A day after that, Guangzhou, one of the biggest cities in China, was placed on lockdown…
As of that point, around 400 million citizens across China were quarantined. It was also revealed that the Coronavirus can likely survive on surfaces for up to 9 days after contact.
On February 8th, citizen journalist Chen Quishi went missing.
Transcript for Quishi’s vlog: https://pastebin.com/BFCuFYr6
Exposing the true reality behind the outbreak, Quishi’s reporting showed horrific scenes of overstretched hospitals full of patients and a woman sitting next to a dead relative in a wheelchair frantically trying to contact family.
Quishi was invaluable to breaking the actual developments of the Coronavirus on the ground and now, he’s vanished.
All of these developments transpired amidst the climbing toll of those infected and dead from the sickness across China. As of writing, there are 34,878 confirmed cases worldwide, 724 dead, and 6,107 in critical condition.
New cases have also appeared in Singapore, France, Thailand, and Vietnam.
A senior Chinese government official ordered authorities across Wuhan to round up all residents infected with the Coronavirus and put them in isolation, quarantine camps, or designated hospitals.
Sun Chunlan, a premier tasked with heading the government’s response to the outbreak in Wuhan, claimed city investigators should go to each home to check the temperatures of every resident.
Makeshift mass quarantine shelters have been erected in response to the instruction by Chunlan. The shelters are meant for patients with “milder symptoms” of the Coronavirus but according to a viral post on Chinese social media site, Weibo, “conditions were very poor” at an exhibition center turned quarantine facility.
There were power outages and electric blankets that couldn’t be turned on to be used. Alongside that was a serious shortage of staff, with the post claiming “doctors and nurses were not seen to be taking note of symptoms and distributing medicine,” and that oxygen devices were scarce.
China’s response to an illness that’s been decreed as “less serious than the flu” is quarantining hundreds of millions who may have come in contact with the Coronavirus. After only 700 supposed deaths, this is perhaps the biggest indicator that something is not as it seems.
The illness is “nothing to worry about” – but major cities across China, huge population centers with millions of citizens – have been placed under quarantine. As time stretches on, it seems that the Chinese government can not hide the severity of the situation, no matter what they do or who they silence.
An interview was recently given by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, to Republik on Julian Assange. The headline reads “A murderous system is being created before our very eyes”. During the interview, Melzer details just why he has got so involved in Assange’s case and what the implications of it are for the future of humanity.
Just to recap, Julian Assange, the former Wikileaks editor, was arrested last year after spending years incarcerated in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he sought asylum for fear of being deported to the US to face charges relating to his publication of leaked documents. It was back in 2010 that Wikileaks published damning evidence of torture and unlawful killings carried out by the US army, provided for by Chelsea Manning. He subsequently was wanted by Sweden on charges of rape, charges which have since been dropped, and which it has been suggested were part of a set-up to engineer Assange’s deportation to the US. Ecuador finally gave him up to the UK authorities last April, by inviting them into the embassy to extract Assange, after seven years of interment within the embassy walls.
The Wikileaks founder’s ordeal is set to continue however, it seems. The 48-year old is currently wasting away inside Belmarsh prison, where he was kept for months in solitary confinement, before incredibly, prisoners themselves protested and asked that he be allowed to mingle with the others. The authorities recently agreed to this concession, but it all too little too late it seems for a man who has been destroyed by the US and British governments, for essentially trying to tell the truth.
As for Nils Melzer, he explains in his recent interview why he has specifically got involved in Assange’s case. His reasons are given as follows: 1. He says that Assange was disclosing evidence of systematic torture by the US army, but he himself has been persecuted for this. 2. Assange has been so ill-treated that he is now exhibiting signs of psychological torture. 3. There is a high chance of him being extradited to a country which Amnesty International has condemned for its use of torture. He also feels that the case has a special symbolic significance for the future of our democracies.
There are many extraordinary points made in Melzer’s interview, which I thoroughly recommend reading: the made-up rape allegation and fabricated evidence in Sweden, the pressure from the British authorities not to drop the case, the biased judge, detention in a maximum security prison, psychological torture – and future extradition to the US, where he could face up to 175 years in jail for exposing war crimes. But I think one of the most significant is the role that the media has played in this case. For Melzer admits that even he, initially, until he became aware of all the facts, was prejudiced against Assange as a result of what he saw and heard in the media. And it was the mainstream media that first began publishing false accusations that Assange had been accused of rape, the media that blackened his character.
The role of the media in Assange’s downfall cannot be underestimated. Even now, very few mainstream journalists are willing to cover his plight. Melzer states that the whole point of Assange’s ‘show trial’ has been to intimidate journalists from doing what Assange did: “The message to all of us is: This is what will happen to you if you emulate the Wikileaks model.”
He believes the case is a scandal and ‘represents the failure of Western law’. If convicted, he will consider it to be a ‘death sentence for freedom of the press.’
If anyone was to be convicted, Melzer argues, it should have been the individuals who carried the massacres and torture Julian Assange reported on. But to date, not one has been charged, nor any criminal investigation been carried out into their actions. Instead, Assange has been the victim of a new harsh reality: “It is becoming a crime to tell the truth” Melzer states.
On Wednesday it was reported that a petition has been signed by over 130 prominent Germans in favour of Julian Assange’s release. The signatories include names such as former German vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel and previous vice president of the European Commission, Gunter Verhuegen. The petition states that Assange’s continued detention in the UK’s highest security prison – Belmarsh – violates his human rights, particularly given his poor state of health.
