Samizdat – 11.09.2022
A bombshell report has revealed that one of the largest bot armies ever discovered was secretly working to advance Western interests in NATO’s ongoing proxy war on Russia in Ukraine.
Researchers at the University of Adelaide who studied 5.2 million tweets published in the weeks after Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine have published an alarming new study which found that 60% to 80% of those posts were shared by fake accounts – and 90% of them were in favor of Kiev.
According to their groundbreaking research, fake accounts using hashtags like #IStandWithUkraine, #IStandWithZelenskyy, and #ISupportUkraine were utilized en masse to perpetuate myths like the “Ghost of Kiev” – a non-existent pilot that pro-Ukraine influencers held up for months as an example of supposed anti-Russian gallantry before the Kiev regime’s military quietly acknowledged he never existed.
Such bots were deployed at key moments in the conflict, like when fighting began in Mariupol and when Russia gained a foothold in its first major Ukrainian city, researchers found.
According to information compiled by the Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika, one pro-US page targeting Central Asian social media users went as far as doctoring a photograph of Puerto Rican actress Valeria Menendez in an effort to convince audiences that there were real human beings behind the influence campaign.
The impact that networks of such bot accounts may have had on public perceptions surrounding the Ukraine proxy war has yet to be determined.
But with Western audiences increasingly preoccupied by more immediate issues like the energy crisis spawned by anti-Russia sanctions or the lack of drinkable water in US cities such as Jackson, Mississippi, polls show that interest in the Ukraine conflict has fallen at least twenty-fold since late February – and it’s likely that the bots’ operators have experienced a serious decline in engagement.
September 11, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Ukraine |
Leave a comment
The writer is in New Zealand.
TWO and a half years into the Covid saga, the public is still faced with an information blackout. The data is very concerning indeed, but no one in parliament or the MSM wants to get in front of it. Instead many are still stuck stoking the fear factor. As Professor Vinay Prasad, an American haematologist-oncologist and health researcher, wrote a few days ago: ‘Legitimising irrational anxiety is bad medicine’.
Early on in our efforts to publicise the dangers of biotechnology medicine, I had an email exchange with Jesse Mulligan, a popular commentator with RNZ Afternoons. His perspective on Covid vaccination was as follows.
December 6, 2021: ‘I feel like anybody aiming to critique such an obviously positive public health measure should begin and end their messaging reminding people that any risks/flaws in the vaccine are minor compared to the horrific impacts of getting Covid . . . I don’t have the time to correspond with you on this at length but, for what it’s worth, if you’re putting people off getting a largely safe vaccine by what you’re writing about it, I think you need to review how you approach writing these messages.’
Mulligan quoted from Ministry of Health directives and had also read some questioning scientific articles, but he could not get past the conclusion that vaccination was an obvious public good and for this reason he declined to have me on his show.
The ‘obvious public good’ narrative has come in for some recent criticism. The BMJ printed an opinion piece in July entitled Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise? Or try this referenced substack article which reports that the negative harm/benefit ratio in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine trials has been acknowledged in a scientific journal article. In other words there is more harm than benefit.
For me, the central early point of pandemic misinformation has been the underlying assumption that biotech medicine interventions could be safe. There really was little or no evidence to justify such an attitude, in fact, as I have discussed, there was a great deal of published pre-pandemic evidence to justify caution.
Given the central role of DNA in human physiology, altering its function was from the outset potentially catastrophic. We are now facing Covid vaccine outcomes which not only involve serious individual adverse effects, but also potentially affect whole populations into the longer term. These outcomes include:
· Elevated excess all-cause death rates and lowered longevity
· Lowered birth rates and fertility
The evidence for these is patchy because governments are not rushing to publish data, but it is still very convincing. So concerning in fact, that the Israeli government has covered up key data and scientific conclusions.
The latest comprehensive evidence for Covid vaccine-induced excess all-cause mortality can be found in this analysis: Excess mortality in Germany 2020-2022.
It is extraordinary that this perilous new normal has found its way into advertising messages, but not into serious commentary. Today I watched a TV ad for a funeral home which arranges alternative and appropriate funerals for those dying young, whilst a British Heart Foundation appeal featured a young woman collapsing on the football field. It did so to encourage donations.
Sudden deaths among all ages are being normalised in the public’s mind because they really are happening at a rate that dwarfs the past, as insurance data confirms. However here in New Zealand we are still being subjected to puerile government advertising devoid of scientific caution. Like this Ministry of Health promotion which turned up this morning:
GET YOUR SECOND BOOSTER – I’ve had three shots, do I really need another booster? Current evidence shows your protection against severe infection slowly decreases over time – GET YOUR SECOND BOOSTER
No mention of safety, no mention of efficacy, and the term ‘current evidence’ used as if this advert is scientifically up to date and reliable. It isn’t.
Why is it so unfashionable to be concerned about rising death rates and lowered birth rates? You might find a clue in this frightening pre-pandemic article from the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Medically assisted deaths could save millions in health care spending: Report. Are higher death rates good news for people with this kind of perspective? We hope not.
We are clearly on a learning curve here. The poor vaccination outcomes were not anticipated, the adverse effects were initially disbelieved on principle and blamed on misinformation.
It is understandable that in the uncertain early days of Covid, people [trusted] the official MoH narrative, but continuing to do so now doesn’t fit the published scientific narrative or the public data. Caution was and is a very scientific strategy, it never deserved bad press.
Those offering advice to the public need to be more discerning if they wish to contribute to the well being and longevity of our society. MSM language has become extreme, and it is increasingly polarising without foundation in science.
There is still a chance for journalists to cover the pandemic with an open mind. It is happening elsewhere. GB News for example has gained one of the largest prime-time news audiences in the UK. Why not initiate a more open public debate? Cooling rhetoric and decreasing polarisation can only lead to better outcomes. Fresh air never harms anyone – it can save lives.
September 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
Medical ethics is about protecting society from medical malfeasance and the self-interest of the humans whom we trust to manage health. It is therefore disturbing when prominent people, in a prominent journal, tear up the concept of medical ethics and human rights norms. It is worse when they ignore broad swathes of evidence, and misrepresent their own sources to do so.
On July 8th 2022, The Lancet published a ‘Viewpoint’ article online: “Effectiveness of vaccination mandates in improving uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in the USA.” The article, which acknowledges the controversial nature of vaccine mandates, primarily concludes that coercing people to take a medical product, and reducing options for refusal, increases product uptake.
