BOT: A computer program that operates as an agent for a user or other program in order to simulate or influence human activity.
Internet Research Agency, Агентство интернет-исследований: A Russian company engaged in online influence operations on behalf of Russian business and political interests. It is linked to Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin and based in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
The Internet Research Agency (IRA) is the real Russian collusion story beginning in 2016 until today.
After years of Russiagate conspiracy theories about how the Russians had somehow rigged the 2016 presidential election using Facebook ads, the Senate Intelligence report awkwardly revealed that the Russian operation had focused most of its attention on black nationalists.
The Senate report revealed that “most of the videos” put out by the Russian IRA troll factory on YouTube “pertained to police brutality and the activist efforts of the Black Lives Matter organization” and found that “no single group of Americans was targeted… more than African-Americans” around “race and related issues”.
But that was an understatement.
The Russians had created their own Black Lives Matter groups, activists and protests. It is still not fully clear where the dividing lines between black nationalists and Russian agents lie. And the media has consistently buried these revelations about the real Russian role in our politics to focus on the discredited smears targeting President Trump and his political allies.
And yet the true Russian agents were the black nationalists championed by the Left.
Social media is filled with fake accounts called BOTs, short for robot, that are used by individuals and nation states to influence social and political policies.
This is volume 2 of the Senate Intel report on Russia’s propaganda activities targeting Americans, on the left and the right, with fake Facebook groups and social media accounts. Despite the media’s false claims, Vol. 2 makes it clear this was not about the election.
Analysis of the behavior of the IRA-associated social media accounts makes dear that while the Russian information warfare campaign exploited the context of the election and election-related issues in 2016, the preponderance of the operational focus, as reflected repeatedly in content, account names, and audiences targeted, was on sociapy divisive issues-such as race, immigration, and Second Amendment rights-in an attempt to pit Americans against one another and against their government. The Committee found that IRA influence operatives consistently used hot-button, societal divisions in the United States as fodder for the content they published through social media in order to stoke anger, provoke outrage and protest, push Americans further away from one another, and foment distrust in government institutions. The divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election was just an additional feature of a much more expansive,, target-rich landscape of potential ideological and societal sensitivities.
The IRA was Russia’s troll org.
Again, we already knew this. A previous report and this report already showed that most of the activities were targeted at black people. Facebook itself revealed that most of the ad buys were post-election. (And the media responded with furious threats and attacks on Facebook.)
The Committee found that no single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans. By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016. Evidence of the IRA’s overwhelming operational emphasis on race is’ evident in the IRA’s Facebook advertisement content (over 66 percent contained a term related to race) and targeting (locational targeting was principally aimed at African Americans in key metropolitan areas with), its Face book pages (one of the IRA’s topperforming pages, “Blacktivist,” generated 11.2 million engagements with Facebook ‘ users), its Instagram content (five of the top 10 Instagram accounts were focused on African-American issues and audiences), its Twitter content (heavily focused on hotbutton issues with racial undertones, such as the NFL kneeling protests),
In other words, the Russkies were doing the same stuff they were doing during the Cold War.
According to the U.S. Senate intelligence report,
For decades, Soviet active measures pushed conspiratorial and disinformation narratives about the United States around the world. The KGB authored and published false stories and forged letters concerning the Kennedy assassination, including accounts suggesting CIA involvement in the killing. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the target of manufactured KGB narratives, as was Ronald Reagan. Russian intelligence officers planted anti-Reagan articles in Denmark, France, and India during his unsuccessful 1976 bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
A declassified U.S. State. Department document from 1981 outlines a series of realized Russian active measures operations, including the spread of falsehoods concerning U.S. complicity in the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca and responsibility for the 1981 death of Panamanian General Omar Torrijos, as well as an elaborate deception involving multiple forgeries and false stories designed to undermine the Camp David peace process and to exacerbate tensions between the United States and Egypt. Among the most widely known and successful active measures operations conducted during the Cold War centered on a conspiracy that the AIDS virus was manufactured by the United States at a military facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland. This fictional account of the virus’ origin received considerable news coverage, both in the United States and in over forty non-Cold War aligned countries around the world. 49 (U) I
In a 1998 CNN interview, retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin described active measures as “the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence”: Not intelligence collection, but subversion; active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO; to sow discord among allies, to weaken the. United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.
The question is how much of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa violence came out of Moscow?
Much like the Soviet involvement in race riots and domestic terrorism by the black nationalist and anti-war Left during the Cold War, we will likely never get a full accounting of the impact.
And yet an important missing piece of Russiagate is that the Left was once again accusing conservatives of its own crimes. Right down to the Russian backing for its election interference.
The Russians weren’t elevating Trump and Republicans, they were backing the far Left.
Russia has historically been on the side of the Democrats and their splinter groups. The Russians have been targeting those who oppose socialism in all of its forms.
The whole Trump Russian Collusion narrative was trumped up, no pun intended.
Who benefited from this onslaught of Russia Myths—The Democrat Party and its candidates.
We have written about the Red—Green—Blue Alliance.
The Communists, Islamists and Democrats are all on the same political page.
America is not about Democrat vs. Republican, its all about Tyrants vs. Patriots.
The 2022 midterm elections are the tipping point. Do patriots take back the House and Senate? This is the fundamental question.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2022-08-07 12:17:582022-08-07 13:08:08Russians Behind Social Media ‘Influence Operations’ Supporting Black Lives Matter and the Black Hammer Party
The Chips Act is a classic case of the government helping special interest groups at the expense of taxpayers.
Of all the problems in the world right now, the chip shortage probably isn’t the chief concern for most people, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a serious issue. The auto and tech sectors have faced unprecedented delays and rising prices in recent months. Some used cars are even selling for more than their new counterparts because of the delays, a sure sign that production has slowed dramatically.
To address this, Congress is contemplating bipartisan legislation known as the Chips Act, which would provide $52 billion in grants and $24 billion in tax credits to the US semiconductor industry. Thanks to a last-minute bipartisan amendment, the bill will also put tens of billions of dollars toward various federal agencies, bringing the total price tag to $250 billion.
Because why not…
The Senate voted to advance the bill on Tuesday, which means it will likely hold a vote on final passage in the coming days. If passed, the bill will then go to the House for passage, and assuming that is successful it would then go to President Biden for signature into law.
The main arguments for the bill were summarized earlier this week in a Wall Street JournalOp-Ed penned by Jim Farley and Pat Gelsinger, the CEOs of Ford and Intel, respectively.
“The pandemic supply-chain shock exposed a problem that had been mounting for years,” they write. “The U.S. share of global chip manufacturing has declined to 12% from 37% in 1990. South Korea and Taiwan, notably, have spent years actively investing in [read: subsidizing] their own chip manufacturing, creating an uneven playing field for U.S. chip makers that harms our economy and global competitiveness.”
They go on to list the disruptions that have occurred in the auto, consumer-electronics, and healthcare industries because of the shortage, and they warn that national defense is also at stake.
“Fortunately, a solution is within reach,” they continue, referring to the Chips Act. “In addition to boosting production of leading-edge and legacy chips, the act would help level the playing field with global competitors…This legislation is vital to many American industries, including ours, that have dealt with significant disruptions.”
“By funding the Chips Act,” they conclude, “Congress will help consumers, protect patients and strengthen the American economy and national security.”
The Problem with Corporate Subsidies
At first glance, that Op-Ed might seem innocuous, even well-intentioned. But it doesn’t take much to realize what’s really going on here. The companies run by these CEOs stand to gain billions of taxpayer dollars—not just tax credits, but government grants—if this legislation passes. Do you really think they wrote that because they care about the American economy and national defense? Give me a break. They wrote it because they want the money, and they will make whatever arguments they think people will buy in order to get it.
So, what’s wrong with their arguments?
For starters, there’s the classic problem of opportunity cost. Fifty-two billion taxpayer dollars being poured into these industries is 52 billion taxpayers dollars that can’t be poured into other industries. The government is not creating resources, it is simply reallocating them, and it’s by no means obvious that this is the best use of these funds. Notably, the free market tends to allocate resources much better than the government because, unlike Congress, it is guided by actual consumer demand.
Additionally, the CEOs conflate strengthening their businesses with strengthening the American economy. In reality, these are two very different things. If it’s cheaper to buy semiconductors from companies in foriegn countries, it would be economically inefficient to produce these products in America. It would be better to let the domestic producers take losses and ultimately fail so their capital could be reallocated to better uses.
Here, of course, the lobbyists have a rejoinder. “The only reason it’s cheaper to buy semiconductors from foreign countries,” they say, “is because foreign governments subsidize their semiconductor producers. We need a level playing field.”
People who are otherwise proponents of free markets are often sympathetic to this line of reasoning. After all, it’s not really the case that American producers are inefficient, right? If only there was a level playing field, they could compete just fine.
“Whenever someone starts talking about ‘fair competition’ or indeed, about ‘fairness’ in general,” he writes, “it is time to keep a sharp eye on your wallet, for it is about to be picked.”
After addressing some other arguments, Rothbard turns to the issue of foreign government subsidies that allow foreign companies to engage in “dumping,” that is, selling products to American consumers “below cost.”
“Another charge claims that Japanese or other foreign firms can afford to engage in dumping because their governments are willing to subsidize their losses,” he writes. “But again, we should still welcome such an absurd policy. If the Japanese government is really willing to waste scarce resources subsidizing American purchases of Sony’s, so much the better! Their policy would be just as self-defeating as if the losses were private.”
Swap out Japanese Sony’s for Taiwanese semiconductors and Rothbard might as well be writing in 2022. The point is, economic well-being is ultimately about consumers, not producers. If foreign governments are willing to subsidize semiconductors, making them cheaper for Americans, then we might as well take the gift. True, it’s not a free market, but it doesn’t help to adopt bad public policy simply because other nations are also doing it.
What Politics Is Actually About
What’s curious about corporate subsidies like this is that large swaths of both the left and the right are opposed to them. Right-wingers oppose corporate subsidies because they are funded with taxpayer dollars and have the government picking winners and losers in the market. Left-wingers oppose corporate subsidies because they help big corporations at the expense of the little guy.
So if both sides of the political spectrum have good reasons for opposing this measure, it’s worth asking ourselves, who exactly is promoting this?
The answer is: the establishment.
It’s important to understand that the real world of politics is somewhat different from the ideological debates we see online and in the news. Sure, politicians know how to say the right things, but when it comes down to it, most of their job is about appeasing special-interest groups, from semiconductor companies to the military industrial complex to farmers to unions…the list is long.
Ambrose Bierce has a great quote that really captures this idea. Giving a satirical definition of politics in The Devil’s Dictionary, he writes, “POLITICS, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”
We’re told that politics is about competing philosophies of government. In theory, each party has its own vision of what good government looks like, and they are trying to live out those principles as best they can.
But most of the time, that’s not what happens. In practice, it is a strife of special interests. For most politicians, the principles they espouse are merely a pretense, a facade. The real work of politics is about placating donors and lobbyists and voting blocs. This is why we see things like corporate subsidies. They aren’t part of some grand governing philosophy. They are simply the inevitable result of a system that is run by the special interests and for the special interests.
Is that cynical? Sure. But it’s a very justified cynicism, and it gets reinforced every time a story like this comes out.
