off-guardian | James Corbett is likely not long for the YouTube world, having received his second warning his channel is on the chopping block.
There are still many platforms on which you can follow his work (detailed in the above video), most importantly his website. We do suggest you subscribe either via email or RSS. (Also here is a list of Corbett’s videos that YouTube has already removed).
For creators out there, this is a timely reminder: ALWAYS have
hardcopy back-ups of your work and sign up to multiple platforms. The
indy platforms are growing in both number and size. From BitChute to
LBRY.tv to social networks like Gab and Parler.
Corbett is not the only independent media facing increased censorship
and denial of service. Whitney Webb, a great independent researcher and
journalist who has written for many outlets and runs UnlimitedHangout.com, is also in danger of having her Patreon shut down.
Likewise, in just the last few weeks, The Last American Vagabond has had both its twitter shut down and its Patreon put “on review”.
Worrying signs. It looks like we might be in for a spring cull of the
alternate media herd. Rest assured, we at OffG are already looking into
alternate options, should Patreon (or PayPal) decide we are also persona non grata.
greenwald |Not even two months into their reign as the majority
party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key
Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship
of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed
how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social
media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike
— including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for
the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already
violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.
Now they
are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee
that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies
now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets,
including Fox News, from the airwaves.
Since when is it the role of the U.S. Government to arbitrate and
enforce precepts of “journalistic integrity”? Unless you believe in the
right of the government to regulate and control what the press says — a
power which the First Amendment explicitly prohibits — how can anyone be
comfortable with members of Congress arrogating unto themselves the
power to dictate what media outlets are permitted to report and control
how they discuss and analyze the news of the day?
But what House
Democrats are doing here is far more insidious than what is revealed by
that creepy official announcement. Two senior members of that Committee,
Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Silicon-Valley) and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) also
sent their own letters
to seven of the nation’s largest cable providers — Comcast, AT&T,
Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice — as well as to digital
distributors of cable news (Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu)
demanding to know, among other things, what those cable distributors did
to prevent conservative “disinformation” prior to the election and
after — disinformation, they said, that just so happened to be spread by
the only conservative cable outlets: Fox, Newsmax and OANN.
In
case there was any doubt about their true goal — coercing these cable
providers to remove all cable networks that feature conservative voices,
including Fox (just as their counterparts on that Committee want to ban
right-wing voices from social media) — the House Democrats in their
letter said explicitly what they are after: namely, removal of those
conservative outlets by these cable providers:
greenwald | Perhaps the most significant blow to the maximalist insurrection/coup
narrative took place inside the Senate on Thursday. Ever since January
6, those who were not referring to the riot as a “coup attempt” — as
though the hundreds of protesters intended to overthrow the most
powerful and militarized government in history — were required to refer
to it instead as an “armed insurrection.”
This formulation was crucial not only for maximizing fear levels about the Democrats’ adversaries but also, as I’ve documented
previously, because declaring an “armed insurrection” empowers the
state with virtually unlimited powers to act against the citizenry. Over
and over, leading Democrats and their media allies repeated this phrase
like some hypnotic mantra:
But this was completely false. As I detailed
several weeks ago, so many of the most harrowing and widespread media
claims about the January 6 riot proved to be total fabrications.
This -- "Ron Johnson, Senator from Wisconsin, by way of Moscow" -- is as batshit crazy and as much conspiratorial derangement as anything from QAnon, and far more damaging since it's mainstream, but because it's on a corporate outlet, it doesn't count:pic.twitter.com/G90LfPRoHF
A
pro-Trump mob didnot bash Office Brian Sicknick’s skull in with a fire
extinguisher. No protester brought zip-ties with them as some
premeditated plot to kidnap members of Congress (two rioters found them
on a table inside). There’s no evidence anyone intended to assassinate
Mike Pence, Mitt Romney or anyone else.
