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

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

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

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

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

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

Complete Erasure Of Conservatives From The Internet

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

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

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

Gun Control Madness

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

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

The gun grabbers are delusional.

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

 

"We" Don't Know Bupkis Beyond Whatever You Tell "Us" - And You Ain't Told The Truth Yet!!!

bloomberg  |  More than a year after Covid-19 touched off the worst pandemic in more than a century, scientists have yet to determine its origins. The closest related viruses to SARS-CoV-2 were found in bats more than 1,000 miles from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the disease erupted in late 2019. Initially, cases were tied to a fresh food market and possibly the wildlife sold there. Other theories allege the virus accidentally escaped from a nearby research laboratory, or entered China via imported frozen food. Amid all the posturing and finger-pointing, governments and scientists agree that deciphering the creation story is key to reducing the risk of future pandemics.

1. Why don’t we know where it came from?

Where, when and how a pathogen crosses the species barrier and begins spreading in humans can be difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint. Although SARS-CoV-2 is genetically similar to coronaviruses collected from a type of bat, it may have followed a long and convoluted path to Wuhan, a city of 11 million people. Scientists are tracing the earliest known cases to try to establish how they were infected, but the trail backward largely goes cold in early December 2019. Where a new disease starts spreading isn’t necessarily where it spilled over from the animal kingdom to infect the first human. HIV, for instance, is thought to have originated in chimpanzees in southeastern Cameroon, but didn’t begin spreading readily in people until the 1920s, when it reached the city of Kinshasa, hundreds of miles away. Scientists reported that finding in 2014, some three decades after the AIDS pandemic was recognized.

2. Who’s looking?

The World Health Organization was asked in May to help with the research, and a team of 17 international scientists, including one based in the U.S., concluded a four-week joint mission with 17 researchers from China in early February. Their findings are slated to be released in March. Other groups, including an expert panel convened by the medical journal The Lancet called the Covid-19 Commission, are also

3. What do we know so far?

Not much. Bats are the source of two coronaviruses that caused lethal outbreaks in people during the past two decades -- severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) -- and the flying mammals are considered the reservoir host for SARS-CoV-2 as well as a plethora of other viruses. (A reservoir host is an animal that harbors a pathogen but isn’t sickened by it.) After SARS-CoV-2 emerged, Shi Zhengli, a virologist who heads a group that studies bat-borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, identified three closely related viruses collected during the previous 15 years. The closest, which is about 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2, was isolated from swabs and fecal material from Rhinolophus affinis, a species of horseshoe bat, in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan in 2013. Some researchers have linked that particular virus to a mineshaft in Mojiang county in Yunnan, where six men contracted a pneumonia-like disease in 2012 that killed three of them. Although SARS-CoV-2 and the virus from Yunnan may share a common ancestor, they’re not sufficiently similar to indicate SARS-CoV-2 was derived from the Yunnan virus. Sampling of bats in Hubei, the province of which Wuhan is the capital, haven’t found any positive for the pandemic strain. Coronaviruses sharing certain genetic features with SARS-CoV-2 have been found in other Rhinolophus bat species and pangolins, a scaly, ant-eating mammal, elsewhere in Asia, highlighting the broad distribution of related coronaviruses that may have contributed to SARS-CoV-2’s evolution. That’s led to multiple hypotheses for how and where it emerged.

probing the virus’s origins.

If The Uniparty Doesn't Restore Narrative Hegemony, Vetted Obama-ite Politicians Will Be In Trouble

 CJR  |  You recently tweeted, “Stockton is the miner’s canary for the impact of disinformation,” describing the 209 Times as “an example of racism and disinfo that is able to thrive in news deserts.” So I’d like to open the floor for you to talk about news media coverage in Stockton, how it has changed over the years, and how this media landscape has allowed for disinformation to not only spread, but really thrive in your hometown.

So Stockton, California, is what’s called a news desert. Even before the layoffs and the cuts, we had one newspaper: the Stockton Record. In addition to that, despite being the twelfth-largest city in the state, sixty-second largest in the country, we weren’t our own media market. So all of our digital, broadcast media was homed in Sacramento, so they’d have to drive an hour to Stockton to shoot things. 

During my years as mayor, the Record had to lay off employees and stopped running as many articles. When the Record didn’t have as much staff to cover things, and subscriptions declined, at the same time, this fake-news site went up. Even when I was on city council, that was the play, just attacking the Record’s credibility all the time. “The Record’s corrupt,” “The Record’s elite,” “No one reads the Record”—and using elected officials to do that and to just question the legitimacy of an imperfect but also the only local press that we had in the city. Then when I became mayor, and after the success of former president Trump’s 2016 campaign utilizing social media and algorithms and weaponized information, these same folks got together and, in my first month as mayor, created what’s now known as the 209 Times. 

People saw 209 Times and thought, Well, it’s a news site. Why would anyone purposely and deliberately go out and deceive people? So a lot of people took it at face value, like this is just an alternative news site because the Record doesn’t run as much, the Record’s not as quick, etc. And what we saw was that they started with just blatantly false articles, like articles that were literally lies and disinformation. It was really about weaponizing information and playing on people’s biases and racism. 

