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There WAS a color revolution in the US after all – its architects now boast they ‘fortified’ the 2020 election

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | February 5, 2021

The 2020 US presidential elections wasn’t “rigged,” oh no, but “fortified” by a conspiracy of activists united in saving “Our Democracy” from the Bad Orange Man, now proud to share their story in a friendly tell-all piece in TIME.

“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” writes Molly Ball – a biographer of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, by the way – in TIME magazine this week, describing it as a “vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election – an extraordinary shadow effort.”

Ball’s article reveals a lot, from why there were no street riots by Democrats either on November 4 or on January 6 – the organizers of this “conspiracy” stopped them – to who was behind the push to alter election rules in key states and set up mail-in voting, who organized “information” campaigns about the results of the election, and who even threatened election officials into making the “right” decision to certify the vote.

While everyone – myself included – was focused on the summer riots as a possible “color revolution,” they turned out to be misdirection. According to TIME, the real action was taking place behind the scenes, as Democrat activists and unions joined forces with NeverTrump Republicans, Chamber of Commerce, corporations, and Big Tech to make sure the 2020 election turns out the way they wanted. They call this a victory of democracy and the will of the people, of course, for no one is ever a villain in their own story.

“Their work touched every aspect of the election,” Ball writes, from getting states to “change voting system laws” and fending off “voter-suppression lawsuits,” to recruiting “armies” of poll workers and pressuring social media companies to “take a harder line against disinformation.”

Then, after Election Day, “they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.” Alarmed yet? Maybe you should be.

So who are these shadowy saviors of Our Democracy? One of them is union organizer Mike Podhorzer of AFL-CIO, a traditional Democrat powerhouse. Another is Ian Bassin, associate White House counsel in Barack Obama’s first administration. The roster of his “nonpartisan, rule-of-law” outfit called Protect Democracy includes a lot of Obama lawyers, a John McCain campaign aide, an editor from the defunct neocon Weekly Standard, and someone from SPLC, while among their advisers is the NeverTrump failed presidential candidate and ex-CIA spy Evan McMullin.

Bear that in mind when you read Bassin’s quote that “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” (emphasis added) but “it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.” Chilling words.

A leading member of this effort is Norm Eisen, another White House counsel under Obama. The pro-Trump Revolver News even raised the alarm about Eisen plotting a “color revolution” in September – but by then it was too late, even if anyone had been paying attention.

By then, the National Vote at Home Institute – an organization barely two years old, and part of the effort – had already instructed secretaries of state across the US with “technical advice on everything from which vendors to use to how to locate drop boxes,” and even provided them “communications tool kits,” i.e. talking points.

In November 2019 – a full year before the election! – Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg hosted “nine civil rights leaders” for dinner, one of whom was Vanita Gupta, Obama’s assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. It was part of this shadowy coalition’s campaign for “more rigorous rules and enforcement” on social media platforms – just in case you were wondering how Trump ended up deplatformed, or the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop got suppressed before the election.

Podhorzer’s messaging efforts were informed by Anat Shenker-Osorio, who “applies tools from cognitive science and linguistics in her work with progressive organizations globally,” according to her 2018 fellowship bio from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. Ironically, as part of their pressure on Big Tech Democrats had whipped up a moral panic about super-targeted “Russian” internet memes that somehow “influenced” the 2016 election – yet Ball’s article says that two groups involved with the conspiracy “created state-specific memes and graphics, spread by email, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, urging that every vote be counted.”

Though Ball doesn’t mention it specifically, those Twitter and Facebook “pre-bunking” labels about safety of mail-in ballots and the winner not being known on Election Day are also the activists’ talking points.

Remember how Republican observers were thrown out of the ballot-counting facility in Detroit? Reports at the time said it was because of overcrowding, but the Time article reveals that a Democrat activist mobilized “dozens of reinforcements” to “provide a counterweight” to them, so eventually “racial-justice activists from Detroit Will Breathe worked alongside suburban women from Fems for Dems and local elected officials.”

It was activists who came up with a strategy of denouncing any challenge to Detroit vote counts as racist, too.

When President Donald Trump asked Michigan’s Republican-majority legislators to challenge the results, Eisen called it “the scariest moment” of the election, and the “democracy defenders” sprung into action.

Eisen’s lawyers dug up dirt on the two lawmakers invited to Washington, activists hounded them at airports, NeverTrump Republicans made calls to party friends, and Bassin’s outfit commissioned an op-ed threatening criminal charges by Michigan’s Democrat AG – whose office then retweeted it. The two were even picketed at the Trump Hotel in DC. The brigading eventually worked, as Michigan Republicans agreed to certify the elections – and other contested states followed.

Perhaps the most intriguing part is buried towards the end. Ball reveals that she got a text from Podhorzer – the AFL-CIO organizer – on the morning of January 6, hours before what the Democrats would describe as “insurrection” by Trump supporters at the US Capitol, saying that the “activist left” was “strenuously discouraging counter activity” in order to “preserve safety and ensure they couldn’t be blamed for any mayhem.”

How did Podhorzer know there would be “mayhem,” hours before the “storming” of the Capitol that Democrats claim Trump “incited” at the rally outside the White House at noon? It’s a mystery.

