life experience of each American, and the thought that these deeply held beliefs could be bought, changed, or otherwise manipulated by social media posts published by foreign actors, malign or otherwise, is deeply insulting to me, and should be to every other American as well.
The irony is that by creating an intelligence organization whose task it is to help prevent the political Balkanization of America by analyzing the social media accounts of Americans who hold differing political beliefs than “the establishment” the newly minted Foreign Malign Influence Center ostensibly serves, the resulting process will only cause the further political division of the United States.
Some 74 million Americans voted for a candidate, Donald Trump, who has promulgated the very issues that the Democratic-controlled Congress seeks to denigrate and suppress through the work of this new intelligence center. These ideas will not simply disappear because the Democrats in Congress have empowered a “center” within the intelligence community whose sole function is to demonize any political thought that does not conform with the powers that be.
As it is currently focused, the Foreign Malign Influence Center is the living, breathing embodiment of politicized intelligence, two words which, when put together, represent the death knell for any intelligence organization. Worse, the work it will be doing, when turned over to a Democratically controlled Congress desperate to undermine the political viability of those 74 million American citizens, will only further fracture an already divided nation.
The Foreign Malign Influence Center was specifically mandated to examine the social media influence campaigns operated by Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. It is particularly telling that they were not directed to investigate the two largest foreign sources of political influence in America today, namely the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the Murdoch media empire. President Putin could only dream about being able to buy congressional seats the way AIPAC does, or control what information becomes magnified (and, by extension, suppressed) by the newspapers, television and radio enterprises owned by Rupert Murdoch.
These are the true villains when it comes to foreign corruption of American politics. These foreigners, however, have a seat at the establishment table. Their malign influence will never be labeled as such, and they will never have to withstand the ignominy of having their work scrutinized under the politicized microscope of an intelligence community that has allowed itself to be corrupted by domestic American politics to the point that it no longer serves the American people as a whole, but only a select class of American persons.
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
Facemask Wearing Runner Collapses After Winning 800 Metre Race
By Richie Allen | April 28, 2021
Track runner Maggie Williams, a student in Bend, Oregon, broke a school record in an 800 metre race last week. Williams won the race, but fainted as she crossed the line. She had run the race while wearing a facemask.
When she recovered enough to speak, the junior athlete said that she felt unable to breathe during the race. State guidelines mean competitors must wear a face covering during competition.
“In the past, this has never happened,” Williams said. “Then this race I was wearing a mask and it did happen, which I don’t think is a coincidence.”
Her coach Dave Turnbull agrees with her. He said:
“It was a different response than I’ve seen for kids that have collapsed to the track just because they were exhausted. She wasn’t sure where she was.”
Oregon’s health authority (OHA) released a statement yesterday. It said:
“The Oregon Health Authority regularly reviews COVID-19 guidance based on medical evidence and evolving science. We are revising the current guidance on the use of masks outdoors during competition. The guidance will allow people to take off face coverings when competing in non-contact sports outdoors and maintaining at least 6 feet of distance from others and the other virus protective protocols.
* The exception will not apply while training and conditioning for these sports or for competitions.
* The exception will not apply before and after competing.”
There is no evidence that facemasks protect the wearer or anyone they come into contact with. There is an abundance of evidence that facemasks are harmful.
Wearing one while running can kill you.
Don’t wear one, ever.
“The UK Currently Operates a System of Informed Consent for Vaccinations.” Currently, Minister?
By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • April 27,2021
Dr Helen Westwood, a GP whose previous letters and comments have appeared on Lockdown Sceptics, wrote to her MP Sir Graham Brady in March with some concerns about the vaccines and the potential for coercion. She has now received a reply from Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi that is far from reassuring.
Here’s what she wrote.
Dear Sir Graham,
Firstly I wish to thank you again for your ongoing hard work in arguing for a more proportionate response to dealing with COVID-19. The concerns I wish to raise with you today relate to the vaccination program and the proposition of vaccination certificates.
As you know I am a GP. I am horrified by the talk of ‘No Jab, No Job’ policies and vaccination certificates.
The GMC are very clear that “all patients have the right to be involved in decisions about their treatment and care” and that “doctors must be satisfied that they have a patient’s consent… before providing treatment or care”. They also state “doctors must… share relevant information about the benefits and harms of proposed options and reasonable alternatives, including the option to take no action”.
