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
This article was originally published by Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse Blog.
Our long slide toward economic oblivion continues, and survey after survey has shown that most Americans are deeply unsatisfied with the current state of the U.S. economy. Inflation is out of control, most Americans are getting poorer due to the rapidly rising cost of living, the housing bubble has started to burst, and the commercial real estate market is a giant mess. But employment is supposed to be our bright spot. The Biden administration continues to tell us that the unemployment rate is less than 4 percent and that there are a lot of jobs available for those that want them. But is this really true?
To answer that question, it is imperative to understand that our government places unemployed persons into one of two categories…
Jobless people are classified into one of two categories by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)—either unemployed or not in the labor force. To be classified as unemployed in the month they are surveyed, people must be actively looking for work. If they are not actively looking, they are classified as not in the labor force.
Over time, the definition of “officially unemployed” has gotten more restrictive, and today only 6.097 million working-age Americans are considered to be in that category.
Meanwhile, a staggering 99.800 million working-age Americans are considered to be “not in the labor force”.
When you add both categories together, you get a total of 105.897 million working-age Americans that do not have a job right now.
Let me try to put that into perspective.
During the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, that number never even got up to 90 million.
So that means that the number of working-age Americans that are not employed at this moment far surpasses anything that we witnessed during the Great Recession.
Please do not believe the garbage that the federal government is trying to sell you.
Unemployment is not low. In fact, John Williams estimates that the real rate of unemployment in this country is somewhere around 25 percent.
If you are out of work at this moment, please realize that you are not alone.
In April, 37-year-old North Carolina resident Al Brown lost his job, and now his family is really struggling…
Al Brown and his fiancée faced a tough call in May when reviewing their weekly budget: What’s a higher priority, more food or dish soap?
Based in Concord, North Carolina, Brown was the main breadwinner for his fiancée and their two children. Then in April, he was let go from his job as a global director of business development at software company Cascade.
He’s since quit his gym membership and sold miscellaneous items around his home, including a computer and yard furniture, to make ends meet. His 13-year-old son quit the basketball team. While losing the family’s source of income has taken a financial toll, it’s also resulted in a mental one.
Since he was laid off, Brown has submitted more than 600 job applications, but that has produced only a few interviews and no job offers…
Brown, 37, now spends his days scouring the internet for jobs or reaching out to potential connections. After filing over 600 applications, only a handful have produced interviews, he says.
If jobs are easy to get, why hasn’t Al Brown been able to find one?
Can anyone out there explain that to me?
Perhaps I am just a little slow because what the Biden administration is telling us about the economy does not seem to correspond with reality at all.
54-year-old Nina McCollum has applied for “hundreds of jobs” since losing her position in March, and she is still jobless as well…
Nina McCollum, 54, was laid off from her writing gig at jobs site Glassdoor back in March. She hasn’t found a new role since, despite applying to hundreds of jobs.
She’s been living off her savings, selling her blood plasma and frequenting food pantries just to get by — all while taking care of a teenage son. Her domestic partner helps out, but he can’t make up for her lost income.
Why can’t these people find work?
What is wrong with them?
Of course, the truth is that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing. They are diligently searching for jobs, but the reality of the matter is that the employment market has gotten very tight.
Meanwhile, the cost of living just continues to rise, and that has resulted in a “collapse of household savings”…
In February, the U.S. personal savings rate was estimated to be around 4.6 percent—much below the decades-long average of about 8.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. But what does this mean?
Some economists think that the collapse of household savings could lead to a spending slowdown and trigger a recession.
The Biden administration may never admit that we have entered a major economic downturn, but that is precisely what we are witnessing.
In fact, the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing purchasing managers index has now been below 50 for eight months in a row…
The U.S. manufacturing sector fell deeper into recession territory in May, extending a multimonth slump as experts warn that the economy faces “clear challenges.”
The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said in a report Monday that its manufacturing purchasing managers index dropped to 46.0 last month, the lowest reading since May 2020 and the eighth consecutive sub-50 reading.
