Covid-19 cases decrease in Texas as governor’s ‘NEANDERTHAL THINKING’ apparently hasn’t caused a predicted virus catastrophe
RT | March 30, 2021
Nearly three weeks on from Texas ending its mask mandate and other Covid-19 measures – leading to Governor Greg Abbott being called a murderer by media and politicians – there’s no sign of the sky falling on the Lone Star State.
In fact, Texas just posted a record low in its rate of positive Covid-19 tests, at less than 5.3%, and hospitalizations are at the lowest level since last October. Deaths are at the lowest level in four months. Since March 2, the day Abbott announced that state Covid-19 restrictions would end the following week, the seven-day average for new infections has dropped 48%, to a nearly six-month low of 3,774.
No one is claiming that infections and other Covid-19 measures are down in Texas specifically because Abbott decided “we no longer need government running our lives,” but the absence of predicted catastrophe is providing a shining example for those who argue that states that keep their economies open fare just as well on pandemic performance as those that lock their people down and destroy livelihoods.
Texas, in fact, is seeing declines in Covid-19 cases just as New York and New Jersey – states with such draconian measures that business owners were literally taken to jail for refusing to obey – are once again suffering the highest infection rates in the country. New Jersey has seen a 37% surge in new cases in the past month, to 23,600 weekly.
The juxtaposition in statistics is clearly flipped the wrong way for President Joe Biden, who earlier accused Abbott and Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves of “Neanderthal thinking” for lifting their coronavirus restrictions, and other doomsayers. And by the way, Mississippi’s Covid-19 case rate is down 57% in the past month, to a seven-day average of 254.
Abbott set off a wave of Republican governors freeing their citizens from mask mandates, which Vanity Fair called a “bold plan to kill another 500,000 Americans.” Biden’s fellow Democrat, California Governor Gavin Newsom, called Abbott “absolutely reckless.” Mainstream media hero Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to Biden, called Abbott’s decision “inexplicable,” while author Kurt Eichenwald said it was “murderous.”
Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa accused the governor of being “anti-human” and predicted that hospitals would be jammed with Covid patients.
That hasn’t happened so far, and Texas has posted 18 straight days of improving case numbers since the restrictions officially ended on March 10. But US mainstream media outlets have responded to the counter-narrative phenomenon mostly by ignoring it.
Instead of telling the Texas story, the New York Times breathlessly warned on Monday that case numbers in Republican-controlled Florida had ticked up 8% from two weeks ago, to nearly 5,000 infections a day. Hospitalizations and deaths remained down, the Times conceded, and the increase in cases paled in comparison to those in New York and New Jersey.
But the outlet warned that Florida is a “bellwether for the nation” and falsely said it was “furthest along in lifting restrictions.” Iowa and Montana lifted their restrictions in early February, and some GOP-led states didn’t have mask mandates to begin with.
And rather than rethinking the efficacy of tight Covid-19 mitigation measures, lockdown proponents suggest that the recent case increases in New York and New Jersey mean that their apparently ineffective rules need to be tougher. New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams urged Governor Andrew Cuomo to “stick to the science, trust the experts and pause planned reopenings now.” Biden said Monday that a national increase in Covid cases may stem from people “letting up on precautions.”
BBC Presenter “Won’t Hug Parents” As It’s “Not Permitted”
By Richie Allen | March 29, 2021
“I’m really looking forward to seeing my parents later”, Rick Edwards told Rachel Burden this morning. The BBC Radio 5 Live presenters were discussing the gradual easing of lockdown, which begins today. “I won’t hug them though”, Edwards hastily added. “Hugging is still not permitted.”
Edwards hasn’t seen his parents in a long time. He’s been avoiding them for fear of killing them with covid. The planet is an open-air lunatic asylum now. Madness reigns supreme. Who’d have believed that such conversations would ever be possible let alone normal?
“How long is it since you saw yer mum?”
“Six months.”
“Shielding?”
“Yep, the government told them to shield cos they’re vulnerable. I’m seeing them later though.”
“Looking forward to it?”
“Yes, but I can’t hug them. Hugging isn’t permitted.”
I met a man in my local park this morning. Lovely bloke. Our dogs were playing and we had a natter. He told me he hasn’t seen his grandchildren in a year.
His daughter is a real stickler for the rules. They get on fine and pre-covid he watched them three times a week. They’re in Liverpool. He’d usually make the short drive.
Now he chats with them on Skype. His daughter won’t hear of them meeting up. She took the “don’t kill granny/grandad” nonsense to heart. The little ones are terrified they’ll make him sick. He has no say in it. He’s concerned that the fear-porn is damaging the kids.
It’s a madhouse. As I write this, Stephen Dixon on SKY News is telling viewers that he’s thrilled to bits that outdoor swimming is “allowed” and that he can now meet with up to six people, because the government said it’s permitted.
A new ad campaign, fronted by ITV resident doctor Hilary Jones, tells us all to “be firm” with friends and relatives if they try to hug us and give them “gentle reminders” about distancing.
Study: U.S. Media’s Covid Coverage Slants Heavily Negative
Mainstream outlets stoke fear while shielding us from encouraging facts
By Brian McGlinchey | March 27, 2021
If you’ve felt the media has heavily emphasized bad news throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, your judgment now has some scholarly corroboration.
Dartmouth College and Brown University researchers have analyzed tens of thousands of Covid-19 articles and found major U.S. media outlets have overwhelmingly pushed negative narratives about the virus.
“The most striking fact is that 87 percent of the U.S. stories are classified as negative, whereas 51 percent of the non-U.S. stories are classified as negative,” according to the study by Dartmouth economics professor Bruce Sacerdote, Dartmouth’s Ranjan Sehgal and Brown University’s Molly Cook.
Thwarting Public Clarity About Covid-19
Though the study doesn’t delve deep into the societal implications, there’s little doubt excessive media negativity has contributed to public misunderstanding of the nature of the disease and the risk it poses to various segments of society.
Consider one of the study’s most glaring findings: Even when Covid-19 cases were falling nationally between April 24 and June 27, major media discussed rising caseloads 5.3 times as frequently as falling ones.
The impact was evident: A June CBS News poll found a record number of Americans felt the fight against coronavirus was going badly. Of course, news of the poll was itself another negative story, feeding a media-facilitated vicious circle of fear.
In July, a Franklin Templeton-Gallup poll found Americans had a poor understanding of the risk of Covid-19 death for different age cohorts:
- Participants said people aged 55+ accounted for a little over half of the deaths, when the actual share was 92%.
- Those under age 25 accounted for just 0.2% of deaths—participants overestimated the share by a factor of 50.
The results aren’t surprising, given the media’s compulsion to accentuate rare occasions when teens and twentysomethings fall victim to the virus.
In June, CNN served up a particularly flagrant example of Covid scaremongering: an article titled “Healthy teenager who took precautions died suddenly of Covid-19.”
The many who skimmed the headline received an anecdotal infusion of fearful misinformation. The minority who made it to the tenth paragraph would finally learn that doctors treating the purportedly “healthy” yet visibly obese teen found he had Type 1 diabetes with a blood sugar level 10 times the norm.
Two months earlier, the Centers for Disease Control announced that about 90% of those hospitalized with the virus had one or more underlying conditions. Among the most common were obesity (48%) and diabetes (28%). Rather than using this teen’s grim story to enlighten the public about who is at greatest risk, CNN aggressively pushed a perception that nobody is safe.
The media’s failure to foster understanding of Covid-19 also seems evident in the many people still seen wearing masks while alone outdoors. According to Dr. Muge Cevik, an infectious diseases and virology scientist at the University of St Andrews, “outdoor risk is negligible unless it involves close interaction or you are in a crowded or semi-outdoor environment.”
Perceptions of the Virus Influence Policy Opinions
Overly-negative Covid-19 reporting has implications well beyond individual feelings and practices: Those who’ve been led to an exaggerated perception of their personal risk are more prone to support strict government policies to counter the virus.
A recent Pew Research poll confirms that individuals’ perception of the pandemic heavily influences their opinions about various government interventions.
For example, Pew asked if limiting restaurants to carry-out service has been necessary to counter the virus. Among those who think Covid-19 represents a minor threat to the U.S. population, 21% agreed. Support soared to 66% among those who deem the virus a major threat.
Many are likely opining from a position of ignorance: How many know that a New York contact tracing study attributed less than 2% of Covid-19 case transmission to bars and restaurants?
Negative About Positives
The Dartmouth and Brown researchers found “the negativity of the U.S. major media is notable even in areas with positive developments, including school re-openings and vaccine trials.”
When schools reopen to in-person teaching—a move validated by the experience of European schools—U.S. media has been quick on the scene with a wet blanket: The study found 86% of mainstream media articles about school reopenings are negative.
The easing of government restrictions reliably attracts negative media. Iowa governor Kim Reynolds’s lifting of the state’s mask mandate in early February sparked a wave of negative reporting and opinion pieces, including a Washington Post piece that was actually titled “Welcome to Iowa: a state that doesn’t care if you live or die.”
In September, similar derision was heaped on Florida governor Ron DeSantis when he lifted major statewide restrictions.
However, when neither Florida nor Iowa experienced negative consequences, there was little media reporting of the good news that government restrictions and mandates may not be worthwhile after all.
We see a similar pattern with the media’s never-ending cycle of warning that various holidays and special events will bring a surge in contagion. From Thanksgiving to Christmas to the Super Bowl and spring break, we’re constantly presented headlines stoking fears these occasions will cause major virus spikes.
When predicted surges don’t happen, the media gives little attention to the happy news that their alarms proved false. Instead, they’re apparently hard at work drafting warnings about whatever’s next on the calendar.
It’s as if mainstream journalists feel duty-bound to stoke Covid-19 fear, while paternalistically shielding us from welcome facts that could lead us to “let our guard down.” In doing so, they negligently disregard the collateral harm they do to mental health and our quality of life.
Hope for Greater Media Balance?
The Dartmouth-Brown study on U.S. media negativity prompted The New York Times’ David Leonhardt to call for introspection: “If we’re constantly telling a negative story, we are not giving our audience the most accurate portrait of reality. We are shading it.”
That’s a welcome acknowledgment: Until recently, Leonhardt’s own Times email newsletter has mirrored the negative slant found across U.S. media.
