Showing posts with label clampdown. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clampdown. Show all posts

Friday, October 20, 2023

While You're Watching Israel The Great Reset Soldiers On...,

Off-Guardian  |  “We need a new approach to digital identity”, so say the authors of an “Agenda Article” for the World Economic Forum, published on the 28th of September.

Digital ID has been in the news a lot lately, obscured for the past week in the mist of the Israel-Hamas situation.

Last month the United Nation Developments Programme published its legal guidelines for digital IDs as well as “mobilizing” global leadership with a $400mn fund to “empower” digital identity programmes in over 100 countries.

Various nations are already making steps in that direction. Multiple US states are either already issuing digital IDs or planning to in the near future, as are Kenya, Somalia, Bhutan and Singapore. Austria’s system is going online in December.

Just last week, Forbes Australia published it’s guide to what “Australians need to know” about digital IDs, and 9News reported that they could be in place as soon as next year.

Just two days ago, the Journal of Australian Law Society predicted the same thing.

Meanwhile, also in Australia, the world’s 21st largest bank is changing its terms and conditions to allow it to “de-bank” customers.

The National Australian Bank’s “revised” terms and conditions go into force on November 1st and include, in clause 11: “NAB may close your account at any time at its discretion”.

The reasons NAB would consider enforcing clause 11 make for interesting reading [emphasis added]:

NAB can take a range of things into account when exercising its rights and discretions. These can include:
[…]
(e) NAB’s public statements, including those relating to protecting vulnerable persons, the environment or sustainability;
(f) community expectations and any impact on NAB’s reputation;

So – as of November 1st – NAB reserves the right to de-bank you if you get cancelled, or say something they don’t approve of about climate change or “vulnerable people”.

In the UK, just two days ago, it was reported the government is planning to upload every passport photo in their records to a facial recognition database. 

At the same time, despite “record profits” for energy companies last winter, the UK government reports they may need to further increase energy bills to “prevent energy companies going bust”.

Two days ago Japan announced it would be trading carbon credits on its stock exchange, and some Japanese firms are introducing a digital currency specifically for the settlement of “clean energy certificates”.

Just yesterday India announced the launch of trial wholesale digital currency, and the South China Morning Post reported a new “hard-wallet” for SIM-based CBDC payments, a joint project between the Bank of China and Chinese telecommunications giants.

Back to Australia, where it was reported on October 12th that Mastercard and the Reserve Bank of Australia had “successfully trialled” the interoperability of CBDC systems, whilst ensuring that “the pilot CBDC can be held, used, and redeemed only by authorised parties“.

Mastercard’s report also notes that the benefits of CBDCs are “programmability, transparency, and compliance”.

 

Friday, August 25, 2023

Are Fraudulent Covid Control Measures About To Be Reinstated?

SummitNews  |   In response to reports of COVID restrictions, including social distancing and masking being reimplemented by colleges and offices, Senator Rand Paul asserted that those pushing the measures again “have no shame.” During a Fox News interview, Paul described the move as “hysteria” being pushed by the leftist media to financially benefit their corporate pharma owners. “These people are so conflicted,” Paul said, adding “It’s so dishonest to put people like that on the air to promote a product that they make more money from … promote this hysteria. This defies all logic. It defies science, and it defies common sense.” “To see this coming up again, these people have no shame,” Paul continued, pointing to Morris Brown College in Atlanta, a black private liberal arts college that has reinstated the measures as part of a “precautionary step.”

“That university that’s wanting to mask up and do all this testing — zero cases,” Paul urged, adding “But even worse than that, even when COVID was really more potent in 2020, the death rate for young, healthy people turned out to be close to zero.” “We don’t know for sure because the CDC won’t release it, but we do know that Germany released all of their data, and not one young, healthy person died. So, it’s a crime to mandate masks. It’s a crime to mandate vaccines, which do have some risks for young, healthy people,” Paul further noted. The Senator urged that Americans are “not going to lay down and take it again,”adding “there will be more resistance” this time. “We will fight back, and we will point out that they are making money off of this. These are not high-minded people. They are making money off of us and making money off of generating hysteria,” the Senator asserted.

Friday, August 18, 2023

Bad Faith Lawfare Against Dr. Meryl Nass

childrenshealthdefense  | Dr. Meryl Nass today filed suit against the Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine and its individual members, alleging the board violated her First Amendment rights and her rights under the Maine Constitution.

The complaint alleges the board engaged in retaliatory conduct against Nass, a practicing internal medicine physician and member of the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientific advisory board, when the board suspended her medical license for publicly expressing her dissenting views on official COVID-19 policies, the COVID-19 vaccine and alternative treatments.

“Because she was outspoken, the board targeted Dr. Nass as someone to silence,” her attorney, Gene Libby told The Defender.

In fall 2021, the board issued a position statement, quoted in the complaint, stating that licensees could face disciplinary action if they “generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation.”

In October 2021, soon after the statement was issued, the board received a complaint alleging Nass was spreading misinformation online and soon after launched an investigation.

The board suspended Nass’ medical license on Jan. 12, 2022, without a hearing, accusing her of engaging in “unprofessional conduct” by spreading “misinformation about COVID-19.”

It also accused her of improperly prescribing hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for three patients for off-label uses of those drugs.

