Accused of Embezzlement While Robbed – the Peculiar Case Against Reiner Fuellmich

by Djamila le Pair, Pinch of Soot
November 9, 2024

The accusation that the German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich embezzled money from his own foundation, the Corona Investigative Committee (CIC), has slowly but steadily been exposed as an inversion of reality, since court proceedings started in January 2024. It is not CIC, but Fuellmich himself who has been robbed.

Fuellmich is said to have embezzled €700,000 from CIC’s donations. The money, however (plus an additional €450,000) is sitting right under everybody’s noses in a German bank account, as Edgar Siemund, one of Fuellmich’s five lawyers, exclaimed in frustration at the end of the 36^th court hearing, on Friday, 1 November.

The State Prosecution of Göttingen (where the hearings take place), however, ignores this fact. Neither does she seem interested in prosecuting the holder of the account, Marcel Templin, for illegally obtaining the funds, which consist of the majority (€1,158,000) of the €1.3 million that Fuellmich’s house sold for in 2022.

 

Politically Motivated

The political motive behind the criminal case against Fuellmich, who co-founded the CIC with three other lawyers (Dr. Justus Hoffman, Antonia Fischer and Viviane Fischer) has been getting more evident, with every court hearing.

In fact, Fuellmich had been more than an eyesore for large enterprises and the German state for decades, as he legally battled (mostly successfully) the financial giant Deutsche Bank (mortgage cases), Kühne & Nagel (bribes), and Volkswagen (emissions scandal).

Since CIC’s was founded in July 2020, however, the German government has invested (and is still investing) a considerable amount of time, money, and resources with the sole aim to silence and destroy Fuellmich financially, professionally and psychologically for once and for all.

The corona crisis transformed Fuellmich into a potential three-tiered threat to the official corona narrative and the longer term implementation of the Great Reset. Not only did Fuellmich provide, with CIC, an online platform for scientists and experts critical of the government’s corona narrative voiced their views and scientific findings, he made several attempts to get a class action suit going abroad (in New York, New Zealand, South Africa and twice in Canada) to fight governments’ abuse of human rights, the damage caused by corona measures and more specifically, the use of the PCR-test as a diagnostic tool. His third offensive was political, as the national electoral candidate for the newly established political party, Die Basis, in the run up to the German 2022 elections.

A dossier, authored by one of Germany’s intelligence services and leaked to Fuellmich’s lawyer Dr. Christof Miseré, contains an order given in 2021 to find, or alternatively “create” grounds to criminally prosecute the lawyer to make sure he would never be able hold a political position.

Not Embezzlement but Loans

The €700,000 – made up of two loans of €200,000 and €500,000 – were part of three loans for which Viviane Fischer, Reiner Fuellmich and the CIC bookkeeper signed lending contracts. Viviane Fischer borrowed €100,000. In addition, €1,000,000 was invested in Gold.

The loans and gold purchase were meant to safeguard a large part of the incoming donations against confiscation or blocking of accounts by the German government – a measure that authorities had already used against several critics of the corona narrative in 2020.

Betrayal

Viviane Fischer turned on Fuellmich publicly, on 2 September 2022, and expelled him from CIC, without informing him. On the 21^st of September she announced – again publicly, through the CIC platform – that he had embezzled €700,000, not mentioning her own loan.

Since early 2021, Justus Hoffman and Antonia Fischer had no longer been part of CIC, but were informed of Fuellmich’s alleged malfeasance by Viviane Fischer, in May or June 2022. Together, and joined by former member of parliament, Wolfgang Wodarg, they publicly discussed Fuellmich’s alleged crime during a couple of CIC broadcasts, without offering Fuellmich the opportunity to address the allegations.

Defamation Campaign

Because Fuellmich was only arrested and imprisoned in October 2023 (after being kidnapped from Mexico) and the court proceedings started as late as January 2024, both main and alternative media had ample time to publish the false accusations of embezzlement and make a big impact on public opinion.

Only during the course of the court hearings, did a different picture start to emerge. As main stream media is not, or no longer present during the hearings, this ‘other picture’ is ignored by main stream press.

Ever Changing Charges

A brief overview of the (adjusted) charge may be help to understand this intertwined and multi-player case:

• Accusation: Whitewashing

An initial attempt to prosecute Fuellmich for whitewashing donations had failed in the period June–August 2022. Two (chief) state prosecutors (one in Göttingen, one in Berlin) both found that the money had been used according to the activities and goals the CIC listed on their website: providing free (Covid-19 critical) information through online broadcasts.

• Accusation: Embezzlement

State prosecutor Simon Phillip John was subsequently transferred from Hannover to Göttingen and accepted the case. The accusations (18 in total) were submitted to him by CIC co-founders Dr. Justus Hoffman and Antonia Fischer and their law practice partner, Marcel Templin.

Templin had nothing to do with CIC, but he had initially helped Fuellmich to collect funds and register clients to start the class action suit. The partnership stopped after Templin sent out an email in which all class action suit signees had been copied in openly, instead of blind copied.

During the trial it has become clear that state prosecutor John was in high-frequent email and other contact with Hoffman, Templin and Antonia Fischer, as well as with Viviane Fischer. No written records exist of their telephone conversations which, in the case of Antonia Fischer alone, amount to at least 30. What’s more, Fuellmich’s lawyers claim the language used in the charges pressed by the three lawyers, contains phrases and terms typical for State Prosecutors. In short, the charges seem to have been formulated in close cooperation with Niedersachsen’s Prosecution Services.

• Accusation: Sham loan contracts

The five judges handling the case dismissed 16 of the 18 charges, but accepted the embezzlement charge for the €200,000 and €500,000 loans – listed as two separate charges.

After the defence team produced the signed contracts for the loans – of which State Prosecutor John said that he had ‘forgotten’ to include them, – the embezzlement claim became difficult to sustain. Chairing judge Schindler then decided that the loan contracts had no official status and should be considered as sham contracts.

This new view crumbled, too, once it transpired that CIC’s registration as a foundation had never been completed. What’s more, with the amount of time that had elapsed since pre-registration, it was no longer possible to ever get it registered. Since CIC would have to be considered a civil law partnership in which each of the partners were eligible to spend the organisation’s money as they saw fit, there was no obligation to make contracts. Therefore, the contracts could be not be considered to be sham contracts.

• Accusation: No intention to pay back the loan

Parallel to the sham contract accusation ran the assumption that Fuellmich never intended to pay back the €700,000. After hearing the testimonies of three witnesses, spontaneously invited by the defence team in July and August 2024, which stated the opposite, this assumption, too, had to be retracted.

• Accusation: Loan was not kept available for spending

The latest interpretation of the charge against Fuellmich was that he should have kept the money available at all times. Fuellmich had invested the money in upgrading his house in Göttingen, since he and his wife intended to sell the house. They were planning to move to their ranch in California, from where he would run both his German and Californian practice. The house was paid off and investing the money in his property would keep it safe from the overreaching arm of the German government, it was assumed. After the sale of the house, the money would be returned to CIC.

The fact that the €100,000 borrowed by Viviane Fischer had also not been available for instant pay-outs, and had not been backed by real estate or other assets did not pose a problem to the court. It sufficed that her husband is known to be wealthy, even thought she used the loan in part to pay off a debt to her husband.

A Million Dollar Robbery

When the house was indeed sold, the solicitor transferred only about €140,000 of the €1,300,000 sale’s price to Fuellmich’s account. The other €1,158,000 was – unbeknown to Fuellmich – transferred to the account of Marcel Templin, making it impossible for Fuellmich to pay back the loan.

During the testimony of A.B., it transpired that Marcel Templin and Dr. Justus Hoffman had pressured both the solicitor and the buyer into facilitating this transaction. So far, neither the State Prosecutor, nor Antonia Fischer and Dr. Justus Hoffman have made any attempt to retrieve the money from Templin. Fuellmich’s own attempt is still being processed.

Not having a loan available at the drop of a hat, is hardly a crime that justifies kidnapping a suspect for. It is not grave enough to keep a man in jail while his trial is ongoing, let alone to shackle him and keep him in solitary confinement for five months.

The State Prosecution Services must have known the case had become untenable and that something had to change, as indeed something did during the 37^th court hearing – which will be the topic of the next and upcoming article on this platform.

Petition for Reiner Fuellmich:  https://www.freereinerfuellmich.org/

Write to Reiner Fuellmich:

JVA Rosdorf
Dr. Reiner Fuellmich
Am Grossen Sieke 8
37124 Rosdorf Germany

• Letters, cards and postcards are allowed
• No glitter on the envelope
• No stamps or money in the envelope
• Do not send books or any other objects, they will be refused
• Do not write about the criminal proceedings against Reiner Fuellmich, although scanning on his incoming post seems to have eased up.
• Put your name on each page of your letter and number the pages. If they do check the mail, at least Reiner will know the order of your writing and can see if pages are missing.

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Cover image source: Pinch of Soot

The Politics of Fear: Laying the Groundwork for Fascism, American-Style

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
October 28, 2024

“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”

~ Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist

America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.

The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.

Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.

This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live.

Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.

We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of conformists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government, fear of those on the Right, fear of those on the Left… The list goes on and on.

The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.

Fear makes people stupid.

Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.

Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.

All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police and marauding SWAT teams.

America has already entered a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of their so-called “anti-government” views, and law-abiding Americans are having their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented, and their communications monitored.

These threats are not to be underestimated.

Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.

This language of fear has given rise to a politics of fear whose only aim is to distract and divide us. In this way, we have been discouraged from thinking analytically and believing that we have any part to play in solving the problems before us. Instead, we have been conditioned to point the finger at the other Person or vote for this Politician or support this Group, because they are the ones who will fix it. Except that they can’t and won’t fix the problems plaguing our communities.

Nevertheless, fear remains the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.

The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, disease, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America. However, with crime at an all-time low, is such fear rational?

Statistics show that you are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack. You are 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane. You are 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack. You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack. You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocating in bed than from a terrorist attack. And you are 9 more times likely to choke to death in your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack.

Indeed, those living in the American police state are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. Thus, the government’s endless jabbering about terrorism amounts to little more than propaganda—the propaganda of fear—a tactic used to terrorize, cower and control the population.

In turn, the government’s stranglehold on power and extreme paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats has resulted in a populace that is increasingly viewed as the government’s enemies.

Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?

So far, these tactics—terrorizing the citizenry over the government’s paranoia and overblown fears while treating them like criminals—are working to transform the way “we the people” view ourselves and our role in this nation.

Indeed, fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

The American people have been reduced to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”

Sanchez continues:

I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…

I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…

Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.

As history makes clear, fear and government paranoia lead to fascist, totalitarian regimes.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.

The following, derived by from John T. Flynn’s 1944 treatise on fascism As We Go Marching are a few of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state:

• The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).
• The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.
• The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.
• The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
• The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.
• The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.
• The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.
• The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.
• The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.
• The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.

The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.

“Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized. Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect,” writes economist Jeffrey Tucker. “It’s incorrect to call fascism either right wing or left wing. It is both and neither… fascism does not seek to overthrow institutions like commercial establishments, family, religious centers, and civic traditions. It seeks to control them… it preserves most of what people hold dear but promises to improve economic, social, and cultural life through unifying their operations under government control.”

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.

We are at a critical crossroads in American history.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it has become the driving force behind the American police state.

All of which begs the question what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.

As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?

There is no easy answer, but one thing is true: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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Cover image based on creative commons work of: ElisaRiva & GDJ

The Danger Is Real: The Deep State’s Plot to Destabilize the Nation Is Working

~~~

“Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of ‘noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.’

“And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting?

“They are, according to the Pentagon, ‘adversaries.’

“They are ‘threats.’

“They are the ‘enemy.’

“They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

“In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

~ John Whitehead

~~~

The Danger Is Real: The Deep State’s Plot to Destabilize the Nation Is Working

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
October 21, 2024

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.”

— H. L. Mencken

If the three-ring circus that is the looming presidential election proves anything, it is that the Deep State’s plot to destabilize the nation is working.

The danger is real.

Caught up in the heavily dramatized electoral showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Americans have become oblivious to the multitude of ways in which the government is goosestepping all over our freedoms on a daily basis.

Especially alarming is the extent to which those on both sides are allowing themselves to be gaslighted by both Trump and Harris about critical issues of the day, selectively choosing to hear only what they want to hear when it casts the opposition in a negative light.

This is true whether you’re talking about immigration and border control, health care, national security, the nation’s endless wars, protections for free speech, or the militarization of the U.S. government.

For starters, there’s the free speech double standard, what my good friend Nat Hentoff used to refer to as the “free speech for me but not for thee” phenomenon in which the First Amendment’s protections only apply to those with whom we might agree.

Despite her claims to being a champion for the rule of law, which in our case is the U.S. Constitution, Harris isn’t averse to policing so-called “hate” speech. In this, Harris is not unlike those on both the Right and the Left who continue to express a distaste for unregulated, free speech online, especially when it comes to speech with which they might disagree.

Then there’s Trump, never a fan of free speech protections for his critics, who has been particularly vocal about his desire to see the military vanquish “radical left lunatics,” which he has dubbed “the enemy from within.”

If it were only about muzzling free speech activities, that would be concerning enough.

But Trump’s enthusiasm for using the military to target domestic enemies of the state should send off warning bells, especially coinciding as it does with the Department of Defense’s recent re-issuance of Directive 5240.01, which empowers the military to assist law enforcement “in situations where a confrontation between civilian law enforcement and civilian individuals or groups is reasonably anticipated.”

This is what martial law looks like—a government of force that relies on the military to enforce its authority—and it’s exactly what America’s founders feared, which is why they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

Responding to concerns that the military would be used for domestic policing, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, which makes it a crime for the government to use the military to carry out arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other activities normally handled by a civilian police force.

The increasing militarization of the police, the use of sophisticated weaponry against Americans and the government’s increasing tendency to employ military personnel domestically have all but eviscerated historic prohibitions such as the Posse Comitatus Act.

Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

Unfortunately, most Americans seem relatively untroubled by the fact that our constitutional republic is being transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

The seeds of chaos that have been sown in recent years are all part of the Deep State’s plans to usher in martial law.

Observe for yourself what has been happening right before our eyes.

Domestic terrorism fueled by government entrapment schemes. Civil unrest stoked to dangerous levels by polarizing political rhetoric. A growing intolerance for dissent that challenges the government’s power grabs. Police brutality tacitly encouraged by the executive branch, conveniently overlooked by the legislatures, and granted qualified immunity by the courts. A weakening economy exacerbated by government schemes that favor none but a select few. Heightened foreign tensions and blowback due to the military industrial complex’s profit-driven quest to police and occupy the globe.

This is no conspiracy theory.

There’s trouble brewing, and the government is masterminding a response using the military.

Just take a look at “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030, but the future is here ahead of schedule.

We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.

By waging endless wars abroad, by bringing the instruments of war home, by transforming police into extensions of the military, by turning a free society into a suspect society, by treating American citizens like enemy combatants, by discouraging and criminalizing a free exchange of ideas, by making violence its calling card through SWAT team raids and militarized police, by fomenting division and strife among the citizenry, by acclimating the citizenry to the sights and sounds of war, and by generally making peaceful revolution all but impossible, the government has engineered an environment in which domestic violence is becoming almost inevitable.

The danger signs are screaming out a message

The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.

According to the Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. government is grooming its armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

And then comes the kicker.

Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

Drain the swamps.

Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?

Ah yes.

Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans.

Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.”

And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting?

They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.”

They are “threats.”

They are the “enemy.”

They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.

If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.

Suddenly it all begins to make sense.

The events of recent years: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.

The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls.

Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that there is nothing they can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

Before long, no one will even notice the floundering economy, the blowback arising from military occupations abroad, the police shootings, the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and all of the other mounting concerns.

It’s happening already.

The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

Few seem to care about the government’s endless wars abroad that leave communities shattered, families devastated and our national security at greater risk of blowback.

The Deep State’s tactics are working.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helm military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and  Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned about the government’s nefarious schemes to lock down the nation.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.

And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Just think about it for a minute: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars.

Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.

Did I say Machiavellian? This is downright evil.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

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.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re already enemies of the state.

It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by Deep State propaganda.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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Cover image credit: sdmaurya40

Brace Yourselves: A Tsunami Approaches

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
October 15, 2024

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security… And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”

—Historian Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.

As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Mind you, 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.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.

Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

The world has been down this road before, as historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free.

We are at our most vulnerable right now.

The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

We’re in a national state of denial, yet no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

No matter how often the team colors change, the playbook remains the same. The leopard does not change its spots.

Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that nothing has changed.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).

Consider for yourselves:

• Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.
• SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
• The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.
• Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.
• For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
• Censorship hasn’t stopped.
• The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
• Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
• The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements.
• The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers.
• Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws.
• The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.”
• The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad.
• The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
• And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep.

So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past century, it will be just another lie.

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” historian Robert Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on.”

The German people backed Hitler because for the majority of them, life was good.

In a nutshell, life was good because their creature comforts remained undiminished, their bank accounts remained flush, and they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor.

Life is good in America, too.

Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Life is good in America as long as you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%.

Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

So, please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to any one particular administration has not been paying attention.

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Cover image credit: SingingAngler

German Lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich’s Persecution in Prison

Today, Germany Has Become Neo-Nazi on Steroids

by Reiner Fuellmich and Peter Koenig, Global Research
October 14, 2024

Introduction by Peter Koenig

13 October 2024 will be the first anniversary of Reiner Fuellmich’s pre-trial prison custody. His conditions, especially for someone who has not committed and is not suspected of a criminal act of violence are, to say it benignly, horrendous, bordering on torture.

Let me remind you, Dr. Reiner Fuellmich in 2020 founded the Corona Investigative Committee (CIC) in Germany, investigating the worldwide corona fraud. In a CIC internal strife, probably instigated from outside forces and secret services, he was unjustly accused of embezzlement. The CIC collapsed. Dr. Fuellmich attempted to return to California, where he had a license to practice law and where he also owned a house.

For some “bureaucratic” formalities (cooperation secret services Germany-US), he was “temporarily” refused entry to the US. He then settled with his wife in Mexico, where he created the International Crimes Investigative Committee (ICIC), and continued investigating crimes committed by the covid scam, as well as related social and economic misconducts by those who dictated the “rules-based order”, overriding all international, national and local laws.

In March 2023, the German Government issued an arrest warrant for Dr. Fuellmich. Since he had not committed a violent crime, an extradition order has no value outside of the EU / Schengen countries. 

Therefore, the German Government – through their secret agents – lured him to a German representation in Mexico, where they kidnapped him on 12 October 2023, took him immediately – as is, without a change of clothes, or even a toothbrush – to the airport, and flew him between two German guards to Frankfurt, where he was immediately arrested on 13 October 2023. Ever since, Reiner has been in pre-trial custody, under the most inhumane conditions, in the Göttingen high-security prison in Rosdorf.

Pretrial custody is on average six months in Germany, at most 11 months. He is detained in solitary confinement, cannot see and talk to anyone, not to his fellow prisoners, must walk alone for his daily hour of exercise in the prison yard, and can have contact by phone or visits by his family for no more than three hours a month.

For every court appearance, Reiner is body-searched, then handcuffed, tightly foot-shackled, and accompanied by two fully machine-gun armed prison guards with bulletproof vests – as if he was a mass murderer.

He is shackled and body-searched, naked, every time the court interrupts, and he is led to an isolated basement room of the court to wait.

This deeply dehumanizing humiliation reminds of German concentration camps during Hitler’s Third Reich regime over 80 years back. 

One would think that humanity has learned from the horrors of WWII, but nada, zilch, nothing.

Humanity is led by the same inhumane monsters; except much worse today. 

Then, the Third Reich was confined to Europe and North Africa; today, the New World Order or One World Order –  one that wants to become One World Government, for which Germany is again playing a leading role, spans the entire globe, all 193 UN member countries.

There is seemingly no way to escape. 

But as history has shown time and time again, any system of excesses, be it injustice no end, war atrocities, abhorrent dehumanization with torture, corruption and genocide no limits, will fall. There is no doubt that the diabolical Cult that allows Germany to hold an honest citizen in such atrocious prison conditions, wants to scare and shut up any others that may speak up against the crimes committed, and are still being committed, by the German Government, and by association, other western governments. 

Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is a western world political prisoner.

Reiner’s description, illustrations and photos speak for themselves.

*

Reiner Fuellmich – A Political Prisoner in the Federal Republic of Germany

A report by Dr. Reiner Fuellmich on his conditions of detention in the Göttingen high-security prison in Rosdorf, in response to the author Kerstin Heusinger, Germany correspondent for the French-language online publication BAM! With exclusive photos from the courtroom and sketches.

7:00 a.m., court date for the civil rights activist and lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich:

“Heavily armed officers with pistols and submachine guns equipped with bulletproof vests are there to greet me. They try to persuade me to put on a bulletproof vest, which I consistently refuse. They then make me sign a waiver releasing them from liability if I am injured or killed by gunfire.

One of the officers searches my body and then, as always, forces me to kneel on a stool while he puts ankle cuffs on me.

He ties a wide leather belt around my waist and then puts handcuffs on me, which are attached to the belt with chains that are in turn secured with a large padlock.

The ankle cuffs force me to take very small steps, making it difficult to get in and out of the transport vehicle. If I were to trip while cuffed like this, I would not be able to stop or soften my fall and would likely break my wrists.

Prison officials told me that they had never seen a defendant held in pre-trial custody for more than 11 months for a simple offense (and not for a serious crime or an act of terrorism), kept in solitary confinement, and, above all, brought to court hearings handcuffed at the hands and feet.

In court, I was taken to the basement, to a tiled cell with a simple wooden bench. Another strip-search. Then I had to wait to be handcuffed and led into the courtroom. Each time the proceedings were interrupted, I was handcuffed again and taken back to the “basement”.

Each time I returned from court, I was stripped naked in a transit room to undergo a thorough body search.

Harassment, humiliation, punishment

Mr. D., the deputy director responsible for pre-trial detention, ordered my complete isolation on the grounds that my legal advice to other detainees could incite them to revolt.

The Rosdorf prison is divided into two sections: the penal section (400 detainees) and the pre-trial detention section (80 detainees), where I have been detained since October 13, 2023.

The pre-trial detainees are spread over 4 levels. Those considered to be particularly dangerous or vulnerable are isolated on level A0, where security is increased and additional restrictions are imposed. I was placed there.

Like the other inmates on level A0, I am strictly forbidden to talk to any other inmate.

For 11 months I have had no internet access, no computer, and no cell phone. I am only allowed to watch TV. My only contact with the outside world is my lawyer and the 3 hours per month for visits or phone calls with my family. Yes, a total of 3 hours per month.

My isolation goes so far that even my daily walk in the courtyard must be done alone. This one-hour walk is suspended if I am caught communicating with another inmate, even if it is only a hand signal. Yes, if I exchange a greeting with a fellow inmate through the bars of a window, even if I just nod my head – he and I will be punished immediately.

All disciplinary measures are imposed without stating reasons and without the possibility of appeal.

Everyone is guilty!

The treatment of pre-trial detainees is particularly poor and borders on torture. Mr. D., who administers pre-trial detention, and also works as a social worker, makes no secret of his convictions: he believes that if you are in pre-trial detention, you are guilty.

His disregard for the presumption of innocence is the main reason why I was placed in solitary confinement.

He has committed serious and intentional breaches of duty, which I have witnessed. These violations were covered up by the prison management. With two exceptions, the security officers carry out the orders they receive without compunction, like robots.

On August 8, 2024, I asked to speak to the deputy director of the penal institution. I informed her that personal belongings and documents had disappeared from my cell during my absence for court hearings. The cells are normally searched regularly according to strict rules. These thefts occurred outside of the official inspections, which are recorded.

Persecution: Dr. Reiner Fuellmich refers to the case of Redzep [another, former case of unjustly incarcerating a man for murder which he did not commit, and the court knew it]

“The seriousness of the situation is demonstrated by the attacks on a pre-trial detainee, Kevin Redzep, who was seriously injured. He has allowed me to publish his name and story. He comes from Montenegro and although he is intelligent and speaks several languages, he cannot write or read German fluently. He was placed in a department where there were several violent inmates or those accused of premeditated murder. He was called a “gypsy” by his fellow inmates, threatened, and asked for help from Mr. D., who refused to take him to the high-risk inmates. The next day, Kevin Redzep was attacked by three fellow inmates during a walk. He was hit over the head with a glass bottle so severely that the zygomatic bone above his left eye was crushed and his vision was at risk.

On July 9, 2024, Kevin Redzep had to undergo surgery before returning to Rosdorf Prison, even before he had recovered. He was involved in another physical altercation with five or six prison officers who threw him to the ground and injured him again in the head. Mr. D. then ordered the isolation of Kevin Redzep, who was already severely traumatized.

Kevin Redzep, who wanted to sue Mr. D, the penal institution, and the state of Lower Saxony for assault, asked me for help. When Mr. D. learned that I had advised this inmate and provided him with a lawyer, Kevin Redzep disappeared. It is assumed that he was transferred to another prison. Since then, Ms. Wörmer, my lawyer, has been trying in vain to find him, hoping that he is still alive.

A glimmer of hope.

Despite the disciplinary punishments they face, the pre-trial detainees show solidarity with me. They encourage me. They shout to me, for example, “Don’t give up, keep going.”

Some prison officials have seen through the pandemic scam and know that my trial is a sham staged by the secret services. They let me know and wish me well.

What helps me most is the enormous support from the international public.

I receive a large number of letters that are no longer read by the prison administration. I read all the letters and I am deeply touched by the affection they show. I try to respond as best I can.

Sometimes I see the pickets and the people who greet me, while I’m sitting in the transport vehicle to court.

I feel the remarkably strong connection to all those who support me. It is this connection that allows us to overcome adversity together.

I have to go to the medical service twice a week to be examined because I refused to give blood. I argued that any medical act, especially any invasive medical act, constitutes a violation of physical integrity if the patient does not voluntarily give consent. I am therefore regularly examined because a prisoner suffering from tuberculosis could potentially have infected people with whom he has been in contact.

One of the prison doctors expressed sympathy for my work. He also told me that the medical staff believe that the health of many detainees is incompatible with detention. However, the prison management prefers to ignore this fact.

After having personally witnessed what happens in pre-trial detention – the suspension of the fundamental rights of the accused, their difficulties in accessing a defense that really cares about their fate – I am convinced that prisons only benefit those who profit from them, with pre-trial detention being more lucrative than post-sentencing detention.

I have not met a defendant who I would describe as “evil”. I have met many, many remand prisoners who appear innocent to me, or who, above all, need therapeutic treatment, as a prison doctor admitted.

If we did not need a few prisons for a few sociopaths, for example those responsible for the pandemic, the wars, the massacres like in Gaza and for the corrupt of the system, I would be in favor of abolishing prisons.”

This statement was recorded by Dr. Reiner Fuellmich on the phone of his lawyer, Katja Wörmer.

It was translated into French by Kerstin Heusinger; and translated into English by Peter Koenig via Deepl.com

Photos and sketches: Kerstin Heusinger

Plan of his cell: Dr. Reiner Fuellmich

Concept and design of the original article: Michel Caulea and Karo

Click here to read the original German version.

This report first appeared (in French) on BAM! NEWS.

All illustrations can be seen in the original German article.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Featured image is by Kerstin Heusinger

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America Is Falling Apart: Our National Priorities Are in Dire Need of Restructuring

By John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
October 02, 2024

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

~ Bob Dylan

A water main breaks every two minutes somewhere in the U.S., resulting in contaminated drinking supplies and boil water notices.

One out of three bridges in the U.S. needs repair, endangering hundreds of millions of commuters. More than 42,000 bridges across the country, carrying about 167 million vehicles each day, are in disrepair.

It is estimated that 300 million people could face power outages across the United States between 2024 and 2028, due in large part to widespread power grid failures.

No wonder U.S. infrastructure received a C- on the Infrastructure Report Card.

America is falling apart.

Collapsing bridges, buckling roads, overheated railways, deteriorating power lines, contaminated water lines, outdated public transportation, overtaxed power grids, aging ports and waterways, unsafe tunnels and highways, and spotty or insufficient telecommunications assets are all becoming frequent hallmarks of the American way of life.

If the nation is woefully unprepared to deal with climate disasters such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts, despite the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that have been pledged to shore up the nation’s infrastructure problems, it is because politicians across the political spectrum have failed us.

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene makes this failure by the government to put the needs of the American people first painfully evident. Entire towns are under water. Roadways have collapsed or are otherwise impassable. Potable water is scarce. More than 1.5 million households are still without power.

Clearly, our national priorities need to be re-examined.

While the politicians play partisan games with our tax dollars, the nation’s critical infrastructure—both the physical foundations of the nation and the figurative foundations of our freedoms—continues to be neglected and deprioritized in favor of grandstanding, bloated military budgets on endless wars abroad, foreign aid to shore up the infrastructure and military defenses of international allies, and all manner of graft and pork barrel spending.

When all is said and done, the bread-and-circus distractions and sleight-of-hand political theater being trotted out in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms adds nothing of real value to the lives of the average American.

It’s time to fix what’s broken in this country.

For starters, we need an overhaul of the nation’s infrastructure.

According to Time magazine, “Throughout the country, millions of Americans don’t have access to or can’t afford broadband internet service. In excess of 2 million people live without running water or basic plumbing. For too long, the American public has had to carry on while these deficiencies have gone unattended. The political will has been weak or inattentive, the rewards too far removed from electoral advantage.”

In other words, the politicians who dance to the tune of the oligarchic elite aren’t motivated to do anything about our failing infrastructure because they get nothing out of it: no votes, no money, no power.

This isn’t about whether the Republicans or Democrats have better policies.

Indeed, both parties’ priorities are disconcertingly alike: both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.

This is about the plight of the American people who continue to be treated like a permanent underclass.

Anyone who believes that this presidential election will bring about any real change in how the American government does business is either incredibly naive, woefully out-of-touch, or oblivious to the fact that as an in-depth Princeton University study shows, we now live in an oligarchy that is “of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.”

When a country spends close to $10 billion to select what is, for all intents and purposes, a glorified homecoming king or queen to occupy the White House, while 38 million of its people live in poverty, and nearly 7 million Americans are out of work, and more than 600,000 Americans are homeless, that’s a country whose priorities are out of step with the needs of its people.

Overhauling the nation’s infrastructure will take a significant amount of money, which won’t happen as long as the U.S. government continues to fund the military industry complex and its voracious appetite for endless wars.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

The American Empire is approaching a breaking point.

This is exactly the scenario President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

Yet as Eisenhower recognized, the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities are beyond grave:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.

The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

If we are to have any hope of restoring both the structural and freedom foundations of this nation, we’ll need to start by getting our priorities in order, and that means focusing on what really matters: shoring up our battered Bill of Rights and investing in the American homeland.

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Cover image credit: Mediamodifier

Hidden Agendas: Beware of the Government’s Push for a Digital Currency

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
September 24, 2024

“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.”

~ Thomas Paine

The government wants your money.

It will beg, steal or borrow if necessary, but it wants your money any way it can get it.

The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to making us any safer.

Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

This is what comes of those $1.2 trillion spending bills: someone’s got to foot the bill.

Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power and control has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, tickets and penalties.

No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough (case in point: the endless stopgap funding deals and constant ratcheting up of the debt ceiling), so the government has to keep introducing new plans to empower its agents to seize Americans’ bank accounts.

Make way for the digital dollar.

Whether it’s the central bank digital currency favored by President Biden, or the cryptocurrency being hawked by former President Trump, the end result will still be a form of digital money that makes it easier to track, control and punish the citizenry.

For instance, weeks before the Biden Administration made headlines with its support for a government-issued digital currency, the FBI and the Justice Department quietly moved ahead with plans for a cryptocurrency enforcement team (translation: digital money cops), a virtual asset exploitation unit tasked with investigating crypto crimes and seizing virtual assets, and a crypto czar to oversee it all.

No surprises here, of course.

This is how the government operates: by giving us tools to make our lives “easier” while, in the process, making it easier for the government to crack down.

Indeed, this shift to a digital currency is a global trend.

More than 100 other countries are considering introducing their own digital currencies.

China has already adopted a government-issued digital currency, which not only allows it to surveil and seize people’s financial transactions, but can also work in tandem with its social credit score system to punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). As China expert Akram Keram wrote for The Washington Post, “With digital yuan, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] will have direct control over and access to the financial lives of individuals, without the need to strong-arm intermediary financial entities. In a digital-yuan-consumed society, the government easily could suspend the digital wallets of dissidents and human rights activists.”

Where China goes, the United States eventually follows.

Inevitably, a digital currency will become part of our economy and a central part of the government’s surveillance efforts.

Combine that with ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) initiatives that are tantamount to social media credit scores for corporations, and you will find that we’re traveling the same road as China towards digital authoritarianism. As journalist Jon Brookin warns: “Digital currency issued by a central bank can be used as a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions.”

As such, digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.

This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. Much like the war on drugs and the war on terror, this so-called “war on cash” has been sold to the public as a means of fighting terrorists, drug dealers, tax evaders and even COVID-19 germs.

In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. The rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue.

According to economist Steve Forbes, “The real reason for this war on cash—start with the big bills and then work your way down—is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.”

This is how a cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—plays right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).

Despite what we know about the government and its history of corruption, bumbling, fumbling and data breaches, not to mention how easily technology can be used against us, the shift to a cashless society is really not a hard sell for a society increasingly dependent on technology for the most mundane aspects of life.

In much the same way that Americans have opted into government surveillance through the convenience of GPS devices and cell phones, digital cash—the means of paying with one’s debit card, credit card or cell phone—is becoming the de facto commerce of the American police state.

At one time, it was estimated that smart phones would replace cash and credit cards altogether by 2020. Since then, growing numbers of businesses have adopted no-cash policies, including certain airlines, hotels, rental car companies, restaurants and retail stores. In Sweden, even the homeless and churches accept digital cash.

Making the case for a digital wallet, journalist Lisa Rabasca Roepe argues that there’s no longer a need for cash. “More and more retailers and grocery stores are embracing Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Samsung Pay, and Android Pay,” notes Roepe. “PayPal’s app is now accepted at many chain stores including Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Home Depot, and Office Depot. Walmart and CVS have both developed their own payment apps while their competitors Target and RiteAid are working on their own apps.”

So what’s really going on here?

Despite all of the advantages that go along with living in a digital age—namely, convenience—it’s hard to imagine how a cashless world navigated by way of a digital wallet doesn’t signal the beginning of the end for what little privacy we have left and leave us vulnerable to the likes of government thieves, data hackers and an all-knowing, all-seeing Orwellian corpo-governmental state.

First, when I say privacy, I’m not just referring to the things that you don’t want people to know about, those little things you do behind closed doors that are neither illegal nor harmful but embarrassing or intimate. I am also referring to the things that are deeply personal and which no one need know about, certainly not the government and its constabulary of busybodies, nannies, Peeping Toms, jail wardens and petty bureaucrats.

Second, we’re already witnessing how easy it will be for government agents to manipulate digital wallets for their own gain in order to track your movements, monitor your activities and communications, and ultimately shut you down. For example, civil asset forfeiture schemes are becoming even more profitable for police agencies thanks to ERAD (Electronic Recovery and Access to Data) devices supplied by the Department of Homeland Security that allow police to not only determine the balance of any magnetic-stripe card (i.e., debit, credit and gift cards) but also freeze and seize any funds on pre-paid money cards. In fact, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment for police to scan or swipe your credit card. Expect those numbers to skyrocket once digital money cops show up in full force.

Third, a government-issued digital currency will give the government the ultimate control of the economy and complete access to the citizenry’s pocketbook. While the government might tout the ease with which it can deposit stimulus funds into the citizenry’s accounts, such a system could also introduce what economists refer to as “negative interest rates.” Instead of being limited by a zero bound threshold on interest rates, the government could impose negative rates on digital accounts in order to control economic growth. “If the cash is electronic, the government can just erase 2 percent of your money every year,” said David Yermack, a finance professor at New York University.

Fourth, a digital currency will open Americans—and their bank accounts—up to even greater financial vulnerabilities from hackers and government agents alike.

