Friday, February 12, 2021
W.H.O. Adviser: ‘Actual Investigation’ in W.H.O. Wuhan COVID Probe ‘Done by Chinese Authorities’
After first being panned as a conspiracy theory before gaining even some mainstream-media acceptance, the claim that the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab was recently “debunked” by a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation. That was the story, anyway.
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Thursday, February 11, 2021
Twitter takes action against both the Project Veritas and James O'Keefe Twitter accounts
Twitter has taken action against the accounts of both Project Veritas and the organization's founder James O'Keefe. The Project Veritas account has been suspended and none of the account's posts are currently visible.
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The Implications Thereof – Allan C. Weisbecker
I’m listening to a dem saying that if they don’t impeach Trump he will get away with his ‘crime’. This of course is a lie. Why not try him in criminal court? They won’t do this or even bring up the possibility (the repubs included).
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RFK, Jr. Responds to Instagram’s Removal of His Account
Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Instagram account was deplatformed without advanced notice. Dozens of media outlets reporting on this censorship asserted the account was removed over “false COVID vaccine claims” or “vaccine misinformation.” Some reports referred to Kennedy as an “anti-vaxxer.”
Kennedy, founder, chairman and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense,” unequivocally rejects those characterizations as false and misleading.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD), including Kennedy, advocates for vaccine safety and health freedom. CHD’s mission is to end childhood health epidemics by exposing the causes, eliminating harmful exposures, holding those responsible accountable and seeking justice for those harmed.
As Kennedy has said many times, for a democracy to function, civil debate of issues — including vaccine science — must be allowed. Censorship of that debate is anathema to democracy.
Kennedy and Mary Holland, CHD president and general counsel, issued the following statements on Instagram’s removal of Kennedy’s account:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Chairman of Children’s Health Defense, said:
“Every statement I put on Instagram was sourced from a government database, from peer-reviewed publications and from carefully confirmed news stories. None of my posts were false. Facebook, the pharmaceutical industry and its captive regulators use the term ‘vaccine misinformation’ as a euphemism for any factual assertion that departs from official pronouncements about vaccine health and safety, whether true or not. This kind of censorship is counterproductive if our objective is a safe and effective vaccine supply.
“The pharmaceutical industry is hastily creating vaccines using taxpayer money and untested technologies. These include a rash of risky new products that are exempt from liability, from long-term safety testing and that have not received FDA approval. Emergency Use Authorization is a mass population scientific experiment. If it has any prayer of working, it will require extraordinary scrutiny from the press and the public.
“Instead, the mainstream media and social media giants are imposing a totalitarian censorship to prevent public health advocates, like myself, from voicing concerns and from engaging in civil informed debate in the public square. They are punishing, shaming, vilifying, gaslighting and abolishing individuals who report their own vaccine injuries.
“Anyone can see that this is a formula for catastrophe and a coup d’état against the First Amendment, the foundation stone of American democracy.”
Mary Holland, President of Children’s Health Defense, said:
“Freedom of expression is the cornerstone of democracy. Children’s Health Defense and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. provide critically needed information on environmental culprits, including vaccines, that are linked to many chronic diseases that now affect 54% of America’s children. Dr. Anthony Fauci has made it clear that young children will be included in COVID-19 vaccination plans even though children have almost zero risk of serious COVID-19 illness. CHD feels strongly that children should not take on 100% risks of vaccine injuries with 0% benefit.
“The sad reality is vaccine injuries can and do happen. The U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database has more than 11,500 COVID-19 vaccine adverse event reports including more than 500 deaths in just six weeks since the vaccination campaign began. Why would Instagram censor Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s platform and call it ‘misinformation’? Why now?
“Instagram deplatformed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Hirewire host, Del Bigtree, just 15 minutes before they were to air the webinar, ‘COVID Vaccine on Trial, If You Only Knew’ highlighting COVID concerns, injuries, mechanisms and other facts from four MDs, several Ph.D.s and leaders from the vaccine-injured community. COVID-19 vaccines use novel technology never before used in a human population. With that comes great unknown risks. The people of the world deserve to have this crucial information to protect their health and that of their children.”
The post RFK, Jr. Responds to Instagram’s Removal of His Account appeared first on Children's Health Defense.
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Instagram Bars Robert F. Kennedy Jr. For Spreading Vaccine Misinformation
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now blocked from Instagram, after he repeatedly undercut trust in vaccines. Kennedy has also spread conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, accusing him of profiteering off vaccines and attempting to take control of the world's food supply.
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Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Proof That the US November Election Was Stolen Exists in Abundance
Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
The official narrative that there was no election theft is likely the largest lie ever perpetrated on the world. The lie is so vast and so fragile that everyone who disagrees with the official narrative is suppressed, deplatformed, kicked off social media, ostracized, and fired from their job in order to protect the lie from examination and exposure. In Michigan the state attorney general is attempting to debar attorneys who represented cases of electoral theft. Massive effort was made—including an orchestrated “storming of the Capitol”—to insure that the evidence would not be presented and that the majority of the population would never encounter the evidence. The presstitutes from the first instance declared continuously with one voice “there was no vote fraud,” “baseless claims of vote fraud,” and the old standby “conspiracy theory.”
Obviously, if there was no fraud, there would have been no danger in examining “baseless claims.” Their baselessness could simply have been demonstrated. If the claims of electoral fraud are baseless, there was no need to spilt the country and to cause half of the voting population to distrust the public institutions that are supposed to uphold election integrity.
Even without hard evidence of a stolen election, it is obvious that Trump did not lose to Biden who inspired no enthusiasm and whose campaign events had to be halted due to non-attendance. How did Trump lose the election when on December 29, after two months of his heightened demonization following the November 2020 election, he won the annual Gallup survey as America’s most admired person, ending Obama’s 12-year run. According to the official vote count, Trump received 11 million more votes in 2020 than the number he won in 2016 and three times the black support. In 2020 Trump received 8 million more votes than Obama received in 2012 and Hillary received in 2016. It is not possible that this extraordinary performance is a losing one. And this is his official vote count, not his suppressed actual vote.
No sane person believes that such an uninspiring candidate as Biden garnered 81.2 million votes—15.3 million more popular votes than Obama in 2012 and Hillary in 2016. The Obama-Hillary popular vote of 65 to 66 million is the limit of the Democrat vote. Even Trump’s losing official vote count of 74 million is larger than any winning president in American history other than the fraudulent 2020 Biden vote count.
In other words, no voting machine or other material evidence is needed to see that the 2020 election was stolen.
Nevertheless, there is massive evidence. Giuliani collected a lot of it, and it was presented to members of state legislatures in swing states. I watched presentations of the evidence by highly skilled analysts and sworn witnesses. In previous postings on this website there are links to the presentations. As so much information has been deplatformed, the links might no longer work. But “MyPillow” CEO Mike Lindell has collected some of the experts who investigated the electoral fraud and has put together a two-hour video that provides some of the massive evidence, certainly enough to liberate you from the media indoctrination “there is no evidence.”