The board suspended Nass’ license and ordered a neuropsychological evaluation, implying she was mentally impaired or a substance abuser and incompetent to practice medicine.

“There were no grounds to order a mental health examination,” Libby said. “That was simply a means to communicate to the public that there was something wrong with Dr. Nass, to discredit her and tarnish her reputation.”

After Nass moved to have the board dismiss its complaint against her, alleging First Amendment violations, the board on Sept. 26, 2022, withdrew its accusations of “misinformation”, just prior to her first hearing date, Oct. 11, 2022.

The board’s case now rests on Nass’ alleged non-adherence to the medical “standard of care” as it pertained to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19 and on the alleged “record-keeping” issues.

Nass told The Defender:

“The two primary complaints against me were that my statements were misleading and that I was prescribing drugs off-label. My speech — which I should note, was not simply opinion, it was an educated opinion developed after consulting the medical literature — is protected by the First Amendment.

“And prescribing drugs off-label is a perfectly legal thing to do, as explicitly stated on the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] website. Somewhere between 20-50% of drugs are prescribed off-label. The lawyers on the board staff know all of this. It’s their job to know the law with respect to medicine.

“They didn’t do this because they thought I had committed some kind of violation. They did it because they thought I’m older and I wouldn’t have the money to challenge them and so they could get away with it — they thought they could turn me into a poster child to scare all the doctors in the country.

“It is part of this broader attempt by the U.S. government and governments across the world to criminalize dissent by criminalizing so-called ‘misinformation.’”

Libby said the remaining allegations against Dr. Nass “are simply a pretext to discipline her. Because now, from an institutional standpoint, the board has to do something. She’s been under suspension for 19 months, which is the longest suspension that I’m aware of for any physician in the state.”

The board refused to schedule hearings on Nass’ suspension on consecutive days. Instead, it has held one day of hearings every other month. There have been six days of hearings so far over 10 months — and Nass’ license has been suspended the entire time.

“This is fundamentally unfair to Dr. Nass, but she’s within the grip of an institution that doesn’t want her speaking out,” Libby said.

In her lawsuit, Nass alleges the board and its members used their power to “crush dissenting views and chill disfavored speech.”

Nass is asking the court for declaratory relief, for an injunction to stop the board from continuing to retaliate against her and for monetary damages and legal fees.

CHD is providing financial and legal resources to Nass’ Maine-based legal team.

CHD President Mary Holland told The Defender:

“CHD is proud to support Dr. Nass’ lawsuit against the Maine medical board and its individual members.

“The board and its members have deprived Dr. Nass of her license and livelihood for over a year with no basis whatsoever. This kind of censorship, intimidation and punishment of doctors of conscience must stop.

“People need independent, thoughtful, caring physicians like Dr. Nass to be honored, not hounded as the board has done.

“I am pleased to see this case move forward in the courts in the interests of justice, for Dr. Nass, her patients and the broader society.”

Board provided resources to ‘combat spread of vaccine misinformation’

The Maine board’s Fall 2021 position statement expressed its support for a statement by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) — a private organization with no regulatory authority — which threatened physicians “who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” with suspension or revocation of their medical license.

According to the statement, physicians have a high degree of public trust and therefore a responsibility to “share information that is factual, scientifically grounded and consensus-driven for the betterment of public health.”

The Maine board’s statement endorsed the FSMB statement, encouraged physicians to address misinformation when encountered, directed physicians to use circulated materials from the American Medical Association (AMA) and said that questioning the COVID-19 vaccine qualifies as “misinformation,” according to the complaint.

The AMA materials provide scripts, talking points and strategies for “combating the spread of vaccine misinformation.”

The Maine board’s chair, Dr. Maroulla Gleaton, is also an FSMB director.

Nass is a widely recognized expert on the anthrax vaccine and biological warfare. She testified before Congress six times and was quoted in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Friday, June 16, 2023

Political Satirist CJ Hopkins Under Criminal Investigation For Thought Crimes In Germany

cjhopkins  |  The Berlin State Prosecutor has launched a criminal investigation of me for tweeting the image on the cover of my book, The Rise of the New Normal Reich

I am charged with “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization,” which is punishable by “imprisonment for not more than three years or a fine.”

The “propaganda” in question is the image on the cover of my book, which image will be familiar to the thousands of readers who have bought and read it. It was a Barnes & Noble and Amazon bestseller upon its release in 2022, and continues to sell quite well internationally. 

As you might recall, the book was banned by Amazon in Germany, Austria, and The Netherlands in August 2022 (i.e., the time of my alleged Twitter crimes).

The Prosecutor’s notice orders me to respond to the charge within two weeks, though it’s possible the deadline to respond was today, June 8, 2023 (i.e, the day I received the notice of the investigation, dated May 25, 2023, in the mail).

Along with my response to the charge, I am ordered to provide the Prosecutor with all my personal identification papers and documentation of my net monthly income.

Obviously, the cover of my book is not “propaganda intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.” Anyone vaguely familiar with my work over the last 30 years is aware of my fierce opposition to fascism, totalitarianism, and all other forms of authoritarianism.

The charge is utterly ridiculous. Swastikas are banned in Germany if they are used to promote Nazism, fascism, neo-Nazi organizations, etc. However, they are allowed to be displayed for the purposes of “civic education, countering anti-constitutional activities, art and science, research and education, coverage of historic and current events,” and similar purposes, according to German law.

