“It’s all for your own good”
By TE Creus | OffGuardian | August 29, 2021
One of the most annoying aspects of the current measures supposedly created “against the pandemic” that we have been subjected to for almost two years now is the insistence that everything is done “for our own good”, as if governments and big companies were strict but caring parents, and we were just unruly or disobedient children who don’t really know what they need.
It brings to mind CS Lewis’ warning about that most oppressive of tyrannies, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims.”
Now, I cannot tell for sure if the vaccines, the lockdowns, the travel restrictions and the masks work or not. My feeling is that they don’t, or at least, not in the way we are being told, but that’s not the issue. The question is why are we being treated like stupid children who cannot simply choose, but have to take a “jab” and then get “green passes” to travel or work or enter any establishment.
Apparently, governments and big corporations worldwide are worried about our “health”.
But are they, really?
Like monomaniacs, they seem to be worried exclusively about Covid.
Not about the incredible amount of mental health issues and the alarming increase of teenage suicides during the various “lockdowns”.
Not about people, like my elderly neighbours, who could not see their family (who live in another country) for over two years and are suffering with solitude.
Not for the people who, afraid of contracting Covid, didn’t go to the hospital to treat other conditions and died.
Not for the people who died or got sick because of side effects of the vaccines.
No, it’s just “Covid”. And even that doesn’t seem to be their main worry. As long as they get their “vaccine passports” and their “tracking apps” and their “cashless society”, they don’t really care if you get the disease or not.
When did this wave of fake concern start? Ok, governments were probably always in the business of being annoying busybodies – “I’m from the government and I am here to help” was a scary sentence since who knows how long. But companies for decades were mostly concerned with selling their product, not with lecturing us.
However, at the peak of the BLM riots, I received dozens of emails from big companies assuring me that, to them, “blacks lives mattered”. In Pride Month, the same companies assured me that they were fighting for transgender rights to use whichever bathroom they wanted. I never asked nor cared what’s their position on those issues, just that they make a good product that I can use.
Now, the same companies send me emails about masks and vaccination and passes. Because, see, they are worried about my health.
Unfortunately, it’s not just governments and big companies. Almost every institution in the culture and the arts is also kowtowing (either by government decrees or to keep being funded, I don’t know) to this literal “new world order”.
For instance, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra now has very strict regulations for entry. They tell us that they want to create “an environment in which we all may confidently discover what it means to be together again.”
And so, in the name of “togetherness”, they are banning all people who are not vaccinated, including all children under 12 years of age who cannot, alas, be legally vaccinated yet. Not even people with a negative Covid test will be allowed entry to the concerts: only the “vaxxed” ones, with their proper certificates. Still, even they will have to endure masks for the whole duration of the spectacle. It’s not clear if also the musicians have to wear masks – I suppose at least the flute players will be exempted.
And yet, despite all those draconian rules which really seem to take out all of the fun out of the process (and in this case it might really be better to just stay home and watch a video streaming online), “these protocols do not offer absolute protection against contracting COVID-19” and the spectators must “voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19.”
Note also that those showing any possible symptoms might not be allowed entry, vaccine or not. (I wonder if anyone who coughs during one of the breaks will be forcefully ejected.)
This is just one example among many of the ludicrous and merciless “new normal” that we are subject to in the name of our health.
But remember, “it’s all for your own good”.
TE Creus is a writer, translator and filmmaker. He is the author of “Our Pets and Us: The Evolution of a Relationship” and the collection of short stories “The Sphere”. He’s the editor of Contrarium.
With a “left press” like this, who needs fascist media?
“Progressive” stars and outlets manage not to say a word about the gravest crisis in the history
By Mark Crispin Miller | OffGuardian | August 27, 2021
It pains me to say it, but Caitlin Johnstone—whose work I used to champion ardently, defending her against the crypto-Stalinists at Counterpunch—is one of many “leftists” who keep partying like it’s 2019.
Same with the interminable Noam Chomsky, The Nation, Consortium News, MoveOn, Popular Resistance, Nation of Change, Covert Action Bulletin, Naomi Klein, Tom Engelhardt and others that I used to champion, and (in some cases) see as friends, as well as outlets that I used to write for.
So Caitlin loves her boomer Dad for his irrepressible outrage over the bombing of Afghanistan, and loves ALL boomers for their fiery dissidence—on issues that don’t matter much at this apocalyptic moment.
From her, and all those other “progressive” voices/outlets, you’d never know that World War III has been raging (openly) since January 2020—a global war against humanity itself.
Someone should tell Caitlin—an Australian!—that those feisty boomers, with some very few exceptions, have turned rigidly authoritarian, and often downright hateful toward the bravest and most necessary dissidents today, standing firm against the bio-fascist mandates of the New World Order, and the looming portents of the Great Reset: dangers that those “leftist” sages never even mention, much less question or confront.
While Caitlin, resident of Melbourne, riffs indignantly about the bombing of Afghanistan back in 19 B.C. (Before COVID), the staunchest dissidents Down Under are the truck drivers threatening to shut that country down, if its cops don’t take their boots off everybody’s necks.
In the midst of this vast slo-mo Holocaust, conducted in the name of “public health” (much as the last one was), we find no reference to it, nor any reference to the unprecedented global wave of censorship on which that Holocaust depends, or to the naked violence of the police throughout the “democratic” West, or to the financial purposes of this whole global nightmare, in any of the “leftist” outlets named above.
Instead, we get “Ban Killer Drones,” “Why US Policy in Nicaragua Isn’t Working,” “America’s Merchants of Death Then and Now” (with no mention of Big Pharma), “Hidden costs of militarism: Climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss,” and (my personal favorite) “Is a Cold War Still Possible in an Overheating World?”
My point is not that such well-worn concerns don’t matter anymore (though some of them were overblown before the COVID crisis), but that they’re now being used by our “left” press to give the misimpression that they’re really on the left — working for peace, freedom, civil rights and economic fairness, always in the interests of the people over all — instead of blinding us to this unprecedented global drive to make those things impossible, and snuff the people out.
Mark Crispin Miller is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and the author of several books, including Boxed In: The Culture of TV; Seeing Through Movies; Mad Scientists: The Secret History of Modern Propaganda; Spectacle: Operation Desert Storm and the Triumph of Illusion; and The Bush Dyslexicon. You can read more of his work through his newsletter, News from the Underground
In the Name of ‘Public Safety’ Australia Descends Into a Nightmarish Orwellian Police State
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 25, 2021
The land Down Under appears to be reverting back to its original status as a penal colony as government officials, looking more like prison wardens than any servants of the people, clamp down on demonstrators weary of more Covid lockdowns.
A heavy police presence in the major Australian cities on the weekend didn’t stop thousands of protesters from taking to the streets in what many saw as a last-ditch effort to protect their severely threatened liberties and freedoms.
The protests came after New South Wales announced its second extended lockdown, which puts Sydney’s 5 million residents under strict curfew conditions until mid-September. The wait will seem all the more excruciating, however, as rumors are flying that the shelter in place orders may be extended all the way until January.
Meanwhile in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city behind Sydney, citizens face similar restrictions, which mean that – aside from going shopping within a designated radius from their homes, exercising for an hour a day outdoors, and going to work so long as they are engaged in “essential employment” – have essentially become prisoners inside of their own homes.
At this point in Australia’s history, the only thing that remains certain is the uncertainty, which makes the lockdowns all the more unbearable.
Images from Australia’s two major cities on Saturday showed powder keg conditions as demonstrators squared off against police, who responded with batons, pepper spray and mass arrests (It will interesting to see if Big Media describes the police actions against the lockdown protesters in the same compassionate way it described the actions taken against Australia’s very own Black Lives Matter protests around the same time last year. As the Guardian sympathetically reported: “At least 20,000 attended the Sydney [BLM] march which passed off peacefully, except for ugly scenes when police officers used pepper spray on protesters who had flowed into Central station after the rally finished.” It will be advisable not to hold your breath). In live footage obtained by Facebook user ‘Real Rukshan,’ large groups of police are seen confronting individual citizens, seemingly guilty of nothing else aside from just being there.
In one scene (at the 2:10 marker), an elderly man who appears to be leaving a Starbuck’s coffee shop is surrounded by no less than five police officers, who proceed to handcuff the man and, presumably, take him to prison. In another scene (at the 0:30 mark), two men are seen standing in front of the Bank of Melbourne confronted by six officers. In front of them on the street are four mounted officers astride anxious horses. The feeling conjured up in these incidences is the same: authoritarian police-state overkill.
