Texas Launches SCOTUS Bid to Save Trump, and Maybe Even the Republic
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 11, 2020
In a dramatic and unprecedented turn of events amid the 2020 presidential election fiasco, the Lone Star State is leading the charge to overturn results in four swing states where multiple irregularities were alleged to have occurred in delivering the presidency to the Democrat Joe Biden. Nothing less than the survival of the Republic as we know it hangs in the balance.
President Donald Trump and 17 Republican-ruled states filed motions this week in support of the Texas’ ‘Hail Mary’ effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn results in four major swing states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – where alleged fraud and irregularities catapulted Biden into the White House. The legal challenge comes just days before the Electoral College is scheduled to formally pronounce on the outcome.
Trump’s legal team has experienced multiple setbacks in its efforts to present its case at the state level. Those failures were not wholly unexpected considering that three of the states being sued are Democrat-run; not exactly places where the scales of justice would tip in Trump’s favor. As for Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp, proving his credentials in the RINO club (‘Republican In Name Only’) has impeded efforts for a recount every step of the way.
The charges being leveled against the states by Rudy Giuliani, the head of Trump’s legal team, are serious despite being almost totally ignored by the mainstream media. The suit accuses both local voting officials as well as Dominion Voting Systems of potential fraud and “severe irregularities.” Several IT experts testified that the voting systems were not only hooked up to the internet, but the votes were tallied at overseas points.
Giuliani outlined the grievances in Atlanta, Georgia, where an alleged water-pipe break, later determined to be a hoax, halted vote counting at a time when Trump’s lead over Biden was looking insurmountable.
“In the city of Atlanta, Republicans were not allowed to watch the absentee mail-in ballot process. Inspections completely cast aside. We have numerous double voters. We have numerous out-of-state voters. And we have specific evidence of intimidation and changes of votes.”
The lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton this week presents a compelling argument, yet has attracted mockery and disdain from some legal experts who argue that no state has the right to interfere in the affairs i.e. conducting elections of another state. The Texas-led lawsuit, however, makes the fascinating counter-argument that those four states where fraud is alleged to have happened “threaten the liberty, not just of their own citizens, but of every citizen of the United States who casts a lawful ballot in that election.” In other words, by not holding fair and transparent elections, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have infringed upon the rights of the citizens of other states.
“States have a strong interest in ensuring that the votes of their own citizens are not diluted by the unconstitutional administration of elections in other States,” the amicus brief reads. “When non-legislative actors in other States encroach on the authority of the “Legislature thereof” in that State to administer a Presidential election, they threaten the liberty, not just of their own citizens, but of every citizen of the United States who casts a lawful ballot in that election—including the citizens of amici States.”
The legal motion went on to mention the unconstitutionality of the Supreme Courts in each state overriding the legislative branch by codifying mail-in ballots that were not properly managed. To support its claim it cited Anderson v. United States (1974), which ruled that every voter in a federal election “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”
Whether or not the filing on behalf of 17 states, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump ultimately succeeds or fails to be heard by the Supreme Court is not really the main point. What is significant is not only have so many Republican states joined together in defense of the populist leader, something that many people did not believe would happen, but it underscores the level of anger and frustration so many Americans are feeling over the outcome to this election of extreme consequence. Indeed, many believe the outcome of this presidential contest, given the strange winds now blowing through Capitol Hill, may actually mean the difference between the United States becoming more of a socialist country than a capitalist one.
With so much riding on the line, conservative Trump supporters are growing desperate, not only with the implications of a Biden-Harris presidency, but by the absolute lack of media coverage throughout the saga. And when there is media attention devoted to the legal challenges, it is an arrogant and condescending tone, as if fraud and corruption has suddenly become a new thing.
This is where not the media and the Big Tech social media platforms are playing with real fire. If enough Republican voters come around to the conclusion that Trump was not only cheated out of another term in office, but was never given a fair hearing to forward those grievances, then we may be heading for some very rough times in the land of the free. To lose in an election is one thing, but to lose under highly dubious terms while lacking both the legal and media methods of voicing those concerns, is a recipe for disaster.
By Wednesday, the general attorneys from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia have filed motions with the Supreme Court. Should the highest court in the land agree to hear the case, Texas senator Ted Cruz has agreed to argue on Trump’s behalf.
Not only would such a court case make for some epic television, it may very well save the Republic from another civil war.
Patriot Act Used By The FBI To Collect Internet Browsing Data, Contradicting Claims Made To Oversight
By Tim Cushing | TechDirt | December 8, 2020
The NSA shut down its bulk phone records collection — authorized under Section 215 — after it became apparent it wasn’t worth the effort. Reforms put in place by the USA Freedom Act prevented the agency from collecting it all and sorting it out later. Instead, it had to approach telcos with actual targeted requests and only haul away responsive records. The NSA somehow still managed to overcollect records, putting it in violation of the law. The NSA hinted the program had outlived its usefulness anyway, suggesting it had far better collections available under other authorities that it would rather not subject to greater scrutiny.
But this didn’t end the government’s bulk records collections. It just ended the phone metadata program. The NSA still collects other records in bulk, including banking records and, oddly, books checked out by library patrons. The broad authority of Section 215 could be read to allow the government collect other records, like email metadata and internet activity. Reasoning that people voluntarily create records of their internet use by using third-party services to surf the web, the government hinted it could sweep these up just as easily as it had swept up call records.
The government’s attempt to collect internet history under this authority ran into some friction earlier this year when the Senate voted to block this collection. Senator Ron Wyden directly asked the director of national intelligence (DNI) to inform the Senate whether or not agencies under its purview had gathered internet use records under this authority. He received this answer.
In a Nov. 6 letter to Mr. Wyden, John Ratcliffe, the intelligence director, wrote that Section 215 was not used to gather internet search terms, and that none of the 61 orders issued last year under that law by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court involved collection of “web browsing” records.
Wyden took this response to mean that implementing a ban on collection of internet history records could be put into place without negatively affecting any intelligence gathering activities. But when the New York Times pressed DNI John Ratcliffe on specifics, a new party inserted itself into the conversation: the DOJ. According to its response, the FBI had already done the thing the DNI had just told Sen. Wyden it hadn’t.
In fact, “one of those 61 orders resulted in the production of information that could be characterized as information regarding browsing,” Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in the second letter. Specifically, one order had approved collection of logs revealing which computers “in a specified foreign country” had visited “a single, identified U.S. web page.”
So, the FBI was collecting internet browsing records, albeit with an order that only targeted foreign users visiting one US web page. Still, this wasn’t what the DNI originally said to Sen. Wyden. This set Wyden off. Again. The supposedly honest answer he received in response to his questions wasn’t actually all that honest. As he pointed out in his statement, the belated admission raised questions about domestic surveillance and potential abuse of Section 215 authority to collect something the DNI said no one was collecting. And, if nothing changed, there was no guarantee the Intelligence Community wouldn’t talk itself into believing a collection of internet browsing data would be cool and legal.
“More generally,” Mr. Wyden continued, “the D.N.I. has provided no guarantee that the government wouldn’t use the Patriot Act to intentionally collect Americans’ web browsing information in the future, which is why Congress must pass the warrant requirement that has already received support from a bipartisan majority in the Senate.”
Previous attempts to erect a warrant requirement for the collection of internet data or search histories have failed to reach the president’s desk. This latest admission has refueled the fire to protect Americans (or visitors to American websites) from government overreach. Even if such a collection targets only foreign internet users, there’s no guarantee it won’t sweep up US citizens — like pretty much every other bulk collection has.
At this point, everything is up in the air. There’s a new president headed into office who might be more receptive to reform efforts, but he’s also the man who served the Obama Administration — one that wasn’t all that concerned about domestic surveillance until it became impossible to ignore the documents leaked by Ed Snowden. Even then, its response was tepid at best and it still allowed IC surveillance business to continue pretty much uninterrupted — something it used to justify extrajudicial killings based on little more than metadata. This needs to be fixed, but surveillance reform advocates still lack majority support. And the guy [potentially] headed to the White House has never seemed all that concerned about surveillance abuses.
“Free Speech Is Being Weaponized”: Columbia Dean and New Yorker Writer Calls For More Censorship
By Jonathan Turley | December 11, 2020
We have been discussing how reporters, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and key advisers. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Now, Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. That’s right. A journalism dean and writer declaring that the problem is that free speech itself is allowing too much freedom on the Internet and other forums.
Coll’s comments came in a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when he was asked by Kasie Hunt about the need for Big Tech to censor speech. Rather than defend the right of people to express themselves freely, Coll lashed out at companies like Facebook as “motivated, as all companies are, to make money” though at the same time is “acting like a public square.” He decried the failure to have more expansive regulation of free speech and showed little concern or merit for arguments from free speech advocates. Like Harvard academics who recently declared “China was right” about censorship, Coll just assumed that it was self-evident that too much free speech is a bad thing and that these companies need to protect people from harmful or false ideas.
“And yes, Facebook has moved somewhat. They’ve had a better election in 2020 than they did in 2016. They’ve learned to put some brakes on, you know, here and there, but you can’t get away from the fact that their mission is to connect everybody in the world. That’s what motivates Mark Zuckerberg and it’s his passion and he profoundly believes in free speech.”
What is most maddening is that Coll spoke on behalf of journalists in calling for less freedom:
“Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principle of journalism and what do we do about that,. As reporters, we kind of march into this war with our facts nobly shouldered as if they were going to win the day and what we’re seeing that is because of the scale of this alternative reality that you’ve been talking about, our facts, our principles, our scientific method–it isn’t enough. So what do we do?”