Yet the maximalist
narrative of an attempted coup or armed insurrection is so crucial to
Democrats — regardless of whether it is true — that pointing out these
facts deeply infuriates them. A television clip of mine from last week
went viral
among furious liberals calling me a fascism supporter even though it
did nothing but point out the indisputable facts that other than Brian
Sicknick, whose cause of death remains unknown, the only people who died
at the Capitol riot were Trump supporters, and that there are no known
cases of the rioters deliberately killing anyone
(Two FBI operatives have since anonymously leaked that it is looking at a “suspect” who may have engaged with Sicknick in a way that ultimately contributed to his death. But nothing still is known; Sicknick’s mother claims he died of a stroke while his brother says it was from pepper spray; and all of this is worlds away
from the endlessly repeated media claim that a bloodthirsty pro-Trump
mob savagely bashed his head in with a fire extinguisher.)
What we know for sure is that no Trump supporter fired any weapon inside the Capitol and that the FBI seized a grand total of zero
firearms from those it arrested that day — a rather odd state of
affairs for an “armed insurrection,” to put that mildly. In questioning
from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Thursday’s hearing, a senior FBI
official, Jill Sanborn, acknowledged this key fact:
(The “one lady” who died referred to by this FBI official was Ashli
Babbitt, an unarmed Trump supporter who was killed when she was shot
point blank in the neck inside the Capitol on January 6 by an armed
Capitol Police Officer).
The key point to emphasize here is that
threats and dangers are not binary: they either exist or they are fully
illusory. They reside on a spectrum. To insist that they be discussed
rationally, soberly and truthfully is not to deny the existence
of the threat itself. One can demand a rational and fact-based
understanding of the magnitude of the threat revealed by the January 6
riot without denying that there is any danger at all.
Those who
denounced the excesses of McCarthyism were not insisting that there were
no Communists in government; those denouncing the excesses of the
Clinton administration’s attempts to seize more surveillance power after
the Oklahoma City courting bombing were not denying that some
anti-government militias may do violence again; those who objected to
the protracted and unhinged assault on civil liberties by the
Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations after 9/11 were not arguing that
there were no Muslim extremists intent on committing violence.
The
argument then, and the argument now, is that the threat was being
deliberately inflated and exaggerated, and fears stoked and exploited,
both for political gain and to justify the placement of more and more
powers in the hands of the state in the name of stopping these threats.
That is the core formula of authoritarianism — to place the population
in a state of such acute fear that it acquiesces to any assertion of
power which security state agencies and politicians demand and which
they insist are necessary to keep everyone safe.
alt-market | This phase of the crisis will happen within a month to two months of
any national shutdown. Red states will refuse to comply. State
politicians, even if they are part of the agenda, will be too scared to
try to enforce federal mandates. They will be compelled by the
conservative citizenry to keep their states open. Most people in these
areas will ignore mandates.
This will lead to a red state fiscal boom, at least in the beginning,
as business continues to thrive in conservative areas while blue states
suffer under medical tyranny. Companies will flee leftist states by the
thousands and move to any states that remain open and accommodating.
This will be short lived, though.
Biden and the federal government will try to retaliate, first by
cutting off federal funds to any state that does not bow to their power
and refusing to give stimulus to any businesses that relocate. Blue
states will be flush with stimulus cash while red states will be forced
to reduce or eliminate welfare programs and some pension funds.
Of course, the government has no real money to give, they only have
our tax dollars and the fiat that the central bank creates from thin
air. The likely response will be that conservative states and citizens
will simply stop paying federal taxes. Another reaction will be red
states taking over federal lands and utilizing the resources on those
lands to rejuvenate their industry and make up for the federal dollars
lost.
What this amounts to is a soft secession of conservative regions,
which will eventually lead to federal attempts at physical intervention
(the economic war will turn into a shooting war). The argument from the
establishment will be that conservatives are putting the rest of the
country “at risk”, that we are “selfish” and “literally killing
grandma”.
Complete Erasure Of Conservatives From The Internet
I expect Biden and Big Tech to further pursue their current witch
hunt against conservative voices, far beyond what we have already seen.
In order to win a fight with conservatives they will first have to
silence us so that our side of the argument is never seen or considered
by the rest of the population. If they allow us to be heard, we will
undoubtedly win because facts and moral reason are on our side.