Mike Lindell’s presentation is here: https://michaeljlindell.com
I recommend that you watch the entire video. It will leave you wondering how such startling information could go unreported and be discarded in Orwell’s Memory Hole. If you won’t find the time for the entire video, then go to Dr. Shiva’s presentation at about the 49 minute spot and to the presentation that begins about 1:08 by Matt DePerno, the lead attorney in the open Antrim County, Michigan, court case where Trump’s large vote was reported as Biden’s and Biden’s small vote was reported as Trump’s. Then go to former Michigan state senator Partick Colbeck at 1:02, Melissa Carone at 1:04, and Russell Ramsland at about 23 minutes into the video.
I admire the partriotism and courage of Mike Lindell. By insisting on the truth, he is bringing all sorts of calumny upon himself, and many retailers are punishing him by dropping his company’s products. I am concerned that the corrupt American Establishment will bankrupt him with endless lawsuits and false criminal indictments. In the United States law is no longer a shield of the people. It is a weapon to be wielded against people as it was in Stalinist Russia.
Although I recommend the video, I think Mr. Lindell gets too involved in the presentations, interrupts the experts’ presentations with questions and points of his own and is too didactic. I also think that Mr. Lindell’s belief is optimistic that the evidence will get a hearing and serve to reunite the country. It is OK with me if Mr. Lindell is correct. Indeed, I hope he is. But the fact is that the election was stolen for a reason, and the Establishment is strong enough to protect the theft from the evidence and the truth.
As for the video itself, there seems to be two sets of contradictory evidence. One set deals with computer algorithms and software in voting machines (not only Dominion’s) that can weight the vote count, for example, counting a vote for one candidate more than one and the other candidate’s vote less than one. The machines can also be programmed to produce a large percentage of ballots that have to be adjudicated, that is assigned to a candidate by the discretion of election officials. Testimony is provided in the video showing how both of these ways were used against Trump.
The other set of evidence has to do with foreign intervention in the election. A couple of experts establish beyond all doubt that despite assurances by Dominion and the media that the machines can’t be connected to the Internet, they most certainly can and were. We are even shown the Dominion manual instructions on how to connect the machines to the Internet.
Once it is established that the machines can be connected to the Internet, foreign intervention becomes possible. The final part of the video presents what appears to be evidence of foreign intervention in the voting. According to the evidence presented, equipment in many countries was used to alter the actual votes, with over 60% of the foreign intrusions coming from China.
So we are left with a question: Who stole the election? The Democrats in the swing states using voting machines and mail-in ballots or China using the Internet to alter the vote count?
If China has its hooks into the Biden family, as the material on Hunter Biden’s laptop indicates, the Chinese government would have a strong interest in having a blackmailable president in the White House. But why was voting machine manipulation necessary if the vote count can be altered via the Internet?
Is the answer that both China and the Democrats were simultaneously stealing the election for Biden independently of one another or in cahoots? Or does foreign intrusion mean the use of foreign location or false foreign computer addresses to hide a local operation?
According to the foreign intrusion evidence, there was intrusion into the voting from other countries as well—Italy, Iran, Iraq, for example.
If our election was actually stolen for Biden by foreign intrusion, why are Democrat election officials, the US media, and Dominion defending foreigners who defeated American democracy?
What I make of the evidence of foreign intrusion is that American conservatives and patriots much prefer to blame foreigners than to point a finger at their own country. It is easier for patriots to say “the foreigners did it” than to say “Americans did it.” Moreover, the theft seems worse and becomes a national security issue if foreigners are to blame.
This comes through strongly in the video’s final words from a retired high-ranking US Air Force general who interprets the stolen election as the work of global socialists/communists who are subverting the United States. This was also the theme of Sidney Powell, which I thought derailed to some extent the Giuliani investigation.
An election stolen by foreign intrusion is inconsistent with the video evidence of Democrat election officials counting the same ballots over and over, pulling out from under tables boxes of ballots that had never been folded or mailed and running them through the machines. It is inconsistent with the hundreds of sworn affidavits of those who witnessed fraud with mail-in ballots. How did China bring all this about? How did China know the graveyards that were voted, the out-of-state people who voted in swing states, the illegal aliens who voted, and so on? Did China also program the voting machines to weight the vote count in Biden’s favor?
If China stole the vote and Democrats did not, why are the Democrats so determined to protect themselves by preventing any examination of the evidence? Why, for example, is the Michigan attorney general trying to debar attorneys who bring election challenges against Michigan election officials, including an attorney who has an open court case in Michigan? Who owns Bill Barr and the Department of Justice? China or the US Establishment?
The Democrats invented the accusation of foreign intervention in the 2016 election. Russia’s alleged intervention was the basis for three years of the Russiagate hoax. It doesn’t seen productive to rival or negate such powerful evidence as presented by Dr. Shiva and the other investigators with a Chinagate story.
Either Democrats used the voting machines to steal the election or China used the Internet to steal the election. The problem with Mr. Lindell’s video is that the video creates this contradiction and does not resolve it.
Or so it seems to me.
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8 Million More Living In Poverty, 9 Million Small Businesses In Danger Of Closing, 10 Million Behind On Rent…
The economic downturn that we are currently experiencing is making the last recession look like a Sunday picnic. Yes, 2008 and 2009 were bad, but they weren’t anything like this. Unprecedented intervention by the Federal Reserve has allowed the rich to get even richer during this crisis, but meanwhile millions upon millions of ordinary Americans are deeply suffering. Unfortunately, what we have gone through so far is just the beginning.
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Is This The Biggest Financial Bubble Ever? Rubino: "Hell Yes It Is!"
Is This The Biggest Financial Bubble Ever? Rubino: "Hell Yes It Is!"
Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
If you’re over 40 you’ve lived through at least three epic financial bubbles: junk bonds in the 1980s, tech stocks in the 1990s, and housing in the 2000s. Each was spectacular in its own way, and each threatened to take down the whole financial system when it burst.
But they pale next to what’s happening today. Where those past bubbles were sector-specific, which is to say the mania and resulting carnage occurred mostly within one asset class, today’s bubble is spread across, well, pretty much everything – hence the term “everything bubble.”
When this one pops there won’t be a lot of hiding places.
Way too much money
Most bubbles start when an influx of outside cash sends the price of something up dramatically. This captures the imagination of the broader investing public and the process takes on a life of its own, culminating in an orgy of bad decisions and eventually a wipe-out of the easy fortunes made on the way up.
So to understand the everything bubble, let’s start at the beginning with that influx of outside money. This time it’s coming from the Federal Reserve in what can only be described as the mother of all print runs. M2, a medium-broad measure of the US money supply, has more than tripled so far in this century, and lately the arc has gone vertical, rising by nearly a third in just the past year.