That used to be an easy question. What you do is allow free speech to combat bad speech. What you do is support the right of citizens and journalists to publish without censorship. What you do is to embrace the freedom of expression while reinforcing the need to use that freedom to counter disinformation. Instead, Coll is joining the forces seeking to silence or curtail the speech of others. You do not support free speech by calling for its curtailment. For free speech advocates, it is as compelling as saying that we needed to “save” villages by destroying them in Vietnam. Worse yet, he is doing it in the names of “good journalism.”
Mess with Texas via mail-in ballot? States secede from presidential vote
By Ramin Mazaheri | Press TV | December 9, 2020
The United States corporate-dominated media has found that the easiest way to shape news coverage on the scores of legal challenges to the 2020 presidential election is to only report on them when the cases have lost.
After all, the more newspaper inches given to objective discussions of widespread voter fraud allegations equals the more chances an average American starts to think the election was rigged. This theory presumes that the average American is so docile and programmable that they have already completely forgotten the mainstream claims which dominated the previous four years: that the election was rigged (by Vladimir Putin).
Not reporting until a court rejects an integrity challenge also allows for a superior “I-knew-it-all-along” tone, combined with open accusations of lunacy on the part of the aggrieved party.
More than a month after the vote the party (Republicans) remain tremendously aggrieved: top pollster Gallup just reported that 83% of Republicans say that reports of Biden being the president-elect are not “accurate”. Yes, it’s an oddly-worded poll, but so many US wordsmiths have been purposely opaque since election day.
It’s always been easy to roll one’s eyes at the smug tone because such condescension will drop to the ground lack a bag of bricks with just one Supreme Court loss, after all.
Yes, the widespread US belief prior to November 3, 2020, was that their elections were poorly designed, poorly funded, poorly run, poorly counted and porous in many other ways besides, but I always thought the biggest post-election day challenge would be over the exact issue which has led to the totally unprecedented situation of states suing other states over accusations of ruining the election’s integrity:
Texas – now joined by Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas – is suing the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin over mail-in ballots.
I’ll show that the US Constitution makes it clear their case should at least be heard by the Supreme Court. The state-on-state nature already takes the case directly to the top.
The Supreme Court always had to rule on the unprecedented expansion of mail-in balloting
What’s so interesting about “democracy with US characteristics” is how the nine justices of the Supreme Court are allowed to be so very, very removed from US society. They debate in private, they grant media interviews very rarely, they don’t have to say much in court (Justice Clarence Thomas went from 2006 to 2016 without publicly asking a question), nor do they even have to give public reasons for many of the momentous decisions they make (they just rejected a key vote fraud case in Pennsylvania with one sentence, but more accurately only one word: “denied”). It’s not the Holy See of Rome, but it’s close.
But it’s not close regarding the holiness, because what this unaccountable and unelected regime of nine holds sacred is merely the 18th century US Constitution, something which is currently losing lustre worldwide by the minute.
Some, not all, of these justices are Wahhabi-like in their insistence that the document is “dead” (and perfect in its deadness), in that it must be followed both to the letter and in the spirit of the bygone (allegedly golden) age in which it was written.
Given this ideological reality doesn’t it seem clear that executive branch orders by some governors, or even just their secretaries of state, to massively and controversially flood their states with mail-in ballots violated the US Constitution – even if these actions were approved by some in the judicial branch – because they often did not get legislative branch approval? Article 1, Section 4 of the US Constitution states: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature …”
Texas’ lawsuit thus asserts: “The four states exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to justify ignoring federal and state election laws and unlawfully enacting last-minute changes, thus skewing the results of the 2020 General Election. The battleground states flooded their people with unlawful ballot applications and ballots while ignoring statutory requirements as to how they were received, evaluated and counted.” The suit claims the vote in Texas was tainted by the vote in Pennsylvania, etc.
People may notice that Article 1, Section 4 does not talk about “Elections for President”, but the US elects their president by an Electoral College, not direct vote. It is regularly inferred that this clause also applies to the presidential vote.
I wish I could find more good media reports on this case to better inform my opinion but – as I began – you just can’t find much objective journalistic discussion on the US voter fraud causes. No well-known anti-Trump media I saw ever even broached Article 1, Section 4 – even though it was named in the lawsuit – all they had was hysterical and completely nonobjective denials that the Texas lawsuit doesn’t even attempt to make a coherent argument. And yet: the Supreme Court gave the defendant states less than 48 hours to respond to Texas’ lawsuit – by 3pm on December 10.
The suit also says the expansion made the vote insecure, but forget about all the alleged vote machine tampering, the purported “smoking gun” videos, the reported 1,000 testimonies making accusations of election malfeasance – all of that either has the evidence or it doesn’t. Maybe there was a huge conspiracy of voter fraud, or maybe there wasn’t. The nation’s top intelligence official, the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, just said that all issues of election fraud must be investigated and only then would we see “whether there is a Biden administration”. Will they all be properly investigated? This is America, so all we can say for sure is that no matter what happens America will insist that they are the spotless beacon the world should follow.
But the question of mail-in ballots – this enormous change to the US voting system which inspired seemingly thousands of complaints by Donald Trump on Twitter, as well as from many regular American citizens – this is the dispute which has the power to immediately invalidate the 2020 vote.
I say: yes, it should invalidate the vote – that is, if Americans want to follow the rules of the antiquated and fundamentally aristocratic American system.
America is not a modern democracy, nor is it accountable – don’t expect the Supreme Court to rule in favor of the outsider Trump
Yes, pro-Trumpers were wrong to wait until after the election – to see if their candidate lost – before bringing this suit, but who’s to say that elite Democrats wouldn’t have forced some of their own governors to do the same thing if Biden was the projected loser? How can judges rule on a case which was never brought before them? The bottom line is that checks and balances are what make democracy “democracy”, whether that democracy is Athenian, American, Chinese socialist or Iranian Islamic, and one person should not be able to change the fundamental nature of how elections are held, even if that person is a state governor or secretary of state, and even if a state judge says their change is OK.
Modern democracies have (at least) three branches for a reason, but it’s OK that mail-in ballots were often routed around the legislative branch?
(I often say Iranian democracy has revolutionarily created a “Supreme Leader branch”. I’d also say the massive influence of the internet/digital age gives more credence to making the unofficial “Fourth Estate” – the media – an official branch. What’s wrong with more than three branches, other than: But the bourgeois West doesn’t do it?)
The re-routing (and some state legislatures, such as Nevada, did approve a sweeping expansion to mail-in ballots) of democratic processes into the hands of one person should be seen as a continuation of what Western democracy truly is: liberal strongmanism. This process became out in the open with Dubya Bush’s phony war on Iraq and the Patriot Act, continued with the ignored anti-austerity elections in Greece, is part and parcel of Emmanuel Macron’s “rubber bullet liberalism” war on France’s Yellow Vests, and was seen in 2020 when some US governors essentially said: We want Trump out so badly that we’ll change the elections by fiat to do it.
(Corona was not a valid excuse in November, because by then 2020 had seen many nations successfully and safely hold elections.)
A coronavirus vaccine was announced just two days after Biden declared victory; after months of refusals – which have fiscally disemboweled the US lower classes – Democrats finally agreed to negotiate on their heretofore totally inflexible 2nd stimulus position as soon as the calendar turned from election November to December; Facebook, Twitter and the US mainstream media currently censor the average Republican’s election reflections as if these citizens were calling for a second Holocaust.
Those are not conspiracy theories but are listed to reveal how truly terrible and power-monging the political and cultural elite is in the United States. They overreach their power time and time again, no matter how negative the effect on their domestic public or the rest of the world.
Such persons wanted Trump out, and I’m not saying that they engaged in a massive conspiracy of election fraud to do so – I’m saying that they obviously changed the fundamental nature of the election to do so.
In the US, states decide individually how elections are run, but there should have been formal legislative debate about any huge changes to the election format and not merely a gubernatorial order reflected upon in private by a judge. It was undemocratic political overreach in a nation full of people who have been conditioned to believe that the boss/CEO/president can and should be able to fire/personally enrich/sanction at will.
There are enough “strict constructionists,” ”originalists” or (as I call them) “American Salafists” currently on the Supreme Court to see the logic of Texas’ argument. However, I do not think the Supreme Court will find in favor of Texas – the power-holders in the US system are fundamentally anti-Trump, I think 2016-2020 has proven that ad nauseam.
Trumpism was vindicated in a grassroots way – like it or not – on November 3rd, but there are no “Trumpist” judges in the top court. Who knows, maybe Trumpism will last long enough that one day there will be, but for now what all Supreme Court judges are is merely typical American conservatives. The idea that even though Supreme Court justices are the most untouchable persons in American society and yet they will bend over backwards to please Trump is, I think, a major (but common) fallacy.
It’s clear that the 2020 election was drastically changed (just look at how voter turnout suddenly was the highest in 120 years), and it’s clear that legislatures often did not fulfill their check and balance role, and it’s clear that “strict constructionism” was not something invented by Justice Anthonin Scalia but is an ideology which has been widely discussed since the very beginning of the American republic… all that will be thrown out to throw out Trump, I predict.
This article has not been pro-Trump or anti-Trump, it is reminding how very drastic the actions of anti-Trump power-holders in the US have been. They changed the nature of the 2020 vote, and they don’t want to admit that, and the Supreme Court is not likely to unconservatively OK a shocking, once-in-three-lifetimes reversal to the 2020 presidential vote – not because of the chaos and alienation it would cause among the 99%, but because American democracy is and has always been expressly designed to protect the elite, not the people/workers/lower classes.
