Caught on camera – how Trump was robbed of the 2020 election
By Thomas Lane | TCW Defending Freedom | May 19, 2022
Joe Biden is president of the United States. That is an indisputable fact. But how he got to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is questionable.
The statistical anomalies of the 2020 election alone make Biden’s victory seem dubious. Here are a few, of many, examples:
Donald Trump’s campaign rallies filled stadiums with tens of thousands of supporters; Biden’s campaign events – when he left the basement – hardly attracted a dozen. If these candidates were two musicians, and one was selling out arenas while the other was struggling to fill a little pub, which act would a record company executive bet on becoming a gold-record performer?
For the past ten American presidential elections, 19 counties, often referred to as the ‘bellwether counties’, predicted the outcome of the race. In 2020, Donald Trump won 18 of these counties, but Biden won the presidency.
At midnight on election night, vote counting mysteriously stopped in five states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and North Carolina – where Trump had a significant lead over Biden. The next morning, Biden suddenly had more votes than Trump. One is expected to believe that nearly 100 per cent of the votes which arrived during this suspicious pause were for Biden?
Certain that the election was fraught with fraud, Trump and some of his supporters challenged the results of the 2020 election with dozens of lawsuits. But most of the cases were dismissed by judges due to ‘lack of standing’, which is a legal term that states ‘the party has not alleged a sufficient legal interest and injury to participate in the case’.
However, Dinesh D’Souza’s new political documentary, 2,000 Mules, just might give Trump’s lawsuits a leg to stand on.
Using geotracking, a technology which locates the exact position of a person by obtaining data from his or her smartphone or similar devices, Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote were able to expose a couple of thousand mules (people who illegally collected and deposited voting ballots) travelling between pro-Biden campaign offices and ballot drop boxes during the final month of the election season.
Engelbrecht and Phillips then obtained security camera footage of the mules stuffing the drop boxes with ballots. The mules’ activity ranged from just a few ballots deposited in several boxes throughout the month, to nearly 300 mules visiting one box and depositing 1,900 ballots (10x the average) in a single day.
In the most compelling scene in the documentary, D’Souza multiplies the number of mules by the number of their drop-box visits, then multiplies that number by the number of ballots deposited by each mule to get a total number of illegal votes. He does this calculation for each swing state where Biden won, then subtracts the number of illegal votes from Biden’s total. Spoiler alert: Mules concludes that Trump won the 2020 election.
D’Souza and his team have done their part: they have exposed the criminals and the crime. Between the geotracking data and the surveillance footage, they have evidence of over 2,000 people committing felonies. However, their hands are tied because they are mere citizens. As D’Souza concludes in the film: ‘It is time for law enforcement to step in.’
Christopher Steele, author of the infamous ‘Trump pee-tape’ dossier, stands by his ludicrous claims in a fawning ABC interview
By Michael McCaffrey | RT | October 18, 2021
Former MI6 man Christipher Steele is the subject of an obscenely vapid ABC documentary, with a contemptible interview by George Stephanopoulos that’s so deferential it’s like watching a first date that should be an interrogation.
Just as MI6 super spy James Bond is back in theatres with No Time to Die, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele is back in the spotlight with the story that refuses to die, in an ABC ‘documentary’ titled Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier, now streaming on Hulu.
Steele came to fame as the shadowy force behind the Steele Dossier, the document which was the spark that lit the Trump-Russia collusion fire that was doused in gasoline by obsessive partisan media coverage and numerous, spurious government investigations for the last five years. The dossier claimed that then-candidate Trump was “colluding with Moscow” and that those devious Russians had “kompromat” on Trump in the golden form of a “pee tape.”
Steele’s “coming out of the shadows” consists of him sitting down with George Stephanopoulos and having a cuddle session on fancy sofas in a posh apartment.
Stephanopoulos is the perfect choice for the softball interview since he and Steele have a lot in common – they’ve both worked for the Clintons. Stephanopoulos as adviser to President Bill Clinton and Steele as de facto dirt-finder for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
ABC tried to stretch the excruciatingly thin gruel of this supposed ‘interview’ into an hour-long documentary by adding talking heads from their own newsroom. They failed, as the end result is a one-hour show that is hilariously shallow and vapid, even by ABC News standards.
Out of the Shadows spends considerably more time rehashing the “history” of Russia, Vladimir Putin and Trump than it does actually talking to Steele. Russia is deemed “a rogue state virus spreading westward with its villainy,” Putin a “KGB killer,” and Trump a “threat to American democracy.” In other words, it’s standard establishment media talking points.