What’s not a mystery is the result of the “conspiracy” Ball has revealed: a de facto one-party state in which Democrats hold absolute power at every level of government and seek to prosecute dissent and disenfranchise the opposition.

Last month, with no inkling of the behind-the-scenes operation just revealed in Time, I wrote of a non-kinetic “fifth-generation” civil war that had unfolded as “a battle for hearts and minds, a series of psychological operations that played out on the media, political and economic fronts.” I argued it had successfully swapped the American Republic for something called “Our Democracy,” which maintains the form but has a radically different content.

One of the “heroes” of Ball’s piece, NeverTrump Republican Jeff Timmer, has a quote in the article about how “Our democracy only survives if we all believe and don’t look down,” referring to the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote.

It’s an interesting admission, as the coyote is the villain of those cartoons – and the one actually immune to the effects of gravity is the roadrunner bird. But you’re not supposed to notice this – and besides, noticing will soon be a crime in Our Democracy.

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

February 6, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

Bernays and Propaganda

By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog | February 6, 2021

Many years ago, the Jewish-American political commentator Walter Lippmann realised that political ideology could be completely fabricated, using the media to control both presentation and conceptualisation, not only to create deeply-ingrained false beliefs in a population, but also to entirely erase undesirable political ideas from the public mind. This was the beginning of not only the American hysteria for freedom, democracy and patriotism, but of all manufactured political opinion, a process that has been operative ever since. Lippmann created these theories of mass persuasion of the public, using totally fabricated “facts” deeply insinuated into the minds of a gullible public, but there is much more to this story. An Austrian Jew named Edward Louis Bernays, who was the nephew of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was one of Lippmann’s most precocious students and it was he who put Lippmann’s theories into practice. Bernays is widely known in America as the father of Public Relations, but he would be much more accurately described as the father of American war marketing as well as the father of mass manipulation of the public mind.

Bernays claimed “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind” it will be possible “to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it”. He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the ‘engineering of consent’, and to accomplish it he merged theories of crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud. Bernays regarded society as irrational and dangerous, with a “herd instinct”, and that if the multi-party electoral system (which was fabricated by a group of European elites as a population control mechanism) were to survive and continue to serve those elites, massive manipulation of the public mind was necessary. These elites, “invisible people”, would have, through their influence on government and their control of the media, a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and responses of the citizenry. His conviction was that this group should flood the public with misinformation and emotionally-loaded propaganda to “engineer” the acquiescence of the masses and thereby rule over them. According to him, this manufactured consent of the masses, creating conformity of opinion molded by the tool of false propaganda, would be vital for the survival of democracy. (1) (1a) (2)

Bernays wrote, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” He stated that in America, people are governed, their minds molded, their tastes formed, their ideas suggested, largely by men they have never heard of. He claimed, “This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner. In almost every act of our daily lives we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” (3)

In his main work titled ‘Propaganda’, (4) (4a) which he wrote in 1928, Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy in which individuals were inherently dangerous (to the rapacity of the elites) but could be harnessed and channeled by these same elites for their economic benefit. He wrote further that “No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any … wise idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by … those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders. Fortunately, the … politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold and form the will of the people.” He clearly believed that virtually total control of a population was possible, and perhaps easy to accomplish: “So vast are the numbers of minds which can be regimented, and so tenacious are they when regimented, that (they produce) an irresistible pressure before which legislators, editors, and teachers are helpless.”

And it wasn’t only the public masses that were ‘inherently dangerous’, but a nation’s leaders fit this description as well, therefore also requiring manipulation and control. Bernays realised that if you can influence the leaders of a nation, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you can control the government and the country, and that is precisely where he set his sights. Bernays again: “In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power. There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities.” He went on to tell us that “The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses.” And in this case, the “few” are the wealthy elites, their even wealthier bankers, and their brethren who control the media, publishing and entertainment industries.

US President Wilson was desperate to fulfill his obligations to his handlers by putting the US into the First World War as they wished, but was having little success with public opinion at home; few Americans wanted to enter the European war. In 1917 Wilson founded what was called The Committee on Public Information, of which Bernays became a star member. It was Bernays’ vast propaganda schemes and his influence in promoting the patently false idea that US entry to the war was primarily aimed at “bringing democracy to all of Europe”, that proved so successful in altering public opinion about the war. Thanks to Edward Bernays, American war marketing was born and would never die.

Until the First World War, these theories of creating an entirely false public opinion based on misinformation, then manipulating this for population control, were still only theories, but the astounding success of propaganda by Bernays and his group during the war laid bare the possibilities of perpetually controlling the public mind on all matters. The “shrewd” designers of Bernays’ “invisible government” developed a standard technique for what was essentially propaganda and mind control, or at least opinion control, and infiltrated it throughout the US government, its departments and agencies, and its leaders and politicians. Coincident with this, they practiced infecting the leaders of every identifiable group – fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social – and encouraging these men to likewise infect their supporters.

