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Everybody’s Guilty: To the Police State, We’re All Criminals Until We Prove Otherwise

By John W. Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | June 23, 2022

The burden of proof has been reversed.

No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.

Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

Thought crimes. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.

Security checkpoints and fusion centers. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes. Fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

Surveillance, precrime programs. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts.

Threat assessments and AI algorithms. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

Militarized police. America is overrun with militarized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.

Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

Asset forfeiture schemes. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme.

Bodily integrity. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level. The groundwork being laid is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.

The Security-Industrial Complex. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn. As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.

The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

In effect, you will disappear.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute.

June 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Ottawa announces police checkpoints for Canada Day

TCS WIRE | June 24, 2022

The City of Ottawa has announced several restrictions for Canada Day, including a motor vehicle control zone with police checkpoints to ban protesters’ vehicles.

“Getting around downtown on Canada Day will be more complicated than usual this year,” a City of Ottawa news release reads.

Unsurprisingly, the motor vehicle control zone only applies to roads leading to or surrounding Parliament Hill — an apparent attempt by City officials to prevent another Freedom Convoy incident, even if they don’t state so outright.

As per the news release, the motor vehicle control zone will be in place from June 29 to July 4 and will affect travel within the city in several ways.

Firstly, all vehicles belonging to people taking part in any form of demonstration, event, protest, or rally are outright banned from going near Parliament Hill, while local and business traffic, pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit will be permitted to move through the control zone freely.

Moreover, those who do not comply with the protester vehicle ban will face ticketing, and “barricades, heavy equipment, or police officers and vehicles will be at various access points surrounding the control zone, to filter lawful traffic onto those streets.”

It isn’t clear how a demonstrator’s vehicle will be distinguished from someone just looking to go to a shop, other than obvious freedom signs.

Signage will also be posted in the motor vehicle control zone that prohibits street parking and stopping.

Additionally, while authorities plan to lift the control zone on July 4, they say they have no problem extending the control zone “should conditions warrant it.”

As for July 1, the City says there will be additional restrictions:

“Some roads within the control zone will be closed to all traffic from 12:01 am on July 1 until 2 am on July 2. There are also some pedestrian and bicycle restrictions.”

Before this latest announcement, the Canadian Press reported, “An Ottawa police officer says this Canada Day will be “unprecedented and unique” with a never-before-seen security posture as the main events take place off Parliament Hill, and protests are planned throughout the day.”

“Police are aware of the demonstrations and are “planning accordingly,” said the officer.”

We now know what those plans entail.

Canada Heritage also announced that they would not allow Canadians to participate in the annual Canada Day celebration at Parliament Hill due to construction after two years of cancelling it due to COVID.

They added that the Canada Day party, which usually sees thousands flock to Ottawa, is being moved to the LeBreton Flats approximately 1.5km Westwards.

As for the planned demonstrations, there are several protests against the remaining COVID mandates planned for Canada Day, which are expected to be attended by many Freedom Convoy protesters from February.

Additionally, this is the same day CAF veteran James Topp will complete his cross-country march to the capital city.

Journalist Andy Lee has also stated she plans to host a campout on Parliament Hill despite the ban and has given police a heads up.

June 25, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , | Leave a comment

French Elections, Round 2: What Actually Happened?

Resisting the Intellectual Illiteratti | June 24, 2022

As has been reported abundantly by the French and international media, Sunday’s results — with Macron’s party and coalition losing its absolute majority — were indeed momentous and have the potential to restore a balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government. (The French courts, as I’ve mentioned before, are almost a lost cause when it comes to performing the duties of judicial review, and in my view there is no point in including the judiciary in the French checks and balances model anymore).

But I think caution is still called for too. There is no reason to assume that immediate reversals or changes to the worst laws of the recent past will be forthcoming or are guaranteed at any point. Just as we have seen in the US in recent congressional votes of generational-defining importance, ideological or partisan differences don’t usually make much, if any, difference when the result is ordained in advance by the executive and consent is manufactured dutifully by the media.

