Does This Video And This Write-Up Make Dr. Dan Stock A "Domestic Violent Extremist"?

DHS – The Secretary of Homeland Security has issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin regarding the current heightened threat environment across the United States. […] These threats include those posed by domestic terrorists, individuals and groups engaged in grievance-based violence. […] Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances over public health safety measures and perceived government restrictions. 

Indystar |  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that K-12 schools adopt universal masking for all students, teachers and staff members, regardless of vaccination status. The Indiana State Department of Health has recommended that schools follow the CDC guidance. 

But the decision has been left to local school boards, the very people that Stock is telling not to listen to the CDC or the state health officials.

State health officials have pushed back on Stock’s video, while maintaining the position that Indiana is a "home rule state" and decisions around masking and more are up to local officials.

“Throughout this pandemic, we have relied on data and science to make recommendations, and we will continue to do so,” said Megan Wade-Taxter, a spokesperson for the Indiana State Department of Health. “The COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths, as evidenced by the fact that more than 98% of Hoosiers who have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since mid-January are unvaccinated."

That’s true even as the delta variant drives a surge of new cases. More than 97% of Hoosiers who have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since June 1 have not been vaccinated, she said.

"Decisions about school protocols rest with school boards and local leaders," she said, "including local health departments and elected officials."

The Hancock County Health Department has also advised all schools in the county, including Mt. Vernon, to follow the CDC and state health recommendations.

"You’ve got so many things coming at you," said Kellie Freeman, a member of the Mt. Vernon Community Schools board that heard from Stock last week. "It’s difficult to know."

At that meeting of the Mt. Vernon board, members were considering parameters that would require individual school buildings to increase cleaning and move toward a mask mandate, based on the percentage of students out due to illness or quarantine. Currently, the district is mask-optional.

Ultimately, the board decided to table the discussion after hearing Stock's comments. 

"I think we have an obligation to… find the facts that were shared today," said board member Shannon Walls.

 

A Sane Society Would Take A Pause - Cornpop Censors Such Suggestions Via Corporate Proxy...,

jonathanturley |  I recently discussed how the Biden Administration was actively encouraging corporations to limit speech and impose vaccine mandates as a type of shadow state. Rather than take such actions directly ( and face both legal and political challenges), the Administration is relying on its close alliance with Big Tech and other companies to carry out such tasks. That surrogate relationship is particularly clear in the expanding censorship program carried out by Twitter, Facebook and other companies. Twitter’s action against political commentator Dave Rubin is an example of how these companies are now dispensing with any pretense in actively barring criticism of government policies and viewpoints.

Rubin was locked out under the common “misinformation” claim by Twitter. However, his tweet was an opinion based on demonstrably true facts. One can certainly disagree with the conclusion but this is an example of core political speech being curtailed by a company with a long history of biased censorship, including the barring of discussions involving Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election.  With a new election looming, these companies appear to be ramping up their censorship efforts.

In his tweet, Rubin stated:

“They want a federal vaccine mandate for vaccines which are clearly not working as promised just weeks ago. People are getting and transmitting Covid despite vax. Plus now they’re prepping us for booster shots. A sane society would take a pause. We do not live in a sane society.”

Even President Biden admitted yesterday that he was wrong weeks ago when he assured people that if they took the vaccine, they would not be at risk for the variants and could dispense with their masks. There are breakthrough cases that have taken many officials by surprise. It is also true that there is now talk of likely booster shots.

Rubin takes those facts and adds his opinion that we should “take a pause.” Twitter declared that to be a violation of its policy “on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”

DNC Wants To Screen Your Text Messages For Anti-Vaxx 'Extremism'

dailycaller |  The Democratic National Committee reportedly wants Short Message Service (SMS) carriers to step in and police private text messages as part of a new push against COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.

Allies of President Joe Biden, including the DNC, plan to “engage fact-checkers more aggressively” and work alongside phone companies to combat misinformation about vaccines shared via social media and private SMS messages, according to a Monday report from Politico.

White House officials are particularly frustrated with the characterization by some Republicans of their door-to-door pro-vaccination campaign, according to the report.

