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With unilateral censorship of a sitting US president, Big Tech has proven it’s more powerful than any government

By Helen Buyniski | RT | January 8, 2021

Big Tech’s moves to muscle President Donald Trump off social media have been heralded by some as victory. But a corporate-run state with politicians serving as mere figureheads amounts to the very fascism they claim to oppose.

The smug, palpable air of ‘mission accomplished’ emanating from Facebook, Twitter and Google in the weeks after the media called November’s election for Democrat Joe Biden has been hard to ignore. Thanks to an iron grip on the political narrative and the heavy-handed suppression of any influential dissenting voices, these insanely wealthy companies and their partners in the media establishment have managed to successfully upend what was left of the US’ democratic process.

In short, they have reason to celebrate, having pulled off the first successful national-level coup-by-media in US history. And better yet — for them at least — having helped the ‘right’ guy win, they won’t have to answer to any bogus charges of Russian collusion this time around. Indeed, no less than the Department of Homeland Security came forward to declare the vote the most secure in US history — a baffling claim at best, given the same officials have spent months insisting foreign infiltration supposedly had democracy hanging by a thread.

The epic pearl-clutching that followed Wednesday’s march on the Capitol is almost guaranteed to result in further restrictions on online speech — and as many observers noted, that’s just how Big Tech and Big Brother want it. No explanations have been forthcoming as to why the Capitol was largely unguarded during the protests, even though Trump had for weeks been calling on his followers to stage “wild” demonstrations on that day. Nor was it clear why Mayor Muriel Bowser waited so long before sending in police and the military to rein in the chaos.

The stage seemed to have been deliberately set for disaster, just the sort of spectacle a clever Big Business-Big Tech axis needs to terrify the masses into believing a full-on insurrection is afoot. The only real surprise in Wednesday’s events is that more people weren’t killed — but that’s where the media came in, wielding luridly detailed descriptions and photographing the most bizarrely-attired figures in the group.

By distracting the public, attributing the violence that claimed five lives to the ubiquitous Radicalized Domestic Extremists™ and banning an ever-growing number of discussion topics, Facebook, Twitter, and Google can dodge a total repeal of Section 230 liability protections and live to blanket the nation in propaganda another day. Never mind the absence of visible ‘white supremacists,’ Nazis, and other undesirables supposedly leading the pro-Trump contingent — it’s always possible to Photoshop in a Nazi insignia or 12 in post.

Ultimately, the narrative diverges from reality just enough to make its point, fingering social media as the culprit, and duping the average American into supporting further incursions on their First Amendment freedoms. The moral of the story becomes “Stop thinking, before someone gets hurt.”

And should the relationship sour, and politicians want their power back? Big Tech can easily scuttle any legislative attempts to break up its monopoly merely by threatening to expose the secrets of the dozens of government agencies that have their data stored in the cloud. Companies like Facebook and Twitter, Amazon and Google have what’s left of American ‘democracy’ by the proverbial balls, and should some crusading politician attempt to disrupt their cozy relationship, they’d almost certainly live to regret it.

It would take just one inconvenient ‘leak’ to turn the public against any Luddite savior attempting to pry Big Tech’s boot off American necks. These firms’ control of the media is so airtight that a manufactured ‘scandal’ could be cooked up and launched into cyberspace in a matter of hours. Such retaliation would serve the dual purpose of destroying the political crusader’s career and reminding other would-be do-gooders not to do anything foolish — like fighting to defend one’s own country against the megacorporations holding it hostage.

By blocking Trump from even posting on Facebook and live-streaming platform Twitch – and only recently allowed back into his Twitter account with a “final warning” after a 12-hour lockout – Big Tech has made it clear they’re no longer satisfied with a mere monopoly over one of the few profitable industries left in the US. They won’t stop accumulating power until they run politics, from the presidency to the smallest local election. With Wednesday’s riots, the carefully-choreographed dance between tech execs and the politicians who do their bidding has been given the green light to ascend to the next level. Deplatforming Trump is only the beginning of a megalomaniacal crusade against all those who would question a government by the algorithms, of the algorithms, and for the algorithms.

Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23

January 8, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | 3 Comments

Climate Lockdowns Are Coming: Part III

What About the Roads? | October 20, 2020

In this three-part series we will exam the transformation from COVID lockdowns to climate lockdowns. Part I we established a timeline of the dark side of the environmental movement. In Part II we looked into the specifics of what a climate lockdown really means and what impact current lockdown measures have had on the environment. Now we will see how it fits into the bigger picture of sustainable development as described by international organizations such as the United Nations and what can be done to derail this agenda.

The time has come to step back and look at the bigger agenda of what’s behind climate lockdowns. The groundwork for Mazzucato’s proposals have already been laid and seeded into the public consciousness. This agenda goes by many names and has many faces but at it’s core it is a deception which promotes sustainable development to combat climate change through organizations like the United Nations.

The deception rests on the successful deployment of the Hegelian Dialectic, also known as problem, reaction, solution. In this case governments and institutions have deemed climate change to be the most pressing issue facing civilization (create the initial problem), the public then demands protection and aid in combating this problem (manage the public reaction), and lastly come to the rescue with sustainability goals (sell the pre-planned solution) which can be brought in without any resistance.

It is through these central pillars that we will conclude this series and present solutions for derailing this dystopian vision of the future.

The Truth About Sustainable Development

Though her work is presented as an opinion piece, Mazzucato is simply promoting a larger agenda. The agenda is pushed through everything from The Green New Deal and The Paris Agreement to The Great Reset crafted by the World Economic Forum and the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda (formerly Agenda 21). These are the instruments which serve as tools for the elite to spread their globalist philosophies. Those familiar with these organizations and accompanying legislation are rightly skeptical of presidents and prime ministers mixing with hedge fund managers, CEOs, European royalty, unelected technocrats, and career bureaucrats to dictate the future of the world. Supposedly this is done in the interest of saving the planet but a closer look at what’s behind these agendas tells a very different story.

At the core of these visions of the future is sustainable development. The United Nations and it’s acolytes in the mainstream media promise a world where economic growth still flourishes without harming the environment, so long as the world adopts their 17 goals for sustainable development. These goals include No Poverty, Zero Hunger, Affordable and Clean Energy, and Quality Education. When presented in this simple way it is difficult to find issue with those goals. After all, who doesn’t want a world where poverty has been eradicated and children aren’t going hungry?

While photos of smiling African children or wind turbines against a pastoral background usually accompany reporting on the goals there is little context given to the history or players involved in their creation. How these goals will actually be achieved is a question mostly left unanswered as well. Once these issues are addressed one really wonders if this agenda is what they say it is, or if there’s more to the story.

So where did the term sustainable development come from and how did it become the core of the United Nation’s goals for the future of mankind? In 1983, Agenda 21 began taking shape in the UN as part of the Brundtland Commission who’s goal was to unite the world on a path towards sustainable development. What came out of this commission was a work called Our Common Future which popularized the term sustainable development and defined it as, “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Short, sweet, and without substance.

The commission conveniently featured a cadre of people close to the Rockefeller Family, who’s fingerprints on the environmental movement can be found everywhere. It was headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland, a member of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission who would go on to become the Prime Minister of Norway; oil man and Rockefeller associate Maurice Strong; Italian politician Susanna Agnelli who’s brother Gianni considered David Rockefeller to be in his inner circle; former EPA head William Ruckelshaus who ran in the same circles in Washington D.C. as Nelson and David Rockefeller; and Canadian environmentalist Jim MacNeil who co-authored Beyond Interdependence, a work on sustainable development for the Trilateral Commission.

The United Nations’ Plans For The Future

The agenda was updated and made public in the form of a 300-page document in 1992 at the UN’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and was adopted by 178 governments. The agenda was expanded upon in the 1995 report, Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA) which elaborates on how society needs to be transformed in the name of sustainability. These works leave no stone unturned when it comes to reshaping the world but there are three factors that are of particular use for creating a control grid: the abolishment of private property, population control, and total resource management.