The stories would all follow a similar thread. Either (a) Michael Tubbs was stealing money from the city, because Black people are criminals—and I think for a lot of people it played on their bias and orientation towards, Who are Black people really? And (b) the second one was, Michael Tubbs doesn’t work, or Michael Tubbs is lazy, which is another racist trope—that Black people, particularly Black men, loiter, that they’re criminals, that they don’t work, that they’re lazy. And (c) the third was, again, Michael Tubbs is just corrupt. It’s just a corrupt administration. There’s no way he could win legitimately. He doesn’t live in the city. It’s corrupt, it’s corrupt; he’s under investigation; he’s corrupt. And for four years, leveraging social media and leveraging algorithms, they fed that poison. 

And in the course of that, they just created a different reality. I left office with a thirteen-million-dollar surplus. We were named as the fourth most fiscally healthy city in this country. But for a lot of folks, it was, No, he’s stealing money. It’s just a different reality. And that’s what I recognized, that no, this disinformation wasn’t just about an election campaign, but indeed, it was a four-year campaign that only works in a news desert. It only works when the algorithm rewards racism and bigotry and bias. It only works when there’s no check, there’s no certification. We know that brain research tells us that we look for news that confirms our bias; we look for facts that confirm our bias. And that, if I’m biased to be racist, or if I’m biased to think that the government is corrupt, I’ll find something, whether it’s the Epoch Times or the 209 Times or OAN or Fox News, that’s going to create the reality.

Liberals Angling On Freeing Narrative Hegemony From The Ruthlessly Parasitic Clutches Of Google And Facebook

nakedcapitalism |   From France to Australia to the US state of Maryland, the free press is waging a battle for survival against Facebook and Google. Besides being gushing firehoses of COVID and election disinformation and QAnon conspiracies, another of Google and Facebook’s dangerous impacts is undermining the financial stability of media outlets all over the world.

Where is the Biden administration and European Commission in this fight? A lot is at stake, yet so far they have been quiet as church mice.

How do Google and Facebook threaten the Free Press? These two companies alone suck up an astounding 60% of all online advertising in the world (outside China). With Amazon taking another 9 percent, that leaves a mere 30% of global digital ad revenue to be split among thousands of media outlets, many of them local publications. With digital online advertising now comprising over half of all ad spendng (and projected to grow further), that has greatly contributed to underfunded and failing news industries in country after country, including in Europe and the US.

Australia’s situation is typical. Its competition commission found that, for every $100 spent by online advertisers in Australia, $47 goes to Google and $24 to Facebook (71%), even as traditional advertising has declined. Various studies have found that the majority of people who access their news online don’t go to the original news source, instead they access it via Facebook’s and Google’s platforms which are cleverly designed to hold users’ attention. Many users rarely click through the links, instead they absorb the gist of the news from the platforms’ headlines and preview blurbs.

Consequently, Facebook and Google receive the lion’s share of revenue from digital ads, rather than the original news sources receiving it. Note that Facebook and Google could tweak their design and algorithms to purposefully drive users to the original news sources’ websites. But they don’t.

So Australia decided to fight this duopoly with some rules-setting of its own. A new law will require large digital media companies to compensate Australian media companies fairly for re-packaging and monetizing their proprietary news content. Media outlets around the world are watching to see how this plays out.

Google initially fought the proposal, but finally negotiated deals with Australian news publishers to pay them some compensation. But Facebook flexed its digital muscles by cutting off Australia entirely from its platform for several days, preventing Aussie news publishers as well as everyday users, including important government agencies like health, fire and crisis services, from posting, viewing or sharing news content.

The result was jarring, the proverbial “shot heard ‘round the world.” Facebook censored Australian users more effectively than the Chinese communist government ever could, prompting charges of “big tech authoritarianism.” Facebook finally relented to Australia’s requirement, in return for some vague and uncertain concessions. But the message of raw, naked platform power was unmistakably clear.

Now a similar battle is playing out in the US state of Maryland. Over the last 10 years, US newspapers’ advertising revenue has declined by 62%, and without that funding newsroom employment dropped by nearly half. Squeezed by these economics, Maryland approved the US’s first tax on digital ad revenue (earned inside its state borders), targeting companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The measure is projected to generate as much as $250 million in its first year, dedicated to schools.

Hand-Wringing, Pearl-Clutching, Handkerchief-Soaking Burraschidt - Signifying Nothing...,

The US has been blanketed by an orgy of hand-wringing, pearl-clutching, handkerchief-soaking grief and horror occasioned by this once-vibrant nation reaching a memorable reported Megadeath Virus of Doom death total.

Here are just a handful of headlines memorializing this grim milestone:
_________________________________________

The New York Times: U.S. Reaches 500,000 Covid Deaths

CBS News: Biden commemorates 500,000 U.S. lives lost to COVID-19

Washington Post: 500,000 people should not have died in a country as ‘rich and sophisticated’ as U.S., Fauci says

Associated Press: Biden mourns 500000 dead, balancing nation’s grief and hope

NBCNews.com: 500,000 Covid deaths means 500,000 families like mine denied a proper goodbye

NPR: US Surpasses 500,000 Deaths From COVID-19

Yahoo News: Biden marks grim milestone of 500,000 COVID-19 deaths, but promises ‘America will smile again’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a symbiotic relationship.

Ahnenerbe The Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Organization

salon  |  There were three main categories of unethical medical experiments carried out by Nazi scientists, most of which were done under the supervision of Sievers and the Ahnenerbe (as well as, famously, by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz). Prisoners were used as some laboratories might experiment on animals.

