Soviet-style thought-policing has come to America, outsourced to Big Tech corporations
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | October 29, 2020
Social media were supposed to democratize speech, liberating the people of the world from the tyranny of gatekeepers. They failed. Seduced by vanity and ideology, they’ve become censors themselves, a Soviet-style thought police.
Once upon a time, Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil,” Facebook was all about connecting people, and Twitter executives proclaimed it the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” Fast-forward to 2020, and they’re all about ‘deplatforming’ voices the legacy media and the political establishment has denounced as unworthy of being heard.
“Who the hell elected you?” thundered Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, during Wednesday’s hearing, expressing frustration over the platform’s crackdown on a story about a major political scandal. In attempting to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s dubious business dealings, Twitter has locked the account of America’s oldest publishing newspaper, and even gone after White House officials and members of Congress.
Yet anyone who didn’t see this coming in the months after the 2016 US election simply hasn’t been paying attention. The greatest irony is that Cruz and his fellow Republicans enabled it themselves, partly by preferring sound bites over legislative action, but also by validating the ‘Russian meddling’ conspiracy theories peddled by their political opponents in an effort to delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump.
Make no mistake, ‘Russiagate’ is how Big Tech was pushed onto the path of censorship. By way of just one example, the Cambridge Analytica ‘scandal’ was used to bludgeon Facebook into hiring censors and partnering with outside ‘fact-checkers’. When it eventually turned out there had been no scandal and the whole thing was a manufactured outrage by self-serving ‘whistleblowers’ and the media… there wasn’t so much as an apology, and the mechanisms stayed in place.
Silicon Valley has been more than eager to go down that path, too. Public records show the vast majority of their employees donate to Democrats, while their executives have poured millions into the campaigns of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden this year.
Nobody needed to pressure Google into embracing the role of the ‘good censor’, its executives and employees did so themselves. Not surprisingly, the president of their parent company at the time, Eric Schmidt, had been fully invested in Clinton’s campaign.
It took a mere suggestion of a crackdown by an influential Senate Democrat for Twitter to ban all RT advertising and overhaul its entire advertising policy, back in October 2017. Not surprisingly, the proposal by Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) went nowhere, but its purpose had been accomplished.
Like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled, the pressure to censor ‘objectionable’ content steadily rose over the course of the Trump presidency. It marched on regardless of the revelations that ‘Russiagate’ was a scam and that the real ‘collusion’ was between the spies, police, prosecutors, media, and the political establishment.
Things almost boiled over when the platforms started deleting any mention of the alleged ‘whistleblower’ who kick-started the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings against Trump – even those made by Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).
The Covid-19 pandemic the very next month saw an expansive effort to ban ‘misinformation’ about the virus – meaning anything not coming from ‘authorities’, even as those very authorities kept changing their line over time! That was probably when the ‘frog’ first began noticing the boiling water.
By then, however, Twitter had begun openly censoring Trump this spring. Condemning riots? “Glorifying violence,” restricted. Putting rioters on notice they can’t set up a lawless “autonomous zone” in Washington, DC? “Abusive behavior, threatening harm,” restricted.
Oh, granted, the same insane standard was later applied to a metaphorical statement by a self-identified socialist, but whether that was the exception that proves the rule or an effort to ‘both sides’ the issue, at the end of the day, Twitter had appointed itself arbiter of acceptable speech – and that was the point.
How can this happen in a country where free speech is the very first enumerated in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights? Because, as both Democrats and libertarian-minded NeverTrump Republicans have been quick to argue, the First Amendment applies only to the government, not to private companies! This is manifestly absurd, but hasn’t been challenged in the courts just yet.
This sophistry has enabled the champions of corporate thought-policing to argue that technically, the US doesn’t have the kind of censorship of word and thought once attributed to the Soviet Union. Because it has Big Tech, it doesn’t have to! Meanwhile, some lawmakers certainly aren’t shy about demanding for more censorship, either.
If you think the comparisons to the KGB or the Stasi are too much, note Twitter’s insistence that the New York Post – founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 – needs to delete the “offending” tweet [linking to the Hunter Biden emails] before its account can be unlocked, but it will supposedly be free to repost it then, because the rules have since changed.
In order to truly work, submission must be voluntary. That’s why Americans still file their tax returns, even though the IRS has been withholding taxes from their wages since the Second World War. That is why in George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith couldn’t just be broken – he had to love Big Brother. That is why Twitter forces you to bend the knee before they will allow you to speak.
What started as anyone’s ability to compete with the New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN on equal footing has morphed into the neutral ‘platform’ choosing to promote their non-stories while shutting down legitimate lines of thought and inquiry under the guise of ‘protecting our democracy’ and fighting (phantom) ‘Russian disinformation’.
So Twitter is basically everything they claim Russia is: They’re manipulating what information people see to try to influence the election.
— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) October 28, 2020
It didn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to stay this way. But it will take more than just strong words to make speech in America free again.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Trump is really a 3rd Party candidate, taking the first axe to the two-party US dictatorship in 170 years
By Robert Bridge | RT | October 29, 2020
Washington despises Trump because he’s an outsider – a third-party gatecrasher – who has upset the duopoly that has had a stranglehold on American politics, and they’re doing everything they can to stop him doing it again.
The meteoric rise of Donald Trump defies the law of US political gravity in that he has elevated himself inside of a rigidly controlled two-party system while going against the interests of the establishment. That is a remarkable accomplishment, and no other modern politician – aside from perhaps John F. Kennedy – has made it this far in Washington by promising to drain the very swamp it sits upon. The Manhattan real estate magnate has essentially become a third-party tour de force, the ultimate bugbear of the powers that be.
Trump is no fool and understood early in the game that there is a veritable army of burly gatekeepers in Washington, standing guard against the threat of third-party provocateurs. In fact, one of the largest gatekeepers is none other than the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a non-profit third-party terminator that is actually sponsored by the Democratic and Republican parties. So when people complain that the Democrats and Republicans are two heads of the same poisonous snake, they are right. This organization is so powerful that it barred the highly popular Ross Perot from appearing on the debate stage in the 1996 presidential campaign alongside Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton and Republican Bob Dole.
A buried footnote with regards to Trump’s political career is that he made his first serious foray into the swamp as the presidential nominee in Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 2000 elections. When those efforts fizzled out, Trump, aware that the road to the White House via a third-party platform was largely inaccessible, began to weigh his chances at running for the presidency on the Republican ticket. Not a bad idea considering that the last time a president was elected in the US who did not identify as either a Democrat or Republican was in 1848, with the election of Whig candidate Zachary Taylor. At the time, however, much of Washington wrote off the tycoon’s dream as a bad joke; the egoistic yearnings of a billionaire who thinks the White House is just another real estate venture.
But Capitol Hill seriously underestimated both the dark mood that had descended upon the nation, as well as Trump’s ability to capitalize on it. With an uncanny gift for electrifying audiences wherever he went, people no longer laughed at his political ambitions. Eventually, Trump went on to do what the polls said was virtually impossible – he defeated the veteran Washington insider, Hillary Clinton, becoming the 45th president of the US. At this point, Trump the ultimate interloper began to use the Republican Party as his own personal Trojan horse to enact radical changes that could not have been achieved otherwise.
For example, despite Washington’s bipartisan love affair with overseas entanglements, Trump held back the dogs of war. He has given the US military arguably its longest break from the battlefield in living memory. That’s not to say that Uncle Sam has suddenly morphed into a marijuana-smoking peacenik under Trump, not at all. In fact, future historians may ultimately blame Trump, the consummate businessman, for selling massive amounts of military hardware to foreign states – like Saudi Arabia, and former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe – that lead to some catastrophic conflict down the road. And who could forget Trump’s crass “we’re keeping the oil” comment with regards to America’s so-called withdrawal from Syria, or the harmful sanctions that have been slapped against Iran?
Meanwhile, Trump has carried out other controversial initiatives, like plugging the gaping hole in the US-Mexico border. Republicans were always content to ignore the massive influx of illegal migrants from South America, so long as it meant cheap labor, while the Democrats found it a great way to capture future voters. Not until a ‘third-party’ solution came along, courtesy of Donald Trump, did the gates begin to close on the “invasion.”
Perhaps Trump’s most ambitious ‘third-party’ project to date has been to take America’s long-ailing industrial sector off of life support. Unfortunately, this program, built around Trump’s pledge to ‘Make America Great Again’, has taken relations with China to the brink. Accusing the People’s Republic of engaging in “unfair trade practices,” the Republican leader took a protectionist position by imposing a number of tariffs and trade barriers, which has naturally triggered a tough response from Beijing. While opinion is split on the matter, a number of analysts agree that the US had been at a severe disadvantage in trade with China and the change Trump fought for was necessary.
Whether or not people agree with Trump’s actions isn’t really the point. The point is that issues that were being ignored by the Democrats and the Republicans, and rarely discussed by the mainstream media, only got attention after a Washington outsider bulldozed his way onto the political scene on behalf of millions of voters. And for all of his efforts, Donald Trump has been one of the most harassed US presidents, suffering a three-year ‘Russiagate’ investigation, as well as impeachment, while still holding onto office with new elections just days away.
In some ways Trump’s political rise was a fluke, unlikely to be duplicated anytime soon. The mainstream media and Big Tech are doing absolutely everything in their power to prevent a second term for the populist. They have even taken the unprecedented step of blocking explosive news on his competitor, Joe Biden, from being seen or shared by the public.‘Once bitten twice shy’, as the expression goes, and the Washington gatekeepers will do everything to block any Donald Trumps and their third-party ideas from storming the scene in the future.