Perhaps the most far-reaching transformation is with regards to private property which will largely be prohibited. They explain that, “Property rights can still be allocated to environmental public goods, but in this case they should be restricted to usufructual or user rights. Harvesting quotas, emission permits and development rights… are all examples of such rights.” This in essences turns over all land, resources, and property to be managed and distributed by bureaucrats who will usher the rural and suburban populations into designated urban spaces. In the United States the map of habitable zones will look something like this (more background on this map here). The smart cities of the future will be unbearably dystopian.

One interpretation of Agenda 21 includes population control as part of the equation. To maintain current standards of living in North America the authors of the GBA estimated that the world population would need to be one billion, two to three billion if “frugal European standards” were desirable. The implicit choice there is that either those standards of living must become a thing of the past or that much of the world’s population will need to be done away with. The authors do not mention how we would return to those levels but with eugenicists like the Rockefellers in support of this agenda it is frightening to imagine the possibilities.

The ability to inventory the world’s production and consumption of any and all resources was a desired but far-off dream of the technocrats of the early 20th century. This dream was closer to being possible in the mid-90s when the GBA stated their goal to:

Expand or promote databases on production and consumption and develop methodologies for analyzing them… Assess the relationship between production and consumption, environment, technological adaption and innovation, economic growth and development, and demographic factors… Identify balanced patterns of consumption worldwide.

The language used here makes this sound like a boring exercise in record keeping but this banal language, when put in the context of a plot like Agenda 21, becomes much more nefarious. Researcher Rosa Koire has been studying the UN’s environmental agendas for decades and calls this cataloging, “The action plan, the blueprint to inventory and control all land, all water, all plants, all minerals, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all information, all energy, all education, and all human beings.” In today’s technologically-driven world, and with the growing Internet of Things, this is a very real possibility.

It became clear in 2015 that 2021 was an unrealistic goal and the agenda once again received a facelift and became Agenda 2030. The agenda outlined in Agenda 21 was reframed as the UN’s Sustainable Goals, 17 interlocking items meant to serve as the blueprint for a sustainable future. They can be read about in great detail and are very appealing on the surface. The catch is that the technocrats in charge of pushing this agenda have to be trusted and as has been outlined previously, and well-documented in other places, this is a huge ask.

A Look At The Green Economy

These technocrats are also asking to be in charge of world finances. Both the World Bank and International Monetary Foundation were spawned from the United Nations and represent, among other institutions and central banks, the financial arm of the elite.

Those in support of this agenda perpetually claim that capitalism has failed us and that along with this reorientation towards sustainability the foundations of our economy will need to change. Patrick Wood, in his seminal book, Technocracy Rising outlines how this will work in the green economy of the future:

It is plainly evident today that the world is laboring under a dysfunctional system of price-based economics as evidenced by the rapid decline of value in paper currencies. The era of fiat (irredeemable paper currency) was introduced in 1971 when President Richard Nixon decoupled the U.S. dollar from gold. Because the dollar-turned-fiat was the world’s primary reserve asset, all other currencies eventually followed suit, leaving us today with a global sea of paper that is increasingly undesired, unstable and unusable. The deathly economic state of today’s world is a direct reflection of the sum of its sick and dying currencies, but this could soon change.

Forces are already at work to position a new Carbon Currency as the ultimate solution to global calls for poverty reduction, population control, environmental control, global warming, energy allocation and blanket distribution of economic wealth. Unfortunately for individual people living in this new system, it will also require authoritarian and centralized control over all aspects of life, from cradle to grave.

What is Carbon Currency and how does it work? In a nutshell, Carbon Currency will be based on the regular allocation of available energy to the people of the world. If not used within a period of time, the Currency will expire so that the same people can receive a new allocation based on new energy production quotas for the next period.

Because the energy supply chain is already dominated by the global elite, setting energy production quotas will limit the amount of Carbon Currency in circulation at any one time. It will also naturally limit manufacturing, food production and people movement.

The elite know this is coming and have already positioned themselves accordingly. Al Gore has already profited nicely off his green investments; members of the Rothschild family are backing sustainability; the Rockefellers have divested from fossil fuels without hurting their net worth; companies like Tesla have made people rich in the name of being eco-friendly. As a matter of fact, a bank (discussion begins at 39:41) has already been set up to facilitate this transition into a new economic paradigm.

It’s another case of new boss, same as the old boss. With most private property rights gone, bodily autonomy in the hands of the ruling class, and complete centralization of the economy there is really nothing outside of the grasp of the elite in this system.

How To Derail Sustainable Development

The cynicism held by those behind this agenda is astounding. They believe that humanity is so distrustful and irresponsible that every facet of their existence must be restricted and controlled. This doesn’t even touch on the eugenicist beliefs held by many within their ranks who would rather see most people simply done away with so they can live in a world unspoiled by their inferiors.

While the fight against such an overarching plan may seem impossible there is a part each person can play in resisting this nightmarish takeover of the world. If the problem is framed as a battle of David v. Goliath, in which the dismantling the UN or wresting away the fortunes of the Gates and Rockefellers of the world are the goals, then the task seems insurmountable. The much simpler resolution to this problem, and one which allows everyone to do their part, is to just opt out and build anew.

It is pure myth to assume that these bureaucracies need to exist or that the billionaires need to have the power that they claim to hold. It is simply a choice to walk away and disavow the system. There are problems in society that need addressing and there are certainly environmental issues that need fixing but these can be handled in a decentralized fashion. To think that a technocratic elite knows what’s best for each man, woman, and child on the planet better than they themselves is ridiculous. Instead we need a free market of ideas, innovations, and technologies where individuals and communities can voluntarily collaborate to create the solutions. A world where mankind works hand-in-hand, not as mortal enemies, could lead to levels of advancement and abundance of society unthinkable by these psychopathic elite.

Once this is understood on a wide scale the work can begin on a large scale. However, nobody has to wait that long as there are already individual tasks that can be done. Some examples:

– Look for signs of these agendas being deployed in your community and push back. Local Agenda 21 serves as the vehicle for taking the larger agenda of the United Nations and reformulating their goals to make them adoptable at the local level.

– If these goals are rolled out it will be much harder to connect with like-minded people in the smart cities of the future. Form Freedom Cells and other voluntary groups to organize, share skills, build community, etc.

– The mainstream media collaborates with the United Nations and governments around the world and therefore cannot be trusted to tell the truth on these issues. Find alternative sources of information on these matters.

– The Internet of Things will be used to spy on the public and under sustainable development goals they will be used to ration resources. Do not allow these devices in your home. Instead, go off the grid or turn to decentralized technology.

– Central planning of the food supply in the Soviet Union and in Communist China led to widespread famine and starvation and yet this is the model the UN hopes to replicate. Grow your own food and support your local farmers. Decentralizing the food supply is critical to preventing food shortages  while helping to build community.

– Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and all the other tech giants all collaborate with the United Nations to push this agenda. Opt-out of these controlled platforms and move towards open-source alternatives.

– When the Dollar, Euro, Yuan, etc collapse the central banks will have controlled digital currencies at the ready. To insulate yourself from the fallout it is worth considering diversifying away from fiat currency. Precious metals, cryptocurrency, local currencies, cash, barter systems, and real assets are all alternatives.

– Take steps to become more self-sufficient. The less you have to rely on technocratic institutions, the state, controlled technological platforms, banks, pharmaceutical companies, etc the less they can interfere with your life.

– Digital censorship is a serious threat to freedom so please share this information. Spread links to websites like this, host documentary screenings, start a book club, distribute USBs loaded with information, bring up Agenda 2030 in conversation, etc. There really is no wrong way to do this last one!