But these pleas are likely to fall on deaf ears. In Assange’s case it’s clear who is calling the shots, and that even European governments have been at the mercy of the US’ demands. And yet western nations follow the US’s lead at their own folly – our democracies are crumbling before our very eyes.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
The original source of this article is Global Research
The effort by the Democratic Party establishment to conceal or suppress reports of Senator Bernie Sanders’ victory in the Iowa caucuses reached a new stage Thursday with Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez calling on the Iowa Democratic Party to “immediately begin a recanvass” of the state.
The twitter statement by Perez came only hours after the final figures from the Iowa Democratic Party showed Sanders more than 6,000 votes ahead of former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the February 3 caucuses, and behind by only two “state delegate equivalents,” out of 2,152, in the process that will lead to the awarding of Iowa’s delegates to the Democratic national convention.
With all but one of nearly 1,800 precincts tallied, Sanders led Buttigieg by 43,671 to 37,557 votes, with Senator Elizabeth Warren in third place with 32,553, among initial ballots cast at the caucuses. Sanders had 24.8 percent of the vote compared to 21.3 percent for Buttigieg.
Sanders had a smaller lead in the second round, after those backing “unviable candidate” (those with less than 15 percent support) were allowed to switch their votes. Buttigieg’s lead in “state delegate equivalents” arises from the overrepresentation of rural areas, where he ran stronger, in the apportioning of delegates.
The statement by Perez appeared to have two purposes: to provide cover for the Democratic Party in response to widespread accounts of inaccuracies and contradictions in the Iowa vote reporting, including a lengthy account posted on the New York Times website Thursday; and to further muddy the outcome of the caucuses, in which Sanders won a clear popular vote victory despite the effective tie in the number of delegates won.
Sanders wiped out Buttigieg’s narrow lead in delegates thanks to votes in satellite caucuses, which were held outside normal hours or outside the state to accommodate voters unable to attend the regular caucuses that began at 7 p.m. Monday night. In two results reported Thursday, one satellite caucus for night-shift workers at a food processing plant in Ottumwa, and the other for students and workers at Drake University in Des Moines, Sanders collected nine “state delegate equivalents” compared to zero for Buttigieg.
It is noteworthy that Perez issued his statement knowing that Sanders was about to hold a press conference in New Hampshire, where he is campaigning for the February 11 primary, to declare victory in Iowa. Sanders again refused to make any criticism of the Iowa Democratic Party for delaying the report of the results for many days.
In his tweet, Perez acknowledged “problems that have emerged in the implementation of the delegate selection plan” and urged a complete recanvass “in order to assure public confidence in the results.” A DNC official told the press that this would involve a hand audit of worksheets and reporting forms from every precinct and satellite caucus, checking for inconsistencies, mathematical errors and other mistakes. The scale of such an effort could postpone any final report of the Iowa results for days, and perhaps even until after the New Hampshire primary, the second contest in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Image on the right: Tom Perez (Source: Flickr/Gage Skidmore)
Iowa state Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price said that he was prepared to order a recanvass, but only if requested by one of the campaigns, not by Perez, who has no actual authority to order the review. None of the campaigns has yet requested a recanvass, and it is not clear that any of them will, since those candidates who finished below the top two, including Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Amy Klobuchar, want the public to forget about Iowa as quickly as possible.
The dueling statements from Perez and Price conceal their underlying political alignment: Price was the Iowa state director for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 before becoming state chairman; Perez was the choice of the Clinton wing of the party to head the DNC, narrowly defeating Representative Keith Ellison, backed by Sanders and Pete Buttigieg in his first national effort. Both Price and Perez are adamantly opposed to the nomination of Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist.”
The New York Times account, under the headline, “Many Errors Are Evident in Iowa Caucus Results Released Wednesday,” was based on a precinct-by-precinct analysis that suggested both math errors in the tallies and more serious violations of rules governing the caucuses, including more people voting in the second round than in the first, and votes being subtracted from “viable” candidates, when their totals should only have increased.
The Times claimed there was no pattern in the errors, in terms of favoring Buttigieg or Sanders, the two leading candidates. Its analysis did not include well publicized and cruder errors in the initial count, such as awarding hundreds of Sanders votes to former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who did not campaign in Iowa, and hundreds of Warren votes to billionaire Tom Steyer. These mistakes were publicly corrected by the Iowa Democratic Party, but they obviously did not add to the credibility of the overall result.
The figures showed the gap between Buttigieg and Sanders, in terms of “state delegate equivalents,” narrowing to near nonexistence. That did not stop the bulk of the corporate media from continuing to present Buttigieg as the surprise victor in Iowa and Sanders as the second-place finisher, and even claiming that Sanders’ comfortable lead in the polls ahead of the New Hampshire primary was in danger.
An example of this was a headline on the website of Newsweek magazine, which read, “Pete Buttigieg Gaining Quickly In New Hampshire As Bernie Sanders Stalls: Poll.” The article was actually reporting a poll in which Sanders led with 31 percent of the vote, with Buttigieg in second place at 21 percent. The report admitted that “Sanders maintains a healthy lead in the state where he won more than 60 percent of votes in the 2016 contest.”
The main concern of the Democratic establishment is not Sanders himself—a proven defender of capitalism and a longtime collaborator with the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate and House. It is that the nomination of a candidate who publicly (if less and less frequently) embraces the socialist label and who professes his opposition to war and militarism could provide encouragement to the leftward movement of millions of working people and youth who are looking for a way to fight back against the capitalist system.
There are further signs of the deep political crisis wracking the Democratic Party. Campaigning in New Hampshire, former Vice President Biden took up the anti-socialist cudgel wielded by Trump in his State of the Union address. “If Senator Sanders is the nominee for the party, every Democrat in America up and down the ballot, in blue states, red states, purple states, easy districts and competitive ones, every Democrat will have to carry the label Senator Sanders has chosen for himself,” Biden said. “He calls him—and I don’t criticize him—he calls himself a democratic socialist.”