There are hints of a growing balance. For example, in recent weeks, major outlets have finally started acknowledging that Florida’s post-reopening experience conflicts with the media-reinforced notion that shutdowns are an essential strategy.
Concluding his review of the study, Leonhardt expressed gratitude to researchers Sacerdote, Cook and Sehgal for “holding up a mirror to our work and giving us a chance to do better.” Let’s hope his sentiment proves highly contagious.
FBI Prepares Massive TV and Movie Propaganda Blitz to Rehabilitate Its Image and Viciously Smear Its Political Targets
By Eric Striker | National Justice | March 27, 2021
It is broadly assumed that TV and movie production in the United States is generally free of government meddling, but this is not true in the case of America’s secret police.
A little known law passed in 1954 at the urging of then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover makes it illegal to display the FBI seal, the FBI initials, and the words “Federal Bureau of Investigation” in commercial popular culture without expressed permission from the Bureau’s propaganda office, the Investigative Publicity and Public Affairs Unit (IPPAU).
In order to obtain permission to portray the FBI on film, writers and producers must give propaganda agents full veto power over their content.
A cache of documents obtained in 2017 by journalists under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) found that the FBI uses this power liberally to sanitize its image. Various other federal agencies like the CIA and ICE do not have this power.
In 2010 terrorism thriller Unthinkable, the IPPAU forced producers to cut a scene showing FBI and CIA agents torturing a man together. In the “revised” version, the CIA agent still tortures the man, but laughably, the FBI agent present protests against the action the entire time, even citing the Geneva Convention as reason for refusing to participate.
The FBI sends “advisors” to rewrite scripts in all productions about them, often cutting out instances of them violating people’s civil rights, talking down to local cops, or engaging in various heinous activities. The result is preferential media treatment most law enforcement groups do not enjoy: the popular portrayal of every single FBI agent as a hero saving the world while we sleep without ever needing to break any rules is deliberately constructed fantasy.
The Trump-era and the Coming Propaganda Offensive
The thuggish and corrupt behavior of the FBI after the 2016 election has, naturally, caused it to suffer an enormous credibility crisis that is only getting worse.
In an attempt to mitigate this, then FBI Director James Comey solicited Jewish television mogul Dick Wolf to create a series of programs to help manufacture public opinion in their favor.
In an interview on the 2017 reality TV show in question, Inside The FBI: New York, Wolf told reporters: “(Comey) feels strongly that this type of positive programming about the Bureau will help educate people about the multitude of areas the Bureau covers and the diversity of its agents and operations. The opportunity to work together was too good to resist.”
The show was co-produced by special agent Anne C. Beagan, who in her capacity as an IPPAU operative went on to supervise Wolf’s fictionalized FBI crime drama, FBI , which began airing in 2018, as well as its spinoff FBI: Most Wanted which began in January 2020.
As if three FBI public relations projects masquerading as TV shows weren’t enough, CBS announced this week that yet another spinoff is in the works: FBI: International.
These shows were all greenlit for new seasons in 2021-2022, meaning that audiences will be inundated without pause with realistic looking fiction glorifying federal agents.
Agent Beagan, who retired last year after a decade of covertly and overtly influencing the media, has also founded her own production company, Anne Beagan Productions, which promises to help create scores of new FBI themed shows and films.
Inverting Reality Through Hyperreality
In FBI, by far the most popular in the young franchise, comical narratives are spun showing FBI agents thwarting villainized portrayals of, you guessed it, white men. “White supremacists” and far-right boogeymen are the most recurring bad guys in the series.
In case you thought the IPPAU would intervene out of inter-agency solidarity, multiple episodes of FBI show an ethnic stew of female-led enlightened agents checking the excesses of caricatured Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, who are shown as a gang of ignorant, racist, murderous thugs out to hurt brown people.
In FBI’s pilot, a bomb goes off in a non-white neighborhood, which investigators initially believe to be part of a gang war between blacks and MS-13. As the story progresses, shrewd agents discover that the culprit is a suit and tie paleo-conservative who planted the bombs in a conspiracy to frame non-whites as violent and dangerous.
In “Crossfire,” a white veteran from Staten Island brainwashes a young Somali Muslim into helping him assassinate state officials. “This Land Is Your Land” features militia members working with a Russian to create biological weapons.
ICE gets special interest. In “Most Wanted,” a federal deportation officer is shown massacring his family and then going on the run. Season 2’s “American Dreams” features a white supremacist hijacking a school bus, with a side plot featuring ICE racially profiling an FBI agent’s daughter and trying to deport her.
While critics have given the show mixed ratings, it is popular with liberal audiences, garnering 8-10 million views per episode.
FBI, in conjunction with mass media, undoubtedly plays a role in manipulating public perception, particularly in Blue America. Last February, 47% of Democrats said “white nationalists” were America’s number one national security threat, compared with just 3% of Republicans and 29% of the population overall.
In a May 2019 survey, only 48% of Republicans said the FBI was doing a good job, with 28% rating them poorly. This number has probably eroded further following the selective and mass prosecution of Capitol protesters compared to the total lack of consequences for murderous violent Antifa rioters over the summer.
The FBI, Hollywood and television corporations seem to think the solution to this is to keep doing exactly what has made them such a polarizing institution while drowning the country with their egoistic sense of themselves.
They are vicious and cowardly tyrants. When this dark moment in America is finally over, they will be categorized alongside the KGB and Stasi, where they belong.
To Western Media, Prosecuting Bolivian Coup Leaders Is Worse Than Leading a Coup
BY JOE EMERSBERGER | FAIR | MARCH 23, 2021
One can imagine an editor of the London-based Guardian (3/17/21) shaking her head sadly as she typed the headline: “Cycle of Retribution Takes Bolivia’s Ex-President From Palace to Prison Cell.” The subhead told readers, “Jeanine Áñez’s government once sought to jail the country’s former leader Evo Morales for terrorism and sedition—now she faces the same charges.”
The Guardian article by Tom Phillips wants us to lament an alleged incapacity of Bolivian governments to stop persecuting opponents once they take office. We are told that Áñez’s government did it, and that now the government of President Luis Arce (elected in a landslide win on October 18, 2020) is also doing it.
The article’s premise is a lie, and the liberal Guardian has hardly been the only outlet spreading it, with help from Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), whom Philips quoted. A team effort between Western media and NGOs like HRW often reinforces the views of the US government (FAIR.org, 8/23/18, 8/31/18, 5/31/2o, 11/3/18).
Áñez was a US-backed dictator installed after a military coup sent democratically elected President Evo Morales fleeing Bolivia for his life on November 10, 2019. Once in power, Áñez immediately promised security forces legal immunity as they massacred dozens of protesters. She is now charged with terrorism (in addition to sedition and criminal conspiracy) over her attempt to keep power by terrorizing the public. Her arrest is good news to people who support democracy and human rights.
But now, as when the coup took place in 2019, the most obvious conclusions are evaded when they are incompatible with US foreign policy (FAIR.org, 11/11/19). It should surprise nobody that US officials have made statements depicting her arrest as political persecution.
Fighting to spring an ex-dictator
In downgrading the coup that installed Áñez to a mere allegation made against Áñez, Reuters (3/13/21), the Financial Times (3/13/21), the Washington Post (3/13/21), CNN (3/15/21) and Canada’s National Post (3/13/21) have all run articles quoting HRW’s Vivanco criticizing her arrest. CNN quoted him:
The arrest warrants against Añez and her ministers do not contain any evidence that they have committed the crime of “terrorism.” For this reason, they generate well-founded doubts that it is a process based on political motives.
The Washington Post article, whose headline alleged a “crackdown on opposition,” used a shorter version of the same quote from Vivanco.
While all the articles described the coup as an allegation, CNN stands out for getting the most ridiculous with its denialism:
Then-head of the Bolivian Armed Forces, Cmdr. Williams Kaliman, asked Morales to step down to restore stability and peace; Morales acquiesced on November 10 “for the good of Bolivia.”
But political allies maintain he was removed from power as part of a coup orchestrated by conservatives, including Áñez.
Did Kaliman need to be filmed putting a gun directly to Morales’ head for CNN to admit it was a coup?
Adding to the disinformation loop from his own platform on Twitter, Vivanco spread an Americas Quarterly op-ed by Raul Peñaranda (3/16/21) that denounced the arrest of Áñez. Peñaranda once said that Bolivia’s democracy was “saved” the day Morales was overthrown, and his recent op-ed depicts the November 2019 coup as a legal transfer of power.
In 2019, the military publicly “urged” Morales to resign, as both the military and police made clear they would not protect him from violent right-wing protesters, some of whom ransacked his house. Áñez, a right-wing senator whose party received only 4% of the national vote in the 2019 legislative elections, had the presidential sash placed on her by military men, while lawmakers from Evo Morales’ party (Movimineto al Socialismo, or MAS), the majority in the legislature, were absent: some in hiding, others refusing to attend without guarantees of their safety and their families’.
Ignoring all that, the Guardian article by Tom Philips refers to “claims the former senator [Áñez] was involved in plotting the right-wing coup that Bolivia’s current government claims brought her to power.” (My emphasis.) Editors are usually big fans of concision. The highlighted words should have been deleted. An added benefit would have been accuracy.
Of course, it’s easier to deny that Áñez was involved in plotting the coup that put her in power (hardly a stretch) if you do not even accept that a coup took place. Reuters placed scare quotes around the word “coup” in headlines about Áñez’s arrest: “Bolivian Ex-President Áñez Begins Four-Month Detention Over ‘Coup’ Allegations” (3/16/21); “ Bolivian Ex-President Áñez Begins Jail Term as Rights Groups Slam ‘Coup’ Probe” (3/14/21).
Reuters (3/14/21) and CNN (3/15/21) also uncritically reported the thoroughly debunked pretext for the coup. CNN reported, “Though an international audit would later find the results the 2019 election could not be validated because of ‘serious irregularities,’ [Morales] declared himself the winner, prompting massive protests around the country.” (The “international audit” is the OAS’s widely debunked report.) Reuters simply stated that the Organization of America States (OAS) “was an official monitor of the 2019 election and had found it fraudulent.”