Given the massive police presence amid the steady deterioration of basic human rights a person might get the impression that Australia is really dealing with an existential crisis. While that may be true with regards to obesity, drug abuse and homelessness, it seems to be a real exaggeration when it comes to Covid-19. After all, while evidence of the above mentioned scourges is visible everywhere in the country, the only place the coronavirus seems to exist in Australia is on the nightly news channels (which, by the way, have done a very poor job of keeping their audiences up to date on latest developments. Sources in New Zealand, for example, have informed that the media there has largely ignored the story of anti-lockdown protests happening just across the Tasman Sea).
For example, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, in an effort to portray the pandemic as enemy number one, expressed from the boob tube her “deepest, deepest sympathies” to the families of three people who died overnight from/with the coronavirus. Who were these fatalities? The public was not informed of their identities, but Berejiklian described them as “a man in his 80s, and a man in his 90s, and a female in her 90s.”
It’s just a hunch, but could the comorbidity in each of those “tragic” cases have been that silent killer popularly known as ripe old age? Yes, every life is precious and worth saving, but is Australian officialdom secretly shooting for absolute immortality among the population and not just prevention? That would certainly be the height of irony if true considering that the effort is killing just about everyone. In fact, it seems that the real pandemic attacking the Australian people is government-sponsored fear.
Meanwhile, Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews added insult to injury when he commanded from his bully pulpit that citizens, now deprived of their favorite drinking holes to while away the jobless hours, were forbidden from removing their masks to drink alcohol in the great outdoors. As to whether the consumption of a non-alcoholic beverage outdoors would also fall within the tight confines of the mask regime, dear leader did not say. However, the answer seems pretty clear since the state is actually using police helicopters to shoo away sunbathers from the nation’s many famous beaches.
All of this insanity has befallen the people Down Under after the continent has witnessed the barest uptick of Covid cases. In the state of New South Wales, for example, where Sydney is located, there were just 825 acquired infections reported on Saturday, an increase from the 644 the day prior. In the state of Victoria, home to Melbourne, the situation appears even less worrying, with just 61 cases reported as of Saturday. These low infection rates, taken together with a high level of public skepticism with regards to the safety of the Covid vaccines, translates into just 29 percent of the population opting to be jabbed to date.
So as the petty tyrants Down Under seem more concerned with getting every single Australian citizen the Big Pharma jab – together with the lifetime of booster shots and lockdowns that will certainly follow – the populace is more concerned about how to save their collective health, sanity and jobs. That’s no easy task when the police give a hard time even to people who are found to be walking their dogs without a face mask on. These days even man’s best friend seems to have it better than the people struggling to survive Down Under.
BOMBS AWAY, APPLEBAUM!
By Paul Robinson | IRRUSIANALITY | August 22, 2021
There’s no war so badly lost, it seems, that someone can’t be found to say that it was all a good idea and the problem was not that the war was fought but that it wasn’t fought hard enough. This was once perhaps the purview of conservatively-minded national security types. But since the end of the Cold War it’s been increasingly the opinion of the keyboard warriors in the democracy-promoting intelligentsia who want nothing more than to bomb the world into oblivion for the sake of liberalism and human rights.
So we should hardly be surprised that the debacle in Afghanistan has brought the liberal interventionists out of their closets to argue that America’s never ending wars aren’t the problem – the real problem is that Westerners are lilly-livered softies who are too decadent to stand up and fight against the forces of evil that surround them, and that if we don’t step up the bombing then democracy, liberalism and all the rest of it will collapse in a tsunami of assaults from the liberty-hating Russians, Chinese and Islamists, who together have formed common front designed to destroy us all.
And so it is that Anne Applebaum (who else?) has stepped up to the plate with a little piece in The Atlantic with the catchy title “Liberal Democracy is Worth a Fight.” Of course, the rotten regime that just fell in Afghanistan was hardly a “liberal democracy,” but I guess it was more liberal and more democratic than the Taliban are likely to be, so we’ll let that one slip. The point is clear: liberal democracy is in peril, and Applebaum wants to issue a call to arms: We must fight. Fight, fight, fight. If not, we’re doomed!
And indeed, her article gets off to a fighting start with the following words:
Of all the empty, pointless statements that are periodically repeated by Western politicians, none is more empty and pointless than this one: “There can be no military solution to this conflict.”
Because, you see, as the Taliban have just shown, there are military solutions. As Applebaum says, “In many conflicts, probably Syria and certainly Afghanistan, there is a military solution: The war ends because one side wins.”
The problem is that it’s the wrong side that keeps on winning. And that bugs Applebaum. She tells us:
The need to prevent this from happening in other places—to prevent violent extremists from invading places where people would prefer to live in peace and in accordance with the rule of law—is precisely why we have armies, weapons, intelligence agencies, and spies of various kinds, despite all of the mistakes they make and the ugly things they sometimes do. The need to prevent violent extremists from creating structures like al-Qaeda or rogue, nuclear-armed regimes is precisely why North Americans and Europeans get involved in distant and difficult conflicts.
That’s also why the phenomenon of liberal internationalism—or “neocon internationalism” if you don’t like it—exists: Because sometimes only guns can prevent violent extremists from taking power. Yet many people in the liberal democratic world, perhaps most people, don’t want to believe this. … They pretend that … that “solidarity” with the women of Afghanistan, without a physical presence to back it up, is a meaningful idea.
Whoa, there, Anne. That’s not actually “why we have armies, weapons,” and all the rest of it. At least, not historically speaking. Historically, we had them to defend our homelands from attack, or, in the more aggressive periods of our past, so that we could attack other peoples’ homelands and take them from them. Armies aren’t social workers whose aim is “to spread solidarity with the women of Afghanistan.” They’re not suited for that sort of thing. What they’re good for is killing people and blowing stuff up. So if there’s a physical threat out there that can be dealt with by killing people and blowing stuff up, then there’s a role for the military. But “building democracy,” “showing solidarity,” and all that guff – not suitable.
Anyway, Applebaum believes that we are in danger. Now Kabul has fallen, our enemies will have others in their sights: South Korea, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Japan, Taiwan – they are all in peril. Applebaum tells us:
Afghanistan provides a useful reminder that while we and our European allies might be tired of “forever wars,” the Taliban are not tired of wars at all. The Pakistanis who helped them are not tired of wars, either. Nor are the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian regimes that hope to benefit from the change of power in Afghanistan; nor are al-Qaeda and the other groups who may make Afghanistan their home again in future. More to the point, even if we are not interested in any of these nations and their brutal politics, they are interested in us. They see the wealthy societies of America and Europe as obstacles to be cleared out of their way. To them, liberal democracy is not an abstraction; it is a potent, dangerous ideology that threatens their power and needs to be defeated wherever it exists, and they will deploy corruption, propaganda, and even violence to do so. They will do it in Syria and Ukraine, and they will do it within the borders of the U.S., the U.K., and the EU.
Yikes!
Let’s unravel this a bit, as it’s kind of silly.
First, it makes no sense to lump Russia, China, and Iran together as if they are all one thing, and even less sense to put them all together with non-state actors like al-Qaeda.
Second, it just isn’t true that the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians see liberal democracy as “A potent, dangerous ideology that … needs to be defeated,” if necessary through violence. I’m no expert on China and Iran, so I’ll leave that to others, though I suspect that their attitude is not dissimilar to that of the Russians. But as far as Russia is concerned, there is precisely no evidence to suggest that the country’s leadership gives a damn about what form of government or political/social/economic system other nations have. What it cares about is that those nations are prepared to be friendly. If they are, then Russia is friendly back. Thus, the Russian Federation has very good relations with a number of liberal democracies. Armenia is a notional liberal democracy; its recent enemy, Azerbaijan, is not. But Russia is an ally of Armenia, not of Azerbaijan.
Simply put, Applebaum is talking out of her hat.
But on she goes. For she’s keen to persuade us that liberal interventionists are just not wooly-eyed idealists. They’re hard-headed realists. It’s their opponents who are naïve and don’t understand the harsh truths of the real world. She tells us:
In the real world, the battle to defend liberal democracy is sometimes a real battle, a military battle, not merely an ideological battle. It cannot always be fought with language, arguments, conferences, or diplomacy, or by deploying human-rights organizations, UN declarations, and fierce EU statements of concern. Or rather, you can try to fight it that way, but you will lose.
Well, here’s the thing, Ms Applebaum my friend, for the past 20 years, Western states, led by the USA, have not been fighting just by using language, arguments, conferences, and all the rest of it, but by invading countries and blasting them from the sky with real hard ordnance. And guess what, they’ve lost that way too!