It is hard to demonize people that simply want to be free.
But, if you can silence conservatives and moderates, then the
narrative can be rigged. The establishment spin doctors can tell people
that we don’t actually want freedom; we want something else, something
evil and nefarious. They can tell people we are “fascists”, and that we
are “racists” and that we actually want tyranny. Who is going to tell
the public otherwise when we are removed from all available platforms
and our websites are booted off service providers due to “dangerous
ideas”?
Gun Control Madness
I know that some people think that leftists under Biden will not try
to carry out a widespread gun crackdown and that much of the current
talk is merely hollow rhetoric. I disagree. I think the globalists are
going for broke, and they need to get as many combat capable firearms as
they can from Americans soon. Democrats will push hard for legislation
like HR 127.
They will then offer a “compromise” with Republicans and the NRA,
cutting out portions of the bill. This will be a trick to make the
public think that the new restrictions are a “reasonable compromise”.
They think we will breath a sigh of relief and say “Well, at least they
didn’t take everything…”
The gun grabbers are delusional.
What will really happen is millions of gun owners will pass local and
state laws negating federal restrictions. No conservatives are going to
give up their gun rights, allow red flag laws to be implemented or
allow high capacity firearms to be limited; not at this stage in the
game.
charleshughsmith | Even as the chirpy happy-talk of a return to normal floods the airwaves, what nobody dares
acknowledge is that "normal" for a rising number of Americans is the social depression
of downward mobility and social defeat.
Downward mobility is not a new trend--it's simply accelerating.
As this RAND Corporation report documents,
(
Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018)
$50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of
American households over the past 45 years.
"The $50 trillion
transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy,
not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and
power wasn't inevitable; it was a choice--a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose
to implement since 1975.
We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow
CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with
the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to
accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid.
We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor.
For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the
rich and powerful above those of the American people."
I've been digging into downward mobility and social depression for years:
Are You Really Middle Class?
The reality is that the middle class has been reduced to the sliver just below the
top 5%--if we use the standards of the prosperous 1960s as a baseline.
Downward mobility excels in creating and distributing what I term social defeat:
In my lexicon, social defeat is the spectrum of anxiety, insecurity, chronic stress, fear and
powerlessness that accompanies declining financial security and social status.
“Even though it sounds like a
paranoid fever dream- a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging
across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to
influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and
control the flow of information.” (Lest you think that this was a subversion of democracy, Ball informs us that “they were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”)
Another conclusion you might come to is that many of the political
figures whom you believed were serving those who elected them into
office, actually serve the interests of a clique of technocrats and
billionaires lusting over the deconstruction of western civilization
under something called “a Great Reset”. Where this was brushed off as an
unfounded conspiracy theory not long ago, even Canada’s Deputy Prime
Minister (and neo-Nazi supporting Rhodes Scholar) Chrystia Freeland decided to become a Trustee of the World Economic Forum
just weeks ago. In this role, Freeland joins fellow Oxford technocrat
Mark Carney in their mutual endeavor to be a part of the new movement to
decarbonize civilization and make feudalism cool again.
Lastly, you might notice that your having arrived at these
conclusions is itself increasingly becoming a form of thought-crime
punishable in a variety of distasteful ways elaborated by a series of
unprecedented new emergency regulations that propose extending the
definition of “terrorism”. Those implicated under the new definition
will be those broad swaths of citizens of western nations who don’t
agree with the operating beliefs of the ruling oligarchy.
Already a 60 day review of the U.S. military is underway to purge the armed forces of all such “thought criminals” while McCarthyite legislation has been drafted to cleanse all government jobs of “conspiracy theorists”.
Another startling announcement from the National Terrorism Advisory Bulletin that domestic terrorists include: “ideologically-motivated
violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental
authority [and] perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”
While not yet fully codified into law (though it will be
if not nipped in the bud soon), you can be sure that things are
certainly moving fast as, before our very eyes, the right to free speech
is being torn to shreds by means of censorship across social media and
the internet, cancelling all opinions deemed unacceptable to the ruling
class.