Following interim analysis of the ongoing clinical trials, emergency use authorisation has been granted by the MHRA for both the Pfizer BioNTech and the AstraZeneca vaccines. They are as yet unlicensed. The clinical trials are due to continue until 2023. I find it alarming that much attention is paid to the headline figures of relative risk reduction (RRR) with no mention of the absolute risk reduction (ARR). The RRR of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine is 95.1% (CI 90.0%-97.6%, p=0.016). Dig a little deeper into the data and you learn that the ARR is only 0.7% (CI 0.59%-0.83%, p<0.001) and the number needed to vaccinate in order to prevent one infection is 142 (CI 122-170).
The WHO published a bulletin written by John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, in October 2020. He quotes an infection fatality rate (IFR) for Covid of 0.00-0.57% and in those under the age of 70 it stands at 0.05%.
Given the minimal risk healthy people under the age of 70 face, and the very small absolute risk reductions noted in the clinical trials, I have to ask why are we so desperate to vaccinate the whole population? For healthy, working age people Covid poses less of a risk than seasonal flu. It has never been proposed that we vaccinate the entire adult population against flu; we target the populations most at risk.
The speed at which these vaccines have been developed is truly remarkable. However, I have grave concerns that they are being rolled out on such a scale and at such pace. I am not sure whether you are familiar with the work of Joel Smalley MBA (a member of HART) but he has done some very interesting analysis of mortality data. Whilst correlation (between vaccination administration and rises in mortality) absolutely does not mean causation, the striking patterns he has highlighted suggest to me that now is the time to pause and reflect on the data we have so far. We know from the clinical trials that the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine causes a drop in lymphocytes around seven days post administration; theoretically at least this could pose a risk of intercurrent infection, especially in frail patients.
Both vaccines in current use in England employ novel technology, namely mRNA (Pfizer BioNTech) and Adenovirus vector (AZ). Human challenge studies have only recently begun. We do not currently know anything about the medium and long term safety of these vaccines. There are concerns about Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) reactions whereby vaccinated individuals may develop more severe disease upon exposure to the wild virus. Theoretical concerns have also been raised about potential cross reactivity with Syncytin-1 which could have effects on placental development and therefore fertility. Until these areas have been studied we cannot advise patients fully. This has significant implications for the informed consent process.
There seems to be some enthusiasm for “vaccination passports” among the population, whether for domestic use or international travel. These have been compared to Yellow Fever certificates that are required for individuals travelling to certain destinations. In reality there is no comparison. The mortality rate for Yellow Fever is in the region of 30%, transmission of Yellow Fever is confined to a relatively small number of countries and there are long term safety data available regarding the licensed vaccine.
Uptake of the Covid vaccine has been notably lower amongst certain ethnic minorities. The reasons for this are as yet unclear, but any policy requiring proof of vaccination has the potential to lead to indirect discrimination.
Professor Chris Whitty has said that doctors and care workers have a “professional responsibility” to get vaccinated. Given that reduction of transmission is not an outcome that is being measured in the clinical trials that are still ongoing, I do not agree with him. Article 6 of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights states: “Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.”
On November 4th 2020 Theresa May MP made a speech in the House of Commons. She was referring to the closure of places of worship when she said, “My concern is that the Government today making it illegal to conduct an act of public worship, for the best of intentions, sets a precedent that could be misused by a Government in future with the worst of intentions, and that has unintended consequences.” I fear the same could be said for the introduction of vaccination passports.
Personally I have declined this vaccine because of the concerns outlined above. I hope this decision does not mean I am unable to work, visit a restaurant or travel.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Helen Westwood
Here is Nadhim Zahawi’s response, passed on to Dr Westood by Sir Graham Brady.
This is how Dr Westwood replied this week.
Dear Sir Graham,
Thank you for sending me the letter you received from Nadhim Zahawi MP, Minister for Business and Industry & Minister for COVID Vaccine Deployment in response to the representations you made to him on my behalf. I have attached his letter and my original email.
I must say I find his responses entirely unsatisfactory. He has failed to address any of my concerns. I know he is an intelligent man, so I can only assume that he has been deliberately disingenuous rather than not understanding the questions posed.