This list is hardly exhausted and will mean different things to different people but that’s really the point. Nobody is better suited to direct your life than you. As we all learn, share, and grow this destructive agenda can be dismantled while a beautiful new chapter of humanity begins.

December 24, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The fascist neo-left and the Trump Factor

By Ghassan Kadi for the Saker Blog | November 21, 2020

Nearly three weeks after the American elections, Americans and the world in general, are still none-the-wiser; not knowing who really won and if the votes have all been legitimate or otherwise.

And the man who is supposedly trying to make America respectable again, yes, Joe Biden, started his ‘tenure’ ironically by presenting his own disrespect by breaking the law and declaring himself as ‘president elect’ and establishing an illegal entity in the name of the ‘Office of President-Elect’.

There are serious accusations that allege that dead people have voted, that boxes of late illegal ballots (all voting for Biden) suddenly appeared from no-where, that the Dominion machines have been deliberately rigged in a manner that favoured Biden, that ballot observers from the Trump camp were not allowed to scrutineer, and much more.

Whilst all of the above points are considered allegations from the legal point of view, the Democrat camp should not be concerned at all if it has nothing to hide. If anything, if it is serious about restoring America’s respect in the eyes of the world, it should encourage transparency and investigations that prove without a single speck of doubt that they are all false. But that same camp that refused the legitimate results of a Trump win four years ago and then fabricated stories like Russiagate and others, is now urging the whole world to believe that the alleged Biden win is legitimate and that there was no interference.

Apart from allegations, what each of us knows for fact is that the media, especially social media, especially Facebook and Twitter have been instrumental in restricting and censoring posts and comments that favour Trump. At the same time, they implemented a blackout relating to the serious allegations of corruption about Biden and his family. If this is not interference in the election results, then what is?

Given the reach and power of social media, and given that most people are not interested in fact-finding, Facebook and Twitter have been engaged in a deliberate campaign of choosing what they allowed to be published and preventing others based on and only on their political views vis-à-vis the American elections.

Once the dust settles one way or the other, if there is any justice left in this world, social media personnel who have forged and implemented those policies must face trial.

What is most ironic about this whole new world that is everything but brave, is that the filthy rich and corrupt are cloaking themselves with the attire of the Left. There is really nothing left of the original Left in today’s Left.

Many, if not most of today’s ”Lefties” are inclined towards the current version of the political Left without really discerning that much has changed since the days of Castro and Guevara.

Today’s Left does not represent the working class.

Today’s Left is not concerned with achieving social justice.

Today’s Left is not concerned with ending capitalism and feudalism.

Today’s Neo-Left, is the consortium of globalists who own sweat shops in developing countries. They are the war-mongers, the arms dealers, the foot soldiers of thought police and they insist that your six-year-old children and grandchildren must learn about subjects like gender fluidity instead of learning history.

The devolution of the former political Left has been taking place for at least three decades, since the collapse of the USSR perhaps and the emergence of the so-called ‘New World Order’. But the 2016 Trump election has fast-tracked the process. George Soros who has an axe to grind with Communism became overnight the principle benefactor of most post-USSR Left movements. For better or for worse, it was as if he wanted to make sure that he contained the Left in a manner that deviates it from its original ideology. But he is not alone, and he is probably not doing this only because of political conviction. His ‘bigger’ partners, whether he is aware of their presence or not, have got a much bigger fish to fry; the fish of global control.

But is globalism what it appears to mean or is it a new form of hegemony? Let us not get into this herein. This will be the subject of the next article. Enough to say that what seems to surface from the actions and agendas of globalists is that they are adamant about destroying Western values; including democracy.

When my wife and I were in Russia on the 70th Anniversary of Victory over Nazi Germany, we were in total awe watching the Eternal Regiment on Nevski Prospect in St. Petersburg. Men and women proudly, silently and dignifiedly marching carrying photos of family members who perished fighting the Nazi malice. What was most amazing was seeing young boys and girls giving flowers to the elderly as a mark of respect. This is because students in Russia study history. The young generations must never take for granted the privileges they have. If they do not understand and respect the sacrifices of their forebears, they will never be able to realize what their own obligations are for today and the future. Many Americans do not know what the 4th of July stands for any more than they know how many States there are in the Union. Children growing up in the West have no idea, no idea at all, how and why they live in affluent countries with public services and government-financed welfare.

And when the million man/woman march was over many hours after it started, we could not see a single empty drink can dumped on the street, not even cigarette butts. And then we remembered that a few days earlier when we were in Moscow admiring among other things, the subway/metro stations, we did not witness any evidence of vandalism or graffiti either on the carriages or in the stations.

A far cry from what we see in the West, because to be proud of who one is has become taboo in the West; courtesy the neo-Left and their henchmen.

Personally, I used to feel concerned of what the armed Right-wing Evangelicals might do if they have it their way. But despite their heavy public display of weapons, I didn’t see any evidence to show that they have taken to the streets for the purpose destroying shops and looting. In saying this, and I am not saying that the pro-Trump militias are incapable of perpetrating organized violence, but recently thus far they haven’t. If anything, with all the BLM-associated violence and the attacks Trump supporters have recently faced, the armed conservatives have thus far displayed a huge degree of self-control and abidance by the rules of the law. They argue that their presence is to protect private and public property, and evidence seems to stack up in their favour.

On the other hand, and despite the bias of mainstream media, videos have emerged showing BLM supporters not only looting, but also terrorizing those who disagree with them and refuse to put their fist up in show of support.

Today’s Neo-Left activists are the ones using Nazi tactics; not the other way around. They are the controlled opposition and the foot soldiers of the thought-police; and these are undeniable facts. If anything, the Trump factor has enhanced their exposure.

And if you resurrect Guevara and catapult him into today’s political world without giving him a crash refresher course, he would not know which side of the political divide is which. If anything, he may think that it is the other way around.

In the event of a Biden win that Trump’s supporters may see as unfair, they may be driven to become violent, I don’t know. What I do know is that I have seen serious and concerning rowdy violent behaviour from the Left that makes me now feel that I am more fearful of organizations such as Extinction Rebellion than I am from the armed Evangelicals.

When the late and great Martin Luther King Jr. made his historic ‘I have a dream’ speech, he did not dream of a day when angry mobs would use the excuse of human rights in order to loot and pillage, gang attack supporters of their political opponents, and break the law and Constitution.

And when John Lennon sang ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Imagine’, he was hoping that one day political leaders would take heed and start putting their hearts before what they can achieve militarily.

Among other things, the thing with Trump is that he is/was not a politician. What drove him from being a profiteering tycoon to a man who wants to end American wars in the world is not something I can explain or understand. Clearly though, even if he is merely running America as a corporation, he must realize that it is not in America’s interests to be constantly engaged in expensive wars that do not have any benefit for America itself. If this is pragmatism from a profit-and-loss business perspective, then I don’t have any problems with this. I want to see American troops pulling out of conflict regions in the world. They have no business in Japan, South Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and my beloved Syria to name a few places.

The thing about Trump is that he is not even a typical die-hard Republican. The archetypal Republicans are not a bunch of ‘nice guys’ either. How can anyone forget the legacy of the GOP? How can we forget George W Bush’s war on Iraq and his lies about the alleged Iraqi WMD’s? And what about his gang of infamous neo-cons; Perle, and Wolfowitz; not to forget Cheney, McCain, and many more from the gung-ho Republican Right that invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, killed at least a million civilians and only ended up creating more problems than the ones they claimed they needed to resolve?

Whether Trump wins or loses the legal battle against what looks like a huge body of evidence of electoral fraud at different levels, between now and January the 20th 2021, unlike what the social media brainwashers want people to think and believe, he is not a ‘presidential candidate’, he remains to be the President of the United States of America and he remains to be the Commander in Chief.