That is very bad news for the US political system, which will continue to be held hostage by the same two parties, with little chance for any winds of change reaching the inner sanctum of power. Trump may very well be the last blast of fresh air in Washington for a long time, and Americans should enjoy the change while they can.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge
Bolivia’s former ‘interim president’ and coup government ministers could face trial over 2019 crackdown on protesters
RT | October 27, 2020
The Bolivian parliament has approved a resolution demanding a criminal case be opened against the nation’s former interim president Jeanine Anez and some of the ministers in her government over their 2019 crackdowns on protests.
The motion says Anez must stand trial over a decree authorizing the army to use force against the protesters back in November 2019, and exempting the military from any criminal responsibility as well as for what was called “massacres” in the cities of Cochabamba and El Alto.
Anez and her government had just ousted President Evo Morales in a coup, and deployed the security forces in a violent crackdown on his supporters. The law enforcement and the military fired live rounds at the demonstrators on several occasions.
At least 37 people died in clashes with the soldiers and riot police officers, according to local media reports. Police and army were even reported to have assaulted processions of mourners carrying coffins of those killed in previous demonstrations.
In addition to Anez herself, seven ministers from her government also face various charges that include corruption and illegal purchase of non-lethal weapons. The list of those that could stand trial involves Foreign Minister Karen Longaric, Defense Minister Fernando Lopez, and Justice Minister Alvaro Coimbra.
Upon learning of the parliament’s decision, Anez rushed to Twitter to declare it an example of political persecution.
“MAS [Movement Towards Socialism party] is returning to its habit of prosecuting those who think differently,” she wrote, even though it was her own government that was accused by Human Rights Watch of persecuting its political opponents.
Anez came to power after Morales, who had ruled the country for some 14 years, resigned under pressure from the military. The November 2019 coup came following massive protests led by the opposition supporters of the former Bolivian president, Carlos Mesa, who insisted that the October elections that handed victory to Morales had been rigged.
As Morales resigned and fled, first to Mexico and then to Argentina, Anez declared herself “interim president,” even though she lacked a quorum in the Senate to get a confirmation.
Earlier this month, MAS leader Luis Arce won the presidential election in a landslide. Anez herself had withdrawn from the running after polls showed her with just ten percent of popular support.
Some questions about “the new normal”
By Richard Hugus | October 24, 2020
Dear Editor, Cape Cod Times :
According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health*, on October 22, 2020 only 1 person diagnosed with Covid 19 was counted as “hospitalized” and 0 were counted in the ICU at Falmouth Hospital. The count at Cape Cod Hospital in these categories was 0 and 0. Falmouth has a population of about 30,000 people. The population of Cape Cod is about 212,000.
Some questions:
Should 212,000 people be required to wear face masks and maintain a distance of six feet from everyone else when just one person is in the hospital?
Should small businesses Capewide be forced into onerous restrictions and widespread closings?
Should students be kept out of school and forced into “virtual” education via computer screen? For that matter, should students be denied an education altogether, or workers be denied employment, if they refuse to get the flu shot that has been mandated in Massachusetts in order to keep the case load (of 1, in this case) in hospitals down?
Should the healthy be required to quarantine when such measures have never been taken before?
Should our right to assemble be curtailed?
Do public health officials, or does anyone, have a right to limit our right of assembly? Or our right to travel?
Should children in day care centers be required to wear masks, and learn at the beginning of their lives that not being able to see other kids’ faces is normal?
Does oxygen deprivation from wearing masks make sense?
Is it right to make people so afraid of the virus that they fear getting medical attention for other illnesses?
Is it acceptable to see young people committing suicide in greater numbers because of the dark world the virus scare has ushered in?
If there was a raging virus, would masks make even a bit of difference?
Are masks a preparation for vaccines which we will also have no choice about?
Does the pharmaceutical industry perhaps have a profit motive in seeing vaccines mandated? Does that industry perhaps have undue influence at WHO and the CDC?
Whatever Covid may once have been, it now looks a lot like a political agenda masquerading as a health crisis. Too many things just don’t make sense. It’s time to say no to whatever and whoever is driving this agenda.
—————
* See 10:50 mark of video presentation
From a Wealthy Socialite to an Israeli Govt Censor, Facebook’s New “Free Speech Court” Is Anything but Independent
Freedom of speech on the Internet is all but extinct, and on the eve of elections, a de facto “free speech court” is going to make sure it never comes back. On Facebook at least.
By Raul Diego | MintPress News | October 27, 2020
Days away from the most polarized electoral contest in American history, social media companies like Facebook have vowed to censor any voices which they and their partners in the federal government consider inconvenient. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is ready to implement election information strategies that have been in the works for years.
Company spokesman Andy Stone told the WSJ that the social media giant will be applying the “lessons” learned from previous elections in accordance with the designs of “hired experts” and vague references to “new teams,” who are leveraging their “experience across different areas to prepare for various scenarios.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s de facto monopoly over online peer-to-peer communication tools has given Facebook an inordinate amount of influence over the political narratives at both national and regional levels, which it has shown a willingness exercise with topics like the Philippines and Palestine.