Steele’s background is somewhat explored, but being the ever-diligent super spy that he is, Steele never explicitly states that he worked for MI6. I guess he doesn’t want to blow his cover.
What Steele actually says in this interview is of strikingly minimal impact. Thanks to Stephanopoulos’ anti-journalistic, anti-adversarial, deferential approach, no new ground is broken.
It’s well-known that Steele didn’t just compile the dossier, he actively pushed it to media outlets, in effect working to try and scupper Trump’s election campaign. The fact that he was ostensibly working for Democrats at the time certainly makes it appear as if he was a part of a wider disinformation/interference operation, but of course that’s a topic Stephanopoulos whistles past in this patty-cake chat.
Steele admits to no wrongdoing or error, despite the U.S. intelligence agencies “eviscerating” his findings after thorough investigation, and the FBI labelling him “untrustworthy.”
The issue of the “sources” Steele uses doesn’t get the attention it deserves either, as it’s reported that he only used one “key collector,” but Steele is quick to make clear it was “one collector” but not “one source.” That seems like a distinction without a difference.
As the documentary reports, that one collector was not a person in Moscow, but actually someone in Washington DC whose name is not revealed. The Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported this person claimed that the information being given to Steele was “word of mouth and hearsay.” In other words, Steele was acting less as an intelligence expert seeking truth with his dossier than he was being a gossip columnist spreading rumor and innuendo.
Steele’s declaration, “I stand by the work we did, the sources we had, and the professionalism we applied to it,” is as devoid of substance as the rest of the interview.
The most damning aspect comes toward the end, and even that is soft pedaled, when Stephanopoulos asks Steele about both the dossier’s allegation that Trump counsel Michael Cohen went to Prague to meet with Russian intelligence and about the pee tape.
Cohen denies a Prague meeting ever took place, and since he has now flipped against Trump, one would assume he’s telling the truth. But Steele’s resolve remains, as he conjures up a wild scenario where Cohen is still lying because he wants to avoid being charged with treason.
Stephanopoulos, of course, lets this utter lunacy pass almost without notice. He could’ve asked Steele how exactly Cohen got to Prague, since his passport shows no travel to the Czech Republic. Or pressed Steele to provide details or at least a passable explanation for how that meeting could possibly have taken place? But he didn’t, he just smiled and continued playing footsie with Steele.
The ‘pee tape’ is the most salacious accusation in the dossier, and despite it never surfacing and no evidence it exists, Steele still stands by the claim…sort of. He says that the tape “probably does” exist but that he wouldn’t “put 100% certainty on it.”
When Stephanopoulos asks why the tape hasn’t come out, Steele replies that “it hasn’t needed to be released…because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president.”
Look, I loathe Trump, always have and always will, but this sounds like the ravings of someone deeply infected with a ferocious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is maybe why he is still taken seriously by the equally afflicted establishment media.
The more you know about Steele, the more readily apparent it becomes that he’s an absolute charlatan and bullshit artist masquerading as a serious intelligence expert. He’s no James Bond, he’s not even George Smiley. He’s more like a cross between Mr. Bean and Inspector Clouseau, who should, like this vacant and vacuous interview/documentary, be relentlessly ridiculed and righteously disrespected.
Critics love Fauci’s new documentary, but audience hate it and accuse Rotten Tomatoes of ‘hiding’ low score
RT | October 11, 2021
Critics have almost universally praised the new documentary on Dr. Anthony Fauci, but audiences have seemingly hated it, even accusing review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes of trying to hide the movie’s unpopularity.
National Geographic’s ‘Fauci’ has been playing in select cinemas since September 10 and premiered on the Disney Plus streaming service last week. Trailers for the film focus heavily on Fauci and his work combating Covid-19, during which time he has become one of the more controversial figures in American politics.
The film, however, takes a positive look at Fauci and focuses more on tales about the health figure from his family, as well as public figures the infectious disease expert has worked with in the past, such as U2 frontman Bono and former President George W. Bush.
On Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates reviews from selected critics and then gives a ‘rotten’ or ‘fresh’ score, the film holds a 91% positive rating, based on 30 positive reviews and three negative. The rating from audience members, however, was conspicuously missing from the website until Monday. As of Sunday, only one review, which was negative, had been posted despite the film being out for weeks.
The site was accused of ‘hiding’ the audience score in an effort to spin the movie’s increasingly negative coverage.