One example SMS message cited by Politico was sent by conservative activist group Turning Point USA, in which co-founder Charlie Kirk falsely contends that “Biden is sending goons DOOR-TO-DOOR to make you take a Covid-19 vaccine. Sign the petition to: No medical raids in America.”

“When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country’s public health and will not shy away from calling that out,” White House spokesman Kevin Munoz told Politico.

Big Tech platforms and corporate media outlets have consistently cracked down on alleged “misinformation” throughout the pandemic, but in some cases, they’ve censored or suppressed information that turned out to be true. Perhaps the chief example is the lab-leak theory, which hypothesizes that the pandemic originated from an accidental leak of the virus out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

The Biden administration has blamed misinformation for contributing to vaccine hesitancy and slowing down the country’s vaccination campaign. Biden set a goal of achieving a 70% vaccination rate by July 4, but the U.S. fell just short of that benchmark.

“The failure to provide accurate public health information, including the efficacy of vaccines and the accessibility of them to people across the country, including South Carolina, is literally killing people, so maybe they should consider that,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week.

 

Successor Ideology Is A More Encompassing And Accurate Term For What Is Mislabeled Critical Race Theory

unherd  |  The extraordinary spread in recent months of what has become known, in the writer Wesley Yang’s phrase, as “the successor ideology” has encouraged all manner of analysis attempting to delineate its essential features. Is it a religion, with its own litany of sin and redemption, its own repertoire of fervent rituals and iconography? Is this Marxism, ask American conservatives, still fighting yesterday’s ideological war?

What does this all do to speed along policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of the liberal state?

If we are to understand the successor ideology as an ideology, it may be useful here, counterintuitively, to return to the great but increasingly overlooked 1970 essay on the “Ideological State Apparatuses,” or ISAs, by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Once influential on the Western left, Althusser’s reputation has suffered somewhat since he killed his wife in a fit of madness 40 years ago. Of Alsatian Catholic origin, and a lifelong sufferer from mental illness, Althusser wrote his seminal essay in a manic period following the évènements of 1968, for whose duration he was committed to hospital. 

Composed with a feverish, hallucinatory clarity, Althusser’s essay aimed to elucidate the manner in which ideology functions as a means to prop up the political order, observing that “no class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the Ideological State Apparatuses”. 

What are these ISAs? Contrasted with the Repressive State Apparatuses — the police, the army, and so on — the ISAs are the means by which the system reproduces itself through ideology: Althusser lists the church, the media and the education system along with the family, and the legal and political system and the culture industry as the means through which the ideology of the governing system is enforced. Althusser here develops Gramsci’s thesis that the cultural sphere is the most productive arena of political struggle, and inverts it: instead of being the site of revolutionary victory, it is where the system reasserts itself, neutering the possibility of political change through its wielding of the most powerful weapon, ideology. 

It is through ideology, Althusser asserts, that the ruling system maintains itself in power: “the ideology of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the grace of God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of state power alone,” he states, “it is by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is realised and real­ises itself that it becomes the ruling ideology.”

The Incorporation Of Free Speech Built Around A Presumption Of Corporate Censorship

jonathanturley |  Under a free speech approach, cakeshop owners have a right to refuse to prepare cakes that offend their deep-felt values, including religious, political or social values. Thus, a Jewish cakeshop owner should be able to decline to make a “Mein Kampf” cake for a local skinhead group, a Black owner to decline to make a white supremacist-themed cake, or a gay baker to decline to make a cake with anti-LGBT slogans. While these bakers cannot discriminate in selling prepared cakes, the act of decorating a cake is a form of expression, and requiring such preparation is a form of compelled speech.

In the same way, NFL teams have a free speech right to prevent kneeling or other political or social demonstrations by players during games, Citizen’s United has a right to support political causes — and, yes, Facebook has a right to censor speech on its platform.

Free speech also allows the rest of us to oppose these businesses over their policies. We have a right to refuse to subsidize or support companies that engage in racial or content discrimination. Thus, with social media companies, Congress should not afford these companies legal immunity or other protections when they engage in censorship.