All this extra money has to go somewhere, so no surprise that it’s flowing in lots of different directions. Among the recipients:
Fixed income
The bond and money markets, made up of instruments that pay interest, are in the aggregate far bigger than the world’s stock markets. And they’ve been booming, with interest rates falling steadily for four straight decades. Since bond prices are the reciprocal of bond yields, the next chart can be read as an epic bull market in bonds, one which has gained steam in the past year as massive currency creation has forced fixed income investors (who have to invest new cash somehow) to buy bonds regardless of what they yield.
To further illustrate how uniquely dysfunctional the world’s bond markets have become, here’s a chart going back to the 1300s showing that today’s rates aren’t just low by modern standards, but are the lowest in human history. Which is another way of saying today’s bond bubble dwarfs anything anywhere ever.
The hopeless position in which pension funds and retirees find themselves is summed up in the following headline: Junk buyers desperate for debt are pressing companies to borrow.
Stocks, of course
The most obvious bubbles happen in stocks, because “the market” gets top billing in both the financial media and the psyches of investors. And after a long, slow slog out of the depths of the Great Recession, US stocks have in the past couple of years blown through all previous valuation records. That’s right, this market is now a bigger bubble than those of 1929 and 1999, and it’s still going strong.
Pretty much any popular stock valuation indicator backs up this assertion, but the most dramatic is probably the “Buffet Indicator,” so named because legendary investor Warren Buffet uses it to decide how to allocate his billions. It’s also easy to understand: chart the aggregate market capitalization of all US stocks against GDP and there you are. When stocks are low versus GDP, they’re underappreciated and undervalued; when high compared to GDP they’re overvalued. Today they’re higher than ever before, including just before the last two major bear markets.
Want some other bubbliscious indicators? Here you go: Right now, more stocks are trading at over 10 times sales than in 1999 at the height of the dot-com bubble. And the number of “zombie” companies, i.e., those that have to borrow to cover their existing debt service and will collapse if cut off from new credit, has never been higher.
Housing
This one is a surprise because it was the epicenter of the last bubble, and very seldom does an asset class reinflate so quickly. But hey, all that money has to go somewhere, and houses are the American dream yadda yadda. In the past couple of years, home prices in many places have blown through their 2006 bubble highs, and are now accelerating. Note the hockey stick inflection at the far right of the following chart.
Today, you can google “home prices” and get dozens of headlines like these:
CoreLogic: December home prices rise at fastest rate since 2014
Are we trapped in another housing bubble? A rapid rise in home prices has some experts worried
In metro Denver housing market, double-digit price gains carry over in 2021
As the hedge fund guy in The Big Short says after visiting Florida, “Yep, it’s a bubble.”
Cryptocurrencies – this generation’s dot-coms?
Cryptos weren’t around for any previous bubbles so their role in what’s coming isn’t yet knowable. What is clear is that they’re behaving like dot-com stocks in the 1990s, with bitcoin (think Amazon.com) soaring parabolically if erratically…
… and hundreds of lesser coins with a wide variety of future prospects (think eBay, AOL, Pets.com) also soaring on a torrent of fiat currency rocket fuel. Here’s the second most valuable crypto:
The conclusion: Even if cryptos end up dominating some future monetary system, their parabolic arcs in the here and now scream “bubble!”
As for moral hazard …
A true bubble is more than just soaring prices. It also features people behaving in ways that with hindsight will seem totally incomprehensible. Think previous bubbles’ daytraders and home flippers making fortunes doing things that experts normally find difficult. And recall the huge amounts of money that once poured into things that in normal times would have little appeal to rational investors. Collateralized Debt Obligations (bonds that were somehow comprised of subprime mortgages and AAA-rated) and mutual funds holding dot-com stocks with no earnings — and no realistic prospect thereof — are prominent examples from the recent past.
Today’s world offers some even better examples of moral hazard, including:
SPACs
These are companies that go public without assets or earnings or any of the other impedimenta typical of IPOs. You give them your money and they’ll figure out how to put it to work. Why? Because they’re geniuses who claim to have made fortunes in the past few years, and you apparently have way too much cash and no productive uses for it. There are even SPAC ETFs that offer exposure to the whole “sector.”
Rock star money managers
In typical bubbles, a handful of money managers roll the dice on the bubble asset and win big. Bigger than big. They make ridiculous amounts of money and are hailed as geniuses and courted by reporters and politicians hoping to bask in their reflected glory. Then of course the bubble pops and the geniuses crash and burn along with their favorite speculations.
The everything bubble’s supernova is the ARK Innovation ETF, run by hitherto obscure (and now household name) Cathie Wood. Her “innovation”? She loaded up on Tesla stock right before it embarked on an epic (and inexplicable) 1000% run that made it more valuable than the ten biggest carmakers on the planet combined.
Wood is still long and strong Tesla in addition to many other prominent bubble assets, and will apparently use the torrent of money now pouring into her fund to roll the dice on an even bigger scale.
High-tech daytraders
This list wouldn’t be complete without the Reddit/Robinhood traders who are having a ball chasing a wide variety of stocks straight up while tormenting hedge funds on the other side of those trades. See When Predator Becomes Prey.
Mutually-exclusive solutions
So here we are, with all the typical bubble pathologies on full display, but for multiple bubbles rather than just one. And a government determined to levitate all those bubbles simultaneously, even at the expense of rising inflation. See Jim Rickard’s latest, Hyperinflation Can Happen Much Faster Than You Think.
What happens when one of these bubbles bursts? The others burst too, in short order. You can’t have an epic, systemically dangerous bust in one big sector and placid good times in all the others. Markets – now more interconnected than ever – simply don’t work that way.
Meanwhile, the actions necessary to fix some of these bubbles are mutually exclusive. A stock market or housing bust requires much lower interest rates and bigger government deficits, while a currency crisis brought on by rising inflation requires higher interest rates and government spending cuts. Let everything blow up at once and there will be literally no fixing it. And the “everything bubble” will become the “everything bust.”
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Tuesday, February 9, 2021
COVID-19 mRNA Shots Are Legally Not Vaccines
Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.
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UK Government Considering Knocking On Doors Of Vaccine Refusniks, Report
UK Government Considering Knocking On Doors Of Vaccine Refusniks, Report
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
The UK government is considering a plan to despatch council staff to knock on the doors of those who have refused to take a coronavirus vaccine, in an effort to coerce refusniks into taking the shot, according to a report.
The London Metro reports that Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi told MPs he wanted to identify ‘at an individual level’ those who have been offered the vaccine but turned it down.
The report states that the plan is being hatched amid fears that a sizeable amount of the population are ‘sceptical’ of the vaccine.
Zahawi said that the role of the council staffers would be to determine why people are refusing the vaccine and then “see what might convince them” to change their minds.
Zahawi refused to confirm how the Government will know who has not taken the vaccine, but did admit during a radio appearance on the BBC that everyone who has taken the shot has been registered in a national immunisation vaccination system.
“We absolutely will look at how we are addressing the issue of refusal rates,” Zahawi said.
While Zahawi touted a high uptake of vaccines among British people, it emerged that around 20% of social care workers have refused to take the vaccine.
In December, a poll found that around a third of people in the UK do not want to take the vaccine.