Given the circumstances, I have to assume the Berlin State Prosecutor has launched this absurd investigation in order to punish me for my aggressive opposition to the roll-out of the New Normal, or intimidate me into silence. There’s quite a lot of that going around these days … just ask Matt Taibbi, Roger Waters, Sucharit Bhakdi, and Kit Klarenberg, among others.

It is possible these trumped-up charges are also a result of my criticism of the official Russia/Ukraine narrative. I’ve been pretty tough on the NATO-backed neo-Nazis and the official propaganda the corporate media has been churning out.

Whatever the actual reason is, I am, needless to say, angry. I will be responding to this baseless and unsupportable charge in a robust fashion. I’ll keep you posted.

 

 

Friday, April 21, 2023

Weaponizing Free Speech: Picking On Old Negroes Nostalgic For The 60's and 70's...,

caitlinjohnstone  |  The superseding indictment containing these charges consists of a lot of verbal gymnastics to obfuscate the fact that the DOJ is prosecuting US citizens for speech and political activities in the United States which happen not to align with the wishes of the US government. The grand jury alleges that the aforementioned Ionov “directed” these Americans to “publish pro-Russian propaganda” and “information designed to cause dissention in the United States,” which is about as vague and amorphous an allegation as you could possibly come up with.

For the record Omali Yeshitela, the founder and chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and one of the four Americans named in the indictment, has adamantly denied ever having worked for Russia. Earlier this month before charges were brought against him, the Tampa Bay Times quoted him as saying, “I ain’t ever worked for a Russian. Never ever ever ever. They know I have never worked for Russia. Their problem is, I’ve never worked for them.”

But it’s important to note that this should not matter. Under the First Amendment the government is forbidden to abridge anyone’s freedom to speak however they want and associate with whomever they please, which necessarily includes being as vocally pro-Russia as they like and promoting whatever political agendas they see fit, whether that happens to advance the interests of the Russian government or not. The indictment alleges that the four Americans engaged in “agitprop” by “writing articles that contained Russian propaganda and disinformation,” but even if we pretend that’s both (A) a quantifiable claim and (B) a proven fact, propaganda and disinformation are both speech that the government is constitutionally forbidden from repressing.

It’s not reasonable for the government to just dismiss the First Amendment on the grounds that it is being “weaponized”. You can’t have your government dictating what speech is valid and what counts as “agitprop” and “disinformation”, because they’ll always define those terms in ways which benefit the government, thus giving more power to the powerful and taking power away from the people. You can’t have your government dictating what political groups are legitimate and which ones are tools of a foreign government, because you can always count on the powerful set such designations in ways which benefit themselves.

Sunday, April 16, 2023

When We Leak It's News, When You Leak It's Treason!!!

racket  |  On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times:

Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say.

Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all!

The Washington Post went with “charismatic gun enthusiast”:

The New York Times summarized key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve been spying on, etc.

You’ll read a lot in the coming days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups, which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act, the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.

The intelligence community has itself been massively interfering in domestic news using illegal leaks for years. Remember the “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” story by David Ignatius of the Washington Post in January of 2017, outing would-be Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn as having been captured in intercepts speaking with a Russian ambassador? That was just the first in a string of leak- or intercept-based news stories that dominated news cycles in the Trump years, involving everything from conclusions of the FISA court to supposedly secret meetings in the Seychelles.

When civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly about using “strategic leaks” as a P.R. staple. In a world where media currency is becoming the ultimate power, these people want a monopoly. It’s infuriating.

Watch how this thing will be spun. It’s going to get ugly fast.

Friday, March 31, 2023

What Is The Restrict Act And Why Is It Bad?

A short booster thread on this issue 👇

The RESTRICT ACT did not surface in a vacuum. It was preceded by Biden groundwork that is much deeper.

2) The “TicTok ban” legislation (SB686), which is a fraudulent auspice for total internet control by the intelligence community, comes from within bipartisan legislation spearheaded by the aligned interests of Senator Warner, the SSCI and DHS.

3) None of this is accidental, and the legislative branch is walking into the creation of an online control mechanism that has nothing whatsoever to do with banning TikTok.
5) If you have followed the history of how the Fourth Branch of Government has been created, you will immediately recognize the intent of this new framework. Image
6) The “National Cybersecurity Strategy” aligns with, supports, and works in concert with a total U.S. surveillance system, where definitions of information are then applied to “cybersecurity” and communication vectors.
7) This policy is both a surveillance system and an information filtration prism where the government will decide what is information, disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, then act upon it.
8) Now put the March 2nd announcement, the executive branch fiat, together with Senate Bill 686 “The Restrict Act” also known as the bipartisan bill to empower the executive branch to shut down TikTok.

10) /END

Thursday, March 09, 2023

"Surplus Humanity" Means That NiggaHertz Bout To Go Off The Charts

therealnews  |  Well actually, there’s three new books because I published The Global Police State in 2020, and this year, there are two new books, Global Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure? But what happened was I was writing and thinking about and speaking about this crisis from 2008 and on, and then the pandemic hit. And it became clear to me as I started researching that and engaging with other people that the pandemic has accelerated in warp speed the crisis itself, and it’s introduced a whole new set of concerns as we face this crisis of humanity. And that book also goes into considerable detail on digitalization, because the digital transformations underway are absolutely tremendous. They’re linked to everything else.