These companies once were viewed as neutral platforms for people to exchange views — people who affirmatively “friend” or invite the views of others. If Big Tech wants to be treated like a telephone company, it must act like a telephone company. We wouldn’t tolerate AT&T interrupting calls to object to some misleading conversation, or cutting the line for those who misinform others.

As a neutral platform for communications, telephone companies receive special legal and economic status under our laws. Yet, it sometimes seems Facebook wants to be treated like AT&T but act like the DNC.

In defending Big Tech’s right to censor people, University of California at Irvine law professor Richard Hasen declared that “Twitter is a private company, and it is entitled to include or exclude people as it sees fit.” That is clearly true under the First Amendment. It also should be true of others who seek to speak (or not speak) as corporations, from bakeries to sports teams.

Yet, when the Supreme Court sent back the Masterpiece Cakeshop case in 2018 for further proceedings, an irate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) declared: “Masterpiece Cakeshop is a commercial bakery open to the public, and such services clearly must be made available to the public on equal terms … No business or organization open to the public should hide their discriminatory practices behind the guise of religious liberty.” But Pelosi applauded when social media companies barred some members of the public based on viewpoint discrimination on subjects ranging from climate change to vaccines to elections.

The difference, of course, is that Masterpiece Cakeshop was willing to sell cakes to anyone but refused to express viewpoints that conflict with the owners’ religious beliefs. Conversely, social media companies like Twitter and Facebook are barring individuals, including a world leader like Trump, entirely from their “shop.” And, taking it one step further, Facebook has declared it will even ban the “voice of Donald Trump.”

Big Tech is allowed to be arbitrary and capricious in corporate censorship. However, our leaders should follow a principled approach to corporate speech that does not depend on what views are being silenced. Because Elizabeth Warren was right. This “never was about a cake” or a tweet or “likes” for that matter. It was always about free speech.

If You Believed Something Different...,

caitlinjohnstone  |  It sure is interesting how stuff keeps happening that makes free speech on the internet something dangerous which must be curtailed. Covid, the Capitol riot, Russian propaganda, all of which just happen to require tightening restrictions on our single best tool against the powerful.

Had online platforms not agreed to curtail speech in alignment with the US empire, they would with 100 percent certainty have been broken up by antitrust cases and been replaced by other monopolistic companies that would censor in alignment with imperial interests.

You’re not permitted to ascend to power within the system unless you cooperate with existing power structures. If you don’t, you’ll be stopped in your tracks and replaced with someone who will.

A rookie journalist who doesn’t advance narratives favorable to US imperialism will keep getting called to the editor’s desk until they get the message. When rookie social media sites first showed up it was the same thing, except instead of the editor’s desk, it was US congressional hearings.

Only A Special Pinhead Could Consider IdPol Ideology Net Of Panicdemic State Ideology

unherd |  The extraordinary spread in recent months of what has become known, in the writer Wesley Yang’s phrase, as “the successor ideology” has encouraged all manner of analysis attempting to delineate its essential features. Is it a religion, with its own litany of sin and redemption, its own repertoire of fervent rituals and iconography? Is this Marxism, ask American conservatives, still fighting yesterday’s ideological war?

What does this all do to speed along policing reform, ask bewildered African-Americans, as they observe global corporations and white celebrities compete to beat their chests in ever-more elaborate and meaningless gestures of atonement? What kind of meaningful anti-systemic revolution can provoke such immediate and fulsome support from the Hollywood entertainment complex, from the richest oligarchs and plutocrats on earth, and from the media organs of the liberal state?

If we are to understand the successor ideology as an ideology, it may be useful here, counterintuitively, to return to the great but increasingly overlooked 1970 essay on the “Ideological State Apparatuses,” or ISAs, by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. Once influential on the Western left, Althusser’s reputation has suffered somewhat since he killed his wife in a fit of madness 40 years ago. Of Alsatian Catholic origin, and a lifelong sufferer from mental illness, Althusser wrote his seminal essay in a manic period following the évènements of 1968, for whose duration he was committed to hospital. 

