10 Facts From the UK Government Pfizer Vaccine Guidance that Promote “Vaccine Hesitancy”
By Johnny Vedmore |
Unlimited Hangout| December 29, 2020
Official government guidance has been released in the United Kingdom to assist healthcare professionals in administering the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine BNT162b2. While the UK government goes to war against supposed misinformation, the official narrative is clearly based on very little to no supporting data from incomplete clinical trials. This article examines the document “Reg 174 Information for UK Healthcare Professionals” and narratives being pushed in the mainstream media that directly contradict that document.
Healthcare professionals globally have begun the controversial campaign to vaccinate large swathes of their respective populations with various experimental medical products. The vanguard of the mainstream pro-vax extremists have been busy enacting mass censorship tactics and committing blatant acts of digital book burning on a scale never before seen in the internet era. So-called “trusted sources” have become indistinguishable from the state-run media apparatus of your bog-standard dictatorship with the usual MSM outlets working non-stop to skew any information that threatens their hyper-aggressive official narrative. Throughout 2020, our basic civil liberties have been quickly stripped away by countless unelected officials from a wide array of unaccountable global power structures, all of them connected to a small group of elites who are sitting aloft the COVID-19 money train and using the heavily exaggerated epidemic to achieve their own long term goals.
Any useful data, scientific paper, or other credible research contradicting the official narrative is being purposely hidden from view. Too many uncomfortable, yet ultimately necessary, questions for vaccine companies such as Moderna, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and their many collaborators, are being heavily censored by those pushing their own various COVID-related agendas. The promised “war on truth” is in full swing throughout all nations globally and their respective state media machines are nearly all towing their official government lines. Mainstream talk shows and podcasts worldwide are also in lockstep, and have often been caught publicly guilt-tripping their easily swayed audiences to help push them deeper into queues for mass medical trials for vaccines and other products that lack research studies on their long term effects. This inconvenient lack of completed research will not stop the money men from pumping this milky white liquid into the arms of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
At this point in the process, the medical professionals who are administering these heavily rushed vaccines are being given the opportunity to defer responsibility and accountability for their actions to the government’s vaccine-related guidance. As the Stanley Milgram experiments have proven, when the option to defer responsibility is present, then roughly 65% of participants will follow the orders they have received regardless of the risk to their subjects. In 1974, Stanley Milgram detailed the behaviour of his participants in his famous study and suggested that people have two basic states of behaviour when they are in a social situation: “The autonomous state”, where people direct their own actions and ultimately take responsibility for the results of those actions and “the agentic state”, where people allow others to direct their actions and then pass off the responsibility for the consequences to the person giving orders, in essence acting as agents of another person’s will.
The majority of the people who are injecting these experimental drugs into their trusting patients are not likely to question the official guidance, as the overwhelming majority will often simply be in an agentic state. Thus, it should be in the best interest of anyone thinking of receiving an mRNA vaccine to first study the guidance offered by the various government sources. And, when one does study the official guidance given to healthcare professionals, one will find many different glaring contradictions and shocking admissions.
While all official bodies are attacking any inconvenient fact as misinformation, they are all busy defrauding the global population with their own misinformation campaigns that surely would have inspired awe in the likes of Joseph Stalin. So, let’s study their own words and examine the NHS guidance given to the medical professionals in the UK for the administration of the recently approved Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
An Introduction to Reg 174 Information for UK Healthcare Professionals (#1-4)
The short ten page official guidance being given to UK healthcare professionals contains many interesting admissions. In fact, the document, released in early December 2020 to accompany the vaccine rollout, appears to advise healthcare practitioners not to risk giving the experimental injection to the majority of the people who are due to receive the vaccine, particularly “prioritized” populations. Those in charge are pushing to vaccinate as much of the population as possible, before any critical public questions can be asked and answered, a situation that has left the safety and ethics of the vaccination campaign questionable at best and inhumane at worst.
In going through the Reg 174 document, it becomes very clear that there are many issues and recommendations that are being hidden from the general public. Here are ten of the most notable causes for concern contained within the official UK guidance document.
The authorisation to produce and supply this experimental vaccine in the UK was given by the UK Department of Health and Social Care, led by Matt Hancock – the UK Secretary of Health, and also by the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). While the MHRA is part funded by the Department of Health and Social Care for the regulation of medical devices, the costs of medicine regulations are met through fees paid by the pharmaceutical industry. The agency’s financial reliance on Big Pharma has led to suggestions by some Members of the UK Parliament that the MHRA is not actually independent. Being in associated roles at the MHRA since 1985, June Raine was officially appointed as CEO in September 2019 and had previously been the Director of Vigilance and Risk Management in the Medicines Division.
2. The official Phase III safety trials will not be completed until 2023
Section 1 of the medical guidance clearly states that this vaccine guidance refers specifically to the “Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 concentrate for solution for injection.” On 2 December 2020, the MHRA became the first medicines regulator in history to approve an mRNA vaccine for human use, granting emergency authorisation for BioNTech and Pfizer’s BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine for widespread use only a week after its first Phase III eight-week trial had finished. However, the Phase III trials for BNT162b2 will not actually be fully completed until January 2023 meaning that, if you’re ready to take the vaccine now, then you should be informed that the safety trials for these experimental vaccines have at least two more years before the results are in. Regardless of that fact, Raine told reporters “no corners have been cut in approving it” and that “the benefits outweigh any risk”.
3. Will you be truly “protected” from COVID-19?
The official guidance clearly states that individuals may not be protected until at least 7 days after their second dose of the vaccine. This fact has again been ignored by various reckless pro-vax media campaigns where powerful elites such as Tony Blair have contradicted this specific recommendation, suggesting recently in an interview that people should only be given a single dose of any vaccine. Mr Blair told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that “Does the first dose give you substantial immunity, and by that I mean over 50 percent effectiveness? If it does, there is a very strong case for not, as it were, holding back doses of the vaccine.” Blair, writing in the Independent, stated that the current vaccination strategy needed to be “altered and radically accelerated”. In responding to Blair’s call for radical acceleration, Professor Wendy Barclay, chair of virology at Imperial College London and member of the UK government’s NERVTAG, said: “I think that the issue with [Mr Blair’s suggestion] is that the vaccine is on the basis of being given in two doses, and the efficacy is on that basis.” Barclay went on to point out that “To change at that point, one would have to see a lot more analysis coming out from perhaps the clinical trial data.”
It is very important to pay attention to the wording of Reg 174 because the Pfizer vaccine purportedly boosts the immune system, rather than stopping the transmission of the virus. This would suggest that you will not be fully “protected” from COVID-19 and that you will still be able to catch the virus and could still suffer complications. The official guidance also states that “Immunocompromised persons, including individuals receiving immunosuppressant therapy, may have a diminished immune response to the vaccine,” with the guidance admitting “No data are available about concomitant use of Immunosuppressants.”
Reg 174 goes on to make this most pertinent of points when it states “As with any vaccine, vaccination with COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 may not protect all vaccine recipients.” The guidance also states clearly that “administration of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 should be postponed in individuals suffering from acute severe febrile illness and that individuals receiving anticoagulant therapy or those with a bleeding disorder that would contraindicate intramuscular injection, should not be given the vaccine unless the potential benefit clearly outweighs the risk.”
4. The complicated multistage dilution and thawing process of the vaccine vials opens the major possibility of human error
In investigating the official instructions for the vaccine’s administration, we can clearly see that there are plenty of opportunities for potential human error. Section 2 of this document describes the distributed vaccine as coming in “a multidose vial and must be diluted before use.” Confirming that each vial contains 0.45 ml (which equates to 5 doses of 30 micrograms) of BNT162b2 RNA embedded in lipid nanoparticles. The delicate preparation process will be repeated 100s of millions of times globally and the multidose vial will be stored frozen and must be thawed prior to dilution. The guidance describes the process for preparing the frozen vials stating that they should be transferred to temperatures of between 2 °C to 8 °C to thaw or, alternatively, the frozen vials may also be thawed for 30 minutes at temperatures up to 25 °C for immediate use. Once thawed, the undiluted vaccine can be stored for up to 5 days at 2 °C to 8 °C, and up to 2 hours at temperatures up to 25 °C. The thawed vial must then come to room temperature and be gently inverted 10 times prior to dilution.
Some of the featured diagrams and instructions found in Reg 174
The complicated thawing and dilution process will obviously leave room for individual error. Healthcare practitioners are also warned not to shake the vials and instead to gently turn them 10 times. Prior to dilution, the vaccine should present as an off-white solution with no particulates visible. The guidance states that you must discard the vaccine if particulates or discolouration are present. The thawed vaccine must be diluted in its original vial with 1.8 mL sodium chloride 9 mg/mL (0.9%) solution for injection, using a 21 gauge or narrower needle and aseptic techniques and this complex, multistage process isn’t completed there.