Bernays was apparently stunned by the outstanding success of his democracy slogan and hate campaign in swaying public opinion in favor of war, and so immediately began to apply his model to peacetime enterprises. “In applying his uncle’s Freudian theories to deal with public conceptions, Bernays realised that provoking a fear of communism and then manipulating the public’s emotions toward it, could be a sure recipe for success in the widespread engineering of popular opinion and control of the population. This theory was so powerful that it became a weapon of its own during the cold war.” The term ‘propaganda’ had acquired a poor reputation so Bernays created and promoted the term ‘Public Relations’, but of course his processes were no such thing. Bernays’ PR ethic involved psychological manipulation and control of the public mind through cleverly-devised – and thoroughly false – propaganda.

Bernays carries the blame for more than American entry into the two world wars, having been instrumental in paving the way for the US cannibalisation and military colonisation of much of the world, and for the US installing and supporting the dozens of brutal military dictatorships around the world. His first international project was helping to engineer the US overthrow of the popular elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. At the time, the Rockefellers’ United Fruit Company and various US elites and international financiers owned most of Guatemala including 70% of all the arable land, the communications facilities, the only railroad and shipping port, and controlled most exports. When Arbenz commenced expropriations and land redistribution, Bernays developed a massive propaganda campaign that colored Arbenz as communist, a terrorist, an enemy to democracy, a blot on humanity, and much more, to the extent that American public opinion supported an outrageous travesty and one of the most brutal violations of human rights in US history. Bernays’ template has been used about 70 times with US invasions of that many nations, which is one source of the vast disconnect between what the American people believe their government has done and what it has actually done. As a side note, Guatemala appealed to the United Nations to stop the Americans’ massive interference in their country, a plea that was sympathetically received by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold who proved troublesome for the US. He would do so again a few years later, and would be assassinated by the CIA for his trouble.

I discussed earlier the black and white mentality that pervades America. Much of this is supported by the witch-hunting versions of Christianity that Americans have embraced, but much of the blame must be laid on Bernays’ propaganda methods. Bernays himself asserted that propaganda could produce rapid and strong emotional responses in the public, but that the range of these responses was limited because the emotional loading inherent in his propaganda would create a kind of binary mentality, eventually forcing the population into a programmed black and white world – which is precisely what we see in the US today. This isn’t difficult to understand. In a discussion of a landscaping option for our garden, we could have a range of dispassionate responses from antipathy to adoration, but when Bernays flooded the public with fabricated tales of Germans killing babies, the range of potential responses was not dispassionate but rather entirely emotional and would be limited to either abhorrence or perhaps a blocking of the information. In a sense, our emotional switch will be forced into either an ‘on’ or ‘off’ position, with no other reasonable choices. We see this in debates on subjects like global warming, where positions do not correspond to educational or employment circumstances, nor to experience, but tend to be strongly emotional responses along ideological and political lines with precisely the kind of binary mentality Bernays predicted.

It is interesting to note that the manipulators eventually became the manipulated. Wilson, in his eagerness to manipulate public opinion in favor of war, failed to realise he was himself being manipulated by his handlers, by these same elite propagandists whose war ambitions he was fulfilling, as well as other schemes they had already planted in his mind. The puppeteer became the puppet, and the practice became permanent. The elite few, as Bernays called them, realised early on the potential for control of governments, and in every subsequent US administration the president and his White House staff, the politicians, the leaders of the military and intelligence agencies, all fell prey to this same disease of shrewd manipulation. Roosevelt’s “intense desire for war” (5) (6) (7) in 1939 was the result of this same infection process and, once infected, he of course approved of the infection of the entire American population. George Bush with Iraq and Obama with Libya and Syria are not different. Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

Bernays was very correct in stating that a society’s ability to participate in a democracy was dependent on how well-informed the society was, but Americans fail to appreciate that it is ignorance and not knowledge or education that protects the existence of multi-party political systems. That is why American leaders, controlled by the same “invisible government” and with a fully-compliant elite-owned media, have intentionally misrepresented their current policies and actions to the public, while their “elite few” specialised in massive historical revisionism, especially American history in the world and the effects of that history on other nations. By keeping Americans ignorant and uninformed, their minds filled with foolish and false myths, and forever distracted by irrelevancies, American leaders and their puppet-masters have used Bernays’ theories to control public opinion and beliefs with lies, religion, patriotism and emotional propaganda. It was very much an “engineered ignorance” created by a continuing program of misinformation, manipulation and deception, a shrewdly-planned subversion of the American public.

The almost overwhelming political-religious ideological fog permeating America today is due to generations of institutionalized deception and propaganda, and is the direct cause of much of the renowned ignorance of the American people. Their capitalist ideology as well, is rooted in economic misconceptions and false propaganda, with the result that almost no Americans today have any understanding of the real (and largely criminal) reasons for their nation’s economic success. The astonishing extent of the binary polarisation of politics and government is another example, yet few Americans have any understanding of their condition. As one author noted, “The wealthy in America have created an inherently imbalanced system that is exploitable by the wealthy and they are working through the use of propaganda and misinformation to convince Americans that the system is just, or, if anything, unfairly biased toward the poor.” And again, “The economic system that America has developed is dependent on the exploitation of foreign countries and the acquisition of foreign resources, which is why (the US) pursues a strategy of global preeminence.” He went on to state that the foreign policy of the American Right-Wing has been developed through extensive propaganda and exaggeration of foreign threats in order to maintain the conditions for public support and to justify the suppression of dissent.