I am already aware of the processes involved in the development and testing of new drugs. I understand that Phases 2 and 3 are usually run sequentially but, given the urgency of this situation, a pragmatic decision was taken to run them in parallel. For elderly patients at increased risk from COVID-19 infection I can understand this approach. However, when the program is being rolled out to younger, healthy individuals whose risk-benefit ratio is entirely different, an alternative approach is required. It is imperative that individuals are not exposed to a greater risk of harm undergoing a medical intervention than the risk of not doing anything. Primum non nocere. Since my original email, significant concerns have been raised in a number of European countries about the risk of rare cerebral venous sinus thromboses associated with thrombocytopenia. Young, fit, healthy people who were at negligible risk of COVID-19 have tragically died.
Mr Zahawi has elected not to make any comment on the concerns I raised regarding rises in mortality in the immediate post-vaccination period. This is a pattern that has been repeated in multiple locations, currently most notably in India. I would like to know what research is being done by the UK Government to investigate this.
I note that Mr Zahawi referred to the fact that the UK “currently operates a system of informed consent for vaccinations”. I have two concerns regarding this statement. Firstly, how is the consent fully informed if we do not know the answers to the questions I have raised? I know from first hand experience that individuals attending for Covid vaccinations are not routinely being informed that the clinical trials are ongoing until 2023. Nor is the potential issue of antibody dependent enhancement being discussed. The advice for vaccinating pregnant women changes virtually day by day. Secondly, why does he need to use the word “currently”? Are there plans for mandatory vaccination in future? Already there are discussions about making vaccination compulsory for care home workers. In September 2019 the Guardian reported that Secretary of State for Health Matt Hancock was seriously considering making vaccinations compulsory for state school pupils. I defy anyone not to find this proposal chilling.
With regard to black, Asian and minority ethnic populations, again Mr Zahawi seems to have entirely missed my point. I was not arguing for the prioritisation of these groups; I was pointing out that uptake in these groups has been lower and therefore any certification system has the potential to lead to indirect discrimination.
I agree with Mr Zahawi that an effective vaccine is an excellent way to protect those that need protection, but it also needs to be safe. Given his failure to address the concerns I raised I can only assume he does not have answers to my questions.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Helen Westwood
Search & Seizure at Home of Judge Who Rendered the Sensational Weimar Mask-Judgment
2020News | April 26, 2021
As 2020News has just learned, the judge at the Weimar District Court, Christian Dettmar, had his house searched today. His office, private premises and car were searched. The judge’s cell phone was confiscated by the police. The judge had made a sensational decision on April 8, 2021, which was very inconvenient for the government’s anti Coronavirus measures policy.
At the suggestion of a mother, the judge had ruled in a child welfare proceeding pursuant to Section 1666 of the German Civil Code (BGB), Ref.: 9 F 148/21, that two Weimar schools were prohibited with immediate effect from requiring students to wear mouth-nose coverings of any kind (especially qualified masks such as FFP2 masks), to comply with AHA minimum distances, and/or to participate in SARS-CoV-2 rapid tests. At the same time, it had determined that classroom instruction should be maintained (full text of the ruling in German including three expert opinions – English translation will be available soon).
This was the first time that evidence was presented before a German court regarding the scientific reasonableness and necessity of the prescribed anti-Corona measures. The expert witnesses were the hygienist Prof. Dr. med Ines Kappstein, the psychologist Prof. Dr. Christof Kuhbandner and the biologist Prof. Dr. rer. biol. hum. Ulrike Kämmerer.
After examining the factual and legal situation and evaluating the expert opinions, the judge came to the conclusion that the measures he had forbidden posed a present danger to the mental, physical or psychological well-being of the child to such an extent that significant harm could be foreseen with a high degree of certainty in the event of further development without intervention.
He wrote: “… the children are not only endangered in their mental, physical and spiritual well-being by the obligation to wear face masks during school hours and to keep their distance from each other and from other persons, but, in addition, they are already being harmed. At the same time, this violates numerous rights of the children and their parents under the law, the constitution and international conventions. This applies in particular to the right to free development of the personality and to physical integrity from Article 2 of the Basic Law as well as to the right from Article 6 of the Basic Law to upbringing and care by the parents (also with regard to measures for preventive health care and ‘objects’ to be carried by children)…”
The judge agreed with the experts’ assessment that the masks were not useful for viral protection, that the PCR test could not detect a disease-causing infection with the necessary certainty, and that asymptomatic transmission played no detectable role epidemiologically with respect to SARS-CoV-2. On the contrary, the masks would have a negative impact on children’s health due to handling-related contamination. Testing in school classes would be unnecessary, harmful and also extremely problematic in terms of data protection.