The healthcare professional should then equalise vial pressure before removing the needle from the vial by withdrawing 1.8 mL of air into the empty diluent syringe. Then they should gently invert the diluted solution 10 times, again being careful not to shake the solution. The official guidance continues: “The diluted vials should be marked with the dilution date and time and stored between 2 °C to 25 °C. After dilution, the vial contains 5 doses of 0.3 mL.” The healthcare professionals are then told to “withdraw the required 0.3 mL dose of diluted vaccine using a sterile needle and syringe and discard any unused vaccine within 6 hours after dilution.”
The instructions must be followed precisely to safely administer the mRNA vaccine; there are no data available on potential consequences for the vaccine recipient if anything goes wrong during this tedious and complex multistage process. On 19 December 2020, video emerged of an official drive-thru vaccination hub which had begun operating out of a car park of Hyde Leisure Centre in Greater Manchester. The video in question, shared by No Comment TV on YouTube, shows people being vaccinated outdoors at Hyde Leisure Centre by gloveless staff and in less than sterile conditions. In an article in the Manchester Evening News four days prior to the videos release the local news site stated that “The first batch of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine arrives in the borough on Tuesday, with vaccinations starting at Hyde Leisure Centre on Wednesday, December 15.”
No Data Available (#5-10)
When reading Reg 174, you will soon notice a recurring theme throughout the document. The guidance clearly states on multiple occasions that there are no data available concerning some of the most important questions surrounding the mRNA vaccine. As previously noted, the actual Phase III section of the safety trials will not be completed until January 2023, meaning that two years of trials are still to be run before the vaccine can be confirmed as safe, effective and ethical.
5. The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in children under 16 years of age have not yet been established
Although the guidance states that the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine has not been established in children, it doesn’t mean that children have not been included within the studies. In fact, in the official Pfizer study entitled “Protocol C4591001”, one of the two main study groups included children as young as 12 years old. The inclusion of children in trials but not the guidance raises the important question, why were children included in the trial? If the vaccine is not to be given to those under the age of 16 years old, then why include children as young as 12 in the trials for an experimental vaccine technology never before authorised for use in humans?
The mainstream media, instead of raising concerns about the involvement of children in the Pfizer clinical trials, have been fully supportive of the move to test experimental pharmaceuticals on minors. CNN reported on children as young as 12 being involved in trials in an October 2020 article entitled “This 12-year-old is happy to be testing a Covid-19 vaccine” while Microsoft News recently announced that “China begins Covid test trials on children as young as age three.”
6. No data are available on the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 in persons that have previously received a full or partial vaccine series with another COVID-19 vaccine
We are currently witnessing the very first of many tailor-made vaccines being rolled out for general use, so don’t expect the COVID-19 jabs to be the only vaccines coming our way. With a 20 to 1 return on investment on many of these new technologies, most pharmaceutical giants will surely be lobbying governments across the globe for the next “necessary” vaccination program. The idea of multiple COVID-19 vaccinations throughout the year is already being presented as a very possible outcome for the future of humanity. Yet, no studies have been completed showing the risk of taking different types of vaccines. There have also been suggestions that people will have to have the same vaccine that they had previously taken every six months or so. This will leave Astrazeneca, Pfizer and Moderna picking up repeat vaccine contracts worth billions in secured future revenue before there are any real data on the results of the vaccines.
7. No interaction studies have been performed and there are no, or a limited amount of, data from the use of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2
Admissions like these should be a cause for concern for anybody reading the official guidance. While officials and carefully chosen “trusted sources” are telling you that “no corners have been cut” in the race to approve these vaccines, it is also true that no full length studies have been completed either. These two facts are juxtaposed and obviously contradict the official narrative that is being thrust upon the general public by all of those involved.
It is clear that the officials have no real data on what will happen next and that there is a tsunami of ethical questions that are not being answered. In the absence of data, there will be speculation.
8. It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 is excreted in human milk and It is unknown whether COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 has an impact on fertility
It is vital to note the potential dangers posed by the BNT162b2 to unborn and newborn babies as well as the reproductive organs in general. There are so many parts of the Pfizer/BioNTech clinical trials that have not yet been completed. Dr. Peter Klatsky, the Director of Fertility Preservation at the Bay Area’s Spring Fertility, talking about the coming animal trials which are to be performed over the coming months was quoted in SFGate as saying, “It will reassure me an awful lot if the protein expression is not seen on the placenta. That the mRNA isn’t making it to the placenta in animals,” he said. “I don’t expect to see any.” The article goes on to explain that it will be about another 9 months until the data has been collected and analyzed.
Section 4.6 of the official guidance recommends pregnant women should not recieve the BNT162b2 vaccine
Big names in mainstream media have also been caught recklessly promoting the vaccine to pregnant women, such as Karen Weintraub writing for USA Today, whose recent article quickly states, “Although there are very little data on how pregnant and nursing mothers will respond to a COVID-19 vaccine, professional organizations and individual doctors say the benefits are very likely to outweigh the risks.” Even though the clinical trials intentionally excluded pregnant women, Weintraub went on to state that “23 women in the Pfizer-BioNTech trial and 13 in Moderna’s became pregnant during the trial.”
While the UK’s official guidance is left sounding ambiguous, on the European continent, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) states that “the Pfizer vaccine should be considered on a case by case basis for pregnant women”, but they also reserve the right to alter the guidance if more data becomes available. It seems there is no longer any erring on the side of caution with some regulators when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccinations.
9. Non-clinical data reveal no special hazard for humans based on a conventional study of repeat dose toxicity but animal studies into potential toxicity to reproduction and development have not been completed
Animal studies have not been completed and, as referred to in the previous section, the data on those animal trials will not be available for another 9 months. It is, of course, a very rare decision to approve an experimental medical technology before any animal studies have been completed. This should be a great cause for concern for any free thinking man or woman. The fact that they have had to use what they refer to as “non-clinical” data in these studies is also in conflict with the idea that the trials were conducted to the highest professional standard. The document also fails to clearly define what non-clinical data actually means.
10. In the absence of compatibility studies, this medicinal product must not be mixed with other medicinal products
Possibly the most fascinating admission in the entire document is the absence of any compatibility studies when somebody is given the vaccine while on any other medication or medical treatment. The guidance clearly states “this medicinal product should not be mixed with other medical products.” This completely jaw dropping sentence will lead many to assume that if you are on any medication at all, then you shouldn’t be given the vaccine. Whether this refers to the mixing of other medical properties directly together with the vaccine, or simultaneous dosing of any other medical product is unclear from the official guidance.
The Mail Online and The Guardian reported in 2019 that a staggering 1 in 4 people in England – nearly 12 million people – were taking what was described as “addictive” prescription medicines such as antidepressants, sleeping pills and opioid painkillers, saying that “the NHS must take action”. Those statistics throw into question the mass rollout of a vaccination with no compatability studies. This makes the fact that elderly care home residents, followed by those aged over 80, will be the first to recieve the experimental Pfizer vaccine an extremely risky strategy. Also in 2019, Age UK reported that nearly 2 million older people were on more that 7 prescription medicines and were at “risk of side effects that are severe in some cases, and occasionally even life threatening.” This worrying issue has been barely reported by the “trusted news sources”.
A Conclusive Lack of Real Data
After examining the official guidance, one fact becomes glaringly obvious — there is little to no data on the official Pfizer vaccine in key areas. In the clinical trials, children as young as 12 years old were used as unnecessary guinea pigs. There also wasn’t enough care taken to avoid pregnant women being involved in the initial clinical trials and under the cover of unyielding and uneducated mainstream propaganda, the safety of some of the most vulnerable people involved in the vaccine trials have been ignored by Pfizer and the politicians who have successfully pushed for the public vaccination campaign to essentially replace mass clinical trials. The stage has been set for a potential disaster on an unimaginable scale. It isn’t only the participants of the trials who are risking their health for the sake of big pharmaceutical companies’ hyperinflated profit margin, but it is also the medical professionals who could be risking their futures by collaborating in these risky experimental trials, which will certainly see many people dead and irreversibly injured.
In one section of Reg 174, the Big Pharma giant lays out the risk to people’s health from the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The most common adverse reaction in participants 16 years of age and older was pain at the injection site, which affected a massive 80% of those taking part in the Pfizer trials. Fatigue came a close second with 60% of trial participants becoming sluggish and tired. Half of those involved in the studies suffered from a headache as the experimental vaccine went to work while myalgia was experienced by 30% of vaccine recipients, though the results do not indicate whether the myalgia was acute (short-term) or chronic (long-term). Almost a third of participants came down with chills, while just under 1 in 5 people suffered from arthralgia (joint pain) and 1 in 10 from pyrexia (increased body temperature).
Adverse reactions reported in clinical trials are listed in the study in decreasing order of frequency and seriousness. Just under 1 in 10 people who take the vaccine will suffer from the very common and common adverse reactions referred to in the latter paragraph, such as headaches, myalgia and chills, but the more serious issues are classified as uncommon – including Lymphadenopathy (which causes swollen or enlarged lymph nodes) and nervous system disorders – which may affect up to 1 in 100 people. Rare adverse reactions that could affect up to 1 in 1000 people and very rare adverse reactions that would affect less than 1 in 10,000 of the vaccine recipients were not included in Pfizer’s self-reported safety information. It has obviously been decided that this information should be kept out of the public domain as much as possible to avoid any further vaccine hesitancy.