The notion of government staff knocking at the doors of refusniks has prompted fears that the British government is keeping a database of vaccine skeptics.
A similar scheme has been implemented in Spain.
With so called ‘vaccination passports’ looming, a non-vaccinated database could enable the government to cross check who they are issuing the ‘freedom passes’ to, and ensure that only the vaccinated are allowed to integrate back into society.
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Monday, February 8, 2021
Out, and proud
They had to destroy democracy in order to save it.
Time published a story that provides absolutely astonishing details and framing of activities that took place around the 2020 election. As readers, you deserve a detailed analysis of this story and the people and organizations involved. The recounting of the story in Time is longer than a chapter in many novels. Time says additional details will be provided in a series of articles over the next several days. This article is an introduction.
The title is provocative enough. “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” The story goes on to describe in precise detail a coalition of various powerful special interest groups that united, beginning a year before the election, to ensure Joe Biden would win.
I’ll quote as extensively as I like from the Time article, without linking to it. Let the shitlib propaganda pimps find their own way to up the hit count, says I. Here’s the archive.is snapshot instead.
A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”
In a way, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.
And now you know just how it was that the Hunter Biden scandal got quashed so handily.
They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.
For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.”
Which, of course, they were.
His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics.
By such OUTRAGES AGAINST “DEMOCRACY”!!! as, oh, requiring valid ID to vote; expunging corpses from the eligible-voter rolls; checking to be sure voters hadn’t relocated; etc. Gee, what would we ever have done without these paragons of virtue looking out for us? Apart from perhaps being able to hold a, y’know, free and fair election, I mean?
Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.
Deadly violence—wherein a Trump supporter and USAF vet was wantonly, needlessly murdered by a trigger-happy Mordor On The Potomac orc, and the other deaths were basically due to heart attack or stroke.
Deadly violence, forsooth. Hasn’t been near enough of it to suit some of us, bitch. Not yet, anyway. Still early innings, though.
This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.
Democracy, along with the Constitution, liberty, and the very concept of unalienable rights, is as dead as America That Was is. It rankles tremendously to be lectured about the system’s “fragility” by the very goddamned filthbags that, over the course of many decades, labored so diligently to weaken its foundation, reducing it to the smashed, smoking ruin it now is.
If, after reading the rest of the thing, you aren’t filled with a blistering rage at the sure and certain knowledge that this is just another example of The Enemy—flush with his ill-gotten triumph, secure in its totality and permanence—openly laughing in the faces of Real Americans, then I really don’t know what more there is to say to you. In another article of which you should read the all, Ace puts it this way:
This is the part of the war where they have shot most of the survivors, and are now engaging in psyops to humiliate and degrade whoever is still alive. They are now admitting they rigged the election so that we understand that there is nothing we can do about it — we are a defeated people, they want us to know, and they intend to rule us.
He’s right, and you know he is. The question now is: what, if anything, are Real Americans to do about it?
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Facing the facts
We are the people we’ve been waiting for.
There are a lot of people posting B.S. from “credible sources” about how Biden will be in power for 9 weeks, or how the military really is in DC to protect us, or (do I really have to make a 3 page line item list?) I’ll skip that.
I understand that in some cases people can’t come to grips with the fact that everything really is lost. So they post crap about “what is going to happen” and general blah said blah or my lawyer said blah or Sidney released blah or whatever blah blah blah – none of it has merit.
FACT: The communists seized the country. The coup is complete.
And it was well planned, where Obama rigged the military to make sure they went along with it.
It is OVER. Trump is not secretly being president behind the scenes, no one is waiting for anyone to prove how bad they are before they get arrested and the military is not running the country.
People need to come to grips with this, because hopeful stories are paralyzing them like a frogs under a bright light, preventing them from jumping to action.
Sitting still like it is business as usual right now is exactly what the communists want, while they pile more and more and MORE troops into DC to eliminate all danger for them while they shred the country.
That is what the military is there for – to support the coup.
For the record: No election will work. The last one did not work, and they are solidifying and rooting in the fraud to heights beyond what it took to simply steal it like flipping a switch last time. We are not going to vote our way out of this.
For the record: There will be no “charge of the light brigade” and Trump is in charge of NOTHING. It will be ALL darkness from here on out.
It’s the blackest of black pills, and I only wish I knew of a plausible argument to be made that it isn’t so. It’s also a must-read—especially for anyone still locked in denial’s thrall, clinging to the forlorn hope of some miraculous last-second reprieve.
(Via Wes Rhinier)
Update!class="ud"> Another grim wake-up call.
The FBI’s missing-in-action response to plain view evidence of massive vote fraud in the presidential election seems poles apart from the agency’s enforcement priority to bring to justice the Capitol rioters. It is more reminiscent of slow-walking White House declassification efforts in the matter of Crossfire Hurricane, or stonewalling the release of subpoenaed documents requested for Senate hearings into the Russia hoax. One wonders little that Biden is pleased with the work Wray has been doing and would be keeping him on as director.
On November 3, we went to bed in America. On November 4, we woke up in Venezuela. But simply rigging the election in soft coup style through bloodless machinations to deny a second Trump term doesn’t end the vendetta. Election Day was but the opening salvo in the Democrat game plan to dupe Americans into abdicating their own liberties. Through dozens of executive actions, our freedoms are being purloined in plain sight and over the lethargic objections of Republican lawmakers.
Any objections they make, lethargic or otherwise, are dishonest. They’re fully-paid up partners, playing their assigned role on the Democracy Kabuki stage.
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LA Times Columnist Has Difficulty Reconciling the Kindness of Her Neighbors and Their Support for Donald Trump
The following article, LA Times Columnist Has Difficulty Reconciling the Kindness of Her Neighbors and Their Support for Donald Trump, was first published on Big League Politics.
Los Angeles Times political columnist Virginia Heffernan recently wrote an op-ed admitting that she has a hard time reconciling the kindness of her neighbors and the fact that they’re Trump supporters. She compares them to Hezbollah, the Nation of Islam, and Nazis, implying that individual people who do nice things may still hold contemptible beliefs or belong to contemptible groups.
In a column titled “What can you do about the Trumpites next door?”, Heffernan describes the neighbors at her “pandemic getaway” house as Trump supporters who courteously plowed their driveway and did it well. Heffernan realizes she owes them thanks, but because they’re “as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans,” she wonders “how much thanks” they actually deserve.
She called her neighbors “staunch partisans of blue lives,” adding that “there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in the neighborhood.”
A few paragraphs later she acknowledged, presumably without irony, that “loving your neighbor is evidently much easier when your neighborhood is full of people just like you.”
Heffernan compared the kindness of her Trump-supporting neighbors to the various individually magnanimous actions of Hezbollah members and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Not only that, she also compared it to the “politeness” of Nazi occupiers that an upper-middle-class French family recalled while she was living with them as a teenager.
Heffernan’s op-ed concludes by saying she can’t absolve her neighbors for supporting Trump, whom she describes as having a “near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans,” but that she can offer “a standing invitation to make amends” instead.
