Justice In Policing Act And Curbs On Qualified Immunity Will Remain DOA In The Courts And In Congress

wikipedia  |  The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 was a policing reform bill drafted by Democrats in the United States Congress. The legislation was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on February 24, 2021.^[1][2] The legislation aims to combat police misconduct, excessive force, and racial bias in policing.^[3][4]

The bill passed the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives on a mostly party-line vote of 220–212,^[5] but not the evenly divided Senate amid opposition from Republicans.^[6][7] Negotiations between Republican and Democratic senators on a reform bill collapsed in September 2021.^[7]

Background

The drafting of the legislation was preceded by a series of protests against the deaths of black Americans at the hands of mostly white police officers and civilians in 2020, including George Floyd in Minnesota and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky.^[4][8] The proposed legislation contains some provisions that civil rights advocates have long sought,^[4] and is named in Floyd's honor.^[9]

Provisions

The legislation, described as expansive,^[4] would:

• Grant power to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to issue subpoenas to police departments as part of "pattern or practice" investigations into whether there has been a "pattern and practice" of bias or misconduct by the department^[10]
• Provide grants to state attorneys general to "create an independent process to investigate misconduct or excessive use of force" by police forces^[11]
• Establish a federal registry of police misconduct complaints and disciplinary actions^[11]
• Enhance accountability for police officers who commit misconduct, by restricting the application of the qualified immunity doctrine for local and state officers,^[10][12] and by changing the mens rea (intent) element of 18 U.S.C. § 242 (the federal criminal offense of "deprivation of rights under color of law," which has been used to prosecute police for misconduct) from "willfully" to "knowingly or with reckless disregard"^[13]
• Require federal uniformed police officers to have body-worn cameras^[11][4]
• Require marked federal police vehicles to be equipped with dashboard cameras.^[11]
• Require state and local law enforcement agencies that receive federal funding to "ensure" the use of body-worn and dashboard cameras.^[4]
• Restrict the transfer of military equipment to police^[11] (see 1033 program, militarization of police)
• Require state and local law enforcement agencies that receive federal funding to adopt anti-discrimination policies and training programs, including those targeted at fighting racial profiling^[4]
• Prohibit federal police officers from using chokeholds or other carotid holds (which led to the death of Eric Garner), and require state and local law enforcement agencies that receive federal funding to adopt the same prohibition^[4]
• Prohibit the issuance of no-knock warrants (warrants that allow police to conduct a raid without knocking or announcing themselves) in federal drug investigations, and provide incentives to the states to enact a similar prohibition.^[4]
• Change the threshold for the permissible use of force by federal law enforcement officers from "reasonableness" to only when "necessary to prevent death or serious bodily injury."^[4]
• Mandate that federal officers use deadly force only as a last resort and that de-escalation be attempted, and condition federal funding to state and local law enforcement agencies on the adoption of the same policy.^[4]

Legislative history

Drafting and introduction in 2020

In the House of Representatives, the legislation was principally drafted by Representative Karen Bass of California (who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus) and Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York (who chairs the House Judiciary Committee); in the Senate, the legislation has been drafted by Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, the Senate's two black Democrats.^[4][11] The legislation was introduced in the House as H.B. 7120 on June 8, 2020, by Bass, with 165 co-sponsors, all Democrats.^[14] The bill was referred to the House Judiciary Committee, and additionally to the House Armed Services Committee and House Energy and Commerce Committee, for consideration of provisions falling within those committees' jurisdiction.^[2] The legislation was introduced in the Senate on the same day as S. 3912, by Booker, with 35 cosponsors.^[15] It was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee.^[16]

Committee hearings

At a June 2020 hearing on police issues in the House Judiciary Committee, George Floyd's brother, Philonise Floyd, testified in favor of police reforms. Also testifying were the Floyd family's attorney Benjamin Crump (invited by the Democrats) and Angela Underwood Jacobs (invited by the Republicans), the brother of Federal Protective Service officer David "Patrick" Underwood, who was killed in the line of duty.^[17][18][19] Committee Republicans invited conservative Fox News commentator and ex-Secret Service agent Dan Bongino,^[19][20] who did not mention police brutality at the hearing and instead focused on dangers faced by police.^[20] Committee Republicans also called Darrell C. Scott, a minister and prominent Trump ally, to testify.^[19][21]

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on June 16, members heard testimony from a number of witnesses, including Vanita Gupta of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; attorney S. Lee Merritt, who represents the family of Ahmaud Arbery; St. Paul, Minnesota Mayor Melvin Carter; Houston Police Department chief Art Acevedo; and Fraternal Order of Police national president Patrick Yoes.^[22] Gupta, who served as head of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration, testified in favor of police reforms and criticized the Trump Justice Department, while Yoes testified against restricting qualified immunity for police.^[23]

FOP Lodges Embrace Enhanced Professionalism And Training Like The NEA Embraces Weight Loss

noahpinion  |  So far I’ve talked about police “professionalization” purely in terms of hours of training. But it’s also important to get the right kind of training — for example, the “warrior mentality” training that some cops currently receive seems a lot less likely to be useful than the “procedural justice” training that has been shown to reduce violence.

And in fact, I think professionalization should probably go beyond training, to include education. Usually, when we think of a “profession”, we think of something that requires a degree. In the U.S., policing tends to be a blue-collar, low-education profession — in California, only 42% of officers have even a bachelor’s degree.

I’m all for expanding opportunity for American workers who didn’t go to college. But policing seems like a special case, because it’s about much more than wages and work — it’s about public safety and the legitimacy of U.S. institutions. Being able to sit through some lectures on Plato and do a bit of algebra homework shouldn’t be a requirement to get a decent, good-paying job in the U.S., but it seems like a pretty low bar for the people who are responsible for deciding when to deal out violent death to citizens on the street. We make teachers get a college degree, so why not cops? In fact, many teachers get a Master’s in Education after college; we should think about expanding the use of Master’s degrees in law enforcement as well.