The first category was survival testing. The idea was to determine the human survival thresholds for Nazi soldiers. One example was an experiment to determine the altitude at which air force crews could safely parachute. Prisoners were placed in low-pressure chambers to replicate the thin atmosphere of flight, and observed to see when organs began to fail. Sievers’ most infamous experiments at Dachau were to determine the temperature at which the human body would fail, in the case of hypothermia, and also how best to resuscitate a nearly-frozen human. A body temperature probe was inserted into the rectum of prisoners, who were then frozen in a variety of manners (for example, immersion in ice water or standing naked in the snow). It was established that consciousness was lost, followed quickly by death, when body temperature reached 25 C. Bodies of the nearly-frozen were then brought back up in temperature through a variety of similarly unpleasant manners, such as immersion in near-boiling water. Himmler himself suggested the most bizarre, but least cruel, method of reviving a hypothermic — by obliging him to have sex in a warm bed with multiple ladies. This was actually practiced (and seemed to work, at least better than the other methods). But the very idea that experiments were undertaken to kill or almost kill, humans through freezing, and then determine how best to resuscitate them, bring them back to life, is not a long leap to the reanimation of the clinically dead.

The second category of tests included those with pharmaceuticals and experimental surgeries, with inmates used like lab rats. Doctors tested immunizations against contagious diseases like malaria, typhus, hepatitis and tuberculosis, injecting prisoners and exposing them to diseases, then observing what happened. Procedural experiments, like those involving bone-grafting without anesthetic, which took place at the Ravensbrueck concentration camp, could also fall into this category. Antidotes were sought to chemical weapons like mustard gas and phosgene, with no regard for the well-being of those experimented upon. Keeping in mind the Nazi policy of using prisoners of “lesser” races for economic benefit (this is why concentration camp victims were often kept just alive enough to provide free labor, rather than universally being killed upon capture), this prisoner-as-guinea-pig approach fits into this perverse logic.

November 1944 saw an experiment with a cocktail drug called D-IX, at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. D-IX included cocaine and a stimulant called pervitine. The Luftwaffe (Nazi air force) had been supplied with 29 million pervitine pills from April-December 1939 alone, with the pill codenamed “obm.” Its use left the soldiers addicted, but did succeed in extending attention spans, reducing the need for sleep and food and giving a dramatic increase in stamina. 18 prisoners were given D-IX pills and forced to march while wearing backpacks loaded with 20 kilos of material — after taking the pills, they were able to march, without rest, up to 90 kilometers a day. The goal was to determine the outer limit of stamina induced by the pills. The D-IX pill proper, launched March 16th, 1944, included in each pill 5 mg of cocaine, 3 mg of pervitine, 5 mg of eucodal (a morphine-based painkiller) and synthetic cocaine. It was tested in the field with the Forelle diversionary unit of submariners. The experimentation and use of the pills, both on prisoners and soldiers, was considered very successful, and a plan was put in place to supply pills to the whole Nazi army, but the Allied victory months later stopped this. These pills sought to create super soldiers, in a contorted interpretation of the Nietzschean übermensch.

The third category was racial, or ideological testing, famously overseen by Josef Mengele, who experimented on twins and gypsies, to see how different races responded to contagious diseases. Mass-sterilization experiments on Jews and gypsies provided a sort of photo-negative to one of Himmler’s pet projects, called Lebensborn. It was a breeding program in which racially-ideal Aryan men and women (tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, strong Nordic bone structure) were obliged to breed, in order to produce more, and purer, Aryan children. This was part and parcel with the belief that the Aryans of the 20^th century were descended from an ancient race with superhuman powers — and that these powers had been gradually lost through interbreeding with “lower” races. If the “pollution” of these other races could be bred out, through generations of Aryans mixing only with other Aryans, then perhaps these powers could be regained? This, too, has an echo of resurrection to it. Resurrecting the lost purity of the original Aryans from Thule, and bringing back their superhuman powers, through breeding programs with pure-blooded Aryans.

Human Beings DO Live In A Simplified Narrative-Dream World...,

NYTimes |  Relations between master and disciple were always difficult. Mr. VandenBroeck already had some background in the occultist philosophy of Ouspenkyism and in the hardly less bizarre Chicago-based general semantics movement, which opposed traditional Aristotelian logic. De Lubicz for his part was suspicious and cryptic. Knowledge had to be worked for.

R. A. Schwaller was born in 1887. In his youth he worked as a chemist and studied art and theosophy. The aristocratic Lithuanian poet and occultist Oscar Milosz conferred the title of de Lubicz on Schwaller. At around the same time, Schwaller de Lubicz claims to have met the enigmatic alchemist Fulcanelli. Fulcanelli later became famous for his book ''Le Mystere des Cathedrales'' (1925), an alchemical reading of the symbolism of Gothic cathedrals.

Soon afterward, Fulcanelli (certainly a pseudonym) vanished mysteriously. De Lubicz claimed that Fulcanelli had not only pirated his (de Lubicz's) ideas on the symbolism of cathedrals, but had also attempted to make gold without fully understanding the procedure. This last had fatal consequences, and Mr. VandenBroeck tells us that, when de Lubicz visited Fulcanelli on his deathbed, the alchemist had turned black.