I think it’s also important to recall that while it is true that it has the last word in the lawmaking process, the lower house in France, L’Assemblée Nationale, needs only a relative majority for a bill to become law. Except for amendments to the constitution, where an absolute majority of members is required to be present, there is no minimum number of deputés that have to be in attendance for a bill to be voted on. If only 5 members happen to be in the lower chamber when a vote is held and 3 vote in favor, the proposed legislation passes.

I mention these facts not to be a killjoy but rather to draw attention to the fact that throughout the coronavirus delirium (which continues, albeit in muted fashion, in France), the French Parliament first voted, in early 2020, with an overwhelming majority and across partisan lines, to declare a state of emergency and confer dictatorial powers to the president. For the following two years, every time the parliament had an opportunity to revoke or limit those powers by, for instance, ending the state of emergency, it not only didn’t do so, but actually went on to codify the worst of the totalitarian covid restrictions, for example, ushering in legalized discrimination with health passes and later, vax passes.

And while it is true that the entirety of the far-left and far-right minorities in the lower house proclaimed themselves opposed to the post-lockdown measures such as health and vax passes, when it was time to put their money where their mouths were, most did not even bother to show up to vote. On two of the most important votes held over the last year, concerning a law that would require the use of health and vax passes for access to transport and places of leisure and culture, as well as to hospitals and retirement homes, Macron’s ruling party’s presence was so weak in the lower house that had every member of the far-left and right oppositions actually made the trip to vote (or voted by proxy), the bills would not have passed. One wonders if the exemptions they enjoyed, as members of Parliament, from the coercive, live-ruining measures that are health and vax passes had anything to do with their being largely absent from the votes.

Either way, the fact that these totalitarian policies didn’t have to become law, that they could have been torpedoed last year, even while the president’s party held an absolute majority in the lower house, doesn’t inspire confidence that they will be done away with now that the balance of power has shifted.

That said, the composition of the recently elected lower house will create many opportunities for the now much larger opposition parties to stop Macron in his tracks. I won’t get into the numbers too much except to say that Macron’s coalition party (which is made up of four centrist parties) is 44 seats shy of the absolute majority necessary to govern unfettered and, having only a relative minority, will need to wheel and deal and seriously compromise in order to get anything it puts foward passed.

At the same time, both Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) won enough seats to significantly expand their power and influence. However, of the two, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally emerged as the clear winner and most powerful single party opposition group. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed chose to form a coalition with three other left-leaning parties in the hopes of acquiring an absolute or relative majority, and while their Nupes coalition won the most seats after the president’s own coalition, it was not enough to secure any majority positions or allow Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party to surpass Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in seats.

On the upside, both far right and far left, having surged in numbers, are now able to call for a motion of censure of Macron’s government, which can lead to a no-confidence vote — a measure Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed promptly resorted to yesterday.

In the case of Marine Le Pen’s far right Rassemblement National, however, having surpassed the critical threshold of 80 seats, her group can now request positions on various important committees, as well as have bills sent to the constitutional court for judicial review. This is a milestone and historic achievement for her much maligned party.

In the case of Mélenchon, as mentioned above, his France Unbowed successfully formed an all-left and left-leaning coalition, which includes the socialist, environmentalist and communist parties. While this coalition won the most seats after Macron’s own coalition, it is believed to be a tenuous alliance in which the individual groups will not see eye to eye on a range of issues. The hope is, however, they will remain united on the most important ones.

The funny thing in all this is that Mélenchon, elected to the lower house in 2017, did not stand for re-election this year in his Marseille district, a seat he would have won handily. It seemed that he bet the house on his coalition pulling off a landslide victory, in which case their numerical superiority in the lower house would force the president to appoint him as Prime Minister. Sadly for Mélenchon (and us), he lost his wager and will now have to direct the operations of his party and coalition from outside the halls of the Assemblé Nationale.