To this effect, in as much as the POTUS is domestically building up a huge legal case against the alleged win of Biden, he equally seems to be preparing for the worst-case scenario on international matters. He is working on the contingencies of losing by seemingly making serious efforts into ending wars and the presence of American troops overseas. May he be successful doing this if he is true to his word.

But Mr. President, if you really want to clean up the slate as much as possible in case you lose the legal battle against the corrupt who serve the Deep State, you must then remember that partial withdrawals do not end wars. A drawdown is not a withdrawal. Stand by your promise and let history festoon you as the man who ended all of America’s wars overseas. For even if you leave one soldier, yes Mr. President, one single American soldier on the soil of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or any other place on earth where his presence is not legitimately requested by the people of that land, then you will be remembered in history as the man who faked withdrawals of American troops; and you despise fake actions Mr. President, don’t you?

Last but not least Mr. President, you must at least stop the oil theft from Syria, repeal the Caesar Act, and pardon Assange.

Assange, Mr. President, is the victim of your enemies. His ‘crime’ was to expose the dirty works of Hillary. How can you not drop all charges against him?

And Mr. President, should you win the legal battle and prove that your opponents have cheated the public, you MUST then clean up the swamp with an iron fist and a high pressure hose. Zuckerberg, the Clintons, the Bidens, CNN, as well as officials that helped fabricate stories about you. The whole gamut of filthy lying manipulators must face justice and the next four years will be a case of now or never.

The electoral issues are something for the American legal system to decide; provided that the system continues to have the power to reach a decision that is lawful and not dictated by the party machine of the Democrats, their cohorts and henchmen with Facebook, Twitter and Google being on the top of the list.

Martin Luther King Jr. would now be saying I’m having a nightmare, I am having a nightmare because in the name of social justice, in my name, protestors are attacked, shops are looted and elections are getting rigged.

The failings of the Neo-Left do not mean that the neo-Right, Trumpism, is always or even necessarily sometimes right by default. What is pertinent is that the choice between the former and traditional Right and Left has now morphed into a choice of discerning right from wrong, and it is the Neo-Left activists who are behaving like Fascists, courtesy the Trump factor.

November 21, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | 1 Comment

UK Labour Party demands online crackdown on ‘anti-vax disinformation’ ahead of Covid-19 vaccine rollout

RT | November 15, 2020

With the UK preparing for a Covid-19 vaccine rollout, the Labour Party is calling for emergency censorship legislation to punish social-media companies if they allow posting of what it considers to be “anti-vax disinformation.”

“Social-media companies have a pitiful record of tackling disinformation,” shadow culture secretary Jo Stevens said Sunday on Twitter.

“The government needs to stop dragging its heels and force companies to remove this dangerous content ahead of the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine.”

Stevens and Labour’s shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, have co-authored a letter demanding that the government impose financial and criminal penalties on social-media platforms that fail to censor anti-vaccine posts.

The government must “deal with some of the dangerous nonsense, nonsensical anti-vax stuff that we’ve seen spreading on social media, which erodes trust in the vaccine,” Ashworth said. He added that the government will need “strong public-health messaging” to ensure that legitimate questions are answered and fears are allayed.

Facebook, Twitter and Google agreed last week to help the UK’s government blunt the spread of vaccine misinformation and disinformation. The companies promised to help spread government-promoted messaging about vaccine safety and to ensure quick response to content that has been flagged by health officials. They also agreed to block people from profiting on anti-vaccine content. But Stevens and Ashworth said that anti-vax groups that were flagged months ago to social-media platforms remain active.

The UK has ordered 40 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, and it aims to get emergency approval to start distribution by next month. But Labour’s push to censor discussion that it deems false is raising concern that proper scrutiny of the vaccine won’t be allowed in a country that was forced to pay settlements to patients who suffered brain damage resulting from the H1N1 vaccine in 2009.

“This is scary,” writer Sue Cook tweeted. “Censorship? If we objectively want to investigate issues around the safety of a particular vaccination before rolling it out, surely that’s good. It is not a matter of being ‘anti-vax.’”

Former Labour MP Ruth Smeeth, who now heads a free-speech group called the Index on Censorship, argued that “rational argument will be lost” if anti-vaccine discussion is pushed underground. “Surely the answer isn’t to ban the anti-vaxxers but to explain why they are wrong on every available platform,” she said.

November 15, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

And Then They Came for the Books…

Truthstream Media | October 19, 2020

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October 31, 2020 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Video | | 1 Comment

Soviet-style thought-policing has come to America, outsourced to Big Tech corporations

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | October 29, 2020

Social media were supposed to democratize speech, liberating the people of the world from the tyranny of gatekeepers. They failed. Seduced by vanity and ideology, they’ve become censors themselves, a Soviet-style thought police.

Once upon a time, Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil,” Facebook was all about connecting people, and Twitter executives proclaimed it the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” Fast-forward to 2020, and they’re all about ‘deplatforming’ voices the legacy media and the political establishment has denounced as unworthy of being heard.

“Who the hell elected you?” thundered Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, during Wednesday’s hearing, expressing frustration over the platform’s crackdown on a story about a major political scandal. In attempting to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s dubious business dealings, Twitter has locked the account of America’s oldest publishing newspaper, and even gone after White House officials and members of Congress.

Yet anyone who didn’t see this coming in the months after the 2016 US election simply hasn’t been paying attention. The greatest irony is that Cruz and his fellow Republicans enabled it themselves, partly by preferring sound bites over legislative action, but also by validating the ‘Russian meddling’ conspiracy theories peddled by their political opponents in an effort to delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump.

Make no mistake, ‘Russiagate’ is how Big Tech was pushed onto the path of censorship. By way of just one example, the Cambridge Analytica ‘scandal’ was used to bludgeon Facebook into hiring censors and partnering with outside ‘fact-checkers’. When it eventually turned out there had been no scandal and the whole thing was a manufactured outrage by self-serving ‘whistleblowers’ and the media… there wasn’t so much as an apology, and the mechanisms stayed in place.

Silicon Valley has been more than eager to go down that path, too. Public records show the vast majority of their employees donate to Democrats, while their executives have poured millions into the campaigns of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden this year.

Nobody needed to pressure Google into embracing the role of the ‘good censor’, its executives and employees did so themselves. Not surprisingly, the president of their parent company at the time, Eric Schmidt, had been fully invested in Clinton’s campaign.

It took a mere suggestion of a crackdown by an influential Senate Democrat for Twitter to ban all RT advertising and overhaul its entire advertising policy, back in October 2017. Not surprisingly, the proposal by Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) went nowhere, but its purpose had been accomplished.

Like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled, the pressure to censor ‘objectionable’ content steadily rose over the course of the Trump presidency. It marched on regardless of the revelations that ‘Russiagate’ was a scam and that the real ‘collusion’ was between the spies, police, prosecutors, media, and the political establishment.

Things almost boiled over when the platforms started deleting any mention of the alleged ‘whistleblower’ who kick-started the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings against Trump – even those made by Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).

The Covid-19 pandemic the very next month saw an expansive effort to ban ‘misinformation’ about the virus – meaning anything not coming from ‘authorities’, even as those very authorities kept changing their line over time! That was probably when the ‘frog’ first began noticing the boiling water.

By then, however, Twitter had begun openly censoring Trump this spring. Condemning riots? “Glorifying violence,” restricted. Putting rioters on notice they can’t set up a lawless “autonomous zone” in Washington, DC? “Abusive behavior, threatening harm,” restricted.

Oh, granted, the same insane standard was later applied to a metaphorical statement by a self-identified socialist, but whether that was the exception that proves the rule or an effort to ‘both sides’ the issue, at the end of the day, Twitter had appointed itself arbiter of acceptable speech – and that was the point.

How can this happen in a country where free speech is the very first enumerated in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights? Because, as both Democrats and libertarian-minded NeverTrump Republicans have been quick to argue, the First Amendment applies only to the government, not to private companies! This is manifestly absurd, but hasn’t been challenged in the courts just yet.

