Every time one thinks that politicians in the United States might have actually have had a “come to Jesus” moment and will henceforth serve the people who pay to support them, something pops up to demonstrate that nothing has changed but the names of the folks who are selling most of us out. As a Loudoun County Virginia resident with children and grandchildren in the public school system who is active in the Fight for Schools movement, I was delighted when Glenn Youngkin defeated the truly despicable Terry McAuliffe to become the next governor of the state. McAuliffe not only engaged in constant race and class baiting in terms of how he couched his appeals to voters, confident that the fraud that he and his party-mates had engineered into the system disguised as “voting rights” would be enough to win the day in a state that has leaned Democratic in recent elections. So tone deaf to the voters was McAuliffe that he came out with “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” and two days before election day went off the deep end by telling his audience at a rally that Virginia just has too many school teachers who are white.
So goodbye McAuliffe, a man born to be forgotten even by his patrons the Clintons but for his improvised victory dance on the stage during one of his last appearances, a performance so appalling that his daughters were embarrassed to watch. So now we have Glenn Youngkin as governor-elect and a new day is dawning… or is it? Hopefully the new administration will kill Critical Race Theory and the pursuit of “equity” in the public schools, thereby returning academic standards to what they once were. And parents might actually be listened to over their concerns rather than being sent to jail for protesting. But what else will be in the package?
Well, it should surprise no one that the usual pander to America’s wealthy and powerful Jewish community has been going on behind the scenes. Media reporting dated the very day after Youngkin was elected revealed that “Glenn Youngkin today announced a plan to combat anti-Semitism in Virginia… one area of particular concern to Youngkin is the increasing number of crimes targeting Jews. That is why as governor he will form a Virginia Holocaust, Genocide and Anti-Semitism Advisory Commission and push the Virginia General Assembly to pass a state law adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism. ‘Virginia must take clear and concrete action to stop all forms of anti-Semitism, and when I’m governor, we will,’ said Youngkin. ‘I will push the General Assembly to pass a law adopting the internationally recognized definition of anti-Semitism, and I will form a commission to examine and address anti-Semitic incidents in Virginia. Our Jewish friends and neighbors must know that we stand with them against the tide of hate and discrimination…’”
Presumably Youngkin, who clearly was coached on his statement, is aware that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism includes criticism of Israel as an indication that one is an anti-Semite. For those of us who have always believed that Israel is a foreign nation with interests that differ from those of the United States and that it can be criticized just as one would any other country in the world, the state of Virginia will clearly be embracing a contrary view. And one can only look forward to the sanctions against anyone who dares to support boycotting Israel products or services, referred to as BDS, to put pressure on Jerusalem to begin treating the Palestinians humanely.
Ironically, Youngkin was labeled an anti-Semite during the campaign against McAuliffe, which should have alerted him to the danger inherent in special commissions set up at the behest of agenda-driven racial or ethnic groups. In a campaign rally, he named George Soros, who is Jewish, as the source of the money that was planting political activists in Virginia local governments and school boards, which is demonstrably true. One Virginia Democrat leader claimed that Youngkin had been “spouting off antisemitic tropes, just to fire up his base.”
Youngkin might consider that far from being the perpetual victim, American Jews are the wealthiest, best educated and politically most powerful demographic in the US, something that is true all across the country and even more so in Virginia near the seat of power in Washington where Jews are way over-represented. Their power enables the brutality of Israel in its occupation of historic Palestine, which includes shooting and imprisoning children, blowing up hospitals and apartment buildings, and engaging in acts of war against its neighbors Syria and Iran. Recently the Jewish state has announced a new wave of illegal “settlement” building on the occupied West Bank, a decision that even provoked the gutless Biden Administration to object mildly, while also describing a group of Palestinian charities and civic organizations as terrorists. Who is the victim Glenn?
There are roughly 70,000 Jews living in Virginia out of a total population of 8,670,000 and one would be hard pressed to find any overt instances of actual anti-Semitism. Jews in Virginia are privileged, just like they are nearly everywhere in the United States, and the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates is a Jewish woman, Eileen Filler-Corn. Of course, groups like the notoriously sensitive Anti-Defamation League (ADL) can always come up with what they claim to be anti-Semitic incidents when there are swastikas drawn on walls or doors or by citing the instances when a Jewish student feels uncomfortable at college because someone was holding up a sign saying “Free Palestine.” Sometimes the perpetrators of so-called anti-Semitic incidents have themselves been Jews.
Youngkin has apparently been briefed to believe that the state is overrunning with fanatical anti-Semites seeking to kill Jews and burn down synagogues so he is pledging “concrete action to stop all forms of anti-Semitism” which presumably will include restrictions on Freedom of Speech, for which appropriate “hate crime” laws will be drafted. This follows a pattern established in a number of other US states where local Jews are working hard to suppress any criticism of Israel.
Youngkin’s unneeded commission to support uniquely Jewish interests will, of course, cost the usual substantial dollop of unaccountable taxpayer money to support a demographic that is already rich and powerful. Israel and the Jewish community already get an enormous free ride from the state government. I have previously reported how Grant Smith, who heads the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP), has detailed how one such board that he has identified in Virginia is a unique example of a state’s economic policies being manipulated by a dedicated Israeli fifth column in government. It is named the Virginia Israel Advisory Board (VIAB).
