Parents Shocked as Armed Cops Show Up at Their Homes to Talk About Kids’ Grades
By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | January 18, 2021
St. Louis County, MO — Over the last decade, TFTP has been reporting on the encroachment of the police state into the public education system. As we previously reported, schools across the country are increasingly hiring police officers to do the job that teachers and guidance counselors once did. This is resulting in the criminalization of childhood as well as increased police violence against children. Never, however, have we reported on what you are about to read below.
While the data shows that students have declining access to a kind and caring role model to guide them through their high school careers, the number of students who have access to a police officer is growing.
A whopping 1.6 million (k – 12th grade) students attend a school that employs a law enforcement officer — but has no counselor.
According to a Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) survey, which counted cops in schools for the very first time in 2014, 24 percent of elementary schools and 42 percent of high schools have armed police officers. In schools with higher concentrations of minorities that number skyrockets.
Now, as schools districts react to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing something even more ominous than an increase in cops in schools. We are seeing cops going to the homes of students.
Parents of at least 1,500 children in St. Louis County are speaking out this month after armed officers have been showing up to their homes. To be clear, the children have not been accused of a crime, instead, the cops are showing up to discuss grades with students and parents — while carrying their guns.
Yes, you read that correctly. Armed agents of the state — with absolutely zero training in how to teach children — are going door to door to talk to children and parents about their grades. The parents who have been visited, however, aren’t buying it, don’t want it, and say that officers showing up at their homes is a scare tactic.
“It was unimaginable, I can’t even really describe how I felt in the moment,” Porsha Outen told KSDK.
Outen said she was frightened and panicked the entire time the cop was in her home.
“I was shaking my voice was cracking, I was emotional because I did not understand,” said Outen. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off his firearm.”
Outen explained to KSDK the officer showed up with a counselor — unannounced at their door — at 8:30 a.m. after students returned from Christmas break. Outen’s daughter, a 15-year-old student at Ritenour High School, allegedly failed to turn in an assignment, so a cop was sent to her home.
“He questioned my daughter about the work that she was supposed to turn in, she answered him, he also asked her if she understood what she was saying to him. At that point I said this conversation is over,” said Outen.
Another parent, Christine Troupe told the media outlet that they received a visit from police as well.
“The implication of the police showing up to your house is like you’ve done something wrong and it’s like even if you’ve not done anything it’s that feeling of something is criminal is happening here,” said Troupe.
Troupe said the cop was at their house because her child has a failing grade in a ceramics art class.
“If the intention is to help our kids or hold them accountable then to me that’s not conducive to them learning basically it’s a scare tactic it’s something you do for something you’re serving a warrant on not for a child that may need a tutor for a ceramics art class,” said Troupe.
School officials — who are now hiding behind the barrel of a gun to carry out their duties — claim the intention is not to intimidate and after the feedback they received, they say police will be told to act differently.
“The presence of an officer is triggering, we’ve gotten that feedback now so now the responsibility is on us in that specific situation to act differently,” said Superintendent Dr. Kilbride, adding that the district has carried out over 1,500 of these visits since August.
“It’s about positive visits as well, it’s about resources, it’s also about areas for improvement as well,” he added.
But parents don’t see the visits as a positive experience at all and want this to stop immediately. Since she was visited by police, Outen has teamed up with the NAACP to make sure they don’t happen anymore.
“As a parent I don’t ever want my child to associate her education with a police officer, I don’t want my child associating a grade that needs to be approved with a gun,” said Outen.
It seems that schools in America are starting to more closely resemble prisons than learning facilities. Think about it — before being locked down in their homes for COVID, children were locked behind steel doors all day long as armed agents of the state patrol the grounds. A few minutes out of the day, the students are given a little yard time — and again, they are kept under the watch of armed state agents.
Video after video shows the horrific nature of such a practice as children are seen being pepper sprayed, beaten, and tasered for normal childhood behaviors. And now, these armed agents are coming to the homes. A slippery slope indeed.
Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Minds.
US-based nonprofit sues Apple to REMOVE Telegram over failure to censor ‘hate speech,’ cites Parler crackdown
RT | January 18, 2021
Coalition for a Safer Web, a non-profit founded by a former US ambassador, has sued Apple, demanding it delete Telegram from its store, arguing that the app is being used to “incite extreme violence” ahead of the inauguration.
The Washington-based nonprofit and its president Marc Ginsberg, who served as US ambassador to Morocco from 1994 to 1998 and was Deputy Senior Adviser to the US President on Middle East Policy (1978–1981), argue in the newly-filed federal lawsuit that Apple fails to hold Telegram accountable for violating its terms of service.
The complaint, filed on Sunday with the US District Court for Northern California, accuses Telegram of allowing anti-Semites, white supremacists and other extremists to thrive on its platform, with Apple purportedly turning a blind eye on the fact.
The suit posits that if Apple fails to remove the app, it may give rise to street violence, arguing that the app “is currently being used to coordinate and incite extreme violence before the inauguration of President [-elect] Joe Biden.”
“Telegram currently serves as the preferred Neo-Nazi/white nationalist communications channel, fanning anti-Semitic and anti-black incitement during the current wave of protests across America,” the lawsuit argues. It alleges that the privacy-focused messaging app is poised to become an even bigger breeding ground for extremist content as users “migrate to Telegram” after Big Tech’s crackdown on Parler, booted from Apple and Google stores for giving a platform to some of the pro-Trump supporters that stormed the US Capitol.