The good news is that we can do something about it. Once we see the corrupting incentives inherent in politics, we can begin to work towards change. But the key is to not be wooed by the politicians, pundits, and executives when they tell us their schemes are designed for our benefit.
Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2022-07-22 13:57:372022-07-22 13:57:37The Semiconductor Industry Is Coming for Your Wallet. As Usual, Congress Is Complicit
The concept of privacy lies mostly in tatters anyway …
With the June 24 Dobbs decision overturning of Roe v. Wade and Casey, the US Supreme Court withdrew the nationwide blockade against the intention of many states to ban abortion to a greater or lesser degree. Depending on where you live, abortion may already be illegal or will shortly become so.
Texas, where I live, is one of the more aggressive states, having effectively banned most abortions since last fall by authorizing private citizens to sue anyone who assists in an abortion. To the best of my knowledge, the penalties for performing abortion focus mainly on the providers. But any woman who wants an abortion now faces a new forest of legal complications, including the possibility that law enforcement agencies may obtain extremely private information such as data from period apps in building a case that an abortion was performed.
In a recent Vox online piece, Sara Morrison pointed out that although women concerned about keeping their possible pregnancy status private should probably get rid of their period apps, that is not the only way you can be spied on, although period-app companies have a rather poor record when it comes to data privacy anyway.
Most media companies have a boilerplate clause as part of that agreement everybody pretends to read (and nobody does), which allows them to share information with legally constituted law enforcement agencies that have a reason to obtain it. So even if a woman sent a private text message to her closest friend saying that she thought she was pregnant, and a state police investigation thought it was relevant in prosecuting an abortionist, they could legally obtain that message.
The concept of privacy lies mostly in tatters these days for anyone who spends any amount of time online, which is pretty much everybody. While the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees the right to be secure in one’s “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” it does allow searches (presumably including online ones) in cases where a crime is suspected and a warrant for the search can be justified.
What is so different today from the circumstances in 1792, when the Bill of Rights was enacted, is that all of us leave electronic trails that are in legal grey areas in many cases. Simply being on social media and using one’s mobile phone creates gobs of data that clever analysts with adequate resources and access to commercial databases by means of search warrants can use to create an incredibly intimate portrait, including one’s pregnancy status or attempts to obtain an abortion.
Morrison says the ultimate solution is better data-privacy laws. And she may be right. The problem with this is that the entire economic basis of social media relies on the violation of the kind of privacy that data privacy laws would protect. So unless the Big Tech giants figure out an entirely new revenue model, their heavy hands on the scale of justice will outweigh any desire on the part of the general public to be more private online.
This is not an easy column for me to write, because I am personally opposed to abortion. At the same time, I realize that trying to enact (or revoke) a law that creates a situation which is hugely unpopular among a large segment of the public leads to situations in which law either loses respect or unduly harsh measures are used to enforce it. Probably some of both will happen in the coming months as the nation readjusts to the new circumstances surrounding abortion.
Judging from the way Morrison wrote her article, she seemed to take the point of view of a woman who finds herself pregnant against her intention and wants to get an abortion, but lives in a state where abortion is now illegal. What are the options?
Over half of current abortions are achieved by means of medication, which means the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol taken to induce a spontaneous abortion. Many states are or will shortly take steps to make such medications illegal for use in abortion, and the natural first thought of many—to order them online—leaves one open to surveillance as explained above.
The next option would be to travel out of state to a place where abortions are still performed. But in a state like Texas, even helping someone with travel arrangements could be grounds for a lawsuit—remote grounds, maybe, but who wants to do something that leaves their friends liable to be sued? And everyone’s whereabouts are being tracked 24/7, or at least the whereabouts of your phone, unless you turn it off. So as things stand, there are really not many places to hide.
Far from solving the problem, the Dobbs decision has brought abortion into the spotlight of public consciousness and debate in a way that perhaps hasn’t been equaled since the original 1973 decision that legalized it by judicial fiat nationwide. The real problem, the one that lies deeper than online privacy, or legal decisions or codes, is a cultural one.
We live in a hypocritical culture which both promises untrammelled freedom and withholds from nearly everyone the means to realize that freedom, which is illusory in any case. The culture has convinced millions of women that pregnancy and childbirth is simply not an option compared to all the other treasures of the world, and if a woman becomes a mother without meaning to, she must correct the error even if it means the death of an innocent being.
This is a serious distortion of how the world is, and correcting it is going to take more than the passage or revocation of a few laws or judicial rulings. But if Dobbs and its fallout get us to thinking about these things, there is at least hope that the truth will eventually emerge. And it is only the truth that makes people truly free.
Karl D. Stephan received the B. S. in Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1976. Following a year of graduate study at Cornell, he received the Master of Engineering degree in 1977… More by Karl D. Stephan
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2022-07-18 06:44:142022-07-18 06:44:47New Cause for Concern over Chemical Abortion and Data Privacy in the wake of Dobbs
As weapons inventories dwindle, there’s little chance the West today can build a surge hardware-making capacity
The long and short of it is that, while the US and NATO can fight a short conflict, neither can support a long war because there’s insufficient equipment in the now-depleted inventory and the timelines to build replacement hardware are long.
Despite a history of having done so before, starting in 1939, there is little chance that the US today can put in place a surge capacity, or that it any longer knows how to do so if it is even feasible.
Based on those circumstances alone – and there are additional, compelling reasons – the US and NATO should be thinking about how to end the war in Ukraine rather than sticking with the declared policy of trying to bleed Russia.
Let’s start by looking back at a time when the United States did know how to plan for surge weapons-building capacity.
WW2 precedent
In 1939 the Roosevelt administration, with Congressional support, passed the Protective Mobilization Act. Ultimately this would lead to the creation of a War Production Board, the Office of Production Management and the marshaling of US industry to fight the Nazis and Japanese
In 1941 the President declared an unlimited national emergency, giving the administration the power to shift industrial production to military requirements. Between 1940 and 1945, the US supplied almost two-thirds of all war supplies to the allies (including the USSR and China) and for US forces – producing some 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces (all types) and 86,000 tanks (light, medium and heavy).
Russia faced an altogether more difficult challenge because after Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941 much of Russia’s defense industrial infrastructure was threatened. Russia evacuated 1,500 factories either to the Ural Mountains or to Soviet Central Asia. Even Lenin’s body was moved from Moscow to Tyumen, 2,500 km from Moscow.
Notably, Stalin Tank Factory 183 would be moved from Kharkiv, now a contested city in the Ukraine war, to the Urals, rebranded as Uralvagonzavod and situated in Nizhny Tagil. The facility had been a railroad car maker, so it was suitable for tank manufacturing. The tank factory relocation was managed by Isaac Zaltzman.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Center For Security Policyhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCenter For Security Policy2022-06-27 13:10:372022-06-27 13:12:01US and NATO Lack Capability To Supply A Long War
[S]ELECTION CODE follows world renown investigative journalist Lara Logan on her most important assignment to date. For over 35 years investigative journalist Lara Logan has been on the front lines of history’s deadliest conflicts. Yet no assignment to date has put her career and life in more danger than this one. Her investigation goes to the heart of the current Information War, revealing yet another facet in the ever-unfolding saga of election fraud, demonstrating the role of the machines in stealing our vote.
The documentary follows the story of Tina Peters the County Clerk in Mesa Colorado, who made a backup of her counties Dominion Voting System server, only to stumble across evidence of manipulation in a recent local city council election…. and also the 2020 general election. Tina’s discovery ignites a chain reaction upending her life. And upending the world.
You will not be able to unsee what you see.
We stand at an apex in human history. Are we handing too much power to technology – and those that program it?
[S]ELECTION CODE is a political thriller uncovering a secret so critical to the survival of America it transcends political parties. It is not about correcting the past. It’s about correcting the future.
Once you see [S]ELECTION CODE you’ll never again let a machine near your vote.
This is why smart travelers take burner phones to China that don’t log into any of their existing accounts and one of the worst user data hacks in America happened when an employee accessed root out of China. But this is evidence from the inside that TikTok is just another data trap.
For years, TikTok has responded to data privacy concerns by promising that information gathered about users in the United States is stored in the United States, rather than China, where ByteDance, the video platform’s parent company, is located. But according to leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings, China-based employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users — exactly the type of behavior that inspired former president Donald Trump to threaten to ban the app in the United States.
The recordings, which were reviewed by BuzzFeed News, contain 14 statements from nine different TikTok employees indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022, at the very least. Despite a TikTok executive’s sworn testimony in an October 2021 Senate hearing that a “world-renowned, US-based security team” decides who gets access to this data, nine statements by eight different employees describe situations where US employees had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how US user data was flowing. US staff did not have permission or knowledge of how to access the data on their own, according to the tapes.
Why would anyone expect anything else? This is how Chinese companies work. The locus of control is always going to be with their own people and the idea that Americans would be allowed to act as gatekeepers over Chinese execs was always implausibly absurd. Americans working for TikTok are there to take orders from China. Not the other way around.
In 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States began investigating the national security implications of TikTok’s collection of American data. And in 2020, then-president Donald Trump threatened to ban the app entirely over concerns that the Chinese government could use ByteDance to amass dossiers of personal information about US TikTok users. TikTok’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information,” Trump wrote in his executive order. TikTok has said it has never shared user data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked.
A Chinese company isn’t going share data with its own government in a system where the options are…
1. Share the data
2. Go to prison, be executed, have your organs harvested and your corpse displayed at one of those human body exhibits traveling America
… sure.
There is, however, another concern: that the soft power of the Chinese government could impact how ByteDance executives direct their American counterparts to adjust the levers of TikTok’s powerful “For You” algorithm, which recommends videos to its more than 1 billion users. Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, has called TikTok “a Trojan horse the Chinese Communist Party can use to influence what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think.”
Project Texas’s narrow focus on the security of a specific slice of US user data, much of which the Chinese government could simply buy from data brokers if it so chose, does not address fears that China, through ByteDance, could use TikTok to influence Americans’ commercial, cultural, or political behavior.
The algorithmic secret sauce is bad enough when it’s in the hands of lefty Big Tech corps in America, imagine what China’s overlords can do with it. And probably;are.
Why is TikTok is abrasively leftist and dedicated to promoting political extremes? Likely, because the Chinese are doing what the Russians were actually (as opposed to the Russiagate nonsense) which is amplifying the extremes in order to cause chaos in America and find likely recruits among the political extremes.
TikTok is a cultural weapon aimed at America and the trigger will always be in Beijing.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2022-06-20 07:39:402022-06-20 07:41:06TikTok Lied to Senate, China Controls the Data, Americans Don’t
On side note, I am sad that I did not make the list but I suspect it’s because Twitter permanently suspended my account with 225,000 followers for … wait for it. Tweeting about election fraud.
— Dan Froomkin/PressWatchers.org ☮️ (@froomkin) June 15, 2022
The National Science Foundation funded this along with far left billionaires. That means the US Government PAID to have a list made smearing Americans for questioning the validity of ballot harvesting and mass mail-in voting. Think about that. This is what communists do.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2022-06-17 05:56:332022-06-17 06:02:57U.S. Government PAID To Create List Of Americans Who Questioned Democrat Dogma
Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition — which can be summed up as the world’s wealthiest person buying one of the most powerful social media and news platforms — underscores one of the big problems with Big Tech.