The VIAB uniquely is actually part of the Virginia state government. It is funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia and is able to access funds from other government agencies to support Israeli businesses. It is staffed by Israelis and American Jews drawn from what has been described as the “Israel advocacy ecosystem” and is self-administered, appointing its own members and officers. Only Virginia has such a group actually sitting within the government itself though other states have similar advisory or “trade” commissions. VIAB is able to make secret preferential agreements, to arrange special concessions on taxes and to establish start-up subsidies for Israeli businesses. Israeli business projects have been, as a result, regularly funded using Virginia state resources with little accountability. It has been estimated that the cash flow in favor of Israel from Virginia alone has exceeded $500 million annually.
Smith has reported how VIAB is not just an economic mechanism. Its charter states that it was “created to foster closer economic integration between the United States and Israel while supporting the Israeli government’s policy agenda.” Smith also has observed that “VIAB is a pilot for how Israel can quietly obtain taxpayer funding and official status for networked entities that advance Israel from within key state governments.” The board grew significantly under Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe’s administration (2014-2018). McAuliffe, regarded by many as the Clintons’ “bag man,” has received what are regarded as generous out-of-state campaign contributions from actively pro-Israeli billionaires Haim Saban and J.B. Pritzker, who are both affiliated with the Democratic Party.
Terry McAuliffe as governor met regularly in off-the-record “no press allowed” sessions with Israel advocacy groups and spoke about “the Virginia Advisory Board and its successes.” That was, of course, a self-serving lie by one of the slimiest of the Clinton unindicted criminals. In short, the VIAB is little more than a mechanism set up to carry out licensed robbery of Virginia state resources being run by a cabal of local American Jews and Israelis to benefit their co-religionists in Israel. As a side benefit to us Virginians, its reckless activities have led to numerous zoning and environmental violations.
So Glenn Youngkin I wish you well. I sure as hell voted for you given that you were running against Terry McAuliffe supported by folks named Biden, Harris, Obama and Abrams, but hey, if you truly have any integrity, it is past time to get your mind right on Israel and its supporters re the con-job they have been pulling on the American people for the past seventy-plus years. You are smart enough to know that but perhaps so ambitious that you will bury your conscience and go along with the bullshit. Anti-Semitism, such as it is, does not threaten our Republic but the continuous pandering to a specific special interest that already has money and power and is tied with a foreign government that wants us to go to war on its behalf is both unacceptable and dangerous. Please take the papers relating your planned anti-Semitism Advisory Commission, which will no doubt be generously compensated and staffed by the Chosen, and shove them into a file somewhere where they will never be seen again. You have more important things to do, believe me.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
The Israeli military has reportedly compiled a digital surveillance database to monitor Palestinians in Hebron in the West Bank using invasive facial recognition tech integrated into a network of cameras and soldiers’ phones.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) even incentivized soldiers to compete against each other to take photos of residents “with prizes for the most pictures collected by each unit,” according to the Washington Post. Soldiers were reportedly offered rewards such as a night off if they managed to take the most pictures.
The surveillance dragnet is apparently based in part on smartphone technology called ‘Blue Wolf’ that captures the photos and cross-references the faces to find matches on the database. The application then signals to the soldier through a “traffic light” of colors which individuals to detain, arrest or leave alone.
Noting that the IDF has admitted to the initiative’s existence in an online brochure, the report also features interviews with former soldiers who had previously spoken to Breaking the Silence – a group of veterans that highlights human rights violations by the IDF.
One former soldier reportedly described the program as the IDF’s secret “Facebook for Palestinians.” Another veteran told the paper a network of facial recognition cameras had been installed at various checkpoints in the flashpoint town – as well as a broader network of CCTV cameras known as ‘Hebron Smart City’ that sometimes even allows the IDF to see inside people’s homes.
The network also apparently makes use of ‘White Wolf’, an app employed by security volunteers in the West Bank to provide ID information about Palestinians before they enter settlements to work.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable if they used it in the mall in [my hometown], let’s put it that way,” said one recently discharged soldier who reportedly served in an intelligence unit. She called the Hebron surveillance system a “total violation of privacy of an entire people.”
People worry about fingerprinting, but this is that several times over.
In response, the IDF issued a statement that noted how “routine security operations” were “part of the fight against terrorism and the efforts to improve the quality of life for the Palestinian population in [the West Bank].” It would not comment on the IDF’s “operational capabilities in this context.”
A German member of the European Parliament is warning against EU plans to adopt new, wide-ranging mass surveillance rules that he says would seriously jeopardize citizens’ right to privacy by forcing tech companies to give access to encrypted messages to the authorities.
And that is what the laws now in the works in Brussels – that are supposed to replace temporary rules adopted in July – are designed to do, by ordering messaging and video chat providers like WhatsApp and Skype to put tech in place that would provide access to people’s private communications and, thanks to an automated system, monitor chats in real time and report suspicious content.
In a statement, MEP Patrick Breyer said that the EU commission must understand that it cannot give itself the right to intrusive surveillance of digital communication of every citizen, and do it without “specific suspicion.” He also believes EU’s policy on this issue is not only illegal and irresponsible – but also [in]effective.
As is often the case, the new intrusive regulation is being sold to the public as a way to combat sexual abuse of children, but the ramifications are much broader, while the idea of suspecting everyone in advance – making citizens “guilty until proven innocent” – doesn’t sit at all well with privacy advocates like Breyer.
Dutch MEP Sophie in ‘t Veld shed light on how dissenters on this issue are treated, revealing that they are made to feel like they are not committed to combating child abuse because they have questions critical of the proposed laws.
A number of other MEPs are opposed to the idea and speak about that openly, with some comparing the EU’s model of mass online surveillance to what is happening in China.
