James Corbett And Whitney Webb About To Be Defunded And Deplatformed...,

off-guardian |  James Corbett is likely not long for the YouTube world, having received his second warning his channel is on the chopping block.

There are still many platforms on which you can follow his work (detailed in the above video), most importantly his website. We do suggest you subscribe either via email or RSS. (Also here is a list of Corbett’s videos that YouTube has already removed).

For creators out there, this is a timely reminder: ALWAYS have hardcopy back-ups of your work and sign up to multiple platforms. The indy platforms are growing in both number and size. From BitChute to LBRY.tv to social networks like Gab and Parler.

Corbett is not the only independent media facing increased censorship and denial of service. Whitney Webb, a great independent researcher and journalist who has written for many outlets and runs UnlimitedHangout.com, is also in danger of having her Patreon shut down.

Likewise, in just the last few weeks, The Last American Vagabond has had both its twitter shut down and its Patreon put “on review”.

Worrying signs. It looks like we might be in for a spring cull of the alternate media herd. Rest assured, we at OffG are already looking into alternate options, should Patreon (or PayPal) decide we are also persona non grata.

The Beltway Uniparty Intends To Impose Narrative Conformity

greenwald |  Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.

Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves. 

Since when is it the role of the U.S. Government to arbitrate and enforce precepts of “journalistic integrity”? Unless you believe in the right of the government to regulate and control what the press says — a power which the First Amendment explicitly prohibits — how can anyone be comfortable with members of Congress arrogating unto themselves the power to dictate what media outlets are permitted to report and control how they discuss and analyze the news of the day?

But what House Democrats are doing here is far more insidious than what is revealed by that creepy official announcement. Two senior members of that Committee, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Silicon-Valley) and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) also sent their own letters to seven of the nation’s largest cable providers — Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice — as well as to digital distributors of cable news (Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu) demanding to know, among other things, what those cable distributors did to prevent conservative “disinformation” prior to the election and after — disinformation, they said, that just so happened to be spread by the only conservative cable outlets: Fox, Newsmax and OANN.

In case there was any doubt about their true goal — coercing these cable providers to remove all cable networks that feature conservative voices, including Fox (just as their counterparts on that Committee want to ban right-wing voices from social media) — the House Democrats in their letter said explicitly what they are after: namely, removal of those conservative outlets by these cable providers:

 

Declaring An "Armed Insurrection" Empowers The State To Employ Military Force Against Citizens

greenwald |  Perhaps the most significant blow to the maximalist insurrection/coup narrative took place inside the Senate on Thursday. Ever since January 6, those who were not referring to the riot as a “coup attempt” — as though the hundreds of protesters intended to overthrow the most powerful and militarized government in history — were required to refer to it instead as an “armed insurrection.”

This formulation was crucial not only for maximizing fear levels about the Democrats’ adversaries but also, as I’ve documented previously, because declaring an “armed insurrection” empowers the state with virtually unlimited powers to act against the citizenry. Over and over, leading Democrats and their media allies repeated this phrase like some hypnotic mantra:

But this was completely false. As I detailed several weeks ago, so many of the most harrowing and widespread media claims about the January 6 riot proved to be total fabrications.

This -- "Ron Johnson, Senator from Wisconsin, by way of Moscow" -- is as batshit crazy and as much conspiratorial derangement as anything from QAnon, and far more damaging since it's mainstream, but because it's on a corporate outlet, it doesn't count:pic.twitter.com/G90LfPRoHF

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 5, 2021

A pro-Trump mob didnot bash Office Brian Sicknick’s skull in with a fire extinguisher. No protester brought zip-ties with them as some premeditated plot to kidnap members of Congress (two rioters found them on a table inside). There’s no evidence anyone intended to assassinate Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or anyone else.

Yet the maximalist narrative of an attempted coup or armed insurrection is so crucial to Democrats — regardless of whether it is true — that pointing out these facts deeply infuriates them. A television clip of mine from last week went viral among furious liberals calling me a fascism supporter even though it did nothing but point out the indisputable facts that other than Brian Sicknick, whose cause of death remains unknown, the only people who died at the Capitol riot were Trump supporters, and that there are no known cases of the rioters deliberately killing anyone

(Two FBI operatives have since anonymously leaked that it is looking at a “suspect” who may have engaged with Sicknick in a way that ultimately contributed to his death. But nothing still is known; Sicknick’s mother claims he died of a stroke while his brother says it was from pepper spray; and all of this is worlds away from the endlessly repeated media claim that a bloodthirsty pro-Trump mob savagely bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.)