After World War I, de Lubicz was largely responsible for the formation of the Veilleurs (the Watchmen), a group dedicated to preserving higher values in a demoralized postwar world. The higher values were those of hierarchy and discipline. The elite of the Veilleurs sought to evolve to a higher state of being. The group's ambitions were esoteric and protofascist. Subsequently R. A. de Lubicz went to Egypt, where he spent years studying the temple at Luxor. ''Le Temple de l'Homme,'' published in 1958, was his exposition of the inner meaning of Pharaonic architecture, which boring mainstream Egyptologists with their profane readings had failed to penetrate. Finally, de Lubicz moved to Grasse, where Mr. VandenBroeck found him a couple of years before his death.

This is all quite interesting, but the reader has to work hard to extract the interest. The book is clogged with abstruse lectures on secret harmonies, mystical chemistry and whatnot. The style is rigorous, but the content is ultimately meaningless.

Eventually, Mr. VandenBroeck left the temple of mysteries at Grasse. It is to his credit that an important motive for his doing so was that he found de Lubicz's political ideas objectionable. It would have been even more to his credit if he had gone further and had recognized that most of de Lubicz's theories were junk. His ''archeology'' at Luxor failed to take account of the ascertainable circumstances of the temple's building. His ''history'' was a farrago of nonsense about racial destiny and the secret histories of Templars, tarot cards and so on. His ''geography'' had space for a manmade Nile and a Sphinx up to its neck in seawater. His ''science'' was an ill-tempered polemic against Darwin and Einstein. It is odd, then, to find Saul Bellow's foreword giving endorsement to de Lubicz as ''a source of revolutionary insights.''

 

 

Social Media Is A Scam

idler |  From The Century of the Self to HyperNormalisation, the journalist Adam Curtis has consistently exposed stories and truths that lay hidden to others. His BBC blogs feature brilliantly researched articles on, for example, the history of think tanks and their relationship with battery farming and Google. Always entertaining and always a provocative, original voice, he refuses to spout liberal platitudes and makes up his own mind. This bold voice has found him millions of fans across the world, and he is gaining a new audience among the teens and 20-somethings.

I recorded two interviews with Curtis and what follows is edited highlights from our exchanges. We start by discussing the so-called power of the tech titans. Adam argues that a simple way to remove their grip on us would be to stop believing in their magic.

Adam Curtis: When we say: “Facebook is a dark, manipulative force”, it makes the people in charge seem extremely powerful. The truth is that people within the advertising and marketing industry are extremely suspicious about whether online advertising has any effect at all. The internet has been captured by four giant corporations who don’t produce anything, contribute nothing to the wealth of the country, and hoard their billions of dollars in order to pounce on anything that appears to be a competitor and buy it out immediately. They will get you and me to do the work for them – which is putting the data in – then they send out what they con other people into believing are targeted ads. But actually, the problem with their advertising is that it is – like all geek stuff – literal. It has no imagination to it whatsoever. It sees that you bought a ticket to Budapest, so you’re going to get more tickets to Budapest. It’s a scam. In a way, the whole Facebook/Cambridge Analytica thing played into their hands because it made it even more mystifying. I’ve always thought John Le Carré did spies a great service because he made it seem as if there were endless depths of mystery and darkness when in fact, if you’ve ever researched the spies, they are (a) boring and (b) useless. I mean really, really useless. I researched MI5 once and they hardly ever manage to capture any traitors… it’s usually someone else who points them in the right direction. And in a way I think that’s true of this. The tech companies are powerful in the sense that they’ve got hold of the internet, which people like me think could be a really powerful thing for changing the world and disseminating new ideas, and they’ve got it in this rigid headlock. To do that, they’ve conned everyone into thinking that their advertising is worth it. And in the process, they’re destroying journalism.

Tom Hodgkinson: Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are surely clever and manipulative though?

AC: I’m sure some really bad stuff went on. There’s no question about that. But where’s the evidence that it actually swayed elections? What we lost in the hysteria about it all, is the sense of: why did people really vote for Brexit and Trump? I maintain that all the evidence points to the fact that there is real anger and a sense of isolation in Britain and America. The results reflected that. For 20 years, they’ve been offered no choice between the political parties. They’ve been given this enormous button that says “Fuck off” and they’ve pressed it. That’s a rational thing to do. The problem with the professional classes is that they don’t know how to deal with that. Instead they turn to these other reasons, which of course are there. But it’s like they’re looking at a little part of something much, much bigger, which involves having to make political choices about what might have gone wrong in your society. Everyone goes: “Oh that’s magical!” about the internet, but so what? That’s actually just so banal. People go: “Oh it’s terrible, they’re manipulating us!” or: “They know so much about me!” Well, what do they know about you? Your shopping? That’s it? What they don’t know, actually, are all the things that you’ve forgotten which are your real intelligence, and that world that you live in your head, day by day – which is rich and extraordinary.

TH: That’s a lovely thought. So we should really be saying they’re stupid and they’re boring?

AC: Yes, and all they really know about you is your shopping.

TH: There are good things about the internet.

AC: The internet is all sorts of things. The real problem is that we’ve grown up in a period of high individualism and, in a period of high individualism, the one thing you don’t notice is power. You’re supposed to be an empowered individual yourself. What’s disappeared out of the language is power. We just don’t see it. We just blindly go through the world, not seeing that there are powerful forces.

Transcend Delusional Narrative Conditioning And Return To The Lucid Understanding Of Reality

caitlinjohnstone |  It’s easier to control people through the narrative world than the real world because the narrative world and its relationship with the real world is too complicated for most people to understand, whereas the real world is quite simple and straightforward. For this reason, a tremendous amount of energy goes into controlling the dominant narratives, the dominant stories that people tell about what’s going on in the world.