I have written before that no Right-Wing government could survive in the full light of day with all truths exposed, because most of these truths are bitterly anti-social and designed only to create a flow of a nation’s wealth to the relatively few members of the elites and financiers. In order to function at all, a Right-Wing government like that in the US must be increasingly secretive and rely ever more heavily on Bernays and on his propaganda in order to produce in the population both his engineered consent and engineered ignorance, without which a democracy could not survive. This is so true that after World War II, the US military heavily restricted media control in occupied Germany and Japan because it recognized that the media could easily educate citizens to the dangers of the American presence both at home and in Europe. This veil of secrecy has been carried to an extent that the American and international elites have created what one writer called a massive framework of lies that functions as an arena within which the desired propaganda ideas are presented to the American people as information, but where the reality is very different from that in which American leadership functions. The same writer stated so perfectly, “Within this framework of lies the world appears to be a simplistic place of good and evil. The feeling of Americans that we are the most successful people on earth, and that America is the most successful country, is used to support the idea that America’s policies are inherently altruistic because our culture tells us that success is the measure of goodness. What is actually the case, though, is that America is successful precisely because American policy is not altruistic.”

The next essay in this series will outline in detail the beginnings – and the devastating results – of Bernays’ initial efforts.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 28 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English-language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West.

February 6, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Bank Of America Secretly Handed Customer Data To FBI Investigators

By Richie Allen | February 5, 2021

Bank of America customers are closing their accounts and taking their business elsewhere after it was revealed that the bank snooped through hundreds of innocent people’s accounts at the request of the federal government. The FBI wanted the information as part of its investigation into the Capitol riot. Anyone who made a transaction in DC on January 6th had their data handed to the feds. FOX News host Tucker Carlson broke the story last night.

After being contacted by the government, Bank of America handed over the information of 211 people. Of the 211 accounts that were turned over, none led to so much as an arrest, although one man was questioned and released without charge. The bank has so far refused to divulge how many accounts it trawled through before producing the 211 names. It has not revealed whether it was compelled by a subpoena or search warrant to hand over the data either.

Civil Rights groups in the US are calling for a boycott of the bank and want to know if other banks have done the same. This morning Bank of America told dailymail.com :

“We don’t comment on our communications with law enforcement. All banks have responsibilities under federal law to cooperate with law enforcement inquiries in full compliance with the law.”

Fox presenter Tucker Carlson said last night:

“These were the private records of Americans who had committed no crime; people who, as far as we know, had absolutely nothing to do with what happened at the Capitol. But at the request of federal investigators, Bank of America searched its databases looking for people who fit a specific profile.”

Referring to the man who was questioned Carlson said:

“The FBI hauls you in for questioning in a terror investigation, not because you’ve done anything suspicious, but because you bought plane tickets and visited your country’s capital. Now they’re sweating you because your bank, which you trust with your most private information, has ratted you out without your knowledge. Because Bank of America did that, you are being treated like a member of Al Qaeda.”

Banks are the most criminally corrupt cartels on Planet Earth. We call them banksters for a reason. To be shocked that they violated the rights of their customers is to be naïve in the extreme. Sometime in the next few years, maybe sooner, your government will declare itself broke, having borrowed trillions in imaginary money to pay for the pandemic hoax. At that point, the idea of a wealth tax or a bail-in will be mooted. Those are code words for daylight robbery. They will take your money without your consent and your bank will be only happy to help them. What Bank of America has done should be a timely reminder of what banks really are. Your bank is not your friend.

February 6, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

CDC: Over 500 Deaths Following mRNA Experimental Injections thru 1/29/21

By Brian Shilhavy – Health Impact News – February 7, 2021

The CDC has done another data dump into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a U.S. Government funded database that tracks injuries and deaths caused by vaccines.

The data goes through January 29, 2021, with 11,249 recorded adverse events, including 501 deaths following injections of the experimental COVID mRNA shots by Pfizer and Moderna.

Besides the recorded 501 deaths, there were 2443 visits to Emergency Room doctors, 156 permanent disabilities, and 1066 hospitalizations.

Almost 70% of the recorded deaths were among people over the age of 65.

As we have previously reported, because the VAERS reporting system is voluntary, studies show that less than 1% of all vaccine injuries and deaths are recorded.

A 2011 report by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Inc. for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stated that fewer than one percent of all vaccine adverse events are reported to the government:

Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of “problem” drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed. (Source.)

When reading the accompanying notes from these cases that were reported to VAERS, it is clear that many healthcare professionals are reluctant to report these cases, probably fearing repercussions for doing so.

In some cases, family members filed the report because the healthcare facility refused to do so.

Some examples:

(VAERS ID # 913733) My grandmother died a few hours after receiving the moderna covid vaccine booster 1. While I don’t expect that the events are related, the treating hospital did not acknowledge this and I wanted to be sure a report was made.