Composed with a feverish, hallucinatory clarity, Althusser’s essay aimed to elucidate the manner in which ideology functions as a means to prop up the political order, observing that “no class can hold state power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the Ideological State Apparatuses”. 

What are these ISAs? Contrasted with the Repressive State Apparatuses — the police, the army, and so on — the ISAs are the means by which the system reproduces itself through ideology: Althusser lists the church, the media and the education system along with the family, and the legal and political system and the culture industry as the means through which the ideology of the governing system is enforced. Althusser here develops Gramsci’s thesis that the cultural sphere is the most productive arena of political struggle, and inverts it: instead of being the site of revolutionary victory, it is where the system reasserts itself, neutering the possibility of political change through its wielding of the most powerful weapon, ideology. 

It is through ideology, Althusser asserts, that the ruling system maintains itself in power: “the ideology of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the grace of God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of state power alone,” he states, “it is by the installation of the ISAs in which this ideology is realised and real­ises itself that it becomes the ruling ideology.”

When Keeping It Woke Goes Wrong: Threatening Merriweather's Job Got Jane Doe's Ass Kicked

I'm gonna use discrimination to get what I want. from r/trashy

slate  |  Last month, a conservative panel of judges on the 6^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the First Amendment grants professors a right to intentionally misgender trans students in class. The decision, authored by Donald Trump-nominee and Mitch McConnell protégé Amul Thapar, had a triumphant tone: Thapar depicted himself as a champion of free speech combatting the “classroom thought police” at modern universities who seek to turn their campuses into “enclaves of totalitarianism” by prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ students.

The facts tell a much more nuanced story than Thapar’s simplistic tale of academic freedom versus totalitarianism. The case centers on professor Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio. In 2018, Meriwether misgendered a trans student, known in litigation as Jane Doe, in class; she asked that use her correct pronouns and honorifics in the future, but he refused. The university found Meriwether in violation of its nondiscrimination policy, which requires professors to use students’ preferred pronouns. Meriwether refused to comply with the policy, and following an investigation, the university placed a “written warning” in his file noting his noncompliance. The professor, backed by the viciously anti-trans law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, then sued—dragging Jane Doe into the center of a years-long legal dispute that she desperately wished to avoid.

I recently corresponded with Doe over email about the case, including its effect on her own freedom of expression and academic experience. We spoke on the condition that I use the pseudonym Jane Doe to preserve her privacy. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mark Joseph Stern: How did you feel when professor Meriwether first misgendered you?

Jane Doe: At first, I thought it was a mistake, either mix-up of words or a miscue based on my clothes or appearance. When it is the latter, it is particularly painful; it makes you feel ugly or that your body is broken. But, at the time, there was no way for professor Meriwether to know that I am transgender. All my documents and school records reflect my correct name and female gender marker.

The 6^th Circuit wrote the following about your reaction to professor Meriwether’s refusal to acknowledge your gender identity because of his religious beliefs: “Doe became hostile—circling around Meriwether at first, and then approaching him in a threatening manner: ‘I guess this means I can call you a cunt.’ Doe promised that Meriwether would be fired if he did not give in to Doe’s demands.” Is this account accurate?

This account is only partially accurate. I approached professor Meriwether after the first class session to let him know that he mistakenly referred to me as male and ask that he refer to me as female in the future. He refused. I showed him my driver’s license to further prove that I am female. He refused again. It was degrading to have to debate with my professor whether I am female and entitled to the same treatment as my peers simply because professor Meriwether believed that I was transgender (it was not until I filed an internal complaint with Shawnee that I disclosed that I am transgender). Professor Meriwether’s persistent refusal to treat me with the same respect he afforded other students was upsetting. Although I made the remark quoted in the opinion, I was not threatening or hostile.

 

 

Elite Discussion Of Vaccine Passport Challlenges By Those Who Would Mandate Them

Harvard |  As COVID-19 vaccines become more widespread, passports that certify immunization status may facilitate a return to normalcy, write Lawrence O. Gostin, I. Glenn Cohen, and Jana Shaw in a viewpoint published today in JAMA.