The upshot of all this is that Macron is looking at a Parliament that may not pass any of his upcoming reforms into laws — and he has a pack of the vile things he’d like to ram through. In the short term, the future will not be easy for the impatient monarch. His government is already facing a motion of censure on the 5th of July (introduced Monday by Jean Luc Melenchon’s France Unbowed party), and three of his cabinet ministers who were in the running for parliamentary seats lost their bids. According to convention, their unsuccessful attempt to get elected to the lower house while working in the president’s cabinet as ministers will require them to resign from their positions, leaving Macron scrambling to appoint replacements. He will have to do this while also meeting with the leaders of the opposition parties, whom he hopes to begin negotiating with, ahead of the upcoming parliamentary session.

Macron is also under great pressure from the EU in Brussels to continue the EU-wide project of neoliberal reforms. Until now, the French president has had a free hand in pushing through some of the most politically, socially and economically destructive and divisive policies ever seen in modern France, the last two years of totalitarian public health policies and the continued dismantling of France’s public health service being the prime examples. Will he be able to continue? It seems the answer is: yes, but perhaps not so easily.

Macron does have one card left he can play, however; though it’s a risky one: he can dissolve the Assemblée Nationale. Yes, you read that correctly. The constitution of the 5th Republic gives the French president the power to dissolve the lower house and call new elections (which have to be organized within 60 days) if he deems the parliamentary configuration to be an impediment to effective lawmaking. (Can you imagine Biden — or better, Trump — announcing to the house of representatives, after one-too-many government shutdowns, “That’s it —  You’re all fired. Everyone out of the capital! We’re gonna have new elections, and we’re gonna get it right this time!”)

Not surprisingly, though, such an un-democratic move is not popular and the last time it was used, by Jacques Chirac in 1997, it blew up in the president’s face when the new vote results were worse than the first time around and forced him to appoint a socialist (and formidable political rival) as Prime Minister. That said, the chattering classes are predicting Macron will indeed resort to this measure at some point in the future. But when?

For us, the main concern remains that of the state of emergency (under which we have been living for two and a half years), which allows Macron to act like a dictator and close businesses, confine people to their homes, impose curfews, force the population to wear facemasks, and make the restitution of these once unconditional rights (to work, to assemble, move and breath freely, etc.) contingent on the injection of experimental drugs that no one needs and only a fraction of the population actually wants.

Though many of its most oppressive measures have been (temporarily) lifted, the state of emergency is still in effect and will remain in effect until July 31 of this year. One of the biggest casualties of the president’s irrational, totalitarian covid policies has been the healthcare workers, 15 thousand of whom (doctors, nurses, orderlies) as well as hundreds of gendarmes, remain suspended from their jobs, without pay, having been deprived of their right to work last September 15th because they refused to take an experimental medicine that, by the government’s own admission, does not prevent transmission of a disease deemed to be a major threat to public health.

Despite the bleak situation, there may be cause for some hope. As mentioned earlier, Macron’s ability to govern by decree is set to end at the end of next month, with the lapsing of the state of emergency. In order to extend it and make possible the return in the fall of vax passes, lockdowns, curfews, travel restrictions, business closures, mask mandates and all the other totalitarian horrors that serve no public health benefit in relation to upper respiratory viruses that spread like the common cold (and therefore can’t be stopped from spreading), but which the leaders of Europe desperately want to retain and make permanent, Macron will need to get a new covid law passed by the parliament before the end of July.

The French president was in fact supposed to present said covid bill at a ministerial meeting today (the first step in the legislative process before the bill reaches parliamentary committees and debates), but had to cancel the meeting because of the aforementioned resignations of three of his ministers. This delay will presumably push the start of the legislative process for this bill back another week. But next week Macron will be out of France on a NATO-related trip, so perhaps it will get pushed back an additional week. When it is eventually presented to the parliament, the bill will need to be debated and put to a vote by the newly elected lower house — and that’s where the rubber should meet the road.

It will indeed be the first and most important test of the new assembly, and one which will no doubt come with an unprecedented amount of pressure and propaganda from Macron and the media. Will the opposition parties finally say no to the president dictator and all his lies and send this disgraceful piece of legislation into the garbage where it belongs? Or will the new Assemblée play ball as the last useless lot did? L’espoir fait vivre, as they say over here.