Convince people to accept the narrative that a government’s leader is an evil dictator in need of regime change, and you can trade that narrative for real world control over a crucial geostrategic region. Convince people to accept that the status quo is working fine and any attempts to change it are dangerous insanity, and you ensure that people will never rise up and take away your real world control. Convince people that anyone questioning your narratives is a conspiracy theorist or a Russian propagandist, and you ensure your continued hegemonic control over the narrative world.

The most powerful manipulators are the ones who have succeeded in exerting control over both the real world and the narrative world, and they pursue both agendas with equal emphasis. Populations in the real world who insist upon their own national, resource, financial, economic or military sovereignty are subject to real world attacks by bombs, starvation sanctions and special ops. Entities in the narrative world which threaten imperial narrative domination are attacked, smeared, marginalized and censored.

That’s all we are seeing with the increasingly shrill mainstream panic about disinformation, conspiracy theories, foreign propaganda and domestic extremism. Our rulers and their media lackeys are not compassionately protecting us from deception, they are ensuring that they remain the only ones authorized to administer deception. By golly the only ones allowed to deceive us should be our government, our news media, our teachers and our priests.

As China and its allies increasingly threaten the real world hegemony of the US and its allies, operations in the narrative world are getting increasingly heated and intense. Expect continued demonization of Russia, and expect anti-China propaganda to get more and more noisy. Expect people to be herded into partisan echo chambers with thicker and thicker walls in the narrative world, because dividing them up in this way makes it much easier to administer propaganda to them.

The narrative world is getting more and more frenzied while the real world is headed toward disaster due to the military and ecological pressures created by our status quo. There are only a few ways this can possibly break, with the most obvious being mass scale climate disaster or nuclear war.

Hunter Biden's Memoir "Like A Pink Horse Riding Down Nightmare Alley"

AP |   Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden and an ongoing target for conservatives, has a memoir coming out April 6.

The book is called “Beautiful Things” and will center on the younger Biden’s well publicized struggles with substance abuse, according to Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Acquired in the fall of 2019, “Beautiful Things” was kept under wraps even as Biden’s business dealings became a fixation of then-President Donald Trump and others during the election and his finances a matter of investigation by the Justice Department.

“Beautiful Things” was circulated among several authors and includes advance praise from Stephen King, Dave Eggers and Anne Lamott.

“In his harrowing and compulsively readable memoir, Hunter Biden proves again that anybody — even the son of a United States President — can take a ride on the pink horse down nightmare alley,” King writes in his blurb. “Biden remembers it all and tells it all with a bravery that is both heartbreaking and quite gorgeous. He starts with a question: Where’s Hunter? The answer is he’s in this book, the good, the bad, and the beautiful.”

In a snippet released by Gallery, Biden writes in his book, “I come from a family forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love.”

The president and first lady released a statement Thursday saying, “We admire our son Hunter’s strength and courage to talk openly about his addiction so that others might see themselves in his journey and find hope.”

During one of last fall’s presidential debates, Joe Biden defended his son from attacks by Trump.

“My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” the Democratic candidate said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”

Everything About The Corporate Fascist OBidenBama Administration Is Fake

caitlinjohnstone |  A new exclusive from The Daily Beast titled “White House Reporters: Biden Team Wanted Our Questions in Advance” reports that the White House press corps is being pressured to provide briefing questions ahead of time in a way that makes even mainstream media journalists uncomfortable.

“While it’s a relief to see briefings return, particularly with a commitment to factual information, the press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” one White House correspondent told The Daily Beast. “That’s not really a free press at all.”

“It pissed off enough reporters for people to flag it for the [White House Correspondents Association] for them to deal with it,” another source reportedly said.

While Obama’s deputy press secretary Eric Schultz calls the move “textbook communications work” designed to ensure that Biden’s press secretary has answers ready instead of having to “repeatedly punt questions”, clearly the reporters on the job feel differently.

“The requests prompted concerns among the White House press corps, whose members, like many reporters, are sensitive to the perception that they are coordinating with political communications staffers,” writes the Beast.

Having questions in advance would indeed be a good way to help insulate press secretary Jen Psaki (for whom liberals are already developing an unwholesome celebrity crush) from hard questions. This would avoid sticky situations like when Psaki deflected inquiries about treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s conflict of interest with the Citadel controversy by babbling about Yellen being the first woman in her position and claiming that receiving $800,000 in speaking fees from that company is no reason for her to recuse herself.

So this is just one more item on the steadily growing pile of fake things about this administration. Everything about it is phony. This is the Astroturf Administration.

 

Respect Science Respect Expertise Respect Hierarchy KNOW YOUR PLACE!!!

mondediplo |  Worrying about the crisis of authority is what liberals do these days in the United States. Older concerns, like the economic problems of blue-collar whites, have become a subject for liberal sneering, but restoring the rightful hierarchy of credentialed expertise has become a matter of real moral urgency. ‘Respect Science’ say the signs and stickers you see in liberal neighbourhoods. Respect expertise. Respect hierarchy. Know your place.

Foreign policy, it is said, must be reclaimed by the foreign policy ‘community’. Central bank policy must be protected from the influence of farmers. From the consensus views of the relevant professions there can be no dissent, at least not in public. ‘Doubt,’ I read recently in the Washington Post, ‘is a cardinal virtue in the sciences ... But it can be disastrous in public health, where lives depend on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.’ Therefore it has to be kept quiet, if not removed from view altogether — a thought-suppressing logic that can be extended into any field of knowledge you care to mention.