“Not with a snowplow but by recognizing the truth about the Trump administration and, more important, by working for justice for all those whom the administration harmed. Only when we work shoulder to shoulder to repair the damage of the last four years will we even begin to dig out of this storm.”
Continue reading: LA Times Columnist Has Difficulty Reconciling the Kindness of Her Neighbors and Their Support for Donald Trump ...
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Jake Tapper and Chris Hayes Lose Their Minds 'Inciting' Against GOP And Reveal Next Step to Control the Narrative
I wrote a piece earlier in response to Bruce Springsteen’s first commercial ad for Jeep for the Super Bowl. I left it with the hope that sanity will prevail because as Americans, we have shown that ability to triumph over all odds. I do believe that sanity and the truth will ultimately triumph.
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Respected doctor and bioweapons researcher believes Covid vaccines are a form of 'weaponized medicine'
An award winning spinal surgeon and former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons believes that current coronavirus vaccines are dangerous bioweapons being deployed against the people. Dr. Lee Merritt, who previously studied bioweapons while serving as an orthopedic surgeon in the United States Navy for 9 years, sat on the board of the Arizona Medical Association, and has published numerous peer-reviewed papers, believes that mRNA-altering coronavirus vaccines currently being distributed in the United States are rewriting our genetic code to make us vulnerable to a second virus later on. "I believed early on in February that this was a biologically manipulated bioweapon because the minute that anybody popped up with data suggesting that they were censored," she said in an interview last month with The New America.
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Vaccination and Censorship: The Truth Will Set Us Free
Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.
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NY Doctor Proved Everyone Wrong About Hydroxychloroquine
Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.
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MICHAEL KINSLEY: Against Impeachment: Failing to convict Trump for a second time gains the Democra…
MICHAEL KINSLEY: Against Impeachment: Failing to convict Trump for a second time gains the Democrats nothing. “And why do Democrats and the media keep referring to Trump as the first president in history to be impeached twice? They tried once and lost, and now they’re trying again and are almost certain to lose again. At what point does impeachment lose its sting and become just another piece of the political tool kit?” Um, about a year ago.
Plus: “In reality, the animus that energizes the call for impeachment and conviction has its roots long before the events of Jan. 6.” It’s an unconstitutional political show trial. The outcome of impeachment is removal. You can’t remove someone who’s already out of office. And the “incitement” claims are BS that fail as soon as you compare Trump’s statements to the far more over-the-top statements of Democrats for the past four years. And that’s not all, as Kinsley notes:
The single article of the impeachment document accuses Trump of fomenting rebellion against the government. His speech on Jan. 6 encouraged a mob to storm the Capitol. Or that is the argument we will hear repeatedly during an impeachment trial, and it is not an unreasonable interpretation of Trump’s words that day.
But meanwhile, federal prosecutors are fanning across the Internet, tracking down and indicting leaders of the mob, which appears to have been far more organized and pre-planned than we thought initially. Every bit of evidence that the rampage was actually a plot undermines the case that Trump’s somewhat ambiguous words shortly before the event are responsible for causing it. You can argue that the rampage was planned or you can argue that Trump caused it. You can’t argue both.
Well, you can, and lots of people are.
I hope Kinsley’s right and it’s also bad for the Democrats politically, because such idiocy needs to carry a price or it will be engaged in again.
And, ironically, even on conviction Congress lacks the power to stop Trump from running again, as noted by Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tillman:
Under the disqualification clause, can Congress prospectively bar an impeached officer from being elected to Congress or to the presidency?
If the House impeaches a president, vice president or officer of the United States, then that defendant is tried by the Senate. If the Senate tries and convicts (by a two-thirds vote), then the convicted party (if still in office) is removed. The Senate may also impose a second punishment on the convicted party. Under the disqualification clause, Congress may bar the convicted party from prospectively holding “any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.” This provision grants Congress the power to prevent a convicted party from being appointed to a federal position, but does nothing to prevent a convicted party from being elected to the House, Senate or the presidency.
Congress has disqualified only three impeached officers (all federal judges) from holding future office, and none have subsequently run for elected federal positions. As a result, we have no substantial law here and little commentary. We have already explained that Justice Joseph Story indicated that elected officials did not fall under the scope of the Constitution’s general “officer of the United States “and “Office … under the United States” language. This latter language is at least as wide as the disqualification clause’s “Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States” language. Story’s position is also supported by Hamilton’s roll of officers. Of course, we also believe the practice of George Washington and other founders who succeeded him as president confirms that the “Office … under the United States” language in the foreign emoluments clause does not reach the presidency. The same result should apply here. An impeached, tried, convicted, removed and disqualified defendant is barred from being an appointed federal officer, and not barred from being an elected official.
This has gotten insufficient attention.
Related: New Evidence and Arguments About the Scope of the Impeachment Disqualification Clause: A Response to the House of Representatives’ Managers’ Trial Memorandum. “Assuming the legality of late impeachment in the current circumstances, House managers may be able to seek a conviction for its expressive function, and they can seek disqualification as a bar against Trump’s holding appointed federal positions in the future. The scope of Senate disqualification is a different issue. We have put forward our position over the course of more than a decade: the better view is that the Senate cannot bar Trump from running for and holding elected federal positions. Let the People decide.”
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Sunday, February 7, 2021
Big Brother Is Spying On You In Thousands Of Ways, And All Of That Info Now Goes Into Centralized “Fusion Systems”
Big Brother is watching you. Sadly, most people don’t realize how extensive the surveillance grid has now become. As you drive to work or to school, license plate readers are systematically tracking where you travel. In major cities, thousands of highly advanced security cameras (many equipped with facial recognition technology) are monitoring your every move. If authorities detect that you are doing something suspicious, they can quickly pull up your criminal, financial and medical records. Of course if they want to dig deeper, your phone and your computer are constantly producing a treasure trove of surveillance data. Nothing that you do on either one of them is ever private.
In the past, compiling all of that information would take a great deal of time. But now tech giants such as Microsoft, Motorola, Cisco and Palantir are selling “fusion systems” to governments all over the planet. These “fusion systems” can instantly integrate surveillance data from thousands of different sources, and this has totally transformed how law enforcement is conducted in many of our largest cities.
Arthur Holland Michel is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and he was given a tour of a “fusion system” that is used by the city of Chicago called Citigraf…
He clicked “INVESTIGATE,” and Citigraf got to work on the reported assault. The software runs on what Genetec calls a “correlation engine,” a suite of algorithms that trawl through a city’s historical police records and live sensor feeds, looking for patterns and connections. Seconds later, a long list of possible leads appeared onscreen, including a lineup of individuals previously arrested in the neighborhood for violent crimes, the home addresses of parolees living nearby, a catalog of similar recent 911 calls, photographs and license plate numbers of vehicles that had been detected speeding away from the scene, and video feeds from any cameras that might have picked up evidence of the crime itself, including those mounted on passing buses and trains. More than enough information, in other words, for an officer to respond to that original 911 call with a nearly telepathic sense of what has just unfolded.