It further concludes that the best way to implement such mandates is for employers and educational institutions to threaten job security and the right to education.
The use of coercion goes against the established ethics and morals of Public Health, and could be argued to be anti-health. In this case, the article justifies it by stating that “the current evidence regarding the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in adults is sufficient to support mandates.” However, it offers scant evidence to back this assertion, and ignores all evidence to the contrary. They apparently consider the ability to work and support a family, or gain formal education, as something that is to be granted or taken away, not a human right.
The Lancet was once a credible journal with a rigorous policy of peer review. However, in this article it appears to have dropped its former standards, promoting medical fascism (coercion, threat and division to achieve compliance with authority) without insisting on a rigorous evidence base to justify such an approach. This suggests an attempt to normalize such approaches in mainstream public health.
Past experience has shown us where fascism behind a façade of public health can lead. The sterilization campaigns aimed at coloured and low-income populations of the US Eugenicist era, and the extensions of similar programs under Nazism in 1930s and 1940s Europe, relied heavily on the normalization of such approaches.
Leading public health voices from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and other institutions championed a public health approach of sanitizing populations rather than environments, encouraging the idea of a tiered society where health ‘experts’ determine the rights and medical management of those deemed less worthy.
Avoiding the discomfort of evidence
The authors of this Lancet paper, ranging from academics and medical consultants to the daughter of a prominent politician, attempt to rewrite human rights in medicine as if precedent never existed. Their argument for coercion in mass vaccination recognizes that ‘vaccine mandates,’ whether issued by governments, employers or schools, all involve a loss of rights. No serious attempt is made to provide a medical justification for mass vaccination with a non-transmission-blocking vaccine.
The paper focuses on the premise that coercion, commonly considered a form of force, makes humans do things they would not otherwise do. Banning fellow humans from making their own health choices on pain of loss of normal participation in society has an impact on increasing vaccine uptake. This is hardly a revelation to any thinking human, but clearly important enough to justify publication in The Lancet.
The article links to evidence of vaccine mandates used for state school entry that show higher compliance when the right of religious and personal belief exemption is removed, or where onerous requirements for exemptions are put in place. Leaving ethical questions aside, the obvious lack of similarity between the authors’ predicate childhood vaccinations that block transmission and COVID-19 vaccines that have minimal impact on transmission, and may even promote it, is ignored. The one mandated adult vaccine predicate referenced in the article, the influenza vaccine, provides only a 2.5% reduction in pneumonia ‘when the (mandated) vaccine was well matched to circulating strains’ in the reference quoted.
When raising the sacking of non-vaccinated workers, the authors seem comfortable with the approach but coy in admitting its consequences. Their admission that “a few large US employers have terminated hundreds of workers for non-compliance references an article in Money magazine which actually paints a bleaker picture, characterizing it as a ‘great resignation.’
The authors will also have been aware of mass layoffs by large employers such as New York City (over 9,000 sacked or placed on leave), the US Department of Defense (DoD, which sacked 3,400), Kaiser Permanente (laid off 2,200), and the tens of thousands of staff lost from the UK care-home sector . Extrapolated across countries and society to actually provide credible data may have been too uncomfortable for the authors and Lancet editors.
High efficacy and safety are an obvious (though on their own, insufficient) prerequisite for any mandated product. This entire area of safety is dealt with by stating; “The current evidence on the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in adults is sufficient to support mandates,” supported by a single study comparing vaccinated individuals 1-3 weeks and 3-6 weeks post-vaccination, revealing low levels of myocardial infarction, appendicitis and stroke.
The claim that “widespread administration in adults has quickly generated a large evidence base supporting the vaccines’ safety, including evidence from active surveillance studies” suggests that both the authors and The Lancet are unaware of the VAERS and Eudravigilance databases set up for exactly this purpose. No mention is made of growing data on myocarditis, menstrual irregularities, or the excess all-cause mortality and severe outcomes in vaccinated groups in the Pfizer randomised control trials on which the FDA emergency registration was based. Were The Lancet’s reviewers unaware of these sources?
The sole reference to vaccine efficacy discusses COVID-19 ventilated patient outcomes, It ignores the period to 14 days post-previous dose that Pfizer acknowledges can be associated with immune suppression. Fenton et al. have noted that classing a vaccinated person as unvaccinated in the first 14 days post-injection has profound impacts on vaccine effectiveness data.
Ignoring the awkwardness of reality
Post-infection immunity in the unvaccinated is a threat to arguments for mandates. The authors disingenuously state that “evidence suggests that the immunity produced by natural infection varies by individual, and that people with previous infection benefit from vaccination. New variants further undercut the case for adequacy of previous infection.
Two references are used here: one from a study in Qatar and the other a study from Kentucky. The Qatar study finds that “the protection of previous infection against hospitalization or death caused by reinfection appeared to be robust, regardless of variant,” whilst the Kentucky study found Covid reinfection was reduced by vaccination over a 2-month period in the months soon after vaccination, prior to the waning and then reversal of this protection as demonstrated in studies of longer duration elsewhere.
The vast breadth of evidence on relative effectiveness of post-infection immunity is ignored. Either the authors failed to read their references and are unaware of waning and of the vast literature on post-infection immunity, or they do not consider demonstration of efficacy important for coerced medical treatments.
In a previous era, or in a previously credible medical journal, an argument for coercion to support a medical procedure would have required very high standards of evidence of efficacy and safety. It is arguing for the abrogation of fundamental principles such as informed consent that are at the core of modern medical ethics. Failure to address well-known contrary data should prevent an article from even reaching the peer-review stage.
Degrading public health degrades society
We are left with a paper stating that coercion is a good path to increase compliance for a product that does not reduce community infection risk, and has potentially serious side effects. Ignoring both of these aspects of COVID-19 vaccines is a poor approach to justifying mass vaccination. The sole nod to any human rights concern – “Some objectors argue mandates represent undue encroachment on individual liberty” – is an interesting way to characterize removal of the right to income, education and the ability to socialize with others.
Although all these rights are recognized under the Universal Declaration for Human Rights, the authors and The Lancet consider them insufficiently serious to dwell upon.
Public health has been down this road before. We have seen the path society takes when basic public health principles are subverted to achieve an aim that some perceive as ‘good.’ We have also seen how most health professionals will comply, however horrific the actions involved. There is no reason to believe that this round of medical fascism will end differently.