Requiring higher education works through at least two separate channels. First, it creates positive selection effects — it means that the police of the future would come from a more educated, intellectual subset of the populace. (The military already does this with the AFQT and ASVAB.) But it also changes people’s lifestyles in generally positive ways. A number of studies have established a causal link between higher education and healthier lifestyles, leading to reduced mortality and better overall health. It seems likely that more education would also give cops a healthier mental and emotional outlook as well, which would result not just in less confrontational interactions with civilians, but in better overall policing and crime reduction as well.

Again, requiring cops to get more education would raise the costs of policing in the United States, because educated workers command higher salaries. This would not sit well with some activists, but it seems to me like something worth spending money on.

So I think that when we talk about professionalizing the police, it should mean exactly that: Making policing a profession rather than just a job. Doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc. all serve specialized and critical functions in our society, for which we require not just extensive training but also formalized and specialized education. I fail to see any good reason why we shouldn’t treat law enforcement as a similarly critical function, deserving of similar investments of time, money, and care.

American Policing Does Not Exist To Protect And Serve Citizens

welcometohellworld  |  The other day I asked if people had ever been helped by cops when they’ve been robbed. The consensus was lol no. They’ll probably just show up and shoot your dog many people joked which is funny because it’s true but also not funny because it’s true. Read all the other replies down below. First let’s talk about a recent police murder in LA.

Look at this press release put out by the LAPD about “an officer involved shooting” from last week. It reads in part:

As the officers arrived at the location, they began a search for the suspect. During that search, officers located a female who was suffering from various injuries and bleeding. They encountered the suspect a short distance away and an officer involved shooting occurred. The suspect was struck by gunfire and taken into custody. Fire department paramedics responded and determined the suspect deceased at scene.

Unbeknownst to the officers, a 14-year-old girl was in a changing room behind a wall, that was directly behind the suspect and out of the officers’ view. She was in the changing area with her mother when the officers encountered the suspect and the officer involved shooting occurred. During a search for additional suspects and victims, officers found the girl and discovered she had been struck by gunfire. She was pronounced dead at the scene. At this preliminary phase of the investigation, it is believed that victim was struck by one of the rounds fired by an officer at the suspect.

Police Chief Michel R. Moore commented: “This chaotic incident resulting in the death of an innocent child is tragic and devastating for everyone involved…”

Here’s how the media relations department initially described the incident.

Update: As officers contacted the suspect and OIS occurred, one of the officer’s rounds penetrated a wall that was behind the suspect, beyond that wall was a dressing room. Officers search the dressing room and found a 14 year old female victim who was struck by gunfire.

— LAPD PIO (@LAPDPIO) December 24, 2021

Setting aside the standard exonerative tense always used by police to absolve themselves of agency in any situation the picture painted here is one of a highly dangerous and “chaotic” situation right? You might read this and easily imagine the officer intervening in the midst of a deadly attack during which a tragic but accidental death also occurred. Well you wouldn’t but one might read it that way.

Here’s how the NYT originally reported it for what it’s worth.

The fucking bullet did it.

What the police body camera video footage actually shows is that the chaos here was set into motion by the police themselves (no surprise there) and by one cop in particular who surveyed the situation for mere seconds then decided to fire off his assault rifle in the middle of a crowded store at a man who posed no threat to anyone else at the time. No warning was given.

It’s a hard video to watch but you should do so anyway.

Content Warning: Bad Police Shooting.

Indefensible. pic.twitter.com/pgGbZqH8xn

— Film The Police LA (@FilmThePoliceLA) December 28, 2021

The shooter the last cop on the scene barrels through all the other cops — a couple of whom seem to be wielding more appropriately non-lethal weapons — pushes them aside and immediately starts blasting.

The anguished screams you can hear after the shooting are from the mother of the girl who the cop shot to death through the dressing room wall.

Valentina Orellana-Peralta was trying on quinceañera dresses when she was killed by the police. She came to the States from Chile earlier this year and “she dreamed of becoming an American citizen and an engineer, and looked forward to seeing LeBron James play basketball in person,” the Guardian reported.

What Exactly Is This SCORPION Unit - Will Those In Charge Be Held Accountable?

psrmemphis  |  Memphis police officers watched as a man with a handgun bulging from his right hip walked past them and into a convenience store where he attempted to make a purchase.

It was busy that Friday night in Parkway Village, the day before several of these same officers would become entangled in a deadly encounter with Tyre Nichols – a violent altercation that resulted in the 29-year-old motorist’s death in a hospital bed three days later.

The action grew intense – and violent – on this night, too.

Members of the Memphis Police Department’s SCORPION Team One swooped onto this gas station parking lot when they saw some young men loitering about.

After witnessing what they believed was a drug transaction, officers chased down one man and, during a struggle, pepper-sprayed him. They arrested another man who, like Nichols, had no criminal record. Carrying a pistol in his belt, he apparently violated the edges of Tennessee’s permitless carry law by entering a business displaying signs that guns are prohibited.

“Suspect … refused to cooperate and listen to detectives and immediately started screaming,’’ Officer Demetrius Haley wrote in a report charging the 22-year-old man with misdemeanor offenses of disorderly conduct and unlawfully possessing a gun.

An investigation by the Institute for Public Service Reporting found that Haley and four other officers terminated by MPD last week in connection with Nichols’ death were affiliated with a special unit called SCORPION, a data-driven initiative that identifies crime hotspots and attempts to suppress them with saturation patrols.

Records show the unit’s aggressive tactics often trigger volatile interactions with members of the public.

Launched in 2021 by MPD Chief Cerelyn “C.J.” Davis as part of Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s war on crime, the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods, or SCORPION, unit identifies upticks in motor vehicle theft and violent crime and then targets those areas with patrolling SCORPION officers – at times in unmarked cars. An opens in a new windowMPD video promoting the unit appears to show some of the officers dressed in plainclothes.