Not only does the official guidance actively hide the types of rare and very rare adverse effects, but they have also been leaving out some of the adverse reactions reported during the clinical trials. As I write this, the Reg 174 guidance for healthcare professionals is on version 10.1 of the document and, since its release, they have yet to admit to the potential of a certain uncommon adverse reaction to the vaccine being a specific nervous system disorder. Structural nervous system disorders include brain or spinal cord injury, Bell’s palsy, cervical spondylosis, carpal tunnel syndrome, brain or spinal cord tumors, peripheral neuropathy, and Guillain-Barré syndrome. However, previous versions of the guidance gives no clue as to what type of nervous system disorders they were referring to. However, recent articles in the USA Today, heavily promoted by the Microsoft Network, suggested that the Bell’s palsy some people came down with in the vaccine trials wasn’t related to the Pfizer jab. The article states that on Dec. 10, the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research held the 162nd meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee to discuss the emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. The USA Today piece even goes on to admit that , “a 53-page briefing noted that there had been four cases of Bell’s palsy among the vaccinated group and none among the placebo group.”
Bell’s palsy causes drooping facial muscles similar to the effects of a stroke, image source PTHealth.com
Even though Miriam Fauzia, who wrote the USA Today piece, claims that the Bell’s palsy was not related to the experimental Pfizer vaccine, the 53-page briefing she sources clearly states, “Among non-serious unsolicited adverse events, there was a numerical imbalance of four cases of Bell’s palsy in the vaccine group compared with no cases in the placebo group, though the four cases in the vaccine group do not represent a frequency above that expected in the general population.” While it is true that 1 to 4 people in 10,000 will develop Bell’s palsy within the general population, it should be noted that the 4 cases in the vaccine trials and none in the placebo group makes for a statistical anomoly that must be examined more thoroughly. Instead, the mainstream media moved quickly to discredit the Bell’s palsy links to the Pfizer vaccine using various misleading tactics to achieve their aims.
Many mainstream outlets were caught spouting the same misleading information with articles entitled “Why you shouldn’t worry about a connection between Bell’s palsy and COVID-19 vaccines,” from Business Insider and a Reuters article from 14 December 2020 entitled, “Fact check: Photo does not show three recipients of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine that developed Bell’s palsy.”
In the case of the Reuters article, which is described as written by “Reuters Staff” rather than a specific journalist, the focus was not on the four Pfizer clinical trial participants who developed Bell’s palsy but instead the article discredits a random post on social media of three people with Bell’s palsy unconnected to the Pfizer vaccine. These type of misinforming mainstream media articles are commonly found to be using obvious fallacies to mislead their readership and with no individual taking responsibility for writing the misinforming piece, a trick repeated by many other media companies complicit with the official narrative. The Reuters article even goes on to admit that: “According to the FDA’s briefing document dated December 10, Bell’s palsy was reported in four vaccine participants and none in the placebo group, out of the 44,000 total participants of the late-stage vaccine trial.” However, the title of the Reuters article would mislead even some of the most keen eyed observers.
The mainstream media has been creating a flood of misleading stories, but it appears as though they have been given carte blanche to continue to do so, probably because they are sticking so tightly to the official narrative. It’s a narrative that is thick with irony, for it is the “trusted sources” who are being caught systematically misleading the general population again and again while also declaring a propaganda war against “fake news”.
The official guidance noted in Reg 174 doesn’t only highlight the serious lack of real data gained from Pfizer’s clinical trials for its Covid-19 vaccine so far, but it also exposes the wealthy medical professionals involved in these experimental vaccine development programs as complacent, reckless and very naive. It’s no secret that children are, more often than not, incapable of giving informed legal consent for such a risky and unethical enterprise. But the pro-vax extremists are using every tactic to coerce and manipulate children and their guardians into becoming human guinea pigs for Big Pharma. Pregnant women are also treated as acceptable collateral damage to advance the new science of gene, mRNA and DNA manipulation, a science and technology that pushes a sinister transhumanist agenda.
Don’t be fooled by the carefully worded vacuous celebrities, self-serving politicians, Big Pharma, and the mainstream medias authoritarian style misinformation campaigns. Keep your humanity intact and read their own words. The government guidance to healthcare professionals clearly states on multiple occasions that there are “no data available”.
Johnny Vedmore is a completely independent investigative journalist and musician from Cardiff, Wales. His work aims to expose the powerful people who are overlooked by other journalists and bring new information to his readers. If you require help, or have a tip for Johnny, then get in touch via johnnyvedmore.com or by reaching out to johnnyvedmore@gmail.com
The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom
By Glenn Greenwald | December 28, 2020
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”
What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.
Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.
That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
Israeli Pegasus spyware ‘used to hack phones of dozens of Al Jazeera journalists’ in large-scale attack – report
RT | December 20, 2020
The personal phones of some 36 Al Jazeera journalists have been hacked by “government operatives” who used a controversial spying tool by Israel’s infamous NSO Group to snoop on them, a report by a Canadian research lab claims.
The report, released on Sunday by Citizen Lab, a research unit at the University of Toronto specializing in cybersecurity, alleged that the phones belonging to the employees of the Qatar-based media network, including journalists, producers, anchors, and executives, had been compromised and hacked with “an invisible zero-click exploit in IMessage” in July and August this year.
The exploit allowed the perpetrators of the attack, which Citizen Lab, “with a medium degree of confidence,” blamed on “government operatives” from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to infect the phones with spyware without the journalists having to click on malicious links themselves.
In its report, Citizen Lab said that the clandestine techniques employed in the attack “were sophisticated” and therefore “difficult to detect,” since the “targets” were often unaware of anything suspicious going on.
The hack might have remained undetected this time as well, were it not for the network’s Arabic language channel reporter Tamer Almisshal, who sounded the alarm that his phone might have been spied-on and let the researchers monitor his online traffic starting from January 2020. Several months after, in July, the researchers saw his personal phone visiting a website where it got infected with NSO’s group Pegasus spyware without Almisshal’s ever clicking on the link.
The discovery has prompted a wide-ranging search for possible other victims among Al Jazeera staff, eventually leading to Citizen Lab and the channel’s IT unit identifying a total of 36 personal phones that had been successfully targeted by the “four NSO group operators.” One of them, who the group nicknamed “Monarchy,” allegedly tapped into 18 phones, while another one – dubbed “Sneaky Kestrel” – spied on 15 phones.
The group said that it believes “Monarchy” was acting on the marching orders from Riyadh, since it “appears to target individuals primarily inside Saudi Arabia,” while “Sneaky Kestrel” focused on those journalists who were “primarily inside UAE.”
The researchers said that the security loophole that facilitated the hack was closed with the IOS 14 update released in September, but noted that, until then, it had likely been taken advantage of on a large scale. “We suspect that the infections that we observed were a miniscule fraction of the total attacks leveraging this exploit.”
Apple, for its part, appeared to throw weight behind Citizen Lab’s allegations of a state-sanctioned hack, saying that the reported attack “was highly targeted by nation states,” but noted that it could verify the findings of the report.
The Israeli group told The Guardian it would “take all necessary steps,” if it is provided with “credible evidence” that its spying tools were abused.
It’s not the first time the producer of Pegasus spyware kit finds itself in the spotlight in connection with allegations that its tech was used against reporters. Amnesty International reported in June this year that an award-winning Morocco-based journalist Omar Radi fell victim to the same spyware in an attack strikingly similar to the one described by Citizen Lab.
Last year, WhatsApp confirmed that dozens of Indian lawyers, journalists, and rights activists were among 1,400 users affected by the snooping software.
Despite the perpetual controversy surrounding the NSO group, an Israeli court in July sided with the firm and the Israeli Ministry of Defense in a case brought by Amnesty International, which demanded a ban on international sales of the software.
IMF researchers propose to have AI use ONLINE history to determine credit rating, in name of ‘inclusion’ of course
RT | December 18, 2020
Traditional data used for credit-scoring could be replaced by AI-powered processes based on online search and purchase histories to better reach a billion-plus “unbanked people” globally, a group of IMF researchers has proposed.
Using non-financial data such as “the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases,” which is then fed into technology powered by AI and machine learning, could “advance financial inclusion, by, for example, enabling more credit to informal workers and households and firms in rural areas,” write Arnoud Boot, Peter Hoffmann, Luc Laeven and Lev Ratnovski in a post on the International Monetary Fund blog.
The authors argue these “alternative data sources are often superior than traditional credit assessment methods,” which tend to boost credit expansion during booms and shrink it during busts. Moreover, they say, traditional credit data is not available for “certain kinds of people, like new entrepreneurs, innovators and many informal workers,” even well-off immigrants to the US.
Their AI-powered credit score based on web searches is just one of the proposals in the paper, which argues the Covid-19 pandemic is “turbo-charging” the technological transformation of the financial industry and looking at how the IMF can “get ahead” of the problems that might create.