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 NYTimes, 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.
NYTimes | As a former
overseas operative who has struggled both on the side of insurgents and
against them, the past few days have brought a jarring realization: We
may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency
within our own country, perpetrated by our own countrymen. Three weeks
ago, it would have been unthinkable that the United States might be a
candidate for a comprehensive counterinsurgency program. But that is
where we are.
Overrepresented among
the ranks of angry but ordinary citizens who stormed the Capitol on Jan.
6 were others, hardly ordinary, committed to violent extremism:
the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, “Christian”
national chauvinists, white supremacists and QAnon fantasists, among
others. Some of these groups may have planned their incursion in
advance, but they could not have breached the Capitol if not for the
wave of populist anger that swept them forward and over the barricades.
Given
impetus and, they believed, political cover by former President Donald
Trump, the capering idiots who filmed themselves in the Capitol seemed
to think they were untouchable. They may be easy to identify and arrest
now, but there are others — well armed, dangerous and now forewarned —
who had a glimpse of what may be possible in the political environment
Mr. Trump created.
There has long
existed in this country a large, religiously conservative segment of the
population, disproportionately (though not entirely) rural and
culturally marginalized, that believes with some reason it is being
eclipsed by a politically and culturally ascendant urban coalition of
immigrants, minorities and the college-educated secular elites of tech
and mainstream media. That coalition, in their eyes, abridges their
religious freedoms, disparages and ‘cancels’ their most cherished
beliefs, seeks to impose ‘socialism’ and is ultimately prepared to seize
their guns.
This, in very general terms, is the core segment of the nation that has
been unified, championed and politically energized by Donald Trump.
Bridging the urban-rural cultural and
political gap with facts, tolerance and empathetic sincerity is a vital
national project, but one which has become effectively impossible. The
sincere belief, reportedly held by a majority
of Republicans, that the Democrats stole the recent national election
through massive fraud has taken the longstanding fears and resentments
of a large section of our fellow citizens to a new and qualitatively
different level.
In context, their
fury is understandable. If I believed as they do, I would be marching
with them. The Big Lie perpetrated by Mr. Trump and his allies in the
political class and among large elements of the right-wing media,
preposterous as it may be, will have incalculable implications not just
for long-term political comity in this country, but also for national
security.
The violent demonstrations
feared for Inauguration Week, in the face of extraordinary security
precautions, didn’t materialize. Relatively few of our citizens would
embark on a program of sustained violence in any case. But if popular
anger has crested, left in its wake is a bitter, simmering restiveness,
one that will provide a nurturing environment for the worst among us —
the extremists who seek a social apocalypse. Their numbers may be
relatively small, but even a small slice of a nation of over three
hundred million is substantial. Without a program of effective national
action, they and their new adherents are capable of producing endemic
political violence of a sort not seen in this country since
Reconstruction.
The challenge facing
us now is one of counterinsurgency. Though one may recoil at the
thought, it provides the most useful template for action, which must
consist of three elements.
NYTimes | The Senate Intelligence Committee will
examine the influence of Russia and other foreign powers on
antigovernment extremist groups like the ones that helped mobilize the
deadly attack on the Capitol last month, the panel’s new chairman said
in an interview this week.
As the
executive branch undertakes a nationwide manhunt to hold members of the
mob accountable, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virgina, said it would
be vitally important for the influential committee to do a “significant
dive” into antigovernment extremism in the United States, the ties
those groups have to organizations in Europe and Russia’s amplification
of their message.
With the power-sharing agreement
between Democrats and Republicans in place, Mr. Warner took over this
week as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after four
years as its vice chairman. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Warner
outlined his priorities, such as the spread of disinformation, the rise
of antigovernment extremist groups, Chinese domination of key
technologies, Russia’s widespread hacking of government computer
networks and strengthening watchdog protections in the intelligence
agencies.