The judge’s ruling confirms the mother’s assessment: “The children are harmed physically, psychologically and pedagogically and their rights are violated, without this being offset by any benefit for the children themselves or third parties.”
In conclusion, the judge stated, “100,000 elementary school students would have to put up with all the side effects of wearing masks for a week in order to prevent just one infection per week. To call this result merely disproportionate would be a wholly inadequate description. Rather, it shows that the state legislature regulating this area has fallen into a factual disconnect that has reached historic proportions.”
The decision, which 2020News analyzed – in English – in more detail here, had caused quite a stir. It had been downloaded about two million times from the 2020News website alone.
In a side note on the sidelines of proceedings with other parties, the decision in question had been described as unlawful by the Weimar Administrative Court without any comprehensible justification.
UK Hiring COVID Marshals to Patrol Streets Until 2023 Despite Lockdown Restrictions Supposedly Ending in June
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | April 27, 2021
Government councils in the UK are hiring COVID Marshals to patrol streets from July until the end of 2023, despite the fact that all lockdown restrictions are supposed to end in June.
“A new army of Covid Marshals is being recruited for roles that could last until 2023 despite Government plans to lift all remaining restrictions on June 21,” reports the Telegraph.
“Councils around the country are advertising jobs that do not begin until July – several days after the supposed freedom day.”
One example is Hertfordshire County Council, which is “offering a contract of up to £3 million to firms that can supply 60 marshals from July 1 until January 31 next year.”
“The contract comes with a possible one-year extension, meaning marshals would still be patrolling until 2023,” states the report.
The Marshals will be tasked with ensuring “compliance” and helping the public understand “regulations and guidance,” despite the fact that all regulations are supposed to be terminated in 8 weeks time.
“We know that the virus is still circulating and will be for some time. We know from last year that numbers of infections can change rapidly, and Government are very clear that we should plan in case a third wave arises. It would be a dereliction of duty not to prepare for a third wave,” said Jim McManus, director of public health for Hertfordshire County Council.
Critics have accused the government of wasting taxpayer money by allowing councils to use government grants to fund the program.
“To start hiring people based on the situation we faced last year, before we had rolled out the vaccines, does seem to be a waste of public money,” said Mark Harper MP, Tory chairman of the Covid Recovery Group.
The fact that COVID Marshals will be patrolling the streets beyond June once again illustrates how the timetable to lift restrictions is completely phony.
Just like the UK government promised for months that it wouldn’t introduce vaccine passports while secretly funding their creation, the state has been caught lying yet again.
In all likelihood, fearmongering over a “third wave” of the virus, despite the UK vaccinating virtually all of its vulnerable population, will be used to reintroduce lockdown at the beginning of Autumn.
Canadian government seeks to police videos posted on social media in ‘assault’ on free speech
RT | April 27, 2021
Critics of Canada’s Liberal government are accusing it of mounting an ‘assault’ on free speech after it proposed modifications to a broadcasting law that would enable it to regulate user-generated video content on social media.
At the heart of the controversy is ‘Bill C-10’, an amendment to the Canadian Broadcasting Act (1991) that purports to give the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) oversight abilities over online streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon.
When the Trudeau government introduced the bill, it contained language exempting content created by individuals. But that clause was removed by a parliamentary committee during the bill’s final review stages on Friday, creating an avenue for the CRTC to treat YouTube videos and TikTok posts uploaded by Canadian users as ‘programs’ – the same way it does broadcast networks.
The move “doesn’t just infringe on free expression, it constitutes a full-blown assault upon it and, through it, the foundations of democracy,” according to former CRTC commissioner Peter Menzies.
“It’s difficult to contemplate the levels of moral hubris, incompetence or both that would lead people to believe such an infringement of rights is justifiable,” Menzies told the National Post newspaper.
The bill’s critics said the changes – made by the Liberal-dominated House of Commons Heritage committee – were especially alarming in light of recent proposals by Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault to give Ottawa the power to order platforms to take down content deemed objectionable.
