Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Authored by Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
There was much speculation toward the end of Donald Trump’s term as president of the United States that Trump would pardon Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, or both of these men who were responsible for exposing vast amounts of wrongdoing by the US government. But, it did not come to pass. Why? Glenn Greenwald, who played a key role in helping Snowden expose information about the US government’s mass surveillance programs and who advocated in public and behind the scenes that Trump pardon both men, has some interesting thoughts about that.
The reason Trump failed to issue a pardon for either Snowden or Assange centers on the deep state trying to protect itself by placing Trump in jeopardy, suggested Greenwald last week in an episode of his System Update show.
In a written introduction for the episode, Greenwald notes that Trump, while president, had both “raised the possibility that he might pardon Snowden” and was “actively considering a pardon for Assange.”
Greenwald, in the introduction, zeros in on a recent interview of Trump by Candace Owens. In the interview, Trump stated he came “very close” to pardoning one of them but did not ultimately do so. Why? Trump said the reason was because Trump “was too nice” to issue the pardon.
Greenwald isn’t buying that explanation. He writes:
The question that obviously emerges from that answer: too nice to whom? To the U.S. security services — the CIA, NSA and FBI — which had spent four years doing everything possible to sabotage and undermine Trump and his presidency with their concoction of Russiagate and other leaks of false accusations to their corporate media allies? Too nice to the war-mongering servants of the military-industrial complex in the establishment wings of both parties who were the allies of those security services in attempting to derail Trump's America First foreign policy agenda? Too nice to John Brennan, James Clapper and Susan Rice, the Obama-era security officials most eager to see both Assange and Snowden rot in prison for life because they exposed Obama's spying crimes and the Democrats’ corruption in 2016? Trump's “I'm too nice” explanation is, shall we say, less than persuasive.
In the System Update episode, Greenwald further explains that Trump’s enmity toward these deep state forces that helped lead Greenwald and many other individuals to think that Trump may issue the pardons:
Now the argument for why President Trump not only should have pardoned Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, but why some of us believed there was a chance that he could didn't rely on the benevolence of President Trump. It relied on the fact that he knew better than anybody how deceitful and abusive and dangerous these agencies are. The agencies that were exposed by Snowden and Assange and the ones that were demanding that they be imprisoned forever. He knew, as well as anybody, the treachery and the illegal interference in our domestic politics because he was one of their targets.
Yet, the pardons did not materialize. Why? Greenwald states that Greenwald “knew that Trump wanted to pardon Edward Snowden and had strongly considered pardoning Julian Assange.” But, continues Greenwald, Trump “got scared into pardoning neither of them for reasons I'm about to explain to you.” Greenwald then argues that ultimately Trump gave in to deep state pressure applied through Republican Senators’ threat to convict Trump on the impeachment brought against him in his final weeks in office. Says Greenwald:
They were making very clear to him explicitly clear Republican senators like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell that if you do any of those things that you are considering doing, pardoning Assange and Snowden, declassifying JFK files, declassifying other secrets that should have been declassified long ago because they're from decades old treachery on the part of the US government, we will vote to impeach you. They had this leverage the sword of Damocles hanging over his head….
“This is the story of why the deep state yet again got its way,” concludes Greenwald in his System Update episode, “even with a person in the White House who knows firsthand just how evil and destructive and toxic they are.”
Watch the System Update episode, and read the introduction and transcript, here.
The post Dr. Zelenko On “Blocking The Common Pathway” Of All The Variants appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
(NBC NEWS) – Whether they realize it or not, about 200 million people in the United States now likely have access to a Covid-19 digital vaccine card.
The digital pass known as the SMART Health Card is voluntary and minimal by design to protect personal information. It has a person’s name, date of birth and the dates and brands of vaccination doses, all contained within a type of scannable bar code known as a QR code.
And after a relatively quiet start, it has built momentum in recent months as more states and companies have signed on, making it something of a de facto national digital vaccine card.
The post Quietly and over some objections, national digital vaccine card has emerged appeared first on WND.
Authored by Meiling Lee via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is affecting children in Colorado more than COVID-19, according to a chief medical officer of Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children.
