Dr. Deborah Birx’s Failed Attempt to Flip the Script

Every report we have, from journalists and from first-hand accounts from people who were there, reveal that Dr. Deborah Birx – White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator – had a primary influence on President Donald Trump in his decisions to lockdown the economy. She is culpable for initiating one of the biggest fails in the history of public health, wrecking the lives of countless numbers of people.

Her idea, to which the US president was an early convert, was to mandate extreme measures, ending freedom of association in civic life, in order to contain and perhaps suppress a virus (or save the health system or flatten the curve or stop the spread or…something). It did not work. All over the world, there is no evidence that these lockdowns achieved anything but economic, social, cultural, and mass psychological destruction. 

Today she is working not only to evade personal responsibility but to pass the buck onto others who actually worked to repair the damage she created in the most destructive role of her long career in government. 

In testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, October 12-13, 2021, she shamelessly told high tales of her own heroism, how actual public-health experts who arrived later tried to undermine her, and how once Trump started ignoring her crankish and radical views, he thereby killed more than a hundred thousand of people. 

She testified that if Trump had continued to follow her prescriptions, “we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30 percent less to 40 percent less range.” 

Notice the fake precision here, without a shred of evidence. On the other hand, we have vast evidence of the epic failure of lockdowns. 

She makes some very serious charges, while evading responsibility for her central role in the egregiously botched response. Birx not only pushed Trump to enact lockdowns. She personally called health officials in every state and demanded that they do the same. And did this for months. They complied based on her position and authority. 

Birx spoke at length at the fateful March 16, 2020 press conference – alongside Anthony Fauci (“he was my mentor”) – that announced the lockdowns. She pushed a wholly new and deeply dystopian social system of universal human separation: “we really want people to be separated at this time.”

She got her way. Not only for two weeks, as was initially promised, but for months and finally for 20 months in many places. That the US locked down in March 2020 also inspired many governments around the world to follow this strategy that began in China. Billions around the world have suffered grave harm. And even on the one metric that mattered to her – suppression of this one virus – the whole thing flopped to an extent that was previously unimaginable. 

As Scott Atlas has said, it makes sense (in our times when ethics mean next to nothing for public officials) that instead of apologizing that she would want to push the blame on others, simply because she bears so much responsibility for what happened in people’s lives. But rather than admit it, she deflected and blamed others. She even named Atlas himself and says that she stopped attending any meeting where he was present. This was not because she was protesting; it’s because he was up on the science and she was not. She didn’t desire to be embarrassed by that fact. 

Let us firmly establish that it was Birx who was most influential in talking Trump into betraying his every instinct. Two Washington Post reporters have documented this in their book Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History. They report that she initially refused the invitation to join the White House Task Force. And why? Here the reporters reveal her politics:

She was also making a political calculation. She had been in government long enough to know how to read the tea leaves. Even though the Democratic primary season was still under way, she believed that Biden could come out on top because he was the safest choice. And if he did win the primary, he could beat Trump. If she were to work in the Trump White House, it could be fatal for her federal career. She wasn’t ready for that.

There we go: even before getting to the White House, she was convinced that Trump would not win reelection. And that raises some profound issues concerning her advice. 

And what was that advice? The reporters explain the scene in mid March 2020:

[Jared] Kushner immediately called two of his close friends, Adam Boehler and Nat Turner, and asked them to help put together a set of guidelines over the weekend that could provide some kind of national recommendations. Boehler was a former summer roommate of Kushner’s during college and was currently heading a federal institution called the US International Development Finance Corporation. Turner was chief executive of Flatiron Health, a technology and services company that specializes in cancer research. Boehler and Turner burrowed into a room in the basement of the West Wing and started calling people who grasped both the scale of the crisis but also the politics. 

Over that weekend, they put together recommendations and then circulated them with Birx and Fauci. The guidelines were refined further before being presented to Trump in the Oval Office. They wanted to recommend shutting down in-person education at schools. Closing indoor dining at restaurants and bars. Canceling travel. Birx and Fauci saw the guidelines as a crucial pause that would buy them some time to better understand the pandemic. Shutting down flights was not enough, they said; more would have to be done….

The group apparently decided that Birx would be the best messenger to convince Trump:

If she were to convince the president to shut down the entire country, she was going to have to make a compelling case. She spent a weekend assembling all of the data from Europe that she could get her hands on. She then looked at the logarithmic curves of infections and deaths to try to predict when the United States would begin seeing an exponential growth of cases and fatalities. The data revealed how quickly the virus had moved through Italy, and she knew that it wasn’t isolated there; the Italians were just more efficient at tracking it. If it was moving like that throughout a major European country, she projected, a similar explosion was about to occur in the United States….

At the meeting, Birx walked the president through everything that she was seeing in Europe, forecasting what could happen if the US didn’t act. [Kushner friend Adam] Boehler offered the recommendation for fifteen days of restrictions, the kind of government crackdown that was anathema to every one of Trump’s instincts. But when they finished with the presentation, the first two words out of Trump’s mouth surprised them. “That’s it?” he asked. Trump had thought that they were going to tell him to call in the National Guard and lock people in their homes. He immediately approved their plan. At 3:21 p.m. on March 16, he delivered a speech that he—and many of his advisers—would come to regret.

At that historic and earth-shattering press conference, Birx played a central role. The reporters observe: 

Trump was reading from notes. The words had been written for him, but he was reading them nonetheless. He had spent the first three years of his presidency stripping back regulations and restrictions, complaining about the “deep state” and government overreach. He was now putting into place the biggest restrictions on Americans’ behavior in the past hundred years. The government’s program was called “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” It was a nationwide shutdown until the end of March, an unprecedented action. Just a few weeks earlier, Trump and his top aides had barely known who Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci were. Now they were teamed up with Jared Kushner and had played a critical role in convincing Trump to shut much of society down.

There we have it. 

A month later, Trump was getting restless. 15 Days had passed and Trump made an announcement that he wanted to open the country again by Easter, which fell on April 12, 2020. Trump met with advisors including Birx. The reporters go on:

Birx sat in silence, her right leg crossed over her left, staring at the president as the words left his mouth. Her expression betrayed nothing. Her military career had conditioned her to remain impassive while her commanding officer was speaking. But Easter? The idea was a nightmare. She had taken a lead role on the task force just one month earlier, and her influence was already slipping away. She had to try to stop this. Birx knew that the United States hadn’t yet reached the peak of infections, a grim milestone that public health experts didn’t anticipate for several more weeks. The number of reported new infections was doubling every few days; it had gone from just more than one thousand cases on March 16, the day the shutdown had gone into effect, to nearly eleven thousand the day of the virtual town hall. The rate wasn’t slowing down, and the count was artificially low because the United States was still doing so little testing. The fifteen-day shutdown would hardly be enough to seriously hamper the virus’s spread. If Trump reopened the country on Easter, the painful effort would have been for nothing.

What did she do about it? 

She knew that [Trump] was under pressure to reopen the economy by Easter, something she was determined to stop. So if he was going to agree to shut down the country for another thirty days when everyone was telling him not to, then, sure, she’d need him to be locked into the data—her data. For some time, her gamble paid off. Other task force members and White House aides marveled at the way she managed Trump, who thought she was elegant and liked working with her. She knew how to strike a delicate balance with him: she flattered him and told him a little bit of what he wanted to hear before offering her recommendations….

That Saturday night, just a few days after Trump had declared that he wanted everything to reopen by Easter, Birx and Fauci met with the president in the Yellow Oval Room, an ornate second-floor chamber in the White House’s private residence just inside the Truman Balcony….