The White House has ordered
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to work with the
Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. on a new analysis of the
threat from domestic extremist groups and the support they receive from
foreign powers or overseas organizations.
The issue is a difficult one for the
intelligence community. By law, the most influential agencies, including
the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, are not allowed to collect
information domestically. But Avril D. Haines, the director of national
intelligence, has some oversight of the intelligence arms of the F.B.I.
and the Department of Homeland Security, which can collect information
domestically. Other intelligence agencies look at foreign attempts to
influence American groups.
While
preliminary work by Ms. Haines’s office is underway, administration
officials said that analysis was unlikely to be completed before April.
But there appears to be significant interest in moving quickly on the
issue in the Senate. At Ms. Haines’s confirmation hearing last month, a number of lawmakers raised the subject of domestic extremist groups.
The
Senate Intelligence Committee will examine both white supremacist
groups on the right, and antifascist, or antifa, groups on the left,
though Mr. Warner was quick to say that the danger the groups posed was
not the same. “I don’t want to make a false equivalency argument here,”
he said, “because the vast preponderance of them are on the right.”
nakedcapitalism | Something else is going on beneath the actual events, for sure. I happened across this story and took a gander at the WSB reddit board and was blown away by the amount of energy there — it was lively and real — something so foreign in an age of sleuths, slights and deception. It does not matter that what was being done would have minimal overall impact on HFs or the financial system in the grand scheme of things. All that matters was people came together spontaneously to do something with no regard for the consequences. And something did happen. Some brokerages halted trading of GME and other affected companies, and it drew quite the media attention as well as a flutter in congress. Maybe it is no big deal as Yves seems to think, but I disagree.
Consider for a moment that this was a somewhat random collection of people (and maybe some big money too) uniting for something that is foolish and self-defeating. People who can afford not to lose, and yet still choose to do so.
Consider also that social media, tech companies, and corporate interests are all geared to measure and predict public sentiment, or further, as for public relations, to shape it. This is predicated upon the continual cycle of researching, organizing, and staging an event (ie product release, new policy, crises) that the public is primed to react to, and upon the assumption that people will generally seek their own interest and well being, often irrationally.
What happens when people act spontaneously (without some widely publicized event or first mover), in tandem, against their own interest and well being? Obviously some people will stand to gain and some to lose. That’s not the point. What is, is that a good chunk of people, bought into their own game with no regard for how it ought to be played, and in the process they (for that moment) changed the rules. And for once they moved and everyone else reacted.
FORGET THE ARTICLE - THE REAL VALUE IS IN THE COMMENTS - OF WHICH THIS IS ONE
thehill |Online messaging platform Discord on Wednesday banned the r/WallStreetBets
(WSB) server, which became the center for discussions among amateur
online traders who fueled an unexpected surge in GameStop’s stock this
week.
A Discord
spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Hill that the decision to
remove the server was due to users sharing “hateful and discriminatory
content after repeated warnings,” adding that it “did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.”
“The
server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time
due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines,
including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading
misinformation,” the spokesperson added.
The statement went on to say, “Discord welcomes a broad variety of
personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to
college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring
this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal
activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.”
This comes after Discord in the days after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol banned a server called “The Donald,” a pro-Trump community linked to banned subreddit r/The_Donald and TheDonald.win.
theverge |Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organizedcampaigns
to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s
App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a
one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it
back up to nearly four stars.
Jesus Christ they really are going all in to reveal the extent of the cabal that runs this country and rigs the rules https://t.co/w0tSQypp9Z
Robinhood came under intense scrutiny on Thursday, after the stock trading app announced it would block purchases of GameStop, AMC, and other stocks
made popular by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and some users have
already replaced their deleted one-star reviews with new ones to make
their anger heard.
RT | A popular stock trading chat group has been booted off Facebook
due to alleged violations of its “sexual exploitation” rules, claims the
page’s founder, who accused “major institutions” of trying to avenge
the GameStop debacle.