What we know for sure is that no Trump supporter fired any weapon inside the Capitol and that the FBI seized a grand total of zero firearms from those it arrested that day — a rather odd state of affairs for an “armed insurrection,” to put that mildly. In questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Thursday’s hearing, a senior FBI official, Jill Sanborn, acknowledged this key fact:

 (The “one lady” who died referred to by this FBI official was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed Trump supporter who was killed when she was shot point blank in the neck inside the Capitol on January 6 by an armed Capitol Police Officer).

The key point to emphasize here is that threats and dangers are not binary: they either exist or they are fully illusory. They reside on a spectrum. To insist that they be discussed rationally, soberly and truthfully is not to deny the existence of the threat itself. One can demand a rational and fact-based understanding of the magnitude of the threat revealed by the January 6 riot without denying that there is any danger at all.

Those who denounced the excesses of McCarthyism were not insisting that there were no Communists in government; those denouncing the excesses of the Clinton administration’s attempts to seize more surveillance power after the Oklahoma City courting bombing were not denying that some anti-government militias may do violence again; those who objected to the protracted and unhinged assault on civil liberties by the Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations after 9/11 were not arguing that there were no Muslim extremists intent on committing violence.

The argument then, and the argument now, is that the threat was being deliberately inflated and exaggerated, and fears stoked and exploited, both for political gain and to justify the placement of more and more powers in the hands of the state in the name of stopping these threats. That is the core formula of authoritarianism — to place the population in a state of such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of power which security state agencies and politicians demand and which they insist are necessary to keep everyone safe.

Elites Overplayed The Pandemic - Cancellation, Economic Warfare And Gun Control Cards Are Next

alt-market |  This phase of the crisis will happen within a month to two months of any national shutdown. Red states will refuse to comply. State politicians, even if they are part of the agenda, will be too scared to try to enforce federal mandates. They will be compelled by the conservative citizenry to keep their states open. Most people in these areas will ignore mandates.

This will lead to a red state fiscal boom, at least in the beginning, as business continues to thrive in conservative areas while blue states suffer under medical tyranny. Companies will flee leftist states by the thousands and move to any states that remain open and accommodating. This will be short lived, though.

Biden and the federal government will try to retaliate, first by cutting off federal funds to any state that does not bow to their power and refusing to give stimulus to any businesses that relocate. Blue states will be flush with stimulus cash while red states will be forced to reduce or eliminate welfare programs and some pension funds.

Of course, the government has no real money to give, they only have our tax dollars and the fiat that the central bank creates from thin air. The likely response will be that conservative states and citizens will simply stop paying federal taxes. Another reaction will be red states taking over federal lands and utilizing the resources on those lands to rejuvenate their industry and make up for the federal dollars lost.

What this amounts to is a soft secession of conservative regions, which will eventually lead to federal attempts at physical intervention (the economic war will turn into a shooting war). The argument from the establishment will be that conservatives are putting the rest of the country “at risk”, that we are “selfish” and “literally killing grandma”.

Complete Erasure Of Conservatives From The Internet

I expect Biden and Big Tech to further pursue their current witch hunt against conservative voices, far beyond what we have already seen. In order to win a fight with conservatives they will first have to silence us so that our side of the argument is never seen or considered by the rest of the population. If they allow us to be heard, we will undoubtedly win because facts and moral reason are on our side.

It is hard to demonize people that simply want to be free.

But, if you can silence conservatives and moderates, then the narrative can be rigged. The establishment spin doctors can tell people that we don’t actually want freedom; we want something else, something evil and nefarious. They can tell people we are “fascists”, and that we are “racists” and that we actually want tyranny. Who is going to tell the public otherwise when we are removed from all available platforms and our websites are booted off service providers due to “dangerous ideas”?

Gun Control Madness

I know that some people think that leftists under Biden will not try to carry out a widespread gun crackdown and that much of the current talk is merely hollow rhetoric. I disagree. I think the globalists are going for broke, and they need to get as many combat capable firearms as they can from Americans soon. Democrats will push hard for legislation like HR 127.

They will then offer a “compromise” with Republicans and the NRA, cutting out portions of the bill. This will be a trick to make the public think that the new restrictions are a “reasonable compromise”. They think we will breath a sigh of relief and say “Well, at least they didn’t take everything…”

The gun grabbers are delusional.

What will really happen is millions of gun owners will pass local and state laws negating federal restrictions. No conservatives are going to give up their gun rights, allow red flag laws to be implemented or allow high capacity firearms to be limited; not at this stage in the game.