But then the companion to Global Civil War – And both of these came out in 2022 – Is Can Global Capitalism Endure?, which is really the big summation of the crisis and what we can expect in the following years and the following decades. So if it’s possible, I would love to put out a summary here of where we’re at with this crisis.

This is a crisis like never before. This is an existential crisis. It’s multidimensional. Of course, we can talk about the economic or the structural dimension, deep economic, social crisis. We’re on the verge of a world recession, but I think it’s going to be much more than that. It’s going to be another big collapse which might even exceed what we saw in 2008. But it’s also a political crisis of state legitimacy, of capitalist hegemony, of the crack up of political systems around the world. And it’s also a social crisis of what technically we can call a crisis of social reproduction. The social fabric is disintegrating everywhere. Billions of people face crises for survival and very uncertain futures. And of course, it’s also an ecological crisis, and this is what makes it existential.

I am suggesting that the 21st century is the final century for world capitalism. This system cannot reach the 22nd century. And the key question for us is, can we overthrow global capitalism before it drags down and destroys all of humanity and much of life on the planet along with it?

So let me step back and say that we can speak about three types of crises. Of course, there are periodic receptions, the mainstream goals of the business cycle that take place about once every 10 years, but we’re in something much more serious. We’re in what we can call a structural crisis, meaning that the only way out of the system is to fund it. The only way out of the crisis is to really restructure the whole system. The last big structural crisis we had was the 1970s. The system got out of that by launching capitalist globalization and neoliberalism. Prior to that, we had the big structural crisis of the 1930s, the Great Depression. System got out of that by introducing a new type of capitalism, New Deal capitalism, social democratic capitalism, what I call redistributive nation state capitalism. And before that, just to take it back once more – Because these are recurrent, they happen, these structural crises about every 40 to 50 years – Was from the late 1870s to the early 1890s. And the system got out of that by launching a new round of colonialism and imperialism.

So now, from 2008 and on, we’re in another deep structural crisis. And I know later in the interview we’ll get into that dimension, that economic structural dimension. Technically, we call it an overaccumulation crisis. But I want to say that there’s a third type of crisis, and that actually is where we’re at: a systemic crisis, which means the only way out of the crisis is to literally move beyond the system. That is, to move beyond capitalism. So when I say that we are in a systemic crisis, this can be drawn out for years, for decades. But we are in uncharted territory. This is a crisis like no other. If we want to put this in technical terms, we’re seeing the historic exhaustion of the conditions for capitalist renewal. And the system, again, won’t make it to the [22nd] century.

As you pointed out in the introduction, the ruling groups, at this point, are in a situation of permanent crisis management, permanent state of emergency. But the ruling groups are rudderless. They’re clueless. They don’t know how to resolve this crisis. And quite frankly, they cannot. They can’t. What we’ve seen is that over the past 40 years, world capitalism has been driven forward by this trickle process that I lay out in these two new books, Global Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure?, of globalization, digitalization, and financialization. And these three processes have aggravated the crisis, really created and aggravated the crisis many times over. And just to summarize a couple other things here, what we’ve seen over the last 40 years is the buildup of this structural crisis and the problem of surplus capital, meaning that corporate profits in 2021 were a record high even in the midst of us all moving down and suffering. Record high profits. So the transnational capitalist class has accumulated enormous amounts of wealth beyond what it can reinvest, hence stagnation, beyond what it can even spend.

And what this has led to is this mass of what we call – I know we’re going to get into this later in the interview – This mass of fictitious capital, meaning all of this capital around the world which is not backed by the real economy of goods and services. It’s what technically we call fiat money, this unprecedented flow of money. And it’s led to this situation where in the world today we have this mass of predatory finance capital which is simply without precedent, and it’s destabilizing the whole system.

But let me conclude this introductory summary by saying the problem of surplus capital has its flip side in surplus people, surplus humanity. The more the surplus capital, the more hundreds of millions, even billions of people become surplus humanity.

And what that means is that the ruling groups have a double challenge. Their first challenge is what do they do with all the surplus capital? How do they keep investing in making profit? Where can they unload this surplus capital and continue to accumulate? But the second big challenge, because the flip side is surplus humanity, is how do you control the mass of humanity? Because there is a global class revolt underway. That’s the title of the book, Global Civil War. After the late 20th century worldwide defeat of proletarian forces, now the mass of humanity is on the move again. There are these rebellions from below breaking out all over the world. And the ruling groups have the challenge of how to contain this actual rebellion underway and the potential for it to bring down the system from, oh, no.

Tuesday, January 31, 2023

In 2023 Novel Resistance Compositions Will Be Expeditiously Crushed By Enhanced Repression

Dale made me aware of a video in which Gonzalo Lira outgasses nonsense from his pie hole in sufficient volume and density so as to subvert the credibility of everything else he has here-to-date said about Ukraine.  In this instance, he's so completely out of his depth and out of his mind talm'bout major riots coming to major American cities this spring in response to police violence. NOPE! Nyet! No way, no how! Nah Gah Happen....,

Ever since the Occupy Movement got b-slapped out of existence by a coordinated Federal clampdown, the Michael Brown uprisings, followed by the George Floyd uprisings, (A BLM/DNC Warren Buffet production) and finally the mass incarceration of every redneck peckerwood and his cousin who got caught up in January 6th Stop the Steal shenanigans - it has become conspicuously obvious to the casual observer that THE MAN is not fucking around and has not been for quite some time.