Last week, the company took a major step in solidifying its grip over the content purveyed on its platform with the official launch of the Facebook Oversight board. A body that is to function like a ‘Supreme Court’ for chat rooms, if you will, with the power to review any decisions regarding post removals or deplatforming and to make policy recommendations. Members have been drawn from “law experts… rights advocates” and journalists from around the world. The oversight board currently boasts 20 members.
Four members – two of which have extensive experience in the U.S. judicial system – serve as the board’s co-chairs and were handpicked by Facebook, according to The Guardian. Other board members include former Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is also a co-chair and is perhaps only remembered outside of Denmark for her selfie faux pas at Mandela’s funeral in 2013 when she was photographed taking a group photo with Barack Obama and David Cameron during the commemoration.
Judges of little character
Thorning-Schmidt’s insensitive moment at the laying-in-state of one of the most significant figures of the 20th century may be less damning to her presence on a social media oversight board than the tax-evasion scandal involving her husband – a British MP –, which ended up costing her re-election. When confronted over the accusations, she retorted that if her intention had really been to evade taxes, she would have done so “much more elegantly.” Despite these questionable instances and her reputation as an “extravagant” woman with expensive tastes, Thorning-Schmidt remains among the least objectionable figures on the oversight board.
Emi Palmor, for example, presents a much more alarming profile. One of 16 non-chair members of the board, Palmor is a former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, she was directly responsible for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinian posts from Facebook. Before being fired from that job, Palmor had created the so-called “Internet Referral Unit” at the ministry; a cybersecurity team that deliberately targeted and took down the aforementioned content, and whose nomination to the Facebook oversight board was loudly protested by pro-Palestinian advocacy groups back in May.
Palmor posing with Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu in 2016. Photo | Israeli Government Press Office
Inviting a literal state censor from a country with such an atrocious record of oppression and overt ethnic cleansing policies to serve in a supervisory role at one of the largest content networks in the world, should be reason enough for concern. Perhaps, even reason enough to call for the board’s dissolution given that such an egregious choice of personnel reveals an unacceptable political bias in an ostensibly impartial quasi-judicial body.
A clear agenda
A look at the other co-chairs on the oversight board leaves no doubt as to which interests Facebook intends to further through its sham social media traffic court. It might not be a surprise to learn that an American company would tap American legal minds to form part of a dispute resolution body, as Jamal Greene, an oversight board co-chair, describes it.
Greene is a Dwight Professor of Law Columbia Law School who served as an aide to Sen. Kamala Harris during the highly-controversial Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Prior to this, he was a law clerk for late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the 1997 Internet decency controls decision that shot down legislation that sought to regulate online speech. An auspicious sign, perhaps, but tempered by Steven’s own pragmatist views on free speech, leaving the door open to context when protecting the “public interest” surrounding the first amendment.
Sitting alongside Greene and Helle Thorning-Schmidt on the oversight board’s co-chairmanship is Michael McConnell; a constitutional law scholar who served seven years as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit court. McConnell wrote the dissenting opinion in the seminal “Ten Commandments” case, which centered around the government’s authority to decide which monuments can be erected in a public park.
Judge McConnell, who has been floated as a potential Supreme Court nominee more than once and is “highly regarded for his writing on church-state law,” argued in favor of the government’s discretionary powers, claiming that private donations to public facilities – like the ten commandments monument in a public park in Utah, that spurred the case – became “government speech” and, therefore within the purview of governmental authority.
Rounding out the co-chair suite is Catalina Botero Marino, a Colombian attorney and former special rapporteur for freedom of expression at the Organization of American States (OAS); an organization well-known for being Washington’s mouthpiece for D.C.-aligned policy in Latin America.
Botero expressed her position on the very topic she will be dealing with first-hand in her new position as co-chair of the Facebook oversight board in a 2019 paper titled “Towards an Internet Free of Censorship: standards, contexts, and lessons from the Inter-American Human Rights System.” In it, Botero reveals why she was tapped to join the make-shift panel of social media judges when she defines freedom of expression as “individual and collective self-government” and highlights her “utmost concern” over the “deliberately false circulation of information, created and put into circulation with the purpose of deceiving the public” in electoral processes.
Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.
Twitter: Double Standards & Advertising
Twitter earns billions from advertising. But restricts Trump tweets on the grounds they might mislead.
By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 28, 2020
Censorship by big tech companies is a growing problem. On Monday, a week prior to a national election, Twitter interfered with a tweet by the current president of the United States. The company took steps to prevent anyone from ‘liking’ or sharing this message from Donald Trump:
Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd.
Twitter further inserted a warning above the tweet:
Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about how to participate in an election or another civic process. [bold added]
As if the list of ideas that are disputed isn’t endless. Will we next be denied the opportunity to ‘like’ tweets that refer to Pluto as a planet, since its status is likewise disputed?
