France Accused of ‘Hysteria Over COVID Variant’ After Nearly 15,000 Truckers Tested Negative
21st Century Wire | December 29, 2020
Before Christmas, sensational reports of a new COVID “variant” in the UK prompted European neighbors France, Netherlands and Belgium – to close their international borders for fear of a dangerous new viral wave. As a result, ferries were unable to leave the Port of Dover until Christmas morning, with some 6,000 hauliers remaining in Kent over the subsequent days, and with many spending Christmas Day and Boxing Day parked, waiting to cross the English Channel. What was all the fuss about? Is there really a new “mutant strain” which UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock claims is still ravaging through the British Isles?
As part of this bio-security theatre, military personnel were then deployed to Kent, including a massive cohort of 1100 British troops, 30 French firefighters, and 60 Polish soldiers – all to supposedly to provide aid and services to the drivers, and to “speed up testing to 600 per hour” carried out at nearby Manston airfield.
As it turns out, all of this was completely unnecessary.
UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps tweeted: “Update on Kent lorry situation: 15,526 #Coronavirus tests now carried out. Just 36 positive results, which are being verified (0.23%). Manston now empty and lorries should no longer head there please.”
What the Government and Mainstream Media will not tell the public is that if the highly dubious PCR Testing was used, then that tiny reported number of 36 ‘positive cases’ could have easily fallen within the margin of false positive errors – meaning all 15,000 plus drivers may have been ‘COVID free’ – an incredible but very telling data point – all but proving that the virus is likely to be severely over-hyped right now in the UK.
As 21WIRE already reported last week, Hancock’s claims of a new ‘dangerous and more transmissible’ virus were totally unfounded and based on sloppy science from the UK government’s NERVTAG science advisory committee.
Because of the near nonexistent COVID cases within this giant trucker sample, critics are now railing against France and other European countries for panicking and closing their borders based on irrational fear of an non-existent “mutant strain” of COVID-19. But the UK authorities have no business pointing the finger at anyone….
MSN reported on Dec 25th…
The French authorities slapped restrictions on hauliers crossing the Channel following the [alleged] emergence of the VUi202012/01 coronavirus mutation which is believed to spread faster than other strains.
The UK and France agreed to a testing regime to allow trucks to start flowing again on the Dover-Calais link.
The Standard has been told that out of the first 1,500 tests none came back positive.
A Whitehall source criticised the “over hasty” action by the French authorities, adding: “All of this trouble – there have been 1,500 tests – no positives.”
The EU’s Transport Commissioner Adina VÄlean criticised Emmanuel Macron’s government over the weekend’s freight ban.
She tweeted: “I am pleased that at this moment, we have trucks slowly crossing the Channel, and I want to thank UK authorities that they started testing the drivers at a capacity of 300 tests per hour.
“I deplore that France went against our recommendations and brought us back to the situation we were in in March when the supply chains were interrupted.”
Mind you, that’s more than a bit rich for anyone in the UK Government-Media Complex to accuse France of over-reacting – when it was Matt Hancock and the fawning mainstream press who for weeks shamelessly pumped-out incessant fear-based claims of an allege COVID “mutant strain” – absent of any actual evidence to back-up their wild assertions. Lesson learned?
SEE MORE:
UK ‘Variant Fears’ Are Over-Hyped Says Leading US Microbiologist
THE PCR DECEPTION
Short Documentary About the Test Used for Covid-19
The Conscious Resistance Network | December 23, 2020
Watch on Minds / Flote / Bitchute / Odysee / Hive
Script:
Reports are streaming in, declaring a Dark Winter for the world due to COVID19. The media rushes to tell the public that case numbers are on the rise again. In response, case numbers are used to support calls for lockdowns, travel and dining restrictions, and the push for compulsory vaccines.
However, in recent months an abundance of evidence has shown that the “gold standard” procedure for detecting COVID-19 is unreliable and could be producing untold numbers of false positives. If this is the case, why are health officials around the world calling for more tests?