Discussing SCORPION in a January 2022 address, opens in a new windowStrickland said the unit of “four, 10-man teams” had made 566 arrests in its first three months alone, seizing more than “$103,000 in cash, 270 vehicles and 253 weapons.”

The mayor said then the unit targets homicides, aggravated assaults, robberies and carjackings.

Yet dozens of reports reviewed by the Institute for Public Service Reporting found SCORPION officers also appear to engage in “zero-tolerance” or “proactive policing”-type activities, at times stopping motorists for tinted windows or for failing to wear seat belts and confronting or arresting others for loitering, gambling, drug possession and other low-level offenses – controversial tactics now at the heart of a national debate on how best to balance public safety and community trust.

A thorough analysis of SCORPION’s activities was not possible on deadline for this story. Some reports show officers removing dangerous individuals from the streets. Policy experts warn, however, that such aggressive tactics, if not properly supervised, can lead to discrimination and abuse, and can erode faith in police.

“They can be very effective,’’ said former Memphis Police Director E. Winslow “Buddy” Chapman. “But they must be very closely controlled and monitored.

“The danger is exactly what happened in this case,’’ he said, referring to the death of Nichols.

Cop City Protester Killing Reveals Treacherous Black Faces In High Places...,

BAR  |  What could possibly go wrong with a $90 million, 85-acre police training ground that the community doesn't want? Someone could be killed, and that happened before Atlanta's awful Cop City project has even been built.

The city of Atlanta, Georgia is often presented as a “Mecca” for Black people. Every mayor of that city who has held office since 1974 has been Black, and celebrities have made it their home. Major Historically Black Colleges and Universities are located there. Atlanta is thought of as a place where Black people thrive.

Except it is like every other major American city, where Black people are more likely to be low wage workers or among the unhoused. The Black people in leadership positions are allowed to occupy them precisely because they have taken a pledge not to upset the established political order.

These caveats must be kept in mind when discussing the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, known popularly as Cop City. The purported Black Mecca municipality is spending $30 million to construct an 85-acre militarized police training camp in the Weelaunee Forest. Cop City will feature a mock town with a gas station, bank, bar, nightclub, school, residential homes, apartments, park, and splash pad. There will also be a warehouse on site for training in “crowd control.”  A survey of area residents indicates that 98% of them are opposed to the facility which will be constructed by the Atlanta Police Foundation. The Foundation has pledged to raise an additional $60 million for the project from corporate donors.

The impetus for this theft of public land and training ground for brutality began in 2020. In that year millions of people across the country rose up in protest after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. But Atlanta then experienced its own rebellion when police there killed Rayshard Brooks. Brooks was killed by police after an altercation which began when he fell asleep in his car in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant. Such circumstances are common in police killings which usually happen during traffic stops, mental health crises, and even calls for help. Only one-third of police killings occur during the commission of violent crimes.

Brooks' death created another rebellion, this time in Atlanta itself, which years before was falsely dubbed, the “city too busy to hate.” The response was classic, as the city’s white fathers ordered their Black puppets to crack down and thus the idea for Cop City was born. Its funders are a who’s who of corporate giants including Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Chick-Fil-A, Home Depot, United Parcel Service, Delta airlines, Amazon and Waffle House. All of these entities claim to have some sort of racial equity program and pledge workplace diversity. Some of their CEOs made grand gestures like “taking a knee” in 2020, but when not creating feel good photo opportunities they use police foundations to help fund police departments across the country. These efforts are little more than slush funds which help police departments spend more money without any accountability to the public.

The protests against Cop City also attracted forest defenders , who camped out to save the old growth trees from destruction. But their peaceful protest of civil disobedience was met with brute force. Some of them have been arrested and charged with “domestic terrorism.” But the worst was yet to come. On January 18, 2023 a forest defender named Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was killed by the police.They claim that Paez Terán shot one of them first. But there has been no independent investigation and conveniently none of the police or members of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation who raided the protectors’ encampment were wearing body cameras. Cop City is killing people before it even exists.

Of course protests ensued after Paez Terán was killed and there were arrests. Mayor Andre Dickens channeled the segregationists of old when he said, "It should be noted that these individuals were not Atlanta or Georgia residents. Most of them traveled into our city to wreak havoc." The representatives of the Black Mecca have resurrected the old “outside agitator” trope.

Police surveillance in Georgia didn’t start with Cop City. In 2007 the plans for what is now Operation Shield were put in place. More than 10,000 video cameras and license plate readers make Atlanta the most surveilled city in the country and one of the most surveilled in the world. Corporate funders to the Atlanta Police Foundation paid for this hyper policing too.

Cop City shows the nexus between oligarchic control, the police state, and their errand girls and boys in the Black political class. The end result of their dirty dealing is the Cop City monstrosity. Police don’t need a training center. They are already trained. They know quite well that their job is to keep Black people under physical control and lock them up as often as possible. A mock town teaching riot control is the last thing Black people need. Haphazard brutality would be transformed into an efficient and well oiled machine.

Obviously Cop City should be opposed, but so should corporate control over our lives, and treacherous Black faces in high places. There will surely be more killings if Cop City becomes a reality.

These Assclowns Will Be Convicted Without Ever Revealing Who Authorized Their "Scorpion Unit"?

 

localmemphis |Five former MPD officers indicted & charged

This comes after all five former Memphis Police officers who were fired following the death of Tyre Nichols were indicted on charges and booked into the Shelby County Jail Thursday morning.

WATCH: “This could’ve been prevented if Internal Affairs took action like I asked.”

DA @SteveMulroy901 confirmed the cops were with @MEM_PoliceDept’s “SCORPION UNIT” — this man was hassled by them… called IA… SILENCE. Now #TyreNichols is dead.