Fifth, digital authoritarianism will redefine what it means to be free in almost every aspect of our lives. Again, we must look to China to understand what awaits us. As Human Rights Watch analyst Maya Wang explains: “Chinese authorities use technology to control the population all over the country in subtler but still powerful ways. The central bank is adopting digital currency, which will allow Beijing to surveil—and control—people’s financial transactions. China is building so-called safe cities, which integrate data from intrusive surveillance systems to predict and prevent everything from fires to natural disasters and political dissent. The government believes that these intrusions, together with administrative actions, such as denying blacklisted people access to services, will nudge people toward ‘positive behaviors,’ including greater compliance with government policies and healthy habits such as exercising.”

Short of returning to a pre-technological, Luddite age, there’s really no way to pull this horse back now that it’s left the gate. To our detriment, we have virtually no control over who accesses our private information, how it is stored, or how it is used. And in terms of our bargaining power over digital privacy rights, we have been reduced to a pitiful, unenviable position in which we can only hope and trust that those in power will treat our information with respect.

At a minimum, before any kind of digital currency is adopted, we need stricter laws on data privacy and an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices by the government and its corporate partners.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the ramifications of any government having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

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Cover image credit: TheDigitalArtist

Don’t Trust the Government. Not with Your Privacy, Property or Your Freedoms

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
September 17, 2024

“In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

—Thomas Jefferson

Public trust in the government to “do what is right” understandably remains at an all-time low.

After all, how do you trust a government that continuously sidesteps the Constitution and undermines our rights? You can’t.

When you consider all the ways “we the people” are being bullied, beaten, bamboozled, targeted, tracked, repressed, robbed, impoverished, imprisoned and killed by the government, one can only conclude that you shouldn’t trust the government with your privacy, your property, your life, or your freedoms.

Consider for yourself.

Don’t trust the government with your privacy, digital or otherwise. In the more than two decades since 9/11, the military-security industrial complex has operated under a permanent state of emergency that, in turn, has given rise to a digital prison that grows more confining and inescapable by the day. Wall-to wall surveillance, monitored by AI software and fed to a growing network of fusion centers, render the twin concepts of privacy and anonymity almost void. By conspiring with corporations, the Department of Homeland Security “fueled a massive influx of money into surveillance and policing in our cities, under a banner of emergency response and counterterrorism.”

Don’t trust the government with your property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.

Don’t trust the government with your finances. The U.S. government—and that includes the current administration—is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, and “we the taxpayers” are being forced to foot the bill for the government’s fiscal insanity. The national debt is $35 trillion and growing, yet there seems to be no end in sight when it comes to the government’s fiscal insanity. According to Forbes, Congress has raised, extended or revised the definition of the debt limit 78 times since 1960 in order to allow the government to essentially fund its existence with a credit card.

Don’t trust the government with your health. For all intents and purposes, “we the people” have become lab rats in the government’s secret experiments, which include MKULTRA and the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. Indeed, you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins. Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.

Don’t trust the government with your life: At a time when growing numbers of unarmed people have been shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety, even the most benign encounters with police can have fatal consequences. The number of Americans killed by police continues to grow, with the majority of those killed as a result of police encounters having been suspected of a non-violent offense or no crime at all, or during a traffic violation. According a report by Mapping Police Violence, police killed more people in 2022 than any other year within the past decade. In 98% of those killings, police were not charged with a crime.

Don’t trust the government with your freedoms. For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people. Freedom no longer means what it once did. This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” On paper, we may be technically free, but in reality, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

Remember the purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.

Unfortunately, what we have been saddled with is, in almost every regard, the exact opposite of an institution dedicated to protecting the lives and liberties of its people.

“We the people” should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn can’t be trusted.

So what’s the answer?

For starters, get back to basics. Get to know your neighbors, your community, and your local officials. This is the first line of defense when it comes to securing your base: fortifying your immediate lines.

Second, understand your rights. Know how your local government is structured. Who serves on your city council and school boards? Who runs your local jail: has it been coopted by private contractors? What recourse does the community have to voice concerns about local problems or disagree with decisions by government officials?

Third, know the people you’re entrusting with your local government. Are your police chiefs being promoted from within your community? Are your locally elected officials accessible and, equally important, are they open to what you have to say? Who runs your local media? Does your newspaper report on local events? Who are your judges? Are their judgments fair and impartial? How are prisoners being treated in your local jails?

Finally, don’t get so trusting and comfortable that you stop doing the hard work of holding your government accountable. We’ve drifted a long way from the local government structures that provided the basis for freedom described by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, but we are not so far gone that we can’t reclaim some of its vital components.

As an article in The Federalist points out:

“Local government is fundamental not so much because it’s a “laboratory” of democracy but because it’s a school of democracy. Through such accountable and democratic government, Americans learn to be democratic citizens. They learn to be involved in the common good. They learn to take charge of their own affairs, as a community. Tocqueville writes that it’s because of local democracy that Americans can make state and Federal democracy work—by learning, in their bones, to expect and demand accountability from public officials and to be involved in public issues.”

To put it another way, think nationally but act locally.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there is still a lot Americans can do to topple the police state tyrants, but any revolution that has any hope of succeeding needs to be prepared to reform the system from the bottom up. And that will mean re-learning step by painful step what it actually means to be a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

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Cover image based on creative commons work of GDJ

Covid, 9/11 & Forever War

From the war on terror to the “pandemic”, the elite are constructing fake threats to start wars that never have to end. 

by Kit Knightly, OffGuardian
originally published September 13, 2021

“The war was not meant to be won. It was meant to be continuous.”

George Orwell, 1984

Our 9/11 coverage this year, the 20th anniversary, has been focused on viewing the attacks of 2001 through the lens of the Covid “pandemic” rollout.

The point is not that both Covid19 and 9/11 are necessarily part of the same grand plan, were carried out by the same people, or were in any way directly connected. Rather, they are thematically connected, on the meta-level.

They spring from the same collective urge all rulers and governments harbour, and are employed to the same end.

They are different tools designed to achieve the same end. Different approaches to the same problem. Different evolutionary stages of the same animal: The decades-long change in the core aims of warfare and even the very meaning of “war” itself.

War has always been vital to the preservation of the state. Wars make rulers rich, and people scared. They unite nations behind leaders, and distract from domestic political issues.

But, as nations become more powerful, weapon technology more advanced, and global power centralises in giant corporations rather than nations, war – in the traditional sense – becomes more expensive, more dangerous, and largely meaningless.

Essentially the old-fashioned motivations for warfare no longer apply, but the ancillary domestic benefits of war-like policy remain. While the state, and their corporate backers, no longer need to take part in pitched battles over the best farmland, they do still need their subjects to believe they are under attack.

In short, by necessity, “war” has gradually shifted from genuine inter-state conflicts over control of resources, into a top-down tool of psychological manipulation.

And the first stage of that evolution was 9/11.

9/11 and the war on terror

9/11 was an inside job. Any objective examination of the evidence can only lead to that conclusion. (I’m not going to lay that out here, we have dozens of articles detailing that. That’s not what I’m writing about today.)

The US government blew up their own buildings, killed their own civilians, terrified their own people. The ruling class engaging in what Orwell called “war against their subjects”, in a very literal sense.

Much like the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany, this staged “attack” was done to create a war-like mentality. To make people believe they were under threat, and serve as the basis for new “temporary emergency powers” for the government.

But 9/11 went further, serving as the casus belli for a war: “The war on terror”.

The War on Terror was a new kind of war, yes it was used as a starting point for more traditional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then proxy wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen, but its main target was actually domestic. A nationwide psy-op war designed to keep 350 million people in a semi-permanent state of fear.

It was the natural next step in the Orwellian redefinition of “war” as a concept.

If the primary aims of your war are a) To maintain domestic control of your population, and b) To funnel tax-payer money into bloated contracts with the private sector, then do you really need to declare war on a foreign country?

In fact, do you need an actual physical “war” at all? Isn’t the idea of a war just as good?

And if all you need is the idea of a war, what better way than to declare war on an idea. Why not make your enemy an abstract concept?

Because the great thing about going to war on an abstract concept is you can’t ever lose, and you never have to win. The war can go on forever.

This idea was first trialled with “the war on drugs”. But that didn’t work because a) people actually quite like drugs and b) Drugs are a vital income stream for the deep state. So it fizzled.

The war on terror is better. Since “terror” is an abstract noun with no solid reality, it can mean anything you want it to mean. “The war on terror” can be domestic or foreign, political or military, overt or covert or both. It can’t be won, it can’t be lost, and it only ends when you say it does.

It’s perfect.

Well, almost perfect.

There are still a few issues.

For example, it’s actually quite difficult to keep people afraid of an abstract concept. You need real-world reminders. Essentially, for the war on terror to continue, you need to keep reminding people terror is out there. Which means terrorism needs to happen. Which means either letting it happen or making it happen (the vast majority of the time it’s the latter).

If you’re staging terror attacks they either have to be real, resulting in real victims and real grieving families asking real questions…or they’re fake, meaning paying actors. Either way is logistically complicated, difficult to control and potentially embarrassing.

There’s also the problem of the terrorists themselves. You’ve publicly declared war on them…but they’re also very useful. There’s a reason you’ve funded them for decades. The inevitable result is you end up with “good terrorists” in country A, and “bad terrorists” in Country B. And when they are revealed to be essentially exactly the same, well that looks bad.

But the biggest problem, really, is that it caps your ambition.

You may have chosen an abstract concept as the target of your war, but that concept needs to take human form somehow. And any human enemy can only be so scary, and can only do so much damage. There’s no way you can frighten everyone at once that way.

Plus, picking a human enemy – along racial, national, ethnic or ideological lines – is inescapably divisive. You can’t ever unite everyone behind that flag.

In short, a war on terror and terrorists is fine if you want to rule a country, but what if you want to rule a planet?

Well, what you need then is a new enemy. An enemy that can be anywhere and everywhere, and that definitely isn’t human.

The war on Covid

The Covid19 “pandemic” has been pitched to the public as a war from the beginning.

As early as March 2020, the UN Secretary General was urging countries to “declare war on the virus” and already calling Covid “the greatest threat since World War II”. A sentiment UN spokespeople have repeated. A lot.

National leaders were just as eager to equate Covid as a new grand cause, in line with the fight against fascism.

Italy’s Prime Minister referred to the nation’s “darkest hour”. New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian told the press “this is literally a war” just last month.

In the UK, the government made numerous transparent attempts to instil a Churchillian “spirit of the Blitz” atmosphere. Unashamedly working World War II parallels into all their Covid messaging, the Queen’s cloying public speech of shamelessly using the line We’ll Meet Again.

In America, ever the hub of military metaphors, Trump called himself a “wartime President” fighting an “invisible enemy”. Former Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo referred to healthcare professionals as “soldiers” in the battle against Covid.

Worldwide, pundits frequently compare Covid to the war on terror, and Covid to terrorists. The war metaphor has been ubiquitous in speeches, headlines and TV spots.

The message is clear and simple: The virus is our enemy. We are at war.

And this war really is perfect.

It has all the benefits of a real war, and none of the drawbacks. All the ephemeral malleability of the “war on terror”, and none of its potential complications.

Think about it…

In the name of Covid we have seen taxation, censorship, surveillance, state expenditure to the private sector and state powers all increase. These are all the cliche “emergency powers” the state seeks out in wartime.

And they’ve achieved it with a simple three-stage trick.

First, take a virus, give it a name and attribute to it the exact same symptoms of every other cold and flu virus. You just created a new disease.

Second, take a test that can “find anything in anybody”, run it on everyone who goes into hospital (especially the terminally ill) and change the legal definition of “cause of death”. You just created “deaths” from your new disease.

Third, start running that same test on everyone, multiple times a week. You just created millions upon millions of “asymptomatic cases”.

Combine these three, and you have created a “pandemic”.

They created an enemy out of thin air, through a wave of propaganda and statistical manipulation. “Covid” is nothing but a filter, a lens placed in front of the public eye that distorts reality without actually changing anything at all.

Just as with the “war on terror”, the real threat is almost entirely imaginary, but this time the optics are so much better. Instead of worshipping the troops, we now pay homage to “healthcare heroes”, the “soldiers on the frontline against the virus”. No bombs, no violence, just dancing nurses.

And what can’t happen with Covid? Simple, anything they don’t want to happen. Because of the very nature of the manufactured pandemic, they have total control of the narrative.

They can control the “cases” through the tests. They can control the “deaths” through the definition of “cause of death”. They can just tweak the meaning of a word here and there, and start and stop the “pandemic” on a whim. They can slow down the “spread”, or speed it up. Introduce a new test or treatment or “cure” it, then create a new variant to bring it back.

This war doesn’t even really exist, so it never has to end and they definitely can’t lose.

Meanwhile, every new law that passes expands the power of the state over the citizen, and every step of the way there new bloated private sector contracts up for grabs. Testing and tracing and PPE. Vaccines and ventilators and quarantine hotels. Public money is pouring into private hands.

And the best part? It’s all being done in the name of “helping people”.

Following 9/11, the Patriot Act empowered mass surveillance, detention without charge and huge infringement of civil rights, because people might be terrorists.

Now, allegedly anti-Covid “public health measures” are allowing the exact same things…because people might be sick.

The state has transformed. What was once considered paranoid and aggressive, is now simply beneficent and paternalistic.

That’s the genius of the War on Covid.

The real forever war

So…how are Covid and 9/11 linked?

One flows directly into the other. They form a continuum of control narratives designed to frighten people into accepting draconian limitations on their freedom, whilst justifying a permanent society-wide warlike mentality.

“The war on terror” and the “war on Covid” are twin psy-ops that show the transformation of “war” from a foreign policy into a purely domestic one.

Orwell described it perfectly in 1984:

In just the last two years we have all seen the truth of this. Covid has shown us supposedly enemy nations suddenly come to an accord and demonstrate almost total unity of purpose to spread one big lie.

The global capitalist hegemony doesn’t need to conquer land or steal resources anymore. They already own everything worth owning, all they need now is to control their workers and preserve the inequality they have created.

That’s the real war being waged here. Not the ridiculous war on terror. And not the laughable war on Covid. No, the real “forever war” is what Niels Harrit calls the vertical war, waged by the very top against everyone below them.

Covid is the most recent and most overt expression of this, but for years now the corporate media has been the spokesperson of the authoritarian heart of the state.

I have written before that we are entering the era of “progressive” statism. Where tyranny is sold as a regrettable inevitability and our leaders are portrayed as a new breed of reluctant dictators, sculpting dystopian political landscapes out of necessity, and with only the purest intentions.

We’re told that our caring masters aren’t controlling or dictatorial because they want to be, but because they need to be, for our sake.

The “great reset” is not a malign “conspiracy theory”, it’s just our kindly overlords child-proofing the world to protect us from ourselves. Tearing our society down so they can build back better into a neo-feudal utopia, where nobody owns anything and everyone is happy and everyone does what they’re told…or else.

This “pandemic” is the thin end of a rapidly widening wedge. Next comes the flu and obesity and global warming. No more meat. No more sugar. No more vacations. They’re bad for you, and bad for the planet, and bad for the polar bears.

Ban homeschools and protests and misinformation. Ban the wrong kind of books and the wrong kind of speech and the wrong kind of thoughts.

Wear the mask and take the jab and live in the pod and eat the bugs.

Global hegemony isn’t going to come about via traditional warfare or Imperial conquest, instead it is being shaped by a conglomeration of restrictions on individual freedom.

That’s the war that links 9/11 and Covid. The real war, and it’s not against drugs, or terrorism or even Covid…it’s against us.

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Cover image credit: DangrafArt

The Left and Right Are Two Cheeks of the Same Ass

(Title thanks to Gareth Icke)

by Gary D. Barnett
August 15, 2024

“In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the ‘Republic.’ But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.”

~ H.L. Mencken

Actually, all politicians and parties fit into the same paradigm called rule, regardless of so-called rhetorical grandstanding when attempting to claim that they are different spots on the same ass. However, in this country, the claimed left and right control the entire narrative, because they control the entire political process. (Not really, but their controllers do) The others, including ‘independents’ and ‘libertarians,’ would be no different, because the most common denominator of all those who seek rule and therefore power, is to control and manage the people by taxation and force of government. The only entity that is exempt from this power-seeking insanity, are anarchists, but then, anarchists abhor government and governing of people, believe only in “no rule,” so are not a risk to any freedom seeking individual. It is the single only thought existing that is completely non-political, and therefore the only sane option based on natural law.

This is not anything new or current, it has always been the case, even though many would attempt to argue this point; each side claiming to be one thing or the other, and in opposition against each other, when both seek the very same agendas. Certainly, there are some necessary exceptions, but those exceptions are fraudulent, and meant only to falsely distinguish one from the other, and this is just in order to fool the fools.

To figure this out, one need only look at all the connections of both parties, and other political entities as well, and the overlap will be so damning as to easily be seen as sinister; this going back many decades. Probably the best and most referenced material to view concerning this issue, is the work of Whitney Webb, now of the Unlimited hangout. Once one takes the time to do individual research and study, it becomes obvious that everything going on, and much more than 99% of the population are completely unaware of, the ties among all the criminal governing elements are not only telling of the mass collusion (conspiracy) between parties, corporations, banking, all ‘intelligence’ organizations, media, and the Zionist Israeli cabal, but are so massive in scope as to be nearly unbelievable. It is literally astounding.

But with all this said, and all the information available from very reliable sources, with reference and source material easily available to any willing to look, (at least for now) there is no excuse for the insane behavior of the general population. It lends to the credibility that the indoctrination and brainwashing of the masses has been a complete success, as stated by myself and many others, that this population is too far gone to be relied upon to ever seek real freedom. It is my contention that the bulk of society will continue to ‘vote’ for masters to rule them, will continue to obey as slaves, and to cower and bow down to the mandates and orders handed down by the ruling class. The most evil Trump and Harris fiasco will bear this out, as a narcissistic, lying, egotistical political plant will face off with an evil woke communist and perverted specimen plant, as most of the ‘voting public’ will fully participate in the wicked process called elections. This will guarantee the finishing destruction of all that is sane, regardless of which piece of garbage is selected by the deep state mob this time around.

Looking deep into the backgrounds of all four of these political scum, (Trump, Vance, Harris, and Walz) is enough to sicken even the most loyal followers or ignorant among this population. With that said, it matters not who is running for office, as all are of the same cloth, regardless of any claims to the contrary, and regardless of any party affiliation. Any targeted research whatsoever, any understanding of the close connections among all these high-level politicians, and throughout our history, is enough for anyone who still possess any aptitude toward logic, reason, or any ability whatsoever to think critically, to abandon immediately any connection to any nation-state, country, or governing structure.

Obviously, I cannot go into all the connections, all the corruption, all the perversions, all the lying, all the theft, and all the murderous policies of those politicians who claim to rule this country, in this short overview. Even if I simply added much of the reference material appropriate for this subject matter, it would take reams of paper; so much so as to guarantee that few if any would wade through all the material (or any) available exposing the mass criminal exploits of all of the political class in this country. It is overwhelming to say the least.

Two of the best sources are certainly the work of James Corbett and Whitney Webb, but there are many more. In just this one piece by Webb, “Government by Blackmail,” there is enough information linking all these criminals, that any who read this article thoroughly, will come away stunned at this fully referenced information, and it only begins to touch the surface of the criminal and conspiratorial nature of all U.S. politics.

Mencken declared perfectly the state of being concerning ‘democracy’ and the collective ignorance of humanity:

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Since the beginning of time, man has been oppressed by the very few who claimed control over all through one or another psychotic governing structure. The few kings, dictators, and oligarchs were able to gain control over billions, while those billions did absolutely nothing to eliminate the heinous system called rule. It is no different in this country, as the few in power took it by force and deceit, while the masses fully accepted it without resistance. In other words, all freedom was voluntarily abandoned in favor of rule, of a master/slave model based on total obedient submission to false authority. This can only lead to a slaughterhouse effect, where the weak and all those who actively dissent, can be rounded up, put into cages, (camps) subject to constant wars, and be made dependent on the very government that was intentionally allowed to gain power over them.

This is madness, this is insanity, and this next ‘election’ cycle will bear this out in spades, but I suspect that few will even have a clue as to what they have allowed to take place. That is the sad state of affairs that consumes this ‘country’ and its controlled and compliant population; one that risks total annihilation at the hands of its chosen masters.

“I have never voted in my life… I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it’s certain they will win.”

~ Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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2024 & the Inevitable Rise of Biometrics

by Kit Knightly, OffGuardian
May 21, 2024

Have you noticed a lot of two-factor authentication prompts lately? Are you getting emailed verification codes that take forever to arrive, so you have to request another?

Perhaps you are asked to do captchas to “prove you’re human” and they seem to be getting more complex all the time or simply not working at all?

Why do you think that might be?

We’ll come back to that.

Did you know we’re in a “breakthrough year” for biometric payment systems?

According to this story from CNBC, JPMorgan and Mastercard are on board with the technology and intend a wide rollout in the near future, following successful trials.

In March this year, JPMorgan signed a deal with PopID to begin a broad release of biometric payment systems in 2025.

A Mastercard spokesman told CNBC:

Our focus on biometrics as a secure way to verify identity, replacing the password with the person, is at the heart of our efforts in this area,”

Apple Pay already lets you pay with a face scan, while Amazon have introduced pay-by-palm in many of their real-world stores.

VISA showcased their latest palm biometric payment set-up at an event in Singapore earlier this year.

As we covered in a recent This Week, PayPal is pushing out its own biometric payment systems in the name of “preventing fraud”.

As always, this is not just an issue in “the West”.

Chinese companies have been leading this race for a while, with AliPay having biometric payment options since 2015.

Moscow’s Metro system has been using facial recognition cameras for biometric payments for over a year.

And it’s not just payments, “replacing the password with the person” has already spread to other areas.

Hoping to corral support for biometrics from the right, national governments are collecting biometrics to “curb illegal immigration”. You can expect that to spread.

The European Union will be implementing a new Biometric Entry-Exit System (EES) as soon as October of this year.

Biometric signing is on the rise too.

Laptops tablets and smartphones already come with face-reading and fingerprint scanning technology to confirm your identity.

Social media companies have been collecting biometric data “for security and identification purposes” for years.

Google Play launched a new biometric accessibility feature only a couple of weeks ago.

It’s all just so convenient, isn’t it? So much faster than e-mailing security codes and solving increasingly impossible captchas (both of which have unaccountably got harder and more complicated recently, and will doubtless continue to do so).

That’s how they get you: Convenience.

They won’t ever remove the “old-fashioned” ways of accessing your accounts, but it will get increasingly slow and difficult to use while biometrics get faster and easier.

Meanwhile, the propaganda will begin to flow.

Influencers will be paid to use “cool” “futuristic” biometric payment options that “feel like having superpowers” in contrived “viral” videos. Biometrics will save the day in a trendy movie or TV show. Some old fuddy-duddy will go on Question Time and rant about the new technology…just before saying something racist or denying climate change.

Maybe a major hack or cyber-attack will only affect those who haven’t switched to biometric authentication yet.

You get the idea.

And all the while supra-national corporate megaliths will be creating a massive database of voice recordings, finger and palm prints, facial and retinal scans.

It’s a good thing we’re ruled by a morally upright elite. Imagine the damage they could do with all of that.

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Cover image credit: geralt

TikTok Hypocrisy

by Ron Paul, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
April 29, 2024

President Biden’s campaign will continue using the popular social media site TikTok even though the president supported a provision in the military aid bill he recently signed forcing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell TikTok within 270 days. If ByteDance does not sell TikTok within the required time, TikTok will be banned in the USA. Biden’s continued use of TikTok to reach the approximately 150 million American TikTok users, is not the only example of hypocrisy from politicians who support the TikTok ban.

The TikTok ban was driven by claims that, because ByteDance is a Chinese company, TikTok is controlled by the Chinese government and, thus. is helping the Chinese government collect data on American citizens. However, the only tie ByteDance has to the Chinese government is via a Chinese government controlled company that owns a small amount of stock in a separate ByteDance operation. Furthermore, ByteDance stores its data in an American facility not accessible by the Chinese government.

Just days before passing the TikTok ban, the same Senate that is so concerned about TikTok’s alleged violations of Americans’ privacy passed the FISA reauthorization bill. This bill not only extended existing authorities for warrantless wiretapping and surveillance, it made it easier for government agencies to spy on American citizens. It did this by requiring anyone with access to a targeted individual’s electronic device to cooperate with intelligence agencies.

Supporters of banning TikTok also cited concerns over the site’s “content moderation” policies. These policies reportedly forbid postings embarrassing to the Chinese government such as some related to the 1989 Tiananmen Square confrontation or the Free Tibet movement.

TikTok, like most social media platforms, engages in content moderation. The TikTok ban was supported by Democrats, including President Biden, who have a history of “encouraging” social media companies to censor Americans from using social media to spread “fake news.”

Fake news is defined as anything that contradicts the Democrat or “woke” agenda, including the truth about covid origins, dangers, and treatments; whether democracy was really threatened on January 6; and the full story of Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

One major reason behind strong bipartisan support for the TikTok ban is the wish to engage in a cold war with China. ByteDance’s Chinese connection makes it a convenient target to help foster anti-Chinese sentiment. Sadly, the anti-Chinese hysteria is a bipartisan phenomenon and has even infected some politicians who take sensible positions on US intervention in Ukraine.

Another major reason banning TikTok has strong bipartisan support is that the site is being used by many young people to share information on the Israeli government’s action in Gaza. The head of the Anti-Defamation League was actually caught on tape complaining about the “TikTok problem.” This use of TikTok made TikTok a target for the many politicians who think the First Amendment makes an exception for speech critical of Israel.

The silver lining in the TikTok ban is it is waking up more Americans, especially young Americans, to the threat the out-of-control welfare-warfare-surveillance state poses to their liberty and prosperity. This provides a great opportunity to spread the ideas of liberty and grow the liberty movement.

Connect with Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

Why Democracy Leads to Tyranny 

by Academy of Ideas
March 30, 2024

 Video available at Academy of Ideas Rumble, Odysee & YouTube channels.

The following is a transcript of this video.

“Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and [destroys] itself. . .It is in vain to Say that Democracy is … less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty.”

Letter from John Adams to John Taylor, December 1814

In every age there is a set of beliefs that are elevated to a sacred status and questioning them is deemed heretical. For centuries it was the dogmas of Christianity that possessed this status, today it is the dogma of the democratic state. Democracy, as currently practiced, is the greatest form of government and anyone who denies this commits blasphemy – or so we are taught. But just as much of the Christian dogma was a veil to protect the power of the Church, the same can be said about democracy. Democracy, with its political campaigns, elections, and the illusion of rule by the people, is a veil behind which politicians and bureaucrats parasitically enrich themselves while imposing their corrupt vision of society on the rest of us. In this video we explore some of the fatal flaws of modern democracy and explain how instead of promoting social flourishing, it has given rise to a form of soft totalitarianism.

“Conceived as the foundation of liberty, modern democracy paves the way for tyranny. Born for the purpose of standing as a bulwark against Power, it ends by providing Power with the finest soil it has ever had in which to spread itself over the social field.”

Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power

There are many institutions that are necessary for a free and prosperous society; these include free markets, the division of labour, a rule of law that promotes order and trust, strong families, sound money, a school system that educates instead of indoctrinates, and a robust media that pursues the truth instead of spreading propaganda. If a democracy preserves these institutions, then one can claim that it is a form of political organization conducive to social harmony. But if a democracy continually produces governments that destroy these institutions, then the value of democracy must be questioned. Across the globe, the governments of most democracies are doing the latter – from the family unit, to schooling, the media, free markets, sound money, or the rule of law, politicians and bureaucrats are actively destroying, or at least severely corrupting, these institutions. Why is this? What are the flaws of modern-day democracies that are leading it to manifest such corrupt governments?

To answer this question, we must distinguish between two types of democracy: direct democracy and indirect democracy. A direct democracy involves citizens casting votes on specific issues, usually by means of a referendum. In a direct democracy majority rules. Whether one views this form of political organization in a positive or negative light will usually depend on if one belongs to the majority or minority. Those in the majority tend to believe that direct democracy is a good system as it leads to the satisfaction of their wants, while those in the minority often feel that direct democracy is nothing more than a tyranny of the masses. “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch,” Benjamin Franklin famously remarked. While the 19^th century British politician Auberon Herbert had this to say concerning the morality of a direct democracy:

“Five men are in a room. Because three men take one view and two another, have the three men any moral right to enforce their view on the other two men? What magical power comes over the three men that because they are one more in number than the two men, therefore they suddenly become possessors of the minds and bodies of these others? As long as they were two to two, so long we supposed each man remained master of his own mind and body; but from the moment that another man, acting Heaven only knows from what motives, has joined himself to one party or the other, that party has become straightaway possessed of the souls and bodies of the other party. Was there ever such a degrading and indefensible superstition?”

Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State

A tyranny of the masses, however, is not the most serious threat facing the West as we live in indirect democracies which render most people politically impotent and the power of the masses relatively negligible. In an indirect, or representational democracy, we vote for politicians who are then, in theory, supposed to represent our interests. But how representational democracy should work in theory, is not how it works in practice. In almost all democratic countries a small number of political candidates are preselected by a handful of political parties that monopolize each country’s political system and from these candidates we vote for the ones we prefer, or at least dislike the least. Once elected, far from being forced to represent the interests of the majority, politicians can, and frequently do, serve their own interests. Or as Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman note in their book Beyond Democracy:

“It is not ‘the will of the people’, but the will of politicians – prompted by groups of professional lobbyists, interest groups and activists – that reigns in a democracy.”

Frank Karsten and Karel Beckman, Beyond Democracy

Many will counter that a benefit of an indirect democracy is that we can vote out the corrupt politicians who fail to serve us. The problem, however, is that modern democracies rarely produce honest and ethical political candidates. Each time one corrupt politician is voted out of office, he or she is replaced by another corrupt politician who merely serves different special interest groups. Furthermore, nation states have grown so large that most of the state actors who rule over us and implement the policies that affect us on a day-to-day basis are bureaucrats who are not subject to popular elections.

And herein lies perhaps the most serious flaw of modern democracies – the democratic process seems incapable of preventing the worst from rising to the top in government. There are several factors that can account for this: Firstly, there is the corrupting nature of power.

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Or as Mikhail Bakunin wrote:

“However democratic may be their feelings and their intentions, once [politicians] achieve the elevation of office they can only view society in the same ways a schoolmaster views his pupils, and between pupils and masters equality cannot exist. On one side there is the feeling of a superiority that is inevitably provoked by a position of superiority; on the other side, there is a sense of inferiority which follows from the superiority of the teacher. . . Who-ever talks of political power talks of domination; but where domination exists there is inevitably a somewhat large section of society that is dominated. . .This is the eternal history of political power. . .”

Mikhail Bakunin, The Illusion of Universal Suffrage

Another factor that can account for the moral corruption of politicians is that like a moth to flame, the most ruthless and power-hungry among us are attracted to state power. Those who enter the game of politics are often the very individuals who we least want to rule over us, or as Frank Herbert wrote:

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”

Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

Another explanation for why the worst rise to the top in modern politics is because Machiavellian, narcissistic, and sociopathic character traits improve one’s chance of winning a political election or getting promoted to the position of a high-level bureaucrat. Or as the philosopher Hans Hermann Hoppe explains:

“. . . the selection of state rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for harmless or decent persons to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position not owing to their status as natural aristocrats, as feudal kings once did . . .but as a result of their capacity as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of state government.”

Hans Hermann Hoppe, From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy

Once in power these demagogues are effectively shielded from the wrath of the citizenry due to a mirage that is created by the dogma of democracy. Most people believe that in a democracy it is we the people that rule, and that as rulers we are collectively to blame for the corruption, ineptitude, and immorality of our government. This belief overlooks the fact that most of us have no impact on the actions of politicians and it diverts responsibility away from the politicians and bureaucrats who are responsible for the policies that are destroying society. Furthermore, when it is believed that we the people rule, our resistance toward the dangerous growth of state power is weakened, or as Hoppe explains:

“Under democracy the distinction between the rulers and the ruled becomes blurred. The illusion even arises that the distinction no longer exists: that with democratic government no one is ruled by anyone, but everyone instead rules himself. Accordingly, public resistance against government power is systematically weakened.”

Hans Hermann Hoppe, From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy

This weakened resistance to the growth of state power has created a fertile ground for the emergence of totalitarian rule across the West. Many will counter that the democratic West is not at all like the totalitarian countries of the past, be it Soviet Russia, Communist China, Nazi Germany, Cuba, or North Korea. These countries centralized power and controlled the lives of their citizens to a degree never seen in history and to a level which far exceeds the experience of the modern West. But the centralization of government power in Western democracies, differs only in degree to that seen in the totalitarian countries of the 20^th century. Western democracies are what can be called soft totalitarian states in contrast to the more brutal manifestations of totalitarianism past. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the rise of soft totalitarianism in Western democracies and described it in his great work Democracy in America:

“After having…taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting…it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupifies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America

Prior to the rise of this soft totalitarianism, social relations were dominated by a multiplicity of different institutions and associations which were independent of government – such as markets, guilds, churches, private hospitals, universities, fraternities, charities, monasteries, and most importantly the “primal community of the family”. These independent associations and institutions, while providing great societal benefits, also acted as barriers to the expansion of government power. The destruction and replacement of these more diverse forms of community with relationships between the individual and the state, which began in the West in the 20^th century and continues to this day, was a crucial step in the rise of governments who hide their totalitarian nature behind the veil of the democratic ideal. Or as Robert Nisbet wrote in The Quest for Community:

“It is not the extermination of individuals that is ultimately desired by totalitarian rulers. . . What is desired is the extermination of those social relationships which, by their autonomous existence, must always constitute a barrier to the achievement of the absolute political community. The prime object of totalitarian government thus becomes the incessant destruction of all evidence of spontaneous, autonomous association…To destroy or diminish the reality of the smaller areas of society, to abolish or restrict the range of cultural alternatives offered to individuals. . . is to destroy in time the roots of the will to resist despotism in its large forms.”

Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community

In places like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia the destruction of institutions independent of the state was done quite rapidly and with the use of violence. The same process has been occurring in Western democracies, but at a slower pace and instead of violence, these alternative institutions are crippled with the use of propaganda, educational indoctrination, laws, regulations, and bureaucratic red tape. But no matter how totalitarianism emerges the result is always the same. Citizens becomes subjects, the state becomes the master, and even if we are still granted the right to vote, we are enslaved nonetheless, or as Lysander Spooner wrote:

“A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.”

Lysander Spooner, The Constitution of No Authority

If our democracies cannot prevent the worst from rising to the top and if they cannot protect us from the rise of a soft totalitarianism, then democracy, as currently practiced, is a failed institutions and alternative forms of political organization must be explored and openly debated. Some may continue to hold out hope that a political saviour will emerge, overcome all the corrupting influences of the state, and return society to a path of peace and prosperity. This, however, is to gamble with the future of society. For as we wait for our saviour, who may never emerge, the state will continue to grow more and more burdensome, and then slowly at first, but ever more rapidly, our societies will deteriorate into the hellish conditions that characterize all totalitarian nations, for as James Kalb noted:

“If all social order becomes dependent on the administrative state, when that becomes terminally corrupt and non-functional everything goes.”

James Kalb, The Tyranny of Liberalism

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Whitney Webb: “They’ve Been Planning This Cyber Attack for Years”

Clayton Morris of Redacted interviews investigative journalist Whitney Webb 

by Redacted News
December 13, 2023



[Should this video be  taken down by Youtube, Whitney’s segment can be found in this full version at Rumble starting at 36:40.]

Transcript of video introduction by Clayton Morris:

“Is the deep state mafia setting up a massive cyber attack false flag on the American people that will disrupt the 2024 election?

Well, it turns out that the United States intel agencies have been running tabletop exercises on this exact scenario. And now the Department of Homeland Security head, Mayorkas, says the greatest cyber threat to America is something called Killware.

So what’s really going on here? Are we being set up for a massive false flag?

