UN Dubs Self ‘Trusted’ Pandemic News Source, Teams Up With World Economic Forum To Encourage ‘New Social Norms’
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 11/28/2020
The United Nations has ‘launched a counter-attack’ against coronavirus misinformation – by teaming up with the World Economic Forum to battle coronavirus misinformation and other ‘potentially dubious content.’
“When COVID-19 emerged, it was clear from the outset this was not just a public health emergency, but a communications crisis as well,” says Melissa Flemming, the UN’s head of global communications.
During the #COVID19 pandemic, the wrong information can be deadly.
Join me in taking the #PledgetoPause before sharing and help stop the spread of misinformation online. https://t.co/Rj0dg5OiZb pic.twitter.com/xeX8hoisXv
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) October 20, 2020
“We’re trying to create this new social norm called ‘pause – take care before you share’ – she continued, adding “We’re equipping people, through this new social norm, with a bit of ‘information scepticism’.”
The new initiative also seeks to rope social media influencers into spreading ‘real news’ about the pandemic – which we assume means nothing to do with hydroxychloroquine, incredibly low fatality rates for most people below retirement age, or anyone even slightly opposed to business-killing lockdowns.
One also has to wonder how the UN and WEF would cover egregious flip-flops from global health authorities on everything from transmissibility to mask use.
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 14, 2020
Regardless, the UN’s campaign is steadfast in their self-determined authority as arbiters of all things COVID.
“So far, we’ve recruited 110,000 information volunteers, and we equip these information volunteers with the kind of knowledge about how misinformation spreads and ask them to serve as kind of ‘digital first-responders‘ in those spaces where misinformation travels,” said Flemming.
Four Iranians on trial in Belgium over suspected France bomb plot in European first
RT | November 27, 2020
An Iranian diplomat and three of his compatriots go on trial in Belgium on Friday after being accused of plotting to bomb an opposition rally outside Paris in 2018, in the first such proceedings in Europe.
The diplomat, Assadolah Assadi, who was formerly based in Vienna, and the three others have been charged by prosecutors in Belgium with planning an attack on a meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). The exiled opposition group is headquartered in the French capital.
The trial is scheduled to be held on Friday and then Thursday next week, and if convicted, Assadi, 48, faces life in prison. The diplomat, who has not commented on the charges, was arrested while on holiday in July 2018 in Germany, where he had no immunity from prosecution and was handed over to Belgium.
This is the first time an Iranian official has been put on trial in an EU member state for terrorism.
Two of his suspected accomplices, a couple living in Belgium, had also been arrested Belgium, with police saying they had half a kilo of the explosive TATP and a detonator.
Another alleged accomplice, Mehrdad Arefani, 57, is an Iranian poet who had lived in Belgium for several years. He was arrested in France in 2018.
Belgian authorities said in June 2018 that they had thwarted an attempt to “smuggle explosives” to France to attack the meeting, and later that year, French officials accused Tehran’s intelligence service of being behind the operation. Jaak Raes, head of the Belgium’s state security service (VSSE), said in a letter to the prosecutor in February this year that “the attack plan was conceived in the name of Iran and under its leadership.”
France also accused Iran’s intelligence ministry of planning the plot and reportedly expelled an Iranian diplomat in retaliation in October 2018.
The assets of an Iranian intelligence unit and officials were frozen in the European Union.
The Islamic Republic has denied the allegations, saying that the “plot” was a stunt by the NCRI, which is labeled a terrorist group in Iran.
With Carole Cadwalladr’s ‘journalism’ deemed untrue and her libel trial unravelling, will she get to keep her awards?
By Damian Wilson | RT | November 26, 2020
Discredited, Brexit-obsessed hack Carole Cadwalladr faces having to explain why demonstrably false claims of dodgy Russian links, illegal funding and data manipulation during the referendum deserve journalism’s highest accolades.
The headline said it all above the prize-winning journalist’s latest piece, ‘A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum.’
Wow! As a tale, it was a liberal journalist’s jackpot. Scheming Russians meddling in British democracy from the heart of Westminster, nefarious foreign agents pulling the strings of populist political puppets to influence the outcome of the most important referendum in a generation.
The shocking details of wrongdoing certainly would have been award-worthy journalism, had any of it been true.
The wild allegations have been slowly unravelling in the Le Carré-style intrigue woven by Carole Cadwalladr, a features hack on The Observer newspaper (circulation a humble 140K), who claims one of the key actors, Leave.EU backer Arron Banks had called her “a crazy conspiratorial woman who lives alone with their cats.” While she was offended by the misogyny of that insult, it’s nothing to the shame she now faces.
With her credibility shot to pieces, surely crusading Cadwalladr should hand back her coveted Orwell Prize and the Reporters Without Borders ‘L’esprit de RSF’ gong she won for her series of articles on alleged foreign interference in British politics.
Because her world of carefully crafted conspiracy has finally crumbled, she was expected to appear in court this morning for the latest round of Banks’ libel case against her – she accused him of telling lies about his relationship with Russia in a TED Talk. Online reports claimed the journalist had pulled the plug at the eleventh hour on two of the three defences she was relying on – truth and limitation – clinging to the lone defence that her claims against Banks were all in the public interest.
But, surely, by admitting that you have no evidence to prove something is true, it cannot logically be argued that publishing said thing is in the public interest? Or am I missing something?
Banks, who has clearly got under Cadwalladr’s skin, expects a finale, tweeting today: “It’s hugely disappointing that she couldn’t just apologise months ago and draw a line under this whole episode.”
What should really sting Cadwalladr is the bill for a £62,000 (almost $83,000) down-payment towards Banks’ legal costs – likely to be much higher later – that she has been ordered to make. But that financial pain has been massively eased by the vast stockpile of cash her gullible supporters have donated, thanks to her crowdfunding efforts. So far her fantasies have raised more than half a million pounds – £364,000 ($486,000) on gofundme, £168,000 ($224,000) on crowdjustice and almost £10,000 on crowdfunder. Who needs to worry about legal costs when the money is so easy to come by?
No doubt Banks will have his eye on that crowdfunded war chest.
With the National Crime Agency finding no evidence of wrongdoing, the Information Commissioner (ICO) clearing Cambridge Analytica of any wrongdoing whatsoever and Cadwalladr herself admitting she had wrongly accused Banks of having broken the law, this shameful put-up job may finally have run its course.
And what about the allegedly suspect £8 million in loans Banks lent to Leave.EU probed by the NCA? It’s final report read, “The NCA has found no evidence that any criminal offences have been committed… It will therefore take no further action against Mr Banks.”
And all that dodgy data manipulation by Cambridge Analytica? Just last month, the ICO, Elizabeth Denham, completed a three-year inquiry only to announce there was “no further evidence to change my earlier view that CA (Cambridge Analytica) was not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK.”
These findings make a mockery of all those self-congratulatory awards handed out among the liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic for exposing… absolutely nothing.
No Russian funding. No Cambridge Analytica interference. No criminality. Nothing.
This humiliation wasn’t the end. Last month Cadwalladr couldn’t bear to leave well-enough alone and took to Twitter once more to attack her nemesis, in a move that hilariously backfired.
The result? Well, it wasn’t pretty. The journalist, no doubt through gritted teeth, announced on Twitter on November 6 that, “On 22 Oct 2020, I tweeted that Arron had been found to have broken the law. I accept he has not. I regret making this false statement, which I have deleted. I undertake not to repeat it. I apologise to Arron for the upset and distress caused.”
Still, the libel case hung over Cadwalladr’s head but the slim thread holding it looks about ready to snap, thanks to the lack of any viable defence, and that should finally close the book on this fairy tale, as soon as a few remaining wrongs are righted.
Because if justice really is to be done then Cadwalladr should hand back those prizes wrongly awarded to her on the basis of disinformation, accompanied by a grovelling apology and that self-righteous TED Talk should be taken down immediately. Yet somehow I don’t think any of this will happen because we all know that the liberal media is never wrong, even when it clearly is.
Depressingly, it appears yet again that there is more than a shred of truth to the cynical maxim in journalism, to NEVER let the facts stand in the way of a good story.
Damian Wilson is a UK journalist, ex-Fleet Street editor, financial industry consultant and political communications special advisor in the UK and EU.