By the way, the only presidential vote which ever mattered at all takes place in less than a week – the Electoral College votes on December 14th. I think this year’s general election on the presidential vote has provided a more interesting – yet legally meaningless – diversion than it normally does, don’t you?
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Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2) – November 5, 2020
Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (2/2) – November 6, 2020
4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fight – November 7, 2020
US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized – November 9, 2020
A 2nd term is his if he really wants it, but how deep is Trump’s ‘Trumpism’? – November 10, 2020
CNN’s Jake Tapper: The overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2) – November 13, 2020
‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state? (2/2) – November 15, 2020
Where’s Donald? When 40% of voters cry ‘fraud’ you’ve got a big problem – November 17, 2020
The 4-year (neoliberal) radicalisation of US media & Bidenites’ ‘unradical radicalism’ – November 22, 2020
80% of US partisan losers think the last 2 elections were stolen – December 3, 2020
Trump declares civil war for voter integrity in breaking (or broken) USA – December 5, 2020
Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.
Why the Texas Supreme Court Lawsuit Against Four Battleground States May Become an End-All Case
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 09.12.2020
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued four US battleground states at the US Supreme Court over alleged election irregularities. Political scientists and academics have discussed whether the lawsuit could change the outcome of the election and why the Supreme Court has become the ultimate authority to solve the election dilemma.
The Texas lawsuit argues that Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan violated the Electors Clause of the Constitution, as they made changes to voting rules and procedures under the pretext of the COVID pandemic either through the courts or executive orders, but not through the state legislatures, as mandated. It also alleges that there were certain differences in voting rules and procedures in different counties within the states in question, which is an abuse of the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution. And, finally, the aforementioned circumstances opened the door to “voting irregularities” in these states, according to the Texas attorney general. Thus, Texas, which approached the Supreme Court under Article III, asked the federal judiciary body to order states to allow their legislatures to appoint their electors.
Praising Texas’ move, President Donald Trump vowed to “intervene” in the case, calling it “the big one”. At least seven other states, including Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, and South Dakota, may join the Texas lawsuit, some reports say.
Does the Texas Case Have Merit?
“It is unlikely that this lawsuit will move forward and change the results of the election, to President Trump’s favour”, believes Anthony Robert Pahnke, Professor of international relations at San Francisco State University. “So, it is true that rules were changed this year. It has yet to be proven that those changes resulted in discrimination against some group. Trump’s intervention will most likely go no further than this tweet.”Attorney General Ken Paxton’s case won’t get very far, insists Joe Siracusa, a professor at Australian Curtin University, arguing that it “it has little or no merit”.
The Texas lawsuit “has little to do with actually attempting to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential vote”, but is an attempt curry favour with Trump and fend off a challenge in the 2022 Texas Republican Party primary, suggests Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
However, Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, offers a different take, emphasising that the Texas suit does have a case.
“According to the US Constitution, presidents are elected by individual states rather than the country as a whole and election rules must be set by each state’s legislature”, he elaborates. “If one state arbitrarily alters its electoral process and particularly if that alteration is not made by that state’s legislature, it has the effect of disenfranchising the other US states. This is clearly what happened in several battleground states, which effectively instituted universal mail-in ballots, often without participation of state legislatures.”
The think tank director highlights that while “the Covid crisis was given as the rationale for altering election processes” and for the sake of “making it easier” for people to vote, “the effect was to in many cases remove the safeguards against vote fraud”.
This issue was earlier addressed by Fox News’ Mark Levine and Hans von Spakovsky, an American attorney and former member of the Federal Election Commission, in a 7 November interview. Von Spakovsky drew attention to the fact that the Democrats and their surrogates filed hundreds of lawsuits in different states, seeking to get rid of security protocols and measures aimed at preventing fraud in the use of absentee and mail-in ballots. The former member of the Federal Election Commission recalled that the Dems tried to pass these measures at a federal level through H.R.1 For the People Act of 2019, which was eventually blocked by the Republican-controlled Senate.
“In lawsuits between states, the US Supreme Court is the court of first resort and that is what is happening in this case”, says McAdams. “Texas officials and the relevant officials of other US states have an obligation to their citizens to defend the vote in their own states and across the United States.”
‘Large Proportion of Americans Have No Faith in the System’
Judging from nationwide polls, a considerable number of voters do not believe that the election was conducted in a fair and accurate way, the think tank director emphasises, warning that “this has created a situation where a large proportion of Americans have no faith in the system”.
“There must be a remedy for what appears to tens of millions of American voters who believe their vote has been stolen from them”, he says.
Forty-seven percent of American voters said it’s likely that Democrats stole the election in several states to ensure that Joe Biden would win, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey.
There is no unanimity on who won the election in the US Congress either: just 27 of all congressional Republicans believe that Joe Biden is the winner of the 2020 race. Furthermore, on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Roy Blunt and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy blocked an inaugural resolution recognizing Biden’s victory, as Trump’s litigations over the alleged voter fraud are still pending.
The case brought forward by the Texas attorney general before the Supreme Court is the “end-all case to really determine the outcome of this election”, Jordan Sekulow, a member of President Trump’s legal team, told Newsmax on 8 December.
“That’s different than most court cases at the Supreme Court, because this is a case of original jurisdiction … because it is state versus state”, he stated.
Canadian Health Ministry Exploring “Immunity Passports,” Vaccine “Tracking And Surveillance”
By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 9, 2020
The Health Minister of Ontario in Canada has stoked controversy by suggesting that people who do not take the coronavirus vaccine will face restrictions on where they can travel and spend time.
When asked by reporters about how the government intends to go about convincing people to get the vaccine, Health Minister Christine Elliott warned that those who refuse it will face difficulties reintegrating into society.
“That’s their choice, this is not going to be a mandatory campaign. It will be voluntary,” Elliot said, but adding that “There may be some restrictions that may be placed on people that don’t have vaccines for travel purposes, to be able to go to theatres and other places.”
When another reporter asked if the government would be introducing ‘immunity passports’, or proof of vaccination cards, Elliot said “Yes, because that’s going to be really important for people to have for travel purposes, perhaps for work purposes, for going to theatres or cinemas or any other places where people will be in closer physical contact.”
Following up on Elliot’s comments, The Toronto Sun spoke to her press secretary, who confirmed that the government is exploring several options for vaccine “tracking and surveillance.”
“This includes exploring developing tech-based solutions while also providing for alternative options to ensure equitable access to any potential ‘immunity passport,’” Alexandra Hilkene said.
Sun reporter Brian Lilley notes “That phrase will set off alarm bells and it should, not just for anti-vaxxers, but for anyone who is concerned about Charter rights and governments running roughshod over them.”
Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams has also said that a COVID-19 vaccine may be required for “freedom to move around”.
“What we can do is to say sometimes for access, or ease, in getting into certain settings, if you don’t have vaccination then you’re not allowed into that setting without other protection materials,” Williams said.
The comments of these Canadian officials add to the litany of other government and travel industry figures in both the US, Britain and beyond who have suggested that ‘COVID passports’ are coming, in order for ‘life to get back to normal’
In an essay in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden noted that he expects the so called ‘immunity passports’ will come into widespread use despite any ethical, legal or operational challenges, and despite the fact that it hasn’t at all been determined whether the vaccine equates to immunity.
Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon
By Jeremy Loffredo and Whitney Webb |
Unlimited Hangout| December 7, 2020
Operation Warp Speed, the “public-private partnership” created to produce and allocate COVID-19 vaccines to the American populace, is set to begin rolling out a mass-vaccination campaign in the coming weeks. With the expected approval of its first vaccine candidate just days away, the allocation and distribution aspects of Operation Warp Speed deserve scrutiny, particularly given the critical role one of the most controversial companies in the country will play in that endeavor.
Palantir Technologies, the company founded by Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, and a handful of their associates, has courted controversy for its supporting role in the US military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its participation in the detention of “illegal” immigrants through their contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and in “predictive policing” law enforcement programs that disproportionately affect minority neighborhoods. Equally controversial, but perhaps lesser known, is Palantir’s long-standing and enduring ties to the CIA and intelligence community at large, which was intimately involved in the development of Palantir’s products that now run on the databases of governments and corporations around the world.
The same national-security state that Palantir has long aided in oppressing countries abroad and minorities domestically is now running Operation Warp Speed. While Palantir’s selection to manage the allocation of the vaccine to “priority groups” may just seem like the national-security state wanting to award the contract to a familiar and trusted company, the allocation strategy’s heavy focus on vaccinating minorities first, with questionable justification for doing so, suggests something else may have been behind Palantir’s selection to play a prominent role in Warp Speed.
Part 1 of this series on Operation Warp Speed and Race, “The Johns Hopkins, CDC Plan to Mask Medical Experimentation on Minorities as ‘Racial Justice,’” explored Warp Speed’s vaccine allocation plan in depth. That plan utilizes a phased approach aimed at “populations of focus” that had been identified in advance by various government organizations, including the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
The main focus of this allocation strategy is to deliver vaccines first to racial minorities and in such a way as to make them feel “at ease” and not like “guinea pigs.” This is particularly glaring given that these minorities will be receiving an experimental vaccine that allocation-strategy documents admit is likely to cause “certain adverse effects . . . more frequently in certain population subgroups,” with research showing that those “subgroups” most at risk of experiencing adverse effects are these same racial minorities.
Part 1 also showed that the government believes information warfare and economic coercion will likely be necessary to combat “vaccine hesitancy” among these minority groups, rather than directly targeting the actual causes of this “hesitancy,” namely, by addressing past instances of illegal medical experimentation on minorities by the US government.