On his website, Breyer explained that what he refers to as “chatcontrol” is allowing the EU to have access to chats, messages and emails the providers scan in a way that is “general and indiscriminate.” He also said that building on the July regulation, the EU planned to already have expanded rules in place this fall, but that the date had to be postponed because of pushback from citizens and stakeholders.
A series of articles have been appearing lately in Big Media, piling pressure on Facebook to step up censorship of what’s considered to be “climate misinformation” on the giant platform.
These reports published by the BBC, The Guardian, and The Verge – all citing and giving a lot of space to a study into climate-related content on Facebook produced by several fairly obscure advocacy groups – came shortly after Big Tech declared “climate misinformation” and “climate denial” to be its next censorship target.
One of these groups, “The Real Facebook Oversight Board,” announced on Twitter that it is publishing a quarterly report that documents “Facebook’s harms on climate change.”
The outfit, which states to be a part of the the-citizens.com site (that for now has a landing page and is funded, among others, by Luminate – an offshoot of billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s organization), said it was working with “Stop Funding Heat” and “Sum of Us” to produce the report.
The Verge bases its article on the “study” published on the Stop Funding Heat website, which accuses Facebook of “fact-checking” less than 4 percent of posts for climate misinformation, that is said to have increased by as much as 77% since January, to garner between about 800,000 and 1.3 million views.
“Facebook has been told over and over, through public reports and in private meetings, that its platform is a breeding ground for climate misinformation. Either they don’t care or they don’t know how to fix it,” Stop Funding Heat’s Sean Buchan is cited as stating.
“The Real Facebook Oversight Board” crops up again in a Guardian article dedicated to the same issue, which reveals that a majority of the 195 Facebook pages the activist groups analyzed mostly share memes ridiculing some politicians’ focus on climate change as a policy issue.
Facebook is singled out as being “among the world’s biggest purveyors of climate disinformation,” while the giant’s perceived inaction in censoring content skeptical of climate change is seen as harmful to the “the battle” led by the elites who gathered in Glasgow for UN’s COP26 summit.
The BBC also covered the topic of the allegedly rampant climate misinformation on Facebook, choosing to cite a study which said only 8% of the 7,000 posts they consider misleading were labeled as misinformation.
Peter McCullough, M.D., is an American cardiologist. He was vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center and a professor at Texas A&M University. He is editor-in-chief of the journals Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine and Cardiorenal Medicine. He is one of the most highly respected and published cardiologists in the U.S.
Jessica Rose, PhD is a specialist in Orthopedics and Sports Medicine at Stanford Children’s Health Specialty Services.
After the preliminary draft of their report was peer-reviewed and approved for publication, it was posted by the publisher on its NIH website. Shortly thereafter, the publisher, Elsevier, without giving a reason, suddenly withdrew the publication. There is now a notice posted that states simply:
That “temporary” removal has turned into a permanent removal. Elsevier has notified Drs. McCullough and Rose that their article will not be republished. Oddly, Elsevier gave no reason for the removal other than explaining that it is their sole prerogative to do so.
But we are not left to guess why the report was removed. All one needs to do is read the report, and it will be clear why the publisher removed it. I tracked down the report and read it. The report revealed the following startling facts.
Within 8 weeks of the public offering of COVID-19 products to the 12-15-year-old age group, we found 19 times the expected number of myocarditis cases in the vaccination volunteers over background myocarditis rates for this age group.
The publisher decided that fact, supported by empirical evidence, cannot be allowed. The long arm of the pharmaceutical companies reached out and let their influence be known.
Another fact that the report revealed was that the incidence of myocarditis among teenagers is much worse than even the raw statistics obtained from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting Service (VAERS) indicate. The report states:
Because of the spontaneous reporting of events to VAERS, we can assume that the cases reported thus far are not rare, but rather, just the tip of the iceberg. Again, under-reporting is a known and serious disadvantage of the VAERS system.
In prior blogs, I have reported that the VAERS system only reports about 1% of the actual adverse events.
VAERS is a reporting system that shows correlation. Further analysis is required to prove causation. Drs. McCullough and Rose did that further analysis and opined that the VAERS data indicates a cause and effect between the vaccinations and teenage myocarditis. Their report indicates:
It is noteworthy that ‘Vaccine-induced myocarditis’ was in fact used as the descriptor by medical professionals as the reason for the myocarditis in the VAERS database.
The report concluded:
Thus, due to both the problems of under-reporting and the known lag in report processing, this analysis reveals a strong signal from the VAERS data that the risk of suffering CIRM [COVID-19-Injection-Related Myocarditis] – especially males is unacceptably high. Again, children are not a high-risk group for COVID-19 respiratory illness, and yet they are the high-risk group for CIRM.
Soon after the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and Deep State insider, remarked “The reversals in Afghanistan are confounding for a Biden national security team that has rarely known personal failure (…) These are America’s best and brightest, who came to the messy endgame of the Afghanistan war with spotless résumés.”
Though his criticism of the national security team is understandably guarded, anyone taking a dispassionate look at the establishment liberals who are deemed America’s “best and brightest” in Washington circles would reach the conclusion that they are stronger on slogans than substance, which leads to a disconnect between ideas and implementation, and lack overseas experience: there is only one career diplomat in a senior position on the National Security Council, the director for Africa.