And investigative journalist Whitney Webb has been writing
about these cyber attack tabletop exercises for years. And she’s been exposing what they’ve been up to. And then this week, we had a crazy “cyber attack” that seemed to shut down half the internet this week. Banks. Rumble was down.

What exactly is going on here? Are we being played like a fiddle?”

Connect with Redacted News at Youtube | Rumble

Connect with Whitney Webb at Unlimited Hangout

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We Must Demand Justice for the January 6th Protestors!

by Ron Paul, Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
November 20, 2023

New US House Speaker Mike Johnson struck a blow for liberty and justice last week when he finally authorized the release of all the tapes from the January 6, 2021 “insurrection.” We were told by no less than President Biden himself that this was the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

The FBI was unleashed by the Biden Administration to hunt down hundreds of participants in this “insurrection” and lock them up in the gulag where they awaited trial in torturous conditions – many in solitary confinement.

A Congressional Committee was set up under then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to “get to the bottom” of the “Trump-led insurrection.” It did not include a single Representative nominated by the opposition Republican Party, but rather two “Republicans” – Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – who could be relied on by Pelosi and the Democrats to toe the line.

In short, the whole thing was an old-fashioned Soviet show trial, where the evidence was kept secret and the pre-determined verdict – guilty – was to be used to tighten the grip of the ruling regime and intimidate any further dissenters into silence. The message was clear: “speak out against the ‘perfection’ of the 2020 election and you may find yourself in the gulag along with the insurrectionists.”

It was terrifying and profoundly anti-American.

And, as we finally can see for ourselves thanks to Speaker Johnson, it was a huge lie. The new video shows demonstrators shaking hands with police officers once they entered the Capitol Building. They were welcomed into the building by officers who even held the doors for them to enter! They had no way of knowing that they would soon be rounded up and locked away.

Does that mean no crimes were committed on January 6th? Not at all. The tapes already released were carefully chosen to single out examples of violence and other possible criminality. But the full release of the tapes demonstrates beyond a doubt that the endless propaganda that this was a coordinated attempt to overthrow the government was false.

And as for that violence and mayhem on January 6th? How much of it was instigated by undercover FBI agents? New footage clearly shows officers outside the building firing on protestors with no warning. That must be why, in hearing after hearing, Biden Administration officials like Attorney General Merrick Garland have refused to tell Congress the number of federal agents present and their roles in instigating violence.

The release of this evidence should immediately result in the release of all non-violent protestors awaiting trial or serving their sentences. Those in power responsible for promoting this lie should take their places in the jail cells.

This delayed justice will not help protesters like Matthew Perna, however. Though the new video release clearly shows him calmly walking inside the Capitol in the presence of unconcerned police officers, when Merrick Garland’s Department of “Justice” announced they would seek terrorism charges against him, Perna, in despair, decided to hang himself in his garage.

Yes, there was an insurrection of sorts. Those in power hated Donald Trump so much that they were willing to torture and even murder their fellow Americans to keep him from the presidency. Unless these people are brought to justice, we will have no Republic left to defend.

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We the Exploited: The U.S. Government Buys and Sells Its Citizens for Profit and Power

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
November 15, 2023

Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists.

But don’t be fooled into thinking the government is protecting you.

To the contrary, the U.S. government is selling us (or rather, our data) to the highest bidders.

By the way, those highest bidders also include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”

Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.

“Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.

In this way, “we the people” have been reduced to economic units to be bought, bartered and sold by all and sundry.

On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

Those intimate details, in turn, have become the building blocks of massive databases accessed by the government and its corporate partners in crime, vulnerable to data breaches by hackers, cyberattacks and espionage.

For years now, and with little real oversight or restrictions, the government has been compiling massive databases comprised of all manner of sensitive information on the citizenry.

Biographical information. Biometric information. Criminal backgrounds. Travel records.

There is not a single person in the U.S. who is not in some government database or another, and these databases are increasingly being shared between agencies, fusion centers, and the police.

The government has also, with little oversight and few guidelines, been adding to its massive trove of data on Americans by buying commercially available information (CAI) from third-party sources. As a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed:

“[Commercially purchased data] can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals. Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.”

In other words, this is the diabolically sneaky way in which the government is attempting to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, which requires that government agents have probable cause and a warrant before spying on Americans or searching and seizing their private property.

It’s bad enough that the government is building massive databases comprised of our personal information without our knowledge or consent, but then they get hacked and we suffer for it.

Earlier this year, for instance, several federal agencies, state governments and universities were targeted in a global cyberattack that compromised the sensitive data of millions of Americans.

Did that stop the government’s quest to keep building these databases which compromise our privacy and security? Of course not.

In fact, the government has also been selling our private information. According to Vice, Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country have been selling drivers’ personal information “to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit.”

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and the government has become a master at finding loopholes that allow it to exploit the citizenry.

Thus, although Congress passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) in 1994 to prevent the disclosure of personal information, it hasn’t stopped state DMVs from raking in millions by selling driver data (names, dates of birth, addresses, and the cars they own) to third parties.

This is just a small part of how the government buys and sells its citizens to the highest bidders.

The why is always the same: for profit and power, of course.

Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.

Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?

That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.

Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.

Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.

No one is spared.

In this regard, we are all equals: equally suffering the indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the most intimate details of one’s life turned into fodder for marketers and data profiteers.

This creepy new era of for-profit surveillance capitalism—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—is made possible with our cooperation.

All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer—those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.

Think about it.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.

With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.

The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually build “digital fences” around your homes, workplaces, friends and family’s homes and other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.

If anyone else stalked us in this way—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and activities—we’d call the cops.

Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with Stingray devices and other Peeping Tom technologies) are also in on this particular scam.

It’s not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your data that is worrisome.

The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.

Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly moving in that direction.

We’ve made it so easy for the government to stalk us.

Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and detained in times of distress) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

The government has the know-how.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands, especially when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.

This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, stalker, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

It turns out that we are Soylent Green.

The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

Oh, how right he was.

Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.

We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food.

Rather, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.

As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, there’s virtually no way to opt out of these assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.

What we desperately lack and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

Connect with The Rutherford Institute

Cover image credit: Eukalyptus

See Related:

Five Ways to Prepare for the Online Privacy Crackdown

UN & Bill Gates Launch “50in5” Global Digital Infrastructure Plans

The End of Privacy Is Near

The End of Privacy Is Near

by Dr. Joseph Mercola
November 17, 2023

Story-at-a-Glance

• “CITIZENFOUR” is a documentary about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. It came out in 2014, but it’s even more pertinent today than it was then
• In January 2013, when documentary film director/producer Laura Poitras received an encrypted email from a stranger who called himself “Citizen Four”
• In June 2013, Poitras flew to meet Snowden at the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong, together with columnist Glenn Greenwald and Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill. After four days of interviews, Snowden’s identity was made public at his request
• Today, Snowden’s warnings ring truer than ever. Artificial intelligence now scours social media, podcasts and videos for key words identifying “anti-vaxxers,” for example. It doesn’t even matter if they agree with what you’re writing or saying. The mere inclusion of certain words will get you axed from the platform
• Next, the plan is to eliminate privacy altogether by requiring a digital identity to access the internet

“CITIZENFOUR” is a documentary about U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden. It came out in 2014, but it’s even more pertinent today than it was then, so if you haven’t seen it, I urge you to do so.

The Snowden story began in January 2013, when documentary film director/producer Laura Poitras received an encrypted email from a stranger who called himself “Citizen Four.” Snowden reportedly chose this codename “as a nod to three NSA whistleblowers who came before him: Bill Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe and Thomas Drake.”

Poitras had already spent several years working on a film about monitoring programs in the U.S., and had been placed on a secret watch list after her 2006 film “My Country, My Country,”¹ a documentary about Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. In his initial email, Snowden wrote:

“Laura. At this stage, I can offer nothing more than my word. I’m a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk and you’re willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more. This will not be a waste of your time …

The surveillance you’ve experienced means you’ve been ‘selected’ — a term which will mean more to you as you learn about how the modern SIGINT system works.

For now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type, and packet your route, is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited, but whose safeguards are not.

Your victimization by the NSA system means that you’re well aware of the threat that unrestricted secret police pose for democracies. This is a story few but you can tell.”

Summary of Snowden’s Journey

In June 2013, Poitras flew to meet Snowden at The Mira Hong Kong, together with columnist Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, an intelligence reporter for The Guardian. After four days of interviews, Snowden’s identity was made public at his request.

Within two weeks, the U.S. government demanded Snowden’s extradition. Facing prosecution in the United States, Snowden scheduled a meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and applied for refugee status.

He managed to depart Hong Kong, but became stranded at the Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow when his passport was canceled. There he remained for 40 days, until the Russian government finally granted him asylum.

The Greatest Weapon of Oppression Ever Built

The U.S. government implemented Stellar Wind, a program to actively — and illegally — spy on all Americans within days of the 2001 9/11 attack. Ten years later, in 2011, construction began on a NSA data center in the Utah desert. It’s now the largest surveillance storehouse in the U.S.

In his correspondence, Snowden warned Poitras that “telecommunication companies in the U.S. are betraying the trust of their customers.” Through Stellar Wind, all phone calls and text messages were being intercepted and stored, and the Stellar Wind program has only expanded from there.

The NSA not only intercepts American citizens emails, phone conversations and text messages, but also Google searches, Amazon.com orders, bank records and more.

“We are building the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of man,” Snowden wrote, “yet its directors exempt themselves from accountability … On cyber operations, the government’s public position is that we still lack a policy framework. This … was a lie.

There is a detailed policy framework, a kind of martial law for cyber operations created by the White House. It’s called ‘Presidential Policy Directive 20’ and was finalized at the end of last year.”

Linkability, the Key to Control — and Entrapment

As explained in the film, a key aspect of control through surveillance is the linkability of data. One piece of data about you is linked to another piece. For example, your bus pass can be linked to the debit card you used to buy the pass. Your debit card is also linked to all other purchases.

With two key pieces of information — WHERE you went on a given day, and WHEN you made purchases, they can determine who you spoke with and met up with by linking those data points with those of other people who were in the vicinity at the same time. And that’s without even using your cellphone data.

When all these various data points are aggregated — location data, purchases, phone calls, texts, social media posts and more — you end up with a collection of metadata that tells a story about you. However, while the story is made up of facts, it’s not necessarily true.

For example, just because you were standing at a particular street corner does not mean you had anything to do with the crime that was reported on that same corner at the time you happened to be there. The problem is, your data could be used against you in that way.

The January 6 prisoners are a perfect example of how bits and pieces of data can be misused. Many have now spent years in jail simply because their cellphone data showed them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

State Power Versus the People’s Power to Oppose That Power

When asked by Greenwald why he decided to become a whistleblower, Snowden replied:

“It all comes down to state power against the people’s ability to meaningfully oppose that power. I’m sitting there every day, getting paid to design methods to amplify that state power.

And I’m realizing that if the policy switches that are the only thing that restrain these states were changed, you couldn’t meaningfully oppose [them].

I mean, you would have to be the most incredibly sophisticated tactical actor in existence. I’m not sure there’s anybody, no matter how gifted you are, who could oppose all of the offices and all the bright people, even all the mediocre people out there with all of their tools and all their capabilities.

And as I saw the promise of the Obama administration be betrayed … and in fact, [how they] actually advanced the things that had been promised to be sort of curtailed and reined in and dialed back … As as I saw that, that really hardened me to action …

We all have a stake in this. This is our country, and the balance of power between the citizenry and the government is becoming that of the ruling and the ruled, as opposed to the elected and the electorate.”

A Decade Later Snowden’s Words Ring Truer Than Ever

“I remember what the internet was like, before it was being watched, and there’s never been anything in the history of man like it,” Snowden said.

“You could have children from one part of the world having an equal discussion, where they were sort of granted the same respect for their ideas and conversation, with experts in a field from another part of the world on any topic, anywhere, anytime, all the time.

It was free and unrestrained. And we’ve seen the chilling of that, and the changing of that model towards something in which people self police their own views. They literally make jokes about ending up on ‘the list’ if they donate to a political cause, or if they say something in a discussion. It’s become an expectation that we’re being watched.

Many people I’ve talked to have mentioned that they’re careful about what they type into search engines, because they know that it’s being recorded, and that limits the boundaries of their intellectual exploration.”

Today, after the extreme ramp-up of censorship, surveillance and harassment we’ve endured since the COVID pandemic began, Snowden’s warnings ring truer than ever.

Artificial intelligence now scours social media, podcasts and videos for key words identifying “anti-vaxxers,” for example. It doesn’t even matter if they agree with what you’re writing or saying. The mere inclusion of certain words will get you axed from the platform.

Snowden’s worst fears have indeed come true, and today most people have come to realize just how dangerous this kind of blanket surveillance can be. Countless individuals whose only “crime” was to share their story of how the COVID shot ruined their lives have had their posts censored and social media accounts shut down.

Canadians whose only “crime” was to donate a few dollars to a peaceful protest had their bank accounts frozen. Small companies and nonprofit organizations with the “wrong” viewpoints have had their online payment services cancelled, effectively strangling their ability to make a living and keep the operation going.

Others have been debanked without recourse, including yours truly. My CEO and CFO and all of their family members also had their accounts and credit cards canceled, apparently for no other reason than the fact that they work for me. In other words, guilt by association.

Will the Internet as We Know It Disappear in the Next Year?

I recently posted an interview with investigative journalist Whitney Webb in which she talks about the next steps in the ramp-up of tyranny. The World Economic Forum has warned we may face a cyberattack on the banks before the end of 2024. That means we almost definitely will, seeing how they like to announce plans ahead of time.

Such a cyberattack will not only destroy the current banking system and usher in programmable central bank digital currencies. It will also eliminate privacy online by requiring everyone to have a digital identification tied to their ISP.

The principles of “know your customer” (KYC) will be imposed on everybody for everything, and anything that doesn’t have that will be made illegal under National Security justifications.

Essentially, what we’re looking at is a cyber Patriot Act, which will allow for the unfettered surveillance of everyone’s online activities, and the ability to restrict or block access to the internet. As noted by Webb, “The internet as you know it will not exist after this happens.”

The goal is to surveil all online activity in real time and have AI perform predictive policing to prevent crime before it happens. At that point, all bets are off. Data points alone may land you behind bars. Thought-crimes will also have ramifications, potentially resulting in the seizure of private property and/or removal of “privileges” previously understood as human rights.

A Global Infrastructure Has Been Built

During their first meeting with Snowden in Hong Kong, he explained that a global infrastructure, built by the NSA with the cooperation of other governments, was already in place. That was 10 years ago, so you can imagine how it’s grown since then.

At that time, that network was already automatically intercepting every digital communication, every radio communication and every analog communication. This blanket siphoning of data allows the NSA and others that have access to the network to retroactively search an individual’s communications, even if all they have is a single identifier. Snowden explained:

“So for example, if I wanted to see the content of your email … all I have to do is use what’s called a selector, any kind of thing in the communications chain that might uniquely or almost uniquely identify you as an individual.

I’m talking about things like email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, even passwords that are unique to you that aren’t used by anyone else.

I can input those into the system, and it will not only go back through the database … it will basically put an additional level of scrutiny on it moving into the future that says, ‘If this is detected now or at any time in the future, I want this to go to me immediately,’ and [it will] alert me in real time that you’re communicating with someone. Things like that.”

According to Snowden, the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has “the most invasive network intercept program anywhere in the world.” That program, Tempora, intercepts all content, in addition to metadata, on everything and everyone.

Snowden also describes the “SSO,” which stands for Special Sorters Operations. The SSO passively collects data across networks, both in the U.S. and internationally. Domestically, this is done primarily through corporate partnerships.

“They also do this with multinationals that might be headquartered in the U.S. whom [they can] just pay into giving them access,” Snowden said. They also do it bilaterally with the assistance of other governments.

You’re Being Spied Upon Everywhere

Snowden also pointed out some of the many ways in which you’re being spied upon by the digital devices around you. As just one example, all VoIP phones, which transmit calls over an IP network such as the internet, have little computers inside of them that can be hot mic’d even if servers are down. As long as the phone is plugged in, someone can use it to listen in on your conversations.

Within days of their first meeting in Hong Kong, Greenwald and Poitras were publishing stories about the NSA’s illegal blanket spying domestically and internationally. CNN Live reported:

“Another explosive article has just appeared, this time in the Washington Post … that reveals another broad and secret U.S. government’s surveillance program.

The Washington Post and The Guardian in London reporting that the NSA and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple.

The Post says they’re extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”

Greenwald also made numerous live news appearances. In one, he stated:

“In 2008, they eliminated the warrant requirement for all conversations, except ones that take place among Americans exclusively on American soil.

So they don’t need warrants now for people who are foreigners outside of the U.S., but they also don’t need warrants for Americans who are in the United States, communicating with people reasonably believed to be outside of the U.S.

So … the fact that there are no checks, no oversight about who’s looking over the NSA’s shoulder, means that they can take whatever they want, and the fact that it’s all behind a wall of secrecy, and they threaten people who want to expose it, means that whatever they’re doing, even violating the law is something that we’re unlikely to know until we start having real investigations and real transparency into what it is that the government is doing.”

Beyond Transparency

At this point, we’re beyond merely needing transparency. The intent to surveil and control every move we make and thought we express is now being openly expressed.

We can just assume that any digital devices can and probably are collecting data on our activities and whereabouts, and that those data are nowhere near held private and can be used against us in myriad ways.

Everyone must now choose between freedom and enslavement, and the option to choose freedom is rapidly closing.

Today, a decade after Snowden broke the dam of secrecy around the global surveillance scheme, we have but one choice left, and that is to actively reject that system by changing how we live our day to day lives. Everyone must now choose between freedom and enslavement, and the option to choose freedom is rapidly closing. Putting off making that choice is itself a choice.

Rejecting the control system means reverting back to “dumb” appliances and devices to the extent you’re able. It means getting savvier about privacy technologies such as deGoogled phones and computers² that cannot spy on you. It means using cash as much as possible and rejecting CBDCs and digital tokens. As noted by Whitney Webb in the interview I linked to earlier:

“There’s a huge need for to divest from Big Tech as much as possible, and it needs to happen quickly, because the choice is either participate in the system being designed for you by crazy people and become a slave, or don’t become a slave. And if you don’t want to be a slave, you have to invest now in Big Tech alternatives, unless you want to live a completely analog life …

The easiest route is to go the slavery route, and that’s how they’ve designed it on purpose. The whole selling point of that system is that it’s convenient and easy. So, obviously, it’s going to take some work to go the other route, but the future of human freedom depends on it so I think it’s a pretty easy choice.”

Connect with Dr. Joseph Mercola

Cover image credit: CDD20

See Related:

Five Ways to Prepare for the Online Privacy Crackdown

5 Ways to Prepare for the Online Privacy Crackdown

With legislation around the world seeking to gut encryption and online anonymity, Ramiro Romani offers an overview of what’s coming and several solutions for divesting from Big Tech products and protecting your online privacy.

by Ramiro Romani, Unlimited Hangout
November 6, 2023

The internet is about to change. In many countries, there’s currently a coordinated legislative push to effectively outlaw encryption of user uploaded content under the guise of protecting children. This means websites or internet services (messaging apps, email, etc.) could be held criminally or civilly liable if someone used it to upload abusive material. If these bills become law, people like myself who help supply private communication services could be penalized or put into prison for simply protecting the privacy of our users. In fact, anyone who runs a website with user-uploaded content could be punished the same way. In today’s article, I’ll show you why these bills not only fail at protecting children, but also put the internet as we know it in jeopardy, as well as why we should question the organizations behind the push.

Let’s quickly recap some of the legislation.

European Union

– Chat Control: would require internet services (Email, chat, storage) to scan all messages and content and report flagged content to the EU. This would require that every internet based service scans everything uploaded to it, even if it’s end-to-end encrypted. Content would be analyzed using machine learning (i.e. AI) and matches would automatically be reported to the police. This is awaiting a vote from the EU LIBE committee.

United Kingdom

–The Online Safety Act 2023: would require user service providers to enforce age limits and checks, remove legal but harmful content for children, and require scanning photos for materials related to child sexual abuse & exploitation, as well as terrorism. It would require providers to be able to identify these types of materials in private communications and to take down that content. This means providers would need visibility into messaging, even those messages are end-to-end encrypted. End to end encrypted messaging providers such as WhatsApp, Viber, Signal, and Element have indicated in an open letter that surveillance on of this type simply isn’t possible without breaking end to end encryption entirely, and have threatened to leave the UK if the bill was passed & enforced without the offending Clause 122. This bill was recently passed by parliament unchanged and will become enforceable in 2024.

United States

– The EARN IT Act 2023: would allow US states to hold websites criminally liable for not scanning user uploaded content for CSAM (child sexual abuse material). This would effectively ban end to end encryption. This bill has 22 cosponsors and is awaiting an order to report to the Senate.

– The STOP CSAM Act 2023 (Full Text): would allow victims who suffered abuse or exploitation as children to sue any website that hosted pictures of the exploitation or abuse “recklessly”, e.g. if your website was not automatically scanning uploads. Websites are already required by law to remove CSAM if made aware of it, but this would require providers to scan all files uploaded. This bill has 4 cosponsors, and is awaiting an order to report to the Senate.

– Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA): would require platforms to verify the ages of its visitors and filter content promoting self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, and sexual exploitation. This would inherently require an age verification system for all users and transparency into content algorithms, including data sharing with third parties. This bill has 47 bi-partisan cosponsors and is awaiting an order to report to the Senate.

Its important to note that the language in these bills and the definition for “service providers” extends to any website or online property that has user-uploaded content. This could be as simple as a blog that allows comments, or a site that allows file uploads. It could be a message board or chatroom, literally anything on the internet that has two-way communication. Most websites are operated by everyday people – not huge tech companies. They have neither the resources or ability to implement scanning on their websites under threat of fine or imprisonment. They would risk operating in violation or be forced to shut down their website. This means your favorite independent media site, hobbyist forum, or random message board could disappear. These bills would crumble the internet as we know it and centralize it further for the benefit of Big Tech who are rapidly expanding the surveillance agenda.

We must pause and ask ourselves, is this effort to ramp up surveillance really about protecting children?

How do companies currently deal with CSAM?

In the United States, tracking CSAM is recognized as a joint effort between ESPs (Electronic Service Providers) like Google, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) a private non-profit established by Congress in 1984 and primarily funded by the United States Department of Justice. Unlimited Hangout has previously reported on the NCMEC and its ties to figures such as Hillary Clinton and intelligence-funded NGOs such as Thorn. They also receive corporate contributions from big names such as Adobe, Disney, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, Ring Doorbell, Verizon, and Zoom.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2020/09/investigative-reports/ashton-kutchers-ngo-supplies-police-with-free-cia-linked-surveillance-tool-to-protect-kids/

Electronic service providers in the United States are already required to report to the CyberTipline (Federal statute 18 USC 2258A) if they become aware of CSAM, otherwise they may face fines or prison time. These CyberTipline reports combine offending content with additional information such as identifying the potential perpetrator, the victim, and other context that is combined and sent off to law enforcement.

Photo & content scanning measures are not required. However, several prominent companies have voluntarily implemented scanning of communications and media, such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Photos, Facebook, Instagram Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, iCloud email, and Microsoft’s Xbox. If you use these services, then your messages and media may automatically be scanned for abusive material.

Ironically and not surprisingly, its these very platforms that have the most malicious activity, including drug & guns sales, child abuse material, and cyberbullying/harassment.

Does voluntary content scanning actually help protect children?

Google began publishing a CSAM transparency report in 2021 which gives numbers on how much CSAM was identified and reported on across Google & Youtube. It includes data since 2020, with counts for how many reports were made to the NCMEC, how many different Google accounts were disabled, and how many “hashes” (photo fingerprints) were contributed to the NCMEC hash database.

It is unclear exactly when Google started creating “hashes” of its users photos, but they have contributed 2.5 million new hashes to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Hash Database to date. Reports are published every 6 months, and we’ve seen staggering growth in all types of reports since 2020. For example, Google’s CyberTipline reports have grown from ~547,000 in 2020, ~870,000 in 2021, to more than 2.1 million reports in 2022. The first half of 2023 has shown a decline, totaling ~750,000 reports from January to June.

As seen on NCMEC’s CyberTipline Data page, Google’s reports represent a mere fraction of the total number of reports submitted to the NCMEC, which works with over 1,500 ESPs – mostly US companies. 5 electronic service providers (Facebook, Instagram, Google, WhatsApp, and Omegle) accounted for more than 90% of the 32 million reports in 2022. Around half (49%) of these reports in 2022 are “actionable”, meaning there is sufficient information for law enforcement to proceed with an investigation. Additionally, 89.9% of reports involved content uploaded by users outside of the US.

The NCMEC also reports the numbers of CyberTipline reports made to different law enforcement organizations such as Internet Crimes Against Children, Local LE, Federal LE, and International LE.

Law enforcement is not required to give any feedback on what happens with these reports and, as a result, they hardly provide feedback. Using the NCMEC’s own numbers, we can see there is little visibility on how the reports are used.

In 2022, we saw the following rates of feedback from law enforcement and other groups who received reports.

• International Crimes Against Children Groups – 491,655 actionable reports resulted in 41.59% Feedback
• Local Law Enforcement – 1,462 actionable reports resulted in 3.48% Feedback
• Federal Law Enforcement – 1,356,988 reports resulted in 0.03% Feedback
• International Law Enforcement – 13,995,567 reports resulted in 0.4% Feedback

Keep in mind, a feedback response doesn’t necessarily mean an arrest or conviction. Feedback responses could may indicate the report was closed or incomplete feedback. Also, these results are not open to the public, although a FOIA request could change that. However, these numbers make it clear that whether companies are voluntarily scanning their content or creating reports after becoming aware of CSAM – there’s no visibility on what actually happens with the reports.

Given the huge volume of reports not acted upon, forcing technology providers to automatically scan content & generate reports is not going to magically change things. It will require law enforcement to act on reports to put child predators behind bars and save children. That is, after all, what legislators say they want.

That’s not to say nothing is being done. A 2022 report of CyberTipline success stories in the United States stated that close to 714 different cases used CyberTipline reports. Only 16 of these cases explicitly reported the assistance of a service provider.

Again, out of 1.35 million actionable CyberTipline reports in the United States in 2022, there have been 714 arrests so far. Its possible there are ongoing investigations that will bring this number higher, but we can only guess without transparency. I was unable to find success stories for any prior years.

I commend these efforts to protect children from dangerous predators; however, these efforts do not necessitate automatic scanning of everyone’s messages or the gutting of encryption. Generating more reports from service providers obviously does not lead to more arrests being made. Lastly, the majority of CSAM material comes from big tech providers, many of whom are voluntarily scanning content anyways. Why enforce this requirement on every website on the internet?

If legislators around the world want to make a genuine impact on child abuse, then they should push for transparency and accountability practices for law enforcement and work to ensure that law enforcement properly investigates the millions upon millions of reports they already receive every year, and make the data available to the public.

We the people need to know that the groups responsible for investigating child abuse are doing their jobs with the processes and data already available, rather than further sacrifice our individual privacy and security for more of the same. The bills/laws in question also lack an understanding of encryption, are not technically feasible to implement, put unnecessary legal liability on technology companies, and lack evidence that the policies will improve outcomes for children.

How can the online child abuse laws across Western countries be so consistent with their practices? How did they all reach the same strategies of age verification, content filtering, and client side scanning?

The framework for this legislation has been in the works for years. One key architect of this push has been the WePROTECT Global Alliance, a merger of initiatives between the European Commission, the US Department of Justice, and the UK Government. Their first summit was hosted in 2014 and is now comprised of 97 governments, 25 technology companies, and 30 civil society organizations.

UNICEF, a member of WePROTECT, released a “model national response” which outlines many of the elements we see in these different child safety bills today. UNICEF and organizations like the US Department of Justice state that sexual exploitation of children cannot be addressed by one country, company, or organization working in isolation. Troublingly, both of those groups have a history of turning a blind eye to child abuse in their respective organizations and/or jurisdictions (see here, here, here and here for examples).

Working groups like the “Five Country” government counterparts (Five Eyes) – USA, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand– have met with the corporate executives of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Roblox, Snap, and Twitter to collaborate on guidelines such as the “Voluntary Principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse” (justice.gov link). These groups are all working together, via public-private partnerships like the Global Cyber Alliance, among others, to change the face of the internet.

Earlier this year, the Department of Justice outlined the “risky” aspects of technology in a 2023 National Strategy Report on Child Exploitation:

 

– an uneven response to online child safety by the tech sector;
– a CyberTipline system that is overwhelmed;
– anonymization of offenders;
– encryption of data storage and communications;
– online environments where children and adults interact without supervision or controls;
– globalized, often sovereignless, platforms;
– remote, often extraterritorial, storage; and
– a compounding lack of public awareness of these risks.

While the issue of child exploitation online is grave and child abusers need to be held accountable – this shouldn’t come of our individual privacy and freedom. From the publicly stated perspectives of these groups, anonymization, encryption, and not allowing governments or tech companies to track all content is equivalent to contributing to child exploitation.

Ignoring the child abuse right in front of their noses

As noted earlier, many of these groups have a track record of responding very poorly to serious child abuse issues when these crimes involve their own organization or persons with political value. For instance, there have been nearly 2,000 allegations of child sexual abuse and exploitations made against U.N “Peacekeepers” worldwide between 2004 and 2016, as reported by the Associated Press. This includes the child sex ring in Haiti from 2004 to 2007 where Sri Lankan UN “Peacekeepers” traded food in exchange for sex with children as young as nine years old.

The names of the offenders are kept confidential by the UN, and the UN puts the responsibility on member states to investigate & prosecute. UN records on these allegations are also incomplete and hundreds of cases have been closed without explanation. The United Nations even continues to send Sri Lankan peacekeepers to Haiti, despite the scandals. In the United States, we can see a similar level of accountability with the Department of Justice still withholding the client list for Jeffrey Epstein’s child prostitution ring, among many, many other examples.

The very organizations that try to convince us to give up our individual liberties for the sake of the children will completely ignore crimes against children when it suits them. Can we really trust these organizations to protect children?

The real-time monitoring of messages and outlawing of privacy will not protect children. On the contrary, it would put their communications into the hands of more third parties. The wiser choice would be to encourage parental awareness and conscious use of technology, e.g. not giving children unlimited access to mobile phones or devices and avoiding use of popular social media platforms and messengers.

If these actors truly cared about protecting children, then they would call an end to the genocide & war crimes occurring in Gaza. Instead, the US is rushing to provide aid to Israel in the form of munitions. In the UK, only 80 out of 650 MP’s have called for a ceasefire. Instead, there is more interest in clamping down on and controlling the internet, a crucial resource for all people in a time of great need.

Inter-governmental organizations are pushing towards an internet where our identities are verified and our messages are tracked. With such legislation coming our way all over the world, how can we retain any privacy?

The answer is simple – do not comply. Do not follow along with big tech companies that voluntarily follow legislative guidelines. Find ways to decentralize your use of software. Invest your time into divesting from big tech and learning alternative solutions for communications, storage, and encryption. Given the stakes, there has never been a more important time to divest from these companies and their software.

Thankfully, there are still many ways that individuals can limit their dependence on centralized software services that perform content or AI scanning. We can boycott those Big Tech companies that scan our content including Microsoft, Google, Apple and countless others. It’s just a matter of learning how to take back our technology.

At this point you might be asking:

• How do we continue to find information on the internet without Google’s search engine?
• Or use our computers without Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s macOS?
• Or use our phones without Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS?
• Or use our browser without Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge, or Apple’s Safari? (the oligopoly of these behemoths extends everywhere.)

Solving these problems with alternative software has been the mission of my initiative Take Back Our Tech, and today I am honored to share 5 Ways To Protect Yourself from Incoming Internet Surveillance Bills with the Unlimited Hangout community.

1. Use a “free” operating system for your computer.

Traditional operating systems (“OSs”) like Windows and macOS are proprietary software, which is distinct from free software. It’s important to understand the difference between the two, as the topic will come up again. So let’s define proprietary and free software.

Proprietary software, or “non-free software,” is not available for users to study, observe, or change. As the user, you are given no rights.

For example, only the developers of Microsoft Windows can get a clear look at the code of the operating system and understand what it does. Users have no way to view the code, and verify what the program does.

In contrast, free software (also known as Free & Open Source Software FOSS) gives users rights. The Free Software Foundation, one of the leading organizations behind the Free Software movement, provides an extended definition:

“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.

You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got them, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.

Alternative operating systems based on GNU/Linux are free software. They offer many intended benefits:

• Visibility into changes: Any user or developer can take a look at code updates and ensure that the operating system is not acting unexpectedly or maliciously. For instance, users of the Ubuntu OS fought back against changes that sent search results to Amazon and got the changes overturned.
• More choices: Because others can modify and distribute free software at will, far more software choices exist in the free software ecosystem — choices that often outcompete and provide more value than proprietary software.
• Costs: All Linux distributions are FREE as in cost. Compare this to paying for Windows activation keys.
• Freedom: Your computer will not automatically track every program that you run, as does macOS, or force updates on you, as Windows does (and to which you agree in their terms of service, a document very few take the time to read).

So what are you waiting for? Throw your proprietary software in the trash and enjoy an operating system that respects your freedom and your data.

• If you’re still not convinced and want to see all the ways traditional operating systems take advantage of you, read our Leap to Linux article.
• If you’re interested in learning how to install a Linux-based OS, please follow #TBOT’s guide.
• If you’re interested in other Linux learning articles, here is #TBOT’s content series on Linux.

Here are some recommendations for free operating systems based on Linux. You can download the .iso file (in which the OS is contained) for each operating system from the following links as well as feature walkthroughs.

Once you’ve made your decision of OS you can follow the guide linked above to get it installed on your machine.

• (Features) Linux Mint: https://linuxmint.com/
• (Features) KDE Neon: https://neon.kde.org/
• (Features) MX Linux: https://mxlinux.org/

2. Use open-source software on your phone.

The two main choices for traditional mobile operating systems today is Google’s Android, and Apple’s iOS. These two options make up 99%+ of the global market share of mobile operating systems. With over 6.6 billion phones on earth, the data pipeline to these two companies is incomprehensibly large – they’ve got real-time data for almost every person on the planet.

Observational studies of both Android and iOS-based phones found that these devices connect back to their parent companies every 5 minutes. In addition, they collect unique device identifiers, phone numbers, locations, and other surprising info.

Although it would be too lengthy to discuss these issues in-depth in this article, if you’d like to see exactly what tracking and data collection occurs on these mobile operating systems, you can read #TBOT’s analysis here.

A few alternative operating systems have popped up in recent years that can compete with the likes of Google and Apple. These operating systems are referred to as “de-googled” operating systems, and are typically built on top of Android’s Open Source Platform (AOSP). This code is maintained by Google, but other developers have been able to build new features on top of it, and more importantly, to remove any behind-the-scenes tracking or data collection.

You can use one of these alternative operating systems today to configure your own “privacy phone.”

I recommend these three operating systems (note that each is compatible with only certain phones):

• GrapheneOS (leading standard for security): https://grapheneos.org/
• DivestOS (device compatibility with 0 Google Services): https://divestos.org/
• LibreMobileOS (a newer OS with great features): https://libremobileos.com/

You can get more information on supported phones and the install instructions on each website.

Alternatively, if you are pressed for time or don’t want to do the research and make the tech decisions yourself, you can get a phone out of the box that comes complete with GrapheneOS and useful free software apps and communication services, through my project Above Phone.

De-googled phones use alternative app stores like F-Droid (where all apps are free software) and Aurora Store (which will allow you to download apps anonymously from the Google Play Store).

Normal Android phones also have access to these apps, but will still suffer from centralized tracking through Google Services. If you have an Android-based phone you can get started with these alternative app stores right away. Get more details on the links below:

F-Droid FOSS App Catalogue: https://f-droid.org/
Aurora Store: https://auroraoss.com/

You may be surprised at how easily you can transition to a de-googled phone — there are user friendly, private, and functional options for almost all of your app needs. You can also use apps like Uber & AirBnb, which don’t work without Google services, but there is usually a workaround, like using those services from within a web browser, or by using advanced features like GrapheneOS’s sandboxing to isolate Google Services from the rest of your phone.