We rely on medical journals such as The Lancet to apply at least the same standards to the purveyors of such doctrines as they do to others and demand a rational and honest evidence base. Anything less would raise legitimate questions as to the role the journal is taking in promoting these doctrines, and their place in a free, evidence-based and rights-respecting society.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is the former Program Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Domini Gordon is Open Science and Open Society Coordinator at Panda.
September 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, The Lancet |
Leave a comment
In early September, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that pharma giant Bayer would have to fork over millions to the DOJ to resolve allegations of fraud under the False Claims Act (FCA).
The False Claims Act, which enables civil cases involving fraud and false claims against the government, dates back to the 19th century and Civil-War-era defense contractor fraud — but in modern times, healthcare fraud is the “top driver of FCA activity, both in the number of cases filed and total dollars recovered.”
In fiscal year 2021 — a year in which medicine and pharma went to town with demonstrably murderous COVID-19 hospital protocols and vaccines — the act brought in $5.6-plus billion, the second largest annual total in the FCA’s history.
Eighty-nine percent of those settlements and judgments were related to “drug and medical device manufacturers, managed care providers, hospitals, pharmacies, hospice organizations, laboratories and physicians.”
And, though the total amounts were smaller in the three preceding years — fiscal years 2020, 2019 and 2018 — healthcare-related cases still predominated, accounting for 86% to 87% of settlements and judgments.
In 2016, and again in 2019, the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen zeroed in on “ongoing, systematic wrongdoing” by the pharmaceutical industry, analyzing up to 27 years (1991-2017) of criminal and civil penalties paid to the federal or state governments, whether via the FCA or other mechanisms.
The top two types of violations were drug-pricing fraud and unlawful or deceptive marketing. But the reports also described practices such as kickbacks, patent manipulation, corporate collusion, data concealment, sale of contaminated or adulterated products, accounting and tax fraud, insider trading and distribution of unapproved drugs.
In 2020, academic authors published a similar analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reporting that 22 of 26 Global 500 or Fortune 1000 pharmaceutical firms had paid state or federal penalties for illegal activities between 2003-2016, with all but one firm engaging in the illegalities “for 4 or more years.”
The authors speculated that the four companies not documented as paying penalties could be more ethical or, conversely, might harbor “an ability for illegal activity to be undetected.”
All of these reports support the conclusion of Marc Rodwin — a Suffolk University Law School professor and expert on health law, policy and ethics — who wrote in a 2015 legal paper that the pharmaceutical industry’s “wide-scale” misconduct “risks slipping into the banalities of ordinary business practices.”
Bayer’s drop in the bucket
Bayer’s just-announced $40-million DOJ settlement, which responds to whistleblower lawsuits initiated nearly two decades ago, represents a drop in the bucket compared to the company’s $48.9-billion earnings for 2021.
The Germany-headquartered company, the world’s sixth-largest pharmaceutical juggernaut, is engaged in an ongoing biotech “investment spree” that has enabled positive financial results despite the current legal headaches associated with its ownership of Monsanto.
Violation Tracker, a database covering corporate misconduct from the year 2000 on, displays 155 results for Bayer and its subsidiaries over the past two decades, listing penalties such as drug and medical equipment safety violations, FCA offenses and various other forms of fraud.
The company’s “history of malfeasance” extends much further back, however, featuring its marketing of heroin as a top-selling children’s cough syrup in the early 20th century; the sale of lethal chemical weapons during WWI in violation of chemical warfare treaties; collaboration, as part of the IG Farben conglomerate, with Nazi medical experiments during WWII; knowingly marketing tainted blood products in the 1970s and 1980s; and, for 16 years, promoting a now-recalled birth control device — the focus of nearly 20,000 lawsuits — that routinely perforated women’s internal organs.
The long-running lawsuits that led to the latest settlement alleged Bayer paid kickbacks to hospitals and physicians to promote three drugs: a cholesterol drug recalled in 2001 after being linked to “significantly more fatal cases than its competitors,” a potent antibiotic associated with a wide range of serious or fatal adverse reactions and a kidney-toxic heart surgery drug approved in 1993 and belatedly recalled in 2007, after killing an estimated 22,000 bypass patients.
The whistleblower also alleged drug marketing “for off-label uses that were not reasonable and necessary” and significant downplaying of the two recalled drugs’ safety risks.
Though Bayer withdrew both drugs for “safety reasons,” its settlement admits no wrongdoing.
Top offenders since the early 1990s
In 1986, Congress amended the False Claims Act, significantly expanding its scope and “breath[ing] new life into what has now become the government’s primary enforcement tool against fraud.”
However, that same year President Ronald Reagan signed into law the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, a piece of legislation that decimated incentives to make vaccines safe by furnishing manufacturers with blanket immunity from liability for vaccine injuries.
The lifting of those legal constraints catapulted vaccines from a “neglected corner of the drugs business” into a major driver of pharmaceutical industry profits.
Public Citizen’s 1991-and-on analyses of settlements indicate these manufacturers also felt emboldened to engage in lawless — and recidivist — behavior even for drugs not enjoying liability protections.
According to Violation Tracker, Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Merck and Pfizer are the top three companies in terms of total penalties paid, with the latter two also accounting for the largest numbers of violations.
Among Pfizer’s penalties was a 2009 settlement for $2.3 billion — the largest healthcare fraud settlement in the DOJ’s history.
Merck and Pfizer happen to be two of the “big four” companies providing the vaccines on America’s childhood vaccine schedule, and J&J and Pfizer are responsible for two of the four COVID-19 shots authorized for U.S. use.
In 2021, Pfizer became the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, by revenue, thanks to its COVID-19 shots, also liability-free, and its Paxlovid drug. Together, Paxlovid and the vaccines accounted for almost half of operational revenues.
“Durable Covid-19 revenues” are fueling Pfizer’s expectation that it will remain a “growth company.”
Cui bono?
Although pharmaceutical industry kickbacks to hospitals and physicians are among the bad behaviors openly acknowledged to lead to settlements or judgments, few experts discuss, even indirectly, the fact that the penalties themselves function as a form of federal kickback.
Law professor Rodwin discreetly alluded to this in his 2015 paper when speculating as to “why prosecutors rarely use the strongest sanctions in their arsenal.” Rodwin hypothesized that it might be because they “prefer to seek monetary penalties to support their budgets.”
According to Violation Tracker, pharmaceutical penalties since 2000 have enriched federal (and state) coffers to the tune of over $87 billion.