Birx and Fauci knew the stakes: either they would convince the president to take drastic action that could save tens of thousands of lives, or they would fail to make their case. Birx sat across from the president, papers in hand. She had printed out her slides so that she could present them as a handout. She had come armed with other analyses and slides in case Trump wasn’t immediately convinced or he had questions that she could answer with more graphics. She hoped that Trump would be able to understand the work she had done and the case she and Fauci were about to make. But with Trump, you never knew what would happen. The doctors began by explaining to him that if he reopened the country now, the fifteen-day shutdown would have been for nothing. There hadn’t been enough time to see the effects of the painful step they had taken. The point of the shutdown had been to “flatten the curve,” which meant to slow down the exponential increase in new cases. The only way to do so, they said, would be through measures such as closing businesses and mandating social distancing so that the health care system wouldn’t face a crush of patients… 

Of course she prevailed yet again:

Trump knew that the crisis was serious, but thirty days? Was it really necessary? he asked them. Why did Birx think it was necessary? Did she really believe that 100,000 to 200,000 people could still die even if the country shut down? Yes, Birx insisted. Her numbers were not models based on theoretical assumptions, she explained; they were reality-based projections based on what she had learned from the European data….

Trump was expected to announce how much longer the shutdown would last at the March 29 press conference. White House officials had been debating whether to extend it for another week or two. About twenty-five minutes after Trump first took the podium, he made an announcement that would stun and anger some of his advisers: he was extending the shutdown guidelines until April 30.

And so on it went, with Fauci and Birx constantly moving the goalposts, sounding the alarm of new cases, urging the president to continue torturing people with lockdowns and closures, and wrecking what had previously been a strong and growing economy, and essentially working to doom his prospects for re-election that she never believed was possible anyway. 

This nonsense continued throughout the summer until at last Trump got fed up and started seeking out other advice from people who happened to understand viral dynamics, epidemiology, and public health. The lead person here was Scott Atlas whom she now blames for undermining Trump’s misplace and dangerous confidence that lockdowns could improve health outcomes. 

Thus can we see her direct culpability in causing the unprecedented wreckage, and now her attempt to avoid taking responsibility. 

The end of her career has an ironic and perhaps inevitable twist. As Jordan Shachtel notes, “Birx infamously resigned in disgrace after she was caught flouting her own guidance, when the longtime government bureaucrat secretly held a large gathering at one of her vacation homes in Delaware. That same week, Birx advised the public not to get together during the Thanksgiving holiday.”

The BBC reported on her thinking concerning why she violated her own edicts:

Explaining her decision to gather with her husband, daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren, she told Newsy: 'My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed as I’m sure many elderly have as they’ve not been able to see their sons, their granddaughters. My parents have not been able to see their surviving son for over a year. These are all very difficult things.'

Deborah Birx bears direct and documented responsibility for imposing these “difficult things” on hundreds of millions of people. She pleaded with us to understand that she had to violate her rules for personal reasons. Now she insists that we blame anyone but herself for outcomes that she knows all too well were her own doing. 

No member of Congress should ever sit by and listen to this nonsense without knowledge of the documented history of her personal responsibility for turning the land of the free and the home of the brave into a population of people cowering in their homes, banned from seeing family, with their schools, businesses, and churches shut by governments for months on end. The costs are legion and the damage will be felt for decades.

Reprinted with permission from Brownstone Institute.

from Dr. Deborah Birx’s Failed Attempt to Flip the Script

'Foreign Policy is War By Other Means'

RPI Director Daniel McAdams spoke before the Mises Caucus of the Libertarian Party earlier this month as part of their "Take Human Action" tour. McAdams recalled the 20 years of Justin Raimondo's writing on what a libertarian foreign policy should look like, suggesting that foreign policy itself, as such, should be put on the chopping block:



from 'Foreign Policy is War By Other Means'

New York City’s New ‘Public Health’ Plan: Let Garbage Pile Up on the Sidewalks

In the name of “public health,” the New York City government this week has been telling city employees to take the experimental coronavirus “vaccine” shots by Friday at 5 p.m. or be fired, or as the city government terms it, “placed on leave without pay.” Plenty of city workers of all types upset by this attack on their freedom have been taking to the streets in large numbers to protest, often admirably joined by leaders of their unions. Apparently, New York City garbagemen upset with their...

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

from Peace and Prosperity http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2021/october/29/new-york-city-s-new-public-health-plan-let-garbage-pile-up-on-the-sidewalks/

The Military's Turn to Wokeness Shows the US Faces No Real Military Threats

Over the course of this year, conservatives have expressed a number of grievances they have with the US military. Tucker Carlson delivered a monologue questioning Joe Biden’s emphasis on the issuance of flight suits designed for pregnant women. (Noteworthy is that Tucker is not against women in combat roles per se, since he states, “If the Pentagon can show that pregnant pilots are the best, we will be the first to demand an entire Air Force of pregnant pilots.” I don’t believe anyone has accused Tucker of thinking carefully about tradeoffs.) Other conservatives, however, do express disagreement with filling combat roles with women. A recurring demand in pursuit of egalitarianism is extending mandated registration for the Selective Service to young women, opposition to which is typically due to the prospect of drafting women to fight, rather than the morally correct position of opposing involuntary servitude for anyone.

A further gripe is the trend of the military’s embrace of wokeness, as evidenced by statements made by General Mark Milley defending the teaching of critical race theory at West Point and the need to “understand white rage,” as well as the approach taken in recent recruitment ads. While Chinese and Russian military recruitment campaigns appeal to a sense of patriotism, one US Army ad features a woman inspired by the activism of her two moms and who feels the need to compete with her sorority sisters in doing something meaningful with her life. How she does this through operating Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Patriot Missile Defense Systems is left unexplained.

One of the latest controversies involving the military is Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate, which leaves service members potentially facing a dishonorable discharge if they refuse to be vaccinated. Hundreds of thousands of US troops have not yet complied with this mandate. While it is unlikely that all of them would continue to refuse if the alternative were a dishonorable discharge, a significant percentage will. Hundreds of Navy SEALs who have refused the vaccine are currently considered undeployable.

Many believe that some or all of these issues hurt troop morale and render the US military a less capable fighting force. This is unambiguously the case when discharging or not deploying personnel who are otherwise qualified and on whom millions of dollars have been spent to train. It serves as an illustration of something those of us skeptical of US military adventurism already knew: Americans in the continental US are incredibly geopolitically blessed in terms of being able to live at peace with the rest of the world, if only those with political authority allowed it. We have mostly friendly neighbors to the north and south, no one who poses a threat close by, and thousands of miles of ocean between us and everyone else. And because of this the US military has the luxury of engaging in terrible, wasteful decision-making that undermines effectiveness without much cost in terms of domestic civilian lives lost from foreign aggression (with the exception, of course, of blowback caused by US foreign policy).

So why would the US military embrace wokeness and other policies if they could possibly come at the slightest cost of effectiveness or morale? The military is a bureaucracy (or rather a set of bureaucracies) and the primary institutional goals of bureaucracies are to preserve their own existence and increase their budgets. Fully embracing the cultural concerns of establishment leftism certainly doesn’t hurt in terms of encouraging the mainstream Left to forget their former opposition to Bush’s wars. Congressional Republicans will present no serious opposition to wokeness in the military, certainly not in terms of reducing their budgets. The CIA seems to be employing a similar strategy. Promoting the fact that they hire gay people covers a multitude of sins, such as assassinations, torture, and regime change. Furthermore, vaccine mandates help purge the military of personnel willing to question certain types of orders.