(VAERS ID # 914621) Resident in our long term care facility who received first dose of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine on 12/22/2020, only documented side effect was mild fatigue after receiving. She passed away on 12/27/2020 of natural causes per report. Has previously been in & out of hospice care, resided in nursing home for 9+ years, elderly with dementia. Due to proximity of vaccination we felt we should report the death, even though it is not believed to be related.

(VAERS ID # 914895) Injection given on 12/28/20 – no adverse events and no issues yesterday; Death today, 12/30/20, approx.. 2am today (unknown if related – Administrator marked as natural causes)

It is important to note that the official CDC’s position on these recorded injuries and deaths in the VAERS database is that NONE of them are related to the COVID mRNA injections.

The CDC does not even have a category for “vaccine deaths,” and hence, there has never been a recorded incident on a death certificate of a vaccine death. … Full article

February 5, 2021 Posted by | War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Russian Foreign Ministry Is Concerned About Political Persecution in the United States

The Saker | February 4, 2021

Moscow intends to hold a ‘serious conversation’ with Washington about the stars and stripes allegations of unauthorized actions in Russia.

The official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova spoke about this at a briefing.

The American authorities, according to their words, will not be able to “divert public views, public opinion from their own problems” with their unbridled attacks on the Russian Federation: “We mean to keep this topic in sight and have a serious conversation with Washington. I assure you, the news won’t keep you waiting.”

“I would like to appeal to Washington. I predict: their protest will not dissipate by itself. Discontent will not work under the carpet. the authorities and the media obedient to them declare, a direct quote: ‘domestic terrorists.’ Doubts about the objectivity of the US law enforcement agencies are also raised by the fact that they are essentially acting in accordance with the political order and guidelines of the current administration, which declared the events of January 6 as a mutiny, and all who were near the congress that day are almost depicted as marauders. However, most of them are ordinary US citizens who are worried about the situation in their own country. And you know how many there are? 74 million voters. They voted for their president, as they believed necessary, they defended their beliefs,” – Zakharova emphasized.

“The United States has already announced so much lately that I want to remind them of what is happening in their country … An endless, unceasing increase in the degree of violence. This is what our partners need to pay attention to, the situation in their own countries, and not try to help rock the situation in our country,” she added.

An official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry stated that human rights with the United States “are constantly and very hypocritically taken care of in relation to other countries, but they do not hesitate to ignore them at home.”

Zakharova is sure the United States will continue at attempts to interfere in the affairs of Russia. “But if the United States of America chooses the tactics of constant intervention in our internal affairs, which we are talking about and bringing facts, and these facts are not hard to find, they are on the surface, – we will be interested to see how they end up doing.”

Maria Zakharova – on the criminal prosecution of participants in the storming of the Capitol:

“It is of serious concern of the ongoing campaign in the United States of persecution of the participants in the so-called storming of the Capitol on January 6 and, in general, all those who disagree with the results of the last presidential elections, which the authorities and the media obedient to them, have declared ‘domestic terrorists.’

According to available informaiton, the FBI has opened over 400 criminal cases, requested more than 500 permits in the courts to search and summon suspects, and also brought charges and has already arrested about 200 people. Severe pressure is carried out, including the treatment of relatives, acquaintances, coercion to give the necessary testimony. Moreover, people who have not even been formally charged are fired from their jobs, expelled from social networks, blocked or harassed.”

February 5, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Kremlin Expresses Regret Over Biden’s Aggressive Statements on Russia

By Evgeny Mikhaylov – Sputnik – 05.02.2021

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov has slammed [proclaimed] US President Joe Biden’s demand to free Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, saying that some kind of ultimatums are unacceptable.

“This is very aggressive and unconstructive rhetoric, to our regret… We have already said that we will not heed such statements, which are some kind of mentoring lectures”, he said

The official also expressed hope that the US has enough “political willpower” to continue constructive interaction with Moscow.

The American president previously declared that the US “will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia”, saying the days of “the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions are over”.

After Biden’s inauguration, the new US president had a phone call with President Vladimir Putin. According to the White House, Biden raised problematic issues between the two countries, such as recent cyberattacks against American companies and government bodies (which Washington still blames on Russia despite a lack of evidence), Moscow’s purported election meddling, the arrest of Navalny, and many others.

At the same time, the presidents managed to find common ground on New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) that resulted in the accord being extended.

February 5, 2021 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Belgrade may postpone or end transfer of Serbian embassy to Jerusalem

By Paul Antonopoulos | February 5, 2021

After the Israeli recognition of the so-called independent state of Kosovo on Monday, Belgrade finds itself in a difficult position and will reconsider its decision to move the Serbian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Serbia committed itself to this step by signing the September 2020 Washington Agreement suspecting that Kosovo and Israel would recognize each other eventually. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić now says that his country will “build relations with the Jewish state in accordance to the new circumstances,” suggesting the embassy move might not occur at all.

The Washington Agreement was always tailored to the interests of Israel and Kosovo and not Serbia, yet Vučić still signed it to the dismay of Serbs. The agreement signed by Kosovo’s so-called Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti and then U.S. President Donald Trump states that Kosovo and Israel agree to mutual recognition. The agreement signed between Vučić and Trump specifies that Belgrade has an obligation to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by July 1, 2021.