The Definitive Case Proving Donald Trump Won the Election
Revolver | November 25, 2020
If Joe Biden taking the lead in Michigan and Wisconsin was the moment the dynamic of the Presidential race changed, this may be the moment the dynamic changes again.
A thorough and damning new analysis just published calls the legitimacy of this critical period into question and shows just how completely ridiculous and far-fetched the core of Joe Biden’s comeback really was in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. It flags four individual vote dumps critical to Joe Biden’s “victory” in these states and shows, convincingly, that their ratios of Biden votes to Trump votes were profoundly anomalous when compared to other dumps in those states and virtually every other vote dump across the country.
The report is written in dry and academic language, filled with graphs, footnotes, and various hedges, but its implications could not be more obvious. Indeed, if the authors were less tepid, they might have fairly titled it:
Joe Biden’s Victory Was Not Legitimate. And Now We Can Prove it.
Because that’s exactly what the report does. It looks at election data and shows what many would expect: the states and cities that had the most suspicious circumstances on election night and into the next day are precisely where the analysis flags extreme anomalies.
Summary and Background of the Report
It starts out with the background on Michigan and Wisconsin — the famous “vote spikes” that were plainly ridiculous and fundamentally changed both the electoral reality and the narrative. The report reminds us of the infamous vote spikes in Michigan and Wisconsin.


The report is based on an analysis of the difference between successive updates in each state, each of which it calls “vote updates.” In online discourse, these are often referred to as “vote dumps” or “vote batches.”
It examines them across states and, controlling for how big a state is and how Democratic it is, does the following:
- Defines, mathematically, what a “vote spike” is
- Shows just how rare those are
- Shows how, during a five-hour period, four particularly extreme vote spikes arrived favoring Joe Biden
- Shows how crucial these were to Joe Biden’s election in MI, WI, and GA
- Most damningly, shows how Joe Biden likely would have lost these states — and the election — were these only more “spiky” than 99% of all vote dumps
The report describes a measurement for showing the relationship between the number of votes Biden wins by (or loses by) in any given vote dump, and how well he did as a ratio of Trump’s votes in that vote dump, while controlling for size and political lean of a state. It thus normalizes the data across states, allowing for apples to apples comparisons. The key mathematical reason why these vote spikes are anomalous is that for every large vote dump heavily favoring Biden in any given area, you also would expect to have smaller vote dumps in the same area which favor him by similar margins. Quoting from the report:
The believability of these updates relies on the premise that the one or two most Biden-favoring parts of the state (perhaps by ballot type) were counted entirely in these two batches. If it cannot be shown that the ballots counted during these spikes were qualitatively different from all other vote updates in Michigan, then the results are likely too extreme along multiple dimensions to be accepted at face value. [Vote Integrity]
It goes on to describe how the same logic applies for the other updates as well. Large ballot dumps which heavily favor a candidate make sense, if there are also smaller ones which favor the candidate more. The “standardization” process used by the researchers here takes care of that, and shows how points up and to the right of the graph are the more “co-extreme” vote dumps, in the language of the report:

That dotted black line at the top is the 99.5th percentile. In other words, only one out of every two-hundred points are above it. The four vote dumps in question are all at or above the 99.92th percentile. With these ratios, if they were at the 99th percentile only, they would each be dragged down to the middle of the three lines shown. Critically, they account for more than the margin of victory in all three states, and thus forty-two electoral votes, and with them, the Presidency.
Making Sense of This
The analysis is incredibly dense but contains several key points, which American Patriots must remember in the coming days and weeks. The most important points are:
- Four of the seven most extreme vote dumps decided the election for Joe Biden. This alone is bizarre and fundamentally cuts against his narrative of moderate increases in suburban and exurban areas. Moreover, the distribution is “heavy-tailed” and these vote dumps are vastly more “co-extreme” than even the points around the 99.5th percentile (the dotted black line in the graph above).
- These four vote dumps were quantifiably far more extreme than virtually every other vote dump, with only a few others as extreme in their aberration from the inverse pattern observed elsewhere.
- The odds of these three states (GA, WI, MI) being so well-represented at the top of the distribution is just over 1%. And when you factor in that a vote dump in GA is the 9th most extreme point, the odds that these three states have five of the top ten most extreme vote dumps drop to a mere 0.00337%. Clearly, there’s something different about these states than others, including other blue states, or even other Midwestern states where a deep-blue urban population offsets the red rest of the state (e.g. Illinois, Minnesota), or states like Colorado, Texas, or Oregon, where the urban areas are also vastly more Democratic than the rest of the state.
- These vote spikes all occurred in the same five-hour period. Wisconsin and Michigan both spent around eighteen hours counting votes, and the count took several days in Georgia. We have since learned that the “pipe burst” story in deep-blue Georgia was never in fact true.
- This five hour period remains a period of great controversy surrounding how the vote counting was “stopped.” Recently, we learned that the story of a “pipe bursting” in Georgia was in fact not true. Combine that with the results shown in this piece, and an obvious picture comes into view: In all three states, the count was “stopped” to give cover for electoral fraud on the scale of hundreds of thousands of votes which were released in the middle of the night, hoping few would notice.
Let me repeat. Fulton County elections officials told the media and our observers that they were shutting down the tabulation center at State Farm Arena at 10:30 p.m. on election night only to continue counting ballots in secret until 1:00 a.m.
— David Shafer (@DavidShafer) November 10, 2020
The burden of proof is now on Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the Democratic party, and their various urban machine operatives to defend these results as legitimate. The on-the-ground circumstances in these states had been suspicious for weeks and warranted investigation in their own right. We now have the math to confirm our suspicions. This report, in winding sentences and hedged language, lays it bare for all of us to see: Joe Biden’s election “victory” relied on a fraudulent counting process in the dead of night.
The media has no interest in covering this, and indeed are trying actively to suppress it. An attempt to Google search for “precincts that stopped the count” makes this clear. The steal of this election, perpetrated in the middle of the night in several states, was allowed to happen only because of the extraordinary assistance given to the Democrats by Big Media and Big Tech. Nonetheless, thanks to what appears to be an anonymous group of researchers, we can definitively state what we knew all along:
President Donald J. Trump is the legitimate winner of this election. Republican state legislators in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia must refuse to seat electors for Joe Biden until a complete forensic audit has been conducted.
Never give up. Never back down. And never concede.
Swedish Opposition Demands Answers About Alleged US Espionage Against Country
By Igor Kuznetsov – Sputnik – 26.11.2020
According to a whistleblower report, the US intelligence service NSA, with the help of its Danish counterpart, spied on targets in several countries, including Norway, Finland, and Sweden.
In an unexpected alliance, the Left and the Sweden Democrats, representing the opposite ends of the Swedish political spectrum, have teamed up in demanding an answer from the government about alleged US espionage.
Danish Radio earlier published a whistleblower report from the country’s Defence Intelligence Service (FE) about the US National Security Agency (NSA) spying against the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish defence industries via access to the data centre on the island of Amager off Copenhagen. From there, the NSA reportedly targeted traffic from ministries and defence companies such as Denmark’s Terma and Sweden’s Saab.
According to Danish sources, the espionage took place at the same time as the Danish state moved to the final round of fighter aircraft procurement, in which Saab’s Gripen was a contender. The Danish state eventually bought 27 US-made F-35 fighter jets.
Left MP Håkan Svenneling asked Social Democrat Foreign Minister Ann Linde what measures the minister and the government in general have taken in connection with the reported espionage, while Sweden Democrat MP Björn Söder demanded an answer from Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist.
“This may have affected the Swedish defence industry in a very negative way and it must be clarified”, Söder explained to national broadcaster SVT, emphasising that the government has been “very slow to act.”
In response, Social Democrat Interior Minister Mikael Damberg stressed that the government is waiting for Denmark’s investigation and that he cannot comment on the “accuracy” of the information that has appeared in the media.
“On the other hand, of course, I and the relevant Swedish authorities follow the Danish investigation with great interest”, Damberg said, assuring that the government “takes very seriously all forms of espionage against Sweden”.
Norway previously launched talks with Denmark about the espionage allegations at defence minister level, involving Norway’s Frank Bakke-Jensen and Denmark’s Trine Bramsen.