Their ability to display ideological cohesion at the expense of a reflexive process of dialogical thinking is remarkable but not surprising: establishment liberals do see themselves as the centre of political enlightenment. If they appear vainglorious and self-righteous it is because they are part of a power structure that produces and perpetuates these character traits. Those who entertain the possibility of failure are side-lined as bearers of bad news, the centre-stage is reserved for those who project confidence and a sense of moral superiority. As to considering opposing viewpoints, that is entirely optional.
In the same Washington Post article Ignatius observed “Failure can shatter the trust and consensus of any team, and that’s a danger now for the Biden White House. This group has been extraordinarily close and congenial during Biden’s first seven months. But you can already see the first cracks in Fortress Biden.”
Are these the kind of cracks that appear when reality hits delusions, when ‘what is’ collides with ‘what ought to be’, when military logic makes a dent in the fairy tale of a benign power successfully exporting “freedom, democracy and human rights”?
Trained for hybrid warfare, Biden’s aides were suddenly dealing with a conventional military crisis and looked out of their depth. As we have seen, managing a retreat and putting a spin on it require a completely different set of skills.
There is no doubt that the optics of one of the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history damaged the reputation of the U.S. both at home and overseas and that’s why we should expect new and more aggressive initiatives to harden American soft power and tighten control of the narrative through underhand methods.
Carefully crafted narratives are crucial for the U.S. because it is selling the world a failed model of development. Trumpeting it as inclusive, gender equal, green and sustainable is like putting lipstick on a pig, it looks grotesque. Managing perceptions, denigrating alternative civilizational and economic models, and demonizing the competition is no longer working, an increasingly large segment of the world population is developing stronger antibodies to the virus of American propaganda. That’s why traditional soft-power tools — trade, legal standards, technology — are increasingly being used to coerce rather than convince.
After the Afghanistan disaster former French ambassador to Israel, UN and U.S. Gérard Araud shared his dismay on Twitter: “The absence of self-examination in the West is seen elsewhere with disbelief. Wars waged by the West have recently cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians for no result and we still lecture the world about values. Do you have any idea about how we are seen abroad?”
If even allies are growing tired of America’s preaching, guess how it is going down in the rest of the world.
At the end of August, when U.S. allies were weighing what the shambolic, badly-coordinated retreat means for Western power and influence, Biden delivered a speech in which he explained “This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It is about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”
His statement signalled the intention to extricate the U.S. army from a war that had exhausted itself, politically, militarily and epistemically, but didn’t suggest that the U.S. will renounce its imperialistic ambitions. In the last twenty years there have been tectonic shifts: cyber, biological, information, cognitive and economic warfare are changing the way wars are being fought. Putting boots on the ground is no longer the best nor the only option to subjugate an adversary.
The reconfiguration of the geopolitical landscape and rapidly changing power relations also required a reassessment of priorities. Now that all eyes are on the Asia-Pacific region the question is whether Biden’s team is the best fit for the challenges U.S. power is facing.
Biden’s closest aides never learned the fundamentals of realpolitik, they hold the belief that liberal values are universally valid and the use of force (rebranded “humanitarian interventionism”) morally motivated. They never doubted that the Western model would conquer the world because they grew up at the end of the Cold War, a time that was indeed characterized by a “unipolar moment”. This period is well and truly over and the Western liberal order in its present form is a fraying system.
While the U.S. allocated resources to the destruction and destabilization of sovereign countries, and ignored the widening income gap at home, their main competitor, China, lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty and kept building state-of-the-art infrastructure at home and abroad, that is projects that make a tangible difference in people’s livelihoods. No wonder concealing the truth has become a matter of national security.
Democrats openly admit their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley to police political discourse and silence the bearers of inconvenient truths. They effectively sowed the seeds for a future where everything and everyone can be(come) a national-security threat. Glenn Greenwald revealed that Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO’s of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. They explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not start censoring more. Pulling the plug on dissenting opinions and de-platforming people who challenge the dominant discourse makes a mockery of free speech, one of the rights that the U.S. claims to be defending when it selectively condemns alleged violations of human rights in other countries. Increasing censorship is also an indication that control of the narrative both at home and overseas has become vital for the U.S.
The conviction that “for America, our interests are our values and our values are our interests’’, one of the tenets of NeoCons, has been revamped by the liberal Left to aggressively promote a different kind of values and causes. A sort of symbolic capital that would allow the U.S. to maintain dominance as rights defender while its own constitutional rights are being eroded at home. Moral grandstanding can only compound the hypocrisy, but that is not stopping liberal totalitarians who are trading off freedom of speech for a child’s right to gender self-identification or for a binding gender or race quota on corporate boards.
History shows that declining empires tend to produce incompetent, self-delusional and divisive leaders who unwittingly accelerate the inevitable fall. That’s exactly what seems to be happening now. Not only the radical liberalism embraced by the Biden administration and Western elite has already antagonized millions of Americans leading to social and political polarization, it is also antagonizing foreign leaders, including the leaders of allied countries such as Hungary and Turkey who are being labelled as ‘authoritarian’. As the U.S. system of alliances is becoming increasingly fragile, dogmatic progressives in the current administration look more and more like Aesop’s donkey in a pottery shop, or a bull in a China shop, if you prefer.
The current National Security Council (NSC) is staffed with advisers who are the product of the kind of groupthink that has long been dominant in Anglo-American universities, those madrassas of the liberal Left where debate is stifled by ideological purges. The opinions and worldviews that are shaped and reinforced in these echo chambers are disseminated and amplified by the media and other industries. Countless careers depend on exporting simulacra of freedom, democracy and human rights, not only because these “experts” have internalized a conviction that these immaterial goods possess an intrinsic moral value, but also because the U.S. has little else to offer the world and leverage on, unless you count assured mutual destruction as leverage.