As much as the move between Israel and Kosovo was expected, it was probably not anticipated that the last item from the Washington Agreement would actually become the first. This is especially painful for Serbia as Vučić agreed with Kosovo’s authorities that the two would not engage in efforts for countries to recognize or stop recognizing Kosovo. This will likely bring new consequences to Serbia’s engagement with Israel.

As Serbian Foreign Minister Nikola Selaković noted, it will be interesting to observe whether there will now be Muslim and Arab countries that will recognize Kosovo or stop recognizing the illegal entity after its normalization with Israel.

So what will Muslim countries do?

Last year, thanks in large to Trump’s efforts, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco normalized their relations with Israel, while Saudi Arabia and the Jewish state have been cooperating for many years behind closed doors.

Turkey, despite being the first Muslim majority country to recognize Israel, has hypocritically reacted to the signing of the agreement between Pristina and Tel Aviv. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan claims that it does “not serve the Palestinian issue” and undermines the vision of a two-state solution. Erdoğan’s outrage is despite his country having multi-billion-dollar trade exchanges with Israel that was increasing year-on-year before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs also stated that by signing the agreement, Kosovo, which it also recognizes, “undertook to open its embassy in Jerusalem, which is contrary to international law.” Again, Turkey made another contradiction considering it violated United Nations Resolution 550 and 789 by partially reopening the town of Varosha in occupied northern Cyprus last year, and by violating the United Nations Charter Law of the Sea by illegally entering Greece’s maritime space for much of 2020.

The question of relocating the Serbian embassy also entails the question of the status of Jerusalem – while the Israelis consider it their capital, the Palestinians say it is an occupied city. Palestinian Ambassador to Serbia, Mohammed Nabhan, said immediately after the signing of the Washington Agreement that 57 countries from the Arab League and the Islamic Organization for Cooperation could withdraw their recognition of Kosovo due to their agreement with Israel. There have been no such announcements from these Islamic organizations or their members.

This is an empty threat by Nabhan as the position of Muslim and Arab states regarding Israel are no longer united, something the Palestinian Authority appears to be oblivious to. Islamic countries are extremely divided over the issue of Israel and Kosovo. Several Muslim states like Iran, Syria, Iraq and Morocco do not recognize the independence of the breakaway Serbian province. Self-proclaimed Kosovo has been recognized by leading Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt. It is difficult to expect that there will be any changes, especially since the voice of the Palestinian Authority is no longer as important as it used to be. The Palestinian question, which was once a major global issue, is now reduced, especially in the Arab World as they are now mostly focused on containing Turkish expansionism and Iranian influence.

Immediately after the signing of the Washington Agreement, it was speculated that Serbia might not fulfill what it signed if Israel recognizes the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo. The very act of recognition is only a consequence of what was already signed in Washington last year. The new American administration are most likely not against Trump’s September 2020 Agreement, meaning they will try and implement it, or at the minimum not stop it. Belgrade’s only trump card is that they can postpone or end the transfer of the Serbian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

February 5, 2021 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bill Would Force Social Media Users To Secretly Report Suspicious People To Law Enforcement

MassPrivateI | February 4, 2021

Senator Joe Manchin wants to bring DHS’s spy on your neighbors “If You See, Something Say Something”  program to social media, blogs, websites, and much more. Manchin’s bill, the “See Something, Say Something Online Act” would essentially turn social media users into Federal spies by forcing them to report suspicious people to law enforcement.

Just how bad is this bill?

This bill would essentially force anyone on social media to report suspicious “transmissions” to law enforcement.

“Known Suspicious Transmission.—The term ‘‘known suspicious transmission’’ is any suspicious transmission that an interactive computer  service should have reasonably known to have occurred or have been notified of by a director, officer, employ, agent, interactive computer service user, or State or Federal law enforcement agency.”

Major Crime —The term ‘‘major crime’’ means a Federal criminal offense that is a crime of violence (as defined 13 in section 16 of title 18, United States Code); relating to domestic or international terrorism (as those terms are defined in section 16 2331 of title 18, United States Code)

What exactly is a known suspicious transmission or major crime?

“Suspicious Transmission is defined as any post, private message, comment, tag, transaction, or any other user-generated content or transmission that government officials later determine commits, facilitates, incites, promotes, or otherwise assists the commission of a major crime. Major crimes are defined as anything involving violence, domestic, or international terrorism, or a serious drug offense.”

How could social media users, bloggers, web forum moderators, web conferencing users etc., know that a comment left or uttered by someone would later lead to them committing a major crime?

The See Something, Say Something Online Act would force social media users into red flagging every person’s comments just in case someone commits a major crime in the future.

This bill would effectively destroy the First Amendment as we know it, dispelling any vestiges of America still being a free country.

Social media users would be forced to submit a Suspicious Transmission Activity Report (STAR) on suspicious individuals within 30 days.

“In General.—If a provider of an interactive computer service detects a suspicious transmission, the interactive computer service, including any director, officer, employee, agent, or representative of such provider, shall submit to the Department a STAR describing the suspicious transmission in accordance with this section.”

