Category Archives: Civil Liberties

Banning Seymour Hersh’s “Offensive” Ideas, by Ron Unz

Posted on February 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

The effort to somehow cancel Seymour Hersh’s article and suppress his voice is massive . . . and is doomed to failure. From Ron Unz at unz.com:

The full availability of the Seymour Hersh interview video has now been restored with the Democracy Now! channel providing the following explanatory message:

UPDATE: We have blurred some imagery about 30 seconds into the video in response to a content warning from YouTube that severely limited the reach of this interview. What you see now is an edited version. For the uncensored version of this interview that aired on our show, visit democracynow.org.

This may be the entire explanation. However, it does strike me as slightly surprising that the content problem would have developed only many hours after the original video was released

In an unprecedented step, Youtube has severely restricted as “inappropriate or offensive” Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster Nord Stream Pipelines interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Energy, Geopolitics, Government, Media, Tyranny, War

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The Sy Hersh effect: killing the messenger, ignoring the message, by Kelly Beaucar Vlahos

Posted on February 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

The mainstream media has almost completely blacked out Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster about the Nord Stream bombing. From Kelly Beaucar Vlahos at responsiblestatecraft.org:

Major media are disregarding questions raised by the embattled veteran muckraker: did the US destroy the pipeline? If not, who did?

Absolute crickets. That is the sound in the major mainstream media — both foreign and domestic — following the charges by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that the United States led a covert operation to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.

The story, released on Hersh’s new Substack last week, unleashed a Twitter war between Hersh’s defenders and detractors, but a simple Google search betrays a dearth of mainstream coverage, with only brief reports by Bloomberg, Agence France Presse, The Times (UK) and the New York Post (a conservative holding of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire). The Washington Times editorial board, also squarely on the right, wrote sympathetically about it on Monday, and Newsweek has covered it as well. 

All other newspapers of record — the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal — and European outlets — BBC, the Guardian, and most German newspapers (an interview on Berliner Zietung dropped late Wednesday ) —  have ignored it. Tucker Carlson and other hosts covered it on FOX News, another Murdoch staple, but the rest of the cable news circuit — CNN, MSNBC — are seemingly on board with what appears to be a total MSM blackout. 

Maybe not an entire blackout: Business Insider published an unflattering report topped with this unwieldy headline: “The claim by a discredited journalist that the US secretly blew up the Nord Stream pipeline is proving a gift to Putin.”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Geopolitics, Governments, Uncategorized

Under Cover of Covid, the U.S. is Moving Toward Becoming a China-Like Checkpoint Nation, by Linda Bonvie

Posted on February 17, 2023 | Leave a comment

You are being watched, constantly and ceaselessly. This data is what the government will use to strip you of whatever remains of your rights. From Linda Bonvie at rescue.substack.com:

While major media have covered the Orwellian advance of facial recognition technology for years, our reporter found little resistance and wide advocacy among major governments, including the United States, for global control based on vaccine passports with facial recognition.

What does China’s President Xi Jinping have in common with President Biden when it comes to covid and “future pandemics?”

Nothing less than embracing a “global digital health network” that includes “digital solutions” to validate “proof of vaccinations” and further promote “digital COVID-19 certificates.”

In other words, a universal vaccine passport.

The eye-opening admission that the U.S. unanimously agrees with not only Australia, but Russia and China, along with sixteen other major world powers, that proof of vaccination to allow “seamless international travel” should be collected in a shared database was officially noted in paragraph 23 of the G20 Bali Leaders’ Declaration following the conclusion of the G20 summit held this past November in Indonesia.  

In fact, the latter country’s Minister of Health, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, simply couldn’t wait to talk about this development. In a conference held before the meeting, which reflected a consensus of those who attended, he stated, “Let’s have a digital health certificate acknowledged by WHO. If you have been vaccinated or tested properly then you can move around.”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, Privacy, Surveillance

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Unmasking Covid Claims: Scientific Review Challenges Claim that Masks Reduced Covid Transmissions, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on February 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

Masks don’t work. Until recently that true sentence would get you kicked off social media. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.com:

A new scientific review raises additional questions over the science behind the mask mandates imposed on the population for years. The new scientific review by  12 researchers from leading universities found little support for the claims that masks reduced Covid exposures.  My interest in the story, as usual, focuses on free speech. Numerous experts were suspended or banned for challenging these very claims and the media labeled any such critics as dangerous or fringe figures. Regardless of your ultimate conclusions on the efficacy of masks, there was clearly a scientific basis to challenge the mask policies. Yet, many people were routinely censored on Twitter and other platforms for daring to challenge the official position on masks.

The Centers for Disease and Control Prevention (CDC) initially rejected the use of a mask mandate. However, the issue became a political weapon as politicians and the press claimed that questioning masks was anti-science and even unhinged. In April 2020, the CDC reversed its position and called for the masking of the entire population, including children as young as 2 years old.  The mask mandate and other pandemic measures like the closing of schools are now cited as fueling emotional and developmental problems in children.

The closing of schools and businesses was also challenged by some critics as unnecessary. Many of those critics were also censored. It now appears that they may have been right. Many countries did not close schools and did not experience increases in Covid. However, we are now facing alarming drops in testing scores and alarming rises in medical illness among the young.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Media, Medicine

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Amnesty for an Apology? COVID Dictators Looking for Way Out, by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Posted on February 15, 2023 | 1 comment

Amnesty ain’t going to cut it. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

Story at-a-glance

  • Draconian COVID measures ruined the lives of millions of lower- and middle-class Americans while lining the pockets of the liberal cabal, and those who spoke the truth were punished rather than lauded for their reason
  • Now, the tide is starting to shift. Recent polling shows 49% of Americans believe the COVID shots may be responsible for the massive rise in sudden deaths and 28% say they know someone they believe was killed by the shots
  • In early November 2022, The Atlantic published an article by Brown University economist Emily Oster, who suggested COVID dictators be granted “amnesty” for their mistaken beliefs about COVID-19. It failed miserably, as just about everyone saw through her ill-conceived arguments
  • January 30, 2023, medical student Kevin Bass followed in Oster’s footsteps, penning an opinion piece for Newsweek in which he urges the scientific community to “admit we were wrong about COVID and it cost lives”
  • Communications analysts agree Bass’ essay is another manipulative effort to overcome public distrust in authorities

In The Hill segment above, Batya Ungar-Sargon reviews how draconian COVID measures ruined the lives of millions of lower- and middle-class Americans while lining the pockets of the liberal cabal. Indeed, the cost of the COVID measures were definitely not born equally by all. Moreover, those who spoke the truth were punished rather than lauded for their reason.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda

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Don’t Bow Down to a Dictatorial Government. America Is a Prison Disguised as Paradise, by John and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on February 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

Fictional totalitarian dystopias are becoming real. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.”— President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The government wants us to bow down to its dictates.

It wants us to buy into the fantasy that we are living the dream, when in fact, we are trapped in an endless nightmare of servitude and oppression.

Indeed, with every passing day, life in the American Police State increasingly resembles life in the dystopian television series The Prisoner.

First broadcast 55 years ago in the U.S., The Prisoner—described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned in a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious, the Village’s inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked by militarized drones, and stripped of their individuality so that they are identified only by numbers.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Tyranny

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When the Private Sector Is the Enemy, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on February 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

Large corporations are fully on board with statism. From Ryan McMaken at lewrockwell.com:

Last Wednesday’s House Oversight Committee meeting provided some much-needed insight into how corporate personnel at Twitter (before Elon Musk’s takeover) had essentially turned the company into an adjunct of the federal government and its intelligence agencies.

Present to testify were high-ranking company personnel who oversaw Twitter during the covid panic and in the early days of the Hunter Biden laptop controversy. Specifically, they were former employees Yoel Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli, and Vijaya Gadde. All three had titles with words like “trust” and “safety” in them. There was also James Baker, a former Twitter attorney and a former FBI agent who promoted the now-disproven “Russiagate” theory. It was clear from their testimony that all four saw themselves as righteous arbiters of truth and that anyone who disagreed with their views was guilty of “misinformation.” Conveniently, this “misinformation” overwhelmingly tended to coincide with these employees’ personal political views.

In practice, however, these keepers of “trust” and “safety” did not function as disinterested fact-checkers, journalists, or stewards of any kind. They certainly weren’t entrepreneurs focused on delivering the highest value for their owners. Rather, they were acting as extensions of the US administrative state, the FBI, and the Democratic Party.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Cronyism, Government, Politics, Propaganda

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Does Israel Seek a “Final Solution for Palestinians?”, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on February 14, 2023 | Leave a comment

It takes a certain chutzpah to pretend that Israel is more sinned against than sinning in its long-running conflict with the Palestinians. From Philip Giraldi at unz.com:

Diaspora Jews choose to look the other way as the carnage increases

There is what passes for a sick joke among those who watch the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians with increasing shock over what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his thugs have been allowed to get away with. It goes something like this: Israel has succeeded in killing or driving out the remaining three million or so Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, describing them as “terrorists.” President Joe Biden, his cabinet and virtually all of Congress respond afterwards by saying how the move was unfortunate but “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

Such is the power of Israel as manifested through its Lobby in the US, and the saddest part of the joke is that it reflects quite likely exactly what would happen. The Palestinians have no constituency in the United States, where Israel and its friends rule the roost. But one of the real ironies of watching a genocide being carried out now in the twenty-first century is that the killers come from a group that constantly flaunts its claimed status as history’s perpetual victims. This duality is a convenience, to be sure, providing as it does immunity from its own crimes as it also escalates the criminal policies that might lead to the genocide of a whole category of potential “enemies.”

Israel’s new government, again headed by the monstrous Benjamin Netanyahu, has shifted hard to the right, incorporating as it does the extremist settlers’ movement as well as parties that have spoken casually of forcing the Palestinians out and even of extermination if it comes to that. Half of Israelis are comfortable with the Arabs having minimal civil rights even if they are Israeli citizens and many accept the desirability of forced expatriation of the Palestinians to neighboring states like Jordan or Lebanon. Arab residents of Israel have only limited legal rights and, contrary to the US domestic Israel Lobby’s constant assertion that the Zionist entity is a “democracy,” Israel in reality became an apartheid state by law when it in 2018 declared itself to be legally the nation state of the Jews with “exclusive right of self-determination.”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Religion, War

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The Federal Government Is Tracking the Unvaccinated, by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Posted on February 14, 2023 | 1 comment

If you are on this website you are probably on a list, and if you are unvaccinated you are probably on another one. Just one more reason to fight against social credit systems, because people on lists will come up losers. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

Video Link

Story at-a-glance

  • The U.S. government has secretly been tracking those who didn’t get the COVID jab, or are only partially jabbed, through a previously unknown surveillance program designed by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
  • The program was implemented April 1, 2022, and adopted by most medical clinics and hospitals across the U.S. until January 2023
  • Under this program, doctors at clinics and hospitals have been instructed to ask patients about their vaccination status, which is then added to their electronic medical records as a diagnostic code, known as ICD-10 code, so that they can be tracked inside and outside of the medical system
  • These new ICD-10 codes are part of the government’s plan to implement medical tyranny using vaccine passports and digital IDs
  • They’re also tracking noncompliance with all other recommended vaccines using new ICD-10 codes, and have implemented codes to describe WHY you didn’t get a recommended vaccine. They’ve also added a billable ICD code for “vaccine safety counseling”

As recently discovered and reported by Dr. Robert Malone,1 the U.S. government has secretly been tracking those who didn’t get the COVID jab, or are only partially jabbed, through a previously unknown surveillance program designed by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Medicine, Privacy, Surveillance, Tyranny

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How We Can Stop the Coming War With Russia, by Ron Paul

Posted on February 14, 2023 | Leave a comment

There’s nothing like the prospect of a nuclear war to amp up protests. It looks like they’ll be a big one in Washington D.C. this weekend. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

Twenty years ago this spring the US government was finally successful in lying us into war with Iraq. Administration after administration had sanctioned and bombed and even invaded the country, but finally 20 years ago next month the Bush Administration unleashed “shock and awe” to flatten a country that did not and could not threaten the United States.

After eight years of battle in Iraq perhaps as many as a million innocent people died, either directly or indirectly, from Washington’s aggression. No one was brought before a tribunal over the lies and destruction. No one even apologized. Washington’s puppet of the day, Ahmed Chalabi, brushed off the lies about Iraq’s WMDs by proclaiming that the war promoters were “heroes in error.” They got their regime change and that’s all they cared about.

The propaganda machine pushing the Iraq war seemed overwhelming at the time. At that time several fellow Members of Congress began to open communication across party lines to look for way to stop the war. From conservatives like the late Rep. Walter Jones and Rep. John Duncan, to progressives like Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Rep. Jim McGovern, and so many more, we began to organize and strategize.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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