And here is where the Applebaumian thesis falls down even according to its own internal logic. For even if Applebaum is right that liberal democracy is under threat from extremists, hard experience shows that military power is not an effective way of dealing with the problem. Our militaries are built to fight other militaries. We’re really good at destroying tanks and planes and all the rest of it. But fighting “extremism” – that’s ultimately an ideological problem and bullets and bombs don’t help a lot; indeed, they often make things worse. The proposed solution doesn’t actually solve the alleged problem.
In Applebaum’s world, our repeated failures in the past 20 years are just a matter of a lack of will and insufficient firepower. If only it were so easy. Would another 20 years and double the firepower have made Afghanistan more secure? What reason do we have to imagine that it would? None at all. Did an all-out invasion of Iraq – and let’s admit it, you can’t have a more in-your-face use of massive military power – solve the problem of extremism in Iraq? Or did it sow the seeds that made the rise of ISIS possible? (You know the answer).
So it’s not like Applebaum’s methods haven’t been tried. They have been, and found repeatedly wanting. So why does she think that it will work next time around? And why do the likes of The Atlantic keep giving people such as Applebaum space to write this nonsense? Now, there’s an interesting question. If we could solve that one, we’d all be a lot better off.
Florida governor DeSantis slams AP over ‘baseless conspiracy theory’ article about Covid-19 treatment
RT | August 23, 2021
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has lit into AP over a “partisan smear piece” about his promotion of a Covid-19 treatment endorsed by the White House, and the agency’s complaints of ‘harassment’ when his staff pushed back on it.
“I assumed your letter was to notify me that you were issuing a retraction of the partisan smear piece you published last week. Instead, you had the temerity to complain about the deserved blowback that your botched and discredited attempt to concoct a political narrative has received,” DeSantis wrote in a letter to the agency, which he made public on Monday.
The Republican governor described the AP story, published on August 17, as a “baseless conspiracy theory” with an “inflammatory headline” that might cause some Floridians to decline life-saving treatment, even though “the public’s trust in corporate outlets like the AP is at historic lows.”
“This is what happens when you decide on the headline and narrative before you begin reporting. The corporate media’s “clicks-first, facts-later” approach to journalism is harming our country.”
“Was it worth it?” DeSantis asked at the end.
The AP article revolved around Democrat outrage that DeSantis was promoting Regeneron – a monoclonal antibody treatment for Covid-19 – because the CEO of a hedge fund that has a financial interest in its maker has donated to the governor’s campaign.
The trouble with that narrative is that the treatment has also been endorsed by health experts and even the current administration. In a press conference on August 12 – days before the AP story – the White House “racial equity in health” adviser Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith said that the Biden administration had deployed “surge teams” to promote the drug in hard-hit US states.
The AP story even noted that experts agreed with DeSantis and that Regeneron has been “shown to cut rates of hospitalization and death by roughly 70%” if given within 10 days of initial symptoms. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who tested positive for the virus after being fully vaccinated on the same day the DeSantis hit-piece came out, said he was taking the drug and has since recovered.
When DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw tweeted about the “baseless” headline and called out both the writer and his editors, AP complained to Twitter that their reporter was being subjected to “harassment” and “bullying.” Pushaw’s account was locked for 12 hours.
“You cannot recklessly smear your political opponents and then expect to be immune from criticism,” DeSantis told AP, adding that he stood by his staff and their work.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has written previously about the phenomenon of corporate outlets labeling any criticism as bullying, commented that AP’s “whining” is part of a trend that “just seems like a cynical tool to place them off limits from critique.”
DeSantis and Abbott, both Republicans, have found themselves in the crosshairs of corporate media outlets over their opposition to lockdowns as well as to mask and vaccine mandates – though both have promoted voluntary vaccinations, and DeSantis has prioritized the elderly, as the highest-risk population. The White House has singled them out as “standing in the way” of its Covid-19 policies.
DeSantis has openly rejected the lockdown strategy as “Faucism” – after Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and a corporate media darling – and publicly stated his opposition to Florida becoming a “biomedical security state” and mandating vaccine passports like New York City.
Shortly after making the AP letter public, DeSantis announced that two more monoclonal antibody treatment centers will be opening in Alachua and St. Lucie counties on Tuesday, with the capacity of treating 300 patients per day, seven days a week. They join similar sites in 14 other counties across Florida.
The shot that was NOT heard ‘round the World
Ashli Babbitt, the Coronavirus Coup, and the Silence of the Scams
By Michael Lesher | OffGuardian | August 14, 2021
More than seven months have passed since an unarmed protester named Ashli Babbitt was shot dead inside the US Capitol while attempting to climb through an opening in a glass door.
Six months after her death, her killer – a police officer who apparently shot her without warning, and certainly without having made any effort to stop her short of putting a fatal bullet through her chest – has never been publicly identified, let alone charged or disciplined.
During those same seven months – during which every self-respecting liberal demanded a criminal penalty for the policeman who killed George Floyd – Ashli Babbitt, the victim of an equally questionable police killing, has been the target of an orgy of media character assassination.
When Donald Trump recently mentioned her death as “a terrible thing” (hardly a radical assessment), New York Magazine’s response seethed with victim-blaming outrage, insisting that the unarmed Babbitt, with no criminal history of any kind:
was leading the mob [inside the Capitol] violently forward toward its goal of threatening or killing officials.”
There’s no evidence that Babbitt intended to kill anyone, let alone that she actually tried to. And there’s plenty of reason to believe that her fatal shooting was illegal. But facts about Ashli Babbitt have never counted for much in liberal media.
For the press, the top priority has been to ensure that in any story told about the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his supporters are the ones who tried to destroy American democracy, while Joe Biden’s Democratic Party heroically came to its rescue.
In this respect, New York’s slander is altogether typical. Refracted through the editors’ invective, in which (among other things) Republican politicians are, weirdly, accused as the real culprits in Babbitt’s death, the underlying message emerges as an ideological tautology: Ashli Babbitt had to die because she joined the wrong sort of protest.
No wonder New York concluded that the hapless 35-year-old was killed “for a very good reason.”
The January 6 demonstration in which she participated has been as relentlessly demonized in the press as Babbitt herself.
According to mainstream media, the men and women who marched to the Capitol to protest the machinations by which Biden ousted Trump from the White House were – take your pick – “fascists” (PBS), “white supremacists” (CNN), “terrorists” (MSNBC), or a violent “mob” bent on paralyzing the United States government (USA Today), while virtually every mainstream media outlet still insists – against all evidence – that, collectively, the demonstrators staged an armed “insurrection” that only just failed to turn the United States into a right-wing dictatorship.
And anyone who imagined that, after seven months of this, the slanders against Ashli Babbitt couldn’t get any more venomous reckoned without the inflammatory effect of mass media Trump-hatred.
When, on July 12, the former President suggested that Babbitt’s killer should at least be publicly identified, the New Republic swung into anti-Republican overdrive, claiming in a hysterical screed that the unarmed Babbitt was a monster who had hoped for “the mass execution of Democratic politicians and prominent liberals” when she went to Washington to be killed on January 6.
Merciful heavens, the woman was so freaking bloodthirsty that she actually used to watch – Tucker Carlson!
Even that wasn’t all. The same rant that accused Ashli Babbitt of harboring dreams of mass murder described the January 6 protest as “a mob of thousands who…rampaged through the halls of Congress,” when in fact only a small fraction of the protesters entered the Capitol at all, and only a handful of those have been accused of possessing “weapons” (most of which seem to have been flagpoles); with a single exception, not one of the charged “insurrectionists” even thought to bring a gun to the coup. (The lone protester facing criminal charges who did carry a pistol into the Capitol never drew it, according to police.)
But hey, fantasy breeds fantasy: for liberals like the TNR editors, where there are Trump supporters, there’s just got to be mayhem.
Lest I be accused of playing an after-the-fact role in the “insurrection” myself, let me emphasize that I do not share Ashli Babbitt’s politics, and that I do not approve of the actions of the protesters who broke into the Capitol on January 6. Nor do I regard the 2020 presidential election as having been “stolen,” at least not in the sense that many of the protesters evidently believed it was – of which more presently.
But whether Ashli Babbitt was right about Donald Trump or about the 2020 election is ultimately beside the point. The plain truth is that as far as anyone can tell she was the victim of an extrajudicial execution – an execution made even more heinous by the fact that Babbitt’s actual offenses inside the Capitol involved no violence and placed no one in jeopardy.
It is an outrage that in the United States of America a police officer can shoot a woman dead for trespassing. And it is doubly an outrage that so few ostensible civil libertarians have been willing to say so.
Scores of liberals, politicians, op-ed writers and public moralists demanded a full-scale investigation into the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor. Why couldn’t one of them utter a single word of protest about the lethally trampled civil rights of Ashli Babbitt?
The smear campaign against Babbitt is more than the product of a pernicious double standard. It also serves to distract the public from the very real issues that spurred the protest in the first place.
I repeat: I don’t credit stories about the ghost of Hugo Chavez rising from the grave to manipulate secretly-programmed voting machines on Election Day. (In fact, I suspect these “theories” have been amplified in popular media precisely because they’re relatively easy to refute.)
But the January 6 protesters did have excellent reasons to be angry about the electoral process that put an end to Trump’s term of office. And since the popular press refuses to discuss the protesters’ legitimate grievances, allow me to enumerate three of the most important ones.
1. The balloting procedures used in key jurisdictions were probably illegal.
In several closely contested states – Georgia, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania among them – state executives made unilateral changes in the election laws in order to facilitate voting by mail rather than at polling booths, citing the “killer virus” as a pretext. Yet in every such case, the applicable state constitution assigns questions of public policy – including the extent to which people can vote by mail – to the state’s legislators rather than the executive branch; these matters cannot legally be determined by gubernatorial fiat except in strictly defined “emergencies.”
Nor can it be claimed that COVID19 posed such an emergency. Even Atlantic Magazine, one of the most sedulous organs of coronavirus hysteria, conceded barely a month before the presidential election that “voting with a mask on is no more dangerous than going to a grocery store with a mask on – something millions of Americans do every week.”
That means that the balloting procedures used in several important states were fundamentally flawed – not only violating the relevant state constitutions but probably transgressing the “due process of law” requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution itself. And while there’s no way to know whether these wrongly altered procedures actually changed the outcome of the election, Trump voters had every right to condemn them.
2. The election was effectively decided by mass media misinformation.
It is ironic that so much recent propaganda accuses Trump and his supporters of circulating “misinformation.” In fact, one of the most consequential misinformation campaigns of modern times was largely responsible for Trump’s defeat.
Post-election observers are in general agreement that Joe Biden – that mumbling mummy – would have stood little chance of besting Trump had it not been for the popular press’ relentless stoking of coronavirus hysteria.
Of particular impact was the claim – repeated in various forms in more venues than I can count – that Trump was “personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths,” as one typical hit piece insisted in the run-up to the election.
But was he? For all the huffing and puffing, no one has presented any real evidence to support the accusation. Yes, the man in the bad wig behaved as anyone familiar with his record might have expected: he made some foolish remarks, picked needless feuds with Democratic governors, hogged the spotlight, reversed himself without acknowledgment, and took credit for things that would have happened just as well without him.
But the fact remains that presidential action had little effect on the virus or its consequences; nearly all the important decisions – including the disastrous lockdowns and small business closures, not to mention the suspension of representative democracy and the attacks on education, public worship and the arts – were made at the state level.
In all of this, the White House was largely irrelevant. Trump’s most culpable act – in my opinion – was backing the Food and Drug Administration as it cut the corners of the testing procedures that should have been required for the COVID19 “vaccines” and granted the manufacturers blanket legal immunity for any adverse medical consequences.
But on that point, remember, Trump was supported by the “experts” and even by his political opponents. Legitimate criticism never figured in the media blitz against the former President. Instead, he was blindsided over claims so vague they couldn’t even be specified, with dire-sounding but meaningless words like “downplaying” or “mishandling” repeated so often that eventually they seemed to prove themselves. It was an impressive display of emotion-churning propaganda. It contained little or no truth.
Did the avalanche of misinformation violate any election laws? Alas, no. But that fact certainly did not deprive angry voters of their right to protest.
3. Biden’s election guaranteed the worsening of the coronavirus coup.
The protesters’ conviction that Trump actually won the election probably won’t stand the test of time. But in one important sense, they did know perfectly well what they were fighting for – and so did we.
Joe Biden has never made a secret of his fondness for attacks on freedom in the name of “health” regulation. Less than two months into his term, Biden was openly mulling an executive fiat that would require the muzzling and six-foot separation of all American workers, even those who have submitted to the “vaccines.”
He has also suggested that anyone who declines to be a guinea pig for Big Pharma is unpatriotic, and has announced a plan to have “local health leaders” hawk the scantily-tested drugs from door to door to add even more pressure to the vaccination campaign – even as the unprecedented “gene therapy” has already figured in more than 5,300 deaths nationwide.
And this is clearly just the beginning.
Each passing week sees the lockdown-lovers flaunting still more contempt for the Bill of Rights. Mandatory muzzling has been reintroduced in Los Angeles County. Geraldo Rivera, a media stalking horse for the administration, has endorsed Jim Crow restrictions for the “unvaccinated” that would bar them from grocery stores and nearly all public places.
The US Surgeon General is publicly calling for still more censorship on social media (where dozens of accounts have already been canceled for disseminating information the authorities don’t like).
The nastiest aspect of all these police-state tactics is the growing intensity of the hate speech aimed at dissenters. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden insisted (falsely) on July 16.
Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, took the incitement a step farther, blaming even infections among vaccinated Americans on “outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage.” In other words: if you get sick, you can thank those dastardly freethinkers who still imagine they’re entitled to civil rights.
It’s a dangerous and divisive strategy. And anyone unsure where it leads need only look to Italy, France and Greece, where officials are already forcing health care workers to submit to vaccinations on pain of losing their livelihoods.
French President Emmanuel Macron, not even bothering to seek parliamentary approval, is mandating “vaccine passports” for anyone who wants to eat at a restaurant or to travel by train.
And these strong-arm tactics are doubtless intended to prepare us for worse still to come. Anthony Fauci himself has declared that COVID19 vaccination should be compulsory in as many places as possible – even though federal law holds otherwise, since the drugs have only been granted “emergency use” authorization – because he thinks it “horrifying” that people should decide the fate of their own bodies. (The good doctor sings a different tune on the question of legalized abortion, but since when have our ruling mandarins been consistent?)
In short, to say that a lot was at stake in the 2020 presidential election would be putting it very mildly. Liberal pundits have expressed shock at the willingness of thousands of people to converge on Washington to denounce the election results that effectively intensified the coronavirus coup. I think it would have been shocking had they not done so.
It’s not just that our government – and its tame mouthpieces in the press – is using the pretext of “health regulation” to demonize those citizens who choose to exercise their right not to be injected with an untested drug. The entire vaccine-blackmail program is premised on a lie.
The campaign necessarily assumes that the COVID19 “vaccines” prevent transmission of the virus from one person to another. They do no such thing.
The manufacturers have acknowledged, and the FDA has explicitly confirmed, the absence of any evidence that the new “vaccines” prevent either infection or transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The argument that vaccination is necessary to “protect the public” against COVID19 is simply fraudulent.
Not only does the fear-mongering about “the unvaccinated” falsely assume that the “vaccines” prevent transmission, it completely ignores the presence of genuine immunity among those who have already been exposed. As with any respiratory virus, exposure to SARS-CoV-2 triggers the development of antibodies and T-cells that serve to prevent future infections and, therefore, to block the virus’ transmissibility.
In October 2020, the prominent Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta estimated that “three months, maybe six is sufficient time for enough immunity to accumulate…that the vulnerable could resume normal lives” in the United States. More than nine months have now passed since Gupta’s assessment.
Even if her estimate turns out to have been overly optimistic, there can be no doubt that enough natural immunity exists in the general population to have a profound effect on the transmissibility of COVID19, with or without the experimental drugs the government wants us to use. Any “analysis” that omits that obvious fact is patently dishonest.
And suppose, for argument’s sake, that one overlooks all this and accepts the “case” numbers peddled by the CDC. Even so, the statistical basis for all the shrieking about “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” is riddled with too many inconsistencies to be taken seriously.
The southern states of Mississippi and Arkansas, for instance, are both at the low end of the vaccination-level range, at 33.6% and 35.2% respectively.
If the Biden-Walensky propaganda were correct, those states would be inundated in comparable outbreaks of new COVID19 infections.
In fact, after adjusting for the small difference in population size, Arkansas’ most recent 7-day average for “new cases” is nearly 2.5 times higher than Mississippi’s. Such a disparity in the official numbers clearly cannot be explained on the basis of COVID19 vaccination rates.
And things are no different at the high end of the vaccination spectrum. Maryland has “fully vaccinated” 57.6% of its population, while New York lags just slightly behind at 55.8%. Yet, after adjustment for the different population sizes of the two states, New York still has nearly 2.5 times the 7-day average number of new “cases” of COVID19 that Maryland has – as big a gap as that between Mississippi and Arkansas.
Or consider the wildly different “case” levels to be found in California, which has a “fully vaccinated” rate of 51.5%, and in Pennsylvania, where the rate is 51.1%. Again, after adjusting for population, California’s latest “new case” average is well over double that of Pennsylvania’s – even though the vaccination level in the two states is virtually identical. Anomalies like these make nonsense of any argument that the US is experiencing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
And what about the “vaccinated”? Here, too, the propaganda doesn’t withstand even cursory scrutiny. Recently, six “fully vaccinated” people at a single wedding – held in a “large, open-air tent” – all came down with COVID19. Of those six, two were hospitalized and one died.
In a rather desperate brush-off typical of mainstream media, Insider’s Hilary Brueck described this as a “small outbreak that underscores how effective vaccines are against even variants of the virus.”
Ah, how nimbly propagandists put about in a changing wind! A year ago, six symptomatic cases of COVID19 would have marked the ceremony where they originated as a dreaded “superspreader event” – it would have been touted as proof that anyone selfish enough to invite guests to a wedding ought to be treated as a public menace.
And if, on top of that, fully a third of those infected had been hospitalized, and over 16% of them had dropped dead – well, I will leave it to the reader to imagine the hysterical headlines that would have erupted about that. Are we really supposed to chant hosannas now that the identical evils are showing up in the wake of COVID19 “vaccinations”?
But let us return to January 6 and the conspiracy of silence surrounding the killing of Ashli Babbitt.
Apart from her violent death – the only one that occurred in the Capitol on January 6 – the incidents of that day were strikingly incommensurate with the media’s horrified depictions of the “storming” of Congress.
Yes, there were scuffles with police, but such things were hardly unprecedented in Washington. And the media’s obsessive use of the phrase “deadly riot” misrepresents the unfortunate but nonviolent deaths (other than Babbitt’s) that occurred during or immediately after the protest.
Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died the following day, and whose death – as we were assured by the New York Times on the basis of “anonymous” reports – resulted from being clubbed over the head with a fire extinguisher by one of the “insurrectionists,” actually died of natural causes (as did two of the older protesters).
The only other supposedly “violent” death, that of protester Rosanne Boyland, was determined by the D.C. medical examiner’s office last April to be the consequence of “acute amphetamine intoxication,” though that didn’t prevent the Times from offering its readers back in January a gorily detailed – and false – account of how Boyland was “trampled” and “crushed” to death by “the mob.”
(By the way, I am not aware that the ostensibly meticulous fact-checkers at the Times have ever printed a direct retraction of either of these two bogus articles. Innocent errors do sometimes merit a correction at the Paper of Record; malicious errors almost never do.)
The threat allegedly posed by the demonstrators to members of Congress seems also to have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the media’s early insistence that the “insurrection” was led by sinister “right-wing extremists,” only a handful of those who breached the Capitol had any ties to the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters or Aryan Nations.
“More than four-fifths” of those charged for their actions on January 6 “come from various backgrounds, from business owners to white-collar professionals,” the BBC reported in February. The claim that the “rioters” brought zip-tie handcuffs to use on Democratic politicians turned out to be another falsification: the one protester photographed holding the “restraints” actually found them on a table inside the Capitol. The police had brought them there.
And frankly, I find it a little hard to believe the stories of lawmakers who say they feared for their lives during the “siege” when one of them, a Democrat from the Virgin Islands, could generate straight-faced media reports by claiming that she preferred a “possible confrontation with the insurrectionist mob” to sharing a “secure location” with some Republicans who were – gasp – not wearing masks!
True, her insistence that masks on the Republicans would have protected her, while her own would not, is part of the magical thinking we’ve all been asked to swallow throughout the propaganda campaign.
But would anyone who genuinely thought she was running from a lynch mob refuse a safe haven just because “I wouldn’t be able to see the virus as it was coming toward me” from a few un-muzzled legislators across the room? What was evidently meant to sound like a horror story reads, to me, much more like farce.
So it turns out that anyone genuinely concerned about “deadly violence” during the January 6 protest can have only one real subject to investigate: Ashli Babbitt. And the more one investigates her death, and the circumstances surrounding it, the less justifiable the whole scenario appears.
Just how, for instance, did protesters manage to enter the Capitol in the first place?
No one in power has offered any convincing answer to that question.
Federal government buildings in Washington are normally among the most zealously guarded in the world. And everyone knew that a large political protest was planned for January 6, the day Joe Biden’s election as President was to be officially certified.
Why couldn’t Capitol police use tear gas to stop the unarmed demonstrators as soon as they breached the entrances, especially since “tear gas munitions were used by other federal police agencies against protesters in front of Lafayette Park” just a few months earlier? And assuming the local police force was somehow unable to handle the crowd, where was the vaunted National Guard?
Some of the protesters believe that they were deliberately entrapped. As one of them later told the FBI, “law enforcement purposefully did not have enough resources there so that supporters of the former president could overrun the Capitol and be subsequently labeled as ‘intruders.’” I cannot prove this theory correct – but I also cannot dismiss it as implausible.
As early as February 4, Time Magazine’s Molly Ball reported that a “conspiracy” involving “an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans” had orchestrated a “vast, cross-partisan campaign” to ensure Biden’s smooth entry into office.
This “conspiracy” was so effective that it “got states to change voting systems” and, on the day of the January 6 protest itself, saw to it that the protesters who converged on the Capitol “were met by virtually no counterdemonstrators” who might otherwise “be blamed for any mayhem.”
Surely a cabal capable of that much could also arrange for the protest to get just far enough out of hand to guarantee media images that would discredit Donald Trump with the nation’s political elites – which, of course, is exactly what happened. Or was it all just coincidence?
Along similar lines, the strange absence of the National Guard on January 6 has been widely reported – but only as an inexplicable blunder.
Yet couldn’t this, like the parallel absence of counter-demonstrations, have been deliberate?
We know that the deployment of National Guard or military personnel to the Capitol would have required the consent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And we know that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was General Mark Milley, a man who (according to a soon-to-be-published book) told his aides that Trump reminded him of Hitler, and whose determination to ensure that Biden was installed as President – “come hell or high water” – went so far that he “informally planned for different ways to stop Trump” after the election, including private telephone conversations with (Democratic) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In fact, credible reports maintain (though he denies it) that General Walter Piatt, director of Army staff, specifically refused to send National Guard troops to the Capitol on January 6 because “it wouldn’t look good.”
An honest press – if we had one – would be taking a hard look into the possibility that the “deadly riot” was really political theater, organized not by the protesters but by the very democracy-haters the protesters came to challenge. That would make Babbitt’s killing an even uglier miscarriage of justice.
Meanwhile, the refusal of the media, the pundits, the civil rights organizations, the politicians – just about everyone in power – to give Ashli Babbitt’s death the attention it deserves is more than a wrong in itself. It is part of a larger pattern of political gaslighting by which the victors in the 2020 election, while accusing Trump & Co. of an attempted “coup,” continue to advance a coup of their own.
Today the coup marches under the name “Delta variant.” But this is only a temporary phase. Specific terrors will vary from month to month, but there will always be some reason for whittling down our remaining freedoms. This latest scare is entirely typical.
Notwithstanding the ballyhoo, there’s no real evidence that the “Delta variant” is particularly dangerous – not even the CDC has attempted to make that case – and as a general rule, subsequent variants of a respiratory virus are less severe than those they follow.
(As a matter of fact, there’s only sketchy evidence that the new “variant” is even more transmissible than the original version, despite popular media’s insistence on this as a matter of fact: the CDC cites only one study about the alleged contagiousness of the “Delta variant,” which is based entirely on manifestly unreliable public “test” data. It’s also rife with anomalies, such as the finding that the variant spreads more rapidly among Asians than among white people, while among blacks it actually appears to be less transmissible. Go figure.)
In other words, like nearly everything the “experts” have claimed about COVID19 for the last seventeen months, the “deadly Delta” story is much less about facts than it is about maintaining public hysteria.
And the motive for the fear porn is perfectly clear. The Biden administration never intended to give the public anything more than a brief honeymoon from coronavirus terror.
True, there had to be some kind of reward for voting Donald Trump out of office. But now it’s time to get back to business – “business” being the deepening confinement of the American public.
“The carefree Covid season is over,” barked CNN on July 17. And the network was quick to identify the next targets of the crackdown: conservative media, for encouraging “vaccine hesitancy,” and “Republican-led states” that “have tried to outdo each other in limiting the power of cities and counties to impose Covid restrictions in case of a new outbreak.”
It’s a short step from condemning defenders of basic liberties to uprooting the liberties themselves. So if you thought this was all about roasting a TV commentator like Tucker Carlson or a politician like Ron DeSantis, think again: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Can we still pry our country loose from the grip of the fear campaign? I hope so, believing as I do in the aspirations to which our political system is dedicated, and still more in the value of the human lives that have grown up under the influence of those ideals.
But if we want each life to matter, we have to prove that Ashli Babbitt’s life mattered too. We need to demand more from the federal Justice Department than the cynical conclusion that there was:
no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defence or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber.”
We need to seek an explanation for the fact that “the officer,” unlike Derek Chauvin – currently behind bars for killing George Floyd – has never faced charges of any kind for gunning down an unarmed woman under circumstances that placed no one in serious danger.
We must ask why there are no crowds in the streets to support the Babbitt family’s lawsuit against the Capitol police, as there would be if she had been killed by a cop during a Black Lives Matter rally.
It must be clear by now that the coronavirus coup isn’t going away of its own accord. If we don’t demand an end to it, there will be no end.
There will only be more fear porn, more manipulated elections, more wrecked livelihoods, more attacks on freedom – and more tragedies like the killing of Ashli Babbitt, who believed that by taking her protest to the seat of government she could make a difference.
Whether she was right about that is no longer up to her. It’s up to us.
Telegraph: “Government climate tsar’s dirty secret: he still drives a diesel car”
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | August 11, 2021
British climate tsar Alok Sharma, leader of Britain’s push to ban gasoline vehicles, who regularly ignores quarantine when returning from countries on the Covid-19 red list, has promised to trade his diesel automobile for an electric vehicle at an unspecified time in the future.
What can I say – whether its President Obama’s epic maskless birthday bash, Gavin Newsom’s shameful visit to the French Laundry restaurant, Nancy Pelosi’s Hair appointment during a lockdown, the Chicago teachers union leader partying in Peurto Rico, while claiming its “too risky” to return to work, Sharma’s contempt for quarantine rules and travel restrictions everyone else in Britain has to observe, or Sharma’s love for his diesel vehicle, a kind of vehicle he is working to deny to everyone else in Britain, one thing is clear.
Our elites no longer even try to hide their disdain for living by the rules they inflict on ordinary people.
Twitter will allow you to deny the genocide of Palestinians, but not a ‘Uighur genocide’, so I’ve been banned
By Maram Susli | RT | August 7, 2021
Big Tech censors are shutting down voices like mine, because they don’t like me exposing the truth of what’s going on in Palestine. But they’re happy with tweets about killings in Xinjiang, even when there’s no evidence for it.
Twitter has a bizarre new policy of censoring political discourse around ‘violent events’. On the 21st of July, I woke up to find my account was locked for supposedly violating “rules against abuse and harassment”. I have had my account for 10 years and amassed a following of 150,000. I use it, or rather used to, to share my articles and interviews. The flagged tweet stated:
“There is a genocide against Palestinians. But there’s no Uighur genocide. There is evidence for one but not the other. We can see Palestinians being slaughtered. On top of which Israeli leaders have admitted they want to exterminate Palestinians. The truth shall set you free”.
The only thing that was wrong in this tweet was that “the truth shall set you free”. Turns out, the truth shall send you to Twitter jail. I do not believe my tweet violated Twitter’s terms and conditions, which makes this scenario all the more insidious. It means that any tweet in the future, no matter how innocuous, could get you censored. Rather than accept Twitter’s demand to delete the tweet and get back my Twitter after 12 hours, I decided to take a stand by appealing the decision.
I’m no stranger to censorship by Big Tech. In 2018, I woke up to find that my Facebook account of 40,000 followers had vanished alongside a slew of headlines that the British government had deemed me a “Russian bot”. After a series of videos and interviews which proved that I am, in fact, human, my account was restored without any acknowledgement of, or apology for, what had occurred.
I’m not unique in my experience of such censorship. I am one of many people who have been unceremoniously silenced on social media, sometimes without a reason given. The demand for censorship by special interest groups has increased to the point that Big Tech have had to relegate the job to artificial intelligence, which gets things wrong about half the time.
This is what I had initially assumed had occurred with my tweet, that it was all a mistake that would quickly be rectified once a human moderator reviewed it. Wrong. That was almost two weeks ago, and my tweet is still, apparently, under appeal. A quick Google search revealed that many people have waited months without any human oversight over the appeals process. I decided to email Twitter support. But what I heard back was even more shocking.
“We’re writing to let you know that your account features will remain limited for the allotted time due to violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically our rules against abusive behaviour and denial of violent events.”
Twitter’s letter to Maram
It appears Twitter has now deemed questioning the lack of evidence for a “Uighur genocide” as a “denial of violent events” and hence a thought crime. Yet there is currently no United Nations body which has concluded that there’s such a Uighur genocide going on. Even journalists writing in The Economist and the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) have questioned whether the genocide label is the right fit for what is happening to Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province.
In fact, no one is even accusing China of conducting mass killings of Uighurs, or a ‘violent event’ in Twitter’s terms. What has been claimed is that China is putting Uighurs in a prison camp. China says the men are being put in “vocational education and training centers”, and says they have terrorist sympathies; the US contends that they are being put into the camps simply for being Muslim.
I am originally from Syria, so I know all about war and genocide. I also know that up to 5,000 Uighur fighters joined Al Qaeda to fight against Syria and that terrorism has been a real threat faced by both Syria and China. Regardless, a prison camp does not constitute a genocide; if it did, the US would be charged with genocide for having put Uighurs in Guantanamo Bay for the last 20 years. Let alone the mass incarceration of its own peoples, many of them disportionately black, in ordinary jails.
This goes to show the hypocrisy of how Twitter selectively implements its rules. You will not be censored off Twitter for denying the genocide of Palestinians. Even though there is decades of undeniable evidence of systematic massacres and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the state of Israel. Palestinians are kicked out of their homes, thrown in jail or killed simply for the ‘crime’ of being Palestinian. They’re not allowed to raise their own flag, retain their identity or even move freely in their own land. In contrast, there is no evidence nor even an accusation of massacres against Uighurs. Ironically, it is the existence of this double standard that my tweet tried to highlight, and Twitter’s censorship has proved my point.
The narrative of the ‘Uighur genocide’ is the latest humanitarian crisis thought up by Washington to justify the next war, and Twitter is selectively censoring anyone who dares question that narrative. Lest we forget how many millions have died across the Middle East thanks to the US, based on exactly such lies. The babies in incubators that sold the first Gulf War. The non-existent WMDs that sold the war in Iraq. The lies about Gaddafi using black mercenaries in Libya. The lies about Syria’s chemical attacks which were used to justify multiple bombing campaigns and the current occupation of that country by the US and its stooges. An occupation that, along with sanctions, is starving 17 millions Syrians of bread and fuel. These lies, that Twitter is denying us the right to question, are what cause real violence. By selectively choosing which claims of violence can and cannot be denied, Twitter has become an echo chamber of the US State department.
I would be remiss not to mention the pro-Israel lobby’s involvement in this. It’s possible the reason for my censorship has more to do with the declaration of a Palestinian genocide than the lack of evidence for a Uighur genocide. My Twitter account was recently mentioned in the Israeli media for defending former Senator Cynthia Mckinney’s right to free speech. It cannot be a coincidence that my Facebook account was also recently locked twice for posting a video that compared Israel to ISIS. I’m also a frequent target of the infamous pro-Israel wikipedia editor “Philip Cross”, who attempts to defame me and many other prominent anti-war voices. It’s possible we are being targeted for our pro-Palestine stance, and any excuse will do to silence us.
What’s the solution to this censorship? It is inevitable that we must migrate to social media alternatives to Big Tech. Twitter alternatives such as PanQuake and GAB, and YouTube alternatives such as Bitchute and Odysee, could eventually overtake the giants. In the meantime, we must take a stand for free speech wherever possible. I reached out to Twitter to give them a chance to comment, but I have not heard back. If you’d like to question them on their censorship, please feel free to tweet this article at @Twittersupport.
Maram Susli is a Syrian-Australian political analyst and commentator.
Biden’s allegation of ‘Russian interference!’ while silent on Big Tech’s meddling is astounding cognitive dissonance
By Laura Loomer | RT | July 31, 2021
As the 2022 midterm election season approaches, Joe Biden and the Democrat Party are already repeating their 2016 claims of “Russian interference,” which they falsely spewed throughout the entire first term of Donald Trump.