But these vaccine passports, or digital health passes, are not without scientific, legal, and ethical challenges.

I asked Gostin, Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, Cohen, Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and Shaw, a professor of pediatrics at Upstate Medical University, about the key areas of concern and promise for vaccine passports. Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, follows.

Chloe Reichel: What is a digital health pass?

I. Glenn Cohen: A digital health pass, sometimes referred to as a vaccine passport, is essentially a way of digitally recording that someone has had a vaccination, and then details about the date of vaccination, and potentially the kind of vaccine they were given, to the extent relevant. It might be something created by a governmental authority, or might be something created in the private sector.

CR: How can these digital health passes help us get to a new normal?

Jana Shaw: Vaccine passports, or digital health passes, let others know that you are safe and that you are keeping others safe by getting vaccinated. Places that require digital health passes are making sure everyone there is safe.

Lawrence O. Gostin: Essentially, the goal is to try to return to as normal as possible, as safely as we can, and as soon as we can.

And so the idea of a digital health pass is to make sure that everyone in a given space is protected, and also has a diminished potential for spreading the infection to others.

CR: Can you describe some of the scientific challenges associated with implementing digital health passes?

JS: There are numerous challenges to creating digital health passes.

Length of protection is one of them. However, that can be easily addressed by including the date of vaccination. As we get more information on length of protection from vaccination, vaccine passports can be then used accordingly.

Another limitation is that the efficacy of various COVID-19 vaccines differs. However, we recognize that the efficacy differs against developing symptomatic disease, and all authorized vaccines are very effective against serious illness.

In addition, as we monitor the emergence of variants of concern, there have been reports of decreased vaccine efficacy among certain vaccines. However, that currently is being addressed by vaccine manufacturers. They are developing vaccines that target the emergent variants to ensure that their vaccines will continue to be effective as variants evade vaccine-induced immunity.

We could not really talk about challenges and not talk about access to vaccination. Universal access to vaccines has to be ensured before digital health passes are rolled out, to mitigate the risk of transmission and the risk of creating an equity divide for those who are not vaccinated.

Every System Of Power Manufactures And Polices Its Own "Reality"...,

consentfactory  |  So, according to Facebook and the Atlantic Council, I am now a “dangerous individual,” you know, like a “terrorist,” or a “serial murderer,” or “human trafficker,” or some other kind of “criminal.” Or I’ve been praising “dangerous individuals,” or disseminating their symbols, or otherwise attempting to “sow dissension” and cause “offline harm.”

Actually, I’m not really clear what I’m guilty of, but I’m definitely some sort of horrible person you want absolutely nothing to do with, whose columns you do not want to read, whose books you do not want to purchase, and the sharing of whose Facebook posts might get your account immediately suspended. Or, at the very least, you’ll be issued this warning:

Now, hold on, don’t click away just yet. You’re already on whatever website you’re reading this “dangerous,” “terrorist” column on (or you’re reading it in an email, probably on your phone), which means you are already on the official “Readers of Mass-Murdering Content” watch-list. So you might as well take the whole ride at this point.

Also, don’t worry, I’m not going to just whine about how Facebook was mean to me for 2,000 words … well, all right, I’m going to do that a little, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate how “reality” is manufactured and policed by global corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, the corporate media, of course, crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and PayPal, and “think tanks” like the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”).

First, though, let me tell you my Facebook story.

What happened was, I made a Facebook post, and a lot of people tried to share it, so Facebook and the DFRLab suspended or disabled their accounts, or just prevented them from sharing it, and sent them the above warning. Facebook didn’t suspend my account, or censor the post on my account, or contact me to let me know that they have officially deemed me a “dangerous individual.” Instead, they punished anyone who tried to “boost” my “dangerous” post, a tactic anyone who has been through boot camp or in prison (or has watched this classic scene from Full Metal Jacket) will be familiar with.