On Monday, an audience score did appear, and it showed valleys of difference in opinion from critics to the audience, with users awarding the film a 2% average from over 250 ratings (though it began with a 4% rating that has continually dropped). Despite the average now showing, there is still a lack of actual user reviews on the site, though many users may have chosen to simply drop a rating instead of writing a review.
“Two Americas,” writer Josh Jordan tweeted, including a screenshot of the ‘Tomatometer’ for ‘Fauci’ along with the recently-released comedy special from Dave Chappelle, which has been labeled transphobic by critics, but has been a popular title on Netflix. Critics on Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie a ‘rotten’ score of 33% while audiences awarded a near perfect score.
Fauci critics were quick to mock the film’s near-universal panning from audience members.
The Rotten Tomatoes score for ‘Fauci’ is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to negative reviews. On IMDB, the movie has a 1.5 rating from over 6000 users.
Trailers for the movie on YouTube haven’t fared much better. One posted by National Geographic has over 100,000 ‘dislikes’ and less than 8000 ‘likes’, as of this writing.
A Disney Plus trailer, on the other hand, has just over 1000 ‘likes’ and over 20,000 ‘dislikes’.
Rotten Tomatoes has been accused of bias in the past, and the company has often chalked up near-universal negative reactions from audiences to trolls’ review-bombing.
In 2019, the company disabled pre-release comments and removed their ‘Want to See’ function – which allowed ratings based on how excited users were for a film – in response to early backlash against franchise pictures accused by critics of going ‘woke’, such as ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ and ‘Captain Marvel’.
Two years before that decision, debate around Rotten Tomatoes and the political influence the audience can have was still a heated debate. Outspoken liberal and comedian Amy Schumer claimed in 2017 that her comedy special ‘The Leather Special’ was review-bombed by the “alt-right” over her comments on Donald Trump and other Republicans (50% critic rating/4% audience). At the time, the site responded again by limiting user functions by removing a five-star system in favor of a positive or negative rating from audiences.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, conservative artists have often pointed to the fact that films aimed at right-leaning audiences often score much lower with critics than audiences as proof the company is more open to ‘certifying’ liberal critics than right-of-center or conservative ones.
Producer John Aglialoro blamed near-universal bad reviews from “hateful” critics on Rotten Tomatoes for his 2011 film ‘Atlas Shrugged: Part I’ struggling to find an audience in theaters (he would go on to produce two sequels covering the last two thirds of Ayn Rand’s influential novel).
A Message To Fauci: You Are In No Position To Dictate The “Greater Good”
By Brandon Smith | Alt-Market | October 6, 2021
How does a fraud like Anthony Fauci find himself in the highest paid position in US bureaucracy? Well, Fauci’s career is a rather shocking testament to the reality of our government and our era – The more corrupt you are the more favors and promotions you will receive.
Fauci is well known as a shameless opportunist among many within the medical research community. For example, the creator of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) Test, Kary Mullis, had nothing but disdain for Fauci. Mullis was an interesting figure who valued scientific honesty above all else. He often warned that his PCR test could be exploited to inflate infection numbers by identifying remnants of a virus in a person’s body without distinguishing whether or not they are actually “infected” (sick). Sadly, his test is now being used in this exact manner today to exaggerate infection rates of the covid-19 virus.
In interviews Mullis has referred to Anthony Fauci as a “liar”, arguing that he is a bureaucrat that “doesn’t know anything about anything”. Mullis noted that people like Fauci have an agenda that is outside of the public good, and that they have no problem misrepresenting the science to the populace to achieve their goals. It should also be noted that YouTube has made it their mission to consistently erase any traces of the Mullis interviews mentioning Fauci from their website.
It is also not surprising that Fauci’s rampant fear mongering over AIDS in the 1980’s has gone mostly unmentioned by the mainstream media. His claim that 1 in 5 heterosexual Americans would be dead from AIDS by 1990 has been summarily memory-holed and the guy is treated like a scientific genius by the journalistic community in 2021.
If there is any justice in this world then Fauci should really go down in history as one of the primary initiators of the Covid pandemic, being that he was a director of the NIAD and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) while overseeing the funding of Gain of Function research on corona-viruses at the Wuhan Lab in China. This is the same research that Fauci blatantly lied about to congress on multiple occasions. And, the Wuhan lab is the same lab that evidence suggests was the ground zero source of the Covid-19 outbreak.
It is important to note that it was Fauci and the NIH that LIFTED the ban on gain of function research on deadly viruses in 2017, and it was well known around this time that the Level 4 Wuhan lab in China was not secure.