Cycle of dishonesty
The coup was incited by transparently dishonest claims repeatedly made by OAS monitors about the presidential election won by Morales on October 20, 2019. Three days after the election, they claimed there was a “drastic,” “inexplicable” and “hard to explain” increase in Morales’ lead in the vote count (FAIR.org, 12/17/19).
The Washington, DC–based Center for Economic and Policy Research immediately pointed out that this was utter nonsense. But in the crucial months following Morales’ ouster, outlets like Reuters constantly shielded the OAS from devastating criticism. Eventually, expert criticism of the OAS continually mounted and disrupted the media silence. Details from the election results in 2020, in which Evo Morales’ party triumphed by an even greater margin than in 2019, further exposed OAS dishonesty.
Like Reuters, the widely quoted Jose Miguel Vivanco of HRW spread fraud claims when it mattered most in 2019. The day after the election won by Morales, Vivanco tweeted in Spanish that “everything indicates that [Evo Morales] intends to steal the election.” As late as December 2019, HRW executive director Ken Roth was also promoting OAS claims without the slightest trace of scepticism. Months into the murderous illegitimate rule of Áñez, Vivanco explicitly referred to Bolivia as a “democracy.” He did so in a Spanish-language interview with BrujulaDigital (5/15/20), an outlet edited by Raul Peñaranda, the coup supporter whose Americas Quarterly op-ed Vivanco recently promoted on Twitter. Meanwhile, on Twitter, Vivanco constantly refers to the governments of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua–two democratically elected presidents the US government wants overthrown–as “dictaduras” (dictatorships).
The New York Times editorial board openly supported the coup that ousted Morales in 2019:
The forced ouster of an elected leader is by definition a setback to democracy, and so a moment of risk. But when a leader resorts to brazenly abusing the power and institutions put in his care by the electorate, as President Evo Morales did in Bolivia, it is he who sheds his legitimacy, and forcing him out often becomes the only remaining option. That is what the Bolivians have done, and what remains is to hope that Mr. Morales goes peacefully into exile in Mexico and to help Bolivia restore its wounded democracy.
So predictably enough, a Times article (3/12/21) about the recent Áñez arrest referred vaguely to the utterly debunked OAS fraud claims (“a contested vote count”) and took the same kind of dishonest stance as HRW and other Western media by equating a US-backed dictatorship to a democratically elected government whose ouster the US supported: “Both Mr. Morales and Ms. Añez used the judiciary to go after their critics.”
The Washington Post editorial board (3/18/21) came out with a wild defense of Añez, headlined: “The Bolivian Government Is on a Lawless Course. Its Democracy Must Be Preserved.” Most ominously, the editorial said, “The Biden administration should lead a regional effort to preserve democratic stability in this long-suffering country, lest crisis turn into catastrophe.” Informed people may laugh at this for a few seconds–until they remember that Bolivia’s people could eventually face lethal US sanctions for daring to hold murderers to account. Left unchallenged, that’s the catastrophe that propaganda like this could bring about.
Brutal dictators supported by Washington have no reason to doubt that establishment journalists and big NGOs will try very hard to keep them out of jail. Removing the threat of US -backed coups from the world will involve a constant struggle against Western media and the sources they present to us as reliable.
Bloomberg Op-Ed: “We Must Start Planning for a Permanent Pandemic”
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | March 25, 2021
Bloomberg has published an article by Andreas Kluth which argues that new variants of COVID-19 mean the pandemic will be “permanent” and that there will be an “endless cycle” of restrictions.
Kluth says that the idea the world will at some point go “back to normal” is “almost certainly wrong” and that SARS-CoV-2 will become “our permanent enemy, like the flu but worse.”
The author cites “the ongoing emergence of new variants that behave almost like new viruses” which means that “we may never achieve herd immunity” because current vaccines are “powerless against the coming mutations.”
“If this is the evolutionary trajectory of SARS-CoV-2, we’re in for seemingly endless cycles of outbreaks and remissions, social restrictions and relaxations, lockdowns and reopenings,” says Kluth. “At least in rich countries, we will probably get vaccinated a couple of times a year, against the latest variant in circulation, but never fast or comprehensively enough to achieve herd immunity.”
Despite the fact the global population has been hit with worse pandemics which at the time it had far less medical expertise to deal with and eventually got over them, Kluth somehow thinks that won’t be the case with COVID.
Kluth is by no means the first to suggest that the pandemic won’t end for years if ever.
In his book Covid-19: The Great Reset, World Economic Forum globalist Klaus Schwab asserts that the world will “never” return to normal, despite him admitting that coronavirus “doesn’t pose a new existential threat.”
A senior U.S. Army official also said that mask wearing and social distancing will become permanent, while CNN’s international security editor Nick Paton Walsh asserted that the mandatory wearing of masks will become “permanent,” “just part of life,” and that the public would need to “come to terms with it.”
Earlier this week, we highlighted the comments of Mary Ramsay, the head of immunisation at Public Health England, who said that restrictions would remain in place for years.
Old Mortality: How the Corona Coup Tortures the Elderly – and Everybody Else
By Michael Lesher | OffGuardian | March 25, 2021
I want to report a crime.
Here are the facts:
About a year ago, my 85-year-old mother was kidnapped by a gang of charlatans and dragged off to Coronavirus Neverland – whence, on her captors’ instructions, she’s been making frightened phone calls to me and other relatives ever since.
What did she say, you ask? Well, in one of the first of those calls, she warned me that I was never to bring my shoes inside my apartment. If I did, according to her kidnappers, something terrible would happen – to me, if not to her.
She also cautioned me against bringing my clothes inside the apartment once I had been exposed to the outside world. Instead, I was to shower and change after each walk or shopping trip. The kidnappers insisted, further, that I was to disinfect all my apartment’s walls and floors at least once each day. (I didn’t tell my mother that the drug store and supermarket shelves were practically bare of cleaning fluids in those days, as panicked shoppers grabbed everything they could carry for daily orgies of sterilization. Apparently, she wasn’t the only kidnap victim.)
As for my hands – well, they had to be scrubbed carefully every few hours, no matter how blistered they might already be from a day spent soaping, showering, sanitizing, mopping, shampooing and sterilizing everything in sight with whatever cocktail of disinfectants my mother’s captors had told her about the previous evening.
All this came garnished with a threat: if my mother and her family didn’t obey all of the kidnappers’ commands, no matter how absurd, we might never see her again.
That was a year ago.
Now things are even worse.
Recently, my mother’s kidnappers have bullied her into submitting to the injection of an experimental drug for which the manufacturer bears no liability, for which there is absolutely no medical necessity, and which our government refuses to subject to the same testing regimen it applies to contraceptive pills or routine antibiotics.
That’s the crime. Now, can’t someone be punished for this?
Yes, I know my mother isn’t the only one being tortured – forgive me if I seem to be minimizing the scope of the rights-busting, society-destroying coup that is abusing us all.
But there is a certain justice in singling out the crime committed against my mother. Haven’t the lockdown-lovers singled her out already, making harmless old people the prime targets of their toxic benefactions?
Bad as the whole coronavirus charade certainly is, it’s hard to find a parallel for the sheer perversity of the propagandists’ abuse of the aged. The “experts” are never more self-righteous than when they thunder at us that the smallest deviation from their New Normal prescriptions amounts to killing off our elders. But no one has ever treated the old with more cynical cruelty – or with less justification.
Think of the title of an article published by one Rabbi Shai Held in the Atlantic – one of the most relentless purveyors of coronavirus propaganda – a year ago:
The Staggering, Heartless Cruelty Toward the Elderly.”
When I first saw those words, I thought the Atlantic editors had suddenly seen the light and wanted their readers to know about the evils of the harsh nursing home confinements recently ordered by governors-turned-dictators in states like New York and New Jersey.
But no. The Atlantic was only showcasing a spiteful sermon from the rabbi about some obnoxious people – Trump supporters or similar unworthies, I assume – who, it was said, were claiming that COVID19 wasn’t really so bad if it only killed old people, who after all were going to die soon anyway.
I don’t know of any real people who said such things – not that facts would have mattered to the Atlantic. What I do know – and what the Atlantic’s Rabbi Held never mentioned – is that officials like Governor Andrew Cuomo, to the applause of the propagandists, forced old people into crowded nursing homes where they were isolated from friends and relatives, forbidden to leave, told they were surrounded by a deadly disease they could not escape, and otherwise either neglected or “helped” by terrified attendants dressed in space suits – a grotesque scenario that could only have added to their sense of danger and hopelessness.
Not surprisingly, many of those inmates died.
Now that’s cruelty.
I’m still hearing stories of people who have not been allowed to visit elderly relatives for months on end; many of us have friends or acquaintances who were prevented from saying goodbye to a dying friend or cousin or grandparent or uncle. This is taken almost for granted nowadays.
Some of the stories I hear are even worse. One man reports being told that his aged mother, a patient last spring at a crowded New York hospital, would not be treated for her COVID19 infection as a matter of “hospital policy” because she had signed a “do not resuscitate” order: since the hospital staff didn’t know how to treat COVID19, a nurse told him, they were treating her illness as terminal.
In other words, they would let the old woman die even if they believed that giving her oxygen could save her life.
A policy like that – if indeed it existed – violated New York law. And when propagandists point to the high death rates at those New York hospitals in March and April as “proof” of the dangers of the coronavirus, I can only wonder how many of the patients they have in mind were killed not by an infection but by medical malpractice.
And what about reports – this time not from patients’ relatives but from a medical professional with first-hand experience – that another New York “hospital policy” involved excessive use of ventilators, likely resulting in damage to the patients’ lungs and possibly hastening their deaths?
The propagandists never mention this; such things, too, are taken for granted.
And these people have the nerve to complain about “cruelty toward the elderly”? If you ask me, they should be giving lessons on the subject.
I’ll say it again: I know that lots of younger people are being tortured too. If you want evidence of how bad things really are – and from the horse’s mouth – take a look at this sadistic effusion in the Atlantic’s February 4 issue, from a woman who watched her husband suffer:
At about 2am on Thursday morning, I woke to find my husband shivering beside me. For hours, he had been tossing in bed, exhausted but unable to sleep, nursing chills, a fever, and an agonizingly sore left arm. His teeth chattered. His forehead was freckled with sweat.