Everything else is - as they say - merely conversation.....,

TheIntercept  |  The recent wave of arrests are part and parcel of a “green scare,” which began in the 1990s and has seen numerous environmental and animal rights activists labeled and charged as terrorists on a federal level consistently for no more than minor property destruction. Yet the Atlanta cases mark the first use of a state domestic terrorism statute against either an environmental or anti-racist movement.

The 19 protesters are being charged under a Georgia law passed in 2017, which, according to the Republican state senator who introduced the bill, was intended to combat cases like the Boston Marathon bombing, Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting.

“During legislative debate over this law, the concern was raised that as written, the law was so broad that it could be used to prosecute Black Lives Matter activists blocking the highway as terrorists. The response was simply that prosecutors wouldn’t do that,” Kautz told me. “There are similar laws passed in many other states, and we believe that the existence of these laws on the books is a threat to democracy and the right to protest.”

The Georgia law is exceedingly broad. Domestic terrorism under the statute includes the destruction or disabling of ill-defined “critical infrastructure,” which can be publicly or privately owned, or “a state or government facility” with the intention to “alter, change, or coerce the policy of the government” or “affect the conduct of the government” by use of “destructive devices.” What counts as critical infrastructure here? A bank branch window? A police vehicle? Bulldozers deployed to raze the forest? What is a destructive device? A rock? A firework? And is not a huge swathe of activism the attempt to coerce a government to change policies?

Police affidavits on the arrest warrants of forest defenders facing domestic terror charges include the following as alleged examples of terrorist activity: “criminally trespassing on posted land,” “sleeping in the forest,” “sleeping in a hammock with another defendant,” being “known members” of “a prison abolitionist movement,” and aligning themselves with Defend the Atlanta Forest by “occupying a tree house while wearing a gas mask and camouflage clothing.”

It is for good reason that leftists, myself included, have challenged the expansion of anti-terror laws in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riots or other white supremacist attacks. Terrorism laws operate to name the state and capital’s ideological enemies; they will be reliably used against anti-capitalists, leftists, and Black liberationists more readily than white supremacist extremists with deep ties to law enforcement and the Republican right.

Since its passage in 2017, the Georgia domestic terrorism law has not resulted in a single conviction. As such, there has been no occasion to challenge the law’s questionable constitutionality. Chris Bruce, policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “the statute establishes overly broad, far-reaching limitations that restrict public dissent of the government and criminalizes violators with severe and excessive penalties.” He said of the forest defender terror charges that they are “wholly inapposite at worst and flimsy at best.”

“The state is attempting to innovate new repressive prosecution, and I think ultimately that will fail for them,” Sara, a 32-year-old service worker who lives by the imperiled forest and has been part of Stop Cop City since the movement began, told me.

Tuesday, January 03, 2023

Opposition To Globalization Has Long Been Classified As Domestic Violent Extremism


piie  |  This paper is about the critics of the “doers” of globalization. It describes who they are, where they came from, what they want, how economists, policymakers, and others might understand them better, and where globalization might head from here. Many critics are themselves strongly internationalist and want to see globalization proceed, but under different rules. Some, particularly the protesters in the streets, focus mainly on what is wrong with the world. But some of them put forward broad alternative visions and others offer detailed recommendations for alleviating the problems they see arising from status quo globalization. Most of them have roots in long-standing transnational advocacy efforts to protect human rights and the environment and reduce poverty around the world. What brings them together today is their shared concern that the process by which globalization’s rules are being written and implemented is undermining democracy and failing to spread the benefits broadly. This paper sketches the key issues and concerns that motivate the critics in a way that is broadly representative and intelligible to economists. It finds more resonance for the critics’ agenda in economics than they commonly recognize. And it attempts to capture the concerns of Southern as well as Northern critics and to analyze the issues that divide as well as bring them together. Finally, it evaluates those issues and alternative proposals on which even globalization enthusiasts and the critics might come together cooperatively.

greenwald |  “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1 Report from the Director of National Intelligence states that it was prepared “in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security—and was drafted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).” 

Its primary point is this: “The IC [intelligence community] assesses that domestic violent extremists (DVEs) who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.” While asserting that “the most lethal” of these threats is posed by “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent extremists (MVEs),” it makes clear that its target encompasses a wide range of groups from the left (Antifa, animal rights and environmental activists, pro-choice extremists and anarchists: “those who oppose capitalism and all forms of globalization”) to the right (sovereign citizen movements, anti-abortion activists and those deemed motivated by racial or ethnic hatreds).

The U.S. security state apparatus regards the agenda of “domestic violent extremists” as “derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment,” which includes “opposition to perceived economic, racial or social hierarchies.” In sum, to the Department of Homeland Security, an “extremist” is anyone who opposes the current prevailing ruling class and system for distributing power. Anyone they believe is prepared to use violence, intimidation or coercion in pursuit of these causes then becomes a “domestic violent extremist,” subject to a vast array of surveillance, monitoring and other forms of legal restrictions:

 

Thursday, September 01, 2022

World's Largest Purveyor Of State Sponsored Terrorism And Political Assassination

warontherocks |  today’s growing wave of assassination attempts has crossed ideologies. Certain adherents of the far left have been responsible for attempts on the Republican baseball practice and more recently Justice Kavanaugh. But the far-right is also active in this space and was responsible for the most recent successful high-level political assassination in the country: the killing of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, state senator of South Carolina, at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015. Jihadists often place prominent figures in their crosshairs, as demonstrated by a recently disrupted plot against George W. Bush. Even the more nascent male supremacist movement has its targets: A so-called “men’s rights activist” attacked the home of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas in July 2020, killing her son.