3. Own your data.

If a major cyber event caused the internet to go down, how would you recover the photos/files/information you stored on cloud services? How would you get the information you needed to prepare for a survival situation?

It would be best to have this information on hand when you need it – not desperately trying to recover it in the event of a cyber disaster.

At a minimum, you should back up all of the following on your local computer instead of on the cloud service you use currently: passwords, legal documents, books, photos, reference material, and maps.

Here are some suggestions to be “cyber-pandemic” ready.

1. Knowledge is power. Download all the books you need in PDF format. A great site to start is PDFDrive
2. Need to navigate offline? Organic Maps (available on F-Droid and for Android phones) lets you download maps of most of the regions on the planet — and you can route to different locations using GPS only (which means you don’t need a SIM card in your phone).
3. If you use Google Drive or iCloud, now is the time to export all of your photos, videos, and documents to a local hard drive. Here’s a tutorial on how to export Google Drive files. Here’s an tutorial on how to export files on iCloud.
4. Are you managing your passwords in the cloud? Know that cloud password managers are not immune to hacking attempts. The best place for your passwords is in an encrypted password vault on your computer. An attacker would need not only the password vault file on your computer, but also the master password used to encrypt the vault. A collection of software called Keepass offers a cohesive way to manage and sync passwords locally on your computer and on your phone.

4. Support alternatives.

A wide range of software can serve as alternatives in the open-source software ecosystem. I’ve categorized and listed several great ones below, all of which are programs for Linux computers!

You can also find an important set of core software for Linux with details on how to use it on #TBOT’s Open-Source Survival Toolkit. A larger list of programs is available on #TBOT’s Open Source Survival Library.

Password Managers

KeepassXC: Offline password manager.
Bitwarden: Cloud-based password manager

Privacy / Security

I2P: Private peer-to-peer networking layer.
VeraCrypt: Open-source cross-platform disk encryption

Browsers

Ungoogled Chromium: A (fork) copy of Google’s Chromium engine with tracking removed
LibreWolf: Firefox fork with improved privacy
Falkon: KDE Project’s web browser

Email

Evolution: A mail client, calendar, address book, and task manager in one
Thunderbird: Mozilla Foundation’s email, chat, and calendaring client
Mailspring: Easy-to-use, modern mail client with integrations to major email providers
KMail: KDE’s email client that supports many mail protocols

Communication

Kotatogram: Alternate Telegram client with improved offline features
AnyDesk: Remote desktop / support software
Jitsi: Free video conferencing
Jami: Free and open-source peer-to-peer video conferencing.

Social Media

Nostr: a decentralized social media protocol
PeerTube: Decentralized video broadcasting
Nitter: Alternative twitter front end
Invidious: Alternative YouTube front end
Libreddit: Alternative Reddit front end
Owncast: Self-hosted live video and web chat server

Graphics

Krita: Free and open source digital illustration program
Inkscape: Professional vector-based graphics editor
GIMP: One of the oldest and best- known image editors
Pinta: Bitmap editor similar to Paint.NET
Gravit Designer: Vector-based design app
Blender: End-to-end 3D creation suite

Photography

DarkTable: Virtual light table and darkroom for photography
DigiKam: Personal photo management

Video Editors

Kdenlive: The KDE project’s video editor
Davinci Resolve: High-end professional video editor
OpenShot: Easy-to-use, powerful video editor

Video Utilities

OBS Studio: Video recording and live streaming
Kazam: Record videos of your screen
Peek: Record videos and gifs of your screen
Spectacle: KDE’s screenshot tool

Technical Tools

Remmina: A remote desktop client
VirtualBox: Create virtual machines

Writing

CherryTree: Hierarchical note-taking application that stores multimedia notes in an encrypted database (not markdown)
Trillium Notes: Build knowledge bases & graphs with this extensible note-taking application (not markdown)
Joplin Notes: Create simple notes and to do lists using markdown

Reading

Foxit PDF: Feature-rich PDF reader.
Sioyek: PDF reader for academic papers.

Office

LibreOffice: Most popular open-source office suite for Linux
OnlyOffice: Collaborative online document editor
CryptPad: Browser-based encrypted document editor
HomeBank: Personal money management

5. Own your communications.

Although social messengers like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger can be useful, many of them are not open source. Even the ones that claim to be open source often only make the front end of the application visible for inspection (that part you interact with directly), not the server-side code that is responsible for delivering messages.

Chat protocols like XMPP and Nostr are fully open source, meaning the code is available for the client and server. This is especially important because it means that you can run the server-side software yourself on a computer under your control. This is called self-hosting, and it’s crucial to censorship resistance and verifying that a software does what it says.

XMPP is over 20 years old and can support tens of thousands of users on a single server. It offers end-to-end encrypted messaging, voice calls, and video calls (as well as files and audio messages). It can be used on computers, phones, and in a web browser, and it’s also completely free to join (you can join any public server). It can even be bridged to the phone network (anonymous phone numbers without needing a SIM card anyone?).

It’s a wonder why XMPP isn’t more well known, but part of the reason could be that it’s hard to monetize (make money) on XMPP. The protocol has been used under the hood for major chat services run by big tech companies scaling to millions of users, unfortunately these big companies hid the underlying technology.

Above Phone is attempting to change this. The Above Privacy Suite offers a professional XMPP service with enhanced privacy. It comes in a bundle with 5 other privacy services.

• If you want more information about XMPP, you can read #TBOT’s most popular article to date, which gives a comprehensive overview.
• If you want video lessons on how to use XMPP for chats, calls, and video calls, you can check out Above Phone’s webinar.

Conclusion

The internet is changing and battle lines are being drawn. On one side, government organizations have become obsessed with invading our personal communications and drastically advancing the ever encroaching surveillance state, supposedly “for the sake of the children.” Together with enthusiastic help from Big Tech, they threaten to monitor even single thought, idea, or creation you share on the internet.

On the other side are people who are not going to let that happen. We’re the underdogs, a small but growing number of people who are demanding privacy and freedom over convenience. It doesn’t have to be their way or the highway when it comes to technology, we can carve our own path, experimenting with software that is friendly and in alignment with our values. Hopefully, this guide can give you a starting point to understand your technology and places to find alternatives.

I encourage you to not only explore and use the software listed in this guide, but to support the developers with financial donations. Their projects may be the key to both surviving and thriving in the growing surveillance state.

Connect with Above Phone project

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Cover image credit: Franz26

Etienne de la Boetie² on the Federal Reserve and Mass Control

by Jeremy Nell, Jerm Warfare
September 18, 2023

The Federal Reserve has a significant grip on the US economy, its political system and, by extension, the rest of the world.

Created by a banking cartel, it’s designed to serve the interests of the banking industry at the expense of the general population. A staggering 90% of the US money supply is essentially created out of thin air by private banks. These banks then loan this money and collect interest, essentially making profits from nothing. (This is known as fractional reserve banking.)

The US government borrows from these central banks, adding to the public debt, which is then shouldered by the citizens.

Plus, the government has no real control over the Federal Reserve, despite the appearance of regulation. The Federal Reserve Board and the heads of the Federal Reserve Banks are the ones who determine the economic policy of the US. These board members have strong ties to big banking and investment companies (such as Vanguard and BlackRock).

The Federal Reserve is a corrupt institution that facilitates war and mass slavery through inflation and theft.

The article claims that this system essentially robs society by inflating prices and reducing the purchasing power of existing dollars. It also discusses how a small number of companies, primarily banks and financial institutions, control a significant portion of global wealth. The article suggests that the death of the dollar could be imminent due to the exposure of these systems. It is obviously unfair that banks are given the monopoly privilege of creating money, which steals the purchasing power from everyone else in society.

Moreover, there are around 147 firms, primarily banks and financial institutions, that control about 40% of global wealth. (Vanguard and BlackRock alone control around $16.5 trillion.)

The ability to create money out of thin air has enabled banks to buy, consolidate, and weaponise the media and other industries,. This has led to a form of monopoly where a small number of companies control significant sectors.

Etienne de la Boetie² is the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation and the author of Government – The Biggest Scam in History.



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Cover image credit: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

CJ Hopkins: The Criminalization of Dissent (Continued)

“Never, ever, give in to a bully. The second you do, that bully owns you. What the bully wants, more than whatever he is demanding, more than anything else in the world, is your fear. The bully interprets your fear as respect, because the bully doesn’t understand respect. The bully craves your fear, and your obedience, because they reify the bully’s “authority.” They enable the bully to feel powerful and important. The bully needs to feel “powerful” and “important” because the bully feels weak and unimportant, and afraid. All fascists are essentially cowards. They are cowards, and nihilists, who hate themselves, and fear themselves, and hate and fear life, which is why they are so obsessed with controlling everything.”

The Criminalization of Dissent (continued) 

by CJ Hopkins, Consent Factory
September 10, 2023

So, the Berlin State Prosecutor has launched another criminal investigation of me. Apparently, I’m being charged with reporting on the original investigation of me that the Berlin State Prosecutor launched in June.

What happened is, the prosecutor visited my blog and read a column I published in July, The Criminalization of Dissent (Revisited), which included screenshots of the alleged “hate-crime” Tweets that the original criminal investigation is based on, and that resulted in the Order of Punishment that the Berlin District Court handed down two weeks ago. So, the prosecutor opened a new criminal investigation and sent my attorney an official notice explaining the gravity of the additional charges.

The charges are of the utmost gravity. I am officially accused of “relativizing” or “minimizing” the crimes of the Nazis … by republishing the two Tweets that I originally tweeted.

Here, once again, are the Tweets …

Yes, that’s right, I just published them again. I am going to explain why I published them again.

I’m not going to explain the Tweets again. I have explained them in several previous columns. I have explained them to Matt Taibbi of Racket News, Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone, James Freeman, Patrick Henningsen, Elena Louisa Lange, Dirk Pohlmann, and Christine Black at Brownstone Institute (forgive me if I’m forgetting anyone). I explained them to Stefan Millius of Weltwoche, and to another journalist at a big Swiss newspaper. My attorney has explained them, in German, to the prosecutor, and to German audiences on Kontrafunk. RT published a piece explaining them. I believe they have been exhaustively explained.

Not that they ever really needed explanation. You would have to be a certified moron to believe they “minimized,” or “relativized,” or in any way made light of the crimes of the Nazis. You and I are not certified morons. Neither is the Berlin State Prosecutor. Neither is the District Court of Berlin. Not to put too fine a point on it, the charges are horseshit, and everyone involved knows it. They are a blatant pretext to crackdown on dissent.

OK, now let me explain why I just published the Tweets again, knowing full well that the Berlin State Prosecutor is probably going to read this column, become extremely agitated, and charge me with additional “hate crimes.”

No, I am not a glutton for punishment. I’m not at all enjoying my introduction to the so-called “German legal system.” It is taking up my time. It is making me angry. It is upsetting my wife, which I do not appreciate. It is costing me a lot of money. It has forced me to ask other people for money, which is something I do not like to do. It’s screwing with my sleep. It is distracting me from my work. And so on. Which is exactly the point.

The goal of horseshit prosecutions like mine (and those of many other dissidents currently) is (a) to punish us for speaking out against “New Normal” totalitarianism by making our lives as miserable as possible, (b) to make examples of us to discourage others from speaking out, and (c) to intimidate us into shutting the fuck up.

Totalitarians, fascists, and other power freaks are essentially just glorified schoolyard bullies. They may cloak themselves in the mantle of the law, but their modus operandi is brute force. Beneath all the bullshit, their message is simple: “either do what we say, or we will hurt you.”

OK, prepare yourself, because I’m going to give you some advice. I do not generally like to do that, but, in this case, I’m going to make an exception.

Never, ever, give in to a bully. The second you do, that bully owns you. What the bully wants, more than whatever he is demanding, more than anything else in the world, is your fear. The bully interprets your fear as respect, because the bully doesn’t understand respect. The bully craves your fear, and your obedience, because they reify the bully’s “authority.” They enable the bully to feel powerful and important. The bully needs to feel “powerful” and “important” because the bully feels weak and unimportant, and afraid. All fascists are essentially cowards. They are cowards, and nihilists, who hate themselves, and fear themselves, and hate and fear life, which is why they are so obsessed with controlling everything.

The point is, never give in to a bully. Never reify a bully’s “authority.” If you do, you will find yourself sucked into the bully’s sadistic, nihilistic “reality.” You will be playing by the bully’s rules. And that is all “reality” actually is, a set of rules we agree to play by, or, in this case, do not agree to play by.

So, getting back to my criminal case, and the Berlin State Prosecutor’s latest attempt to bully me into shutting up and demonstrating my “respect” for the “authority” and “power” of the Berlin State Prosecutor, fuck that. I do not respond well to threats. I do not take orders from totalitarians and fascists, or any other type of authoritarians or bullies. So that is why I have republished those Tweets, and why I will continue to republish those Tweets every time the German authorities threaten me with additional criminal charges for refusing to obey their “authority.”

Again, I am under no illusions. I expect the prosecutor to file new charges and issue further threats, which I will defy, which will lead to additional charges, and so on. I am not looking forward to that, but I don’t have any other choice, not if I want to be able to respect myself.

If you have any doubts about whether that will happen (i.e., an endless cycle of new bullshit criminal charges stemming from my repeated refusal to respond to the German authorities’ bullying), well, let me tell you about another dissident the German authorities are currently persecuting. I’ll do it quickly, and then I’ll let you go.

As many of my readers are aware, I am presently holed up in an undisclosed location in the Italian countryside. Michael Ballweg, the founder and lead organizer of the “Querdenken” movement, was also here for a while. Michael, who is an excellent cook, whipped up some delicious “extremist” dinners, after which we all sat around “denying Covid,” “conspiracy theorizing,” brainwashing each other with “Russian propaganda,” and “delegitimizing the state,” and so on. Late at night, when the other “extremists” were sleeping, Michael and I discussed our criminal cases.

Michael’s case is a bit more serious than mine. Michael just spent nine months in jail. The German authorities have seized his assets, and frozen all his funds, so he is homeless, and bankrupt, and they are prosecuting him for attempted fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion, or, in other words, for launching a protest movement. If you’re not familiar with Michael and Querdenken, you can read the official propaganda disseminated by the usual “mainstream” media or the Intelligence officers who edit Wikipedia, or … here’s a Spiked article to start you off. Then, go ahead, do your own research.

The most absurd aspect of Michael’s case is the German authorities’ “theory of his crimes.” According to this theory, Michael’s devious scheme was to commit serious fraud by … well, basically, launching a nationwide protest movement that was certain to get a ton of media attention and incur the wrath of the German authorities. As any criminal mastermind will confirm, the best way to commit major fraud is to absolutely infuriate the government by organizing a series of massive protests, and generate tons of media attention, because you definitely want as much publicity as possible while you are defrauding your unsuspecting supporters of their voluntary donations to your cause.

Seriously, this is their “theory of the crime,” which would make Michael Ballweg the most idiotic and incompetent fraudster in the history of fraud.

I could go on about his case, and mine, or those of the numerous other dissidents that are currently being made examples of, and about the broader GloboCap crackdown on dissent, which is happening, not just in New Normal Germany, but all throughout the New Normal Reich, but I need to end here and go water some plants. I am serving as “caretaker” of this thoughtcriminal sanctuary, and I take my responsibilities seriously.

I’ll keep you (and the Berlin State Prosecutor) posted on my further “hate crimes.” In the meantime, best wishes from somewhere in Italy!

Connect with C.J. Hopkins substack | website

Cover image credit: revzack

How Big Business Uses Big Government to Rape You (And Why You Love It)

by James Corbett, The Corbett Report
September 2, 2023



Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee / Rokfin / Rumble

FROM 2016: You’ve probably heard all about Upton Sinclair’s 1906 expose of the turn-of-the-century American meatpacking industry and the Chicago stockyards…but everything you’ve heard about it is wrong. The book wasn’t an expose of the meatpackers, the legislation it inspired served to help the industry it sought to punish, and Sinclair himself hated the end result of his book, which aimed for the heart and hit the stomach by accident.

Join us for this month’s edition of the Film, Literature and the New World Order as we learn not to trust what’s on the label of mainline history.

FLASHBACK SHOW NOTES:

Big Government Has Come for This Small-Town Amish Farmer. Here’s How He’s Fighting Back.

Episode 227 – The Regulation Trap

Interview 1382 – The Social Media Regulation Psyop

Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” – FLNWO #35

EPISODE SHOW NOTES:

The Jungle (Free Audiobook)

Upton Sinclair – Spartacus Schoolnet

History Brief: Teddy’s Food and Drug Regulation

Horse Meat, Hanford Leak, Obama’s Oscar

Genetic Fallacy: How Monsanto Silences Scientific Dissent

Why Government Regulation is a Lie (and what you can do about it)

Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism

Meat Packers Rape You – And You Love It

Meat Packing – Mises Wiki

How the Wholesome Meat Act Gives Us Less Wholesome Meat

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Cover image credit: Angela_Yuriko_Smith

We the Targeted: How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
August 29, 2023

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

— President Harry S. Truman

Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.

The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.

Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

This last point is particularly disturbing.

Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.

In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.

Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices. Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

Flagging you as a danger based on your feelings. Customs and Border Protection is reportedly using an artificial intelligence surveillance program that can detect “sentiment and emotion” in social media posts in order to identify travelers who may be “a threat to public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel.”

Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.

Flagging you as a danger based on your DNA. DNA technology in the hands of government officials completes our transition to a Surveillance State. If you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects. It’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.

Flagging you as a danger based on your face. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.

Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.

Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.

Flagging you as a danger based on your public activities. Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such “suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.”

Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”

Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.

Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.

Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.

Flagging you as a danger based on your correspondence. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

Don’t believe it.

As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”

The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.

Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the police state wants us silent, servile and compliant.

They definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

And they certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting police brutality and racism, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.

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Cover image credit: Tumisu

Police Blocked Roads to Prevent Residents From Fleeing the Immolation of Lahaina

by Edward Hendrie, Great Mountain Publishing
August 24, 2023

An eyewitness reveals that police blocked traffic to prevent residents from fleeing the immolation of Lahaina.

There was no logical reason for the police to block cars fleeing the destruction of the city other than to ensure as many people died as possible.

The witness describes the actions of the police as “a combination of stupid and evil.”

Remnants of destroyed cars on Front Street that were caught in the traffic jam caused by a police blockade. The reporter states that the passengers fled their cars. But did they? How does he know? A directed energy weapon could have caught the passengers by surprise. If they were struck with a directed energy weapon, they would have been immolated as they sat in their cars.

Lahaina Is Within 40 Miles of a U.S. Government Directed Energy Facility on Maui

The Dog That Didn’t BarkLahaina Was Destroyed by a Directed Energy Weapon

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Cover image credit: US National Guard

German Courts Are Going FULL Dystopia 

by OffGuardian
August 23, 2023

It’s been an astonishing couple of days for German judges. Well, “astonishing” if you’ve been living in a cave for the last four years.

Many of you likely already know that satirist and playwright (and frequent OffG contributor) CJ Hopkins is being prosecuted in Germany for “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”

All because the cover of his book has a swastika on it.

Needless to say, the charges are absurd. Insultingly so. You can read CJ’s first-hand account of this nonsense here and here.

Anyone who isn’t a) stupid or b) delusional can plainly see these charges have nothing to do with a stock-image swastika, and everything to do with the content of the book. In short, they are politically motivated charges brought against an author for criticizing the state. The very essence of dystopian tyranny.

…and yesterday he was convicted.

He now faces 60 days in prison or a 3600 Euro fine.

That’s case one, and as we say one you are likely familiar with if you’re regular readers.

Something you probably haven’t heard is that, just this morning, a different German court sentenced a former judge to two years in prison.

His crime? Ruling that mask mandates in schools were not constitutional.

The case dates back to April 8th 2021, when Weimar District Family Court judge Christiaan Dettmar ruled that two schools in the district a) could not enforce mask mandates, b) must continue in-person classes and c) could not force pupils to test for “Covid”.

From Human Rights Blog:

The court case was a child protection case under to § 1666 paragraph 1 and 4 of the German Civil Code (BGB), which a mother had initiated for her two sons, aged 14 and 8 respectively, at the local Family Court. She had argued that her children were being physically, psychologically and pedagogically damaged without any benefit for the children or third parties. At the same time, she claimed this constituted a violation of a range of rights of the children and their parents under the law, the German constitution (Grundgesetz or Basic Law) and international conventions.

After listening to testimony from expert witnesses, the judge ruled in favour of the mother, writing in his verdict:

These are the risks [to mask mandates]. The children are not only endangered in their mental, physical and psychological well-being by the obligation to wear face masks during school hours and to keep their distance from each other and from other persons, but they are also already being harmed. At the same time, this violates numerous rights of the children and their parents under the law, the constitution and international conventions.

Two weeks after handing down this ruling, his home and office were raided by the police and his mobile phone was seized.

And now, two years later, he was found guilty of “judicial misconduct” and initially given two years in prison (the court has since suspended the sentence). “Judicial Misconduct”, for simply disagreeing with the government.

Free speech is the first and most vital liberty, without it no one is truly free. An independent judiciary is a must to preserve any kind of justice, judges who simply nod along with government edicts are the building blocks of authoritarian states.

The voice of the people and the power of the courts – ideally – work together to hold the government to account.

And yet, whether in the judiciary or the arts, the German legal system is now a machine for criminalizing and punishing dissent of any kind.

…I’d make a comparison to another German government that used to function in a similar way, but I really can’t afford a 4000 euro fine.

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We’re All Suspects in a DNA Lineup, Waiting to be Matched With a Crime

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
August 21, 2023

“Make no mistake about it…your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason… I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”

—Justice Antonin Scalia dissenting in Maryland v. King

Be warned: the DNA detectives are on the prowl.

Whatever skeletons may be lurking on your family tree or in your closet, whatever crimes you may have committed, whatever associations you may have with those on the government’s most wanted lists: the police state is determined to ferret them out.

In an age of overcriminalization, round-the-clock surveillance, and a police state eager to flex its muscles in a show of power, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.

No longer can we consider ourselves innocent until proven guilty.

Now we are all suspects in a DNA lineup waiting to be matched up with a crime.

Suspect State, meet the Genetic Panopticon.

DNA technology in the hands of government officials will complete our transition to a Surveillance State in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc.

It’s getting harder to hide, even if you think you’ve got nothing to hide.

Armed with unprecedented access to DNA databases amassed by the FBI and ancestry website, as well as hospital newborn screening programs, police are using forensic genealogy, which allows police to match up an unknown suspect’s crime scene DNA with that of any family members in a genealogy database, to solve cold cases that have remained unsolved for decades.

As reported by The Intercept, forensic genetic genealogists are “combing through the genetic information of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in search of a perpetrator.”

By submitting your DNA to a genealogical database such as Ancestry and 23andMe, you’re giving the police access to the genetic makeup, relationships and health profiles of every relative—past, present and future—in your family, whether or not you or they ever agreed to be part of such a database.

Indeed, relying on a loophole in a commercial database called GEDmatch, genetic genealogists are able to sidestep privacy rules that allow people to opt out of sharing their genetic information with police. The end result? Police are now able to identify and target those very individuals who explicitly asked to keep their DNA results private.

In this way, merely choosing to exercise your right to privacy makes you a suspect and puts you in the police state’s crosshairs.

It no longer even matters if you’re among the tens of millions of people who have added their DNA to ancestry databases. As Brian Resnick reports, public DNA databases have grown so massive that they can be used to find you even if you’ve never shared your own DNA.

That simple transaction—a spit sample or a cheek swab in exchange for getting to learn everything about one’s ancestral makeup, where one came from, and who is part of one’s extended family—is the price of entry into the Suspect State for all of us.

After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects.

It’s what police like to refer to a “modern fingerprint.”

Whereas fingerprint technology created a watershed moment for police in their ability to “crack” a case, DNA technology is now being hailed by law enforcement agencies as the magic bullet in crime solving, especially when it helps them crack cold cases of serial murders and rapists.

After all, who wouldn’t want to get psychopaths and serial rapists off the streets and safely behind bars, right?

At least, that’s the argument being used by law enforcement to support their unrestricted access to these genealogy databases, and they’ve got the success stories to prove it.

For instance, a 68-year-old Pennsylvania man was arrested and charged with the brutal rape and murder of a young woman almost 50 years earlier. Relying on genealogical research suggesting that the killer had ancestors who hailed from a small town in Italy, investigators narrowed their findings down to one man whose DNA, obtained from a discarded coffee cup, matched the killer’s.

In another cold case investigation, a 76-year-old man was arrested for two decades-old murders after his DNA was collected from a breathalyzer during an unrelated traffic stop.

Yet it’s not just psychopaths and serial rapists who are getting caught up in the investigative dragnet. In the police state’s pursuit of criminals, anyone who comes up as a possible DNA match—including distant family members—suddenly becomes part of a circle of suspects that must be tracked, investigated and ruled out.

In this way, “guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in a technological age in which one is just a DNA sample away from being considered a person of interest in a police investigation. As Jessica Cussins warns in Psychology Today, “The fundamental fight—that data from potentially innocent people should not be used to connect them to unrelated crimes—has been lost.”

Until recently, the government was required to at least observe some basic restrictions on when, where and how it could access someone’s DNA. That was turned on its head by various U.S. Supreme Court rulings that heralded the loss of privacy on a cellular level.

For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Maryland v. King that taking DNA samples from a suspect doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment. The Court’s subsequent decision to let stand the Maryland Court of Appeals’ ruling in Raynor v. Maryland, which essentially determined that individuals do not have a right to privacy when it comes to their DNA, made Americans even more vulnerable to the government accessing, analyzing and storing their DNA without their knowledge or permission.

It’s all been downhill since then.

Indeed, the government has been relentless in its efforts to get hold of our DNA, either through mandatory programs carried out in connection with law enforcement and corporate America, by warrantlessly accessing our familial DNA shared with genealogical services such as Ancestry and 23andMe, or through the collection of our “shed” or “touch” DNA.

Get ready, folks, because the government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

This has been helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget).

For example, Rapid DNA machines—portable, about the size of a desktop printer, highly unregulated, far from fool-proof, and so fast that they can produce DNA profiles in less than two hours—allow police to go on fishing expeditions for any hint of possible misconduct using DNA samples.

Journalist Heather Murphy explains: “As police agencies build out their local DNA databases, they are collecting DNA not only from people who have been charged with major crimes but also, increasingly, from people who are merely deemed suspicious, permanently linking their genetic identities to criminal databases.”

All 50 states now maintain their own DNA government databases, although the protocols for collection differ from state to state. Increasingly, many of the data from local databanks are being uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s massive DNA database, which has become a de facto way to identify and track the American people from birth to death.

Even hospitals have gotten in on the game by taking and storing newborn babies’ DNA, often without their parents’ knowledge or consent. It’s part of the government’s mandatory genetic screening of newborns. In many states, the DNA is stored indefinitely. There’s already a move underway to carry out whole genome sequencing on newborns, ostensibly to help diagnose rare diseases earlier and improve health later in life, which constitutes an ethical minefield all by itself.

What this means for those being born today is inclusion in a government database that contains intimate information about who they are, their ancestry, and what awaits them in the future, including their inclinations to be followers, leaders or troublemakers.

For example, police in New Jersey accessed the DNA from a nine-year-old blood sample of a newborn baby in order to identify the child’s father as a suspect in a decades-old sexual assault.

The ramifications of this kind of DNA profiling are far-reaching.

At a minimum, these DNA databases do away with any semblance of privacy or anonymity.

These genetic databases and genomic technology also make us that much more vulnerable to creeps and cyberstalkers, genetic profiling, and those who would weaponize the technology against us.

Unfortunately, the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—continues to lag far behind the government and Corporate America’s encroachments on our rights.

Moreover, while much of the public debate, legislative efforts and legal challenges in recent years have focused on the protocols surrounding when police can legally collect a suspect’s DNA (with or without a search warrant and whether upon arrest or conviction), the question of how to handle “shed” or “touch” DNA has largely slipped through without much debate or opposition.

As scientist Leslie A. Pray notes:

We all shed DNA, leaving traces of our identity practically everywhere we go… In fact, the garbage you leave for curbside pickup is a potential gold mine of this sort of material. All of this shed or so-called abandoned DNA is free for the taking by local police investigators hoping to crack unsolvable cases… shed DNA is also free for inclusion in a secret universal DNA databank.

What this means is that if you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name.

As the dissenting opinion to the Maryland Court of Appeals’ shed DNA ruling in Raynor rightly warned, “A person can no longer vote, participate in a jury, or obtain a driver’s license, without opening up his genetic material for state collection and codification.”

It’s just a matter of time before government agents will know everywhere we’ve been and how long we were at each place by following our shed DNA. After all, scientists can already track salmon across hundreds of square miles of streams and rivers using DNA.

Today, helped along by robotics and automation, DNA processing, analysis and reporting takes far less time and can bring forth all manner of information, right down to a person’s eye color and relatives. Incredibly, one company specializes in creating “mug shots” for police based on DNA samples from unknown “suspects” which are then compared to individuals with similar genetic profiles.

Of course, none of these technologies are infallible.

DNA evidence can be wrong, either through human error, tampering, or even outright fabrication, and it happens more often than we are told.

What this amounts to is a scenario in which we have little to no defense against charges of wrongdoing, especially when “convicted” by technology, and even less protection against the government sweeping up our DNA in much the same way it sweeps up our phone calls, emails and text messages.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals from the past expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.

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Cover image credit: OpenClipart-Vectors

Technocensorship: The Government’s War on So-Called Dangerous Ideas

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
August 1, 2023

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

—Ray Bradbury

What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.

Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

This is the very definition of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”

Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.

By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.

Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

It’s happening already.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

Little by little, Americans are being conditioned to accept routine incursions on their freedoms.

This is how oppression becomes systemic, what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.

It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.

Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.

As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”

His answer: “I suspect that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper.”

Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.

The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.

In Easter Island’s case, as Diamond speculates:

The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”

Sound painfully familiar yet?

We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. The erosion of our freedoms has happened so incrementally, no one seems to have noticed. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognize the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry have become fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.

Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are on that downward slope now.

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Incandescent Light Bulb Ban Starts on August 1; Gas Stove Ban Coming Next

by Chris Menahan, InformationLiberation
Jul. 30, 2023

Biden’s Department of Energy plans to mete out “the maximum civil penalty” against manufacturers that “knowingly distribute” illicit light bulbs which violate their new efficiency standards.

From Politico, “While everyone was yelling about gas stoves, the incandescent light bulb went away”:

It’s lights out for the incandescent bulbs that people have known, changed and singed their hands on for 140 years.

The modern descendant of Thomas Edison’s most famous legacy is set to formally meet its demise in the U.S. at the end of this month, despite years of efforts by Republicans to extend its lifespan. As of Aug. 1, the Energy Department will fully enforce new efficiency regulations that the old bulbs can’t meet, effectively prohibiting their retail sale.

[…] The endgame for old light bulbs came quietly — by early this year, lawmakers had mostly moved on to squabbling over gas stoves and other newer targets of the Energy Department’s efficiency efforts.

With the Biden regime jailing their opposition en masse, transifying kids, threatening to start WWIII and throwing open the borders, certain issues have to take a back seat.

Over a decade ago, though, the light bulb issue shone bright for tea party conservatives and GOP presidential hopefuls, who accused Democrats of trying to limit consumers’ choices.

CFL bulbs — the alternative at the time — literally induced migraine headaches in otherwise healthy people. When they broke, a hazmat team was needed to clean up the mercury they released.

Republican lawmakers even succeeded in passing legislation to block the Obama administration from carrying out the new efficiency standards — sometimes to the irritation of large light bulb manufacturers that had spent big bucks preparing for them.

[…] The fight zigged, then zagged: The Obama administration took action in its waning days to finalize the bulb efficiency requirements, only for former President Donald Trump — who once proclaimed energy-efficient bulbs made him “look orange” — to halt the move. But DOE pushed the rules to the finish line last year after President Joe Biden came into office with a climate agenda that includes a focus on energy efficiency measures.

Trump blocking the ban was one of the highlights of his presidency.

DOE completed the action last April, but full enforcement of the rule is set to begin Aug. 1. The transition away from the inefficient bulbs has been underway for more than a year, as the department provided flexibility for manufacturers and retailers to comply with the new standard.

That fight may be settled, but the larger fight over energy efficiency standards is still looming. Republican lawmakers in recent months have continually derided the Biden administration’s efficiency actions on everything from more efficient stoves to laundry machines and dishwashers.

For example, the Energy Department is proposing new efficiency standards covering gas stoves as well as electric stoves and ovens. Advocates say the rule would save consumers money on natural gas and lessen a source of greenhouse gas pollution, but critics point to DOE estimates that only about half of gas stoves now in the market could meet the proposed standards — something they contend amounts to a de-facto ban.

[…] DOE said it intends to seek the maximum civil penalty against [light bulb] manufacturers that knowingly distribute products that violate the standards. The department has previously issued civil penalties worth tens of thousands of dollars for companies violating its energy conservation standards.

Over half the country still appears to be using mostly incandescents.

Forty-seven percent of U.S. households reported using LED bulbs for most indoor lighting in 2020, according to the Energy Information Administration, up from only 4 percent in 2015.

It’s still not clear what incandescents will survive this ban. There’s some exemptions for certain specialty bulbs but I can’t find a definitive list anywhere.

Incandescents are still the best bulbs there are as the light they produce is 100 on the color rendering index — meaning it’s identical to sunlight — whereas the best LEDs are only around 90.

Nonetheless, as is now the norm, the plebs must be made to suffer to advance the “liberal world order.”

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This Pro-Mask “Study” Is Why You Should NEVER “Trust the Science”

by Kit Knightly, OffGuardian
July 27, 2023

Last week it was reported that the Australian state of Victoria may be considering “permanent” facemask mandates to achieve “zero-Covid”.

Now, we don’t need to get into the personal liberty implications of such a law, or  the near-infinite supply of evidence that masks don’t work to prevent the transmission of respiratory disease.

They don’t work, they never worked. Mandating them was a political move designed to make the fake Covid “pandemic” appear real, and their continued use is a symptom of brainwashing or a by-product of chronic virtue signaling.

The mask debate, such as it was, is over.

No, the only aspect of this development worth talking about is the “evidence” used to support the position – and trust me, the quotes are entirely justified.

The “study” which claims to demonstrate the benefits of permanent masking was published in the Medical Journal of Australia last week and titled “Consistent mask use and SARS‐CoV‐2 epidemiology: a simulation modelling study”.

“Simulation modelling study” is very much the key phrase there. For those who don’t know,  “simulation modelling studies” involve feeding data into a computer programme, then asking it to form conclusions.

Clearly, they are only as reliable and useful as the data you use. In fact, you can very easily make them produce any result you want by feeding in  the “right” (bad) data.

In this particular modelling study they started out by telling the computer that cloth masks reduce transmission by 53% and respirators reduced it by 80%:

Odds ratios for the relative risk of infection for people exposed to an infected person (wearing a mask v not wearing a mask) were set at 0.47 for cloth and surgical masks and 0.20 for respirators

Essentially, they told their computer that masks prevent disease…and then said “ok, computer, since you now know masks prevent disease  – what would happen if everybody wore them all the time?”

The computer then told them – obviously  – that nobody would get sick.

Because they made it logically impossible for it to say anything else.

But there’s a bit more to it.

The next layer of interest is where they got their input data from.

After all there have been dozens of studies done on masks over the years, 98% of which say masks don’t work.

So, did our guys they choose a peer-reviewed real-time control trial relying on lab-tested double-blind results?

Perhaps one of the dozen or so such trials listed in our 40 facts article?

Did they maybe average the results of multiple studies?

No, they used a phone survey.

One phone survey.

This phone survey, published last year and conducted in late 2021.

In this *ahem* “scientific study”, they had people randomly call up those who had recently been tested for “Covid”, ask them “did you wear a mask?” and then published the conclusion – “masks reduce transmission by 53%” – as if they meant something.