This essay is not a brief for free speech absolutism or an effort to rationalise conspiracy theory or an attack on higher learning. It is about the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the left, and here is the suggestion I mean to make: the form of liberalism I have described here is inherently despicable. A democratic society is naturally going to gag when it is told again and again in countless ways, both subtle and gross, that our great national problem is our failure to heed the authority of traditional elites.

Worse, when those traditional elites come together with unprecedented unanimity to insist their high rank proves their correctness and justifies their privilege ... when they say we are in a new cold war against falsehood ... when the news media dumps its neutrality and likens itself to superheroes and declares it is mystically attuned to truth and legitimacy ... when they do those things and then get the biggest news story of the decade fabulously wrong, a society like ours is going to spot the hypocrisy. And we are going to resent it.

Which is to say that the effect of all this moral judgmentalism has been the opposite of what was intended. To spend four years scolding people in the shrillest notes of moral hysteria was perhaps the perfect recipe for convincing Trump supporters to redouble their dedication to this deluded and prejudiced man. It is well known that shaming people for failing to live up to your personal high standards of Covid hygiene is not a good strategy for changing their behaviour. Multiply that dynamic by 300 million and you’ve got America in the age of Trump. Ten per cent of a nation energetically scolding the other 90%.

If historians still exist in 30 years, they will look back upon these last four years with disgust and bewilderment. Disgust when they contemplate the loud, vain ignoramus who sat in the White House scarfing hamburgers and spinning conspiracy theories on Twitter while Covid burned through the nation.

But when they look at liberals, they will shake their heads with disbelief. How could they have thought it was wise to try to enlist the great economic and cultural powers of our time — the masters of Silicon Valley — to try to censor our opponents? Ira Glasser, the old ACLU chief, relates how liberal academics embraced speech codes because they ‘imagined themselves as controlling who the codes would be used against’. What these well-meaning liberals didn’t understand, he continued, was that ‘speech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like it’s a great weapon to have when you’ve got the poison gas in your hands and a target in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting — especially politically — and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you.’

As Glasser’s metaphor suggests, this cannot end well. The mob attack on the Capitol frightened us all. But for Democrats to choose censorship (via the monopolists of Silicon Valley) as the solution to the problem is a shocking breach of faith. There are many words one might use to describe a party that, over the last 30 years, has shown itself contemptuous of working-class grievances while protective of the authority of the respected... but ‘liberal’ isn’t one of them.

 

Damn Skippy Libertarians Are Domestic Terrorists!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Short Seller Hedge Funds Were The Good Guys In Gamestop Pissant Insurrection...,

WaPo  |  The particular targets of the GameStop crowd are hedge funds and short sellers. Here, a couple of definitions may be useful. Generally speaking, a hedge fund is a small-to-medium-size company that makes money by choosing smart investments. There is nothing nefarious about this. To the contrary, if you don’t like too-big-to-fail banks that get backstopped by taxpayers, small-enough-to-fail hedge funds ought to be celebrated. If you worry about complex financial conglomerates with corrupting conflicts of interest, single-purpose investment boutiques are simpler and healthier. On the online forums where the GameStoppers congregate, you read complaints about hedge funds being bailed out during the crisis of 2008. Actually, banks, brokers, insurers, mortgage providers, money market funds and even car companies got rescues. Hedge funds got nothing.

What about short sellers? These are specialists who research stocks that might go down, sometimes because bosses are illegally covering up bad news about their companies. When short sellers identify a case of fraud or similar, they borrow and sell the stock, hoping to buy it back at a lower price later. Again, there is nothing evil about this. To the contrary, it’s a way of keeping prices honest. A market without short sellers is like a political system without investigative journalists.

This, however, is not how GameStoppers see things. They have gone after a short seller named Andrew Left, hacking into his social media accounts, sharing his personal information online, ordering dozens of pizzas to be delivered to his home in the middle of the night, and texting his children with threatening and profane language, according to the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps not surprisingly, Left has announced he will stop playing the game. Irrational stock prices will be that much likelier.

The worry is that the GameStoppers will now target others. Short sellers operate in the open: You can check short-selling volumes for any given stock on Yahoo. By whipping up frenzied buying of a heavily shorted company, speculators can cost the shorts billions and maybe put them out of business. Already, GameStoppers are buying other beaten-down companies, such as cinema giant AMC. A Goldman Sachs index of heavily shorted stocks is up sharply this month because the shorts have been routed.

Hedge funders and short sellers are out to get rich: They are certainly not angels. But there is a difference between trading based on evidence and research and trading based on conspiracy theories and mob tactics. Over the past week, it’s been tempting to celebrate the colorful rebels — they represent the democratization of finance, the revenge against the fat cats. Now it is time to remember that truth matters.

At Its Heart The Gamestop Story IS FICTION - And You Pissants Have Once Again Been Deceived...,

wired |  At its heart, the GameStop story is about small-time traders—many, according to press accounts, young and inexperienced—going up against established players and winning, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a person (so far, at least). The WallStreetBets subreddit describes itself as “a gathering place of millions of unique individuals who are tired of being run over by the big guys and are each fighting back in their own way.” Its investors, who use the page to discuss strategy and timing, were exploiting the rigidity in “short” positions of hedge funds, who bet that GameStop’s stock would decline in value. Such “short” funds represent a commitment to provide a share of GameStop at a specific time, no matter the price, magnifying the profit potential if the redditors could push the stock in the other direction and send the hedge funds scrambling to meet their obligations.