The First Amendment Was From A Time When Speech Was Expensive And Rare...,

taibbi  |  When Columbia law professor Timothy Wu was appointed by Joe Biden to the National Economic Council a few weeks back, the press hailed it as great news for progressives. The author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age is known as a staunch advocate of antitrust enforcement, and Biden’s choice of him, along with the appointment of Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, was widely seen as a signal that the new administration was assembling what Wired called an “antitrust all-star team.”

“Big Tech critic Tim Wu joins Biden administration to work on competition policy,” boomed CNBC, while Marketwatch added, “Anti-Big Tech crusader reportedly poised to join Biden White House.” Chicago law professor Eric Posner’s piece for Project Syndicate was titled “Antitrust is Back in America.” Posner noted Wu’s appointment comes as Senator Amy Klobuchar has introduced regulatory legislation that ostensibly targets companies like Facebook and Google, which a House committee last year concluded have accrued “monopoly power.”

Wu’s appointment may presage tougher enforcement of tech firms. However, he has other passions that got less ink. Specifically, Wu — who introduced the concept of “net neutrality” and once explained it to Stephen Colbert on a roller coaster — is among the intellectual leaders of a growing movement in Democratic circles to scale back the First Amendment. He wrote an influential September, 2017 article called “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” that argues traditional speech freedoms need to be rethought in the Internet/Trump era. 

Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a “devotee” of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that “these old opinions are so great, it’s like watching The Godfather, you can’t imagine anything could be better.”

If you hear a “but…” coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff’s Notes version of Wu’s thesis:

 

Google Diversity Thinner Than Skimmed Piss - Old Marian Croak The Only Responsible Negroe On Deck...,

theverge |  Google has fired Margaret Mitchell, co-lead of the ethical AI team, after she used an automated script to look through her emails in order to find evidence of discrimination against her coworker Timnit Gebru. The news was first reported by Axios.

Mitchell’s firing comes one day after Google announced a reorganization to its AI teams working on ethics and fairness. Marian Croak, a vice president in the engineering organization, is now leading “a new center of expertise on responsible AI within Google Research,” according to a blog post. 

Mitchell joined Google in 2016 as a senior research scientist, according to her LinkedIn. Two years later, she helped start the ethical AI team alongside Gebru, a renowned researcher known for her workon bias in facial recognition technology.

In December 2020, Mitchell and Gebru were working on a paper about the dangers of large language processing models when Megan Kacholia, vice president of Google Brain, asked that the article be retracted. Gebru pushed back, saying the company needed to be more open about why the research wasn’t acceptable. Shortly afterwards, she was fired, though Google characterized her departure as a resignation. 

After Gebru’s termination, Mitchell became openly critical of Google executives, including Google AI division head Jeff Dean and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. In January, she lost her corporate email access after Google began investigating her activity.

“After conducting a review of this manager’s conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees,” Google said in a statement to Axios about Mitchell’s firing.

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.

Insurgents Deviate From The Official Ideology And Must Be Liquidated

Update bill gates predicts food shortages while buying up all the farmland he can. Kinda makes you wonder. He gets a hold of microsoft now you have to live with computer virus threat, he gets a hold of vaxx companies now you have to live with pandemics. Stevie wonder can see the this coming from a mile away.

consentfactory |   It’s time for Globocap to take the gloves off again, root the “terrorists” out of their hidey holes, and roll out a new official narrative.

Actually, there’s not much new about it. When you strip away all the silly new acronyms, the (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror is basically just a combination of the “War on Terror” narrative and the “New Normal” narrative, i.e., a militarization of the so-called “New Normal” and a pathologization of the “War on Terror.” Why would GloboCap want to do that, you ask?

I think you know, but I’ll go ahead and tell you.

See, the problem with the original “Global War on Terror” was that it wasn’t actually all that global. It was basically just a war on Islamic “terrorism” (i.e., resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology), which was fine as long as GloboCap was just destabilizing and restructuring the Greater Middle East. It was put on hold in 2016, so that GloboCap could focus on defeating “populism” (i.e., resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology), make an example of Donald Trump, and demonize everyone who voted for him (or just refused to take part in their free and fair elections), which they have just finished doing, in spectacular fashion. So, now it’s back to “War on Terror” business, except with a whole new cast of “terrorists,” or, technically, an expanded cast of “terrorists.” (I rattled off a list in my previous column.)

