Five years ago, authorities in the central Chinese city of Wuhan and surrounding areas in Hubei province imposed a travel ban on some 18 million people, just days after admitting that the newly emerging coronavirus was transmissible between people.
Five years on from COVID-19—from Wuhan’s lockdown to global pandemic, from zero-COVID to coexistence—the world has changed. As survivors, what have we learned?
The lockdown prompted a mass rush to leave the city that likely helped spread COVID-19 around the country and beyond.
It also plunged China into three grueling years of citywide lockdowns, mass quarantine camps and compulsory daily COVID tests, with residents locked in, walled off and even welded into their own apartments, unable to earn a living or seek urgent medical care.
China is still struggling to recover today, despite the ending of restrictions in 2022 following nationwide protests, political commentators and a city resident told RFA Mandarin in recent interviews.
The most worrying thing about the Wuhan lockdown was that the authorities took that model and imposed it on cities across the country over the three years that followed, according to independent political commentator Qin Peng.
“The first thing [the authorities learned] was how to control public speech, how to arrest citizen journalists, how to block the internet, how to leak information and create public opinion through paid-for international experts and media,” Qin said. “The second thing was how to tame the public and bring everyone into line with the use of official narratives.”
“The third was how to turn an incident for which they were clearly responsible into a problem caused by somebody else … by blaming the United States, or nature,” Qin said.
Rows of beds lie waiting to be filled at a makeshift hospital set up in the Wuhan Sports Center stadium, Wuhan, China, Feb. 12, 2020.(AP)
The World Health Organization last month called on China to fully release crucial data surrounding the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2020, although the call was dismissed by Beijing.
Massive controls ‘still possible’
U.S.-based former Peking University professor Xia Yeliang said the government learned that it was still possible to impose massive and far-reaching controls on the population.
“They weren’t sure it would work after so many years of economic reform and opening up, although such strict controls had been possible during the time of [late supreme leader] Mao Zedong,” Xia said. “They thought people wouldn’t accept it.”
“But after the Wuhan lockdown, the authorities discovered that it was still possible.”
Wuhan was Ground Zero in the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the first city in the world to undergo a total lockdown in early 2020.
Authorities claimed that only 2,531 people died in the initial wave of infections, but estimates at the time based on the number of cremations carried out by the city’s seven crematoria suggested that tens of thousands died.
Apart from the spread of the virus, the most immediate impact for many was the clampdown on freedom of speech.
Whistleblowing doctors like Li Wenliang and Ai Fen were threatened and silenced after they tried to warn people about the new viral “pneumonia” that bore all of the hallmarks of a SARS-like virus.
During the 76 days of the Wuhan lockdown, the authorities deleted 229 articles and posts by citizen journalists who rushed to the city to document the pandemic from the front line, according to the documentary film “Wuhan Lockdown,” which remains banned in China.
Police also pursued and detained several prominent live bloggers in the city, including Li Zehua, Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin and Zhang Zhan, all of whom were to serve lengthy terms behind bars for their attempts to report on the emerging pandemic.
Outside the city, censors were busy deleting articles and comments on the pandemic and the authorities’ response.
Wuhan residents also lost the right to freedom of movement, to earn a living and to seek medical care, and were effectively prisoners in their own homes, according to reports at the time.
Paying the price
There was a heavy price to pay, both psychologically and economically, however.
“Since the Wuhan lockdown, I’ve lost interest in so many things that I used to love,” Wuhan resident Guo Siyu told RFA Mandarin. “My health, my parents and my kids are my top priority now.”
“I barely have any thoughts of material success … and even my spiritual life has faded into the background: I just want to stay alive and be safe,” she said.
Xia said the initial attempt to control the citywide spread of COVID-19 was understandable.
“When you have the large-scale spread of an infectious disease, with an unknown source and outcome, it is not entirely wrong to choose to control the movements of the population,” Xia said. “But what really needs reflecting on is what they did afterwards.”
For example, Chinese President Xi Jinping never visited Wuhan in person, Xia said.
“He claimed to be overseeing operations in person, but he wasn’t there in person,” Xia said, adding that the emergency relief services had also failed to deliver reliable supplies of food, transportation and medical attention to everyone to needed them.
“Maybe they were taken by surprise initially, but what about a few months later?” he said. “It was a dereliction of government duty that they were still unable to achieve this several months down the line.”
Medical staff transport COVID-19 patients at the Huoshenshan makeshift hospital in Wuhan, China, Feb. 4, 2020.(Xiao Yijiu/Xinhua News Agency/AP)
Xia said the Chinese government seems incapable of reflecting on its errors and learning from them, and controls on public speech mean that nobody is allowed to do that for them.
“I think this is a government that doesn’t reflect, and a society that cannot reflect,” he said. “And a government that can’t reflect can’t run the country effectively.”
CCP’s damaged standing
Qin said the government’s insistence on the zero-COVID policy, using lockdowns and tracking people’s movements and infection status via the Health Code app, had ultimately damaged the economy and the Chinese Communist Party’s standing in the eyes of its own people.
“People used to have this irrational belief in the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to govern,” Qin said. “But from the extreme prevention and control measures right through to the way they relaxed restrictions with no preparation, we can see how inflexible their policies are.”
“And they failed to deliver the economic recovery that everyone predicted after the restrictions were dropped,” he said. “This has had a profound impact on all aspects of China’s political and economic development, and damaged the authority of the national government and Xi Jinping personally.”
“That’s why they dare not talk anymore about their victory over the pandemic,” Qin said.
Guo, who once made a living coaching Chinese students to apply to study overseas, said neither she nor her city has ever really recovered.
“Relations between China and other countries have broken down, and I have no income,” she said.
“It’s been five years, and yet the pandemic has never ended,” Guo said. “The impact of that lockdown on us, the native people of Wuhan, has never gone away.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Zhu Liye for RFA Mandarin.
Some people are still complaining –rightly — about the penetration of women’s competitive sports (along with prisons and school lavatories). There is a strong temptation to see this merely as some bizarre fashion against which too many officials lack the courage to resist. In fact I do not believe this is cowardice. There are cowards up front but they don’t make policy. Look what happened at Penn and Harvard. Normally immune CEOs at these elite kindergartens were sacked for failure to behave like “trannies” toward students who dared to protest the mass murder in Palestine. The mass murder and population displacement in the entire Middle East and Ukraine (by Kiev not Russia) has induced far less outrage. This is despite (or perhaps because of) the subsequent enrichment of serial murderers like George Soros who back the causes they have learned to blindly support. It is particularly egregious since these students go into debt to in the hope of joining the ruling cadre and are essentially customers of these hedge funds.
For the purposes of argument let us say that the same tiny sadist elite holds the purse for all major ideological institutions. Competitive sports is one of them, a central tool for mass indoctrination.