This week, Joe Biden accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of trying to disrupt the 2022 US congressional elections by “spreading misinformation,” going as far as saying Russia was undermining and violating US sovereignty.
Election interference is real. However, Biden, who appears to be in a state of constant mental decline and confusion, demonstrates the election-interference cognitive dissonance that has become commonplace within the Democrat Party and among Democrat voters. As a Republican voter and Congressional candidate myself, I am very concerned about election interference in the 2022 congressional elections, just not from Russia. I agree with Biden’s concerns about the 2022 congressional elections being disrupted by election interference. In fact, the biggest issue currently facing the United States of America and the future of our elections process is election interference – just not by Russia.
The election interference that Americans must be weary of, heading into 2022, is Big Tech interference.
For Biden and the Democratic Party, Russia has become an easy scapegoat and political boogeyman for very real political issues that are affecting the integrity of our elections. As we saw during the four years that Donald J Trump was President, the Democrats have zero qualms about accusing their political opponents of being Russian bots, Russian agents, or about dividing the entire nation over a feverish conspiracy of Russian election interference.
What they are not willing to do, however, is admit that the biggest threat to the integrity of US elections is Big Tech tyranny. When it comes to interfering in elections, the evidence makes it very clear that Russia is of no concern, while Big Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are deplatforming US Congressional candidates like myself and banning a sitting US President during the certification process of the 2020 elections. Political censorship and Big Tech election interference has created widespread distrust of America’s elections process, but Joe Biden refuses to address it because Big Tech companies and their executives are Democratic Party mega-donors and their election interference efforts are aimed at aiding and electing Democrat politicians.
Speaking at the Geneva Summit last month following his meeting with Vladimir Putin, Biden said he told Putin there would be consequences to any election interference in the United States, adding that those who engage in election interference will have shrinking credibility.
“Let’s get this straight. How would it be if the United States was viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everyone knew it? It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to maintain its standing as a major world power.”
Ironically, Biden is right, but his severe case of cognitive dissonance has prevented him from recognizing and properly addressing the fact that the most egregious election interference that is happening in the world is actually originating from the United States. It is happening in Silicon Valley, California, where a handful of billionaires have taken it upon themselves to decide which political candidates in America, and around the world, will be able to have a voice during elections.
The United States desperately wants to remain the arbiter of truth, morality, and to set the standard for what it means to have free and fair elections, but the Democratic Party’s acceptance of Big Tech’s blatant interference with the 2020 elections and recent admissions by Biden’s administration that he is actively working with Facebook to censor content he views as “misinformation,” has created a severe credibility issue.
Not only does Biden have a credibility issue regarding his accusations against foreign nations of election interference but, since the 2020 elections, the United States has a credibility issue in the eyes of other world leaders who have been told for generations that the United States is the leading world power.
Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Apple are American companies. While these companies certainly have an international and global consumer base, they were created and founded in the United States of America.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, “Employees of Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc., and Microsoft Corp. , Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. were the five largest sources of money for Mr. Biden’s campaign and joint fundraising committees among those identifying corporate employers, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of campaign finance reports. Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign received at least $15.1 million from employees of those five tech firms, records show.”
There is no denying that Biden received significant financial support from both the employees of and the executives of these powerful Big Tech companies that are now curating political discourse and communication all around the world.
For this reason, Biden has refused to hold Big Tech to the same standard regarding election interference that he wishes to hold Putin.
Even more disturbing is the fact that Putin himself has been more vocal about Big Tech’s election interference than the US leader, which has further diminished the United States standing as an authority on fair elections
Following Trump’s ban from nearly every Big Tech social media platform in January 2021, Putin himself, who the Democrats have spent years vilifying and falsely accusing of election interference, used his platform to call out Big Tech’s out-of-control power. During his speech at the Davos World Economic Forum this year, Putin argued that Big Tech is undermining free and fair elections through their monopolistic business practices.
“Digital giants have been playing an increasingly significant role in wider society,” Putin said via videolink. “In certain areas they are competing with states… Here is the question, how well does this monopolism correlate with the public interest? Where is the distinction between successful global businesses, sought-after services and big data consolidation on the one hand, and the efforts to rule society […] by substituting legitimate democratic institutions, by restricting the natural right for people to decide how to live and what view to express freely on the other hand?” he asked.
As I previously wrote in a previous Op Ed: “Big Tech and the Democrats love virtue-signaling about fake news and foreign-election interference, but it’s a classic case of projection, because spreading fake news and interfering in democratic elections is exactly what they are guilty of doing.”
While there may be no cure for Biden and the Democratic Party’s debilitating case of cognitive dissonance, which will surely worsen as time goes on, it will be up to the American people during the 2022 midterm elections to adopt the task of curtailing Big Tech’s election interference so that America can continue to remain a respected world leader and set the global standard for free and fair elections.
Laura Loomer is an award-winning conservative investigative journalist, free-speech activist, and former Republican US congressional nominee in Florida’s 21st District. She is the author of “LOOMERED: How I Became the Most Banned Woman in the World.” Follow her on Gab and Parler @LauraLoomer, and on Telegram @loomeredofficial
History tells us the United States’ supposed ‘concern for democracy’ in Nicaragua is nothing of the sort
By Daniel Kovalik | RT | July 30, 2021
A century and a half has shown us that American meddling in Nicaragua is never about improving the lot of the people of that nation, and only ever about furthering Washington’s imperialist agenda.
The US government is back at it. It is again expressing concern about the state of democracy in Nicaragua, and conjuring up a new round of punitive sanctions against that tiny country to allegedly prevent dictatorship from taking hold there.
The newest sanctions bill against the country is titled “Reinforcing Nicaragua’s Adherence to Conditions for Electoral Reform (RENACER) Act.” As the Senate version explains, “This bill requires the Executive branch to align US diplomacy and existing targeted sanctions to advance democratic elections in Nicaragua, and includes new initiatives to address corruption, human rights abuses, and the curtailment of press freedom.” Sadly, many US non-governmental organizations and ‘intellectuals’ who should know better have sided with the government in its attack on Nicaragua.
However, a brief history of US involvement in Nicaragua is worth recounting here to fairly assess the government’s bona fides regarding its interest in democracy in that country. The first instance of US intervention in Nicaragua came in the form of William Walker in the mid-19th century, at around the time the Monroe Doctrine, by which the US proclaimed its sole prerogative to dominance over the Western Hemisphere, was announced. William Walker declared himself president of Nicaragua, reinstituted slavery there, and burned down the historic city of Granada for good measure, yet his foray into the country was supported by many Americans as an exercise in progressive advancement.
John J. Mangipano explains this phenomenon well in his peer-reviewed dissertation titled ‘William Walker and the Seeds of Progressive Imperialism: The War in Nicaragua and the Message of Regeneration, 1855-1860’. As he explains: “For a brief period of time, between 1855 and 1857, William Walker successfully portrayed himself to American audiences as the regenerator of Nicaragua. Though he arrived in Nicaragua in June 1855 with only fifty-eight men, his image as a regenerator attracted several thousand men and women to join him in his mission to stabilize the region. Walker relied on both his medical studies as well as his experience in journalism to craft a message of regeneration that placated the anxieties that many Americans felt about the instability of the Caribbean. People supported Walker because he provided a strategy of regeneration that placed Anglo-Americans as the medical and racial stewards of a war-torn region. American faith in his ability to regenerate the region propelled him to the presidency of Nicaragua in July 1856. … Though William Walker did not ultimately succeed as a regenerator, American progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt revived his focus on medical and racial stabilization through their own policies in the Caribbean, starting in the 1890s.”
As Mangipano concludes, “The continuity existing between these groups of imperialists suggested that the regenerators, despite their temporary failures, succeeded in nurturing ideas about why Americans needed to intervene in the Greater Caribbean.” This impulse to “progressive imperialism” – now called by the kinder and gentler-sounding “humanitarian interventionism” – continues to motivate even many US leftists in their attitudes towards Nicaragua and other countries of the Global South, and with the same terrible results.
Meanwhile, in the name of progressivism and democracy promotion, the US would go on to send the US Marines to occupy Nicaragua in the early part of the 20th century and set up the Somoza dictatorship that ruled Nicaragua with an iron fist for over four decades from 1936. The Marines were routed by Augusto César Sandino and his gang of merry men and women, Sandino was later assassinated, and the Somozas held control. America would then organize, finance, and direct the murderous ex-Somoza National Guardsmen in the form of the Contras to try to destroy the Sandinista Revolution, which finally overthrew the US’s beloved dictatorship in 1979. Washington coerced the Nicaraguan people into voting against the Sandinistas in 1990 with the threat of continued war and brutal economic sanctions. Then, in 2018, they supported violent insurrectionists who terrorized Nicaragua for months in an effort to topple the very popular Sandinista government that was re-elected in 2006.