In short, GloboCap has simply expanded, recontextualized, and pathologized the “War on Terror” (i.e., the war on resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology). This was always inevitable, of course. A globally-hegemonic system (e.g., global capitalism) has no external enemies, as there is no territory “outside” the system. Its only enemies are within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as “terrorists” and “extremists.” These terms are utterly meaningless, obviously. They are purely strategic, deployed against anyone who deviates from GloboCap’s official ideology … which, in case you were wondering, is called “normality” (or, in our case, currently, “New Normality”). 

In earlier times, these “terrorists” and “extremists” were known as “heretics,” “apostates,” and “blasphemers.” Today, they are also known as “deniers,” e.g., “science deniers,” “Covid deniers,” and recently, more disturbingly, “reality deniers.” This is an essential part of the pathologization of the “War on Terror” narrative. The new breed of “terrorists” do not just hate us for our freedom … they hate us because they hate “reality.” They are no longer our political or ideological opponents … they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no longer need to be argued with or listened to … they need to be “treated,” “reeducated,” and “deprogrammed,” until they accept “Reality.” If you think I’m exaggerating the totalitarian nature of the “New Normal/War on Terror” narrative, read this op-ed in The New York Times exploring the concept of a “Reality Czar” to deal with our “Reality Crisis.”

Damn Skippy Libertarians Are Domestic Terrorists!!!

antiwar |  The Department of Homeland Security issued on Wednesday a nationwide terror alert lasting until April 30. The alert warns of potential terrorist attacks from Americans who are “ideologically motivated” and have “objections to the exercise of government authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”

The language used in this alert suggests that millions of Americans are potential terrorists. Second Amendment supporting, antiwar, anti-tax, anti-politics, anti-militarization, pro-life, and anti-Federal Reserve activists certainly have “objections to the exercise of government authority.” They are certainly viewed by the political class and its handmaidens in big tech and the mainstream media as ideological extremists. Anyone who gets his news from sources other than mainstream media or big tech, or who uses certain “unapproved” social media platforms, is considered to have had his grievances “fueled by false narratives.” For something to be considered a false narrative, it need only contradict the “official” narrative.

The "domestic terrorist” alert is the latest sign that activities on January 6 on Capitol Hill, like the attacks of September 11, 2001, are being used to advance a long-standing anti-liberty agenda. Legislation expanding the federal government’s authority to use its surveillance and other unconstitutional powers against “domestic terrorists” is likely to soon be considered by Congress. Just as the PATRIOT Act was written years before 2001, this legislation was written long before January 6. The bill’s proponents are simply taking advantage of the hysteria following the so-called insurrection to push the bill onto the congressional agenda.

Former CIA Director John Brennan recently singled out libertarians as among the people the government should go after.

This is not the first time libertarians have been smeared. In 2009, a federally-funded fusion center identified people who supported my presidential campaign, my Campaign for Liberty, or certain Libertarian and Constitution parties candidates as potentially violent extremists.

The idea that libertarianism creates terrorists is absurd. Libertarians support the non-aggression principle, so they reject using force to advance their political goals. They rely instead on peaceful persuasion.

Libertarianism is being attacked because it does not support just reforming a few government policies. Instead, it presents a formidable intellectual challenge to the entire welfare-warfare state.

America Is Now Ruled By A Single Elite Class And Wokeness Is Its Protocol Of Exclusion

Why the embodiment of il33t, suave, 1% panache like George Sanders - tryna get at Lucy's ravishing young fire-cro*** - have Mumm decanted into martini glasses? jes dayyum....,

tablet |  More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.

Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.

Mrs. Astor would approve.

If Teachers Are A Fallen Professional Class, What Does That Make Diversity Trainers?

jeanettecespinoza |  I grew up in a predominately white suburb and as a child and teenager, I wasn’t immediately aware of the racism I was experiencing. On the surface, it appeared we were all on a level playing field. I lived next door to white people, had white friends, was a cheerleader along-side white girls, acted in plays with white people, and even had sleep-overs at white people’s homes. To me, I was welcomed into white spaces so my exposure to white supremacy was minimal.