“RSV is very contagious and very prevalent in the school system as well as throughout daycare centers and in homes,” Dr. Reginald Washington told FOX31 KDVR-TV on Jan. 12, adding that “COVID is increasing in its prevalence” and impacting children the second most, with the adenovirus being third.
First grade students prepare for class in La Puente, Calif., on Nov. 16, 2020. (FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
RSV is a common respiratory virus that causes cold-like symptoms in people of all ages. Doctors say that the virus is so common that many children will have been infected with it before they are two years old.
RSV is mild in most children and goes away in a week or two but for some—who are immunocompromised or have a lung or heart disease—it can be quite severe.
RSV outbreaks usually occur from the fall through the spring, but an increase in RSV cases across the Southern parts of the United States prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to issue a health advisory in June 2021.
Other countries also experienced a spike in RSV out of season. Public Health England, responsible for improving and protecting the country’s health and wellbeing, issued a notice encouraging parents “to look out for symptoms of severe infection in at-risk children” in July 2021. The agency says the increase was a result of the “various restrictions in place [during the winter of 2020] to reduce the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19), there were far fewer infections in younger people” that “many will not have developed immunity.”
Doctors in Queensland, Australia saw a significant rise in RSV cases in children between January and April of last year. Summer in Australia began Dec. 1, 2020, and ended on Feb. 28, 2021. The northeastern state recorded a total of 378 RSV cases in 2021 compared to 88 cases for all of 2019 and 70 cases in 2020.
Dr. Damian Roland, honorary professor of pediatric emergency medicine at Leicester University said that regardless of the disease, the focus should be on the signs and symptoms of the child, and not making parents afraid of the illness.
“From [the] parent point of view [it] doesn’t matter if [the] child has RSV, #COVID19 or [an]other virus. Decision making should be on their wellness not the disease,” Roland said on Twitter on Jan. 12.
He added, “My comment is we are creating fear in parents of particular diseases rather than how their child is. If your child has fever but is well & drinking the cause of that fever is irrelevant (but please get a COVID test as per national policy).”
Dr. Lynora Saxinger, infectious diseases expert and associate professor at the University of Alberta listed the symptoms that parents should be aware of and when to bring their child to the doctor or call Emergency Medical Services.
“Listen. Red flag symptoms for KIDS with virus infection: (Both RSV which is generally tough at this time of year, and has come back after a year off, and COVID19): my colleagues are seeing BOTH viruses causing ‘croup’—even in older kids,” Saxinger wrote on Twitter on Jan. 12.
Listen
— Dr. Lynora Saxinger 🇨🇦 *answers DM not mentions (@AntibioticDoc) January 12, 2022
🚩 red flag symptoms for KIDS with virus infection:
(Both RSV which is generally tough at this time of year, and has come back after a year off, and COVID19):
my colleagues are seeing BOTH viruses causing “croup”- even in older kids. Respiratory viruses usually
1/ pic.twitter.com/XTc31Jmaph
RSV causes “an estimated 33.1 million acute lower respiratory tract infections worldwide and 3.2 million hospitalizations in children under 5 years,” according to The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
The CDC says that there is currently no specific treatment for infection with RSV, but the World Health Organization (WHO) says that a vaccine may be “available in the near future.”
“Fortunately, several vaccine candidates are now in the human testing phase targeting young children, older adults, and pregnant women, and an effective safe vaccine is likely to be available in the near future,” the WHO said.
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone,
In a drastic pivot from typical denunciations of false flag operations as conspiratorial nonsense that don’t exist outside the demented imagination of Alex Jones, the US political/media class is proclaiming with one voice that Russia is currently orchestrating just such an operation to justify an invasion of Ukraine.
“As part of its plans, Russia is laying the groundwork to have the option of fabricating a pretext for invasion,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday.
“We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine.”
“Without getting into too much detail, we do have information that indicates that Russia is already working actively to create a pretext for a potential invasion, for a move on Ukraine,” Pentagon Spokesperson John Kirby told the press on Friday.
“In fact, we have information that they’ve pre-positioned a group of operatives, to conduct what we call a false flag operation, an operation designed to look like an attack on them or their people, or Russian speaking people in Ukraine, as an excuse to go in.”
The US government has substantiated these incendiary claims with the usual amount of evidence, by which I of course mean jack dick nothingballs. The mass media have not been dissuaded from reporting on this issue by the complete absence of any evidence that this Kremlin false flag plot is in fact a real thing that actually happened, their journalistic standards completely satisfied by the fact that their government instructed them to report it. Countless articles and news segments containing the phrase “false flag” have been blaring throughout all the most influential news outlets in the western world without the slightest hint of skepticism.
This sudden embrace of the idea that governments can stage attacks on their own people to justify their own pre-existing agendas is a sharp pivot from the scoff which such a notion in mainstream liberal circles has typically received. This 2018 article from The New York Times simply dismisses the idea that the 2014 Maidan massacre was a false flag carried out by western-backed opposition fighters in Ukraine to frame the riot police of the government who was ousted in that coup, for example, despite the existence of plenty of evidence that this is indeed what happened. This BBC article dismisses without argument the idea that the alleged 2018 chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria could have been a false flag carried out by the Al Qaeda-aligned insurgents on the ground to provoke a western attack on the Syrian government, yet there are mountains of evidence that this was the case.
Articles denouncing the very idea of “false flag conspiracy theories” surface routinely in the mass media. Snopes has a whole article explaining that false flags are kooky nonsense without any mention of the fact that this is a known tactic we’ve seen intelligence operatives discussing in declassified documents, like when the CIA considered planting bombs in Miami to blame Castro. I myself was once temporarily suspended by Facebook just for posting an article about false flag operations that are publicly acknowledged to have occurred. People who dare to question the many gaping plot holes in the official 9/11 narrative have often been treated with the same disdain and revulsion as neo-Nazis and pedophilia advocates.
"A US official told CNN" is not a "Scoop" but demonstrates the willingness of 'journalists' to stenograph unverifiable government disinformation. https://t.co/wr2u3xKtiI
— Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) January 14, 2022
None of this is to say that every theory about any false flag operation is true; many are not. But the way the mass media will instantly embrace an idea to which they’ve heretofore been consistently hostile just because their government told them to to do it says so much about the state of the so-called free press today, and the fact that the rank-and-file public simply accepts this and marches along with it as though talking about false flags has always been normal says so much about the level of Orwellian doublethink that people have been trained to perform in today’s information ecosystem. The way false flag operations were widely considered conspiratorial hogwash until the instant they were reported as real by the media institutions who’ve lied to us about every war is downright creepy.
The problem with preemptive false flag accusations is of course that the side making the claim can simply launch an unprovoked attack and then say “See? They’re staging a false flag to frame our side, just like we said they would!” And then they can present their subsequent actions as defensive in nature, when in reality they were the aggressors and instigators. We are seeing nothing from the obedient western news media to suggest they’d do anything other than uncritically regurgitate such claims into the minds of their trusting audiences.
As the Beltway doctrine that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost crashes headlong into the reality of an emerging multipolar world, the US government is now more dangerous than it has ever been at any point in its history. We need the press to be holding the drivers of empire to account with the light of truth, and we need the public to be opposing and scrutinizing these reckless escalations. Instead, we are getting the exact opposite. God help us all.
* * *
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CBS conducted a poll of the collapsed support for Joe Biden [DATA HERE] and then outlined their findings earlier today. However, keeping up with their need to ignore things, they skip over how the vaccination mandate is opposed within their responses. Margaret Brennan and Anthony Salvanto, CBS News’ director of elections and surveys, discuss how […]
The post Sunday Talks, CBS Outlines Collapsed Support for Biden Regime, But Purposefully Ignore One Central Component of Their Own Poll appeared first on The Last Refuge.
The editorial board of Utah's largest newspaper - the Salt Lake Tribune - which is controlled by the family of former Governor Jon Huntsman Jr., has called for the deployment of the National Guard "to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere."
The draconian measure was suggested in a Saturday op-ed titled "Utah leaders have surrendered to COVID pandemic," suggesting that elected officials have failed to mandate the vaccine for all citizens, and that if Utah was a "civilized place" Governor Spencer Cox (R) would treat the unvaccinated (and no mention of the naturally immune) as lepers with severe lockdown mandates.
"Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere," the editorial board writes.
The board blames "Government officials, mostly but not exclusively Republicans, were apparently determined not to be caught governing in the face of this challenge," adding that "Any move or recommendation to mask up or, when safe and effective vaccines became available, to make vaccination a requirement of admission to public places and society in general was shouted down as an unwarranted imposition on individual freedoms."
The Salt Lake City newspaper wants the Utah national guard to not allow unvaccinated people to leave their homes. This is mindless, anti-science insanity — omicron is infecting everyone — but these “journalists” are demanding totalitarianism. And they think they’re the good guys. pic.twitter.com/BYoskGNQ5R
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 16, 2022
In response to the op-ed, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson tweeted: "The truth is Omicron is out of control everywhere. Even in places with mask and vaccine mandates. We always push vaccines, but even vaccinated ppl [sic] are catching it. It’s easy to take shots from the cheap seats but this is the sort of nonsense that makes editorial boards irrelevant." (h/t Fox News)
The truth is Omicron is out of control everywhere. Even in places with mask and vaccine mandates. We always push vaccines, but even vaccinated ppl are catching it. It’s easy to take shots from the cheap seats but this is the sort of nonsense that makes editorial boards irrelevant pic.twitter.com/Zladdqnulc
— Deidre Henderson (@DeidreHenderson) January 15, 2022
All in the family...
As Zero Hedge reader Paul W. notes, "Former Utah R Governor, Jon Hunstman, Jr. directly controls the Salt Lake Tribune through the Huntsman Family Investment vehicle. The SL Tribune is a non profit that is wholly owned and controlled by the Hustmans.
"Jon's brother, Paul, is the Chair of the Editorial board at the Tribune," he continued, adding: "The Hunstmans are implicitly calling for violence against unvaxxed Americans."
Former Orinn Hatch staffer, Utah senator Matt Whitlock summed it up: "Use the national guard to prevent unvaccinated from going anywhere?! That would be more draconian than any state in the country - how do they think things are going in Australia? The Trib editorial board is absolute garbage."
Use the national guard to prevent unvaccinated from going anywhere?! That would be more draconian than any state in the country - how do they think things are going in Australia?
— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) January 15, 2022
The Trib editorial board is absolute garbage.
Guest Post by Jordan Schachtel
The artwork is a brilliant Soviet-style mockery of Joe Biden and Anthony Fauci COVID Mania regime. And seeing it appear in downtown Washington, D.C., the home of America’s ruling class and unquestioning COVID compliance, is the perfect setting for these absolute gems.
The first piece showcases an angry Joe Biden holding an OSHA-labeled mallet surrounded by the word “comply.” The second illustration, labeled, “good kids are compliant kids,” shows a handful of children in red masks looking up to an injection needle-surrounded Joe Biden. The third shows a sitting Joe Biden holding the coronavirus in his hand, with the caption, “Mandate! Segregate! Subjugate!” The last piece of artwork, “Trust The Scientism,” shows Anthony Fauci, dressed in clergy attire, possessing a giant hypodermic needle.
I particularly enjoy the Soviet propaganda style. It
Here are the four posters lined up together, courtesy of Leigh Wolf’s Twitter page:
A DC Karen noticed the artwork and started to rip down the posters.
ANNND some lady is already out here ripping down the “dangerous propaganda.”
pic.twitter.com/xrEYHl4poq
—
(@LeighWolf) January 15, 2022
She was filmed desecrating the artwork by Leigh Wolf, a comms and production professional who happens to be a former colleague of mine at CRTV/Blaze Media Wolf spotted the artwork and took photos of it before it was ripped down.
I reached out to Leigh and asked if he had any inside info about how the artwork ended up in Washington D.C. Wolf told me he has no idea who put them up. I’ll post an update if I can find the artist behind these magnificent creations.