This week, the GameStop story became a national talking point, particularly on Twitter, where users of all stripes and political persuasions cheered on the financial chaos. The billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Mark Cuban defended WallStreetBets, as did the left-wing representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, each pleased to see hedge funds undone by their own greedy ways. An arcane finance story became a class-warfare parable for the general public, with regular folks acting just as clinically as the hedge fund executives they were vanquishing—that is, being upfront about treating investments as mere manipulations, as opposed to some complex matter meant to assess the genuine value of a company. As Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter: “Gotta admit it’s really something to see Wall Streeters with a long history of treating our economy as a casino complain about a message board of posters also treating the market as a casino.”

On Thursday, Robinhood blocked the kind of speculative trades of GameStop stock that were used by the redditors to drive up its share price. Though the brokerage reportedly did this to protect its own finances, the move nonetheless seemed destined to backfire in ways similar to Egypt’s drastic internet shutdown, which ultimately helped the protests spread. Suddenly, the GameStop controversy changed from a revenge fantasy against hedge funds to a matter of economic fairness: Are the same tools available to all investors, no matter their wealth? (The comparison is obviously imperfect—unless you really see the Reddit day traders as freedom fighters. More to the point, by blocking speculative trades of GameStop, Robinhood could be seen as protecting new investors who seem destined to lose money when GameStop’s share price comes back to earth.)

Next up in this cycle, one imagines, is the recognition that this revolution, whether tolerated or quashed, won’t change much at all. And like the authoritarians who found their way back to power, the hedge fund managers are likely to rein in the trading apps and their mischievous fans, ensuring their hold on the markets.

That’s the thing about the internet—time and again, it has proven better for the top dogs. At the very least, it certainly won’t threaten them. If we are foolish enough, and heartless enough, to allow a financial system that so thoroughly separates wealth creation from work and genuine improvement to society, well then the internet will make this skewed system even more lucrative for those who play. The richest will reap the wealth and the poorest, least experienced traders will end up holding the bag. An empty bag, at that.

Is Marjorie Taylor Greene A Congressional Craziness Outlier?

caitlinjohnstone |   I really hope Americans get rid of that dangerous right wing lunatic in congress, by which I mean all of the people in congress.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is not more crazy than all the DC politicians who agree the US should maintain planetary hegemony using bombs, regime change ops, starvation sanctions and nuclear threats. She’s just a less popular genre of crazy.

There is an ideological struggle to determine whether the Republican Party will be the kind of bat shit crazy that believes in QAnon and Jewish Space Lasers or just the kind of bat shit crazy that believes in carpet bombing Iran and destroying the ecosystem for money.

Stop normalizing status quo politics.

Stop normalizing ecocide.

Stop normalizing imperialism.

Stop normalizing mass murder.

Stop normalizing nuclear standoffs.

Stop normalizing starvation sanctions.

Stop normalizing exploitation.

Stop normalizing oppression.

Stop normalizing the mainstream so-called “centrists” who promote these extremist evils.

If people could really grasp how horrific our status quo is, wingnut freaks like Marjorie Taylor Greene wouldn’t stand out against the background, because everyone who helps bolster this murderous and depraved status quo is also a wingnut freak. And there would be just as urgent a push to cast out all the other freaks as there is to cast out her.

The ruling class keeps Americans as poor as possible so they can’t use their money to do naughty things like fund leftist political campaigns or sabotage hedge funds.

People are like two clicks away from burning Wall Street to the ground and setting up guillotines and mainstream analysts are still wringing their hands about how gamer trolls might be compromising the integrity of the market somewhat.

Red Ant Evangelicals Enmeshed In Revolution Against The Government?

newrepublic |  These Christians apparently believe that they had no choice but to try to overthrow the Congress. For months, various evangelicals have claimed in sermons, on social media, and during protests that malicious forces stole the election, conspired to quash Christian liberties, and aimed to clamp down on their freedom to worship and spread the Christian gospel. They felt sure that the final days of history were at hand and that the Capitol was the site of an epochal battle. As one evangelical from Texas told The New York Times, “We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light.”

Much has been made about the evangelical community’s relationship to Donald Trump. And typically, observers tend to view this alliance as purely transactional, with nose-holding evangelicals pledging their support to this least Christian of men in order to get something in return—most notably, a trio of religiously conservative Supreme Court justices. This dominant interpretation also treats Trump as the apotheosis of a shape-shifting brand of grievance politics that unites and permeates all factions of the right, very much including the evangelical movement. But what is less understood—and what the Capitol riot revealed in all its gruesome detail—is the extent to which Trump channels the apocalyptic fervor that has long animated many white evangelical Christians in this country.

For the last 150 years, white evangelicals have peddled end-times conspiracies. Most of the time their messages have been relatively innocuous, part of the broader millenarian outlook shared among most major religious traditions. But these conspiracies can have dangerous consequences—and sometimes they lead to violence. Every evangelical generation throughout American history has seen some of its believers driven to extreme conspiracies that blend with other strains of militant political faith. This has meant that in the Trump era, with the destabilizing impact of a global pandemic and a cratered economy, white evangelical Christianity has become enmeshed with, and perhaps inextricable from, a broader revolution against the government.