Ginsberg, who is a co-plaintiff in the suit, notes that in a letter to Apple in July he already asked the tech behemoth to pull Telegram to hold its “financial feet to the fire,” but has received no reply. The former US official, who is Jewish, argues that Apple’s inaction has caused him “emotional distress” through the use of his iPhone. Ginsberg estimated damages he allegedly suffered as a result of Apple’s perceived leniency towards the messaging app at over $75,000.
“By continuing to host Telegram on the Apple App Store, Defendant facilitates religious threats against him and his family that has caused Ambassador Ginsberg to fear for his life,” the complaint charges.
The nonprofit told the Washington Post on Sunday that it plans to mount a similar lawsuit against Google.
Arguing that Apple should banish Telegram from its store without delay, the suit draws on Parler’s case as a precedent, noting that: “Apple has not taken any action against Telegram comparable to the action it has taken against Parler to compel Telegram to improve its content moderation policies.”
Telegram has seen an explosive growth in its user base after established social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube blocked US President Donald Trump and launched a crackdown on his supporters.
The messaging platform, which prides itself for its end-to-end encryption for messages, reported over 500 million monthly users in the first week of January, with CEO Pavel Durov saying that it added 25 million new users in just 72 hours. However, while some portion of the newcomers might have indeed been conservatives fleeing the wide-ranging social media purge, Durov said that almost two in five new clients came from Asia, 27 percent from Europe, and 21 percent from Latin America.
While facing constant criticism for its lax moderation policies, Telegram has recently made headlines for banning“dozens of public channels” for inciting violence.
Without Democracy in the U.S., Can the Simulacra of Democracy Survive Elsewhere?
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 17, 2021
The ‘Ides of March’, they came early this year – on 6 January, at least for one current U.S. ‘Caesar’. What happened; how it happened; who concocted the Capitol events, will be long debated. However, the daggers had long been sharpened for Caesar, well before the invasion of the Capitol. In a sense, the stage was already set – Trump walked into the DC ‘Forum’, and ended ‘stabbed to death’, as had Julius. It has been truly Shakespearean.
It was well-known that Trump might well reject the election results, because of postal ballot potential fraud (as postal ballots assumed their disproportionate 2020 electoral predominance). The Transition Integrity Project (TIP) precisely (purposefully?) had taunted Trump last June with its forecast of a contested election in which Trump would lose – after “all of the mail-in ballots had been tallied”. The TIP then had turned to the prospective tactics and tasks for forcefully ousting a President-in-denial from the White House. (The media and ‘platforms’ had been participants in this early war-gaming of how to deal with a Trump, who contested the election result, and questioned the legality and authenticity of postal ballots).
It needn’t have been this way – but no compromise on rules on postal balloting was attempted (rather, the reverse). In any event, the Capitol invasion now stands as a major psychic event (the “Insurrection”) searing the American consciousness. Apart from unnerving the legislators, unused to experiencing a sudden loss of security, the invasion has become the sacrilege to a ‘sacred space’ (with all the additional connotations of America’s exceptional, divine mission). The daggers were gleefully plunged in – Trump is impeached again; he is to be tried in the Senate after the Biden inauguration; and he and his family, may expect the legal dismemberment that will follow.
The ‘Blue State’ has – from Trump’s first election – been determined to crush him. That is underway. And somehow sychronistically, we now have the Tech digital deletion of Red America from social platforms, with talk of a ‘purge’ and cultural ‘re-education’ for his supporters (and their children), as well. Biden is already speaking like a War President (and the Capitol now has taken the air of a theatre of war, with troops and weapons strewn about its corridors): “Trump”, said Biden, “has unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of democracy, from the outset, and yesterday was but the culmination of that unrelenting attack”.
Here is the key first implication to that ‘psychic event’ – not just for Americans, but for the world spectating the unfolding events: Biden has called for measures against “domestic terrorism”, and used language that is usually reserved for combat with an external enemy state – language such as accompanies major wars. This is ‘revenge cycle’ material. In the case of two nations, literally at war, they do do this. This is a part of it. They hope to resolve their conflict through humiliation, repression and the forced submission of the other (i.e. Japan after WW2). But America is, at least nominally, one nation. What happens when a single nation splits, with one turning the ‘seditious’ elements into an ‘alien other’?
We do not know. But hatred is intense, both toward Trump and the ‘deplorables’. And now, these sentiments are reciprocated in the wake of the President’s humiliation, at a contents-free impeachment, reached in few hours. What seems certain is that the course of events likely will lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of ever greater polarisation.
The rise of Trumpism has created a new radical Manicheanism amongst the liberal élite. Tech, with its algos feeding like-minded material to the like-minded, has a lot to do with this digital and ideological divide. But the bottom line is that this divide is (falsely) cast as a death-struggle now underway between a monolithic liberalism and a monolithic illiberalism.
This carries a huge message for Russia, Iran and China (and others) – the U.S. is deeply divided, but its ‘new mission’ will be a ‘moral high-ground’ war against illiberalism – at home, firstly – and then overseas.