Indeed, pursuing this strategy seems to come with little downside risk. If it does, in fact, reduce the ability of the military or intelligence agencies to protect Americans (to the extent that that is still considered part of their purpose) and results in civilian deaths, their budgets are far more likely to be increased rather than decreased. Their failure to prevent the deaths of thousands of Americans on 9/11 led to unprecedented increases in their powers and resources. We are now told that their failure to prevent whatever you want to call what happened on January 6 (setting aside their role in facilitating it) justifies further increases in their powers. For them, failure is success.

Thankfully, the veil is being lifted and those with previously promilitary sensibilities are seeing that the military is not unambiguously their friend. This is a necessary step to achieve the ends of peace and a noninterventionist foreign policy. Questioning the military is increasingly considered within the realm of reasonable discourse for those who consider themselves patriots. Polls have traditionally found that the military enjoys among the highest levels of trust among the general public. This is changing and that’s a good thing.

Reprinted with permission from LewRockwell.com.

from The Military's Turn to Wokeness Shows the US Faces No Real Military Threats

The Assange persecution lays out Western savagery at its most transparent

The first day of the US appeal in the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in court that the US government could guarantee that it wouldn’t treat the WikiLeaks founder as cruelly as it treats other prisoners.

I wish I was kidding.

In their write-up on Wednesday’s proceedings, The Dissenter’s Kevin Gosztola and Mohamed Elmaazi report that the prosecution argued that “the High Court should accept the appeal on the basis that the US government offered ‘assurances’ that Assange won’t be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) or incarcerated in ADX Florence, a super-maximum prison in Colorado.”

What this means is that in order to overturn the January extradition ruling which judge Vanessa Baraitser denied on the basis that the notoriously draconian US prison system is too cruel to guarantee Assange’s health and safety, the prosecution has established as one of their grounds for appeal the claim that they can offer “assurances” that they would not inflict some of their most brutal measures upon him. These would include the aforementioned Special Administrative Measures, wherein prisoners are so isolated that they effectively disappear off the face of the earth, or sending him to ADX Florence, where all prisoners are kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.

Prosecution bashes judge for blocking Julian Assange’s extradition

My latest w/ @kgosztola via The Dissenterhttps://t.co/aQHZ4dVTyO

— Mohamed Elmaazi (@MElmaazi) October 27, 2021

What’s ridiculous about these “assurances,” apart from the obvious, is that within its own legal argument the US government reserves the right to reverse those assurances at any time and impose SAMs or maximum security imprisonment upon Assange if it deems them necessary. As Amnesty International explains:

They say: we guarantee that he won’t be held in a maximum security facility and he will not be subjected to Special Administrative Measures and he will get healthcare. But if he does something that we don’t like, we reserve the right to not guarantee him, we reserve the right to put him in a maximum security facility, we reserve the right to offer him Special Administrative Measures. Those are not assurances at all. It is not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise.

So the prosecution’s legal argument here is essentially “We promise we won’t treat Assange as cruelly as we treat our other prisoners, unless we decide we really want to.”

This is not just a reflection on the weakness of the extradition appeal, it’s a reflection on the savagery of all the so-called free democracies that have involved themselves in this case.

This argument made minutes after Assange had to excuse himself from his own hearing due to ill health. https://t.co/V4Z9z19n9b

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) October 27, 2021

This same prosecution argued that Assange should not be denied US extradition from the UK on humanitarian grounds as in the case of activist Lauri Love, because Love suffered from both physical and psychological ailments while Assange’s ailments are only psychological. They stood before the court and made this argument even as Assange was visibly pained and unwell in his video appearance from Belmarsh Prison, which he was only able to attend intermittently due to his frail condition.

“For my newspaper, I have worked as media partner of WikiLeaks since 2009,” tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi who attended the hearing via video link. “I have seen Julian Assange in all sorts of situations, but I have never ever seen him so unwell and so dangerously thin.”

So they’re just openly brutalizing a journalist for exposing US war crimes, while arguing that they can be trusted to treat him humanely and give him a fair trial if granted extradition. This after it has already been confirmed that the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him during the Trump administration, after we learned that the prosecution relied on false testimony from a convicted child molester and diagnosed sociopath, after it was revealed that the CIA spied on Assange and his lawyers in the Ecuadorian embassy, and after intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein famously died under highly suspicious circumstances in a US prison cell.

The worst atrocities in history have all been legal. All the worst examples of genocide, slavery, tyranny and bloodshed have been allowed or actively facilitated by the state. The persecution of Assange is geared toward entering the imprisonment of journalists into this category.

#Assange Lawyer in Fiery Rebuttal at Day’s Conclusion https://t.co/YnDrm8JQsm

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) October 27, 2021

The goal is to set a legal precedent which allows journalists who expose the crimes of the powerful to be persecuted not covertly as is normally done in ‘free democracies,’ but right out in the open. To tell journalists “We’ll just throw you in prison if you cross us.”

What makes this precedent uniquely dangerous is that it is not just threatening to imprison American journalists who expose US crimes, but any journalist anywhere in the world. This is an Australian journalist in the process of being extradited from the UK for publishing facts about US war crimes in the nations it has invaded. The aim is to set up a system where anyone in the US-aligned world can be funneled into its prison system for publishing inconvenient facts.

This is the savagery of the Western world at its most transparent. It’s not the greatest evil the US-centralized empire has perpetrated; that distinction would certainly be reserved for its acts of mass military slaughter that it has been inflicting upon our species with impunity for generations. But it’s the most brazen. The most overt. It’s the most powerful part of the most depraved power structure on earth looking us all right in the eyes and telling us exactly what it is.

And if we can really look at this beast and what it is doing right now, really see it with eyes wide open, it reveals far more about those who rule over us than anything any journalist has ever exposed.

Reprinted with permission from RT.

from The Assange persecution lays out Western savagery at its most transparent

'Team Pfizer'? Possible Conflict Of Interest On FDA's 'Jabs For Kids' Panel

Why do so many members of the FDA Panel that just approved the covid shot for young children seem to have ongoing ties to Pfizer? Is the panel's objectivity compromised? Also today: Danish authorities threaten more lockdowns, Ireland's most-jabbed are also most new cases, and Biden threatens vax refusers with "re-education." Watch today's Liberty Report:



from 'Team Pfizer'? Possible Conflict Of Interest On FDA's 'Jabs For Kids' Panel

UK report raises concerns about suboptimal vaccine antibodies erasing natural immunity

In many areas of life, half a loaf is better than no loaf at all. But when it comes to vaccines, the opposite is true. Half-baked antibodies injected throughout the entire population can make the virus even stronger and negate people's natural immunity. Thus, all the defenses of the leaky vaccine suggesting that it at least conveys "some" protection are actually extremely concerning, a point driven home by a nugget in the most recent surveillance report from Public Health England (PHE).

On page 23 of PHE's "COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report Week 42," British health officials report a shocking finding. They believe their serology tests are underestimating the number of people with prior infection due to "recent observations from UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination." In other words, the vaccine might be reducing the all-important N antibodies that one generates from natural infection. Kudos to former NYT reporter Alex Berenson for discovering this important point.

Until now, we've been operating under the assumption that those with prior infection don't need the vaccine to boost immunity and taking the shots would only expose them to the growing risk of side effects. However, what if the shots are actually sliding back the natural immunity generated in those with previous infection? What if that is related to the macro concern that a narrow-spectrum vaccine with suboptimal antibodies that only recognize the "S" (spike) protein of the virus but not the "N" (nucleocapsid) of the virus will cause B cells in those with the vaccine to learn to produce only S antibodies, which are slower-acting and less sterilizing (don't stop transmission) than N antibodies, which are faster-acting and are more effective in their protection against the virus?