The Biden campaign was in visible crisis, purging both the Iowa state director and the Iowa field director after the dismal showing there, and shifting advertising money from the South Carolina primary on February 29 to the Nevada caucuses February 22 in an effort to avoid losing the first three contests in the Democratic race. Biden admitted in one campaign appearance Wednesday that the Iowa caucus had been a “gut punch” to his campaign.
Meanwhile, the Sanders campaign announced that it had raised $25 million from more than 648,000 donors in January, the best fundraising month of the campaign, with an average donation of $18, most of it on-line. These included 219,000 first-time donors. A campaign statement declared, “Working class Americans giving $18 at a time are putting our campaign in a strong position to compete in states all over the map.” According to Sanders aides, “teacher” was the most common occupation, and the top five employers of those making contributions were Amazon, Starbucks, Walmart, the US Postal Service and Target.
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Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman funded the creation of ACRONYM, the group that sabotaged the Iowa caucus results, after bankrolling voter manipulation campaigns including the notorious online “false flag operation” in Alabama’s 2017 senate race.
At the time of publication, February 6, the winner of the Iowa’s Democratic Party caucus is still unknown. Senator Bernie Sanders, the clear winner in virtually every exit poll, is currently ahead in votes. Yet somehow Pete Buttigieg, a favorite of the party establishment who was unknown to most voters until last year, has claimed victory.
The force accused of sowing the confusion and disarray surrounding the first Democratic Party contest of the 2020 election season is a dark money nonprofit called Acronym. It was Acronym that launched Shadow Inc, the mysterious company behind the now-infamous, unsecured, completely unworkable voter app which prevented precinct chairs from reporting vote totals on caucus night.
The exceptionally opaque Acronym was itself created with seed money from a Silicon Valley billionaire named Reid Hoffman who has financed a series of highly manipulative social media campaigns.
The billionaire founder of LinkedIn, Hoffman is a top funder of novel Democratic Party social media campaigns accused of manipulating voters through social media. He is assisted by Dmitri Mehlhorn, a corporate consultant who pushed school privatization before joining Hoffman’s political empire.
One of the most consequential beneficiaries of Hoffman’s wealth is Acronym CEO Tara McGowan, a 33-year-old former journalist and Obama for America veteran.
Acronym CEO Tara McGowan with Barack Obama, her former boss
Once touted as “a weapon of a woman whose innovative tactics make her critically important to the Democratic Party,” McGowan’s name is now synonymous with the fiasco in Iowa. She also happens to be married to a senior advisor to Pete Buttieg’s presidential campaign.
Back in December 2018, McGowan personally credited Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s “Investing in US” initiative for the birth of her dark money pressure group, Acronym.
“I’m personally grateful and proud to be included in this group of incredible political founders + startups @reidhoffman and his team, led by Dmitri [Mehlhorn], have supported and helped to fund over the past two years,” she declared on Twitter in December 2018.
I’m personally grateful and proud to be included in this group of incredible political founders + startups who @reidhoffman and his team, led by Dmitri, have supported and helped to fund over the past two years. https://t.co/o0QApPbHWY
Hoffman and Mehlhorn have also faced scrutiny for their alleged operation of a series of deceptive pages which attempted to manipulate center-right users into voting for Democrats. Today, Acronym’s McGowan oversees a massive Facebook media operation that employs similarly deceptive techniques to sway voters.
Through youthful, tech-centric operatives like McGowan, Hoffman and Mehlhorn are constructing a massive new infrastructure that could supplant the party’s apparatus.
As Vanity Fair reported, “Hoffman and Mehlhorn, after all, are not just building a power base that could supplement traditional Democratic organizations, they are, potentially, laying the groundwork to usurp the D.N.C. entirely.”
‘Laying the groundwork to usurp the D.N.C. entirely’
Having fostered friendships with nationally known Silicon Valley oligarchs like right-wing libertarian Trump supporter Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, is now making his name as a top sugardaddy of the Democratic anti-Trump resistance.
Following Trump’s election in 2016, Hoffman plowed his money into an array of new Democrat-aligned social media groups through a funding hub he founded called Investing in US.
To run Investing in US on a day-to-day basis, Hoffman tapped Dmitri Mehlhorn, a venture capitalist and political strategist accustomed to walking the line between the corporate world and Democratic Party.
“There was no risk-capital or growth-capital arm of the resistance, and so that is what we’ve tried to build,” Mehlhorn told Vanity Fair.
“Now, in terms of what that implies, that implies that we are backing founders, so people who we think have big, potentially game-changing ideas.”
Mehlhorn’s career path tracked closely with neoliberal party favorites like Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker. He studied at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, launched his career at McKinsey Associates, and became a leading advocate for school privatization as the chief operating officer of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst.
According to Mehlhorn’s bio, he sits on the board of American Prison Data Systems, a company that claims to reduce recidivism by giving prisoners tablets to study coding for five hours a day.
In a 2018 Medium post, announcing the “founders” that Investing in US planned to back, Mehlhorn resorted to distinctly neoconservative talking points to emphasize the mission of his organization.
After quoting Ronald Reagan, he declared, “Trump and his movement, borrowing heavily from other authoritarian criminals such as Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin, promised to hollow out America’s principles in favor of his own personal enrichment.”
Pledging to “inoculate our politics and our economy against corruption, white nationalism, and mass deceit,” Mehlhorn announced major donations to “diverse groups” with names like Woke Vote, PushBlack, and an “anti-Nazi” organization known as Integrity for America.
Among the top recipients of support from Investing in US was McGowan’s Acronym, which Mehlhorn described merely as a “media group.”