A case in point is The Summit for Democracy that Biden will convene in virtual mode on December 9–10, 2021, while a second meeting will take place a year later. The plan is to bring together over 100 leaders from selected governments (some of the choices have already stirred controversy among democracy advocates) plus various NGOs, activists (regime change actors) and corporations to “rally the nations of the world in defence of democracy globally” and “push back authoritarianism’s advance”, “address and fight corruption”, “advance respect for human rights”.
Though this initiative is mainly a way to strengthen ideological cohesion among allies by appealing to “common values” and conjuring up yet another global threat, namely “authoritarianism”, it effectively divides the international community into two Cold War-style blocks, friends and foes. On one side countries that earned a seal of approval for toeing the line and therefore deserve to be labelled “democratic”; on the other side a basket of deplorables that refuse to recognize the superiority of the U.S. model of governance and civilizing mission. Basically, the politically correct version of neocolonialism.
The Summit for Democracy will take place against the backdrop of AUKUS, the new Anglo-Saxon alliance that effectively joins NATO to the Asia-Pacific through Britain. What is clearly intended as an alliance against China severely damages regional peace and stability, intensifies the arms race, and jeopardizes international efforts against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
On one hand the U.S. is flexing its military muscle, on the other hand it is flexing the ideological muscle that, in the intentions of the Summit organizers, will provide the impetus to renew and strengthen the liberal international order that has served U.S. interests since the end of WW2.
The Summit for Democracy may have a higher profile convener than similar events held in the past but its premise sounds just as tone-deaf and over-ambitious. Take for example The Copenhagen Summit for Democracy that was organized in May by the “Alliance of Democracies”, a foundation set up by former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen in 2017. Its objective was to create a Copenhagen Charter, modelled on the Atlantic Charter, having a Clause 5 similar to NATO’s Article 5, whereby “a state coming under economic attack or facing arbitrary detentions of its citizens due to its democratic or human rights stance could ask for unified support including retaliatory measures of fellow democracies.” This and other creative proposals included in the Copenhagen Charter will likely be rehashed at the Summit to be opened by Biden in December.
Rasmussen too can boast a spotless resume as cheerleader for U.S. global leadership, and that might explain why he seems trapped in a time warp and blind to the actual state of that leadership. If the reader needs further confirmation of Rasmussen’s complicated relationship with reality, here is an excerpt from an article titled ‘The Right Lessons From Afghanistan’ that he wrote for Foreign Affairs a few weeks after the Afghanistan fiasco, “The world should not draw the wrong lessons from Afghanistan. This fiasco was far from inevitable. It would also compound the folly if the world’s developed democracies stopped supporting the quest for freedom and democracy in authoritarian states and war-torn countries. That includes Afghanistan, where the United States and its partners should lend their support to the ongoing resistance efforts to oppose the Taliban.” We all know what happened to those “resistance efforts”, but Rasmussen won’t let reality get in the way of his illusions.
It is unlikely the Summit for Democracy will achieve the unspoken objective of creating an Alliance of Democracies that could bypass the UN Security Council. But it is undeniable that international law has long been under attack and is incrementally replaced with the Atlanticist concept of a “rules-based international system”, which does not have any specific rules but allows the West to violate international law under the pretext of advancing liberal ideals and exporting democracy.
It’s expected that USAID will be called to play a major role at the summit. USAID under Samantha Powers has a seat in the NSC and has been tasked with the mission to “modernize democracy assistance across the board”. This includes “supporting governments to strengthen their cybersecurity, counter disinformation and helping democratic actors defend themselves against digital surveillance, censorship, and repression.” In typical Orwellian doublespeak the U.S. is seeking help by claiming to help. With a military budget already stretched over the limit, enlisting foreign actors (both state and non-state) to do its bidding in the information and cognitive warfare becomes imperative.
NED, USAID, USAGM, “philanthropic” organizations like Open Society Foundations and the Omidyar Network have long been grooming and bankrolling journalists, activists, politicians, various types of influencers and community leaders. Their job is to paint a negative picture of China, Russia and any country resisting U.S. diktats. In Africa, just to mention one of many examples, “independent” journalists are paid to investigate Chinese companies that are involved in mining, construction, energy, infrastructure, loans and environment and portray them as causing harm to communities, environment and workers.
At the beginning of October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled a new partnership with the OECD in Paris: the overt goal was to combat corruption and promote “high-quality” infrastructure. But the partnership is part of a broader effort to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The U.S. has also appealed to the G7 and QUAD to provide the financial muscle for its Build Back Better World initiative (BW3), a rehash of Trump’s Blue Dot Network. Since the U.S. and its partners cannot respond to BRI symmetrically — they are unable to match China dollar for dollar, project for project — they are relying on virtue-signalling both as a marketing and bullying tactic. According to this initiative, infrastructure building in developing countries should comply with a certification scheme and lending rules set by the U.S. and its partners, rules that are cloaked in the familiar jargon of social and environmental sustainability, gender equality, and anti-corruption.
In case the competition with China in Asia, Europe and Africa does turn into open confrontation, the U.S. could use the BW3 to increase pressure on investment funds, global financial institutions and insurance companies to discriminate against projects that don’t meet standards set by the U.S. in return for concessions and sweeteners. When Western companies cannot compete fairly with Chinese ones, they can always rely on friendly officials in Washington to rewrite the rules of the game in their favour.