The Robinhood Stock
Traders group boasted more than 157,000 members before it was taken
offline on Wednesday, its 23-year-old founder, Allen Tran, told Reuters, adding that the social media giant cited its policies surrounding “adult sexual exploitation.” A notification of the ban seen by Reuters included no further reasoning for what prompted the move.
The page has no formal affiliation with the stock trading app of the same name.
Tran,
however, maintains that he has never seen explicit or sexual content on
the page, arguing instead that the group was targeted by “major institutions”
after members racked up thousands of dollars from trades first proposed
in Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets community, which has driven a dramatic
price surge in certain heavily shorted stocks, namely those of GameStop,
AMC, BlackBerry and Nokia.
“The major institutions are
attempting to silence our community. We are positively impacting
people’s lives and they are attacking our group because we are more
powerful than them,” Tran wrote in a Facebook post after the group’s ban, arguing “there is power in masses.”
theintercept |Elly Page had never seen anything like
what’s happened in recent days. A senior legal adviser at the
International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, Page has been tracking the
proliferation of anti-protest bills across the U.S. since Donald Trump
became president in 2017. “The number of bills we have seen in the past
three weeks is unprecedented,” she said.
Since the day of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, at
least nine states have introduced 14 anti-protest bills. The bills,
which vary state by state, contain a dizzying array of provisions that
serve to criminalize participation in disruptive protests. The measures
range from barring demonstrators from public benefits or government jobs
to offering legal protections to those who shoot or run over
protesters. Some of the proposals would allow protesters to be held
without bail and criminalize camping. A few bills seek to prevent local
governments from defunding police.
The pushes by close to a fifth of state legislatures are part of a pattern that began to pick up speed after the summer’s uprisings
in response to the police killing of George Floyd, which in many
communities included significant property damage. In a handful of
states, lawmakers did what they often do: introduced new legislation —
however unnecessary — to show that they were responding to their
constituents’ concerns.
The rate of new bills being offered sped up dramatically this month as lawmakers kicked off their legislative sessions
at the very moment that Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Bills quickly arose in Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota,
Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island.
“There has generally been an uptick at the beginning of odd-numbered
years, when most states begin their biennial legislative sessions. But
this year beats prior recent years,” Page said in an email. Since
January 1, she noted that 11 state legislatures have introduced 17
bills, including those filed before the Capitol insurrection. “Compare
that to 0 during the same period in 2020, 9 in 2019, 5 in 2018, and 13
in 2017,” she said, adding that the 2017 spike was mostly due to North
Dakota responding to that winter’s Standing Rock protests.
Because of state legislatures’ part-time schedules, most legislative
sessions were over by late last summer, leaving insufficient time to
pass bills that responded to the uprisings against police brutality. “We
expected to see some bills this month, as state legislatures
reconvened, but the number of bills and their severity is still
shocking,” she said.
In Florida, lawmakers have latched on to the insurrection at the
Capitol to justify a bill they’d been working on for months. “Lawmakers
may be trying to take advantage of the moment and the visuals of the
violent and destructive Capitol scene, to make their case — to the
public and to fellow lawmakers — that these draconian new measures are
necessary,” said Page.
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.
mtracey | There was no real “coup attempt,” despite incessant politician and media histrionics to that effect. Just a pitiful outburst that was quickly dispersed.
It was clear
within about ten minutes of the intrusion that the most severe
consequences would stem not from the incident itself, but the
deliberately-stoked over-reaction. The bipartisan political and media
class, whether cynically or sincerely, is broadcasting their steadfast
conviction that this was something like a “MAGA Terrorist Insurrection” —
which is literally how it’s being described on CNN. Under such
allegedly extreme circumstances, of course extreme remedial action is
going to be demanded.
Few
entities capitulate to upswells of political hysteria more reliably
than the tech companies. Knowing that there will soon be a Democratic
presidential administration and Congress to appease, they launched this
week what is the most drastic corporate censorship offensive in modern
history. Not only was Trump banished from Facebook, Instagram, and
Twitter — the latter being his primary communications platform (for
better or worse) — multiple high-profile Trump allies were likewise
purged. Steve Bannon was nuked from YouTube. Trump and his supporters
are being neutralized online not because he currently poses any kind of
bonafide “threat” to the Republic, but because his enemies are desperate
for revenge. And they have been gifted with a perfect “crisis” that
will justify their getting it.
gizmodo | In the wake of the violent insurrection at
the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone
researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users
across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe
haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved
into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.