But this bubble of protection was broken during my sophomore year when I began to reflect on my high school experience.

I was a cheerleader, but I was the only Black girl on the squad.

I was an actor, but the roles I played were designed for white characters.

I was invited to sleep-overs but was often either the only Black girl or one or two out of the fifteen or twenty girls in attendance.

Of the white friends I had, I could probably be counted as their only Black friend. While I knew many white people, for most of them I was their only exposure to someone of a different ethnic background on a regular basis.

The playing field was anything but level.

When this became evident to me, I approached our guidance counselor to ask about creating a Black studies group where Black students could come together and share experiences and white students could come to learn more about our culture and world views. The counselor, who was a white woman, welcomed my suggestions and offered to facilitate the group. I was beyond excited that we would be doing something to make a positive difference and couldn’t wait to get started.

But when the group began, only a few Black people showed up, and no white people came at all. It was great getting together with my Black friends to discuss our experiences, but this was something we did all the time when we got together. My objective was to help create a space where white people would begin to understand our stories and use their privilege to create more all-inclusive spaces, but there was zero desire to make this happen.

After one meeting, I stayed after to talk to the counselor about my frustration with the lack of white participation and her answer has stayed with me for decades:

“It’s a brave effort, Jeanette, but realistically, it's hard for white people to reckon with racial disparity. It’s a lot to ask young white people who have been sheltered from adversity to talk about the difficulties Black people have to deal with. Most probably aren’t equipped to deal with that much pain and trauma.”

Even as a fifteen-year-old I remember thinking if it's too much for them to just discuss it, what about those of us who have to deal with it and will experience it for the rest of our lives? That day it became clear to me that the feelings of white people took precedence over my actual pain and suffering, and at that moment, my innocence and open view of the world was forever compromised.

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.

Nothing Boosts Trust In Government Like A CFR Panel Of Pasty CIA Alumni Talking About Trust...,

thehill |   In October, Thomas Weiss and I urged all of us to keep calm in the face of what might be a violent election and transition season. We foresaw the need to say, among other things, that the military should affirm the rule of law and their oath to the Constitution. Sadly, the Joint Chiefs felt the need to do just that last week.  

When President Trump extolled “strength” to a nascent mob in Washington on Jan. 6, he wasn’t talking about moral force. In militarized societies, the model of political change is often military.  War is the assertion of “might makes right,” the negation of the rule of law. 

Political scientists worry these days about democratic erosion, when the norms and institutions of previously stable representative democracies decline. We usually ponder the causes of erosion in other countries. 

Democracy is, on one hand, democratic elections where the people decide who will govern them, and processes for horizontal and vertical oversight and accountability. There is also a deeper conception of democracy — the norms of citizen deliberation, and human and civil rights that guarantee expression, inclusion and collective action. Democratic legitimacy depends on the ability of citizens to engage in public reason. The more democratic a society is, the greater the limits it has on the use of force both at home and abroad. We don’t take out weapons to resolve our disputes.

Democratic erosion or backsliding occurs when democratic institutions, norms and values are gradually — and sometimes almost imperceptibly — reduced. Democratic erosion includes the decline of competitive elections, the reduction in forums where citizens can deliberate and form policy preferences, and the diminished ability for accountability. The indicators of erosion also include constraints on freedom of the press, which reduces transparency and accountability, the unchecked accretion of power in the executive branch, and the loss of civil rights, including the right of assembly.

Democratic erosion has various causes. Some blame power-hungry executives who don’t want to give up power. The question, here, is why democratic institutions aren’t able to stop power-hungry elites who would concentrate power and economic resources.  

Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman, in their book “Four Threats,” also highlight excessive executive power but then add political polarization, racism and nativism, and economic inequality that prompts the wealthy to mobilize to protect their position.  

War and militarism exacerbate all those things. But more than that, war and militarism are antipodal and undermining of democratic norms, institutions and practices.

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

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