The emerging trend is due in no small part to the reemergence of so-called “accelerationism” as a distinct violent extremist strategy. For extremists seeking to sow chaos and speed up some cataclysmic societal collapse, high-profile politicians provide an attractive target, as symbols of the mainstream liberal political order. “We need to kill the HVT’s,” one poster wrote on Telegram in August 2019, using a military acronym for high-value target. “When a popular HVT is gunned down, it inspires hope and dreams.” The COVID pandemic then added fuel to the fire as public officials were blamed and then threatened for the lockdowns and enforced quarantines. Targets ranged from prominent health officials like cerebral National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, as well as many other lower-level state officials responsible for the imposition of these extraordinary public health measures. Fauci was forced into constant law enforcement protection because of threats against his life — which was only a prelude to the death threats and serial harassment that now routinely are directed against local and state election officials.

Political assassinations are uniquely suited to tear at the country’s social fabric. For starters, they force opposing politicians and voters into an apparently awkward dilemma between condemning hatred and violence and seeming to renege on their own political positions — a situation Democrats did not handle particularly well after the attempt on Kavanaugh’s life. As Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco stated in June in response to that attempted attack, “We can’t come together on this topic without acknowledging and condemning the appalling rise in violence that we have seen from a range of ideologies directed at public officials.” But they also risk dissuading good people, across the political spectrum, from running for public office and participating in a vibrant American democracy. Indeed, perhaps the most damning element of the January 6 commission hearings has been the broadcasting of the threats issued against everyday public servants, such as Georgia’s election workers. The Department of Justice recently announced it has opened around 110 federal criminal investigations into “contacts reported as hostile or harassing by the election community.” “A common refrain I hear from my members is that nobody is going to take this seriously until something bad happens, and we are all braced for the worst,” the National Association of State Election Directors executive director warned in recent written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Until recently, this was not a field you went into thinking it could cost you your life.”

Heightening the threat yet further is a growing tendency for assailants to use untraceable or even homemade weaponry as part of violent plots — as seen in the assassination of Abe, in which the assassin used a fully homemade shotgun to evade Japan’s stringent gun laws. The crude attack was reminiscent of failed drone attacks against political leaders in Venezuela and Iraq and may be indicative of an emerging era in which more widely accessible tools are weaponized in these strikes against individuals — again, regardless of the motivating ideology. Cruder technology lowers the barriers to entry for attackers, allowing even untrained or unprepared extremists — such as Zeldin’s assailant, who, despite being an Army veteran, used a personal protection device disguised as a cat-shaped keychain in his assault — to attempt serious plots. As Colin Clarke and Joseph Shelzi write, “The proliferation of emerging personal technologies like drones, 3-D-printed weapons, and other innovations will likely open the door for more attacks against high-profile figures in the future.”

We live in an age of heightened political tensions, when political decisions are often seen as existential crises, and where elections, therefore, carry perceived life-or-death stakes. With a midterm around the corner, a former president under investigation, and major upheavals occurring on hot-button issues such as abortion and gun control, extremists inclined to violence will be increasingly likely to lash out. The situation is only made more serious by the seeming consent a faction of the political right has offered to would-be assassins, including a Florida State House candidate who was recently expelled from Twitter for writing, “Under my plan, all Floridians will have permission to shoot FBI, IRS, ATF and all other feds on sight! Let freedom ring!” The conceit that fuels these would-be assassins’ fanaticism and feeds their egos poses a considerable and growing danger to civil servants and political figures across the political spectrum — at a time when mass shootings at schools, shopping malls, cinemas, and other public venues have already become an increasingly frequent occurrence. “The system was blinking red,” Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet famously told the 9/11 Commission describing the months before September 2001 — a sentiment which feels pertinent again now.

Sunday, May 01, 2022

Nina Jankowicz Designated "Minister Of Truth" In Preparation For World War III

jonathanturley  |  Many politicians and pundits are in full panic over Elon Musk’s threat to restore free speech values to Twitter.  While Hillary Clinton has called upon Europeans to step in to maintain such censorship and Barack Obama has called for U.S. regulations, the Biden Administration has created a new Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Homeland Security. It appointed an executive director, Nina Jankowicz, who is literally pitch perfect as an advocate for both corporate and state censorship.

It would have been hard to come up with a more Orwellian name short of the Ministry of Truth. However, the DGB needed a true believer to carry out the monitoring of political speech in the United States. It found that person in Jankowicz, who has long been an outspoken anti-free speech advocate.

Jankowicz was selected by the Biden Administration after years of pushing disinformation on the left while calling for censorship of the right.

Jankowicz previously argued that Congress should create new laws to block mockery of women online by reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and including “provisions against online gender-based harassment.”

Jankowicz testified before British House of Parliament last year about “gender misinformation” being a “national security concern” and a threat to democracy requiring government censorship.