As Reason warned, the See Something, Say Something Online Act would put reporting on your fellow American on steroids. It would create a glut of frivolous reports, including many that are politically motivated, or otherwise disingenuous.

Social media users and law enforcement would keep detailed personal information, including metadata of suspicious people for five years.

“Each STAR submitted under this section shall contain, at a minimum—  (1) the name, location, and other such identification information as submitted by the user to the provider of the interactive computer service; (2) the date and nature of the post, message, comment, tag, transaction, or other user-generated content or transmission detected for suspicious activity such as time, origin, and destination; and (3) any relevant text, information, and metadata related to the suspicious transmission.”

“Retention Of Records —Each provider of an interactive computer service shall— (A) maintain a copy of any STAR submitted under this section and the original record equivalent of any supporting documentation for the 5-year period beginning on the date on which the STAR was submitted. (B) make all supporting documentation available to the Department and any appropriate law enforcement agencies upon request.”

No one can tell a person that they have been flagged as suspicious

“Non-Disclosure—Except as otherwise prescribed by the Attorney General, no provider of an interactive computer service, or officer, director, employee, or agent of such a provider, subject to an order under subsection (a) may disclose the existence of, or terms of, the order to any person.”

Social media users could face prosecution for not reporting suspicious people

Imagine someone leaving a comment on social media like the police suck or calling someone a bitch, twit or twat and then they go on to commit a crime in the future. Would anyone like to guess what might happen next?

Every social media user who refused to file a STAR report on a suspicious person would open themselves up to prosecution or a lawsuit.

“Compliance—Any provider of an interactive computer service that fails to report a known suspicious transmission shall not be immune from civil or criminal liability for such transmission under section 230(c) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 230(c)).”

Where does one begin when it comes to describing just how bad this bill is?

Forcing social media users to essentially submit STAR reports on people they deem as suspicious opens up a Pandora’s box of problems.

Social media users who are forced into reporting on people could flag everyone’s comments to guard against being prosecuted or sued. This bill, if passed as it is written, would have a devastating effect on the civil rights and freedoms of every American.

February 5, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Britain’s ban on China’s global television network is a hostile and misguided move that will lead to retaliation from Beijing

By Tom Fowdy | RT | February 4, 2021

The UK communications regulator Ofcom has revoked the license of China Global Television Network (CGTN), banning it from broadcasting in the country. The channel, which was due to set up its new European headquarters in London, is accused of being editorially controlled by the country’s ruling Communist Party and thus violating broadcasting rules.

The UK has overplayed its hand with this vindictive action that demonstrates it is intent on following America’s anti-China foreign policy. When the strikeback comes, it will be more than just the BBC in Beijing’s crosshairs.

Just minutes after the Ofcom ban came through, China’s Foreign Ministry has asked the BBC to “apologise” for a report concerning Covid-19. This is a sign of things to come. In fact, it mirrors the same pattern of events from a year ago when Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, announced restrictions on Chinese media operating in the United States. This resulted in China expelling American journalists after having asked the Wall Street Journal to apologize for its coverage. The move, however, is clearly a political one, and undoubtedly a huge provocation in UK-China ties, and one which is bound to have enormous consequences, especially for the BBC’s content and coverage within China itself. The announcement comes conspicuously just a week after Beijing had declared non-recognition of UK British National Overseas (BNO) passports over controversy surrounding a migration plan for Hong Kongers.

And here’s what Britain doesn’t seem to realize. Whilst it is true that the media environment within China is tightly controlled, reciprocity matters nonetheless. The BBC is still operating and broadcasting in China, even if its reports are subject to some censorship. As a result, it is almost guaranteed that Beijing will take some form of reciprocal action, and given the BBC’s incredibly politicised coverage of China of late, it seems untenable that they wouldn’t.

Pompeo last year launched an assault on Chinese media operating in the United States. He implemented visa restrictions, demanded they reduce their numbers and made them register as diplomatic overseas missions. What even he didn’t do, however, despite his fanatical approach to Beijing, was kick them out completely or deny them a presence in America. He understood at the very least that freedom of speech was a staple of American values and that irrespective of differences between political systems, how a country’s media was treated was a medium of diplomacy. Therefore reciprocity, the idea of “tit for tat,” matters. Pompeo knew if he pushed too hard, American journalism within China, already walking on eggshells, would be finished altogether.

Not surprisingly, China retaliated. However, its diplomatic style was indirect, as opposed to explicit. Not long after Pompeo’s announcement, Beijing took issue with the Wall Street Journal, over a headline describing the country as “the sick man of Asia,” which it deemed to be derogatory,  and demanded the publication apologise. The Journal did not, and so Beijing expelled a number of its reporters as punishment.

The timing of this UK-Sino row is not a coincidence. Beijing is already frustrated with the BBC behind the scenes, but because of diplomatic considerations chose to do nothing about it. As the above illustrates, a nation cannot simply expel journalists without justification – even China knows this. To do so is to violate a norm. History is already repeating itself.

However, Beijing is increasingly unhappy with the BBC. The broadcaster has been persistent in driving forwards the narrative on issues such as Xinjiang, including commissioning a report on allegations of forced labour which led to US sanctions against the cotton sector, and then yesterday producing a graphic set of interviews whereby Chinese authorities were accused of systematic sexual abuse of the Uyghur minority. For the sake of its relationship with London, Beijing has to date acted with restraint.