But these systems are not just used to track down criminals.
In fact, they can be used to investigate literally anyone.
On another occasion, Arthur Holland Michel got the opportunity to test out the “fusion system” that Microsoft had built for New York City…
The NYPD official showed me how he could pull up any city resident’s rap sheet, lists of their known associates, cases in which they were named as a victim of a crime or as a witness, and, if they had a car, a heatmap of where they tended to drive and a full history of their parking violations. Then he handed me the phone. Go ahead, he said; search a name.
A flurry of people came to mind: Friends. Lovers. Enemies. In the end, I chose the victim of a shooting I’d witnessed in Brooklyn a couple of years earlier. He popped right up, along with what felt like more personal information than I, or even perhaps a curious officer, had any right to know without a court order. Feeling a little dizzy, I gave the phone back.
If this is what is going on in major cities such as Chicago and New York, can you imagine the technology that the alphabet agencies of the federal government must now possess?
Of course this isn’t just happening in the United States.
On the other side of the Atlantic, a joint European surveillance project known as ROXANNE is causing a great deal of concern…
An acronym for Real time netwOrk, teXt, and speaker ANalytics for combating orgaNized crimE, it was announced in November the Republic’s involvement in the project currently being developed in Switzerland.
A biometrics based platform ostensibly to monitor and crack down on organised crime, an additional application of ROXANNE which its creators advertise freely is the ability to monitor those guilty of alleged hate speech and political extremism.
Strict new laws against “hate speech” and “political extremism” are being instituted all over Europe, and this new tool will help to track down “thought criminals”.
In particular, this new tool will be heavily monitoring “social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube as well as normal telecommunications platforms”…
A product of the EU funded Horizon 2020 to foster new surveillance technology, ROXANNE works across social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube as well as normal telecommunications platforms to identify, categorise, and track faces and voices enabling authorities to paint a more in depth picture of the network being investigated, whether it be in relation to criminal activity or those deemed politically extreme.
Enabling authorities to draw on raw data from a variety of sources and platforms in order to recognise common speech patterns, facial features, and geolocation, the end result is both to identify suspects and paint an intricate picture of the networks being put under the microscope.
So if you live in Europe and you think that you might be guilty of “thought crime” at some point, you might want to get rid of your phone and your computer.
Seriously.
Things really have gotten that bad over there, and it is just a matter of time before the madness gets to the same level in the United States, because we are going down the exact same road.
Here in the U.S., more political voices are being “deplatformed” with each passing day. Progressive reporter Jordan Chariton originally cheered when conservatives were being deplatformed, but at this point he regrets his calls for censorship now that YouTube has taken down one of his videos…
However, after YouTube pulled video from his own channel featuring footage of the January 6 riot for violating the platform’s policies against “spam and deceptive practices,” the Chariton reversed his position.
“With time to reflect, & seeing Silicon Valley’s censorship onslaught, I regret this tweet made in [the] heat of moment,” the progressive journalist wrote. “Whether certain cable/YouTube outlets mislead audiences w/ dishonest claims lacking real evidence, they shouldn’t be targeted.”
It is all fun and games when it is happening to “the other side”, but when it happens to you suddenly it becomes real.
They really do want to control what all of us do, say and think, and the Big Brother surveillance grid is becoming more suffocating with each passing year.
If we do not put limits on this technology while we still can, it is just a matter of time before our society becomes a dystopian nightmare far more horrible than anything than George Orwell ever dared to imagine.
***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael Snyder and my brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book, I have written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned) By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe. I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook, Twitter and Parler, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help. During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.
The post Big Brother Is Spying On You In Thousands Of Ways, And All Of That Info Now Goes Into Centralized “Fusion Systems” first appeared on The Most Important News.
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The Delusions of Crowds—A Review
The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups by William J. Bernstein. Grove Atlantic, 461 pages (February 2021)
In the very late 19th and very early 20th century, the chattering classes started intoning on the subject of “the masses.” Depending on one’s cultural sensibilities, “the masses” were either a righteous historical force or an uncontrollable, anxiety-producing threat to stability and order. A certain subset of the era’s scribes began to wax poetic about “the crowd”—the most visible and volatile manifestation of “the masses” and the means by which assemblages of peasants of yore had righted wrongs either customarily or through force.
I became aware of this former cottage industry of crowd whisperers while reading Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs (1991). Buford’s book is a fantastic work of reportage on English football hooligans that makes reference to this existing literature. An American journalist then living in the UK, Buford spent years marauding across Europe with Manchester United supporters, raising hell at every turn. The author found that the rioting regularly incited by the football casuals with whom he embedded had little to do with working class social frustrations, as some cultural commentators tended to insist. Nor was the violence merely a safety valve for downtrodden people. Buford argued that group violence simply gave its members an “antisocial kick”—it was just exhilarating to smash up other people and other places.
Reading Buford led me to the more scholarly accounts of crowd behavior. I tried my hand at Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé’s Captain Swing (1969), a Marxist examination of the agricultural uprisings of the 1830s in rural England. The authors claimed that a new class consciousness, rooted in the tradition of “mobbing,” emerged among farm workers in response to the capitalist transformation of the economy. Then, not long after I finished Captain Swing, I happened to catch a rerun of VH1’s Behind the Music about The Doors, and discovered that Jim Morrison spent a significant amount of time in college reading about crowd behavior. Apparently, his on-stage persona was heavily influenced by the theories of French dramatist Antonin Artaud and psychologist Gustave LeBon. They were fresh out of Antonin Artaud at my local library, but I managed to pick up a copy of Gustave LeBon’s 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind instead.
Like Buford nearly a century later, LeBon attributed sinister qualities to the crowd. He argued that in crowds, otherwise decent people become barbarous. Buford presented his thugs as willful agents of mayhem who take advantage of chaotic situations to do dreadful things. LeBon, on the other hand, described men hypnotized by the crowd, and powerless among the throngs to be anything better than the lowest common denominator. In LeBon’s mind, the crowd could be nothing kinder than a marauding horde. LeBon’s book, I soon learned, was itself a latter day rendering of Charles Mackay, a Scottish writer who had written a classic history of mass hysteria a half-century earlier.
Published in 1841, Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is as amusing a survey of human folly as has ever been written. Mackay took “crowd” to mean something closer to “public opinion” or “mass hysteria” than he did an actual specific gathering of people. When I teach World History, I make use of several of the tales of mankind’s misadventures that Mackay recounts in the book. I assign my students Mackay’s chapter on the Dutch “tulip mania” of the 1630s, when the astonishing popularity of the plant led to a speculation bubble which turned a basket of bulbs, ever so briefly, into a commodity more valuable than bars of gold. Mackay makes the case, often in gory detail, that episodes of collective mania seem to be an inevitable consequence of human nature. Humans in every time and place have cast aside their better judgment and allowed themselves to be caught up in all manner of irrational hoopla.
The insights Mackay made nearly two centuries ago provide the starting point for William J. Bernstein’s analysis in The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups. Bernstein, a neurologist who has previously written about finance and economics, pays explicit homage to Mackay in both the title and content of this book. He, too, seems more interested in popular crazes than in specific gatherings of people. He works through the features of several different economic bubbles, demonstrating how the crowd got sucked into a number of different explosions in speculation. He revisits the South Sea Company and Mississippi Company episodes of the early 1700s already pilloried by Mackay. He treads on home turf in a thoroughgoing takedown of the dot-com hucksters of the late 1990s, showing how any naysayer to the prevailing market optimism was heaped with scorn by those who apparently knew better. His unflattering portraits of CNBC’s downmarket (think Jim Cramer) and upmarket (think Larry Kudlow) Wall Street cheerleaders during that decade is particularly droll. But these chapters seem more like due diligence than the book’s casus belli.
Bernstein seems to be far more preoccupied with the dangers presented by the other target of Mackay’s ire—religious fanatics. Mackay told many stories about medieval hunts for relics and trials by ordeal as well as more recent dragnets for actual witches. Bernstein follows suit and pillories religious zealotry past and present, tracing a line of lunacy from the likes of the militant Anabaptists to ISIS. But he also makes a point of training his fire on more mainline religious traditions. Any stripe of Christianity with a tinge of evangelicalism or the least bit of interest in eschatology gets lumped in with death cults both old and new.
Brandishing his credentials as a neurologist, Bernstein lends the luster of science to garden variety critiques of religiosity. Evolutionary biology has made us imitators, he reminds us, particularly when people form crowds. Social science tells us that humans prefer a good story to hard data, and decades of peer-reviewed research tells us that humans tend to opt for self-deception to critical thinking. In the end, this demi-Vulcan cant reveals as much about the author’s contempt for evangelical Protestantism as anything else, as he casually dissolves useful distinctions between a broad range of theological viewpoints. Pro-Israel dispensationalist evangelicals, for instance, are grouped with ISIS and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians. In Bernstein’s mind, these rather disparate perspectives form a continuum of end-times narratives, and he even trots out the shopworn cliché that a cult is a delusion shared by hundreds and a religion is a delusion shared by millions.
Despite this unedifying hostility, Bernstein is an excellent writer, and like Mackay before him, he tells the story of human manias with great skill. His chapters on the Swabian Peasants’ War and Anabaptist uprisings are terrifying depictions of the end-times frenzy that wreaked havoc on northern Europe throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. The distance between these events in the German-speaking world and, say, the Reign of Terror in France or the Chinese Cultural Revolution is not that great. And the speed with which apparently reasonable people moved from the embrace of a new theological idea to a willingness to torture those whose own theological ideas diverged even slightly is startling.
Nevertheless, Bernstein’s explanation for such phenomena is somewhat trite. In essence, he attributes the rapid growth of eschatological thinking among the German peasantry to their desire for an escape from the drudgery of their daily lives (neglecting to mention that most people who had ever lived led lives of similar toil). He presents the rise of end-times thinking in northern Europe as a predictable psychological response to a story well told and a desire to be a part of something—collectively, people took up with a compelling narrative and turned away from reason. But anyone who has ever held a religious or political idea with fervency could tell you that there’s more to it than that. Believing in something and trying to remake your world or your soul for the better provides a feeling of supreme human agency. As Vivian Gornick put it in her 1978 book The Romance of American Communism, “for better or worse, radical politics—full of sorrow and glory—embodies the stirring spectacle of humans engaged, alive to the beauty and rawness of self-creation.”
The more recent events covered by Bernstein are among the least compelling sections of his book. He spends several of the later chapters sparring with contemporary movements in the Abrahamic religions. “The human hunger for compelling narratives, of which the end-times is the most seductive, almost invariably exacerbates another unfortunate human tendency, our proclivity to in-group/out-group behavior,” he writes with an imperiousness that might make even Neil deGrasse Tyson wince. He finds this kind of thinking not only in “the inferno of the Islamic State” but also in “prosperous societies.” To Bernstein, Jerry Falwell and ISIS are selling the same bill of goods. But this kind of equivalence is self-evidently absurd. The outfits in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria that attempted to commit genocide against the Yazidis, sold thousands of captives into slavery, made a spectacle of summary beheadings of their prisoners, and deprived women of even the most basic personal freedoms. For all of Falwell’s charlatanry, the differences between the Moral Majority and the Middle East’s most fanatical groups are more conspicuous than their similarities. Bernstein’s failure to acknowledge this frequently makes him sound like a college sophomore going through his “who’s to say” phase in class discussion.
There is plenty to recommend about The Delusions of Crowds. It is laden with great anecdotes and the writing is always engaging. One comes away with the sense that civilization operates on narrow margins and is always on the verge of collapsing into irrationality. Certainly, the recent months of American street violence between extremist factions on the political Left and Right lend credence to the concerns articulated in Bernstein’s book. It would have been nice, though, if he had subjected the disciples of Stalin and Mao to the same withering scrutiny he brings to bear on pilgrimages by American Christians to the Holy Land.
Clayton Trutor holds a PhD in US History from Boston College and teaches at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. You can follow him on Twitter @ClaytonTrutor.
Photo by ekrem osmanoglu on Unsplash
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The establishment 'declared war on me'
Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Kalynn Fitzgerald looks through a pair of binoculars aboard the USS Hershel 'Woody' Williams in Djibouti, Jan. 30, 2021. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Eric Coffer)
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
By Frank Miele
Real Clear Politics
I didn’t declare war on the establishment; it declared war on me.
It declared war on me when it supported energy policies that could enrich Saudi Arabia and Russia and would cost me more money at the gas pump or on my power bill.
It declared war on me when it told me my ideas weren’t worthy of debate and discussion or that they were even so dangerous they couldn’t be shared publicly.
It declared war on me when it used the police powers of the FBI and CIA to first spy on a presidential candidate and then worked to undermine the administration of that candidate after he was elected.
It declared war on me when it told me my religious beliefs did not deserve the protection of the First Amendment.
It declared war on me when it told me boys could compete against girls in high school sports and that they could shower together afterwards.
It declared war on me when it offered citizenship to illegal aliens and shipped American jobs to China.
It declared war on me when it mocked the usefulness of a wall on the Mexican border and simultaneously put up a razor-wire fence around the Capitol.
It declared war on me when it tried to defund the police so that millions of Americans would be left defenseless against mobs from antifa and Black Lives Matter.
It declared war on me when it said America was never great.
It declared war on me when it told my children they are not good enough because they are white.
It declared war on me when it said that defending the Constitution’s rules on federal elections is sedition.
It declared war on me when it told me that I was a domestic terrorist if I didn’t believe the government’s official pronouncements about elections, about free speech, and about right and wrong.
Let’s just say it plainly: The establishment declared war on me and on all conservative Americans when it decided that leftist orthodoxy was more important than the Constitution.
Don’t believe me? Fine, why should you believe a Trump supporter? You’ve been indoctrinated by the national media, Big Tech oligarchs, the Democratic Party, and academic elites to believe without questioning that people like me can’t be trusted. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Listen instead to John Brennan, the former CIA director under President Obama, who speaks authoritatively for the Deep State:
He said on MSNBC that “the members of the Biden team who have been nominated or have been appointed, are now moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about what looks very similar to insurgency movements that we've seen overseas, where they germinate in different parts of the country and they gain strength and it brings together an unholy alliance frequently of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”
This “guilt by labeling” is the antithesis of fair play or justice. It is a convenient mechanism for the ruling class to herd people into identity clusters so that individual rights can be supplanted by group responsibility. If this reminds you of China’s Cultural Revolution, you are not wrong. The ruling class wants you to conform, confirm and comply. If you step outside the lines, be prepared to be shamed, silenced and ostracized.
A shocking example was provided Wednesday when Douglass Mackey of Delray Beach, Fla., was arrested for creating memes that allegedly misled voters in 2016 to think they could vote by texting instead of by actually going to the polls. This is the equivalent of arresting Sacha Baron Cohen for exposing the gullibility of the rich and famous. The FBI offered no evidence that Mackey actually convinced anyone not to vote, but even if it did, so what? Would you rather live in a country where the FBI is hunting down pranksters — four years after the supposed transgression — or a country where voters are expected to be able to recognize a joke when they see one?
But nothing can be taken for granted any more. The people — and even their representatives and senators — are considered enemies of the state because they hold opinions that don’t meet the standards of Joe Biden or (this is even scarier!) Jake Tapper.
No wonder the people are starting to rise up and rebel against the plutocracy. It’s not “We the Oligarchs” who are the source of power in the Constitution, but “We the People,” yet the ruling establishment has forgotten that. If people like Donald Trump and Douglass Mackey are deemed to be “enemies of the state,” then those who would suppress them and their freedoms must be considered “enemies of the people.”
A house divided against itself cannot long stand, but if there is to be a truce it will not come from submission, but from a recognition that all people are created equal, that they all have certain inalienable rights, and that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those words were worth fighting for once. Are they worth fighting for today?
I don’t know, but I do know this: If Americans can’t have liberty, we can’t have America either — at least not one that is distinguishable from China. The time has come to make a choice.
Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His new book “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com to read his daily commentary or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Parler @HeartlandDiary.
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
The post The establishment 'declared war on me' appeared first on WND.
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Washington Post Says COVID Lab Accident "Plausible" And "Must Be Investigated"
Washington Post Says COVID Lab Accident "Plausible" And "Must Be Investigated"
Exactly one year ago today, Zero Hedge was 'enjoying' our suspension by Twitter after we pointed out that scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been experimenting on bat coronaviruses, and that investigators trying to determine the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak might want to have a word with them.
We later reported that the same scientists had been using 'gain-of-function' research to make bat coronaviruses more transmissible to human beings - for which they were roundly criticized in 2015.
Thus, it seemed only logical that the possibility of a lab escape at 'ground zero' was at least non-zero, and should be investigated alongside the 'natural origin' theory which posits that the virus jumped from bats to an intermediary species, which then infected a cluster of people at a Wuhan wet market. According to a study published in The Lancet, 66% of patients admitted to Wuhan hospitals (27 out of 41) as of January 2nd, 2020 had been exposed to the Huanan seafood market.
Since then, the lab leak hypothesis has gained traction - and has been elevated to let's at least investigate status by legitimate bodies.
Three weeks ago, the US State Department announced that while they haven't determined whether the COVID-19 pandemic "began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China," the US government "has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses."
And in late January, A World Health Organization (WHO) adviser who previously worked under President Clinton and then-Senator Joe Biden said that COVID-19 was most likely an accidental lab leak.
Which brings us to the Washington Post, whose editorial board on Sunday suggested that the lab leak hypothesis was "plausible" and "must be investigated."
Many scientists have speculated that the virus leaped from animals, such as bats, to humans, perhaps with an intermediate stop in another animal. This kind of zoonotic spillover has occurred before, such as in the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014.
But there is another pathway, also plausible, that must be investigated. That is the possibility of a laboratory accident or leak. It could have involved a virus that was improperly disposed of or perhaps infected a laboratory worker who then passed it to others.
The Post then notes that "Published papers show that some of these institutions have been very active in coronavirus research. The most active is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli leads a research team that has extensively studied and experimented on bat coronaviruses that are very similar to the one that ignited the global pandemic."
Also noted is Shi's response to the virus - which was to 'check her laboratory records to see whether there had been any mishandling of experimental materials,' and that the genetic sequence of COVID-19 did not match a similar coronavirus her team had sampled in caves in China, which "really took a load off my mind," she told Scientific American. "I had not slept a wink for days," Shi claimed.
In reality, the cave-culled virus, RaTG13, was reportedly 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2, however in September, researchers in India concluded that "the RaTG13 genome had serious issues and all data related to it required a full review."
The Post remains skeptical of Shi's claims.
But that must not be the end of the story. China actively covered up the early stages of the pandemic, concealed the transmissibility of the virus from its own people and the world, and punished Wuhan doctors who expressed worry about it in late December 2019. President Xi Jinping did not warn the public in China or abroad until mid-January.
Since then, Chinese officials and scientists have advanced a host of dubious theories to suggest the origin of the virus was beyond China’s borders: perhaps brought to China by contaminated packaging of frozen food from abroad or from the U.S. military biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., or from mink farms. The disinformation only heightens suspicions that China is trying to distract from or conceal something. -Washington Post
And while we recommend (we know...) reading the rest of the Post's Editorial Board here - where they discuss 'gain of function' research, a mysterious database, and RaTG13, among other things - prepare yourselves for some serious damage control by the World Health Organization (WHO), who was finally allowed into Wuhan in search of evidence supporting the natural origins theory.
The field trip prominently included Peter Daszak - president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit group that has received millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Of note, Daszak drafted a February, 2020 statement in The Lancet on behalf of 27 prominent public health scientists which condemned "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin."
So, the not exactly unbiased Daszak and his team are preparing to release 'important clues' found during their investigation, according to Bloomberg. Daszak reports that the main findings will likely be released before Feb. 10, and that the Hunan fresh produce market in central Wuhan was "especially useful" - which was sanitized after its closure last January. That didn't mean there were no clues, apparently.
Investigators looked further and found “important clues” about the market’s role, Daszak said, declining to elaborate.
“Right now, we’re trying to tease everything together,” he said. “We’ve looked at these three strands separately. Now we’re going to bring it together and see what everything tells us.”
While the food market was shuttered and cleaned almost immediately after cases were recognized, “it’s still pretty intact,” Daszak said. “People left in a hurry and they left equipment, they left utensils, they left evidence of what was going on, and that’s what we looked at.” -Bloomberg
Whatever the WHO team comes up with should, at minimum, make for some great reading.
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