This report is a brief look into the history of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) procedure and the evidence that PCR is unreliable and should not be used as a determinant for the number of COVID-19 cases or as a factor in political decisions. Please share with friends and family to keep them informed, and if someone shared this with you, please watch with an open mind.
The PCR Deception
In the months since the COVID-19 panic began health authorities around the world have encouraged the public to “get tested” to help track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus that causes COVID19. However, as fear and hysteria subside, the scientific community and public at large are calling into question the efficacy of the test used to determine a patients status.
The main test that is used to determine an individual status involves the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method. This incredibly sensitive technique was developed by Berkeley scientist Kary Mullis, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993. The PCR method amplifies a small segment of DNA hundreds of times to make it easier to analyze. For COVID19, a process known as Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is used to detect SARS-CoV-2 by amplifying the virus’ genetic material so it can be detected by scientists.
PCR is sometimes described as a technique or process, but for simplicity we will refer to it as a test. PCR is viewed as the gold standard, however, it is not without problems. PCR amplifies a virus’s genetic material and then each sample goes through a number of cycles until a virus is recovered. This is known as the “cycle threshold” and has become a key component in the debate around the efficacy of the PCR test.
In late August 2020, I attended a press conference in Houston, Texas to ask Houston Health Authority Dr. David Persse about concerns about PCR.
Dr. Persse says that when the labs report numbers of COVID-19 cases to the City of Houston they only offer a binary option of “yes” for positive or “no” for negative. “But, in reality, it comes in what is called cycle-thresholds. It’s an inverse relationship, so the higher the number the less virus there was in the initial sample,” Persse explained. “Some labs will report out to 40 cycle-thresholds, and if they get a positive at 40 – which means there is a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of virus there – that gets reported to us as positive and we don’t know any different.”
Persse noted that the key question is, at what value is someone considered still infectious?
“Because if you test me and I have a tiny amount of virus, does that mean I am contagious? that I am still infectious to someone else? If you are shedding a little bit of virus are you just starting? or are you on the downside?.”
He believes the answer is for the scientific community to set a national standard for cycle-threshold. Unfortunately, a national standard would not solve the problems expressed by Dr. Persse.
UK Parliament and Scientists Have Concerns About PCR Test
In the first weeks of September 2020 a number of important revelations regarding PCR came to light. First, new research from the University of Oxford’s Center for Evidence-Based Medicine and the University of the West of England found that the PCR test poses the potential for false positives when testing for COVID-19. Professor Carl Heneghan, one of the authors of the study said there was a risk that an increase in testing in the UK will lead to an increase in the risk of “sample contamination” and thus an increase in COVID-19 cases.
The team reviewed evidence from 25 studies where virus specimens had positive PCR tests. The researchers state that the “genetic photocopying” technique scientists use to magnify the sample of genetic material collected is so sensitive it could be picking up fragments of dead virus from previous infections. The researchers reach a similar conclusion as Dr. David Persse, specifically they state:
“A binary Yes/No approach to the interpretation RT-PCR unvalidated against viral culture will result in false positives with segregation of large numbers of people who are no longer infectious and hence not a threat to public health.”
Heneghan, who is also the the editor of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, told the BBC that the binary approach is a problem and tests should have a cut-off point so small amounts of virus do not lead to a positive result. This is because of the cycle threshold mentioned by Dr. Persse. A person who is shedding an active virus and someone who has leftover infection could both receive the same positive test result. Heneghan also stated that the test could be detecting old virus which would explain the rise in cases in the UK and said setting a standard for the cycle threshold would eliminate the quarantining and contact tracing of people who are healthy and help the public better understand the true nature of COVID-19.
Shortly after Heneghan’s criticisms the UK’s leading health agency, Public Health England, released an update on the testing methods used to detect COVID-19 and appeared to agree with Professor Heneghan regarding the concerns on the cycle threshold. On September 9, 2020, PHE released an update which concluded, “all laboratories should determine the threshold for a positive result at the limit of detection.”