MORE: https://t.co/ZCfj3fE8Zx pic.twitter.com/3hk5vsaj7u

— The Memphis Holler (@MemphisHoller) January 26, 2023

The officers were fired last week after MPD said they were found to be "directly responsible for the physical abuse of Mr. Nichols.”  They were identified as Demetrius Haley, Tadarrius Bean, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills, Jr. and Justin Smith.

Haley, Smith, Bean, Mills, and Martin are each charged with second degree murder, aggravated assault – acting in concert, aggravated kidnapping causing bodily injury, aggravated kidnapping while possessing a weapon, official misconduct thru unauthorized exercising of official power, official misconduct thru failure to perform a duty imposed by law, and official oppression.

Read the full indictment HERE.

The TBI said all five are in custody in the Shelby County Jail. Bond for Haley and Martin was set at $350,000, while bond for Bean, Mills and Smith is set at $250,000.

Charges explained

Mulroy explained the charges during his news conference, saying second-degree murder is a knowing killing, and appropriate in this case. 

In a news release, the D.A. said "first-degree murder usually falls into one of the following two categories: Premeditated, intentional killings and felony murder. Second-degree murder is generally either an unplanned, intentional killing (reacting in the heat of the moment when angry) or a death caused by a reckless disregard for human life."

He said if it was a legal detention, it became illegal at some point... and aggravated means that someone was harmed. 

Mulroy said official misconduct means they intentionally or knowingly exercised unlawful authority, and that law enforcement officers should prevent misconduct.

Mulroy said official oppression is knowing mistreatment during the course of carrying out official duties.

Culture Control Is Practiced Through Public Relations And Advertising

Since 2013 the U.S. government has been freed to direct lies, propaganda and psychological operations against American people domestically.  Here is something to help explain why the MSM is nothing but propaganda, and how long the media has been used against the American people, and why it may never change in the US and the collective west.

Western narrative hegemony is planned, created and controlled by the same people who run Defense (War) , Foreign Policy (imperialism),  Police (private militia to control LOCAL populations) and Finance (the means of extracting wealth from the masses).

Elite House Slaves manage all of the above. Relatives and private school friends work in each of these areas of activity and they make up the Permanent State. This organizing set of affiliations is the same throughout the Collective West's poisonous Garden. 

Elite House Slaves make up narratives and sell them through both contemporary and traditional pulpits - using velvet gloves to cover their hoary claws. They bring out the Gauntlets when peasants get restless and put forth grassroots responses.

Elite House Slaves are obvious to those of us who have somehow managed to break away from the daily brainwashing.

phys.org  |  The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations [Bernays] chose a career in journalism, eventually helping the Woodrow Wilson Administration promote the idea that US efforts in World War I were intended to bring democracy to Europe. Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime. [However since] propaganda had acquired a pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”

Drawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund – a relationship Bernays was always quick to mention – he developed an approach he dubbed “the engineering of consent.” He provided leaders the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious.

Even though Bernays saw the power of propaganda during war and used it to sell products during peacetime, he couldn’t have imagined that his writings on public relations would become a tool of the Third Reich.  In the 1920s, Joseph Goebbels became an avid admirer of Bernays and his writings – despite the fact that Bernays was a Jew. When Goebbels became the minister of propaganda for the Third Reich, he sought to exploit Bernays’ ideas to the fullest extent possible. For example, he created a “Fuhrer cult” around Adolph Hitler.

Bernays learned that the Nazis were using his work in 1933, from a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers. He later recounted in his 1965 autobiography: They were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.

What Bernays’ writings furnish is not a principle or tradition by which to evaluate the appropriateness of propaganda, but simply a means for shaping public opinion for any purpose whatsoever, whether beneficial to human beings or not.

This observation led Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to warn President Franklin Roosevelt against allowing Bernays to play a leadership role in World War II, describing him and his colleagues as “professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism, and self-interest.”

Today we might call what Bernays pioneered a form of branding, but at its core it represents little more than a particularly brazen set of techniques to manipulate people to get them to do your bidding. Its underlying purpose, in large part, is to make money. By convincing people that they want something they do not need, Bernays sought to turn citizens and neighbors into consumers who use their purchasing power to propel themselves down the road to happiness.

Without a moral compass, however, such a transformation promotes a patronizing and ultimately cynical view of human nature and human possibilities, one as likely to destroy lives as to build them up.

foreignpolicy |  "For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?"

Hamilton 68 (Russiagate) The Biggest Khazarian Deception OF ALL TIME!!! (That We Now Know About)

 racket  |  Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68.

If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history. Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s “research.” Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source. 

Hamilton 68 was and is a computerized “dashboard” designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure “Russian disinformation.” It was the brainchild of former FBI agent (and current MSNBC “disinformation expert”) Clint Watts, and backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan think-tank. The latter’s advisory panel includes former acting CIA chief Michael Morell, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former Hillary for America chair John Podesta, and onetime Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. 

The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham:

The secret ingredient in Hamilton 68’s analytic method was a list of 644 accounts supposedly linked “to Russian influence activities online.” It was hidden from the public, but Twitter was in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s sample by analyzing its Application Program Interface (API) requests, which is how they first “reverse-engineered” Hamilton’s list in late 2017.

The company was concerned enough about the proliferation of news stories linked to Hamilton 68 that it also ordered a forensic analysis. Note the second page below lists many of the different types of shadow-banning techniques that existed at Twitter even in 2017, buttressing the “Twitter’s Secret Blacklist” thread by Bari Weiss last month. Here you see categories ranging from “Trends Blacklist” to “Search Blacklist” to “NSFW High Precision.” Twitter was checking to see how many of Hamilton’s accounts were spammy, phony, or bot-like. Note that out of 644 accounts, just 36 were registered in Russia, and many of those were associated with RT. 

The Hamilton 68 tale has no clear analog in media history, which may give mainstream media writers an excuse not to cover it. They will be under heavy pressure to avoid addressing this scandal, since nearly all of them work for organizations guilty of spreading Hamilton’s “bullshit” stories in volume.