Yet of greater – and wider – significance is that the ‘noble lie’ – the mask concealing the cynical arrangement that is American ‘democracy’ – has been stripped away. The crucial import was underlined by the German FM, Heiko Maas, when he observed: “Without democracy in the U.S., [there is] no democracy in Europe”.
What might have Maas meant? Possibly, he was referring to the angry 75 millions of Red America that have now grasped the shocking magnitude of the fraud played on them. By fraud here is not a reference to the particular claims about 3 November, but to the much bigger fraud of a system rigged in the interests of the Establishment. This has been one of the basic props to the engineered consent upon which public order and social stability in America and Europe has rested for decades: the naïve belief in the democratic essence of the system.
This prop is being overturned by the ‘Blue State’ precisely in order to savour a sweet revenge on Trump for pulling aside the mask on so much else of ‘Establishment America’. Trump laid bare how corrupt the ‘swamp’ had become, and he articulated Red America’s deepest concerns and frustrations about off-shored jobs, economic precarity and ‘forever wars’. They, in turn, had projected their exasperation, bitterness, and illusions back onto him, turning him, by default, into their standard-bearer.
Yet – astonishingly – this toppling of the pillar of an engineered ‘noble lie’ is being done precisely by those (the Establishment), who one might have thought, had the most interest in keeping it intact. But they cannot resist it. They just cannot forgive ‘outsider’ Trump’s intrusion into their neatly constructed illusions: trashing their elaborate ‘construct’ of reality, simply by magicking up new ‘facts’ to contest their ‘science’.
Isn’t this what is so frightening for Merkel and Maas? The EU has its own, more fragile, ‘noble lie’. It is this: States – by relinquishing a portion of their sovereignty – might hope to participate in a ‘greater sovereignty’ (i.e. the European Project), and still believe that it is ‘democratic’.
This cynical European arrangement only stands if Merkel and Macron can hold up American ‘democracy’ as the guiding principle to the European Project (however misleading that may be). But now, with the ‘lights going out’ in the ‘City on the Hill’, and with only a broken democracy ideal under which EU leaders may shelter, how will the dreary formula of a diluted sovereignty, with no real democracy; with no roots in the ground below; with the EU moving to ever closer oligarchy, and led by an unaccountable, and secretive ‘politburo’, survive?
The point is that European ‘democracy’ is also rigged towards Germany and the élites. And ordinary Europeans have noticed, (especially when only one part of the community bears a disproportionate burden of the Covid economic pain). The élites fear Trump: he may lay it all bare, for all to see.
Some EU leaders may hope that Trumpism will be so completely crushed, and its voice silenced, that Europe’s own fracturing engineered public consent can be contained. Yet they must know, in their hearts, that recourse to identity and gender ideology (as pretext for greater state-ism), will only armour-plate the bubbles and divisions because they prevent people from hearing each other. It is the post-persuasion, post-argument politics of polarisation.
For sure, the rest of the world are taking close note. They will not be accepting moral lectures from Europe in the future (though undoubtedly, they will still get them), and states will look to build ‘public consent’ around quite different ‘poles’ – loose concerts of states, traditional culture and the historic narratives of their communities.
The Masks Are Coming Off
By Rob Slane | The Blogmire | January 9, 2021
I had intended to start the New Year with a heart-warming piece entitled, “2021: The Year of Censorship of Dissent”. It would have been a somewhat prophetical piece, shocking some readers with predictions of a coming crackdown on dissent, and causing others to hoot with laughter because they haven’t quite caught up with the times we are in. You know, the types who say things like “Oh perrrlease! Social Media companies are private companies and they have the right to decide who they allow on their platform” and “Stop making out it’s the gulag” etc.
Unfortunately, my plans were scuppered by the fact that media and social media companies — let’s call them Global Pravda — have come out of the blocks even earlier than even I anticipated, and have been censoring left right and centre. As a result, my intended “prophetical” utterance seems like yesterday’s news.
We’ve had the censoring of Talk Radio on YouTube. Although this was then restored after intervention at the highest level, I understand some of the wonderful conversations between Mike Graham and Peter Hitchens are still banned. YouTube have also banned videos from extremely qualified scientists around the world, including two lengthy interviews given in English by one of the most qualified microbiologists on planet earth, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi.
We’ve then seen the President of the United States being banned from Facebook, Instagram and more recently Twitter. I am no fan of Donald Trump, but it is clear that he has never used these platforms to “incite violence” – the excuse given for his ban –, and it is obvious that there is something else going on there. And we’ve also seen numerous conservatives and scientists who oppose or question the mass quarantining of healthy people literally losing hundreds of Twitter followers in the last few days. Their followers are simply being deleted by Jack’s Magical Dissent Removing Algorithm, which has been invoked with a vengeance.
Last year really was nuts. It was a year when the authorities managed to convince people that even though they have no symptoms of an illness and feel as right as rain, they need to go get tested for the illness they don’t have, using a test that is not fit-for-purpose, such that they come away telling others that they have the illness they don’t actually have. Imagine doing that before 2020:
“Doctor, doctor, I think I have flu.”
“Oh really, what symptoms have you got. A cough? Achiness?”
“Oh no, I feel perfectly well. No symptoms whatsoever.”
“Then what makes you think you’ve got the flu?”
“I just think I might have it. Can I have a test?”
I imagine you’d have been laughed out of the surgery. Yet not only is this what people have been doing for over 9 months, but we’ve been told that people who aren’t ill need to be placed in quarantine and cover their respiratory passages with a piece of cloth, lest they spread the illness they don’t have to others. It’s quite mad, but we can at least comfort ourselves that it will be a source of amusement for our descendants.
It makes me quite nostalgic for the past. Well, 2009 anyway. Back then, when certain folks were trying to ramp up the fear and hysteria over the H1N1 (Swine Flu) outbreak (one Neil Ferguson prophesying 65,000 deaths in Britain), and Mexico announced a shutdown of much of its society for a time, the then Director General of the World Health Organisation, Dr. Margaret Chan, appealed for calm:
“In this regard, let me make a strong plea to countries to refrain from introducing measures that are economically and socially disruptive, yet have no scientific justification and bring no clear public health benefit. Rational responses are always best. They are all the more important at a time of economic downturn.”
Yet despite 2020 craziness, it doesn’t seem like it will hold a candle to 2021. If the first week or so is any barometer, it may be that 2020 was just the trailer or the warm-up act for the real thing. We’ve already seen the Chief Medical Adviser telling people who don’t have an illness to act as if they do have an illness. We’ve already seen the rollout of a vaccine, the study for which is not due to be completed until on 27th January 2023. And we’ve already seen international organisations telling us that restrictions are likely to continue for the foreseeable future, Salvation by Vaccine notwithstanding – although those of us who have followed things carefully knew this anyway.
Yet the real story of 2021 — if anyone is allowed to tell it — is likely to be mass censorship. What we are already seeing is, ironically, an unmasking. If 2020 was the year in which people put their Masks on, 2021 is already shaping up to be the year when the Globalists and Global Pravda really take theirs off. They are really going for it, blatantly censoring dissent, brazenly de-platforming alternative views, and shamelessly using technology to ensure that reasoned, fact-based challenges to establishment narratives are silenced.
It is ugly, its sinister and its menacing. And unless you are someone who longs to live in a more totalitarian state, you need to get wise to it now, you need to pray against it now, and you need to fight against it now. The masks are coming off and freedom is being crushed. Choose which side you want to stand on.
Facebook Censors Mexican Cardinal for Denouncing ‘New World Order’
By Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D. | BREITBART | January 16, 2021
Facebook has censored a video of Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, archbishop emeritus of Guadalajara, for suggesting that globalist leaders are exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to bring about a new world order.
In place of the cardinal’s weekly video, Facebook exhibited a greyed-out screenshot emblazoned with the banner “False information.” Underneath, Facebook added, “This publication repeats information about COVID-19 that independent fact checkers deemed false.”
On its Facebook page, Semanario Arquidiocesano Guadalajara, an information service run by the Archdiocese of Guadalajara, posted the following screenshot on January 13, along with the text “Cardinal Juan Sandoval denounced the imposition of a new world order, hours later his video was censored”:
In the nine-and-a-half-minute January 12 video, bearing the title “Plot of a new world order,” the cardinal begins by saying, “Dear friends, this will go on for a long time.”
“This pandemic won’t end in a month or two months, perhaps not this year, perhaps not in three, four, five, six years,” he said. “That’s what these men want. It will be a long haul.”
“It’s a tough, difficult situation, the likes of which has not been seen in human history,” he said:
“Bill Gates is a prophet and foretells the future,” the cardinal noted wryly, “and not only did he predict the coming of the coronavirus, but has also warned of a possible future smallpox pandemic.”
During the pandemic, Cardinal Sandoval has criticized the shuttering of businesses and services as disproportionate measures to curb the spread of the virus.
“What they’re after is a world government, a new world order,” the cardinal asserts in the video.
“They want a single world government, a single army, a single currency, a single economy, and also a single religion — that will certainly not be the Christian religion,” he said. “It will be the religion of Mother Earth, in the name of humanity and universal brotherhood.”
“To this end, pandemics serve to weaken nations; they impoverish and indebt them, bringing down their economies,” Sandoval said. “They also weaken education, closing schools and replacing them with distance learning.”
“These pandemics also impede religious practice, as we saw all last year,” he said. “They close the churches, reduce the number of people who can worship.”
“But above all, they are creating fear, a terrible fear among the people,” he warned.
EC’s von der Leyen dares European nations to call her bluff with announcement of (mandatory?) vaccine certificates
(Alessandro della Valle/Keystone via AP)
RT | January 15, 2021
Europeans must carry certificates proving they’ve been vaccinated against Covid-19 to travel, EC president Ursula von der Leyen told Portuguese media – likely shocking Europeans who’d never heard of such a rule.
Von der Leyen sprung the idea of a “mutually recognized vaccination certificate” as a “medical requirement” for travel on Thursday in the course of praising a similar plan outlined to her in a letter from Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
“It is a medical requirement to have a certificate proving that you have been vaccinated,” von der Leyen told Portuguese reporters.
While Mitsotakis’ plan was not meant to be “compulsory or a prerequisite for travel,” von der Leyen seemed to be leaning in that direction, repeating that “we have to have a medical requirement that proves that people have been vaccinated.” The idea of an EU-wide vaccine certificate “is a political and legal decision that should be discussed at a European level,” she continued emphatically.
This was no doubt news to Europeans unfamiliar with the contents of Mitsotakis’ letter. The Greek leader wrote that it was “urgent to adopt a common understanding on how a vaccination certificate should be structured so as to be accepted in all member states,” and an EU-wide meeting is scheduled for Thursday, at which point Mitsotakis is expected to make the case for certificates “facilitating the freedom of movement of persons who have been vaccinated against Covid-19.”
“It is urgent to adopt a common understanding on how a vaccination certificate should be structured so as to be accepted in all member states,” he wrote. Greece plans to issue digital vaccine certificates to every resident who receives the jab.
Seemingly brainstorming ways to incentivize the uptake of such certificates without imposing an explicit mandate, von der Leyen suggested on Friday that they be combined with Covid-19 tests for those unable to access the vaccine in a timely fashion. Such a package would allow for greater travel to warm-weather destinations – a must for EU member states with tourism-dependent economies concerned that a second year in a row without pleasure travel will destroy them.
Brussels insists it has obtained enough of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines to inoculate every European , and von der Leyen has forbidden member states from making their own side deals. However, defiant Hungary has already reached a deal to buy China’s Sinopharm vaccine, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban saying on Friday that the local regulators must act“responsibly,” but “quickly” to approve the Chinese-made jab. Budapest has been negotiating with Russia for a supply of Sputnik V as well, complaining that the sluggish speed of the EU program will require Covid-19 restrictions to remain in place for “several more months” of unnecessary economic suffering. Nor is it the only member nation that has complained about the pace of the EU’s vaccination rollout.
There’s also confusion about recently-Brexited British citizens’ compatibility with an EU-wide vaccine passport program – or whether the UK is planning to issue the certificates at all. Conservative MP Michael Gove claimed vaccine passports were “not the plan,” a statement echoed by PM Boris Johnson’s vaccine czar Nadhim Zahawi – but not until after Zahawi had already admitted London was “looking at the technology.”
Privacy advocates have warned that vaccination certificates could easily snowball into intrusive global digital IDs, complete with discrimination based on medical conditions, rationing of benefits, and thorny human rights issues stemming from requiring people to be injected with what remain largely-untested pharmaceutical compounds. Thousands of recipients of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna jabs have experienced incapacitating side effects.
Norway is currently investigating the death of 23 nursing home residents who passed away shortly after receiving Pfizer jabs, with 13 of the cases being linked to the side effects of the vaccine.
Meanwhile, Spain plans to keep a database of vaccine refusers which it will share with other “European partners,” effectively relegating vaccine skeptics to second-class citizens.
“I Am Open”: 50,000 Italian Restaurant Owners Plan to Ignore Lockdown
Huge act of civil disobedience plans to conduct business as usual inspite of “anti-Covid” measures
OffGuardian | January 15, 2021
Today – Friday 15th January – over 50,000 restaurants are planning to open, an act of mass civil disobedience against “anti-Covid” lockdown measures which have massively hurt the restaurant business, especially small family-owned businesses.
Spreading through social media under the hashtag #IoOpro (“I am opening”), the movement is largest country-wide act of civil disobedience since lockdowns began.
Italain opposition MP Vittorio Sgarbi has backed the movement, saying in an interview:
Open up, & don’t worry, in the end we will make them eat their fines”.
Italy’s government is already facing internal conflict and crisis, an early election is a possibility.
A similar movement already started in Mexico on January 12th, when hundreds of restaurant owners gathered to protest the lockdowns.
The “I am Open” protest is spreading across Europe as well, with variants already taking hold in German-speaking Switzerland (#Wirmachenauf) and Poland (#OtwieraMY).
It’s good to be reminded that, no matter how much it looks like the new normal is spreading unopposed, it’s not. People all over the world are resisting where they can. That’s what “Covid Positive” is all about.
To follow the progress of this movement we recommended following Robin Monotti and the It’s Time to Rise accounts on twitter and other platforms.
New Jersey government drains gym’s bank account over Covid-19 rule-breaking, despite ongoing legal appeal
RT | January 15, 2021
The owners of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, New Jersey had their bank account unexpectedly drained even while pursuing their legal appeals against a growing stack of fines levied by the state for alleged violation of Covid-19 rules.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy “took it upon himself to empty our bank account entirely, to the tune of $165,000,” gym owner Ian Smith claimed in a Wednesday Instagram post. The confiscation took place “without warning, and without permission” despite both parties being eight months into a bitter legal battle over state Covid-19 restrictions – including a lawsuit against the governor, he added.
The gym owner accused the governor “and his cronies” of “effectively and intentionally interfering with our right to council [sic]” in a Twitter post, noting that the sum taken represented “100% of [the gym’s] legal defense money.”
In addition to several charges filed against Atilis Gym in July, when its owners were arrested for defying a court order to shut down their business, the gym has been hit with additional fines of $15,497.76 since November for every day it remains open to its members without enforcing a mask mandate.
However, the owners have appealed all financial judgments against their establishment. Smith pointed out that he has challenged not only the daily fines, but some “eighty municipal and criminal charges against us; ongoing litigation in the case of the revocation of our business license without due process; and the unconstitutional health department shut-down that was placed upon us in the first place.”
When Murphy ordered the state’s gyms to close back in March, Smith and his business partner Frank Trumbetti took their case to court, arguing they should be permitted to stay open as long as they maintained strict sanitary and social distancing protocols. The pair sued both Murphy and state health commissioner Judith Persichilli, vowing that “no governor, or no government official, will ever wield [such excessive] powers ever again.”
Smith personally served Murphy with a recall petition at his office in December in an effort to force the Democrat out of office.
The gym has not been charging members to work out since April, and all of the money in the account came from donations and apparel sales, according to Smith’s Instagram post. He added that the gym has seen 105,000 visitors since the pandemic began and not a single reported case of Covid-19.
While New Jersey has since permitted gyms to open, provided they follow the state’s Covid-19 regulations, Atilis does not require its patrons to wear masks while exercising.
Smith took his story national on Thursday with an interview by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who marveled that the gym owners were “being punished for trying to keep people healthy and trim in the middle of a pandemic that kills people who are overweight and out of shape.”
A spokesman for the New Jersey attorney general’s office subsequently claimed the gym owners had lied about the state “seiz[ing] their bank account funds” in the amount of $173,000. Smith had initially tweeted $173,613.60 had been taken from his account before revising the amount to $165,000 in his Instagram video.
“The State has obtained judgments against the owners, and intends to collect on them” in the amount of $134,463.08, the spokesman explained to Fox News, arguing that the $165,000 in “frozen” assets had been seized as the result of a bank levy in the course of the enforcement of a judicial order against the gym owners.
Presumably hoping to avoid government seizure of future legal assistance donations, Smith told Carlson that contributions would be immediately converted to cash going forward.
Gyms have become hotspots of local resistance to Covid-19 regulations, in part due to the prominence of obesity as a risk factor for the disease. A group of New York gyms filed a class action lawsuit against Governor Andrew Cuomo in July, and Orchard Park gym owner Robbie Dinero won his own case against the state government after a State Supreme Court judge affirmed New York’s order to close down gyms was “arbitrary and capricious” last month.
New Jersey has thus far endured the highest Covid-19 death rate in the US, with New York having the second-highest rate.
However, the majority of deaths in both states took place in nursing homes, which were required by the states’ governors to accept patients believed to be infected with Covid-19.
Silicon Valley and WEF-Backed Foundation Announce Global Initiative for COVID-19 Vaccine Records
Multiple airlines are now testing a digital health passport, called CommonPass, that will store health information needed for travel on a secure, easy-to-update app. The Commons Project
By Whitney Webb |
Unlimited Hangout| January 15, 2021
Silicon Valley’s most influential companies, alongside healthcare companies, US intelligence contractors and the Commons Project Foundation, recently launched the Vaccination Credential Initiative. The initiative’s ambitions reach far beyond vaccines and will have major implications for civil liberties.
On Thursday, tech giants with deep ties to the US national-security state—Microsoft, Oracle, and the MITRE corporation—announced that they had partnered with several health-care companies to create the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) to advance the implementation of digital COVID-19 vaccination records.
According to a Reuters report, the VCI “aims to help people get encrypted digital copies of their immunization records stored in a digital wallet of their choice” because the “current system [of vaccination records] does not readily support convenient access and sharing of verifiable vaccination records.”
The initiative, on its website, notes that the VCI is a public-private partnership “committed to empowering individuals with digital vaccination records” so that participants can “protect and improve their health” and “demonstrate their health status to safely return to travel, work, school and life while protecting their data privacy.” The initiative is essentially built on a common framework of digital vaccination “wallets” called SMART Health Cards that are meant to “work across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries” as part of a new global vaccination-record infrastructure.
The host of the VCI website and one the initiative’s key backers is the Commons Project Foundation. That foundation, in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF), runs the Common Trust Network, which has three goals that are analogous to those of VCI. As listed on the WEF website, the network’s goals are (1) to empower individuals by providing digital access to their health information; (2) to make it easier for individuals to understand and comply with each destination’s requirements; and (3) to help ensure that only verifiable lab results and vaccination records from trusted sources are presented for the purposes of cross-border travel and commerce.
To advance these goals, the Common Trust Network is powered by “a global registry of trusted laboratory and vaccination data sources” as well as “standard formats for lab results and vaccination records and standard tools to make those results and records digitally accessible.”
How CommonPass works, thecommonsproject.org
Another, and related, Commons Project Foundation and WEF partnership is CommonPass. CommonPass, which is also supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, is both a framework and an app that “will allow individuals to access their lab results and vaccination records, and consent to have that information used to validate their COVID status without revealing any other underlying personal health information.” Current members of CommonPass, including JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss International Airlines, United Airlines, and Virgin Atlantic, are also members of the Common Trust Network.
This overlap between the Commons Project Foundation/WEF partnerships and the VCI illustrates that the WEF itself is involved with the VCI, albeit indirectly through their partners at the Commons Project Foundation. The Commons Project Foundation itself is worth exploring, as its cofounders, Paul Meyer and Bradley Perkins, have long-standing ties to the RAND Corporation, the US’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the International Rescue Committee, as noted in this article published last year by MintPress News. The IRC, currently run by Tony Blair protégé David Milliband, is developing a biometric ID and vaccination-record system for refugees in Myanmar in cooperation with the ID2020 Alliance, which is partnered with CommonPass backer, the Rockefeller Foundation. In addition, the ID2020 Alliance funds the Commons Project Foundation and is also backed by Microsoft, one of the key companies behind the VCI.
Wearable IDs for your Health and your Wallet
Overlap between digital vaccination records, promoted via initiatives such as CommonPass and VCI, and the push for a new global digital-identity system is no coincidence. Indeed, the developer of VCI’s SMART Health Cards framework at Microsoft Health, Josh C. Mandel, noted in his overview presentation on that framework that digital identity is integral to the digital vaccination-record effort. SMART Health Cards, as of now, are expected to include a person’s complete name, gender, birth date, mobile phone number, and email address in addition to vaccination information, though it is possible and likely that more personal information will be required as the initiative advances, given that VCI states that these identifiers are merely a starting point.
While advertised as digital vaccination records, SMART Health Cards are clearly intended to be used for much more. For instance, public information on the framework notes that SMART Health Cards are “building blocks that can be used across health care,” including managing a complete immunization record that goes far beyond COVID-19 vaccines, sharing data with public-health agencies, and communication with health-care providers.
Vaccine Credential Initiative partners, vaccinationcredential.org
Yet, this framework will not be limited to health-care information, as Mandel has said. In his presentation, he notes the application of SMART Health Cards could soon be used as IDs for commercial activity, such as renting a car. The VCI framework’s use of the term “digital wallet” to refer to its digital vaccination record is also suggestive of future connectivity to economic activity. Efforts to link digital identity, not just to economic activity but also to health data, have recently escalated, for example with the piloting of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (aka GAVI)–Mastercard–Trust Stamp partnership in Africa. That program, first launched in 2018, links Trust Stamp’s digital-identity platform with the GAVI-Mastercard Wellness Pass, a digital vaccination record, and Mastercard’s click-to-pay system run on AI technology called NuData. Mastercard and GAVI are both partnered with the ID2020 Alliance, which includes VCI member Microsoft.
Given the reasonable speculation that such platforms would utilize digital currency, specifically cryptocurrency, for financial activity, it is worth noting that VCI member Microsoft filed a patent in 2019 that would allow “human body activity,” including brain waves and body heat, to mine (i.e., generate) cryptocurrency. This, of course, would link biometrics to financial activity, among other things.
Such a system, as laid out in the Microsoft patent, would likely require the introduction of wearables in order to be implemented. Notably, numerous wearables for contactless identity, digital travel passes, and payment devices have recently been launched. Examples include DigitalDNA, Proxy, and FlyWallet. FlyWallet is particularly notable as their latest product, Keyble, is a wearable that combines digital identity through fingerprint authentication, which enables both contactless payments and health applications, such as vital-sign monitoring and data sharing with insurance companies and health-care providers.
Sponsored by Spooks and Silicon Valley
The SMART Health Cards framework was developed by a team led by the chief architect of Microsoft Healthcare, Josh Mandel, who was previously the Health IT Ecosystem lead for Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences. Verily is currently heavily involved in COVID-19 testing throughout the United States, particularly in California, and links test recipients’ results to their Google accounts. Their other COVID-19 initiatives have been criticized due to still-unresolved privacy concerns, something that has also plagued several of Verily’s other efforts pre-COVID-19, including those involving Mandel.
Of particular concern is that Verily, and by extension Google, created Project Baseline, which has been collecting “actionable genetic information” with a focus on “population health” from participants since 2017. Yet, during the COVID-19 process, Project Baseline has become an important component of Verily’s COVID-19 testing efforts, raising the unsettling possibility that Verily has been obtaining Americans’ DNA data through its COVID-19 testing activities. While Verily has not addressed this possibility directly, it is worth noting that Google has been heavily involved in amassing genomic data for several years. For instance, in 2013, Google Genomics was founded with the goal of storing and analyzing DNA data on Google Cloud servers. Now known as Cloud Life Sciences, the Google subsidiary has since developed AI algorithms that can “build your genome sequence” and “identify all the mutations that an individual inherits from their parents.”
Google also has close ties with the best-known DNA testing companies in the United States, such as Ancestry.com. Ancestry, recently purchased by private-equity behemoth Blackstone, shares data with a secretive Google subsidiary that uses genomic data to develop lifespan-extending therapies. In addition, the wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, is the cofounder and CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe. Wojcicki is also the sister of the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, Susan Wojcicki.
Google and the majority of VCI’s backers—Microsoft, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic, the Mayo Clinic, and MITRE Corporation, Change Healthcare—are also prominent members of the MITRE-run COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition. Other members of that coalition include the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the CIA-linked data-mining firm Palantir, as well as a myriad of health-care and health-record companies. The coalition fits well with the ambitions of Google and like-minded companies that have sought to gain access to troves of American health data under the guise of combatting COVID-19.
The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition describes itself as a public-private partnership that has enabled “the critical infrastructure to enable collaboration and shared analytics” on COVID-19 through the sharing of health-care and COVID-19 data among members. That this coalition and VCI are intimately involved with MITRE Corporation is significant, given that MITRE is a well-known, yet secretive, contractor for the US government, specifically the CIA and other intelligence agencies, which has developed Orwellian surveillance and biometric technologies, including several now focused on COVID-19.
Just three days before the public announcement of VCI’s establishment, Microsoft Healthcare and Google’s Verily announced a partnership along with MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute to share the companies’ cloud data and AI technologies with a “global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners” to accelerate the Terra platform. Terra, originally developed by the Broad Institute and Verily, is an “open data ecosystem” focused on biomedical research, specifically the fields of cancer genomics, population genetics, and viral genomics. The biomedical data Terra amasses includes not only genetic data but also medical-imaging, biometric signals, and electronic health records. Google, through its partnership with the Pentagon, which was announced last September, has moved to utilize the analysis of such data in order to “predictively diagnose” diseases such as cancer and COVID-19. US military contractors, such as Advanced Technology International (ATI), have been developing wearables that would apply that AI-driven predictive diagnosis technology to COVID-19 diagnoses.
Predictive COVID-19 diagnosis is also an ambition of another company that backs VCI, Salesforce. Salesforce is one of three companies that created COVID 360, which Salesforce senior vice president Bob Vanstraelen describes as a “free full Coronavirus treatment solution for patients and citizens at risk” that is hosted on Salesforce Health Cloud and was by Deloitte’s Israel branch and the Israeli intelligence-linked AI firm Diagnostic Robotics. COVID 360 uses the Diagnostic Robotics clinical-predictions platform and applies it to COVID-19 so that “government agencies or caretakers” can identify individuals “in proximity to a potential positive coronavirus case” and mandate coronavirus testing and/or treatment regimes, based on a risk profile generated by COVID 360. Diagnostic Robotics and Salesforce are both members of the MITRE-run COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition.
Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff, inclusivecapitalism.com
Salesforce founder, chair, and CEO Marc Benioff was previously a vice president at Oracle. Oracle, another VCI backer, was created as a spin-off of a CIA project of the same name, and its top executives have close ties to the outgoing Trump administration and also to Israel’s government. While Benioff’s pre-Salesforce history to a CIA-linked company like Oracle is significant, Benioff’s close ties to the World Economic Forum also deserve greater scrutiny.
Benioff is not only a member of the WEF’s board of trustees, but he is also the inaugural chair of the forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a “revolution” that its architect and WEF founder Klaus Schwab defines as a merging of humans’ physical, digital, and biological identities. Benioff is also the owner and cochair of Time magazine, which recently ran an entire issue focused on promoting the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the WEF-backed Great Reset.
Benioff also serves on the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, a collaboration between the Vatican and oligarchs to create a “more inclusive, sustainable and trusted economic system” for the twenty-first century. Alongside Benioff on the council are well-known figures such as Lynn Forester de Rothschild (close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons), Mark Carney (UN special envoy for Climate Action and former Governor of the Bank of England), and William Lauder (executive chairman of Estée Lauder, nephew of Mega Group member Ronald Lauder) as well as the top executives of MasterCard, Visa, Dupont, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, BP, and Bank of America. Also present are the heads of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Benioff and others mentioned in this article are perfect examples of the cross-pollination between groups of oligarchs and their associated foundation and organizations and how these networks are working together to pursue a common agenda. While the push for combining digital identity with vaccination records and economic activity appears, superficially, to be the efforts of various organizations and groups, the same individuals and entities appear time and again, pointing to a coordinated push to not only implement such a system, but manufacture consent for such a system among the global population.
The effort to manufacture consent for an all-encompassing digital identification system is notable given that its main “selling point” thus far has been coercion. We have been told that such a system is necessary, or we will never be able to return to work or school, we will never be able to travel and we will be prohibited from participating normally in the economy. While this system is being introduced in this way, it is essential to point out that coercion is a built-in part of this infrastructure and will be used to modify human behavior to great effect, reaching far beyond just the issue of COVID-19 vaccines if implemented.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.
Peer Reviewed Study Shows COVID Lockdowns Have No Benefits Compared to Voluntary Measures
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | January 15, 2021
A new peer reviewed study by Stanford researchers has found that mandatory lockdowns do not provide more benefits to stopping the spread of COVID-19 than voluntary measures such as social distancing.
The study compared countries that had imposed mandatory lockdowns, such as England, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the U.S., to those that had relied on the public to follow voluntary measures, such as Sweden and South Korea.
The researchers subtracted “the sum of non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) effects and epidemic dynamics in countries that did not enact more restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (mrNPIs) from the sum of NPI effects and epidemic dynamics in countries that did.”
After analyzing the data, the researchers found “no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country.”
The authors added that they “do not question the role of all public health interventions,” but insisted that stay at home orders and business closures had no additional impacting on lowering the spread of the virus.
The study adds to the weight of evidence that clearly indicates lockdowns are totally pointless and only create further misery and death.
According to Professor Philip Thomas of Bristol University, the UK lockdown will end up costing 500,000 lives due to the health impact of the economic recession it will cause.
Untold numbers of people will also die from having their urgent treatments delayed as well as avoiding hospitals.
According to research published by Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University, around 1.4 million people globally will also die from untreated TB infections.
Last September, Germany’s Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Gerd Muller, warned that lockdown measures throughout the globe will end up killing more people than the coronavirus itself.
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From the Archives
World War II Didn’t End The Great Depression
Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | April 4, 2024
A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II (1941-1945) lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression.
This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to reach $1 trillion a year in 2026, inviting financial catastrophe. … continue
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