Social engineering is based on multiple layers of indoctrination and structural organisation, whether labor process or reproduction. The outrage over transgender terror cannot be suppressed by neutralizing of women and healthy heterosexual men, meanwhile labeled with bizarre terms like “cis”. As yet there are no reliable replacements. Sports sell products and they sell weapons. NASCAR races are traditional promotion for the military. They also support the creation of masses of “losers” who engage in vicarious triumph through the selected heroes in each discipline.
Hence it is imperative to disrupt and undermine all forms of natural life. That is being done through compulsory use of pharmaments and restructuring of the indoctrination organs, to which sports belong. Before injections were introduced to control the potential for illness from the “dangerous” (now called “deplorable”) class, sports were industrialized as mass spectator operations, first for patriotism and then for consumption. Private-public partnerships have already brought the conventional military to an advanced stage.
Anyone who doubts that sports are instrumental in managing consumption only has to examine contemporary footwear. It is also a branch of the identity industry. Identity politics is nothing less than the marketing of recombinant genetic engineering. Dependent on corporate managed consumption, identity can be created and erased like software updates. After all software is the digital extraction of human intellectual labor — no less exploitative than using children to crack coal or other extractive operations. Despite many apparent service advantages (except for its employees) Amazon is essentially the template for a digital synthetic culture. The 2020-21 lockdowns from which it profited enormously were the test field for “digital enclosures”.
It may take a while until the entire competitive sports sector has been reorganized around anti-human values but the campaign is very aggressive. On the fringe are disciplines like robot football. Robot soldier prototypes are in advanced stages too.
Hollywood has been selling this vision for decades now. When real humans die off through wars and pharmaments combined with poisoned foods, the social structures will be complete to subordinate the remaining humans to planned obsolescence.
There is a certain tragedy in the 19th century struggle to assert the value of labor. The result has been that it is valued above all those who actually perform it. The sincere effort to eliminate oppression of women and children has resulted in the destruction of the social bonds that sustained human life — as opposed to abstract surplus value. “Freeing” peasants from the land and women from child bearing has not benefited either as a group. Even today we can see that the benefits promised by such relief have been hoarded by the ruling class. This was accomplished by isolating nominal freedoms and promoting them to destroy the social fabric in which those freedoms might actually mean something. Another public-private partnership under the umbrella of the intergovernmental public-private partnership cartel, aka United Nations, the International Organisation for Migration promotes politically and materially the vision that labor is just an internationally distributed natural resource to be moved wherever it can be most efficiently profitably exploited. War is just another means of resource allocation the UN promotes.
The once helpful analytical tool by which systems of domination and exploitation were shown not to be natural, but the product of ruling class violence has now been appropriated so that ordinary human activity is defined as an artificial social construct. The difference between the critical theory and the current ideology lies in the definition of human life as artificial while its management by the ruling oligarchs is elevated as natural. The pretenders to divinity in their mountain retreats have turned critique into a strategy for destroying human society as living environment. Margaret Thatcher was not exaggerating when she said there is no “society”.[1] Her ostensibly libertarian assertion belied the fact that corporations under her long reign certainly constituted a “society” from which she and her family personally benefited- unlike Yorkshire miners. The aim of her handlers was to destroy it. It is the organisational complement to genetics and recombinant biological manipulation. That is also why it is not too harsh to properly apply Daniel Goldberg‘s banal and mendacious term “willing executioners” but to the “Wokie Dokies” rather than some fictional Germans under NSDAP rule.[2] It has been the “woke” who were most easily persuaded to collude in the extermination of the old and infirm since the outbreak of the Covid War.
The “third way”, a chimera propagated by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and cohorts of “young global leaders” and still churned by Soros’ alma mater the LSE, triumphed as the cult of the new trans-human millennium. Its principal pathology is exhibited in the myopia that induces innumerable people-not just acolytes- to support the depopulation of Ukraine and the Middle East- that is the function for which the same people created Israel and the Zelensky regime. Bound by the malignant narcissism and nihilism of their masters they may be embarrassed by the crudity of the current campaign in Palestine but they support albeit unwittingly their own redundancy and obliteration. First they will cheer the carnage as purification. By the time they are led to the slaughterhouse it will be too late.
ENDNOTES
[1] “They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.” – in an interview in Women’s Own (31 October 1987)
[2] Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996). Goldhagens initially scandalous book was eventually discredited as scholarship but not before its slanderous impact as “holocaust porn”.
For many people in 2020, the news that the central Chinese city of Wuhan had been placed under lockdown was the first indication that something was profoundly amiss, and that the emerging pandemic could have a global impact.
Four years on, there has been no official mention of the anniversary, although the authorities appeared to be taking steps to ensure nobody uses the date to cause trouble for the ruling party.
Staff members check the temperatures of passengers arriving on a train from Wuhan to Hangzhou, China, Jan. 23, 2020. (AFP)
Wuhan police took at least one activist out of town ahead of the politically sensitive fourth anniversary of the citywide lockdown – the first of the COVID-19 pandemic, RFA has learned.
The person, who requested anonymity for fear of further reprisals, said state security police had forced him to leave town with them on a “day trip” on Tuesday, which marked the anniversary of the start of Wuhan’s lockdown on Jan. 23, 2020.
“They took me out for a day trip yesterday because it was the anniversary of the [Wuhan] lockdown,” the person said. “I was confused yesterday, and I didn’t realize why I was being dragged out for the day.”
“I only saw later what my friends were posting on WeChat Moments, that it was the fourth anniversary,” he said.
“The authorities were having a ‘stability maintenance’ day,” the activist said, in a reference to a nationwide system of controls and restrictions that targets potential activists before they take action.
State media silent
There was no mention of the anniversary in state media, although some people commemorated the date on overseas social media platforms, posting the official announcement from four years ago.
“Today, Hubei province has launched its top-level response to a major public health emergency,” the announcement said.
“From Jan. 23, 2020, all bus, subway, ferry and long-distance passenger transportation in and out of the city will be suspended.”
“No residents will be permitted to leave Wuhan without a special reason,” it said.
Patients infected with COVID-19 rest at a temporary hospital in the Wuhan Sports Center, Feb. 17, 2020. (Xiao Yijiu/Xinhua via AP)
The notice was to plunge the city into a whirlwind of compulsory daily testing, enforced quarantine in rapidly constructed mass facilities, and a desperate struggle to seek medical treatment as hospitals in the city were overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, seriously ill people were left scrambling for medical attention, as crematoriums started operating around the clock.
A recent documentary made from footage filmed at the time and smuggled out of the country for editing overseas remains blocked to viewers behind China’s Great Firewall, including the 11 million people who call Wuhan home.
“The level of control they had over people [back then] was like something out of a novel, with scenes straight out of [George Orwell’s dystopian novel] 1984 becoming part of our daily lives,” one of the film’s producers, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals, told RFA. “It was very scary.”
“What’s even more scary now, looking back on it, is that people have already forgotten that this kind of thing was happening all around us,” they said. “It could come back at any time.”