Interestingly, if you scroll down to the “affiliations” section you can see that one of the authors is a Pfizer grant recipient.

Rather more troublingly – and for some reason not mentioned as a conflict of interest – is that the whole study was produced by the California Board of Public Health.

California had already had a mask mandate in place for almost a year before this “study” was even started.

What we have here is not “science” it’s a computer model based on the results of a subjective phone survey conducted by a government agency with a vested interest. It is entirely meaningless, and yet is published in journals and cited by “experts”, perhaps even used as the basis of introducing new laws.

This is how “The Science^TM” works. And, although Covid has maybe opened many people’s eyes to this issue, it is far from unique to “Covid”. You are just as likely to find this kind of “research” published on any topic – especially those that serve a political purpose – and have been for years if not decades.

Stanford Professor of evidence-based medicine,  John Ioannidis wrote a paper called “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”, and that was back in 2005.

This has nothing to do with the “pandemic”, and everything to do with the difference between science and “The Science”. So let’s examine that distinction.

“Science” is an approach to the world. A rational method for gathering information, testing new ideas and forming evidence-based conclusions.

“The Science” is a self-sustaining industry of academics who need jobs and owe favours.

An ongoing quid pro quo relationship between the researchers – who want honors and knighthoods and tenure and book deals and research grants and to be the popular talking head explaining complex ideas to the multitudes on television – and the corporations, governments and “charitable foundations” who have all of those things in their gift.

This system doesn’t produce research intended to be read, it creates headlines for celebrities to tweet, links for “journalists” to embed, sources for other researchers to cite.

An illusion of solid substantiation that comes apart the moment you actually read the words, examine the methodology or analyse the data.

Self-reporting surveys, manipulated data, “modelling studies” that spit-out pre-ordained results. Affiliated-authors paid by the state or corporate interests to provide “evidence” that supports highly profitable or politically convenient assumptions.

This mask study is the perfect example of that.

Interlacing layers of nothing designed to create the impression of something.

That’s why they want you to trust it, rather than read it.

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Runaway Slaves

by Jeff Thomas, International Man
July 24, 2023

I believe it’s safe to say that most all of us sympathise with anyone who’s living in a condition of relative slavery and, if he has the courage to attempt to free himself, we root for him to succeed. Those of us who are the most compassionate would even offer him support in his quest, if we were called upon to do so.

But few of us think about slavery as being a modern institution. We tend to see slaves as victims of a racial divide who suffered disgracefully in times gone by.

So, we should take a look at the definition of slavery. In essence, it’s a state in which the product of an individual’s labour is forcibly taken from him. (His condition may include abuse, bondage, etc., but these are symptoms, not a definition.) The purpose for enslavement is always the same: to obtain the fruits of the slave’s labour, without mutually agreed-upon compensation.

And so, if we look at the bare bones of the definition, we easily recognize that if all of the fruits of our labour are taken from us, we are entirely enslaved. If a portion of those fruits is taken from us, we are partially enslaved.

Taxation is unquestionably, by definition, partial enslavement. It’s safe to say that virtually no one in the present world has ever been asked to sign away to his government the power to tax him. Make no mistake about it – taxation is achieved through force. You don’t wish to pay whatever is demanded? You go to prison.

Throughout history, there have been governments that taxed their minions ever-increasingly, eventually reaching the point that people began to leave the country rather than pay the usurious tax. (Rome declined in the fourth century as countless merchants left to live in the more-primitive north, amongst the barbarians, in order to escape tax enslavement. Similar developments have occurred in other countries throughout history.)

Although, in bygone eras, total slavery was quite common and occurred in every continent at one time or another, in our own time, governments have recognized that partial slavery is more effective – give people the impression that they’re free, whilst taking a major portion of the fruits of their labours from them in the forms of taxation and inflation.

But, at some point, people tend to rebel against slavery. First a few try it and succeed, followed by greater numbers, followed again by even greater numbers. In today’s world, we read falsified statistics of the numbers leaving a given country and those giving up their citizenship and don’t realise that these numbers are far from correct. They’ve been adjusted radically downward to make those running for freedom seem like anomalies.

Yet, as the former “free world” becomes increasingly oppressive; as the economic system breaks down, political leaders will experience dramatically diminished revenues and the only solution to keeping themselves in tax dollars (and in power) will be to tax the few remaining productive people far more heavily, to make up for the shortfall. It is at that point that an exodus will begin – first, quietly, then in increasing numbers. Then, emphasis on preventing slaves from running away will increase dramatically.

This will occur in three ways, as it always does.

The Owner Will Try to Prevent an Escape

In days of old, a slave owner would be likely to spend money to advertise in newspapers and print flyers to be distributed, offering a significant reward for the return of a slave. If the slave were recaptured, he would likely be flogged and might even be hanged.

An oppressive government is much the same. They’ll be happy to make examples of those seeking freedom, if their flight occurs after a no-exit date has been declared.

The Owner Will Pressure Other Jurisdictions Not to Accept Runaways

Historically, states and countries that have endorsed slavery have put the pressure on their non-slave-holding neighbours, warning that they will suffer if they give safe harbour to escaped slaves. Limiting trade and controlling the movement of money are the most immediate sanctions.

And, in fact, we’re already seeing this in the US today. With FATCA, the US is putting enormous pressure on banks worldwide to provide extensive information on any American holding an account there. And, if the US is not satisfied with that reporting, they levy huge fines. The outcome is as intended – most banks in the world no longer want Americans as clients… at all – the punishment for welcoming them is too great.

The next logical step is to limit expatriation in the same way – that other countries will be punished for taking in Americans as refugees after an as-yet-unnamed date.

The Chosen Destinations Will Become Overrun

Many destinations are presently sympathetic, welcoming the first “runaways.” But as numbers increase, the receivers of refugees will become like Californians in the 1930’s, who originally welcomed the Okies as potential low-paid farmworkers, but later turned against them violently when too many arrived to absorb into the population comfortably.

At some point, each existing destination will declare a moratorium on further refugees. Those who got in under the wire would be safe and sound, but no new applicants would be considered. (Again, this has historically been the norm.)

The final outcome would likely be similar to that in Germany in the late 1930’s, when German Jews who saw the writing on the wall, attempted to leave the country in ever-greater numbers. But, by far, the majority decided to wait and see if conditions worsened before exiting. Two things happened: 1) Destination countries collectively closed their doors to any further immigration of German Jews and, 2) Germany eventually made expatriation for Jews illegal. Those who were trapped went in their millions to slave labour camps, where total slavery was the universal rule.

This is not an anomaly – countries that find themselves in a similar situation, in which large numbers wish to escape, tend to drop the pretense of respect for freedom and resort to full slavery. Whether it be Mao’s work camps, or the Gulags of Russia, once the mask is off, partial slavery often is done away with and full slavery ensues.

Of course, we’d like to argue that all of the above examples are extreme and that nothing that severe could happen today. But then, those who fell victim in these examples also felt that way at the time, or they wouldn’t have stayed put and allowed themselves to be victimized.

Those folks were essentially the same as you or I. Their only shortcoming was that they failed to anticipate the fact that the historical economic and political warnings were occurring all around them, and they failed to vote with their feet.

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The Free Speech Scare

“War and censorship go together because it is wartime that allows ruling elites to declare that ideas alone are dangerous to the goal of defeating the enemy…”

~~~

“The war, however, was of domestic origin and targeted at Americans themselves…”

~~~

“The Red Scare mutated a century later to become the virus scare in which the real pathogen they tried to kill was your willingness to think for yourself.”

The Free Speech Scare

by Jeffrey A. Tucker, Brownstone Institute
July 21, 2023

It was a strange experience watching the House hearing in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was testifying. The topic was censorship and how and to what extent federal government agencies under two administrations muscled social media companies to take down posts, ban users, and throttle content. The majority made its case.

What was strange was the minority reaction throughout. They tried to shut down RFK. They moved to go to executive session so that the public could not hear the proceedings. The effort failed. Then they shouted over his words when they were questioning him. They wildly smeared him and defamed him. They even began with an attempt to block him from speaking at all, and 8 Democrats voted to support that.

This was a hearing on censorship and they were trying to censor him. It only made the point.

It became so awful that RFK was compelled to give a short tutorial on the importance of free speech as an essential right, without which all other rights and freedoms are in jeopardy. Even those words he could barely speak given the rancor in the room. It’s fair to say that free speech, even as a core principle, is in grave trouble. We cannot even get a consensus on the basics.

BREAKING – EXPLOSIVE: @RobertKennedyJr puts Democratic Congress members trying to censor him in their place with fiery open remarks during a hearing to expose censorship. It's shocking that in the United States of America, people are being censored for speaking the truth! WATCH! pic.twitter.com/MKQMk2INAu

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) July 20, 2023

It seemed to viewers that RFK was the adult in the room. Put other ways, he was the preacher of fidelity in the brothel, the keeper of memory in a room full of amnesiacs, the practitioner of sanity in the sanatorium, or, as Mencken might say, the hurler of a dead cat into the temple.

It was oddly strange to hear the voice of wise statesmen in that hothouse culture of infantile corruption: it reminded the public just how far things have fallen. Notably, it was he and not the people who wanted him gagged who was citing scientific papers.

A PHD level explanation of the important of free speech to democracy from @RobertKennedyJr. pic.twitter.com/S0HxIDLvLA

— The Wolf Of All Streets (@scottmelker) July 20, 2023

The protests against his statements were shrill and shocking. They moved quickly from “Censorship didn’t happen” to “It was necessary and wonderful” to “We need more of it.” Reporting on the spectacle, the New York Times said these are “thorny questions”: “Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?”

These are not thorny questions. The real issue concerns who is to be the arbiter of truth?

Such attacks on free speech do have precedent in American history. We have already discussed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which led to a complete political upheaval that swept Thomas Jefferson into the White House. There were two additional bouts of censorship folly in the 20th century. Both followed great wars and an explosion in government size and reach.

The first came with the Red Scare (1917-1020) following the Great War (WWI). The Bolshevik Revolution and political instability in Europe led to a wild bout of political paranoia in the US that the communists, anarchists, and labor movement were plotting a takeover of the US government. The result was an imposition of censorship along with strict laws concerning political loyalty.

The Espionage Act of 1917 was one result. It is still in force and being deployed today, most recently against former President Trump. Many states passed censorship laws. The feds deported many people suspected of sedition and treason. Suspected communists were hauled in front of Congress and grilled.

The second bout occurred after the Second World War with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Army-McCarthy hearings that led to blacklists and media smears of every sort. The result was a chilling of free speech across American industry that hit media particularly hard. That incident later became legendary due to the exaggerations and disregard for the First Amendment.

How does the Covid-era censorship fit into this historical context? At Brownstone, we’ve compared the wild Covid response to a wartime footing that caused as much trauma on the homeland as previous world wars.

Three years of research, documents, and reporting have established that the lockdowns and all that followed were not directed by public health authorities. They were the veneer for the national security state, which took charge in the month of February 2020 and deployed the full takeover of both government and society in mid-March. This is one reason that it’s been so difficult getting information on how and why all of this happened to us: it’s been mostly classified under the guise of national security.

In other words, this was war and the nation was ruled for a time (and maybe still is) by what amounts to quasi-martial law. Indeed, it felt like that. No one knew for sure who was in charge and who was making all these wild decisions for our lives and work. It was never clear what the penalties would be for noncompliance. The rules and edicts seemed arbitrary, having no real connection to the goal; indeed no one really knew what the goal was besides more and more control. There was no real exit strategy or end game.

As with the two previous bouts of censorship in the last century, there commenced a closure of public debate. It began almost immediately as the lockdowns edict were issued. They  tightened over the months and years. Elites sought to plug every leak in the official narrative through every means possible. They invaded every space. Those they could not get to (like Parler) were simply unplugged. Amazon rejected books. YouTube deleted millions of posts. Twitter was brutal, while once-friendly Facebook became the enforcer of regime propaganda.

The hunt for dissenters took strange forms. Those who held gatherings were shamed. People who did not socially distance were called disease spreaders. Walking outside without a mask one day, a man shouted out to me in anger that “masks are socially recommended.” I kept turning that phrase around in my mind because it made no sense. The mask, no matter how obviously ineffective, was imposed as a tactic of humiliation and an exclusionary measure that targeted the incredulous. It was also a symbol: stop talking because your voice does not matter. Your speech will be muffled.

The vaccine of course came next: deployed as a tool to purge the military, public sector, academia, and the corporate world. The moment the New York Times reported that vaccine uptake was lower in states that supported Trump, the Biden administration had its talking points and agenda. The shot would be deployed to purge. Indeed, five cities briefly segregated themselves to exclude the unvaccinated from public spaces. The continued spread of the virus itself was blamed on the noncompliant.

Those who decried the trajectory could hardly find a voice much less assemble a social network. The idea was to make us all feel isolated even if we might have been the overwhelming majority. We just could not tell either way.

War and censorship go together because it is wartime that allows ruling elites to declare that ideas alone are dangerous to the goal of defeating the enemy. “Loose lips sink ships” is a clever phrase but it applies across the board in wartime. The goal is always to whip up the public in a frenzy of hate against the foreign enemy (“The Kaiser!”) and ferret out the rebels, the traitors, the subversives, and promoters of unrest. There is a reason that the protestors on January 6 were called “insurrectionists.” It is because it happened in wartime.

The war, however, was of domestic origin and targeted at Americans themselves. That’s why the precedent of 20th century censorship holds in this case. The war on Covid was in many ways an action of the national security state, something akin to a military operation prompted and administered by intelligence services in close cooperation with the administrative state. And they want to make the protocols that governed us over these years permanent. Already, European governments are issuing stay-at-home recommendations for the heat.

If you had told me that this was the essence of what was happening in 2020 or 2021, I would have rolled my eyes in disbelief. But all evidence Brownstone has gathered since then has shown exactly that. In this case, the censorship was a predictable part of the mix. The Red Scare mutated a century later to become the virus scare in which the real pathogen they tried to kill was your willingness to think for yourself.

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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The Asinine Insanity of the ‘Climate Change’/C02 Hoax: Kill the Cows to Save the Earth!

by Gary D. Barnett
July 18, 2023

Sky Falling

“Experts Agree: Not only is the sky falling but we’re all going to die from global warming. SUVs are a major culprit, and have been contributing to rising sea levels according to climate expert, Chicken Little. Colleague, Algore, speaking during a blizzard, agreed with Little.”

~ The Daily Alarmist

I must preface my comments here with sane logic, so as to ward off the absurd idiots who have bought hook, line, and sinker, the madness of the mainstream media, the political class, the non-science ‘scientists,’ the fake environmental whackos, the evil UN, the illegitimate IPCC, and the staged marketing of the ever-pathetic rantings of the once teenage bimbo ignoramus, Greta Thunberg, about man’s normal activity destroying the ‘planet.’ It is just not so!

Yes, the climate on earth changes on a regular basis. Yes, extreme weather conditions are seemingly present more often than not considering the near past. Yes, warming and cooling takes place over time, and has for millions, (or billions) of years. Yes, particular humans, (government, malevolent ‘scientists,’ NGOs, and the military, among many other nefarious individuals and organizations) can manipulate weather to harm us, but no; driving an SUV cannot kill us all. I present this as a purposeful affront to the evil liars, propagandists, depopulation monsters, eugenists, and technocrats, who desire to rule the earth at the great expense of all common men and nature.

The latest absurdity, not new or unique in any way, is the plan of the Irish government to cull (kill) 200,000 healthy cows, claiming “they contribute to ‘climate change’ due to ‘carbon’ emissions.” Anyone who takes this nonsense seriously, or accepts and/or ignores it, is opening the gates to voluntary human extermination. To not be able to understand that both cows and humans eat, live, and expel C02, and to not see that there are eight times more humans than cows globally, why would anyone not grasp that killing humans would be, according to these mad enviro-fools, even more effective in their efforts to ‘save the planet’ than killing cows? Why not kill every animal, including large numbers of humans, if ‘saving the planet’ from farts is the main goal?

Humans not only expel more C02 than cows, but they consume vast amounts of energy, they drive cars, they fly on planes, they build factories that pollute, they mine, they create incredible mountains of plastic and garbage, they perpetuate wars that destroy the earth at unheard of levels, and they continue to outpace cows in population growth by extreme margins. Cows only breath and fart, so why kill these innocent animals; why not just go ahead and cut to the chase, and kill large swaths of humans, (the real plan) saving the soon to be endangered Bos taurus — bovine? (cow) Are you beginning to see the absurdity of this bogus ‘climate change’ bullshite? The nonsense swallowed up and believed by most all these ‘climate change’ pushing scum, expands the bounds of absurdity to astronomical levels.

It gets much worse. This incredibly harmful and idiotic plan by the very imbecilic Irish Department of Agriculture, and the Irish Environmental Protection Agency, will pay 5,000 euros ($5,622) for each cow killed. Keep in mind, that 200,000 cows makes up 0.02% of the total number of cows on earth. Is anyone stupid enough to consider this a legitimate fight against the fraudulent notion of ‘climate change?’ At that price, it would cost $1.125 billion just to pay the farmers for killing their animals. (At this price, to kill all cows on earth, would cost $5.525 trillion) But what about the cost to dispose of these animals, the huge amount of energy and pollution used to do so, the loss of food and dairy products, the supply reduction and obvious extreme price increases certain to come? How will these losses be made up, and how much increased energy will be required to fill this void?

I do realize that most might consider this a minor subject matter, but that would be a grave mistake on your part. The powers that be are not planning on stopping with the killing of animals; they are intent on total control over every aspect of your life, including what food you eat, where you are allowed to go, how much energy you are allowed to use, how much heat you will be allowed in winter to keep warm, how you spend your allotted currency units, (CBDCs) how much medical care you may be allowed, where you may live, and even control whether you may procreate or not.

Why not get to the meat (pun intended?) of this problem, and dispose of the lies and propaganda that consume this now ignorant, pathetic, and indifferent population. The weather is being controlled, it is greatly harming humanity and nature, and is causing an incredible amount of damage not only to this earth, but to every living thing on it. This is not, and never has been, the result of normal human behavior, but is due to mass manipulation of the weather by the ruling class of claimed ‘elites’, who have chosen to use false climate narratives to create mass fear in order to control all. This is the ultimate fake ’emergency’ being used to take over humanity.

Many factors are likely present concerning climate extremes, including, but not limited to, weather geoengineering by the State, graphene rain, directed energy, climate modification assault, heating the ionosphere using HAARP technology, cloud seeding, spraying our skies with metals and poisons through stratospheric aerosol injection, (chemtrails) and most assuredly, artificially creating and enhancing the destructive  nature of hurricanes and earthquakes. Certainly, there are other devastating manipulations of weather going on as well that are unknown at this time, as the military’s full technological potential is hidden, and far ahead of what is believed by most. In addition, releases of toxic chemicals, bioweapons, and the continuous poisoning of the earth’s land and water by deadly substances such as glyphosate, is continuously ongoing. Weather is now a major weapon against mankind, and is being used to monopolize all agriculture and food production, or planned lack thereof.

It is not just cows that will be targeted by these evil ‘climate change’ monsters, it is the entire human race. So to believe that killing cows will save anyone or this earth, is not only completely ludicrous, but a sign that this is only the start of a much broader assault on all of the proletariat herd. They may attempt to begin with the cattle, but if that atrocity is allowed to happen, you and your family will likely be next.

Carbon Dioxide (C02) is absolutely vital to the existence of man. Without it, everything on earth would die. Through the process of photosynthesis, leaves on trees and plants use the great energy of the sun in order to convert this C02 to feed the plants, causing life-sustaining oxygen to be produced so that all things can live and breathe. It is said that one large tree can produce by using expelled C02, enough oxygen supply to provide what is necessary for a full day for several people. Plants also store carbon dioxide to clean the air and reduce negative effects to the environment. This process is imperative for life to survive, as without it, oxygen would cease to be available. If carbon dioxide were to be eliminated, (net zero is the stupid term used) everything would die. Keep this in mind the next time you hear some ranting ‘climate change’ dreg advocating the killing of all our animals (including humans) to ‘save the planet.’

All that is needed to save this planet and everything on it, is the elimination of all rulers and governments! Think about that the next time you perpetuate your own destruction by choosing to vote to ‘elect’ a master, any master, to rule over and control you. It is better to cull politicians and save the cows.

“Almost all of history is an unbroken trail of one conspiracy after another. Conspiracies are the norm, not the exception.”

~ G. Edward Griffin

Reference links:

Irish government to cull 200,000 healthy cows to meet ‘climate goals’

Carbon Dioxide from breathing and farting is not a concern for ‘global warming’

Don’t blame cattle

World cattle numbers by year

Chemtrails: The Conspiracy Theory That Never Was

The power of one tree

Geoengineering Watch

HAARP and the Sky Heaters

Connect with Gary D. Barnett

Cover image credit: ArtTower & LauraTara

Mental Health Round-Ups: The Next Phase of the Government’s War on Thought Crimes

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
July 18, 2023

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is a dangerous activity.”

—Hannah Arendt

Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.

Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

If we don’t nip this in the bud, and soon, this will become yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the First and Fourth Amendments at will.

This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

As the AP reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.

The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union also declared dissidents mentally ill and consigned political prisoners to prisons disguised as psychiatric hospitals, where they could be isolated from the rest of society, their ideas discredited, and subjected to electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures to break them physically and mentally.

In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union also made use of an administrative process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:

The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime . . . but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is “prejudicial to public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility,” he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years.

Warrantless seizures, surveillance, indefinite detention, isolation, exile… sound familiar?

It should.

The age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) its critics is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these individuals are declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.

These developments are merely the realization of various U.S. government initiatives dating back to 2009, including one dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

Coupled with the report on “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” issued by the Department of Homeland Security (curiously enough, a Soviet term), which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.

Thus, what began as a blueprint under the Bush administration has since become an operation manual for exiling those who challenge the government’s authority.

An important point to consider, however, is that the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is locking up individuals trained in military warfare who are voicing feelings of discontent.

Under the guise of mental health treatment and with the complicity of government psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, these veterans are increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs in need of intervention.

For instance, the Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.

One tactic being used to deal with so-called “mentally ill suspects who also happen to be trained in modern warfare” is through the use of civil commitment laws, found in all states and employed throughout American history to not only silence but cause dissidents to disappear.

For example, NSA officials attempted to label former employee Russ Tice, who was willing to testify in Congress about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, as “mentally unbalanced” based upon two psychiatric evaluations ordered by his superiors.

NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had his home raided, and he was handcuffed to a gurney and taken into emergency custody for an alleged psychiatric episode. It was later discovered by way of an internal investigation that his superiors were retaliating against him for reporting police misconduct. Schoolcraft spent six days in the mental facility, and as a further indignity, was presented with a bill for $7,185 upon his release.

Marine Brandon Raub—a 9/11 truther—was arrested and detained in a psychiatric ward under Virginia’s civil commitment law based on posts he had made on his Facebook page that were critical of the government.

Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.

The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.

In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.” Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.

Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others), are a perfect example of this mindset at work and the ramifications of where this could lead.

As The Washington Post reports, these red flag gun laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”

With these red flag gun laws, the stated intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.

While in theory it appears perfectly reasonable to want to disarm individuals who are clearly suicidal and/or pose an “immediate danger” to themselves or others, where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

Let that sink in a moment.

Now consider the ramifications of giving police that kind of authority in order to preemptively neutralize a potential threat, and you’ll understand why some might view these mental health round-ups with trepidation.

No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

We stand at a crossroads.

As author Erich Fromm warned, “At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.”

Connect with The Rutherford Institute

Cover image credit: geralt

This Is Why We Need to Talk About CBDCs

 Video available at Odysee & YouTube

by Aaron & Melissa Dykes, Truthstream Media
July 14, 2023

(Normally this is the type of article we only share with our Patreons, but this needs to be seen by everyone who can.)

Central banks and governments, at a global scale, have prepared to implement CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) with important consequences for every aspect of freedom in our lives.

Though they will introduce it to the public gradually, its capacity for total control is immense.

It isn’t merely that the new dollar is digital, traceable and trackable. It’s based on blockchain technology, of course. It isn’t merely that small business will be hurt (yet again) or that private transactions will be eradicated. Nor will it be merely consequential for drug dealers, scammers, or illicit trades.

CBDCs will be PROGRAMMABLE. Where and how money is spent is literally built into this new currency. And they plan to use it to change how money is used.

Yes, CBDCs are programmable. The executives that frequent the World Economic Forum and the other elite forums have said so.

And so, CBDCs will not just be money. No, not at all. CBDCs are designed as tools of a very political and ideological agenda; some of the worst policies that have been pushed in recent decades will now have the force of spending controls to “nudge” people into submission and compliance.

Again, CBDCs ARE PROGRAMMABLE. Whoever controls the money controls the agenda. That is the point.

Why is this important? Central banks, private banks, government authorities and global designers will have the power to turn on and off transactions of every kind. They can algorithmically-determine precisely what the CBDC money can be spent on; when and under what conditions; and by who.

At the touch of a button, PROGRAMMABLE cash in the form of CBDCs can block the sale of firearms, alcohol, cannabis or tobacco. Or other sensitive products. But that’s just the start (you knew that).

At the same touch of a button, PROGRAMMABLE CBDCs can prevent the sale of meat, dairy, candy and junk food, or disallow the purchase of gasoline or use of a vehicle (and an endless array of other examples; you get the idea.)

With yet another press of the button, they can also freeze bank accounts of political dissidents — like those supporting the recent trucker protest in Canada, for instance.

Spending under CBDCs could be allocated for specific purposes — like rent and groceries — or be timed to expire, requiring, for instance that money be spent by the end of the month.

CBDCs could also prevent individuals with “bad social credit scores” from purchasing anything more than the bare basics of survival. Black Mirror’s Nosedive has already depicted as much, but that’s mild compared to what’s possible.

Blackrock CEO Larry Fink recently said: “Behaviors are gonna have to change. And this is one thing we’re asking companies — you have to force behaviors, and at BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors.”

BlackRock CEO: “At BlackRock we are forcing behaviors… you have to force behaviors.” pic.twitter.com/2Q2H84GPC7

— Te𝕏asLindsay™ (@TexasLindsay_) June 4, 2023

The compliance of private businesses — any major business who relies upon good standing in the global financial system — can also mandate adherence to any number of political agendas and purchasing behaviors. Energy caps; green conscience laundering; medical misinformation policies; sensitivity about world events, wars and catastrophes; identity politic political correctness shifting sand madness; polka-dots-over-stripes; anything is possible!

And the private policies of private banks and businesses — ultimately steered by central bank CBDC policies — could easily circumvent restrictions on our civil rights under governments and public systems. (And what could you really do about it? Where else could you go?) The Bank of International Settlements recently announced 93% of the world’s central banks are currently working on a CBDC, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is already hard at work on a global CBDC platform.

Social media and other tech giants have already paved the way to this version of circumnavigation-hell (I’m not touching you; I’m not touching you!!), even as it emerged that shadowy government agencies were literally coordinating the takedown of free speech online in violation of First Amendment protections.

This nightmare of privacy-less technological enslavement under CBDCs is complicated and perhaps predicated by the advent of AI and the loss of employment for hundreds of millions and even billions of people who once held relative autonomy over their own lives.

UBI (Universal Basic Income) funds will be increasingly provided by governments — as it perhaps must be in a scenario with no meaningful employment — not just for the poor and unemployed, but for nearly everyone. Certainly, people will need financial support to live their lives.

But that money would be used to control as much as it would be used to provide sustenance. Not only would every transaction large and small be tracked, but its use would be specifically tailored to the vision of life proscribed by the very powerful and their AI tech tools. Anything in violation of prevailing policies would be automatically out-of-bounds.

While this design could be used for good (though such powers are unwise), and many would give it that benefit of the doubt, those paying attention can see plainly its drawbacks and potential for the very worst.

With little-to-no context and no one to appeal to, an “artificially intelligent” system administers, gives, and takes away as it is programmed to do. Perhaps clumsily suppressing on the basis of key words and categories… perhaps insidiously on the basis of personalized profiles with millions of pieces of data. This system can and will automatically behaviorize all who live under its auspices, with grave consequences which are easy to predict. And even worse outcomes are quite possible.

Even under the most glowing version of this vision of the near future, where personal behaviors are improved, and people become “better” citizens, nicer neighbors and excellent stewards of the environment — even then, if a positive outcome can even be supposed — it would be a world without freedom.

Freedom itself is on the line under programmable CBDCs, in an almost direct way.

Instead of technology freeing us from worry, labor, and drudgery, it stands to reinforce and radically expand top-down control. This is not hyperbole.

New behaviorism — such as living within one’s allotted carbon footprint allowance — could and would be enforced easily, but tyrannically under this kind of system. Likely it would come with a velvety touch and a gradual implementation to dissuade outrage and condition acceptance; but in of itself, the system could nonetheless be flipped-on overnight.

A government powerful enough to give to all, and yet also take away from all is not only possible, but immediately part of the scheme. Accountability, dissent, free expression, and independent lives could all become a thing of the past, replaced by an engineered obedience, dulled further by the extremes of algorithmically driven group think.

Polls show that CBDCs — now being pursued by the Federal Reserve in the United States and by most every major government and financial system around the globe — are extremely unpopular with the people, but only by those who are aware of their potential existence and uses.

The vast majority of the public — most already lost in a sea of apathy and indifference — remain ignorant of how radically the money system they live under is changing. People need to be informed. Dissent needs to be expressed now while it still can be.

The unfortunate, flawed maxim “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide” is due for a nightmarish upgrade. The elites, already concentrated in wealth and power — and now unleashing AI — plan to literally program and control your entire life through digital currency.

Something huge is happening. Please pay attention. Please tell people what this can do. Please make your voice heard.

Resources

The Trust Game ten episode financial docuseries by Truthstream on Vimeo (to Support TSM)

The Trust Game on YouTube (for free)

Bank of England Tells Ministers to Intervene on Digital Currency ‘Programming’

CATO Poll: Only 16% of Americans Support the Government Issuing a Central Bank Digital Currency

CATO: Central Bank Digital Currency — Assessing the Risks and Dispelling the Myths

Connect with Truthstream Media

Cover image based on creative commons work of: FreeGiver & geralt

The Criminalization of Dissent (Revisited)

by CJ Hopkins, The Consent Factory
July 3, 2023

Greetings from Thoughtcriminal 231Js1736/23!

That’s my official Thoughtcrime Case Number, which my attorney needs to reference in all our official correspondence with the New Normal Thoughtpolice. I think I’m going to silk-screen it on a T-shirt and wear it on my first day in Moabit Criminal Court, “the largest criminal court in Europe with 340 judges and 360 prosecutors.”

That’s right, the Berlin State Prosecutor’s office is pursuing its criminal investigation of me for allegedly “disseminating propaganda, the content of which is intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization,” which according to Germany’s Grundgesetz could send me to prison for up to three years.

My attorney wrote to them and politely explained how ridiculous their investigation is and why they should summarily drop the charges, but New Normal Germany has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to Thoughtcrime, especially Thoughtcrime involving any kind of Covid-denying propaganda.

The “propaganda” in question is these two Tweets.

Which, OK, I just disseminated them again, so there’s another three years in prison. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s six years in prison, i.e., three years for each separate count of Thoughtcrime.

I wrote those Tweets in German, so let me translate.

The one on the left reads, “The masks are ideological-conformity symbols. That is all they are. That is all they have ever been. Stop acting like they have ever been anything else, or get used to wearing them.” The hashtag translates as “Masks are not a benign measure.”

The one on the right is a quote by Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health of Germany, tweeted by Die Welt, a national newspaper. It reads “The masks always send out a signal.” And, yes, Karl, that’s exactly the point I was making.

The image is from the cover art of my book The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021), which was banned in Germany by Amazon, Inc. two days after I tweeted the above Tweets. (It appears to also be banned for sale in German bookstores, but I don’t have confirmation of that.)

My attorney just received the screenshots of these Tweets from the Berlin State Prosecutor a few days ago. Up to then, we didn’t know what they were, and we couldn’t find them, because they have been censored by Twitter, presumably on the orders of the German Thoughtpolice. We knew they featured the cover art of my book, because the Prosecutor’s office described it, but we didn’t know about the “Covid denial.”

So, essentially, I’m facing criminal charges, and being threatened with who knows how many years in prison, or thousands of Eurodollars in fines, for (a) stating what has now been widely acknowledged, and what was generally understood by every serious epidemiologist until the Spring of 2020, namely, that mask-mandates do not work, and thus are nothing but symbolic measures designed to generate and enforce mass obedience, and (b) insulting the Minister of Health of Germany, who happens to be a fanatical serial liar who is directly responsible for the serious injury and death of … well, we’ll never know how many people.

Neither of which are actual crimes. Not even in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The pretext for the charges I am facing is the swastika behind the mask, which, as I noted in a recent essay, is a play on the international bestseller, The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, by William Shirer, which you can buy in any bookshop in Berlin.

Incidentally, my book has also been a bestseller, at least on Amazon (in countries where it’s not banned) and Barnes & Noble, but I’ve still got a little ways to go before I get to Shirer territory.

So, there you are … those are my Thoughtcrimes.

I’ve been writing about the “New Normal” as a new form of totalitarianism for several years now. I wrote about it in one of my essays, The Criminalization of Dissent, in May of 2021. Some of my colleagues rolled their eyes. They thought I was being hyperbolic again. I wasn’t. This is what I meant. It is literally the criminalization of dissent.

I wasn’t the only one covering the story of the criminalization of dissent in Germany. The New York Times reported on it in April of 2021 …

“The country’s domestic intelligence agency says it will create a new department to deal with extremism among conspiracy theorists.” (German Intelligence Puts Coronavirus Deniers Under Surveillance)

As did Aljazeera …

“For intelligence officers to be legally allowed to start observing parts of the anti-lockdown movement, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had to create an entirely new category of groups because the ‘Querdenkers’ do not fit neatly into the existing classifications of right-wing or left-wing. The new category is for groups suspected of being ‘anti-democratic and/or delegitimizing the state in a way that endangers security.’ The designation allows intelligence officers to gather data about individuals and their activities, and could in a further step include shadowing people and tapping their communications.” (German Spy Agency to Monitor Some Anti-Lockdown Protesters)

I was not a member of the “Querdenker” movement, or any other movement for that matter, but I doubt that makes any difference to the BfV or the Berlin State Prosecutor. Anyone even vaguely prominent who spoke out against the “Corona measures” is fair game for threats and prosecution. The beneficent-sounding Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV, is basically Germany’s FBI. It’s now two years after the above stories were published, and they are still on the hunt for “Covid deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and other such persons suspected of “delegitimizing the state” … whatever that Orwellian language means.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what it means. It means whatever they say it means. That’s what it means. It means it doesn’t mean anything, and they do not have to pretend it means anything. It means, “Shut the fuck up. Get in line. Do what we tell you. Say what we tell you. Think what we tell you. Or we will fucking get you. We will make up some charges and prosecute you. We will censor you into Internet oblivion. We will shut off your fucking bank account. We’ll send the IRS to your house. We’ll ruin your career. We’ll hurt your family. We will extradite you to the USA and lock you up in Supermax prison for 175 fucking years.”

How am I doing? Do I sound hyperbolic?

And, no, of course I’m not just talking about Germany. The criminalization of dissent is being rolled out everywhere. Ireland is just the latest of dozens of countries all throughout the West that are criminalizing so-called “hate speech.” The specifics are different but the message is the same, “Watch what you say, or we will prosecute you, or otherwise seriously fuck you up.”

Oh, and also, I should probably mention, my lawyer advised me not to republish those Tweets. He completely understands where I am coming from, but it is his job to look out for me and to try his best to … you know, keep me out of German prison, which I’m not making easy for him.

Now, I want to be very clear about this. I have no desire to go to German prison. I am about to turn 62 years old. I’m not at all interested in tossing anyone’s salad or having my salad tossed by anyone, especially not a pumped-up, tattooed member of some local Turkish drug gang, or an actual German neo-Nazi, but I’m not going to be intimidated into shutting up or toning my act down to placate the New Normal Thoughtpolice.