Boot is a professor of finance at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Hoffman and Laeven are economists with the European Central Bank, where Ratnovski has been seconded from his job as an IMF economist. In other words, these are very serious finance people and their proposal isn’t meant in jest. They just don’t seem to be familiar with the “when I die, delete my internet history” meme.
Highlighted by Gizmodo on Friday, the proposal was met by alarm and derision by the US commentariat. New York Times opinion writer Charlie Warzel called it a “a fantastic example of people who have an idea that is perhaps well intentioned but incredibly foolish” and compared it to a slow-motion car wreck
Other responses compared the IMF proposal to a pitch for an episode of the dystopian series ‘Black Mirror,’ and joked that perhaps people should start running searches such as “Why am I so great with money?” and “I <3 the IMF.” Then there were those who worried that letting AI make lending decisions would be – what else? – racist.
The IMF proposal was also panned as yet another attempt to expand control by globalist institutions, along the lines of the World Economic Forum-proposed ‘Great Reset’ using the pandemic as a pretext.
Last month, a Deutsche Bank monthly featured a proposal by another researcher to tax people working from home in order to subsidize those that can’t, as well as the infrastructure sitting unused during the pandemic. In the same publication, the same researcher also authored a proposal to reimagine Western cities by abolishing zoning regulations.
Instagram is Using False “Fact-Checking” to Protect Joe Biden’s Crime Record From Criticisms
By Glenn Greenwald | December 17, 2020
A long-standing and vehement criticism of Joe Biden is that legislation he championed as a Senator in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly his crime bill of 1994, contributed to the mass incarceration of Americans generally and African-Americans specifically.
Among the many on the left and libertarian right who have voiced this criticism (along with President Trump) is then-Senator Kamala Harris, who said during the 2020 Democratic primary race that Biden’s “crime bill — that 1994 crime bill — it did contribute to mass incarceration in our country.” When Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2015, Bill Clinton, who as president signed Biden’s bill into law, told the NAACP: “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told Biden during a 2019 presidential debate: “There are people right now in prison for life for drug offenses because you stood up and used that tough-on-crime phony rhetoric that got a lot of people elected but destroyed communities like mine.” Booker then said in an interview with The Huffington Post that that Biden’s “crime bill was shameful, what it did to black and brown communities like mine [and] low-income communities from Appalachia to rural Iowa,” also denouncing it for “overwhelmingly putting people in prison for nonviolent drug offenses that members of Congress and the Senate admit to breaking now.”
In 2016, author and scholar Michele Alexander argued that Hillary did not deserve the votes of black people due to her and her husband’s support for numerous bills, including Biden’s 1994 crime bill, that led to the mass incarceration of African-Americans. Harvard’s Cornel West said in 2019: “When [Biden] says [the 1994 crime bill] didn’t contribute to mass incarceration, I tell him he has to get off his symbolic crack pipe.”
While that debate over the damage done by Biden’s crime bill has long raged in Democratic Party politics and the criminal justice reform movement, it is now barred from being aired on the Facebook-owned social media giant Instagram, or at least is formally denounced as disinformation. With Joe Biden about to enter the White House — one that will exercise significant influence in determining Silicon Valley’s interests, will be filled with tech executives, and was made possible in large part by Silicon Valley’s largesse poured into the Biden/Harris campaign — Instagram has arrogated unto itself the power to declare these well-established criticisms of Biden and his crime bill to be “False” and having “no basis in fact.”
As first noted on Monday by former Sanders campaign organizer Ben Mora, Instagram publicly denounced as “False” a post on Sunday by the left-wing artist and frequent Biden critic Brad Troemel, who has more than 107,000 followers on that platform. Troemel’s post said nothing more than what Biden’s chosen running mate, Kamala Harris, has herself said, as well as numerous mainstream media outlets and countless criminal justice reform advocates have long maintained.
Troemel posted a 1994 photo of a smiling, mullet-sporting Biden standing next to then-President Bill Clinton. The photo contained this caption: “Find someone that looks at you the way Biden looked at Clinton after signed Biden’s crime bill into law. Bringing mass incarceration to black Americans.” This was the same photo and caption which an anonymous Trump supporter under the name “realtina40” first posted back in June.
Shortly after Troemel posted this on Sunday, Instagram appended a note in red letters, with a warning sign that read: “Learn why fact-checkers have indicated that this is false.” That was followed by a note plastered over Troemel’s original post with the title: “False,” and which claimed “independent fact-checkers say this information has no basis in fact.” The same thing was done by Instagram to “realtina40” original June post.
This is not the first time Troemel has been censored by Instagram for posting criticisms of Biden. In response to questions, he told me he first earned the “false” label when posting a meme in April which he had created that mocked Biden’s campaign messaging. Instagram’s retaliation happened after the Biden campaign loudly complained about Troemel’s satirical ad. Biden campaign operatives falsely blamed the Trump campaign for having created it, and then induced Twitter to censor it.
As Troemel told me: “Here you can see Dems using the Russia-tinged cover of disinformation as a way to discredit any and all criticism of Biden found on social media.” When Troemel re-posted that meme last month with the clear notation that it was satirical, Instagram began “shadow banning” him: severely limiting the reach of his posts. It was those events — all involving Troemel’s criticisms of Biden from the left — that caused Instagram to heavily scrutinize his postings, culminating in its blurring of his latest post with a “False” label that contained these well-documented criticisms of Biden’s crime bill.
The only thing that is demonstrably “false” here is Instagram’s Biden-shielding assertion that there is a “fact-checking” consensus that this criticism of Biden’s 1994 crime bill is false. It is true that one media outlet, USA Today, fact-checked the identical claim posted back in June by the anonymous Instagram user and concluded that “our research finds that while the crime bill did increase the prison population in states, it did not bring about a mass incarceration relative to earlier years.” But that article so concluded even while admitting that Biden’s “crime bill did increase the prison population in states” and “any increase in the overall prison population would automatically translate into a larger number of Black inmates.” The article’s own premises thus bolster, not refute, the claim at issue.
But numerous other media outlets and fact-checking organizations — far more than just one — concluded the opposite: namely, that there is at least a reasonable and substantial basis for these claims about Biden’s bill:
- PolitiFact rated as only “Half True” Biden’s claim that the 1994 crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration,” noting the bill provided funds to states on the condition that they force prisoners to serve longer sentences and that it bolstered the tough-on-crime climate that led to higher incarceration rates in the states (that was the same point Bill Clinton made to the NAACP: “the federal law set a trend…. [W]e had a lot people who were locked up, who were minor actors, for way too long”);
- The Washington Post’s designated fact-checker Glenn Kessler assigned two Pinocchios to Biden’s insistence that his crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration,” noting that “the bill encouraged states to build more prisons — with more money coming to them if they increased penalties.” Kessler cited a Brennan Center report that “the 1994 Crime Bill is justly criticized for encouraging states to build and fill new prisons.”The Post added: “There are many factors that contributed to the United States having such a high incarceration rate, but few dispute the crime bill was a contributor. Bill Clinton has acknowledged this.” The paper’s “two Pinocchio” rating means Biden’s denial contains “significant omissions and/or exaggerations…. Similar to ‘half true’”);
- CNN purported to fact-check the same claims from Biden and found that Biden’s denial “misses the broader impact that federal policy can have on the way that states incarcerate, including the influence of federal money,” concluding that the view that the 1994 crime bill was a significant factor in mass incarceration was, at the very least, debatable.
- The fact-check from NBC News flatly stated that “though the bill was not the root cause of ‘mass incarceration,’ it was ‘the most high-profile legislation to increase the number of people behind bars,’ according to a Brennan Center analysis in 2016.”
- Fact-checking Sen. Booker’s accusations against Biden, The Atlantic said: “it is true that the bill—which extended the death penalty to 60 new crimes, stiffened sentences, offered states strong financial incentives for building new prisons, and banned a range of assault weapons—helped lead to the wave of mass incarceration that’s resulted in the United States accounting for 25 percent of the world’s prison population.” It added that “a 2016 analysis by the Brennan Center concluded that the 1994 bill contributed both to the subsequent decline in crime and to the doubling of the rate of imprisonment from 1994 to 2009.”
- The New York Times’ fact-check of Biden’s denial rated it “Exaggerated,” quoting a criminologist to say that Biden’s bill “encouraged [states] to mass incarcerate further.”
- Regarding Biden’s denial that his 1994 crime bill “led to more prison sentences, more prison cells, and more aggressive policing — especially hurting Black and brown Americans,” Vox pronounced: “The truth, it turns out, is somewhere in the middle,” noting that “the law imposed tougher prison sentences at the federal level and encouraged states to do the same” and also ensured “an escalation of the War on Drugs.”
One could spend literally all day listing media outlets, criminal justice experts, and politicians from both parties who have insisted that Biden’s 1994 crime bill was a significant factor in mass incarceration generally and of African-Americans specifically, or that the assertion is at least reasonably debatable and grounded in empirical facts — exactly what Instagram has decided is out of bounds to state. It is axiomatically true, or at the very least logically reasonable, that if Biden’s crime bill led to more mass incarceration — and few doubt that it did — then the bill, in the words of the denounced Instagram post, “brought mass incarceration to black Americans.”