It's not like we weren't confronted with some other warning signs that the vaccine could perhaps negate some of the immunity acquired from prior infection. In March, researchers from Mount Sinai in New York and Hospital La Paz in Madrid posted a preprint study indicating that at least the second Pfizer shot might weaken T cell immunity. In a shocking discovery after monitoring a group of vaccinated people both with and without prior infection, they found "in individuals with a pre-existing immunity against SARS-CoV-2, the second vaccine dose not only fail to boost humoral immunity but determines a contraction of the spike-specific T cell response." They also note that other research has shown "the second vaccination dose appears to exert a detrimental effect in the overall magnitude of the spike-specific humoral response in COVID-19 recovered individuals."

Thus, mass vaccinating with leaky suboptimal antibody production could serve as a Trojan horse and make people more susceptible to an ever-enhanced virus. It's not like we had no warning about the possibility of viral enhancement through waning and suboptimal vaccine-mediated antibodies. On page 52 of Pfizer's "Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for an Unapproved Product Review Memorandum," it is admitted that antibody dependent disease enhancement was a possibility in the long run with waning efficacy.

"However, risk of vaccine-enhanced disease over time, potentially associated with waning immunity, remains unknown and needs to be evaluated further in ongoing clinical trials and in observational studies that could be conducted following authorization and/or licensure," write the FDA regulators in the memo. In the April 9, 2021, follow-up memorandum (p. 40), the FDA follows up with the same concern.

Well, here we are today, and we now know this vaccine wanes so badly that they are pushing boosters for everyone, as transmission rates among the vaccinated begin to overtake the unvaccinated. At the time of the April FDA memorandum, it was claimed that the vaccines were not waning. But several months later, they leaked so much that now the CDC is not even ruling out the possibility of deeming those without booster shots "unvaccinated," just like in Israel. So, if the vaccine-mediated antibodies wane beyond what anyone could have imagined, and we are seeing with our own eyes that the virus is getting worse instead of better, how is the concern of viral enhancement not even entertained?

Fair use excerpt. Read the whole article here.

from UK report raises concerns about suboptimal vaccine antibodies erasing natural immunity

George Soros backs liberal media company with a mission to counter fake news & promote ‘GOOD INFORMATION’

The newest combatant in the US "disinformation" wars is a media company bankrolled by Democrat mega-donors Reid Hoffman and George Soros, and run by an operative whose astroturfed local news outfit was actual misinformation.

Good Information, Inc. launched on Tuesday as “a civic incubator committed to investing in immediate solutions that counter disinformation and increase the flow of good information online.” According to Axios, it is bankrolled by LinkedIn co-founder Hoffman, Soros, as well as Silicon Valley investors Ken and Jen Duda and Incite Ventures.

Exclusive: Billionaires Reid Hoffman, George Soros and others back new media firm led by @taraemcg to combat disinformation
— As part of its launch, “Good Information” will acquire @CourierNewsroom, a local news group with a progressive perspective. https://t.co/v4ddccFPoK

— Sara Fischer (@sarafischer) October 26, 2021

Tara McGowan, a former Democratic strategist who worked on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s 2012 and 2016 campaigns – and ran a progressive nonprofit called ACRONYM that spent a whopping $100 million on a digital ad campaign to defeat Donald Trump in 2020 – has been put in charge of the venture. 

ACRONYM was a major investor in Shadow, the outfit that mangled the results of the Iowa caucuses early on in the Democratic primary process, hurting the candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Another of its operations, Courier Newsroom, will be sold to Good Information for an undisclosed sum; McGowan reportedly recused herself from the deal. 

Ironically, Courier Newsroom was repeatedly called out for misinformation, including by NewsGuard – another major player in the “disinfo” wars – in the pages of the Washington Post, no less.

“Courier Newsroom is a clandestine political operation,” wrote NewsGuard’s Gabby Deutch, who described it as “a different, more tech-savvy form of political misinformation.”

Courier and Acronym are “exploiting the widespread loss of local journalism to create and disseminate something we really don’t need: hyperlocal partisan propaganda,” Deutch added in a February 2020 article.

None of that prevented McGowan from gushing about her new venture as something that will fix the “broken, divisive information ecosystem in which we find ourselves today” that is “an all-hands-on-deck challenge for American democracy.”

The broken, divisive information ecosystem in which we find ourselves today is an all-hands-on-deck challenge for American democracy. Excited to finally share what we’ve been building over the past few months to address it👇🧵 https://t.co/HF62VZEH3H

— Tara McGowan (@taraemcg) October 26, 2021

“I still believe that winning elections is necessary to preserving our democracy,” she added. “But the information crisis is bigger than politics – and requires solutions beyond it.”

To prove that her new outfit won’t be a hyper-partisan Democrat operation, McGowan cited The Bulwark, “a center-right news site founded in opposition to Trumpism,” as an example of a conservative news outlet Good Information could support. Left unsaid is that The Bulwark are “conservatives” in name only, whose obsessive hatred of Trump has them endorsing just about every Democrat running for any office in the US. 

The new company’s advisory board tells a similar story, consisting of mainly Democrat activists advocating for censorship. One notable name that leaps out is Nandini Jammi, previously of the pressure group Sleeping Giants who then launched her own operation called Check My Ads. Jammi’s modus operandi is to contact advertisers and services used by people she disagrees with, and call them racist.

This is how it works in the Globalist American Empire

Just as Revolver News breaking ground with investigative reporting, our email service cuts cord with us because some nobody commissar complained@Bigmailer is going to regret this decision Big Time pic.twitter.com/tnVqL3LBvo

— Darren J. Beattie 🌐 (@DarrenJBeattie) October 25, 2021

All of this, however, pales in comparison to the chief founder of the new venture. Hoffman publicly apologized in December 2018 for funding New Knowledge, a Democrat tech outfit advising the Senate Intelligence Committee on “Russian meddling” in US elections.

That’s because New Knowledge admitted to running a false-flag “Russian bot” campaign to get a Democrat elected in the special election for the Senate in Alabama the year prior. 

Again, the only actual meddling in US elections by ‘Russian bots’ turned out to be a false flag by a Democrat-run tech company. New Knowledge has since rebranded while its operatives moved up to bigger and better things – such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, another major “disinfo” player.

Exclusive: Foxes back new hen house design to promote chicken safety https://t.co/Kw7ezoKLEe

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) October 26, 2021

Soros, of course, is well known for lavishly funding Democrat candidates and causes, from backing California Governor Gavin Newsom against the recent recall initiative to dropping massive quantities of cash into local elections for district attorneys in major US cities and counties over the past several years.

More recently, he has pivoted to condemning “false and misleading information” allegedly proliferating online.

Global internet freedom continues to decline as governments increasingly crack down on free online expression and as false and misleading information proliferates. https://t.co/KQvAdgT6OM

— George Soros (@georgesoros) September 30, 2021

Reprinted with permission from RT.

from George Soros backs liberal media company with a mission to counter fake news & promote ‘GOOD INFORMATION’

What a Shocker! FDA Panel Approves Shots for Kids!

Shocking...but at the same time, not shocking. An FDA panel has voted in favor of giving Covid shots to children aged 5-11. Daniel McAdams & Chris Rossini discuss this story, along with the latest on Assange, Jan. 6, and "Good Information, Inc." Watch today's Liberty Report:



from What a Shocker! FDA Panel Approves Shots for Kids!