If anyone is responsible for global covid deaths, it is Fauci, the Chinese government and anyone else involved in that gain of function research which is primarily used to WEAPONIZE viruses under the guise of creating “therapeutics.” Gain of function research was originally banned under the Biological Weapons Convention which went into effect in 1975, unless it was being used for therapeutics. Now ALL gain of function research that is revealed publicly is labeled as therapeutics even if it is actually designed to produce biological weapons. This is sometimes referred to as “dual use research.”
The prevailing narrative continues to be that even if the virus came from the Wuhan lab then it was surely an accident. I continue to believe according to the available evidence that Covid-19 was deliberately released in order to create a global crisis which could then be exploited by the establishment to introduce extreme controls over the populace to the point of medical totalitarianism. But of course, there is no smoking gun to prove this, only common sense.
If we take the notorious Event 201 into account things get a little weird. Event 201 was a war game held by the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its claimed purpose was to simulate the effects of a deadly coronavirus pandemic “spread by animals” to humans and to develop the policies governments and their corporate partners should employ to deal with it. Interestingly, this simulation was held in October of 2019, only two months before the REAL THING happened. Nearly every policy suggested by the participants of Event 201 has now been adopted by most governments, including the social media censorship campaign against anyone that questions the origins of the virus and the safety of the experimental mRNA vaccines.
Anthony Fauci and friends….
WEF founder Klaus Schwab was quick to announce at the start of the pandemic that Covid-19 was the “perfect opportunity” to launch the “Great Reset”, which is a globalist plan to completely erase free market systems and replace them with a highly centralized socialist framework. The WEF envisions a world in which carbon related power is banned, all financial transactions become digital and are monitored and controlled by central authorities, and they have even suggested that one day people will “own nothing and be happy”. This is a reference to the so-called “shared economy” of the future, where the concept of personal property is abolished and all people will live in communal housing collectives where necessities are rationed or rented out to them by the government.
Something must have went wrong with covid, however, because the Event 201 death estimates for such a virus were around 65 million within the first year of the outbreak. This of course never happened with Covid-19. So, the resistance to the mandates has been high, or much higher apparently than the globalists expected. They have been forced to engage in an endless fear campaign for the past 18 months over a virus with a mere 0.26% median death rate. It is a virus that well over 99.7% of all people will survive and it has an extremely low chance of long term effects on those who do actually end up hospitalized. In the majority of states the hospitalization rates are between 10-35 people for every 100,000 people infected.
These numbers come from the CDC and the medical establishment at large, yet they are ignored by propagandists like Fauci, just as Fauci has continued to ignore natural immunity as a factor in covid mandates. It might seem bizarre to almost any scientist, doctor and virologist not paid by the government, but Fauci has argued that natural immunity should be ignored when compared to vaccination. Multiple studies from around the world now show that natural immunity is up to 27 times more effective at preventing covid infection than the vaccines, but those with natural immunity are considered a threat to others under the new mandates unless they are also vaxxed.
This simply makes no sense from a scientific perspective until you realize that the mandates are not about science, they are about authoritarianism. Fauci is the US front man for a campaign of medical tyranny being imposed in every nation; this is why he does not care about natural immunity. The idea of it is inconvenient to his narrative, so he pretends it is inconsequential.
It is perhaps ironic that Fauci himself is becoming inconsequential as he is slowly fading away from the media limelight. I have noticed that ever since the NIH gain of function information was released to the public Fauci has been in the media less prominently. A documentary produced by National Geographic and soon to be distributed by Disney+ portrays the conman as a misunderstood savior and is sure to be a trash fire. That said, it does represent a clear last-ditch effort to save the man’s false reputation.
There is a good reason for all of this. Fauci’s distaste for personal freedom has been well documented and is making him extremely unpopular. He even recently argued on CNN in favor of vaccine mandates using this perverse position:
“There comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision for the greater good of society.”
Fauci and his globalist ilk can be distilled down to this single mantra: Do as you are told for the greater good. But who gets to determine what the “greater good” is? Isn’t it disturbing that it’s always the same elitists that end up in that position? I know that leftists in particular love the idea of the vaccine mandates and worship Fauci, and they say we skeptics should “listen to the science”, but Fauci is not a scientist, he’s a door-to-door salesman, and as I’ve noted above the REAL science does not support the arguments for forced vaccinations or lockdowns.