Postscript:

Europe is slowly transitioning into a bio-security and surveillance state. Tomorrow, the EU parliament is expected to rubber stamp the EU commission’s decision to extend the use of the EU Digital Covid Pass for another year for all travel to and within Europe.

This will mean that, until the end of June 2023, in order to board a plane, train or boat into or within Europe, you will need to show either a negative PCR or antigen tests 24 hours before traveling, a certificate of proof of recovery from covid (which may be valid for 3 months), or proof of experimental injection.

The law reads like a Pfizer press release, and is just as fraudulent and circular in its reasoning. This digital covid certificate measure, we are told, is necessary to ensure the free and safe movement of Europeans within Europe, a right that is guaranteed by the European Union’s various treaties and conventions…but which was illegally taken away two years ago by the European Union.

There are protection rackets that are more sophisticated than this…I don’t understand how Europeans will submit to this for another year. It’s an ominous sign.

June 24, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Israeli forces beat up international activists in Masafer Yatta

Israeli soldiers beat up a handcuffed international activist in Masafer Yatta
WAFA – June 22, 2022

HEBRON – Israeli forces today beat up a number of international solidarity activists in Masafer Yatta in the southern Hebron hills, according to local sources.

Coordinator of the Protection and Steadfastness Committee in Masafer Yatta, Fuad al-Amour, said the heavily-armed soldiers brutally assaulted a number of international activists while protesting the military drills close to and in al-Markez, and held two others for a long period.

The Israeli army have been conducting drills in al-Markez, one of 12 hamlets making up the Masafer Yatta, which rely heavily on animal husbandry as the main source of livelihood, for the second day in a row.

Al-Amour added that the army has built mock-ups as targets between the makeshift dwellings of the hamlet residents and has been conducting training with heavy weaponry, spreading panic among the residents.

The army has also deployed military checkpoints in the vicinity of the hamlets in the area, in preparation for military training, and perhaps paving the way for an imminent removal of the Palestinian residents.

Recently, Israel’s top court gave the army the green light to forcibly expel some 1,300 Palestinians living in twelve villages or hamlets making up the Masafer Yatta area marking one of the largest expulsions carried out by the State of Israel in recent decades.

Located in Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli administrative and military control, the area has been subjected to repeated Israeli violations by settlers and soldiers targeting their main source of living – livestock.

It has been designated as a closed Israeli military zone for training since 1980s and accordingly referred to as Firing Zone 918.

Israeli violations against the area include demolition of animal barns, homes and residential structures. Issuance of construction permits by Israel to local Palestinians in the area is non-existent.

June 23, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Israeli occupation forces destroy an access road to a Ramallah-area village

WAFA – June 22, 2022

RAMALLAH – The Israeli occupation forces today destroyed an access road to Ras Karkar village, northwest of Ramallah, hampering the movement of people, according to the head of Ras Karkar village council, Marwan Nofal.

He said that the destroyed road had been partially paved for 20 years and that three months ago, following coordination with the Israeli military government, work on the rehabilitation of the road started. However, two days after the start of the work, the military forces raided the area and seized the vehicles used in the work, imposing a fine on their owners.

Nofal said that despite continuous promises to allow the rehabilitation work, the army sent its bulldozers today to destroy the road under the pretext that the road is located on “state land”.

The destruction of the road led to depriving farmers of access to their lands on the western side of the village, he said, and isolating several houses, noting that this is not the first time the Israeli military has targeted the village.

Ras Karkar suffers from the presence of seven iron gates at its entrances that limit the movement of people and access to their homes and lands.

At the same time, the Israeli military government does not allow it to carry out any work to improve the village’s infrastructure, said Nofal.

June 23, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

If you don’t want to have a Covid vaccine, get a job enforcing vaccine mandates.

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | June 21, 2022

Last week the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) quietly sent round a memo exempting officials from vaccine mandates. Why is this so hypocritical? Well, because the officials they were exempting from the vaccine mandate were officials hired to enforce the very same vaccine mandate.

So it seems the easiest way to get around the vaccine mandate is to get a job enforcing the vaccine mandate.

I’ve probably said vaccine mandate a few too many times now, so here is the memo itself.

The Biden administration first announced the mandates back in August 2021, stating that healthcare and nursing home staff must be COVID-19 vaccinated or lose funding. After legal challenges, different deadlines were imposed with the final deadline occurring on 21 March 2022.

Vaccine mandate deadlines encouraged/forced (take your pick) employees to get vaccinated with uptake rising from 63% to 88% in a number of months. Doctors, nurses and staff who still decided that vaccination was not for them, lost their jobs.

In February, the CMS warned state survey agencies that they must enforce all federal health and safety requirements or lose federal financial support. Although it didn’t explicitly say so, this was widely recognised as a warning to Florida and other states that had said they would not enforce vaccine mandates. Furthermore, the CMS said they would bring in outside surveyors if states did not comply with their directives.

CMS surveyors were given the role of evaluating whether healthcare workers were complying with federal vaccine mandates. They stated that staff vaccination under 100% would constitute non-compliance. However, the extremely reasonable CMS (sarcasm) said that any facility with over 80% of its staff vaccinated would be given 60 days to reach 100% without further action being taken.

Brian Harrison, state representative of Texas and former chief of staff for the Department of Health and Human Services under the Trump administration, said in an interview with Newsmax “This shows that the Biden administration is truly authoritarian and these mandates never had anything to do with public health in the first place, but sadly and tragically, they had much more to do with giving the federal government more control over our lives. These mandates must end.”

Harrison thinks that after the CMS enforced the mandates on its own surveyors, they were unable to live under the same rules. “They couldn’t take it. So instead of taking down the mandate, which would have been the normal common sense solution, they just exempted their own government contractors instead of all the Americans.”

Rules for thee, not for me.

June 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Canada threatens to bring back vaccine passports

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | June 21, 2022

Canada may not have seen the last of the mandatory COVID-19 vaccine passports. Proposed restrictions could even be harsher than before, likely to require three to four inoculations in order to travel.

It’s worth noting that the mandate is not set in stone, but the government is preparing for the possibility of introducing the measures in the Fall. Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos made the announcement during a press conference. The vaccine passport mandate for federal employees and other travelers might be over for now, but Duclos made it clear that it’s likely to return this fall.

In addition to officially denouncing passport mandates, Duclos took the opportunity to explain some changes in wording regarding vaccine requirements. Canada will no longer refer to people who have had all of their vaccinations as “fully vaccinated.” Instead, the language in any official documents will read “up-to-date.” This is because the government says three doses are no longer enough for many people, with some people being told to get four or even five doses.

These changes came after Dr. Theresa Tam, the chief public health officer, told reporters that several studies had just been completed.

Initially, according to the report, two doses of a vaccine would allegedly give a person 50 to 80 percent protection; however, that number falls to just 20 percent against Omicron and newer variations of the coronavirus.

Canada’s goal is now to convince people to get their third and fourth doses and restricting civil liberties has been a controversial way of forcing that over the last couple of years. Over 90 percent of Canadian adults have two doses, but less than 60% have received their booster.

The Conservative Party of Quebec has already started fighting back against the possibility of a third dose being required for a vaccine passport. For them, it’s a personal choice that shouldn’t be mandated. Many in Canada are ready to put the last few years behind them.

June 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Punishing Dissident Physicians

CA Assembly Bill 2098 would muzzle physicians and severely punish those who challenge covid public health measures

By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | June 21, 2022

I will be heading to Sacramento next Monday to testify at a Senate committee hearing on California Assembly Bill 2098. The bill, sponsored by Senator Pan—who has been in Pharma’s back pocket for years and the source of much legislative health policy mischief in my home state—would give the medical board the authority to punish any physicians who challenge the safety and efficacy of covid vaccines. This bill is advanced even as evidence continues to emerge of safety problems with the mRNA shots, including a study this week showing the vaccines lower sperm counts in men:

But this proposed measure seeks to enshrine in law “scientific” conclusions which are highly dubious:

All three of these statements are demonstrably false: (a) The death count figures cited are grossly overestimated by hospitals failing to distinguish dying from covid vs. dying with covid and the financial incentives from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to overestimate covid deaths; (b) the efficacy of vaccines has declined with time and new variants, so the statistic cited here is no longer true of the vaccines against omicron; (c) the CDC has consistently failed to follow-up on serious safety signals, apart from myocarditis, and the post-marketing surveillance data acquired from our FOIA request showed serious safety issues in the first three months of vaccine rollout.