This is not the first time Heneghan’s work has directly impacted the UK’s COVID-19 policies. In July 2020, UK health secretary Matt Hancock called for an “urgent review” of the daily COVID-19 death numbers produced by Public Health England after it was revealed the stats included people who died from other causes. The Guardian reported that Professor Heneghan and a fellow scientist released a paper showing that if someone dies after having tested positive for COVID-19, their death is recorded in the COVID-19 death statistics. A source in the Department of Health and Social Care told The Guadian, “You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a COVID death.’”
Heneghan also recently told the BMJ , “one issue in trying to interpret numbers of detected cases is that there is no set definition of a case. At the moment it seems that a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) positive result is the only criterion required for a case to be recognised.”
“In any other disease we would have a clearly defined specification that would usually involve signs, symptoms, and a test result. We are moving into a biotech world where the norms of clinical reasoning are going out of the window. A PCR test does not equal covid-19; it should not, but in some definitions it does.”
Heneghan says he is concerned that as soon as there is the appearance of an outbreak there is panic and over-reacting. “This is a huge problem because politicians are operating in a non-evidence-based way when it comes to non-drug interventions,” he stated.
Heneghan is correct that the scientific authorities ought to take false positives seriously, especially when a person can be sent to isolate or quarantine for weeks due to a positive test result. Even the U.S. FDA’s own fact sheet on testing acknowledges the dangers posed by false positives:
“ in the event of a false positive result, risks to patients could include the following: a recommendation for isolation of the patient…. unnecessary prescription of a treatment or therapy, or other unintended adverse effects.”
A CDC fact sheet also acknowledges the possibility of false positives with the PCR test.
Professor Heneghan believes the confusion around COVID-19 has come as a result of a shift away from “evidence-based medicine.” In a recent opinion piece published at The Spectator, Heneghan wrote that patients have become a “prisoner of a system labelling him or her as ‘positive’ when we are not sure what that label means.” He warns:
“Governments are producing a series of contradictory and confusing policies which have a brief shelf life as the next crisis emerges. It is increasingly clear the evidence is often ignored. Keeping up to date is a full time occupation.”
More evidence for the unreliability of PCR came on November 11, 2020, when the Lisbon Court of Appeal ruled that PCR ““in view of current scientific evidence, this test shows itself to be unable to determine beyond reasonable doubt that such positivity corresponds to the infection of a person by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”
The decision relates to an appeal by the Regional Health Administration of the Azores,Portugal which forced four German citizens to comply with a 14 day quarantine in a hotel room. After the four citizens appealed the decision, the panel of judges concluded that “the number of cycles of such amplification results in a greater or lesser reliability of such tests. And the problem is that this reliability shows itself, in terms of scientific evidence (…) as more than debatable.”
The ruling was criticized by some scientists in Portugal and has been completely ignored by the United States media and politcians.
More recently, On December 3, 2020, the Florida Department of Health announced a new update requiring all laboratories conducting COVID-19 tests to record new details for the PCR test.
The update notes that all Florida “laboratories are subject to mandatory reporting to the Florida Department of Health (FDOH),” including for “PCR, other RNA, antigen and antibody results.” The update adds new requirements for the PCR test, asking labs to record the “cycle threshold” (CT) values for the process. The FDOH document states:
“Cycle threshold (CT) values and their reference ranges, as applicable, must be reported by laboratories to FDOH via electronic laboratory reporting or by fax immediately.”
On December 14, the World Health Organization (WHO) posted a notice on their website warning that PCR may not be entirely accurate for detecting SARS-CoV-2. The WHO memo admits that using too high of a cycle threshold will likely result in false positives.
“Users of RT-PCR reagents should read the IFU carefully to determine if manual adjustment of the PCR positivity threshold is necessary to account for any background noise which may lead to a specimen with a high cycle threshold (Ct) value result being interpreted as a positive result.”