 

Time Grows Short Sleepyheads...,

charleshughsmith |  Even as the chirpy happy-talk of a return to normal floods the airwaves, what nobody dares acknowledge is that "normal" for a rising number of Americans is the social depression of downward mobility and social defeat.

Downward mobility is not a new trend--it's simply accelerating. As this RAND Corporation report documents, ( Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018) $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.

Time magazine's article on the report is remarkably direct: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% -- And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure.

"The $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn't inevitable; it was a choice--a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people."

I've been digging into downward mobility and social depression for years: Are You Really Middle Class? The reality is that the middle class has been reduced to the sliver just below the top 5%--if we use the standards of the prosperous 1960s as a baseline.

The downward mobility isn't just financial--it's a decline in political power, control of one's work and ownership of income-producing assets. This article reminds us of what the middle class once represented: What Middle Class? How bourgeois America is getting recast as a proletariat.

This reappraisal of the American Dream is also triggering a reappraisal of the middle class in the decades of widespread prosperity: The Myth of the Middle Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor?

Downward mobility excels in creating and distributing what I term social defeat: In my lexicon, social defeat is the spectrum of anxiety, insecurity, chronic stress, fear and powerlessness that accompanies declining financial security and social status.

The Conspiracy to Subvert Conspiracy Theorizing

strategic-culture |  The first conclusion you would likely arrive at is that the United States government was just put through the first coup in over 58 years (yes, what happened in 1963 was a coup). Although it is becoming a bit prohibitive to speak such words aloud in polite society, Nancy Pelosi’s official biographer Molly Ball, recently penned a scandalous Time Magazine article entitled ‘The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Elections’ which admitted to this conspiracy saying:

“Even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream- a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” (Lest you think that this was a subversion of democracy, Ball informs us that “they were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”)

Another conclusion you might come to is that many of the political figures whom you believed were serving those who elected them into office, actually serve the interests of a clique of technocrats and billionaires lusting over the deconstruction of western civilization under something called “a Great Reset”. Where this was brushed off as an unfounded conspiracy theory not long ago, even Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister (and neo-Nazi supporting Rhodes Scholar) Chrystia Freeland decided to become a Trustee of the World Economic Forum just weeks ago. In this role, Freeland joins fellow Oxford technocrat Mark Carney in their mutual endeavor to be a part of the new movement to decarbonize civilization and make feudalism cool again.

Lastly, you might notice that your having arrived at these conclusions is itself increasingly becoming a form of thought-crime punishable in a variety of distasteful ways elaborated by a series of unprecedented new emergency regulations that propose extending the definition of “terrorism”. Those implicated under the new definition will be those broad swaths of citizens of western nations who don’t agree with the operating beliefs of the ruling oligarchy.

Already a 60 day review of the U.S. military is underway to purge the armed forces of all such “thought criminals” while McCarthyite legislation has been drafted to cleanse all government jobs of “conspiracy theorists”.

Another startling announcement from the National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin that domestic terrorists include: “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority [and] perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”

While not yet fully codified into law (though it will be if not nipped in the bud soon), you can be sure that things are certainly moving fast as, before our very eyes, the right to free speech is being torn to shreds by means of censorship across social media and the internet, cancelling all opinions deemed unacceptable to the ruling class.

The CIA Created Or Infiltrated Dozens Of Leftist Organizations...,

 off-guardian |  Just the other day The New York Times had this headline: 

Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.

Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.”  This is guilt by headline.  It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook, Instagram’s parent company.

That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow.  What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.

I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power-hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. 

These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so.  If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core.

For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many.  The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.

To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense.  These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc.  They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media.  Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.

In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations. 

Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.

Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc.  The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.

That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon Valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.  All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.

But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell.

It is a symbiotic relationship.

Sonderbehandlung (Special Treatment) Is Coming For Deplorables

NYTimes |  As a former overseas operative who has struggled both on the side of insurgents and against them, the past few days have brought a jarring realization: We may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency within our own country, perpetrated by our own countrymen. Three weeks ago, it would have been unthinkable that the United States might be a candidate for a comprehensive counterinsurgency program. But that is where we are.

Overrepresented among the ranks of angry but ordinary citizens who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were others, hardly ordinary, committed to violent extremism: the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, “Christian” national chauvinists, white supremacists and QAnon fantasists, among others. Some of these groups may have planned their incursion in advance, but they could not have breached the Capitol if not for the wave of populist anger that swept them forward and over the barricades.