In the absence of modernized anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, Big Tech companies in the U.S. have amassed far too much economic and political control over society, and especially over the news and publishing industries.
The power at Big Tech companies with respect to their management of sites like Facebook News and Google News – is held by a few individuals who are often times more motivated by a desire to turn profits and promote their own ideology or world view, rather than by a genuine desire to guarantee a free and diverse press.
Due to Big Tech’s market manipulation in the news and publishing industries, thousands of local and smaller news operators — including many conservative publications — have been forced to shutter their doors in recent years.
This forsakes the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and thus, is a threat to our democracy.
Importantly, new survey research shows that the American public recognizes this threat, and wants their elected officials to act on it.
New polling by Schoen Cooperman Research — conducted among a representative sample of U.S. adults and commissioned by News Media Alliance — reveals widespread concern surrounding Big Tech’s power and manipulative practices, as well as strong support for reforms to rein in these monopolies.
Notably, strong majorities of Americans are concerned about the economic and political power of Big Tech companies (74%) and are supportive of increased government regulations on Big Tech companies in order to curb their economic and political power (63%).
With respect to news and publishing specifically, nearly 4-in-5 Americans are concerned that Big Tech companies have too much power over these industries (79%) and manipulate these industries for their own gain (78%).
To that end, three-in-four Americans agree that “Big Tech’s monopoly over the news and publishing industries is a threat to the free press and unfair to publishers, especially to small and local outlets.” (76%)
In addition to being broadly concerned about this problem, Americans are supportive of Congress taking action to restore fairness, balance, and freedom to the press.
Respondents were asked about a specific piece of legislation proposed in Congress known as the Journalism, Competition, and Preservation Act (JCPA). The JCPA would provide a legal basis for news publishers to negotiate fair terms for use of their content by Big Tech companies — and thus, would demonstrably curb the economic and political power of these companies.
Remarkably, 7-in-10 Americans support Congress passing the JCPA (70%) and believe it is important for Congress to pass the JCPA (64%) after reading a brief description of the bill. And by a four-to-one margin, U.S. adults would be more likely, rather than less likely, to back a candidate for Congress who supported the JCPA.
In my experience as a professional pollster who has worked in opinion research for over four decades, it is rare for an issue or piece of legislation to garner this level of public support.
Our findings present a clear call-to-action to Congress, and elected officials in both parties now have a mandate from the public to rein in Big Tech by pursuing the JCPA or similar reforms.
Moreover, the very survival of American democracy is contingent on our leaders safeguarding free speech and ensuring a fair economy.
Congress must fulfill its duty by passing legislation like the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act into law.
Contributor. Douglas E. Schoen is a Democratic pollster and strategist. He is the author of “The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, From the Grass Roots to the White House.” The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2022-05-09 05:27:352022-05-09 05:30:03SCHOEN: Americans Are Sounding The Alarm Over Big Tech
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has quietly set up a Disinformation Governance Board to oversee what information is and isn’t “truthful”
Heading up this new “Ministry of Truth” is Nina Jankowicz, a “Russian disinformation expert” who in her spare time sings show tunes about disinformation and erotic Harry Potter songs on TikTok
Jankowicz is herself known for spreading disinformation. She called the Hunter Biden laptop story a “fairytale” and “Russian disinformation,” and she’s openly opposed to free speech and anti-censorship efforts
In her book, “How to Lose the Information War,” Jankowicz criticized Poland’s efforts to eliminate censorship of conservatives on social networks, and called for the U.S. government to regulate and conduct oversight of people who disagree with the Democratic party on Twitter
Every dictatorship and autocracy has had a ministry of truth, a department of propaganda, and Biden has now joined them. May 1, 2022, GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced a bill to immediately defund and terminate the Disinformation Governance Board
By now, you’ve probably heard that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has created a Disinformation Governance Board to oversee what information is and isn’t “truthful.”1 This includes information relating to elections.2 It’s so incredibly Orwellian, you’d think it was pure fiction, yet here we are. It’s real.
This “Ministry of Truth” will reportedly operate under and receive funding from the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), created by President Biden to “curb radicalization in the U.S.”3 It appears those in the Biden administration must have thought “1984” was an instruction manual rather than a warning.
Known Disinformation Spreader Made Head of Truth Ministry
Heading up this new “Ministry of Truth” is Nina Jankowicz,4 a “Russian disinformation expert” who in her spare time makes a fool of herself singing made-up show tunes about disinformation and erotic Harry Potter songs5 on TikTok.
As noted by both Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and Jimmy Dore of “The Jimmy Dore Show” in the videos above, Jankowicz is qualified to do absolutely nothing. Independent journalist Glen Greenwald also highlighted Jankowicz’s obvious lack of real credentials in a May 4, 2022, Substack article:6
“The concept of ‘anti-disinformation expert’ is itself completely fraudulent. This is not a real expertise but rather a concocted title bestowed on propagandists to make them appear more scholarly and apolitical than they are …
There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity … The purpose of Homeland Security agents is to propagandize and deceive, not enlighten and inform.
The level of historical ignorance and stupidity required to believe that U.S. Security State operatives are earnestly devoted to exposing and decreeing truth is off the charts … That nobody should want the U.S. Government let alone Homeland Security arrogating unto itself the power to declare truth and falsity seems self-evident.”
Surprisingly enough, even mainstream news outlets have pointed out Jankowicz’s role in the spreading of disinformation and outright lies. For example, as reported by the British Daily Mail:7
“The Russia disinformation expert previously called the laptop of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter a ‘Trump campaign product.’ This is causing questions over Jankowicz’s ability to accurately judge disinformation now that several sources have come out confirming the validity of Hunter’s laptop …
When stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop started emerging, several outlets, social media sites and left-leaning disinformation experts claimed that it was just misinformation coming from Trump and others on the right.
In an October 2020 report, Jankowicz shared her skepticism of the contents of the laptop and the claims it belonged to Hunter. ‘We should view it as a Trump campaign product,’ she told the New York Daily News at the time. Twitter repeatedly took down the Hunter Biden laptop story and prevented it from being spread on the platform.”
In one October 2020 tweet, she referred to the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “fairytale.”8 Jankowicz was also among those who insisted Trump had colluded with Russia to win the presidency in 2016, a claim we now know is patently false. In reality, it was Hillary Clinton and allies who colluded to fabricate this false narrative and derail Trump’s presidency.9
Over the past couple years, we’ve repeatedly seen how information censored on the grounds that it was “misinformation” turned out to be factual and true. In early 2020, YouTube betrayed its founding principles and started censoring and banning anything that contradicted the World Health Organization’s stance on COVID-19.
Yet, time and again, the WHO turned out to be wrong.10 No organization is infallible, and the WHO has a long history of corruption that makes its ability to discern what’s best for public health all the more suspect. Twitter followed suit, axing health experts, scientists and respected journalists like Tess Lawrie, Martin Kulldorf, Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Robert Malone, Steve Kirsch, Alex Berenson and many more.11
Jankowicz’s Hostile Stand Against First Amendment Rights
Jankowicz has also publicly opposed the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, saying free speech is bad for “marginalized communities.” Shortly after Elon Musk announced his takeover of Twitter, she told NPR:12
“I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities …
We need the platforms to do more, and we frankly need law enforcement and our legislatures to do more as well … the U.K. has an online safety bill that’s being considered right now where they’re trying to make illegal this currently, quote, ‘awful but lawful content’ that exists online where people are being harassed.”
Lack of censorship on social media will make abuse against marginalized groups worse, she claims. At the same time, she insists that “a HUGE focus” of the new disinformation board will be “protecting free speech, privacy, civil rights and civil liberties.”13
This is clearly Orwellian doublespeak, where what’s being said is the complete opposite of reality. How can you have a board dedicated to dictating “truth,” which means censoring “untruth,” while simultaneously protecting free speech? Either all viewpoints are allowed, or only one viewpoint is permitted, and if only one viewpoint is tolerated, then there’s clearly no free speech.
In her book, “How to Lose the Information War,” she also criticized Poland’s efforts to eliminate rampant online censorship of conservatives on social networks by forming a Ministry of Digital Affairs.
In other words, she wants conservative views to be censored, not just in the U.S., but everywhere. In that book, she also called on the U.S. government to regulate and conduct oversight of people who disagree with the Democratic party on Twitter. As noted by Carlson, that’s likely why she was selected in the first place.
The future head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth claims in this video that revolutions are an appropriate response to rigged elections. “Believe it or not, sometimes people get fed up with having their voices silenced for decades,” she explains. https://t.co/fJo2zxd0qQ
Not surprisingly, then, Jankowicz has expressed “dismay” at Musk’s decision to no longer censor posts discussing potential fraud in the 2020 election.14 Interestingly, in a September 2020 tweet, she defined the term “color revolution” and “why the U.S. isn’t a candidate for one.”15
In it, she noted that “Believe it or not, sometimes people get fed up with having their voices silenced for decades,” but she then insisted that a color revolution isn’t possible in the U.S. because “we are not an autocracy,” and color revolutions only occur in oppressive autocracy regimes.
Given an Inch, They’ll Take a Mile
Others disagree with that assessment. As noted by former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (video above), every dictatorship and autocracy has had a ministry of truth, a department of propaganda. And Biden just joined them.
Gabbard also accurately points out that the government has been working with media and Big Tech to censor for some time already. We’ve become increasingly aware of this covert backdoor influence over the past two years. Now, however, they’re formalizing that influence, which is, by the way, completely unconstitutional.
Moreover, the scary truth here is that the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” could cover absolutely anything. As noted by Carlson in the featured video, the DHS has not actually defined or given any clues as to what mis- or disinformation actually is.
“Would you declare war on a country you couldn’t name?” Carlson asks. “Would you sentence someone to death for a crime you couldn’t describe? Of course you wouldn’t, not if you were a sane and decent person. Because you can’t have justice without precise definitions …
But they’re not defining the core concept, the heart of what is effectively a new law enforcement agency. Maybe that is because [U.S. secretary of homeland security, Alejandro] Mayorkas doesn’t want justice, and neither does the president he serves. They want power. And to get power, they plan to control what you think.”
Carlson points out that the DHS has now publicly admitted they intend to punish people for merely thinking “the wrong way,” even if they’ve committed no actual crime worthy of judicial intervention. In short, anyone who disagrees with the Biden administration is now an enemy of the state. As noted by Carlson:
“You can’t make any of this up. It’s too grotesque. Would you believe a novel with this plot? No, you wouldn’t, but it’s happening, and that’s the bad news. The good news is, everyone involved in Joe Biden’s Ministry of Information is a buffoon. They may be evil, but they’re also ridiculous.”
He then airs one of Jankowicz’s undignified TikTok videos, where she’s singing about disinformation. “This is now one of our top law enforcement officials,” he dryly notes. Jankowicz has also, ironically, accused Republicans of dealing in “highly emotional rhetoric,” which proves nothing except the fact that she’s read George Orwell’s “1984” more than once.
In fact, Democrats accuse their opponents of doing exactly what they themselves are doing so regularly, you can be near-assured that any accusation is a veiled admission at this point. And, in his report, Carlson reviews how Jankowicz is guilty of this exact behavior. Carlson also points out that her falsehoods have by no means been inconsequential.