Waiting Upon Structures to Crack

Jeffrey Tucker, in a piece entitled How Close Is Total Social and Economic Collapse?, writes, “Economies and societies fall apart slowly, then a bit more, then all at once. We seem to be in the middle period of this trajectory [in the US]. The slow part began March 2020 when politicians around the world imagined that it would be no big deal to shut down the economy and restart it once the virus went away”. What a beautiful display of the power of ‘science-driven’ government it would be – Technocracy on a war-footing.

But, “[n]one of it worked. You cannot turn off an economy and normal social functioning and then turn them back on like a light switch. The attempt alone will necessarily cause unpredictable amounts of long-term breakage, not only of economic structures but also of the spirit of a people. Everything going on now reflects the disastrous presumption that doing that would be possible – and not cause dramatic and lasting damage. It was the greatest failure of politics in a century”.

Everything works until suddenly, it doesn’t. As Minsky said, stability breeds instability. The problem is that complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes them cost-effective also removes the redundancies that make them resilient. Things can fall apart quickly when some unforeseen event occurs. Not only things; the collective public psyche is a fragile complex system too – it cannot be restored to what it was simply by jabbing the re-set button.

Tucker views this essentially as a failure of judgement. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t – which is to say, a judgement failure in the way he means it. Yes, the supply-chain debacle may not adequately have been foreseen; or the self-harm that has resulted from attempting to de-couple from an intertwined economy as ubiquitous as that of China (i.e. microchip disruption).

But perhaps the reason the vaccine strategy is not being reconsidered, but has become cult doctrine on which the Establishment has doubled-down, is that it was conceived at the outset, not just as a means to an end – i.e. creating herd immunity via vaccines – but also an end in, and of itself.

Looked at in this way, we can perceive not just "one failure" – that a V-shaped recovery on re-start, was presented as gospel – but rather, a series of related judgmental "failures." These may give the appearance of being a troupe of wandering errors of well-intentioned, yet flawed analysis, though in fact, they were always connected by being conceived at the outset as ends in, and of themselves.

The commonality to these "errors' lies with their being of "one project" – being of one "genus" – and not simply being a string of accidents of error.

The ostensible logic is that by "nudging" almost everyone to get vaccinated, it will help achieve herd immunity, and thereby eliminate the virus. Is the Tucker-like flaw here that it was assumed that the vaccines were not "leaky" in respect to variants; or that the vaccinated would not be vulnerable to infection; or that the vaccinated would not carry, shed and transmit the virus; or that any protection would not degrade in weeks or months? Perhaps they misunderstood the history of the SARS family of virus (to be not particularly susceptible to vaccines, from their tendency to slide sidewise into variants); or then again, maybe mass vaccination is also an end in itself?

No vax, no job? The unvaxed have become "the enemy," in exactly the way that philosopher Carl Schmitt said that casting an "enemy" is supposed to work: the assignment of a label so black and so unremittingly "other" that mediation with such "monsters" "who put the lives of others at risk" becomes inconceivable. Such black and white Manicheanism is the essence of politics, Schmitt wrote approvingly. In Italy, for example, representatives of the political, medical and media establishment have openly accused the unvaccinated of being “rats”, “subhumans” and “criminals”, who deserve to be “excluded from public life” and “from the national health service” and even deserve to “die like flies”.

Is this another failure of thinking clearly? The inability of leaders to comprehend how such language tears society apart; that a society will not return to normal social and functioning, directly on the Green Pass "switch" being turned off (if it ever is)?

Or, is it an end in itself? – Vaccination as a proxy for political loyalty – the majority defining itself in polar opposition to a demonized minority: "Holding the wrong political ideology makes you unclean." You should be purged. Perhaps that is why the Biden administration is also not concerned about mass firings (and its economic disruptions) – because It helps purify the country of Trump-supporting recalcitrants?

Most obviously, the rushed "greening project" tied to a declared climate "emergency" is a counterpart to the shut-down and vaccine flaw. It seems that this similarly was imagined as straight-forward: the world would pirouette away from dirty to clean energy, through carbon "mandates" that would shut-down both personal and collective carbon profligacy. And the economy then would be re-booted after $150 trillion had been spent on green renewables. Another display of the power of "science-driven" governments, run by experts, supposedly untainted by partisanship, or expectations of personal gain.

Again, it’s not working: You cannot just "turn off" a fossil-fuel based economy, and then turn it back on, a short-while later, as a green-washed "net zero" one.

We may, on the one hand, perceive this as a simple failure to appreciate the practical impediments that have given the world its energy crunch, and its concomitant huge cost-hikes for consumers – albeit triggered, we are told, out of a pure concern to save the planet.

Or, on the other hand, is the carbon mandate also an end in, and of itself? i.e. the transition to a global technocratic managerial class, and the transfer of key policy tools away from the national level to the supranational? If so, this too, is not working. The social costs of the energy price shock will ripple across politics and cause further breakages in the economy.

And, is the associated shift from traditional economic management to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – which happened to overlap with the pandemic shut down – a simple coincidence arising out of the need to act to protect people during the Covid crisis? One that has witnessed the Central Banks’ "creation" of $30 trillion of liquidity injected into economies, as pandemic support. Was this then, just an unfortunate misappreciation of the risks of generating (non-transitory) inflation that would impoverish consumers, and possibly provoke economic recession?

Or, was it an end in itself, too – conceived at the outset as the jet-fuel that would finance the transition from hyper-financialised individualist capitalism (that is acknowledged even by the technocrats) to be no longer sustainable, to a stockholder corporate managerialism that would largely displace individual property rights, in favour of broader ESG, social, environmental, and diversity visions of stockholder corporatism?

As long ago as 1941, James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution, was making the case that the old paradigm of labour versus capitalism was passé; that progressive evolution would transition the world away from the capitalist-socialist dialectic to a new synthesis – an organizational structure made up of an élite managerial technocratic class – a type of society that was both "socialist" (ESG and woke), yet also corporate entrepreneurial. It would be led by experts that understood problems beyond the ken of the public. Burnham believed this was in process to replace capitalism on a world scale ("Davos" calls it stockholder corporatism today).

Does this have an end in itself? Of course – the elite oligarchic class is preserved, and controls money and credit, albeit now at a supranational level, (i.e. the ECB practicing strict credit rationing for companies, according to its own Green doctrines). But this isn’t working so well either: We are experiencing both an energy "price-shock," and disruptive inflation (more breakages).

At the international geo-political plane, things don’t seem to be working either. Team Biden says it wants a "managed competition" with China, but why then send Wendy Sherman (who is not noted for her diplomatic skills) to China as Biden’s envoy? Why has there been this continuous chip-chipping away at the 1972 "One China" policy with a series of small, seemingly innocuous moves on Taiwan if Team Biden wants contained competition (what he said he wants in a recent call with President Xi), but falters, time after time, to instigate a serious relationship?

Does the Team not understand that it is not "containing" competition, but rather playing-with-fire, through its’ opaque hints that the US might support Taiwan independence?

And then, why of all people, dispatch Victoria Nuland to Moscow, if the competition with Moscow was to be quietly "balanced out" as Biden’s face-to-face with Putin in Geneva seemed to signal? Like Sherman, Nuland was not received at a senior level, and her "Maidan arsonist" reputation of course preceded her in Moscow. And why decimate Russia’s diplomatic representation at NATO HQ, and why have Secretary Austin talk in Georgia and Ukraine of NATO’s "open door"?

Is there some hidden logic to this, or were these envoys intentionally sent as some kind of "kick-ass" provocative gesture to underline who’s boss (i.e. America is Back!)? This is known in Washington as "capitulation diplomacy" – competitors are presented with only the terms of their capitulation. If so, it didn’t work. Both envoys effectively were sent packing, and Washington’s relations with these key states are degraded to near zero.