She has demanded that both tech companies and government should work together using “creativity and technological prowess to make a pariah of online misogyny.”

On the Hunter Biden laptop, Jankowicz pushed the false narrative that it was a false story and that “we should view it as a Trump campaign product.” She continued to spread that disinformation, including tweeting a link to a news article that she said cast “yet more doubt on the provenance of the NY Post’s Hunter Biden story.” In another tweet, she added “not to mention that the emails don’t need to be altered to be part of an influence campaign. Voters deserve that context, not a [fairy] tale about a laptop repair shop.”

She even cites the author of the Steele Dossier as a guide for how to deal with disinformation. In August 2020, Jankowicz tweeted “Listened to this last night – Chris Steele (yes THAT Chris Steele) provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinfo. Worth a listen.”

She also joined the panic over the Musk threat to reintroduce free speech values to Twitter. In an interview on NPR, she stated “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities.”

 

Sunday, February 20, 2022

The Mask Wars Have Polarized American Society

tabletmag  |  Recent days have witnessed the emergence of a new rift in our pandemic debate. Strikingly, this time the dispute is not just partisan, but also splitting the Democratic Party. While Democratic governors appear to see where political winds are blowing, some blue cities are moving in the opposite direction. And many states that are dropping adult mask mandates are retaining them for kids, resulting in the absurd prospect of indefinite masking for a less vulnerable population for whom masks have more significant downsides.

How did partisan warfare over mask mandates become such a central feature of the pandemic? The familiar answer is that the mask wars are just another symptom of national polarization. When Donald Trump casually denigrated cloth masks as president, the stage was set for a Democratic backlash—turning masks into not just a public health measure, but also a talismanic symbol of virtue signaling on one side and a rallying cry about freedom for the other. But polarization is only part of the story. Mask mandates are a microcosm of a key failure of our pandemic response: the poor climate for public discourse fostered by an elite culture whose overconfidence led to a prolonged strategy of undermining open discussion in a vain attempt to prove that complex questions could have only one universal and immutable answer.

From the beginning of the pandemic, technocratic elites have offered us a dubious bill of goods. Aided and abetted by the media and by many academics, politicians proffered—indeed, likely believed—the idea that the pandemic would go away if everyone just did as they were told. “If everyone wore a mask for two weeks …” became a telltale refrain, a claim that was neither true nor possible. Pundits celebrated President Joe Biden’s ill-fated “hundred days of masking,” which promised “just 100 days to mask, not forever.” This habit of exaggeration and blind optimism among elites helps explain gaffes like Biden’s bizarre claim during his campaign that every single pandemic death could have been averted by better leadership.

Choices needed to be made, and leaders got some right (accelerating vaccine research) and others wrong (failing to protect the elderly). In other instances, they missed opportunities, failing to strengthen policies like sick leave that would improve our resilience—a topic almost entirely avoided by political elites, who prefer to blame the pandemic’s consequences on a handful of dissenters. But in acting as if their policy choices came from scientific omniscience, elites minimized the messiness of the real world—in which chance, trust, and voluntary decisions all play a crucial role.

Today, the plerophory of elites—born of hubris and unbridled self confidence—is bearing bitter fruit. For some, the overselling of policy has led them to religiouslike zeal and dogmatism about particular interventions. For others, it has led to a complete loss of faith in institutions like the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH, which depend on public trust in order to fulfill their missions. Masking was simultaneously described as a panaceabetter than a vaccine, in the memorable words of the former CDC director—yet it wasn’t good enough to quickly reopen many closed schools, even given that an unvaccinated child faced lower risk than a vaccinated grandparent. The arbitrariness of the resulting policy recommendations and mandates is etched into the many photographs of masked kids, sometimes posed with unmasked politicians, that will likely come to represent much of our badly flawed pandemic response.

Thursday, February 17, 2022

Trudeau's Emergency Overreaction Brings Unwanted Scrutiny To Similar DHS Contingencies...,

jonathanturley  |  With the emergency powers, Trudeau can now prohibit travel, public assemblies, conduct widespread arrests, and block donations for the truckers. This also includes freezing bank accounts and ramping up police surveillance and enforcement.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association objected:

“The federal government has not met the threshold necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act. This law creates a high and clear standard for good reason: the Act allows government to bypass ordinary democratic processes. This standard has not been met. The Emergencies Act can only be invoked when a situation ‘seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada’ & when the situation ‘cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.’”

Such voices have been drowned out by media demonizing the truckers as racists or insurrectionists.

As civil libertarians, it is less important what people are saying as their right to say it. That includes people who speak through their financial support or donations. Millions in such donations were blocked by GoFundMe or the Canadian government in this crackdown.

It is often tempting to ignore the implications of such extreme measures by focusing on your disagreement with a given group. To understand the scope of this law you can simply look to how widely revered movements could be treated under the same provisions.  For example, the Civil Rights marchers also engaged in civil disobedience in shutting down bridges and occupying spaces.  As I stated on Monday,

“Now, when you put all of that together, you’ve extinguished the ability of thousands, perhaps even millions of people to express themselves through a form of civil disobedience. And according to Prime Minister Trudeau’s definition, he could have shut down the Civil Rights Movement. He could have arrested Martin Luther King. He could have arrested any number of figures that we now celebrate today as visionaries.”