This report, the second part of this trilogy covering the racist underpinnings of key aspects of Operation Warp Speed, reveals the real factors behind Palantir’s rise to prominence as a national-security state contractor and the real reason why this company was chosen to identify the same “critical population” minority groups that it has been helping the US government oppress and surveil since the company’s inception.
Tiberius Rising
On November 24, 2020, Secretary Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a former Eli Lilly executive, announced that the department would begin conducting “practice runs” for Operation Warp Speed’s distribution networks in anticipation of HHS’s national roll out of a COVID-19 vaccine, which is set to begin in mid-December.
CNBC, reporting on Azar’s comments, noted that Tiberius, a software program developed and managed by Palantir, “will help the federal government allocate the amount of vaccines each state will receive,” and local officials will use Tiberius to “decide where every allocated dose will go—from local doctors’ offices to large medical centers.” According to that report and others, Tiberius would collect data from US government agencies, as well as from local and state governments, pharmaceutical firms, vaccine manufacturers, and companies like McKesson that have been contracted for the coming vaccine distribution.
Palantir’s role in Operation Warp Speed was only announced in late October, with mainstream news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal reporting that the company was creating a new software product that would manage the production and allocation of COVID-19 vaccines in the operation’s campaign. That mass of data will include “a wide range of demographic, employment and public health data sets” that will be used “to identify the location of priority populations” and make related decisions regarding the allocation of vaccine doses. Tiberius will also allow officials to “proactively identify distribution bottlenecks, inventory constraints, and gaps in administration across key populations.”
AFP confirmed the Wall Street Journal’s reporting and noted that Tiberius would provide Palantir with access to sensitive health information so that it could “help identify high-priority populations at highest risk of infection.” The Business Insider website noted that Tiberius would be capable of showing “areas with high proportions of healthcare workers, clinically vulnerable people . . . elderly people” or any other demographic deemed to be a “target population” by Operation Warp Speed. A separate report at Military.com quoted HHS’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Paul Mango, as stating that delivery timetables and vaccine-delivery locations were “being mapped out” by Tiberius, which enables officials to see how many people in a given “target population” are in any US zip code.
Palantir’s Tiberius uses the software that manages HHS Protect, a secretive database that hoards information related to the spread of COVID-19 gathered from “more than 225 data sets, including demographic statistics, community-based tests, and a wide range of state-provided data.” HHS Protect has been criticized by several public health experts and epidemiologists, among others, because of the sudden decision by HHS to force US hospitals to provide all data on COVID-19 cases and patient information directly to HHS Protect. Hospitals have been threatened with the loss of Medicare or Medicaid funding if they decline to regularly feed all of their COVID-19 patient data and test results into the HHS Protect database.
HHS Protect, notably, contains protected health information, which several US senators warned in July raises “serious privacy concerns.” According to a group of Democratic senators and representatives, “neither HHS nor Palantir has publicly detailed what it plans to do with this PHI [protected health information], or what privacy safeguards have been put in place, if any.” They added that they were “concerned that, without any safeguards, data in HHS Protect could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways, such as in the law and immigration enforcement context.” Palantir is well-known for its controversial contract work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security that uses Palantir software in immigration raids.
HHS Protect is also controversial for its newly added artificial intelligence–driven “predictive” component, which “uses prewritten algorithms to simulate behaviors and forecast possible outcomes.” HHS has asserted that this AI component, called HHS Vision, was not built with software components purchased from Palantir, but with software from a smaller government contractor with close ties to IBM, another intelligence-linked tech giant.
In addition to the mass of information Palantir has access to through HHS Protect, the company is also a member of the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, a “collaborative private-industry response” involving Big Tech, NGOs, and health-care corporations that “share and leverage real-time data, best practices, and clinical expertise” for the official purpose of “preserving healthcare delivery” and “protecting people” during the coronavirus crisis. Other members, aside from Palantir, include Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and IBM as well as the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the murky US intelligence contractor, the MITRE corporation. The massive amount of data shared by the coalition’s members, which also includes most major electronic health-record companies in the US, is aimed at “unlocking large-scale analytics for COVID-19.”
Tiberius, like HHS Protect, utilizes Palantir’s Gotham software, which has been “honed over a decade of partnership with military, civil, and intelligence communities,” according to Palantir’s product manager for Gotham, Ryan Beiermeister. In recent years, it has incorporated more aspects related to machine learning and artificial intelligence. According to Forbes, Gotham accumulates vast amounts of personal data that allow it to “map a person’s family members and business associates, as well as email addresses, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security numbers, and height, weight, and eye color.” It is usually favored by law enforcement and intelligence agencies and has been used (controversially) by several police departments, including in Los Angeles and New Orleans, as the cornerstone of “predictive policing” or precrime initiatives. A HHS spokeswoman stated that Tiberius will not use personally identifiable information.
Other reports have noted that Tiberius is involved to some extent in the clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccine candidates, which would also provide Tiberius with access to the data from those trials, including how various “population subgroups” react to a given vaccine candidate. As reported in Part 1 of this series, the Johns Hopkins guidance, on which the vaccine-allocation strategy was based, notes that it is likely that “certain adverse effects may occur more frequently in certain population subgroups.”
Those very subgroups with the greatest risk of experiencing adverse effects—ethnic minorities—are also the same subgroups set to be prioritized by the US government and identified by Tiberius to be vaccinated first during the official roll-out of Operation Warp Speed. Tellingly, those same ethnic minorities flagged by Johns Hopkins as priority groups are the same minorities that Palantir is best known for targeting through their controversial contracts with Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement and law enforcement agencies.
Palantir and the Militarization of Health Care
New York Army National Guard Spc. Cody Roche records vehicle and personnel that enter through the Entry Control Point of the Bronx-Lehman COVID-19 Testing Site, April 4, 2020. US National Guard photo by 1st Lt. Kyle Kilner.
Tiberius is the most recent addition to—and perhaps the most emblematic—of Palantir’s moves into the growing field of “public health” surveillance. In addition to Palantir’s contracts related to HHS Protect, the company has also scored other COVID-19–related contracts with subdivisions of the HHS. As one example, it was Palantir that built the CDC web app for monitoring the spread of COVID-19, which has been actively collecting data since March 2020. The technology for this project was built on Palantir’s Foundry software and “takes in a range of anonymized data from US hospitals and healthcare agencies, including lab test results, emergency department statuses, bed capacity and ventilator supply.”
In early October, the National Institutes of Health Center for Advancing Translational Sciences awarded Palantir a $36 million contract for “enterprise data integration and data management,” giving the NIH the Foundry-based public health software as well. In addition, according to federal procurement records, the US Coast Guard contracted with Palantir in April to help with its COVID-19 Readiness System. Palantir’s contracting with the NIH preceded the COVID-19 crisis by a matter of months, with the company winning a NIH contract in January to provide “comprehensive data capabilities” for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, according to Forbes.
Palantir is also gaining comparable data access to the UK population. In March, the UK’s National Health Service awarded the company a $1.3 million contract to help develop its COVID-19 data store, with a similar mandate to help UK officials understand how to allocate resources appropriately. According to CNBC, “the NHS health records, which Palantir has gained access to, includes patient names, ages, addresses, health conditions, treatments and medicines, allergies, tests, scans, X-ray results, whether a patient smokes or drinks, and hospital admission and discharge information.” More recently, the NHS has been in talks for a little over a month with Palantir to see about the company playing a role in “sensitive” contact tracing. Aside from the UK, Palantir has claimed to be involved in the COVID-19 response efforts of at least ten other governments in addition to the US and UK.
These lucrative public health contracts are set to be a long-term boon for the company, which recently went public. As InvestorPlace explained in late November, “the re-emergence of the pandemic this fall and winter in the US and Europe will lift Palantir’s revenue.”
Meanwhile, just as Palantir has been acquiring “contact tracing” contracts throughout the Western world during 2020, the company has also been dramatically expanding its contracting work with the US military, which has also been playing an outsized role in the COVID-19 response, especially with Operation Warp Speed. Though the military has contracted with Palantir for years, the company has recently acquired more contracts than ever with the Department of Defense, and it has recently supplanted long-favored defense contractors, like Raytheon, winning several key bids.
In February 2020, Palantir was awarded a massive $823 million contract with BAE Systems for the US Army’s Distributed Common Ground System, and a month later the company was awarded a $80 million contract with the US Navy to create and manage a new logistics system. Then, in April, Palantir won a contract with the newly created US Space Force to build “a common operating picture of space.” At the end of November, Palantir was awarded a contract of an undisclosed sum by the Army’s Futures Command, a command focused on Army modernization with a heavy emphasis on AI and machine learning.
Palantir’s increasingly successful acquisition of top military contracts began in earnest last year. In March 2019, Palantir won an $800 million contract to build the Army’s new AI-driven “battlefield intelligence system.” Then, in October 2019, Palantir scored a two-year $91 million contract to develop AI and machine learning capabilities for the US Army Research Laboratory. The deal includes both their Foundry and Gotham products, with Foundry spotting and flagging “risks” and Gotham integrating multiple data sets into one. By the end of last year, Palantir had scored yet another multimillion-dollar contract with the military for the Army’s Project Vantage. Also, in December 2019, it was revealed that Palantir had taken over the Pentagon’s AI drone-assassination program, known as Project Maven, which had proved too controversial even for Google, the company that had originally won the Maven contract.