The Russia-China axis have come to the conclusion that polite diplomatic discourse with Washington is like water off a duck’s back. The US and its European protégés simply do not hear what Moscow or Beijing says to them – so what is the point to talking to "tin-eared" Americans? Answer: None.

Tucker wrote in respect to pandemic lockdowns that “everything going on now reflects the disastrous presumption that [continuing] doing that [which it was already doing] would be possible, and not cause dramatic and lasting damage. It was the greatest failure of politics in a century”. Is this true for America’s foreign policy too (i.e. capitulation diplomacy)?

Is it assumed that the way for America to retain global primacy is to continue coat-trailing China on Taiwan and its One China policy; and to coat-trail Russia on NATO membership for Ukraine? And that repeated hints at bilaterals with a folksy Biden are all that is necessary to stop events spiraling out of control?

Is all this coat-trailing and provocation simply Team Biden misjudging how serious China and Russia are about their Red Lines "meaning it," or, is it an end in itself? (As an aside, Burnham was clear that many wars would have to be fought before a managerial society could fully take hold. These wars would lead to the destruction of sovereign nation states, such that only a small number of great nations would survive, culminating into the nuclei of three "super-states." Burnham believed that “sovereignty will be restricted to the few super-states”.)

Tucker’s initial question, we should recall, was How Close Is Total Social and Economic Collapse? Our point in this piece is that this litany of failures are linked by being conceived at the outset, as ends in, and of themselves. And to one extent or another, none are working. So is a perfect storm gathering?

The commonality to these distinct "errors" lies with their being "one project" – a stealth coup of the policy tools and structures of public accountability, at the national level, and their transfer to the supranational plane (also known as the Re-Set). They derive, all, from the cult of technocratic managerialism. In the last analysis, Tucker is right: In the pursuit of this project, and its failing flock of subsets, “the attempt alone will necessarily cause unpredictable amounts of long-term breakage, not only of economic structures but also of the spirit of a people.”

Cults historically are dismissive of fragility in complex systems. They are focussed on the means to "ends." They would not necessarily see Tucker’s "breakages" even as breakage. Human attitudes and behaviour – i.e. people – are seen as an obstruction, and as Biden repeatedly warns, “if people won’t help, they must get out of the way of vaccine rules … get out of the way of people doing the right thing”.

It seems that Russia and China, seeing all this, will remain aloof and patient – waiting upon structures to crack.

Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.

from Waiting Upon Structures to Crack

What the CIA Is Hiding in the JFK Assassination

With President Biden succumbing to the CIA’s demand to continue keeping the CIA’s records relating to the Kennedy assassination secret, the question naturally arises: What is the CIA still hiding? (See my blog post of yesterday entitled “Surprise! Biden Continues the CIA’s JFK Assassination Cover-Up.”)

To understand what they are still hiding and why they are still hiding it, it’s necessary to go back to the 1990s during the era of the Assassination Records Review Board — and even further back than that to November 22, 1963 — the day that Kennedy was assassinated. 

People often say that if the CIA and the Pentagon had orchestrated the assassination of President Kennedy, someone would have talked by now. 

That’s just not true. When it comes to murder, people don’t talk. They know that if they do talk, they run the risk of themselves being murdered, maybe their families too. People who participate in murder schemes know that they had better keep their mouths shut or else.

One example is Mafia figure Jimmy Hoffa. We still don’t know who killed Hoffa. That’s because no one talked. Another example is Johnny Roselli, the liaison in the CIA-Mafia partnership to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. We still don’t know who murdered Roselli. No one has ever talked.

People who talk also run the risk of being prosecuted because there is no statute of limitations for murder. A good recent example is real-estate heir Robert Durst. He was recently convicted of murdering a person twenty-one years ago.

So, it was always a safe bet that the CIA and the Pentagon would be able to keep their regime-change operation in Dallas sealed in secrecy.

However, not so with respect to the fraudulent autopsy that the Pentagon carried out on President Kennedy’s body on the evening of the assassination. When the ARRB released people who had participated in the autopsy during the 1990s, they talked.

As I detailed in my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 and in my online presentation in our Zoom conference last spring, a fraudulent autopsy was an essential part of the cover-up in the assassination.

The problem that the plotters had, however, is that in order to carry out this part of the cover-up, they had to enlist the assistance of many people within the vast national-security establishment who played no role in the assassination. Since all those people were innocent and mostly unwitting participants to the cover-up, they didn’t have the same incentive to stay quiet as the people who knowingly participated in the assassination itself.

The military did its best to keep everyone quiet by telling the autopsy participants that what they were doing was classified. Everyone in the military knows what that means — people are expected to take classified secrets to the grave with them. Participants to the autopsy were required to sign written secrecy oaths. They were also threatened with court martial or criminal prosecution if they ever revealed what they had done or seen.

As I pointed out in The Kennedy Autopsy, the scheme for a fraudulent autopsy was actually set into motion at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Immediately after Kennedy was declared dead, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, announced his intent to conduct an autopsy on the president’s body, as Texas law required. That was when a team of armed Secret Service agents, brandishing guns, told Rose in no uncertain terms that they would not permit him to do the autopsy. Forcing their way out of Parkland Hospital, they took the body to Dallas’s Love Field, where new President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it. Johnson then took the body back with him to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where he delivered it into the hands of the military.

Although the mainstream media always treated all this as normal, given the dominant role that the national-security establishment was playing in Cold War America, it was actually quite bizarre and aberrant. The military never had any jurisdiction or legal authority to conduct the autopsy. At that time, killing a president was not a federal crime. The United States was not at war with any nation state. Kennedy was not killed on the field of battle. His killing was a straight murder case under Texas state law. Any criminal prosecution for the assassination would take place in Dallas. A genuinely honest autopsy would be a critically important part of that criminal prosecution, especially since a sharp team of criminal-defense lawyers would inevitably be defending the accused.

The military was mostly, but not entirely, able to keep its fraudulent autopsy secret for some 30 years, until the ARRB began releasing people who had participated in the autopsy from their vows of secrecy. As the ARRB began forcing the military to release its records relating to the autopsy, the dam of secrecy surrounding the autopsy broke wide open. That’s when the fraud became apparent. That’s why the JFK Records Act was such a nightmare for the Pentagon and the CIA. If it hadn’t been for that law, there is no doubt that the military’s fraudulent autopsy would still be shrouded in secrecy today. 

What the Pentagon and the CIA learned from the era of the ARRB is that the community of assassination researchers is composed of some very smart people. By analyzing the evidence that the ARRB was succeeding in getting released, assassination researchers were able to put together the pieces of the puzzle that established a fraudulent autopsy, along with lots of other pieces of circumstantial evidence establishing that what occurred on November 22, 1963, was a highly sophisticated national-security state regime-change operation.

The leading figure in this endeavor was Douglas Horne, who served on the ARRB staff. Anyone who reads Horne’s five-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board will inevitably conclude that the autopsy that the military conducted on the Kennedy’s body a few hours after the assassination was fraudulent to the core. 

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy being conducted on President Kennedy’s body, especially given that the scheme for a fraudulent autopsy was launched at the moment Kennedy was declared dead.

It stands to reason that if a government agency is being forced to reveal records relating to a regime-change operation, that agency is going to keep the most incriminating evidence secret for as long as possible. We still don’t know what the CIA is still hiding, but we can safely assume that there is a good reason why the CIA does not want to let those super-smart assassination researchers get a hold of it. 