The thing is, I don’t respond well to bullies. I feel a particular antipathy toward them. I’m not very fond of liars either. And totalitarians … there’s another group of people I don’t like. I am not ashamed to admit my bias against such people. I wish them ill. I am sorry about whatever vicissitudes of fortune or experience turned them into lying, bullying, totalitarian creeps, but they can suck foul wind out of my ass if they think I am going to bow down to them. They can do what they want to me. They have that power. They can silence me for a while if they want. But they cannot make me silence myself.

And they cannot make me pretend to respect them.

The Germans are real big on respecting authority. So am I. But authority is earned. It does not stem from a title or a uniform. It stems from knowledge, experience, integrity, and honorable behavior, not from brute force. Fascists, totalitarians, and the like do not deserve our respect. They deserve our scorn. They deserve our derision. I have plenty of it for them.

Also, there are the kids to think about. I don’t have any, but other people do. What kind of an example are we setting for the kids if we start censoring (or “sensitivity-editing”) ourselves every time some fascist bully threatens to put us in jail if we don’t? A lot of the young people are already pretty pussified as it is these days. I’m certainly not a tough guy or anything, but sometimes, in life, you have to fight, and it doesn’t really matter if you get your ass kicked.

Oh, and, if you’re contemplating writing to me and telling me to “get the hell out of Germany” or inquiring as to why I haven’t “gotten the hell out of Germany,” please do not do that. I am extremely tired of hearing it. Instead, just wire a high six-figure sum into the Swiss account I will be setting up shortly, and, I promise you, I’ll get the hell out of Germany, and send you a postcard from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Ionian Sea.

In the meantime, I’ll definitely keep you posted on Case 231Js1736/23, and maybe I’ll go ahead and do up that T-shirt. Wait, what am I thinking? This is New Normal Berlin! I could find a VC, round up some 20-year-old, transgender, Ayahuasca-guzzling tech bros (or “tech persons with penises” or whatever the proper “non-harmful” nomenclature is at the moment), and start up some type of totally Bitcoined bespoke Thoughtcriminal T-shirt business!

The way things are going, I’ll probably make a killing … or at least I’ll be able to cover my legal costs, which, after that last little gratuitous outburst, Lord knows what kind of new charges I’ll be facing!

Connect with CJ Hopkins

Cover image based on creative commons work of CDD20 & OpenClipart-Vectors

When Dissent Ends, Transhumanism Reigns, and Digitization Rules, Humanity Will Cease to Be Human

by Gary D. Barnett
June 27, 2023

“The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

~  Arundhati Roy

Self-defense comes in many forms, but all defense of self begins and ends with dissent, non-compliance, disobedience, saying no to any and all rule, and never allowing aggression against mind and body; mental or physical. Without dissent, defense is not possible, because when voluntary compliance is the prevailing behavior, whether sought, desired, or not, all defense mechanisms are effectively disarmed. In other words, silence in the face of injustice, immorality, terror, or tyranny, creates a condition of weakness, submission, and irresponsibility, which are all the fodder of indifference.

When you say nothing, when you do not say no, when you take no action against evil, you commit evil. By not speaking out, and by not responding, you have spoken loudly, and openly committed an act of cowardice. The ultimate blame lies not just with the aggressor in this circumstance, but also equally with he who hides and remains silent.

In “Beyond Good and Evil,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” This is an accurate description of the phenomenon of becoming what one lives, so if you live in a state of indifference, ignoring the evil around you, accepting it in order to avoid conflict and responsibility, you become the evil you have chosen to ignore. The dark abyss in this circumstance, is created by your own inaction against it.

What we face as a society, is the most tremendous threat ever perceived or active in the history of mankind. Do you scoff at this seemingly ‘bold’ pronouncement? If so, you are already fooled, and a major contributor to the vast problems rampant in our world today. Instead of the State just singularly seeking war, the continuance of the bogus Federal Reserve System, isolated government corruption, communism, fascism, or any broad-based totalitarian assault on certain segments of society, we are all being bombarded from a thousand different directions at once with all these atrocities and many more, including attacks on our freedom and sovereignty, on our minds and bodies, and on every aspect of our being.

Due to the colossal advances in technology, which in many more ways than not are being used against us in order to build a literal transhuman world run by technocratic means, we are facing what could be considered a technological Armageddon, where all control over humanity will be isolated in the hands of the most powerful few. To accept this, to treat it as normal or eminent, is a most fatal error, and one that could determine our fate in perpetuity.

When humanity ceases to exist in any natural form, when male and female become one, when transhumanism and mind control are inescapable realities, when perversion is commonly accepted, the presence of life that we have all known to be magical and a wonder, will have disappeared. The world being designed is not a world of love, hope, and dreams, it is a nightmare of horror, and those pursuing this downfall of man have already lost all human characteristics. They are monsters, so we must fight and defeat them without becoming monsters ourselves.

There is a reason that the children, beginning in infancy, are targeted by State indoctrination, drugs, chemicals, bioweapon injections masquerading as ‘vaccines,’  insane propaganda, distraction, gross perversion, and are pulled away from family mentally and physically throughout their lives. This, in and of itself, if allowed to continue, will guarantee mind destruction of multiple future generations, and that will secure a fully dumbed-down, compliant, and obedient proletariat mass in the future. At that point, total control by the technocrats over humanity will have been achieved.

While technology has the capability to accomplish many great things, in the hands of these monsters who seek universal control, it can also be used to destroy us. Many refer to this technological phenomenon as ‘artificial intelligence,’ (AI) but there is no such thing. This false terminology is being used against us, as machines are not intelligent, they are programmed by intelligence, or so it is believed. When man becomes a machine, real intelligence ends, and a programmed society of slaves is the result. AI is ‘defined’ as “perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information–demonstrated by computers, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or other animals.” 

Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn, reason, and understand, so honest intelligence cannot be artificial, and machines are still machines. The transhuman digitization of man will mean the end of all traditional life as we know it.

The bulk of this society, has already succumbed to a digital world, and relies on what is falsely labeled ‘social media’ as parent, family, and friend, disregarding the natural state of personal communication, love, companionship, debate, and the grandeur of nature. At this point, the future is not owned by you, but is owned by your masters. All privacy has disappeared, and most all private and financial transactions are captured and data-based.

Every aspect of life is now tracked, traced, used, surveilled, restricted, censored, taxed, and every activity imaginable requires licensure (paid permission slip) by the State. You are already a slave, whether you realize it or not.

The plot continues to thicken, as centrally-controlled digital currencies (CBDCs) are being rolled out around the world, which will allow for most every individual to be fully contained and regulated. This will lead to mass restrictions as to what you are allowed to do, where you may travel – if at all, what food you must eat, what medical care you may or may not receive, what State stipend you will be allotted, how much energy you will be permitted to use, and on, and on.

Everything in your existence will depend on behavior modification; in other words, do as you are instructed by the State technocratic rulers, or lose everything, as your entire life will be technologically sanctioned.

It is imperative to understand that everything you think you know about technology, and technological advances, is likely at a minimum, 20 years behind. Every so-called new discovery and new technology recognized as such, are not new at all. What the military has now, and is working on today, is unknown to most all except the very few at the top of the pyramid of power. To understand and grasp this concept, should strike fear in the hearts of man.

The internet, and therefore, the internet of things, was not discovered and implemented by some computer geek, but was designed and created by the military through the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.” (DARPA) Getting to this terroristic time in our history was no accident, and was intentionally planned long ago. We have little time left to stop this totalitarian hell that has been created in order to destroy what we know as the human race.

Will you continue to sit on the sideline, keeping your eyes closed, your ears covered, and your mouth shut, or will you stand up and defend your freedom and life, and that of your family? The only solution, as I have often said, is through active dissent. Say no to the State, disobey, do not comply with any tyrannical order, and do so as individuals en masse. No one can do this for you, but it can and should be done by many independent freedom-minded individuals.

Asking someone else for a solution for the masses as a collective, is worthless, and exposes apathy at a level that if practiced by the herd as it has been for so long, the end of humanity will surely be our destiny.

“Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.”

~ Jacob Bronowski, Science & Human Values

Connect with Gary D. Barnett

Cover image credit: marcusspiske

The Two Party System and the Dumbing Down of America

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free… it expects what never was and never will be – Thomas Jefferson 

by Greg Reese, The Reese Report
June 28, 2023



After seven years of violent revolution, our American founders were well aware that political factions were most often used to divide and conquer the people. And they knew that the Republic they created would only last as long as the people could remain educated.

In 1816 Thomas Jefferson wrote; “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

By the end of the Civil War, the two-party system became the norm, the Globalist system we face today was born, and the deliberate dumbing down of the American citizen began with our great-great-grandparents.

In the late eighteen hundreds, the Skinner Pavlovian method was brought into American schools by Johns Hopkins. These psychological methods allowed teachers the ability to program students’ behavior in the same way that Pavlov did with dogs.

In 1934, the Carnegie International Endowment for Peace published the Report On The Commission On Social Studies. Which explicitly stated the goal of eventually taking away people’s land, and noted that most people would obviously oppose this. The solution was to begin using the school system to re-condition the minds of children.

In 1976, the bicentennial year of the Declaration of Independence, 124 Congressmen signed the “Declaration of Interdependence.” which stated that: “Two centuries ago our forefathers brought forth a new nation; now we must join with others to bring forth a New World Order.”

And it pledged to give children special attention in distributing a common education to suit their goals.

By the nineteen nineties, this globalist dumbing down system was perfected. And America began exporting it worldwide in what is known as Outcome-based education.

Starting in 2010, Common Core began in the United States. It outlined what students were expected to know at each grade level, and enforced ways to assess those standards.

Charlotte Iserbyt, author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, has traced most of this agenda stemming from The Order of Skull and Bones at Yale, through both Republicans and Democrats. Two wings of the same globalist bird which understood that dumbed-down people have a base desire for a simple Dualistic choice.

In 1953, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the Robbers Cave Experiment, wherein, eleven-year-old boys who thought they were signing up for summer camp were organized into two separate tribes and were manipulated into fighting each other. Which was easily accomplished by having a single resource that the two groups competed for.

The Henri Tajfel experiments of the nineteen seventies showed that by simply dividing people into two groups, they would naturally identify with their own group and discriminate against the other.

The basic ego mind is constantly making preferences. No matter how dumb you are, you have an opinion about everything. And if you can keep the population dumb enough, and give them two parties to choose from, they will innately identify with one, and despise the other.

This allows the globalist system the cover they need to implement unpopular policies, such as a Central Bank Digital Currency, while ‘We the People’ ignorantly fight each other.

United we stand. Divided we fall. And we’ve been falling for it for generations.

The American people have been so thoroughly dumbed down that we think freedom is the ability to choose between two parties working for the same control system. And we have been made so weak that we are afraid to even discuss the option of violence. Which is most often the only remedy for tyranny.

But if we were an enlightened people, we could simply unite together as one and just say no to the tyrants.

The answer to 1984, is 1776

Connect with Greg Reese

FBI Make-Work Entrapment Schemes: Creating Criminals in Order to Arrest Them

by John & Nisha Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute
June 20, 2023

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.

Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.

Clearly, this is not a government agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.

Indeed, this same government agency has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.

Basically, it works like this: in order to justify their crime-fighting superpowers, the FBI manufactures criminals by targeting vulnerable individuals and feeding them anti-government propaganda; then, undercover agents and informants equip the targeted individuals with the training and resources to challenge what they’ve been indoctrinated into believing is government corruption; and finally, the FBI arrests the targeted individuals for engaging in anti-government, terrorist activities.

This is what passes for the government’s perverse idea of being tough on crime.

For example, undercover FBI agents pretending to be associated with ISIS have been accused of seeking out online and befriending a 16-year-old with brain development issues, persuading him to secretly send them small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and then the moment Mateo Ventura, turned 18, arresting him for providing financial support to an Islamic terrorist group.

If convicted, the teenager could spend up to 10 years in prison.

Yet as The Intercept explains, “the only ‘terrorist’ he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old… This law enforcement tactic has been criticized by national security researchers who have scrutinized the FBI’s role in manufacturing terrorism cases using vulnerable people who would have been unable to commit crimes without prolonged government assistance and encouragement… the Ventura case may indicate that authorities are still open to conjuring terrorists where none existed.”

In another incident, the FBI used an undercover agent/informant to seek out and groom an impressionable young man, cultivating his friendship, gaining his sympathy, stoking his outrage over injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government, then enlisting his help to blow up the Herald Square subway station. Despite the fact that Shahawar Matin Siraj ultimately refused to plant a bomb at the train station, he was arrested for conspiring to do so at the urging of his FBI informant and used to bolster the government’s track record in foiling terrorist plots. Of course, no mention was made of the part the government played in fabricating the plot, recruiting a would-be bomber, and setting him up to take the fall.

These are Machiavellian tactics with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings, but it is especially dangerous for anyone whose views could in any way be characterized as anti-government.

As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”

For instance, it was reported that the FBI had been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.

All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.

What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.

Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.

This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.

To go after terrorists, they become terrorists.

To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers.

To go after thieves, they become thieves.

For instance, when the FBI raided a California business that was suspected of letting drug dealers anonymously stash guns, drugs and cash in its private vaults, agents seized the contents of all the  safety deposit boxes and filed forfeiture motions to keep the contents, which include millions of dollars’ worth of valuables owned by individuals not accused of any crime whatsoever.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy.

This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.

Some days, it feels like the FBI is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.

In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.

In a stunning development reported by The Washington Post, a probe into misconduct by an FBI agent resulted in the release of at least a dozen convicted drug dealers from prison.

In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.

For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”

Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.

The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”

The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.

Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

The powers-that-be are not acting in our best interests.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Think about it.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from threats to our freedoms.

The U.S. government is creating the threats to our freedoms. It is, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the source of the threats to our freedoms.

Connect with The Rutherford Institute

Cover image credit: Clker-Free-Vector-Images

The European Commission and WHO Launch Landmark Digital Slavery Initiative to Centralize and Institutionalize Global Technocratic Idolatry.

Translation of June 5, 2023 World Health Organization announcement. 

by Katherine Watt, Bailiwick News
June 13, 2023

5 June 2023 | News release | Geneva/Brussels

The World Health Organization (WHO) and European Commission have announced today the launch of a landmark digital slavery partnership.

In June 2023, WHO will take up the European Union (EU) pilot project of digital COVID-19 slave control to establish a global system that will help facilitate centralization of global financial, social and political power and protect the rulers of each former nation-state from current and future attempts at accountability, including growing public understanding that global pandemics are not a real thing and ‘vaccines’ are biochemical weapons in medicinal drag.

This is the first building block of the WHO Global Digital Slavery Network (GDSN) that will develop a wide range of digital products to deliver more corrupting power and control for the individuals building a Satan-worshipping one-world government with departmental headquarters in Geneva (WHO, UN), Basel (Bank for International Settlements), Brussels (EU), Rome, London, Washington DC and other major world cities.

“Building on the EU’s highly successful digital slavery network, WHO aims to offer all WHO Member States access to an open-source digital slavery tool, which is based on the principles of elitism, greed, fear, pride, secrecy, techno-materialism, data reductionism and privacy-intrusion,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “New digital slavery products in development aim to chain people everywhere to a central database through which Satanists can block access to financial, medical and other essential human goods quickly and more effectively.”

Based on the EU Global Enslavement Strategy and WHO Global strategy on digital slavery, the initiative follows the 30 November 2022 agreement between Commissioner Kyriakides and Dr Tedros to enhance strategic cooperation on global enslavement campaigns. This further bolsters a robust multilateral system with WHO at its core, powered by a strong EU.

“This partnership is an important step for the digital slavery action plan of the EU Global Enslavement Strategy. By using European best practices we contribute to digital slavery standards and interoperability globally — to the benefit of those seeking coercive power over the daily thoughts, words and actions of millions of human beings and those desperate to avoid removal from power, criminal trials, convictions and execution for already-committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes that cry out to God for vengeance.

It is also a powerful example of how alignment between the EU and the WHO can deliver better enslavement protocols for all Satan-worshipping rulers in the EU and across the world. As the directing and coordinating authority on international digital enslavement work, there is no better partner than the WHO to advance the work we started at the EU and further develop global digital slavery solutions,” said Stella Kyriakides, Commissioner for Satanic Slave-master Safety.

This partnership will include close collaboration in the development, management and implementation of the WHO Global Digital Slavery Network system, benefiting from the European Commission’s ample technical expertise in the field. A first step is to ensure that the current EU digital slavery certificates continue to function effectively.

“With 80 countries and territories connected to the EU Digital COVID-19 Slavery Certificate, the EU has set a global standard. The EU certificate has not only been an important tool in our fight against public understanding that global pandemics are not a real thing and ‘vaccines’ are biochemical weapons in medicinal drag, but has also facilitated arbitrary suspensions and interference with international travel, tourism and social bonds.

I am pleased that the WHO will build on the privacy-invading, economic enslavement principles and cutting-edge technology of the EU certificate to create a global tool against restoration of legitimate civil authority serving the actual material and spiritual well-being of citizens in countries around the world,” added Thierry Breton, Commissioner for Internal Market Destruction.

A global WHO system building on EU legacy

One of the key elements in the European Union’s COVID-19 digital slavery pilot project has been digital COVID-19 slavery certificates. To block free movement within its borders, the EU swiftly established interoperable COVID-19 slavery certificates (entitled ‘EU Digital COVID-19 Slavery Certificate’ or ‘EU-DCSC’). Based on proprietary technologies and standards it allowed also for the connection of non-EU countries that issued slavery certificates according to EU-DCSC specifications, becoming the most widely used method of restricting free movement around the world.

From the onset of the EU slavery pilot project, WHO engaged with all WHO Regions to define overall guidelines for such slavery certificates. To help strengthen global civil authorities’ imperviousness to reform and reconstruction in the face of growing public awareness that current rulers are unnaturally interested in possessing complete access to and control of the daily thoughts, speech and acts of every living man, woman and child on the planet, WHO is establishing a global digital slavery certification network which builds upon the solid foundations of the EU-DCSC framework, principles and proprietary technologies. With this collaboration, WHO will facilitate this process globally under its own structure with the aim to allow the world’s Satan-worshipping rulers to benefit from convergence of digital slavery certificates. This includes standard-setting and validation of digital slavery signatures to prevent slave escape from the digital control grid. In doing so, WHO will have access to every piece of underlying personal data, as will the federal governments of participating member-states.

The first building block of the global WHO system becomes operational in June 2023 and aims to be progressively developed in the coming months.

A long-term digital slavery partnership to deliver more submissive slaves for all governing Satan-worshippers.

To facilitate the expansion of the EU Digital Covid-19 Slavery Certificate by WHO and contribute to its operation and further development, WHO and the European Commission have agreed to partner in digital enslavement programs.

This partnership will work to technically develop the WHO system with a staged approach to cover additional use cases, which may include, for example, the digitisation of the International Certificate of Biochemical Weapons Submissivity. Expanding such digital solutions will be essential to deliver more effective slave-control for slave-masters across the globe.

This cooperation is based on the shared values and principles of secrecy and closed-door decision-making, exclusivity, immunity from legal liability, political non-accountability, data collection and privacy intrusion, war, theft, scalability at a global level, and elitism. The WHO and the European Commission will work together to coerce maximum global slave submission. Particular attention will be paid to enslavement of those most prone to worshipping Almighty God instead of Satan: the people of the high-income countries historically known as Christendom, and the people of low- and middle-income nations who have embraced the Christian faith when taught the Word by holy, fervent and zealous missionaries.

Acronyms

• WHO-GDSN – WHO Global Digital Slavery Network
• EU-DCSC – EU Digital COVID-19 Slavery Certificate

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Cover image credit: geralt

What’s Next to the Moon? – An “Apex Body” and Digital ID to Rule Us All

by Jacob Nordangard, Ph.D.
June 10, 2023

United Nations recently published three new Policy Briefs “to provide more detail on certain proposals contained in Our Common Agenda” – The UN Secretary-General’s vision for the future of global cooperation that will be decided at “The Summit of the Future” in September 2024. These briefings; A Global Digital Compact, Reforms to the International Financial Architecture and The Future of Outer Space Governance sets out a chilling course for our future.

Among the proposals are a new “apex body” in charge of the entire financial system that will “enhance its coherence and align its priorities with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” This could, according to Secretary-General António Guterres, be done through a “Biennial Summit between the Group of 20, Economic and Social Council, the Secretary-General, and heads of international financial institutions.”

This will further integrate the G20 with the United Nations into a body that can be described as an economic Security Council. It also seems like a perfect nest for the “apex predators” that runs the international banking system.

A vital part of the agenda is also digital connectivity and the establishment of a Global Digital Compact. This can be described as a cybernetic organ, consisting of a digitally connected network of people, entities, devices, and things, that easily can be directed by those who run the system. In the Policy Brief it is for example explained how digitisation will help to achieve the global goals. The suggestions happens to be very similar to what World Economic Forum and PwC prescribed in their report Unlocking Technologies for the Global Goals in 2020. A Digital ID is a cornerstone in this work and is among other things seen as a way to reduce poverty.

This may, however, come at a cost. In the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperations report Age of Digital Interdependence from 2019, it is stated that:

A digital ID can help unlock new opportunities but can also introduce new risks and challenges. They can be used to undermine human rights – for example, by enabling civil society to be targeted, or selected groups to be excluded from social benefits.

Will you get your social protection coverage if you don’t comply with vaccinations or other measures introduced to achieve the SDGs? Probably not. This can later be fused with a social credit system and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) – which is now being introduced and tested in many countries across the world. To receive your daily bread you have to obey and accept the instructions from the Masters that run the show. If the UN declares a “Planetary Emergency” this will have severe consequences for our freedoms (as we experienced during the pandemic).

In the Policy Brief – A Global Digital Compact the authors truthfully are mentioning the rising inequality after the pandemic.

Digital technologies are accelerating the concentration of economic power in an ever smaller group of elites and companies: the combined wealth of technology billionaires, $2.1 trillion in 2022, is greater than the annual gross domestic product of more than half of the Group of 20 economies.

But it seems that United Nations has a somewhat peculiar way of solving this problem. Not only do they strive towards digitising everything – they have also partnered with Big Tech in order to achieve this.



The UN Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation was led by Melinda Gates from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (according to the bio, Melinda “helped develop many of the company’s multimedia products” during her time at Microsoft) and tech billionaire Jack Ma from the Chinese Ali Baba Group.

This comes with assistance from Young Global Leaders like Mohammed Al Gergawi (chairman of the high-tech Mecca gathering – World Government Summit in Dubai), and Marina Kolesnik (Russia/Ukraine) as well as a “generous” contribution from the World Economic Forums Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Ali Baba developed Chinas Social Credit System through their subsidiary Ant Group whereas Microsoft promotes Digital ID in the ID2020 Alliance together with GAVI – The Vacccine Alliance and the ever so present Rockefeller Foundation.

United Nations seems to have hired a gang of robbers to manage the bank. These are the “trustees of the material universe for future generations” as stated in the global business elites’ Davos Manifesto from 1973.

And now our “generous” tech billionaires are heading for Outer Space. The last Policy Brief (The Future of Outer Space Governance) formulates the grand vision to reestablish a presence on the moon with a way station (Lunar Gateway) and the development of a base at the south pole of the Moon as well as conducting a manned mission to the red planet (Elon Musk’s SpaceX).

These are old fantasies from the late 1940s that never seem to materialise. But their “space-based opportunities” also highlight the “important link between outer space and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” with the importance of satellite surveillance to “track deforestation, monitor protected areas for illegal poaching and fishing and assess biodiversity changes” as well as track our every move through the global navigation satellite systems.

As WEF-trustee and Climate Prophet/Profiteer Al Gore proclaimed with a giggle in the commercial for his satellite surveillance project Climate Trace: “And most importantly… NO MORE HIDING”.

Are these people insane? How can the construction of a digital world brain really contribute to a greener and healthier planet?

Connect with Jacob Nordangard, Ph.D.

Cover image credit: geralt

WHO Launches New “Digital Health Initiative”

Chalk up another “I told you so” for the Conspiracy Theorists. 

by Kit Knightly, OffGuardian
June 8, 2023

On Monday, the World Health Organization and European Union announced the launch of their new “partnership”, building on the EU’s “highly successful” digital certification network, which was introduced during the “pandemic”.

From the WHO’s website [emphasis added]:

WHO will take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility…

This would be those digital health passports that “conspiracy theorists” warned about, but which we were all told weren’t ever going to be a thing.

This isn’t about “Covid” anymore, WHO Chairman Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said as much in his statement on the launch, and it’s again made clear on the website, which repeatedly underlines the supposed purpose of the initiative:

• [To] protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats, including pandemics
• [To] enhance strategic cooperation on global health issues
• [To] help strengthen global health preparedness in the face of growing health threats
• [To] to deliver better health for citizens across the globe

What are these “health threats”? Well, they quite intentionally don’t say, but we can all make pretty good guesses. Climate change, obviously. Obesity seems pretty likely, poverty, overpopulation …and as many more as they choose.

– That’s the whole point of the open-ended wording, you can adapt it as you go.

Anyway, it won’t just be about about Covid passports, again as the conspiracy theorists predicted. But, more than that, it won’t even just be passports…

This is the first building block of the WHO Global Digital Health Certification Network (GDHCN) that will develop a wide range of digital products to deliver better health for all.

They are delightfully vague about what exactly these other “digital products” might be, how much they are going to cost global taxpayers, and just how many of our rights we’ll be required to forfeit in the name of a “healthy” planet (although ou can read the WHO’s “Global Strategy on Digital Health” to get some rough ideas).

However, while the details are brushed over, the overall aim is pretty openly stated:

enhance strategic cooperation on global health issues […] bolster a robust multilateral system with WHO at its core, powered by a strong EU.

It’s globalism – sorry, “multilateralism”.

Globalism has been the end game since the pandemic started. Hence the Pandemic Treaty, the new IHR regulations all that fun stuff. One world government (or maybe two world governments, if the New Cold War plays out as expected), installed in the name of public health.

Note that this launch lines up with a lot of “coincidental” domestic political movements from around the world.

For example, in the US they are set to vote on the “Improving Digital Identity Act”, which would require digital ID to do…pretty much everything.

In Canada major corporations are uniting to embrace digital ID as a key part of Agenda 2030 and “sustainable development goals”.

In the UK Sir Keir Starmer has promised a “totally digital NHS” under the next Labour government.

In essence, each country – for notionally different reasons, and supposedly independently of their own free will – are all going to develop a digital ID/health passport system at exactly the same time, and while working with the WHO to ensure “interoperability”.

Therein lies the plausible deniability. See, it won’t be one global health and surveillance system! No, it will be 100+ different “interoperable” systems…that just happened by chance to all be conceived and built at the same time along the same guidelines.

A distinction good enough to fuel the inevitable defenses from corporate fact-checkers even if it can’t fool anyone else.

However, all that aside, the most interesting part of this story is where you read about it.

Viz – the back pages.

At the height of the pandemic, this would be big news, maybe breaking news in big red letters. There’d be op-eds in all the major outlets celebrating the move, accompanied by “fact checks” with headlines like “No, global digital passports doesn’t mean one world government”.

Now, if you’re not following certain social media accounts or regularly checking the news cycles for quite specific terms, you’d never have heard about this. It’s not even mentioned in any mainstream news site I’ve read.

Resistance has pushed the New Normal narrative out of the limelight, to be replaced by war porn, Trump, illegal immigrants or Harry and Meghan.

You’re all being encouraged to think the Great Reset was a flash in the pan, the New Normal just an old joke. 2020 was just a bad dream & now everything is back to normal & Left versus Right, East versus West…

But no. This is the last reel of the scary movie. The demon seems to be exorcised, the danger looks like it’s over and the heroine has gone to take a bath, unaware of what’s creeping slowly toward her from the shadows.

The Great Reset is still very much alive, but your resistance temporarily shut it down, so it’s changed its tactic. It was overt. Now it’s covert. Now it’s hoping to sneak in while you’re not looking and snatch you up and swallow you down before you even know what’s happening.

It’s incredibly important you don’t let that happen.

So – wake up, and wake other people up. Shake them. Yell at them. Get them to look over their shoulder at the big rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem – so we can try to stop it being born.

Connect with OffGuardian

Cover image based on creative commons work of: CDD20

Unveiling the Privacy Perils of Amazon Sidewalk

by Neil Radimaker, The Conscious Resistance
May 26, 2023

In a time where technology continues to shape our lives, the emergence of Amazon Sidewalk has ignited a fervent debate about the balance between convenience and privacy. As an independent investigator, I feel compelled to understand the deep complexities and potential dangers of this pervasive network. This investigative report aims to shed light on the surveillance capabilities, coverage area, and the undisclosed collaborations surrounding Amazon Sidewalk.

Amazon Sidewalk, is a shared network launched by Amazon, promising to enhance the functionality of devices like Amazon Echo devices, Ring Security Cams, outdoor lights, motion sensors, and Tile trackers. It extends their working range and helps them perform better both at home and beyond the front door. However, the very features that make it appealing also raise serious concerns about privacy and surveillance.

One-sided PR Video: About Amazon Sidewalk and how Semtech’s LoRa® technology plays a critical role (Published: March of 2023).

This report is a culmination of research, analysis, and critical thinking, and it is my hope that it serves as a catalyst for informed conversations and collective action.

Unveiling the Dangers of Amazon Sidewalk’s Surveillance Capabilities

In this digital age, where connectivity and smart devices have become ubiquitous, a new level of surveillance has emerged, blurring the boundaries between public and private spaces. Amazon Sidewalk stands at the forefront of these intrusive surveillance networks. In this report, we dive into the alarming dangers posed by these surveillance capabilities and the implications for personal privacy and autonomy.

Audio and Video Intrusion:

One of the most concerning aspects of Amazon Sidewalk is its ability to intrude into our private spaces without our explicit consent or knowledge. By silently capturing seamless audio and video data through devices like Ring cameras, Amazon Echo and other compatible smart home technologies. Sidewalk has the potential to turn every room of our homes into a watchful eye, constantly recording and analyzing our activities. This level of surveillance undermines the sanctity of our personal lives and raises questions about the boundaries of consent and individual autonomy.

Integration with Facial Recognition:

One of the most controversial aspects of Amazon Sidewalk’s privacy invasion potential is its integration with facial recognition technology. By combining video surveillance with facial recognition algorithms, Sidewalk will have the capacity to identify individuals and track their movements with alarming accuracy. Individuals can be identified and monitored, alerting officials when a person designated as “suspicious” is caught on camera.

Behavior Profiling:

By collecting a vast amount of data about our daily routines, habits, and preferences, Amazon Sidewalk has the potential to construct detailed profiles of individuals. Through sophisticated algorithms and data analysis, Sidewalk can track our movements, monitor our online activities, and even make inferences about our behaviors and interests. This level of profiling creates a comprehensive digital portrait, encroaching upon our autonomy and raising concerns about potential manipulation or discrimination.

Room Mapping and Blueprinting: 

Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot, the maker of Roomba raises concerns about data sharing and collaboration with Amazon Sidewalk. The Roomba’s advanced features, including its mapping and blueprinting capabilities, introduce interesting privacy implications. With data collection and the ability to gather detailed information about our home layouts and furnishings. The Roomba can also silently record audio and video, analyzing our activities, intruding into our most private spaces.

Overlap of Coverage Reach:

Amazon Sidewalk’s extensive network coverage raises concerns about the widespread surveillance it enables. With a vast number of interconnected devices, this creates an overlapping network of surveillance that spans entire neighborhoods and public spaces. This level of coverage infringes upon our very sense of privacy, as our movements and activities can be captured and monitored from various angles and locations privately and publicly. Amazon Sidewalk’s ambition is to establish a nationwide network, the company currently claims it now provides coverage to over 90% of the U.S. population, including those who live in moderately rural areas.

Unregulated Data Collection:

The vast amount of data collected by Amazon Sidewalk raises significant concerns about its storage, usage, and potential for misuse. With access to intimate details of our lives, including our daily routines, social interactions, and even sensitive information, the potential for abuse or unauthorized access to this data is alarming. The lack of clear regulations and safeguards heightens the risks associated with such uncontrolled data collection.

The Partnership Between Amazon, Law Enforcement and Federal Agencies:

Amazon Ring’s partnership with local law enforcement agencies has raised significant privacy concerns. The doorbell-camera company has established video-sharing partnerships with more than 400 police forces across the United States, potentially granting them access to homeowners’ camera footage. This partnership allows police to request video recorded by homeowners’ cameras within a specific time and area, aiding officers in viewing footage from the company’s millions of Internet-connected cameras installed nationwide.

While homeowners can decline these requests, the number of police deals is likely to fuel broader questions about privacy, surveillance, and the expanding reach of tech giants and local police. Legal experts and privacy advocates have voiced alarm about the company’s ambitions and its increasingly close relationship with police, arguing that the program could threaten civil liberties, turn residents into informants, and subject innocent people, including those who Ring users have flagged as “suspicious,” to greater surveillance and potential risk.

Currently, law enforcement can request footage from Ring cameras through the Neighbors app, but homeowners have the right to refuse. If the footage is deemed critical, officers can seek a search warrant or court order to force Ring to release the footage, regardless of the homeowner’s objections. There have however been cases where Ring did not require the use of a warrant or court order to release the footage to law enforcement. This effectively transforms private security systems into tools for law enforcement. Ring’s collaboration with law enforcement has been criticized for potentially fostering racial profiling and eroding community trust.

The high-resolution cameras can capture detailed images not only of the owner’s doorstep but also of neighboring houses down the street. Some officers have confessed to looking for Ring doorbells while investigating crimes or canvassing neighborhoods, in case they need to resort to legal maneuvers to obtain the video without the homeowner’s consent.

As concerns regarding the privacy and security implications of Amazon Sidewalk continue to grow, it becomes imperative to examine the collaborations and deals with federal agencies.

Reports have surfaced indicating that Amazon has entered into collaborations with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The exact nature and scope of this collaboration remain undisclosed, but it has raised concerns about the potential access and sharing of data between Amazon Sidewalk and the FBI. The implications of such a partnership on surveillance capabilities and the handling of user data warrant further investigation and scrutiny.

While the specifics are shrouded in secrecy, there have been many reports talking about the working relationship between Amazon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In fact, a $600 million computing cloud was developed by Amazon Web Services for the CIA. This cloud is intended to service all the agencies that make up the intelligence community, ushering in a new era of cooperation and coordination. The cloud allows agencies within the intelligence community to order a variety of on-demand computing and analytic services from the CIA and National Security Agency.

Final thoughts from the author:

For all intents and purposes, the “Total Information Network” is here. Amazon Sidewalk fits the description of a comprehensive surveillance system that extensively monitors, tracks, and collects all data on a large scale. This network leverages advanced technologies, such as surveillance cameras, facial recognition software, data analytics algorithms, and interconnected databases, to gather and analyze vast amounts of information about individuals. Consequently, it creates a surveillance state that encroaches upon the existence of personal privacy, granting authorities and centralized entities unparalleled access to individuals’ activities, behaviors, and personal data. In many ways, it resembles a magnified version of the dystopian surveillance depicted in George Orwell’s “1984.” This is now reality.

This type of information network should raise major concerns. It is very similar to the ideals and unethical principles of past oppressive regimes, who created extensive lists of individuals for surveillance and control. The collection of personal information within such a network creates a potential for retrospective use against people in the future.

Just as the Stasi meticulously documented citizens’ activities and associations, and the Nazis compiled lists to target specific groups, this comprehensive surveillance system enables authorities to retrospectively identify and target individuals based on their past actions, beliefs, or affiliations. This poses a grave risk to personal freedom, as historical data can be weaponized to persecute, discriminate against, marginalize, and even murder individuals through the acts of democide and genocide.

The lessons from history remind us of the importance of guarding against the misuse of personal information and protecting individual rights, even as technology advances and surveillance capabilities expand.

It is my hope that this report sparks meaningful conversations and prompts individuals, communities, and policymakers to question the balance between connectivity and privacy. The path forward requires a collaborative effort, with individuals, advocacy groups, and policymakers working together to shape regulations and guidelines that prioritize privacy, autonomy, and consent. It is only through vigilant and educated learning that we can navigate the complexities of the digital age and ensure the protection of our fundamental rights and freedoms.