While it may seem odd that Palantir would simultaneously win massive contracts from health-care agencies and the military, the military has, in fact, been heavily driving the takeover of US health care by the national-security state during 2020. Through partnerships with other leading Silicon Valley firms, the Pentagon is playing a major role in the COVID-19 response through Warp Speed, but it also is involved in other public health efforts that are technically unrelated, including predictive cancer diagnoses and “fitness” wearables. In addition, HHS—under the leadership of the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, Robert Kadlec—dramatically deepened its partnerships with the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) over the same period. Palantir not only fits right in with this larger Pentagon-led initiative to militarize health care nationwide but the company is at its core.
As the previously cited reports have detailed, Operation Warp Speed is being almost completely managed by the US military, along with the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency (NSA), as opposed to civilian health agencies, which, as noted in Part 1 of this series, are significantly less involved than in previous national-vaccination efforts and have even been barred from attending some Warp Speed meetings. The DHS, NSA, and the military all have multimillion-dollar contracts with Palantir.
In July, a government chart was obtained by STAT that showed “that roughly sixty military officials—including at least four generals—involved in the leadership of Operation Warp Speed have never worked in health care or vaccine development.” One senior federal health official told STAT he was surprised by the number of soldiers in military uniform walking around the health department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. and said that recently he’d seen more than one hundred officials in the Warp Speed corridors wearing “Desert Storm fatigues.”
Given Palantir’s emerging role as the public health police, it’s worth taking a step back to examine its record of enabling the racism and the militarism of US state violence. As noted by the Guardian earlier this year, “Palantir is well known in the defense and policing worlds.”
Palantir has come under fire as a result of the company’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including its creation an intelligence system used by ICE that is known as Investigative Case Management (ICM). The IB Times described ICM as “a vast ‘ecosystem’ of data to help immigration officials in identifying targets and creating cases against them” that also “provides ICE agents with access to databases managed by other federal agencies.” ICM further gives ICE access to “targets’ personal and sensitive information, such as background on schooling, employment, family relationships, phone records, immigration history, biometrics data, criminal records as well as home and work addresses.”
This $92 million relationship between ICE and Palantir should cause concern, considering Palantir will be in charge of allocating “tailored” COVID-19 vaccines to the same minorities they’re helping a militarized law enforcement agency target, “build cases against,” and deport. In addition, as noted in Part 1 of this series, Warp Speed is set to explicitly prioritize both incarcerated individuals and undocumented immigrants of color, meaning that those incarcerated in ICE detention facilities, many of whom were placed there as a result of Palantir’s other software, will also be flagged by Palantir’s Tiberius software.
Palantir’s work with ICE is hardly the sole reason controversies surround the company. It also has a close relationship with local law enforcement agencies and police departments across the country whom they supply with policing tools that overwhelmingly target minority groups. Some of those tools are “predictive,” meaning that they flag individuals who have not committed a crime but, according to Palantir’s data mining and algorithms, are “likely” to do so in the future. As noted by the Guardian in 2017, US law enforcement, in various parts of the country, have been using “Palantir to predict who will commit a crime by swooping Minority Report–style on suspects.”
Police departments that have used Palantir’s policing tools include but are not limited to the NYPD, LAPD, Chicago PD, Virginia State Police, and the New Orleans PD. Per its proponents, Palantir’s policing tools harness the technology of big data to help police departments “streamline” law enforcement, thereby enhancing efficiency. Critics, however, say Palantir’s tech creates “racist feedback loops” in which a “disproportionate amount of police resources are allocated to historically hyper-policed communities.”
Notably, Palantir’s predictive-policing methods were developed during the war in Iraq, a conflict where many legal red lines were crossed by the occupying forces. These aggressive policing techniques, forged during the fires of the so-called Global War on Terrorism, in which Iraqi citizens were almost completely denied their civil and human rights, are now being implemented in the US and elsewhere.
Palantir’s law enforcement tools crunch data and identify certain areas of cities or neighborhoods that should receive an uptick in police presence. The Palantir police technology can create “chronic-offender bulletins,” which attempt to predict and identify potential “repeat offenders” and problem areas.
After someone is deemed a possible or probable repeat offender, extra attention and enhanced surveillance techniques are deployed against that individual. Similarly, once an entire neighborhood is flagged by Palantir’s algorithms as densely populated with repeat offenders, the neighborhood is considered a “hotspot zone” and is then more heavily policed, increasing the chance that residents will be stopped for minor infractions.
The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition criticizes the technological assumptions that underlie Palantir’s algorithm-based policing as “pathologizing” individuals and entire neighborhoods. It says that the programs “enable the continuation of decades of discriminatory and racist policing under the apparent neutrality of objective data.”
Palantir’s policing tools also allow jurisdictions that normally would never communicate or share information to do so, resulting in a greater concentration of police power. As Wired noted, “When enough jurisdictions join Palantir’s interconnected web of police departments, government agencies, and databases, the resulting data trove resembles a pay-to-access social network—a Facebook of crime that’s both invisible and largely unaccountable to the citizens whose behavior it tracks.”
Of all Palantir’s predictive-policing efforts, arguably the most notorious took place in New Orleans. As revealed by The Verge in February 2018, Palantir had been secretly running a “predictive policing” pilot program for the New Orleans Police Department for six years and had been hiding it from the population of New Orleans and its city council. Key city council members were quoted as stating that they “had no idea that the city had any sort of relationship with Palantir, nor were they aware that Palantir used its program in New Orleans to market its services to another law enforcement agency for a multimillion-dollar contract.” Two weeks later, the press office of the outgoing New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu, told the Times-Picayune that his office would not renew its “pro bono contract” with Palantir.
As Palantir’s role in “predictive policing” began to grow into a national controversy, another shady intelligence-linked company, Carbyne911—also funded by Peter Thiel— began contracting with police departments and emergency-service providers. Carbyne911, which received early investments from intelligence-linked figures such as Nicole Junkermann and the infamous Jeffrey Epstein, has stepped forward to take over what was once Palantir’s predictive-policing portfolio for counties throughout the country. As explored in this article, Carbyne911 has a predictive-policing component that is eerily similar Palantir’s.
In one recent example of Palantir-Carbyne baton passing, Carbyne911 entered into an agreement with the City of New Orleans this March, a deal that gave the company access to all emergency 911 call data and complete surveillance of those who call or interact with the city’s emergency-services system, without any accountability or limitations. Just a month later, the New Orleans Police Department installed police checkpoints across the city.
Yet, Carbyne911’s takeover of New Orleans in 2020 is not simply limited to 911 call-data collection. The company has also been involved in New Orleans official COVID-19 response from the very beginning. In March, Carbyne911 also claimed to be helping to “flatten the curve” in New Orleans.
Carbyne’s recent pivot into public health followed the tarnishing of the company’s public image over the past year, which was initially spurred by the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. After it was revealed that Epstein had invested a sizable sum in the company and that two of his close associates, Nicole Junkermann and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, where Carbyne directors, the company became heavily scrutinized for its connections with Israeli intelligence.
Carbyne911 has since removed most of its original board of directors from public view in an effort to distance itself from Epstein-connected characters such as Junkermann and Barak and has also been using a company called Wowza to promote its services in an apparent effort to avoid further unwanted scrutiny.
Wowza Media Systems, which was founded in 2005 by David Stubenvoll and Charlie Good, partnered with Carbyne911 in 2015 to build what Wowza refer to as a “reliable, secure streaming ecosystem.” In June 2020, the CEO of Wowza admitted that “New Orleans uses Carbyne’s COVID-19 service to manage emergency calls and help individuals who have contracted the virus contact telehealth professionals instead of flooding emergency rooms. . . . Carbyne has been fielding 70 percent of the city’s emergency calls, a majority of which were related to COVID-19 symptoms.”
While the vast majority of Palantir’s original predictive-policing programs have been discontinued over the past two years, its services are being replaced by Carbyne911. From New York to New Orleans, it seems that when one Thiel company relinquishes its control over public data, another Thiel-backed company emerges to take the reins.
The Mentality behind Palantir
Aside from the company’s role in aiding the US national-security state target minorities, it is also worth exploring the views on race espoused by Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, and Peter Thiel, Palantir’s cofounder, board member, and person most often associated with the company in the media. In late October, the New York Times published a lengthy profile of Palantir with a particular focus on its CEO, Alex Karp. In that article, Karp expressed his life-long obsessive fear of being murdered due to his “amorphous” racial background and that this fear “propels a lot of the decisions” that are made at Palantir.
New York Times writer Michael Steinberger described Karp’s fear:
“I still can’t believe I haven’t been shot and pushed out the window,” Karp told me. We were in Palantir’s New York office, located in the Meatpacking district. He wasn’t being literal, despite the office’s bulletproof windows and the bodyguards hovering nearby. Rather, he meant the feeling of inevitable doom that has plagued him since childhood. . . .
He intuited from a young age that his background made him vulnerable, he said. “You’re a racially amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who’s also dyslexic—would you not come up with the idea that you’re [expletive]?” Although he was now the head of a major corporation, neither time nor success had diminished the anxiety. If the far right came to power, he said, he would certainly be among its victims. “Who’s the first person who is going to get hung? You make a list, and I will show you who they get first. It’s me. There’s not a box I don’t check.” His fear, he said, “propels a lot of the decisions for this company.”
A 2013 report published by Forbes noted that Karp has a 24/7 security detail that is explicitly there “to protect him from extremists.”
It is certainly telling that Karp’s longstanding and deep-seated fears of being targeted because of his ethnicity is a driving force behind many decisions that Palantir makes. Yet, while Karp professed to the New York Times that his fear is linked to a potential rise of “the far right,” this claim becomes doubtful when examining the politics and views of Karp’s close friend and Palantir cofounder, Peter Thiel.