This is one of the more significant Twitter Files stories. Each one of these tales explains something new about how companies like Twitter came to lose independence. In the U.S., the door was opened for agencies like the FBI and DHS to press on content moderation after Congress harangued Twitter, Facebook, and Google about Russian “interference,” a phenomenon that had to be seen as an ongoing threat in order to require increased surveillance. “I do very much believe America is under attack,” is how Hamilton 68 co-founder Laura Rosenberger put it, after watching the tweets of Sonya Monsour, David Horowitz, and @holbornlolz.

The Hamilton 68 story shows how the illusion of ongoing “Russian interference” worked. The magic trick was generated via a confluence of interests, between think-tanks, media, and government. Before, we could only speculate. Now we know: the “Russian threat” was, in this case at least, just a bunch of ordinary Americans, dressed up to look like a Red Menace. Jayson Blair had a hell of an imagination, but even he couldn’t have come up with a scheme this obscene. Shame on every news outlet that hasn’t renounced these tales.

 

 

 

Why Does Shepsel Ber Nudelman's Daughter HATE Putin Russia?

NYTimes  |  Ukraine was a Ukraine issue, not a Russia issue, and so the burden of dealing with the expanding crisis there fell in the laps of a newly appointed ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, and the newly appointed assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, the old Russia hand Victoria Nuland.

The daughter of Sherwin Nuland, the surgeon and Yale bioethicist, she fell in love with Russian culture after seeing a performance of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” when she was 12; she studied Russian history and politics at Brown, worked at a Soviet children’s camp and after that for an embassy family in Moscow. Then, eager for adventure and contact with real-live Russians, she did her tour on the Soviet fishing vessel (for seven months, not one). That experience taught her something about the planned economy: After 25 days of drinking and card-playing, the crew did five days of hard work to meet their monthly targets. She also says she learned “how to drink 10 shots of vodka and still get back to my cabin and put a chair under the doorknob. Things could get a little hairy when the boys were drunk.”

At a Senate hearing, top US diplomat Victoria Nuland celebrated the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombing:

"Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea." pic.twitter.com/KS5OM4N165

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) January 27, 2023

She entered the Foreign Service in 1984. Over a long and eventful career, she witnessed the defense of the Russian White House during the attempted hard-line coup against Mikhail Gorbachev; served as Talbott’s chief of staff during the chaotic ’90s; worked as Dick Cheney’s deputy national security adviser in the years after Sept. 11 but “before Cheney became Cheney,” as she put it; and served as the State Department spokeswoman under Hillary Clinton. She was known inside successive administrations as a Russia hawk, but when asked if she hated the country, she drew a distinction between “Russian culture and the Russian people,” which she loves, and the Soviet strain she sees in Putin’s Russia, which she does not. “I deplore the way successive governments in Moscow — Soviet and Russian — have abused their own people, ripped them off, constrained their choices and made us the enemy to mask their own failings,” Nuland says. Hearing her speak with such conviction about governments that, in at least one case, no longer existed, you could understand how she had been over the years a very effective advocate inside several American administrations for her point of view.

In December 2013, with the protests in the center of Kiev just a few weeks old, Nuland traveled to Moscow and then to Kiev to try to defuse the crisis that had engulfed the Yanukovych government. She made little progress with the Kremlin, which was of the opinion that Yanukovych should simply clear the protesters from the streets. On her first night in Kiev, she was woken by members of her staff. The riot police brought out to contain the protests had formed a ring around them and were closing in. The demonstrators were desperately singing patriotic songs to keep up their spirits, but they were in mortal danger. Nuland got on the phone with Washington and worked to release a statement in Secretary of State John Kerry’s name, expressing “disgust” at the move on peaceful protesters. “After that,” Nuland says, “the singing grew louder”; the demonstrators on the square, she told me, were holding their phones in the air, “displaying the Kerry statement in Ukrainian and Russian.” The riot troops backed off.

The next morning, Nuland was to meet with Yanukovych. But first she wanted to visit the protest encampment, which, two weeks into its existence, had grown in both scope and moral authority. “In accordance with Slavic tradition, I wanted to bring something,” Nuland says. She took a large plastic bag filled with treats. Alongside Pyatt, she handed them out to the protesters, and thus was born one of the iconic images of the Ukraine crisis, immediately and widely circulated by the Kremlin’s media apparatuses — a powerful official, not a famous politician like Senator John McCain or Secretary of State John Kerry but a representative of the supposedly more neutral American policymaking bureaucracy, succoring revolutionaries in the center of Kiev. (Nuland points out that they also gave food to the riot police.) Two months later, as the Yanukovych government entered its terminal phase, Nuland’s “[Expletive] the E.U.” comment leaked out. For many Russians and Europeans, the line became emblematic of American arrogance.

A few weeks later, Yanukovych fled the country, and Russian troops annexed Crimea. In tandem with Fried, who had taken the newly established position of sanctions coordinator at the State Department, Nuland began drafting harsh sanctions against Putin’s inner circle, individuals involved in the invasion of Ukraine and eventually large Russian companies and banks. Fried told me that one senior State Department official thought this was pretty funny. He said to Fried, “Do the Russians realize that the two hardest-line people in the entire U.S. government are now in a position to go after them?”

The Russians may have realized this perfectly well. According to American intelligence agencies, two years after the sanctions went into effect, the Russians started feeding emails stolen from the servers of the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks and helping with their distribution.

 

What Obscene Tricks Do Blinken/Nudelman Have Up Their Sleeve?

johnhelmer  |   And what can be believed when, the day after Blinken’s remarks, Victoria Nuland, the most psychopathological Under Secretary of State in the record of the office, announced to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that she and Blinken are ready “in the context of Russia’s decision to negotiate seriously and withdraw its troops from Ukraine and return territories, I would certainly support that [easing of sanctions].”