That’s why the national-security establishment will fight tooth and nail for permanent secrecy on their remaining JFK assassination-related records. Oh, the Pentagon and the CIA will most likely authorize Biden and the National Archives to release some innocuous records for appearance’s sake. But make no mistake about it: They will make certain that Biden, the National Archives, and all future presidents comply with their demand for permanent secrecy on what they need to hide on a permanent basis.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

from What the CIA Is Hiding in the JFK Assassination

Covid Economics: How Central Planning Tyrants Ruined The World

Conventional wisdom - particularly as pushed by the mainstream media - is that our current economic bottle-necking, inflation, and labor shortages are all caused by the "pandemic" that emerged early last year. If it's anyone's fault, it's the fault of the virus, not the noble politicians who spent the past year fighting the virus. Is that true? Mises Institute President Jeff Deist joins today's Liberty Report to smash conventional wisdom and lay the blame where it belongs. Today on the Liberty Report:



from Covid Economics: How Central Planning Tyrants Ruined The World

Why Censorship Advocates Are Obsessed with Stories about Yelling 'Fire!' in a Theater

If one boldly asserts the importance of the right of freedom of speech, it is almost inevitable that another will respond with one of the most common apologetic arguments for the government limitation of speech, “But you can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.” The non sequitur argument is supposed to humble the right of free speech in favor of some government restriction. This argument fails logically because it does not follow that because a theater may restrict speech of those it admits through sale of a ticket that government must be empowered to legally restrict the speech of its citizens in general.

Additionally, the problem is largely theoretical and imaginary. This is a common tactic of statism and argumentation in favor of statism: Problem X might arise in society, therefore, government must prevent X by action Y. In other words, we are expected to believe that the government must legally restrict freedom of speech because otherwise people would be free to shout “Fire!” in crowded theaters. This is not the case logically or practically. Have you ever heard of this happening in real life?

With that said, where does this common argument come from and when was the first time it was used?

One might understandably think that this common colloquial example of why speech must be limited came from a case in which someone actually yelled “Fire!” in a crowded theater, causing panic, injury, or death. In fact, the “fire” example does not come from a law or case having to do with theaters at all. The statement comes from Schenck v. United States (1919), in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stated on behalf of the unanimous court:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic…. The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree.

This famous statement, though most people have no idea where it originated, has been used for over a century to allegedly demonstrate the dangers or limits of freedom of speech. As such, this argumentation has been the foundation of many government restrictions of freedom of expression. Ironically, this case was a decision that people who passed out literature that claimed that the draft for World War I was a form of slavery, contra the Thirteenth Amendment, and encouraged others to resist the draft, could be legally prohibited from such speech. The case itself had nothing to do with theaters. It is not as if this was a pervasive problem in theaters across the United States, demanding federal government action to solve. Again, such an example of someone yelling in a theater in order to cause a panic is not actually an issue of freedom of speech but of property rights and contract.

Just as one who does not allow someone else to yell “Fire!” in his or her home without consent, the theater owner(s) and those who attend the theater have mutual expectations of one another, even if not stated directly. The purchase of a ticket allows one entrance to the theater, the viewing of a movie, access to the facilities like bathrooms, and the ability to litter. In return, the moviegoer agrees to an implicit contract to behave by watching the paid-for movie without disturbing others. People get removed from theaters all the time for disturbing others without yelling “Fire!” This issue does not come up that often because it hardly exists and is not a societal problem for which government(s) must restrict freedom of speech. The reason that this problem is uncommon is because implicit contract, informed consent, and property rights regulate the potential issues. The fact that such a vacuous example became such a compelling argument for the government restriction of freedom of speech in many other areas is disturbing. To summarize, Walter Block has argued concerning this very issue that...

...to override the right of free speech, for any reason, is a dangerous precedent, and never necessary…. The rights of theater patrons can be protected without legally prohibiting free speech. For example, theater owners could contract with their customers not to yell “fire!” … The situation would be entirely analogous to that of someone under contract to sing at a concert, but who refuses to sing, and instead lectures on economics. What is involved in both cases is not the right of free speech, but the obligation to honor a contract.

Reprinted with permission from Mises.org.

from Why Censorship Advocates Are Obsessed with Stories about Yelling 'Fire!' in a Theater

He Killed Snoopy??? #ArrestFauci Trending On Twitter

Revelations over the weekend of horrific dog torture experiments funded by Fauci have unleashed a massive wave of demands that Biden's top Covid advisor be not only fired, but arrested. Will he survive another scandal? Also today: Sweden permanently suspends Moderna jab, Austria looking at lockdown again, CDC considering re-defining "fully vaccinated," and more. Don't miss today's Liberty Report:



from He Killed Snoopy??? #ArrestFauci Trending On Twitter

The Great New Normal Purge

So, the Great New Normal Purge has begun … right on cue, right by the numbers.

As we “paranoid conspiracy theorists” have been warning would happen for the past 18 months, people who refuse to convert to the new official ideology are now being segregated, stripped of their jobs, banned from attending schools, denied medical treatment, and otherwise persecuted.

Relentless official propaganda demonizing “the Unvaccinated” is being pumped out by the corporate and state media, government leaders, health officials, and shrieking fanatics on social media. “The Unvaccinated” are the new official “Untermenschen,” an underclass of subhuman “others” the New Normal masses are being conditioned to hate.

You can see the hatred in the New Normals’ eyes …

Go ahead, scold us for describing the New Normals as members of a psychotic, totalitarian movement again. pic.twitter.com/A4U5chA1MK

— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) October 5, 2021

But it isn’t just a purge of “the Unvaccinated.” Anyone deviating from the official ideology is being systematically demonized and persecuted. In Germany, Australia, and other New Normal countries, protesting the New Normal is officially outlawed. The New Normal Gestapo is going around to people’s homes to interrogate them about their anti-New Normal Facebook posts. Corporations are openly censoring content that contradicts the official narrative. New Normal goon squads roam the streets, checking people’s “vaccination” papers.

And it’s not just governments and corporations carrying out the New Normal Purge. Friends are purging friends. Wives are purging husbands. Fathers are purging children. Children are purging parents. New Normals are purging old normal thoughts. Global “health authorities” are revising definitions to make them conform to New Normal “science.”

And so on … a new official “reality” is being manufactured, right before our eyes. Anything and anyone that doesn’t conform to it is being purged, unpersoned, memory-holed, erased.

None of which should come as a surprise.

Every nascent totalitarian system, at some stage of its takeover of society, launches a purge of political opponents, ideological dissidents, and other “anti-social deviants.” Such purges can be brief or open-ended, and they can take any number of outward forms, depending on the type of totalitarian system, but you cannot have totalitarianism without them.

The essence of totalitarianism — regardless of which costumes and ideology it wears — is a desire to completely control society, every aspect of society, every individual behavior and thought. Every totalitarian system, whether an entire nation, a tiny cult, or any other form of social body, evolves toward this unachievable goal … the total ideological transformation and control of every single element of society (or whatever type of social body it comprises). This fanatical pursuit of total control, absolute ideological uniformity, and the elimination of all dissent, is what makes totalitarianism totalitarianism.

Thus, each new totalitarian system, at some point in its evolution, needs to launch a purge of those who refuse to conform to its official ideology. It needs to do this for two basic reasons: (1) to segregate or otherwise eliminate actual political opponents and dissidents who pose a threat to the new regime; and (2) and more importantly, to establish the ideological territory within which the masses must now confine themselves in order to avoid being segregated, or eliminated.

The purge must be conducted openly, brutally, so that the masses understand that the rules of society have changed, forever, that their former rights and freedoms are gone, and that from now on any type of resistance or deviation from official ideology will not be tolerated, and will be ruthlessly punished.