In short, there is a grave threat to democracy in Nicaragua. But it is not from Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, who have built the first democratic state in that country in years. Rather, it is from the United States and the “useful idiots” who continue to believe the US is somehow attempting to bring democracy, despite all evidence to the contrary.
One way the US is threatening democracy is by funding destabilizing and anti-government efforts to the tune of millions of dollars. Nicaragua has responded, as any self-respecting nation would, by punishing those facilitating such foreign interference pursuant to its Law 1055, titled ‘Law for the Defense of the Rights of the People to Independence, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination for Peace’. As Stephen Sefton, an educator and decades-long resident of Estelí, Nicaragua, explains,
“Under the law, it is a crime to seek foreign interference in the country’s internal affairs’ request military intervention; organize acts of terrorism and destabilization; promote coercive economic, commercial and financial measures against the country and its institutions; or request and welcome sanctions against the State of Nicaragua and its citizens.
“In addition, Cristiana Chamorro of the Violeta Chamorro Foundation, Juan Sebastián Chamorro of the Nicaraguan Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUNIDES), Félix Maradiaga of the Institute for Strategic and Public Policy Studies (IEEPP) and Violeta Granera of the Centre for Communications Research (CINCO) may also face charges for money laundering and breaking the ‘Foreign Agents’ law which requires all organizations receiving finance from overseas [in this case, the US] to register with the authorities, report the amount of money received and how it is used.”
However, as Sefton emphasizes, “Despite numerous reports in international media to the contrary, none of the people arrested had been selected by any of Nicaragua’s political alliances or parties as possible candidates for the upcoming general election on November 7th this year. Cristiana Chamorro, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, Arturo Cruz and Félix Maradiaga had earlier stated they aspired to the candidacy of one of the political parties, most likely the Citizens for Liberty political alliance. But none of them was formally under consideration. In any case, as many observers have noted, the figure of their possible candidacy in the elections has served as a smokescreen to distract from the criminal charges against them, for which they would face prosecution in practically any country in the world.” Note that last, important phrase.
To put it bluntly, it is the US which, as it has now done for about a century and a half, is trying to dictate to the Nicaraguan people the type of government and economic model they should choose. As an independent, sovereign nation, Nicaragua has every right to push back against this incessant meddling.
I’ve just returned from Nicaragua, where, along with other members of an international delegation, I witnessed first-hand the Nicaraguan people’s enthusiasm for the Sandinista Revolution on its anniversary, July 19. I saw the crowd of thousands assemble in Pope Paul II Plaza, in Managua, to celebrate this extraordinary event, in which the Sandinista Front, led by Daniel Ortega, overthrew a dictator heavily armed by the US government. Our delegation visited Masaya, which was bombed from the air by Somoza in the final days of his brutal rule. It is continuing to rebuild after the destruction wrought by the neo-Contras of 2018, who, with US backing, laid siege to the city and terrorized it for months, until the historic combatants who defeated Somoza routed them with the assistance of the police.
During our trip, we saw for ourselves the incredible advancements of the Sandinista government, which is providing free healthcare and education to all Nicaraguans. We witnessed the children, who had suffered such poverty and deprivation during the Somoza years and the Contra War that followed, attend school and play in the beautiful parks erected across the country by the Sandinistas. We traveled throughout Nicaragua on beautifully paved roads that once were dirt and stone, if they existed at all
I myself travelled on those dirt roads in 1987 and 1988, when I visited Nicaragua for the first time. Back then, I saw children dressed in rags and without shoes, barely able to get enough to eat because of the US sanctions and the brutal war. One does not see that type of destitution in Nicaragua now, and that’s thanks to the Sandinista Revolution, which, contrary to mainstream claims, has stayed true to its values of defending the poor and the most vulnerable.
Nonetheless, the US is intent on destroying it, and the progress it has brought for the Nicaraguan people. And the people are fully aware of this, and that is why 85% of those polled oppose foreign interference in their country, just as any self-respecting nation would. I stand with them in denouncing US interference, sanctions, and aggression toward that little country which has mightily stood up to the Goliath of the North. In this Biblical struggle, all my support is with David.
Daniel Kovalik teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and is author of the recently-released No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using “Humanitarian” Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests.
Twitter forced Dave Rubin to delete a tweet criticizing federal vaccine mandates
By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | July 30, 2021
Twitter locked talkshow host and author Dave Rubin out of his account and forced him to delete a tweet where he called out federal vaccine mandates and noted that people with the vaccine are getting and transmitting COVID.
“They want a federal vaccine mandate for vaccines that are clearly not working as promised just a few weeks ago,” Rubin said in the now-deleted tweet. “People are getting and transmitting COVID despite vax. Plus now they’re prepping us for booster shots. A sane society would take a pause. We do not live in a sane society.”
Twitter flagged the tweet for allegedly “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19” and ordered him to delete the tweet to regain access to his account.
But Rubin fired back by noting that the so-called misleading and potentially harmful information in the tweet echoed recent statements from President Joe Biden and the mainstream media.
“Everything I said in this tweet is true,” Rubin said. “Biden mentioned federal mandate today, the vax obviously isn’t working as intended, and Pfizer is talking booster shots.”
Rubin pointed to several mainstream media articles that agree with the points he made in the tweet including a USA Today article describing Biden’s Thursday announcement of some vaccine mandates, a Washington Post article that describes how the director of Emory Vaccine Center was Walter A. Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center “struck by data showing that vaccinated people who became infected with delta shed just as much virus as those who were not vaccinated,” and a CNN article about Pfizer releasing new data that supports a third booster shot.
In an interview with Fox News, Rubin described how Big Tech’s misinformation rules are only applied to certain perspectives while others get a pass.
“If they’re going to delete people for misinformation, you’d have to delete basically every single Democrat on Twitter because they all claimed that there was Russian collusion, that Trump was an agent of Russia for four years, they claimed that Brett Kavanaugh was a serial rapist, they claimed that the Covington kids were all racist, they claimed that Jussie Smollett was almost lynched, Hillary Clinton tweeted that Donald Trump was an illegitimate president, there are all endless lies from these people,” Rubin said. “Who decides what COVID misinformation is? If you’re banned for COVID misinformation, Fauci should be banned from the internet in perpetuity.”
This is the latest of many examples of independent creators being censored for posts about the coronavirus while those deemed to be “authoritative sources” by Big Tech get a pass.
Last year, numerous mainstream media outlets that are often boosted by Big Tech for supposedly being authoritative sources downplayed the coronavirus by suggesting that it’s no more dangerous than the flu and advised against wearing masks. These outlets weren’t censored by Big Tech, even after rules were introduced that expressly prohibit claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the flu or claims that wearing a face mask does not help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Meanwhile, independent creators or members of the public that simply debate or question these same issues are swiftly censored by the tech giants.
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Guaido’s True Colors: “President” to Fix Venezuelan Relations with Israel
By Jim Carey | Geopolitics Alert | February 13, 2019
Caracas – In an interview over the weekend, “interim President” of Venezuela Juan Guaido promised he would work on restoring relations with Israel.
Despite not actually having a government or being in any type of official position of power within Venezuela Juan Guaido is still somehow making big promises. Last week it was the promise to sell oil he doesn’t control to the US and this week he is setting foreign policy for a state, a military, and a diplomatic core that he doesn’t have.
Regardless of Juan Guaido’s material position, Israel has been more than willing to indulge in the US fantasy in Venezuela and was one of the early states to recognize the fraud as “interim President.” Now it seems Guaido is more than willing to repay the favor should he ever actually hold office.
Guaido made this promise in a recent interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper where he told the interviewer that he was “very happy to announce that the process of stabilizing relations with Israel is in full swing.” While what exactly that means when you’re a President with no power is rather ambiguous, for some reason Guaido has said restoring relations “is very important for us.”
Regardless of all these factors, there are still several reasons the new President has made this a high priority. Even without any actual diplomatic staff recognized by the state, Guaidó has still been in contact with Israel and has even discussed opening a new Venezuelan embassy in Israel, saying it “is one of the subjects we are talking about.”
Another reason Guaidó claims he wants to restore relations with the Zionists is due to the fact that there “are many Venezuelans in Israel and many Jews in Venezuela.”
According to Guaidó, this Venezuelan Jewish community “is very active and prosperous”… continue
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