Her disinformation helped presidential candidate Biden to lie about an incredibly important story — Hunter’s laptop — that could have altered the outcome of the presidential election, had it been up for public discussion. Jankowicz has never apologized for dismissing what was in fact truthful, and neither has anyone else who insisted the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
An International Coordination Effort to Censor Free Speech
Now, some have pointed out that this Disinformation Governance Board didn’t come into existence until Musk bought Twitter, promising to turn it into a free speech platform.16,17 However, other evidence strongly indicates there’s international coordination taking place.
In mid-April 2022, the European Union approved new rules aimed at policing Big Tech platforms. As reported by the Financial Times:18
“The EU will force Big Tech companies to police content online more aggressively after approving a major piece of legislation that sets the rules for the first time on how companies should keep users safe on the internet …
Leading tech groups will be forced to disclose to EU regulators how they are tackling disinformation and war propaganda in order to curb the spread of fake information — an effort that has gained fresh momentum since the Russian invasion of Ukraine … Countries such as the U.S., Canada and Singapore are expected to follow with similar rules in the coming months.”
Some of the language used to describe this EU legislation sounds good — for example, it will ban the targeting of internet users based on personal information such as gender, religion and sexual preferences, and terms and conditions must be clearly understandable even to children.
However, there are also many reasons to suspect that these regulations will end up serving as a springboard for government-directed censorship. Among them is the fact that the EU is supporting the proposal to make the WHO into a global health authority, and the WHO, in turn, is setting up its own censorship network.
A key player in that network is NewsGuard,19 which entered into a partnership with the WHO in August 2020.20 As reported by Carlson, NewsGuard has also received funding from the U.S. Pentagon to blacklist any site that publishes “misinformation” about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Time to Draw a Line in the Sand
Clearly, the shocking censorship we experienced during the COVID pandemic was only the beginning. It’s going to include all kinds of information. The creation of a DHS Disinformation Governance Board is truly a watershed moment in history, and we cannot allow it to stand. As noted by Carlson in the featured video at the top of this article:
“Just to be clear, this is a nightmare unfolding in slow motion. But this is the point where we’re just going to have to draw the line. No, Joe Biden, you cannot have a federally funded ministry of truth. And no, Nina Jankowicz can’t run it. Period. It’s not your country … and you don’t get to do this to a free people. Period. This can’t happen.”
May 1, 2022, GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert introduced a bill to immediately defund and terminate the Disinformation Governance Board. In an interview with Fox News, Boebert said:21
“This kind of stuff is terrifying. We in Congress have the power of the purse. It is our duty to shut down this department immediately. I’m calling on leadership in the Republican Party — Leader McCarthy, Whip Scalise, and others — to join me in calling for this department to be shut down and defunded.
No tax dollars should go to where Biden can use the power of the federal government to silence truthful stories like Big Tech did with the Hunter Biden story. Democrats took [Orwell’s book ‘1984’] not as a warning, but as a guide.
This is really a department of propaganda. To say that the federal department has a say in what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s truth and what’s not — this is a very dangerous place that we’ve come to.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MERCOLA Take Control of Your Healthhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMERCOLA Take Control of Your Health2022-05-09 04:59:482022-05-09 04:59:48Decoding the Latest Attack on Free Speech
The ‘New York Times’ has finally admitted that the laptop’s emails were genuine.
It is well known that Twitter makes a sport of censorship. There’s even a Wikipedia page dedicated to the topic.
Typical of previous years, the 2022 log of Twitter suspensions is mostly a list of conservative commentators and Republican politicians — though refreshingly, a deranged Middle East dictator, one Ali Khamenei of Iran also made the cut this year.
Sharing “Covid-19 misinformation” (or at least what is presently considered such) is one of the more likely sins to get you banned in 2022, as is — gasp — calling male swimmers “men”.
What Twitter deems a transgression changes slightly from year to year but the themes and the political partisanship is consistent.
In 2020, what really put a bee in Twitter’s bonnet was sharing factual stories that threatened Joe Biden’s entry into the White House. Yes, Twitter interfered in the 2020 election. Egregiously.
The New York Times’s recent, glaring admission that Hunter Biden’s laptop is authentic, though 18 months late, has brought this fact to the fore once again.
We are yet to fully come to terms with Twitter’s misdeeds in those closing weeks of the 2020 contest, and the precedent they have set for public discourse in the West.
But first some background, if you are unfamiliar with what happened.
With all of America on seat’s edge and the world tuned in to the Trump-Biden contest, the New York Post broke a bombshell report on October 14, 2020.
Through intriguing circumstances, a laptop belonging to Joe’s son Hunter had made its way to the Post. On that hard drive were emails indicating that when the senior Biden was Vice President, he massaged US foreign policy in Ukraine to the benefit of his son’s business ventures there.
A follow-up story intimated that Joe Biden himself was making a ten percent cut from Hunter’s overseas dealings, despite Joe previously denying any knowledge of what his son was up to abroad.
The evidence strongly suggested that the millions in profit flowing to the Biden family estate from Ukraine, China and Russia were only made possible by the exclusive White House access it granted Hunter’s contacts in those countries.
Additionally, the laptop harboured a trove of debauched images and videos revealing Hunter’s prostitute- and drug-fuelled lifestyle — factors that made the Biden family more vulnerable to blackmail and other clandestine political influence.
So much for the story — what of the censorship?
Infamously, Twitter immediately locked two accounts: the New York Post’s, and that of Trump’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who had tweeted out the report. Anyone else who tried to share the story were either suspended or unable to tweet the link, myself included. As Brendan O’Neill of Spiked has described that “truly extraordinary moment“:
Here we had the spokesperson for the democratically elected president of the United States and the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in America being cast out of social media for the crime of sharing a story that was true.
Not only was the story true — revelations of endemic Biden family corruption would doubtless have swung many undecided voters back to Trump in those dying days of the 2020 race, had they had access to it. This is a hypothesis made even more likely by poll after poll unearthing post-election Biden voter regret.
Twitter was the most flagrant partisan operative in the Hunter laptop saga, but far from the only one.
Facebook limited sharing of the New YorkPost’s piece until its “fact checkers” had a chance to assess the report. They never did. And they never apologised. In the years previous, however, Facebook did give free rein to flat-out lies about a Trump “pee-pee” tape and his being a Russian asset.
The conspiracy of the corporate press was one of silence. Had the same revelations emerged about Donald Trump Jr, there is no question the media would have reigned fire and brimstone on the Trump family.
But even a generous bribe wouldn’t have tempted most media outlets to report accurately on Hunter’s toxic laptop with a presidential election just around the corner. “The media world has largely ignored the Post’s Hunter Biden story,” one CNN reporter bragged at the time. “We don’t waste our time on stories that are not really stories,” taxpayer-funded NPR likewise scoffed.
Then came 50 former intelligence officials to denounce Hunter’s laptop as a Russian plant, part of a disinformation campaign to get Trump re-elected. They didn’t have any evidence for this, they admitted, just the feels. Now the media had its angle, one they amplified endlessly until Biden’s victory was secured.
With Hunter’s laptop now authenticated, the New York Post recently chased down every one of those 50 intelligence figures for a retraction. Most didn’t respond. A few couldn’t be reached. Several dug their heals in. Not one walked back their perfidious story. “Intelligence”?
Now, with the Russia-Ukraine war in full swing, even more Biden family misdeeds are coming to light. The Daily Mail reported just this week that, per emails on his laptop, Hunter helped secure millions in funding for a US contractor specialising in deadly pathogen research in Ukraine biolabs. The same company has also partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now acknowledged as the most likely source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
What else don’t we know about the Bidens? What else are we about to find out?
Most importantly, what is the future of political discourse in the West? Our democracies are rendered hollow if elites in Silicon Valley and on America’s coasts decide before an election what information can and cannot be seen by the public.
There has never been a more pressing need for regulation that will rein in Big Tech’s political partisanship and election interference. And never have everyday people needed more discernment as they assess the news stories put before them.
Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexitieshttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities2022-03-30 07:11:222022-03-30 07:11:47Hunter Biden’s laptop and how Twitter tipped the scales of the 2020 election
What You Need to Know About the Transhumanist Agenda
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
According to Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the goal of The Fourth Industrial Revolution is to change what it means to be human by merging man and machine
Humans are now “hackable,” in that technology now exists by which a company or government can know you better than you know yourself, and that can be very dangerous if misused
Professor Yuval Noah Harari predicts that algorithms will increasingly be used to make decisions that have historically been made by humans, either yourself or someone else, including whether or not you’ll be hired for a particular job, whether you’ll be granted a loan, what scholastic curriculum you will follow and even who you will marry
Harari warns that if we allow the establishment of a digital dictatorship, where the system, be it a corporation or a government, knows the most intimate details about each and every person, it will be impossible to dismantle it. Its control will be total and irreversible
If you believe that your thoughts and behavior are and always will remain under your own control, think again. We already have the technology to directly alter thoughts, emotions and behavior
According to Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the goal of The Fourth Industrial Revolution1 is to change what it means to be human by merging man and machine. In short, while the term “transhumanism” is not being used, that’s exactly where the global cabal intends to take us, willing or not.
In a November 2019 interview with CNN,2 history professor and bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari, a Klaus Schwab disciple, warned that “humans are now hackable animals,” meaning, the technology now exists by which a company or government can know you better than you know yourself, and that can be very dangerous if misused.
He predicted that algorithms will increasingly be used to make decisions that historically have been made by humans, either yourself or someone else, including whether or not you’ll be hired for a particular job, whether you’ll be granted a loan, what scholastic curriculum you will follow and even who you will marry.
Profound Dangers Ahead
There’s also an ever-increasing risk of being manipulated by these outside forces that you’re not even fully aware of. Looking back over the last two years, it’s rather easy to confirm that mass manipulation is taking place at a staggering scale, and that it’s phenomenally effective.
As noted by Harari in 2019,3 the available capabilities already go far beyond Orwell’s “1984” authoritarian vision, and it’s only going to become more powerful from here. He’s certain that in short order, there will be the ability to monitor your emotional state through something as simple as a wearable wristband.
You may dutifully smile and clap when listening to a speech by a government official, but they’ll know you’re angry or don’t agree with what’s being said, and could therefore take action against you based on your most personal, internal emotions rather than what you outwardly express.
Importantly, Harari warned that if we allow the establishment of this kind of digital dictatorship, where the system, be it a corporation or a government, knows the most intimate details about each and every person, it will be impossible to dismantle it. Its control will be total and irreversible. And, Harari believes we may have only a decade, at most two, to prevent this digital dictatorship from taking over.
Reengineering Life Itself
Harari also discussed the coming transhumanism at the WEF’s 2020 annual meeting in Davos (above), and in this speech, he went even further. Not only does the global elite have the technological capability to create a global digital dictatorship, but “elites may gain the power to reengineer the future of life itself.”
“For four billion years, nothing fundamental changed in the basic rules of the game of life,” he said. “All of life was subject to the laws of natural selection and the laws of organic biochemistry. But this is now about to change.
Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design, not the intelligent design of some god in the clouds, [but] OUR intelligent design, and the design of our ‘clouds,’ the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud. These are the new driving forces of evolution.”
It’s hard to determine whether Harari is for or against transhumanism. He speaks of it as an inevitability, and something that can be used for tremendous good. But he also recognizes its profound dangers, and seems to believe we need to discuss how these technological capabilities can be used, and whether they should.
In the featured Davos speech, it sounds as though he’s a proponent of this human intelligent design venture, but in his 2019 interview with CNN, he also stated that “we must never underestimate the stupidity of humans.” The fact that we have the technology to design new life forms, including new kinds of humans, does not necessarily mean that we’re smart enough to design something better than what natural evolution has come up with thus far.
In his Davos speech, Harari also pointed out that science is now enabling us to create life not only in the organic realm but in the inorganic realm as well. We’re talking about “living” robots and the like. He also raises the question as to who “owns” your DNA, if it can be charted and hacked. Does it belong to you, a corporation, or the government?
‘The Days of Free Will Are Over’
Whatever Harari’s true feelings about transhumanism, he emphatically states that the idea that we have a soul and free will, those days “are over.” In other clips that have been inserted into the featured video, Harari predicts that in the future, people will be able to look back and see that the COVID pandemic was the turning point where biological surveillance took over and became norm.
The explanation for how that was able to occur is given by Schwab, who has publicly admitted (see featured video) that participants in the WEF’s Young Global Leaders program have “penetrated the cabinets” of many world governments.
In Canada, for example, about half the politicians, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have taken Schwab’s training. Schwab is all about ushering in transhumanism and changing what it means to be human, and his minions of global leaders are sure doing everything they can to make those dreams a reality. This is a dystopian future WEF and its global allies are actively trying to implement, whether humanity at large agrees with it or not.
Changing What It Means To Be Human
Schwab dreams of a world in which humans are connected to the cloud, able to access the internet through their own brains. This, of course, also means that your brain would be accessible to people who might like to tinker with your thoughts, emotions, beliefs and behavior, be they the technocratic elite themselves or random hackers.
If you believe that your thoughts and behavior are and always will remain under your own control, think again. We already have the technology to directly alter thoughts, emotions and behavior. Some of these capabilities are described in a 2021 project report by the U.K. Ministry of Defense, created in partnership with the German Bundeswehr Office for Defense Planning.
The report, “Human Augmentation — The Dawn of a New Paradigm, a Strategic Implications Project,”4 reviews the scientific goals of the U.K. and German defense ministries, and they are precisely what the title suggests. Human augmentation is stressed as being a key area to focus on in order to win future wars:5
“Human augmentation will become increasingly relevant, partly because it can directly enhance human capability and behavior and partly because it is the binding agent between people and machines.”
Key words I’d like to draw your attention to are the affirmation that human augmentation can “directly enhance behavior.” If you can enhance behavior, that means you can change someone’s behavior. And if you can change a person’s behavior in a positive way, you can also control it to the person’s own detriment.
Theoretically, absolutely anyone, any random civilian with a brain-to-cloud connection and the needed biological augmentation (such as strength or speed) could be given wireless instructions to carry out an assassination, for example, and pull it off flawlessly, even without prior training.
Alternatively, their physical body could temporarily be taken over by a remote operator with the prerequisite skills. Proof of concept already exists, and is reviewed by Dr. Charles Morgan, professor in the department of national security at the University of New Haven, in the lecture below. Using the internet and brain implants, thoughts can be transferred from one person to another. The sender can also directly influence the physical movements of the receiver.
Project Immortality
Historically, the striving for immortality has been a faith-based venture, based in the idea that the soul is immortal while the body perishes, which is a concept I am in complete alignment with. Transhumanists more or less reverse this idea. They discard the notion of soul altogether and aim for the preservation of the perceived personality, first through radical life extension of the physical body, and later through the transfer of brain data into a replacement form.
According to Dmitry Itskov, the Russian founder of the Immortality 2045 project,6 only 2% of people are ready to accept death — a statistic that he uses to justify the search for immortality through things like artificial organs, artificial body constructs, the simulation of mental processes and, ultimately, the transferring of one’s mind into an artificial carrier.
The goals of this project include not only the creation of the cybernetic technologies needed to achieve an immortal body, but also the creation of “a new philosophical paradigm for humanity.” Schwab has talked about the same thing, using the term “social contract” rather than “philosophical paradigm.”
The Immortality 2045’s vision, published in 2011, starts with the creation of the first robotic copy of a human body that can be remotely controlled by 2020. By 2025, they want an avatar into which the human brain can be transplanted at the end of life. By 2035, they want an avatar with a synthetic brain, into which the human personality can be transferred and, by 2045, they imagine a holographic-like avatar. Itskov says:7
“The aim of the first project, known as ‘Avatar,’ is the creation of a robot copy of a human being controllable through a ‘brain-computer’ interface. When I’m asked to give the gist of this project, I tell people to recall the film ‘Surrogates,’ which depicts a world in which every person has an artificial body that he controls remotely.
The makers of that blockbuster put an accent on the negative side of such a scenario. Nonetheless, the film’s highly graphic demonstration of the idea allows one to get an immediate sense of what it is.”
Does living through an avatar sound like a life devoid of spirituality to you? Not so, Itskov says, because by ending our dependency on our physical bodies, “many things will open up spiritually.” I have my doubts about that, as most spiritual adepts will tell you that being hooked on technology tends to hinder rather than elevate spiritual pursuits, which are most easily achieved by living simply, in close contact with the natural world.
I just don’t foresee being able to elevate spiritually when any number of outside parties can access your brain and dictate what you think, feel and believe. Transhumanists like Itskov tend to focus only on the perceived benefits of synthetic life. For example, he promises that his avatars will be affordable for everyone who wants them, regardless of income bracket.
Yet the WEF has clearly announced that by 2030, nobody will own anything, and while not clearly stated, that will likely even include your own body. So, to think that your avatar would be “yours” is probably unrealistic.
Looked at through the lens of the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution, it seems the plan is for the elite to literally own all of humanity, which will be refashioned to their own liking. And, if people can be hacked and controlled remotely, then we can be sure they will be. That’s particularly true for synthetic or mechanical avatars that can’t “live” or remain “conscious” without a cloud connection.
Resource to Understand the Transhuman Agenda — Blockchained
Corey Lynn is a top-notch investigative journalist who covers topics the mainstream won’t touch, including the transhumanist agenda. On her website, Corey’s Digs,8 you can find select chapters from her book, “Global Landscape on Vaccine ID Passports.”
Chapter 4 in the book is titled “Blockchained,” which explains what digital identity is all about. Digital ID is not just a piece of identification, with which you can prove who you are. It will collect and monitor ALL of your data, from your personal finances, education, work history, GPS location 24/7, everything you’ve ever typed on your computer, your search history, social media presence, emotional status and physical biometrics, down to your DNA.
I will only cover a minor part of that chapter here, the part on human augmentation and artificial intelligence (AI), so for more, be sure to browse through her website or, better yet, read her book, which can be purchased on her site. The digital PDF is only $9.95 and a print copy is $19.95.
Big Data, Data Sharing and AI
Make no mistake, transhumanism is the ultimate goal of the technocratic elite, and both “big data” and AI are integral components of that. Without one or both of those, the transhumanist dream is dead in the water. The goal of transhumanism is undoubtedly why there’s been so much focus on those two areas in the first place.
So, remember, data gathering, data sharing and AI are not about making your life more convenient. They’re to make you obsolete. The intention is to replace you with a synthetic copy of you that can be remotely controlled.
In 2021, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organization that consists of 38 countries that work with various working groups and policy makers, issued a report on the “State of Implementation of the OECD AI principles.” So far, 46 countries have adopted these AI principles.
The strategy is to develop centralized repositories of public datasets in each country, and then enable public-private data sharing to build a vast network where each dataset is connected with all the others.
Biosecurity Will Be Used to Justify Surveillance Tyranny
Another report, by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), founded “to advance the development of artificial intelligence” and “comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States,” highlights the need to combat digital disinformation and prioritizing biosecurity.
To help with that, a U.S. government-funded supercomputer is being set up at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory under the direction of the Department of Energy. This AI supercomputer can do more than 1 quintillion calculations per second.
Some of this data sharing is already taking place. As noted by Corey, NATO launched an in-house biometrics system for data sharing between nations in November 2020, and in May 2021, the U.S. military merged its biometrics-enabled watch list with the Department of Defense’s automated biometric identification system (ABIS).
“They are working on multi-modal fusion matching and improving biometric face-matching capability through AI and machine learning, and have already improved their long-range infrared cameras,” Corey writes. “Looking toward the near future, they are also focused on palm print biometrics, faces in crowds, integration to identify threats online, and non-traditional latent DNA collection.”
We Need Biometric Privacy Laws NOW
While surveillance science is moving at lightning speed, regulations and privacy laws are trailing at a snail’s pace. A federal biometric privacy bill, the National Biometric Information Privacy Act, was introduced in 2020 but didn’t go anywhere. As noted by Corey, it could be resurrected if enough people speak up.
In the U.S., a handful of states do have biometric privacy laws, Illinois’ being one of the strictest, but the vast majority have no such protections in place. As reported by Corey:
“The Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) requires private entities to inform people in writing that their information is being collected and stored, what the purpose is, and term for collection and storage, and must secure a written release from the person.
Those same private entities are not allowed to sell, lease, trade, or profit from a person’s biometric information. A person may file suit at $1,000 for each negligent violation or $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation, plus attorneys’ fees and costs. Actual harm is not required to establish standing.”
Clearly, we need these kinds of protections everywhere, in all states and all countries, because as it stands, the global cabal of transhumanist technocrats are building a data-sharing system that is intended to become global. The lack of legal protections against data collection, analysis and sharing is what allows this reckless expansion of surveillance. As noted by Corey:
“If it’s not crystal clear by now, globalists and eugenicists (sometimes one in the same) are running the show, and they are working very hard at achieving their ultimate desires of a controlled human race, evolution of transhumanism with a strong artificial intelligence taking the place of many humans, while they fly to Mars during their years of immortality, and observe humanity through endless surveillance systems. But their dream only becomes a reality if people allow it to.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MERCOLA Take Control of Your Healthhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMERCOLA Take Control of Your Health2022-03-16 04:20:582022-03-16 04:27:53VIDEO: Transhumanism and How the Coming Digital Dictatorship Will Alter Your Life
We learned that in the final days of the 2016 presidential race, when the Clinton campaign came up with the Steele dossier — a collection of sensational and unsupported allegations about Trump and Russia — the FBI used the dossier to win approval to wiretap Carter Page, a low-level former Trump campaign adviser. Then we learned that also in 2016, the FBI used a confidential informant, a professor named Stefan Halper, to spy on Page and George Papadopoulos, another low-level Trump adviser.
Then we learned that in 2016, the FBI sent an undercover agent — a woman who used the alias Azra Turk — to secretly record conversations with Papadopoulos.
So there is ample evidence to say that the FBI spied on the Trump campaign. Now we are learning about another type of spying — the Clinton campaign spying on the Trump campaign. The revelations are coming from the investigation of John Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration, and retained by the Biden administration, to probe the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
In a court filing Friday, Durham reported that in July 2016, a tech executive named Rodney Joffe (he is unnamed in the court papers, but his name has been widely reported) worked with the Clinton campaign’s law firm to “mine internet data,” some of it “non-public and/or proprietary” — that means secret — to search for information that could be used to claim a Trump-Russia connection. Among the secret data that was “exploited,” according to Durham, was internet traffic from Trump Tower, from Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building and — after Trump was elected — the executive office of the president of the United States, or EOP.
Democrats commissioned, payed for and distributed the Russian collusion story and the media picked up the ball and ran with it.
Today Biden and his administration are blaming Russia for our economic woes. Go figure. For Democrats it’s always never take the blame, shift it to someone else.
This is worse than Watergate. It is worse than anything see in America ever before.
It is a tragedy and sadly, under a Biden DOJ Hillary and those involved won’t be prosecuted.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2022-03-15 10:20:462022-03-15 10:22:31Save America Ad Targets Hillary: ‘Justice Is Coming!’
As I have often written in my decades long fight for free speech, beginning with the Danish cartoons, freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society. Without it, a tyrant can wreak havoc unopposed, while his opponents are silenced.
Putting up with being offended is essential in a pluralistic society in which people differ on basic truths. If a group will not bear being offended without resorting to violence, that group will rule unopposed while everyone else lives in fear, while other groups curtail their activities to appease the violent group. This results in the violent group being able to tyrannize the others
Inoffensive speech needs no protection. The First Amendment was developed precisely in order to protect speech that was offensive to some, in order to prevent those who had power from claiming they were offended by speech opposing them and silencing the powerless.
A free society is by its nature one in which people put up with others being uncivil and offensive. The alternative is a quiet authoritarian society in which only one opinion is allowed and the others are silenced, and ultimately sent to the camps.
My relentless fight was always to protect and defend us from what the Democrats are doing to us now. I was silenced. And the right stood by. Others were silenced and the right stood by. Now we are all be silenced ……
Former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social wants to make itself cancel-proof against leftist demands that Big Tech preemptively deplatform it.
So far, the increasingly popular free speech platform has already survived attacks from the corporate media hellbent on smearing anything associated with Trump. Now, leftists are wielding Jan. 6 as an excuse to demand Big Tech companies such as Apple thwart Truth Social before it even becomes fully operational at the end of the month.
In “Big Tech Could Save Us From ‘Truth Social,’” author Samuel O’Brient, who has a history of demanding censorship because he believes “Limiting Free Speech is Essential to Democracy,” argues that Big Tech companies should preemptively nuke the anti-political censorship platform simply because it is associated with the former president.
“Trump clearly wants to use Truth Social to rally his troops again and fire them up for another run at the White House. There’s almost no way that such a mission won’t include inciting violence in some form,” O’Brient wrote this week. “If Truth Social becomes a venue for hate-spewing and further insurrection-plotting, these big tech giants can buy themselves a lot of goodwill by honoring their credos and standing up to protect American democracy.”
While corporate media are still largely focused on downplaying the number of people abandoning propaganda sites run by the political actors in Big Tech, leaders at Truth Social know that a war on their attempt to offer a “family-friendly” social media site is coming and they are prepared to stop it in its tracks.
“The campaign by the left and the mainstream media to censor and suppress other viewpoints is a shocking threat to democracy,” Devin Nunes, CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) in charge of launching Truth Social, told The Federalist. “The fact that there’s even a need and a demand for Truth Social – a social media platform that won’t censor content based on viewpoints – is unsettling in itself. Once you begin censoring, the suppressions develop a momentum of their own. This naturally leads to demands for preemptive censorship, which until recently was a concept you only found in dystopian science fiction novels.”
Despite the difficulties presented by a market largely controlled by Big Tech monopolies, Truth Social built most of its platform from the ground up. Parler previously tried a similar strategy but was eventually nuked by dozens of companies who wanted the platform gone for political reasons. Unlike in Parler’s case, Apple is really the only Big Tech company that has the power to remove Truth Social from its app store and the new social media platform is already working to keep the illegal activity that censors use to justify suppression off of the platform.
While some are calling for Truth Social to be wiped off of the web, the leaders of the social media company are confident that their lack of reliance on corrupt, political actors for web services will guard them against sudden deplatforming.
“We’re building as much of our own infrastructure as possible from scratch. We won’t be relying on Big Tech firms to keep our website on the internet, and we’re partnering with companies that are fundamentally committed to free speech, such as Rumble,” Nunes said.
Big Tech is filled with political entities that have used their influence and authority to suppress narratives about Covid-19, biological sex, and political stances they dislike. During the 2020 election alone, social media oligarchs did their best to alter the election outcome in favor of now-President Joe Biden. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was caught red-handed funneling money into poor election practices that benefit Democrats and Twitter, aided by the corrupt corporate media, deliberately blacked out any coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Facebook, Twitter, and others justified wiping Trump off of their platforms for “inciting violence” but have let actual warmongers like Russia’s Vladimir Putin stay on.
Users are hungry for a social media platform that doesn’t threaten them when they think or speak differently than the regime desires and Nunes said they will find it with Truth Social.
“The Big Tech companies generally did not begin as leftwing propaganda projects. In fact, the founders of a lot of these companies were idealistic proponents of free speech. But over time, they got corrupted and transformed their platforms into appendages of the Democratic Party and the left,” Nunes said. “Truth Social won’t do that, no matter the pressure from the media, the government, the left, or anywhere else. President Trump, myself, and others here have spent years fighting back against the left’s ridiculous attempts to silence us.”
Nunes is all too familiar with political censorship that is strategically used to justify false narratives circulated by the corrupt corporate media. When he served as the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes was quick to call out the fraudulent stories about Trump colluding with Russia which were repeatedly promoted by the dishonest press. Nunes also helped expose Twitter for shadowbanning conservatives like him.
“You can’t eliminate one side from the public debate and expect to keep a healthy democracy. Everyone is entitled to have their say, and we’re not going to hire a bunch of Big Tech-style political enforcers and ideological goons to force-feed you the viewpoints we decide you should be reading. That’s condescending and unfair, and we won’t do it,” Nunes said.
Quick note: Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here. We will not waver. We will not tire. We will not falter, and we will not fail. Freedom will prevail.
Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.
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http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Geller Reporthttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Geller Report2022-03-07 07:31:442022-03-07 07:32:31Democrats Demand Big Tech Censor Trump’s Truth Social
February 21, 2022, the Canadian Parliament approved Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s motion to invoke the Emergencies Act in response to the peaceful trucker protest against vaccine mandates
Under the Act, Canadian banks can seize the personal bank accounts of anyone suspected of participating in or supporting the protest, and these financial surveillance powers are intended to become permanent
February 14, 2022, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules to cover crowdfunding platforms and their payment service providers. The broadened surveillance power requires all digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (Fintrac)
What’s happening in Canada should be a sobering wakeup call for the whole world. Governments intend to control dissent through financial blackmail, which is why they’re also pushing for programmable central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)
Programmable currency is digital cash programmed to ensure it can only be spent on essentials or goods that an employer or government deems to be sensible. In other words, the issuer of the money would have complete control over how you spend your own money, and could punish you for undesirable opinions or behavior by restricting your purchasing ability or seizing your funds altogether
February 21, 2022, the Canadian Parliament approved Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s motion to invoke the Emergencies Act, with 185 votes for and 151 against, in response to the peaceful trucker protest against vaccine mandates.1 While Trudeau in a February 14, 2022, press conference (above) promised the Act would be limited in time, geographical location and scope, he’s already reneging on that promise.
Financial Surveillance Powers Will Be Permanently Expanded
The act was invoked to allow the government to physically disperse the trucker convoy without actually listening to their complaint, and to punish anyone who has supported the protest.
Under the act, banks are empowered to seize the personal bank accounts of anyone suspected of participating in the protest, or supporting it with as little as a $25 donation. Disturbingly, the surveillance powers over financial transactions granted by the act are actually intended to become permanent. As reported by National Review:2
“In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden ‘the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.’
That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., ‘Fintrac’).
‘As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac,’ Freeland said.
She justified the move as a way to ‘mitigate the risk’ of ‘illicit funds’ and ‘increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement’ …
Freeland said the trucker convoy, which had assembled to protest coronavirus restrictions, had ‘highlighted the fact’ that digital assets and funding mechanisms ‘weren’t captured’ by the Canadian government’s pre-existing surveillance powers.
As a result, she said, ‘the government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FinTrac on a permanent basis.’”
As noted by the National Review, we can already tell what the Canadian government will do with those expanded surveillance powers. We’re seeing their intentions in action. By invoking the Act, Trudeau has given himself the unilateral power to destroy the lives of Canadians who happen to disagree with him, regardless of the issue at hand.
Without court order or due process, the government can now freeze bank accounts, cancel insurance policies and revoke drivers’ licenses, and the victims have no recourse or remedy.
“All this, of course, flies in the face of Trudeau’s promise that the Emergencies Act powers would be temporary,” National Review notes, adding:3
“When he announced his invocation of the order, he promised the Canadian people that his expanded authorities would ‘be time-limited, geographically targeted, as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address.’ Not a single part of that sentence has proved to be true.”
Government Wants to Decide How You Spend Your Money
What’s happening in Canada should be a sobering wakeup call for the whole world. They’re showing us exactly what’s in store for all of us. Governments will basically control dissent through financial tyranny and blackmail.
The next step in that direction is the implementation of programmable digital currencies, worldwide. As reported by The Telegraph in June 2021, the Bank of England has already started moving on a programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC), and there’s no doubt that this is the plan of all central banks worldwide.4
Executive board member of the European Central Bank, Fabio Panetta, mentioned it in his December 10, 2021, lecture on the future of digital money in Rome, Italy.5
What’s meant by a “programmable” currency? As explained by The Telegraph,6 “Digital cash could be programmed to ensure it is only spent on essentials, or goods which an employer or government deems to be sensible.” In other words, the issuer of the money would have complete control over how you, the recipient, spend it.
“Tom Mutton, a director at the Bank of England, said during a conference … that programming could become a key feature of any future central bank digital currency …” The Telegraph reported.7
“He said … what happens if one of the participants in a transaction puts a restriction on [future use of the money]? There could be some socially beneficial outcomes from that, preventing activity which is seen to be socially harmful in some way. But at the same time it could be a restriction on people’s freedoms.’”
Absolute Control Through Financial Slavery
That programmable currency might restrict freedom is probably the understatement of the century. It’s an absolute given. Imagine your employer, your government and the central bank itself having the privilege to dictate how you spend your own money!
Imagine a third party deciding how much you’re allowed to spend on rent, what kind of food or clothing you’re allowed to buy, or what hobbies you’re allowed to spend money on and when. That’s the power they intend to obtain, and current events in Canada prove it.
The “socially beneficial outcomes” Mutton is hinting at are basically that an unelected cabal will have the ability to micromanage your personal finances, and hence dictate your behavior in every area of your life. As noted by British activist and radio presenter Maajid Nawaz in the Joe Rogan clip above, with a programmable CBDC, the British government would have complete control over anyone who disagrees with their policies or activities.
For example, with other surveillance, they could determine that he was planning to appear on Rogan’s show and simply reprogram his CBDCs with the click of a button, such that he would not be allowed to purchase a plane ticket. So much for that plan then.
Of course, CBDCs will exist by themselves. They’re designed to be used together with digital ID and a social credit score, like that in China. The COVID vaccine passports are one type of platform that could be used for this, but even if a state or country rejects vaccine passports, don’t for a moment think you’re out of the woods, not by a long-shot. Chances are, they’ll introduce a digital ID system instead, which will serve the exact same function.
Global Leadership Has Been Infiltrated
In the full Rogan interview, Nawaz goes on to discuss how governments around the world have been infiltrated by World Economic Forum (WEF) members whose agenda it is to implement global authoritarianism. As reported by Life Site News:8
“… the WEF has installed its members in national leadership roles around the world to further the organization’s sprawling authoritarian agenda. Explaining that government leaders worldwide have begun lifting COVID-19 mandates and restrictions while leaving in place an apparatus of digital tracking and identification that forms the embryonic stages of a digital social credit score.
Nawaz said the WEF under Schwab has worked on ‘embedding people in government who are subscribed to’ the Great Reset agenda. ‘That’s what they say themselves,’ Nawaz said, pointing out that the so-called Great Reset, whose advocates have famously asserted that by 2030 people will ‘own nothing and be happy,’ is explained in detail on the WEF’s website.9
In a 2020 book entitled ‘COVID-19: The Great Reset,’ Schwab openly argued that the COVID-19 response should be used to ‘revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions’ …
The WEF has clearly articulated10its interest in pursuing a global digital ID system. ‘So this is going to be this never-ending process to slowly move the goal posts,’ Rogan surmised. ‘Towards more and more authoritarianism,’ Nawaz added. ‘Checkpoint society. It’s all there. They’ve told us this.’”
How exactly has the WEF infiltrated governments and leadership roles around the world? In part by getting members of its Young Global Leaders group elected or installed in key positions. Would it surprise you to learn that Trudeau went through Schwab’s Young Global Leaders program?
Other members whose dictatorial mindset cannot be disguised any longer are New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron. Bill Gates and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have also gone through the program, and both are clearly supporting and promoting The Great Reset agenda through their respective business ventures.
Globalists Plan to Seize Control of Health Systems Worldwide
Your money isn’t the only thing the globalist cabal wants to control, however. In a February 18, 2022, article, Dr. Peter Breggin, author of “COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey,”11 warns that the next move in the globalists’ war on humanity is to seize control over the health care systems of the entire world:12
“We have discovered the next move of the global predators — already in progress — in their escalating assaults against individual and political freedom. The next big assault on human freedom involves a legalized takeover of national healthcare systems by the World Health Organization (WHO).
This stealth attack — with its initial plans already backed by many nations — will begin full implementation in 2024 if it is not quickly recognized and fought! … The Chinese Communist influence over WHO has been solid for more than a decade, and the party was able to install Tedros without any competition.
He became the first and only Director-General who is not a physician and instead is a communist politician. Now the Director-General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus — known simply as Tedros — has unveiled plans to take charge of all global health.
While addressing the WHO Executive Committee on January 24, 2022, Director-General Tedros spelled out his global health plan, including his final priority for his enormous scheme: ‘The fifth priority is to urgently strengthen WHO as the leading and directing authority on global health, at the center of the global health architecture.’
Tedros’s closing words to his report to the executive committee are chilling in their grandiosity and echo Marxist exhortations to cheering mobs by a Stalin, Mao, or Xi Jinping: ‘We are one world, we have one health, we are one WHO.’ Tedros seeks to become super-Fauci for the world, and, like Fauci, he will do it on behalf of the global predators.”
Health Fascism
As explained by Breggin, the global health care takeover really began with Gates’ Decade of Vaccines, announced in 2010 at the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos. At that time, Gates installed Dr. Anthony Fauci on his vaccine advisory board, thereby guaranteeing his plans would receive support from the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci is the head of. Breggin continues:13
“A theme for the Decade of Vaccines was ‘Public-Private Partnerships Drive Progress in Vaccine Development, Delivery’ — essentially the precursor to the Great Reset establishing a world governance of public and private health united in the spirit of fascism.
By 2012, Gates achieved official UN approval for his scheme, establishing a broad network of global predators aimed at exploiting and dominating humanity through public health. Communist China would play a prominent role through its control over the UN and WHO and through its close relationships with global predators like Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Mike Bloomberg, Big Tech executives, and many other billionaires and world leaders.
A decade and more later, during COVID-19, WHO has proven its usefulness to the predators in orchestrating science, medicine, and public health in the suppression of human freedom and the generation of wealth and power for the globalists.”
Under the guise of a global pandemic, the WHO, the WEF and all of its installed leaders in government and private business, were able to roll out a plan that has been decades in the making. The pandemic was a perfect cover. In the name of keeping everyone “safe” from infection, the globalists have justified unprecedented attacks on democracy, civil liberties and personal freedoms, including the right to choose your own medical treatment.
Now, the WHO is gearing up to make its pandemic leadership permanent, and to extend it into the health care systems of every nation. “The idea is ‘the principle of health for all’ — universal health care organized by WHO as part of the Great Reset,” Breggin explains.
Pandemic Treaty Is Being Established
May 24, 2021, the European Council announced it supported the establishment of an international Pandemic Treaty, under which the WHO would have the power to replace the constitutions of individual nations with its own constitution under the banner of “pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”14
“The world has already seen how any pandemic emergency, real or concocted, now or in the future, could then justify WHO taking over the entirety of government operations of sovereign nations, robbing all individuals of their freedoms, and fully crushing the democratic republics of the world,” Breggin warns.15
“The spirit of Communism can be felt throughout the document. We are told that the ‘purpose’ of the new strategy will be ‘guided by a spirit of solidarity, anchored in the principles of fairness, inclusion, and transparency.’ Notice, as in all pronouncements by global predators; there is no mention of individual rights, political liberty, or national sovereignty.
The great engine of human progress, human freedom, will be replaced by the great destroyer of humanity, collectivism, under the rule of the elite. Tucked into the report were the real goals … Here are three main purposes or goals of the proposed treaty:
1.response to any future pandemics, in particular by ensuring universal and equitable access to medical solutions, such as vaccines, medicines, and diagnostics 2.a stronger international health framework with the WHO as the coordinating authority on global health matters 3.the ‘One Health’ approach, connecting the health of humans, animals, and our planet
The report adds, ‘More specifically, such an instrument can enhance international cooperation in a number of priority areas, such as surveillance, alerts, and response, but also in general trust in the international health system.’ Clearly, they were building support for Tedros’s January 24, 2022 announcement that WHO would take over the international health care system.”
Even Your Food Will Be Under Their Control
In addition to your finances and your health care, the global cabal also intend to control the food supply and dictate what you can and cannot eat, in the name of combating climate change and saving the planet. The Great Reset16 is indeed the reset of life and society as we know it. Not a single area will be left untouched.
Sustainable development, Agenda 21, the 2030 Agenda, the New Urban Agenda, the Fourth Industrial Revolution,17 “Build Back Better,”18 green economy, the Green New Deal, the Paris Climate Agreement and the global warming movement in general all refer to and are part of The Great Reset agenda and its resource-based economics.
The common goal of all these movements and agendas is to capture all of the resources of the world — the ownership of them — for a small global cabal that has the know-how to program the computer systems that will ultimately dictate the lives of everyone.
When they talk about “wealth redistribution,” what they’re really referring to is the redistribution of resources from us to them. The goal is for you to own nothing. Everything you need, from the shirt on your back to a roof over your head, you’ll have to rent from the globalist owners.
Even the food you put into your mouth is planned to be under their complete control. To this end, the WEF has partnered with the EAT Forum, which will set the political agenda for global food production. The EAT Forum was cofounded by the Wellcome Trust, which in turn was established with the financial help of GlaxoSmithKline.
EAT collaborates with nearly 40 city governments across Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America and Australia, and maintains close relationships with imitation meat companies such as Impossible Foods, which was cofunded by Google, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.19 Gates has also been gobbling up farmland, becoming one of the largest private land owners in the U.S.20
EAT has developed a “Planetary Health Diet” that is designed to be applied to the global population and entails cutting meat and dairy intake by up to 90%, replacing it largely with foods made in laboratories, along with cereals and oil.21
Not surprisingly, Gates is on record urging Western nations to stop eating real meat altogether,22 and articles have been published in the past three years insisting people need to get used to eating bugs and drinking reclaimed sewage,23 all in the name of sustainability and saving the planet.
Being able to see the globalists’ plan as clearly as we can see it now, we have an obligation to future generations to resist, denounce and refuse any and all implementations of the technocratic agenda. We can win, for the simple fact that there are more of us than there are of them, but we have to be vocal about it — we need to join forces and present a united front, resisting peacefully, like the Canadian truckers.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MERCOLA Take Control of Your Healthhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMERCOLA Take Control of Your Health2022-02-28 04:40:062022-02-28 04:43:59VIDEO: The Plandemic Enters Final Stage, Real Purpose Exposed
A key concern that vaccine passports bring to the fore is related to privacy. If implemented, they will strip us of most of the privacy we’re used to, as they are a precursor to digital identity and a far more invasive digital surveillance apparatus
Another key concern is that vaccine passports and digital IDs can force compliance in any area of life
The vaccine passport is a platform to which they can add a digital ID and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). This would give them near-total control over your life, as they can “cancel” your existence and ability to live if you dissent
If we accept vaccine passports, we’re basically giving our consent to everything that comes after
Another global economic crisis is a mathematical inevitability, so work on improving your resiliency, food security and self-reliance through community
In my mind, there’s little doubt that the primary reason for the rollout of the COVID jabs was not for public health but to justify the rollout of vaccine passports, which in turn are just the first iteration of a much broader mechanism to surveil, track, manipulate and control the population of the world.
Corbishley has been a journalist, writing about politics, finance and privacy issues for the past decade. While based in Barcelona, Spain, he’s been contributing to two U.S. blogs since 2013.
“Israel was the first democratic country to launch digital IDs, in February, 2021, and when I started to see what was going on there, I began to get very concerned,” Corbishley says. “I wrote an article in April 2021, raising my concerns about the risks these vaccine passports posed.
Then, little by little, I began to see what’s happening in Europe. I began to see what was happening in Italy, in France, when the so called Green Pass was launched in June. This was a document that was supposed to be created to enable travel between countries in Europe.
Very quickly, it began to be used to control access to public services, access to public places within one’s own country. We were beginning to see restrictions that we’d never seen in our lifetime.
So, I began to write more and more and this brought me to the attention of the Vermont-based publisher, Chelsea Green. We had some conversations and we decided that there was an opportunity to write about something that everybody should know about. Even at this stage. It’s not being talked about anywhere near as much as it should be.”
Two Key Concerns
One of the primary concerns vaccine passports bring to the fore is related to privacy. If implemented, they will strip us of most of the privacy we’re used to. It’s quite clear that they are a precursor to digital identity and a far more invasive type of digital surveillance apparatus.
“The passports essentially function as a gateway to allow government to herd us into a totally new reality where our actions, our movements, our thoughts, our behavior are tracked and surveilled,” Corbishley says.
But it’s not just about surveillance. It’s also about forcing compliance, and that’s the second key concern.
“If we’ve learned one thing about the vaccine passport, this is about changing the way we relate to government, and it’s about changing the way government relates to us, the governed.
If you do not do exactly what the government says going forward, whether that is putting one jab inside your arm, whether is putting two jabs inside your arm, or however many jabs inside your arm, you will be deactivated. You will not be able to access the most basic services and the sort of places that we need to be able to participate in society and economy.”
Surveillance on Steroids
Of course, we’ve been under surveillance for many years already. All Google-related technologies are tracking and surveillance technologies. Our cell phones track and surveil us. Ditto for Facebook and other social media platforms. They’re all harvesting personal information and keeping tabs on everyone’s whereabouts.
We also know these technologies have been used to influence and manipulate people’s thoughts, beliefs and behavior. Up until now, however, all of that manipulation has been covert. The system that’s being erected now is unique and new in that the forced compliance will be, in many cases, overt — blatant and indisputable, as punishment will be tied to things like your personal finances and travel privileges.
Clearly, the vaccine passport is a platform to which they can add central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). So, as an example, the government could put out a political narrative, and if you vocalize disagreement, there goes access to your bank account. Or your travel privileges. Or your loan application.
With Google-based smart homes, it’s not even impossible to foresee a future in which you could simply be locked inside your home if you were to be labeled a dissenter. Or locked out of your home. Or they could shut off your utilities.
The possibilities to punish dissenters are endless when everyone and every THING is digitally identifiable, trackable and wirelessly connected. With a single keystroke, someone you don’t know can shut down your life, rendering you homeless and helpless.
Chances are, there won’t even be a live person anywhere for you to contact with your grievances. Much of the system will be run by artificial intelligence and various algorithms. It’s important to realize that if we accept vaccine passports, we’re basically giving our consent to everything that comes after, Corbishley warns. We’re accepting that this is our future.
Why We Must Reject Digital IDs and CBDCs
We must also remain alert to the rollout of other control mechanisms that are just as problematic as the vaccine passports, especially digital IDs and CBDCs, but also any number of other digital and biometric controls. As explained by Corbishley:
“Right now, in Canada, we’ve got the premier of Ontario saying that they are going to withdraw the vaccine passports. We’ve got Alberta saying it’s going to withdraw the vaccine passports.
This is the message we’re getting from all over the Western world. It’s like, ‘It’s time to take a step back. We are now going to let you live your life. We’re going to let some kind of normality return.’
You’re seeing Scandinavia talking about doing away with vaccine passports altogether. So, it’s interesting to see some countries using that language. But I think you have to be very careful because as they’re talking about doing this, they’re ushering in digital identity systems, which are going to be on a much grander scale than the vaccine passports …
They are instituting digital identity that is going to allow not just this kind of control of your vaccine status, but control of your tax records, control of your employment records … And they will include … your vaccine status. So, it’s extremely disingenuous. I think they are misleading their populations in a very dark way …
All of these things are happening, but the ultimate step is probably the central bank digital currencies, which are likely to come on board in the next three to five years.
The chairman of the Bank of International Settlements, Agustín Carstens, who used to be the chairman of the Bank of Mexico, openly said that the wonderful thing about central bank digital currencies is that it allows them to track everything you do.
What he didn’t say is that it allows them to deactivate an account. It allows them to stop people from being able to transact. They didn’t go that far. But he said that this is so different from cash. So yeah, people are not realizing just how this control grid is being built, little by little, piece by piece, but they need to start paying attention before it’s too late.”
They’re Building a Social Credit System
By now, many are familiar with the social credit system in China, or have at least heard of it. How does this system compare or relate to vaccine passports and digital IDs?
“I think that the social credit system in China is, to a certain extent, a template. It’s where governments probably want to go. They would like to be able to use the new technologies we have to nudge people into the right sorts of behaviors without having to use more overt punishment.
You can either reward people for doing the right sort of things, or you can give them a little digital spank every now and then when they’re doing the wrong sort of things. I think that that is where China is leading the way.
Ironically, in the research I did for my book, I found that while China’s ambitions with the credit social credit system are essentially unfettered — they want total control — they’re not there yet.
They’re still running quite a few pilot schemes. So, it depends where you are in China, the extent to which you are exposed to this kind of system, where you’re getting points for good behavior and where you’re getting points deducted for bad behavior.
But the template is there. You’ve also got companies like Ant Financial and Tencent. These are the equivalents of Google, Facebook, whatever, that are running their own social credits schemes within their own little universe. So, it’s a very complex situation in China. It’s not as complete as some might believe, but the intention, the ambition, is huge.
I would say that we are definitely seeing examples of this beginning to feed through into the West. We’re seeing banks talk about using our social media behavior to determine our credit score, which is very similar to what they’re doing in China. There’s clearly the means, and there’s clearly a desire to push in that direction.”
Unity Is the Challenge of Our Lifetime
The challenge we now face is that, to have any chance of preventing this control grid, we need to be unified. The problem is, many simply aren’t able to see the dangers. Most people under the age of 30 are used to doing just about everything on their phones, and the convenience of digital IDs and digital banking is alluring.
Organizations such as the World Economic Forum and many of the central banks that are pushing the rollout of this control grid can also make it impossible or near-impossible to live without a digital ID and CBDCs. Already, we’ve seen leaders saying, out loud, that their goal is to make life as difficult and inconvenient as possible for anyone without a vaccine passport. They’ll do the same for digital IDs and CBDCs.
“One of the best examples is Italy,” Corbishley says. “If you want to see a country that has really gone into sixth gear with the vaccine passports, it’s Italy. They’ve said, ‘Look, if you don’t have this document, you cannot work. You cannot get on a bus and go across town. You cannot get on the metro. You cannot access retail premises apart from supermarkets, pharmacies, petrol stations and pet stores.’
You have basically closed down, narrowed down the existence to such a limited one that most people end up just saying, ‘OK, let’s do it. I don’t have an alternative. I’m not going to survive this way.’
If you have a mortgage and your finances are already tight, and your government is telling you, you’re not going to be able to work, most people crumble, and so they’re able to do it …
A journalist in Canada was talking about the truckers, the Freedom Convoy. He was saying, ‘These guys don’t represent Canadians; 90% of Canadians have taken the vaccine and they’re all perfectly happy with the restrictions, the mandates.’ It’s like, how do you know how many of those 90% actually took the vaccine because they had no choice? It was a very disingenuous argument.”
How to Prepare for the Inevitable
While the situation is bleak and dire, Corbishley doesn’t believe vaccine passports, digital IDs and CBDCs are inevitable. “I think we’re in the midst of a major battle,” he says.
The question is, how can we win when all the cards seem stacked against us?
“I think that we have to, No. 1, inform as many people as possible. That’s why I wrote the book. I wrote the book hoping to reach people who maybe had been vaccinated, but were beginning to have certain doubts, people who were on the fence.
I mean, I know plenty of people who have had two shots, who are wary about having a third one. I know plenty of people who have had two shots, have had Omicron, and they’re now thinking, ‘Why the heck am I having to take a third shot?’ People are beginning to question this.
I think that we are in the midst of what can only be described as an existential battle. If we lose this battle, it can be very difficult, as individuals, to protect ourselves because the degree of control they will have over us is going to be huge.
I think there will be this creation of a parallel community, a parallel society, where people are able to function. We’re seeing signs of bartering beginning to take place within a community like that in Italy. They are surviving as best they can — and we’re talking about millions of people who haven’t crumbled. They’ve not given way yet.
That gives me a certain amount of hope. I think the fact that people have grown tired of the restrictions means that government is having to, to a certain extent, reconsider, but at the same time, they are pushing through digital IDs.
I think this is what is really important for people to understand. While they’re saying, ‘We are going to abandon the vaccine passports,’ in most countries where they’re saying this, that is not the case. In the U.K., they’ve not done that. They have simply shifted from a mandatory vaccine passport to a voluntary vaccine passport.
You’ve got vaccine passports very much in use for international travel. So, if you’re British, you want to travel to mainland Europe, if you’ve not got your vaccine passport, you’re not going to be able to go mainland. It’s the same if you’re European and want to go to the U.S.
So, there is so much happening it’s hard to keep track. That is coming from somebody who spends most of his day trying to keep track of these things. If you are just someone who is working a 9-to-5 job and you get home and you’ve got three kids to look after, it’s going to be much harder to keep abreast of these developments.
I have a certain amount of hope that they haven’t won yet. But it’s an immense amount of power they have. We are talking about organizations like the World Economic Forum, which represents hundreds of the most powerful companies on the planet. We’re talking about the most powerful governments on the planet.
So, it’s going to be a huge battle, and they’ve got most of the advantages in this battle. But I do think that what’s happening in Canada suggests a resistance can be formed. I think that resistance is growing in Germany. It’s certainly growing in Austria. The government is beginning to have second thoughts about the vaccine mandate.”
Expect Economic Collapse
There are also the growing economic risks, globally, to consider. The central banks around the world have painted themselves into a corner and they can’t get out. We are almost certain to see another financial crisis. It’s only a matter of when.
There is already clear evidence we are in the early stages of economic collapse, and that’s a parallel issue that needs to be taken into consideration when trying to predict what might happen with digital IDs and CBDCs, as they’re all connected. To prepare for an inevitable economic collapse, I would suggest focusing on improving your resiliency on a local level.
For example, make sure you have access to water supplies other than your tap, grow your own food and develop relationships with other local growers and farmers to build your food security.
These are very basic things that can save your life when everything collapses and your dollar, drachma or euro becomes fit for use as toilet paper. Having food, water, shelter and community makes you far more resistant to tyranny because if you don’t have these things, you need the government to provide them for you.
“I think the community is essential,” Corbishley says. “Having people who are of a similar mindset, of a similar worldview, people you can definitely count upon …
Resilience is going to be very tough. As a result of the lockdowns, small businesses are in serious straits. They’ve had to take on huge amounts of debt just to weather the lockdowns … There’s no doubt that large companies have much easier access to cheap debt than small companies …
This is tragic because small businesses are a fundamental cornerstone of the community. They’re a fundamental part of the global economy and, even more important than that, small businesses are run by independent people. If we begin to see a massive culling of small businesses, then we are going to see less independence and more dependence. So, that is one area which deeply concerns me …
I think the most important thing, and the hardest thing, is to maintain your humanity. I think that is fundamental and that is why having a community around you that you love and that loves you is absolutely essential to surviving this. I don’t think you can be an island and get through what’s coming.
Another thing I would suggest, if you do have money, if you have investments, is to diversify as much as possible — probably not best to have all your money in a bank, and especially not one bank …
If you look at countries like Mexico, going through the Tequila Crisis in the 1990s, or Brazil, going through the huge hyperinflation it had, how do you survive that relatively intact? When you own real assets, you own property. Maybe you own precious metals … In Turkey, inflation is absolutely surging and people are using gold, they are looking at cryptocurrencies. They are doing anything except keeping their money in Turkish lira.”
More Information
So, in closing, the best you can do right now is to educate yourself about the impending digital control grid, share information, resist and oppose any and all attempts to implement vaccine passports or digital IDs, take a stand for freedom, build community and prepare for deteriorating economic conditions by diversifying your monies and investments.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MERCOLA Take Control of Your Healthhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMERCOLA Take Control of Your Health2022-02-27 06:34:482022-02-27 06:35:45What You Need to Know About Vax Passports, Digital IDs, CBDCs