According to Danish Radio, the NSA used the Amager data centre with its XKeyscore system, which was revealed in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden and which is a key feature of the NSA’s entire interception apparatus. The programme allows for a large amount of data in fibre cables to sifted through with the help of “selectors”, which are keywords such as the names of people in top positions in target organisations.
Founded in 1937, Saab AB is one of Sweden’s leading defence companies. Between 1947 and 1990 it served as the parent company of renowned car manufacturer Saab Automobile. Its main focus, however, is and has been fighter aircraft, combat weapons, missile systems, torpedoes, sensor systems, and unmanned underwater vehicles, as well as airborne surveillance solutions, radars, and means of electronic warfare. With some 17,000 employees, Saab is seen as the backbone of Sweden’s military-industrial complex.
Iranian Response Would Be Destructive: Israeli Report Says Army Hasn’t Been Instructed to Prepare for Scenarios of US Strike on Iran
Al-Manar | November 26, 2020
“Israel” Defense Website denied all the circulated rumors which claimed that the Israeli occupation army had been ordered to prepare for all the possible scenarios of a US military strike on Iran, considering that all such reports had to do with the election in US and the Zionist entity.
The website added that the drills carried out by the Israeli army were part of the military routine, noted that the US President Donald Trump and the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu planned to use such rumors for electoral purposes.
The Zionist air force does not have the war jets which can carry the bombs needed to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear sites, according to the website which doubted the efficiency of such strikes even of they were carried out.
“Israel” Defense Website pointed out Trump needs the Congress approval to launch military strikes on Iran, adding that the US voters would not forgive him over committing such a fault.
The report also discussed Iran’s response to any US strike, highlighting the huge rocketry capabilities of the Islamic Republic.
The Iranian forces and Hezbollah will wage a huge missile attack on ‘Israel’ and the US military bases in the Guld countries, causing heavy losses, according to the report which added that hundreds of Israelis would dies in such a confrontation.
The report finally wondered whether the Zionist entity could face such a military challenge, reiterating that the rumors about Iran strike have a mere political purpose.
A U.S. Color Revolution ‘Comes Home to Roost’ in the 2020 Election
By Max Parry • Unz Review • November 25, 2020
It has been more than three weeks since election day and the incumbent U.S. president still has yet to concede defeat. Despite the media’s distraction over the perspiration of his personal attorney during a bizarre press conference, the legal team led by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has actually done a decent job uncovering potential fraud in battleground states where vote counting was delayed for several days before the former vice president was declared a “winner” by the news media and Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, the 2020 election is not a sporting event or academic paper, therefore evidence that instances of fraud occurred will likely not be enough for the litigation to change the outcome, though it does appear his camp is finally facing up to leaving the White House come January. Then again, whether or not burden of proof was ever provided is immaterial, seeing as before he even took the oath of office a silent coup was underway to remove the democratically-elected government of Donald J. Trump that is now entering its final phase.
Trump found an unlikely voice of support contesting Biden’s premature declaration of victory in former six-term Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney, who this time was the running mate of former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura as a write-in entrant in some eligible states for the divided Greens who officially nominated labor activist Howie Hawkins. During the 2016 election, the Democrats scapegoated Jill Stein for Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss, even baselessly implicating the Green Party nominee in the Russiagate hoax simply for having appeared at a 2015 Moscow gala for the RT television network where General Michael Flynn and Russian President Vladimir Putin were in attendance. Not only did the legislatures of swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin exclude Hawkins from the ballot at the behest of Democrats in a shameless act of voter suppression, but McKinney described the irregularities which plagued electronic voting machines in her home state of Georgia in 2020 as “déjà vu”, having been cheated out of Congress herself by such tactics in 2006. McKinney also previously penned an essay entitled “The Purple Revolution: U.S. Hybrid Warfare Comes Home to Roost?” on the establishment’s efforts to remove Trump which makes an apropos historical reference.
This November 22nd marked fifty-seven years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When asked for his reaction to the killing of the 35th president in Dallas back in 1963 and less than two years before his own public murder, civil rights leader Malcolm X famously stated that “chickens were coming home to roost”, alluding to the U.S. government’s interventions overseas such as the CIA-orchestrated assassination of the first Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960 following its independence from Belgian colonial rule. His remarks in the wake of a national tragedy proved too controversial even for the Nation of Islam which publicly censured its most recognizable minister who would announce his departure from the black nationalist organization a few months later. The following year, he would be gunned down in Harlem in an assassination long-suspected to have been the work of the FBI’s counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) which had infiltrated his inner circle to frame the NOI for a mysterious death equally thought by the public to have been a state-sanctioned execution like that of JFK.
It is unclear whether the African-American Muslim leader believed the U.S. government was behind Kennedy’s death, but chances are he was not naïve enough to think that the same machinations used abroad could not be implemented by those very forces domestically to remove someone elected by the American people they opposed. If the Kennedy assassination was indeed a result of the “unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex” which his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower even famously warned of during his farewell address, what took place was almost certainly a secret putsch. The president had already been undercut by his own Joint Chiefs of Staff and Central Intelligence Agency in trying to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis and his back-channel negotiations with Nikita Khrushchev were sabotaged by hawkish officials within his own administration. The internal struggle that scuttled Kennedy’s attempts at détente parallels the vying factions which undermined Trump ’s diplomacy with North Korea to a near tee.
Political scientist Michael Parenti explained in his essay The JFK Assassination: Defending the Gangster State how the 35th president was targeted by the security state which perceived Kennedy as “soft on communism” and placating the Soviet Union in his diplomatic efforts following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion:
“The dirty truth is that Kennedy was heartily hated by right-wing forces in this country, including many powerful people in the intelligence organizations. He had betrayed the national interest as they defined it, by refusing to go all out against Cuba, making overtures of rapproachment with Castro, and refusing to escalate the ground war in Vietnam. They also saw him as an anti-business liberal who was taking the country down the wrong path. Whether Kennedy really was all that liberal is another matter. What the national security rightists saw him to be was what counted.”
While the widely perceived truth about the JFK assassination remains sealed from public view, the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commissions of the 1970s exposed the numerous CIA-backed juntas which unseated popular leaders in Guatemala, Syria, Iran, the Dominican Republic, the Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, and countless other nations in the global south. Ever since, the CIA’s preferred regime change stratagem has been to use what are paradoxically labeled non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — which actually receive U.S. government funding — as cutouts to destabilize noncompliant nations under the guise of supporting “pro-democracy” opposition movements. During the Cold War, the vast majority of states overthrown were left-leaning or socialist governments aligned with the Eastern Bloc, but in the post-Soviet world many of the toppled administrations have been far from left-wing and even conservative, with their only offense favoring economic ties with Russia or China and resisting Western hegemony.
Similarly, when domestic protest movements have taken shape at home in the U.S., the political establishment has used plutocratic foundations in Big Philanthropy and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex to defang them for its own agenda. Look no further than the way the nationwide mass demonstrations against racism and police brutality this year were rapidly transformed into a movement to elect Joe Biden, who drafted the senate version of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, with no substantial legislation passed to reform police. The corporatized Black Lives Matter movement, a recipient of $100 million dollar grants from the CIA’s philanthropic frontage in the Ford Foundation, grew out of the legacy of the short-lived Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 which itself were coopted by reformist and pro-Democratic Party outfits. Not coincidentally, OWS was also infiltrated by Serbian political activist Srđa Popović of Otpor! (“Resistance!”) and the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) fame who previously led the Bulldozer Revolution which overthrew Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević in 2000.
A central component of the Gene Sharp-inspired ‘Color Revolution’ template is the engineering of contested election scenarios where leaders singled-out for regime change can be ousted after appearing to consolidate power, as seen in election-themed revolutions in Serbia (Bulldozer), Georgia (Rose), Ukraine (Orange), Kyrgyzstan (Tulip), Moldova (Grape), and other countries. The same manner in which Biden declared himself the victor in spite of the lawsuits filed in federal court was recently observed abroad in the disputed election aftermath in Belarus where U.S.-backed opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya announced herself the winner of its presidential contest in order to spark preplanned protests in Minsk against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. This was a replication of an unsuccessful blueprint from the 2009 Green Movement unrest in Iran during the incumbency of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the presidential crisis in Venezuela last year, among others.