Given impetus and, they believed, political cover by former President Donald Trump, the capering idiots who filmed themselves in the Capitol seemed to think they were untouchable. They may be easy to identify and arrest now, but there are others — well armed, dangerous and now forewarned — who had a glimpse of what may be possible in the political environment Mr. Trump created.

There has long existed in this country a large, religiously conservative segment of the population, disproportionately (though not entirely) rural and culturally marginalized, that believes with some reason it is being eclipsed by a politically and culturally ascendant urban coalition of immigrants, minorities and the college-educated secular elites of tech and mainstream media. That coalition, in their eyes, abridges their religious freedoms, disparages and ‘cancels’ their most cherished beliefs, seeks to impose ‘socialism’ and is ultimately prepared to seize their guns.

This, in very general terms, is the core segment of the nation that has been unified, championed and politically energized by Donald Trump. 

Bridging the urban-rural cultural and political gap with facts, tolerance and empathetic sincerity is a vital national project, but one which has become effectively impossible. The sincere belief, reportedly held by a majority of Republicans, that the Democrats stole the recent national election through massive fraud has taken the longstanding fears and resentments of a large section of our fellow citizens to a new and qualitatively different level.

In context, their fury is understandable. If I believed as they do, I would be marching with them. The Big Lie perpetrated by Mr. Trump and his allies in the political class and among large elements of the right-wing media, preposterous as it may be, will have incalculable implications not just for long-term political comity in this country, but also for national security.

The violent demonstrations feared for Inauguration Week, in the face of extraordinary security precautions, didn’t materialize. Relatively few of our citizens would embark on a program of sustained violence in any case. But if popular anger has crested, left in its wake is a bitter, simmering restiveness, one that will provide a nurturing environment for the worst among us — the extremists who seek a social apocalypse. Their numbers may be relatively small, but even a small slice of a nation of over three hundred million is substantial. Without a program of effective national action, they and their new adherents are capable of producing endemic political violence of a sort not seen in this country since Reconstruction.

The challenge facing us now is one of counterinsurgency. Though one may recoil at the thought, it provides the most useful template for action, which must consist of three elements.

 

Deeply Compromised Senator Mark Warner Takes Over Official Senate Demonization Of Deplorables...,

A Severely Compromised Senator Mark Warner is About To Become Chairman of The Senate Intelligence Committee

NYTimes |  The Senate Intelligence Committee will examine the influence of Russia and other foreign powers on antigovernment extremist groups like the ones that helped mobilize the deadly attack on the Capitol last month, the panel’s new chairman said in an interview this week.

As the executive branch undertakes a nationwide manhunt to hold members of the mob accountable, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virgina, said it would be vitally important for the influential committee to do a “significant dive” into antigovernment extremism in the United States, the ties those groups have to organizations in Europe and Russia’s amplification of their message.

With the power-sharing agreement between Democrats and Republicans in place, Mr. Warner took over this week as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after four years as its vice chairman. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Warner outlined his priorities, such as the spread of disinformation, the rise of antigovernment extremist groups, Chinese domination of key technologies, Russia’s widespread hacking of government computer networks and strengthening watchdog protections in the intelligence agencies.

The White House has ordered the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to work with the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. on a new analysis of the threat from domestic extremist groups and the support they receive from foreign powers or overseas organizations.

The issue is a difficult one for the intelligence community. By law, the most influential agencies, including the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, are not allowed to collect information domestically. But Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, has some oversight of the intelligence arms of the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, which can collect information domestically. Other intelligence agencies look at foreign attempts to influence American groups.

While preliminary work by Ms. Haines’s office is underway, administration officials said that analysis was unlikely to be completed before April. But there appears to be significant interest in moving quickly on the issue in the Senate. At Ms. Haines’s confirmation hearing last month, a number of lawmakers raised the subject of domestic extremist groups.

The Senate Intelligence Committee will examine both white supremacist groups on the right, and antifascist, or antifa, groups on the left, though Mr. Warner was quick to say that the danger the groups posed was not the same. “I don’t want to make a false equivalency argument here,” he said, “because the vast preponderance of them are on the right.”

 

Red And Black Ants Must NEVER SEE The Jar Or The Hand That Shakes It!!!

nakedcapitalism |  Something else is going on beneath the actual events, for sure. I happened across this story and took a gander at the WSB reddit board and was blown away by the amount of energy there — it was lively and real — something so foreign in an age of sleuths, slights and deception. It does not matter that what was being done would have minimal overall impact on HFs or the financial system in the grand scheme of things. All that matters was people came together spontaneously to do something with no regard for the consequences. And something did happen. Some brokerages halted trading of GME and other affected companies, and it drew quite the media attention as well as a flutter in congress. Maybe it is no big deal as Yves seems to think, but I disagree.