Any readings below 50 represent recession, with all key sub-components in contraction, including the employment index, suggesting layoff pressures are building.
It’s really happening.
Other than for a brief period during the pandemic, we have not seen economic turmoil of this magnitude since 2008 and 2009.
Unfortunately, we are still only in the very early chapters of this crisis.
The economic outlook for the remainder of 2023 is very bleak, the outlook for 2024 is even worse, and the long-term outlook is nightmarish.
But you have to give our leaders credit for propping things up for as long as they did. By flooding the system with money, they were able to delay our moment of reckoning for a long time.
Of course their gimmicks were also making our long-term problems even worse, and now our long-term problems have become our short-term problems.
There is so much pain ahead of us, and our country is not prepared to handle it.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “End Times” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to the new book I have written six other books that are available on Amazon.com including “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending copies as gifts to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible. I have also started a brand new Substack newsletter, and I encourage you to subscribe so that you won’t miss any of my articles. 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 and Twitter, and anyway that you can share these articles with others is definitely a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.
A new article in Science magazine admits that Covid vaccines can cause neurological and cardiovascular damage:
On the face of it, the article recognizes the plight of the unfortunate people who suffered an injury due to Covid vaccinations:
in recent months, what some call Long Vax has gained wider acceptance among doctors and scientists, and some are now working to better understand and treat its symptoms.
The authors set out to minimize the suffering; without any editorial regard for repetitiveness, it goes on and on about how “rare” vaccine injuries are:
rare cases of abnormal blood clotting and heart inflammation … a debilitating suite of symptoms that resembles Long Covid, has been more elusive, its link to vaccination unclear … “You see one or two patients and you wonder if it’s a coincidence,” … Cases seem very rare—far less common than Long Covid after infection … regulators in the United States and Europe say they have looked for, but have not found, a connection … “We can’t rule out rare cases,” says Peter Marks … though rare, Long Covid–like symptoms after vaccination are a real phenomenon …
In insisting that Covid is much more dangerous than the vaccine, Science resorts to an outright lie, not noting the contradiction between two paragraphs:
Cases seem very rare—far less common than Long Covid after infection.
This is repudiated by the actual evidence Science discloses:
They found that within 90 days after a shot, the rate of POTS-related symptoms was about 33% higher than in the 3 months before; 2581 people were diagnosed with POTS-related symptoms after vaccination, compared with 1945 beforehand. However, the study found a bigger effect from COVID-19 itself: The rate of POTS symptoms in about 12,000 unvaccinated people after infection was 52% higher than beforehand.
Is a 33% increase in POTS after a vaccine shot “far less common” than the 52% increase from Covid? That is a very disingenuous suggestion: people routinely get multiple rounds of Covid vaccines, having the risk multiply with each dose.
Who are the experts Science is quoting for this article?
Peter Marks, an FDA Commissioner, for whom all vaccines are perfect
German Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, the evil Covid clown of Germany
Tom Shimabukuro of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, author of a fake study using incorrect denominators he published to “prove” that Covid vaccines are safe for pregnancy
The article seems like an attempt to acknowledge the ill effects of Covid vaccines while simultaneously sweeping them under the rug as “rare.”
For about two years, COVID science and fact checkers required us to believe that spike protein is a harmless substance:
That fact-checkers assurance was hollow and had no data behind it. Finally, Science acknowledges that:
AN IMMUNE OVERREACTION to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which COVID-19 vaccines use to induce protective antibodies, is one possible cause of these symptoms. One theory is that after vaccination some people generate another round of antibodies targeting the first. Those antibodies could function somewhat like spike itself: Spike targets a cell surface protein called the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor, enabling the virus to enter cells. The rogue antibodies might also bind to ACE2, which helps regulate blood pressure and heart rate, says Bernhard Schieffer, a cardiologist at the University of Marburg. If those antibodies disrupt ACE2 signaling, that could cause the racing heart rates and blood pressure swings seen in POTS.