Victoria Nuland said yesterday that the US is working on setting up a "judicial mechanism" to prosecute Putin, whom she preemptively declared guilty. Thus confirming that the US is pursuing regime change. If you're throwing Putin in prison, you're changing the regime by force

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 27, 2023

What Nuland meant by the Ukraine and the territories to be “returned”, Blinken had disclosed the day before. Crimea, Zaporozhe and “the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia”, meaning Kherson, Donetsk and Lugansk,  will remain Russian and will not be negotiated or “returned” because, said Blinken, “an assault on Crimea would be a tripwire for nuclear escalation.”   

For the time being there has been no Russian acknowledgement of either Blinken’s or Nuland’s statements.  

Listen now to the TNT Radio discussion of what is happening behind the scenes in Washington and Moscow – a breaking news story which has blindsided the mainstream media and also the alternative media.

Read the Blinken statement of Wednesday morning, January 25, and President Vladimir Putin’s response in the afternoon.

Here is the official text of Nuland’s opening statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26;  and here is what Nuland replied in answer to a question from Republican Senator Rand Paul on Russian sanctions.    Rand then told Nuland the sanctions are a form of race war: “If we’re going to sanction people for their belief and, you know, their sort of nationalist version of the world, then we won’t have any, we won’t have any discussion between people or any legislative exchange. That would be about 90 percent of the people. I would venture to say that every member of the Duma probably supports Crimea. This is their perspective.”   

History Of The Jews In Ukraine

wikipedia  |  The history of the Jews in Ukraine dates back over a thousand years; Jewish communities have existed in the territory of Ukraine from the time of the Kievan Rus' (late 9th to mid-13th century).^[9][10] Some of the most important Jewish religious and cultural movements, from Hasidism to Zionism, rose either fully or to an extensive degree in the territory of modern Ukraine. According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine constitutes the third-largest in Europe and the fifth-largest in the world.^[3]

Whilst at times it flourished, at other times the Jewish community faced periods of persecution and antisemitic discrimination. In the Ukrainian People's Republic (1917-1920), Yiddish was declared a state language, along with Ukrainian and Russian. At that time, the Jewish National Union was created and the community was granted an autonomous status.^[11] Yiddish was used on Ukrainian currency in this same period, between 1917 and 1920.^[12] Before World War II, slightly less than one-third of Ukraine's urban population consisted of Jews;^[13] they were the largest national minority in Ukraine.^{[citation needed]} Ukrainian Jews consist of a number of sub-groups with distinct characteristics, including Ashkenazi Jews, Mountain Jews, Bukharan Jews, Crimean Karaites, Krymchak Jews, and Georgian Jews.

In the westernmost area of Ukraine, Jews were mentioned for the first time in records in 1030. During the Khmelnytsky Uprising between 1648 and 1657, an army of Cossacks massacred and took into captivity large numbers of Jews, Roman Catholics, and Uniate Christians. One estimate (1996) reports that 15,000-30,000 Jews were killed or taken captive, and that 300 Jewish communities were completely destroyed.^[14] More recent estimates (2014) greatly reduce the number of Jews that died during the national uprising of Ukrainians to 3,000-6,000 people between the years 1648–1649.^[15]

During the 1821 anti-Jewish riots in Odesa following the death of the Greek Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople, 14 Jews were killed. Some sources claim this episode as the first pogrom.^[16] At the start of 20th century, anti-Jewish pogroms continued to occur, leading to large-scale emigration. When Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, antisemitic attitudes were expressed in numerous blood libel cases between 1911 and 1913.^{[citation needed]} In 1915, the Russian imperial government expelled thousands of Jews from the Empire's border areas.^[17][18]

During the conflicts of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Russian Civil War, an estimated 31,071 Jews were killed in pogroms between 1918 and 1920.^[19] During the establishment of the Ukrainian People's Republic (1917–21),^[20] pogroms continued to be perpetrated on Ukrainian territory. In Ukraine, the number of civilian Jews killed by Petliura's forces during the period was estimated at between 35,000 and 50,000 to 100,000 ^[21]

Pogroms erupted in January 1919 in the northwest province of Volhynia and spread to many other regions of Ukraine.^[22] Massive pogroms continued until 1921.^[23] The actions of the Soviet government by 1927 led to a growing antisemitism in the area.^[24]

Total civilian losses during World War II and the German occupation of Ukraine are estimated at seven million. More than one million Soviet Jews, of them around 225,000 in Belarus,^[25] were shot and killed by the Einsatzgruppen and by their many local Ukrainian supporters. Most of them were killed in Ukraine because most pre-WWII Soviet Jews lived in the Pale of Settlement, of which Ukraine was the biggest part. The major massacres against Jews occurred mainly in the first phase of the occupation, although they continued until the return of the Red Army. In 1959 Ukraine had 840,000 Jews, a decrease of almost 70% from 1941 totals (within Ukraine's current borders). Ukraine's Jewish population continued to decline significantly during the Cold War. In 1989, Ukraine's Jewish population was only slightly more than half of what it was thirty years earlier (in 1959). During and after the collapse of Communism in the 1990s, the majority of the Jews who remained in Ukraine in 1989 left the country and moved abroad (mostly to Israel).^[26] Antisemitic graffiti and violence against Jews are still problems in Ukraine.^[27][28]

Interesting How Russia's Head Khazarians In Charge Can Keep Respectful Tongues In Their Mouths...,

kremlin.ru  |  In the run-up to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Vladimir Putin met at the Kremlin with Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar and President of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia Alexander Boroda.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, friends,

This meeting precedes International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, the Heroes of the Resistance, and our country’s position on this is well known. The majority of Jews killed by the Nazis were Soviet citizens, and we share this pain.

You are aware of our current position too. We are strongly against consigning crimes of this kind to oblivion, since crimes like this have no statute of limitations. We hold this policy to make sure that nothing like this ever happens to humankind again.