“The design principle of RT-PCR means that for patients with high levels of circulating virus (viral load), relatively few cycles will be needed to detect virus and so the Ct value will be low. Conversely, when specimens return a high Ct value, it means that many cycles were required to detect virus. In some circumstances, the distinction between background noise and actual presence of the target virus is difficult to ascertain.”
The fact that the Florida Department of Health and the WHO is taking this step is another sign that an increasing number of health professionals and regulators are questioning the accuracy of PCR. Unfortunately, both of these stories have been ignored by the mainstream media.
As noted earlier, this incredibly sensitive technique was developed by Berkeley scientist Kary Mullis, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993. By the mid-90’s, Mullis had become skeptical that PCR was able to detect HIV and made several statements towards the end of his life indicating that he believed the technique was being improperly used by researchers.
As we approach 2021 the public is being told that a Dark Winter is waiting, with governments and media predicting a rise in cases and deaths. However, it’s important that we pause to acknowledge the many concerns surrounding the PCR test before international health authorities crash the economy, send millions into poverty, and threaten civil liberties. We must help the public understand the limitations of the PCR test and the dangers of resting public health policy on such a flawed process.
Finally, we must also hold accountable those who continue to promote PCR and refuse to answer these questions or even acknowledge these concerns. We cannot ignore the disastrous results produced by policymakers who failed to heed warnings about PCR.
12,000 NYC Students Banned From School For Not Consenting To Random Covid Testing
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | December 28, 2020
About 12,000 New York City students are being prevented from attending in-person learning because their parents “failed to sign consent forms for weekly random testing”, Bloomberg reported last week. The students are part of a larger group of 190,000 pre-school through elementary students who returned to classrooms in December.
While about 60,000 pre-school and kindergarten students are exempt from testing, there are still about 130,000 students who are required to participate in random testing.
Nathaniel Styer, a spokesman for the city Department of Education, said: “Due to the extensive efforts of our staff, 91% of students who need a consent form have one on file. Students without consent forms, and who do not have approved exemptions, are transitioned to remote instruction.”
Random testing is conducted on 20% of everyone in each school building, every week. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza are responsible for implementing the standards that went into place after NYC schools had previously shut down.
Meanwhile, high school and middle school students that are part of NYC’s 1 million plus student body are all receiving remote instruction. “Tens of thousands” of elementary school parents have voluntarily opted out of the random testing in favor of remote learning as well, Bloomberg concluded.
Should Dr. Birx Be Forgiven For Breaking Her Own Rules?
By Ethan Yang | American Institute for Economic Research | December 28, 2020
Another day, another politician violates their own rule. Do as I say not as I do; this has been the prevailing theme of the pandemic as politicians openly flout the laws and recommendations they advocate for. From people like Speaker Nancy Pelosi to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to local county supervisors in Los Angeles, hypocrisy thrives at every level of government. Our leaders tell society to suck it up and lock down while providing little justification or direction. Meanwhile, they reserve the right to travel, dine out, and see their loved ones for themselves after devoting effort to prevent the rest of us from doing so. As they enjoy these luxuries, their policies bring economic devastation, social deprivation, and encourage fellow citizens to turn on one another.
Another public official to be added to this long list of hypocrites is Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. AP News writes,
“The day after Thanksgiving, she traveled to one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware. She was accompanied by three generations of her family from two households. Birx, her husband Paige Reffe, a daughter, son-in-law and two young grandchildren were present.”
This is of course after she and her colleagues made a number of recommendations not to travel or gather on Thanksgiving. According to the New York Post,
“Birx had urged people in the days leading up to Thanksgiving to keep gatherings to “your immediate household.”
“I don’t like it to be any number,” Birx said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“Because you know, if you say it can be 10, and it’s eight people from four different families, then that probably is not the same degree of safe as 10 people from your immediate household.”
Birx said at the time that every American is obligated to make sacrifices to stop the spread of the virus.”
Dr. Birx believes that we should not gather with anyone besides those in our immediate household yet here she is just like many politicians before her. The New York Post also writes that when confronted on the matter Dr. Birx attempted to justify the trip by stating that she was going to “winterize the property before a potential sale.” On the matter it reports,
“I did not go to Delaware for the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving,” Birx said in a statement.
She argued that the members of the trip belong to her “immediate household,” though she acknowledged they live in separate homes.”
As unconvincing as that sounds, even if Dr. Birx didn’t go to celebrate Thanksgiving that doesn’t change the fact that she was meeting with people from different households. Preparing the house for sale doesn’t change things either as American businesses have been crumbling under the boot of lockdowns since March. Although failing to prepare her house for sale might have lasting and adverse consequences, every day Americans have been making these sacrifices for months.
The New York Post provides a follow up on this situation when it reports that to justify her visit Dr. Birx said the following,
“My parents stopped eating and drinking because they were so depressed,” the 64-year-old complained to Newsy.
“My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed,” Birx said of the need to “recover from the trauma of the last 10 months.”
Although this is certainly a compelling reason to visit her family, the problem is that this is what countless Americans have been dealing with as well. Dr. Birx has simply realized what the consequences of her policies have been. For many Americans, lockdowns have generated the social agony her family has experienced. Plenty of Americans have also lost jobs and livelihoods. According to data from Yelp, 60 percent of businesses that closed will never open again. For many Americans, they have experienced even worse. According to the CDC, drug overdoses have skyrocketed in 2020, expanding the list of self-inflicted deaths both intentional and unintentional. Despite all this, the average American has obediently complied with these guidelines even though they have every right not to.
Should We Forgive Dr. Birx?
Dr. Birx and the countless politicians like her should be forgiven under the following condition: That they learn from their mistakes and empathize with the average American’s struggle with their policies. To understand the eternal lesson that policy intentions do not equal policy results. If we could have more people in power who understand this truth then society would be better off. Lockdowns are a classic example of a policy that seemed to have benevolent intentions but wound up having lethal consequences. There are laws that work and those that don’t. Lockdowns and all the arbitrary restrictions that come with them promote contempt for the rule of law while doing little to control the virus. They have not only done little to prevent the spread of Covid-19, but they have wrecked society as a result. Part of the process of leadership is having the humility to admit that you were wrong and understanding that you can’t force a square peg through a round hole. Likewise, you cannot drastically shut down society and prohibit everything it means to be human without expecting terrible results.
The great economist Friedrich Hayek once wrote,
“The basic source of social order, however, is not a deliberate decision to adopt certain common rules, but the existence among the people of certain opinions of what is right and wrong…. Except where the political unit is created by conquest, people submit to authority not to enable it to do what it likes, but because they trust somebody to act in conformity with certain common conceptions of what is just. There is not first a society which then gives itself rules, but it is common rules which weld dispersed bands into a society.”
Hayek spoke of lawmaking as a sort of discovery process of policies that are compatible with society rather than simply forcing one’s will on society. Lockdowns are a clear example of an unsustainable law that is not only incompatible with society but impossible to follow. Dr. Birx has learned firsthand that her recommendations are not sustainable in the long run and even she of all people can’t follow such an edict. Rather than feeling humiliated and ashamed, she should attempt to enlighten her colleagues about her discovery. Otherwise, this will go down as another one of countless instances of elitism and hypocrisy exercised by our public servants.
Dr. Birx may have saved her family from emotional trauma or worse by visiting them. Surely she had taken the necessary precautions to ensure that her trip was as safe as possible. It would certainly be reasonable to make such a trip given the circumstances. She weighed the dangers and rewards of the actions she was taking and made a thoughtful decision. Rather than apologizing and retreating, she should fight for the average American’s right to do the same. One could only wish.
Ethan Yang joined AIER in 2020 as an Editorial Assistant and is a graduate of Trinity College. He received a BA in Political Science alongside a minor in Legal Studies and Formal Organizations. He currently serves as Local Coordinator at Students for Liberty and the Director of the Mark Twain Center for the Study of Human Freedom at Trinity College.
German MP suggests restrictions ‘similar’ to Covid-19 lockdowns to fight climate change
RT | December 28, 2020
Humanity should sacrifice “personal freedom” just as many nations did during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to successfully fight climate change, a German MP has said, adding that there will “never” be a vaccine against CO2.
Germany had barely started its coronavirus vaccination campaign when a Social Democratic MP, Karl Lauterbach, warned that his compatriots need to brace themselves for yet another challenge: global warming.
“We need measures to deal with climate change that are similar to the restrictions on personal freedom [imposed] to combat the pandemic,” the professor of health economics and epidemiology at the University of Cologne wrote in a guest piece for Die Welt newspaper. He added that he hoped climate change issues would play “a dominant role” during the upcoming election campaign ahead of the federal ballot scheduled for September 2021.
The politician said he “had an impression” that Germany, Europe, and particularly the US “would not have been able to defeat the Covid pandemic without the development of a vaccine.” All these nations are still quite far from defeating the virus, as their vaccination campaigns have only just started, and the number of new infections in these nations remains relatively high. But he appeared much more concerned about the fact “there will never be a vaccine against CO2.”
Lauterbach admitted he was rather skeptical about whether his dream future, in which humanity would beat climate change through the sacrifice of freedoms, would ever be achieved. “My experience of combating the coronavirus pandemic has unfortunately made me extremely pessimistic about whether we will be able to successfully stop climate change in time,” he admitted.
According to the MP, the problem lies with the fact that Germans have “underestimated” the pandemic and continue to do so. Now, as the vaccination campaign kicks off, some might be too tempted to throw off the shackles of yet another lockdown well before the time is right to ease the restrictions, he warned.
It is “necessary” for the lockdown to remain in place until the number of new cases falls “well below 50 per 100,000 people in a week,” the epidemiologist said, calling on fellow citizens to “have discipline, altruism and … patience to achieve this.”
However, many Germans seem unlikely to agree with such advice. The nation has repeatedly seen massive protests against coronavirus restrictions. The government’s decision to re-introduce a partial lockdown in early November sparked a new wave of demonstrations, some of which turned violent. Some of those opposing the lockdown went as far as to compare themselves with the anti-Nazi resistance, provoking a harsh rebuke from Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.
The fact that Christmas parties in Germany were limited to close family members would have done little to brighten the nation’s mood. The ban on drinking alcohol in public and buying fireworks for use on New Year’s Eve probably came as unwelcome news too.
The nation launched its vaccination campaign on Saturday – a day ahead of the joint EU inoculation drive. Ensuring the German population is immune to the virus will likely still take some time, since each European country has so far received only around 10,000 doses. More are expected to be delivered in January.
The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom
By Glenn Greenwald | December 28, 2020
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”
What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.
Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.
That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
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New Book
Trans agenda is ‘normalization of sadism’ – US author
RT | September 23, 2026
The US Democratic Party has embraced a transgender agenda that amounts to “the normalization of sadism,” author A.J. Rice has said, warning that radical trans policies would return if the party is allowed to regain power.
Speaking to RT’s America First host Scotty Nell Hughes about his new book, ‘The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity’, Rice argued that activists have gained significant influence in schools, medicine, and corporate America while people who questioned the agenda have faced pressure to stay silent.
The author described the “trans mafia” as the sprawling network of people and institutions that have helped the movement gain influence. He singled out parts of academia, wealthy backers, and corporations, and stated that providers of transition-related treatment also have a financial incentive to keep young people in their care indefinitely.
Rice argued that the consequences of these policies ultimately fall on children who are being drawn toward gender-affirming medical treatments and on girls who are expected to share locker rooms or compete in sports with biological males.
He noted that while voters rejected the Democrats’ approach to gender in 2024, the party, which has been “captured by madness,” has since only doubled down and is seeking what is effectively “the normalization of sadism.” … Full report
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