Oddly enough, despite understanding some dangers of the spike protein, Science insists on giving people more shots of spike protein:
COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives, and the world is gearing up for a new round of boosters.
Unsurprisingly, research projects involving Covid vaccine victims have difficulty attracting “funders”:
In the next few months, the nonprofit REACT19 plans to distribute small grants, in the tens of thousands of dollars, to teams studying immunology, biomarkers, and other features of postvaccine illness. Even modest support matters, Krumholz says, because “it’s incumbent on us to produce preliminary data” to win over funders with deep pockets.
The deep-pocketed funders of Covid vaccines had no problem pouring billions into them without any preliminary data - but helping their victims is not one of their financial priorities.
Thus, the researchers helping the vaccine-injured operate with tens of thousands of dollars, while Pfizer shareholders enjoy their multi-billion windfall.
Do you know any specific individuals who had a neurological or cardiovascular injury due to COVID vaccines? Describe them, but please be mindful of people’s privacy.
By John & Nisha Whitehead“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”—Thomas JeffersonJuly 02, 2023: Information Clearing House — The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against the government’s massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is—you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16. You need something else than just an AR-15.”The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.
By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.
This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.
For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.
A 2008 Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report goes on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.
Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.
The events of recent years have all been part of a master plan to shut us up and preemptively shut us down: by making peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.
The powers-that-be want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law.
This is how it begins.
As John Lennon warned, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”
Already, discontent is growing.
According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 7 out of 10 Americans believe that American democracy is “imperiled.”
Americans are worried about the state of their country, afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and tired of being treated like suspects and criminals.
What we’ll see more of before long is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.”
This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.
Our backs are against the proverbial wall.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.
When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Brace yourselves.
There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.
Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.
Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.
And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.
The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.
The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, yet that is no real recourse at all.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what is unfolding before us is not a revolution. This is an anti-revolution.
We are at our most vulnerable right now.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57640.htm
Keeping up with the corruption of the Covid regime feels like drinking from a firehose. The volume of the fraud, the pace of new discoveries, and the breadth of the operations are overwhelming. This makes it imperative for groups like Brownstone Institute to digest the onslaught of information and communicate salient themes and dispositive facts, particularly given the dereliction of mainstream media.
On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee released a report on how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “colluded with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans,” adding to the informational firehose we work to imbibe.
The 36-page report raises three familiar issues: first, government actors worked with third parties to overturn the First Amendment; second, censors prioritized political narratives over truthfulness; and third, an unaccountable bureaucracy hijacked American society.
The House Report reveals that CISA, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, worked with social-media platforms to censor posts it considered dis-, mis-, or malinformation. Brian Scully, the head of CISA’s censorship team, conceded that this process, known as “switchboarding,” would “trigger content moderation.”
Additionally, CISA funded the nonprofit EI-ISAC in 2020 to bolster its censorship operations. EI-ISAC worked to report and track “misinformation across all channels and platforms.” In launching the nonprofit, the government boasted that it “leverage[d] DHS CISA’s relationship with social media organizations to ensure priority treatment of misinformation reports.”
The switchboard programs directly contradict sworn testimony from CISA Director Jen Easterly. “We don’t censor anything… we don’t flag anything to social media organizations at all,” Esterly told Congress in March. “We don’t do any censorship.” Her statement was more than a lie; it omitted the institutionalization of the practice she denied. The agency’s initiatives relied on a collusive apparatus of private-public partnerships designed to suppress unapproved information.
This should sound familiar.
Alex Berenson gained access to thousands of Twitter communications that uncovered concrete evidence that government actors – including White House Covid Advisor Andy Slavitt – worked to censor him for criticizing Biden’s Covid policies.
White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty privately lobbied social-media groups to remove a video of Tucker Carlson reporting the link between Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and blood clots.
Facebook worked with the CDC to censor posts related to the Covid “lab-leak” hypothesis. Company employees later met with the Department of Health and Human Services to de-platform the “disinformation dozen,” a group including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
These were not cherry-picked examples – they were part of an institutional collusion to strip Americans of their First Amendment rights. Journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi exposed the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a collection of the world’s most powerful government agencies, NGOs, and private corporations that worked together to silence dissent.
The Supreme Court has held that it is “axiomatic” that the government cannot “induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” Yet, CISA has joined the disturbing tendency of public-private partnerships designed to impede Americans’ right to information and freedom of speech.
Read More – CISA Was Behind the Attempt to Control Your Thoughts, Speech, and Life
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, and he remains one of the nation's most prominent whistleblowers who leaked secret government information to the public. Upon his death the general consensus among the writers of memorials for Ellsberg was that he was right to leak government secrets. As the editorial board at The Orange County Register recently put it, he was "a true American hero."
They're right about Ellsberg. During the Vietnam War, through his release of the so-called Pentagon Papers in 1971, Ellsberg made public a large trove of secret government documents that exposed many of the Federal government's lies about its involvement throughout Indochina. Much of the information applied to the Johnson Administration which had been lying about the war to both the public and the Congress. Naturally, the release of this information, which smashed the Federal government's credibility on foreign policy, also called into question countless claims about the Nixon Administration. Nixon, of course, had already authorized an illegal and secret bombing campaign in Cambodia in 1969.
At the time, the response to Ellsberg's deeds was hardly one of universal acclaim. Yet, over time, criticism has waned and Ellsberg's critics have been exposed for what they were: knee-jerk defenders of a regime devoted to war crimes and crimes against the Bill of Rights.
In fact, it has become so difficult to criticize Ellsberg that defenders of today's regime have had to devise ways to claim that Ellsberg's leaks were heroic, but the leaks by more recent whistleblowers—such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden—have been traitorous. The fact that Ellsberg himself always supported leakers like Snowden and Assange is studiously ignored.
Yet, what was true for leakers in 1971 remains true today: it is heroic to expose the lies of governments, and those who seek to jail truthtellers are the real criminals who choose to protect state power at the expense of freedom and basic human rights.
It does not require any courage or independent thinking to support Daniel Ellsberg in 2023. To do so is to do what is already accepted and popular. This is why journalists almost universally support Ellsberg today. It's easy.
Yet, to support modern-day Ellsbergs—such as Assange, Snowden, Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, and Jack Texeira—requires some degree of independent thought, skepticism, and disregard for the regime. This is why so few journalists in the corporate media support these modern-day leakers. To do so might endanger journalists' positions with the organs of power within mainstream media. Moreover, most corporate journalists are firmly on the side of the regime. They have no interest whatsoever in undermining it.
Indeed, many journalists at the time of the release of the Pentagon Papers condemned Ellsberg. For example, at the 1971 meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association a speaker insisted that approval of Ellsberg is akin to approval of any "pamphleteer" who publishes "a plan of a secret submarine or a list of foreign agents abroad, obtained from any peddler of secrets." The editors of TIME magazine, meanwhile, reminded readers that the federal government ought to use the "remedy" of prosecuting whistleblowers if publishing secrets might "endanger national security." The editors fail to mention that the federal government itself gets to determine what the amorphous phrase "national security" actually means.
Politicians, of course, freely attacked Ellsberg with that term that is forever a favored refuge of the simple-minded: "traitor." The Nixon Administration prosecuted him under the Espionage Act of 1917. Ellsberg himself suspected he would spend the rest of his life in jail, but he escaped conviction thanks to the administrative incompetence of Nixon's "Plumbers." The Nixon Administration had already violated so many of Ellsberg's basic procedural rights in the lead up to the trial that no court would side with the administration. Ultimately, however, it must be noted that the Supreme Court took no action to meaningfully limit the Espionage Act. The Court took the easy way out in spite of the fact that the Act has always been unconstitutional, immoral, and contrary to basic property rights. As David Gordon has summed it up:
The [Espionage Act] blatantly violated the text of the Constitution. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech"; and as Justice Hugo Black liked to say, "'no law' means 'no law'." Congress had earlier violated the First Amendment with the Sedition Act of 1798; but along with the Alien Act of the same year, it was repudiated by Thomas Jefferson and was generally regarded as a disaster. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court said that the Espionage Act was constitutional.
In other words, Ellsberg managed to walk free on a technicality, but the threat of prosecution against other whistleblowers, who have done the same thing as Ellsberg, remains.
The fact that media opinion and public opinion generally sides with Ellsberg has done little to shield modern-day leakers from both public condemnation and legal prosecution.
Modern supporters of Ellsberg who also condemn men like Snowden and Assange attempt to justify this contradiction by creating narratives like the myth of the "good leaker." Kevin Gosztola has shown this tendency in how many who favor prosecuting Snowden and Texeira have attempted to claim that Ellsberg was a "responsible" leaker who held back information that might have been damaging to US national security. Yet, Gosztola shows this was not actually the case. Ellsberg did indeed expose the name of at least one clandestine CIA officer. Moreover, Ellsberg himself has noted that when he did withhold information from his leaks, it was not to protect the regime or its agents. Rather, Ellsberg feared releasing that data might hurt efforts to negotiate an end to the war. Ellsberg did not care "if the names of U.S. intelligence sources were exposed."
Ellsberg was also aware that defenders of the US security state used his case to discredit modern-day leakers and manipulate the narrative. Gosztola notes:
Ellsberg said the pundit class has used him as a “foil” against any “new revelations” of systematic government abuses of power. They have claimed certain leaks were different than his leaks to make it easier to discredit people who took great risks to reveal the truth.
Naturally, it is necessary to create the myth that Ellsberg is "good" and Assange, et al, are "bad" so as the get around the pesky reality that most everyone today accepts it was for the best that many Vietnam-era lies were exposed. At the time, of course, this was hardly self-evident to millions of Americans who had been sufficiently propagandized into the idea that the federal government ought to be able to do more or less whatever it wants in the name of "national security."
This attitude certainly continues today, and it is this lazy deference to the prerogatives of the federal security state that allows federal agents and their enablers to keep alive efforts to arrest Assange and Snowden so the CIA and FBI can take their pound of flesh.
This attitude, of course, is thoroughly incompatible with the idea of self-government and the rule of law. In the years immediately following the end of the Cold War, even many Conservatives began to see the damage the Cold War had done to basic American freedoms in this respect. Thus, Sam Francis would write in 1992:
A self-governing people generally abhors secrecy in government and rightly distrusts it. The only way, then, in which those intent upon . . . the expansion of their power over other peoples, can succeed is by diminishing the degree of self-government in their own society. They must persuade the self-governing people that there is too much self-government going around, that the people themselves simply are not smart enough or well-informed enough to deserve much say in such complicated matters as foreign policy. . . . We hear it . . . every time an American President intones that “politics stop at the water’s edge.” Of course, politics do not stop at the water’s edge unless we as a people are willing to surrender a vast amount of control over what the government does in military, foreign, economic, and intelligence affairs.
Governments like to keep secrets because it is politically expedient. It helps smooth the ways for more wars, and larger wars. It helps ensure the taxpayer gravy train keeps flowing, and that the taxpayers are untroubled by real facts about government lies and government crimes. Ellsberg—and other heroes like Assange, Snowden, and Manning—undermine the regime by telling the truth. This is why modern journalists and politicians hate them.
Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,
Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner who worked directly with Hunter and James Biden on a sketchy deal with a Chinese energy firm and who came forward as a whistleblower before the 2020 election, was never asked to testify to the Delaware grand jury investigating Hunter Biden, CBS News reported Thursday.
Bobulinski was reportedly “open to testifying, and his attorney reached out to the office of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss,” but the prosecutor did not return their calls, two sources familiar with the discussions told CBS News’ Catherine Herridge.
Weiss’ decision to ignore Bobulinski is the latest indication that prosecutors purposefully tanked the investigation to protect Hunter’s father, Joe Biden.
Last week, whistleblower documents were released revealing that federal prosecutors repeatedly interfered on Hunter Biden’s behalf during the probe into the younger Biden’s business dealings. According to former IRS supervisory agent Gary Shapley and an unnamed IRS agent, federal prosecutors blocked two search warrants and refused to press more extensive criminal charges. The whistleblower also testified that when agents sought a search warrant for Hunter Biden’s storage locker, prosecutors tipped off Biden’s legal team so they could remove any incriminating evidence.
Shapley also said he was stopped from pursuing investigative leads into “dad” or the “big guy.”
Shapley, who is still a supervisory special agent with the IRS, says he was prevented from pursuing any leads that involved President Joe Biden, including the now-infamous 2017 email from James Gilliar, a business associate of Hunter Biden’s, which bore the subject line “Expectations” and outlined a “provisional agreement” for “equity” in a deal with a Chinese energy company.
Two of Hunter Biden’s former business partners who received the message told CBS News that a line in the email — “10 held by H for the big guy?” — was shorthand for 10% held by Hunter Biden for his father.
Shapley told CBS News that his efforts to look further into money trails that involved “dad” or “the big guy” were blocked by a senior prosecutor working for Weiss.
“I would say that they limited certain investigative leads that could have potentially provided information on the president of the United States,” Shapley told CBS News.
Shapley also alleges that in August 2020, an iCloud search warrant recovered the threatening July 2017 WhatsApp “shake-down” message from Hunter Biden to Chinese businessman Henry Zhao about an outstanding payment.
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,” Hunter Biden allegedly wrote. “And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”
According to Shapley, prosecutors “denied” the IRS investigators’ efforts to learn more about the message.
On Sept 4, 2020, according to the IRS whistleblowers, the DOJ ordered a “cease and desist” on any overt investigation of Hunter Biden or Biden family influence peddling. They also claim that the FBI hid the 1023 form alleging foreign bribery from the IRS case attorneys overseeing the case.
The FBI verified that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real in 2019, yet worked with social media platforms to censor reporting on it before the 2020 election.
And now it has come to light that prosecutors didn’t even bother to have a the key witness testify before the grand jury.
Bobulinski came forward in October of 2020, revealing during a conference press in Nashville, Tennessee two hours before the presidential debate that he had personally met with Joe Biden in May 2017, as part of discussions over the potential business deal with Chinese energy firm, CEFC.
“In my approximately hour long meeting with Joe that night, we discussed Biden’s history, the Biden’s family business dealing plans with the Chinese, with which he was plainly familiar, at least at a high level,” Bobulinski said. Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed that he had nothing to do with Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings.
“I’ve heard Joe Biden say that he’s never discussed business with Hunter, that is FALSE,” Bobulinski alleged. “I have first-hand knowledge about this because I directly dealt with the Biden family, including Joe Biden,” he added.
The FBI had Bobulinski sit for an interview the next day, and made him turn over copies of his cell phones.
In a statement, James Comer, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, said prosecutors “prevented investigators from taking any steps to verify this evidence that could lead to President Biden.”
“The fact that a key witness associated with the CEFC deal was not brought in to testify before the grand jury proves again that the Justice Department is engaged in a coverup,” said Comer, who vowed to “pursue a thorough investigation into the Department of Justice’s misconduct.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland insisted on June 23 that Weiss had “complete authority to make all decisions on his own.”
s the U.S. attorney in Delaware and assigned this matter during the previous administration, [he] would be permitted to continue his investigation and to make a decision to prosecute any way in which he wanted to,” Garland said.
Earlier this month, Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to just two federal misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes, and was spared prison time.
A federal judge still needs to sign off on “sweetheart” plea bargain prosecutors brokered with Hunter Biden’s legal team.
U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika of the District of Delaware set a court date of July 26 for Biden to make his initial court appearance related to the plea deal
Noreika, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Donald Trump, will have the power to either approve or reject the plea agreement.