A cautionary tale about the ravages of the “deadly virus”? That’s what it would have been if the poor man had tested positive for COVID19 six months earlier. But now her spouse’s torment is the cue for a flood of joyous propaganda:
[A]s I lay next to him, cinching blanket after blanket around his arms, I felt an immense sense of relief. All this misery was a sign that the immune cells in his body had been riled up by the second shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, and were well on their way to guarding him from future disease.
Ah, the innocence of ideological purity! For the Atlantic apparatchik, her husband’s “misery” meant “an immense sense of relief,” just as being burned alive in a bombed building in 1941 moved a British Communist Party member to bless Joe Stalin (as related years later by her friend Teddy Prager):
My feet, she screamed, it’s burning my feet, and I kept chopping at the beam [that trapped her], but nothing moved. Poor Freddie…. It’s no good, she was now crying, I’m done for. And then, as I wept with desperation and smoke, too exhausted to lift the axe any longer, she cried out: Long live the Party, long live Stalin…Long live Stalin, she cried out, and Goodbye boys, goodbye Teddy.
Isn’t it nice to know that indoctrination still works? Long live Pfizer! Long live experimental drugs and human guinea pigs! Hurray for Joe Biden! Who cares what happens to my husband, so long as the corporate bosses and mask-maniacs and police-state enthusiasts get everything they want?
So yes, every detail of this sinister farce is ugly. But the lockdown-lovers have always claimed to be driven by particular solicitude for the aged. And so it is especially disgusting to watch them lie to old ladies in order to make them submit to dangerous drugs, after terrorizing them for a solid year with fictions intended to leave them more vulnerable to the next round of fraud.
And let’s not mince words: fraud is the right name for what they’ve done to my mother (and so many others). The evidence of all-cause mortality figures in the US (and elsewhere) demonstrates clearly enough that COVID19 has had no significant impact on medical death rates, at least since last summer.
On top of that, a study conducted by several prestigious scientists, chaired by the estimable John Ioannidis, recently concluded that the drastic lockdowns imposed in 2020 did not stem the spread of the virus any better than far milder measures would have done. There is no COVID19 emergency – and if there ever was, which is doubtful, the hysterical official response did more harm than good.
And yet most of the United States still languishes – illegally – under quasi-dictatorial rule, with the acquiescence of mainstream media, which apparently never thought ordinary people should be allowed to control their own lives in the first place. One result of this coup (the only accurate word for it) was the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, engineered in significant part through dishonest COVID19 reporting, and spurred by mail-in voting procedures that almost certainly would not have been approved by the legislative processes required by the relevant state constitutions.
But don’t expect any outrage about this political chicanery from the people who regularly denounce illiberal government in places like China or Venezuela. Representative democracy was largely scrapped in the US a year ago, so it just doesn’t matter that the presidential voting system was illegally altered in order to promote a Democratic victory – just as it doesn’t matter that the mainstream media produced a torrent of worthless claims about Trump’s “mishandling” of the virus in order to make voters blame him for 200,000 deaths as they cast their ballots.
Mention these facts and you are a “conspiracy theorist.” Pretend not to know them and you are “following the science.”
And what if you happen to care about the welfare of elderly people – or of children, whose vulnerability has always been supposed to entitle them to special consideration? Well, if you take your cues from coronavirus propaganda, there’s only one right way to treat both groups: cynically exploit them so as to spread the fear porn as thickly as possible.
Consider, for example, a bizarre January “news” story in which children in California were described making tearful apologies to their grandparents as the latter died, allegedly from COVID19, in off-limits hospital rooms.
The “experts” and the reporter just knew those kids must have infected their elders after attending a Thanksgiving or Christmas party. True, there’s little real evidence that children function as contagious carriers of COVID19, let alone that any have actually passed the infection to an elderly relative. But why let facts get in the way of cruelty? The kids had to learn a lesson: enjoying an innocent holiday celebration meant killing off Granny.
No one in mainstream media challenged that piece of cynical sadism, as far as I know – just as no one challenged the claims of California “health” officials during the same period that the state was experiencing death tolls from COVID19 of over 400 per day. (In fact, for the week ending January 9, the putative daily death tolls for the state edged closer to 500.)
But was that even true?
According to the all-cause mortality figures shown on the CDC website, during the weeks ending January 2 and January 9 there was a total of 8,958 deaths in California, as compared with a total of 11,761 deaths during the same period a year earlier, before any “pandemic” was declared.
In other words, during the same period when California “experts” were screaming about 400-500 extra deaths each day from a disease that presumably wasn’t killing anyone the previous January, the total number of deaths actually decreased by an average rate of 200 per day as compared with the same period a year earlier.
To square California’s claimed coronavirus deaths with those facts, we would probably have to suppose that heart disease, cancer, traffic deaths, diabetes and so on were all so drastically reduced in California that their daily death tolls diminished by more than 600 per day since the previous year.
Yes, miracles do happen, as Forrest Gump reminded us. But the more reasonable interpretation is that the COVID19 horror story California “health” officials were telling us in January was a fiction made out of numbers-juggling. Which is pretty much what the whole “deadly plague” story has been from the start – a combination of alarmist and unscientific “projections,” unreliable and over-used tests, arbitrary diagnoses, fear-mongering and politically-driven cause-of-death classifications, which were then fanned to hysteria by power-hungry politicians and a compliant “news” media, not to mention corporate behemoths that stood to gain from the panic.
So I return to my mother – now 86 – and her psychological kidnapping by a bunch of frauds and fear-porn peddlers pretending to be “experts.” Since no one in a position of authority will help, what can I do for her?
Well, one thing I can’t do is to remain silent.
Our country – hers and mine – is being torn apart by measures that the public and its elected representatives have never been permitted to debate, let alone to approve. Maybe I can’t persuade my mother that she’s being lied to. But at least I don’t have to lie myself. Maybe, one of these days, something I say will help her – or if not her, then someone else’s mother who has fallen into the clutches of the same captors.
Can I preserve the principles of civil rights in an era when the very notion of freedom is scoffed at from the headlines of every “liberal” newspaper in the West? I don’t know. But I can do my best to ensure that it won’t happen with my consent, that I won’t be an accomplice in my own victimization – or my mother’s.
And I’m confident of one thing: that when I am 86 years old, I will not be telling my grandchildren that when the chips were down I was too busy washing my hands and marching to the police state’s every command to speak up against the destruction of everything I believe in.
The crimes against us all may continue. I will not contribute to them.
Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014).<
WHO IS SHAKING THE JAR?
The Burning Platform | March 22, 2021
“If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti-Mask. Vax vs. Anti-vax. Rich vs. poor. Man vs. woman. Cop vs. citizen. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar… and why?” – Shera Starr
A few weeks ago, I saw the above quote in Jeff Thomas’ article Learning from Ants, and it has been reverberating in my mind ever since. It is a perfect analogy for what has been happening in this country for years, with the jar lately being shaken at a rate faster than a Biden vote count increase at 3:00 am in a swing state. Everyone in this country, and the world, is at each other’s throats. Who is shaking the jar? Why are they shaking the jar? Why do they want us fighting each other?
If they keep us focused on fighting each other, they believe we will not notice their reprehensible criminality, as they manipulate the masses through psychological engineering and the employment of propaganda techniques to push their desired narrative. If you ask someone – who is shaking the jar? – they will likely answer based on the standard left vs right, liberal vs conservative, white vs black paradigm which has been created by those benefiting from conflict. It is always a safe bet to follow the money when trying to identify the culprits.
The elevated intensity of manipulation by those pulling the strings of societal discontent reveals much about their level of desperation in creating more chaos, because the awakening of more to the truth, endangers their wealth, power, and control. They have turned the shaking power up to eleven in the last year, as an implosion of the Ponzi financial system was looming as we entered 2020, and the Deep State oligarchs needed cover to implement a massive injection of liquidity into the veins of Wall Street bankers, the medical industrial complex, and mega-corporations like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target.
The weaponization of a contagious, but highly non-lethal to anyone under 80 years old, flu became the perfect camouflage of fear to bailout the teetering financial system and creating turmoil, chaos, and distrust among the populace. The non-stop fear mongering was purposely ramped to keep the public distracted while the national wealth pillaging operation proceeded at a breakneck pace behind the scenes. $600 for you and $10 trillion for them.
The monstrous effort to polarize the country by the psychopaths in suits pulling the strings of societal disgruntlement has the ultimate purpose of subjugation and dominion over every aspect of our lives. They no longer feel the need to conceal their treachery, as they openly proclaim their Great Reset, where you will own nothing and be happy – living in a 200 sq ft shipping container, eating synthetic meat, drinking Gates endorsed reprocessed piss, snacking on bugs, and praying their windmill and solar power works on calm cloudy days as a frigid winter storm front arrives.
None of this is an accident. It is not occurring naturally. This is the result of a designed blueprint to control and rule the world by a relatively small cadre of billionaire oligarch globalists, Big Tech despots, bought off politicians, the banking cabal fronted by their puppets at the Federal Reserve, surveillance state operatives, military industrial complex parasites, captured corporate media, mega-corporations, and mid-level government apparatchiks sucking on the teat of the Deep State.
These people are the real government who had been pulling the strings behind the curtain, but now feel emboldened to openly execute their plans, after observing how easily the masses could be manipulated and controlled through fear during this conveniently engineered pandemic. Decades of dumbing down the populace through government run public school indoctrination disguised as education, has produced millions of non-critical thinking barely sentient consumers who have their beliefs fashioned, choices formed, and opinions dictated by manipulative men operating in the shadows.
Those pulling the strings understand the psychological processes, societal relationships, and technology driven social media addictions of the masses. They know how to sell a narrative based upon the emotions, feelings, fears and biases of the masses. With so few capable of critical thinking and seeing through their deceptive manipulation of the story-line, complete control over mainstream and social media gives those pulling the strings tremendous power over the direction of society.
And if they can keep the majority at each other’s throats, distracted by trivialities, minutia, false narratives, and unable to decipher the truth, they can keep us subjugated and constrained while they pilfer and pillage the wealth of the nation. It is a despicably audacious plan but is working to perfection. But, as always with humans, their hubris and myopia have convinced themselves they are infallible and immune to defeat. Their greed and arrogance will ultimately lead to their downfall.