I am aware of the position of the Jewish community of Russia and the position of the State of Israel regarding the role and importance of the Red Army in defeating Nazism and fascism. We highly appreciate this, but to reiterate, this matter is of particular importance for our people.

You are also aware that the investigating authorities and the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation continue to deploy serious efforts trying to identify crimes of this type committed against any citizens of the former Soviet Union, regardless of their ethnic origin. Without a doubt, this work is a major contribution to the efforts seeking to bring to light the crimes committed by the Nazis against the Jews as well.

We know that Jewish organisations around the world are supportive of the work we are doing. We are doing our best to ensure that our efforts are supported at the international level as well. Unfortunately, many countries use various pretexts to avoid participating in joint efforts in this important area. We will continue to pursue this work regardless of the ongoing political developments.

I am aware that you are holding an event tomorrow, or rather a string of events associated with this date, so please convey my best wishes to the participants of tomorrow’s programme.

Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar: Thank you very much, thank you for your words.

Indeed, the Holocaust and all the developments of World War II are tragic events for us. I know this firsthand, since my family, my father miraculously survived the Holocaust. They managed to leave on the last ship. My mother survived the Holocaust because some good people hid her during the war.

So, the suffering from the Holocaust – so many Jews suffered at that time and 6 million innocent people died – this suffering remains terrible to us to this day. Every year, when we remember these events, we always say: never again. Tomorrow also marks the anniversary of the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad. It is also a time when we remember the suffering during the siege. A situation where innocent people suffer only because someone attacks them is terrible, inexplicable and unsupportable.

So, thank you very much for everything you have done and are doing today. Moreover, Jews feel very comfortable living in Russia today, and thank God for what is actually happening in our country today.

In this regard, we keep saying that we are ready to do our best to find peaceful solutions. Because a situation where people suffer is bad for everyone; everyone suffers when they see others around them suffering. All of us understand that we are children of one God, and we want all his children to live in brotherhood, mutual understanding and friendship and truly respect each other. When people suffer, it is because someone is not letting them live a calm everyday life. The Talmud says that a person who saved the life of one human being saved the whole world, and we value every life.

To reiterate, we as a Jewish community, I believe, not only in Russia, but all over the world, are ready to do everything to find peaceful solutions, so people can really… maybe our people understand more than anyone else what suffering is, so we are ready to do everything we can to promote peace around the world, and have people live a good life.

Vladimir Putin: Good. Thank you.

 

On Khazarian Vulgarity...,

unz  |   I read with interest a recent column in The Tablet by David Mikics (Professor of English, University of Houston) on Jewish vulgarity or, as the piece otherwise explains it, “the once-vibrant Jewish trait of not caring what the goyim think.” Although touted as a three-part series, only the first part has been published thus far, and this first essay is a kind of focused review of elements within John Murray Cuddihy’s The Ordeal of Civility and Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. In the following essay I want to expand upon, and challenge, some of the ideas raised in the piece by Mikics.

I have to agree with the basic premise of the opening remarks of Mikics’s column. He writes that “the charge that Jews are vulgar now seems almost quaint. … Jewish lack of manners was once taken seriously both by Jews and by their gentile neighbors and competitors. The vulgar, unmannerly Jew was a countercultural force, and not just a reason for shame and repression.” The overall state of contemporary culture has indeed degraded to such an extent that Jews no longer stand out as singular producers of cultural obscenities. And yet there is a deep history of Jews as the agents of vulgarity in the West, stretching back to Roman accounts. Mikics doesn’t seem concerned with this deep history, focusing only on the twentieth century as covered by the works of Cuddihy and Slezkine.

Historical Jewish Obscenity

Jews have often been regarded by host cultures as both inherently obscene and as promoters of the obscene — a corrosive force acting against group morality, and therefore group cohesion. In Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (2014), Josh Lambert points out that in the ancient Mediterranean Jews were referred to as “an obscene people.”[1] Such comments may have been as much observations as aspersions, since we know that in later centuries obscenity became an integral part of Jewish linguistic culture. For example, Bernard Dov Weinryb writes that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Poland, “many erotic or obscene expressions and metaphors appear in Hassidic writings. …They reflect the way the average Jew in those times used obscene language, mainly of an erotic character, in his conversation.”[2] On more recent contexts, Jonas E. Alexis has written that,

Jewish actors tend to gravitate towards shows with sexual themes. … Israeli-American Natalie Portman tells us in the movie No Strings Attached that “monogamy goes against our basic biology.” And [Jewish singer] Adam Lambert says, “When I’m on stage there’s definitely a sexual energy that goes into it.” In 2009 Lambert performed ‘For Your Entertainment’ at the American Music Awards. During the performance Lambert dragged a female dancer by her ankles and pushed “a male dancer’s head into his crotch and simulated oral sex.”[3]

As well as being represented and self-representing as having an intrinsic relationship to the obscene, the historical record is also replete with examples of Jews involving themselves heavily in the trade in obscenity. In his pseudonymously-published Letters from England (1808), the English Poet Laureate Robert Southey remarked on Jewish peddlers who wandered nineteenth-century England hawking “miserable and obscene prints.”[4]

In 1886 Édouard Drumont warned of a “pornographic war” being waged on France by Jews.[5] In 1913, a “filthy press” in Warsaw “belonging to a certain Zimmerman,” was confiscated by Polish police after it was discovered disseminating pornography throughout the Russian Empire — activities described by the newspaper Przegląd Katolicki as a “Jewish atrocity.”[6]
Estonian police raided a building in 1909 belonging to the Jewish Benjamin Mikhailovsky, one of the richest merchants in Narva. One of Mikhailovsky’s side projects, apart from the trade in precious metals, was printing, and during their search police seized “11,119 cards they considered pornographic.”[7] And in Poland in 1910, the Polish Archbishop Pelczar would write, “I consider it my duty to warn Christian society against those Jews who intoxicate our people in the tavern and destroy them with usury; against those who maintain houses of debauchery in the towns; who trade in live goods [i.e. selling women into prostitution], who poison our young people with pornographic prints and periodicals.”[8] In the U.S, it is well-established that Jews have had a prominent role in the porn industry since the late nineteenth century.