A classmate of Thiel’s at Stanford and now best-selling author, Julie Lythcott-Haims, wrote in 2016 that Thiel had told her back when they were at university together that “apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant.” Lythcott-Haims went on to say that Thiel’s statements gave her the impression that he was “indifferent to human suffering or felt that oppressing whole swaths of humans was a rational, justifiable element of a system of governance.”
Though this is just one anecdote, Thiel’s own subsequent statements and actions support this portrayal of his views. For instance, as the New York Times recently noted, “Thiel has argued that democracy and economic freedom are incompatible and suggested that giving women the vote had undermined the latter.”
In regard to the claim about democracy and economic freedom, an August article from Reason on Thiel’s political views provides more insight. For instance, Thiel wrote in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” while a major ally of Thiel’s, blogger Curtis Yarvin, claimed that same year that democracy was “a precancerous growth always pregnant with some malignancy.”
Another influence on Thiel is German philosopher Carl Schmitt, a man infamous for his promotion of dictatorship as an inherently superior form of government. In a 2004 essay, Thiel used Schmitt’s statement that “the high point of politics are the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy” in reference to the direction “the West” should take in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. At the time, Thiel had lamented that “a direct path forward” to face down the post-9/11 enemy “is prevented by America’s constitutional machinery.” It goes without saying that, at the time of the September 11 attacks, “the enemy” was perceived largely along ethnoreligious lines.
Thiel has also been linked to “white nationalists” and the “far right fringe,” the very groups that fuel Karp’s deepest fears, while individuals closely connected to Thiel, such as Jeff Giesea, are prominent supporters of “alt-right” personalities such as Mike Cernovich and Andrew “weev” Auernheimer.
Thiel’s enduring close association with Palantir and his long-standing, close relationship with Karp discredits Karp’s claim that his fear of being murdered for his ethnicity is solely based on fear of the “far right,” given that Thiel is essentially the “far right” personified. Regardless of Karp’s real reasons for feeling so afraid, what is clear is that race is at the forefront of his thinking and, thus, at the forefront of much of Palantir’s company decisions.
Privatizing Total Information Awareness
In order to fully understand the incredible power Palantir wields and why it was chosen to serve such an integral role in launching Operation Warp Speed, it is important to understand who was really behind the rise of Palantir and why.
In general terms, Palantir was created to be the privatized panopticon of the national-security state, the newest rebranding of the big data approach of intelligence agencies to quash dissent and instill obedience in the population. This has long been a key objective of US intelligence, having been pioneered by the CIA as far back as the Vietnam War. It was covertly turned against the bulk of the US population by both US and Israel intelligence during the Iran-Contra and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s, though efforts to use these big data approaches to target domestic protests and specific social movements had been ongoing for years.
The panopticon was originally an English philosopher’s concept for a new, revolutionary prison design, but the idea was more fully developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. As independent journalist Johnny Vedmore reported in October, Foucault “would use the concept of Bentham’s original Panopticon as a way to describe and explore ‘disciplinary power.’ . . . According to Foucault’s work, disciplinary power had been successful due to its utilization of three technologies: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examinations.”
Vedmore then notes:
Among the most notable of Foucault’s analyses of the utility of the Panopticon is the following quote from his book Discipline and Punish: “The major effect of the panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” In other words, the uncertainty of whether or not an individual is being constantly watched induces obedience in that individual, allowing only a few to control the many.
It is perhaps unsurprising that for the recent profile on Palantir in the New York Times Karp chose to pose with three Palantir employees under a large portrait of Foucault.
During the Reagan administration, the individuals at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal began to develop a database called Main Core, which firmly placed the US national-security state on its current, tech-fueled Foucauldian path. A senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and service in five presidential administrations told Radar in 2008 that Main Core was “a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” It was expressly developed for use in “continuity of government” (COG) protocols by the key Iran-Contra figure Oliver North and was used to compile a list of US dissidents and “potential troublemakers” to be dealt with if the continuity of government protocol was ever invoked.
Main Core utilized PROMIS software, which was stolen from its owners at Inslaw Inc. by top Reagan and US intelligence officials as well as Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan. Also intimately involved in the PROMIS scandal was media baron and Israeli “super spy” Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and reportedly the man who brought the intelligence-linked child trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein into the Israeli intelligence fold. Like PROMIS, Main Core involved both US and Israeli intelligence and was a big data approach to the surveillance of perceived domestic dissidents.
The Iran-Contra and PROMIS scandals were exposed, but they were subsequently covered up, largely by the then and current US attorney general William Barr. Main Core persisted and continued to amass data. That data could not be fully tapped into and utilized by the intelligence community until after the events of September 11, 2001, which offered a golden opportunity for the use of such tools against the domestic US population, all under the guise of combating “terrorism.” For example, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 government officials reportedly saw Main Core being accessed by White House computers.
September 11 was also used as an excuse to remove information “firewalls” within the national-security state, expanding “information sharing” among agency databases and, by extension, also expanding the amount of data that could be accessed and analyzed by Main Core and its analogues. As Alan Wade, then serving as the CIA’s chief information officer, pointed out soon after 9/11: “One of the post-September 11 themes is collaboration and information sharing. We’re looking at tools that facilitate communication in ways that we don’t have today.”
In an attempt to build on these two post-9/11 objectives simultaneously, the US national-security state attempted to institute a “public-private” surveillance program so invasive that Congress defunded it just months after its creation due to concerns it would completely eliminate the right to privacy in the US. Called Total Information Awareness (TIA), the program sought to develop an “all-seeing” surveillance apparatus managed by the Pentagon’s DARPA. The official agreement was that invasive surveillance of the entire US population was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, bioterrorism events, and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks before they could take place.
The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Reagan’s National Security Advisor during Iran-Contra and being convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal. Poindexter, during the Iran-Contra hearings, had famously claimed that it was his duty to withhold information from Congress.
In regard to TIA, one of Poindexter’s key allies was at the time the chief information officer of the CIA, Alan Wade. Wade met with Poindexter in relation to TIA numerous times and managed the participation of not just the CIA but all US intelligence agencies that had signed on to add their data as “nodes” to TIA and, in exchange, gained access to its tools.
The TIA program, despite the best efforts of Poindexter and his allies such as Wade, was eventually forced to shut down after considerable criticism and public outrage. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that the surveillance effort would “kill privacy in America” because “every aspect of our lives would be catalogued,” while several mainstream media outlets warned that TIA was “fighting terror by terrifying US citizens.”
Though the program was defunded, it later emerged that TIA was never actually shut down, with its various programs having been covertly divided among the web of military and intelligence agencies that make up the US national-security state. While some of those TIA programs went underground, the core panopticon software that TIA had hoped to wield began to be developed by the very company now known as Palantir, with considerable help from the CIA and Alan Wade, as well as Poindexter.
At the time it was formally launched in February 2003, the TIA program was immediately controversial, leading it to change its name in May 2003 to Terrorism Information Awareness in an apparent attempt to sound less like an all-encompassing domestic surveillance system and more like a tool specifically aimed at “terrorists.” The TIA program was shuttered by the end of 2003.
The same month as the TIA name change and with a growing backlash against the program, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. Thiel, however, had begun creating the software behind Palantir months in advance, though he claims he can’t recall exactly when. Thiel, Karp, and other Palantir cofounders claimed for years that the company had been founded in 2004, despite the paperwork of Palantir’s incorporation by Thiel directly contradicting this claim.
Also, in 2003, apparently soon after Thiel formally created Palantir, arch neocon Richard Perle called Poindexter, saying that he wanted to introduce the architect of TIA to two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. According to a report in New York Magazine, Poindexter “was precisely the person” whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon,” that is, TIA. During that meeting, Thiel and Karp sought “to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.”
Soon after Palantir’s incorporation, though the exact timing and details of the investment remain hidden from the public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel became the company’s first backer, aside from Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million. In-Q-Tel’s stake in Palantir would not be publicly reported until mid-2006.
The money was certainly useful. In addition, Alex Karp recently told the New York Times that “the real value of the In-Q-Tel investment was that it gave Palantir access to the CIA analysts who were its intended clients.” A key figure in the making of In-Q-Tel investments during this period, including Palantir, was the CIA’s chief information officer at the time, Alan Wade.
After the In-Q-Tel investment, the CIA would be Palantir’s only client until 2008. During that period, Palantir’s two top engineers—Aki Jain and Stephen Cohen—traveled to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia every two weeks. Jain recalls making at least two hundred trips to CIA headquarters between 2005 and 2009. During those regular visits, CIA analysts “would test [Palantir’s software] out and offer feedback, and then Cohen and Jain would fly back to California to tweak it.” As with In-Q-Tel’s decision to invest in Palantir, the CIA’s chief information officer at the time, Alan Wade, played a key role in many of these meetings and subsequently in the “tweaking” of Palantir’s products.
It should come as no surprise, then, that there is an overlap between Palantir’s products and the vision that Wade and Poindexter had held for the failed TIA program. One can see the obvious parallels between Palantir and TIA by examining how the masterminds behind each describe their key functions.
Take, for instance, the following excerpt from Shane Harris’s book The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State regarding Wade’s and Poindexter’s views of TIA’s “built-in privacy protections”:
Wade liked the idea, but he heard something even more intriguing in Poindexter’s pitch, a concept that he hadn’t heard in any of the tech briefings he’d sat through since 9/11: the words “protect privacy.” Wade thought that Poindexter’s was the first ambitious information architecture that included privacy from the ground up.