At present, online services like Netflix and Amazon Prime are not subject to Canadian content rules.
A spokesperson for Guilbeault told the Toronto Star that the bill would still “exempt individual users from being considered broadcasters” and the clause was simply removed to allow for better regulation of things like music playlists.
“Where content uploaded by individual users is curated by a platform, and is deemed of significant impact, that platform, not the users, could be subject to the Broadcasting Act,” she told the paper.
But critics aren’t buying it. Cara Zweibel, fundamental freedoms programs director at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, contends that the legislation “opens up a regulatory door” for Ottawa to implement future regulations on user content.
The same concerns were echoed on social media. University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist asked Guilbeault how “removing your own legislative safeguards and regulating user generated content for millions of Canadians” could be considered as “standing up to web giants”?
Meanwhile, privacy lawyer David Fraser branded the minister’s approach to policymaking an “incoherent word salad of buzzwords.”
“Regulating what I post on YouTube or forcing Facebook or Twitter to pay for news links that I share on their platforms is simply idiotic,” he wrote.
Others said the Liberals took an “already bad law” and made it worse, warning of an “exodus” from platforms if it came into force.
Not everyone was against the proposals, however. Daniel Bernhard, executive director of advocacy group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, said the bill was not the “assault on liberty some were making it out to be.”
In a series of tweets that denounced “hypothetical concerns” about a “tyrannical CRTC”, Bernhard said options to regulate social media monopolies are “far less intense than broadcast licensing” and that “even in that hyper regulated system, CRTC has never been found to have censored or intervened in programming.”
ACLU Again Cowardly Abstains From an Online Censorship Controversy: This Time Over BLM
Black Trans Lives Matters’ march in London. (Photo by Dave Rushen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
By Glenn Greenwald | April 26, 2021
Enormous sums of money have poured into racial justice groups since the May, 2020 murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police Department. “The foundation widely seen as a steward of the Black Lives Matter movement says it took in just over $90 million last year,” according to a February Associated Press review, while at least $5 billion was raised by groups associated with that cause in the first two months alone following Floyd’s death.
Two weeks after the Floyd killing, The New York Times said that the “money has come in so fast and so unexpectedly that some groups even began to turn away and redirect donors elsewhere,” while “others said they still could not yet account for how much had arrived.” Propelled by the emotions and nationwide protest movements that emerged last summer, corporations, oligarchs, celebrities and the general public opened their wallets and began pouring money into BLM coffers and have not stopped doing so.
Where that money has gone has been the topic of numerous media investigations as well as concerns expressed by racial justice advocates. AP noted that BLM’s sharing of financial data in February “marks the first time in the movement’s nearly eight-year history that BLM leaders have revealed a detailed look at their finances.” That newfound transparency was prompted by what AP called “longstanding tensions boil[ing] over between some of the movement’s grassroots organizers and national leaders — the former went public last fall with grievances about financial transparency, decision-making and accountability.”
In December, ten local BLM chapters severed ties with the national group amidst questions and suspicions over the handling of activities and finances by one of its co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, who had assumed the title of Executive Director. On April 10, The New York Post published an exposé on what it called Cullors’ “million-dollar real estate buying binge.” The paper noted that as protests were unfolding around the country, the BLM official was “snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone, according to property records,” including a California property valued at $1.4 million. The article also revealed that the self-described Marxist and her partner “were spotted in the Bahamas looking for a unit at the Albany,” an “elite enclave laid out on 600 oceanside acres,” which “features a private marina and designer golf course.” The Post included photos of several of the properties obtained from public real estate listings.
In an interview about that Post story with Marc Lamont Hill, Cullors — except saying she has not visited the Bahamas since the age of 15 — did not deny the accuracy of the reporting, but instead justified her real estate acquisitions. She denied she had taken a salary from the BLM group, pointing to other income she earns as a professor, author, and a YouTube content creator as the source of this sudden outburst of real estate purchases. She denounced the Post reporting as “frankly racist, and sexist.”
So that seems like a perfectly healthy cycle for covering a controversy, obviously in the public interest. In the wake of concerns from activists about where this massive amount of BLM money has gone, The New York Post did its job of unearthing the splurge of real estate acquisitions by the person who controls and directs BLM’s budget and who has been a target of accusations and suspicions from activists. Cullors then had the opportunity to publicly provide her side of the story concerning her aggressive and ample financial investments.