Poverty spreads
Several Wuhan residents told RFA that most people have more pressing concerns in the current economic downturn.
“The trauma fades as time goes by, but I definitely won’t forget it, because the pain of that time was unforgettable,” a resident who gave only the surname Wang for fear of reprisals told RFA.
“Some people have no jobs, and nothing to eat, and the sequelae [of the zero-COVID era] aren’t going to be resolved any time soon,” he said.
A Jianghan district resident who gave only the surname Song agreed, saying that poverty appears much more widespread in Wuhan these days.
“Who could forget the beginning of lockdown on Jan. 23, 2020?” she said. “It had a huge impact on people’s lives.”
“A lot of people were made unemployed … and a lot of the shops are closed … for example on Hongqiqu Road in Jianghan district,” she said. “Many people are worried about their livelihood – things are really tough.”
A passenger arrives at the nearly deserted Wuhan train station, usually full of passengers ahead of the Lunar New Year, on Jan. 23, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP)
Others took to social media to comment on the date, or to say that the past four years were something of a blur. Others complained that they were far worse off, economically, than four years ago.
For many who lived through that time, the full story remains untold, although possibly guessed at.
Even by the end of Wuhan’s 76-day lockdown, which was to set the pattern for ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s nationwide zero-COVID restrictions over the three years that followed, residents were calling into question the official death toll as the virus ripped through an unprepared and as-yet-unvaccinated community.
Widespread doubts remain that China’s reported COVID-19 death toll – a 2021 study published in British medical journal The Lancet estimated excess deaths outside China at 18 million — could be an accurate reflection of reality.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.
The global pandemic preparedness accord (‘pandemic treaty’) currently being put in place by the World Health Organization (WHO) will pave the way for “a fascist approach to societal management.” The beneficiaries will be unscrupulous corporations and investors whom the COVID‐19 response served well. This will result in the loss of human rights and individual freedom.
So says Dr David Bell, a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and former WHO scientific and medical officer. The treaty represents a terrifying power grab that, if successful, will give the WHO a central directing role and monopoly power in global health governance.
As currently drafted, the treaty will hand the WHO the authority to order measures, including significant financial contributions by individual states, lockdowns, travel restrictions, forced medical examinations and mandatory vaccinations during a public health emergency of its own declaring.
The WHO will have sole and extensive power to declare Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC) for any potential or real threat for extended areas, whether these threats are biological, climate or environment related. And it will do so without proper proof and solely decide measures and medical substances to be imposed on the public without informed consent.
Its powers will also include the official censorship of information, including free speech — views opposing the official narrative put out by the WHO — and it will be accountable to no national parliament or be limited by any constitutional safeguards.
A group of prominent lawyers, doctors and concerned citizens have written to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Minister of Health and Family Welfare Shri Mansukh L Mandaviya urging them to reject the WHO’s global pandemic treaty. The signatories are listed at the end of this article, and the 10-page letter can be accessed in full with all relevant links and references on the Awaken India website: WHO Pandemic Treaty Ultra Vires of the Constitution).
The WHO released a Zero Draft of the WHO CA+ (this ‘pandemic treaty’ is now officially known as an ‘accord’) with 38 Articles on 1 February 2023 and, subsequently, another draft with 41 Articles on 2 June 2023. The accord marks a fundamental change in how the WHO will function. It seeks secretively, behind closed doors, sweeping powers under its director general.
The signatories make clear that, under the proposed accord, the WHO can, at will, call a pandemic, declare a PHEIC and then take over the authority of national governments to detain citizens, restrict their travel, require them to have vaccine passports (forced testing and vaccination) and increase social media censorship. The accord would also operate as a ‘framework convention’ that’s on-going, year after year, indefinitely. It facilitates a dictatorship role for the WHO as it moves to acquire unfettered power.
Two instruments, the accord itself and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) 2005, are designed to operate in parallel to give draconian powers to the WHO. Both texts irremediably entail the transfer to the WHO of the power to threaten health freedom, thereby representing a fundamental threat to national, medical and bodily autonomy.
In their letter, the authors state that the WHO is an external, unelected body, which may not and cannot be appointed to such a dictatorship position. During the COVID-19 event, the WHO’s role in facilitating medical tyranny was clear to see.
It advocated enforced lockdowns, which destroyed the livelihoods of millions in India and across the world and created a surge in mental health problems. It shut down schools, putting back the education of a generation. It promoted incompletely tested and unapproved vaccines under EUA (Emergency Use Authorisation) that despite the claims of ‘safe and effective’ where nothing of the sort and caused a sharp rise in spike protein-induced heart and brain disease.
If adopted at the 77th World Health Assembly in May 2024 by a simple majority vote, the ‘pandemic treaty’ will come into force within 12 months for all countries, unless a country proactively files rejections or reservations within a 10-month period.
The letter to the prime minister and the health minister states that the accord and those pushing it are:
Manifestly violative of Fundamental Rights of the citizens of India and, therefore, Ultra Vires of the Indian Constitution. In their very intent, they cancel the fundamental right to bodily autonomy and integrity, through mandating medical procedures, coercion and further grossly illegal acts.
The letter adds:
This is a breathtaking and terrifying onslaught on fundamental civil liberties. It must be understood as fundamental, that the negation of bodily integrity of any human being means the loss of all human rights.
In making its point, the letter refers to the Nuremberg Code (1947) by stating:
The consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights resumed this ban against unintentional experimentation in its 1966 text, which states: no one may be subjected without his consent to medical or scientific experiment.
It also references the Geneva statement for doctors (1948):
I will respect the autonomy and dignity of my patient. I will not use my medical knowledge to infringe human rights and civil liberties, even under force. I will keep absolute respect for human life, from conception. I will consider my patient’s health as my first concern.
The signatories note that there is little alternative but to jettison the WHO from national life and implore the prime minister and the health minister to act to uphold the sovereignty of India and the rights of every citizen.
They add that unelected, unaccountable and largely unknown delegates from 194 countries meet in Geneva during World Health Assembly meetings, as they did in 2022 when they adopted amendments to the IHR. The process is fraught with secrecy, autocracy and impending tyranny, blatantly devoid of any transparent, democratic process.
These country delegates are unelected and do not represent the people of their country. The signatories ask:
How can they negotiate on behalf of nations, let alone an international/global health regulation binding on 194 countries?
If the ‘global pandemic treaty’ is forced through, we could see perpetual lockdowns. At the same time, corporate interests will dominate. Pandemics will become self-sustaining by creating a bureaucracy whose existence will depend on them.
People will be at the mercy of the police and bureaucrats who will be immune to any penalty for any acts carried out in ‘good faith’. These acts could take the form of mandatory medical procedures, forced entry into premises, forced isolation and quarantine.
It was bad enough in 2020 with the full force of the state lined up against the public, especially those who did not agree with COVID policies, but imagine the abuse of power that could occur if the WHO acquires the powers it seeks.