Trump‘s lawyer Rudy Giuliani appeared to be confused when he alleged that the e-voting irregularities involving the election software company Dominion Voting Systems had ties to diseased former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and international financier George Soros, who actually supports the U.S.-backed opposition to the Chavista government in Caracas. Giuliani may be mistaken but is pointing to something accurate, except in the contested U.S. election his client is in the position of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro while Biden would be the equivalent of self-appointed “interim president” Juan Guaidó. Sans a few exceptions such as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who certainly knows a rigged contest when he sees one), most of the “international community” congratulated Biden on his assumed win just like Venezuela’s illegitimate coup leader. Meanwhile, both the pseudo-left and conservative right seem to be equally misunderstood about Soros, who is neither the charitable billionaire or “globalist” bogeyman they imagine, but rather an anti-communist business tycoon who favors vulture capitalism and Western imperialism under the banner of liberal democracy.
As touched on by Cynthia McKinney, in the aftermath of Trump’s shocking triumph over Hillary Clinton in 2016, rumors began to swirl that a Soros-funded U.S. ‘Color Revolution’ was in the works — a ‘Purple Revolution’, monikered after the noticeable shade Mrs. Clinton chose to don in her concession speech as a combination of blue and red intended to symbolize bipartisan opposition to Trump. Whether or not that was true, it was in the wee hours following her loss that the Clinton campaign reportedly settled on placing the blame at the feet of unproven Russian interference for Trump’s unlikely victory. Or was it even earlier? Recently declassified CIA memorandums proved that months before the election in July 2016, Clinton had orchestrated a plan to whip up a smear campaign tying Trump to the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee email server. The documents also showed beyond a doubt how the Russia probe was launched even though both the FBI and CIA were privy to Clinton’s intent on linking Trump with the Kremlin.
The three-year Russia investigation and subsequent impeachment over the Ukraine scandal were only the beginning chapters in the slow-motion soft coup against Trump. When all else failed, the U.S. elite began to prepare for his ouster in the 2020 election. In fact, the possibility of a second Trump term was evidently too much of a nightmare for the establishment to even fathom, so they only prepared for his defeat and presupposed refusal to relinquish power instead. Quite literally, an exclusive cabal of Washington insiders, establishment Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans were gathered by a former high-ranking Pentagon official, Nils Gilman, to participate in role-playing “election simulation” scenarios and tabletop “war game” exercises predicting various election outcomes which anticipated that Trump would resist acknowledging defeat and transferring power, precipitating a constitutional crisis. It was called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) and featured Clintonites John Podesta and Donna Brazile, who were joined by prominent neoconservative figures William Kristol, Max Boot, and the former George W. Bush speechwriter who coined the “Axis of Evil” phrase, war criminal David Frum.

Most telling is that among the scenarios considered, even in the postulated drill where the premise was a decisive victory for Trump, TIP determined that Biden should ignore the vote result and consider any measures necessary to attain the presidency, including provoking a constitutional crisis and possible civil war where Democratic-held states would be encouraged to secede from the Union, the electoral college abolished, and statehood awarded to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Upon reading the TIP report, it is clear that the real purpose of the bipartisan exercise was to mastermind the very disputed election outcome and concentration of power it predicts would be triggered by Trump. It is also possible that the project enlisted mass media in its scheme. Just weeks before Election Day, a highly-publicized scandal broke at The New Yorker magazine after staff writer and CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin accidentally exposed himself during a Zoom video meeting with fellow employees. Many were too amused to notice the online conference call was revealed to be an “election simulation” featuring top columnists of the publication role-playing as participants.
It would not be out of the realm of possibility given the unprecedented extent to which corporate outlets and Big Tech companies have gone to influence the outcome of the election. Even those within legacy media such as The New York Post, one of the oldest newspapers in the United States, found itself censored by Twitter for publishing an explosive story which contained emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop of which not even the former vice president’s campaign denied the authenticity. When Trump delivered a press conference outlining his campaign’s allegations of election fraud, major news outlets not only made the Orwellian decision to “fact check” Trump live on-air but cut away from the speech in the middle of his remarks in coordinated unison. Then when the president’s own social media posts were censored and flagged as disinformation, the jig was truly up. It’s little wonder Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg openly bragged about how the platform was “partnering with the intelligence community” for censorship to be a soft power arm after the 2016 election. Lo and behold, rather than being broken up for violating anti-trust laws, Silicon Valley has already been rewarded for staying true to its roots in the national security state by Biden’s transition team which consists of executives from Airbnb, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Dell, DropBox, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Lyft, Stripe and Uber.
Can it really be that Trump is so hated because of his rejection of certain foreign policy orthodoxies like JFK alone? The truth is really so much more. It is because of his inclination to disgrace Washington’s sacred institutions for his own political gain which the entire establishment desperately needs to maintain the faith of the masses in its corrupt political system, rogue national security state, yellow press, and obsolete democratic process. It is imperative to preserve these bureaucratic cornerstones as above criticism because they are a linchpin to holding power. As a political outsider, Trump blazed his own trail to the presidency and in doing so undermined the hallowed bastions of power in Washington, promising to “drain the swamp” while eroding faith in the leading U.S. spy agencies as an unelected secret government or “deep state”, and most of all denouncing corporate media as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” Even though these were accuracies cynically told by Trump for his own advantage, they were misunderstood by his detractors to be falsehoods simply because he was the source.
Trump’s populist agitation even worried his own group of backers within the ruling elite who convinced him to soften his rhetoric and reverse many of his positions once he took office. Since the 2020 election has not resulted in a desirable outcome, he has only continued to increase popular distrust of the political order and its mechanisms which guarantee the status quo overrides the will of the people, signaling he is more than willing to take the whole system down with him. Indeed, polls indicate many Americans seem to agree with the president that the election was rigged in Biden’s favor. This is precisely why his rabble-rousing is viewed as dangerous by the elite which unleashed its media organs and intelligence agencies from day one to sabotage him — they knew that he is willing to lay bare the full corruption of the powers that be in order to help his own cause. For this reason, the media has resorted to the most deceitful and partisan methods to portray Trump as a unique danger that most be ousted at any cost.
It is no wonder how a coalition as incongruous as that behind Biden came into formation, from Lincoln Project “Never Trumper” Republicans to the Democratic Socialists of America, Big Tech monopolies to Black Lives Matter, Wall Street megadonors to the remnants of Occupy Wall Street, Bush-era national security officials to the inappropriately-named Revolutionary Communist Party (Refuse Fascism), and so on. Or to really give an idea of just how absurd the ideological alliance was to ensure a Biden presidency, the Transition Integrity Project was even shamefully promoted by the likes of so-called “progressive” news outlets like Democracy Now! which made its journalistic name critically covering the very neoconservative figures from the Bush years behind TIP. Somehow, those in power managed to persuade the “anti-establishment” to side with them against the bad orange man as the supposed greater evil, tricking them into defending institutions they should oppose as inviolable and the archaic U.S. electoral system which deprives them of real democracy as unimpeachable. This is the real legacy of the Trump era — only time will tell if it is its lesson.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com
The Great Pretext… for Dystopia
In their World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret bring us the voice of would-be Global Governance.

Viewing the virtual-reality film “Collisions” at a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2016. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Diana Johnstone | Consortium News | November 24, 2020
By titling their recently published World Economic Forum treatise Covid-19: The Great Reset, the authors link the pandemic to their futuristic proposals in ways bound to be met with a chorus of “Aha!”s. In the current atmosphere of confusion and distrust, the glee with which economists Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret greet the pandemic as harbinger of their proposed socioeconomic upheaval suggests that if Covid-19 hadn’t come along by accident, they would have created it (had they been able).
In fact, World Economic Forum founder Schwab was already energetically hyping the Great Reset, using climate change as the triggering crisis, before the latest coronavirus outbreak provided him with an even more immediate pretext for touting his plans to remake the world.
The authors start right in by proclaiming that “the world as we knew it in the early months of 2020 is no more,” that radical changes will shape a “new normal.” We ourselves will be transformed. “Many of our beliefs and assumptions about what the world could or should look like will be shattered in the process.”