Curiously, Public Citizen’s two reports showed a sudden drop in 2013 and 2014 in the number and size of settlements, with federal criminal penalties “nearly disappearing” by 2017.
Eager to counteract any perception of declining enforcement, a publication called FCA Insider proclaimed in early 2021 the DOJ’s “years-long effort … to be more proactive in combatting fraud,” optimistically suggesting that “sophisticated data mining tools” were going to help the nation’s top law enforcer achieve increased fraud-related recoveries.
An honest look at history shows, however, that far more often than not, the DOJ — and regulatory agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — have been pharma’s biased partners in crime rather than its antagonists.
Examples of the phony and selective zeal for justice include the alleged fraud perpetrated by DOJ lawyers intent on denying compensation to thousands of National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program petitioners, and, more recently, Pfizer’s astonishing argument that a COVID-19-vaccine-related whistleblower lawsuit against it should be dismissed “because the U.S. government knew about the wrongdoings but continued to do business with the vaccine maker.”
And from the pharmaceutical industry’s perspective, handing over an $87-billion cut to the feds to grease the skids appears to be an acceptable price to pay.
As Public Citizen noted a few years ago, pharma penalties over the 1991-2017 period represented a paltry 5% of the 11 largest global drug companies’ net profits “during just 10 of those 27 years,” amounting to little more than a slap on the wrist.
Emphasizing the “stark imbalance” between penalties and profits, the consumer group concluded that without more sincere and active enforcement — including prosecution and jail sentences for executives overseeing systemic fraud — “illegal but profitable activities will continue to be part of [pharmaceutical] companies’ business model.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
September 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, United States |
Leave a comment
What would you do if you were Merrick Garland? Would you prosecute Trump? Or would you walk away, concerned about accusations you and the FBI were playing politics?
Step One appears easy, put off any decision until after the midterms. Trump is not a candidate, key issues driving the midterms (inflation, Ukraine, Roe) are not his issues and though Trump is actively stumping for many candidates, initiating any prosecution before the midterms is just too obvious. Nothing else about Mar-a-Lago has had an urgency to it (months passed from the initial voluntary turnover of documents and the forced search) and announcing an indictment now would be a terrible opening move. So if you’re Garland, you have some time.
On the other hand waiting until after the midterms can be dangerous if as expected the Republicans do well and take both the House and the Senate. Even with slim majorities Republicans are expected to initiate their own hearings, into Hunter Biden’s laptop and how the FBI played politics with that ahead of the 2020 election. Holding off an indictment until that is underway risks making your case look like retaliation for their case. That’s a bad look for a Department of Justice which claims it is not playing politics. It would look even worse if the Republicans try and cut you off, opening some sort of hearings into the Mar-a-Lago search prior to an indictment. Nope, if you’re Merrick Garland you are caught between a rock and a hard place.
But there is a bigger question: if you are Garland and you indict Trump, can you win? Candidate Trump is already earning a lot of partisan points claiming he is the victim of banana republic politics, and his indictment ahead of 2024 (it matters zero if he has formally announced or not, he is running of course) will allow him to claim he was right all along. An indictment will allow Trump to fire both barrels, one aimed at Garland and the other at the FBI and these, coupled with the dirty tricks a Republican investigation into the FBI and Russiagate will expose will make Trump look very right. He was the victim of partisan use of justice, and the FBI did try to influence both the 2016 election (with Russiagate) and the 2020 (by deep-sixing Hunter Biden’s laptop claiming falsely it was Russian misinformation) and now is taking a swing at 2024 with the Mar-a-Lago documents. If public opinion moves further to Trump’s side, Merrick Garland through his indictment just reelected Trump to the White House as a sympathy candidate. The spooks call that blowback, and it is a real threat in this instance.
Any action against Trump must preserve what is left of faith in the rule of law applied without fear or favor, or risk civil disenfranchisement if not outright civil unrest. Garland will have to address the most obvious precedent case involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who maintained an unsecured private email server which processed classified material. Her server held e-mail chains classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level which included the names of CIA and NSA employees. The FBI found classified intelligence improperly stored on Clinton’s server “was compromised by unauthorized individuals, to include foreign governments or intelligence services, via cyber intrusion or other means.” Clinton and her team destroyed tens of thousands of emails, potential evidence, as well as physical phones and Blackberries which potentially held evidence. She operated the server out of her home kitchen despite the presence of the Secret Service on property who failed to report it. Her purpose in doing all this appeared to have been avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests during her tenure as SecState, and maintaining control over what records became part of the historical archive post-tenure.
Clinton seems to have violated all three statues Trump was searched under. If the FBI is going to take similar fact sets and ignore one while aggressively pursuing another, it risks being seen as partial and political. Any further action against Trump and certainly any prosecution of him must address why Hillary was not searched and prosecuted herself. Fair is fair, and after all nobody is above the law.
The other fear holding Garland back would be that of losing the case outright in court. Classified documents are typically dealt with either via administrative penalties (an officer is sent home for a few days without pay) or as part of some much larger espionage case where the documents were removed illegally as part of the subject spying for a foreign country. Rarely is a case brought all the way to court for simple possession. Most of the laws Trump may have broken require some sort of intent to harm the United States. In other words, Trump would have had to have taken the documents not just for ego or his library or as some uber-souveniers but with the specific intent to commit harm against the United States. Garland certainly does not have that.
Other factors which typically play into documents cases are also not in Garland’s favor. Despite not being kept in line with General Services Administration standards, the documents appear to have been locked away securely at Mar-a-Lago, the premises itself guarded by the Secret Service. Trump has already turned over surveillance video of the documents storage location, which presumably does not show foreign agents wandering in and out of frame. It is much harder to prosecute a case when no actual harm was shown done to national security.
Another factor in documents cases involves the content of the documents themselves. The uninformed press has made much of the classification markings, but Garland will need to show the actual content of the docs was damaging to the U.S., and that Trump knew that. Overclassification will play a role, as will the age and importance of the information itself; after all, it is that information which is classified, not the piece of paper itself marked Secret. Garland will know Trump will fight him page by page, meaning much of the classified will be exposed in court and/or the trial will move to classified sessions to shield the information but feed the conspiracy machine. One can hear Trump arguing his right to a public trial being taken away.