American policymakers seem unable to abandon a Cold War mentality that is essentially utopian in expectations, legalistic in concept, moralistic in the demands it places on others, and self-righteous. Some analysts believe that the source of the problem might be the force of public opinion, deemed emotional, moralistic and binary, the old “Us vs Them.”
Classical international relations theorists have long held the assumption that American public opinion has moralistic tendencies: for liberal idealists the moral foundation of public opinion, mobilized by norm entrepreneurs, opens up the possibility of positive moral action, whereas for realists, the public’s moralism is one of the main reasons why foreign policymaking should be insulated from the pressures of public opinion.
However it is myopic to conceive of public opinion and policymaking as separate entities when in fact they are both shaped by the interests of powerful elites. Public opinion doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is swayed by new and old media that are often controlled by the same interest groups and corporations that fund the think tanks and foundations influencing U.S. foreign policy.
For instance, not only was the collusion and revolving door between government and the tech industry a feature of the Obama administration, it characterizes the Biden administration as well. The transnational interests of these elite groups are usually cloaked in a progressive, inclusive, democratic rhetoric to make their narrow agenda appear big enough so that unsuspecting ordinary people may want to claim ownership and subscribe to it. Corporate interests and national interest are a tangled web no longer subjected to public scrutiny since national level democracy has been hollowed out. When the trilemma of democracy, state, and market becomes irreconcilable, global market players call the shots without democracy or state being able to control them, oversee unceasing technological innovation (including artificial intelligence) or curb the excessive financialization of the economy.
Though U.S. attempts at nation-building result in chaos and misery for local populations, Americans haven’t given up on trying to remake the world in their own distorted image by aggressively promoting their worldviews, exporting a simulacrum of democracy and politicizing human rights issues.
They reject true multilateralism by trying to dominate the international organizations that were created to further cooperation and harmonize national interests. For the corporate donors of both the Democratic and Republican Party other countries’ national interests are a relic of the past that should be done away with. And indeed national interests would hardly be compatible with a world order led by the U.S. in partnership with global stakeholders (global corporations, NGOs, think-tanks, governments, academic institutions, charities, etc.)
These global stakeholders and their political representatives effectively want to replace the modern international system of sovereign states that is enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Under this system, commonly referred to as Westphalian system, states exist within recognised borders, their sovereignty is recognised by others and principles of non-interference are clearly spelled out. Since this model doesn’t allow the government of one nation to impose legislation in another, the U.S. loudly promotes the idea of global governance, under which a global public-private partnership is allowed to create policy initiatives that affect people in every country as national governments implement the recommended policies. Typically this occurs via an intermediary policy distributor, such as the IMF, World Bank, WHO, but many international organizations now play a similar role.
In the Biden administration we see a dangerous convergence of the national security establishment and Silicon Valley tech giants. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines both worked for WestExec, the consulting firm that Blinken cofounded with Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defence under President Obama. Google hired WestExec to help them land Department of Defense contracts. Google’s former Chief Executive Eric Schmidt made personnel recommendations for appointments to the Department of Defense. Schmidt himself was appointed to lead a government panel on artificial intelligence. At least 16 foreign policy positions are occupied by CNAS alumni. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is a bipartisan think tank that receives large contributions directly from defence contractors, Big Tech, U.S. finance giants.
These donors spend considerable resources shaping the intellectual environment, academic research and symposia in order to build consensus around their agenda. The Biden administration also features dozens of officials hailing from the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank set up by John Podesta, a longtime Clintonworld staple, with George Soros’ generous contribution. The ties between Open Society Foundations (OSF) and CAP are so strong that Patrick Gaspard, the former head of OSF, was nominated president and CEO of CAP.
When government becomes the expression of global corporate interests and channels the belief system of a small, privileged elite it can be hard to tell who is leading who, who is really making policy and setting national security strategies and goals.
Biden’s national security team is the product of this corrupt system. Its members may tone down the “freedom, democracy and human rights” rhetoric if it gets in the way of achieving a particular strategic goal, but they won’t abandon it because it has proven to be effective in providing a legitimating frame and moral justification to U.S. hegemony.
If we look at the Roman empire we see how one constant theme was “expand or die”. Expansion isn’t only to be intended as territorial or military. Expanding influence, alliances, the use of Latin, the spread of Roman laws, currency, standards, culture and religion all contributed to the cohesion of the Empire. Given the current constraints to U.S. ambitions — namely the strategic partnership between China and Russia, BRI, the more assertive role played by regional powers, nervousness and conflicting interests among U.S. allies and a large budget deficit — the room for expansion has been considerably reduced. Thus the U.S. is doubling its efforts in areas where it still has room for maneuver.
Biden’s slogan “America is Back” sought to reassure allies but cannot hide the fact that the emperor is naked. Advertisers, politicians and psyops planners are continuously manipulating people into changing their perceptions of reality and making choices that ultimately do not benefit them. But no matter how hard the power-knowledge regimes of Western intellectual production work to conceal the decline, the West no longer dominates the world and the values it advocates are not unanimous, far from it. Labelling governments that don’t embrace liberal values and U.S. standards as “autocratic regimes” is just foolish sloganeering and doesn’t take into account the changing balance of power on the ground. The world is evolving toward a multipolar system and the U.S. had better take notice of it. Those serving in the NSC are still imagining a world that no longer exists, one where America has the power to force other countries into doing its bidding. The current ideological approach blinds pragmatic thinking, thus impeding discussions and negotiations.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Someone should tell the Biden team.