Throughout the book, the authors seem to gloat over the presumed effects of widespread “fear” of the virus, which is supposed to condition people to desire the radical changes they envisage. They employ technocratic psychobabble to announce that the pandemic is already transforming the human mentality to conform to the new reality they consider inevitable.
“Our lingering and possibly lasting fear of being infected with a virus … will thus speed the relentless march of automation…” Really?
“The pandemic may increase our anxiety about sitting in an enclosed space with complete strangers, and many people may decide that staying home to watch the latest movie or opera is the wisest option.”
“There are other first round effects that are much easier to anticipate. Cleanliness is one of them. The pandemic will certainly heighten our focus on hygiene. A new obsession with cleanliness will particularly entail the creation of new forms of packaging. We will be encouraged not to touch the products we buy. Simple pleasures like smelling a melon or squeezing a fruit will be frowned upon and may even become a thing of the past.”
This is the voice of would-be Global Governance. From on high, experts decide what the masses ought to want, and twist the alleged popular wishes to fit the profit-making schemes they are peddling. Their schemes center on digital innovation, massive automation using “artificial intelligence,” finally even “improving” human beings by endowing them artificially with some of the attributes of robots: such as problem-solving devoid of ethical distractions.
Engineer-economist Klaus Schwab, born in Ravensburg, Germany, in 1938, founded his World Economic Forum in 1971, attracting massive sponsorship from international corporations. It meets once a year in Davos, Switzerland – last time in January 2020 and next year in May, delayed because of Covid-19.

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum, on Jan. 21, 2015. (World Economic Forum, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A Powerful Lobby
What is it, exactly? I would describe the WEF as a combination capitalist consulting firm and gigantic lobby. The futuristic predictions are designed to guide investors into profitable areas in what Schwab calls “the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)” and then, as the areas are defined, to put pressure on governments to support such investments by way of subsidies, tax breaks, procurement, regulations and legislation. In short, the WEF is the lobby for new technologies, digital everything, artificial intelligence, transhumanism.
It is powerful today because it is operating in an environment of State Capitalism, where the role of the State (especially in the United States, less so in Europe) has been largely reduced to responding positively to the demands of such lobbies, especially the financial sector. Immunized by campaign donations from the obscure wishes of ordinary people, most of today’s politicians practically need the guidance of lobbies such as the WEF to tell them what to do.
In the 20th century, notably in the New Deal, the government was under pressure from conflicting interests. The economic success of the armaments industry during World War II gave birth to a Military-Industrial Complex, which has become a permanent structural factor in the U.S. economy.
It is the dominant role of the MIC and its resulting lobbies that have definitively transformed the nation into State Capitalism rather than a Republic.
The proof of this transformation is the unanimity with which Congress never balks at approving grotesquely inflated military budgets. The MIC has spawned media and Think Tanks which ceaselessly indoctrinate the public in the existential need to keep pouring the nation’s wealth into weapons of war. Insofar as voters do not agree, they can find no means of political expression with elections monopolized by two pro-MIC parties.
The WEF can be seen as analogous to the MIC. It intends to engage governments and opinion manufacturers in the promotion of a “4IR” which will dominate the civilian economy and civilian life itself.
The pandemic is a temporary pretext; the need to “protect the environment” will be the more sustainable pretext. Just as the MIC is presented as absolutely necessary to “protect our freedoms,” the 4IR will be hailed as absolutely necessary to “save the environment” – and in both cases, many of the measures advocated will have the opposite effect.

Public street art on 6th Street in Austin, Texas, depicting the impact of Covid-19 closings. (Leah Rodgers, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
So far, the techno-tyranny of Schwab’s 4IR has not quite won its place in U.S. State Capitalism. But its prospects are looking good. Silicon Valley contributed heavily to the Joe Biden campaign, and Biden hastened to appoint its moguls to his transition team.
But the real danger of all power going to the Reset lies not with what is there, but with what is not there: any serious political opposition.
Can Democracy Be Restored?
The Great Reset has a boulevard open to it for the simple reason that there is nothing in its way. No widespread awareness of the issues, no effective popular political organization, nothing. Schwab’s dystopia is frightening simply for that reason.
The 2020 presidential election has just illustrated the almost total depoliticization of the American people. That may sound odd considering the violent partisan emotions displayed. But it was all much ado about nothing.
There were no real issues debated, no serious political questions raised either about war or about the directions of future economic development. The vicious quarrels were about persons, not policy. Bumbling Trump was accused of being “Hitler,” and Wall Street-beholden Democrat warhawks were described by Trumpists as “socialists.” Lies, insults and confusion prevailed.
A revival of democracy could stem from organized, concentrated study of the issues raised by the Davos planners, in order to arouse an informed public opinion to evaluate which technical innovations are socially acceptable and which are not.
Cries of alarm from the margins will not influence the intellectual relationship of forces. What is needed is for people to get together everywhere to study the issues and develop well-reasoned opinions on goals and methods of future development.
Unless faced with informed and precise critiques, Silicon Valley and its corporate and financial allies will simply proceed in doing whatever they imagine they can do, whatever the social effects.
Serious evaluation should draw distinctions between potentially beneficial and unwelcome innovations, to prevent popular notions from being used to gain acceptance of every “technological advance,” however ominous.
Redefining Issues
The political distinctions between left and right, between Republican and Democrat, have grown more impassioned just as they reveal themselves to be incoherent, distorted and irrelevant, based more on ideological bias than on facts. New and more fruitful political alignments could be built through confrontation with specific concrete issues.
We could take the proposals of the Great Reset one by one and examine them in both pragmatic and ethical terms.

(Bob Mical, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
No. 1 – Thanks to the pandemic, there has been a great increase in the use of teleconferences, using Skype, Zoom or other new platforms. The WEF welcomes this as a trend. Is it bad for that reason? To be fair, this innovation is positive in enabling many people to attend conferences without the expense, trouble and environmental cost of air travel. It has the negative side of preventing direct human contact. This is a simple issue, where positive points seem to prevail.
No. 2 – Should higher education go online, with professors giving courses to students via internet? This is a vastly more complicated question, which should be thoroughly discussed by educational institutions themselves and the communities they serve, weighing the pros and cons, remembering that those who provide the technology want to sell it, and care little about the value of human contact in education – not only human contact between student and professor, but often life-determining contacts between students themselves. Online courses may benefit geographically isolated students, but breaking up the educational community would be a major step toward the destruction of human community altogether.
No. 3 – Health and “well-being”. Here is where the discussion should heat up considerably. According to Schwab and Malleret: “Three industries in particular will flourish (in the aggregate) in the post-pandemic era: big tech, health and wellness.” For the Davos planners, the three merge.
Those who think that well-being is largely self-generated, dependent on attitudes, activity and lifestyle choices, miss the point. “The combination of AI [artificial intelligence], the IoT [internet of things] and sensors and wearable technology will produce new insights into personal well-being. They will model how we are and feel […] precise information on our carbon footprints, our impact on biodiversity, on the toxicity of all the ingredients we consume and the environments or spatial contexts in which we evolve will generate significant progress in terms of our awareness of collective and individual well-being.”
Question: do we really want or need all this cybernetic narcissism? Can’t we just enjoy life by helping a friend, stroking a cat, reading a book, listening to Bach or watching a sunset? We better make up our minds before they make over our minds.

User being monitored in a biometrics lab. (Grish068, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
No. 4 – Food. In order not to spoil my healthy appetite, I’ll skip over this. The tech wizards would like to phase out farmers, with all their dirty soil and animals, and industrially manufacture enhanced artificial foods created in nice clean labs – out of what exactly?
The Central Issue: Homo Faber
No. 5 – What about human work?
“In all likelihood, the recession induced by the pandemic will trigger a sharp increase in labor-substitution, meaning that physical labor will be replaced by robots and ‘intelligent’ machines, which will in turn provoke lasting and structural changes in the labor market.”
This replacement has already been underway for decades. Along with outsourcing and immigration, it has already weakened the collective power of labor. But clearly, the tech industries are poised to go much, much further and faster in throwing humans out of work.