As The Grayzone reported, Acronym has ballooned since its founding into a massive dark money operation, even launching a Super PAC dubbed Pacronym that has raked in money from hedge fund billionaires like Seth Klarman and Donald Sussman.
What Mehlhorn and Hoffman never disclosed to the public, however, was their support for a Democrat-aligned group that waged a covert online disinformation campaign which aimed to influence the outcome of the 2017 special senate election in Alabama.
Project Birmingham: From New Knowledge to no knowledge
The 2017 senate election in Alabama was one of the most dramatic races of President Donald Trump’s first term in office. Treated by national media as a referendum on Trump in a red state, it pitted a far-right Republican, Roy Moore, against Doug Jones, a moderate Republican who ran as a Democrat. In the end, Jones won an upset victory in a deep red state, thrilling Democrats across the country.
As Dan Cohen wrote in a series of reports for The Grayzone, the outcome of the 2017 Alabama race was heavily influenced by an online disinformation operation. The campaign, which was unknown to voters at the time, was called Project Birmingham.
Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman provided $100,000 to the architects of this black ops campaign. His money was pipelined through American Engagement Technologies (AET), a company run by Obama administration veteran and Democrat tech operative Mikey Dickerson. Through AET, another firm comprised of Obama campaign veterans and national security state operatives called New Knowledge was contracted to carry out the secretive voter manipulation project.
In internal documents first covered by the New York Times, Project Birmingham’s architects described the scheme as an “elaborate false flag operation” which aimed to convince voters that the Kremlin was supporting Moore through thousands of fake Russian bots.
Project Birmingham went to absurd lengths to drive voters away from Moore. Its architects deployed a phony Facebook page encouraging Alabamians to vote for an obscure write-in Republican candidate, arranged interviews for the candidate in major newspapers, and even sought to arrange SuperPAC funding for his dark horse campaign.
The deeply un-democratic campaign was overseen by a cast of characters remarkably similar to those who bungled the 2020 Iowa caucus count. Like the staff of Acronym and Shadow Inc., the New Knowledge operatives who carried out Project Birmingham were 30- and 40-something techies who had worked in the Obama administration and on various Democratic campaigns. (New Knowledge was rebranded as Yonder after the scandal was exposed in national media.)
The devious tactics they waged in Alabama likely influenced the outcome of the election. A leaked “Project Birmingham Debrief” claimed that New Knowledge’s black operations “moved enough votes to ensure a Doug Jones victory.”
After the scheme was exposed, Hoffman issued a public apology and claimed he had no knowledge of the New Knowledge disinformation project. He said nothing about the Investing in US employee who worked directly on Project Birmingham, however.
This was hardly the first time Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s finger prints were discovered on a deceptive voter manipulation campaign.
Aiming to ‘mirror’ the tactics of Russia’s Internet Research Agency
Following the 2018 midterm congressional election, Reid Hoffman and his henchman Dmitri Mehlhorn faced further scrutiny in national media, this time for operating a fake news-style organization called News for Democracy.
This shady outfit managed an array of community Facebook pages initially focusing on sports, Christianity, patriotism, and other topics that were likely to generate interest from right-wing voters in swing states.
Yet the seemingly locally-branded cultural pages took a decisively political turn as election night approached. After racking up millions of likes, News for Democracy slipped in ads for Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke on a Facebook page targeting evangelical Christians, and attacked a Republican candidate, Senator Marsha Blackburn, on a page focused on local Tennessee sports.
While Hoffman’s right-hand man, Mehlhorn, claimed to reject the spread of misinformation, he told the Washington Post that through projects like News for Democracy, he aimed to “mirror” the tactics of the notorious Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm.
Tech billionaire Reed Hoffman funded the @NewKnowledgeAI Alabama black op. His advisor, Dmitri Mehlhorn, has called for efforts to "mirror" the tactics of the Russian Internet Research Agency troll farm. This IRA Facebook ad is clearly worth emulating. https://t.co/rh90K8WND7pic.twitter.com/yq7cuOLPWQ
Facebook eventually launched an investigation into the insidious manipulation ploys of Hoffman and Mehlhorn’s News for Democracy.
The very tactics that landed the two in hot water are remarkably similar to those that Tara McGowan, the Acronym founder who disrupted the Iowa caucuses, has put on display.
McGowan recently founded Courier Newsroom, a seemingly journalistic initiative that appeared to take on a more overtly partisan role with time. Like News for Democracy, Courier Newsroom has opened local news pages on Facebook with unassuming names like “The Virginia Dogwood” or “Arizona’s Copper Courier.” After seeding the pages with folksy local stories, Courier Newsroom bombards users with pro-Democrat political messaging.
As Bloomberg reported, McGowan used “her sizable war chest and digital advertising savvy to pay to have her articles placed into the Facebook feeds of swing-state users.” McGowan then used “that feedback to find more people like them.”
One of McGowan’s dubious news pages, the Virginia Dogwood, spent a whopping $275,000 on Facebook ads during the 2018 midterm elections.
“We’ll try it, see if we can make it work, and hopefully become a permanent piece of the new infrastructure,” McGowan told Bloomberg.
Tara McGowan’s shenanigans in Iowa could be seen in the light of a wider string of manipulations by the Silicon Valley-backed neoliberal network behind her. While Democratic Party elites blame incompetence for the fiasco in Iowa, the history of Acronym and its billionaire backers casts a disturbing shadow over the whole episode.
A high-level person currently at Burisma Holdings in Ukraine is in possession of many documents that expose how the company has been used to steal virtually all of the money coming to Ukraine from USAID and how this money was diverted, laundered and kicked back.
This insider claims to have seen the names of everyone involved, including high-level business people and politicians from the UK, US and other countries. Roughly 10 out of the 40 total are US Democrat politicians.