But then something quite unhealthy and unusual occurred. Five days after publication of that Post article, the Substack journalists Shant Mesrobian and Zaid Jilani reported that Facebook was banning the sharing of that article worldwide on its platform — similar to what Twitter and Facebook did in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election to The New York Post‘s reporting on the Biden family’s business dealings in China and Ukraine. The Substack reporters noted that Facebook ultimately confirmed the worldwide ban of the Post‘s reporting to The New York Times’ media reporter Ben Smith, justifying it on the ground that the article “revealed personal details about [Cullors] and her residence in violation of Facebook’s community standards.”
In his weekly New York Times Sunday night media column, Smith returned to this subject. When a Facebook lawyer justified the censorship by citing an alleged policy that the tech monopoly will ban any “article [which] shows your home or apartment, says what city you’re in and you don’t like it,” Smith expressed extreme skepticism:
The policy sounds crazy because it could apply to dozens, if not hundreds, of news articles every day — indeed, to a staple of reporting for generations that has included Michael Bloomberg’s expansion of his townhouse in 2009 and the comings and goings of the Hamptons elites. Alex Rodriguez doesn’t like a story that includes a photo of him and his former fiancée, Jennifer Lopez, smiling in front of his house? Delete it. Donald Trump is annoyed about a story that includes a photo of him outside his suite at Mar-a-Lago? Gone. Facebook’s hands, the lawyer told me, are tied by its own policies.
Presumably, the only reason this doesn’t happen constantly is because nobody knows about the policy. But now you do!
Smith was additionally disturbed that Facebook was, in essence, overriding the editorial judgment of news outlets, which grapple every day with how to strike the balance between ensuring the public knows of information in the public interest and protecting a person’s right to privacy. For obvious reasons, public figures and organizations — which both BLM and Cullors undoubtedly are — are deemed to have a lower expectation of privacy when it comes to what is newsworthy. That is why, for example, the extramarital affairs of Donald Trump or Bill Clinton are deemed newsworthy whereas, outside of the dead-but-returning Gawker sewer, the sex lives of private citizens are not. Yet Facebook accords no deference to the editorial judgments even of the most established media outlets. Instead, they told Smith, “Facebook alone decides.”
Whatever one’s views are on this particular censorship controversy, there is no doubt that it is part of the highly consequential debate over online free speech and the ability of monopolies like Facebook to control the dissemination of news and the boundaries of political discourse and debate. That is why Smith devoted his weekly column to it. And yet, when Smith approached the standard free speech advocacy groups for comment on this story, virtually none was willing to speak up. “Facebook’s usual critics have been strikingly silent as the company has extended its purview over speech into day-to-day editorial calls,” he wrote.
Among those groups which insisted that it would not comment on Facebook’s censorship of the Post‘s BLM story was the vaunted, brave and deeply principled free speech organization, the American Civil Liberties Union. “We don’t have anyone who is closely plugged into that situation right now so we don’t have anything to say at this point in time,” emailed Aaron Madrid Aksoz, an ACLU spokesman. Smith said “the only criticism he could obtain came from the News Media Alliance, the old newspaper lobby, whose chief executive, David Chavern, called blocking The Post’s link ‘completely arbitrary’ and noted that ‘Facebook and Google stand between publishers and their audiences and determine how and whether news content is seen.’”
How is it possible that the ACLU is all but invisible on one of the central free speech debates of our time: namely, how much censorship should Silicon Valley tech monopolists be imposing on our political speech? As someone who intensively reports on these controversies, I can barely remember any time when the ACLU spoke up loudly on any of these censorship debates, let alone assumed the central role that any civil liberties group with any integrity would, by definition, assume on this growing controversy.
In lieu of the traditional, iconic and organization-defining willingness — eagerness — of the ACLU to defend free speech precisely when it has been most controversial and upsetting to liberals, what we now get instead are cowardly, P.R.-consultant-scripted excuses for staying as far away as possible: “We don’t have anyone who is closely plugged into that situation right now so we don’t have anything to say at this point in time.” That sounds like something Marco Rubio’s office says when asked about a Trump tweet or that a corporate headquarters would say to avoid an inflammatory controversy, not the reaction of a stalwart civil liberties group to a publicly debated act of political censorship.