This sophistry has enabled the champions of corporate thought-policing to argue that technically, the US doesn’t have the kind of censorship of word and thought once attributed to the Soviet Union. Because it has Big Tech, it doesn’t have to! Meanwhile, some lawmakers certainly aren’t shy about demanding for more censorship, either.

If you think the comparisons to the KGB or the Stasi are too much, note Twitter’s insistence that the New York Post – founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 – needs to delete the “offending” tweet [linking to the Hunter Biden emails] before its account can be unlocked, but it will supposedly be free to repost it then, because the rules have since changed.

In order to truly work, submission must be voluntary. That’s why Americans still file their tax returns, even though the IRS has been withholding taxes from their wages since the Second World War. That is why in George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith couldn’t just be broken – he had to love Big Brother. That is why Twitter forces you to bend the knee before they will allow you to speak.

What started as anyone’s ability to compete with the New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN on equal footing has morphed into the neutral ‘platform’ choosing to promote their non-stories while shutting down legitimate lines of thought and inquiry under the guise of ‘protecting our democracy’ and fighting (phantom) ‘Russian disinformation’.

So Twitter is basically everything they claim Russia is: They’re manipulating what information people see to try to influence the election.

— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) October 28, 2020

It didn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to stay this way. But it will take more than just strong words to make speech in America free again.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic

October 30, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter vs. the First Amendment in Social Media Censorship

By Peter Van Buren | We Meant Well | October 24, 2020

Twitter and Facebook are the censors the Founders feared when they wrote the First Amendment. In the 18th century, none of those forward-thinking men could have envisioned a day when technology and global corporations would overshadow the power of governments to control information. But that day is here, and @jack and his colleagues are trying to steal an election for Joe Biden in real time.

The social media giants this week tried to disappear a story from the New York Post claiming Hunter Biden had sold access to his father Joe to a Ukrainian company. I’m afraid to include a link to the story, for fear this article too will be blocked and made to disappear. See, you can’t tweet a link to the Post’s story or send it as a direct message on Twitter and you can’t post it on Facebook without some sort of red flag. If you’re an unimportant person your message will just be blocked. If you are important, like the White House press secretary, @Team Trump, or a conservative journalist trying to report out the fuller story, your account will be locked. The NY Post, one of the largest mass circulation dailies, can’t RT its own article on Twitter. In my case, I was life banned from Twitter years ago, censored so broadly I can’t even buy a ticket for this ride. Orwell of course anticipated all this, creating the term “unperson” for someone erased from society. But he, too, did not anticipate the power of the electronic media companies or he would have likely also created the term “unthought.”

The goal of Twitter and Facebook censorship is unthought, to make the NY Post story go away to the extent possible, and to delegitimize it as much as possible in those spaces the giants do not yet control because it might hurt Biden’s chances in the election. They have reimagined free speech as a liability to democracy. They have also crossed some border into the bizarro world by claiming the NY Post story is unproven after years of pressing untrue Russiagate stories into the public conscious, and after featuring NYT stories on Trump’s taxes based on purloined documents never made public. They have given voice to their self-created Blue Check experts who, simply based on imagination, claim the Post story has been spiked directly into the American vein by the Russians. The latter is especially insidious, using a fully disproven story (the Russians controlled the 2016 election) to support another new unproven accusation. This is sadly consistent with another blow to democracy, the media’s abandonment of any commitment to objectivity in favor of ideological activism. This election, there is a Right Candidate and a Wrong Candidate and it is the media’s job to use the tools of censorship, propaganda, and now unthought to direct your vote accordingly.

We have no protection. For something like this to be unconstitutional or illegal, the denial has to come from the government. Facebook and others can deny speech rights anytime they want. We now know the argument only the government is covered by the 1A has reached its limit. Technology and market dominance give great power with no responsibility to a handful of global companies even as the law hides behind the simplicity of the 18th century. That way of thinking requires you to believe that Facebook, et al, would never act as a proxy, barring viewpoints on behalf of a politician who would not be allowed to do it himself.

The NY Post story being disappeared caught the public’s eye, coming from a MSM source, right in front of the election, with all the sleaze of crack pipes and Russian spies as a cherry on top. But this has been going on for a long time.

After hazy accusations that some Russians tried to influence the 2016 presidential election, Twitter and Facebook banned advertising by RT and Sputnik. Senator Chris Murphy followed by demanding social media censor even more aggressively on the government’s behalf for the “survival of our democracy.” Following racial violence in Charlottesville, Google, GoDaddy, and Cloudflare collectively ended their relationships with The Daily Stormer, “effectively booting it off the Internet.” Google noted that, “while some free speech advocates were troubled by the idea that ‘a voice’ could be silenced at its source, others were encouraged by the united front the tech firms put up.”

Google blocks users from their own documents on Google Drive if the service feels the documents are “abusive.” Twitter and the others suspend those who promote (what it defines as) hatred and violence, “shadow bans” others to limit the size of their audience, and tweaks its trending topics to push certain political ideas and downplay others. It purges users and bans “hateful symbols.” There are near-daily demands by increasingly organized groups to censor specific users, with Trump at the top of that list. Users can snitch out other users so that Twitter can evaluate whether they should be suspended. The motivation is always the same: to limit the ideas people can choose to be exposed to.

Google has basically added its terms of service to the First Amendment. A leaked document from the tech giant argues that because of a variety of factors, including the election of Donald Trump, what it dismissively calls the “American tradition” of free speech may no longer be viable. The report lays out how Google can serve as the world’s “Good Censor,” protecting us from harmful content and, by extension, dangerous behavior, like electing the wrong president again. Google sees itself at the nexus of  historic change, declaring, “Although people have long been racist, sexist, and hateful in many other ways, they weren’t empowered by the Internet to recklessly express their views with abandon.” Google is, for the first time in human history, in a position to do something about it. After all, via 90 percent market dominance, they “now control the majority of our online conversations,” so the Internet is whatever they say it is.

We are approaching a time when the freedom to speak will no longer exist independent of the content of speech. What you’re allowed to say could depend on media’s opinion of how it will affect others, in this case, electing Joe Biden. Maybe you like Joe, but do I really have to include here “but what about the next time they use this power, maybe against something believe in?”

For those muttering “it can’t happen here,” look how American tech companies are already employing their tools to serve the 1A-free China market’s social control needs. Companies exist to make money. You can’t count on them past that. Handing over free speech rights to an entity whose core purpose has nothing to do with free speech means it will inevitably quash ideas when they conflict with profits; it just happens to be going your way right now. Those who gleefully celebrate that the anthropomorphized @jack and good old ‘Zuck are not held back by the 1A and can censor at will seem to believe they will always yield power in the way “we” want them to. And trading away a little free speech, especially from a journalistic roach like the NY Post seems reasonable compared to another four years of Trump.

It makes sense for them to unabashedly mainstream unthought and censorship Because Trump. Never before have a large number of Americans feared a politician more. Trump isn’t just against what you are for, he is someone literally out to kill you, via COVID, via some war, your life is in danger. He is not just bad, he is a pure strain of evil without goodness, like a pedophile.

Google first introduced censorship in the most well-intentioned way: to stop child predators. The Internet giant tweaked its search results to block sites it believed linked to child porn. It went on to do the same for terrorist sites, and sites that encouraged suicide. But Google can skew search results any way it wants. It knows the higher an item appears on a list of search results, the more users will click on it. In a test, placing links for one candidate above another in a rigged search increased the undecided voters who chose that candidate by 12 percent. Burying an idea can have a similar effect; 21st century free speech is as much about finding an audience as it is about finding a place to speak. Censorship in the 21st century targets both speakers (example: Twitter blocks someone) and listeners (Google hides that person’s articles). There will soon be no fear anyone will lock up dissident thinkers in some old-timey prison to silence them; impose a new Terms of Service and they are effectively dead. As are their ideas.