John Mark Dougan, former Palm Beach County Deputy Sheriff and former publisher of police department whistleblowing websites, now living under political asylum in Moscow has recorded this interview with the Burisma whistleblower.
He says he spent the past two months actively seeking to cultivate relationships with Burisma employees on the Russian social media site, VKontakte, and he succeeded in getting one of the executives to speak to him.
He told Sara Westall, “I came across one individual that doesn’t like what’s going on. This person’s in a top-level position…and we actually met and this person brought stacks of documents, ledgers, all sorts of stuff for me to take a look at and…this information is very good…information on people involved in Burisma, in the laundering of state money – and it’s not just people in the United States and Ukraine, it’s people all around the world, like Great Britain for instance; politicians and business people.
“Not only does it expose them but it exposes their shell companies that they have in Panama and Cyprus and other places like that…
“[The Bidens] are a big piece of the information but there’s actually a lot of people involved in it…Generally speaking, it’s just a bunch of top-level people around the world – not necessarily politicians but there are a lot of politicians and the Bidens are very heavily involved…
“Now, I think Burisma might have laundered…the total aid coming to Ukraine. So, if that’s the case, there’s probably a lot more companies in Ukraine doing this scheme.”
Dougan took this information to the FBI but he never heard back from them. “It is a goldmine of information and it implicates top-level people in the United States. It implicates politicians.”
He says the FBI doesn’t investigate the corruption of powerful people, because they could become angered and cut the FBI’s budget. So, the FBI brass doesn’t want this information to get out.
The whistleblower can’t disclose this information from within Ukraine or their whole family will be assassinated.
Dougan is trying to raise $10,000 to help this person relocate to Russia. He says, “If I can make this happen, this whistleblower will give me a treasure trove of documents that I’ve already seen. Names, dates, amounts, calendars, phone records, etc. Please help me raise the money to get this whistle blower to safety and to get the evidence of the truth!”
People ask him why a Burisma employee would need $10,000 to get out of Ukraine and he explains that the average salary in Ukraine is $300 per month and although this person is earning slightly over $1,000 per month, they are supporting a family plus their parents and paying legal fees. Also, relocating to another country is expensive.
The whistleblower had a lot of faith that the new president, Zelensky would clean things up but powerful Democrats, like John Kerry have put Zelensky under enormous pressure and have so far successfully shut down investigations into Burisma, reminding us that it was Trump’s discussion with Zelensky of a possible investigation into corruption at Burisma that triggered the whole sham impeachment, to begin with.
On February 5th, shortly after Trump’s acquittal, Senator Chuck Grassley (IA-R) requested details on Hunter Biden’s travel and business deals in Ukraine and China from the United States Secret Service (an interesting choice of US Government agency!) so, we’ll see where this leads, now that the latest iteration of the Witch Hunt has imploded.
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TRANSCRIPT OF DOUGAN’S INTERVIEW WITH THE BURISMA WHISTLEBLOWER
DOUGAN: I’m gonna ask you a question. I want you to answer first in Ukrainian and then I want you to answer in English but first, when I ask you a question I want you not to answer right away because I want to be able to change your voice…
What is your current occupation?
WHISTLEBLOWER: I’m senior executive I don’t want to give my title but I am at the very top.
DOUGAN: What is your current city and country?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Kiev, Ukraine.
DOUGAN: What is the company that you work for now?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Burisma Holdings.
DOUGAN: I noticed on the website the address for Burisma, it says that their office is in Cyprus. So, if you live in Kiev how do you actually work for Burisma?
WHISTLEBLOWER: The corporate office is located in Ukraine. The Cyprus address is just to prevent people from investigating. Also, Cyprus’ banking laws to make hiding money very easy.
DOUGAN: And how long have you worked there?
WHISTLEBLOWER: More than 10 years. I don’t want to give an exact answer.
DOUGAN: And who were your supervisors?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Before, when Hunter Biden was involved, I answered to Alexander Gorbunenko. Now, it’s Yuriy Gaudich and Taras Burdeinyi.
DOUGAN: And who are they?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Yuriy Gaudich is the Chief Financial Director and Taras Burdeinyi is General Director, CEO.
DOUGAN: Have you ever heard of Joe Biden? Have you ever met Joe Biden?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Not really. He was at a meeting with our director in 2014 but I didn’t speak to him or introduce myself.
DOUGAN: Have you ever met Hunter Biden?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Yes, on several occasions. He was nice enough, very friendly to all the girls in the office.
DOUGAN: How about Devon Archer?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Yes, on several occasions.
DOUGAN: How about a guy by the name of Mykola Zlochevsky?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Yes, I used to work for him for several years. He moved to England right after Hunter Biden was hired. Biden was also helpful because he was able to get his father to stop the investigation into Burisma and Zlochevsky.
After that, Biden put pressure on the International Court in the UK to release Zlochevsky’s money, since the investigation had been closed.
DOUGAN: How about a guy by the name of Viktor Shokin?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Yes, he was a prosecutor investigating our company. When a group of his investigators came to search our financial records, the CEO called Hunter Biden, who said he’d fix the situation.
DOUGAN: And speaking of Hunter Biden, what job has Hunter Biden performed for Burisma?
WHISTLEBLOWER: (Laughs about calling it a job). Hunter Biden had no role and has played no part in anything Burisma does, except getting state money. It totaled about $1.2 billion Ukrainian Hryvnia. At that time, it was about $100 million USD [the Ukrainian currency has lost about half of its value since 2014].
That money was then laundered and disbursed to various shell companies belonging to politicians and businessmen.
Hunter’s role ensured the money kept coming. A lot of the money that was laundered was the money provided to the Ukrainian government by the United States.