There are “strong grounds” to conclude that Israel’s systematic targeting of journalists working in Palestine and its failure to properly investigate killings of media workers amount to war crimes, a complaint being submitted to the International Criminal Court (ICC) will say.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), working with the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS) and the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), has asked Bindmans and Doughty Street Chambers to submit a complaint to the ICC detailing “the systematic targeting of Palestinian journalists on behalf of four named victims – Ahmed Abu Hussein, Yaser Murtaja, Muath Armaneh, and Nedal Eshtayet – who were killed or maimed by Israeli snipers while covering demonstrations in Gaza. All were wearing clearly marked PRESS vests at the time they were shot.”
“At least 46 journalists have been killed since 2000 and no one has been held to account,” the IFJ said in a statement on its website.
The complaint will also include the “bombing of the Al-Shorouk and Al-Jawhara Towers in Gaza City in May 2021″.
IFJ General Secretary Anthony Bellanger said: “The targeting of journalists and media organisations in Palestine violates the right to life and freedom of expression. These crimes must be fully investigated. This systematic targeting must stop. The journalists and their families deserve justice.”
The Times is reporting this morning that trolls could be sentenced to two years imprisonment for sending messages or posting content that causes psychological harm.
Writing in this morning’s paper, Home Affairs Editor Matt Dathan said:
Ministers will overhaul communication laws by creating new offences in the forthcoming Online Safety Bill, the flagship legislation to combat abuse and hatred on the internet.
The Department for Culture, Media & Sport has accepted recommendations from the Law Commission for crimes to be based on “likely psychological harm”.
The proposed law change will shift the focus on to the “harmful effect” of a message rather than if it contains “indecent” or “grossly offensive” content, which is the present basis for assessing its criminality.
A new offence of “threatening communications” will target messages and social media posts that contain threats of serious harm. It would be an offence where somebody intends a victim to fear the threat will be carried out.
A “knowingly false communication” offence will be created that will criminalise those who send or post a message they know to be false with the intention to cause “emotional, psychological, or physical harm to the likely audience”. Government sources gave the example of antivaxers spreading false information that they know to be untrue.
The new offences will include so-called “pile-ons” where a number of individuals join others in sending harassing messages to a victim on social media.
I have been warning Richie Allen Show listeners for several years now, that this was coming. Long before the advent of covid-19, I predicted that people would eventually be prosecuted and even imprisoned for expressing their opinions.
You might well ask, how could the state prove that someone “knowingly” sent an anti-vaccine communication? In a fair and just world it would be next to impossible to prove that the accused antivaxxer didn’t believe what he/she was saying. But these are not fair and just times. It’s open tyranny now.
You might think that all any defendant would need do is march into court with the latest Yellow Card reports. UK citizens who believe that they have had an adverse reaction to a jab can report it on the government website. It’s known as the Yellow Card scheme.
Again, in a righteous world, that would be the end of it. But there’s nothing righteous about our world right now.
The Online Harms Bill was dreamt up to destroy the independent media. Three years ago, I was approached by academics from Salford University and an old friend who still works for the BBC.
They told me that they were coming for the independent/alternative media and that The Richie Allen Show was top of the list in the UK. You’ll remember me telling you that at the time.
Three years ago, The Department for Culture, Media and Sport held hearings about online harms and misinformation, to gather the facts before publishing the Online Harms white paper. As the producer of the country’s most popular independent news show, I peppered them with emails, asking to be allowed to provide a statement to the hearing about what it is that I (and others) do and why we do it. I never received a reply.
Throughout the scamdemic, I have platformed academics from long established universities and colleges, men and women who have challenged lockdown, the claims about covid and of course, the vaccines.
Every one of those guests earned the right to express their opinions in a public forum. But that just won’t do. If your agenda is to regularly inject everyone on the planet with mRNA and DNA jabs, you must first rid yourself of any opposition. It’s happening now.
I said it already, it’s open tyranny. Your government is proposing to lock up its citizens for expressing opinions based on their own personal experiences or what they have read elsewhere, often in official documents.
Some day soon, it’ll be an offence to question vaccine safety and a crime to declare that you do not believe the global warming narrative on the basis that expressing such thoughts causes real harm to others.
I can hardly believe that this is happening. But it is.
“Liberal” MPs in Canada have expressed support for the government’s proposed internet censorship legislation. They went further to propose the appointment of a “Digital Safety Commissioner” who would be responsible for investigating complaints about “hurtful” content to be reported by users anonymously.
According to a report on Blacklock’s Reporter, Federal Liberal MPs have endorsed Trudeau’s internet censorship plans, on condition that there will be “proper due process” for those accused of posting “hurtful content.”
Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith insisted that the government should “ensure that there is public process or due process.”He added: “Fundamentally we need a public due process system to manage takedown by large companies.”
Internet censorship and online harassment are some of the top things the Trudeau administration is focusing on. The government started with Bill C-10, which focused on policing “user-generated content” on social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. The bill did not pass before the end of the last parliamentary session because of opposition from conservatives.
Now Trudeau’s former Minister for Heritage Steven Guilbeault has proposed a new internet censorship bill. He said the new bill “is going to be controversial.”
“People think that C-10 was controversial. Wait until we table this legislation,” he added.
The new bill proposes social media companies to be held liable for “hurtful content” on their platforms. It also seeks to enable Canadians to anonymously complain about hurtful content to have it taken down.
However, the government is yet to define the term “hurtful.”