The argument Twitter, Facebook, and Google are private companies, that no one forces you to use their services, and in fact you are free to switch to MySpace, is an out-of-date attempt to justify end runs around the First Amendment. Platforms like Twitter are the public squares of the 21st century (seven of 10 American adults use a social media site), and should be governed by the same principles, or the First Amendment will become in practical terms irrelevant.

Pretending a corporation with the reach to influence elections is just another company that sells stuff is to pretend the role of unfettered debate in a free society is outdated. These corporations understand their power to influence. They feel morally required in using it for partisan goals. They have exercised it for Joe Biden. When that happens, elections can be stolen in real time. Just watch.

October 24, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , , | 1 Comment

Star ‘disinformation’ reporter brags about doxxing Trump supporters & NBC defends it as journalism

RT | October 22, 2020

An NBC reporter has bragged about doxxing Trump supporters, “anti-vaxxers,” and other societal rejects, one self-described victim has revealed, suggesting the aim is to turn the US’ national security apparatus against her targets.

Brandy Zadrozny, an NBC feature reporter who specializes in ‘disinformation’ and ‘extremism’ on the internet, is teaching the world how she digs up data on her targets – from phone numbers and home addresses to property records and even Amazon wishlists – to expose their real-life identities. She recently shared her doxxing methods in an online textbook hosted by DataJournalism.com.

But while this might sound like standard journalism practice, Zadrozny’s targets – who have recently included anonymous Trump supporters on Twitter – are private citizens who have committed no crimes, and exposing their real-life identities for allegedly posting “disinformation” is a not-so-subtle effort to turn them into enemies of the state, one such recent target, Revolver News reporter Darren Beattie, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Wednesday.

“She uses state-of-the art-proprietary technical tools to dig up personal information about anonymous Trump supporters online,” Beattie told the Fox News host. “She’ll do anything she can to unearth anonymous Trump supporters – basically so she can ruin their lives.”

Beattie revealed that Zadrozny’s “doxxing handbook” is sponsored in part by Bellingcat, the notoriously partisan ‘open-source intelligence’ outfit that, in turn, is backed by the US’ National Endowment for Democracy. It’s also funded by Google, a military contractor in its own right, and the European Journalism Centre, which counts such oligarchic bogeymen as George Soros and Bill Gates among its financial backers. So much muscle behind the doyenne of doxxing would be enough to give anyone who’s ever tweeted “wrongthink” pause, especially when her how-to guide describes how she has “identified people by connecting photos of things like cars, homes, or pets” in addition to profile photos.

Calling the institutionally sanctioned outing “disgusting and disgraceful, even by modern journalism standards,” Beattie described the work of Zadrozny and her ilk as that of “a neo-Stasi” attempting to “crush the rebellion of the American people against their corrupt ruling class,” suggesting her repeated description of anonymous conservatives’ social media posts as “disinformation” was meant to bring down the force of the national security state “to silence Trump supporters domestically.”

The former White House staffer shared screenshots from the textbook on Twitter, revealing the extensive lengths to which Zadrozny went to “out” the Columbia Bugle, which she refers to as a “popular far-right anonymous Twitter account that boasts that it was retweeted twice by Donald Trump’s account.”

Such dogged detective work is one thing when an investigator is hunting a criminal, but quite another when the quarry’s only “crime” is posting political material on social media. And Zadrozny’s targets have been subjected to death threats and suffered real-world harm because of her work.

While Beattie and Carlson both called on NBC to denounce Zadrozny’s abusive tactics, the network responded by defending its employee, calling her an “incredible and meticulous reporter” whom they were “proud to call … our colleague.” Other colleagues stepped up to defend her and attack her accusers, painting the Fox News segment as a preemptive strike against an article Zadrozny was working on about Beattie’s site.

Trained by oligarch-funded journalism outfit the Poynter Institute, Zadrozny shot to journalistic stardom in the past few years, making her name hyping Russiagate, denouncing pedophile hunters, and shutting down Facebook communities in which parents of autistic children swap tips about healing what they believe are vaccine injuries. The unifying thread running through her work, other than a fanatical devotion to pro-establishment narratives, has been reliance on social media deep-dives to learn more about her subjects without having to actually, well, interview them.

October 22, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Battlefield Social Media: The West’s Growing Censorship

By Ulson Gunnar – New Eastern Outlook – 08.10.2020

Censorship in the West flourishes as tech giants turn social media back into traditional programmed media.

The United States, United Kingdom and the European Union are fond of passing judgement on nations around the globe regarding “free speech.”

While it is increasingly clear to a growing number of people that this “concern” is disingenuous and aimed at merely defending agitators funded and directed by Western special interests in these targeted nations, the West still likes to fashion itself as a sort of champion of free speech.

Yet back home the Internet has been taken over by social media and tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Their platforms clearly serve as online public squares where everything is discussed and even election campaigns play out. Yet these companies have, over the years, begun to eliminate voices of dissent against a notion known as “consensus.”

If you are speaking out against “consensus” you are in real danger of disappearing from these platforms. Some of these platforms, like Google-owned YouTube, serve as the livelihood to people who have for years built up their audiences, produced hundreds of videos and when their accounts are deleted for speaking out against the “consensus,” they have their livelihoods destroyed.

In the wake of these incremental “purges” is a chilling effect with content creators self-censoring or even withdrawing entirely from Western social media.

It is the sort of very real censorship the West has crusaded against in fiction around the globe for decades.

Consensus or Else 

A more recent example is Google’s decision to ban ad revenue for those going against the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) “consensus.”

CNBC in their story “Google will ban ads from running on stories spreading debunked coronavirus conspiracy theories,” would claim:

Google next month will ban publishers from using its ad platform to show advertisements next to content that promotes conspiracy theories about COVID-19. It will also ban ads that promote those theories. In cases where a particular site publishes a certain threshold of material that violates these policies, it will ban the entire site from using its ad platforms.

Those “conspiracy theories” might include questioning the official death rates of COVID-19. Yet even the British government itself has been recently forced to investigate its statistics regarding death rates, vindicating the very sort of people who would have been either forced into silence or forced to give up ad revenue.

The London Guardian in its article, “Matt Hancock orders urgent review of PHE Covid-19 death figures,” would admit:

The UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, is ordering an urgent review of the daily COVID-19 death statistics produced by Public Health England, after it emerged that they may include recovered former sufferers who could have died of other causes.

False reporting over deaths to hype COVID-19, induce greater public panic and pave the way for billions in government handouts to pharmaceutical giants is at the very core of many of these so-called “conspiracy theories” Google seeks to silence through its campaign of financial coercion.

Imagine if this chilling effect was achieved sooner. Would the British government have even bothered investigating its faulty statistics if there weren’t people suspicious of them?

The chilling effect this has over openly discussing something as serious as COVID-19 considering its socioeconomic impact is truly alarming and much more so because it is happening in the so-called “free world” overseen by its self-appointed arbitrators in the US, UK and EU.

A similar campaign was carried out to purge Google, Twitter and Facebook of anyone allegedly connected with “Russia” who also so happened to be anti-war and anti-NATO for waging those wars.

Entire lists are compiled by Western government-funded organizations which are then submitted to these tech giants for purging. The Western media writes accompanying articles announcing, justifying and spinning the purges… but also sending a warning to those left about what is and isn’t going to be tolerated on these platforms.

Social Media Transforming Back into Programmed Media 

Content creators are faced with two decisions; to either self-censor themselves to protect their work, their audiences and their livelihood, or to accept the possibility they will eventually be “purged” (censored) and need to rebuild their audiences from scratch on platforms with far fewer potential readers, viewers and patrons.

Social media, of course, is no longer social media in this sort of environment, but more akin to the sort of programmed media giant Western special interests built their power on over the course of the 20th and early 21st century.

Private Public Squares? 