Glenn Greenwald recently called out the faux journalists working in the corporate media complex for their shamefully pathetic attempt to twist the truth into the false narrative required by their Deep State puppet masters. They are nothing but highly paid whores doing tricks at the behest of their oligarch pimps.
“If you think the real power centers in the US are the Proud Boys, 4Chan & Boogaloos rather than the CIA, FBI, NSA, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and spend most of your time battling the former while serving the latter as stenographers, your journalism is definitionally shit.” – Glenn Greenwald
Real journalists like Greenwald and Tucker Carlson are not afraid to confront those shaking the societal jar. That is why there is a concerted effort by those shaking the jar to try and destroy Substack, where Greenwald writes, after The Intercept began to censor his articles, and to force Fox to cancel Carlson by pressuring advertisers to boycott his show. This Cancel Culture tactic is being employed by those in control to crush dissent and free speech, so their narrative can dominate the airwaves and social media platforms, drowning out the truth.
There is a war for the soul of America underway and only one side is fighting – the globalist cabal along with their billionaire backers (Gates, Soros, Bloomberg), Big Tech tyrants, Big Media, Big Pharma, and Big Corporations. They have positioned their troops as attorney generals, governors, mayors, and legislators; in universities; in K-12 classrooms; in the media; on Wall Street; at the Fed; and in the Swamp of D.C. They now have a senile useful idiot in the White House, with a compliant cackling diversity hire waiting in the wings to become their new stooge.
The technique of using propaganda to manipulate the opinions of the masses, put forth by Edward Bernays almost one hundred years ago, has been enhanced and perfected by the deceitful and traitorous psychopaths operating as the shadow government, as they purposely construct false narratives and bogeymen, so they can expand their supremacy, dominion, and fortunes. It has always been this way, as human nature never changes, but the level and intensity has been ratcheted up to a degree never seen before in human history.
Technological advances have allowed these evil men to reinforce their narrative, while suppressing the truth tellers, and brainwashing the masses to do as they are told. Over the last five to ten years, they have convinced a vast swath of the population to believe utter nonsense, cower in their basements on command, and buy into false narratives and fake news that a sixth-grade level IQ should be able to see through. I have never lived through the final days of an empire, but this must be how it feels.
Those shaking the jar understand the mental processes of the ants because the indoctrination curriculum instilled in their brains by government controlled public schools through sub-mediocre, union worshiping, social justice warrior teachers has been designed to make them obedient, non-thinking, susceptible to psychological manipulation consumers.
The controllers know which buttons to push to keep the masses at each other’s throats: Democrat vs. Republican; liberals vs. conservatives; black vs. white; male vs. female; gay vs. straight; young vs. old; rich vs. poor; capitalists vs. socialists; white collar vs. blue collar; essential vs. non-essential; police vs. citizens; military vs. civilian and numerous variations on these categories of warring factions. Below is only a partial list of false narratives, fake news and outright lies over the last several years used by the powers that be to keep the ants fighting each other:
- The Russiagate conspiracy created by the Obama and Hillary acolytes, in conspiracy with the leaders of the FBI, CIA, and DOJ to take down a duly elected president was a coup built upon nothing but lies, fomented and spread by the seditious corporate media. If the country were ruled by honest, forthright, law abiding people, Obama, Hillary, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and dozens of underlings would be in prison for this plot to unseat Trump.
- The Mueller investigation cost the American taxpayer tens of millions; produced thousands of hours of fake news reports by CNN, MSNBC, the NYT and the rest of the left-wing media; ruined the lives and reputations of dozens; distracted Trump from governing for two years; and resulted in absolutely zero proof of any wrongdoing or collusion with the Russians. The entire episode was created to distract from Hillary’s emails, the murder of Seth Rich for providing the info to Julian Assange, and the filthy dealings of the Clinton Foundation.
- The lies about kids in cages and children being torn from the arms of their loving parents at the border, with photo shoots of AOC crying in an empty parking lot, was nothing but tripe. The “cage” pictures were taken during the Obama administration. It seems those cages are being used again, with Biden inviting millions to cross our unprotected border, but now the narrative is one of humanity and caring. The hypocrisy of these feckless idiots knows no bounds.
- The “fine people” hoax regarding the Charlottesville protests and clashes in 2017 had been used by the Democrats and their media mouthpieces for three years to make it appear Trump supported white supremacy. It was a complete and utter lie, and they knew it. Of course, the full airing of his real comments was played during the latest impeachment hoax, clearly vindicating Trump. But liberals still latch onto this false narrative like an infant with a bottle. The infantilization of the masses appears to be working, as they cry at every perceived micro-aggression.
- George Soros and his Open Society organization is intent on destroying all societal norms and community standards which have bound us together for generations. His desire is to destroy the family unit and replace it with the state. He openly funds anything and anyone who will further this agenda. He encourages things like Drag Queen Story Hour at public libraries where purveyors of pedophilia freaks teach five-year-olds how to twerk and attempt to legitimize their mental illness as normal. This brain washing of children is child abuse. Soros has spent tens of millions to get sociopath District Attorneys elected in Democrat run urban shitholes, whose sole purpose is to encourage crime, not prosecute murderers and thieves, and allow havoc and chaos to engulf their cities. Mission accomplished, as murder rates have skyrocketed in every Democrat run urban paradise in America – and the killing is not being committed by white supremacists. Soros is tearing down our society so it can be built back in his dystopian communist vision of the future.
- The entire Jeffrey Epstein episode is another false narrative created by the jar shakers because they were the perverts, pedophiles, and deviants who Epstein was blackmailing with secret videotapes and whatever took place on his private island. Clinton, Gates, Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, John Roberts and dozens more sociopaths were all implicated. Everyone knows Epstein did not kill himself. He was murdered by those at the top to shield themselves from revelations of their perversions and crimes. When you control the narrative, you can get away with anything. Maxwell will not talk. She knows her fate if she does.
- The faked chemical weapons attack in Syria, blamed on the Assad regime, was completely fabricated and staged. It resulted in president Trump launching a missile attack against the Syrian government. Everything reported by the corporate media over the last decade has been built upon lies. Obama created ISIS, with the support of McCain and the neo-cons, to overthrow the regime of Assad. They did such a bang-up job turning Libya from the richest country in Africa to a 3rd world ungovernable hellhole, they wanted to accomplish the same in Syria. It was only after Putin’s military began obliterating ISIS, the U.S. was shamed and reluctantly joined, and then took full credit for their defeat.
- Blaming Russia for everything bad that happens in our country, run by incompetent corrupt boobs, has become the go to lie by Democrats and their media lapdogs at CNN, Washington Post, NYT and MSNBC. They were accused of hacking into our electrical grid in 2016, with the entire story debunked in days. The Washington Post claimed 200 websites had been infiltrated by the Russians, accusing Ron Paul and Tulsi Gabbard of being Russian assets. The laughability of these claims by Hillary’s army did not stop useful idiots from believing. The Russians were accused of using sonic and microwave weapons to cause brain damage to U.S. personnel in the US embassy in Cuba. It was determined the sounds were male crickets during mating season. The bullshit continues to this day, as Biden has accused Putin of interfering in the 2020 election and calling him a killer. Maybe the Russians interfered to get Biden elected, knowing he is a dementia racked bumbling fool.
- The first ridiculous impeachment of Trump was based on a phone call with the Ukraine president regarding the actual corruption and payoffs to Hunter Biden and the Biden crime family to influence U.S. policy in the Ukraine. The U.S. had already funded and aided in the coup against the democratically elected president and encouraged the civil war that followed. The real crimes were committed by Hunter selling influence and the Big Guy having the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Hunter fired. Ironically, two key figures in the impeachment hearings Eric “the farter” Swalwell and Diane ‘the crypt keeper” Feinstein had much bigger skeletons in their closets – sleeping with a Chinese spy and employing a Chinese spy for almost twenty years as her driver.
- The second, more ridiculous, impeachment of Trump was such a shitshow, John Roberts refused to participate in the farce. This travesty of justice was conducted to send a message to all Trump supporters they will be painted with the brush of insurrectionists and white supremacists. The absurd charade was conducted after Trump was already out of office. Swalwell and his parade of woke jokes doctored evidence, lied and exaggerated the claims against Trump, and were ultimately eviscerated and embarrassed by Trump’s defense team on national TV. But they convinced their faithful intellectually deficient dupes Trump had provoked an armed insurrection, no matter the verdict.
- The false narrative of the January 6th “armed insurrection” is blatantly false and continues to be flogged by the dutifully deceptive defecators on the payroll of CNN and MSNBC. There is only one requirement for an armed insurrection. Somebody must be armed. Not one firearm was used by any of the selfie taking boobs wandering around the Capitol. I guess someone could have been gored by the buffalo dude. The fake news about a Capitol cop beaten to death with a fire extinguisher was peddled for months by CNN and MSNBC. It was 100% fake news. He died of a stroke a day after the protest. The only person killed was an unarmed female who posed no threat to anyone. They still have not revealed the name of the cop that executed her. The presence of ANTIFA plants, paid by CNN, instigating the crowd, has been memory-holed by the malleable media.
- The “armed insurrection” by “white supremacists” false narrative has been exploited by the hateful shrew Pelosi to turn D.C. into an armed fortress with national guard members pretending to protect the Capital from imminent attack by the Trump militia armies. The FBI does their part by fear mongering about non-existent right wing domestic terrorists, while Democrat run cities continue to be terrorized and burned by real ANTIFA and BLM terrorists, with Federal buildings under armed attack and set on fire. The diversity hire Defense Secretary is busy purging white Trump supporters from the ranks, while encouraging the feminization of his forces, to the delight of Russia and China. Pelosi and Schumer will never tear down those walls. They know their far-left agenda will ultimately result in chaos and revolution. They want to extinguish our exiting civilization, so they can “build back better” as a globalist utopia where the few, like Gates, Soros and Schwab, rule over the many, and you will own nothing and be happy – or else.