The Covid-19 crisis and social distancing have “suddenly accelerated this process of innovation and technological change. Chatbots, which often use the same voice recognition technology behind Amazon’s Alexa, and other software that can replace tasks normally performed by human employees, are being rapidly introduced. These innovations provoked by necessity (i.e. sanitary measures) will soon result in hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of job losses.”
Cutting labor costs has long been the guiding motive of these innovations, along with the internal dynamic of technology industry to “do whatever it can do.” Then socially beneficial pretexts are devised in justification. Like this:
“As consumers may prefer automated services to face-to-face interactions for some time to come, what is currently happening with call centers will inevitably occur in other sectors as well.”
“Consumers may prefer…”! Everyone I know complains of the exasperation of trying to reach the bank or insurance company to explain an emergency, and instead to be confronted with a dead voice and a choice of irrelevant numbers to click. Perhaps I am underestimating the degree of hostility toward our fellow humans that now pervades society, but my impression is that there is a vast unexpressed public demand for LESS automated services and MORE contact with real persons who can think outside the algorithm and can actually UNDERSTAND the problem, not simply cough up preprogrammed fixes.

“Corporate agility in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” session held in Tianjin,China, September 2018. (World Economic Forum, Faruk Pinjo, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
There is a potential movement out there. But we hear nothing of it, being persuaded by our media that the greatest problem facing people in their daily lives is to hear someone exhibit confusion over someone else’s confused gender.
In this, I maintain, consumer demand would merge with the desperate need of able-minded human beings to earn a living. The technocrats earn theirs handsomely by eliminating the means to earn a living of other people.
Here is one of their great ideas. “In cities as varied as Hangzhou, Washington DC and Tel Aviv, efforts are under way to move from pilot programs to large-scale operations capable of putting an army of delivery robots on the road and in the air.” What a great alternative to paying human deliverers a living wage!
And incidentally, a guy riding a delivery bicycle is using renewable energy. But all those robots and drones? Batteries, batteries and more batteries, made of what materials, coming from where and manufactured how? By more robots? Where is the energy coming from to replace not only fossil fuels, but also human physical effort?
At the last Davos meeting, Israeli intellectual Yuval Harari issued a dire warning that:
“Whereas in the past, humans had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance… Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new ‘useless class’ – not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.”
No. 5 – And the military. Our capitalist prophets of doom foresee the semi-collapse of civil aviation and the aeronautical industry as people all decide to stay home glued to their screens. But not to worry!
“This makes the defense aerospace sector an exception and a relatively safe haven.” For capital investment, that is. Instead of vacations on sunny beaches, we can look forward to space wars. It may happen sooner rather than later, because, as the Brookings Institution concludes in a 2018 report on “How artificial intelligence is transforming the world,” everything is going faster, including war:
“The big data analytics associated with AI will profoundly affect intelligence analysis, as massive amounts of data are sifted in near real time … thereby providing commanders and their staffs a level of intelligence analysis and productivity heretofore unseen. Command and control will similarly be affected as human commanders delegate certain routine, and in special circumstances, key decisions to AI platforms, reducing dramatically the time associated with the decision and subsequent action.”
So, no danger that some soft-hearted officer will hesitate to start World War III because of a sentimental attachment to humanity. When the AI platform sees an opportunity, go for it!
“In the end, warfare is a time competitive process, where the side able to decide the fastest and move most quickly to execution will generally prevail. Indeed, artificially intelligent intelligence systems, tied to AI-assisted command and control systems, can move decision support and decision-making to a speed vastly superior to the speeds of the traditional means of waging war. So fast will be this process especially if coupled to automatic decisions to launch artificially intelligent autonomous weapons systems capable of lethal outcomes, that a new term has been coined specifically to embrace the speed at which war will be waged: hyperwar.”
Americans have a choice. Either continue to quarrel over trivialities or wake up, really wake up, to the reality being planned and do something about it.
The future is shaped by investment choices. Not by naughty speech, not even by elections, but by investment choices. For the people to regain power, they must reassert their command over how and for what purposes capital is invested.
And if private capital balks, it must be socialized. This is the only revolution – and it is also the only conservatism, the only way to conserve decent human life. It is what real politics is about.
Diana Johnstone lives in Paris. Her latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher and is also the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her lates book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr .
What NO ONE is Saying About The Lockdowns
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If you are advocating for lockdowns, you are complicit in tearing families apart. You are complicit in inflicting untold suffering on millions of people around the world. You are complicit in casting the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies into even further grinding poverty. You are complicit in murder.
TRANSCRIPT
This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com. November 24, 2020
In 2006, a 15-year-old high school student from Albuquerque, New Mexico won third place in the Intel science and engineering fair for her project on slowing the spread of an infectious pathogen during a pandemic emergency. Using a computer simulation that she developed with the help of her father, she argued that in order to slow the spread of the disease, governments should implement school shutdowns, keep kids at home and enforce social distancing.
Incredibly, that third place high school science fair project can be tied directly to the lockdown policies being implemented by governments around the world today. You see, that father that she developed her computer simulation with was no average doting dad, but a senior researcher at Sandia National Laboratories who at that time was working on pandemic emergency response plans for the US Department of Homeland Security. His proposal to implement school shutdowns and, if need be, workplace shutdowns in the event of a pandemic emergency was developed at least in part in response to his daughter’s high school project.
Now those advocating for lockdowns have seen the destruction and death that those policies have wrought this year and we are living through that right now. Not only are people being deprived of their livelihoods and forced into grinding poverty as a direct result of these shutdowns, but now the undeniable truth is that if you are advocating for lockdowns, you are advocating for some portion of the population to be consigned to death.
This is no longer debatable. It is even openly admitted—although months too late by the World Health Organization.
DAVID NABARRO: I want to say it again: we in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as a primary means of control of this virus. [. . .] We may well have a doubling of world poverty by early next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents and poor families are not able to afford it.
This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe, actually. And so we really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method. Develop better systems for doing it. Work together and learn from each other. But remember, lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.
SOURCE: The Week in 60 Minutes #6
This is the point at which, no doubt, I’ll be expected to produce the data to back up the non-controversial observation that lockdowns kill, even though that data will do precisely nothing to penetrate the consciousness of those who have already decided that they occupy the moral high ground for advocating locking billions of people around the globe as prisoners inside their own homes. But persevere I will.
I’ll point, for example, to the letter signed by hundreds of doctors calling the lockdowns themselves a “mass casualty incident” and exhorting politicians to end the shutdowns.
I’ll point to the research that shows that thousands of people will die because of delays to cancer surgery treatments as a result of the medical shutdowns.
I’ll point to the research of the Well-Being Trust showing that 75,000 Americans are expected to die deaths of despair—including alcohol and drug misuse and suicide—this year alone as a result of the lockdowns.
I will point to the research of The Lancet showing that 265 million people are expected to be thrown into severe food insecurity as a result of these lockdowns.
I will even point to the research showing 125,000 children are expected to die from malnutrition as a result of these lockdowns.
But, as I say, none of these deaths will matter to those who have already decided that they are right and virtuous for advocating locking vast swathes of the human population inside their own homes to starve to death in the name of slowing the spread of a disease that even the epidemiologists who have been wrong about everything this year tell us will kill less than one percent of the infected.
Yes, slowing the spread, not stopping the spread. This was never about stopping a pandemic. Even the lockdown advocates never advocated that. But somehow that has been forgotten and “15 days to flatten the curve” has turned into a never-ending carte blanche for the biosecurity state to implement any number of draconian policies on its population, any number of policies on the checklist of the would-be dictator. Not only locking people inside their own homes, but constant surveillance of the population through the contact tracing and tracking apps that are increasingly being implemented around the globe, and, inevitably, the proposals for mandating the experimental vaccines which agents of the state will forcibly inject into people against their will.
This is not acceptable.
We cannot allow this to stand.
If we forsake this, our most basic right—the right to step foot outside of our own homes—then we forsake our humanity itself. An important part of what makes us human is being taken away from us in the name of stopping the spread of COVID-19.
But there is good news for those who have managed to retain their sanity in the time of insanity. We do not need a complicated plan in order to subvert this agenda. We do not need special deputization or to ask permission from the government. We do not need to join any particular political party or even any particular protest movement.