Of course the defense is that Google, Facebook and Twitter are “private companies”and can do as they please with their platforms. In reality, these companies work in tandem with Western governments whether it is fomenting political destabilization abroad or creating “concensus” at home.

The notion that censorship is “OK” because the US, UK and EU governments launder it through private companies ignores the close relationship these companies have with the government and how their platforms have been transformed into de facto public squares and critical channels of public communication and participation.

The West’s growing overt censorship leaves it with a choice; to either accept that it is in reality as guilty of censorship and manipulating the public as it has claimed its opponents are, or continue pretending it isn’t but at the continued cost of its legitimacy upon the global stage.

There is a very good reason the West is in decline around the globe and why its attempts to leverage notions like “human rights” and “free speech” against nations like China or Russia are increasingly impotent. That reason can be found, at least in part, among the growing number of purge lists, censorship campaigns and calls for “consensus” across Western social media.

Finally, the increasingly overt nature of censorship and controlled narratives promoted by tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter should have them facing restrictions and bans around the globe. Why should any nation host a “public square” where discourse is entirely controlled by interests oceans away? Why shouldn’t a local alternative be created instead where the revenue is kept locally and if narratives are to be controlled, controlled in a way that best suits people locally?

It is ironic that, China for example, is condemned for not allowing Google, Facebook and Twitter to operate freely within their information space because it is a violation of “free speech,” even as Google, Facebook and Twitter cudgel free speech on their own respective platforms.

How much longer will the world tolerate these double standards? How long until individuals, organizations and even entire nations begin creating alternatives to Google, Facebook and Twitter to at the very least balance out the lopsided power and influence they have collectively accrued and abused?

October 8, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How Israel wages War on Palestinian History

By Jonathan Cook – The National – August 21, 2020

When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute Palestinian youth.

Jenin had been sealed off from the world for nearly three weeks as the Israeli army razed the neighbouring refugee camp and terrorised its population.

Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin shows the young man hurrying silently between wrecked buildings, using his nervous body to illustrate where Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians and where bulldozers collapsed homes, sometimes on their inhabitants.

It was not hard to infer Bakri’s larger meaning: when it comes to their own story, Palestinians are denied a voice. They are silent witnesses to their own and their people’s suffering and abuse.

The irony is that Bakri has faced just such a fate himself since Jenin, Jenin was released 18 years ago. Today, little is remembered of his film, or the shocking crimes it recorded, except for the endless legal battles to keep it off screens.

Bakri has been tied up in Israel’s courts ever since, accused of defaming the soldiers who carried out the attack. He has paid a high personal price. Death threats, loss of work and endless legal bills that have near-bankrupted him. A verdict in the latest suit against him – this time backed by the Israeli attorney general – is expected in the next few weeks.

Bakri is a particularly prominent victim of Israel’s long-running war on Palestinian history. But there are innumerable other examples.

For decades many hundreds of Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank have been fighting their expulsion as Israeli officials characterise them as “squatters”. According to Israel, the Palestinians are nomads who recklessly built homes on land they seized inside an army firing zone.

The villagers’ counter-claims were ignored until the truth was unearthed recently in Israel’s archives.

These Palestinian communities are, in fact, marked on maps predating Israel. Official Israeli documents presented in court last month show that Ariel Sharon, a general-turned-politician, devised a policy of establishing firing zones in the occupied territories to justify mass evictions of Palestinians like these communities in the Hebron Hills.

The residents are fortunate that their claims have been officially verified, even if they still depend on uncertain justice from an Israeli occupiers’ court.

Israel’s archives are being hurriedly sealed up precisely to prevent any danger that records might confirm long-sidelined and discounted Palestinian history.

Last month Israel’s state comptroller, a watchdog body, revealed that more than one million archived documents were still inaccessible, even though they had passed their declassification date. Nonetheless, some have slipped through the net.

The archives have, for example, confirmed some of the large-scale massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out in 1948 – the year Israel was established by dispossessing Palestinians of their homeland.

In one such massacre at Dawaymeh, near where Palestinians are today fighting against their expulsion from the firing zone, hundreds were executed, even as they offered no resistance, to encourage the wider population to flee.

Other files have corroborated Palestinian claims that Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages during a wave of mass expulsions that same year to dissuade the refugees from trying to return.

Official documents have disproved, too, Israel’s claim that it pleaded with the 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return home. In fact, as the archives reveal, Israel obscured its role in the ethnic cleansing of 1948 by inventing a cover story that it was Arab leaders who commanded Palestinians to leave.

The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.

A new study by Avner Ben-Amos, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, shows that Israeli pupils learn almost nothing truthful about the occupation, even though many will soon enforce it as soldiers in a supposedly “moral” army that rules over Palestinians.

Maps in geography textbooks strip out the so-called “Green Line” – the borders demarcating the occupied territories – to present a Greater Israel long desired by the settlers. History and civics classes evade all discussion of the occupation, human rights violations, the role of international law, or apartheid-like local laws that treat Palestinians differently from Jewish settlers living illegally next door.

Instead, the West Bank is known by the Biblical names of “Judea and Samaria”, and its occupation in 1967 is referred to as a “liberation”.

Sadly, Israel’s erasure of Palestinians and their history is echoed outside by digital behemoths such as Google and Apple.

Palestinian solidarity activists have spent years battling to get both platforms to include hundreds of Palestinian communities in the West Bank missed off their maps, under the hashtag #HeresMyVillage. Illegal Jewish settlements, meanwhile, are prioritised on these digital maps.

Another campaign, #ShowTheWall, has lobbied the tech giants to mark on their maps the path of Israel’s 700-kilometre-long steel and concrete barrier, effectively used by Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law.

And last month Palestinian groups launched yet another campaign, #GoogleMapsPalestine, demanding that the occupied territories be labelled “Palestine”, not just the West Bank and Gaza. The UN recognised the state of Palestine back in 2012, but Google and Apple refused to follow suit.

Palestinians rightly argue that these firms are replicating the kind of disappearance of Palestinians familiar from Israeli textbooks, and that they uphold “mapping segregation” that mirrors Israel’s apartheid laws in the occupied territories.

Today’s crimes of occupation – house demolitions, arrests of activists and children, violence from soldiers, and settlement expansion – are being documented by Israel, just as its earlier crimes were.

Future historians may one day unearth those papers from the Israeli archives and learn the truth. That Israeli policies were not driven, as Israel claims now, by security concerns, but by a colonial desire to destroy Palestinian society and pressure Palestinians to leave their homeland, to be replaced by Jews.

The lessons for future researchers will be no different from the lessons learnt by their predecessors, who discovered the 1948 documents.

But in truth, we do not need to wait all those years hence. We can understand what is happening to Palestinians right now – simply by refusing to conspire in their silencing. It is time to listen.

August 22, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | 1 Comment

Managing the Narrative

Corporations and government use internet to control information

By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • August 18, 2020

Some Americans continue to believe that when they go to the internet they will get a free flow of useful information that will guide them in making decisions or coming to conclusions about the state of the world. That conceit might have been true to an extent twenty years ago, but the growth and consolidation of corporate information management firms has instead limited access to material that it does not approve of, thereby successfully shaping the political and economic environment to conform with their own interests. Facebook, Google and other news and social networking sites now all have advisory panels that are authorized to ban content and limit access by members. This de facto censorship is particularly evident when using the internet information “search” sites themselves, a “service” that is dominated by Google. Ron Unz has observed how when the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai faced congressional scrutiny on July 29th together with other high-tech executives, the questioning was hardly rigorous and no one even asked how the sites are regulated to promote certain information that is approved of while suppressing views or sources that are considered to be undesirable.