- The false narrative they have been beating to death since the election is the Qanon conspiracy of a vast array of right-wing domestic terrorists planning a takeover of the government. They were blamed for the January 6th non-insurrection and are being used as the excuse to keep 12-foot walls around the Capitol. This entire storyline is laughable, except brainless twits in the corporate media flog it to benefit Pelosi and her parade of congressional dimwits as they intentionally mislead the public about the real threats in this country. If 5% of Trump voters had ever heard of Qanon, I would be shocked. If .00001% of the public believed the fairy tales spun on 4Chan or 8Chan or whatever Chan, then I would be flabbergasted. In retrospect, it is evident this was a Psy-Op conducted by the surveillance state to lure people into a trap of hope, and now is being used to paint all Trump supporters as crazy white supremacists, intent on overthrowing the government. Mission accomplished by the jar shakers.
In Part 2 of this article, I will detail the extraordinary efforts by those in power to cover-up the ultimately fatal levels of debt endangering the American Empire, by creating trillions more in debt, and pondering what happens next on our road to perdition.
Charade of a Biden Presser
By Stephen Lendman | March 26, 2021
While the real Joe Biden was out to lunch or napping, his double held a charade of a presser.
The real Biden is too cognitively impaired to carry out duties of the office he was selected, not elected, to hold.
The real Biden lost touch with reality, affairs of state handled by others in his name — including contacts with foreign leaders by unelected president-in-waiting Kamala Harris.
Biden’s double needed cheat sheet notes to answer questions —including names and images of reporters to know who asked questions.
Gaffe-filled answers didn’t surprise from a figure uninvolved in daily White House affairs — showing up solely to represent the real Biden in public because he’s cognitively unable to represent himself.
How much longer this charade can go on is an open question.
If not for establishment media keeping things under wraps, it would have been publicly exposed long before last November’s selection process.
An unelected president is largely hidden from public view because he’s too mentally impaired to complete a sentence without mumbling, bumbling, being able to maintain his train of thought or get his facts straight.
All the while, hardliners in charge of his regime’s domestic and foreign policy are running wild.
They’re inflicting enormous harm on ordinary Americans — notably by pushing seasonal flu-renamed covid mass-jabbing with toxic drugs — and heightening tensions by threats against China, Russia and other nations free from US control.
The deplorable state of America today is disturbing and frightening.
Things shifted from a billionaire, bombastic, reality TV president to a hollow one.
The self-styled world’s leading nation is a laughing stock on the global stage — a hugely dangerous one with nukes and other WMDs it used before and may again.
The New York Post said “Biden seem(ed) confused during” his first presser.
He “repeatedly los(t) his train of thought… forgetting questions (asked) and relying heavily on cue cards from a binder he brought along.”
Asked about the state of US infrastructure, he said it ranks 85th in the world.
After checking cheat sheet notes, he corrected himself, saying the US ranks 13th globally.
NY Post editors called his first presser “a trip into an alternate reality.”
“In fact after fact, his statements were either grossly misleading or downright false.”
“New photos reveal several cheat sheets used by” Biden… including one with the headshots and names of reporters he planned to call on.”
He “only took questions from a list of journalists whose names and outlets he read from a cue card.”
“A photo of the card shows circled numbers around select reporters.”
At the end of the presser charade, he said “but folks, I’m going” — exiting without permitting one or more follow-up questions.
Separately the Post said “GOP leaders rip(ped) Biden’s ‘hard to watch’ first presser — maybe his last after Thursday’s gaffe-filled fiasco.
Questions appeared as scripted as unacceptable answers.
According to former White House press secretary Sean Spicer:
Biden “took 30 (including follow ups) questions from 10 friendly reporters for 59 minutes covering 5 subjects.”
Fellow former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted:
“Right out of the gate, the White House press corps” showed support for Joe Biden.
“Would have been nice if they would have routinely shown that level of respect for” Trump.
Wall Street Journal editors called some of Biden’s remarks “dishonest.”
He’s acting as “prime minister of the Pelosi-Schumer” regime.
Fox News slammed Thursday’s charade, saying “(i)f Joe Biden is not capable of doing the job, he shouldn’t be in the job.”
Sean Hannity called him “dazed and confused… (a) pathetic and embarrassing” performance.
“(W)ho is running the (White House) show,” he asked?
“Is it (Kamala) Harris? Is it chief of staff Ron Klain? Is it Schumer? Is it Pelosi?”
“Is it Barack Obama? Is it Susan Rice?”
“Because it’s certainly not the frail, the weak, and the cognitively struggling guy we all witnessed today.”
An RT op-ed accused the White House press corps of “sycophantic… boot-licking.”
An early March Rasmussen poll found that around half of Americans don’t think Biden is physically or mentally capable of conducting affairs of state.
Given his deteriorated state, he’s likely unaware of what’s being done by others in his name.
You Refuse to Get Vaccinated, But Are You Ready to be an Outcast?
By Mike Whitney | Unz Review | March 25, 2021
Let’s assume for a minute, that the vaccination campaign is led by people who genuinely want to end the current crisis and restore the country to “normal”. Let’s also assume, that they believe that mass vaccination is the best way to achieve that objective by preventing the spread of the virus and, thus, reducing the death toll. Is that sufficient justification for silencing vaccine critics and conducting a nation-wide brainwashing operation aimed at controlling public opinion?
No, it’s not. People need to hear both sides of the story, in fact, that’s the only way they can make an informed decision about how they wish to proceed. The media has no right to commandeer the airwaves and control whatever people hear and see. And they have no right to deliberately exclude the medical professionals and other experts whose views conflict with the official narrative. The only way that people can offer their informed consent for vaccination, is if they’re able to weigh the risks and benefits for themselves. But that’s only possible if they have access to many diverse sources of information which, at present, they don’t. Increasingly, the only message that most people hear is the one that is provided by the government in collaboration with industry honchos and other elites. Traditionally, this type of state media is called “propaganda” which is a term that certainly applies here.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how this has affected the debate on vaccines, namely, there isn’t one. The skeptics have been dismissed as antivaxx loonies while an entirely new regime of experimental vaccines is being praised as a “miracle drug”. At the same time, the government –which has aligned itself with the industry it’s supposed to regulate– is doing everything in its power to pressure people into getting vaccinated. What we’re seeing is the most extravagant Madison Avenue “product launch” in America’s 245-year history, and it’s coming at us full-throttle from all sides. It’s virtually impossible to turn on the TV or radio without being deluged by one emotive vignette after the other all of which are aimed at promoting vaccination. How does this respect the right of the individual to make his own informed decision free from government coercion?
It doesn’t. This is flagrant indoctrination and yet no one talks about it. It’s shocking. Have you noticed how the critics of the mRNA vaccines have been prevented from expressing their views in the media? Have you noticed how the doctors, scientists, virologists, epidemiologists and public health experts have all been blocked from appearing on the cable news channels or excluded from the nation’s leading newspapers? Have you noticed how these critics have been attacked on social media, censored on FaceBook and removed from Twitter? Have you noticed the lengths to which the media has gone to eliminate any challenge to the “official narrative” and to denounce, ridicule or blacklist anyone who dares to offer a conflicting opinion?
Why? Why is the media preventing these experts from articulating their reservations to the American people directly?
It’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s because the people that are managing this campaign don’t want anything that veers from the “official narrative”. They don’t want people thinking for themselves, they don’t want people searching alternate websites that challenge the new prevailing doctrine on vaccines, they don’t want people to read the details about the trials or the medical journals or the research papers. They don’t want you to question their motives, or weigh the risks and benefits of getting vaccinated. They don’t want you to notice that their vaccine never completed long-term trials or met the normal standards for product safety. They don’t want you to consider the fact that mRNA is a relatively new technology with a checkered past that includes some very disturbing animal trials in which all the animals died. They don’t want you to think about any of this. They want you to shut up, stand in line, turn off your brain, and roll up your sleeve. And, anyone who disagrees with that sentiment, is being censored.
Am I being unfair?
That’s not my intention. And –believe it or not– my intention is not to criticize the vaccines themselves, but the manner by which they are being shoved down our throats. That, I object to strongly because it violates the people’s right to informed consent. A lopsided, nationwide public relations blitz that relentlessly glorifies vaccines while deliberately excluding even the slightest criticism from respected professionals, does not respect the rights of the people. It’s brainwashing, pure and simple.
And why have behavioral psychologists been employed by the government to promote the vaccination campaign? Why have they concocted a strategy designed “to change people’s beliefs and feelings about vaccination” to inform “people about the prosocial benefits of vaccination”, and to “intervene on behavior directly”, which means that you’re given an appointment, and told that you will be getting your vaccination at the end of the session.” Psychologists call this a “presumptive recommendation” which effectively eliminates the element of personal choice by creating a scenario in which getting vaccinated is a fait accompli. How is this not coercion?
It is coercion, subconscious coercion. The doctor is strong-arming the patient into getting vaccinated by making it look like its standard procedure. That puts pressure on the patient to follow the path of least resistance, which is compliance. It’s a clever tactic, but it is also transparently manipulative.
The behavioral psychologists who have helped to shape the government’s policy, believe that the emphasis should be placed on the “safety and effectiveness” of the vaccines. That’s the cornerstone for building public support. At the same time, they show no interest in providing evidence that would support their claims, which suggests that “safe and effective” is nothing more than a meaningless bromide that is invoked to dupe the sheeple into getting inoculated.
You might have also heard the term “vaccine hesitancy” used to describe the people who have decided not to get vaccinated. The moniker is clearly intended to denigrate vaccine skeptics by suggesting that they have a mental condition, like paranoid schizophrenia. This is an effective way to discredit one’s enemies, but it also shows the glaring weakness of the pro-vaccine position. If the proponents of vaccination had something of substance to offer, they would rely on facts and data rather than ad hominin attacks. As it happens, the facts do not support their position. Besides, “vaccine hesitancy” is not a character flaw or a mental condition, it’s the sign of someone who has taken responsibility for his own health and welfare. Ask yourself this: Why would a normal, rational person be eager to have an experimental cocktail injected into his bloodstream potentially triggering all manner of long-term ailments or death? Is that the choice a normal person would make?