The researcher, who asked to be referred to by their Twitter handle, @donk_enby,
began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of
the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating”
evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab,
among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the
insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to
overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power.
Hoping to create a lasting public record for future researchers to sift
through, @donk_enby began by archiving the posts from that day. The
scope of the project quickly broadened, however, as it became
increasingly clear that Parler was on borrowed time. Apple and Google
announced that Parler would be removed from their app stores because it
had failed to properly moderate posts that encouraged violence and
crime. The final nail in the coffin came Saturday when Amazon announced
it was pulling Parler’s plug.
Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99 percent of its content. In a tweet
early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler
video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded
to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this data tranche, now more than 56 terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed that the raw video files include GPS metadata pointing to exact locations of where the videos were taken.
@donk_enby later shared a screenshot
showing the GPS position of a particular video, with coordinates in
latitude and longitude.
The privacy
implications are obvious, but the copious data may also serve as a
fertile hunting ground for law enforcement. Federal and local
authorities have arrested dozens of suspects in recent days accused of
taking part in the Capitol riot, where a Capitol police officer, Brian
Sicknick, was fatally wounded after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher.
@donk_enby
describes herself as hacker, in the sense that she’s “someone with a
creative, but skeptical attitude toward technology,” to paraphrase a
definition offered by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe’s largest hacker
association. “I want this to be a big middle finger to those who say
hacking shouldn’t be political,” she said. @donk_enby work has aided
other researchers, including one at New York University’s Center for
Cybersecurity.
@donk_enby, whose efforts are documented on the website ArchiveTeam.org, said the data will eventually be hosted by the Internet Archive. (The two sites are not affiliated.)
caitlinjohnstone | Patriot Act 2.0 will be rolled out
with a lot of mindless bleating about white supremacists and fighting
fascism and the actual policies and laws put into place will have
virtually nothing to do with any of those things. It will be geared at
preventing the revolutionary changes that need to be pushed for via
grassroots activism in the United States.
Listening
to US politicians and pundits the last few years you’d assume it’s been
raining actual 9/11s and Pearl Harbors in America 24/7.
“Our democracyhas
been attacked!” screamed the political establishment that just forced
you to choose between Donald Trump and Democrat Donald Trump for
president.
Saying there’s been an attack on American democracy is like saying there’s been an attack on Kazakhstan’s fjords.
Liberals
learned the words “coup” and “insurrection” like five seconds ago and
now they are academic experts on both of these things.
The
narrative managers’ ability to move liberals and progressives from
“Defund the police” to “MOAR POLICING” in just a few months was even
more impressive than their ability to move them from “Believe Women” and
#MeToo to “Tara Reade is a lying grifter”.
Here’s how politicians, media and government could eliminate conspiracy theories if they really want to:
To
support the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of
monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more and more global control over
human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens
to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is self-destructive.
“Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority
of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to
create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically
inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them,” Wall Street Journal reports.
Did you know that Biden has often boasted about being the original author of the US Patriot Act?
The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted
that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of
the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow
its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write
the whole entire thing in a week.
This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:
“Months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, [then-Senator Joe] Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995.
It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be
used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of ‘terrorism’ that
could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S.
military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent
detention of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for
National Security Studies said the bill would erode
‘constitutional and statutory due process protections’ and would
‘authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to
investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.’
Biden’s bill was never put to a vote, but after 9/11 then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reportedly credited his bill with the foundations of the USA PATRIOT Act.
axios | Dominion Voting Systems on Friday filed a defamation lawsuit seeking
$1.3 billion in damages against Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who
has pushed unfounded conspiracy theories alleging that the company was
involved in an international communist plot to rig the election against
President Trump.