Some people dispute the efficacy of annual flu shots. Will Twitter, as a result, be neutering all tweets in favour of those vaccines? Some people dispute the notion that climate change is a crisis and an emergency – rather than a manageable problem. Will Twitter henceforth be preventing us from sharing 17-year-old Greta Thunberg tweets, which mention multiple things a week many grownups would dispute?
It’s hilarious that Twitter’s other concern is that Trump’s assertions might be misleading. This company survives on advertising. By huge multinational brands. Cosmetics. Casinos. Pharmaceuticals. We all know those ad campaigns are orchestrated by saints rather than spin doctors.
Seriously, folks. Spin is a fact of life. Sometimes it’s political. More frequently, it’s financial. The notion that Twitter exposes its users to billions of dollars worth of advertising, yet polices utterances by the US President lest they mislead tells us everything we need to know.
Big tech companies are about double standards and selective censorship. Their thumbs are firmly on the scale. Even during election campaigns.
Newly Increased Coronavirus Crackdowns in Europe, a Preview of What Joe Biden Wants for All of America
Biden campaign rally, 27 October
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | October 28, 2020
Across Europe, supposedly in reaction to rises in the numbers of coronavirus cases, many national governments are imposing increased crackdowns that severely restrict the exercise of liberty. These coronavirus cases are in large part derived from testing that produces many false positives and that is often conducted on relatively young and healthy people who have very little risk of dying or even becoming seriously sick from a coronavirus infection.
Of course, the European politicians exerting their newly increased power say “the science” supports their tyrannical actions. And they will tend to give platforms to doctors and other scientists who back up those claims while ignoring or deriding the many doctors and other scientists who disagree.
If Joe Biden were president of the United States now, we can expect he would be following the course of these European power grabbers. The only likely reasons for restraint, aside from the potential of overwhelming popular revolt, would be if Biden had already implemented and maintained a countrywide crackdown of such high degree that he thought he could not feasibly increase it further or if congressional opposition or court orders managed to stop him.
In an August interview with David Muir at ABC, Muir asked Biden if Biden would shut down the country if “the scientists” say to do so because of coronavirus. Biden replied, “I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists.” Of course, the scientists Biden is referring to are people like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx who have helped stir up and maintain overblown fear of coronavirus and support for state and local crackdowns while members of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force. Biden is not referring to people like Scott Atlas, a more recently added coronavirus advisor of Trump, who argues that much of the government action taken in the name of countering coronavirus cause more harm than good.
Biden also reiterated in the ABC interview his commitment to imposing a national mask mandate.
Keep in mind that Biden, in the ABC interview, is talking about both what he would do at the time of the interview and what he would do as president after he takes office on January 20 — about three months from now, five months after the interview, and ten months after crackdowns began to be imposed across America. He seems content to impose extraordinary mandates on Americans for a long time. In large part this appears to be the case because Biden places little or no value on the average American’s freedom. Biden, in the ABC interview, provides this response to people who say a mask mandate “impacts on their freedom”:
Come on. Give me a break. It’s about saving lives.
Biden disregards freedom. He disregards science as well given that the evidence indicates wearing masks does not prevent coronavirus infection and does damage health.
The beginning portion of the Thursday presidential debate was dedicated to discussion by Biden and President Donald Trump regarding coronavirus policy. The exchange presented a sharp contrast in views related to coronavirus policy. Biden described the upcoming situation with coronavirus in America by saying “we’re about to go into a dark winter,” a hyperbolic description supporting his advocacy for imposing draconian countrywide mandates. If he wins, Biden will take office during that winter. In contrast, Trump said in the debate “no we’re not gonna shut down.” In regard to crackdowns continuing on local and state levels, Trump stated, “we have to open our country.” Trump further stated that “the cure cannot be worse than the problem itself, and that’s what’s happening.” Also, unlike Biden, Trump has been very sparing in his wearing of masks and has never proposed a national mandate.
In October, European nations have imposed and expanded draconian mandates in the name of countering coronavirus. Meanwhile, some American states and local governments have eased up on coronavirus mandates while others have increased them. Should Biden become president in January, expect him to act to make the coronavirus crackdown in America go countrywide and go big.
Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute.
Defining Despotism Down
By James Bovard | American Institute for Economic Research | October 27, 2020
The simultaneous defining down of both democracy and despotism is 2020’s darkest legacy. Voters are recognizing that their ballots merely choose elective dictators who can exempt themselves from the Constitution simply by pronouncing the word “emergency.” At the same time, despotism is being redefined to signify government failing to force people to do the right thing.
Hundreds of millions of Americans were locked in their homes via governors’ shutdown orders earlier this year. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has said he may decree a national lockdown if Covid infection numbers rise. More than 10 million jobs have been lost thanks to the shutdown orders and countless misery has been imposed on scores of millions of people unnecessarily isolated from friends and family.