On Monday, The New York Post sought comment from Facebook about Instagram’s “False” label. The tech giant, in the words of that paper, said “that Instagram won’t end its censorship unless USA Today changes its assessment.” Yet the Post — long an advocate for tough-on-crime legislation — itself echoed virtually every other media outlet by noting that “whether Biden’s law contributed to mass incarceration is a matter of debate.”
Indeed, from what I can tell, USA Today is the only prominent media outlet of all the ones which fact-checked this issue to conclude that the claim about Biden’s bill is “false.” The overwhelming consensus of fact-checkers and experts is that the 1994 crime bill at the very least contributed to mass incarceration generally and of African-Americans specifically, and that the magnitude of that role is debatable.
But Instagram has closed this debate, at least on its platform. They have announced that the claims about Biden’s 1994 crime bill as expressed by not only Brad Troemel — but also Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton, Cory Booker, Cornel West, the Brennan Center and countless others — has been proven false.
This episode demonstrates two crucial facts. The first is that what is so often passed off as quasi-scientific, opinion-free “fact-checking” are instead extremely tendentious, subjective and highly debatable opinions. That’s how Instagram can cherry-pick the conclusions of USA Today and treat it as if it is Gospel even though numerous other outlets, mainstream politicians in Biden’s own party, and criminal justice experts reached a radically different conclusion. “Fact-checking” in theory has journalistic value, but it is often nothing more than a branding tactic for media outlets to disguise their highly subjective pronouncements as unchallengeable Truth.
The second, more important point is that Silicon Valley giants lack any competency to determine the truth or falsity of political claims even when they act with the best of motives. Who at Instagram decided to rely on the USA Today claims while ignoring all the conflicting conclusions from other outlets and experts, and who decided how to apply that conclusion to the post at issue? And why did USA Today randomly decide to subject an anti-Biden meme about his crime bill from the account of a relatively obscure, anonymous Trump supporter but ignore similar statements coming from Senators Harris and Booker and Bill Clinton, thus handing Instagram an excuse to label any similar views as “False” and without “any basis”? Why are tech companies trying to officiate political debates this way?
Recall that the censorship of Twitter and Facebook of The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was based at least in part on the claim that the documents were the by-product of hacking and “Russian disinformation” — claims that have “no basis in fact.” As Matt Taibbi put it last week when warning of the dangers of YouTube’s decision to ban from its platform any questioning of the legitimacy of the 2020 election while still allowing similar questioning of the 2016 election: “There’s no such thing as a technocratic approach to truth. There are official truths, but those are political rather than scientific determinations, and therefore almost always wrong on some level.”
Moreover, the assumption that tech giants are acting with the best of intentions is completely unwarranted. Like every faction, these companies are awash with bias, partisanship, ideological dogma and self-interest. They overwhelmingly donated to the Democratic Party and the Biden campaign. Their executives are residing in virtually every sector of the Biden/Harris transition. Currying favor with the Biden administration — by, say, soft-censoring or discrediting harmful critiques of the President-elect — serves their corporate interests in multiple ways. And their overwhelmingly establishment-liberal employees are increasingly insistent that views they dislike should be censored off their platforms.
This is why it has been so dangerous, so misguided, to acquiesce to a campaign that is being led by corporate media outlets to insist that these tech giants abandon a belief in a free internet and instead censor more aggressively. That a person will now be declared by Facebook’s properties to be a disseminator of disinformation for voicing long-standing and well-documented criticisms of Joe Biden’s crime record is yet another bleak glimpse of a future in which unseen tech overlords police our discourse by unilaterally arbitrating truth and falsity, decree what are permissible and impermissible ideas, and rigidly setting the boundaries of acceptable debate.
Twitter Says It Will REMOVE All Posts Claiming Vaccines Can Harm People
By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 17, 2020
Twitter has declared that it will remove all posts that suggest there are any “adverse impacts or effects of receiving vaccinations,” despite reports already emerging of health workers getting sick from taking Pfizer’s coronavirus shot.
Twitter announced that beginning next week it will memory-hole any posts that “invoke a deliberate conspiracy” or “advance harmful, false, or misleading narratives” about vaccines.
“Using a combination of technology and human review, we will begin enforcing this updated policy on December 21, and expanding our actions during the following weeks,” the company proclaimed.
Twitter added that it will be monitoring posts about vaccinations “in close consultation with local, national, and global public health authorities around the world.”
The tech company will also wipe any posts that suggest vaccines “are used to intentionally cause harm,” or “control populations,” or are “unnecessary.”
The statement also notes that posts will be scrubbed if they contain “false claims which have been widely debunked about the adverse impacts or effects of receiving vaccinations.”
Exactly what “debunked” means was not clarified. Presumably it means any claims about vaccines that Twitter disagrees with.
The New York Times and others reported Wednesday that healthcare workers in Alaska have been hospitalized with a serious allergic reaction after taking Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine.
The development follows reports last week from Britain where some healthcare workers reported serious allergic reactions to the vaccine, prompting Britain’s medical regulator to issue a warning for people with a history of allergies not to take the shot.
There is a mountain of documented evidence that some vaccines can cause harm and have adverse effects, and compared to previous vaccines, the coronavirus shot is relatively untested, indeed six people even DIED during the rush to develop it.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators also revealed that some people who got Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine during its trial have since developed Bell’s palsy, a form of facial paralysis.
Both the US and UK governments have rolled out technology specifically to monitor adverse effects of the vaccine, because they know there will be many, many cases.
Yet Twitter appears to be decreeing that any suggestion the shot could cause damage will be met with strict censorship.
Where it cannot prove something has been “debunked” and remove the post entirely, Twitter says it intends to attach “warning” labels to tweets that “advance unsubstantiated rumours, disputed claims, as well as incomplete or out-of-context information about vaccines.”
Last month, Twitter declared that it will send warnings to everyone who likes a post the company deems to contain “misleading information”.
Instagram censors claim that Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill led to ‘mass incarceration’ of black Americans
RT | December 17, 2020
Instagram has been actively censoring a meme about President-elect Joe Biden’s legislative record, after it flagged as “false” an artist’s post linking the ex-Senator’s 1994 Crime Bill to mass incarceration of black Americans.
The political meme, uploaded by Brad Troemel on Wednesday, shows an old photo of Biden and then-President Bill Clinton, along with a caption that reads: “Find someone that looks at you the way Biden looked at Clinton after Clinton signed Biden’s crime bill into law. Bringing mass incarceration to black Americans.”
The Facebook-owned platform quickly flagged Troemel’s image as “false information.” Instagram also cited “independent fact-checkers” from USA Today, who apparently “say this information has no basis in fact.” Thus, before being able to view the image, the platform requires users to first read a disclaimer, which links to a USA Today article allegedly debunking the claim that the 1994 crime bill led to mass incarceration of black Americans.
The so-called “fact check,” written by Doug Stanglin and published in July, asserts that despite the Crime Bill being “a grab-bag of crime-fighting measures,” ‘mass incarceration’ actually began “in the 1960s” and is not a racialized phenomenon.
Troemel’s interaction with Instagram was easy to verify, as the platform still almost immediately slams the “false information” label on a newly uploaded image.
Yet, USA Today’s analysis appears to fly in the face of assessments by both left-wing and some conservative supporters of criminal justice reform.
The issue ultimately appears up for debate, with some critics saying that the Crime Bill contributed massively to mass incarceration, while others split hairs, saying it simply exacerbated an already ongoing trend.
Instagram’s move, however, was largely seen as overly-protective of Biden, with some even calling it political censorship.
Facebook spokesperson Stephanie Otway told the New York Post, that Instagram would not stop flagging the Biden meme, as long as the platform’s “fact-checking partners” keep the rating the same. The Post itself referred to the so-called fact-check as “hotly disputed.”
After his post was flagged, Troemel updated his Instagram bio to say he was “currently shadowbanned for criticizing Joe Biden.”
In October, Biden himself admitted it was a “mistake” to support the bill, after facing renewed criticism over its impacts – and later reiterated the point during the final presidential debate against Donald Trump.
‘Hate crime entrepreneurs’ are cashing in on taxpayers’ money while they try to kill free speech in Britain
© Getty Images/Ray Tang/Anadolu Agency
By Joanna Williams | RT | December 15, 2020
Free speech is under assault in the UK from organisations who inflate the number of supposed ‘hate crimes’ and ‘incidents’ to fill their coffers with government cash and leave us with only police-sanctioned expression.
Make a bad joke on Twitter, give a speech at a Conservative party conference, or refer to someone using the wrong pronouns, and you could find the police knocking on your door.
Last year, the police in England and Wales recorded over 100,000 hate crimes, up eight percent on the previous year.