Under current laws, so-called “hate speech” is illegal.
Attacking the new bill, Conservative MP Michael Chong said: “I can say clearly that we don’t support censorship. We don’t support restrictions on freedom of the press.”
The newest combatant in the US ‘disinformation’ wars is a media company bankrolled by Democrat mega-donors Reid Hoffman and George Soros, and run by an operative whose astroturfed local news outfit was actual misinformation.
Good Information, Inc. launched on Tuesday as “a civic incubator committed to investing in immediate solutions that counter disinformation and increase the flow of good information online.” According to Axios, it is bankrolled by LinkedIn co-founder Hoffman, Soros, as well as Silicon Valley investors Ken and Jen Duda and Incite Ventures.
Tara McGowan, a former Democratic strategist who worked on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s 2012 and 2016 campaigns – and ran a progressive nonprofit called ACRONYM that spent a whopping $100 million on a digital ad campaign to defeat Donald Trump in 2020 – has been put in charge of the venture.
ACRONYM was a major investor in Shadow, the outfit that mangled the results of the Iowa caucuses early on in the Democratic primary process, hurting the candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Another of its operations, Courier Newsroom, will be sold to Good Information for an undisclosed sum; McGowan reportedly recused herself from the deal.
Ironically, Courier Newsroom was repeatedly called out for misinformation, including by NewsGuard – another major player in the “disinfo” wars – in the pages of the Washington Post, no less.
“Courier Newsroom is a clandestine political operation,” wrote NewsGuard’s Gabby Deutch, who described it as “a different, more tech-savvy form of political misinformation.”
Courier and Acronym are “exploiting the widespread loss of local journalism to create and disseminate something we really don’t need: hyperlocal partisan propaganda,” Deutch added in a February 2020 article.
None of that prevented McGowan from gushing about her new venture as something that will fix the “broken, divisive information ecosystem in which we find ourselves today” that is “an all-hands-on-deck challenge for American democracy.”
“I still believe that winning elections is necessary to preserving our democracy,” she added. “But the information crisis is bigger than politics – and requires solutions beyond it.”
To prove that her new outfit won’t be a hyper-partisan Democrat operation, McGowan cited The Bulwark, “a center-right news site founded in opposition to Trumpism,” as an example of a conservative news outlet Good Information could support. Left unsaid is that The Bulwark are “conservatives” in name only, whose obsessive hatred of Trump has them endorsing just about every Democrat running for any office in the US.
The new company’s advisory board tells a similar story, consisting of mainly Democrat activists advocating for censorship. One notable name that leaps out is Nandini Jammi, previously of the pressure group Sleeping Giants who then launched her own operation called Check My Ads. Jammi’s modus operandi is to contact advertisers and services used by people she disagrees with, and call them racist.
All of this, however, pales in comparison to the chief founder of the new venture. Hoffman publicly apologized in December 2018 for funding New Knowledge, a Democrat tech outfit advising the Senate Intelligence Committee on “Russian meddling” in US elections.
That’s because New Knowledge admitted to running a false-flag “Russian bot” campaign to get a Democrat elected in the special election for the Senate in Alabama the year prior.
Again, the only actual meddling in US elections by ‘Russian bots’ turned out to be a false flag by a Democrat-run tech company. New Knowledge has since rebranded while its operatives moved up to bigger and better things – such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, another major “disinfo” player.
Soros, of course, is well known for lavishly funding Democrat candidates and causes, from backing California Governor Gavin Newsom against the recent recall initiative to dropping massive quantities of cash into local elections for district attorneys in major US cities and counties over the past several years.
More recently, he has pivoted to condemning “false and misleading information” allegedly proliferating online.
Mortality data tells us information about deaths in Australia and is usually released every 6 weeks. For an unexplained reason, the latest data is over 15 weeks overdue.
As Government becomes more and more powerful, anyone who challenges the current policies is smeared and censored. The legacy media happily parrots the propaganda, afraid of losing government funding.
Unreliable, intermittent wind and solar energy will leave Australian families sitting in the dark without coal-fired power to back them. ‘Renewables’ only farm taxpayer money, not energy.
RT says it’s going to challenge a ruling by the Court of Appeal in London, which decided that the six-figure fine imposed by British broadcast regulator Ofcom for an alleged breach of impartiality rules was “proportionate.”
The Court of Appeal announced its decision on Tuesday, saying that the High Court of Justice was right to rule that the enforcement action taken by Ofcom against RT was “necessary in a democratic society” in order to protect the public. It added that the action taken was “proportionate.”
RT’s deputy editor-in-chief, Anna Belkina, reacted to the development by announcing that the broadcaster is planning to appeal the decision.
“We… firmly believe that both Ofcom’s code and the law have been misapplied,” she insisted. “We shall continue the fight to protect the validity of diverse views in media discourse.”
The British broadcast regulator imposed a huge fine of £200,000 ($276,000) on RT in July 2019 after saying earlier that it found seven instances of failure to adhere to the country’s impartiality rules.
The alleged violations occurred during coverage of such controversial issues as the suspected poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018, as well as the role played by the US in the conflict in Syria, according to Ofcom. The regulator initiated most of the probes on its own, without receiving complaints from viewers.
RT has rejected the allegations of breaching impartiality rules and went to court to appeal against the regulator’s sanctions. It also insisted that the fine seemed “particularly inappropriate and disproportionate per Ofcom’s own track record,” pointing to instances in which cases of hate speech and incitement to violence resulted in much lower financial penalties.
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
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If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
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