On Tuesday, I returned to that same point and noted that Canada could easily use the same law against the marchers and Dr. King today. Trudeau’s government could cut off all funding for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) while arresting figures like Dr. King. I noted that “I thought [the use of the Emergency Act] was quite excessive. This is an act of civil disobedience. That is a standard tactic of groups going back to the civil rights movement and even earlier to block bridges and streets, to do what was referred to as — quote — ‘good trouble.’ By this rationale, they could have cracked down on the Civil Rights Movement. They could have arrested Martin Luther King.”

The “they” is clearly the Canadian government in its use of these emergency powers today — not a reference to arrests in the past in the United States.

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Canadian Emergency Powers Declaration - A Dry Run For What This Way Comes?

DHS been squaring up on you stiff-necked hard-headed busters for a minute now - because any minute now - the clampdown will kick off in earnest here in the homeland.

CISA |  CISA’s Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation (MDM) team is charged with building national resilience to mis-, dis-, and malinformation and foreign influence activities. Through these efforts, CISA helps the American people understand the scope and scale of MDM activities targeting elections and critical infrastructure, and enables them to take actions to mitigate associated risks. The MDM team was formerly known as the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF). 

January 31, 2022: Today, CISA released a set of four election security training videos to enhance the awareness and importance of securing the Nation’s election infrastructure. The training videos provide an overview of CISA’s role in election security, the importance of building public trust through secure practices, the risks associated with ransomware and resources to mitigate them, and the risks associated with phishing and resources to combat them.

January 27, 2022: The Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) and the Subsector Coordinating Council’s (SCC) Joint Mis/Disinformation Working Group released the Rumor Control Page Start-Up Guide and the MDM Planning and Incident Response Guide for Election Officials as voluntary tools to assist State and local election officials prepare for and respond to risks of MDM.

Tuesday, February 15, 2022

Trudeau Sayyin It Don't Mean Much, But Now That His Ukro-Nazi Testicles Have Spoken...,

canada |  Around the world, liberal democracies have been facing serious and sustained threats.

We may have thought – we may have hoped – that Canada would be spared. Over the past two and a half weeks, we have learned that it is not.

This occupation and these blockades are causing serious harm to our economy, to our democratic institutions, and to Canada’s international standing.

The world’s confidence in Canada as a place to invest and do business is being undermined.

These illegal blockades are doing great damage to Canada’s economy and to our reputation as a reliable trading partner.

The blockade of the Ambassador Bridge has affected about $390 million in trade each day. This bridge supports 30 percent of all trade by road between Canada and the United States, our most important trading partner.

In Coutts, Alberta, about $48 million in daily trade has been affected by the blockades.

In Emerson, Manitoba, about $73 million in daily trade has been affected by the blockades.

Those costs are real. They threaten businesses big and small. And they threaten the livelihoods of Canadian workers, just as we are all working so hard to recover from the economic damage caused by COVID-19.

We fought tooth and nail to protect Canada’s privileged trading relationship with the United States during the NAFTA negotiations and in the face of the illegal and unjustified 232 tariffs.

We will not allow that hard-won success to be compromised. The world is watching. Our jobs, our prosperity, and our livelihoods are at stake.

That is why our government is taking action. We are resolute and determined. These illegal blockades must and will end.

As part of invoking the Emergencies Act, we are announcing the following immediate actions:

First: we are broadening the scope of Canada’s anti-money laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use. These changes cover all forms of transactions, including digital assets such as cryptocurrencies.

The illegal blockades have highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms, and some of the payment service providers they use, are not fully captured under the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act.

Our banks and financial institutions are already obligated to report to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, or FINTRAC. As of today, all crowdfunding platforms, and the payment service providers they use, must register with FINTRAC and must report large and suspicious transactions to FINTRAC.

This will help mitigate the risk that these platforms receive illicit funds; increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by FINTRAC; and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement into these illegal blockades.

We are making these changes because we know that these platforms are being used to support illegal blockades and illegal activity, which is damaging the Canadian economy.

The government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FINTRAC on a permanent basis.

Second: the government is issuing an order with immediate effect, under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations. This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.

Third: we are directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades and report to the RCMP or CSIS.

As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account of an individual or business affiliated with these illegal blockades without a court order. In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability.

Federal government institutions will have a new broad authority to share relevant information with banks and other financial service providers to ensure that we can all work together to put a stop to the funding of these illegal blockades.

This is about following the money. This is about stopping the financing of these illegal blockades. We are today serving notice: if your truck is being used in these protests, your corporate accounts will be frozen. The insurance on your vehicle will be suspended. Send your semi-trailers home. The Canadian economy needs them to be doing legitimate work, not to be illegally making us all poorer.

We are announcing these measures after careful reflection. I spoke directly with the heads of Canadian banks and I would like to commend them for doing their part to uphold Canadian laws and Canadian democracy, and to protect our economy.

Team Canada has stood together over the past two years. We have trusted one another. We have leaned on one another. 

What we are facing today is a threat to our democratic institutions, to our economy, and to peace, order, and good government in Canada. This is unacceptable. It cannot stand and it will not stand.

What Is France To Do With The Thousands Of Soldiers Expelled From Africa?

SCF  |    Russian President Vladimir Putin was spot-on this week in his observation about why France’s Emmanuel Macron is strutting around ...