The seeds of totalitarianism were clear to see with Anthony Fauci saying that he is ‘the science’, former New Zealand PM Jacinda Arden declaring the government as the ‘single source of truth’ and social media companies working hand in glove with the deep state to censor and deplatform prominent figures and world-renowned scientists who questioned the official narrative.
We saw the suspension of fundamental civil liberties with the threat of state violence on hand, often resulting in citizens being abused by de facto paramilitary police forces for breaching ‘pandemic rules’ that had no scientific basis.
Governments declared that they were ‘following the science’, but what we saw were inflated death numbers, manipulated data and the fraudulent use of RT-PCR tests to help create the perception of a deadly pandemic in the minds of the public. Readers can consult the online article Stay Home, Save Lives: Uncovering the COVID Deception, which provides insight into the various deceptions that helped instill fear into the global population in 2020.
The WHO also provided a wrong projection of mortality. The exaggeration caused panic in the population — part of a carefully orchestrated ‘fear pandemic’ — and paved the way for lockdowns and the mass uptake of vaccines sold to the public based on false claims. The synthetic spike protein of the vaccines has resulted in clotting, bleeding, heart problems and brain blood clotting as well as neurodegenerative problems. And what we are seeing across so many countries since the vaccine rollout is significant excess mortality, which the media is silent about.
Moreover, the WHO operates within a biopharmaceutical complex, a complicated syndicate that has formed over time, which instructs world health policies. This complex involves the health agencies of national governments, including India, the US and the UK, the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation, the Welcome Group and major pharmaceutical companies. Revolving door arrangements between these organisations have resulted in regulatory capture.
Researcher and campaigner Yohan Tengra of the Awaken India Movement conducted a two-year investigation into how this works in India. Through his research, he exposed the billionaire cartel that controlled India’s COVID-19 Task Force. Tengra listed not just the names of those who sat on this task force, but he also detailed how they are financially connected to the pharmaceutical-vaccine industry.
The task force was responsible for the aggressive push to lockdown, mandatory mask requirements, forced testing of asymptomatic people, dropping ivermectin from the national protocol, suppressing vaccine adverse events and much more.
Tengra also exposed how India’s prominent public health personalities, who regularly appeared in the media and on TV, are connected to the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Welcome Trust, USAID, the World Bank and other aspects of the global deep state.
We have every right to be concerned about a ‘pandemic treaty’ shaped by powerful interests with stakes in closing down economies (see the online article Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation by Fabio Vighi), mandatory vaccination programmes and digital surveillance who are all too willing to strip away our fundamental rights for their own gain.
The letter to India’s prime minister and the minister of health makes clear that the WHO’s massive conflict of interest should disqualify it from any role in world health.
Signatories:
Dr. Jacob Puliyel, Delhi, MD, MRCP, MPhil, Paediatrician and Visiting Faculty International
Prashant Bhushan, New Delhi, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India
Colin Gonsalves, New Delhi, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India
Nilesh Ojha, Mumbai, President – Indian Bar Association, Advocate Bombay High Court and Supreme Court of India, Human Rights Activist
Author Dr. Amitav Banerjee, Pune, MD, Formerly Epidemiologist, Indian Armed Forces
Dr Aseem Malhotra, London (Overseas Citizen of India), MBChB, MRCP. Consultant Cardiologist
Aruna Rodrigues, Mhow, Lead Petitioner: GMO PIL in the Supreme Court and Member Iridescent Blue Fish (IBF)
Dr. Donthi Narasimha Reddy, Hyderabad, Public Policy Expert and Campaigner
Dr. Megha Consul, Gurugram, Paediatrics, Senior Consultant, Neonatologist
Dr. Pravin Chordia, Pune, MD Surgeon
Dr. Lalitkumar Anande, Mumbai, MBBS, PG Diploma in Clinical Research
Dr. Vijay Raghava, Bangalore, MBBS Dr. Veena Raghava, Bangalore, MBBS, DA
Dr. Kuldeep Kumar, Haridwar, MBBS MS (GENERAL SURGERY) Dr. Praveen Saxena, Hyderabad, Radiologist & Clinical metal toxicologist, MBBS, DMRD Osmania
Dr. Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury, Faridabad, Ph.D (Diabetes)
Dr. Gautam Das, Kolkata, MBBS, General Physician
Saraswati Kavula, Hyderabad, Documentary Filmmaker & Freelance Journalist, Awaken India Movement
Bhaskaran Raman, Mumbai, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Advocate
Ishwarlal S. Agarwal, Mumbai Advocate
Tanveer Nizam, Mumbai
Dr. Susan Raj, Chattisgrah, BSc Nurse, MSW(M&P), Doctorate Humanities, Behavior Specialist
Jagannath Chaterjee, Bhubhaneshwar, Social Activist
Dr. Abhay Chedda, Mumbai, BHMS, CCAH, FCAH
Dr. Gayatri Panditrao, Pune, Homeopathic Physician, BHMS, PGDEMS
At least as one response to the perceived failures of the French Revolution, some of what became the Romantic movements in the 19th century turned away from social interaction, especially collective activity, and toward individual isolation. Such a reaction was not peculiar to this period. In fact, withdrawal from social contact was an established niche strategy throughout Latin Christendom. There were two broad views in the Church as to how sin was to be encountered. One was collective labour. The other was solitary penitence.
Solitude for the Romantic movements emerged as a process of disengagement. By withdrawing from the noise of society artistic (creative) potential could be enhanced. Contemplation was often focused on nature or introspection. The work produced in the process, whether in literature or visual arts, created an iconography for human isolation and alienation. At the same time, nature served as a source of potential redemption from all those sources of alienation found in society. Nature in various forms also became a repository of the divine. The paintings of Caspar David Friedrich are well-known examples for this process in the visual arts. The Prelude, by William Wordsworth, is certainly exemplary in the literary arts.
Wordsworth began The Prelude in 1799 and finished it in 1805, although he made several revisions in the course of his life. The poem can be understood as a literary investigation into the forces and events that shaped the personality of the author and his poetical labour. In Book Four he wrote:
When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude-
How potent a mere image of her sway!
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre: hermit,
Deep in the bosom of the wilderness;
Votary (in vast cathedral, where no foot
Is treading, where no other face is seen)
Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top
Of lighthouse, beaten by Atlantic waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless wastes.[1]
Wordsworth began as a great supporter of the French Revolution and ended greatly disappointed by it. The poem examines the path that transformed him into a revolutionary and led him away from revolution in the end. The revolution had promised to reorganise society along principles of equality as articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Wordsworth and others felt it had failed. The dictatorship and imperial ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte were proof that it was impossible to create a society based on New Testament equality by removing the divinely ordained monarchy.