Hate crime is defined as “any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.” This can include verbal abuse, intimidation, threats, harassment, or bullying, directed at individuals or groups on account of their race, religion, sexuality, disability or transgender identity. In addition to this – and the cause of much of the door-knocking – police also investigate and report ‘hate incidents.’ A hate incident is not a criminal offence at all, but simply any speech or action that someone from a ‘protected’ group finds offensive.
As I investigate in ‘Policing Hate’, a new report published by the think tank Civitas, in England and Wales today we do not have free speech. We are only permitted to say things that do not offend others. And we do not have equality before the law; some groups of people are awarded additional legal protections to everyone else.
Now, the Law Commission, an independent body designed to review the law and make recommendations to the government, is proposing changes to hate crime legislation. Unfortunately, if enacted, these changes will go even further in curtailing free speech.
To understand why the Law Commission’s proposals are so censorious, we need to look to the influence of groups I’ve labelled ‘hate crime entrepreneurs’. These are charities and campaigning organisations, like Stonewall, Disability Rights UK, and StopHate UK, that support and advocate for people with disabilities, transgender people, and the lesbian, gay and bisexual community.
Many of these groups do a great job of representing their members’ interests. But when it comes to the law, this is a problem – they are neither neutral nor objective. In order to raise the money necessary to keep services functioning and pay staff wages, they need to present the people they support as disadvantaged and oppressed. Hate crime and hate incidents appear to provide one measure of just how victimised a particular group is.
But no matter how many statistics about hate incidents charities compile, we are no nearer to having an objective measure of the verbal abuse or hostility different groups experience. Offence is experienced subjectively. It is entirely possible for two people to hear the exact same joke, or listen to the exact same speech, and for one person to be offended while the other finds only humour or interest. One person might see themselves as a victim of a hate crime while their friend brushes off the same incident with a shrug of the shoulders.
Through their websites and campaigning, groups like Stonewall define hate crime and then encourage their members to see themselves as victims and to report crimes to the police. They then use these inflated statistics as part of their publicity material. Stonewall, for example, claims, “Two in five trans people have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their gender identity in the last 12 months.” This sounds shocking, but it may mean little more than they saw a transgender person being ‘misgendered’ on social media.
Furthermore, many groups that lobby on behalf of particular communities receive government funding for their work. For example, ‘Challenge It, Report It, Stop It’, a previous government hate crime action plan, reports on plans to support a range of groups such as the Jewish Museum, Show Racism the Red Card, Searchlight Educational Trust, and Faith Matters’ ‘Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks’ (MAMA) project. As a result, these groups are effectively paid by the government to tell groups advising the government (civil servants or the Law Commission) what they want to hear.
Hate crime entrepreneurs have a vested interest in presenting the people they represent as victims. So it is hardly surprising that, when asked by the Law Commission, they argue for the law to be changed to define hate crime ever more broadly and to extend protections to yet more groups. What is surprising is that the Law Commission should draw upon evidence from such organisations in compiling recommendations for legal changes.
As the Law Commission’s paper makes clear, these campaigning organisations, along with academics, have had considerable influence in shaping both the analysis and recommendations that comprise the consultation. The role of hate crime entrepreneurs is evident in the paper’s acknowledgement that, “every submission to the inquiry containing data about local or national trends had agreed that: the situation is getting worse and that, due to large numbers of hate crimes not being reported to third-party services or the police, the true profile of hate crime in the UK is akin to an iceberg, with the majority hidden from view.”
If the legal limits on what we can say are to be determined by those with a financial incentive to be easily offended, then we will have even less free speech than we have at present. If hate crime entrepreneurs get their way, we will be left with nothing other than state-sanctioned, police-approved speech. It is vitally important that, before the Law Commission’s consultation closes on December 24, they hear from people who consider free speech to be the most important, foundational right we have.
Joanna Williams is the founder of the think tank Cieo. She is the author of Women vs Feminism, Why We All Need Liberating From the Gender Wars and is a regular columnist for Spiked. Follow her on Twitter @jowilliams293
Antisemitism claims mask a reign of political and cultural terror across Europe
By Jonathan Cook | December 11, 2020
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.
The article concerns Germany but anyone reading it will see very strong parallels with what is happening in other European countries, especially the UK and France.
The same European leaders who a few years ago marched in Paris shouting “Je suis Charlie” – upholding the inalienable free speech rights of white Europeans to offend Muslims by insulting and ridiculing their Prophet – are now queuing up to outlaw free speech when it is directed against Israel, a state that refuses to end its belligerent occupation of Palestinian land. European leaders have repeatedly shown they are all too ready to crush the free speech of Palestinians, and those in solidarity with them, to avoid offending sections of the Jewish community.
The situation reduces to this: European Muslims have no right to take offence at insults about a religion they identify with, but European Jews have every right to take offence at criticism of an aggressive Middle Eastern state they identify with. Seen another way, the perverse secular priorities of European mainstream culture now place the sanctity of a militarised state, Israel, above the sanctity of a religion with a billion followers.
Guilt by association
This isn’t even a double standard. I can’t find a word in the dictionary that conveys the scale and degree of hypocrisy and bad faith involved.
If the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein wrote a follow-up to his impassioned book The Holocaust Industry – on the cynical use of the Holocaust to enrich and empower a Jewish organisational establishment at the expense of the Holocaust’s actual survivors – he might be tempted to title it The Antisemitism Industry.
In the current climate in Europe, one that rejects any critical thinking in relation to broad areas of public life, that observation alone would enough to have one denounced as an antisemite. Which is why the Haaretz article – far braver than anything you will read in a UK or US newspaper – makes no bones about what is happening in Germany. It calls it a “witch-hunt”. That is Haaretz’s way of saying that antisemitism has been politicised and weaponised – a self-evident conclusion that will currently get you expelled from the British Labour party, even if you are Jewish.
The Haaretz story highlights two important developments in the way antisemitism has been, in the words of intellectuals and cultural leaders cited by the newspaper, “instrumentalised” in Germany.
Jewish organisations and their allies in Germany, as Haaretz reports, are openly weaponising antisemitism not only to damage the reputation of Israel’s harsher critics, but also to force out of the public and cultural domain – through a kind of “antisemitism guilt by association” – anyone who dares to entertain criticism of Israel.
Cultural associations, festivals, universities, Jewish research centres, political think-tanks, museums and libraries are being forced to scrutinise the past of those they wish to invite in case some minor transgression against Israel can be exploited by local Jewish organisations. That has created a toxic, politically paranoid atmosphere that inevitably kills trust and creativity.
But the psychosis runs deeper still. Israel, and anything related to it, has become such a combustible subject – one that can ruin careers in an instant – that most political, academic and cultural figures in Germany now choose to avoid it entirely. Israel, as its supporters intended, is rapidly becoming untouchable.
A case study noted by Haaretz is Peter Schäfer, a respected professor of ancient Judaism and Christianity studies who was forced to resign as director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum last year. Schäfer’s crime, in the eyes of Germany’s Jewish establishment, was that he staged an exhibition on Jerusalem that recognised the city’s three religious traditions, including a Muslim one.
He was immediately accused of promoting “historical distortions” and denounced as “anti-Israel”. A reporter for Israel’s rightwing Jerusalem Post, which has been actively colluding with the Israeli government to smear critics of Israel, contacted Schäfer with a series of inciteful emails. The questions included “Did you learn the wrong lesson from the Holocaust?” and “Israeli experts told me you disseminate antisemitism – is that true?”
Schäfer observes:
The accusation of antisemitism is a club that allows one to deal a death blow, and political elements who have an interest in this are using it, without a doubt… The museum staff gradually entered a state of panic. Then of course we also started to do background checks. Increasingly it poisoned the atmosphere and our work.
Another prominent victim of these Jewish organisations tells Haaretz :
Sometimes one thinks, “To go to that conference?”, “To invite this colleague?” Afterward it means that for three weeks, I’ll have to cope with a shitstorm, whereas I need the time for other things that I get paid for as a lecturer. There is a type of “anticipatory obedience” or “prior self-censorship”.
Ringing off the hook
There is nothing unusual about what is happening in Germany. Jewish organisations are stirring up these “shitstorms” – designed to paralyse political and cultural life for anyone who engages in even the mildest criticism of Israel – at the highest levels of government. Don’t believe me? Here is Barack Obama explaining in his recent autobiography his efforts as US president to curb Israel’s expansion of its illegal settlements. Early on, he was warned to back off or face the wrath of the Israel lobby:
Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as “anti-Israel” (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.
When Obama went ahead anyway in 2009 and proposed a modest freeze on Israel’s illegal settlements:
The White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel … this sort of pressure continued for much of 2009.
He observes further:
The noise orchestrated by Netanyahu had the intended effect of gobbling up our time, putting us on the defensive, and reminding me that normal policy differences with an Israeli prime minister – even one who presided over a fragile coalition government – exacted a political cost that didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.
Doubtless, Obama dare not put down in writing his full thoughts about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the US lobbyists who worked on his behalf. But Obama’s remarks do show that, even a US president, supposedly the single most powerful person on the planet, ended up blanching in the face of this kind of relentless assault. For lesser mortals, the price is likely to be far graver.