New York, the state hit worst by Covid, had one of the earliest and strictest lockdowns in the nation. After Gov. Andrew Cuomo swayed the legislature to give him “authorization of absolute power,” as the New Yorker declared, he issued scores of decrees, including one compelling nursing homes to admit Covid-infected patients and permitting Covid-infected staffers to keep working at those homes. More than 10,000 New York nursing home patients died of Covid. In June, Cuomo said the nursing homes deaths occurred “because the staff brought in the infection,”
A New Yorker profile explained that Cuomo and his aides saw the battle over Covid policy as “between people who believe government can be a force for good and those who think otherwise.” For many liberals and much of the nation’s media, placing people under house arrest, padlocking schools, and bankrupting business vindicated government as “a force for good.”
But the lockdowns failed to prevent almost nine million Americans from testing positive for Covid (the actual number of cases may be ten times higher, according to the Centers for Disease Control). As AIER’s Jeffrey Tucker quipped, “Mitigating disease through compulsory lockdowns is like cleaning your house by bombing it.” The World Health Organization’s envoy for Covid-19, David Nabarro, warned that “lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.” Nabarro also warned that “we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year” or “at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”
Lockdowns that were initially justified to “flatten the curve” have been perpetuated on increasingly ludicrous pretexts:
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently decreed that Covid restrictions would be perpetuated in California counties based on voter turnout, alcohol availability, and other non-health factors. California assemblyman Kevin Kiley groused, “An entire county can be kept shut down because certain areas are judged to be lacking in ‘equity,’ even if the whole county has relatively few cases of Covid.”
- In Washington, D.C., the local government is perpetuating private and public school shutdowns and other restrictions as long based on a newly-decreed standard: “a requirement that more than 60 percent of new cases be closely connected to other known cases.” The city currently can connect less than 10% of cases, so this Veto on Normalcy can last forever – or at least as long as devotees pledge their devotion to (mindless) “data and science.” D.C. Covid mania is so extreme that worshippers at the Basilica at Catholic University have been prohibited from performing the “stations of the cross” inside the church, instead being ordered to sit in a pew.
The contract between citizens and the government in this nation hinges on elected politicians obeying the Constitution. After Covid crackdowns obliterated constitutional rights, courts slammed run-a-mok rulers:
- Federal judge William Stickman IV last month condemned Pennsylvania’s Covid restrictions: “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.”
- The Michigan Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had extended a “state of emergency” far beyond what an unconstitutional state law allowed.
- Federal judge Daniel Domenico last week ruled that some of Colorado’s Covid restrictions violated religious freedom: “The Constitution does not allow the State to tell a congregation how large it can be when comparable secular gatherings are not so limited, or to tell a congregation that its reason for wishing to remove facial coverings is less important than a restaurant’s or spa’s.”
- In May, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down a state official’s stay-at-home order as “unlawful, invalid, and unenforceable.”
The U.S. Department of Justice declared earlier this year: “There is no pandemic exclusion … to the fundamental liberties the Constitution safeguards.” Attorney General William Barr declared last month that imposing “a national lockdown, stay-at-home orders, is like house arrest. It’s — you know, other than slavery… this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”
But most of the media cheered almost every arbitrary restriction imposed by any government official in the name of fighting Covid. University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner fretted in the Washington Post that “judicial opposition to the lockdown orders is not just about religious liberty. It’s also, and perhaps really, about the role of government in American life.” And any limit on government power is equivalent to national suicide, apparently. A New York democratic legislator told the New Yorker that Gov. Cuomo is “inclined towards tyranny. But in a crisis that’s what people want.” The media’s valorization of Cuomo helped make his new book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, a bestseller. Tyranny is comforting to some people regardless of how much havoc and pointless suffering tyrants inflict.
For many liberals, mandatory masks have become the new version of the Emancipation Proclamation. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, presidential candidate Joe Biden declared, “We’ll have a national mandate to wear a mask — not as a burden but as a patriotic duty to protect one another.” When asked if he will force everyone to wear a mask, Biden replied, “This isn’t about freedom, it’s about freedom for your, your neighbors.” Biden also declared, “Every single American should be wearing a mask when they’re outside for the next three months, at a minimum.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in July that a federal mask mandate would be “authoritarian” but endorsed a national mask decree last week.
The ultimate symbol of maskless tyranny became Trump’s White House balcony appearance, when he removed his mask and muttered a few words after exiting Walter Reed Hospital. Even though no one was standing close by, Trump was widely compared to Mussolini – as if not wearing a mask was the ultimate betrayal of the American people.
Rather than campaigning against Trump’s abuses of power, Biden and the Democrats are condemning Trump for not seizing far more power to pretend to keep everyone safe from everything. During the first years of the War on Terror, some servile Republicans cheered on Bush administration travesties with the throwaway line: “You don’t have any constitutional rights if you’re dead.” Nowadays, many frightened Americans seem ready to support perpetual lockdowns based on the axiom: “You don’t have any rights if anyone tests positive for Covid-19.” A virus with a 99.9% survival rate has spawned a 100% presumption in favor of despotism.
The failure of iron fist policies should be the storyline of the 2020 election but instead Biden and much of the media want to double down on repression. Can the votes that are cast in the coming week close the authoritarian Pandora’s Boxes that have opened across the nation? Or will conniving invocations of “data and science” suffice to blight Americans’ rights and liberties in perpetuity?
James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty.
‘Wokeness Wars’ Coming to Your County
By Philip M. Giraldi – American Free Press – October 23, 2020
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 dystopian short story “Harrison Bergeron” describes a 2081 America in which the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution of the United States have together mandated that all Americans must be made completely equal. No one is allowed to be more intelligent or handsome or more physically capable than anyone else. The standards are enforced by a Handicapper General, an elderly woman named Diana Moon Glampers armed with a shotgun, who mandates the wearing of disfiguring masks for those who are thought to be too beautiful while tiny radios are mounted inside the ears of intelligent people, programmed to go off at intervals and disrupt any thoughts. Those who are stronger or faster than others are required to wear heavy weights around their wrists and ankles.
Somehow, the Vonnegut story comes to mind at the present time, particularly in my home county here in Virginia. Loudoun County, a suburb of Washington D.C. where all that fiat money is printed, is the wealthiest in the United States based on per capita income. When I moved here twenty-three years ago, it was solidly Republican, but now it is controlled by the Democrats, largely due to the influx of out of state newcomers moving in to take the thousands of new federal jobs in the burgeoning Global War On Terror. When in power, the Republicans foolishly had allowed their business cronies to build large and ugly commuter housing developments that eventually changed the political power alignment when the liberal newcomers inevitably outnumbered the relatively conservative locals.
The county Board of Supervisors is headed by a black woman named Phyllis Randall. Randall has been in place since 2015 and is reliably progressive. Apart from muttering about “diversity” and “affordable housing,” she has generally avoided race issues in a county that is less than 10% black but has become more outspoken recently. The county seat Leesburg had a monument near the court house featuring a seven-foot bronze war memorial statue of a Confederate infantryman dubbed “Silent Sam” by some of the locals. Randall had described the memorial as a racist symbol that had intimidated “Thousands of Loudoun citizens, Black citizens, who never had a voice and sometimes didn’t have a vote.” It is a ridiculous argument that is often made when historical monuments are about to be purged by vandals, but apparently a statue can inspire real fear in some circles, at least according to Randall.
After being reelected last November and backed by a unanimously gutless board in a May vote, Randall felt empowered to remove the offending statue saying that she was “correcting history” over a “statue [that] should never have been put up.” The removal was accomplished on June 21st, in the midst of the wave of looting, rioting and arson all over the United States that was triggered by the Floyd George death.
Randall has also been pushing to replace the highly respected local sheriff’s department with a police department which would be controlled by her board. The popular sheriff is an elected official and he has committed the crime of being both somewhat independent and a Republican.
Since the removal of the Confederate statue, there has been more fun and games to include an apology to the black citizens of Loudoun from both the board of supervisors and the school board for the school segregation that continued into the 1960s. The local NAACP graciously responded that the apology was “not enough.” That was followed by a slap at another perennial punching bag for the social justice warrior movement. Columbus Day on the school calendar was renamed. Indigenous Peoples Day.
All of that has been bad enough, but the clincher is what is going on with the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS). The school board has spent $422,500 on a consultant to apply Critical Race Theory (CRT) to a new program of instruction that will be mandatory for all employees and will serve as the framework for teaching the students. When schools eventually reopen, all kindergarteners, for example, will be taught “social justice” in a course designed by the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center and “diversity training” will be integrated in all other grade levels.
Critical Race Theory has been fairly criticized as it pretends to be an antidote to systemic racism but is itself racist in nature as it opposes a race neutral system that equally benefits everyone. It proposes that all of America’s governmental bodies and infrastructures are racist and supportive of “white supremacy” and must be deconstructed. It requires everything to be examined through a value system determined by identity politics and race and it views both whites and their institutions as hopelessly corrupted, if not evil.
The principal concern currently is that the school board, which is revising its Personal Conduct Policy 7560 “Professional Conduct” for staff, is basically treating the First Amendment right to free speech as inapplicable when it comes to challenging certain policies involving the school system arguing that the Bill of Rights itself is just a tool in support of white supremacy, which is what CRT teaches. The Personal Conduct draft only addresses the First Amendment briefly, noting that the right “may be outweighed” by LCPS interest in “promoting internal…and external community harmony and peace” through “directives, including protected class equity, racial equity, and the goal to root out systemic racism.”