However, because the UK has acted first, China now has a political casus belli to take retaliatory actions targeting journalists who consistently broadcast unfavourable or misrepresentative stories about its internal affairs. The BBC is unquestionably on the top of that list, and Beijing’s demand for an apology from it shows what lies ahead.

Inevitably, the BBC will refuse and insist that its coverage is accurate and impartial, as it always does. Thus, like what happened with the Wall Street Journal a year ago, Beijing will close the doors on them in some way, reciprocating Britain’s action in banning CGTN. This may involve expelling a correspondent or removing the BBC’s right to appear on Chinese television altogether.

It is likely to go a lot wider than tit-for-tat media strikes. This sets UK-China relations on a collision course, affirming a growing view in Beijing that the UK is now a hostile country, intent on following America’s anti-China foreign policy. This will inevitably involve China subjecting Britain to the same harsh treatment it has meted out to Australia and Canada, involving sanctions on goods and the like.

Given that there were other options before banning, the UK has definitely overplayed its hand with this. Even Pompeo, of all people, knew better than to ban CGTN completely.

Tom Fowdy is a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations with a primary focus on East Asia.

February 4, 2021 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Was Fraud in the 2020 Election Inconceivable?

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF |February 4, 2021

One of the fascinating aspects of the 2020 presidential election fraud brouhaha was the mainstream media’s certainty that there was no fraud, without even performing the semblance of an investigation. The media mindset was based on the concept of inconceivability — that it was just inconceivable that anything like that could happen in the United States. That sort of thing only happens in foreign countries, the inconceivable mindset holds.

Yet, consider all the things that the the U.S. deep state did, in secret, to prevent Salvador Allende from becoming president of Chile.

In the run-up to the 1964 Chilean presidential election, the CIA secretly spent almost $6 million in support of Allende’s opponent, Eduardo Frei. According to Wikipedia, the “CIA considered its role in the victory of Frei a great success.” The CIA concluded that Frei would not have won without the secret assistance of the CIA.

What business did the U.S. deep state have embroiling itself in a foreign election? It held that Allende, as a socialist or a communist, would pose a grave threat to U.S. “national security” if he were elected president of Chile.

Six years later, Allende ran again and achieved a plurality of votes. Since the Chilean Constitution required a majority, the election was thrown into the hands of the Chilean parliament.

The CIA took its stash of secret U.S. taxpayer money and used it in an attempt to bribe the members of the Chilean parliament to not elect Allende.

At the same time, the CIA did everything it could to instigate a military coup, notwithstanding the fact that a coup would violate Chile’s constitution. The CIA took the position that the Chilean constitution was irrelevant, given that an Allende presidency would pose a threat to “national security,” both in Chile and the United States. Given that the U.S. Constitution itself did not authorize foreign military coups, the CIA’s position was that it was irrelevant as well since “national security,” the CIA believed, was sovereign and supreme over the Constitution.

The overall commander of the Chilean armed forces, Gen. Rene Schneider, balked at the CIA’s coup proposal. His position was that the Chilean constitution controlled. Since it did not provide a coup as a way to remove a democratically elected president, the Chilean armed forces would not participate in the U.S. deep state’s illegal scheme.

To accelerate the possibility of a coup, the CIA conspired to violently kidnap Schneider. During the kidnapping attempt, Schneider was shot dead. (No CIA official or any other U.S. official has ever been brought to justice for the murder of Rene. Schneider.)

The kidnapping and murder of an innocent man ended up boomeranging for the U.S. deep state. The Chilean people were so outraged over Schneider’s murder that the Chilean parliament rejected the CIA’s bribes and ended up electing Allende president.

The U.S. deep state wasn’t finished. For the next three years, the CIA did everything it could to stir up economic chaos in the country in order to encourage people to desire a military coup to “save” the country. For example, the CIA secretly instigated a national truckers’ strike in the hope of preventing food from reaching the Chilean populace.

Finally, on September 11, 1973, amidst the economic crisis produced by Allende’s socialist economic policies and the CIA’s interventionist policies, and with the encouragement and support of the U.S. deep state, the Chilean deep state initiated a military coup in which the national-security branch of the national government went on the attack against the executive branch of the government. In what would prove to be an eerie confirmation of former President Dwight Eisenhower about the dangers that a “military-industrial complex” poses to a democracy, Chile’s military-intelligence branch of the government prevailed over Allende’s executive branch, leaving him dead.

Chile’s national-security establishment, again with the full support of the U.S. national-security establishment, proceeded to take full control over the government and rounded up, incarcerated, tortured, raped, sexually abused, executed, or disappeared over 50,000 supporters of Allende.

Now, it’s very true that it’s possible that there was no fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. But given all that the U.S. deep state did to prevent Allende from being president of Chile, can we really say that it is inconceivable that the U.S. deep state would do whatever it deemed necessary to prevent a U.S. presidential candidate that it deemed to be a threat to “national security” from becoming president?

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.

February 4, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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