ALL Our Little Latinex Minions Getting WAAAAY Out Of Pocket!!!

LATimes |  A proposal floated by the leaders of Brazil and Argentina to launch a common currency is being met with deep skepticism by analysts, who say neither country is positioned to tackle such a complicated undertaking or instill confidence in the idea with global markets.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told reporters Monday, though, that a common currency would reduce a harmful dependence on the U.S. dollar.

“I think this will happen with time, and it is necessary because there are countries that sometimes have difficulty acquiring dollars,” Lula said in Buenos Aires after meeting his Argentine counterpart, Alberto Fernández. “We must not in the 21st century continue doing the same as what was done in the 20th century.”

The currency would initially be shared between Argentina and Brazil for trade and transactions between the two countries and later be adopted by fellow members of the Mercosur trade bloc, Lula explained. Details remained fuzzy a day after Lula and Fernández announced the outlines in a joint statement published Sunday in the Argentine newspaper Perfil.

Speaking in Buenos Aires on Monday afternoon, Brazil’s Finance Minister Fernando Haddad clarified that the proposal would not entail the adoption of a sole currency to replace the Brazilian real and the Argentine peso.

Economists had immediately questioned the logic of the plan between the South American neighbors. Economic conditions are deteriorating in Argentina, where nearly four in 10 people live in poverty. The nation has one of the world’s highest inflation rates — 95% in 2022 — and its peso has been steadily depreciating for over a decade. Its multiple foreign exchange rates include an illegal one employed in backrooms by money-changers — a practice so entrenched that this so-called “blue dollar” rate is published daily in newspapers.

Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation, sits in an objectively better place economically, but it is hardly a beacon of success. Its inflation in 2022 exceeded the ceiling of the central bank’s target range for a second straight year. And the real has shed half its value against the dollar since 2014, just before the nation plunged into its deepest recession in a century. The nation’s growth prospects remain subdued, and it hasn’t recorded a primary budget surplus since 2013.

“Neither country has the initial conditions to make this succeed and attract others,” Mohamed A. El-Erian, former chief executive of Pimco, one of the world’s premier fixed-income investment managers, tweeted on Sunday. “The best this initiative can hope for is that talk creates some political cover for much-needed economic reforms.”

Fernández said neither he nor his Brazilian counterpart knows how a currency could function between their two countries or in the region. But he said they agree that depending on foreign currencies for trade is harmful. The greenback’s recent strength has complicated the repayment of dollar-denominated debt for developing nations around the world, including Argentina. Its central bank uses its precious dollar reserves to pay down its foreign debt and to intervene in the currency market to stem depreciation, and so it is loath to sell greenbacks to importers for trade.

Both countries’ economic teams will present proposals for trade and bilateral transactions, with a currency created after “much debate and meetings,” Lula said.

The proposal isn’t original, nor has it come only from the left.

Leftist Latinex Leadership Talm'bout Throwing Out The OAS In Favor Of CELAC

NC  |  The invasion of the capital has also, however briefly, united almost all of the governments of Latin America against right-wing authoritarianism. Just about every head of state in the region, with the notable exception, I believe, of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Guatemala’s Alejandro Giammattei, has expressed support for Lula’s government and condemnation of the events of Sunday, Jan 8. They include the heads of state of Uruguay, Ecuador, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Again, this would have been unthinkable just a few days ago.

The reason why this is important is that one of the key foreign policy goals of Lula’s new government is to open a new chapter of regional cooperation and integration in Latin America — something that has been tried many times before and largely failed.

One of Lula’s first actions since taking office was to confirm the return of Brazil to CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), an intergovernmental mechanism for dialogue and political agreements. It was set up in Caracas in 2011 with the implicit goal of deepening Latin American integration and reducing the influence of the United States on the politics and economics of Latin America. Lula will officially ratify his decision to rejoin at CELAC’s seventh summit, to be held in Buenos Aires on Jan 24.

As readers may recall, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador (aka AMLO) proposed using CELAC as a vehicle to create in Latin America something similar to the European Economic Community, the six-member economic association formed in 1957 that would eventually evolve into today’s 27-member European Union. But he also emphasised “the need to respect national sovereignty and adhere to non-interventionist and pro-development policies” as well as ensure that any resulting structure is “in accordance with our history, our reality, and our identities.”

In his speech at the sixth CELAC summit, held in September 2021, AMLO reiterated his hopes that CELAC would eventually supplant the widely reviled Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS) as the main institution for intra-regional relations. He also invited Mexico’s North American trade partners, the US and Canada, to join. Both are already observer states, as too is China.

However, as I noted at the time, it’s virtually impossible to even imagine senior representatives of the US and Canadian governments sitting around a table with leaders of countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, let alone debating regional policy with them. Lest we forget, just last summer the Biden Administration scored a major diplomatic own goal by refusing to invite the same three countries to the 9th Summit of the Americas, in Los Angeles, which resulted in a number of other heads of state refusing to attend.

Now, the Biden administration will have to contend with the diplomatic blowback from the arrival of Bolsonaro and his lackey Torres in Florida just days before Sunday’s insurrection. A number of members of the progressive caucus, including AOC, have already called for Bolsonaro not be allowed refuge on US soil.

This places the Biden administration in a bit of a bind, since the US has always served as a refuge for US-aligned heads of state and coup plotters in Latin America. Plus, lest we forget, the US Justice Department had an important hand in the now-disgraced Operation Car Wash in Brazil, which led to the downfall of Dilma Rousseff’s government, the imprisonment of Lula just as he was preparing to run for office again, and the eventual election of Bolsonaro.