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New Normal Newspeak #3: “Progressive”

OffGuardian | July 30, 2021

“New Normal Newspeak” is a series of short articles highlighting how our language has come under assault in the past eighteen months.

***

We have a backlog for these NNNS posts, but I saw this today on Twitter, and it made me laugh so it gets to jump the queue.

A few days ago, Saudi Arabia announced they would be introducing vaccine passes for, essentially, anyone that wanted to do anything.

And then Max Boot, the neo-liberal warmonger who’s paid to squat over his keyboard and squeeze out columns for the Washington Post, called it “progressive”:

There it is in black and white – an absolute monarchy that still practices public beheadings, has no religious freedom, democracy or equal rights, has decided to add to their delightful resume by introducing digital surveillance, enforced experimental vaccination and medical apartheid. Doesn’t that sound so progressive?

The Council of Foreign Relations fellow has since deleted the tweet. And it’s not hard to see why.

Maybe no other word has had its meaning as brutally violated as “progressive” in the last decade. It is used to stifle freedom of speech, to camouflage corruption of “liberal” candidates, as a casus belli for regime change and to bang the drum for new cold wars with both Russia and China.

But applying it to Saudi Arabia is a whole new level of stretched meaning.

It’s also a little preview of how the billionaire-owned MSM will be selling medical apartheid to their hypnotized “liberal” readers in coming weeks.

July 30, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

New FBI Initiative Will Put “Hate Crime” Quotas On Local Law Enforcement

By Eric Striker | National Justice | July 29, 2021

The Department of Justice and the FBI have a message for local police departments: start charging more white people with hate crimes or invite an investigation.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta told an assembly of FBI agents yesterday that they are now tasked with hounding police departments in their district if they do not register any “hate crimes.”

Gupta and FBI Deputy Assistant Director of the Criminal Investigative Division Jay Greenberg have declared “hate crimes” by “racially motivated violent extremists” (a euphemism generally reserved for right-wing white men) to be a national threat priority — a rare designation.

According to Greenberg, the FBI will be increasingly specialized in pursuing “hate crimes” through increased training in the matter, an aggressive media campaign designed to recruit victims in “underrepresented and targeted populations,” and putting federal pressure on local law enforcement to charge and report hate crimes when they otherwise wouldn’t.

Hate crimes laws are political and racially motivated. Blacks and Jews are heavily overrepresented as supposed victims in the FBI’s “hate crime” database, while whites are charged at higher rates than general crime rates. For example, last month a black man who shot five white men in a multi-state shooting spree told police his sole motive was that he hated white people, yet neither local prosecutors or the FBI have charged him with a hate crime.

According to the FBI’s 2019 hate crime report, blacks are 49% of victims of racial bias while Jews are 60% of crimes motivated by religious animosity. Most of the blacks in the data were victims of “intimidation,” an often Constitutionally dubious charge. A large number of reported hate crimes targeting both blacks and Jews are hoaxes, as seen in famous cases like the Jussie Smollett incident and the thousands of bomb threats targeting Jewish community centers that were the work of a Jew in Israeli.

Just yesterday, a white man was charged with “ethnic intimidation” for putting up stickers that say “I Love Being White.” The FBI wants more police departments to exploit the legal gray area and lack of First Amendment advocacy groups for white dissidents to juke crime statistics and distort the reality of crime. Blacks commit roughly 90% of violent interracial felonies, a statistic the Critical Race Theorists at the FBI find inconvenient.

The mad rush for white racists at the FBI is bound to cause more embarrassments for the increasingly discredited agency. Last year, the theater put on by the FBI over NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s “noose,” which turned out to be a hoax, served to reveal the hyper-politicization and lack of seriousness at the Bureau.

July 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Belgium investigates possible manslaughter following deadly floods that killed over 40

RT | July 29, 2021

An investigation into fatal floods has been launched in Belgium’s Wallonia region, the worst hit by the disaster earlier this month. Prosecutors are looking into “involuntary homicide by lack of foresight or precaution.”

An investigative judge has been appointed to identify possible officials who allegedly may be responsible for manslaughter during this month’s deadly floods, a public prosecutor’s office in the city of Liege announced on Wednesday. A prosecutor has already taken note of various public positions relating to the chain of events preceding the floods, adding that those in charge might be responsible for the “lack of foresight or precaution,” according to local media.

The inquiry relates to the severe floods that hit the region in the south of Belgium on July 14. The province of Liege suffered the worst, and 41 deaths have been confirmed in Wallonia in total, with at least two more persons still missing, local media reported this week, citing regional government. At least 202 of 262 municipalities in Wallonia can claim support from the disaster fund, region’s prime minister Elio Di Rupo announced at a press conference earlier this week, saying that “this shows the scale of the disaster.”

Locals have also called for an independent investigation. Residents and businesses in the town of Chaudfontaine in the Liege province have joined forces in a “People against flows” collective, planning to file a complaint against the state, according to local media. They suspect that the mishandling of dams in the region could have possibly led to the disaster, while also blaming officials’ negligence in terms of evacuation orders. At least some damage could have possibly been prevented by lowering water levels at a major dam following bad weather forecasts, specialists have suggested.

The flooding in Belgium has damaged infrastructure, leaving thousands without power and drinking water. In neighboring Germany, dozens were killed in the massive flooding, and the disaster has also hit Switzerland and Austria. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has said her country will continue to “oppose” the destructive forces of nature, while calling for a tougher climate protection policies.

July 29, 2021 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

The real pandemic is everyone doing as they are told

By Michael Driver | The Conservative Woman | July 29, 2021

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

– Henry David Thoreau

WE LIVE in the age of the oxymoron. Diversity means everyone thinks the same. Tolerance means the vicious exclusion of anyone who doesn’t. Levelling up is literally exacerbating inequality to medieval levels. Freedom passports means you require papers to watch football. Vaccines don’t prevent the infection or transmission of disease. Democracy is the imposition of new laws and policies no one voted for. Journalism is propaganda. Modern Monetary Theory means effect before cause, the ‘wet pavements cause rain’ branch of economics. Education is the process of removing information rather than importing it. That you don’t think but repeat is more important than that you learn and grow. Asymptomatic transmission means the healthy can infect the immunised. Sociopaths are philanthropists. Virtue signalling is camouflage for a collapse in morality. The green new deal is neither green, new or a deal. Environmentalists means a collection of the world’s most polluting corporations. Climate change policies are any act which preserves the most extreme forms of exploitation. War is peace, freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Owning nothing is happiness, as Orwell might have added if he were around today. Probably on social media (another oxymoron, they’re hard to escape).

A parlour game for this age of absurdity is to see how many of these logical inversions you can think of. Now I want to head in a different direction and consider two questions: What is the effect of collective cognitive dissonance? Where will it lead us?

I believe the effect of collective cognitive dissonance is the mass abdication of responsibility to authority. When something becomes impossible to understand or reconcile, the natural human instinct is to rely on authority figures – to herd. When people feel intense insecurity they abdicate freedom for perceived safety.

According to psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980): ‘Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking – and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.’

Fromm described the concept of automaton conformity as ‘changing one’s ideal self to conform to a perception of society’s preferred type of personality, losing one’s true self in the process’. Fromm described the desire to subsume the self into the herd.

The human species now sounds like a herd of animals with the relentless repetition of alliterative phraseology: for build back better I hear moo moo moo, new normal baa baaa etc. A cacophony of mindless agreement is expressed as poetic assonance: ‘double jabbed’, we yabber at each other like a flock of jabbering birds. Another parlour game for the next lockdown is to list all the new terms and phrases which sound like advertising slogans or neuro-linguistic programming. Why the repetition? Why the repetition?

The real pandemic is everyone thinking the same, a culture so mono it feels as if ISIS won. So why is this conformity reckless?

The width of the edge is what really matters in society. Too wide and we have anarchism, too narrow totalitarianism. Mass conformity is the mechanism of totalitarianism, it is the most reckless act. Progress is always ground up, never top down. All the good stuff happens at the edge. Great art is never produced by corporations. Scientific discoveries take place in patent offices, medical breakthroughs in dirty Petri dishes, great music is made by the unemployed, entrepreneurs succeed via repeated failure. Mandela didn’t change the world from Davos. The moment the pressure on de Klerk forced him to widen the edge, the idea of freedom nursed by Mandela blossomed like a giant protea. The campaigners for women’s suffrage were on the edge of society. Nothing changes from the middle. A third game might be to look around you and list everything born of the maverick. Start with the device you’re most likely reading this article on and work your way out.

Returning to the Thoreau quote at the top of this piece: mavericks need space to dance to a different tune. The edge needs to be just wide enough. ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music,’ as Nietzsche might have said. Reckless conformists hear only one note, mavericks the whole range. Think of us as the control group.

July 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Vive la Vaccination Revolution!

By Richard Ings | The Conservative Woman | July 29, 2021

IN THE early hours of Monday, and with fewer than half of MPs present in the Chamber of Deputies, France’s parliament voted into law some of the most draconian legislation since the Second World War Vichy régime, which will shortly see unvaccinated citizens run out of restaurants, chased out of cafés and barred from bars. They will no longer be allowed on long-distance public transport and, as I reported two weeks ago, (Farewell, Liberté | The Conservative Woman ) will not be permitted to enter hospitals either as visitors or patients (an exemption was eventually made for ‘emergency admissions’). Health workers have until mid-September to get the vaccine or face dismissal.

The list of venues in France where a ‘health pass’ will be demanded is already extensive, broadly covering all leisure from sports centres to cinemas, and even weddings on public property (all must take place in the town hall to be legally recognised). Amendments from MPs to  limit the scope of the pass – including one to rule out extending it to polling stations – were rejected, meaning that any ‘public place’ could, as deemed necessary, become subject to restrictions (and if it’s already going to happen in hospitals then who knows what will be next?)

Encouragingly, popular resistance to the new measures is growing. Anecdotally, many bars and restaurants are refusing to check health passes. A railworkers’ union has told its members not to check passengers’ health passes and has promised to strike if any of its members are sacked for not having one themselves. A Lyons hospital is going on indefinite strike from Thursday to protest against the pass, and the compulsory-vaccination-in-all-but-name of its staff.

An official estimate (on the low side) put demonstrator numbers on Saturday July 24 at 161,000 nationwide, about 50 per cent more than the previous Saturday, and marches are being planned for this Saturday and in the interim. Despite the measures being introduced when traditionally at least half of the country is on holiday (in other words, a good time to bring in a bad law), more than a third of French people polled said they supported last weekend’s protests.

The government is clearly feeling the pressure. Olivier Véran, the Health Minister, unfeelingly dismissed a social media video of a nurse in tears because she would have to leave her job if forced to take a vaccination as ‘unrepresentative of the profession’. President Macron, visiting French Polynesia at the weekend, waded into the debate, flanked by dozens of masked hospital workers, and gruffly asserted that there was ‘no such thing as freedom without duty’. ‘If you infect me, I’m the victim of your freedom,’ he claimed, while dismissing protesters as ‘selfish’ and ‘irrational’.

Worryingly, if not untypically, the main opposition is trying to take the government in an equally authoritarian direction. The president of the Paris region and potential presidential candidate, Valerie Pécresse, is one of many arguing that the way around a divisive health pass is to make the vaccination obligatory for everyone. That she cannot see that this is the de facto goal of the health pass, and the outcome of her own proposal would also be social division, simply reflects the poverty of mainstream political leadership in the country.

Thankfully, France has a vigorous tradition of popular protest which now and again turns insurrectionary. Macron’s state troopers had to deal with months and months of Yellow Vest protests throughout 2019, which it used military-grade weaponry to put down, ultimately exhausting the movement physically. But though that patriotic, democratic rebellion has been through the wringer, it’s not quite ready to be hung out to dry, and popped up to co-ordinate marches on Saturday in Paris and in dozens of towns up and down the country. Meanwhile, Frexiteer Florian Philippot (who advocates France leaving the EU) had his own, substantial Paris rally, and the Left-wing, selective defender of civil rights, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has lent support to the anti-vaccine passport cause from within and without Parliament, meaning the government is getting hit from all sides.

Unity between these diverse groups may be a pipe dream, but the shared determination to stand up for individual freedom could end up a powerful motivating force towards overcoming division, as it was during the years of the French Resistance. For now, may each dissenter find the protest that suits him best and aux armes, citoyens!

July 29, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

Nigeria cleric Zakzaky, wife acquitted of all charges, freed from jail

Press TV – July 28, 2021

A court in Nigeria’s central state of Kaduna has acquitted Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky, leader of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, and his wife of all the charges levelled against the duo.

The trial at the Kaduna State High Court started on May 15, 2018 and dragged on for over three years. The high court issued its final verdict on Wednesday, Ishaq Adam Ishaq, their lawyer, said in a statement.

They were released from detention following the ruling, he added.

“At last, we defeated them. we won,” hailed the legal representative, adding, “They have gained their freedom. They are now freed and with us.”

Zakzaky and his wife, Mallimah Zeenat, were standing trial in the court on an eight-count charge of alleged culpable homicide, disruption of public peace and unlawful assembly among others levelled against them by the Kaduna state government.

They had pleaded not guitly.

In December 2015, Nigeria’s military launched a crackdown as part of a deadly state-ordered escalation targeting the movement that Abuja has branded as illegal.

The campaign saw the troops attacking Zakzaky’s residence in the town of Zaria in Kaduna, afflicting him and his wife with serious injuries that reportedly caused the cleric to lose his left eye.

During the crackdown, the military also attacked the movement’s members as they were holding religious processions, with the government alleging that the Muslims had blocked a convoy of the country’s defense minister.

The movement has categorically rejected the allegation, and said the convoy had intentionally crossed paths with the IMN’s members to whip up an excuse to attack them.

The violence led to the death of three of Zakzaky’s sons and more than 300 of his followers.

The couple were kept in custody despite a 2016 ruling by Nigeria’s federal high court that ordered their release from prison.

Amid the long-drawn-out jail term, the couple were allowed to leave for India for medical purposes. Their stay was, however, reportedly plagued by the state’s interference aimed at preventing them from receiving proper medical treatment.

The couple’s freedom came following tireless activism on the part of Nigeria’s Shia faithful and repeated damning reports about their situation by international human rights bodies.

July 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , | Leave a comment

What’s Decent About Torture, Assassination, and Secret Surveillance?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | July 28, 2021

In a Los Angeles Times editorial predictably hyping up the extreme danger to “national security” arising from the January 6 Capitol protests, the Times quotes Capitol police officer Harry Dunn as saying, “We represent the good side of America, the people who believe in decency.”

Really?

So tell us, Officer Dunn, what is decent about the following actions of the U.S. government:

1. The torture center and prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
2. The indefinite detention of people at Guantanamo Bay without charges or trial.
3. The denial of trial by jury in terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay.
4. The use of evidence acquired by torture at Guantanamo Bay.
5. The use of confessions acquired by torture at Guantanamo Bay.
6. The use of hearsay to secure convictions in terrorism “trials” at Guantanamo Bay.
7. The secret monitoring of communications between attorney and detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
8. The torture of people at the hands of U.S. officials in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the world.
9. The intentional destruction of videotapes depicting the torture of people at the hands of U.S. officials.
10. The invasion, occupation, and war of aggression against Iraq, a country that had never invaded or attacked the United States.
11. The invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting 20-year destruction of life and property.
12. The secret mass surveillance of the American people.
13. The secret illegal surveillance partnerships with American telecoms.
14. The sanctions against the people of Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
15. U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions, while difficult, were “worth it.”
16. The decades-old embargo against Cuba, which has been a major factor in the suffering of the Cuban people.
17. The sanctions against Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, and other countries, with the aim of causing death and suffering among the citizenry to achieve regime change.
18. Trade wars against China and other nations.
19. MKULTRA.
20. The invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
21. Coups and invasions for the purpose of regime change, including against democratically elected foreign presidents and prime ministers.
22. State-sponsored assassinations and executions, including of American citizens, along with cover-ups of such assassinations.
23. Official lies, including under oath.
24. The secret hiring of Nazis to secretly serve the U.S. government.
25. COINTELPRO.
26. The “war on terrorism.”
27. Secret illegal surveillance of American officials and American citizens for the purpose of blackmailing them.
28. The racist war on drugs, along with civil asset forfeiture, mandatory minimum sentences, and deadly no-knock raids.
29. The war on immigrants, which has brought untold death and suffering to countless people.
30. The immigration Berlin Wall along America’s southern border.
31. The immigration police state along America’s southern border, including domestic highway checkpoints, warrantless searches of farms and ranches, boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers, and violent raids on American businesses.
32. The unexplained killing of Ashli Babbit during the January 6 Capitol protests.
33. Soaring federal spending and debt.
34. Waco and Ruby Ridge.
35. The undeclared Vietnam War.
36. The undeclared Korean War.
37. Inciting crises and new official enemies to justify ever-increasing budgets for the national-security establishment and its army of “defense” contractors.
38. The Federal Reserve and decades of monetary debauchery and debasement.
39. The IRS.
40. The persecution and prosecution of people who disclose the evil and sordid dark-side secrets of the U.S. government.

Pray tell, Officer Dunn: Is all this the official “decency” to which you refer?

July 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Piers Morgan Calls For Unvaccinated to be Denied Medical Treatment

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | July 28, 2021

Professional attention-seeker Piers Morgan is leading the charge for unvaccinated people to face state-sanctioned discrimination after he asserted that those who haven’t had the COVID jab should be denied medical treatment.

Yes, really.

“Those who refuse to be vaccinated, with no medical reason not to, should be refused NHS care if they then catch covid,” tweeted Morgan. “I’m hearing of anti-vaxxers using up ICU beds in London at vast expense to the taxpayer. Let them pay for their own stupidity & selfishness.”

Morgan failed to mention that those who have chosen not to take the vaccine also pay for the NHS through their taxes.

He subsequently called those who haven’t taken the shot “incredibly stupid and deeply depressing,” asking, “What the f*ck is wrong with you????”

Essentially, Morgan is arguing that people who refuse to allow themselves to be injected with vaccines linked with innumerable side-effects to ward off a virus for which they have a 99.8 per cent survival rate should be left to die in order to save money.

If enacted, his ‘solution’ would also end up killing people who are admitted to hospital for ailments that have nothing to do with COVID, given that positive tests in hospitals are counted as COVID admissions even if the person is asymptomatic and is being treated for a non-COVID illness.

As we have repeatedly stressed, a two-tier society is now being created where discrimination targeting the unvaccinated is becoming not only normalized but encouraged.

Morgan is about one step removed from openly calling for the unvaccinated to be rounded up and incarcerated in medical prison camps.

An added irony to his faux-populist authoritarianism is that Morgan himself has been caught repeatedly flouting the same COVID-19 rules that he aggressively demands be imposed on everyone else.

July 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

French back restauranteur’s ‘free zone’ rebellion against Macron’s mandatory passes

RT | July 28, 2021

People in France have shown their support for a restaurateur who declared his eatery a ‘free zone’ in response to the government’s vaccine passports mandate for restaurant and bar entry amid widespread protests.

With the government set to require all people to show their Covid-19 health passport when entering bars and restaurants from the beginning of August, some in France have started their own campaign to rebel against what they described as the state’s “health dictatorship.”

The Twitter account ‘Zone Libre’ or ‘Free Zone’ is encouraging restaurateurs to display a sign rejecting the health pass mandate by President Emmanuel Macron’s government.

The tweet reads: “Zone Libre becomes the slogan of opponents of the health dictatorship,” adding the hashtag “Zone Libre” and “No to the Shame Pass.”

The tweet is accompanied by an image of a sign that reads: “Here, we respect your freedom, your dignity and medical secrets.” The message on the outside of the sign says “All welcome, with or without a health pass.”

While the account itself hasn’t received much attention, a video of chef Michel Le Menn sticking the sign to the facade of his eatery has been widely shared across social media. The restaurant, ‘Le Coup de Fourchette’ is reportedly located in Brest, a port town in Brittany.

In the footage, people can be seen photographing the ‘Zone Libre’ sign while the crowd chants “Liberte” or “Freedom.”

Sharing the video, one person wrote: “resistance starts like this, respect Sir.”

“All restaurateurs must do the same, if he is the only one to do it the state will crush him with all its weight to make an example,” one person wrote.

The term itself is rather controversial, as the ‘Zone Libre’ was also the name for the area of France controlled by the Vichy government of Marshal Philippe Petain during World War II. The short-lived state was notoriously anti-Semitic.

On Monday, the French government passed into law a bill forcing vaccination for medical workers and greater use of the controversial health pass. The government had previously stated its intention to make compulsory the use of the health pass for access to bars and restaurants from August; the passes are already required for places like museums and swimming pools.

The health pass, which can be displayed on an app or printed out, shows whether the individual has either been vaccinated or provided a negative test.

Macron’s government has seen widespread opposition to the pass, with 160,000 people protesting across the country on Saturday. Demonstrators chanted “Freedom, Freedom” as they marched around French towns and cities.

July 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | , , | Leave a comment

Was Lockdown Illegal?

By Noah Carl • The Daily Sceptic • July 27, 2021

There has been much debate among lawyers as to whether the various “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (i.e., lockdown measures) that have been imposed over the past year and a half are actually legal.

In April of 2020, the barrister Francis Hoar wrote an article laying out the case for the illegality of Britain’s lockdown. While his piece is very much worth reading in full, I will do my best to summarise the main points here.

Hoar argues that lockdown measures were a “disproportionate interference with the rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights”, and were therefore in breach of the Human Rights Act 1998.

To make his case, he appeals to the so-called Siracusa Principles, which were adopted by the UN Economic and Social Council in 1984. These principles stipulate that government responses to national emergencies that involve the restriction of human rights must fulfil certain criteria.

Specifically, they must be: carried out in accordance with law; directed toward an objective of general interest; strictly necessary to achieve that objective; the least intrusive way of achieving that objective; based on scientific evidence, and neither arbitrary nor discriminatory; of limited duration, respectful of human dignity and subject to review.

Hoar argues convincingly that lockdown measures failed to meet several of these criteria. For example, lockdowns were not strictly necessary, since the same outcomes could plausibly have been achieved with far less intrusive measures (i.e., a focused protection strategy).

And it’s highly doubtful that lockdowns were “respectful of human dignity and subject to review”, given that they initially proscribed all political gatherings and public demonstrations without exception – a measure unprecedented in British history.

Hoar suggests that, “were they challenged by judicial review”, the measures should be “disapplied if necessary”. (Recall that he was writing back in April of last year). Incidentally, a longer and more detailed version of his article is available here.

Another figure from the legal community to argue for the illegality of the UK’s lockdowns is Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court Justice. In a lecture delivered to the Cambridge Law Faculty in October 2020, he claimed that lockdown measures were without legal basis, and described the U.K.’s response as “a monument of collective hysteria and government folly”.

As readers may be aware, there was in fact a major legal challenge to the U.K.’s lockdowns, brought by the entrepreneur Simon Dolan (and funded to the tune of £427,000). The challenge sought a judicial review of the lockdown measures. Unfortunately, it proved unsuccessful.

I’ve been told by people with legal expertise that mounting another challenge would be difficult, given the adverse judgement in the case brought by Dolan. It’s therefore unlikely the Government will be liable for claims from individuals and businesses who’ve suffered due to lockdown.

Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that legal bodies in each of the following countries have found at least some aspect of the lockdown policy illegal: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Spain, Finland, Czechia, Scotland, Slovakia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States.

So while the High Court in London did reject Dolan’s case against the Government, lockdown opponents have won important victories in a number of countries.

And given that the evidence against lockdown has only increased since the judgement in Dolan’s case, lockdown opponents will have plenty of ammunition if any future Government decides to lock down in response to a similar virus.

July 28, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | July 27, 2021

It is time to recalibrate the government.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

So what we can do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

It won’t be easy.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.

In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

This way lies madness.

Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

That’s their job: make them do it.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.


Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

July 28, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Film Review | , | Leave a comment