Consider for a moment that this was a somewhat random collection of people (and maybe some big money too) uniting for something that is foolish and self-defeating. People who can afford not to lose, and yet still choose to do so.

Consider also that social media, tech companies, and corporate interests are all geared to measure and predict public sentiment, or further, as for public relations, to shape it. This is predicated upon the continual cycle of researching, organizing, and staging an event (ie product release, new policy, crises) that the public is primed to react to, and upon the assumption that people will generally seek their own interest and well being, often irrationally.

What happens when people act spontaneously (without some widely publicized event or first mover), in tandem, against their own interest and well being? Obviously some people will stand to gain and some to lose. That’s not the point. What is, is that a good chunk of people, bought into their own game with no regard for how it ought to be played, and in the process they (for that moment) changed the rules. And for once they moved and everyone else reacted.

FORGET THE ARTICLE - THE REAL VALUE IS IN THE COMMENTS - OF WHICH THIS IS ONE

Here for contrast, is a great and highly detailed article detailing the hand that's shaking the jar.

AWWW SNAP Wall St. Elite - Unlike In 2008 - Ants Done Caught You Shaking The Jar!!!

 thehill |  Online messaging platform Discord on Wednesday banned the r/WallStreetBets (WSB) server, which became the center for discussions among amateur online traders who fueled an unexpected surge in GameStop’s stock this week. 

A Discord spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Hill that the decision to remove the server was due to users sharing “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings,” adding that it “did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.”

“The server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines, including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation,” the spokesperson added. 

The statement went on to say, “Discord welcomes a broad variety of personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.”

This comes after Discord in the days after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol banned a server called “The Donald,” a pro-Trump community linked to banned subreddit r/The_Donald and TheDonald.win. 

theverge |  Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.

Jesus Christ they really are going all in to reveal the extent of the cabal that runs this country and rigs the rules https://t.co/w0tSQypp9Z

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) January 29, 2021

Robinhood came under intense scrutiny on Thursday, after the stock trading app announced it would block purchases of GameStop, AMC, and other stocks made popular by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and some users have already replaced their deleted one-star reviews with new ones to make their anger heard.

RT |  A popular stock trading chat group has been booted off Facebook due to alleged violations of its “sexual exploitation” rules, claims the page’s founder, who accused “major institutions” of trying to avenge the GameStop debacle.

The Robinhood Stock Traders group boasted more than 157,000 members before it was taken offline on Wednesday, its 23-year-old founder, Allen Tran, told Reuters, adding that the social media giant cited its policies surrounding “adult sexual exploitation.” A notification of the ban seen by Reuters included no further reasoning for what prompted the move.

The page has no formal affiliation with the stock trading app of the same name.

Tran, however, maintains that he has never seen explicit or sexual content on the page, arguing instead that the group was targeted by “major institutions” after members racked up thousands of dollars from trades first proposed in Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets community, which has driven a dramatic price surge in certain heavily shorted stocks, namely those of GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry and Nokia.

“The major institutions are attempting to silence our community. We are positively impacting people’s lives and they are attacking our group because we are more powerful than them,” Tran wrote in a Facebook post after the group’s ban, arguing “there is power in masses.”

State Legislatures Working In Unison To Outlaw Protests

theintercept |  Elly Page had never seen anything like what’s happened in recent days. A senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, Page has been tracking the proliferation of anti-protest bills across the U.S. since Donald Trump became president in 2017. “The number of bills we have seen in the past three weeks is unprecedented,” she said.

Since the day of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, at least nine states have introduced 14 anti-protest bills. The bills, which vary state by state, contain a dizzying array of provisions that serve to criminalize participation in disruptive protests. The measures range from barring demonstrators from public benefits or government jobs to offering legal protections to those who shoot or run over protesters. Some of the proposals would allow protesters to be held without bail and criminalize camping. A few bills seek to prevent local governments from defunding police.

The pushes by close to a fifth of state legislatures are part of a pattern that began to pick up speed after the summer’s uprisings in response to the police killing of George Floyd, which in many communities included significant property damage. In a handful of states, lawmakers did what they often do: introduced new legislation — however unnecessary — to show that they were responding to their constituents’ concerns.

The rate of new bills being offered sped up dramatically this month as lawmakers kicked off their legislative sessions at the very moment that Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Bills quickly arose in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island.