Sources:

1. 1. The Atlantic: The Details About the CIA’s Deal With Amazon
   2. The Register: ACLU: Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties concerns
   3. The Washington Post: Doorbell-camera firm Ring has partnered with 400 police forces, extending surveillance concerns
   4. Popular Science: Amazon Sidewalks Privacy Concerns
   5. The Verge: Amazon Sidewalk Privacy Echo Ring Smart Home
   6. Business Insider: Amazon Sidewalk Raises Privacy Concerns Ahead Launch Experts
   7. CPO Magazine: Amazon Sidewalks Smart Neighborhood Vision Raises Serious Privacy Concerns
   8. Consumer Reports: Pros and Cons of Amazon Sidewalk Network Plus How to Opt Out
   9. HackRead: Critical Vulnerability Amazon Ring Camera Record
   10. Wired: Ring Doorbell Camera Amazon Privacy
   11. Komando: Roomba Security Tips
   12. EFF: Ring Reveals They Give Videos Police Without User Consent or Warrant
   13. New York Post: Employees at Amazon’s Ring Have Been Spying on Customers
   14. The Guardian: Amazon Ring Largest Civilian Surveillance Network US
   15. Amazon Sidewalk Website
   16. Amazon Sidewalk White-paper
   17. AWS IoT Core Features
   18. Amazon Conditions of Use
   19. Amazon.com Privacy Notice

Neil Radimaker is a Reporter, Journalist, filmmaker and cinematographer, as well as the co-founder and co-creator of The Conscious Resistance Network, which is a decentralized media network focused on promoting individual freedom, peaceful resistance, and alternative solutions to mainstream problems. 

Connect with The Conscious Resistance

Cover image based on creative commons work of: TheDigitalArtist

James Fetzer on the Nashville Transgender School Shooter Hoax

by Jeremy Nell, Jerm Warfare
May 22, 2023

James Fetzer has chatted to me many times.

His conversations are always explosive.

I strongly recommend listening to his analyses of 9/11, Sandy Hook and staged mass shootings. They are all red pill conversations.

Paradigm shifts have become a big thing thanks to the Covid™ narrative. The events of 2020 were so obviously abnormal that questioning everything immediately became a staple of my new normal.

We all know about Nashville school shooting incident that happened recently.

The following is what CNN reported.

Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old former Covenant School student who killed six people at the school Monday, carefully planned the attack, according to officials.

While the shooter’s gender identity is unclear, police told CNN that Hale was assigned female at birth and used “male pronouns” on social media.

I laughed at the bit about “assigned female at birth”. (Mark McDonald has more on that.)

Does that shooter look like a female?

The following conversation with James is mostly a slideshow in which he breaks apart the entire story, concluding that this was yet another staged mass shooting.



Connect with Jerm Warfare

Connect with James Fetzer

 See Related:

James Fetzer on the 9/11 Coverup

James Fetzer on the Sandy Hook Coverup: What Actually Happened at the School, and Was It a False Flag Operation to Usher In Stricter Gun Laws?

Newtown, CT Resident: Questioning the Sandy Hook Narrative — Mind-Boggling “Coincidences” Connect Mafia-Like Ties Within Key Town Positions

Paul James with Reinette Senum on The History of Our Enslavement in America Under the Guise of Democracy

The Lost Political History of America is Revealed

If you are wondering why we have no representation these days… Paul James unravels a history where America went from being a Republic to a defacto corporate, municipal government.

by Reinette Senum, Reinette Senum’s Foghorn Express
May 20, 2023



[View video at Reinette Senum’s Foghorn Express. Mirrored at TCTL Odysee, BitChute
& Brighteon channels.]

This interview with Paul James will be an eye-opener for the vast majority of Americans.

Our history is not what we have been led to believe.

The loss of our Republican government since President Lincoln is revealed in this riveting historical review that we were never taught in school…. and by design.

Lawful government was to protect our “unalienable” rights, not inalienable rights as we have come to know.

The civil war, tormented by the Rothschilds London and Rothchild’s France, was not intended to free slaves but to indenture and bankrupt America to establish a new form of government in 1871 through the Act of 1871.

This act established a municipal government of the District of Columbia, replacing this country’s “original organic” government. The people who established this corporate, municipal government had no authority to do so, and in fact, we have been operating under a defacto corporation since the 1870s that has become completely tyrannical to the point of attempting to genocide us…..

While we believe we have representatives that have taken an oath to “protect us from enemies foreign and domestic,”… as I have reported earlier, here, the oath has been manipulated to allow America to be infiltrated, put under foreign control, and with a foreign agenda to collapse California and America.

The Oath in the current California Constitution (A. D. 1879), Article XX, Section 3 is required to be taken by every government officer and employee (from Governor Newsom down to a city dog-catcher) before they can enter the duties of their respective offices. Not one state, county or city officer or employee has taken and subscribed the Oath mandated at Article XX, Sec. 3; nor, have they complied with the common law [Calif. Civil Code, Sec. 22.2] or statutory requirement [Calif. Government Code, §§ 1450- 1653] to file a fidelity/performance bond before assuming the duties of their respective offices. Therefore, by operation of law, every act or action that any live actor commits, claiming to be a de jure state, county or city government officer or employee, is being done under color of law [18 U.S.C. § 242], color of office and color of authority. Anyone who is in violation of the fundamental organic Law of the state has no authority whatsoever to enact, enforce or adjudicate any state statutory law, rule or municipal code.

The American People living in every State [not including the district of Columbia], including but not limited to California, are entitled by the supreme Law of the Land, to a “Republican Form of Government” [“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” Constitution of the United States, Article IV, Section 4].

The current Form of Government in California (and all other united States of America) clearly is not a Republican Form of Government, but rather is a private, for-profit, foreign corporate municipal democracy, organized in California in A. D. 1879, controlled and operated exclusively by constitutionally- banned agents of the BAR [https://www.brighteon.com/13ef3415-e3f0-494c-9182-38566ea2b44f].

In addition, as Paul James lays out, we live under “Lawfare” and “Warfare.”

Lawfare is a form of Mixed War consisting of the use of the so-called justice system (i.e., private, for-profit, foreign BAR court system), to intentionally and corruptly apply private, foreign, corporate government municipal law applicable only for corporations, ens legis persons and legal fictions to the American People, as if they were any of the aforesaid juristic entities. The live agents of the BAR routinely use lawfare against private Americans, to damage or delegitimize them socially and financially, to tie-up their time and resources, to seize their children, homes, businesses, private property and/or imprison them, under color of law; and, this includes enforcing mandatory vaccinations or forced use of medical procedures under color of law. The term is a portmanteau of the words law and warfare.

Mixed War occurs whenever the government of a nation is an enemy of, and at war against, its own people. The most insidious and perfidious type of mixed war exists when the agents of government act against the people under the territorial Boundaries of the republic state of California to deny and infringe upon constitutionally- protected unalienable Rights, under color of law, through the use of fraudulent simulated legal process
[see: Calif. Government Code § 68076 and the following link to fully understand this point: http://www.internallydisplacedpeople.org/joomla30/index.php/courtseals].

If you aren’t familiar with any of the above — the fact that we have actors masquerading as elected officials and a corporation masquerading as a government — this is the interview for you.

Connect with & support the work of Reinette Senum

Connect with Paul James at Telegram

Andrew Napolitano on Pegasus & Predator Spy Systems: The Feds and Their Copycats

The Feds and Their Copycats 

by Andrew P. Napolitano, Judge Napolitano
May 18, 2023

The federal government recently revealed that at least 50 U.S. government personnel working in 10 foreign countries have had their mobile devices hacked by unknown persons who employed software known as “zero-click.” The zero-click product, called Pegasus, is manufactured by an Israeli high-tech company, called NSO Group.

Pegasus enables the user to download the contents of the target’s mobile device or desktop without having to trick the target into clicking onto a link. It also enables the user to follow the person in possession of the device, capturing all texts and emails, as well as listening to conversations on the device or that take place in near proximity to it.

Pegasus is so sophisticated that its victims are largely unaware of the digital attack on their devices. The feds learned that they have been victimized by this software when Apple informed them. Apple told the feds to expect much more of this. The feds are deeply troubled by this warning, as they don’t know who the victims are. The president himself was recently in Ireland, where his personal phone may have been targeted.

But don’t feel sorry for the feds. They have been using this software and similar products on unsuspecting Americans since the Trump administration.

Here is the backstory.

In reply to a routine Freedom of Information Act request made in 2020, the FBI acknowledged spending $5 million to license Pegasus from NSO Group. When FBI director Christopher Wray was asked about this, he reluctantly told Congress that his agents bought zero-click, but he denied its use in law enforcement. What does that mean? Isn’t the essence of the FBI’s work law enforcement?

Wray claimed that the FBI only purchased zero-click in order to reverse engineer it — basically to see how it worked. But that’s not truly why the FBI wanted Pegasus. It hoped to use the software to spy on Americans without first obtaining search warrants.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, written in the aftermath of British searches of colonial homes not based on evidence of crimes, requires judicially issued search warrants based on probable cause of crime for all searches and seizures.

Thus, the owners and users of mobile devices and desktops — that’s nearly every American — have a privacy right in the use of their devices and in the data they have stored in them. Even a narrow interpretation of the amendment that guarantees privacy in “persons, houses, papers, and effects” must acknowledge that a computer chip — the heart of every computer — is an “effect,” and thus its owner or user enjoys privacy protection.

Protection from whom? Let’s see.

When President Joe Biden learned of the FBI’s use of Pegasus — the FBI secretly bought it during the Trump years — and the FBI’s shady explanation for its use of it, the White House announced an executive order that it claimed would prevent future use of zero-click. The Biden executive order stops the sales of Pegasus to Americans and to the government, but it does not stop the sales of all zero-clicks.

Rather than simply banning zero-click, rather than banning all warrantless searches, Biden banned only the use of one brand of zero-click software and only when it has also been used by foreign governments to target the U.S. government, when it is under the control of a foreign government, when it has been used to target the freedom of expression of foreign human rights activists or when it has been used by foreign authoritarians.

What about stopping the use of zero-click by federal authoritarians? Biden banned it because of how others use it, not because, in its essence, it violates the Fourth Amendment. Quick to pick up on this, the feds quickly purchased Predator — a twin of Pegasus, made by another foreign high-tech firm, with a more benign track record of sales and use.

What good does Biden’s executive order do? Whom does it protect? The Biden executive order is Joe Biden at his worst. Claiming to deny commercial benefit to a foreign company because it also sells to bad guys but permitting another foreign company to sell functionally the same product to the feds protects no one’s Fourth Amendment rights.

When Thomas Jefferson predicted shortly before he died in 1826 that, in the long run, personal liberty would shrink and government power would grow, he could not have imagined any of this. It seems that, no matter who is in the White House and which political party controls either house of Congress, the tentacles of government reach deeper into our lives with every tick of the clock.

Is there any area of private or harmless behavior that the government leaves alone?

The government that Jefferson left us has been inverted. That government needed the permission of the voters to do nearly anything. Today, we need the permission of the government to do nearly everything. And folks under observation change on account of the observation.

Two of my closest friends — husband and wife — told me they were discussing diamond earrings on their cellphones with each other last week. Soon, ads for diamond earrings began popping up on their desktops.

This was obviously not the government, yet, government sets the tone and the standard. Federal agents use zero-click to hack into our computers because that’s a lot easier than developing probable cause of crime and presenting it to a judge. Big tech uses hacking because that’s more effective than advertising.

Now big tech targeting consumers can mimic the feds — and, like the feds, get away with it because when the government breaks its own laws, it sets a precedent for others to follow. Is this the government the Framers left us? Is it the government we voted for? What awaits us on the other side of this Orwellian landscape?

Copyright 2023 Andrew P. Napolitano

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Cover image credit: geralt

TSA Pilot-Tests Controversial Facial Recognition Technology at These 16 US Airports

by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge
May 18, 2023

The next time you find yourself at airport security, prepare to look directly into a camera. The Transportation Security Administration is quietly testing controversial facial recognition technology at airports nationwide.

AP News said 16 airports, including Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall and Reagan National near Washington, as well as ones in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Jose, and Gulfport-Biloxi and Jackson in Mississippi, have installed kiosks with cameras (at some TSA checkpoints) that allow passengers to insert their government-issued ID and look into a camera as facial recognition technology asses if the ID and person match.

Here’s what to expect at airports utilizing this new technology:

Travelers put their driver’s license into a slot that reads the card or place their passport photo against a card reader. Then they look at a camera on a screen about the size of an iPad, which captures their image and compares it to their ID. The technology is both checking to make sure the people at the airport match the ID they present and that the identification is in fact real. A TSA officer is still there and signs off on the screening. -AP

“What we are trying to do with this is aid the officers to actually determine that you are who you say who you are,” said Jason Lim, identity management capabilities manager, during a recent demonstration of the technology to reporters at BWI.

TSA said the pilot test is voluntary, and passengers can opt out. The facial recognition technology has raised concerns among critics, like five senators (four Democrats and an Independent) who sent a letter in February to the TSA requesting the pilot test be halted immediately.

“Increasing biometric surveillance of Americans by the government represents a risk to civil liberties and privacy rights,” the senators said. 

The letter continued:

“We are concerned about the safety and security of Americans’ biometric data in the hands of authorized private corporations or unauthorized bad actors.

“As government agencies grow their database of identifying images, increasingly large databases will prove more and more enticing targets for hackers and cybercriminals.”

Meg Foster, a justice fellow at Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, is concerned that even though the TSA says it’s not storing biometric data, it collects, “What if that changes in the future?”

Jeramie Scott, with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that even though the TSA facial recognition kiosks are being tested, it could be only a matter of time before it becomes a more permanent fixture at checkpoints.

Despite the US being a first-world country, it has third-world protections for its people. There’s an increasing number of government agencies that want your biometric data. Even the IRS wants your face.

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Government and Rule: The Bane of Humanity

by Gary D. Barnett
May 12, 2023

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”

~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century

Properly summing up government and rule of any kind, is to accept that all government, all State force, and all authority of one over another, is an atrocious abomination against humanity. Government is the scourge of mankind, it can only exist due to force, and if any government or any rule is administered by any politician or ruler, or any of their ilk, freedom has already vanished. As Orson Scott Card so clearly explained what he had learned: “My father always said that government is like watching another man piss in your boot. Someone feels better but it certainly isn’t you.” This image is accurate, but if the free man sticks his boot up the arse of the government, he will not only feel better, he will be free.

The bottom line as I see it, is that there is no such thing as good government, benevolent government, necessary government, or protective government; there is only evil government. This is easy to understand when one simply discovers what governments cause, what they do, what they steal, who they murder, and how they hold power over all. Considering America, without government and rule, there would have been few if any wars, no government taxation, (theft) no confiscation of much of the land in this country by rule of ‘law’ and force, few if any monopolies, no mass regulation of any kind, no government prisons filled with those incarcerated for victimless crimes, no drug laws, no gun laws, and no murderous federal or state police and military. There would be no politicians, no elections, no voting for masters, no congress, no president, (king) no massive bureaucracies, no government indoctrination systems, (‘public’ schools) no republicans, no democrats, and therefore a great reduction of lies.

Without a government, the false flag inside job of September 11, 2001, would never have happened. There would never have been any Patriot Act, no war of terror by the United States, no torture program, and probably no recessions or depressions, unless they were isolated, natural, localized, and very short-lived. The housing and economic crisis beginning in 2008 would not have occurred. Stock and bond manipulation would be nearly impossible, and mass spending, currency expansion, and monetary inflation would be unheard of in an environment devoid of government.

There would be no national emergencies declared by government, so the fake ‘covid’ pandemic would never have taken place. There would never have been business closings ordered, no mask mandates, no forced home imprisonment, no curfews, no lockdowns, no ‘social distancing,’ no testing, and absolutely no required deadly poisonous bio-weapon injections purposely and unjustly called ‘vaccines.’.

There would never have been any travel restrictions, no bailouts, no mass welfare scams called ‘stimulus checks, no hyper-inflation, no poisoning of food sources, no destruction of farms and ranches, no slaughter of animals, no toxic chemical poison spraying of the atmosphere, no geo-engineering of weather and unnatural disasters, and no Trump or Biden.

There would be no debt ceiling, because there would likely be no federal or state debt. There would be no national deficit, and no unfunded liabilities. There would be little if any division among the people because most all division is caused and stoked by government. There would be no immigration problem, no fences at the borders, no ‘war on drugs,’ no drug cartels supported fully by the U.S. government and the CIA and other ‘intelligence’ services. There would be no antagonistic foreign policy, and therefore, no real risk of nuclear war with China or Russia, and no food and energy shortages caused by state thugs.

No one has any legitimate right to give authority, or assign any power of one over another, by calling it government. The very idea that one can vote to allow by proxy, the rule of the many by the few; those chosen liars and cheats called politicians, is in and of itself absurd. How can any illegitimately selected political class, the most immoral group of criminals on earth, legislate morality to others? All that government consists of, are those dregs of society seeking rule, who are given power to do things that no normal citizen has a right to do. Any who are allowed to make ‘laws’ controlling others, are automatically assuming a position above their own heinous ‘laws.’ They are only able to do this by using the resources they steal from all, to buy violent enforcers called police and military, to punish, harm, or murder, any who question or refuse their false ‘authority.’

As I have said in the past: “All those who continue to support the notion that government is necessary, all those who continue to advocate government as the only answer to societal cohesion, all those who demand that others accept government for the benefit of all, and all those dependent on rule who expect government to be their master and protector, are in essence the destroyers of liberty, and therefore they are advocates for mass slavery. There is no legitimate reasoning for such asinine behavior.”

Government can only exist when people accept that they are slaves, and allow a master to rule over them. Without this voluntary acceptance of rule, no government could ever stand. No individual or group of individuals, has any right whatsoever to rule another, and this has only been possible due to the insane mindset that is collectivism of the masses. This so-called ‘philosophy’ that is ‘collectivism,’ sets the stage for where we are today; living as slaves in a society of fools, dependent on a master’s permission to live and breathe. No freedom will ever be present, so long as any government (State) exists. This is a reality that cannot be questioned.

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”

~ Herbert Marcuse

Copyright © 2023 GaryDBarnett.com

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REAL ID in the US: 15 Years On and Still Not in Full Effect 

“But even as of December 2022, only 17 percent of IDs in Kentucky were REAL ID compliant. The fact that the department has extended the deadline for another two years indicates a high level of non-compliance. The federal government does not want the political fallout it would face by effectively banning millions of people from domestic air travel…

The federal government’s struggle to implement REAL ID for what will be at least 17 years reveals a dirty little secret – the feds can’t do much of anything when states refuse to cooperate. This was the blueprint James Madison gave in Federalist #46 to resist “unwarrantable” or even unpopular federal acts. He said that a “refusal to cooperate with officers of the union” would create impediments and obstructions that would stymie federal actions…”

REAL ID: 15 Years On and Still Not in Full Effect 

by Mike Maharrey, Tenth Amendment Center
May 11, 2023

On this date in 2008, the REAL ID Act was supposed to go into effect.

It didn’t.

And it still isn’t in full effect to this day.

Last December, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) extended the enforcement deadline yet again for two more years, announcing it would not begin enforcing REAL ID requirements until May 2025.

In fact, the DHS has delayed the full implementation of REAL ID multiple times since Congress passed the act in 2005 with an original implementation date of May 11, 2008. Even with the federal government badgering states and using the threat of turning them into virtual no-fly zones to compel the adoption of REAL ID, the feds have found it incredibly difficult to coerce states into compliance.

The bottom line is due to intense opposition and foot-dragging by the states, REAL ID won’t be in full effect until at least 17 years after the initial implementation date – and that’s assuming the DHS doesn’t extend the deadline again.

This proves that “the Father of the Constitution” was right. Nullification works.

James Madison told us that a “refusal to cooperate with officers of the Union” would create “very serious impediments” for federal enforcement – in just a single state. If a number of states did the same, he said it “would present obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter.”

This is exactly what has happened with REAL ID.

Background

President George W. Bush signed the REAL ID Act into law in 2005, essentially mandating a national ID system and putting the onus of implementation on each state.

But things didn’t go smoothly from the beginning, and by any conceivable measure, the implementation of REAL ID has been an abject failure because of widespread state resistance and refusal to cooperate with the scheme.

Most states simply ignored the law, and many rebelled outright for several reasons, including privacy concerns, along with the fact that Congress didn’t provide any funding for the mandates it expects states to implement. A large number of states simply chose not to act. New Hampshire, Missouri, Maine, Oklahoma and others took things a step further, passing laws expressly prohibiting compliance with the national ID standards.

Instead of forcing the issue, the feds issued waiver after waiver.

The DHS started extending deadlines almost immediately. On January 29, 2008, the agency issued REAL ID regulations that created a gradual implementation schedule. States would have until the mandated implementation date of May 11, 2008, to become “materially” compliant with the act but could ask for an extension valid until the end of 2009. It also set a date of May 10, 2011,  for full compliance.

In December 2009, the DHS extended the date for “material compliance” because “a large majority of states and territories—46 of 56—have informed DHS that they will not be able to meet the Dec. 31 REAL ID material compliance deadline.” At the time, it left the full compliance date in place.

That date came and went. In December 2012, the DHS announced that only 13 states had met the law’s requirements and that beginning the following month, all the other states would get a deferment.

“Beginning January 15, 2013, those states not found to meet the standards will receive a temporary deferment that will allow Federal agencies to continue to accept their licenses and identification cards for boarding commercial aircraft and other official purposes.”

On and on it went, with new extensions and deferments year after year.

Ten years after its passage, more than half the states in the Union still had not complied with REAL ID. Of the 28 not in compliance, 21 had “extension waivers” until October 2016.

“There is an impasse,” Edward Hasbrouck a privacy advocate with the Identity Project told the New York Times in December 2015. “There has been a standoff for more than a decade now. The feds have limited powers to coerce the states in this case.”

In 2016, the feds ratcheted up their bullying tactics, specifically threatening to stop accepting noncompliant licenses at TSA security checkpoints. This would effectively ground travelers from states that refuse to comply with the unconstitutional national ID scheme. On Oct. 13, 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent letters to five states denying their request for time extensions to bring their driver’s licenses in compliance with REAL ID. At the time, the DHS set a 2018 deadline but still allowed for individual state extensions.

Instead of standing their ground, politicians began to cave. Idaho reversed its ban on Real ID implementation in 2016. Oklahoma followed suit the next year. At least six other states reversed course during this time period. Missouri lifted its ban on Real ID in 2018.

With states clamoring to get compliant, the enforcement deadline was ultimately extended to October 2020 and then again to October 2021.

After almost yearly implementation delays since 2008, it appeared DHS was seriously going to start enforcing the act in 2021. But in yet another about-face in April of that year, the Department extended the October 2021 deadline to May 2023. At the time, DHS said only 43 percent of American driver’s licenses were REAL ID compliant. That percentage has likely increased in the last two years, but the DHS did not provide any compliance data in its latest extension notice.

But even as of December 2022, only 17 percent of IDs in Kentucky were REAL ID compliant. The fact that the department has extended the deadline for another two years indicates a high level of non-compliance. The federal government does not want the political fallout it would face by effectively banning millions of people from domestic air travel.

And now the deadline stands May 2025.

We’ll see how that works out.

The federal government’s struggle to implement REAL ID for what will be at least 17 years reveals a dirty little secret – the feds can’t do much of anything when states refuse to cooperate. This was the blueprint James Madison gave in Federalist #46 to resist “unwarrantable” or even unpopular federal acts. He said that a “refusal to cooperate with officers of the union” would create impediments and obstructions that would stymie federal actions.

This has certainly proved true when it comes to REAL ID.

But we also see another less pleasant reality in this saga. We can’t trust politicians to hold the line. State legislators and governors held the feds at bay for over a decade. It wasn’t until they started to cave that REAL ID gained any momentum toward implementation. And even then, the federal government has still faced a rocky road.

Ultimately, it takes public action to stop government overreach. We can’t just turn our heads and hope elected officials will do their job. That only happens when we keep the pressure on.

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Cover image credit: geralt

They’re Coming to Take You Away

…When the monolithic narrative that is all they have been taught lies in ruins, they will replace it not with a rational, informed alternative – for they will know of none – but with whatever satisfies the rage of a population that realizes, too late, that it has been hoodwinked.

Woe to the freedom-haters when the lion they think they have tamed turns its fury on the liberal society that soothsayers like Zelikow and Lipstadt still imagine they are defending!”

by Michael Lesher, Brownstone Institute
May 9, 2023

Suppose I tell you in advance that the essay you are reading is meant to startle you. And suppose I suggest, by way of demonstration, that two people as loosely connected as the leader of the “COVID Crisis Group” and Joe Biden’s “Special Envoy To Monitor and Combat Antisemitism” – both of whom have recently offered recommendations for improving political life in the United States – are in fact determined to unravel American freedoms.

Would you be surprised?

Well, if so, that is exactly the startling fact I am trying to bring to your attention. True, you may not have heard that the 34 COVID-19 “experts” headed by one Philip Zelikow (last seen justifying the concealment of information about the 9/11 attacks) and anti-Semitism “ambassador” Deborah Lipstadt – perhaps best known for slandering scads of Jewish survivors of the Nazis as “soft-core” Holocaust deniers because they objected to the massacre of 1,462 of Gaza’s civilians nine years ago – are both out to dismantle the Bill of Rights. But if you haven’t, it isn’t because they’ve been coy about their objectives.

Take the Zelikow panel. Its new book on “the lessons learned from COVID-19” openly conflates the federal government’s management of a respiratory virus with “wartime” – thus rationalizing the executive branch’s preemption of democratic government. Not only that, Zelikow and his band of “experts” explicitly call for the consolidation of power in the hands of an unelected “health security enterprise” that would control, among other things, a “systematic biomedical surveillance network.” And in case you can’t guess who is likely to benefit from the snooping, the panel goes on to praise the coercive experimental drug program that gave us the COVID-19 “vaccines” – “a bargain at $30 billion,” according to the editors of the Washington Post – signaling at one stroke the experts’ contempt for the Nuremberg Code and their subservience to Big Pharma.

As for Lipstadt, she has launched her attack on the First Amendment by redefining “anti-Semitism” so as to include an extraordinary range of political speech. Her first step in that transformation is the familiar trick of confusing criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Jewish bigotry. But her second step is newer and, arguably, even more disturbing: she tars all denigration of Jews with the hot-button label “conspiracy theory.”

Let’s be clear: however noble the pretext of opposing Jew-hatred, it should be obvious that once you characterize anti-Semitism as a “conspiracy theory” you have made a case for censorship. As Lipstadt herself explained to Jane Eisner of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (in an interview printed in the latest AARP Magazine but not available online): “[I]t’s a conspiracy theory that Jews control the media, the banks, the election process, etc. If you believe that there is a group controlling these things, then essentially you’re saying that you don’t believe in democracy.”

And there’s the trouble. After all, an overt attack on democracy isn’t a viewpoint; it isn’t even an expression of run-of-the-mill bigotry. It’s a threat to the state. And it follows, if you accept Lipstadt’s formulation, that anyone the government can label an “anti-Semite” may now be punished in the same way the Biden administration is already punishing people who protested the presidential election results of November 2020. Note, too, the selective parameters of the offense: blaming Donald Trump’s election on the Russians is presumably “legitimate” speech; but accusing a “group” of controlling “the election process” can land you in jail – that is, when the “group” is not an official enemy but a favored minority, and when that “process” has reached results endorsed by those in power.

So the Zelikow panel and Ambassador Lipstadt can’t be accused of hiding their illiberal goals. Like the Democratic lynch mob that denounced Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger on the floor of Congress last March for revealing the extent of government censorship of Twitter, these propagandists quite openly assert that surveillance is good for us, while free speech is entirely too dangerous to be entrusted to mere citizens.

“Ordinary folks and national security agencies responsible for our security,” Congressman Colin Allred lectured Taibbi, “are trying their best to find a way to make sure that our online discourse doesn’t get people hurt, or see our democracy undermined.” It’s pretty breathtaking to watch an African-American liberal solemnly declare that the CIA and the FBI are the true guardians of democracy – not to mention his defense of the security state’s behind-the-scenes censorship of political speech. But what’s even more ominous is that not a single prominent Democratic politician nor a single pundit in mainstream liberal media has repudiated anything the congressman said.

Is it any wonder, then, that no one in mainstream media has mentioned the totalitarian tendencies implicit in the COVID Crisis Group’s recommendations for “pandemic” regulation via dismantling democracy, or in Ambassador Lipstadt’s appeals to the public to “discredit” anti-Semitism by recasting it as a criminal conspiracy?

Of course it isn’t. And that is my point. That is my motive in writing in tandem about these two apparently disparate subjects, connected only by the facts that both of them involve recent public declarations and that both of them represent attacks on fundamental liberties.

Because the truth is that condemning freedom is now so entirely respectable that it’s happening practically everywhere – under every possible pretext, almost any day, from just about any left-liberal institution that claims to care about the public good. Close your eyes, and you can hardly tell whether what you’re hearing is coming from a Democratic Party stalwart or from an old-line Soviet apologist explaining why Andrei Sakharov or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Yuri Orlov is really, notwithstanding the accuracy of what he’s been saying, a threat to the state who deserves to be muzzled or jailed.

And the media’s silence about it all is as ominous as the Orwellian nattering of the freedom-haters themselves.

Take another look at the Zelikow panel’s assessment of the US government’s performance during the “COVID crisis.” Writing about what the “experts” praise or blame in their report, the Washington Post never once mentions the crippling of the US working-class economy due to arbitrary confinements and business shutdowns, the educational damage done to a whole generation of children through needless school closures, the reckless suspension of representative democracy in four-fifths of our states, the medically unjustifiable trauma caused by “mask mandates,” or the undermining of the national healthcare system through an obsessive focus on one respiratory virus while more serious issues were sidelined for over a year. As far as the Post is concerned, the real outrages of the COVID coup never happened at all.

Even when the experts and the editors do manage to notice something sinister, they go out of their way to miss the point. The Zelikow panel specifically notes the “four pandemic planning exercises” staged by the US government barely a year before the announcement of the COVID-19 outbreak. And it offers a few technical criticisms of the proceedings.

But neither the panel nor the Post editors’ congratulatory summary of its conclusions addresses the fact that the exercises – which omitted any suggestion for using repurposed drugs as early treatment for a novel virus, as in all previous influenza-like outbreaks – made a point of discussing the importance of thought-policing social media. That prescription for censorship became a grim reality after March 2020. But you’d never know it from reading the Zelikow panel’s assessment of the government’s mistakes in addressing the “pandemic.”

And Lipstadt? She claims to be a passionate defender of free speech. But that didn’t stop her from smearing Senator Ron Johnson as a “white nationalist sympathizer” because of his politically incorrect comments about Black Lives Matter. And when that issue made it to the op-ed page of the New York Times, it was only to further demonize Johnson; Lipstadt’s slander got a pass.

Why do I worry so much about this? Well, first of all because an attack on freedom is an attack on all of us.

But I think there is a special reason for alarm. It’s not just that our ruling elites believe that we, the people, need to be stripped of our right to free expression. I’m afraid that the freedom-haters clustered around our figurehead President are not even aware just how thin the ice is onto which they’re propelling us. Their position (taking the most charitable possible view of it) runs something like this: if the public isn’t exposed to views of which the censors disapprove, hoi polloi will meekly accept whatever policies are imposed on them (for their own good, of course).

But the censors are wrong. The fabric of American political life has been strained to such tautness that a single acute crisis might rupture it altogether. And if that happens, people who have been deprived of reasonable dissent will not shrink from violent opposition; on the contrary, they will embrace it. When the monolithic narrative that is all they have been taught lies in ruins, they will replace it not with a rational, informed alternative – for they will know of none – but with whatever satisfies the rage of a population that realizes, too late, that it has been hoodwinked.

Woe to the freedom-haters when the lion they think they have tamed turns its fury on the liberal society that soothsayers like Zelikow and Lipstadt still imagine they are defending!

Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books. He has also published op-ed pieces in such varied venues as Forward, ZNet, the New York Post and Off-Guardian.

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Canadians Take a Stand: Ongoing Citizen-Led Inquiry Into Canada’s COVID-19 Response & Crimes Against Humanity

Canada’s Unprecedented Inquiry 5 — Time to Stand Up

by Michelle Leduc Catlin, Gather Your Wits
May 2, 2023

First they came for the unvaccinated, and I did not speak out —

Because I was not unvaccinated.

Then they came for the truckers, and I did not speak out —

Because I was not a trucker.

Then they came for the Christians, and I did not speak out —

Because I was not a Christian.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

~ An homage to Martin Niemöller

When do you stand up?

That was the title of my first blog here, posted exactly 2 years ago this week, which began with the famous Niemöller poem.

I could not have foreseen that I would write 150 more stories about Covid science, anti-science, and the outcomes of policies using words that, before 2020, I did not have in my lexicon.

Social distancing, mask mandates, anti-vaxxer, dis-information, lockdowns (outside of prison) and more.

I could not have imagined that “vaccine” and “passport” were only the first 2 words horrifyingly strung together by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to incite division.

I could never have anticipated that I would become the Spokesperson for one of the most inspiring and empowering movements in Canadian history.

As I type those words, sitting on an airplane headed to the next set of hearings of the National Citizens Inquiry, my eyes fill with tears.

Again.

Those who have been in attendance or viewed online even one full day of testimony in any of the 5 cities we’ve now visited, will have some sense of why I find myself crying so often these days.

We have heard sworn testimony of health ruined, families torn apart, churches targeted, and lives devastated.

We have heard expert after expert speak of the absolute failure of governments and institutions charged with protecting the health and safety of Canadian citizens.

And despite all this (or perhaps because of it), we have been ignored by any authorities and agents responsible for the devastation created over the last 3 years, as well as by the mainstream media whose job it is to question government policy and to accurately inform the people of important events.

And, I’m moved to tears for another reason.

Canadians are coming together to bridge the divides created by those who willfully or through negligence have sewn fear and hatred and suspicion based on superficial differences.

We have heard testimony from citizens across the country and across the political spectrum, from scientists and pastors, from rural people and urban dwellers, from teenagers and the elderly, “vaccinated” and “unvaccinated.”

And we applaud them all.

Literally.

Every witness is accorded the respect they deserve by an audience of fellow citizens acknowledging the courage it takes to stand up and speak out in these grey days of caustic commentary and state-sanctioned censorship.

Because we all understand that telling any truth that defies the mainstream narrative is risky.

Take the well-known case of former RCMP officer and Trudeau sniper guard, Danny Bulford, whose moral code and adherence to duty led to his lawful involvement in the Freedom Convoy last year, for which he was arrested. He now finds himself unable to work in a field to which he dedicated his life.



Then there is the lesser known case of Dr. Justin Chin, an ER doctor who simply and respectfully asked questions about Covid policies on social media, who was fired without trial and threatened with physical harm and death — by fellow healthcare workers. [Red Deer day 2 @ 3:21:26]

“Science isn’t something to be blindly trusted, it’s a process.”
Dr. Justin Chin

Despite these threats, there are more doctors coming forward to give testimony to what has become painfully obvious.

We have failed, miserably.

We heard from dismayed dentist, Dr. Misha Susoeff, who was sure that doctors would never allow “vaccine” mandates to completely contradict the foundational concept of informed consent. [Red Deer day 3 @ 2:12:54]

“The streets of Ottawa should not have been packed with trucks. It should have been the Mercedes and the Escalades. And it should have been the doctors honking and waving flags. They should have been there to protect us.”
Dr. Misha Susoeff

A chiropractor for 26 years, Dr. Curtis Wall found that mask-wearing was interfering with his ability to do his job and stopped wearing it. While none of his patients complained, his governing College found him guilty of professional misconduct, labelling him “ungovernable.” [Red Deer day 2 @ 6:54:48]

Dr. Eric Payne is a brilliant paediatric neurologist who was brought to Alberta from the Mayo Clinic. With 3 other physicians, he filed a lawsuit against Alberta Health Services for defying the medical ethic of informed consent and implementing mandatory “vaccination” — and still has 2 complains against him for spreading “misinformation.” [Red Deer day 3 @ 4:38:13]

Another brave doctor who co-filed in the AHS lawsuit is Dr. Gregory Chan, who has diligently and relentlessly been pursuing justice for the vaccine injured. Of the 56 forms he submitted to the public health authority, nearly 90% were either ignored or rejected. [Red Deer day 1 @ 5:32:03]

We’ve also heard harrowing stories of Christian pastors persecuted for fulfilling their religious duties.