The big picture: Dominion
alleges that Powell acted "in concert with allies and media outlets
determined to promote a false preconceived narrative about the 2020
election—caused unprecedented harm." In an interview with the Axios Re:Cap podcast last week, Dominion CEO John Poulos did not rule out suing Trump himself.
What they're saying: "As
a result of the defamatory falsehoods peddled by Powell ... Dominion’s
founder, Dominion’s employees, Georgia’s governor, and Georgia’s
secretary of state have been harassed and have received death threats,
and Dominion has suffered enormous harm," the lawsuit reads.
"After
Dominion sent Powell a letter putting her on formal notice of the facts
and the death threats and asking her to retract her false claims,
Powell doubled down, tweeting to her 1.2 million Twitter followers that
she heard that “#Dominion” had written to her and that, although she had
not even seen Dominion’s letter yet, she was “retracting nothing”
because “[w]e have #evidence” and “They are #fraud masters!""
"Dominion
brings this action to set the record straight, to vindicate the
company’s rights under civil law, to recover compensatory and punitive
damages, to seek a narrowly tailored injunction, and to stand up for
itself and its employees."
The other side: Powell
wrote on Twitter Friday, "Dominion’s suit against me &
DefendingTheRepublic.org is baseless & filed to harass, intimidate,
& to drain our resources as we seek the truth of Dominion's role in
this fraudulent election. We will not be cowed in exercising our 1st
Amendment rights or seeking truth."
guardian |By now, the world has witnessed white rioters seize the Capitol building in Washington DC. After hearing Donald Trump
encourage them to reject the presidential election’s outcome, thousands
reportedly pushed through cops to storm ongoing congressional debates
and reign supreme over politicians who fearfully scurried out of the
halls of power. Draped in American, Confederate, and Trump flags, the
raiders invaded the House floor, occupied representative offices, and
filled balconies and scaffolds that line the windows. Joe Biden took to a
podium to respond, cautioning the country that “our democracy is under
unprecedented assault”.
On television, I
saw paramedics rush a stretcher in the pandemonium. The woman bearing a
bloodied face laying on top startled me, the anchor, and the cameraman.
Please God, don’t let that woman be dead,I prayed, though her
eyes lacked an animating essence. When I saw the video of the Proud
Boys burn a Black Lives Matter banner a few weeks ago, I knew there
would be more violent acts of desperation because they need a cause to
feel empowered. Envying the resistance of the oppressed, Trump
supporters want reasons to march and chant, so they create enemies and
feign vulnerability as their cause grows lost. They sacrificed their
lives to save white supremacy, even though it threatens them, too,
materially and morally. And Black lives may never matter to people, like
the woman, who will risk their own white lives during a pandemic to
attack the nation’s capital to protect Donald Trump.
A
senior Capitol police officer reportedly shot and killed her. But even
the police shooting of the Trump supporter did not immediately catalyze
significant law enforcement action to stop the conservative Caucasian
invasion. Later, I watched a group of unmasked white men and women chase
down a Black law enforcement agent who wielded only a stick in return. I
was angry. Not because I felt bad for the cop, but because in that
moment, I watched him realize that he was Black, outnumbered, and per
the Dred Scott supreme court decision, “had no rights which the white
man was bound to respect.”
Wednesday was a reminder of one difference between white rebellion to
feigned oppression and Black resistance to actual oppression: where
there is radical Black resistance, there is state repression. Where there is white rebellion for conservative causes, there is collusion with the state. Even when the white cops are outnumbered, like the McKinney, Texas, cops who assaulted Dajerria Becton
in her swimsuit, they escalate; he just pulled the gun out on Black
teens who came to her rescue. Police have stomped, beat, shot,
teargassed, and arrested protesters who organize, march, pray and sing
for our multi-racial liberation movements. Including me. Yet on
Wednesday, activists and bystanders knew damn well that if the election
refusers who raided the Capitol were Black, then the same politicians
who kneeled for George Floyd and painted yellow “Black lives matter” letters onto the streets would have sent the full force of the law to stop it.
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4/3
43
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