No free speech on Israel
It was this same mobilisation of Jewish organisational pressure – orchestrated, as Obama notes, by Israel and its partisans in the US and Europe – that ended up dominating Jeremy Corbyn’s five years as the leader of Britain’s leftwing Labour party, recasting a well-known anti-racism activist almost overnight as an antisemite.
It is the reason why his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has outsourced part of Labour’s organisational oversight on Jewish and Israel-related matters to the very conservative Board of Deputies of British Jews, as given expression in Starmer’s signing up to the Board’s “10 Pledges”.
It is part of the reason why Starmer recently suspended Corbyn from the party, and then defied the membership’s demands that he be properly reinstated, after Corbyn expressed concerns about the way antisemitism allegations had been “overstated for political reasons” to damage him and Labour. (The rightwing Starmer, it should be noted, was also happy to use antisemitism as a pretext to eradicate the socialist agenda Corbyn had tried to revive in Labour.) It is why Starmer has imposed a blanket ban on constituency parties discussing Corbyn’s suspension. And it is why Labour’s shadow education secretary has joined the ruling Conservative party in threatening to strip universities of their funding if they allow free speech about Israel on campus.
Two types of Jews
But the Haaretz article raises another issue critical to understanding how Israel and the Jewish establishment in Europe are politicising antisemitism to protect Israel from criticism. The potential Achilles’ heel of their campaign are Jewish dissidents, those who break with the supposed “Jewish community” line and create a space for others – whether Palestinians or other non-Jews – to criticise Israel. These Jewish dissenters risk serving as a reminder that trenchant criticism of Israel should not result in one being tarred an antisemite.
Israel and Jewish organisations, however, have made it their task to erode that idea by promoting a distinction – an antisemitic one, at that – between two types of Jews: good Jews (loyal to Israel), and bad Jews (disloyal to Israel).
Haaretz reports that officials in Germany, such as Felix Klein, the country’s antisemitism commissioner, and Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, are being allowed to define not only who is an antisemite, typically using support for Israel as the yardstick, but are also determining who are good Jews – those politically like them – and who are bad Jews – those who disagree with them.
Despite Germany’s horrific recent history of Jew hatred, the German government, local authorities, the media, universities and cultural institutions have been encouraged by figures like Klein and Schuster to hound German Jews, even Israeli Jews living and working in Germany, from the country’s public and cultural space.
When, for example, a group of Israeli Jewish academics in Berlin held a series of online discussions about Zionism last year on the website of their art school, an Israeli reporter soon broke the story of a “scandal” involving boycott supporters receiving funding from the German government. Hours later the art school had pulled down the site, while the German education ministry issued a statement clarifying that it had provided no funding. The Israeli embassy officially declared the discussions held by these Israelis as “antisemitic”, and a German foundation that documents antisemitism added the group to the list of antisemitic incidents it records.
Described as ‘kapos’
So repressive has the cultural and political atmosphere grown in Germany that there has been a small backlash among cultural leaders. Some have dared to publish a letter protesting against the role of Klein, the antisemitism commissioner. Haaretz reports:
The antisemitism czar, the letter charged, is working “in synergy with the Israeli government” in an effort “to discredit and silence opponents of Israel’s policies” and is abetting the “instrumentalization” that undermines the true struggle against antisemitism.
Figures like Klein have been so focused on tackling criticism of Israel from the left, including the Jewish left, that they have barely noted the “acute danger Jews in Germany face due to the surge in far-right antisemitism”, the letter argues.
Again, the same picture can be seen across Europe. In the UK, the opposition Labour party, which should be a safe space for those leading the anti-racism struggle, is purging itself of Jews critical of Israel and using anti-semitism smears against prominent anti-racists, especially from other oppressed minorities.
Extraordinarily, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, one of the founders of Jewish Voice for Labour, which supports Corbyn, recently found herself suspended by Starmer’s Labour. She had just appeared in a moving video in which she explained the ways antisemitism was being used by Jewish organisations to smear Jewish left-wingers like herself as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi points out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people”.
In suspending her, Starmer effectively endorsed this campaign by the UK’s Jewish establishment of incitement against, and vilification of, leftwing Jews.
Earlier, Marc Wadsworth, a distinguished black anti-racism campaigner, found himself similarly suspended by Labour when he exposed the efforts of Ruth Smeeth, then a Labour MP and a former Jewish official in the Israel lobby group BICOM, to recruit the media to her campaign smearing political opponents on the left as antisemites.
In keeping with the rapid erosion of critical thinking in civil society organisations designed to uphold basic freedoms, Smeeth was recently appointed director of the prestigious free speech organisation Index on Censorship. There she can now work on suppressing criticism of Israel – and attack “bad Jews” – under cover of fighting censorship. In the new, inverted reality, censorship refers not to the smearing and silencing of a “bad Jew” like Wimborne-Idrissi, but to criticism of Israel over its human rights abuses, which supposedly “censors” the identification of “good Jews” with Israel – now often seen as the crime of “causing offence”.
Boy who cried wolf
The Haaretz article helps to contextualise Europe’s current antisemitism “witch-hunt”, which targets anyone who criticises Israel or stands in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, or associates with such people. It is an expansion of the earlier campaign by the Jewish establishment against “the wrong kind of Jew”, as identified by Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry. But this time Jewish organisations are playing a much higher-stakes, and more dangerous, political game.
Haaretz rightly fears that the Jewish leadership in Europe is not only silencing ordinary Jews but degrading the meaning – the shock value – of antisemitism through the very act of politicising it. Jewish organisations risk alienating the European left, which has historically stood with them against Jew hatred from the right. European anti-racists suddenly find themselves equated with, and smeared as, fledgling neo-Nazis.
If those who support human rights and demand an end to the oppression of Palestinians find themselves labelled antisemitic, it will become ever harder to distinguish between bogus (weaponised) “antisemitism” on the left and real Jew hatred from the right. The antisemitism smearers – and their fellow travellers like Keir Starmer – are likely to end up suffering their very own “boy who cried wolf” syndrome.
Or as Haaretz notes:
The issue that is bothering the critics of the Bundestag [German parliament] resolution is whether the extension of the concept of antisemitism to encompass criticism of Israel is not actually adversely affecting the battle against antisemitism. The argument is that the ease with which the accusation is leveled could have the effect of eroding the concept itself.
The Antisemitism Industry
It is worth noting the shared features of the new Antisemitism Industry and Finkelstein’s earlier discussions of the Holocaust Industry.
In his book, Finkelstein identifies the “wrong Jews” as people like his mother, who survived a Nazi death camp as the rest of her family perished. These surviving Jews, Finkelstein argues, were valued by the Holocaust Industry only in so far as they served as a promotional tool for the Jewish establishment to accumulate more wealth and cultural and political status. Otherwise, the victims were ignored because the actual Holocaust’s message – in contrast to the Jewish leadership’s representation of it – was universal: that we must oppose and fight all forms of racism because they lead to persecution and genocide.
Instead the Holocaust Industry promoted a particularist, self-interested lesson that the Holocaust proves Jews are uniquely oppressed and that they therefore deserve a unique solution: a state, Israel, that must be given unique leeway by western states to commit crimes in violation of international law. The Holocaust Industry – very much to be distinguished from the real events of the Holocaust – is deeply entwined in, and rationalised by, the perpetuation of the racialist, colonial project of Israel.
In the case of the Antisemitism Industry, the “wrong Jew” surfaces again. This time the witch-hunt targets Jewish leftwingers, Jews critical of Israel, Jews opposed to the occupation, and Jews who support a boycott of the illegal settlements or of Israel itself. Again, the problem with these “bad Jews” is that they allude to a universal lesson, one that says Palestinians have at least as much right to self-determination, to dignity and security, in their historic homeland as Jewish immigrants who fled European persecution.
In contrast to the “bad Jews”, the Antisemitism Industry demands that a particularist conclusion be drawn about Israel – just as a particularist conclusion was earlier drawn by the Holocaust Industry. It says that to deny Jews a state is to leave them defenceless against the eternal virus of antisemitism. In this conception, the Holocaust may be uniquely abhorrent but it is far from unique. Non-Jews, given the right circumstances, are only too capable of carrying out another Holocaust. Jews must therefore always be protected, always on guard, always have their weapons (or in Israel’s case, its nuclear bombs) to hand.
‘Get out of jail’ card
This view, of course, seeks to ignore, or marginalise, other victims of the Holocaust – Romanies, communists, gays – and other kinds of racism. It needs to create a hierarchy of racisms, a competition between them, in which hatred of Jews is at the pinnacle. This is how we arrived at an absurdity: that anti-Zionism – misrepresented as the rejection of a refuge for Jews, rather than the reality that it rejects an ethnic, colonial state oppressing Palestinians – is the same as antisemitism.
Extraordinarily, as the Haaretz article clarifies, German officials are oppressing “bad Jews”, at the instigation of Jewish organisations, to prevent, as they see it, the re-emergence of the far-right and neo-Nazis. The criticisms of Israel made by the “bad Jew” are thereby not just dismissed as ideologically unsound or delusions but become proof that these Jews are colluding with, or at least nourishing, the Jew haters.