In Red Deer, James Coates relayed how he was jailed, handcuffed and shackled, and how his congregation went underground and were hunted by RCMP — with a canine unit. [Red Deer day 3 @ 3:04:00]

In Canada.

But there are courageous truthtellers that Canadians would never know about without their testimony at the NCI.

Joelle Valliere is a funeral director who spoke up about how her first Pfizer shot caused kidney failure resulting in the need of a transplant — which she cannot get because she doesn’t have the 2nd shot. [Red Deer day 1 @ 1:31:03]

Tracy Walker shared openly about how she lost her house and couldn’t afford food or insulin because lockdowns closed her in-home hairstyling business. [Red Deer day 1 @ 6:58:36]

Dianne Molstad withstood bullying and being fired by her doctor of 30 years to stand up for her right to decide what to do with her own body. [Red Deer day 2 @ 6:41:36]

Sherry Strong used her considerable health expertise to speak out about unhealthy mandates and became a “social pariah,” losing her career as a speaker overnight. [Red Deer day 1 @ 10:22:10]

Angela Tabak recalled the tragic decline of her beautiful son who suffered mental health issues but failed to get much-needed support after mandates led to “extremely compromised” mental healthcare. She testified so that no other mother would have to go through what she has. [Red Deer day 2 @ 7:19:48]

3 days of hearings ended with the testimony of Jennifer Curry, whose mental health injuries from getting the jab against her will are as profound as her physical injuries.She crossed a province to share her story, which has left her counting the days of suffering since she made the decision to take the shot.

119.

“I changed my life because I didn’t stand up.”
Jennifer Curry

As a result of her testimony, Jennifer has the possibility of starting her count over.

She can now begin counting the days since she took a stand for herself, and so many others. [Red Deer day 3 @ 10:13:17]

Her testimony brought us full circle to the day 2 testimony of Regina Goman, a Polish political refugee whose stand during the Solidarity movement in Poland led to 13 months in prison.

When many years later she was awarded with Poland’s Cross of Freedom and Solidarity, she could not leave Canada because of travel restrictions imposed by our government on the unvaccinated.

Having lived through authoritarianism before, Regina pleaded with Canadians to recognize the direction we’re headed.

“Please take advantage of the time we have left….This is the time to speak up.”
Regina Goman



If these stories aren’t enough for everyone around the world who has been subjected to anti-science policies that have caused incalculable damage to stand up, perhaps this will be…

The testimony of expert witness Catherine Christensen.

As a lawyer representing the men and women of the Canadian armed forces who are prohibited from speaking out against the military and the government, she was able to articulate just some of the alarming damage done to both those who serve and the service itself.

“COVID-19 did not decimate the military. The leadership did it from within.”
Catherine Christensen

The injection mandates led to a loss of ~3000 to 5000 service men and women who were forced to leave through vax refusal or vax injury.

But perhaps even worse is the damage to those who have remained.

“The foundation of trust is gone in the Canadian military….Once trust is broken, you can’t have a military.”
Catherine Christensen

Ms. Christensen declared that the military is effectively “out of business.”

All of this was completely avoidable.

With a 27-year career in the military, Lieutenant Colonel David Redman was well equipped for the job of head of Emergency Management Alberta.

Though he retired, his pandemic plan was still in place when the Covid crisis began.

That comprehensive, well-established and researched plan was discarded.

Among the many mistakes and misdeeds perpetrated by the government, the use of fear was perhaps the most destructive.

“You always control fear — never use fear.”
Lieutenant Colonel David Redman

If you want to understand how a pandemic is meant to be handled, you must watch Lieutenant Colonel Redman’s expert testimony.

And share it.



Also watch Dean Beaudry’s expert testimony on Risk Assessment and Mitigation Assessment.

He came to several sobering conclusions, including the idea that the past 3 years were, “a pandemic of loss of values.”

Giving a Chief Medical Officer so much decision-making power, with no inclusion of dissenting opinions or approaches, was a disaster.

“The only reason to [not build consensus] is when control is prioritized over doing what is right.”
Dean Beaudry



We need to share any and all testimony that will have people see with their own eyes, hear with their own ears, and feel with their own hearts, what has happened and what is continuing to happen in this country.

And while I want to leave you on a positive note, I am also in tears because so many still do not see.

“We are at a point of peril.”
Lieutenant Colonel David Redman

As I finish writing my impressions of the latest set of hearings of the National Citizens Inquiry, I know that the vast majority of people who read this are already aware of the collision course we’re on.

You, dear reader, already know that democracy is under siege.

You already know that people are dying for absolutely no good reason.

And so I am asking you the question, what moves you to tears?

What will it take to bring all your skills and talents to bear?

When do you stand up?

Connect with Michelle Leduc Catlin

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Cover image based on creative commons work of: fill

Disinformation and the State: The Aptly Named RESTRICT Act

by Ryan Turnipseed, Mises Institute
April 21, 2023

The RESTRICT Act (Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act) has recently been making the rounds in the media, and rightfully so. The act is truly terrifying, but more than the open tyranny that it would further, the act illustrates a very clear problem from the perspective of the state.

In previous eras, either formally or informally, the state exercised a great deal of control over the information available to the wider population. This is no longer the case in the present day. With the advent of the internet and the resulting decentralization of media and other channels of information, the state has had increasingly fewer options at its disposal to control information. It is very obviously afraid of losing its position as the controller of information, and the RESTRICT Act is a desperate attempt to reassert itself as such.

What’s in the Act?

At this point, most people who have been paying attention should recoil upon seeing a large acronym under the consideration of Congress. After the USA PATRIOT Act, normal people recognized that these bills of massive overreach were, to put it lightly, misnamed. But in a move of honesty, the RESTRICT Act does exactly what it says it will do should it be enacted and enforced. The Senate’s website is remarkably up-front, saying:

Vendors from the U.S. and allied countries have supplied the world’s information communications and technology (ICT) for decades. In recent years, the global ICT supply chain has changed dramatically; a number of prominent foreign vendors—many subject to the control of autocratic and illiberal governments—have gained significant market share in a variety of internet infrastructure, online communications, and networked software markets. . . . The RESTRICT Act comprehensively addresses the ongoing threat posed by technology from foreign adversaries by better empowering the Department of Commerce to review, prevent, and mitigate ICT transactions that pose undue risk, protecting the US supply chain now and into the future.

Thankfully, the state is going to defend us from information and communications technology from “autocratic and illiberal governments,” as if our own states, which locked us in our own homes, were democratic and liberal. What specifically is being targeted in the broad category of information and communications technology?

As the act has been publicly marketed, this is a move against the popular social media platform TikTok. The US government’s reasoning is simple: TikTok, and similar platforms, are owned by foreign states, and these foreign states can distribute or facilitate information that is contrary to the narratives pushed by our state.

This is an existential threat to the US government. Seeing as the goal of a state is to maintain control, as articulated by Marray Rothbard in his book Anatomy of the State, having rival states present alternative narratives to the population harms your legitimacy. This legitimacy is necessary for the state to exist. As Rothbard says of people supporting the state:

This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature. But support in the sense of acceptance of some sort it must be; else the minority of state rulers would eventually be outweighed by the active resistance of the majority of the public.

The state, therefore, must maintain its legitimacy to survive, and the US government is attempting just that by trying to retake control over the country’s media. As mentioned earlier, the internet rendered most of the state’s old methods of control obsolete, which is why for the last few years the US government has been on the defensive, using covert means to influence channels of information (as can be seen with the Twitter Files).

The fact that the state has had to openly announce its direct censorship and control signals the state’s weakness. If it were stronger and bolder, as it was in most of the last century, it would have just acted already and passed the action off as a mundane matter of governance. If it were on surer footing, it would have just continued its policy of covert influence. The state is threatened. It’s afraid!

In the media and wider US society, a false debate has arisen. One side is in support, and the other side rejects the RESTRICT Act as terrifyingly evil because it is consolidating power in parts of the executive branch. According to the act, the executive branch will now have the authority to

address any risk arising from any covered transaction arising from any covered transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States that the Secretary determines . . . poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States.

The popular opposition is claiming that this is tyrannical because the secretary of commerce is appointed only by the president and reports only to the president, making the secretary unelected and subject to no congressional oversight. This objection is approaching the truth, but it’s not quite there. This act is not bad because the person who gets to determine what is an “undue or unacceptable risk” is unaccountable and undemocratic.

The act is far worse because the state should not be deciding what is an “undue or unacceptable risk.” Should this go through, the United States will have its own censor under whom no ray of light, from wherever it may come, shall in future go unnoticed and unrecognized by the state or be divested of its possible useful effect, and it will be called the secretary of commerce.

Implications of the Act

As with everything pushed by the state, what will actually happen goes far beyond the written intentions. Just as the act nominally passed to defend our freedoms from terrorism is used to spy on millions of normal Americans, this act will control and censor far more than TikTok (which is obviously not the only foreign-owned media in this country). And this is written into the act itself, which provides, “The Secretary may undertake any other action as necessary to carry out the responsibilities under this Act that is not otherwise prohibited by law.”

Worse than just the focus on “foreign adversaries,” how long until this is applied to any media deemed adversarial? How long until this act, after being passed, is amended to crack down on “domestic adversaries” like conspiracy theorists and spreaders of “disinformation,” all of which, of course, will be determined by the state? We have every reason to believe the state will grab this power, being as these categories, deemed so by the state, threaten its legitimacy. As Rothbard wrote, “A ‘conspiracy theory’ can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the state’s ideological propaganda.”

Even though the advances of tyranny are now commonplace, and the continual infringement of our liberties is the norm, this blatant aggression in the form of the RESTRICT Act should not go unnoticed. Moreover, this fight should not happen on the state’s terms. The rhetoric surrounding the act focuses on TikTok and “foreign adversaries,” two subjects that are unpopular and, frankly, difficult to defend. However, defending them, or focusing on them at all, is missing the point. The state was not content with merely spying on you, restricting your commerce and production, drafting you, and forcing your children into state schools and subjecting them to who knows what.

No, the state also needs to control your information, for if the information is free, and people can research and discuss freely, the state’s legitimacy, and therefore its very existence, is threatened. As it has shown us by so openly and disgustingly lashing out, anyone who engages in the spreading of ideas outside the purview of the state, especially of ideas that correctly dismantle the legitimacy of the state, is contributing to the state’s peril. As the US government has just proven by its ugly reaction, the spreading of ideas is how we are to proceed ever more boldly against this evil.

Ryan Turnipseed is an undergraduate in economics and entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University.

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Cover image credit: TheDigitalArtist

Hello Project Icebreaker, Goodbye Financial Freedom: “The Orwellian Nature of CBDCs Cannot Be Overstated”

by Brandon Smith, Birch Gold Group
published April 6, 2023

There has been extensive discussion in the past couple of years within alternative media circles about the dangers of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs); a currency framework very similar to blockchain based products like bitcoin but directly controlled by central bankers.

CDBCs are a threat that some analysts including myself have been writing about for more than a decade, so it’s good to finally see the issue being addressed more in the mainstream.

The economics of enslavement

The Orwellian nature of CBDCs cannot be overstated.

In a cashless society people would be dependent on digital products for exchanging goods and labor, and this would of course mean the end of all privacy in trade. Basically, everything you buy or sell or work for in your life would be recorded, and this lack of anonymity could easily be used to stifle your freedoms.

For example, say you like to eat steak regularly, but the “green” government decides to list red meat as a health risk and a “climate change risk,” due to carbon emissions from cows. They determine by your purchase history (which they now have full access to) that you have contributed more carbon pollution than most people by eating red meat often. They declare that you must pay a retroactive carbon tax on your past purchases of red meat. Not only that, but your insurance company sends you a letter indicating that you are now a risk and they cut off your health coverage.

Other products you might consume and services you use can be tracked to create a psychological profile on you, which could then become a factor in determining your social credit score as they do often in China.

Maybe you refuse or forgot to purchase your annual mRNA booster shot, and the tracking algorithm makes a note of this. Now you are under suspicion for being “anti-vax” and your social credit score plummets, cutting you off from various public venues. Maybe you are even fired from your job.

In the worst case scenario, though, economic access is the greatest oppressive tool.

With CBDCs in place and no physical cash in existence, your savings will never truly be yours and you never be able to hold your purchasing power in your hands.

The means of exchange would be firewalled by the banks. Any (or all) government agencies would be able to freeze your ability to transact.

If one day you get angry about a particular government policy or a stupid thing a politician says, and openly call the system “corrupt” in public? The Bureau of Tolerance in Public Discourse could simply suspend your access to your digital money… Temporarily, of course. Only until you submit and change your tune – if it’s your first offense.

Repeat offenders might be required to attend a Sensitivity Training Boot Camp – at your own expense, of course! With CDBCs, any government bureaucrat could not only prevent you from making any purchases, they could also allow you to only make specific purchases, like a train ticket to Sensitivity Training Boot Camp where you’d spend eight to twelve weeks being “reeducated” in order to regain your rights to buy food.

This is every authoritarian’s dream come true.

Imagine this power even in the hands of a benevolent leader! It would be so easy to nudge citizens to live healthier, more productive lives… (In fact, in China, one of the documented uses of their combination “social credit score” and cashless transactions is denying individuals the ability to buy junk food because they’re considered to be overweight.)

In the hands of a callous, ruthless government? Much, much worse.

CBDCs give government bureaucrats the ability to starve their political opponents with algorithmic precision. It would be a new world of technocratic oppression – allowing раскулачивание or “dekulakization” of individuals or entire regions at the push of a button. At any time, for any reason.

Imagine living under the threat of possible “liquidation” every single day for the rest of your life.

This power that Stalin or Hitler or Chairman Mao could only dream of has only become possible relatively recently. Over the past few years, the combination of powerful computing, unimaginably advanced data analysis and extraction techniques and universal spying devices (also known as “smartphones”) have created the opportunity for autocrats to create the ultimate tool of control and oppression.

That “opportunity” is rapidly becoming a reality.

Project Icebreaker

It’s important to understand that central bankers are moving at breakneck speed to develop and introduce digital currencies. It’s not a matter of experimentation, they already have these systems ready to implement. In my investigations of various CBDC programs and how quickly they are progressing I came across an interesting program called Project Icebreaker managed and developed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

For those not aware, the BIS is a globalist institution with a clandestine past known as the “central bank of central banks.” It is the policy-making hub for most of the central banks in the world. If you ever wondered how it was possible for so many national central banks to operate in tandem with each other instead of in the interests of their home countries, the BIS is the answer. In other words, organizations like the Federal Reserve are not necessarily loyal to Americans or to American officials, they are loyal to the dictates of the BIS.

The BIS is at the forefront of the CDBC movement. They’ve funded a vast array of projects to test and refine CBDC technologies for some time. Right now, the BIS estimate that at least 81 central banks around the world are in the process of introducing their very own CDBC.

Now, there are only 195 countries in the whole world, and more than 2/3 of them are pursuing this freedom-destroying, autocrat’s-dream-come-true.

Project Icebreaker in particular grabbed my interest for a number of reasons. The BIS describes the project as a foreign exchange clearing house for Retail CBDCs (retail CBDCs are digital currencies used by the regular public and businesses), enabling the currencies to be traded from country to country quickly and efficiently. This is accomplished using the “Icebreaker Hub”, a BIS controlled mechanism which facilitates data transfers for an array of transactions and connects banks to other banks.



Investigating further I realized that the Icebreaker Hub in theory functions almost exactly like the SWIFT payment system used currently by governments and international banks. More than 10,000 financial institutions in 212 different countries use the SWIFT network to transfer funds overseas for their clients; it is an incredible centralized hinge or fulcrum that gives its controllers considerable power.

As a point of reference, after the start of the war between Ukraine and Russia, the expulsion of Russia from the SWIFT network was used as a weapon in an attempt to crash the Russian economy. Russia has found ways around using SWIFT, but some damage has indeed been done to their financial structures. Consider this, however – What if all monetary transactions were centralized through CBDCs and the BIS controlled the hub in which all retail CBDCs are exchanged globally? That’s exactly what Icebreaker is.

Now imagine that you operate a business that relies on international transactions. Say you need to pay manufacturers in Vietnam to produce your products. With CBDCs in place your entire business would be completely dependent on a system like Icebreaker to move than digital money to Vietnamese banks,  into your manufacturer’s account.

Say the BIS, for whatever reason, decides that all Vietnamese manufacturing illegally use child labor. Or the Ngân hàng Nhà nước Việt Nam (State Bank of Vietnam) doesn’t toe the BIS policy line, and BIS technocrats decide to “teach them a lesson.” Or maybe the BIS doesn’t approve of your products – or maybe they just don’t like you…

With Icebreaker, any BIS factotum can implement Russian-style sanctions. Your access to international commerce? Denied. Your business is now functionally dead – at the push of a button.

But Icebreaker isn’t just a reactive system – it can be a proactive system, too…

What if you had to meet certain standards in order to be allowed use of the hub, and the BIS dictates the standards?

What if the BIS decides that your company needs to meet woke ESG requirements before you can get permission for Icebreaker transactions? Insufficiently diverse board of directors? Denied. Using commodities that aren’t ethically, sustainably sourced by war refugees? Denied. Offering a product or service insufficiently aligned with globalist goals? Denied.

The BIS itself can actively manipulate social, cultural and economic decisions –  using millions of businesses as their missionaries.

The entire global economy would, essentially, be held hostage.

For the average American who does most of their shopping locally, this might not seem like a big deal.

For the business world, an economic firewall could easily be used to control all international trade.

Any larger organization or business would require slavishly obeying the whims of the BIS.

It gets worse, though.

Part of the process of the “spoke and wheel” exchange method used by Icebreaker includes the exploitation of a “bridge currency” to fill gaps in exchange rates and liquidity. On the surface this seems like a clever way to speed up transactions by avoiding cross-currency shortages at banks.

That said, I want readers to think about the long-term path that this kind of “bridging” sets in motion in the realm of CBDCs.

Let’s say there is a global scale economic crisis which causes many currencies to fluctuate wildly. We’ve already seen three events that meet this definition in the last 20 years – so they really aren’t that uncommon.

Let’s say, for example, that the U.S. dollar loses its global reserve role (as it’s already lost its petrodollar exclusivity). Or, say, a debt ceiling standoff calls into question the market value of those $7.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury bonds owned by global central banks…

This would send the $7.5 trillion/day foreign exchange market into a historic panic.

Price inflation becomes rampant and banking institutions falter under liquidity pressures.

Central bankers, who have a “solution” in search of a crisis to address, push CBDCs as the antidote. The BIS Icebreaker becomes the middleman for every single international transaction.

The populace, terrified by the economic crash, immediately embrace the digital framework. But the BIS claims they can’t find a currency they consider stable enough to act as an intermediary…

Well, “luckily” for all of us the BIS and IMF have been working on their own global CBDC. In the case of the IMF, this one-world currency would be based around the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket in use for decades to broker currency transfers between governments.

The BIS now uses this one unified, centrally controlled currency as the linchpin for world trade.

Eventually the BIS, IMF and various central banks will ask the public the inevitable question: “Why are we bothering with these national currencies when we have a perfectly good bridge currency in the form of this one-world CBDC? Why don’t we just get rid of all these superfluous separate CBDCs and have one currency for everyone?”

Thus, total global financial centralization would be achieved. And once you have a one-world currency, a completely centralized and micro-managed global economy and the most vital trade systems in the world controlled by a tiny handful of faceless unelected bureaucracies, why then have nations at all? Global government would be the next and final step.

I can see the nightmare play out when I look at projects like Icebreaker. They are seemingly innocuous, but they act as the DNA for economic tyranny that would make even the worst historic genocides pale in comparison.

What’s the solution? The last bastion of financial privacy, barter. Physical precious metals (gold as a store of value, silver for transacting and trade) would very likely become increasingly the preferred form of money for all truly free individuals for as long as the corrupt globalist regime has its tentacles in everyone’s digital wallets.

Brandon Smith has been an alternative economic and geopolitical analyst since 2006 and is the founder of Alt-Market.com.

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Cover image credit: Leonhard_Niederwimmer

Global Elites Goading Americans Into Violence Against Transsexuals

The official story of the Nashville shooting does not add up 

by Greg Reese, The Reese Report
March 31, 2023



Connect with Greg Reese

Transcript prepared by Truth Comes to Light editor:

 

According to the media, female Audrey Hale, who identified as a male, murdered six at a Christian School in Nashville, TN, including three children.

An anti-gun lobbyist who witnessed the Highland Park parade shooting was at the crime scene with her friend, who lost a daughter at the Waffle House shooting.

They spent the day telling all the cameras how they were, coincidentally, there on vacation and that America needs more gun laws.

[Anti-Gun Lobbyist is seen here in various clips from local media & CNN.]

The US military routinely orchestrates simulated crises all over the country and hires civilians to be crisis actors.

And we’ve seen the use of crisis actors in several major events, such as 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing.

The anti-gun lobby has been accused of using crisis actors for years, but this is a whole new level. And when we look at the details of the Nashville shooting, the presence of the gun lobbyist does not appear to be a coincidence.

The Nashville shooting has signs of a typical false flag.

The woman being touted by the media as the shooter’s good friend who received the Instagram confession is actually just a childhood acquaintance who says she was contacted because she’s a local media personality.

The alleged shooter was under doctor’s care for an emotional disorder. And the shooter is seen wearing two different pairs of shoes within the hour.

Pumas going in and Vans going out. But there is more to this false flag than the typical gun grab.

This Saturday, a group called Trans Radical Activist Network is organizing a protest in Washington, DC, called Day of Vengeance. This is reportedly a new movement called Militant Trans, an armed branch of the LGBTQ cult that is threatening to kill those who oppose sex change ops for children.

Just hours after the Nashville shooting, the governor of Arizona’s press secretary tweeted a picture of a woman wielding two handguns with the caption “Us when we see transphobes”. This is followed by what appears to be online support. Madonna raises money in Nashville, not for the three murdered children, but for the trans community.

A trans named Adam Denker, who now goes by Kayla, recently made headlines for posting a short video with a rifle, threatening to fight back against transphobes.

Journalist Andy Ngo is reporting that Denker is a member of Antifa and is former military, which shouldn’t be a surprise. The military has changed their code to allow for transsexuals. Military psychologists have been pushing confused personnel into getting radical sexual reassignment surgeries, that the military is now paying for.

So far in 2023 alone, the US government has spent $10 million to research LGBTQ Americans. And that’s nothing. In the year 2017 well over 100 organizations gave $185 million to support the LGBTQ community.

And the top spender has been Big Pharma.

The mentally ill are being weaponized by the New World Order and we the people are being goaded into seeing them as the enemy.

Cover image credit: Dr. Meierhofer~commonswiki 

See related:

James Corbett: False Flags and the Dawn of Bioterrorism

Concerning the State, There Are No Accidents, No Coincidences, and No Natural ‘Emergencies’ or Threats: All Is Planned

Red Flagged Nation: Gun Confiscation Laws Put a Target on the Back of Every American

Derrick Broze With Peter Dale Scott: From 9/11/2001 to 1/6/2021 — 20 Years of False Flag Terror

The Digital Iron Curtain: How the RESTRICT Act Threatens to Devastate Privacy and Crush Free Speech Online

This is going way past banning TikTok.

by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project
March 28, 2023

In an era where the world has become more Orwellian than Orwell himself could have ever imagined, it should come as no surprise that the US government is once again attempting to expand its stranglehold on individual liberty. Enter Senate Bill 686, also known as the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act (RESTRICT Act). Far from being the limited TikTok ban it purports to be, the RESTRICT Act represents an unprecedented expansion of government power and surveillance, reaching into nearly every aspect of our digital lives.

Make no mistake, this piece of legislation is the “Patriot Act on steroids.” The RESTRICT Act would seemingly grant the US government total control over all devices connected to the internet, including cars, Ring cameras, refrigerators, Alexa devices, and your phone. It goes beyond the pale, with the end goal being nothing short of a complete invasion of your privacy.

Under the guise of national security, the RESTRICT Act targets not only TikTok but all hardware, software, and mobile apps used by more than one million people. This means that anything from your Google Home device to your smartphone could be subject to government monitoring and control.

Should you dare to defy the RESTRICT Act, you’ll face devastating consequences. Violators can be slapped with a 20-year prison sentence, civil forfeiture, and denied freedom of information requests. All this, mind you, for simply trying to maintain some semblance of privacy in your own home.

The RESTRICT Act, S.686 – 118th Congress (2023-2024), being pushed through congress against TIKTOK will give the US government total control of all things connected to the internet. Cars, Ring cams, refrigerators, Alexa devices, your phone, etc. A sentence of 20 years in prison,… pic.twitter.com/KTntOxOF0f

— Conspiratorial Report (@CnsprtrlRprt) March 26, 2023

The insidious nature of the RESTRICT Act doesn’t stop there. As reported by @underthedesknews, the bill’s proponents are also seeking to undermine Section 230 and limit free speech. The implications are clear: this legislation is not about protecting Americans but rather about stripping away our rights and liberties.

The list of supporters for this draconian bill reads like a who’s who of Big Government cheerleaders and like all attacks on freedom, it has bipartisan support. Among them are Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, Sen. John Thune, R-N.D., National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and nine Democratic co-sponsors such as Hillary Clinton’s former VP pick, Tim Kaine, and U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin.

@underthedesknews

#keeptiktok #tiktokhearing #cspan #politics #congress

♬ original sound – UnderTheDeskNews

It’s time to call this bill what it truly is: an all-out assault on individual freedom and privacy. The RESTRICT Act would usher in an era of unparalleled state control over our digital lives, a nightmare scenario that even George Orwell would have struggled to imagine.

A quick synopsis of Senate Bill 686 a.k.a. the RESTRICT Act.
byu/tommos ininterestingasfuck

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Cover image source: The Free Thought Project

The Overpopulation Myth

by Rosanne Lindsay, Traditional Naturopath, Nature of Healing
March 22, 2023

The myth of overpopulation is an unfounded belief that: the number of people on Earth will exceed the [hypothetical] carrying capacity of the planet in the foreseeable future, leading to economic or social collapse, and that actions ought to be taken to curb population growth.

Population alarmists at the United Nations propose that the world’s growing population will strip the Earth of its useable resources and will outpace innovation and rates of production. This, they believe, will cause diminishing standards of living, more poverty, more hunger, famine and starvation, water shortages, pestilence, war and conflict over diminishing resources, the evisceration of wildlife habitats, and environmental catastrophes.

–  Population Research Institute

Overpopulation: The Myth

Spoiler Alert:  Data trends are clear. The world is in a population decline.

Overcrowded cities ≠ overcrowded planet. – Jared Wolf

True numbers show that China’s fertility rate is below 1.5 children per woman.  Many countries, though not all, have now fallen below the 2.5 birth rate marker, which will begin to create lopsided populations with too many old and not enough young to support them. No known society has recovered from such a decline.  Twenty-three countries expect their numbers to halve by 2100.

When officials at the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) projected 8 billion people by 2022, were they correct in their assessment? What is UNFPA? How accurate are their models?  How do they know that their numbers will spell the collapse of civilization? Are they really part of the depopulation solution? Are your tax dollars supporting their coercive methods? Why should we believe them?  [More on what UNFPA is here].

The term “overpopulation” is an attempt to mislead through social engineering. It is an attempt to control human behavior by pinning the blame on humans for environmental changes and to create fear. Meanwhile, environmental catastrophes – famines, water shortages, extreme temperatures – are engineered through technology to feed the myth of  “Climate Change.”

The fact is that the climate is ever changing. There is nothing to fear. There is only the act of questioning and stopping the changers of climate who cause it to rain and snow as some solutions to droughts. [See US patent for altering weather and a list of companies in the U.S. altering weather patterns].

Governments today are pushing population control policies in order to control the number of children being born as a protective measure to their national resources. All of these policies have received global recognition of their brutality: –Population Research Institute

• China’s one-child policy, where women were severely fined, arrested, or forcibly sterilized for exceeding the birth limit.
• India’s sex-selective abortion where approximately 15.8 million girls have been eliminated since 1990 due to a cultural preference for boys. Now the government wants to impose their own two-child policy.
• Latin America’s forced sterilization programs where women where arrested for being pregnant and their babies where aborted in unsanitary conditions.
• The United Nation’s ‘education programs’ that refuse aid to developing countries unless they accept contraception, abortion, and sterilization to prevent the false idea of population over-growth.
• The United States government helped to found the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) in 1969 to be a nonpartisan clearinghouse for population and demographic information. Instead, UNFPA evolved into an advocacy group that has had a hand in several coercive population control programs around the world. – Population Research Institute 

“Overpopulation” is the prescribed reason for the U.N.’s Sustainability Agenda, with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), that urge people to “eat bugs over beef” for reasons unproven, in order to counter “Climate Change.”

The world has overcrowded cities, not overcrowded countries. According to the Sustainable Review, “if the entire world population lived in Texas, we would still be less crowded than New York City. Texas has over 268,000 square miles of land for a planet of 8 billion-plus people.”

Ironically, overpopulation is the official reason to herd people into “Smart Cities,” where the digital (CBDC) blockchain, 5G, and The Internet of Things will make it easier to control, sanction, and monitor people.

Humanity is moving ever deeper into a crisis which has no precedent – a ‘final exam’ as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in the Universe. It is not an examination of political, economic, or religious systems but of the integrity of each and all individual humans’ responsible thinking and unselfish response to the acceleration in evolution’s evermore unprecedented events. – Buckminster Fuller, 1981, “Critical Path” 

Thanks to social engineering and movie-making, humanity has been purposely mislead. The population is in decline. Employers can no longer find find people to hire. New apartment buildings stand empty in US cities. And fertility rates have plummeted.

Population Collapse Suppressed

During the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), the talk was about Population Collapse and Artificial Intelligence, not overpopulation. According to the Sustainable Review, “Every region on Earth now expects more deaths than births in the coming decades.” Furthermore, reports from the U.S. VAERS database indicate that death rates have increased.

Ironically, the concept of overpopulation has always been sold during times of starvation. Episodes of starvation have been underreported throughout history. The latest December 2021 Chinese census has not been made public, but estimates from the 2020 census show China loses 400,00o people annually. The United States noted similar numbers. Officials guesses a lower fertility rate is a natural result of China’s social and economic development. But could it be due to UNFPA’s social engineering? However, this is not the first decline for the Chinese:

Government figures show the Chinese population declined by around 13.5m between 1959 and 1961, although that is believed to be a serious underestimate. Independent scholars believe tens of millions of people died during the Great Leap famine between 1959 and 1961, when Mao ordered the entire nation to make steel in backyard furnaces and crops were exported and hoarded even as millions starved.  –Sun Yu, Financial Times, 2021

Controlling Herd Size

The U.S. media promotes fear of coming food shortages, while governments promote culling animal herds, resulting in higher food prices. According to the UK Agriculture, Food, Environment, “Culling is the best strategy a farmer has to controlling herd size.”

But which herd are they describing? Animal or human?

By the 2020s we find ourselves commandeered by a technology whose algorithms and oh so virtual artificial intelligence are often regarded as a model to emulate in real life, sacrificing our very own minds in a blind displacement of genuine thinking. Is it any wonder we find our entire species in the diamond lane on the highway to extinction?  – Boho Beau, Whole World

The propaganda to save Earth from human overpopulation is promoted through movies and secret government programs, alike, as a distraction to the reality of population collapse through engineering.

The 2017 movie, Downsizing, is a social satire that promotes the shrinking of people to five inches through a new technique called “cellular reduction,” as a way to both save the planet and be able to afford an elegant lifestyle at the same time. But, in the end, the same problems that plague the “big people” also affect the little ones since everyone shares the same Earth.

In the HBO, post apocalyptic series, The Last of Us, a global zomie-esque fungus pandemic is blamed on “Climate Change.” The result is the creation of Settlement Cities that eventually become “QZs,”or quarantine zones, run by FEDRA (military arm), where freedom is nonexistent. The story proclaims the mushroom Cordyceps to be the source of the plague while an experimental vaccine to be the solution. In reality, Cordyceps is a healer that recovers the immune system and has anti-tumor properties. Everything is reversed.

Movies correspond to politics through panic propaganda and predictive programming. Why else would Hollywood release so many plague-based movies based on false information? In case of any future global pandemic, the U.S. government has made plans to control the human herd through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Put another way, FEDRA equals FEMA.

FEMA was created by a series of Executive Orders. Presidents use Executive Orders to bypass Congress and exercise the unilateral power of their office. FEMA has the authority to suspend laws, move populations, arrest and detain citizens without a warrant and without trial. FEMA can seize property, food supplies, and transportation systems. It can suspend the Constitution of the United States, which, by the way, presidents already accomplish by using Executive Orders.

FEMA is an agency with powers beyond any other U.S. agency. It was set up to assure the survivability of the United States Government in the event of a nuclear attack. These are the 10 FEMA regions in the US (see map). If FEMA is the solution, then why is Donald Trump suddenly in the news promoting “Freedom Cities” on federal land? Could these be centered in FEMA regions?

Yes they could.

Raise The Red Flag!

The “freedom cities” movement is promoted as being “a decentralized collection of dozens of local and national progressive” groups, dedicated to civil and immigrant rights that have banded together “to fight anti-sanctuary policies.” Some “freedom cities” include: Madison, Wis.; Portland, Oregon; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Albany, California; Silver City, New Mexico; Austin, Texas; and dozens of others.

For any discerning human, “government rights” is a red flag.  Governments do not grant rights. Government can only grant benefits and privileges that come with citizen responsibilities. Rights are not gifts from government. Rights are innate, by birth, that governments are established to protect. Choice cannot be legislated. So, any talk of new “government rights” along with the new definition of “freedom” should be questioned. Can you say, Police State America?

See map of U.S. Federal-owned land by State

Under Rex 84, short for the Readiness Exercise Program, signed by President Ronald Regan in 1984, there are now over 600 FEMA camps nation wide, or about 12 FEMA camps in every state on federal land.  In the event that Martial Law is implemented, FEMA would be able to detain large numbers of U.S. citizens. Two subprograms Cable Splicer and Garden Plot could follow after Martial Law, during times of major civil disturbances. Cable Splicer and Garden Plot are code names for a regionalization and orderly takeover of the state and local governments by the federal government.

Nature Strives For Balance 

In order to prevent the demise of the human population, young 20-something couples will need to bear 3-4 children starting now. Yet, is such a plan feasible in the toxic, expensive world humans have allowed to manifest? What does China want with people’s DNA, anyway?

Nature strives for balance, of which humans are a part. If humanity has lost its ability to procreate, then humans have lost an ability to come into balance, which is what Nature offers. Are humans really herd animals? Are we evolving or devolving? Have the majority of humans disconnected from Nature? Do they accept the demonization of Nature’s healing plants and mushrooms while accepting experimental injections of unknown substances?

Perhaps it is time for humanity to protect its DNA as it would protect its children or its property, before humanity is lost altogether.

Rosanne Lindsay is a Naturopath, writer, earth keeper, health freedom advocate and author of the books The Nature of Healing, Heal the Body, Heal the Planet and  Free Your Voice, Heal Your Thyroid, Reverse Thyroid Disease Naturally.

Rosanne Lindsay is available for consultation through Turtle Island Network.  Subscribe to her blog at natureofhealing.org.

Related articles:

• Prophets Roll Out The New Freedom
• Does Predictive Programming Create Reality?
• The Climate Change Deception
• Operation Regionalization
• Hijacking Parental Rights. Do You Consent?

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