If this bill passes, any physician who raises these or other inconvenient scientific facts or study findings could be disciplined by the medical board, as the text of the bill explains:

 It shall constitute unprofessional conduct for a physician and surgeon to disseminate misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19, including false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

The supposed scientific “facts” mentioned in the bill make it clear just what information will be considered “misinformation” under this law. This bill will spell the end of scientific integrity and medical freedom in California. I worry that if it passes, other states could follow suit. As I have said before, California is the tip of the spear:

The Tip of the Spear

Here is the text of a letter I submitted last week to the committee where the bill is currently being reviewed:

13 June 2022

To: California Legislators and Committee Members

RE: AB 2098: Physicians and Surgeons: Unprofessional Conduct – OPPOSE

As a licensed physician in California I strongly oppose the proposed California bill AB 2098 and urge you to vote no and oppose as well.

Advances in science and medicine typically occur when doctors and scientists challenge conventional thinking or settled opinion. This is the very nature of scientific progress. Fixating any current medical consensus as “unchallengeable” by physicians will stifle medical and scientific advances and give undue authority to a few gatekeepers who act as guardians of the consensus. As I testified in January at a U.S. Senate panel on Covid policy: “The scientific method suffered [during the pandemic] from a repressive academic and social climate of censorship and silencing of competing perspectives. This projected the false appearance of a scientific consensus—a ‘consensus’ often strongly influenced by economic and political interests.”

One need only look at the last two years to see how frequently public health recommendations and consensus thinking about Covid changed from one month to the next with the advent of new information. It was frontline ICU physicians who discovered and spoke out about bad outcomes when patients were prematurely placed on ventilators. This shifted the consensus in the direction of avoiding ventilation as much as possible. Likewise, it was frontline physicians who discovered that placing covid patients face-down in the prone position while they were ventilated could improve outcomes, challenging another consensus. Both of these advances came by way of challenging the way things were currently being done. Other physicians challenged the early consensus, which did not recommend the use of steroids to treat Covid. Eventually, this dissenting opinion gained ground and now represents conventional thinking: corticosteroids for critically ill covid patients are now standard care. Many other examples regarding guidelines on masks, social distancing, and other Covid policies could be cited here.

Allowing the free interchange among competing perspectives is absolutely necessary for scientific and medical progress. Good science is characterized by conjecture and refutation, lively deliberation, often fierce debate, and always openness to new data. The censorship of free speech in AB 2098 spells not only the demise of civil liberties and constitutional rights, but the end of the scientific enterprise when it comes to dealing with Covid in CA.

Patients will not trust physicians if they believe their physician has been muzzled by the law and cannot speak his or her mind honestly. Patients want to know that if they ask their physician a question, including a question about Covid, they will get their doctor’s honest opinion—regardless of whether they follow that opinion, seek a second opinion, or whatever. Patients will not trust physicians if they know their doctor is simply parroting a consensus judgment that he may or may not agree with or endorse.

This bill will not help us to deal with Covid more effectively. Doctors will be punished for practicing medicine according to their best judgment. Informed consent, the foundation of good medical ethics, will be seriously compromised, and the trust necessary for the doctor-patient relationship will be shattered. I strongly urge you and your fellow lawmakers must oppose AB 2098. It will harm not only physicians and medical institutions in California, but even more concerningly, it will harm patients.

Sincerely,

Aaron Kheriaty, MD

Here is a link to information from The Unity Project on what you can do to oppose this bill—especially important if you happen to live in California. Please spread the word.

June 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Trudeau-bashing children’s book a best-seller

TCS WIRE | June 20, 2022

“How the Prime Minister Stole Freedom” by Derek Smith has topped the Amazon Canada best-seller chart.