In this way, Germany, the UK and much of Europe have come to justify the exclusion of the “wrong Jew” – those who uphold universal principles for the benefit of all – from the public space. Which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants, because, rooted as it is in an ideology of ethnic exclusivity as a “Jewish state”, it necessarily rejects universal ethics.
What we see here is an illustration of a principle at the heart of Israel’s state ideology of Zionism: Israel needs antisemitism. Israel would quite literally have to invent antisemitism if it did not exist.
This is not hyperbole. The idea that the “virus of antisemitism” lies semi-dormant in every non-Jew waiting for a chance to overwhelm its host is the essential rationale for Israel. If the Holocaust was an exceptional historical event, if antisemitism was an ancient racism that in its modern incarnation followed the patterns of prejudice and hatred familiar in all racisms, from anti-black bigotry to Islamophobia, Israel would be not only redundant but an abomination – because it has been set up to dispossess and abuse another group, the Palestinians.
Antisemitism is Israel’s “get out of jail” card. Antisemitism serves to absolve Israel of the racism it structurally embodies and that would be impossible to overlook were Israel deprived of the misdirection weaponised antisemitism provides.
An empty space
The Haaretz article provides a genuine service by not only reminding us that “bad Jews” exist but in coming to their defence – something that European media is no longer willing to do. To defend “bad Jews” like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is to be contaminated with the same taint of antisemitism that justified the ejection of these Jews from the public space.
Haaretz records the effort of a few brave cultural institutions in Germany to protest, to hold the line, against this new McCarthyism. Their stand may fail. If it does, you may never become aware of it.
Once, the “bad Jews” have been smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of Israel as Jew haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an antisemite because these “antisemites” have been disappeared; when the Jewish “community” speaks with one voice because its other voices have been eliminated; when the censorship is complete, you will not know it.
There will be no record of what was lost. There will be simply an empty space, a blank slate, where discussions of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians once existed. What you will hear instead is only what Israel and its partisans want you to hear. Your ignorance will be blissfully complete.
Yes, Bill Gates Said That. Here’s the Proof.
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. | Children’s Health Defense | December 11, 2020
Some chiseler altered Bill Gates’ June 2020 TED Talk to edit out his revealing prediction that we will all soon need digital vaccine passports (slide 1). But after considerable effort, we tracked down the original video (slide 2).
Gates’ minions on cable and network news, his public broadcasting, social media and fact-checker toadies all now insist that Gates never said such things. They say he never intended to track and trace us with subdermal chips or injected tattoos.
They dismiss such talk as “conspiracy theories.”
Well, here it is from the horse’s mouth.
In 2019, according to a not-yet-purged Scientific American article, Gates commissioned the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build an injectable quantum dot dye system to tattoo stored medical info beneath children’s skin. The tattoo was designed to be readable by an iPhone app.
Gates’ company, Microsoft, has patented a sinister technology that uses implanted chips with sensors that will monitor body and brain activity. It promises to reward compliant humans with crypto currency payments when they perform assigned activities.
Gates also invested approximately $20 million in MicroCHIPS, a company that makes chip-based devices, including birth-control implant chips with wireless on/off switches for remote-controlled drug-delivery by medical authorities.
In July 2019, months before the COVID pandemic, Gates bought 3.7M shares of Serco, a military contractor with U.S. and UK government contracts to track and trace pandemic infections and vaccine compliance.
To facilitate our transition to his surveillance society, Gates invested $1 billion in EarthNow, which promises to blanket the globe in 5G video surveillance satellites. EarthNow will launch 500 satellites allowing governments and large enterprises to live-stream monitor almost every “corner” of the Earth, providing instantaneous video feedback with one-second delay.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also acquired 5.3 million shares of Crown Castle, which owns 5G spy antennas including more than 40,000 cell towers and 65,000 small cells.
Please make your own copy of these clips — as Gates’ power to disappear inconvenient facts is expanding every digital day.
Pentagon searching for ‘vetted Official Twitter Partner’ to help it influence platform’s users
RT | December 11, 2020
The US Defense Department is looking to ramp up its real-time surveillance of social media and specifically seeking a contractor already trusted by Twitter to model and influence shifting public sentiment in real time.
The Pentagon is seeking a “small business” software developer that not only enjoys privileged status as a “vetted Official Twitter Partner” but is also capable of picking through the “entire Twitter historical archive for analysis” and monitoring conversations in more than 150 languages, according to a Thursday posting by the department’s Washington Headquarters Services.
The ideal Pentagon partner will be able to “ingest near-real-time social media feeds from Twitter and other platforms” while searching the data ‘firehose’ for multipart search terms, ideally in “most major languages” simultaneously. The program would have to be able to present the results of its real-time analysis “graphically in various formats,” including on “geospatial maps and over time horizons.”
From there, the Pentagon’s corporate colleague would be able to “compute and highlight trend analysis” as well as “sentiment analysis … based on shifting online attitudes.” Essentially, the Defense Department wants a computer program that can accurately ascertain the thoughts and emotions of the social media hive-mind – including tracking “public reactions and significant events as they spike” on any given platform – and alter them if the need arises.
The candidate would also have to be able to “distinguish between real authors and online bots which may be pushing disinformation” – though it’s not clear if the company has to be able to tell the Pentagon’s own bot army apart from garden-variety AI-powered accounts.
All of this information would be packaged into Excel spreadsheets and prioritized for government agencies in terms of what warrants “immediate attention” and what simply forms part of the background of current events.
The Pentagon already deploys multiple sophisticated tools to monitor and influence Twitter and other social media platforms. It was one of the earliest adopters of “sock puppet” software allowing a single individual to control numerous fake social media accounts, and has been working with software companies to measure and analyze “group dynamics” – supposedly to predict “cyber terrorism events” – on social platforms since at least 2012.
In August, the Pentagon inked a $12.2 million contract with Dataminr to perform services similar to those listed in Thursday’s posting. The collaboration was expected to last only three months, however, and was supposed to conclude by mid-November.
While the US military has tracked and infiltrated dissident groups for decades in ‘real life,’ its capabilities in both impersonating and monitoring human conversation online have exploded over the past decade as more of what is considered ‘war’ takes place in the minds of targeted populations. Using private contractors allows the government – technically bound by the First and Fourth Amendments forbidding it from impinging on Americans’ free speech or right of protection from unreasonable search and seizure – to ignore constitutional concerns, as it’s technically an independent corporation violating targets’ rights.
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From the Archives
Politicians lie
By Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance | August 18, 2013
There is no way to say this truth nicely: Politicians lie. That includes Japanese, American, Egyptian, Israeli, and Palestinian politicians! Is there something more common sense than that? Yet, so many citizens around the world believe their own politicians or wistfully acknowledge lies but think it is part of the job needed to run things. They believe even when politicians contradict themselves blatantly. This phenomenon is rather remarkable. It is a dissonance and disconnect from reality that many seem oblivious to. It is very dangerous because it can lead to accepting rationales for going to war. These can be deadly wars that lead to millions of lives lost as happened in what was called World War 1 and WW2. Even when incredible and declassified evidence abound, politicians continue to lie and old mythologies refuse to die. Here are just a few of the countless lies told to us over the past few decades… continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- From Unipolar Universalism to Multipolar Civilizational Distinctiveness
- RSF military group defects, joins Sudanese army: State media
- Ireland goalkeeper refuses to play ‘Israel’ as squad weighs boycott
- China pushes back against US on Cuba, Iran
- Ukrainian Soldiers, Potential Mercenaries: Have Gun, Will Travel!
- Burnham’s UN debut… A masterclass in British disinformation
- Iran flights continue despite US aviation sanctions
- Global Tipping Points Lead the World Into a State of Entropy
- The day-after at the White House: USA and Xi Jinping
- The Geopolitical Balance in the Red Sea: The UAE Being Displaced by New Players
- If Americans Knew
- Deconstructing Netanyahu’s pants-on-fire UN rant – Daily Update
- Trump betrayed voters with his campaign lies and prioritized a foreign country once he took office
- Netanyahu calls Israel’s war in Gaza ‘opposite of genocide’ in UN speech to near-empty hall
- Settler Kidnappings: Torture, Sexual Abuse and Terrorisation of Palestinian Abductees as Israel Deepens Annexation of West Bank
- Gaza winter nears as 162,000 tents become unusable, raising fears of humanitarian crisis
- Netanyahu says, “It’s the opposite of genocide”; UN says Gaza economy is world’s ‘most severe crisis on record’ – Daily Update
- Israel’s US-Backed Assault on Gaza Has Created the ‘World’s Most Severe Economic Crisis on Record’: UN
- ‘Protecting U.S. Citizens’… From Israel
- ‘This is where I live now, the back of a truck’: a day in the life of a grandmother in Gaza
- In UN Speech, Iran’s President Displays Pictures of Children Killed by US, Brings Attention to Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