As far as I can see, behavioral psychologists are playing a critical role in this mass vaccination campaign. According to a report put out by the National Institutes of Health, it appears that a rapid response team has been formed to attack the opinions of people who challenge the “official narrative”. Check out this blurb from the report titled “COVID-19 Vaccination: Communication: Applying Behavioral and Social Science to Address Vaccine Hesitancy and Foster Vaccine Confidence”:
Mitigate the impact of COVID-19-related misinformation…
The spread of health-related misinformation was a significant public health concern well before the COVID-19 pandemic. During the last decade, vaccine-related discourse online and in the media has been plagued by misinformation. Anti-vaccine groups have leveraged political and social divisions to diminish trust in vaccines, pushed false narratives questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, spread false claims about adverse outcomes, and downplayed the risks the disease’s vaccines protect against.…
COVID-19 vaccine communication efforts cannot ignore misinformation and must take actions, informed by behavioral and communication research, to identify emerging rumors and respond in a way that is informed by behavioral science. Real-time, agile, and scalable monitoring of discourse concerning COVID 19 vaccination—including conspiracy theories, rumors, and myths—can support a swiftly developed and implemented response. “Misinformation surveillance” efforts should identify the most prominent sources of misinformation, the tactics being used, and the groups most at risk of being exposed to and influenced by the rumors. This information, in addition to data regarding the dynamics and patterns of misinformation spread, could help inform the appropriate response and best targets for intervention efforts…
Correcting the false claim contained in the message, exposing the tactics used by disinformation agents, and inducing skepticism by highlighting the ulterior motives of these actors are all potentially effective strategies for mitigating the impact of misinformation…” (“COVID-19 Vaccination* Communication: Applying Behavioral and Social Science to Address Vaccine Hesitancy and Foster Vaccine Confidence,” the National Institutes of Health)
Repeat: “Misinformation surveillance”… “disinformation agents”…“the ulterior motives of these actors“??
Really? Now who’s sounding paranoid?
This is very scary stuff. Agents of the state now identify critics of the Covid vaccine as their mortal enemies. How did we get here? And how did we get to the point where the government is targeting people who don’t agree with them? This is way beyond Orwell. We have entered some creepy alternate universe.
Here’s more on the topic from a statement by Arthur C. Evans Jr., PhD, CEO of the American Psychological Association, in response to the approval by an advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration of a vaccine against COVID-19:
“We recognize that there are pockets of resistance to vaccines, distrust of the medical establishment and misinformation about vaccines generally… Some populations are understandably less likely to accept vaccinations due to a legacy of mistrust rooted in unethical public health practices.
“It is critical that leaders across the political spectrum unite behind messages of vaccine safety and transparency.” …
Enlist credible spokespeople who can connect with diverse communities, especially those where mistrust and skepticism run high. When leaders talk about vaccines as standard practices, as opposed to options, people are more likely to accept them. Research suggests building trust and providing clear information about vaccines can improve vaccination uptake rates. It is critical that leaders across the political spectrum unite behind vaccine safety and transparency, clearly explaining what is in the vaccine and what it does and doesn’t do in the body.
Consider the wide variety of factors that motivate human behavior. Behavioral science indicates that people are more likely to adhere to vaccine recommendations when they believe they are susceptible to the illness, when they want to protect others, when they believe the vaccine is safe or at least safer than the illness, and when their concerns and questions are managed respectfully by doctors and experts.” (“APA Welcomes Step Toward First U.S. Vaccine Approval,” American Psychological Association)
Is it really ethical for the APA to be involved in a mass vaccination campaign? Is this the role an organization like this should play in a democratic society? Should the APA use its unique understanding of human behavior to persuade people on behalf of the government and big pharma? And, more importantly, if behavioral psychologists helped to shape the government’s strategy on mass vaccination, then in what other policies were they involved? Were these the “professionals” who conjured up the pandemic restrictions? Were the masks, the social distancing and the lockdowns all promoted by “experts” as a way to undermine normal human relations and inflict the maximum psychological pain on the American people? Was the intention to create a weak and submissive population that would willingly accept the dismantling of democratic institutions, the dramatic restructuring of the economy, and the imposition of a new political order?”
These questions need to be answered.
Surprisingly, the resistance to vaccination is nearly as strong today as it was a year ago. According to PEW Research:
(only) “69% of the public intends to get a vaccine – or already has…
Those who do not currently plan to get a vaccine (30% of the public) list a range of reasons why. Majorities cite concerns about side effects (72%), a sense that vaccines were developed and tested too quickly (67%) and a desire to know more about how well they work (61%) as major reasons why they do not intend to get vaccinated.
Smaller shares of those not planning to get a vaccine say past mistakes by the medical care system (46%) or a sense they don’t need it (42%) are major reasons why they don’t plan to get a vaccine; 36% of this group (11% of all U.S. adults) say a major reason they would pass on receiving a coronavirus vaccine is that they don’t get vaccines generally.
The new national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted Feb. 16 to 21 among 10,121 U.S. adults. (“Growing Share of Americans Say They Plan To Get a COVID-19 Vaccine – or Already Have,” PEW Research)
So, despite the nonstop propaganda blitz, a significant portion of the population remains unconvinced, unimpressed and steadfast. Go figure? Of course, this is just Round 1. Soon, persuasion will turn into coercion, and from coercion to outright force. It’s already clear that air-travel will require vaccine passports, and that public transit, concerts, libraries, restaurants and, perhaps, even grocery stores could follow soon after. Vaccination looks to be the defining issue of the next few years at least. And those who resist the edicts of the state will increasingly find themselves on the outside; outcasts in their own country.
Western media quick to accuse Syria of ‘bombing hospitals’ – but when terrorists really destroy hospitals, they are silent
By Eva Bartlett | RT | March 24, 2021
As legacy media again bleat the unsubstantiated “Syria is bombing hospitals” chorus of its war propaganda songbook, let’s pause to review the relatively unknown (but verifiable) reality of terrorists bombing hospitals in Syria.
Following recent allegations of a hospital being targeted Al Atarib, western Aleppo, the US State Department repeated the claim, in spite of any clear evidence to back it up.
Instead, reports rely on highly questionable sources like the White Helmets, the USAID-funded Syrian American Medical Society and the usual unnamed “witnesses” and (clearly impartial!) “rebel sources,” as per a Reuters’ report on the recent claims.
In fact, Reuters even acknowledges being unable to verify the authenticity of videos purporting to show “a ward damaged and civil defence rescuers carrying bloodstained patients outside.”
Let’s recall that Idlib is occupied by Al-Qaeda in Syria – a fact emphasized (as I wrote) by the US’ own former special envoy, Brett McGurk, who deemed the northwestern Syrian province the “largest Al-Qaeda safe-haven since 9/11.”
The presence of Al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups makes it impossible for independent, neutral bodies to assess what is going on.
Facts matter, they say. But really, not so much when it comes to war propaganda.
In Sarmada, Idlib countryside, one of the targets was a Tahrir al-Sham (Al-Qaeda in Syria) fuel market, the smuggled fuel tankers obliterated.
A White Helmets video supposedly filmed in Al-Atarib alleges a hospital was bombed there. It indeed shows what looks like a medical facility covered in dust, and a lot of bulky men of fighting age. Glaringly absent are women or normal looking civilians.
Given the White Helmets’ penchant for working only in areas controlled by terrorist factions, working with them and even numbering among them, dabbling in organ trade, and having lied many times in the past, the video proves nothing.
There is, on the other hand, a precedent for “hospitals” or medical centres being weaponized by terrorists. And not just once or twice, but repeatedly in terrorist-occupied areas throughout Syria.
I’ve seen them in Aleppo and eastern Ghouta.
The Eye and Childrens’ Hospitals, a large complex in eastern Aleppo, was militarized and occupied by terrorists including the Tawhid Brigade, Al-Qaeda and even IS (Islamic State, formerly ISIS). Prisoners were held, and tortured, in nightmarish prisons and solitary confinement cells deep below.
As journalist Vanessa Beeley noted, in eastern Ghouta, medical centres, “provided treatment almost exclusively to extremist armed factions.” They were also built underground, “linked by a vast maze of tunnels that snaked below most of the districts controlled by the armed groups, providing cover for the fighters during SAA [Syrian Arab Army] military campaigns.” (An aside, see one of these massive tunnels in Douma, at the location of the underground “hospital.”)
In Idlib, a “hospital” that the New York Times claimed Russian warplanes bombed in May 2019 was a cave used as a terrorist headquarters. Another fortified cave in Khan Sheikhoun was well-stocked with weapons, medical supplies and gas masks, and a prison with solitary confinement cells.
In areas liberated from terrorists, the Syrian Army routinely finds such caves, with tunnels connecting terrorist bases so they can avoid moving above ground.
In the past, Russia has provided satellite imagery when the question of a building allegedly being bombed arose. Until we have conclusive evidence either way, it is a question of he said, she said, although common sense (and the history of such lies) points to more media fabrications.
Hospitals bombed, media yawns
Since the media and pundits clearly care so much about Syrian hospitals being bombed, and even destroyed, it’s worth reviewing some of the major hospitals damaged or destroyed by terrorist factions.
However, unsurprisingly, not a lot of information is available. The following is a partial list, with me filling in details from attacked hospitals that I have gone to.
- The September 2012 Free Syrian Army (FSA) bombing of and complete destruction of Al-Watani Hospital in Qusayr, Homs province.
- The September 2012 FSA bombing and complete destruction of two hospitals in Aleppo.
- The December 2013 FSA & Al-Qaeda bombing and complete destruction of Aleppo’s Al-Kindi hospital, one of the largest and best cancer hospitals in the Middle East.
- The April 2015 FSA bombing and siege of the National Hospital in Jisr al-Shughour, Idlib.
- The May 2016 IS horrific multiple suicide bombings in Jableh (and also in Tartous the same day), including inside Jableh’s National Hospital.
- The May 2016 attack outside Aleppo’s Dabeet maternity hospital, a missile hit a car parked outside, which then exploded, killing three women at the hospital and injuring many more.
I went to Aleppo in July 2016 and spoke with the director, who confirmed his hospital was gutted in the blast, and noted that a week later terrorists’ mortars hit the roof of the hospital, destroying the roof and injuring construction workers.
In May 2018, before Daraa was fully liberated, I went to areas which were under fire from terrorists (including the day I went), and took a perilous high speed ride in the taxi I had hired in Damascus to the state hospital, down a road exposed to terrorist sniping from less than 100 metres away.