Hell, I keep asking the same questions on the mandates in these articles and not a single leftist or pro-vax proponent has come up with a valid or logical response, but out of morbid curiosity I would love to see Fauci give his answers:
1) Covid has a median death rate of only 0.26%, so why should we take ANY risk on an experimental mRNA vaccine with no long term testing to prove its safety?
2) Why not give support to the 0.26% of people actually at risk from dying due to covid instead of spending billions of dollars on Big Pharma producing a rushed vaccine that you plan to force on the 99.7% of people who are not at risk?
3) In majority vaccinated countries like Israel, over 60% of covid hospitalizations are fully vaccinated people. The exponential rise of fully vaccinated patients in multiple nations suggests that the vaccines do not work. Why should we take a vaccine that has been proven not to be effective?
4) If you believe the vaccines actually do work despite all evidence to the contrary, then why should vaccinated people fear anything from unvaccinated people? How are we a threat to them?
5) If the vaccines don’t work, then doesn’t this mean the mandates are pointless and the people that are most safe are the people with natural immunity? Shouldn’t we be applauding the naturally immune and encouraging treatment instead of useless vaccination?
6) Since the vaccines actually don’t work according to the data, isn’t it time to stop blindly dismissing treatments like Ivermectin and focus on trials and studies that research these alternatives? Why the vitriolic propaganda campaign to label Ivermectin nothing more than “horse paste” when it is actually a long used Nobel Prize winning treatment for human ailments? Is it because the experimental covid vaccines would lose their emergency authorization status under the FDA if effective treatments exist?
7) Why are government funded scientists so keen on defending Big Pharma to the point of ignoring all data that contradicts their claims? Are you just embarrassed of being wrong, or are you corrupt?
8) Who decided you are qualified to determine what constitutes the “greater good?”
Globalists and errand boys like Fauci will never be able to answer these questions without twisting the narrative. They will say “What about the 700,000 dead in the US?” to play on the idea that the freedom minded lack empathy for their fellow man. Of course, around 40% of those deaths are patients from nursing homes with preexisting conditions, so we have no idea if they died from covid or from their previous ailments. Also, millions of people die every year from a plethora of communicable diseases including the flu and pneumonia, and we never tried to lock down the entire country and crush people’s civil rights because of this.
If we maintained a running tally of flu and pneumonia deaths year after year as we are doing with covid, then the ever increasing number of bodies would seem just as forbidding. Society cannot function when it is preoccupied with death.
Yes, around 0.26% of people die from covid, but life goes on for everyone else. Our freedoms are more important than your irrational fears. Our freedoms are more important than globalist agendas for centralization. Our freedoms ARE the greater good. Without them our society dies, and as our society dies millions more people will die from the inevitable collapse and tyranny that will follow; far more than will ever die from covid.
This is why nothing Fauci says has any relevance to us. He is so transparent in his corruption that he might as well be invisible. We will continue to ignore his declarations and admonitions and we will continue to fight back against the vaccine passports and restrictions. When all is said and done, if Fauci, Biden and other globalist puppets try to use force to impose their agenda upon us then there will come a day very soon when they will be held accountable for their crimes against humanity, and then they will wish they were invisible.
You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com
Fauci Flop? New Documentary About COVID Czar Fails To Disclose Box Office Results
BY Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – September26, 2021
A new documentary called “Fauci,” released by National Geographic Documentary Films two weeks ago, honors Dr. Anthony Fauci’s work to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic and COVID-19 pandemic. Since the release two weeks ago, there’s been no data on ticket sales by major film sites, according to Just The News.
The new documentary was released in theaters across York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, D.C., and New Orleans on Sept. 10. No major film site, including RottenTomatoes.com, Boxoffice Pro, IMDB.com, and BoxOfficeMojo.com, has calculated ticket sales or earnings for the film.
The documentary “follows the renowned infectious disease specialist’s work in two health crises: AIDS and the coronavirus pandemic. Dr. Fauci agreed to participate as long as it didn’t interfere with his work,” NYT tweeted.
Shawn Robbins, the chief analyst with Boxoffice Pro, said it’s “incredibly uncommon” for a major studio not to release box office earnings.
“Niche distributors often lack the proper resources for data reporting. That may or may not be the case with this particular documentary,” said Robbins. He said it’s too early to suggest “Fauci” has become a flop at theaters, but time will tell.
Just The News said the film had one condition before seeing it: patrons of the theater had to show their vaccine cards.
On IMDB, the documentary has a 2.2 rating out of 10. About 80% of the reviews rate it as a 1 star.