Hyperbole aside, the critical question returns to whether or not prosecutors could prove specific intent on Trump’s part for the more serious charges. Proving a state of guilty mind — mens rea — would be the crux of any actual prosecution based on the Mar-a-Lago documents. What was Trump thinking at the time, in other words, did he have specific intent to injure the United States or to obstruct some investigation he would have had to have known about? Without knowing the exact nature of the documents this is a tough prediction but even with the documents on display in front of us proving to a court’s satisfaction what Trump wanted to do by keeping the documents would require coworkers and colleagues to testify to what Trump himself had said at the time, and that is unlikely to happen. It is thus unlikely based on what we know at present that Trump would go to jail for any of this.
Take for example the charges of tax evasion now levied again the Trump Organization (i.e., not Trump personally and not part of the Mar-a-Lago case.) Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, as part of a plea deal, will testify against the Organization but not Trump himself as to why the Organization paid certain compensation in the form of things like school tuitions, cars, and the like, all outside the tax system. It will be a bad day for the Organization but loyal to the end, Weisselberg will not testify as to his boss’ mens rea. It is equally unclear who would be both competent and willing to do so against President of the United States Trump. Blue Check enthusiasm aside, he won’t go to jail over this.
The final questions are probably the most important: DOJ knows what the law says. If knowing the chances of a serious conviction are slight, why would the Justice Department take the Mar-a-Lago case to court? Then again, if knowing the chances for a serious conviction are slight, why would the FBI execute a high-profile search warrant in the first place? To gather evidence unlikely ever to be used? No one is above the law, but that includes politics not trumping clean jurisprudence as well.
And then what? If Garland successfully navigates the politics, if he proves his case in court, and if he secures some sort of conviction against Trump which withstands the inevitable appeal, then what? Trump’s Mar-a-Lago “crimes” are relatively minor. Could Garland call Trump having to do some sort of community service during the 2024 campaign a win? Pay a fine? It seems petty. It sure seems Trump wins politically big-picture whether he wins or loses at Mar-a-Lago. If you were Merrick Garland, what would you do?
September 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | FBI, Hillary Clinton, United States |
Leave a comment
The US and the Israeli Ministry of Public Security have imposed restrictions and sanctions on Israeli spyware company NSO. It was placed on the US blacklist, resulting in a decline in its deals and income.
However, it wasn’t the politicians, opposition activists and journalists who were spied on who benefitted from these restrictions, but rather another cyber-attacker Tal Dilian, a former combat fighter in an elite Special Operations Unit of the Intelligence Corps in the Israeli army and held a senior position in the Israeli Military Intelligence Division “Aman”.
One of the spyware companies that Dilian founded is Intelexa, which developed the Predator software. Dillian focused on selling this spyware programme to countries where the Israeli Defence Ministry does not issue permits to export cyber-attack software, such as Bangladesh, Sudan and Ukraine, according to a report in Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper published on Friday.
Unlike cyber-attack companies registered and operating in Israel, which are subject to the supervision of the Security Export Supervision Division in the Ministry of Defence, Dilian believes he is not under the Ministry of Security’s supervision and can supply his goods to any country or entity.
About a year ago, the phone of Greek journalist Thanasis Koukakis was behaving oddly, as his battery began to die quickly and phone calls were being disconnected. The journalist, who criticised the Greek prime minister’s economic policy, became suspicious that he was being watched. A month later, a Canadian cyber security research institute, Citizen Lab, discovered that the Predator programme had hacked Koukakis’ phone.
It was also found, following the formation of a commission of inquiry into the matter by the European Parliament and after examining 200 of its members’ phones, that an unsuccessful attempt had been made to hack the phone of the head of the Greek opposition, Nikos Androulakis, which caused a scandal described as the “Greek Watergate”.
Citizen Lab published a report last December confirming that two Egyptian dissidents in exile, politician Ayman Nour and a popular programme host who wishes to remain anonymous, had been hacked by the Predator spyware.
The newspaper added that investigations into the Greek scandal revealed the source of the Predator programme as Israel. Several weeks ago, members of the investigation commission set up by the European Union secretly visited Israel and met with officials in the Ministries of Justice and Public Security, as well as with Director General and founder of NSO Shalev Julio. The investigation committee announced that it had not found evidence linking Pegasus to a spying scandal in Spain.
While the US and Israeli authorities imposed sanctions and restrictions on Israeli cyber companies, an official in the Israeli cyber intelligence company Verint, Sam Rabin, resigned to appoint the deputy general manager of Intelexa, based in North Macedonia. However, most of its employees and director, as well as the hackers, are individuals dismissed from Israeli intelligence services. Dilian held the rank of colonel in the Israeli army and was the commander of the 81st Technological Unit and a senior officer in the army’s special operations unit.
September 10, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | European Union, Human rights, Israel, United States |
Leave a comment
If you are not a daily recipient of the Global Health Now (GHN) newsletter, I strongly advise against starting. I do these things so you don’t have to. After all, I am not averse to a bit of ‘global health’ provided it is evidence-based, equitable, necessary and does not require me to start wiping my bottom with leaves.
The concept of global health now seems to be a platform for highlighting inequities we can do little about, guilt induction among the populations of Western countries and most recently conveying panic generated in Geneva at the WHO about relatively mild diseases to the rest of the world. In fact, global health is the superhighway along which the panic-laden WHO buses travel. No sooner has one bus gone (Covid-19) than another one (monkeypox) comes along.
It took them longer than I expected but they have got there now. Recent issues of GHN have been highlighting similarities between Covid-19 and monkeypox. Recently GHN reported how the ‘US monkeypox outbreak is marked by vaccine disparities’. Apparently ‘black people make up a third of US monkeypox cases but have received 10 per cent of vaccine doses’; this is being ascribed to ‘distrust of the medical establishment’.
That would be the medical establishment which recommended locking them down for nearly two years, wearing disgusting face masks which everyone knew did not work, and enforcing vaccine mandates and vaccine passports for a vaccine which was not necessary, did not work and is known to be potentially harmful. All power to the elbows of black Americans who have seen the light over the medical establishment ahead of the rest of the population.
Meanwhile, monkeypox has been ‘jostling’ the experts’ understanding of the disease. Once thought not to be transmitted asymptomatically, they now think that it can be. Bet you never saw that one coming. In further news, monkeypox patients are ‘exhibiting a plethora of symptoms not previously linked to the disease’ including ‘lesions in the throat or rectum’; but we have been here before in these pages.
A worrying symptom associated with monkeypox has been uncovered: it is ‘inflammation of the heart’, also referred to as myocarditis or heart muscle inflammation, which I am sure is receiving maximum attention and being played for all it is worth in an effort to get people lined up for jabs. It is worth noting that the above is based on a single case report and it ‘highlights the possibility of cardiac manifestations in patients with monkeypox infection’.
Contrast that with the known and widespread risk of myocarditis among young males following Covid-19 vaccines, the demonstrable increase in deaths among professional footballers (compulsorily vaccinated) on the field of play and the concomitant reaction described in the American Heart Association’s flagship journal Circulation as ‘rare and mild’.
Here is what that rare and mild condition can do to you: first ‘reduce the heart’s ability to pump blood. Myocarditis can cause chest pain, shortness of breath, and rapid or irregular heart rhythms (arrhythmias)’; then ‘if left untreated, myocarditis may lead to symptoms of heart failure, where your heart has trouble pumping blood the way it should. In rare cases, it leads to other problems, such as cardiomyopathy’. But not to worry, apparently ‘many people with myocarditis go on to recover completely’ but ‘the condition can also cause permanent damage to the heart muscle. This can lead to complications like arrhythmia and heart failure’. And it should only lay you low for six weeks; who wouldn’t want some of that?
If ever there was evidence for the social construction of diseases, we now have it in abundance. Just as with the ‘social construction of reality’ (Berger & Luckman if you can stand to read it) whereby nothing is real until it is experienced, and the reality depends on who is experiencing it, we have the same with these infections. The symptoms are clearly context-dependent and depending on what the context of the sufferer is, for example of myocarditis, they may or may not be taken seriously.
September 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science |
Leave a comment
A leaked video recording reveals researchers in June shared data with the Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH) showing serious and long-term side effects associated with Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
However, the MOH did not disclose the researchers’ findings to the expert committee that met later that month to decide on recommending the vaccine for children under age 5, or with leaders of Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine booster program.
Additionally, the MOH on Aug. 2 issued a report — on adverse events following the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine from Dec. 9, 2021, to May 31, 2022 — that contradicted the data presented during the early-June meeting.
“In fact, the report completely contradicts what was said in this discussion,” Retsef Levi, Ph.D., a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the Israeli Public Emergency Council for the Covid19 Crisis, told GB News in an Aug. 21 interview.
Yaffa Shir-Raz, Ph.D., health communication and pharmaceutical companies public relations strategy researcher at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, translated the June meeting from Hebrew into English.
The English translation shows the research team warned MOH officials they should think carefully about how to present the researchers’ findings to the public because they posed a potential legal risk, as the findings contradicted MOH’s claims that serious side effects are rare and short-term.
Shir-Raz tweeted on Sept. 1 an excerpt from the recorded meeting in which the research team warned MOH seniors they would have to think of the legal ramifications of the team’s findings.
According to the video recording, the researchers informed MOH officials about the many reports of serious and long-term side effects of the Pfizer vaccine, including side effects Pfizer didn’t list on the patient information leaflet, such as digestive side effects — especially abdominal pain in children — and back pain.
Additionally, Levi told GB News:
“On the free text part of the form, where patients were allowed to report whatever they wanted to, they [the researchers] observed and got many, many reports of neurological side effects — some not currently listed by Pfizer as side effects of the vaccine.”
The researchers also noted many cases of what Levi called the “re-challenge phenomenon” — or the recurrence or worsening of a side effect following repeated doses of the vaccine — which the researchers said indicated there was most likely a causal link between the vaccine and many side effects.
“The research team repeatedly stressed during the discussion,” Shir-Raz said in her translation and summary in English, “that their findings indicate that — contrary to what we were told so far — in many cases, serious adverse events are long-term, that last weeks, months, a year, or even more, and in some cases — ongoing, so that the side effect still lasted when the study was over.”
The side effects included menstrual irregularities and various neurological side effects, muscle-skeletal injuries, GI problems and kidney and urinary system adverse events, Shir-Raz said.
According to Levi’s review of the meeting footage, the researchers expressed a sentiment of “concern” and felt their “conscience” bothered them by the reality of their findings.
The researchers told the MOH officials their findings contradicted the MOH’s prior messaging that the vaccine was safe and side effects were both rare and short-lasting.
In 50% of the reports in which a duration was specified by the individual, the researchers said, the duration was over six months, according to the video’s English subtitles.
Moreover, in 65% of the neurological cases that mentioned a duration, the individuals reported their symptoms were ongoing, Levi said.
“Now it turns out that the reality is not what the narrative was promoting,” Levi said. “The side effects are long-term and serious.”
The research team told the MOH officials:
“You have to think very very carefully about how you communicate this to the public because you may open yourself to legal lawsuits and liability issues because what you promoted is, in fact, not the reality in what we see in the reports.”
Despite the importance of this discussion, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, head of public health services at MOH — and the person who signed the contract with Pfizer — was not present during the meeting. The researchers repeatedly asked MOH officials to make sure Dr. Alroy-Preis saw their findings
The MOH commissioned the Shamir Medical Center team of researchers with experience in pharmacovigilance to analyze the data from the adverse effects reporting system launched in Dec. 2021.
Although Israel began its COVID-19 vaccination campaign in 2020, it did not have an adverse effect reporting system until the end of 2021.
Steve Kirsch, executive director of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, commented on the news in a Sept. 2 Substack post, asking, “Why didn’t they release the original presentation made by the safety team?”
“There needs to be an investigation ASAP into what happened, but the head of the MoH, Nitzan Horowitz, isn’t calling for one,” he said.
“The precautionary principle of medicine now demands an immediate halt to the COVID vaccination program,” Kirsch said.
Kirsch also commented on the lack of media coverage of the Israeli researchers’ findings:
“Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, the Health Ministry’s head of public services and a top COVID adviser to the Israeli government, issued no public statement.
“Leaders of our ‘trusted institutions’ all over the world said absolutely nothing after the news broke on August 20, 2022.
“This suggests that there is widespread corruption in the medical community, government agencies, among public health officials, the mainstream media, and social media companies worldwide: they will not acknowledge any event that goes against the mainstream narrative.
“This is a level of corruption that is unprecedented. The atrocities here are clear-cut.
“Everyone should be speaking out and calling for a full investigation and fully evaluating the safety data collected by the Israel government.”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
September 9, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, Israel |
Leave a comment
Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu placed cameras in the room where he met with a delegation of US senators, without informing them beforehand that the meeting’s venue would have recording equipment, Israeli website Walla News reported.
A member of the American delegation noticed a video camera in the meeting room, which one of Netanyahu’s advisers had turned on while Netanyahu was holding a microphone in his hand.
The news site added that the US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides asked Netanyahu why he was holding a microphone, but Netanyahu tried to evade the question saying, “This is nothing.” But the ambassador and the senators were not convinced and asked for that recording equipment to be removed before the start of the meeting.
Walla cited sources as saying that Netanyahu wanted to record the meeting in order to use the footage in his campaign for the upcoming Knesset elections.
Israel is set to hold its fifth election in four years in October after the Knesset was dissolved in June.
September 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, United States |
Leave a comment
Is it true that “9/11 was an inside job”? Yes, insofar as Israel is “inside” the U.S. But for the 9/11 truthers who have identified Israel as the main perpetrators, “9/11 was an inside job” is at best a half-truth, and at worst an integral part of the Zionist operation, like a secondary flag sewn as a lining under the false flag of Islamism. Victor Thorn (1963-2017) wrote in his book 9/11 made in Israel: The Plot Against America (2011): “In essence, the ‘9-11 truth movement’ was created prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as a means of suppressing news relating to Israeli complicity. . . . The slogan ‘9-11 was an inside job’ was quite possibly the greatest example of Israeli propaganda ever devised.” In milder terms, it is “controlled opposition”.
A genuine truth movement would have pointed to Israel as the prime suspect from the start. From day one, it was obvious who would benefit. At 1 pm New York time on the day of the attacks, George Friedman (“born in Budapest, Hungary, to Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust,” Wikipedia informs us) wrote gleefully on his geopolitical website STRATFOR:
It’s pretty simple: 9/11 is best understood as a case of “triangulation”, by which two parties are drawn into conflict with each other by the invisible hand of a third party. In this case, the desired “clash of civilization” between the West and the Muslim world was triggered by Israel, 9/11 being only one operation in this ongoing strategy. Triangulation is the favored tactic of the Mossad, described by the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies, on the eve of 9/11, as having “capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.” Triangulation is also used to create civil strife within a nation (intra-national clashes of civilization, so to speak) for various purposes. In most cases, Israel’s hand is invisible only to the extent of the authorities’ and the people’s voluntary blindness (the proverbial elephant in the room).
If, instead of comparing 9/11 to Operation Northwoods that never happened, the most widely watched early 9/11 conspiracy film (Loose Change) had reminded Americans of the attack on the USS Liberty, the 9/11 Truth movement would have moved in a totally different direction than the one it took under the leadership of Alex Jones. No one would think of calling the USS Liberty attack an “inside job” or “a self-inflicted wound.”
Filling the background with other documented Israeli false flag operations (the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, the Lavon Affair in 1954, Israel bombing its own embassies in Argentina in 1992 and in London in 1994, etc.) could have turned such a movement into a tsunami. The “inside job” theory, on the other hand, can never reach a critical mass, for a simple reason: the idea that the U.S. government would, by itself, deceive and terrorize its own citizens by killing thousands of them to justify wars in the Middle East that are not even in the nation’s interest is just too hard to believe for the vast majority of Americans — harder to believe than the official narrative with its material impossibilities. By comparison, Israel attacking America under the false flag of Islamic terrorists to win American support against their Arab enemies makes plain common sense. It is only with the hypnotic power of Zion-controlled corporate medias, and with the complicity of a well-organized “controlled opposition” that such a natural idea was suppressed from the minds of average Americans.
Nevertheless, the belief that “9/11 was an Israeli job” is gaining ground all over the world. Sooner or later, the tsunami will come. And the sooner the better. I am hoping that my film, “9/11 and Israel’s Great Game,” now in English, will help bring it about. Pass it around if you judge it useful:
This film, unfortunately, was shunned from all 9/11 Truth festivals this month. The organizers, I have been told, “decided not to muddy the waters with a film about Israel’s involvement in 9/11.” This must be ironic, for evidence of Israel’s involvement brings clarity, while muddy waters are what Israel needs. However, the film will be streamed on noliesradio.org on October 9th, followed by a debate between Alan Sabrosky, Kevin Barrett, and myself. …
Full article
Video
September 8, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | Middle East, United States, Zionism |
Leave a comment
The US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a ruling, ordering Dr. Anthony Fauci and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to respond to document requests by the New Civil Liberties Alliance in conjunction with the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general on behalf of plaintiffs in State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al.
Judge Terry A. Doughty made the order, which has great importance for the millions of Americans experiencing censorship on social media – which is allegedly at the pressuring of government bodies and officials and would therefore be a violation of the First Amendment.
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
The judge’s ruling was on “whether the White House Defendants, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre and Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci should be compelled to respond to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories and document requests” and “[w]hether Dr. Fauci, in his capacity as National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (“NIAID”) Director, should be required to provide additional responses to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories and document requests.”
The judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and the defendants have no legal right to refuse to comply with the order.
“In accordance with the previous expedited discovery order, Plaintiffs served interrogatories and document requests upon White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and upon Dr. Anthony Fauci in his capacity as Chief Medical Advisor to the President,” the ruling states. “Government Defendants have refused to provide any interrogatory responses or responsive documents, maintaining that these would be internal communications that would implicate serious separation of powers concerns, that Plaintiffs are required to exhaust other avenues for the discovery first, and that it would be unduly burdensome and disproportional to the needs of the case.”
“The breadth and extent of the government’s censorship activities has turned out to be massive and far exceeded that disclosed by the federal government in response to initial court-ordered discovery made public last week,” the NCLA said in a statement to Reclaim The Net.
Much light has recently been shed on the Federal Government’s role in calling for direct censorship on social media platforms, as a result of the documents obtained during the lawsuit. Collusion between social media platforms and the CDC was also evident.
NCLA is representing several plaintiffs, some of which are prominent and well-respected epidemiologists who were censored by Big Tech platforms for diverging from the White House’s narrative on COVID-19.
The US district court judge Terry A. Doughty ruled on Tuesday:
“First, the requested information is obviously very relevant to Plaintiffs’ claims. Dr. Fauci’s communications would be relevant to Plaintiffs’ allegations in reference to alleged suppression of speech relating to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin, and to alleged suppression of speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns,” the ruling continues. “Jean-Pierre’s communications as White House Press Secretary could be relevant to all of Plaintiffs’ examples.
“Government Defendants are making a blanket assertion of all communications to social media platforms by Dr. Fauci, and Jean-Pierre based upon executive privilege and presidential communications privilege,” the order adds. “Plaintiffs concede they are not asking for any internal White House communications, but only external communications between Dr. Fauci and/or Jean-Pierre and third-party social media platforms.”