It is important to add here that these judgements were based on reports scarcely more circumspect than found in today’s mass media. Wordsworth would not have been able to see the results of the Jacobin societies in the provinces or to measure the violence with which the changes introduced were opposed by the counter-revolution with its foreign supporters. The rejection of the French Revolution by much of the English intellectual caste and England’s emergent cultural power in the 19th century constitute a bias which still overshadows the appreciation of the 1789 revolution beyond the English-speaking world. Even today very little attention is given to the counter-revolution and foreign intervention. Almost all school and university texts focus on the Jacobins and the so-called Terror, although the “White Terror” killed substantially more people.
At the same time the foundation of what we once recognized as modern science, evolving as it did from the same cultural context, emerged as the product of solitary investigation. In fact by the end of the 19th century the image of the scientist and the artist merged as solitary investigators, discoverers and innovators were ranked among the upper strata of Western society and the artistic creator/ scientific genius became clichés.
The solitude, whether in science or the arts, was in many ways a recovery of the penitentiary tradition in the Latin Church. In order to discover god and attain grace it was necessary to exercise as close to purity as possible. If artistic or scientific truth approached that of the divine or substituted for it, then it was also to be obtained by the investigator isolated from sources of corruption thus able to perceive pure data. The scientist sought this isolation in research performed in private laboratories that were sometimes associated with university faculties. The concept of academic freedom—a secularization of monastic privileges—was interpreted to assure the necessary solitude for unbiased research and pursuit of truth. Thus although scientific research is inevitably a collective activity, the fiction of solitary research was created by formally isolating the university from daily political and commercial interests.
The artist sought places in the countryside or abandoned his native land for a self-imposed exile or quest. George Gordon Byron’s death in the Greek war of independence in 1824 is only the most notorious.
By the end of the 19th century the literary-artistic and scientific-scholarly caste was endowed with its own ethic and processes for transforming the pure into the true. This ideal was based on a critique of society’s corruption and the striving to transcend it. The bearer of this ideal was to become the autonomous self, solitude incarnate.
Following the defeat of Napoleon the Congress of Vienna not only restored the monarchical system, if somewhat “embourgeoised”, it reinstalled the deification of truth and knowledge as something otherworldly in origin. As Nietzsche observed at the end of the century, god was restored in all but name, while the name of “god” became an empty category, a mere symbol for the will to power.
The emergence of the autonomous Self, whose access to identity and truth derived from exercises in solitude, derived from two traditions. One, already mentioned, was the penitentiary. The individual withdraws from society as a source of sin and by contemplation, absorption and submission to God attains a higher degree of grace and eventually redemption from the sins with which society has soiled him.
The other tradition is that of natural divinity. The individual withdraws in order to contemplate and then engage the creative forces of nature. By comprehending them the artist becomes an agent of creation. Like nature he becomes capable of producing exemplifications of truth. The truth-value of these exemplifications is claimed by virtue of the method applied to create them. This is sometimes called “scientific method” or “artistic creativity”. Until recently it has been assumed that integrity of the respective methods was essential to the value of the product.
The Romantics found that solitude created the conditions by which they could contemplate the problems with which they had been confronted in society. The psychic isolation of the countryside or a foreign environment permitted them to focus on what remained in them when they were no longer influenced by daily social interaction. The longer the isolation continued the more they were exposed to themselves. In some cases this resulted in a “stripping” of their personalities down to the basics, e.g. the interaction of the human with nature unmitigated by social instructions. At some point the artist or scholar would arrive at an essence from which his personality could be redesigned, primarily through the creative or investigative work. The principle can be illustrated simply enough. If anyone has been left alone with a problem long enough, especially one which is highly conventionalized but for which there is no external solution available, there is at least a tendency for the person to use whatever means are at his disposal to solve the problem—even if they are unconventional. If a person is left in a group with the same problem and attempts to use that unconventional method, he will likely feel enormous pressure to abandon it in favour of the approach used by everyone else in the group.
One of the additional products of this solitude, voluntary psychic isolation, is to develop the strength of persona necessary to reproduce the solution created even under social pressure. Thus solitude is not only a strategy for stripping but for clothing the Self. There is certainly enough anecdotal evidence to justify statements like “he is too headstrong because he has been working alone too long.” One of the Romantic contributions to cultural transformation has been the adaptation of solitude to the modern scientific construction of the Self.
The Self as envisioned by the Romantics was a liberated personality, freed from the oppressive social structures and thus able to act as an agent of social transformation. However another Self was developed in response to the revolutionary impulses.
In 2002, British filmmaker Adam Curtis produced a television documentary, roughly based on a book by Stuart Ewen, called The Century of the Self. [2] Curtis’ central thesis is that the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, initiated and for a while led a movement that would turn the concept of the Self into the central instrument of social control in the West. In his study of public relations, the euphemism for propaganda Bernays introduced after World War I, Ewen explains how the culture of the Self was appropriated and exploited by corporate and political communications actors (Business and Government) to produce a society of individuals who believe themselves to be autonomous but are in fact manipulated in their every thought and move. Bernays drew on his uncle’s theories of the unconscious to show that control could be exercised over people by speaking to what they “really” thought and felt as opposed to what they actually said.
Instead of individuals—as the Romantics imagined—creating an authentic Self and entering society to act on the basis of this authenticity, Bernays and his successors devised methods they believed would suggest to the masses of isolated individuals ways they could reconstruct themselves in the interests of those who rule society. This presumed that one could create individuals in isolation that could be sufficiently alienated to engage in searching strategies. The aim was to exploit industrial and especially post-war psychic distress among masses of people whose lives had been irreversibly affected by the world war. These people would be encouraged in their sense of alienation. That alienation would be labelled individualism. The emotional duress would be sustained by graduated fear. This fear was sublimated in the reconstitution of groups of alienated individuals.
Curtis’s 4-episode film continues with a focus on commercial activity. Edward Bernays argued if he was able to produce advertising that would persuade people to go to war and fight he ought to be able to do this to sell products. After World War I ended the US was faced with massive overproduction. There were just too many goods that had been produced just to be wasted in war and now the plant lay idle and the goods collected dust in warehouses. Modern advertising was initiated to move those goods and restore the enormous profitability of wartime industrial manufacturing. He shows that creating desires and fears were complementary aims. On one hand the individual has to be freed from inhibitions like thrift, morality, social responsibility, or just a realistic assessment of his financial condition. The objective impositions of society are to be stripped from him so that he can feel his true nature as a desiring subject. Then he is intensively exposed to the prefabricated objects he ought to desire. This process is stimulated by fear, either the inability to satisfy those desires or the injection of ever more desires for which he has not yet the means of satisfaction. Dissatisfaction and fear are the constant state in which the individual is to be confined. Society does not offer him comfort, whether as routine or sustenance. Instead it exposes him to continuous competition for the satisfaction of the desires cultivated in him during his enforced isolation. Society becomes a machine for enforcing the private desires and the cycles of satisfaction – dissatisfaction, safety – fear that are translated into spending and consumption.
This process of alienation could not have become industrialized without political force. At the same time as individualism was being encouraged, Business and the State were waging vicious war against any genuinely autonomous collectivities like labour unions and popular movements, especially communism in the industrialized world and anti-colonialism/ nationalism among the peoples subjugated by colonial and imperial rule. Although Business was certainly enamoured with Bernays’ approach to mass marketing of products and services, there was also great demand for technologies of the “Self” by state actors.
The State’s interest in the Self, as opposed to the citizen, has not ceased. Curtis shows how the CIA and other covert agencies of the State promoted large-scale experimentation with the technology for creating or modifying the “Self”. One of the most notorious was the work of Dr Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal during the 1950s and 1960s. There experiments were performed on people who were subjected to pharmaceutical treatment in combination with electro-shocks and various degrees of sensory deprivation. The principle driving this work was that humans could have their consciousness erased and be “reprogrammed” on demand.
Although the Allan Memorial was eventually closed and Dr Cameron’s work denounced, there is no evidence that this kind of involuntary psychic isolation for political and social engineering goals has discontinued. The rudimentary descriptions available of programs run by the CIA and US military at the Guantanamo Detention Center, US Naval Base Guantanamo Cuba since the beginning of the century bear similarities to those run by Dr Cameron so great that they ought to be equally disturbing. Yet despite numerous pledges this center remains in operation with some 700 persons incarcerated at last count.[3]
The mass incarceration, appropriately denoted with prison jargon as “lockdowns”, organized and enforced to varying degrees from March 2020 to the end of 2021 has been excused by medical grounds discredited almost as soon as the public health authorities proposed them. Studies are only beginning to emerge that raise the question: what were the real reasons for these forced isolations, in innumerable cases, solitude and involuntary psychic isolation.
One of Dr Cameron’s experiments was to use covert media, e.g. hidden audio recordings, to introduce thoughts and verbalization to the brain of his presumably erased subject. The recordings would be played during the sleep sessions.
When the first reports and complaints about torture in Guantanamo Detention Center became public there was frequent mention of forced exposure to loud music and audio-visual material the prisoner would presumably find offensive. Sensory deprivation was combined with saturation exposure to foreign stimuli.
During the so-called “lockdowns” I was particularly struck by the closures and domestic incarceration in Portugal. In 2005, I was in Fatima for the first time. My friend and I were amazed at the people assembling there. Cripples of all sorts, people visibly disfigured or disabled by every conceivable illness made their way to the sanctuary. They were on their way to ask for the blessing and healing power of the Holy Virgin, Mother of God. Who knows if any of them had infectious illnesses? The power of the Almighty was present and able to heal. Yet during the mass incarceration the Shrine of Fatima was closed. Had I still been a practicing member of the Latin Church I would have been in uproar. How could the State presume to be more powerful than Our Lord and the Mother of God? How could anyone presume to keep me from the omnipotent divine?
To end, again with Wordsworth:
Oh, yet a few short years of useful life,
And all will be complete, thy race be run,
Thy monument of glory will be raised!
Then, though (too weak to tread the ways of truth)
This age fall back to old idolatry,
Though men return to servitude as fast
As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
By nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace—knowing what we have learnt to know,
Rich in true happiness if allowed to be
Faithful alike in forwarding a day
Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work
(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
Prophets of Nature, we to them speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blessed by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.
(“The Prelude,” Book fourteen, 430-454)
ENDNOTES
[1] William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” cited from The Prelude and other Poems, Alma Classics (2019)
[2] Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, New York, 1996; Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, originally released on BBC Two in 2002. Available on YouTube.
[3] From the time the US Government announced its program of “extraordinary renditions” and incarceration of “terrorists” at its illegally occupied south-eastern Cuba naval station, Guantanamo Bay aka as GITMO, there have been estimates and official claims ranging between 1,500 and 20 over the past two decades. Thus far there is no way to be certain exactly how many prisoners were or are held at this high security naval base. Therefore 700 is considered a conservative number, even if it may exceed current official claims.
Over five hundred and twenty-five days ago, between the evening of February 13 and afternoon of February 14, 2022, four men were arrested for their participation in Freedom Convoy protests at the Alberta border town of Coutts.
They were charged with conspiracy to commit murder of police officers in support of a plot to overthrow the Government of Canada. They have been dubbed the ‘Coutts Four.’
The accused are self-employed fisherman Chris Carbert, who ran a landscaping and fencing business with nine employees. A Lethbridge, Alberta, resident, 42-year-old Carbert is a single father who has been raising his son since the boy was nine-months-old.
Another Lethbridge resident, and best friend of Chris Carbert since public school, is 49-year-old Chris Lysak. He is an electrician and father of two girls.
A third member of the ‘Coutts Four’ accused of conspiracy to commit murder is 41-year-old Jerry Morin. He is a lineman who grew up near Vulcan, Alberta. The CBC states he resided in Olds, Alberta, at the time of his arrest. The fourth accused of these serious charges is Anthony “Tony” Olienkick. Tony, age 40, took part of the clean-up in High River, Alberta, after the 2013 floods.[1] He has a gravel truck and is self-employed, and the CBC has reported his home is in Claresholm, Alberta.
The Coutts Four have been denied bail. They have remained in custody for over 525 days with a trial date yet to be set. More pretrial motions will be heard between July 25 to 28 by the crown and defence lawyers at the Lethbridge court house. Since the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, kingdoms and democracies have allowed those charged with a crime to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. With that provision has come the right to be granted bail and to a speedy trial. When citizens are accused of a crime and left to rot in prison without having their day in court, their spirits can be broken and be persuaded to agree to plead guilty even when they are innocent.
Bail Is Granted to Those Accused of Having Committed Murder, and Lesser Charges in Canada
In Canada, when someone is charged with committing a crime, they are released on bail. This includes for those charged with murder. For example, on September 2021, 31-year-old Umar Zameer was released on bail after being charged with first-degree murder of Toronto Police Constable Jeffrey Northrup.[2] In April 2022, Marlena Isnardy was released on bail after while awaiting her trial for the charge of murdering 27-year-old Matthew Cholette in Kelowna, British Columbia.[3] A case of double murder in the city of Mission in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, concerned the deaths of Lisa Dudley and her boyfriend Guthrie McKay. Accused of first-degree murder, Tom Holden was released on bail.[4] And in March 2023, 22-year-old Ali Mian was released on bail as he awaited trial to answer to charges of second-degree murder in the shooting death of an armed intruder, 21-year-old Alexander Amoroso-Leacock.[5]
But the Coutts Four are not granted bail
Meanwhile others charged of first and second-degree murder are out on bail. What is going on here? Does the RCMP have a case that proves the accused pose a danger, if released on bail, and plan to violently overthrow of the government? Or, are their applications for bail being denied as part of political theatre within a larger government narrative to justify invocation of the Emergencies Act?
In 1166 the Assize of Clarendon ruling under England’s King Henry II established the tradition of habeas corpus (in Latin: “that you have the body”) which gave those charged with a crime a right to appear in court to defend themselves. The 1166 judgment declared, “No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseized of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land.”[6] And, in the Magna Carta, section 38 states “No bailiff (legal officer) shall start proceedings against anyone [not just freemen, this was even then a universal human right] on his accusation alone (on his own mere say-so), without trustworthy witnesses having been brought for the purpose.”[7] Habeas corpus rights are part of the British legal tradition inherited by Canada. The rights exist in the common law and have been enshrined in section 10(c) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states that “[e]veryone has the right on arrest or detention … to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful.” While section 9(c) of the Charter states that a protected right of Canadian citizens is “freedom from arbitrary detention or imprisonment.”[8]
Former Toronto Police Sergeant Detective, Donald Best, points out that it is almost unheard of in Canada for an accused to be denied bail.
Does the denial of bail mean the four must be guilty? Consider the way the RCMP gathered evidence.
The Mounties alleged that other unknown persons were still at large and connected to the plot to overthrow the government.
Yet, the RCMP didn’t fingerprint and DNA test the firearms and other items that might have originated with ‘other unknown’ suspects. If you are an investigator, you want to identify who else might be involved in a plot. If you have a weapon, getting the fingerprints and DNA evidence can point to the identities of other persons that are suspects in the larger plot. Yet, the RCMP didn’t bag each item where it was found, and protect each item for its secure transit to a forensic lab. Best wrote on his website, “Failure of police officers to adhere to fundamentals of exhibits collection and protection doesn’t just potentially weaken the prosecution’s case, it can also deny exculpatory evidence to the defense. Many times, I have seen otherwise good officers get ‘tunnel vision’ about a suspect or an investigation, and begin to pay attention only to evidence that supports their theory of the case and the crime. These officers become so focused that they will even deliberately exclude evidence that doesn’t support their vision of events.”
Best points out in the RCMP photo of the cache of weapons ‘discovered’ by the Mounties, “Items have been arranged on the floor with five of the long-guns rather precariously leaning against the table for display. No (investigator) would normally position or store firearms in such a manner where a bump of the table might cause them to fall…” A photo of the cache of weapons “had a national impact and was used by both the media and the government as justification for invoking the Emergencies Act, and the police operations to arrest and clear Freedom Convoy protesters in Ottawa.”[9]
Background
In January 2022 Canadian mainstream media and politicians described an unruly mob headed for Ottawa. On January 26, 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadians there was a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” coming to Ottawa in a “so-called freedom convoy.”[10] Protesters began arriving in Ottawa on January 28, with the majority arriving the following day.
Source: OffGuardian
Protest leaders worked with Ottawa Police Service Police Liaison Teams to ensure emergency lanes in downtown Ottawa remained open. On two occasions, an Ontario court ruled the protests in Ottawa could proceed. The second ruling, on February 16, 2022, took into account the protesters adhering to the February 7 injunction against honking of horns. There was no looting, no acts of actual physical violence, no smashing of windows. Numbers of police remarked about the lack of criminality. Nonetheless, inflammatory rhetoric coming from politicians and the media depicted the protesters as “terrorists,” “mercenaries,” “hillbillies,” “white supremacists,” “Nazis,” “insurrectionists,” “an unruly mob,” and more.[11]
Protest leaders held press conferences welcoming an opportunity to meet with government leaders, including public health officials. They wanted to have a discussion about the pandemic measures.
Could dialogue lead to a breakthrough, a win-win? Even when unions and management are in tough negotiations during a strike, there can be a breakthrough with an unexpected way forward to resolve matters. Face-to-face dialogue was always a first step to learn if there was a way forward. A 73-page plan by the Ontario Provincial Police included recommendations that the federal government enter into dialogue with the protesters. The government did so in 2020 when First Nations protesters disrupted rail service, ferry sailings, pipeline construction and blockaded an Ontario highway. But in 2022, the Liberal government was in no mood for dialogue. Policing agencies and even the Ontario Attorney-General had suggested the federal government engage in dialogue with the protesters. But the protesters were depicted as impossible, unreasonable people, incapable of participating in discussion.
*****
On the 31st of January 2022, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau addressed the nation regarding the Freedom Convoy protest movement at a Press Conference from an undisclosed location which was broadcast live.
He portrayed the protesters as violent people, racists and more.
On the 2nd of February, he added another layer with a tweet. (Below, See this)
Are the protesters really what he claims them to be?
I was there for four days with my camera, I never saw or witnessed anything close to what he describes.
Is it possible this is all made up? If it is, what is the purpose? (Jean Francois Girard)
VIDEO
At 4:30 p.m., February 14, Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to crush the protest. Bank accounts of some hundreds of protesters were frozen.
Yet, in an effort to defuse the situation in downtown Ottawa, on February 12, 2022 protest leaders came to an agreement with the City of Ottawa to remove seventy-five percent of protest vehicles from the city between February 14th and 16th. By 12PM, February 14, 102 vehicles had been removed, according to Serge Arpin, City of Ottawa Chief of Staff to the Mayor.[12] There were other Freedom Convoy protests that emerged during the Ottawa protests. Yet, in relation to the justification to invoke the Emergencies Act, in Windsor, Ontario, protesters and police reached an agreement to clear the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge by late on February 13th. The charges against protesters in Coutts, Alberta, across from Sweetgrass, Montana, were dealt with under the existing laws of the land on the February 14.
“Comments made publicly, by public figures and in the media (about Ottawa protests) … were not premised in fact” – Supt. Patrick Morris (Ontario Provincial Police Intelligence)
After the Emergencies Act was invoked, it triggered a mandatory inquiry as prescribed in 1988 legislation passed in Parliament. A Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) was held over six weeks in Ottawa during the fall of 2022. But the justification for invoking the Emergencies Act began to unravel as police and intelligence officers gave testimony. At 1:00 PM on February 14, 2022, prior to the Emergencies Act invocation, an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) “Operational Intelligence Report” described the Ottawa protest. “The mood today was again calm, festive, and family oriented. Speakers were again telling people to walk away from agitators and thanked the police for remaining calm. Many of the speakers were promoting love and peaceful protest, some even taking quotes from the Bible. Speakers were also wishing everyone a happy Valentine’s.” The memo noted there were “children on Wellington Street playing hockey.”[13]
Supt. Patrick Morris, “the foremost authority in the Province of Ontario regarding Intelligence” with the OPP testified before the POEC. He said of the protest, “ … the lack of violent crime was shocking …. If there was an actual threat, then there would have been an investigation, and if it was an actual threat, I assume the Ottawa Police Service would have laid a charge for uttering threats.”