Section B3 of the draft revised policy requires total commitment to the forthcoming “equity” policies and it threatens punishment to include firing if anyone within the system dares to express a criticism. The full text cites “Any comments or actions that are not in alignment with the school division’s commitment to action-oriented equity policies, and which impact an individual’s abilities to perform their job responsibilities or create a breach in the trust bestowed upon them as an employee of the school division. This includes on-campus and off-campus speech, social media posts, and any other electronic or telephonic communications.”
The school board also has an “Action Plan to Combat Systemic Racism” which will require mandatory “racial literacy” classes for staff with the objective of creating “equity literacy and racial consciousness” for employees. To support struggling black students there will be non-coercive alternatives to suspension or expulsion for misbehavior, a feature that is being copied in many school districts. It is all part of the larger “Comprehensive Equity Plan” that the revised personal conduct policy is intended to protect, which includes manipulating passing grades to achieve “equity” — that is, to reward or punish people based not on their conduct and accomplishments or hard work, but primarily on their race and ethnicity. It calls specifically for the “disruption and dismantling of white racism.” It is not intended to give everyone an equal chance and is rather trying to guarantee a certain outcome. It will mean pushing people through the system based on race rather than merit until they find themselves holding jobs that they cannot possibly perform based on what they learned at school.
If that were not bad enough, the document also encourages school system employees to report on other employees who are critical of the policy. Most companies are within their rights to demand certain behavior while in the workplace, but the Loudoun County Public Schools demand that even criticizing the new policy with friends, family, at home, while on the phone, while shopping or even walking through the park is a violation subject to punishment. The draft states explicitly that employee speech “will not be tolerated” if it could be perceived as “undermining the views, positions, goals, policies or public statements” of Schools Superintendent Eric Williams or the school board. And other LCPS employees would have the “duty to report” speech violations to the school administration. Given that, the likelihood that anyone who is bold enough to surface as an employee-critic would be railroaded by the school administrators and the board is guaranteed. And, one might point out, LCPS has no teachers’ union.
Rod Dreher observes how the policy will also translate into what and how one’s children are taught. They too will be required to conform. “If your kid goes to a church that is not progressive and LGBT-affirming, she better shut up about her religious views at school, or she will be expelled. If you[r] kid won’t consent to calling a trans student by that student’s preferred pronoun, that could be the end of him at Loudoun County public schools. Anything that the left identifies as a manifestation of ‘white supremacy’ — and these days, what isn’t? — makes students who hold it targets of the system. What if a high school student believes that on balance, Robert E. Lee was a noble, if tragic, figure, and said so in a history class? He would have to fear that Loudoun County public schools, in the state of Virginia, would punish him as a white supremacist. Basically, deep-blue, wealthy, predominantly white Loudoun County in suburban Washington, DC, is going to ruin its public schools by turning them into ideology factories.”
One might also observe that imposition of a totalitarian style “equity” regime based on race will inevitably drive many of the academically better prepared students out of the system. Many of the better teachers will also move to the private academies that will spring up due to parental and student demand. Others will stop teaching altogether when confronted by political correctness at a level that prior to 2020 would have seemed unimaginable. The actual quality of education will suffer for everyone involved.
The outcry against the proposed Loudoun Public Schools Personal Conduct Policy has been such that there has been some suggestion that it might be revised, but the most recent minutes of school board meetings suggest otherwise. One suspects that if the policy ever actually is approved it will be challenged and declared to be unconstitutional, but it would be unwise to place too much trust in America’s increasingly politicized “social” judicial system.
A quote attributed to Sinclair Lewis goes “If fascism ever comes to America it will be carrying a Bible and wrapped in a flag.” He was wrong. We have learned in the past few months that totalitarianism can come from either the left or the right. Currently in America it is coming wrapped in a lot of virtue signaling coming from a gaggle of politicians and media “experts” who are working hard to turn the part of the United States that they have not burned down into what they perceive as a utopia where everyone can gather round the campfire and sing “Kumbaya.” Of course, one will have to eliminate all the deplorables first, and some radicals are clearly prepared to use informants and spies to do so. It’s ironic that the progressives who wrote the draft on Professional Conduct for Loudoun County Public Schools just cannot see that there is scant difference between the system of control and intimidation that they are promoting and the vilified regimes once in place in Russia and Germany. Well, possibly the school board will develop a spine and a conscience and reverse itself. But, on the other hand, more likely not. Sadly, the issue is quite real for me as I have grandchildren in LCPS.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
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Because no animal reservoir has been found for SARS-CoV-2, it cannot properly be termed a zoonosis.* Should we call it a labnosis? And what does that mean?
By Meryl Nass, MD | July 12, 2021
After a year and a half of seeking but not finding SARS-2 in any wildlife anywhere (apart from domesticated or zoo animals that appear to have caught it from humans) is it time to say, yes, it didn’t just escape from a lab. It was created, built, assembled in a lab. Or many labs
Coronavirus scientists have been constructing new viruses out of bits and pieces of other viruses for a long time.
Why did they do it? … continue
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