In this particular case, it is not difficult to understand the cause of the ACLU’s silence. They obviously cannot defend Facebook’s censorship — affirmatively defending the stifling of political speech is, at least for now, still a bridge too far for the group — but they are petrified of saying anything that might seem even remotely critical of, let alone adversarial to, BLM activists and organizations. That is because BLM is one of the most cherished left-liberal causes, and the ACLU now relies almost entirely on donations and grants from those who have standard left-liberal politics and want and expect the ACLU to advance that ideological and partisan agenda above its nonpartisan civil liberties principles. Criticizing BLM is a third rail in left-liberal political circles, which is where the ACLU now resides almost entirely, and thus it again cowers in silence as another online act of censorship which advances political liberalism emerges. Indeed, BLM is an organization which the ACLU frequently champions:
Like so many liberal-left media outlets and advocacy groups, the ACLU was suffering financially before they were saved and then enriched beyond their wildest dreams by Donald Trump and the #Resistance movement he spawned. “The American Civil Liberties Union this week laid off 23 employees, about 7 percent of the organization’s national staff,” announced The Washington Post in April, 2015. But in the Trump era, the money flowed in almost as quickly and furiously as post-Floyd money to BLM. In February, 2017, said AP, the group “is suddenly awash in donations and new members as it does battle with President Donald Trump over the extent of his constitutional authority, with nearly $80 million in online contributions alone pouring in since the election.” So that is the donor base it now serves.
The ACLU’s we-know-nothing routine for abstaining from commenting on Facebook’s censorship of the BLM article is, for so many reasons, preposterous. The group funds what it calls its Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and some of its best lawyers oversee it. Clearly they focus on these issues. And the ACLU in general has taken a firm and borderline-absolutist position against online censorship by Silicon Valley monopolies: principles whose application to this particular case would be easy and obvious. The ACLU has a section of its website devoted to “Internet Speech,” and its position on such matters is stated explicitly:
The ACLU believes in an uncensored Internet, a vast free-speech zone deserving at least as much First Amendment protection as that afforded to traditional media such as books, newspapers, and magazines….The ACLU has been at the forefront of protecting online freedom of expression in its myriad forms. We brought the first case in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared speech on the Internet equally worthy of the First Amendment’s historical protections.
In a July, 2018 article published on the group’s site entitled “Facebook Shouldn’t Censor Offensive Speech,” the group praised Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial pledge “to keep Facebook from diving deeper into the business of censorship” as “the right call.”
Unlike in response to the BLM controversy, the ACLU had no trouble back then recognizing that “what’s at stake here is the ability of one platform that serves as a forum for the speech of billions of people to use its enormous power to censor speech on the basis of its own determinations of what is true, what is hateful, and what is offensive.” The ACLU’s stated policy on these controversies could not have been clearer: “given Facebook’s nearly unparalleled status as a forum for political speech and debate, it should not take down anything but unlawful speech, like incitement to violence.” In light of that principle, how is it remotely hard to denounce Facebook’s censorship of the Post‘s article given that it does not even arguably fall within the scope of those narrow exceptions?
Because the ACLU still employs a few old-school civil libertarians among its hundreds of lawyers and staff, those employees manage to do work and express views that are consistent with the ACLU’s old-school civil liberties agenda even when contrary to the interests of liberal politics. But the tactics used by the ACLU in those cases to downplay or hide those aberrations are as transparent as they are craven.
When three Silicon Valley monopolies united to remove the social media app Parler from the internet in January, 2021 after influential Democratic lawmakers demanded it — one of the most brute acts of monopolistic censorship yet — an ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner, was cited in The New York Times as labelling Parler’s destruction “troubling,” telling the paper: “I think we should recognize the importance of neutrality when we’re talking about the infrastructure of the internet.” But on the ACLU’s highly active and influential Twitter account — the group’s primary platform for promoting its work, expressing its views, and soliciting donations, where it has two million followers and often tweets up to fifty times a day — the group said absolutely nothing about the removal of an entire social media app from the internet.