IMDB users criticized the documentary as establishment-backed propaganda. Here’s one review:
Hilarious how this movie uses George Bush, and Susan Rice, to ascribe credibility for Dr. Fauci 😂 Bush’s false “Weapons of Mass Destruction” Iraq War, and Susan Rice’s “Benghazi” debacle speak for themselves.
The movie does indeed humanize Fauci with stories about his family. He said they are being harassed because of his work. So what do they do? They put their images and information in the movie….😧
Then along comes Bono’s interview. I’m still trying to figure out what a singer really has to do with any of this.
It has interesting interviews, but is a very one sided movie. It’s mostly politicos trying to dig out poor ole Dr. Fauci from the avalanche of his massive PR nightmare. He’s 80 years old, maybe just maybe it’s time to relax and retire.
The mystery remains why National Geographic continues to withhold the box office earnings of Fauci, but the poor reviews at IMBD suggest the flick might have been a flop, and that is why.
BBC submarine drama is anti-Russian propaganda machine in action
By Johanna Ross | September 25, 2021
The scene: a British nuclear submarine. A detective has been sent to investigate the death of a sailor. When she asks the Naval Commander why there needs to be so much secrecy, as Britain is not at war, he responds ‘That is an illusion. We have always been at war’.
The series, entitled ‘Vigil’ is the BBC’s most watched drama of the year, and has been well publicised, attracting an audience of 10.2 million over its first week. It depicts a fight with an illusive, ruthless adversary that successfully manages to infiltrate a UK submarine to ‘knock out Britain’s nuclear deterrent’, killing British citizens in the process. The murder weapon of choice is a nerve agent; can you guess who the enemy is yet?
Of course it’s Russia. Nuclear submarines, nerve agent, a treacherous opponent; from the opening sequence with video footage of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev projected onto a submarine, the audience is under no illusion as to who this adversary is. Nowadays, the British public almost expects it to be Russia.
For years now the UK population has been schooled on ‘evil Russia’ across all media platforms – from the news to TV dramas to films – with the line between fiction and reality becoming increasingly blurred. One of the most Googled questions about the ‘Vigil’ drama series is ‘is it real?’ This is hardly surprising given the sheer volume of anti-Russian content, with cinema often dramatising real life events and vice versa.
Take the Skripal case, for instance. The apparent poisoning with ‘Novichok’ of the former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter took place just a few months after a British/American TV series ‘Strike Back’ was released, in which a ‘rogue Russian biochemist‘ was working on a substance of the very same name. That was probably the first time that western audiences had ever heard the word ‘Novichok’, and yet, by extraordinary coincidence, it was to appear on our TV screens just a few months later, in the news. The finger of blame was immediately pointed at Moscow, just as preparations were being made for Russia to host the 2018 world cup. The timing could not have been worse for the Kremlin, and yet it helped Britain considerably in its bid to discredit Russia in its hosting of the sporting event.
TV and cinema being used by governments as instruments to sway and foster public opinion is nothing new. In the book ‘Propaganda and empire: the manipulation of British public opinion, 1880-1960’ John M MacKenzie explores the plethora of ways the British government promoted imperialism throughout the empire’s existence, not only through cinema, but using everything from cigarette cards to school textbooks. During the war, the British Ministry of Information also pumped out films with instructive government messaging under the direction of Humphrey Jennings. These documentaries were more about what to do and what not to do, promoting slogans such as ‘grow your own’ and ‘make do and mend’ to aid the war effort on the home front.
The ‘Vigil’ drama obviously had a considerable budget. And its political function is twofold; it highlights the ‘threat’ from Russia, and the question of the Trident’s future in an independent Scotland. By playing up the idea of a real, imminent danger from Russia, it persuades the viewer of the importance of retaining Britain’s nuclear deterrent. As tensions grow between East and West, and Boris Johnson pursues his ‘Global Britain’ strategy, we will no doubt see more programmes emphasising Britain’s military strength countering Russia and let’s not forget, China. Sadly, such manipulation of the population doesn’t encourage understanding between peoples and instead, fosters division and discrimination. At best it is Britain using Russia as a scapegoat to bolster its sense of national pride; at worse, it is laying the groundwork for a future conflict with Russia.
Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | July 27, 2021
It is time to recalibrate the government.
For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.
By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.
We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.
We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.
This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.
These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.
That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.
So what we can do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?
It won’t be easy.
We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.
The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.
In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.
We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.
Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.
Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.
Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?
In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.
These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.
This way lies madness.
Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.
How to do this? It’s not rocket science.
There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.
Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.
Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.
Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.
That’s their job: make them do it.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.
The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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