The hospital was battered and partially destroyed from terrorists’ mortars, and mostly empty of patients. The director showed me destroyed wards (dialysis and laboratory), and off-limits areas due to high risk of sniping (gynecology, operations, blood bank, nursing school, children’s hospital).
When I returned to Daraa in September, after the region was liberated, the hospital was full of patients, since it was finally possible to access without risk.
Behind the hospital, roughly 50 metres away, I saw a building which I was told had been occupied by terrorists. Hence the extreme risk of being sniped while inside the hospital.
I never saw any Western outlet speak of this hospital, although it serviced civilians and was quite visibly partially destroyed.
In November 2016, I met Dr. Ibrahim Hadid, former Director of Kindi Hospital, who said that he wanted medical colleagues and institutions to exert some of the concern they have for “hospitals” allegedly bombed in terrorist areas.
They, and Western corporate media, have done the opposite, of course.
Another chemical song and dance routine?
Meanwhile, Russia is warning of a possible new staged chemical provocation by Tahrir al-Sham in Idlib.
The Russian Center for Reconciliation says, “militants are plotting to stage a fake chemical attack near the settlement of Qitian,” to again accuse the Syrian government of using chemicals on the people.
As anyone following the war on Syria knows, although the West desperately wants to prove Syria committed one or more chemical attacks, it has failed, to the point where even OPCW experts spoke out, contradicting the claims.
As I wrote last week, in spite of incessantly lying about Syria for ten years, Western (and Gulf) media, pundits and politicians steam ahead with more lies – recycled accusations and war propaganda.
So, it is likely the “hospitals bombed” theme will surge anew, and then the “chemical attacks” theme. And then maybe we’ll have another new Bana al-Abed to ask Biden to bomb Syria or “holocaust” Idlib…
On and on it goes, ceaseless war propaganda.
The irony is of course, as I feel the need to make clear nearly every time I write, those script-readers claiming that Syria (and Russia) are bombing hospitals, or using chemicals, or whatever lie is next recycled, don’t actually care about the lives of Syrians.
If they did, they would stop whitewashing terrorism in Syria, aid the country and its allies in liberating Idlib and the Aleppo countryside, stop pillaging its oil, leave Syria, and lift the sanctions.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
Is Joe Biden Enabling Russiagate 2?
His national security team provides the script
By Philip Giraldi | Unz Review | March 23, 2021
The old expression that “lightning never strikes the same place twice” is frequently used in the aftermath of a truly awful experience, meaning that the odds are that something exactly like that will never occur again. Unfortunately, however, we Americans will now have to endure lightning striking twice due to the emergence of President Joe Biden and whoever is telling him what to say. I am referring specifically to Russiagate, which is possibly the single most discredited bit of politically motivated chicanery that this country has seen in the past twenty years. Joe is relying on the “evidence” provided by a conveniently timed new declassified “Intelligence Community Assessment” entitled “Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Election.” The document was dated March 10th but released by Director Avril Haines of the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) on March 16th.
The new report consists of eleven pages of text and charts. It specifically discounts any direct evidence to alter votes electronically, but asserts that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally directed his spies and proxies to turn the US election in favor of Donald Trump. Based in part on the report, Joe Biden subsequently labeled Putin a “killer” and vowed that both Russia and its president would “pay a price” which we will be “seeing shortly” for their claimed meddling in American politics. The Bidenesque grotesque overreach has led to the Kremlin recalling its ambassador in Washington home for “consultations” and will at a minimum put US forces in the Middle East at risk.
Does it sound more than a bit like the Democratic Party is still looking for revenge for 2016? You bet, and the name calling that took place during the 2020 campaign made it predictable that they would turn on Russia as soon as an opportunity presented itself, if only because it is always convenient to have a foreign enemy to blame one’s own failings on. And there is also payoff personally for Joe and his sons in the report, which strongly suggests that the claims and evidence of Biden family corruption were actually just disinformation put out by the Kremlin’s spy agencies.
Anyone who reads the report and tries to assess its credibility from the viewpoint of the evidence that it presents to make its case will notice that there is very little solid to back up the conclusions, which themselves are weasel worded. The report in fact concludes with the disclaimer “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” There is, to be sure, no evidence that even a single vote was changed or that anyone succeeded in influencing any persons or policies that emerged from the election. And, as a former CIA field officer, I found that whoever drafted the final report in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) really doesn’t have a clue regarding how and why nations spy on each other, much less still how one runs what it is referred to as “covert action.”
The most important key judgement of the report, number two, reads as follows: “We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating socio-political divisions in the US.”
Every foreign government with an external intelligence capability, including that of the United States, does exactly what Russia is being accused of. If there is another country that is either seen as an adversary or even a threat, the intelligence agencies will attempt to influence opinion of the public and elites in that country to avoid their doing things that do damage to one’s own interests. That is accomplished through placements in the media and direct contact with influential politicians in the country being targeted. As the Russians correctly saw a Democratic victory as detrimental to their interests, it is inevitably that they should use their own media resources to surface alternative views that might help the other candidate, in this case Donald Trump.
Lying is, after all, a traditional role for intelligence services. The Romans had a spy service run out of the imperial palace that provided military and political intelligence all across their vast empire. It included what might be called deception operations carried out to confuse enemies about intentions and capabilities. In more recent centuries, the British became masters of both spying and deception. Major influencing intelligence operations run against the United States can be credited with having led to American involvement in both world wars.
Currently, the world’s preeminent spy agency in terms of manpower, resources and global reach is undoubtedly the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). That is not to suggest that it is necessarily the best intelligence agency, as smaller, more nimble, focused organizations can outperform the spies from the large countries in the niche areas that they consider important.
America’s federal government’s various intelligence agencies are in fact into deception big time, so much so that they have a number of euphemisms that permit them to lie about lying. The CIA regards spreading false information as part of its “covert action” activity while the military prefers variations on “perception management.” Both occasionally refer to “influence” or “influencing” operations. Either way, it is in reality a form of “information warfare” in which words and ideas are used to shape a perspective favorable to the country engaging in the practice and damaging to one’s adversaries.
The United States Department of Defense defines “perception management” as “Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.” In other words, perception management is a multi-tasked mechanism designed to get an adversary to think or believe what one wishes, no matter what the truth actually is.
The CIA has historically disseminated disinformation primarily through press placements, using agents and collaborators worldwide to circulate stories that were presumed to be supportive of presumed U.S. interests. When possible, local politicians or journalists might be recruited and paid to support the effort, but the ODNI report does not accuse the Russians of doing that. In fact, given the U.S. disinformation efforts vis-à-vis Venezuela, Iran, China and regarding Russia itself, it would be wise to consider that the largest portion of disinformation circulating on the internet is produced by the United States government itself. And when all of that doesn’t work, the U.S. is more than willing to directly interfere in foreign elections. In fact, it has played an active role in elections worldwide, up and including regime change in places like Ukraine, at least 81 times according to its own publicly available data.
The ODNI report also mentions other countries that “interfered” or attempted to do so in 2020, naming Iran as a Biden supporter in Key Judgment Three: “We assess that Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects— though without directly promoting his rivals— undermine public confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the US.” China was let off this time around, with the assessment even conceding that there was no evidence that it had been involved in the election, but reports from Washington suggest that it will be sanctioned anyway, along with Iran and Russia as a consequence of being out of favor with the White House and Congress.
One suspects that in drafting up the report the neoconnish Avril Haines saw what she wanted to see because there is scant evidence to condemn the behavior of either Russia or Iran acting in their own interests without breaking into voting machines or suborning officials. Even the New York Times in its own reporting on the “Assessment” included a judgement taken directly from the document, that “Russian state and proxy actors who all serve the Kremlin’s interests worked to affect U.S. public perceptions” before admitting that “The declassified report did not explain how the intelligence community had reached its conclusions about Russian operations during the 2020 election. But the officials said they had high confidence in their conclusions about Mr. Putin’s involvement, suggesting that the intelligence agencies have developed new ways of gathering information after the extraction of one of their best Kremlin sources in 2017.” In other words, the Times is taking the assertions in the report as an act of faith as it has no idea what evidence actually supports the claims that are being made.
To be sure the release of the report was welcomed by the usual players in Congress, including Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who enthused that “The American people deserve to know the full truth when a foreign government seeks to interfere in our elections, and today’s release of the Intelligence Community’s Assessment is an important step.” Schiff predictably does not know what “interfere” means, for which there is no evidence, and he exhibits no curiosity about the report’s omission of the one country that does regularly interfere in American elections down to the local level. That country is, of course, Israel, which Noam Chomsky has referred to, observing that “Israeli intervention in U.S. elections ‘vastly overwhelms’ anything Russia has done.” It seems that Biden, Haines and Schiff all missed that little detail.
So here we go again. New president, new national security team, same old nonsense. Russiagate one more time around will not render the entire argument being made about a vast conspiracy to destroy democracy any more credible. Yeah, nations spy on each other and try to influence things their way but get over it. If the whole world is out to “get” the United States it just might be because the whole world has finally realized that Washington is neither exceptional nor a force for good. Leave everyone else alone and they will leave you alone. That’s a law of nature.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
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US murdering 1 million Iraqis is democracy, Iran giving yogurt to Iraq is “domination”
By Ali Salaam | American Herald Tribune | July 31, 2017
The New York Times, owned by the Zionist Jewish supremacist Ochs-Sulzberger family, has no problem with Iraqi suffering as long as Iran is not the one behind it.
The Iraq War was a genocide of the Iraqi people by Zionist supremacists in the Bush administration. Over 1 million innocent people were killed based on a lie. American soldiers died in an Israeli war and now an average of 22 soldiers commit suicide every day because their consciences cannot cope with the fact they committed crimes in an illegal war that served no purpose other than to benefit Israel, not America.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the Zionist regime, once said “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
Paul Wolfowitz had his sights on Iraq since his time in the first Bush administration. Former Israeli official and Bush administration official Richard Perle had his eyes on Iraq since at least his authorship of the Clean Break white paper. The Zionist regime had their eyes on Iraq since the 1980s when strategist Oded Yinon wrote his white paper in support of dividing the Arab-Muslim world along ethnic and sectarian lines. The global Zionist lobby has had their eyes on Iraq since Theodor Herzl stated that Eretz Israel’s true borders go from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq. … continue
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