The purge is usually launched during a “state of emergency,” under imminent threat from some official “enemy” (e.g., “communist infiltrators,” “counter-revolutionaries,” or … you know, a “devastating pandemic”), such that the normal rules of society can be indefinitely suspended “for the sake of survival.” The more terrified the masses can be made, the more willing they will be to surrender their freedom and follow orders, no matter how insane.

The lifeblood of totalitarianism is fear … fear of both the system’s official enemy (which is constantly stoked with propaganda) and of the totalitarian system itself. That the brutality of the system is rationalized by the threat posed by the official enemy doesn’t make it any less brutal or terrifying. Under totalitarian systems (of any type or scale) fear is a constant and there is no escape from it.

The masses’ fear is then channeled into hatred … hatred of the official “Untermenschen,” whom the system encourages the masses to scapegoat. Thus, the purge is also a means of allowing the masses to purge themselves of their fear, to transform it into self-righteous hatred and unleash it on the “Untermenschen” instead of the totalitarian system, which, obviously, would be suicidal.

Every totalitarian system — both the individuals running it and the system, structurally — instinctively understands how all this works. New Normal totalitarianism is no exception.

Just reflect on what has happened over the last 18 months.

Day after day, month after month, the masses have been subjected to the most destructive psychological-terror campaign in the history of psychological terror. Sadly, many of them have been reduced to paranoid, anus-puckering invalids, afraid of the outdoors, of human contact, afraid of their own children, afraid of the air, morbidly obsessed with disease and death … and consumed with hatred of “the Unvaccinated.”

Their hatred, of course, is utterly irrational, the product of fear and propaganda, as hatred of “the Untermenschen” always is. It has absolutely nothing to do with a virus, which even the New Normal authorities admit. “The Unvaccinated” are no more of a threat to anyone than any other human being … except insofar as they threaten the New Normals’ belief in their delusional ideology.

No, we are way past rationality at this point. We are witnessing the birth of a new form of totalitarianism. Not “communism.” Not “fascism.” Global-capitalist totalitarianism. Pseudo-medical totalitarianism. Pathologized totalitarianism. A form of totalitarianism without a dictator, without a definable ideology. A totalitarianism based on “science,” on “fact,” on “reality,” which it creates itself.

I don’t know about you, but, so far, it has certainly made quite an impression on me. So much so that I have mostly set aside my satirical schtick to try to understand it … what it actually is, why it is happening, why it is happening now, where it is going, and how to oppose it, or at least disrupt it.

The way I see it, the next six months will determine how successful the initial stages of the roll-out of this new totalitarianism will be. By April of 2022, either we’ll all be showing our “papers” to the New Normal Gestapo to be able to earn a living, attend a school, dine at a restaurant, travel, and otherwise live our lives, or we will have thrown a monkey wrench into the machinery. I do not expect GloboCap to abandon the roll-out of the New Normal over the longer term — they are clearly committed to implementing it — but we have the power to ruin their opening act (which they’ve been planning and rehearsing for quite some time).

So, let’s go ahead and do that, shall we? Before we get purged, or unpersoned, or whatever. I’m not sure, as I haven’t seen a “fact-check” yet, but I believe there are some commercial airline pilots in the USA who are showing us the way.

Reprinted with permission from Consent Factory.

from The Great New Normal Purge

An Educational Tonkin Gulf? The NSBA Apologies for the Letter that Triggered the Controversial Federal Operation

We recently discussed the controversy following the letter of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) asking the Justice Department to investigate parents causing disruptions or making threats at school board meetings. The letter included a reference to using the Patriot Act against possible domestic terrorism. Attorney General Merrick Garland responded a few days later with an order to the entire Department of Justice to monitor school board meetings around the country and coordinate a response with local officials.

Now the NSBA has issued an apology. The question is whether Garland will now rescind or amend his much criticized memo. It has the feel of an educational version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Should we reconsider our deployment in light of the false premise that triggered the escalation of hostilities?

The NSBA stated “On behalf of NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter . . . there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”

Notably, recent coverage indicates that the NSBA coordinated the letter with the White House before it was issued. A significant number of people at the organization (and likely some in the Administration) saw early drafts of this letter. Not one appears to have objected to the reckless and extreme language directed toward parents, citing a handful of cases.


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For his part, Garland stated that none of these past disruptions would constitute domestic terrorism. However, as I discussed earlier, he further pledged that he will not use such laws against parents objecting to critical race theory or other issues at these meetings. However, those answers only begged the question of why the Justice Department has pledged this broad effort to monitor and respond to threats at these meetings. If these are not matters of domestic terrorism, why is the Justice Department implementing this effort? The letter does not cite any pattern of criminal threats or their interstate or federal profile.

This question was picked up in a letter to Garland from half of the eight members of the Commission on Civil Rights. They requested “specific examples” of “harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” which Garland claimed as evidence for the need for federal intervention in parent protests at schools.

Now even the NSBA agrees that its letter was over-the-top and extreme.

Reprinted with permission from JonathanTurley.org.

from An Educational Tonkin Gulf? The NSBA Apologies for the Letter that Triggered the Controversial Federal Operation

Will Biden Start Nuclear War with China Over Taiwan?

President Biden’s “townhall” meeting this past week was a disaster. From his bizarre poses to the incoherent answers, it seemed to confirm America’s worst fears about a president we are told was elected by the most voters ever. Though he didn’t bother campaigning, we are to believe he somehow motivated the most voters in history to pull the lever in his favor. Or mail in a ballot in his favor. Or something.

After the townhall, the Wall Street Journal was early among mainstream media publications to observe that the emperor has no clothes. In an editorial titled “The Confusing Mr. Biden,” the paper wrote, “Even with a friendly audience and softball questions, Mr. Biden’s performance revealed why so many Americans are losing confidence in his Presidency.”

The Journal focused on one of the most shocking and disturbing revelations from the carefully crafted event: asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if the United States would come to the defense of Taiwan should it come under attack by the Chinese mainland, he replied, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.”

Anderson threw him another softball in hopes he might correct this dangerous misstatement, but Biden was not nimble enough to see his gaffe. He doubled down.

It was left to the “Chemical Ali” of this Administration, White House Spokesman Jen Psaki, to “clarify” that when the President signaled a major shift in US policy – a shift that could well lead to nuclear war with China – he was just kidding. Or something.

Said Psaki the next day: “Well, there has been no shift. The President was not announcing any change in our policy nor has he made a decision to change our policy. There is no change in our policy.”

In other words: “Pay no attention to the man who pretends to be the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States.”

But this is not George W. Bush, who was elected in 2000 with zero experience in foreign policy. This is not Trump, who was so hapless that he campaigned on a policy of peace while hiring John Bolton to carry out that policy.

No, Biden has twice been Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Foreign policy has always been considered his one area of competence. Surely the Biden of even the Obama Administration would have understood the potentially catastrophic implications of his statement.

Strategic ambiguity has been US policy toward Taiwan/China for decades, but the new Biden China policy could be re-named “strategic incoherence.”

The policy of “strategic ambiguity” is foolish enough – who cares who rules Taiwan? – but advancing the idea that the United States is willing to launch a nuclear war with China over who governs Taiwan is a whole other level of America-last foolishness.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Miley was heralded as a hero for betraying his Commander in Chief Trump by seeking to restrict Trump’s access to the US nuclear arsenal. Milley claimed that Trump was so unsound of mind that he could not be trusted with the nuclear football.

Yet when actual unsoundness is there for everyone to see, Milley and the other “woke” generals are silent as the grave. These are dangerous times.

from Will Biden Start Nuclear War with China Over Taiwan?