In discussions between Mykola Zlochevsky and the American Vice President, Joe Biden, it was established that the money would keep coming as long as the son, Hunter Biden and his friend, Devon Archer received a position on the Board of Directors.
It was a meaningless position but if we did not pay Hunter Biden, it was clear that the money from the United States would stop.
The reward was substantial. We paid Hunter Biden about [$100 million] and we made hundreds of millions of dollars.
DOUGAN: That’s a lot of money. And you have the evidence to suport these claims?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Of course!
DOUGAN: And it’s the same evidence that you showed to me?
WHISTLEBLOWER: Yes, of course.
DOUGAN: And will you give it to me?
WHISTLEBLOWER: You told me that you would help get me and my family out of Ukraine. When I give these documents, my identity will be discovered and if I am still living in Ukraine, I would likely be killed.When you get me out of Ukraine, I will give you everything I have.
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1. Dougan claims to be in possession of over 1.5 terabyte’s worth of Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail videos, given to him in 2010 for safekeeping by Joe Recarey, a detective on the Epstein case at the Palm Beach Police Department, who died unexpectedly in 2018. Dougan claims that 10 copies of these video files have been sent to his contacts on every continent, with a deadman’s switch.
2. Dougan says DNC staffer, Seth Rich contacted him in February 2016, asking him to help publish the DNC emails that he’d stolen while working at their DC headquarters. Rich personally handed Dougan a thumbdrive with a first tranche of DNC emails and Dougan did the initial set-up of the DCLeaks website, where these emails were first published. In other words, DCLeaks was not set up by the Russian GRU, as claimed in the Mueller Report. Seth Rich was murdered on July 10, 2016 and it’s long past time his murder was solved.
Speaking of which, a new Freedom of Information request to the FBI which did not mention Seth Rich, but asked for all email correspondence between FBI Head of Counterterrorism Peter Strzok, who headed the investigation into the DNC leaks and Wikileaks, and FBI attorney Lisa Page, has revealed two pages of emails which do not merely mention Seth Rich but have “Seth Rich” as their Subject Line. The emails were provided in heavily-redacted form. The FBI had previously said it had no records regarding Seth Rich, begging the question, what other falsely-denied documents does the FBI hold about Rich, that were not accidentally picked up by a search for correspondence between two named individuals?
Will we wonder, what were we thinking? and marvel anew at the madness of crowds?
When we look back on this moment from the vantage of history, what will we think? Will we think how obvious it was that the coronavirus deaths in China were in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds claimed by authorities?
Will we think how obvious it was that the virus would spread around the globe, wreaking havoc on the global economy and social order, even as the authorities claimed only a handful of cases had arisen outside China?
Will we be amazed at the delusional confidence that the U.S. economy would be untouched by the virus as stock markets quickly soared to new all-time highs while the world's largest economy ground to a halt in a desperate attempt to close the barn door after the horses had already escaped?
Will we look back at the patently false data being promoted by authorities and wonder why the majority accepted it all as credible?
Will we re-examine all the smartphone videos posted on the web by average people and wonder why all the lies were given more credibility than actual videos?
Will we recall how content that didn't parrot the approved narrative that everything was under control and the global impact would be near-zero was suppressed, banned, de-platformed or marginalized? Will we wonder at the complacency of all those who accepted this orchestrated suppression with such obedient passivity?
Will we look back at the claim that only twelve people in the entire U.S. had the virus, despite all the direct flights from Wuhan and the tens of thousands of people who'd traveled from China to the U.S. in January, and marvel at our credulity?
Will we look back at the wreckage left in the wake of the coordinated campaign to suppress the facts and lay the responsibility for all the carnage on the authorities who devoted more energy to hiding the realities of the pandemic than to preparing us for the impact?
Will we ponder the incredible grip of mass delusion on the human mind when we recall the confidence that the U.S. economy was invulnerable to the virus and the implosion of China, and the blithe quasi-religious faith that central banks would never let global stock markets decline even 2%?
Will we wonder how the mainstream could watch the Chinese economy shutting down and still remain absolutely confident that the global economy would be untouched as the spot of bother was sure to evaporate in a week or two and all would be restored to pre-virus euphoria?
Will we wonder what were we thinking? and marvel anew at the madness of crowds? Will we wonder why we embraced the delusion so readily, and relive the moment when the gate to reality creaked open? Will we relive our realization that we'd embraced an absurd fantasy floating on a tissue of lies, or will we bury that painful moment of truth?
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Lies are a powerful form of magic; they can mislead large groups of people into making terrible errors, as well as cause them to be blind to the obvious. Lies make people hurt themselves while thinking they are helping themselves. It is a truly dark and horrific act of sorcery.
As the world stands at the edge of a global pandemic event, the people who are immune to the effects of lies have an opportunity to take action should the virus continue to expand beyond the borders of China. We have a small window of time, perhaps a couple of months, in which we can prepare ourselves for the fallout and ensure we are as protected as we can be. This means taking precautions to prevent viral transmission, increasing the strength of our own immune systems, prepping for the loss of supply lines and freight shipments to retailers, organizing family, friends and neighbors for mutual aid and security, as well as preparing for the inevitable government attempts at martial law.
Of course, a person cannot or will not take any of these measures as long as they believe that the virus is not a threat, or they think that the pandemic will have little effect on their daily lives. I have recently seen a discomforting level of propaganda and disinformation agents invading the media and discussion boards related to this issue. Whenever I see such an intense disinformation campaign surrounding an event, this tells me a couple of things:
1) If they are trying to overtly downplay the seriousness of the event while lying about the facts involved, it tells me that the event is a legitimate threat and it will probably get worse as time passes.
2) If they all push the same false narrative and talking points it tells me that this is an organized effort paid for by a larger party with extensive resources.
If the narrative glosses over or hides recently revealed evidence by claiming that the event is “all hype”, then it is designed to create inaction in the public – It is designed to make us apathetic, which means there is a concerted conspiracy to harm us. It is not just an attempt to hide the guilt of the people involved in creating the crisis.
So what are some of the most insidious lies being spread right now on the virus threat? Lets go through a quick list of those I've identified so far:
Lie #1: Deaths Caused By The Coronavirus Are Nothing Compared To The Death Rate Of The Average Flu...
This lie seems to be the most common being used to plant seeds of apathy in the public consciousness right now. I have even heard people on the street regurgitate it verbatim as they try to convince themselves that all is well. But even using official numbers, which are likely false and greatly reduced, the argument is simply wrong on every level.
There is a big difference between “number of deaths” and the actual “death rate” of a virus. The flu infects tens of millions of people annually around the world with deaths in the US numbering usually under 10,000. In the US in the 2019-2020 season so far, the flu infected over 9 million people resulting in 4800 deaths; meaning the death rate of the flu is minor compared to the number of sick. Flu deaths are usually collated over the course of a year, yet people are already trying to compare death rates to the coronavirus, which has only been active for a few weeks.
Keep in mind also that the CDC has been called out for greatly inflating influenza death rates in order to push vaccine propaganda. They consistently attach flu death numbers with pneumonia deaths; which I would point is is the exact OPPOSITE of what the Chinese are doing with the coronavirus numbers.
The coronavirus has been active for about a month in China, it has a hibernation of around two weeks, and, China has been lying extensively about the number of deaths associated with the disease by labeling most deaths due to pneumonia. We truly have no idea what the potential death rate of this illness is. What we do know is that it behaves much like SARS, which had a death rate of around 11%. According to official numbers the coronavirus transmits faster and has already killed more people in a few weeks than SARS did in over a year.
The notion that the virus only kills the elderly is also incorrect. The two deaths now confirmed outside of China were both men in their 30's and 40's.
When considering the issue of viral death rate, we have to take into account the capacity of local medical facilities in handling patient load. If hospitals are only handling a few cases at a time, then the patients will get better overall treatment and less deaths will occur. But, if hospitals are overwhelmed with thousands of cases at a time, as is happening in China, then treatment quality will go down and many more people will die. A minimal death rate outside of China today does not mean a minimal death rate tomorrow should the virus spread beyond hospital capacity.
With the flu, people can usually treat themselves with ease at home; the coronavirus is obviously much more dangerous. No country in modern times has EVER quarantined over 50 million people in 16 cities because of the average flu. The comparison between the coronavirus and the flu is patently ridiculous. There is no comparison. The coronavirus is on another level entirely.
Lie #2: The Coronavirus Came From An Animal Market And The Claim It Is Engineered Is A “Conspiracy Theory”...
The phrase “conspiracy theory” is usually exploited as a way to dismiss facts and evidence without consideration on the basis that the official story is the only story that has any validity. In other words, the official story requires no justification because the authorities are infallible and always have our best interests at heart.
The problem is, governments and the mainstream media have been caught lying over and over again about issues far less important than a global pandemic, so I'm not sure why we should trust ANYTHING they say ever. There is considerable evidence that China has been lying incessantly about the number of sick and dead due to the coronavirus, including leaked accounts from medics and other people at ground zero in Wuhan. These people are now being silenced by the Chinese government. In fact, the Chinese government was suppressing coverage and information on the coronavirus from the very beginning of the contagion, which helped allow it to spread unchecked.
Now, social media companies are taking action to remove people who try to document the facts of the virus and its potential source in the name of "stopping fake news". Anyone who questions the official narrative is not only a "conspiracy theorist" but also a "danger" to the public. This narrative is supported by US government officials:
"These lies can cause immediate and tangible harm to people, and the platforms must act to stop them from spreading," House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said in a statement to The Hill. "It’s critical that Americans receive verified, trustworthy information about the coronavirus and heed the advice of our country’s public health officials as we learn more about its potential impact here at home..."
The facts are the facts, and if the facts suggest a conspiracy, then so be it. Only 20 miles away from the market in question stands the LARGEST Level 4 Biohazard Lab in Asia, which studies directly into the world's deadliest pathogens including SARS and coronavirus. In 2017, experts warned that a virus could escape the labs in Wuhan because of lax containment standards. To put this in perspective, it would be like an Ebola outbreak striking the city of Atlanta and then blamed on a food market only 20 miles from the CDC. It looks suspicious...
Last year, Chinese researchers were dismissed from a Level 4 lab in Winnipeg, Canada without public explanation, but the same lab was exposed last year for sharing deadly virus samples with China, including Ebola and henipavirus. One of the Chinese researchers work focus was the SARS virus. Media and government attention in Canada at the time of the scandal was on concerns that the lab in Winnipeg was supplying viral samples that would be used in China's biowarfare programs.
According to a paper published by virologists in India, the coronavirus genetic code also contains proteins that are exactly like those found in HIV. Interestingly, coronavirus patients have been shown to respond positively to drugs that are meant to treat HIV and AIDS carriers. Through official pressure the paper has now been retracted and the authors have said they will “revise it". But, the whole point of peer review is for the data to be examined by others in the field and then proven or disproven. If the data can be reproduced, then it needs to be taken seriously.
This is not what the CDC and other official institutions on disease study want. They seem intent on dismissing any information outright that suggests the coronavirus might have been made in a lab rather than in nature.
If true, the chances of coronavirus containing protein combinations identical to HIV in nature are astronomical, meaning, the virus was engineered. If the virus is proven to be engineered, then this makes future narratives and propaganda harder to implement. For example, it will be much harder to blame the pandemic on "global warming" if the virus was created by a bunch of guys in lab coats rather than in nature.
To repeat the facts, Wuhan is a hub for China's largest biohazard labs and these labs are suspected by biological warfare experts of being involved in bioweapons testing. Until there is more independent examination of the virus (the original strain before mutation), no one knows for certain what the source is.
The mainstream media has been very aggressive in denying any links to bioweaponry, claiming that there “is no evidence” linking Wuhan's labs to the virus; yet, there is FAR MORE evidence of the involvement of the biohazard labs than there is evidence proving that the virus originated an animal market. They have simply decided that the animal market story is the tale they prefer, and so it has become the official story.
Lie #3: The Virus Won't Have Any Effect On America
The general thrust of the mainstream view of the coronavirus has been to assert that the US will not be affected and that concerns are "overblown". The UN's World Health Organization continues to refuse to take the event very seriously, and even Larry Kudlow, Trump's Director of the National Economic Council, claims the damage to the US economy will be 'minimal'.
Now, firstly I have to say I would take the economic analysis of a long time cocaine addict with a grain of salt. This is the same guy who was wildly incorrect in all his calls on the housing bubble in 2005-2006, and yet he is now advising the White House on financial crisis events? But lets set the incompetence of Kudlow aside for a moment and consider that perhaps he is just reading from a script prepared for him by others. Certainly, there are a lot of people out there that would like to keep the public ignorant of the depth of the situation, and they will give all sorts of half-assed rationales as to why they lie.
For the Chinese authorities, the pandemic is an undeniable fact of life, but they will say their economy and global image required the truth to be “tempered” to prevent civil unrest and to stop investors pulling from their money out of Chinese markets en masse.
For US authorities who waited far too long to start shutting down flights from China carrying multiple infected, the claim will be that they had to lie to prevent general panic and market panic.
For the UN's World Health Organization that lied about China “containment” and actually downplayed the danger of travel to China for a time while the virus was raging and human-to-human transmission was confirmed, I see no excuse really. Their behavior, and the behavior of the US and Chinese governments makes me suspect that they WANT the pandemic to spread.
As I write this the 11th confirmed case of coronavirus has been identified in the US with many more suspected cases still under observation. Obviously, the virus is here already, but the issue of how much it will affect Americans is being diminished or buried in an endless stream of propaganda.
Given enough time, a viral outbreak that spreads as fast as the coronavirus with a death rate of 5% or more is going to cause negative effects in every facet of the US economy. But in our current window of the progression of the pandemic, I think it's important to point out that even if the death rate is low in the US, there is no escaping the economic consequences attached to this event.
The US economy is interdependent with multiple nations, and is tightly connected to China. The greatest danger of globalism in terms of economics is that it forces national economies into losing the redundancies that protect them from systemic collapse. When one major economy goes down, it brings down all other economies with it.
Not only that, but the US financial structure is precariously unstable anyway, with record levels of national debt, consumer debt and corporate debt, not to mention steep declines in manufacturing and demand. The US sits atop one of the most massive economic bubbles of all time – The Everything Bubble, created by the Federal Reserve over ten years of stimulus measures, barely keeping the system alive in a state of zombification.
The bubble was always going to collapse. In fact, recent events in Fed repo markets suggest it was already collapsing. The coronavirus outbreak is a perfect cover event for this implosion. To understand why a collapse event might be preferred by a certain minority of people within the elitist establishment, read my last article 'How Viral Pandemic Benefits The Globalist Agenda'.
As I have argued for the past couple of years, all that is needed to bring down the US economy is one major trigger event. The idea that a global pandemic would not damage the American system already teetering on the edge of the abyss is simply absurd. This event has the capacity to cause crisis around the world, not just in China.
Lie #4: The Virus Is Contained
You are going to hear this lie often in the next month or two. I've heard it several times already from Chinese and US authorities in the past few weeks, and clearly their definition of the word "contained" must be different from mine.
China's official sickness count and death toll rises exponentially by the day, and this is not accounting for the number of sick and dead they are hiding. Over 50 million people are now in forced quarantine and martial law measures have been implemented. Hong Kong's hopes of containment have been dashed and officials now expect the outbreak to grow worse in the region.
Japan just announced that a man carrying the virus boarded a cruise liner and then departed, infecting at least ten people in the process and forcing the ship into quarantine for the next two weeks.
A woman in Santa Clara, California carrying the virus came back from China and had been in the US for around 10 DAYS before the illness was identified. Meaning, every single person she came in contact with in that time is now a potential carrier, and for the next two weeks they won't know they are contagious. These are just a few examples of why it is foolish to write off this situation as "contained"; you cannot contain what you cannot identify.
The disinformation campaign seems designed to hide the true source of the virus, but also to keep the masses lethargic and inactive. We are meant to sit and wait while the virus and the potential economic catastrophe runs us over. Do not fall for the con; prepare accordingly, and never accept what lying governments and mainstream media outlets tell you as the whole truth. It is better to take precautions you might not need than to be found very stupid and desperate down the road because the "experts" told you it was all hype.
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Twitter has locked the account of conservative journalist James O'Keefe for publishing publicly available evidence that a pair of radical leftists with violent fantasies work for the Bernie Sanders campaign. While O'Keefe's tweets are still visible, he can't publish anything new on the platform until he deletes a post which violates Twitter's rules against "posting private information."
Iowa state Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price said that he was prepared to order a recanvass, but only if requested by one of the campaigns, not by Perez, who has no actual authority to order the review. None of the campaigns has yet requested a recanvass, and it is not clear that any of them will, since those candidates who finished below the top two, including Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Amy Klobuchar, want the public to forget about Iowa as quickly as possible.