He described his privacy appliance concept, in which a physical device would set between the use and the data, shielding the names and other identifying information of the millions of innocent people in the noise. The TIA system would employ “selective revelation,” Poindexter explained. The farther into the data a user wished to probe, the more outside authority he had to obtain.
Compare TIA’s “selective revelation” sales pitch with that recently offered by Karp and Thiel to the New York Times about Palantir’s own supposed privacy safeguards:
Karp and Thiel say they had two overarching ambitions for Palantir early on. The first was to make software that could help keep the country safe from terrorism. The second was to prove that there was a technological solution to the challenge of balancing public safety and civil liberties—a “Hegelian” aspiration, as Karp puts it. Although political opposites, they both feared that personal privacy would be a casualty of the war on terrorism. . .
To that end, Palantir’s software was created with two primary security features: Users are able to access only information they are authorized to view, and the software generates an audit trail that, among other things, indicates if someone has tried to obtain material off-limits to them.
The explanation offered by Poindexter and Wade for TIA and that presented by Karp and Thiel for Palantir are essentially analogous. Similarly, Palantir’s “immutable log” concept, whereby “everything a user does in Palantir creates a trail that can be audited,” was also a hallmark of the TIA system envisioned by Poindexter and Wade.
As noted in The Watchers:
Poindexter also proposed “an immutable audit trail,” a master record of every analyst who had used the TIA system, what data they’d touched, what they’d done with it. The system would be trained to spot suspicious patterns of use. . . . Poindexter wanted to use TIA to watch the watchers. The CIA team [including Alan Wade] liked what they heard.
The benefits in repurposing the “public-private” TIA into a completely private entity after TIA was publicly dismantled are obvious. For instance, given that Palantir is a private company as opposed to a government program, the way its software is used by its government and corporate clients benefits from “plausible deniability” and frees Palantir and its software from constraints that would be present if it engaged in a public project.
As this same late October New York Times profile on Palantir notes:
The data, which is stored in various cloud services or on clients’ premises, is controlled by the customer, and Palantir says it does not police the use of its products. Nor are the privacy controls foolproof; it is up to the customers to decide who gets to see what and how vigilant they wish to be.
From PROMIS to Palantir: Building the Public Health Panopticon
While Wade was involved in operating the information technology infrastructure of US intelligence and in guiding the rise of Palantir, he was also intimately involved in another company known as Chiliad. Chiliad was a data analytics company founded in the late 1990s by Paul McOwen, Christine Maxwell, and an unnamed third individual. However, Bloomberg lists Alan Wade as a cofounder of Chiliad, meaning that Wade, as the third cofounder, was involved in creating Chiliad while also serving in a top post at the CIA.
This is significant for two main reasons. First, Chiliad was developed into the very tool that became in demand by US intelligence in the immediate aftermath of September 11. It had been conveniently set up well in advance, however, allowing it to score key contracts thanks to the advanced stage of its product and its founders’ intelligence connections. This, along with a glowing recommendation from the heavily compromised 9/11 Commission, benefited Chiliad’s software, which was remarkably similar to early versions of Palantir and PROMIS software. Due to ongoing litigation in the PROMIS case, efforts were made by the US national-security state to retool and tweak the PROMIS software sufficiently so that it could argue that the software in use was dissimilar to the original stolen product, according to the original PROMIS developer, Bill Hamilton of Inslaw Inc.
Second, Wade, employed by the CIA at the time of founding Chiliad, created the company with Christine Maxwell, sister of Ghislaine Maxwell and daughter of Robert Maxwell. Before her father’s death, Christine was intimately involved in and ended up leading the US-based front company that Robert Maxwell had used to sell versions of PROMIS, which had a backdoor to US national laboratories for Israeli intelligence, seriously compromising US national security. The CIA, alongside Israeli intelligence, was intimately involved in the PROMIS software scandal. Thus, the involvement of both Wade and Maxwell in creating Chiliad and the clear overlap in the PROMIS and Chiliad software, suggests Chiliad was the US-Israeli successor to PROMIS. In addition, Wade’s role in the rise of Palantir suggests that Palantir is yet another successor to PROMIS, a possibility also explored to some extent in this article.
Notably, Palantir began its rise to prominence as the go-to counterterrorism software of the West, just when Chiliad pivoted away from that sector, eventually folding a few years later. Notably, in the years prior to its shutdown, Chiliad had begun moving into health-care data, a pivot that became very obvious by 2012, when it began adding prominent health-care industry executives to its company board and getting involved in aiding “medical research.”
Not long after Chiliad was shut down, Wade, who had also been the chairman of its board for many years, was added to the board of a UK cybersecurity firm called Darktrace. Darktrace, as noted in this article by Johnny Vedmore, is the result of the joining of UK intelligence with a team of AI researchers at Cambridge who were seeking to develop the AI “singularity.” This attempt at “self-aware” AI was subsequently developed into “cybersecurity” software under the watchful eye and direction of UK intelligence. Darktrace’s intelligence-linked software now runs not only a large swath of the UK power grid and the computers of major corporations around the world but also cybersecurity for the UK’s NHS, giving it access to patient-health data.
Not long after Darktrace’s foray into health care began, Palantir made its own pivot into health care, both for the NHS in the UK and HHS in the US. The latter partnership has expanded considerably over this past year, from HHS Protect to contact tracing and now to Operation Warp Speed. Meanwhile, Palantir’s contracts with the US military, which is managing Operation Warp Speed, have also expanded considerably over the course of the past year. Palantir’s expansion into nearly every sector of government is set to continue, particularly with president-elect Biden’s pick to lead the US intelligence community—Avril Haines, who was a consultant to Palantir right up until she joined the Biden campaign as an adviser earlier this year.
Like the planned all-seeing TIA apparatus, even mainstream outlets such as the New York Times have taken to describing Palantir as the “all-seeing eye,” the center of a panopticon that has grown exponentially under the guise of a “private sector–led” response to a public health emergency. This “public health” panopticon, as clearly seen with Palantir and its role in Warp Speed, is all about advancing the long-standing goals of the national-security state and targeting the same populations targeted by state violence under the guise of “protecting” them and the collective. Palantir’s objective is, and always has been, control of information and of knowledge and becoming the centerpiece of a vast surveillance enterprise that now extends far beyond the US borders.
The minority groups that Palantir has long targeted on behalf of the national-security state, and whom they will now identify and prioritize for Warp Speed vaccination, have long been the groups that the Western power structure has been most worried about rising up against the structural inequality and state violence that disproportionately affects them. It is thus no coincidence that the next leap of the surveillance state, through “pharmacovigiliance” and militarized aspects of Warp Speed, will target these same groups.
With military-led Operation Warp Speed and ICE-partnered Palantir gearing up to “tailor” certain COVID-19 vaccines to minority “target populations,” we will next explore, in the third and final part of this series, the individuals surrounding one particular Operation Warp Speed vaccine. This vaccine has not only had a host of safety issues but was also developed by researchers with deep ties to the British Eugenics Society, which changed its name in 1989 to the Galton Institute.
Jeremy Loffredo is a journalist and researcher based in Washington, DC. He is formerly a segment producer for RT AMERICA and is currently an investigative reporter for Children’s Health Defense.
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.
A-hole Of The Year Nominee: The World Economic Forum For Wanting Less Facial Recognition Regulation
MassPrivateI | December 8, 2020
The World Economic Forum (WEF) gets my vote for A-hole Of The Year for publishing a report that advocates for less adversarial regulations to help spread facial recognition usage world-wide.
The 67 page report titled “Global Technology Governance Report 2021: Harnessing Fourth Industrial Revolution Technologies in a COVID-19 World” is all about spreading the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (biometrics) across the globe.
“The Fourth Industrial Revolution – for instance, artificial intelligence (AI), mobility (including autonomous vehicles), blockchain, drones and the internet of things (IoT) – have been at the center of these innovations and are likely to play a dominant role in what emerges post-pandemic.”
The WEF thinks governments should relax regulations on biometric collection devices.
“Governing these new technologies (facial recognition) will require new principles, rules and protocols that promote innovation while mitigating social costs. Public-private collaboration will be crucial to making the right choices for future generations. A faster, more agile approach to governance is needed to effectively respond and adapt to the ways these technologies are changing business models and social interaction structures.”
The WEF claims consumers and governments should be encouraged to share private data.
“Regulators and lawmakers should protect privacy while also encouraging data sharing to ensure that technologies meet their potential. Consumers, public authorities and private companies can all share key data in order to fully benefit from these new technologies.” (page 11)
The WEF also thinks that restricting data sharing would inhibit the growth of facial recognition, drones and the internet of things.
“Many countries have restrictions on data sharing, especially related to finance and healthcare. However, data is a vital ingredient for technologies such as AI autonomous vehicles and blockchain, and restricting its flow can inhibit the growth of data-dependent fields.”
“For innovation to thrive, agile and responsive regulation will be crucial in the post-pandemic world. Business models are changing rapidly, and regulators will need to keep pace with these changes without stifling innovation.” (page 16)
On Page 18, the WEF compares sharing personal facial recognition data with governments and law enforcement to sharing cancer treatment data which is appalling. The so-called deep pools of quality data that facial recognition produces are in fact the intimate details of people’s lives.
“Rapid advances in facial recognition software show what deep pools of quality data can produce and shed light on the kinds of revolutionary outcomes that sharing data on cancer treatments or carbon emissions could produce.”
The WEF’s “Agile Regulation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” is all about making biometric companies rich at the expense of everyone’s privacy.