“There has generally been an uptick at the beginning of odd-numbered years, when most states begin their biennial legislative sessions. But this year beats prior recent years,” Page said in an email. Since January 1, she noted that 11 state legislatures have introduced 17 bills, including those filed before the Capitol insurrection. “Compare that to 0 during the same period in 2020, 9 in 2019, 5 in 2018, and 13 in 2017,” she said, adding that the 2017 spike was mostly due to North Dakota responding to that winter’s Standing Rock protests.

Because of state legislatures’ part-time schedules, most legislative sessions were over by late last summer, leaving insufficient time to pass bills that responded to the uprisings against police brutality. “We expected to see some bills this month, as state legislatures reconvened, but the number of bills and their severity is still shocking,” she said.

In Florida, lawmakers have latched on to the insurrection at the Capitol to justify a bill they’d been working on for months. “Lawmakers may be trying to take advantage of the moment and the visuals of the violent and destructive Capitol scene, to make their case — to the public and to fellow lawmakers — that these draconian new measures are necessary,” said Page.

 

If You Are A Conservative You WILL BE Targeted - Even Libertarians!!!

alt-market |  The strategy seems to be this: Demonize conservatives as much as possible as quickly as possible so that our purge from social platforms can be rationalized. When we are incapable of defending ourselves in the public sphere because we have been removed from the internet, the establishment and leftists can blame us for everything going wrong. The public would have no access to any other points of view or contradictory facts and evidence because the alternative media will be gone. We become the monsters, the bogeymen and the source of all American suffering.

We didn’t fall into the trap of supporting martial law measures during the BLM riots, so this must be Plan B.

Will their plan work? I doubt it. Just as the globalist rollout of the pandemic lockdowns and medical tyranny is failing to gain traction in the US as huge numbers of people refuse to take the questionable vaccines, I suspect millions upon millions of Americans are already savvy to the propaganda schemes of the establishment and will not buy in. But, that doesn’t mean the elites won’t try it anyway.

In early November in Issue #47 of my newsletter, The Wild Bunch Dispatch, I war gamed the Biden scenario extensively and concluded that if he was to enter the White House it would have to be followed by a massive erasure of conservative media platforms from the internet. I stated that:

“If Biden does indeed enter the White House and take control of the presidency, expect certain consequences right away: A complete full spectrum censorship campaign of conservative news sources will be undertaken by tech companies and government. There is no way Biden and the democrats could keep control of the situation while conservatives are able to share information in real time. Do not be surprised if web providers suddenly start kicking conservative sites off their servers, just as Bitchute (a YouTube alternative) was kicked off their server for 24 hours on election night.”

This is already happening, and Biden hasn’t even stepped foot into the role of “commander and chief” yet. The coordinated effort by Big Tech to remove Parler, a Twitter alternative, from the web completely was not all that surprising. Luckily, Parler will be back up and running by the end of the month, but the censorship campaign is only going to get worse from here on. Biden WILL support and defend the censorship efforts by Big Tech and the fascist marriage between government and the corporate world will be complete.

To summarize, the globalists have to silence us before they can effectively demonize us. The truth is on our side; facts and logic are on our side. They can’t win the war of ideas if we are allowed to speak; this is why they are so desperate to silence us.

Sweeping gun control measures will be issued by Biden, but only after the conservative purge from the internet is close to finished. If conservatives are isolated from one another in terms of communication, this makes it harder to organize a defense against aggressive gun confiscation. Biden will most likely try to exploit Red Flag gun laws first, this would allow federal agencies to declare anyone to be “a threat to public safety” without due process, and have their guns taken away preemptively.

There is an obvious outcome to all of these actions and I don’t think it’s far fetched to suggest that conservative counties and states will demand secession. At the very least, conservatives are going to continue to relocate to red states and red counties, just so they can continue to do business and make a living without government interference. There’s no way that most conservatives controlled states or counties are going to submit to federal lockdown mandates or medical passports, and economies in conservative regions are going to remain stable because of this while blue states are going to crumble.

Biden will seek to retaliate against conservative controlled areas of the country in response.

There comes a point when it is impossible for those that value freedom, logic and reason to live side-by-side with those that are irrationally obsessed with control. The American constitutional framework in particular was designed to prevent collectivism from overriding individual liberties, but if the system is sabotaged through subversion and the Bill of Rights is violated, then maintaining the system is no longer plausible.

The best option for a number of reasons is to separate. Secession is often referred to as “running away” from a cultural problem, but this is an ignorant way of looking at it.

We are reaching a stage right now in the US where it will be virtually impossible to voice political concerns without risking retribution. If you are a conservative, you will be targeted.