And so an insurrection in the name of Jesus Christ broke out in tandem with the Trump voter fraud putsch. The action is also, in all likelihood, a prophetic foretaste of where this group might go once Trump is finally out of office.

---

Evangelical apocalypticism is grounded in a complicated and convoluted reading of the biblical books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, some of the most violent books in the Bible. When read in conjunction with one another, and overlaid with some of Jesus’s and Paul’s New Testament statements, they reveal a hidden “plan of the ages.” The word apocalypse comes from the Greek word apokalypsis—an unveiling or uncovering of truths that others cannot see.

Secret Invisible Evidence Isn't Evidence...,

It's entirely possible this cyber attack was Russia, but is it just me or did it go very quickly from "these are the hallmarks of Russian hackers to" media just saying this was Russia's hack? pic.twitter.com/rWJxjOGEAE

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) December 18, 2020

caitlinjohnstone |  Today we're all expected to be freaking out about Russia again because Russia hacked the United States again right before a new president took office again, so now it's very important that we support new cold war escalations from both the outgoing president and the incoming president again. We're not allowed to see the evidence that this actually happened again, but it's of utmost importance that we trust and support new aggressions against Russia anyway. Again.

The New York Times has a viral op-ed going around titled "I Was the Homeland Security Adviser to Trump. We’re Being Hacked." The article's author Thomas P Bossert warns ominously that "the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are compromised by a foreign nation" perpetrated by "the Russian intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world."

Rather than using its supreme tradecraft to interfere in the November election ensuring the victory of the president we've been told for years is a Russian asset by outlets like The New York Times, Bossert informs us that the SVR instead opted to hack a private American IT company called SolarWinds whose software is widely used by the US government.

"Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim’s network," Bossert explains, saying that "The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate." Its magnitude is so great that Bossert says Trump must "severely punish the Russians" for perpetrating it, and cooperate with the incoming Biden team in helping to ensure that that punishment continues seamlessly between administrations.

The problem is that, as usual, we've been given exactly zero evidence for any of this. As Moon of Alabama explains, the only technical analysis we've seen of the alleged hack (courtesy of cybersecurity firm FireEye) makes no claim that Russia was responsible for it, yet the mass media are flagrantly asserting as objective, verified fact that Russia is behind this far-reaching intrusion into US government networks, citing only anonymous sources if they cite anything at all.

And of course where the media class goes so too does the barely-separate political class. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin told CNN in a recent interview that this invisible, completely unproven cyberattack constitutes "virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States." Which is always soothing language to hear as the Russian government announces the development of new hypersonic missiles as part of a new nuclear arms race it attributes to US cold war escalations.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald is one of the few high-profile voices who've had the temerity to stick his head above the parapet and point out the fact that we have seen exactly zero evidence for these incendiary claims, for which he is of course currently being raked over the coals on Twitter. 

"I know it doesn't matter. I know it's wrong to ask the question. I know asking the question raises grave doubts about one's loyalties and patriotism," Greenwald sarcastically tweeted. "But has there been any evidence publicly presented, let alone dispositive proof, that Russia is responsible for this hack?"

Congressional Democrats Liken Solarwinds Epic Fail To A RUSSIAN INVASION!

 c4isrnet |  The Senate’s No. 2 Democrat said Russia’s apparent hack into multiple government agencies is a “virtual invasion” that demands the U.S. show Russia and other adversaries there is “a price to pay” for breaching American systems.

In a Senate floor speech Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said the U.S. needs to “respond in kind” and that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a friend. A day earlier on CNN, he called the hack “virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States, and we should take it that seriously.”

“No, I’m not calling for an invasion myself or all-out war. I don’t want to see that happen, but it’s no longer a buddy-buddy arrangement between the United States and Vladimir Putin,” Durbin said Thursday. “When adversaries such as Russia torment us, tempt us, breach the security of our nation, we need to respond in kind.”

Durbin’s remarks came hours before President-elect Joe Biden issued an announcement that he had instructed his team to learn as much as possible about the breach. He vowed a tough response, beyond expanding investment in cyber defense.

“But a good defense isn’t enough; we need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyber attacks in the first place,” Biden said in a statement. “We will do that by, among other things, imposing substantial costs on those responsible for such malicious attacks, including in coordination with our allies and partners. Our adversaries should know that, as President, I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation.”

This week brought the disclosure of a global cyberespionage campaign that penetrated multiple U.S. government agencies by compromising a common network management tool from the company SolarWinds used by thousands of organizations. Russia, the prime suspect, denied involvement.

Cybersecurity investigators said the hack’s impact extends far beyond the affected U.S. agencies, which include the Treasury and Commerce departments. Defense contractors like General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls Industries were on SolarWinds’ client list, but those two firms have declined to comment.

SolarWinds counts all five military services, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency among its clientele, and the New York Times reported that the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and parts of the Pentagon were compromised.

Congressional Democrats have generally been more vocal about the hack than Republicans, pointing fingers at President Donald Trump, who fired Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency chief Christopher Krebs in November. As Washington continued to assess the extent of the hack, Democrats criticized Trump’s silence on the matter.

“We need to gather more facts. But early indications suggest Pres Trump’s tepid response to previous cyber transgressions by Russian hackers emboldened those responsible,” Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed said in a tweet Wednesday. He is the Senate Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat and sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee.