Judge rejects Biden regime’s request to delay depositions in social media censorship lawsuit
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | November 5, 2022
A US District Judge has rejected a request to delay the deposition of top officials in President Biden’s administration in the lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, alleging censorship collusion between the Biden administration and social media companies.
District Judge Terry Doughty rejected a request for a partial stay of the deposition orders he approved for top officials in the current administration. Government attorneys requested a partial stay for the deposition of three officials pending a ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
The government wants the appeals court to vacate part of the deposition orders for deputy assistant to the president Rob Flaherty, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Jen Easterly, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director.
In their request for a partial stay, government lawyers argued that, “high-ranking governmental officials would be diverted from their significant duties and burdened in both preparing and sitting for a deposition, all of which may ultimately prove to be unnecessary if the Court of Appeals grants.”
Judge Doughty rejected the request because the government failed to show that the officials would be irreparably harmed by the depositions. According to the judge, being diverted from “significant duties” does not qualify as irreparable harm.
However, the plaintiffs could be irreparably harmed by the partial stay because they allege that the government violated their First Amendment rights, Doughty argued.
Quoting a ruling from another case, Doughty said, “The loss of First Amendment freedoms, even for minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”
“The Court finds that both the public interest and the interest of the other parties in preserving free speech significantly outweighs the inconvenience the three deponents will have in preparing for and giving their depositions,” Doughty added.
Following the ruling, the three officials will be deposed in December, unless the appeals court approves the government’s writ of mandamus on November 7. The writ requests the court to reverse the deposition orders for the three officials.
We obtained a copy of the order for you here.
NBC Quietly Removes Report Claiming Paul Pelosi Walked Away From Police, “Did Not Immediately Declare” Emergency
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 5, 2022
The Paul Pelosi attack continues to grow more bizarre by the day.
On Friday, sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News that when the police responded to the high-priority call, they had no idea they had been called to the Pelosi residence. What’s more, Pelosi did not immediately declare an emergency or try to leave his home.
“After a ‘knock and announce,’ the front door was opened by Mr. Pelosi. The 82-year-old did not immediately declare an emergency or try to leave his home,” reports NBC. Instead, Pelosi “began walking several feet back into the foyer toward the assailant and away from police.”
What’s more, Pelosi and attacker David DePape were reportedly alone for 30 minutes.
Of note, NBC News has deleted the clip from their Twitter feed and scrubbed it from their website.
Meanwhile, a neighbor living across from the Pelosis who was awake when the assault took place didn’t hear an alarm or anything unusual.
“No, not a thing, and you know we were awake at that hour in the morning; my husband was awake. We didn’t even hear sirens,” neighbor Sally McNulty told The Epoch Times.
McNulty, who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years, said everything was quiet around the time of the 2 a.m. attack on Oct. 28.
“This is one of the quietest streets in the city,” she said. “You can hear a pin drop at night.”
McNulty said she doesn’t recall ever hearing the Pelosis’ alarm go off in the past, though she has occasionally heard others in the neighborhood.
She said that Paul Pelosi had no enemies she knew of and was well-liked.
Other neighbors declined to comment.
Marjorie Campbell, a former neighbor of the Pelosis for 10 years, told the Daily Mail she recalled fleets of black SUVs surrounding the house around the clock when she stayed there.
Everyone in the neighborhood has alarms on their windows, and if glass were smashed, an alarm would sound, she told the publication. Campbell recalled her computers getting scrambled by alleged security measures to protect the congresswoman.
Nancy Pelosi was at her Pacific Heights home, the site of the attack, on Nov. 2 while several dark SUVs were parked outside. Capitol Police were present, too, as were multiple San Francisco Police Department cars.
Paul Pelosi had surgery to address a skull fracture and other injuries at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, after 42-year-old David DePape allegedly fractured his skull with a hammer on Oct. 28.
DePape pleaded not guilty to an attempted murder charge during a brief appearance in San Francisco Superior Court on Nov. 1. -Epoch Times
As PJ Media reports,
Pelosi’s failure to call out for help or flee his home was a detail in the court filing that previously raised a red flag to me, and it seems that even NBC News finds it odd. “Why Pelosi didn’t try to flee or tell responding officers he was in distress is unclear,” NBC News’s Miguel Almaguer noted.
Nevertheless, the report suggested it was unknown whether Pelosi was already injured or what mental state he was in.
Scholz’s China trip raises hackles
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | NOVEMBER 5, 2022
German diplomacy presented a riveting sight of “counterpoint” with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock hosting her G7 partners in Münster on November 3-4 even as Chancellor Olaf Sholz was deplaning from Berlin on a one-day visit to Beijing.
The photo-op showed the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken flanking Baerbock at the main table with Under-secretary of State Victoria Nuland — best known as the master of ceremonies at the 2014 “Maidan” coup in Kiev in 2014 — peering from behind.
Germany is catching up with photo journalism. Seriously, the photo couldn’t have arrested more meaningfully for the world audience the split personality of German diplomacy as the present coalition government pulls in different directions.
Quintessentially, Baerbock has highlighted her discontent with Scholz’s China visit by assembling around her the like-minded G7 counterparts. Even by norms of coalition politics, this is an excessive gesture. When a country’s top leader is on a visit abroad, a display of dissonance undercuts the diplomacy.
Equally, Baerbock’s G7 counterparts chose not to wait for Scholz’s return home. Apparently, they have a closed mind and the tidings of Scholz’s discussions in Beijing will not change that.
First thing on Monday, Scholz should ask for Baerbeck’s resignation. Better still, the latter should submit her resignation. But neither is going to happen.
In the run-up to Scholz’s China visit, he faced withering criticism for undertaking such a mission to Beijing with a business delegation of powerful German CEOs. Clearly, the Biden Administration looked to Baerbock and the influential “Atlanticist” circles embedded within Germany’s political economy to lead the charge.
Has Scholz bitten more than he could chew? The answer depends on a counter question: Is Scholz eyeing a legacy in the great tradition of his predecessors in the Social Democratic Party, Willy Brandt (1969-1974), Helmut Schmidt (1974-1982)?
Those two titanic figures took path-breaking initiatives toward the former Soviet Union and China respectively during defining moments in modern history, defying the shackles of Atlanticism that curbed Germany’s strategic autonomy and consigned that country as a subaltern in the US-led alliance system.
The cardinal difference today is that Brandt (who navigated Ostpolitik ignoring the furious American protestations over the first-ever gas pipeline connecting Soviet gas fields with Germany) and Schmidt (who seized the moment to cash in on US-China normalisation) — and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (1998-2005) too, who expanded and deepened expansion of business relations with Russia and struck an unprecedented working relationship with the Kremlin leadership, much to Washington’s irritation — were assertive leaders.
Put differently, it all depends on Germany’s collective will to break the NATO glass ceiling, which Lord Ismay, the Alliance’s first secretary-general, had succinctly captured as intended to “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Currently, the interplay of three factors impact German politics.
First, the Indo-Pacific strategy. Make no mistake, the proxy war in Ukraine is a dress rehearsal for the inevitable confrontation between the US and China over Taiwan issue. In both cases involving the strategic global balance, the stakes are exceedingly high for the US’ global hegemony and the multipolarity in the world order.
Germany has a pivotal role in this epochal struggle, not only by virtue of occupying the highly volatile ground in the middle of Europe that also carries remains of history, but being the economic powerhouse in the continent at the threshold of becoming a superpower.
The angst in Washington is self-evident that Scholz’s China visit may weaken the US’ geopolitical design to repeat the impressive feat of western unity over Ukraine if tensions boil over in Asia-Pacific and China is forced to act.
Of course, no analogy is complete as China is unlikely to opt for a 9-month old, incremental special military operation by Russia to “grind” the Taiwanese military and destroy the Ukrainian state. It’ll be world war from day one.
The analogy is complete, though, when it comes to the sanctions from hell that the Biden Administration will impose on China and the brigandry of confiscation of China’s “frozen assets” (exceeding a trillion dollars at the very least) ensues, apart from paralysing China’s supply chains.
Suffice to say, “doing a Ukraine” on China holds the key to the perpetuation of US global hegemony, as China’s financial assets get appropriated to refuel America’s ailing economy and dollar’s status as world currency and neo-mercantalism and control of capital movement, etc. remain intact.
Second, one big diplomatic victory of the Biden Administration so far has been in transatlantic politics where it succeeded in consolidating its dominance over Europe by pitchforking to the centerstage the Russia question. The European countries’ Manichean fears of an historic resurgence of Russian power were stirred up.
Few expected a Russian resurgence so soon after President Vladimir Putin’s famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007.
The western narrative at that time was that Russia simply lacked the capacity to regenerate as a global power, as Russia’s military’s modernisation was unfeasible. Arguably, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s entire diplomacy toward Russia (2005-2021) was pinned on that facile narrative.
Thus, when Putin announced most unexpectedly at a meeting of the Defence Ministry Board in Moscow on 24th December 2019 that Russia has become world leader in hypersonic weaponry and that “not a single country possesses hypersonic weapons, let alone continental-range hypersonic weapons,” the West heard it with undisguised horror.
The Biden team cashed in on the profound disquiet in the European capitals to rally them and drum up “western unity” over Ukraine. But a hairline crack is now appearing over Scholz’s visit to Berlin. Blinken rushed in to push Scholz back into the fold.
Third, following the above, a fundamental contradiction has appeared today as the West’s “sanctions from hell” against Russia boomeranged on Europeans, pushing them into recession. Germany has been hit very hard, staring at the spectre of the collapse of entire sectors of its industry, consequent unemployment and social and political turmoil.
The German industrial miracle was predicated on the availability of cheap, unlimited, assured supply of energy from Russia and the disruption is creating havoc. On top of it, the sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines rules out a revival of the energy nexus between Germany and Russia (which German public opinion favours.)
To be sure, with all the data available from the sea bed in the Baltic Sea, Schulz must be well aware of the geopolitical consequences of what the US has done to Germany. But he is not in a position to create a ruckus and instead opted to internalise the sense of bitterness, especially as Germany is in a humiliating position of having to buy frightfully expensive LNG from American companies to replace Russian gas.
The only option left to Germany is to reach out to China in a desperate search to revive its economy. Incidentally, Scholz’s mission primarily aimed at the relocation of production units of BASF, the German multinational chemical company and the largest chemical producer in the world, to China.
It is highly improbable, though, that Washington will allow Scholz a free hand. Fortuitously for Washington, Scholz’s coalition partners — Greens and FDU — are unvarnished atlanticists and are willing to play the American game, too.
Brandt or Schroeder would have fought back, but Scholz is not a street fighter, although he senses the US’ grand design to transform Germany as an appendage of the American economy and integrate it into a single supply chain. Simply put, Washington expects Germany to be an indispensable cog in the wheel of the collective West.
Meanwhile, Washington holds a strong hand, as Germany’s corporate sector is also a divided house with many companies who are well-placed to benefit from the economic model shift that Washington is promoting, showing reluctance to support Scholz — albeit a corporatist chancellor himself.
The US is adept at leveraging such situations. Reportedly, some of Germany’s high-tech companies did not accept Scholz’s invitation to accompany him to Beijing, including the CEOs of Mercedes-Benz, Bosch, Continental, Infineon, SAP, and Thyssen Krupp.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Says Ukraine Aid Will Drop to Zero If GOP Takes Congress
By Ilya Tsukanov – Samizdat – 04.11.2022
Last month, the White House expressed concerns that Trump Republicans could jeopardize future military and economic assistance to Ukraine after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy promised to stop writing “blank checks” to Kiev if the GOP wins back control of the House in the midterms.
Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has vowed that US aid to Ukraine will drop to nothing if her party takes Congress on Tuesday.
“Democrats have ripped our border wide open. But the only border they care about is Ukraine, not America’s southern border. Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. Our country comes first,” Greene said at a “Save America” Trump rally in Sioux City, Iowa on Friday.
The congresswoman accused President Joe Biden and the Democrats of ignoring domestic problems, including the economy, inflation, crime, and the fentanyl crisis, of “putting America last,” and “destroying every single thread of democracy in the process.”
Greene promised that the GOP would open corruption investigations, impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and President Joe Biden, and “defund all the horrific policies the Democrats have passed over the past two years,” including plans to increase the size of the IRS, vaccine mandates, and political actors inside the Department of Justice and the FBI.
“In order to truly make a commitment to America, Republicans are going to have to be the new Republican Party. We can no longer be the party of Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Dick Cheney, George Bush and Mitt Romney, or any other sellout, weak Republican brand that just holds hands with Democrats and serves the globalist agenda that is the enemy of us all,” Greene said.
Greene, 48, has been an outspoken critic inside the Republican Party of Washington’s economic and military aid to Kiev. Earlier this year, she attacked the $40 billion Ukraine Spending Bill, citing the nation’s shortage of baby formula. “40 billion dollars, but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies,” the lawmaker said on the House floor in May.
Greene condemned the bill’s approval of “an unknown amount of money to the CIA” and other boondoggle assistance. “If this is claiming that it’s about saving lives, let’s be real. Then we would care about war-torn countries like Ethiopia. So that’s a bunch of hypocrisy,” she said.
57 mostly pro-Trump House Republicans and 11 GOP senators voted against Ukraine assistance earlier this year, citing fears of escalating tensions with Russia and a range of domestic issues. According to an NPR primary election tracker estimate, over nine in ten of the 200+ Trump-endorsed candidates running for the House, Senate, and top state offices won their GOP primaries earlier this year, oftentimes knocking out Republicans with a traditional, neoconservative stance on foreign policy, and those rejecting the former president’s claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.
On Friday, Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee released a 1,050-page report citing whistleblower testimony outlining alleged politicization of the FBI and the DoJ, with the document expected to serve as a “road map” for congressional probes against Biden and the Democrats, should the GOP take Congress on Tuesday.
FBI is ‘rotted at its core,’ Republican lawmakers say
RT | November 4, 2022
America is no longer a country where citizens are afforded equal justice under the law, as guaranteed by their Constitution, because the nation’s top law enforcement agency has been corrupted by politicized leadership and a “woke, leftist agenda” being imposed from the top, Republican lawmakers have claimed.
The allegations were contained in a 1,050-page report released on Friday by Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee. The report, which was based on information gathered from 14 FBI whistleblowers who came forward to expose a pattern of misconduct, argued that the agency was “rotted at its core.”
“Quite simply, the problem — the rot within the FBI — festers in and proceeds from Washington,” the report said. “The FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, have become political institutions.”
The report detailed such abuses as a secret partnership in which the FBI receives private information on conservative users from Facebook, without seeking their consent or going though the legal processes that would normally be required to tap such data.
Whistleblowers also alleged that the FBI “looked the other way” on dozens of attacks against anti-abortion groups, even as the agency sent heavily armed teams of officers to arrest pro-life activists at their homes for alleged violations of selectively enforced crimes. Parents who spoke out at school board meetings over controversial policies were targeted by investigators as alleged terrorists.
At the same time, former FBI official Timothy Thibault “shut down” a probe into the overseas business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and attempted to keep the case from being reopened, the report said. Thibault openly displayed his political bias in social media posts that included his official title.
“America’s not America if you have a Justice Department that treats people differently under the law,” Representative Jim Jordan, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News on Friday. “It’s supposed to be equal treatment under the law. That’s not happening, and we know it’s not happening because 14 brave FBI agents came to us as whistleblowers and told us what exactly is going on here.”
The report also accused the FBI of inflating statistics on domestic extremism to help fuel a narrative promoted by President Joe Biden’s administration. FBI employees who have conservative views are being purged from the agency, it claims.
Republicans argued that the FBI was plagued by a “systemic culture of unaccountability,” as well as “rampant corruption, manipulation and abuse.” The agency’s shift toward “political meddling” has allegedly pulled resources away from legitimate law enforcement duties. For instance, one whistleblower claimed that he was told after the January 2021 US Capitol riot that child sex-abuse cases were “no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.”
‘Activist groups’ tanking Twitter profits – Musk
RT | November 4, 2022
Twitter owner Elon Musk has accused “activist groups” of “trying to destroy free speech in America” by pressuring advertisers to boycott his platform even though he hasn’t changed any policies. The billionaire took to Twitter to complain about the “massive drop in revenue” on Friday.
The platform is losing money “due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” Musk tweeted, calling the situation “extremely messed up!”
“They’re trying to destroy free speech in America,” he wrote.
Musk held a Zoom call on Tuesday with representatives from the Stop Hate for Profit Coalition, a pressure group led by the ADL that has organized advertiser boycotts of social media platforms over perceived weaknesses in keeping out “hate speech.” Representatives from the NAACP, Color of Change, the Asian American Foundation, and the George Bush Presidential Center were also reportedly present, among others.
The coalition was able to secure all three of its “immediate requests” from the Tesla tycoon, according to multiple members and Musk himself.
He promised not to replatform banned accounts before the midterm election results were certified or before a “clear process” had been devised, and vowed to keep in place “election integrity” measures. Additionally, Musk agreed to form a “content moderation council” that would include representatives from the ADL and other coalition members with “diverse” viewpoints.
Despite appearing to bring the self-described “free speech absolutist” to heel, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt hinted that further controls might be necessary in a statement released following the call. He insisted “much more needs to be done to reduce lies and hate on Twitter” and said backtracking on previous progress was “not an option.”
A few Twitter users had suggestions for how Musk might deal with the pressure campaign.
“Name and shame the advertisers who are succumbing to the advertiser boycotts,” Mike Davis, co-founder of the Internet Accountability Project, tweeted, suggesting Musk’s followers engage in a “counter-boycott” against them.
More than three quarters of 2.7 million respondents agreed that advertisers should support free speech over political correctness when polled by Musk on Wednesday.
Musk fired the board of directors and several high ranking executives upon taking over as CEO last week. However, he has attempted to reassure advertisers that the site would not become a “free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequence” under his watch.
Pfizer, Democrat-led “Accountable Tech” are Blackmailing Twitter
Will they succeed at preserving censorship?
By Igor Chudov | November 3, 2022
Pfizer is “pausing advertising on Twitter” because it is “concerned that Mr. Musk could scale back content moderation, which they worry would lead to an increase in objectionable content on the platform.”
Pfizer was one of the most significant sources of revenue for Twitter. I constantly saw Pfizer ads and promoted posts, such as this one:
(If you are not sure why “the human brain” becomes so sweaty once pink “science” grabs it firmly from behind, neither am I)
What is interesting is that this advertising pause involves not only Pfizer but other large multinationals with no specific issues related to Twitter censorship, such as General Mills, a producer of popular but unhealthy breakfast cereals.
Who is behind this? Meet a new “action coalition” called “Accountable Tech” that is directing efforts to withhold advertising money from misbehaving technology companies. You may be very surprised, or not, but “Accountable Tech” is packed with Democratic operatives:
Accountable Tech is spearheading this letter to Twitter advertisers:
Accountable Tech joined more than 25 groups to deliver the below message in a letter to Twitter’s top advertisers to demand nonnegotiable requirements for their ad business in the midst of Elon Musk’s acquisition:
To whom it may concern:
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter will further toxify our information ecosystem and be a direct threat to public safety, especially among those already most vulnerable and marginalized.
The undersigned organizations believe that Twitter should continue to uphold the practices that serve as guideposts for other Big Tech platforms. We call on you – Twitter’s top advertisers – to commit to these standards as non-negotiable requirements for advertising on the platform:
- Keep accounts including those of public figures and politicians that were removed for egregious violations of Twitter Rules – such as harassment, violence, and hateful conduct – off the platform
All these coalitions attempt to influence large advertisers into doing their bidding by withholding ad money from tech companies that “Accountable Tech” wants to punish.
I understand why Pfizer, a company selling fraudulent “Covid vaccine” and relying on censorship for continued sales, has a vested interest in Twitter continuing to censor vaccine skeptics. However, other companies mentioned above do not have such reasons.
General Mills should only care about selling its cereals. As such, they would advertise wherever the ads would bring future product buyers. So, the pecuniary interest of that company is certainly NOT in pausing their Twitter ads that go along with sports coverage and other non-controversial threads.
Thus, by stopping ads, General Mills acts against its own shareholders. Its management is not blind to this. However, over the years, the coalitions like Accountable Tech have acquired significant influence within these companies and boardrooms via various “diversity,” “equality,” and other “stakeholder” commissions intimidating corporate management.
I discussed this previously in a somewhat broader context after Musk made his first Twitter offer. I explained why “free speech” is a threat to very powerful interests:
Not all tech companies succumb to these “silencing coalitions.” Substack is a very successful, profitable platform that said no to all attempts to deplatform “misinformation superspreaders.” Rumble recently told France to bug off with its requests to close certain channels and blocked France. Other platforms like gab are doing just fine financially without these corporate advertisers.
These “fringe” platforms are resisting censorship but involve comparatively few users. What “Accountable Tech” is trying to do is keep the general masses on the largest social networks from learning the truth.
Will Elon Musk overcome this blackmail? Does he even care to have free speech on Twitter? Is he an ally of freedom? Will “Accountable Tech” win and silence us? What do you think?
Willful Blindness
When people don’t see what’s right in front of them
Bill & Elliott Rothstein in “The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess”
By John Leake – Courageous Discourse – November 3, 2022
Author’s Note: The following post is Part I of a series on Willful Blindness, Ideological Blindness, and other failures of perception.
According to Wikipedia:
Action is an American dark comedy series about a Hollywood producer named Peter Dragon, who is trying to recover from his last box-office failure. It aired on Fox during the 1999–2000 season. The series was critically praised for its irreverent and sometimes hostile look at Hollywood culture.
Peter Dragon’s Vice President of Production at Dragonfire Films is a former child actress named Wendy Ward, who also works as a high end courtesan for wealthy Hollywood denizens.
Episode 13, “The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess,” was shot in 2000. Action was cancelled before it was aired, but the episode was released on DVD and posted on YouTube. In this episode, Peter desperately needs to acquire a script, and is distressed to discover it is owned by Bill and Elliott Rothstein—extremely boorish brothers who have a knack for spotting and acquiring valuable properties.
Peter visits them at their favorite restaurant and offers to purchase the script. They tell him to have his cute Vice President, Wendy Ward, deliver the check to their house the following evening. Being an exceptionally good sport, Wendy decides to go into the Lion’s Den. Though she succeeds in her mission, she is so traumatized by her encounter with the Rothstein Brothers that she leaves Hollywood forever. As she puts it: “I’m through with this, Peter. I called a cab and I’m gonna go home and pack and I’m gonna move some place, some place clean.”
It now seems astonishing that such a brutal depiction of Hollywood was made for what was intended to be a popular television series. It also seems obvious that Bill and Elliott Rothstein are modeled after Bob and Harvey Weinstein. The habits, manners, and appearance of the former strongly resemble the latter.
A few years later, at a 2005 comedy event, Courtney Love was interviewed on the red carpet by comedian Natasha Leggero, who asked her if she had any advice for young girls moving to Hollywood. “If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party at his Four Seasons [hotel room] don’t go,” she said.
As “The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess” and Courtney Love indicated, it was no secret that being alone with Harvey Weinstein was a grave occupational hazard for a young woman’s body and soul.
Human affairs are more complicated and messy than we are often comfortable acknowledging. We all want things, and much of life is about gauging how much we are willing to accept and tolerate in order to get them. When Gwyneth Paltrow thanked Harvey Weinstein at her Academy Award acceptance speech in 1999, and Meryl Streep thanked him at the 2012 Golden Globe Awards by calling him “God,” both women were probably being perfectly sincere. During those moments, they were thinking about his extraordinary talent as a film producer, and not his terrible reputation with women.
Willful blindness—averting one’s gaze from bad conduct—is usually done with a simple calculation—namely, I can’t object to this conduct because doing so would prevent me from receiving a benefit I really want.
Most of us occasionally engage in some degree of willful blindness. It would be wildly impractical to go through life protesting every bit of bad behavior we encounter. However, it seems to me that—since around 2000—willful blindness on a spectacular scale has been endemic to American business, culture, and politics. The corporate scandals of the early 2000s, the Iraq War under false pretenses, massive fraud on Wall Street leading to the Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve bailouts of the same people who caused the crisis. Then there was the Russian Collusion Hoax and the related, swamp of US government corruption in Ukraine—now a full-blown orgy for arms dealers and money launderers. Last but not least, the stupendous fraud and homicidal bad faith of the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex and its friends in Washington during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
All of the above could only happen because thousands of people in an array of organizations and institutions found it expedient to turn a blind eye to the innumerable signs they were participating in corrupt enterprises. It reminds me of a (perhaps apocryphal) quote attributed to Cicero: “Rome is made out of marble but it’s built on a sewer.”
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From the Archives
Confronting the Threat of Ethnic Bioweapons
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
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