The Clampdown Exceeds Cass Sunstein's Wildest Imaginings...,

rule of law: elite, establishment politics, psyops, and livestock management methods

There Was No Coup Attempt But There Will Be An Authoritarian Clampdown

mtracey |  There was no real “coup attempt,” despite incessant politician and media histrionics to that effect. Just a pitiful outburst that was quickly dispersed.

It was clear within about ten minutes of the intrusion that the most severe consequences would stem not from the incident itself, but the deliberately-stoked over-reaction. The bipartisan political and media class, whether cynically or sincerely, is broadcasting their steadfast conviction that this was something like a “MAGA Terrorist Insurrection” — which is literally how it’s being described on CNN. Under such allegedly extreme circumstances, of course extreme remedial action is going to be demanded.

Few entities capitulate to upswells of political hysteria more reliably than the tech companies. Knowing that there will soon be a Democratic presidential administration and Congress to appease, they launched this week what is the most drastic corporate censorship offensive in modern history. Not only was Trump banished from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter — the latter being his primary communications platform (for better or worse) — multiple high-profile Trump allies were likewise purged. Steve Bannon was nuked from YouTube. Trump and his supporters are being neutralized online not because he currently poses any kind of bonafide “threat” to the Republic, but because his enemies are desperate for revenge. And they have been gifted with a perfect “crisis” that will justify their getting it.

Rebellious Rednecks In Hotter Water As Internet "Researcher" Downloaded All Of Parler's Posts...,

great job, everyone pic.twitter.com/22gooTH4sl

— crash override (@donk_enby) January 11, 2021

gizmodo |  In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.

The researcher, who asked to be referred to by their Twitter handle, @donk_enby, began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power. 

Hoping to create a lasting public record for future researchers to sift through, @donk_enby began by archiving the posts from that day. The scope of the project quickly broadened, however, as it became increasingly clear that Parler was on borrowed time. Apple and Google announced that Parler would be removed from their app stores because it had failed to properly moderate posts that encouraged violence and crime. The final nail in the coffin came Saturday when Amazon announced it was pulling Parler’s plug.  

Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99 percent of its content. In a tweet early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this data tranche, now more than 56 terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed that the raw video files include GPS metadata pointing to exact locations of where the videos were taken.

@donk_enby later shared a screenshot showing the GPS position of a particular video, with coordinates in latitude and longitude.

The privacy implications are obvious, but the copious data may also serve as a fertile hunting ground for law enforcement. Federal and local authorities have arrested dozens of suspects in recent days accused of taking part in the Capitol riot, where a Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick, was fatally wounded after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.

@donk_enby describes herself as hacker, in the sense that she’s “someone with a creative, but skeptical attitude toward technology,” to paraphrase a definition offered by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest hacker association. “I want this to be a big middle finger to those who say hacking shouldn’t be political,” she said. @donk_enby work has aided other researchers, including one at New York University’s Center for Cybersecurity.

@donk_enby, whose efforts are documented on the website ArchiveTeam.org, said the data will eventually be hosted by the Internet Archive. (The two sites are not affiliated.)

 

Grassroots Activism Will Be Censored On Social Media

caitlinjohnstone |  Patriot Act 2.0 will be rolled out with a lot of mindless bleating about white supremacists and fighting fascism and the actual policies and laws put into place will have virtually nothing to do with any of those things. It will be geared at preventing the revolutionary changes that need to be pushed for via grassroots activism in the United States.

Listening to US politicians and pundits the last few years you’d assume it’s been raining actual 9/11s and Pearl Harbors in America 24/7.

“Our democracy has been attacked!” screamed the political establishment that just forced you to choose between Donald Trump and Democrat Donald Trump for president.

Saying there’s been an attack on American democracy is like saying there’s been an attack on Kazakhstan’s fjords.

Liberals learned the words “coup” and “insurrection” like five seconds ago and now they are academic experts on both of these things.

The narrative managers’ ability to move liberals and progressives from “Defund the police” to “MOAR POLICING” in just a few months was even more impressive than their ability to move them from “Believe Women” and #MeToo to “Tara Reade is a lying grifter”.

Here’s how politicians, media and government could eliminate conspiracy theories if they really want to:

• Stop lying all the time
• Stop killing people
• Stop promoting conspiracy theories (eg Russiagate)
• Stop doing evil things in secret
• End government opacity
• Stop conspiring

To support the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is self-destructive.

After January 20th The Clampdown Will Begin In Earnest

caitlinjohnstone |  Biden has announced plans to roll out new domestic terrorism laws in the wake of the Capitol Hill riot.

“Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them,” Wall Street Journal reports.

Did you know that Biden has often boasted about being the original author of the US Patriot Act?

The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.

This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:

“Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of ‘terrorism’ that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode ‘constitutional and statutory due process protections’ and would ‘authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.’

Biden’s bill was never put to a vote, but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.

And Of Course The Big Bish Schlapp DuJour..., Sidney Powell

axios  |  Dominion Voting Systems on Friday filed a defamation lawsuit seeking $1.3 billion in damages against Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who has pushed unfounded conspiracy theories alleging that the company was involved in an international communist plot to rig the election against President Trump.

The big picture: Dominion alleges that Powell acted "in concert with allies and media outlets determined to promote a false preconceived narrative about the 2020 election—caused unprecedented harm." In an interview with the Axios Re:Cap podcast last week, Dominion CEO John Poulos did not rule out suing Trump himself.

What they're saying: "As a result of the defamatory falsehoods peddled by Powell ... Dominion’s founder, Dominion’s employees, Georgia’s governor, and Georgia’s secretary of state have been harassed and have received death threats, and Dominion has suffered enormous harm," the lawsuit reads.

• "After Dominion sent Powell a letter putting her on formal notice of the facts and the death threats and asking her to retract her false claims, Powell doubled down, tweeting to her 1.2 million Twitter followers that she heard that “#Dominion” had written to her and that, although she had not even seen Dominion’s letter yet, she was “retracting nothing” because “[w]e have #evidence” and “They are #fraud masters!""
• "Dominion brings this action to set the record straight, to vindicate the company’s rights under civil law, to recover compensatory and punitive damages, to seek a narrowly tailored injunction, and to stand up for itself and its employees."

The other side: Powell wrote on Twitter Friday, "Dominion’s suit against me & DefendingTheRepublic.org is baseless & filed to harass, intimidate, & to drain our resources as we seek the truth of Dominion's role in this fraudulent election. We will not be cowed in exercising our 1st Amendment rights or seeking truth."

Read the full lawsuit.

Sum'n Not Right - But Not In The Way This Wokist Spokist Imagines...,

guardian  |  By now, the world has witnessed white rioters seize the Capitol building in Washington DC. After hearing Donald Trump encourage them to reject the presidential election’s outcome, thousands reportedly pushed through cops to storm ongoing congressional debates and reign supreme over politicians who fearfully scurried out of the halls of power. Draped in American, Confederate, and Trump flags, the raiders invaded the House floor, occupied representative offices, and filled balconies and scaffolds that line the windows. Joe Biden took to a podium to respond, cautioning the country that “our democracy is under unprecedented assault”.

On television, I saw paramedics rush a stretcher in the pandemonium. The woman bearing a bloodied face laying on top startled me, the anchor, and the cameraman. Please God, don’t let that woman be dead, I prayed, though her eyes lacked an animating essence. When I saw the video of the Proud Boys burn a Black Lives Matter banner a few weeks ago, I knew there would be more violent acts of desperation because they need a cause to feel empowered. Envying the resistance of the oppressed, Trump supporters want reasons to march and chant, so they create enemies and feign vulnerability as their cause grows lost. They sacrificed their lives to save white supremacy, even though it threatens them, too, materially and morally. And Black lives may never matter to people, like the woman, who will risk their own white lives during a pandemic to attack the nation’s capital to protect Donald Trump.

A senior Capitol police officer reportedly shot and killed her. But even the police shooting of the Trump supporter did not immediately catalyze significant law enforcement action to stop the conservative Caucasian invasion. Later, I watched a group of unmasked white men and women chase down a Black law enforcement agent who wielded only a stick in return. I was angry. Not because I felt bad for the cop, but because in that moment, I watched him realize that he was Black, outnumbered, and per the Dred Scott supreme court decision, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Wednesday was a reminder of one difference between white rebellion to feigned oppression and Black resistance to actual oppression: where there is radical Black resistance, there is state repression. Where there is white rebellion for conservative causes, there is collusion with the state. Even when the white cops are outnumbered, like the McKinney, Texas, cops who assaulted Dajerria Becton in her swimsuit, they escalate; he just pulled the gun out on Black teens who came to her rescue. Police have stomped, beat, shot, teargassed, and arrested protesters who organize, march, pray and sing for our multi-racial liberation movements. Including me. Yet on Wednesday, activists and bystanders knew damn well that if the election refusers who raided the Capitol were Black, then the same politicians who kneeled for George Floyd and painted yellow “Black lives matter” letters onto the streets would have sent the full force of the law to stop it.