The picture book illustrated by Kaeda Knipe pokes fun at Trudeau’s response to the Freedom Convoy and his subsequent clampdown on the rights of Canadians.

“In the city of Ottawa on Parliament Hill, the Canadian Government debate and pass bills. Every person in Canada liked freedom a lot, but the Prime Minister who ran the country did not,” the book summary reads.

“He took everyone’s freedoms and locked everyone down tight. It seemed like the lockdowns had no end in sight. Until one day, Truckers became very annoyed, so they decided to form a Freedom Convoy. Will the Prime Minister be let off the hook? You’ll only find out if you read this book.”

Although the book, which is written in the style of Dr. Seuss, doesn’t reference Trudeau by name, the principal character is an obvious placeholder for him.

“The book is a fictional parody dramatization based on a true story and real events and was drawn from a variety of sources, including published materials and interviews. For dramatic and narrative purposes, this book contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue,” a disclaimer explains.

“The views and opinions expressed in this book are those of the characters only and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions held by individuals on which those characters are based.”

The independently published book has since garnered 770 ratings and has four and a half stars.

On Twitter, author Smith has promised more books lampooning Canadian political figures.

“We have multiple books in the works,” Smith wrote on Monday. Among the proposed titles is “The boy who cried racist,” which would be a parody of NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.

June 21, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

Wake up, everyone!

By Paul Weston | TCW Defending Freedom | June 21, 2022

AFTER two years of Covid-19 insanity, the West has several new crises to deal with. Rampant inflation, coming food shortages and fuel shortages, monkeypox, a mystifying confusion about XX and XY chromosomes and a strange war in Ukraine which appears to be a proxy war between nuclear armed America and nuclear armed Russia.

I say a strange war because no one seems remotely interested in stopping it, no matter that it could lead to Armageddon. I think this is because Putin can be blamed for some of the deliberately engineered crises we are currently experiencing, so don’t expect it to end soon. Our armchair warrior political class seems more than happy to supply weapons to prolong the inevitable and are valiantly prepared to fight to the last surviving Ukrainian.

I feel as though we no longer exist as human beings in the eyes of our overlords. We are now just cattle being herded toward a dystopian future by a small number of immensely powerful individuals and global organisations who make no secret of the future they wish to build for us. This global coup d’état is driven by lies and corruption at every level of our national and international institutions. Nothing we have been told over the last couple of years is true.

For example, over the last thirty years in England and Wales an average 1.2 per cent of the population died every year, the vast majority of them old and ill. In 2020, the year of the alleged Covid-19 killer pandemic, just 1 per cent of the population died, and again the vast majority were old and ill. Yet despite experiencing a lower-than-average death rate, a Covid-19 emergency was declared which saw the biggest power grab by the state over the lives of its citizens since the dictatorships of Lenin, Hitler and Mao.

The most chilling aspect of this totalitarian takeover is that Western countries acted in unified lockstep as they tore up every tried and trusted historical public health protocol related to airborne viruses and replaced them with a tyranny that had no basis in medical or scientific reality.

People who recognised what was happening publicly protested and were met with state enforced paramilitary brutality never previously seen in the West. In Australia rubber bullets were used against peaceful protesters. In Canada, Justin Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to beat, jail and pauperise peaceful protesters who preferred to live their lives according to the Nuremberg Code rather than Trudeau’s Mengele Code. In New Zealand huge posters of a beaming Jacinda Ardern were ruthlessly displayed on advertising hoardings across the country.

The biggest issues I can see in all this criminal insanity are two-fold. Firstly, our ruling class now know they can do whatever they want to us if they terrorise us sufficiently, as in carry out acts of genuine terrorism against their own citizens to achieve a political ambition. Secondly, we now know exactly what they want to do to us because they meet up in Davos every year and shamelessly talk about it in very loud voices.

Their power is immense, and for the first time in history they have the ability to build a revolutionary new society without having to carry out violent street revolutions. All they need is electronic data and digital IDs linked to a government-controlled central bank digital currency, which all Western governments are currently implementing. Covid-19, mass vaccinations and digital Covid passes – please don’t think they have been consigned to history – were a necessary pre-condition of course if a Digi-Tyranny could ever become a reality.

Western governments are also working on legislation to both silence dissent on social media and stifle physical public protest. New Ministries of Truth are being formed which will disappear and memory-hole any written and spoken words our ruling class considers to be misinformation or disinformation. This is Orwell’s 1984 and it is happening before our very eyes.

Who are the people/organisations enacting this totalitarian Western coup d’état? Well, it is primarily the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the EU, Big Tech social media, the pharmaceutical industry, the entire Western political class and three gargantuan financial institutions called BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, along with a handful of monumentally wealthy billionaires including Soros and Gates.

The concerted power and wealth held by the above has completely corrupted politics, science, journalism, the judiciary, academia and medicine. There are still some brave souls from those professions who risk their careers by speaking out, but you will never see them via the mainstream media or the biggest social media platforms. Those we are allowed to see are bought and paid for propagandists who tell us nothing other than the revolutionary line.

I am fifty-eight years old now. I was born a long time after World War Two and my entire life – up until 2020 at least – was one of unimaginable ease and freedom compared to most humans who have ever lived. But the freedom I enjoyed is over now. Our future could be very grim indeed. Another pandemic will soon be coming our way and I suspect this one will be necessarily much more lethal than the last.

Also coming our way are ever rising interest rates to counter the deliberately engineered inflation. If these interest rates hit double figures, every average earning mortgage holder will lose their house. The manufacture of petrol and diesel cars will soon be phased out and extortionate taxes will be introduced to keep older ones on the road. Air travel for the masses is not part of the New World Order’s Green Agenda, nor is heating our homes with oil or gas.

They have told us what they want. A smaller population. A lower carbon footprint. A digital ID surveillance/social credit state capable of bending us to their dictatorial will. No more meat, just bugs; lots and lots of delicious bugs. The apparatchiks of the Green New World Order will still have their private jets, their beachside mansions, their haunches of venison and their champagne whilst we will own nothing, which I rather suspect will fail to induce delirious happiness whatever Herr Schwab might purportedly believe.

Can they achieve their publicly oft-stated agenda? Yes, they simply have to continue doing what they are already doing, although it will need to be substantially ramped up, hence my belief another pandemic is on the cards. In America they have the problem of gun ownership in the hands of ordinary citizens, so I think we will see huge efforts – by means more foul than fair – to urgently rectify this problematic issue for the New World Order.

Is it all doom and gloom? Not really. They have shown their hand and despite their seemingly limitless power and wealth there are only a few thousand of them whilst there are billions of us. I see our future as one of only two credible possibilities: freedom for us and jail for them, or slavery for us and even bigger yachts, private jets and sizzling steaks for them. It is up to us in other words. The very first thing the average person needs do is wake up. Before it is too late.

June 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Prison Remains the Same (Palestine)

Sharif Nakhleh | May 8, 2022

THE FILM is a brilliant explanation of the history, present, and possible future of Palestine by  anthropologist Khalil Nakhleh, a Christian Palestinian from the Galilee who experienced Israel’s founding war and subsequent actions first-hand.

Mixing current and archival footage, the film weaves a tale of expulsion and return, through the origins of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict to the resistance and political occupation of an entire people.

Filmed across various locations in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Israel, the film is a thoughtful, yet searing look at physical and psychological oppression.

Dr. Nakhleh has authored a number of academic books and articles on Palestinian society, development, NGOs, and education, including The Myth of Palestinian Development: Political Aid and Sustainable Deceit and Globalized Palestine: The National Sell-out of a Homeland. [See his books here.]

THE FILMMAKER Sharif Nakhleh is an independent filmmaker living and working in San Francisco with over 20 years of experience as a director, writer and editor. His body of work includes documentary and narrative films, music videos and commercials.

The Prison Remains The Same is an homage to his father’s legacy and nod to his own identity as a Palestinian American.

June 19, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

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