All we have to do is disobey these unlawful “orders.”
CASSIE ZERVOS: The persistent anti-lockdown protesters said they will not forget Melbourne’s strict 112 day measures as they took to the steps of Parliament. They carried signs saying “Don’t trust the government” and chanted for police to join them in their rally.
SOURCE: Melbourne anti-COVID lockdown protest turns ugly outside Parliament House
BUSINESS OWNER: I’ve lost friends who’ve killed themselves. I’ve seen clients die because they’ve lost their livelihood.
HEALTH INSPECTOR: I’m sorry to hear that.
BUSINESS OWNER: I know you are and i’m just a—I’m asking for you to guys have some compassion.
SOURCE: Buffalo, New York Business Owners Stand Up to Cuomo Lockdown Orders
ASHLEY DRIEMEYER: Can he arrest us all? Because, from what I am gathering, in this area we are all banding together and going against our governor.
SOURCE: Illinois restaurant owner will defy new state restrictions
[CROWD BANGS POTS AND PANS DURING PROTEST]
SOURCE: Protests in Denmark – Epidemic law and mandatory vaccines – EPIDEMILOV
BUSINESS OWNERS: Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!
SOURCE: Buffalo, New York Business Owners Stand Up to Cuomo Lockdown Orders
If you have managed to retain your sanity during this time of widespread insanity, I applaud you and wish to assure you that you are not alone. Many, many people all around the world are defying orders. They are protesting against these lockdowns. They are standing up. They are disobeying.
But of course the corporate controlled press don’t want you to know that disobedience is an option on the table and they will not report on this. But disobedience is an option. Open your business. Leave your home. Do not ask for permission. Disobey.
To those who are still advocating for lockdowns, I encourage you to do so to the face of those parents who have lost their teenage children due to suicide as a direct result of the shutdowns and tell them that their child’s death doesn’t matter because it wasn’t listed as being due to COVID-19. Or do so to the face of the tens of thousands of others who have already lost loved ones as a direct result of these shutdown or the hundreds of thousands more who will die as long as these lockdowns endure.
If you are advocating for lockdowns, you are complicit in tearing families apart. You are complicit in inflicting untold suffering on millions of people around the world. You are complicit in casting the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies into even further grinding poverty. You are complicit in murder.
A line is being crossed right now. Which side of history are you on? Make your decision now and make it wisely, because your actions during these times will not be forgotten.
You have been warned.
This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com.
Propaganda, Election Fraud and the Death of Journalism
By Frank Miele | Real Clear Politics | November 23, 2020
Easy question: Is it illegal to steal an election or not?
You would have to assume that it is no big deal based on the response to claims of widespread fraud in the contest between President Trump and Joe Biden. Big Media says the evidence just doesn’t exist, and most Americans seem to be lost in a blue haze of blind acceptance that whatever they are told by the talking heads on TV must be true.
This kind of unthinking obedience to authority is a frightening harbinger of an America that is no longer a nation of laws, but rather a nation of edicts. You can already see that unfolding in the sheep-like acceptance of COVID-19 restrictions that blatantly ignore the Constitution. But if you dare do your own independent assessment of facts — whether regarding the efficacy of mask use in preventing spread of coronavirus or regarding the security of electronic voting — you will quickly come to a different conclusion than that which is approved by Big Tech, Big Media and Big Money.
Unfortunately, most people don’t take the time to do their own research. They simply believe whatever is told to them. For those in thrall to the establishment media, that means they believe that Trump’s allegations of election fraud are “baseless.” Remember, the media made that declaration within hours of the election, long before any evidence had been presented in a court of law and before analysis had begun on the raw vote totals. Once that narrative was established, it didn’t matter how many affidavits were presented, how many witnesses came forward, or how much analysis suggested that the vote count may have been manipulated. The jury of the American people had already been tainted by Big Media to believe the narrative that Trump is a sore loser.
Don’t forget, the mainstream media — in the interests of public enlightenment (now known as wokeness) — have spent the past four years reporting as fact that the duly elected president of the United States is a liar, a tax cheat, a Russian puppet, and a racist. In other words, he is a con man who never should have been anywhere near the Oval Office in the first place. So why would anyone now believe his claims that Democrats used phony mail ballots, vote-counting software and foreign manipulation to steal the election? Most of the media is pretending that there is not even a real story to report in what, if true, would be one of the gravest constitutional crises in the history of our republic.
As Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said in his press conference Thursday, “The coverage of this has been almost as dishonest as the scheme itself. The American people are entitled to know this,” he warned the press. “You don’t have a right to keep it from them. You don’t have a right to lie about it.”
But, the newsrooms at CNN and MSNBC are keeping it from the public. They refused to even carry Giuliani’s press conference laying out the evidence of election fraud. As for Fox News, they covered it, and then put a reporter on the air to say the claims were “simply not true” or “baseless.” Clearly, we are not going to get the truth from the media. Has there been even one reporter for a mainstream outlet such as the Washington Post asking questions about the vulnerability of electronic voting systems to hacking or manipulation? Is any news organization demanding that the Justice Department or FBI get to the bottom of the story?
The loss of a free and neutral press means that democracy cannot work even if its elections were completely above board. The capacity of the people to self-govern is dependent on their access to true and accurate information. Sadly, the opposite principle applies as well. When journalism abandons objectivity in favor of an agenda, then the people are in the position of cattle being led to slaughter.
Thomas Jefferson described the abuses of a free press in 1814 in a letter to his friend Walter Jones:
“I deplore … the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write for them… These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief… This has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit.”
Ouch! Take that, New York Times! Take that, CNN!
Of course, it is just such a malign “party spirit” that informs almost all mainstream journalism in the Age of Trump — a spirit that is visible in the hostility towards Trump himself, but also in the accommodation towards Democrats such as Joe Biden. Last Monday’s Biden press conference was a stunning abdication of responsibility by the media for its much-vaunted role of “speaking truth to power” — or at least asking tough questions.
Three of the first four queries were merely anti-Trump questions asked in a new way. Instead of asking Trump “How do you justify your unprecedented attempt to obstruct and delay a smooth transfer of power?” the reporters merely asked Biden what he thought about Trump’s “unprecedented attempt” blah blah blah. Then the next three questions were about COVID, which after six months of campaigning, even Sleepy Joe Biden could answer with his eyes closed.
Isn’t the media going to hold Biden accountable just like they claimed to hold Trump accountable? Why not ask about the curious patterns of vote counting in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia that make millions of people think Biden tried to steal the election? Shouldn’t he be asked to support a full investigation to prove his victory was legitimate? How about a question about whether Hunter Biden will come out of hiding now that the election is over? How about asking the “president-in-waiting” to condemn the BLM and antifa violence that sent several innocent Trump supporters to the hospital two weeks ago?
How about our celebrity journalists celebrate their own crucial role as defenders of democracy? If they don’t want to “render themselves useless,” they need to swear allegiance to facts, wherever they lead, and not to one party. Or as Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana put it more indelicately, “They have to be equal opportunity assholes.”
But they aren’t — and sooner or later the American people will get tired of being manipulated. Journalism is supposed to give an honest account of the facts so that people can make up their own minds what they believe to be true. Propaganda, on the other hand, is a dishonest attempt to persuade people not to examine the facts for themselves. Journalism starts with facts and allows people to reach their own conclusion. Propaganda starts with a conclusion and manipulates people into accepting it as fact. You can decide for yourself whether what we have today is journalism or propaganda.
But the bottom line is this: Whether or not Donald Trump can prove his case in court should be irrelevant to the job of the press. What honest reporters ought to recognize is the significance of the allegation itself, the historical nature of the crime being alleged, and the importance to the future of our republic that the case must be heard.
Too bad there are so few honest reporters left.
Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His new book “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com to read his daily commentary or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Parler @HeartlandDiary.
A dozen compelling allegations of voting irregularities in 2020 election
By John Solomon | Just the News | November 23, 2020
While many Democrats and their allies in the traditional media argue there is no evidence of systemic voting irregularities in the Nov. 3 election, a mountain of evidence has been amassed in private lawsuits alleging there was, in fact, significant and widespread voting misconduct.