The “information” sites generally get a free pass from government scrutiny because they are useful to those who run the country from Washington and Wall Street. That the internet is a national security issue was clearly demonstrated when the Barack Obama Administration sought to develop a switch that could be used to “kill it” in the event of a national crisis. No politician or corporate chief executive wants to get on the bad side of Big Tech and find his or her name largely eliminated from online searches, or, alternatively, coming up all too frequently with negative connotations.

Google, for example, ranks the information that it displays so it can favor certain points of view and dismiss others. Generally speaking, progressive sites are favored and conservative sites are relegated to the bottom of the search with the expectation that they will not be visited. In late July, investigative journalists noted that Google was apparently testing its technical ability to blacklist conservative media on its search engine which processes more than 3.5 billion online searches every day, comprising 94 percent of internet searching. Sites targeted and made to effectively disappear from results included NewsBusters, the Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze, Townhall, The Daily Wire, PragerU, LifeNews, Project Veritas, Judicial Watch, The Resurgent, Breitbart, Drudge, Unz, the Media Research Center and CNSNews. All the sites affected are considered to be politically conservative and no progressive or liberal sites were included.

One has to suspect that the tech companies like Google are working hand-in-hand with some regulators within the Trump administration to “purge” the internet, primarily by removing foreign competition both in hardware and software from countries like China. This will give the ostensibly U.S. companies monopoly status and will also allow the government to have sufficient leverage to control the message. If this process continues, the internet itself will become nationally or regionally controlled and will inevitably cease to be a vehicle for free exchange of views. Recent steps taken by the U.S. to block Huawei 5G technology and also force the sale of sites like TikTok have been explained as “national security” issues, but they are more likely designed to control aspects of the internet.

Washington is also again beating the familiar drum that Russia is interfering in American politics, with an eye on the upcoming election. Last week saw the released of a 77 page report produced by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) on Russian internet based news and opinion sources that allegedly are guilty of spreading disinformation and propaganda on behalf of the Kremlin. It is entitled “Understanding Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem” and has a lead paragraph asserting that “Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem is the collection of official, proxy, and unattributed communication channels and platforms that Russia uses to create and amplify false narratives.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, The New York Times is hot on the trail of Russian malfeasance, describing the report and its conclusions in a lengthy article “State Dept. Traces Russian Disinformation Links” that appeared on August 5th.

The government report identifies a number of online sites that it claims are actively involved in the “disinformation” effort. The Times article focuses on one site in particular, describing how “The report states that the Strategic Culture Foundation [website] is directed by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the S.V.R., and stands as ‘a prime example of longstanding Russian tactics to conceal direct state involvement in disinformation and propaganda outlets.’ The organization publishes a wide variety of fringe voices and conspiracy theories in English, while trying to obscure its Russian government sponsorship.” It also quotes Lea Gabrielle, the GEC Director, who explained that “The Kremlin bears direct responsibility for cultivating these tactics and platforms as part of its approach of using information and disinformation as a weapon.”

As Russia has been falsely accused of supporting the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the existence of alternative news sites funded wholly or in part by a foreign government is not ipso facto an act of war, it is interesting to note the “evidence” that The Times provides based on its own investigation to suggest that Moscow is about to disrupt the upcoming election. It is: “Absent from the report is any mention of how one of the writers for the Strategic Culture Foundation weighed in this spring on a Democratic primary race in New York. The writer, Michael Averko, published articles on the foundation’s website and in a local publication in Westchester County, N.Y., attacking Evelyn N. Farkas, a former Obama administration official who was running for Congress. In recent weeks, the F.B.I. questioned Mr. Averko about the Strategic Culture Foundation and its ties to Russia. While those attacks did not have a decisive effect on the election, they showed Moscow’s continuing efforts to influence votes in the United States…”

Excuse me, but someone writing for an alternative website with relatively low readership criticizing a candidate for congress does not equate to the Kremlin’s interfering in an American election. Also, the claim that the Strategic Culture Foundation is a disinformation mechanism is overwrought. Yes, the site is located in Moscow and it may have some government support but it features numerous American and European contributors in addition to Russians. I have been writing for the site for nearly three years and I know many of the other Americans who also do so. We are generally speaking antiwar and often critical of U.S. foreign policy but the contributors include conservatives like myself, libertarians and progressives and we write on all kinds of subjects.

And here is the interesting part: not one of us has ever been told what to write. Not one of us has ever even had a suggestion coming from Moscow on a good topic for an article. Not one of us has ever had an article or headline changed or altered by an editor. Putting on my ex-intelligence officer hat for a moment, that is no way to run an influencing or disinformation operation intended to subvert an election. Sure, Russia has a point of view on the upcoming election and its managed media outlets will reflect that bias but the sweeping allegations are nonsense, particularly in an election that will include billions of dollars in real disinformation coming from the Democratic and Republican parties.

Putting together what you no longer can find when you search the internet with government attempts to suppress alternative news sites one has to conclude that we Americans are in the middle of an information war. Who controls the narrative controls the people, or so it seems. It is a dangerous development, particularly at a time when no one knows whom to trust and what to believe. How it will play out between now and the November election is anyone’s guess.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

August 18, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Media Falsely Claim Ethiopian Climate Crisis as Crop Yields Set Records

By H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateREALISM | August 10, 2020

Among the top Google News search results today for “climate change,” an article at Insider.com claims “food insecurity from climate change” is “pushing millions of people into cities.” In reality, Ethiopian crop yields are enjoying consistent, impressive gains, and are setting new records virtually every year. Also, Ethiopia’s rural population is growing, not shrinking, as higher crop yields support more farmers and more food production. The Insider.com article being promoted by Google is a perfect example of the dishonest claims made by proponents of the Climate Delusion.

The Insider.com article, titled “Climate change is pushing millions of people into cities like Addis Ababa. Here’s what rapid urbanization looks like in the Ethiopian capital,” asserts that World Health Organization predictions of a growing Ethiopian urban population prove that climate change is devastating crop production and driving people into cities. But that is faulty logic that defies objective reality. In reality, Ethiopia is benefiting from increasing food production and rapid economic growth in its cities. This economic growth is not forcing people away from the farms, but rather enticing many Ethiopians into cities with better paying jobs and the cultural and social attractions of urban life.

Data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), charted below, show remarkable growth in Ethiopian crop yields as the Earth continues its modest warming. Crop yields per acre are currently 80 percent higher than just a decade ago, and double what they were in the year 2000.

Moreover, the FAO reports that fully half the Ethiopian population was undernourished in the year 2000, while less than 20 percent of the population is undernourished today.

It is amazing that a “news” article at Insider.com can paint this spectacular crop growth and beneficial improvement in nutrition as “food insecurity from climate change.”

About the only thing that is true in the Insider.com article is that Ethiopia is experiencing dramatic urban population growth. However, it is a lie that the urban growth is being caused by climate change destabilizing food production and forcing people into cities. According to the FAO, Ethiopia’s urban areas have added 13 million people since the year 2000. However, Ethiopia’s rural areas have added 28 million people since the year 2000. Ethiopia’s urban and rural areas are gaining population – with rural areas experiencing the largest growth – as increasing crop yields sustain more population and bring more wealth to the nation’s people.

World Bank economic data illustrate this. Per the World Bank:

“Ethiopia’s economy experienced strong, broad-based growth averaging 9.9 percent a year from 2007/08 to 2017/18, compared to a regional average of 5.4%. … Industry, mainly construction, and services accounted for most of the growth. … Higher economic growth brought with it positive trends in poverty reduction in both urban and rural areas. The share of the population living below the national poverty line decreased from 30% in 2011 to 24% in 2016.”

In summary, Ethiopia is enjoying spectacular gains in crop yields that are supporting a rapidly growing population and dramatic growth in both urban and rural populations. The growth in Ethiopia’s urban population is clearly and inarguably a result of spectacular increases in food production and a wealthier population rather than mythical food insecurity. But the easily discernible and reassuring truth doesn’t promote climate alarmism. Therefore, the media lie and invent a false narrative.

August 12, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment