'Delta Variant' Scaremongering: Fauci's Last Stand?

The media has joined the "public health experts" in hyping the danger of the "Delta variant" of the coronavirus. Fauci warns that it is the most dangerous yet. Yet data from the UK strongly suggest that, like all viruses, it becomes weaker with each mutation. So who's telling the truth and who is pushing a narrative? Also today: Capitol Hill Police hold open door for 69 year "insurrectionist" on Jan 6th, but she is arrested yesterday for entering the building. And...what does New York City's botched mayoral election tell us about elections? Watch today's Liberty Report:



from 'Delta Variant' Scaremongering: Fauci's Last Stand?

Dear 'Insurrectionists': Welcome to the Anti-State Movement

American Greatness website's Julie Kelly is a hero of modern journalism. She embodies the spirit of Mencken and so many others who refused to bow to the career-advancing zeitgeist of worshipping the state. She has doggedly reported on the incredible -- beyond-Stalinist -- persecution of a rag-tag group of "insurrectionist" Trump supporters who found themselves in a trap sprung by the deep state and its storm-trooping FBI to set-up MAGA-ists as enemies of the state to justify a broader persecution of the very right-wing populism that propelled Trump into the Oval Office - to the shock of the elites - in the first place.

Trump was a "knuckle-dragger" who had the gall to successfully challenge the anointed successor to the "peace" president Obama on the slogan of "why not get along with Russia?" and "Blue collar America: I am not a Washington elite. I've got your back."

We have credibility because we are not partisan: Trump was, sadly, a disaster once in place - Pompeo? Barr? Sessions? Bolton? - he kept his enemies close but, unfortunately, not in the manner of Don Corleone.

Still we remain remotely sympathetic because we understand that for all his faults his enemies are far more evil than he is.

Just like the Soviet empire, the US empire is frail, weak, and cannot brook any criticism rooted in logic or any semblance of reality as understood by the unwashed masses. 

With that said, Kelly's recent article does offer some major Scooby-snacks to anti-empire and anti-state peace and prosperity activists. 

She captures the deep and breathtaking corruption of the Capitol Hill Cops in setting up the Trump supporters as insurrectionists, pointing to the cops' off-camera use of violent crowd-control devices against peaceful and patriotic protesters. The 14,000 hours of video surveillance has been suppressed in favor of tiny sound bites without context to make innocent Americans look like kulaks in the era of Stalin.

To be honest, I was not at all shocked when I heard of the corruption of the Capitol Hill Police Department. As a 12 year Congressional staffer for Dr. Ron Paul I experienced it up close and personal on many occasions. One Capitol Hill officer was notorious for yelling at staffers who crossed against the light even when there were no cars visible in any direction. It was pure power trip for him.

Little did I know that his blustering and yelling at staffers for crossing when there was no cross-traffic anywhere in the distance was a cover for far more corrupt activities.

I have never before revealed this in public, but one time when he threatened me for crossing the street against the light when there was no traffic anywhere remotely in sight I challenged him. I asked him why he was threatening staffers when clearly there was no reason for us to wait for three or more minutes on a very minor side street to cross to get to work. I may even have framed my question in a rude manner, as he was such an absurd bully.

He forced me to go with him behind the guard shack on the corner of C and First Street - out of public view. He said to me, "I will file a report that you came up on me with a weapon and threatened me with violence and you will be arrested. It's my word against yours and you will go to jail."

I was shocked because I did not threaten him in any way; just questioned his bullying of staffers. But he threatened to lie to his superiors about me to get me charged with a serious crime. And of course go to jail.

That's when I understood that the US Capitol Hill Police Department was as corrupt as a banana republic dictatorship. They did the bidding of their masters, the heads of the House and Senate. You want threats? We'll give you threats. You want arrests? We'll give you arrests. They are no police officers, they are prostitutes. And they proved it again - not at all to my surprise - on the January 6th "insurrection."

So that's why I looked with some amusement at the MAGA demonstrators who thought upon confronting Capitol Hill Police Officers they were given the opportunity to give a deep embrace to the thin Blue Line. 

As one "insurrectionist" was quoted as saying to the corrupt Capitol Hill Cops were carrying out their ant-Trump operation, “We’ve always supported you!”

What a wake-up call to the police state for the ignorant, flag-mongering MAGA-ists:

As the old Soviet joke goes:

"I love the Party."

"But does the Party love you?"

So yes I will continue to argue that the bogus "insurrectionists" should all immediately be set free. But I will also argue much more forcibly that these same absurd MAGA protesters finally digest the nature of the state: dudes that state hates you! You support that "thin blue line"? You think the cops are on your side when you bluster about "come and take it"?

Who do you think will actually come and take it? It's always the corrupt Capitol Hill Cops, directed by demonic monsters Pelosi and McConnell.

MAGA "insurrectionists" are you ready to join the non-interventionist movement? Because the Party that you still foolishly embrace wants you to go to the gulag.

Open your eyes: the state is evil because it is directed by evil people like Pelosi and Biden and McConnell and Schumer et al. Let us know when you have finally freed your mind and we will welcome you to the freedom movement.

from Dear 'Insurrectionists': Welcome to the Anti-State Movement

Remembering Justin Raimondo

(Published two years ago on the sad event of Justin's death.) “Don’t do what I did when I was your age - a lot of running around. Instead, read and learn as much as you can so you’re prepared to effectively fight for peace and liberty.” This sounds like the advice Campaign for Liberty Chairman Ron Paul gives young people, but it was advice given to me when I was a young lad of 25 by my friend Justin Raimondo. Justin passed away last week from lung cancer at the age of 67. Most of you...

Read the full report by clicking the title, below...

from http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2021/june/29/remembering-justin-raimondo/

Biden Claims Bombing Syria And Iraq Is A 'Defensive' Move. What?

Over the weekend President Biden ordered US airstrikes on Syrian and Iraqi territory. The Administration claims that bombing countries 6,000 miles away who could not pose a threat to the US if they wanted was a "defensive" move. One problem: US troops are illegally occupying Syria and the bombing was unequivocally condemned by the Iraqi government. So..."defense"...or aggression? Also today, new polls and studies on Covid and US trust in the media. Don't miss today's Liberty Report:



from Biden Claims Bombing Syria And Iraq Is A 'Defensive' Move. What?

Mexico Supreme Court Rules Against Marijuana Prohibition

After a Monday Mexico Supreme Court decision finding unconstitutional certain provisions of the national government’s marijuana prohibition, an avenue has opened for people in the country to legally consume marijuana as well as engage in home cultivation of the plant. David Agren provides details at the Guardian. Countrywide legalization is the situation now to the north and south of America. While just coming into being in Mexico, countrywide legalization has been in place in Canada since...

Read the full report by clicking the title, below...

from http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2021/june/29/mexico-supreme-court-rules-against-marijuana-prohibition/

Losing the Plot on COVID

What happens when a population of introverts, hypochondriacs, and obsessive-compulsives is continuously bombarded with messages to seclude and disinfect themselves, for fear that COVID-19 prickle-balls lurk everywhere, waiting to attack?

What happens is that emotionally damaged people start driving bad politics and bad policy.

"Fifteen days to flatten the curve." That phrase is surely now banned by corporate media, for it reminds us how the supposedly acute health threat of March 2020 was repeatedly re-packaged to keep populations off-balance and out of business not for 15 days, but for 15 months. 

Never in modern times has a health issue been so flagrantly politicized, nor wielded as a club, as the Wuhan virus has been. Outside a few rational locales, almost every nation drank the COVID Kool-Aid, competing to see who could enforce the stupidest rules.

Naturally, academia would lead the way: 

Among Americans aged 15–24, a total of 587 died of COVID in 2020, according to the CDC, representing about 0.16%, or about 1 in 642, of COVID deaths. If you are young, you have essentially no chance of dying of COVID. The low youth mortality impact from COVID was known by April 2020.

Yet many universities now require these low-risk young people to inject the experimental vaccine or be banished from campus. Did you already catch the WuFlu and have antibodies? Too bad. The great pulsating brains of academia cannot differentiate.

Young people who want to serve their country are also targets: the passive-aggressive command at West Point compels the unvaccinated to sacrifice a week's vacation to quarantine and then to wear masks in the most ridiculous circumstances imaginable — to harass them and make them look like fools. Military leaders do not care whether the experimental vaccines might do more harm than good, especially on a previously COVID-exposed youth. Take the jab and shut up, cadet; Colonel Suckup needs to PowerPoint his 100% compliance success.

Famed baseball pitcher Anthony Fauci claims that he is Science personified, yet anyone can make simple deductions that have eluded the doctor: there is effectively no difference in COVID rates between regions that went full Stalin on COVID rules and those areas that took a more holistic or decentralized approach to the virus. 

Great Britain, with its multiple draconian lockdowns, has a COVID case rate of 6.76% of the population, while Sweden, which mostly left schools and businesses open and went soft-touch on mask mandates, has a case rate of 10.7%. But Sweden's death rate is 20% lower than the U.K.'s, so what was the point of Britain's lockdown hysteria?

Fair use excerpt. Read the rest here.

from Losing the Plot on COVID

Biden's Lawless Bombing of Iraq and Syria Only Serves the Weapons Industry Funding Both Parties

For the second time in the five months since he was inaugurated, President Joe Biden on Sunday ordered a US bombing raid on Syria, and for the first time, he also bombed Iraq. The rationale offered was the same as Biden's first air attack in February: the US, in the words of Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, “conducted defensive precision airstrikes against facilities used by Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border region.” He added that “the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense.”

Embedded in this formulaic Pentagon statement is so much propaganda and so many euphemisms that, by itself, it reveals the fraudulent nature of what was done. To begin with, how can US airstrikes carried out in Iraq and Syria be "defensive” in nature? How can they be an act of “self-defense"? Nobody suggests that the targets of the bombing campaign have the intent or the capability to strike the US "homeland” itself. Neither Syria nor Iraq is a US colony or American property, nor does the US have any legal right to be fighting wars in either country, rendering the claim that its airstrikes were "defensive” and an “act of self-defense” to be inherently deceitful.

The Pentagon's description of the people bombed by the US — “Iran-backed militias groups” — is intended to obscure the reality. Biden did not bomb Iran or order Iranians to be bombed or killed. The targets of US aggression were Iraqis in their own country, and Syrians in their own country. Only the US war machine and its subservient media could possibly take seriously the Biden administration's claim that the bombs they dropped on people in their own countries were "defensive” in nature. Invocation of Iran has no purpose other than to stimulate the emotional opposition to the government of that country among many Americans in the hope that visceral dislike of Iranian leaders will override the rational faculties that would immediately recognize the deceit and illegality embedded in the Pentagon's arguments.

Beyond the propagandistic justification is the question of legality, though even to call it a question dignifies it beyond what it merits. There is no conceivable Congressional authorization — none, zero — to Biden's dropping of bombs in Syria. Obama's deployment of CIA operatives to Syria and years of the use of force to overthrow Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad never had any Congressional approval of any kind, nor did Trump's bombing of Assad's forces (urged by Hillary Clinton, who wanted more), nor does Biden's bombing campaign in Syria now. It was and is purely lawless, illegal. And the same is true of bombing Iraq. The 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq, which the House just last week voted to repeal, has long since ceased to provide any legal justification for ongoing US troop presence and bombing campaigns in that country.

In its statement justifying the bombing raids, Biden's Pentagon barely even bothered to pretend any of this is legal. It did not cite either the 2002 AUMF for Iraq or the 2001 AUMF authorizing the use of force against those responsible for 9/11 (a category which, manifestly, did not include Iran, Iraq or Syria). Instead, harkening back to the days of John Yoo and Dick Cheney, the Biden Defense Department claimed that “as a matter of international law, the United States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense,” and casually asserted that “as a matter of domestic law, the President took this action pursuant to his Article II authority to protect US personnel in Iraq."

Those claims are nothing short of a joke. Nobody seriously believes that Joe Biden has congressional authority to bomb Syria and Iraq, nor to bomb “Iranian-backed” forces of any kind. As The Daily Beast's long-time War on Terror reporter Spencer Ackerman put it on Sunday night, discussions of legality at this point are "parody” because when it comes to the US's Endless Wars in the name of the War on Terror, “we passed Lawful behind many many years ago. Authorization citations are just pretexts written by lawyers who need to pantomime at lawfulness. The US presence in Syria is blatantly illegal. Such things never stop the US”

Fair use excerpt. Read the rest here.

from Biden's Lawless Bombing of Iraq and Syria Only Serves the Weapons Industry Funding Both Parties

HMS Defender Versus The Russian Military: The Danger of Believing Your Own Propaganda

Less than two weeks after NATO members reaffirmed allegiance to Article 5 – that an attack on one member was an attack on all members – the UK nearly put that pledge to the test. In a shockingly provocative move, the UK’s HMS Defender purposely sailed into Crimean territorial waters on its way to Georgia.

Press reports suggest that there was a dispute between the UK defense and foreign ministries over whether to violate Russia’s claimed territorial waters with a heavily armed warship. According to reports, Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself jumped in to over-rule the more cautious Foreign Office in favor of confrontation.

As Johnson later claimed, because the UK (and the US) does not recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea, the UK was actually sailing through Ukrainian waters. It was an in-your-face move toward Russia just weeks after the US and NATO were forced to back down from a major clash with Russia in eastern Ukraine

This time, as was the case in eastern Ukraine, the Russians took a different view of the situation. Russian coast guard vessels ordered the HMS Defender to exit Russian territorial waters – an order they punctuated with rare live fire of cannon and dropping of bombs.

Having had their bluff called, the UK government did what all governments do best: it lied. The Russians did not shoot at a UK warship, they claimed. It was a previously-scheduled Russian military exercise in the area.

Unfortunately for the UK government, in its haste to create good propaganda about standing up to Russia, they had a BBC reporter on-board the Defender who spilled the beans: Yes, the Russian military did issue several warnings, yes it did buzz the HMS Defender multiple times, and yes there were shots fired in the Defender’s direction.

Similarly, in the spring, Russia rapidly deployed 75,000 troops on the border with Ukraine in response to a US-backed Ukrainian military build-up. The message was clear: Russia would no longer sit by as the US government and its allies intervened next door.

Russia now has demonstrated that it will protect Crimea, which voted in a 2014 referendum to re-join Russia. The Crimean vote was triggered by the US-backed coup in Ukraine. That is called “unintended consequences” of foreign interventionism.

The problem with the UK, the US, and their NATO allies is that they believe their own propaganda and they act accordingly. A famous 2004 quote attributed to George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove, clearly spelled out this line of thinking. Said Rove, “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

These two recent near-clashes with Russia demonstrate that the “reality” created by an almost religious belief in American or NATO exceptionalism can often crash hard against the reality of 75,000 troops or the Black Sea Fleet

The anti-Russia propaganda endlessly repeated by both political parties in Washington and amplified by the anti-Trump media for more than four years has completely saturated the Beltway and beyond. Even as the Russiagate conspiracy was proven to be a lie, the propaganda it spawned lives on.

Blustering Boris Johnson almost provoked a major war over an infantile desire to continue poking and prodding Russia in its own backyard. This time the war was averted, but what about next time? Will the adults ever be in charge?

from HMS Defender Versus The Russian Military: The Danger of Believing Your Own Propaganda

Report: United States Ranks Last In Media Trust

For years, we have been discussing the decline of journalism values with the rise of open bias in the media. Now, a newly released report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford has found something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The United States ranked dead last in media trust among 49 countries with just 29% saying that they trusted the media. The most tragic aspect is that it does not matter. The media has embraced the advocacy journalism and anyone questioning that trend risks instant cancellation. The result is a type of state media where journalists are bound to the government by ideology rather than law.

The plunging level of trust reflects the loss of the premier news organizations to a type of woke journalism. We have have been discussing how writers, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and his key advisers. Even journalists are leading attacks on free speech and the free press. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation.

Likewise, the University of North Carolina recently offered an academic chair in Journalism to New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. While Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her writing on The 1619 Project, she has been criticized for her role in purging dissenting views from the New York Times pages and embracing absurd anti-police conspiracy theories. Even waiting for the facts is viewed as unethical today by journalism professors who demand that reporters make political or social declarations through their coverage.

One of the lowest moments came with the New York Times’ mea culpa for publishing an opinion column by a conservative senator. The New York Times was denounced by many of us for its cringing apology after publishing a column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Ark.). and promising not to publish future such columns. It will not publish a column from a Republican senator on protests in the United States but it will publish columns from one of the Chinese leaders crushing protests for freedom in Hong Kong. Cotton was arguing that the use of national guard troops may be necessary to quell violent riots, noting the historical use of this option in past protests. This option was used most recently after the Capitol riot.

Almost on the one-year anniversary of its condemning its own publication of Cotton (and forcing out its own editor), the New York Times published an academic columnist who previously defended the killing of conservative protesters. Over at the Washington Post this week, the newspaper promoted a columnist, Karen Attiah, who last summer caused an outrage after she tweeted “White women are lucky that we are just calling them Karens. And not calling for revenge.”

Given this trend, it is little surprise that viewers no longer trust the media. They have watched as stories ranging from Hunter Biden to the origins of the pandemic have been aggressively censored by Big Tech and blacked out by journalists. The problem is that this echo journalism works for some in the media even if it ultimately destroys the profession as a whole. It is a journalistic version of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons where everyone acts for their immediate benefit as “the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.”

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from Report: United States Ranks Last In Media Trust

What is Behind Gen. Mark Milley's Righteous Race Sermon? Look to the New Domestic War on Terror.

For two hundred forty years, American generals have not exactly been defined by adamant public advocacy for left-wing cultural dogma. Yet there appeared to be a great awakening at the Pentagon on Wednesday when Gen. Mark Milley, the highest-ranking military officer in the US as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified at a House hearing. The Chairman vehemently defended the teaching of critical race theory at West Point and, referencing the January 6 Capitol riot, said, “it is important that we train and we understand ... and I want to understand white rage. And I'm white."

In response to conservative criticisms that top military officials should not be weighing in on inflammatory and polarizing cultural debates, liberals were ecstatic to have found such an empathetic, racially aware, and humanitarian general sitting atop the US imperial war machine. Overnight, Gen. Milley became a new hero for US liberalism, a noble military leader which — like former FBI Director Robert Mueller before him — no patriotic, decent American would question let alone mock. Some prominent liberal commentators warned that conservatives are now anti-military and even seek to defund the Pentagon.



It is, of course, possible that the top brass of the US military has suddenly become supremely enlightened on questions of racial strife and racial identity in the US, and thus genuinely embraced theories that, until very recently, were the exclusive province of left-wing scholars at elite academic institutions. Given that all US wars in the post-World War II era have been directed at predominantly non-white countries, which — like all wars — required a sustained demonization campaign of those enemy populations, having top Pentagon officials become leading anti-racism warriors would be quite a remarkable transformation indeed. But stranger things have happened, I suppose.

But perhaps there is another explanation other than righteous, earnest transformation as to why the top US General has suddenly expressed such keen interest in studying and exploring "white rage”. Note that Gen. Milley's justification for the military's sudden immersion in the study of modern race theories is the January 6 Capitol riot — which, in the lexicon of the US security state and American liberalism, is called The Insurrection. When explaining why it is so vital to study "white rage,” Gen. Milley argued:

What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind here, and I do want to analyze it.

The post-WW2 military posture of the US has been endless war. To enable that, there must always be an existential threat, a new and fresh enemy that can scare a large enough portion of the population with sufficient intensity to make them accept, even plead for, greater military spending, surveillance powers, and continuation of permanent war footing. Starring in that war-justifying role of villain have been the Communists, Al Qaeda, ISIS, Russia, and an assortment of other fleeting foreign threats.

According to the Pentagon, the US intelligence community, and President Joe Biden, none of those is the greatest national security threat to the United States any longer. Instead, they all say explicitly and in unison, the gravest menace to American national security is now domestic in nature. Specifically, it is "domestic extremists” in general — and far-right white supremacist groups in particular — that now pose the greatest threat to the safety of the homeland and to the people who reside in it.

In other words, to justify the current domestic War on Terror that has already provoked billions more in military spending and intensified domestic surveillance, the Pentagon must ratify the narrative that those they are fighting in order to defend the homeland are white supremacist domestic terrorists. That will not work if white supremacists are small in number or weak and isolated in their organizing capabilities. To serve the war machine's agenda, they must pose a grave, pervasive and systemic threat.

Viewed through that lens, it makes perfect sense that Gen. Milley is spouting the theories and viewpoints that underlie this war framework and which depicts white supremacy and "white rage” as a foundational threat to the American homeland. A new domestic War on Terror against white supremacists and right-wing extremists is far more justifiable if, as Gen. Milley strongly suggested, it was "white rage” that fueled an armed insurrection that, in the words of President Biden, is the greatest assault on American democracy since the Civil War.

Fair use excerpt. Read the whole article here.

from What is Behind Gen. Mark Milley's Righteous Race Sermon? Look to the New Domestic War on Terror.

The Deep State Defeat of Donald Trump

“The Trump–Deep State clash is a showdown between a presidency that is far too powerful versus federal agencies that have become fiefdoms with immunity for almost any and all abuses,” I wrote in an FFF article a year ago. Since then, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by fewer than 50,000 votes in a handful of swing states that determined the Electoral College result. There were numerous issues that could drive that relatively small number of votes. But machinations by the Deep State probably cost Trump far more votes than it took to seal his loss.

“The Deep State” commonly refers to officials who secretly wield power permanently in Washington, often in federal agencies with vast sway and little accountability. During Trump’s first impeachment, the establishment media exalted the Deep State. New York Times columnist James Stewart assured readers that the secretive agencies “work for the American people,” New York Times editorial writer Michelle Cottle hailed the Deep State as “a collection of patriotic public servants,” and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson captured the Beltway’s verdict: “God bless the Deep State!”

The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he had colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. The FBI launched its investigation on the basis of ludicrous allegations from a dossier financed by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. FBI officials deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign. A FISA warrant is the nuclear bomb of searches, authorizing the FBI “to conduct simultaneous telephone, microphone, cell phone, e-mail and computer surveillance of the US person target’s home, workplace and vehicles,” as well as “physical searches of the target’s residence, office, vehicles, computer, safe deposit box and US mails,” as a FISA court decision noted. The FISA court is extremely deferential, approving 99 percent of all search warrant requests.

Leaks from federal officials spurred media hysteria that put Trump on the defensive even before he took his oath of office in January 2017. A 2018 Inspector General (IG) report revealed that one FBI agent labeled Trump supporters as “retarded” and declared, “I’m with her” (Clinton). Another FBI employee texted that “Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS.” One FBI lawyer texted that he was “devastated” by Trump’s election and declared, “Viva la Resistance!” and “I never really liked the Republic anyway.” The same person became the “primary FBI attorney assigned to [the Russian election-interference] investigation beginning in early 2017,” the IG noted.

FBI chief James Comey leaked official memos to friendly reporters, thereby spurring the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Trump. A 2019 Inspector General report noted that top FBI officials told the IG that they were “shocked,” “stunned,” and “surprised’ that Comey would leak the contents of one of the memos to a reporter. The IG concluded, “The unauthorized disclosure of this information — information that Comey knew only by virtue of his position as FBI Director — violated the terms of his FBI Employment Agreement and the FBI’s Prepublication Review Policy.” The IG concluded that by using sensitive information “to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees — and the many thousands more former FBI employees — who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information.” The IG report warned that “the civil liberties of every individual who may fall within the scope of the FBI’s investigative authorities depend on FBI’s ability to protect sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure.” But the only penalty that Comey suffered was to collect multimillion-dollar advances for his book deals.

The Steele dossier

In December 2019, another Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made “fundamental
errors” to justify surveilling the Trump campaign. The FBI refrained from launching a FISA warrant request until it came into possession of a dossier from Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent. The Steele dossier played “a central and essential role in the decision by FBI [Office of General Counsel] to support the request for FISA surveillance targeting Carter Page, as well as the FBI’s ultimate decision to seek the FISA order,” the IG report concluded. The FBI “drew almost entirely” from the Steele dossier to prove a “well-developed conspiracy” between Russians and the Trump campaign. The IG found that FBI agents were “unable to corroborate any of the specific substantive allegations against Carter Page” in the Steele dossier but the FBI relied on Steele’s allegations regardless.

The FBI withheld from the FISA court key details that obliterated the dossier’s credibility, including a warning from a top Justice Department official that “Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the DNC [Democratic National Committee].” The CIA disdained the Steele dossier as “an internet rumor,” one FBI official told IG investigators.

Many if not most of the damning details involving Russiagate have still not been disclosed. But the occasional disclosures are doing nothing to burnish the credibility of the key players. On January 12, 2017, Comey attested to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that the Steele dossier used to hound the Trump campaign had been “verified.” But on the same day, he emailed the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, “We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting.” That email was revealed this past February, thanks to a multi-year fight for disclosure by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

If the FBI’s deceit and political biases had been exposed in real time, there would have been far less national outrage when Trump fired Comey. Instead, that firing was quickly followed by the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Russian charges. In April 2019, Mueller admitted there was no evidence of collusion. Conniving by FBI officials and the veil of secrecy that hid their abuses had roiled national politics for years.

Not one FBI official has spent a single day in jail for the abuses. In January, former FBI assistant general counsel Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced after he admitted falsifying key evidence used to secure the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. A federal prosecutor declared that the “resulting harm is immeasurable” from Clinesmith’s action. But a federal judge believed that a wrist slap was sufficient punishment — 400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation.

The Deep State defeated Trump in part because the president appointed agency chiefs who were more devoted to secrecy than to truth. Bureaucratic barricades were reinforced by judges who repeatedly defied common sense to perpetuate iron curtains around federal agencies.

Syria

Trump’s failure to extract the United States from the Syrian civil war was one of his biggest foreign policy pratfalls. Each time he sought to exit that quagmire, the Washington establishment and Deep State agencies pushed back.

When Trump tried to end CIA assistance to Syrian terrorist groups in July 2017, a Washington Post article portrayed his reversal in apocalyptic terms. Trump responded with an angry tweet: “The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad.” That disclosure spurred a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the New York Times for CIA records on payments to Syrian rebel groups. The CIA denied the request and the case ended up in court.

CIA officer Antoinette Shiner warned the court that forcing the CIA to admit that it possessed any records of aiding Syrian rebels would “confirm the existence and the focus of sensitive Agency activity that is by definition kept hidden to protect US government policy objectives.” Of course, “kept hidden” doesn’t apply to the CIA when it was engaged in “not for attribution” bragging to reporters. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius proudly cited an estimate from a “knowledgeable official” that “CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years.”

Federal judges, unlike Syrian civilians slaughtered by US-funded terrorist groups, had the luxury of pretending the program didn’t exist. In a decision last July, the federal appeals court of the Second Circuit stressed that affidavits from CIA officials are “accorded a presumption of good faith” and stressed “the appropriate deference owed” to the CIA. The judges omitted quoting former CIA chief Mike Pompeo’s description of his agency’s modus operandi: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s like we had entire training courses.”

Since Trump’s tweet did not specifically state that the program he was seeking to terminate actually existed, the judges entitled the CIA to pretend it was still top secret. The judges concluded with another kowtow, stressing that they were “mindful of the requisite deference courts traditionally owe to the executive in the area of classification.” Judge Robert Katzmann dissented, declaring that the court’s decision put its “imprimatur to a fiction of deniability that no reasonable person would regard as plausible.”

On February 9, another federal appeals court shot down a FOIA request from BuzzFeed journalist Jason Leopold who had sought the same records on the basis of Trump’s tweet. But the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia unanimously blocked Leopold’s request: “Did President Trump’s tweet officially acknowledge the existence of a program? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. And therein lies a problem.” The judges proffered no evidence that Trump had tweeted about a program that didn’t exist. The judges reached into an “Alice in Wonderland” bag of legal tricks and plucked out this pretext: “Even if the President’s tweet revealed some program, it did not reveal the existence of Agency records about that alleged program.” Since Trump failed to specify the exact room number where the records were located at CIA headquarters, the judges entitled the CIA to pretend the records didn’t exist.

Only a federal judge could shovel that kind of hokum. Well, also members of Congress and editorial writers, but that’s a story for another month.

In his final months in office, Trump repeatedly promised massive declassification which never came. Was the president stymied by persons he had unwisely appointed, such as CIA chief Gina Haspel and FBI chief Christopher Wray? Or was that simply another series of empty Twitter eruptions that Trump failed to follow up? Instead, his legacy is another grim reminder of how government secrecy can determine political history.

Have Deep State federal agencies become a Godzilla with the prerogative to undermine elections? Unfortunately, there’s no chance that federal judges would permit disclosure of the answer to that question. Former CIA and NSA boss Michael Hayden proudly proclaimed, ““Espionage is not just compatible with democracy; it’s essential for democracy.” And how can we know if the Deep State’s espionage is actually pro-democracy or subversive of democracy? Again, don’t expect judges to permit any truths to escape on that score.

Secrecy is the ultimate entitlement program for the Deep State. The federal government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The more documents bureaucrats classify, the more lies politicians and government officials can tell. Federal judge Amy Berman Jackson warned in 2019, “If people don’t have the facts, democracy doesn’t work.” Actually, it is working very well for the FBI, CIA, and other Deep State agencies.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from The Deep State Defeat of Donald Trump

Fauci and the Biden Admin are Purposely Deceiving us About the 'Delta Variant' Threat

Prominent actors within the US government have been lying to the American people about COVID-19 for 18 months and counting, and their latest behavior shows that the individuals in charge of US Government Science have no intention of stopping the charade anytime soon. Over time, their lies have evolved to become so common and so reckless to the point that someone with even the most rudimentary understanding of viruses can instantly debunk the lies. The latest “Delta variant” paranoia peddling has put their incompetence, deliberate spreading of falsehoods, and perpetual gaslighting of their own citizens on display for the world to see.

The Biden Administration, through lifelong government bureaucrat Anthony Fauci, is making a hard push to fear monger about the supposed dangers posed by the “Delta variant” of the virus that causes COVID-19.

A video posted from the White House account made the rounds Thursday morning, stating:

“Here’s the deal: The Delta variant is more contagious, it’s deadlier, and it’s spreading quickly around the world – leaving young, unvaccinated people more vulnerable than ever. Please, get vaccinated if you haven’t already. Let’s head off this strain before it’s too late.”

Here’s the deal: The Delta variant is more contagious, it’s deadlier, and it’s spreading quickly around the world – leaving young, unvaccinated people more vulnerable than ever. Please, get vaccinated if you haven’t already. Let’s head off this strain before it’s too late. pic.twitter.com/9gBeRpvCe8

— President Biden (@POTUS) June 24, 2021

Fauci has been on a media tear this week hyping up the threat of the Delta variant.

The Delta variant of the novel coronavirus that was first found in India is the greatest threat to the United States’ effort to eradicate COVID-19 in its borders, Dr. Anthony Fauci said https://t.co/Bp1XcMurn3 pic.twitter.com/eaWWrb0YlS

— Reuters (@Reuters) June 22, 2021

Sometimes it’s easy to reflexively dismiss these warnings of doom and gloom as total nonsense, especially when they are in fact total, bald-faced nonsense.

(Check out this video from Ivor Cummins breaking down how the Delta variant, previously referred to as the Indian variant, is nothing more than a “political scariant.”)

The #DeltaDeceit gets going in Ireland, at the behest of #ISAG #NPHET #BigPharma - see vid in reply tweet for explanation:
https://t.co/X4YKVCJp2f

— Ivor Cummins (@FatEmperor) June 24, 2021

First of all, it goes against all understanding of 101 concepts for a virus to mutate to become both more contagious and more deadly. If a virus becomes more contagious, it spreads faster but does not kill off its host. If a virus becomes more deadly, it doesn’t spread as fast because it has taken out its host. In fact, the best evidence we have on the Delta variant shows that it is probably less deadly than previous mutations. And it’s always good to remember that we’re talking about a disease that sports an original recovery rate well over 99%.

Agree @EricTopol virus can't mutate to be more fit and more virulent. Think we've reached peak fitness. I try to explain in thread here. A silly example I've used -if you evolve a hand on top of your head to grasp more, you can't wear a hat- tradeoffshttps://t.co/kxRJBhSzNe https://t.co/lTVod6R547

— Monica Gandhi MD, MPH (@MonicaGandhi9) June 21, 2021

Horowitz: The Delta deception: New COVID variant might be less deadly https://t.co/ssm8X3PBbc

— Daniel Horowitz (@RMConservative) June 24, 2021

Second, the idea that human intervention can “head off” a strain is an idea straight out of “COVID Zero” (the idea that you can eliminate the virus from this earth) pseudoscience playbook. Fauci and the gang are by no means brilliant minds, but they are well aware that they cannot eliminate a virus from circulation. This makes it obvious that there is are several ulterior motives in play, none of which have anything to do with our health.

Outside of academic models (we all know how well those held up in the past with lockdowns, masks, etc), there is no hard evidence anywhere in the world that this Delta variant is any more or less dangerous than any other mutation of the virus. In fact, the statistics on this variant shows no particular reason for alarm. Yet the government is — let me know if this sounds familiar — baselessly making stuff up about a virus based on absolutely zero real world data.

India, where the Delta variant originated, has seen COVID cases decline 85% from the peak several weeks ago while it was the dominant strain. As of June 22, the country had fully vaccinated only 3.8% of the population. pic.twitter.com/NVut6B5xLk

— Don Wolt (@tlowdon) June 23, 2021

More contagious AND deadlier?

According to what data? https://t.co/qm2dR16aoy pic.twitter.com/MhGv6tmSsF

— Hold2 (@Hold2LLC) June 24, 2021

Since the beginning of COVID Mania, the government has never been on the side of science, evidence, and data. From the infamous Gates-funded panic models and fraudulent Chinese government “science” that encouraged the world to lock down indefinitely, to the absurd “studies” about the efficacy of masks, this latest Delta variant scaremongering has once again put their lies on display for the world to see. Given the almost two years of immunity building related to the virus, the threat posed by COVID-19 at this point in time is virtually nonexistent. There never was a legitimate reasons for a single restriction on our liberties, and today, the “delta variant” argument to curb our rights and transform our society is more baseless than ever before.

Reprinted with permission from The Dossier.
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from Fauci and the Biden Admin are Purposely Deceiving us About the 'Delta Variant' Threat

Biden 'Confesses' - There Was No Insurrection!

While not long ago President Biden claimed the unarmed crowd that entered the US Capitol building was the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War, yesterday he told gun owners they'd need F-15s and nuclear weapons if they wanted to overthrow the government. So...what gives? Also today: CDC says Covid deaths now "preventable" and cases of post-vaccine heart inflammation skyrocket. Watch today's Liberty Report:



from Biden 'Confesses' - There Was No Insurrection!

Who Is A 'Terrorist' In Biden’s America?

In the latest sign that the US government’s War on Domestic Terror is growing in scope and scale, the White House on Tuesday revealed the nation’s first ever government-wide strategy for confronting domestic terrorism. While cloaked in language about stemming racially motivated violence, the strategy places those deemed “anti-government” or “anti-authority” on a par with racist extremists and charts out policies that could easily be abused to silence or even criminalize online criticism of the government.

Even more disturbing is the call to essentially fuse intelligence agencies, law enforcement, Silicon Valley, and “community” and “faith-based” organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, as well as unspecified foreign governments, as partners in this “war,” which the strategy makes clear will rely heavily on a pre-crime orientation focused largely on what is said on social media and encrypted platforms. Though the strategy claims that the government will “shield free speech and civil liberties” in implementing this policy, its contents reveal that it is poised to gut both.

Indeed, while framed publicly as chiefly targeting “right-wing white supremacists,” the strategy itself makes it clear that the government does not plan to focus on the Right but instead will pursue “domestic terrorists” in “an ideologically neutral, threat-driven manner,” as the law “makes no distinction based on political view—left, right or center.” It also states that a key goal of this strategic framework is to ensure “that there is simply no governmental tolerance . . . of violence as an acceptable mode of seeking political or social change,” regardless of a perpetrator’s political affiliation. 

Considering that the main cheerleaders for the War on Domestic Terror exist mainly in establishment left circles, such individuals should rethink their support for this new policy given that the above statements could easily come to encompass Black Lives Matter–related protests, such as those that transpired last summer, depending on which political party is in power. 

Once the new infrastructure is in place, it will remain there and will be open to the same abuses perpetrated by both political parties in the US during the lengthy War on Terror following September 11, 2001. The history of this new “domestic terror” policy, including its origins in the Trump administration, makes this clear.

It’s Never Been Easier to Be a 'Terrorist'

In introducing the strategy, the Biden administration cites “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” as a key reason for the new policy and a main justification for the War on Domestic Terror in general. This was most recently demonstrated Tuesday in Attorney General Merrick Garland’s statement announcing this new strategy. However, the document itself puts “anti-government” or “anti-authority” “extremists” in the same category as violent white supremacists in terms of being a threat to the homeland. The strategy’s characterization of such individuals is unsettling.

AG Merrick Garland: “In the FBI’s view, the top domestic violent extremist threat comes from racially or ethically motivated violent extremists specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race.”
pic.twitter.com/4JtruuMSv2

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 15, 2021

For instance, those who “violently oppose” “all forms of capitalism” or “corporate globalization” are listed under this less-discussed category of “domestic terrorist.” This highlights how people on the left, many of whom have called for capitalism to be dismantled or replaced in the US in recent years, could easily be targeted in this new “war” that many self-proclaimed leftists are currently supporting. Similarly, “environmentally-motivated extremists,” a category in which groups such as Extinction Rebellion could easily fall, are also included. 

In addition, the phrasing indicates that it could easily include as “terrorists” those who oppose the World Economic Forum’s vision for global “stakeholder capitalism,” as that form of “capitalism” involves corporations and their main “stakeholders” creating a new global economic and governance system. The WEF’s stakeholder capitalism thus involves both “capitalism” and “corporate globalization.” 

The strategy also includes those who “take steps to violently resist government authority . . . based on perceived overreach.” This, of course, creates a dangerous situation in which the government could, purposely or otherwise, implement a policy that is an obvious overreach and/or blatantly unconstitutional and then label those who resist it “domestic terrorists” and deal with them as such—well before the overreach can be challenged in court.

Another telling addition to this group of potential “terrorists” is “any other individual or group who engages in violence—or incites imminent violence—in opposition to legislative, regulatory or other actions taken by the government.” Thus, if the government implements a policy that a large swath of the population finds abhorrent, such as launching a new, unpopular war abroad, those deemed to be “inciting” resistance to the action online could be considered domestic terrorists. 

Such scenarios are not unrealistic, given the loose way in which the government and the media have defined things like “incitement” and even “violence” (e. g., “hate speech” is a form of violence) in the recent past. The situation is ripe for manipulation and abuse. To think the federal government (including the Biden administration and subsequent administrations) would not abuse such power reflects an ignorance of US political history, particularly when the main forces behind most terrorist incidents in the nation are actually US government institutions like the FBI (more FBI examples here, here, here, and here).

Furthermore, the original plans for the detention of American dissidents in the event of a national emergency, drawn up during the Reagan era as part of its “continuity of government” contingency, cited popular nonviolent opposition to US intervention in Latin America as a potential “emergency” that could trigger the activation of those plans. Many of those “continuity of government” protocols remain on the books today and can be triggered, depending on the whims of those in power. It is unlikely that this new domestic terror framework will be any different regarding nonviolent protest and demonstrations.

Yet another passage in this section of the strategy states that “domestic terrorists” can, “in some instances, connect and intersect with conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation and misinformation.” It adds that the proliferation of such “dangerous” information “on Internet-based communications platforms such as social media, file-upload sites and end-to-end encrypted platforms, all of these elements can combine and amplify threats to public safety.” 

Thus, the presence of “conspiracy theories” and information deemed by the government to be “misinformation” online is itself framed as threatening public safety, a claim made more than once in this policy document. Given that a major “pillar” of the strategy involves eliminating online material that promotes “domestic terrorist” ideologies, it seems inevitable that such efforts will also “connect and intersect” with the censorship of “conspiracy theories” and narratives that the establishment finds inconvenient or threatening for any reason. 

Pillars of Tyranny

The strategy notes in several places that this new domestic-terror policy will involve a variety of public-private partnerships in order to “build a community to address domestic terrorism that extends not only across the Federal Government but also to critical partners.” It adds, “That includes state, local, tribal and territorial governments, as well as foreign allies and partners, civil society, the technology sector, academic, and more.” 

The mention of foreign allies and partners is important as it suggests a multinational approach to what is supposedly a US “domestic” issue and is yet another step toward a transnational security-state apparatus. A similar multinational approach was used to devastating effect during the CIA-developed Operation Condor, which was used to target and “disappear” domestic dissidents in South America in the 1970s and 1980s. The foreign allies mentioned in the Biden administration’s strategy are left unspecified, but it seems likely that such allies would include the rest of the Five Eyes alliance (the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand) and Israel, all of which already have well-established information-sharing agreements with the US for signals intelligence.

The new domestic-terror strategy has four main “pillars,” which can be summarized as (1) understanding and sharing domestic terrorism-related information, including with foreign governments and private tech companies; (2) preventing domestic terrorism recruitment and mobilization to violence; (3) disrupting and deterring domestic terrorism activity; and (4) confronting long-term contributors to domestic terrorism.

The first pillar involves the mass accumulation of data through new information-sharing partnerships and the deepening of existing ones. Much of this information sharing will involve increased data mining and analysis of statements made openly on the internet, particularly on social media, something already done by US intelligence contractors such as Palantir. While the gathering of such information has been ongoing for years, this policy allows even more to be shared and legally used to make cases against individuals deemed to have made threats or expressed “dangerous” opinions online. 

Included in the first pillar is the need to increase engagement with financial institutions concerning the financing of “domestic terrorists.” US banks, such as Bank of America, have already gone quite far in this regard, leading to accusations that it has begun acting like an intelligence agency. Such claims were made after it was revealed that the BofA had passed to the government the private banking information of over two hundred people that the bank deemed as pointing to involvement in the events of January 6, 2021. It seems likely, given this passage in the strategy, that such behavior by banks will soon become the norm, rather than an outlier, in the United States. 

The second pillar is ostensibly focused on preventing the online recruitment of domestic terrorists and online content that leads to the “mobilization of violence.” The strategy notes that this pillar “means reducing both supply and demand of recruitment materials by limiting widespread availability online and bolstering resilience to it by those who nonetheless encounter it.“ The strategy states that such government efforts in the past have a “mixed record,” but it goes on to claim that trampling on civil liberties will be avoided because the government is “consulting extensively” with unspecified “stakeholders” nationwide.

Regarding recruitment, the strategy states that “these activities are increasingly happening on Internet-based communications platforms, including social media, online gaming platforms, file-upload sites and end-to-end encrypted platforms, even as those products and services frequently offer other important benefits.” It adds that “the widespread availability of domestic terrorist recruitment material online is a national security threat whose front lines are overwhelmingly private-sector online platforms.” 

The US government plans to provide “information to assist online platforms with their own initiatives to enforce their own terms of service that prohibits the use of their platforms for domestic terrorist activities” as well as to “facilitate more robust efforts outside the government to counter terrorists’ abuse of Internet-based communications platforms.” 

Given the wider definition of “domestic terrorist” that now includes those who oppose capitalism and corporate globalization as well as those who resist government overreach, online content discussing these and other “anti-government” and “anti-authority” ideas could soon be treated in the same way as online Al Qaeda or ISIS propaganda. Efforts, however, are unlikely to remain focused on these topics. As Unlimited Hangout reported last November, both UK intelligence and the US national-security state were developing plans to treat critical reporting on the COVID-19 vaccines as “extremist” propaganda.

Another key part of this pillar is the need to “increase digital literacy” among the American public, while censoring “harmful content” disseminated by “terrorists” as well as by “hostile foreign powers seeking to undermine American democracy.” The latter is a clear reference to the claim that critical reporting of US government policy, particularly its military and intelligence activities abroad, was the product of “Russian disinformation,” a now discredited claim that was used to heavily censor independent media. This new government strategy appears to promise more of this sort of thing. 

It also notes that “digital literacy” education for a domestic audience is being developed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Such a policy would have previously violated US law until the Obama administration worked with Congress to repeal the Smith-Mundt Act, thus lifting the ban on the government directing propaganda at domestic audiences. 

The third pillar of the strategy seeks to increase the number of federal prosecutors investigating and trying domestic-terror cases. Their numbers are likely to jump as the definition of “domestic terrorist” is expanded. It also seeks to explore whether “legislative reforms could meaningfully and materially increase our ability to protect Americans from acts of domestic terrorism while simultaneously guarding against potential abuse of overreach.” In contrast to past public statements on police reform by those in the Biden administration, the strategy calls to “empower” state and local law enforcement to tackle domestic terrorism, including with increased access to “intelligence” on citizens deemed dangerous or subversive for any number of reasons.

To that effect, the strategy states the following (p. 24):

The Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Homeland Security, with support from the National Counterterrorism Center [part of the intelligence community], are incorporating an increased focus on domestic terrorism into current intelligence products and leveraging current mechanisms of information and intelligence sharing to improve the sharing of domestic terrorism-related content and indicators with non-Federal partners. These agencies are also improving the usability of their existing information-sharing platforms, including through the development of mobile applications designed to provide a broader reach to non-Federal law enforcement partners, while simultaneously refining that support based on partner feedback.

Such an intelligence tool could easily be, for example, Palantir, which is already used by the intelligence agencies, the DHS, and several US police departments for “predictive policing,” that is, pre-crime actions. Notably, Palantir has long included a “subversive” label for individuals included on government and law enforcement databases, a parallel with the controversial and highly secretive Main Core database of US dissidents. 

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made the “pre-crime” element of the new domestic terror strategy explicit on Tuesday when he said in a statement that DHS would continue “developing key partnerships with local stakeholders through the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) to identify potential threats and prevent terrorism.” CP3, which replaced DHS’ Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention this past May, officially “supports communities across the United States to prevent individuals from radicalizing to violence and intervene when individuals have already radicalized to violence.” 

The fourth pillar of the strategy is by far the most opaque and cryptic, while also the most far-reaching. It aims to address the sources that cause “terrorists” to mobilize “towards violence.” This requires “tackling racism in America,” a lofty goal for an administration headed by the man who controversially eulogized Congress’ most ardent segregationist and who was a key architect of the 1994 crime bill. As well, it provides for “early intervention and appropriate care for those who pose a danger to themselves or others.”

In regard to the latter proposal, the Trump administration, in a bid to “stop mass shootings before they occur,” considered a proposal to create a “health DARPA” or “HARPA” that would monitor the online communications of everyday Americans for “neuropsychiatric” warning signs that someone might be “mobilizing towards violence.” While the Trump administration did not create HARPA or adopt this policy, the Biden administration has recently announced plans to do so.

Finally, the strategy indicates that this fourth pillar is part of a “broader priority”: “enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.” In other words, fostering trust in government while simultaneously censoring “polarizing” voices who distrust or criticize the government is a key policy goal behind the Biden administration’s new domestic-terror strategy. 

Calling Their Shots?

While this is a new strategy, its origins lie in the Trump administration. In October 2019, Trump’s attorney general William Barr formally announced in a memorandum that a new “national disruption and early engagement program” aimed at detecting those “mobilizing towards violence” before they commit any crime would launch in the coming months. That program, known as DEEP (Disruption and Early Engagement Program), is now active and has involved the Department of Justice, the FBI, and “private sector partners” since its creation.

Barr’s announcement of DEEP followed his unsettling “prediction” in July 2019 that “a major incident may occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.” Not long after that speech, a spate of mass shootings occurred, including the El Paso Walmart shooting, which killed twenty-three and about which many questions remain unanswered regarding the FBI’s apparent foreknowledge of the event. After these events took place in 2019, Trump called for the creation of a government backdoor into encryption and the very pre-crime system that Barr announced shortly thereafter in October 2019. The Biden administration, in publishing this strategy, is merely finishing what Barr started.

Indeed, a “prediction” like Barr’s in 2019 was offered by the DHS’ Elizabeth Neumann during a Congressional hearing in late February 2020. That hearing was largely ignored by the media as it coincided with an international rise of concern regarding COVID-19. At the hearing, Neumann, who previously coordinated the development of the government’s post-9/11 terrorism information sharing strategies and policies and worked closely with the intelligence community, gave the following warning about an imminent “domestic terror” event in the United States:

And every counterterrorism professional I speak to in the federal government and overseas feels like we are at the doorstep of another 9/11, maybe not something that catastrophic in terms of the visual or the numbers, but that we can see it building and we don’t quite know how to stop it.

This “another 9/11” emerged on January 6, 2021, as the events of that day in the Capitol were quickly labeled as such by both the media and prominent politicians, while also inspiring calls from the White House and the Democrats for a “9/11-style commission” to investigate the incident. This event, of course, figures prominently in the justification for the new domestic-terror strategy, despite the considerable video and other evidence that shows that Capitol law enforcement, and potentially the FBI, were directly involved in facilitating the breach of the Capitol. In addition, when one considers that the QAnon movement, which had a clear role in the events of January 6, was itself likely a government-orchestrated psyop, the government hand in creating this situation seems clear. 

It goes without saying that the official reasons offered for these militaristic “domestic terror” policies, which the US has already implemented abroad—causing much more terror than it has prevented—does not justify the creation of a massive new national-security infrastructure that aims to criminalize and censor online speech. Yet the admission that this new strategy, as part of a broader effort to “enhance faith in government,” combines domestic propaganda campaigns with the censorship and pursuit of those who distrust government heralds the end of even the illusion of democracy in the United States.

Reprinted with permission from UnlimitedHangout.com.

from Who Is A 'Terrorist' In Biden’s America?

RPI's McAdams: US Website Seizures 'Act of a Tyrant'

RPI Director Daniel McAdams appeared on RT International today to discuss yesterday's US government seizure of more than 30 news websites in Iran and the Middle East including at least one in "ally" Iraq. While the US talks up its support for press freedom internationally, this seizure demonstrates that the only press considered "free" by the US government is the press that praises the US government. Watch the interview here:

Read the full report by clicking the title, below...

from http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2021/june/23/rpis-mcadams-us-website-seizures-act-of-a-tyrant/

Was It Something I Said? The WHO Backtracks on Its Advice Children Not be Given Experimental Coronavirus Vaccine Shots, the Day after I Wrote about the Advice.

On Monday, I wrote about the World Health Organization (WHO) recommending at its website that children not be given experimental coronavirus vaccine shots, a position I noted is diametrically opposed to that of national, state, and local governments in America that are putting out much effort to give the shots to as many children — ages 12 and up so far — as possible. The next day, the WHO website section dealing with experimental coronavirus vaccine shots for children was extensively revised. ...

Read the full report by clicking the title, below...

from http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2021/june/23/was-it-something-i-said-the-who-backtracks-on-its-advice-children-not-be-given-experimental-coronavirus-vaccine-shots-the-day-after-i-wrote-about-the-advice/

Freedom Of Press? US Govt. Seizes Dozens Of Foreign News Websites

Apparently the "rules-based order" that the Biden Administration touts does not apply to the United States, as the Justice Department announced yesterday it was seizing the websites of dozens of foreign news outlets, including the Iranian government-funded PressTV. Is taking down foreign news sites a good look for the US? This and more on today's Liberty Report:



from Freedom Of Press? US Govt. Seizes Dozens Of Foreign News Websites

Libertarians and the Drug War

With June 2021 being the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” an ever-increasing number of editorials and op-eds are calling for an end to the drug war. This is an extremely positive sign, not only because it brings America closer to ending this evil, immoral, and destructive government program, but also because it shows the power of ideas on liberty.

The intellectual climate was entirely different back in 1989, when I started The Future of Freedom Foundation. Back then, it was mostly only libertarians who were calling for an end to the drug war — and not all libertarians at that. The idea of drug legalization was considered weird, bizarre, and beyond the pale of legitimate discourse. People were simply not ready to hear such a radical message. 

After all, the argument went, anyone who favored drug legalization obviously favored drug use and drug abuse. People simply could not understand that advocating an end to the drug war did not necessarily connote support of drugs themselves.

Back then, I was appearing on lots of talk-radio programs. I knew that I could always light up the phone lines by calling for drug legalization. People were outraged that anyone could possibly favor such a position. 

I was once invited to deliver a talk on libertarianism to a libertarian club at a public high school in Houston. Parents of a student in the club learned that I favored drug legalization. They called a member of the school board, who called the principal, who called the club’s sponsor, who called me. You would have thought that World War III had broken out. 

In the end, they let me deliver my talk, which included the case for legalizing drugs. I emphasized both the moral and the utilitarian case for drug legalization. I said that a free society necessarily is one in which people are free to ingest whatever they want to ingest, no matter how harmful. I also pointed out the horrific consequences of the drug war, especially in terms of drug gangs and drug cartels, just like when booze was criminalized.

The girl whose parents made the call to the school board, was in the audience. So were her parents. I can only imagine how embarrassed she must have been. During the Q&A session, one student raised his hand and asked, “Why is it that some people are so scared to consider different ideas?” Before I could answer, another student responded, “It’s what happens to you when you get old.”

We devoted the April 1990 issue of our journal Future of Freedom, which was then called Freedom Daily, to the drug war. Included in that issue was a reprint of an article by Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning libertarian economist, entitled “An Open Letter to Bill Bennett,” which had appeared in the September 7, 1989, issue of the Wall Street Journal.

As the federal government’s so-called drug czar at that time, Bennett was charged with enforcing the drug war. Friedman beseeched him to bring an end to the drug-war insanity. The article is well worth reading today. It is a perfect indictment of the war on drugs, even though written more than 30 years ago. Friedman wrote:

Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.

Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.

That wasn’t the first time Friedman advocated an end to the drug war. Back in 1972, the year after Nixon declared his war on drugs, Friedman wrote an article entitled “Prohibition and Drugs,” which appeared in the May 1, 1972, issue of Newsweek. That article is also well worth reading today. Friedman wrote:

Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?…. In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion and example are likely to be far more effective than the use of force to shape others in our image.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning what John Erlichmann, Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, said about the drug war, according to author Dan Baum in an article in Harper’s Magazine:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

For the past 50 years, libertarians have been leading the way toward ending this horrific government program. Today, the drug war is teetering, held in place mostly by the people who are benefiting from it, i.e., drug lords and drug-enforcement personnel. The progress is a testament to the power of ideas on liberty and to the importance of adhering to principle when it comes to advancing liberty. Let’s keep pushing until we see the end of this evil, immoral, failed, and destructive government program.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from Libertarians and the Drug War

So Much Of What The CIA Used To Do Covertly It Now Does Overtly

In the later years of an abusive relationship I was in, my abuser had become so confident in how mentally caged he had me that he’d start overtly telling me what he is and what he was doing. He flat-out told me he was a sociopath and a manipulator, trusting that I was so submitted to his will by that point that I’d gaslight myself into reframing those statements in a sympathetic light. Toward the end one time he told me “I am going to rape you,” and then he did, and then he talked about it to some friends trusting that I’d run perception management on it for him.

The better he got at psychologically twisting me up in knots and the more submitted I became, the more open he’d be about it. He seemed to enjoy doing this, taking a kind of exhibitionistic delight in showing off his accomplishments at crushing me as a person, both to others and to me. Like it was his art, and he wanted it to have an audience to appreciate it.

I was reminded of this while watching a recent Fox News appearance by Glenn Greenwald where he made an observation we’ve discussed here previously about the way the CIA used to have to infiltrate the media, but now just openly has US intelligence veterans in mainstream media punditry positions managing public perception.



“If you go and Google, and I hope your viewers do, Operation Mockingbird, what you will find is that during the Cold War these agencies used to plot how to clandestinely manipulate the news media to disseminate propaganda to the American population,” Greenwald said. “They used to try to do it secretly. They don’t even do it secretly anymore. They don’t need Operation Mockingbird. They literally put John Brennan who works for NBC and James Clapper who works for CNN and tons of FBI agents right on the payroll of these news organizations. They now shape the news openly to manipulate and to deceive the American population.”

In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird. It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.

Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and the public is too brainwashed and gaslit to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits. The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor, and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.

They’re just rubbing it in our faces now. Like they’re showing off.

Bellingcat got funding from the US gov-funded NED. It acts like an unofficial NATO propagandist, obsessively focusing on Western enemies. pic.twitter.com/DDegClagkj

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) June 25, 2017

And that’s just the media. We also see this flaunting behavior exhibited in the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a propaganda operation geared at sabotaging foreign governments not aligned with the US which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. The late author and commentator William Blum makes this clear:

[I]n 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to “support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts”. Notice the “nongovernmental” — part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.

“We should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”

And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

We see NED’s fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang to the imperial propaganda operation known as Bellingcat.

"The U.S. had financed some of the protester groups through the CIA aligned National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Technology Fund. If the U.S. wants to continue instigating unrest in Hong Kong it must now move those programs to the CIA and distribute the money secretly." https://t.co/kpmcikpjb1

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) July 1, 2020

To further #humanrights & human dignity for all people in China, the National Endowment for Democracy has funded Uyghur groups since 2004. #NEDemocracy #HumanRightsDay https://t.co/C0LJEyWxq1 pic.twitter.com/OqZdehdxXN

— NEDemocracy (@NEDemocracy) December 10, 2020

Hell, intelligence insiders are just openly running for office now. In an article titled “The CIA Democrats in the 2020 elections”, World Socialist Website documented the many veterans of the US intelligence cartel who ran in elections across America in 2018 and 2020:

“In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 50 congressional seats — nearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements. Some 30 of these candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one quarter of the 40 previously Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, the intervention of the CIA Democrats continues on what is arguably an equally significant scale.”

So they’re just getting more and more brazen the more confident they feel about how propaganda-addled and submissive the population has become. They’re laying more and more of their cards on the table. Soon the CIA will just be openly selling narcotics door to door like Girl Scout cookies.

Or maybe not. I said my ex got more and more overt about his abuses in the later years of our relationship because those were the later years. I did eventually expand my own consciousness of my own inner workings enough to clear the fears and unexamined beliefs I had that he was using as hooks to manipulate me. Maybe, as humanity’s consciousness continues to expand, the same will happen for the people and their abusive relationship with the CIA.

Reprinted from Medium.com with author's permission.
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from So Much Of What The CIA Used To Do Covertly It Now Does Overtly