Indeed, the ACLU — outside of a few token, hidden statements — has chosen to play at most a minor role in the key free speech controversies of the day, ones focusing on such weighty matters as internet freedom and online censorship over our political debates by Silicon Valley monopolies. Over the last four years, as Facebook’s censorship has expanded rapidly, the ACLU has said little to nothing about it — including remaining in utter silence about the extraordinary decision to censor pre-election reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop and what it revealed about Joe Biden’s business dealings. Last month, Substack reporter Michael Tracey reviewed the ACLU’s prior 100 tweets and found that 63 of them were about trans issues while a grand total of one was about free speech and none about due process. A comparison of the number of ACLU statements on online censorship controversies to its manifestations on trans issues similarly reveals a fixation on the latter with very little interest in the former.
It goes without saying that the ACLU has every right to devote a huge bulk of its institutional resources and public advocacy to the cause of trans equality if it chooses to do so. But what that reveals is that the group is becoming exactly what its leaders always vowed it would never be: just another garden-variety liberal political advocacy group. After all, there is no shortage of extremely well-financed LGBT groups doing the same advocacy on trans issues. Those LGBT groups shifted their focus almost entirely to trans issues when they won the entire agenda of gay and lesbian equality with the Supreme Court’s 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in all fifty states, and supporting trans rights is the mainstream, standard view of Democratic Party leaders and liberal activists.
The ACLU’s refusal to engage with growing online censorship is baffling even from the perspective of its liberal politics given that radical leftists are increasingly (and predictably) the targets of tech censorship alongside anti-establishment right-wing voices. Just yesterday, the highly popular trans YouTube host Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints complained that one of her past episodes had just been demonetized and urged: “Free speech should be reclaimed as an essential leftist issue. We should not surrender the most fundamental civil right to Google LLC in the name of deplatforming rightists and curtailing harassment.” Wynn’s last video, rebutting the views of J.K. Rowling on trans issues, featured Wynn’s list of the telltale signs of “indirect bigotry” toward trans people, and she included “free speech advocacy,” but — as happens to so many people — Wynn has apparently reconsidered that view and has discovered the centrality of free speech values now that her own speech is targeted. But agitating for more online political censorship still remains a cause deeply popular among establishment liberals, further explaining the ACLU’s reluctance to involve itself in these controversies on the side of free expression.
ACLU page touting its advocacy of trans and nonbinary rights
What always distinguished the ACLU in the past — and what gave it credibility with judges in courtrooms — was its devotion to and focus on non-partisan free speech, free press and due process causes that were too unpopular or controversial for other groups to touch, particularly liberal groups who could not afford to offend the political sensibilities of Democrats. There are still some isolated occasions when the ACLU does such things — such as when it spoke up in defense of the NRA against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s efforts to target the group with destruction or when the ACLU recently denounced parts of the Democrats’ H.R.1 “reforms”— but the ACLU largely hides those exceptions on its most popular public platforms, and they are becoming increasingly rare.
And now we have arrived at the truly depressing and tawdry place where the ACLU is afraid to apply its long-stated principles to denounce Facebook’s censorship because the censorship in question happened to be an article that reflected poorly on the sacred-among-liberals BLM group. In the place of brave lawyers and activists defending the constitutional rights and civil liberties even of those people and groups most despised, we have instead a corporate spokesman emailing The New York Times with excuses about why it cannot and will not speak up about a major censorship controversy that has been brewing for two weeks. In that decline one finds the ACLU’s sorry trajectory from stalwart civil liberties group into a lavishly funded arm of the Democratic Party’s liberal political wing.
Featured Video
Spain train disaster raises questions over Israeli-linked security contractors
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
- German CDU MPs Seek Climate “Misinformation” List
- The ‘Gaza Treatment’: How Media Headlines Obscure Who is Bombing Yemen
- Ro Khanna urges Democrats to strip Israel ‘integration’ provision from defense bill
- Why Iran designated British MI6, Royal Navy, and RAF as hostile, terrorist organizations
- Armenian opposition politician dies in custody
- US still trying to recycle failed hypersonic missile programs
- France’s ‘Cold War’: Paris blames Tehran for supermarket fridge hacks
- Psywar no more? 77th Brigade’s sudden death
- Ukraine Already Carved Up… Before Talks Begin? /Prof. Richard Sakwa
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- German Authorities Start Initiative To Evaluate Public Register For Climate “Disinformation” Spreaders!
- Zonal Asymmetry of Temperature Change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current
- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