September 7, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, United States |
Leave a comment
President Joe Biden believes that hysterical denunciations of extremism will save the Democratic Party in the upcoming congressional midterms. Despite media portrayals of Biden as a good-natured moderate, the president has relied on sweeping castigations of opposition throughout his political career. Worse, Biden’s rhetoric on extremism could signal an attack on any limits on presidential power.
Last Thursday in Philadelphia, Joe Biden overheated in a primetime speech with a backdrop seemingly inspired by a mix of the movie “V for Vendetta” and Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. The harsh red atmospherics perfectly complimented Biden’s attempt to portray ex-president Donald Trump and his Republican supporters as the Anti-Christ waiting to crucify American democracy.
Biden declared that, “Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” But he didn’t confess to the audience that he considered almost half of all Americans to be “extremists.”
A few hours before Biden’s speech, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre asserted, “When you are not with what majority of Americans are, then you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking.” Is this wacko definition of extremism designed to vilify anyone who doubts Biden will save America’s soul?
Four days later, speaking in Wisconsin, Biden declared, “Extreme MAGA Republicans in Congress have chosen to go backwards—full of anger, violence, hate, and division… Extreme MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and our economic security, they embrace political violence.” A week before the Philadelphia speech Biden denounced Republicans for “semi-fascism.”
To vanquish extremism, Biden called for everyone to “unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy.” In other words, everyone must support Joe Biden or democracy will be destroyed. But Biden’s version of democracy is a parody of the Constitution. He believes that thanks to 43,000 votes in three swing states, he has unlimited power to dictate how Americans must live.
In his Philadelphia speech, Biden invoked the “Rule of Law” five times, notwithstanding his twenty months of dictatorial decrees. Law Professor Jonathan Turley observed, “President Biden has arguably the worst record of losses in [federal court] the first two years of any recent presidential administration.” The only limits on his power that Biden recognizes come from his pollsters, not from the Constitution.
Since Biden took office, his appointees have exploited “extremism” to sanctify stretching his power. Last year, the Biden administration revealed that guys who can’t get laid may be terrorist threats due to “involuntary celibate–violent extremism.” The White House did not disclose whether self-abuse was the latest terrorist warning sign. A senior administration official (speaking anonymously to the media) said the new program would encourage people: “If you see something, say something.” The Biden report stressed that federal law enforcement agencies “play a critical role in responding to reports of criminal and otherwise concerning activity.”
“Otherwise concerning activity”? This is the same standard that turned prior anti-terrorist efforts into farces.
Refusing to get injected with an experimental vaccine is another badge of extremism according to Biden scorekeepers. On August 13, 2021 the Department of Homeland Security issued a terrorist alert, warning that “anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists could exploit…potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks.” Anyone who loudly objects to being locked back under house arrest thus became the moral equivalent of the Taliban, or maybe Hezbollah.
The following month, Biden gave a primetime address which dictated a COVID vaccine mandate for more than 80 million private employees and also portrayed the unvaccinated as public enemies. By the time Biden codified his decree in a November Federal Register notice, the efficacy of the COVID vaccine had fallen to less than 50%. But Biden apparently believed he was entitled to force people to get injected no matter how badly Pfizer shots failed. In January, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s vax mandate for private companies.
The Biden administration won’t let the Constitution impede its war on extremism. As part of this new priority, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may exploit a “legal work-around” to spy on and potentially entrap Americans who are “perpetuating the ‘narratives’ of concern,” CNN reported last year. But federal informant programs routinely degenerate into “dollars for collars” schemes that reward scoundrels for fabricating crimes that destroy the lives of innocent Americans. The DHS plan would “allow the department to circumvent [constitutional and legal] limits” on surveillance of private citizens and groups. Federal agencies are prohibited from targeting individuals solely for First Amendment-protected speech and activities. But federal hirelings would be under no such restraint. Private informants could create false identities that would be problematic if done by federal agents.
One DHS official bewailed to CNN, “Domestic violent extremists are really adaptive and innovative. We see them… couching their language so they don’t trigger any kind of red flag on any platforms.” DHS officials have apparently decided that certain groups of people are guilty regardless of what they say (“couching their language”). The targets will likely include gun owners who distrust the politicians who vow to seize their guns. Any excesses by the new informants will be excused because they are for the sacred cause of saving democracy (or at least crippling Biden’s opposition).
Anyone who vigorously opposes federal power can get tarred as an extremist. On the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated, former CIA chief John Brennan announced on television that federal intelligence agencies “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” about extremists, libertarians, and other malefactors. Federal entrapment operations may have already harvested a heap of hapless individuals who could be indicted when politically convenient.
The definition of “extremism” is a flag of convenience for the political establishment. The definition of “extremism” has forever been in flux. The only consistent element in definitions of extremism is that politicians always win. A 2013 Pentagon training manual explained, “All nations have an ideology, something in which they believe. When a political ideology falls outside the norms of a society, it is known as extremism.” In other words, beliefs that differ from prevailing or approved opinions are “extremist” by definition. And who gets to say what is acceptable to believe? The same politicians and government agencies and their media allies whose power is buttressed by prevailing opinions.
“Extremism” is even more vaporous than “terrorism.” With terrorism, at least the individual or group is purportedly committing (or planning to commit) some violent act. An extremist, on the other hand, is someone with a bad attitude who might do something unpleasant in the future. Crackdowns on potential extremists provide the perfect tool to demonize dissent.
Will the Biden crackdown on extremists end as ignominiously as Nixon’s crackdown almost 50 years earlier? Nixon White House aide Tom Charles Huston explained that the FBI’s COINTELPRO program continually stretched its target list “from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.” At some point, surveillance became more intent on spurring fear than on gathering information. FBI agents were encouraged to conduct interviews with anti-war protesters to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox,” as a 1970 FBI memo noted. Is the Biden castigation campaign an attempt to make its opponents fear that the feds are tracking their every email and website click?
The Biden administration could be expanding the federal “Enemies List” faster than any time since the 1970s. Will Biden’s war on extremism succeed in radically narrowing the boundaries of respectable American political thought? Permitting politicians to blacklist any ideas they disapprove won’t “restore faith in democracy.” What if government is the most dangerous extremist of them all?
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.
September 7, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | FBI, Joe Biden, United States |
Leave a comment
Aletho News 