The question for the courts is whether the irregularities were widespread enough to impact the outcome or erase Joe Biden’s lead in at least three of the six battleground states where results are being contested.
And while both President Trump’s campaign and private entities like the Amistad Project are planning to file more lawsuits on Monday, Just the News reviewed the scores of filings and affidavits and declarations in the court cases.
Here are the 12 most compelling pieces of evidence presented to the courts as of Sunday night:
City of Detroit worker swears she witnessed thousands of ballots being falsified
Of all the sworn statements to date, career civil servant Jessy Jacob of Detroit provided the most sweeping claim of election fraud.
She stated in an affidavit she personally witnessed — and in some cases was instructed — to backdate thousands of absentee ballots the day after the election to make them appear legal even though they were not in the Qualified Voter File and had not arrived by the deadline. “I estimate that this was done to thousands of ballots,” her sworn statement says.
Jacob also described how in the weeks before Election Day she witnessed Detroit poll workers skipping voter ID checks and that she was “instructed by my supervisor to adjust the mailing date of these absentee ballot packages to be dated earlier than they were actually sent. The supervisor was making announcements for all workers to engage in this practice.”
File
Jacob described 70 to 80 other poll workers who also were instructed to falsify ballots, potentially a massive fraud.
Nearly three quarters of Detroit’s precincts had mismatched voting totals
Wayne County Board of Canvassing member William Hartmann, a Republican, says in a sworn declaration that Michigan’s largest county certified results knowing there were massive discrepancies between the approved voter files and the ballots cast and counted in Detroit.
“In my review of the results, I determined that approximately 71% of Detroit’s 134 absentee voter counting boards were left unbalanced and many unexplained,” his statement said.
Hartmann also raised concerns that birth dates in voter ID files “were altered in the pollbooks.”
File
Unfolded, pristine mail-in ballots flagged in Georgia
At least nine observers who watched an audit last week in Georgia’s razor-thin election have signed affidavits swearing they saw suspicious mail-in ballots, almost uniformly cast for Biden. The ballots were in pristine condition and had no creases on them, meaning the ballots had not been mailed in envelopes as required, according to the affidavits.
“It was pristine. There was a difference in the texture of the paper — it was as if they were intended for absentee use, but had not been used for that purpose,” Susan Voyles, a poll manager with two decades of experience, wrote in her affidavit about her time at a recount center in Fulton County. “There were no markings on the ballots to show where they had come from, or where they had been processed. I observed that the markings for the candidates on these ballots were unusually uniform, perhaps even with a ballot marking device.”
Thousands of ballots went uncounted initially in Georgia, belatedly discovered during audit
Election officials divulged last week that thousands of uncounted ballots were discovered in Georgia, most favoring Trump, during a post-election audit. They include:
- 2,600 uncounted ballots in Floyd County.
- 2,755 ballots in Fayette County that were not included in the original count
- 508 ballots in Walton County
Large numbers of Pennsylvania voters say their absentee votes weren’t counted or someone else requested their mail-in ballot
Just the News interviewed numerous Pennsylvania voters who say either their mail-in ballots were never counted or that someone else had appeared to request and obtained their mail-in ballots. A data scientist then projected from sampling that the problems were widespread.
In a sworn declaration, a respected mathematician says his analysis of election data and phone interviews with Pennsylvania voters raises questions about as many as 100,000 absentee ballots requested in the key battleground state where President Trump and Joe Biden are separated by just about 82,000 votes.
Williams College Professor Steven Miller, a Yale and Princeton trained math expert, said he analyzed Pennsylvania ballot data collected by former Trump campaign data chief Matt Braynard as well as 2,684 voter interviews conducted by a phone bank and found two concerning patterns. One involved possible votes that were not counted, the other ballots that appeared to be requested by someone other than a registered voter.
“I estimate that the number of ballots that were either requested by someone other than the registered Republican or requested and returned but not counted range from 89,397 to 98,801,” Miller said in the sworn statement provided to Just the News.
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Miller_DeclarationAndAnalyisPA_GOP_BallotRequestData_2020_Final.pdf
Las Vegas Review Journal columnist Victor Joecks disclosed he signed a total of nine other voters’ mail-in ballot envelops and eight of the ballots were accepted even though it was not the signature of the voter. That’s an 89% failure rate for Clark County’s signature validation techniques.
“It’s unclear how much voter fraud took place in Nevada,” Joecks wrote. “But it’s clear signature verification isn’t the fail-safe security check elections officials made it out to be.”
Joecks discussed the security weaknesses in a podcast with Just the News last week.
Social worker charged in Texas with submitting voter registration applications for nursing home residents
Kelly Reagan Brunner, a social worker in the Mexia State Supported Living Center in Texas, was charged with submitting voter registration applications for dozens of facility residents absent signatures or effective consent, including some residents who are not even eligible.
“State Supported Living Centers serve people with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” a press release from the Texas attorney general states. “Brunner submitted voter registration applications for 67 residents without their signature or effective consent, while purporting to act as their agent.
“Under Texas law, only a parent, spouse or child who is a qualified voter of the county may act as an agent in registering a person to vote, after being appointed to do so by that person. None of the SSLC patients gave effective consent to be registered, and a number of them have been declared totally mentally incapacitated by a court, thereby making them ineligible to vote in Texas.”
Computer issue in Oakland County, Mich., blamed as a GOP incumbent belatedly declared winner after first being told he lost.
While it had appeared that incumbent Republican Adam Kochenderfer had narrowly lost an Oakland County commissioner election contest, it turned out that he had actually won.
“A computer issue in Rochester Hills caused them to send us results for seven precincts as both precinct votes and absentee votes,” Oakland County Director of Elections Joe Rozell said in a text message, according to the Detroit Free Press. “They should only have been sent to us as absentee votes.”
Antrim County, Mich., reversed election results after error found
Due to an issue in Antrim County, Mich., it appeared that Biden had outpolled Trump according to the unofficial vote count. But it ultimately turned out that the president had actually beaten Biden in the county. According to a Nov. 7 statement from Michigan’s Secretary of State, Democrat Jocelyn Benson, “user error” was to blame for the incorrect unofficial results.
“The error in reporting unofficial results in Antrim County Michigan was the result of a user error that was quickly identified and corrected; did not affect the way ballots were actually tabulated; and would have been identified in the county canvass before official results were reported even if it had not been identified earlier,” according to the statement.
Numerous Republicans poll observers in multiple states say they were improperly ejected
From Michigan to Pennsylvania, numerous GOP poll observers say they were ejected or improperly kept from monitoring ballot-counting in big city election centers. Bipartisan poll watching is supposed to be one of the most important protections against fraud.
David Shestokas, a Chicago-based lawyer who joined several dozen other lawyers and Allegheny County residents to poll-watch in Pittsburgh, said observers for campaigns “were maybe 15, 20 feet from many of the tables, in a coral. Other tables may have been 100-150 feet away.”
“We literally had no input and no ability to watch anything,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, each and every one of those ballots was opened illegally.”
Voter drive in Nevada targeting Native Americans offered gifts as voting incentives
A get-out-the-vote effort by a Nevada Native American group included a raffle with cash prizes, a tactic the Trump campaign says amounted to an illegal incentive to vote.
The Nevada Native Vote Project, a group that seeks to “increase civic participation of the Indigenous populations in Nevada,” sponsored a “virtual raffle” during this year’s presidential election, according to a post on the group’s Facebook page.
The event, sponsored jointly with the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, informed voters that they would be entered in a raffle if they sent in a photograph of themselves with an “I Voted” sticker and/or a “ballot completion form.”
Among the prizes in the raffle were four $250 gift cards, four $100 gift cards and eight $25 gift cards, as well as “beadwork, t-shirts & more,” the raffle poster advertised.
Los Angeles prosecutors uncover scheme in which thousands of fraudulent ballots cast
Two men were charged last week with 41 counts for allegedly submitting thousands of fraudulent voter registration applications on behalf of homeless people, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office .
Marcos Raul Arevalo, 34, and 53-year-old Carlos Antonio De Bourbon Montenegro, aka Mark Anthony Gonsalves, were each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit voter fraud, eight counts of voter fraud, four counts of procuring and offering a false or forged instrument and four misdemeanor counts.