“Around the world, governments have been forced to fast-track changes to regulation to enable innovations from telemedicine to drone delivery to help their economies adapt to disruption. A more agile, flexible approach to regulation is needed in order to unlock the potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
“The Agile Regulation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution project seeks to promote adoption of these practices and make it easier for innovations to be introduced and scaled across the world, while mitigating the risks. If we get this right, we can unlock innovation that will help power our prosperity.”
‘If we get this right, we can unlock the innovation that will help power our prosperity’? Really?
If governments fail to regulate or ‘agilely” regulate personal facial recognition/drone surveillance data around the world, then no one will be safe from Big Brother.
The WEF also wants biometric companies to set an international standard framework to encourage governments to approve biometric surveillance devices.
Letting biometric companies or special interest groups like the WEF decide how best to surveil 7 billion plus people is a mistake of epic proportions. Not only will it [not] make everyone rich like the WEF and biometric companies but privacy as we know it will become almost non-existent.
And that is why I nominate the World Economic Forum for my first-ever “A-hole Of The Year” award.
New Study Claims Vaccinated Children Appear To Be “Significantly Less Healthy” Than Unvaccinated
By Arjun Walia | Collective Evolution | December 4, 2020
A new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health has, according to the authors, discovered that vaccinated children require far more healthcare than unvaccinated children. At least that’s what they found from the group of children used to collect the data.
This type of study is interesting to see given the fact that studies comparing unvaccinated children to vaccinated children are lacking, there aren’t many of them. These studies are, as the authors state, “rarely conducted.”
None of the post licensure-vaccine safety studies have included comparisons to groups completely unexposed to vaccines.
The study concludes that “the unvaccinated children in this practice are not, overall, less healthy than the vaccinated and that indeed the vaccinated children appear to be significantly less healthy than the unvaccinated.
The data source for this study was all billing and medical records of Integrative Pediatrics, a private pediatric practice located in Portland, Oregon.
The study emphasizes the need for more research given the fact that, again, there is hardly any in this area. They concur with Mawson et al., 2017 , who reported: “Further research involving larger, independent samples is needed to verify and understand these unexpected findings in order to optimize the impact of vaccines on children’s health” and with Hooker and Miller 2020, who wrote: “Further study is necessary to understand the full spectrum of health effects associated with childhood vaccination.”
These studies mentioned above also had similar findings.
According to the authors,
Vaccines are widely regarded as safe and effective within the medical community and are an integral part of the current American medical system. While the benefits of vaccination have been estimated in numerous studies, negative and nonspecific impact of vaccines on human health have not been well studied. Most recently, it has been determined that variation exists in individual responses to vaccines, that differences exist in the safety profile of live and inactivated vaccines, and that simultaneous administration of live and inactivated vaccines may be associated with poor outcomes. Studies have not been published that report on the total outcomes from vaccinations, or the increase or decrease in total infections in vaccinated individuals.
This is important because, although vaccinations in some cases may protect against the target disease, what else might they be doing not only on the short term, but in the long term? It’s also important to point out that in other cases, like the HPV vaccine, there is no evidence that they do protect against the target disease.
Another great example comes from a study published in 2017 that examined the introduction of the diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine (DTP) in an urban community in Guinea-Bissau in the early 1980s. They found that the DTP vaccine was associated with 5-fold higher mortality than being unvaccinated. The authors state the following:
All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis. Though (this) vaccine protects children against the target disease it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections.
This new study points out,
Pre-licensure clinical trials for vaccines cannot detect long-term outcomes since safety review periods following administration are typically 42 days or less. Long-term vaccine safety science relies on post-market surveillance studies using databases such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC’s) Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) and the Vaccine Safety Datalink. VAERS is a passive reporting system in which, according to Ross 2011, “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.” The Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) can, in principle, according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM, 2013), be used to compare outcomes of vaccines and unvaccinated children. Based on the IOM’s recommendation, in 2016, the CDC published a white paper (CDC, 2016; Glanz et al., 2016) on studying the safety of their recommended pediatric vaccine schedule. Unfortunately, to date, no studies have been published comparing a diversity of outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
Below is one of many interesting graphs from the study. The orange line represents the vaccinated children, and the blue one represents the unvaccinated.
For methods used, limitations, and more please refer to the study.
The parents that I work with in New York, that I see around the country are very concerned that their rights are being taken away, that their knowledge about the science is being pushed away by an agenda that only says, unvaccinated children are a problem.
No study has every been done in this country, appropriately, to address the health outcomes of children who are vaccinated versus the children who are unvaccinated. I have been seeing families in my practice for over 20 years, that have opted out of vaccination, they are the healthiest children I’ve ever seen. – Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a NY licensed paediatrician
Why This Is Important: Given the fact that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) has paid out approximately $4 billion dollars to families of vaccine injured children, there are clearly, in my opinion, some valid points here, especially against compulsory vaccinations. Again, as mentioned above, VAERS only accounts for an estimated 1 percent of vaccine injuries, this one percent is what is recorded.
A 2010 HHS pilot study by the Federal Agency for Health Care Research (AHCR) found that 1 in every 39 vaccines causes injury, a shocking comparison to the claims from the CDC of 1 in every million.
Take the MMR vaccine for example, if you search on VAERS, as of 2/5/19, the cumulative raw count of adverse events from measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines alone was: 93,929 adverse events, 1,810 disabilities, 6,902 hospitalizations, and 463 deaths. Again, don’t forget about that 1% figure cited in the study.
There are a number of legitimate concerns about vaccine safety that would require quite a long and very in-depth article, but I just wanted to let the reader know here briefly. Aluminum for example, is another concern I’ve written quite a lot about.
These are a few reasons as to why vaccine hesitancy is at an all time high, even among many physicians and scientists. This has actually been observed for a while. For example, one study published in the journal EbioMedicine in 2013 outlines this point, stating in the introduction:
Over the past two decades several vaccine controversies have emerged in various countries, including France, inducing worries about severe adverse effects and eroding confidence in health authorities, experts and science. These two dimensions are at the core of vaccine hesitancy (VH) observed in the general population. VH is defined as delay in acceptance of vaccination, or refusal, or even acceptance with doubts about its safety and benefits, with all these behaviours and attitudes varying according to context , vaccine and personal profile, despite the availability of vaccine services VH presents a challenge to physicians who must address their patients’ concerns about vaccines and ensure satisfactory vaccination coverage.
At a 2019 conference on vaccines put on by the World Health Organization this fact was emphasized by Professor Heidi Larson, a Professor of Anthropology and the Risk and Decision Scientist Director at the Vaccine Confidence Project. She is referenced, as you can see, by the authors in the study above. At the conference, she emphasized that safety concerns among people and health professionals seem to be the biggest issue regarding vaccine hesitancy.
She also stated,
The other thing that’s a trend, and an issue, is not just confidence in providers but confidence of health care providers, we have a very wobbly health professional frontline that is starting to question vaccines and the safety of vaccines. That’s a huge problem, because to this day any study I’ve seen… still, the most trusted person on any study I’ve seen globally is the health care provider…
Is there not enough information here alone to warrant informed consent? I have a hard time understanding how someone who would take the new COVID-19 vaccine, for example, would be worried about me contracting the virus if they are protected?
Why have we given governments the ability to mandate such actions? Why have we given them so much power to dictate what we do and how we want to live? Is this really how we want to live, is this really the kind of world we want to create?
A Deeper Discussion. What Do We Do About The Increasing Vaccine Pressure?
So many are concerned about mandatory vaccination. Further, many are starting to see that mandated vaccines may not be the future, but that services and options will be denied unless you can prove you have been vaccinated. Is it still the time to point the blame? Or is there a radical new approach we must take? A shift in our worldview, re-examining who we think we are, why we are here and what world we want to create is where we will begin to find the answers we are looking for. Has the dualistic fight the enemy method worked in the past? Are we not still here regardless of having used this method in the past? Maybe it’s time for a new conversation, one that looks at ourselves in a whole new light. This perhaps is how we will solve our ongoing challenges at their core.
Below is a deeper discussion about it from CE Founder Joe Martino. You can follow me, Arjun, here on Instagram.
People who refuse ‘voluntary’ Covid-19 vaccination could face restrictions, Ontario govt warns
RT | December 8, 2020
No one will be forced to receive a coronavirus jab, but people who refuse to get vaccinated could be deprived of certain freedoms, Ontario’s Health Minister Christine Elliott has cautioned.
The senior health official acknowledged that inoculation would be voluntary, but encouraged “everyone who is able to, to have the vaccination,” noting that there could be consequences for those who forgo the procedure.
“There may be some restrictions in terms of travel or other restrictions that may arise as a result of not having a vaccination, but that’s going to be up to the person themselves to make that decision on the basis of what’s most important to them.”
The remarks were made on Monday in response to a question from a journalist about whether schools, businesses, and other institutions could ask people for proof of vaccination.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford responded that it would be unlawful to “force every single person to take” the vaccine, but Elliott’s follow-up remarks seemed to suggest the government might rely upon coercive tactics to obtain ‘voluntary’ compliance.
The health minister’s comments come amid growing fears that mass vaccination programs being rolled out by governments around the world could lead to some form of health ‘passport’ which could be used to restrict travel and other activities.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Monday that, pending approval from health authorities, Canada could begin receiving doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech as early as next week. Canada is expected to obtain up to 249,000 doses of the drug by the end of December.
On Tuesday, the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to begin administering the Pfizer-BioNTech jab. The UK government has insisted that it has no plans to issue any kind of identification which could be used to discriminate against those who have not been inoculated.
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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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