Morris testified,
I was concerned by the politicization and I was concerned by hyperbole and I was concerned by the affixing of labels without evidence to individuals’ movements et cetera.” Morris elaborated in his testimony that his letter reflected his concern about “comments made publicly, by public figures and in the media that I believed were not premised in fact …. I was leading the criminal intelligence collection of information and the production of criminal intelligence in relation to these events. So, I believed I was in a unique situation to understand what was transpiring. So, when I read accounts that the State of Russia had something to do with it; Or that this was the result of American influence, either financially or ideologically; Or that Donald Trump was behind it; Or that it was un-Canadian; Or that the people participating were un-Canadian and that they were not Canadian views and they were extremists; I found it to be problematic, because what I ascertained from my role … I did not see validation for those assertions …. I did not see information that substantiated what was being said publicly and via the media. And I found that the subjective assertions sensationalized … and exacerbated conflict …. So the labelling was problematic to me.
Morris further stated in a letter before the POEC, “I do not know where the political figures are acquiring information on intelligence on the extent of extremist involvement.” He was emphatic, “I want to be clear on this. We produced no intelligence to indicate these individuals would be armed. There has been a lot of hyperbole around that.”[14]
OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique, with a certificate from the University of St. Andrews in Terrorism Studies, also testified. He agreed that, “based on all OPP intelligence and the intelligence provided by the RCMP and federal intelligence agencies to the OPP…there was no credible threat to the security of Canada.” Carrique confirmed it “would be my understanding” that in order to invoke the Emergencies Act, there needs to be a “credible threat.” He agreed that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protected citizens’ rights to assemble and protest. He agreed that this includes protesting government policies. Carrique also concurred that the trucks that were arriving in Ottawa in late January 2022 “did so at the direction of police officers.”[15]
Incendiary Allegations Made About Coutts Early into the Protest
If the comments made publicly by politicians and the media about the protests in Ottawa were “problematic, being controlled and one-sided,” was this also the case in Coutts? On February 1, 2022 Alberta Premier Jason Kenney spoke to the press and residents of the province. He stated that he’d “received reports in the last hour of people allied with the protesters assaulting RCMP officers, including in one instance trying to ram members of the RCMP, later leading to a collision with a civilian vehicle in the area. This kind of conduct is totally unacceptable. Assaulting law enforcement officers who are simply doing their job to maintain public safety and the rule of law is completely unacceptable. And without hesitation, I condemn those actions …. ”[16]
But in a documentary titled Trucker Rebellion: The Story of the Coutts Blockade, Rebel News reporters Kiane Simone and Sydney Fizzard learned that Premier Kenney’s statements were not accurate. Simone spoke on his cell phone with RCMP Corporal Curtis Peters. The officer clarified, “There were no physical altercation(s) between RCMP officers and protesters. Yesterday, when we had protesters go around and breach the road block set up on Highway 4 to the north, there was some public safety concerns and officer safety concerns that took place there. Vehicles travelled through, drove through fields to get around the road block and then onto Highway 4. They were travelling southbound on Highway 4 in the northbound lanes. And that was happening at the same time we had a few vehicles leaving the protest and travelling northbound in the northbound lanes. So, we had a traffic-meeting head-on on the double-lane highway there. And we did have a collision take place. A head-on collision occurred as a result of all this between a person trying to reach the blockade and a person who was just travelling north on the highway. And fortunately, it was a relatively minor collision. But a confrontation which led to an assault took place as a direct result of that collision.”
Kiane Simone asked, “was that an assault on an RCMP officer?” Peters replied, “No. That was an assault between two civilians, between a protester and a civilian.” Kian Simone pressed, “So, Jason Kenney’s statement was not true at the press conference.” RCMP Corporal Peters emphasized, “I can tell you what I just told you, sir. You can have my name. It’s Corporal Curtis Peters. I’m the spokesperson here. My badge number is 5-2-9-5-7.”[17]
The Coutts Four in the Headlines
On February 14, 2022 the RCMP issued a press release regarding arrests in Coutts. It included a photo of an RCMP vehicle in the background, and a table in the foreground. Leaning against, on and below the table were weapons the RCMP said it “discovered” in “three trailers associated to this criminal organization.” The weapons they seized included 13 long guns, several handguns, multiple (three) sets of body armour, a machete, and high-capacity magazines. The press release did not name any of the individuals or the charges against them.[18] Global News carried the story later that day, and a reporter spoke to Alberta RCMP Supt. Roberta McHale. She said, “There was a heavy stash of weapons and these weapons were brought by people who had the intent on causing harm.” She announced that the RCMP were investigating a range of charges, including conspiracy to commit murder. McHale added, “This was a very complex, layered investigation, and some people might ask why it took so long. These investigations aren’t necessarily easy.”[19]
On February 17, 2022 the Toronto Star ran this headline: “Father of accused in alleged Coutts blockade murder conspiracy says son was radicalized online, as others dispute RCMP narrative.” Mike Lysak, whose son Chris is one of the Coutts Four, was reported to have expressed his frustration watching his son “fall further and further into an online world of COVID-19 misinformation.” The Toronto Star claimed Mike Lysak said his son had become involved in the Diagolon group.[20] But, Granny Mackay, a guest on the Good Morning with Jason podcast, rejects that narrative. She has let me know that after the Toronto Star ran their story, Mike Lysak was upset. He said the newspaper twisted his words.
Global News had reported on February 15 about tweets by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network which stressed that RCMP had seized “a plate carrier with Diagolon patches.” The tweets described Diagolon as “an accelerationist movement that believes a revolution is inevitable and necessary to collapse the current government system.” Deputy Director for Anti-Hate, Elizabeth Simmons, warned about Diagolon. “A lot of them claim to be ex-military and … have some kind of military training.” She added, “this is a very anti-Semitic group. It’s rife with neo-Nazis.” She pointed to the February 3, 2022 arrest in Nova Scotia of Jeremy MacKenzie on firearms charges.[21]
A Global News story on February 3, 2022 described Jeremy MacKenzie as the “creator of Diagolon.” An RCMP warrant to search MacKenzie’s home in Pictou, Nova Scotia on January 26, 2022 referred to a video where MacKenzie spoke about “Diagolona.” RCMP contended that MacKenzie intended to create a new nation from Alaska to Florida made up of the provinces and states with the fewest pandemic restrictions. MacKenzie, a Canadian Armed Forces veteran of the Afghanistan War, attended some of the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa. But his firearms charges are not related to the Freedom Convoy. MacKenzie had a firearms license, but it was alleged he had an over-capacity magazine.[18] At the time the news story was reported, the Freedom Convoy protests were less than a week old. But, the headline, “Man who attended Ottawa protest convoy arrested on firearms charges,” inferred that the people protesting on Parliament Hill were violent. And now, here were followers of Jeremy MacKenzie in Coutts who were allegedly also violent.[22]
Radio-Canada reported on February 17, 2022 about the names of those who were charged. Chris Carbert and Chris Lysak were described as people who have ties to Jeremy MacKenzie, of the “American-style militia movement” Diagolon, a “neo-fascist, white supremacist” and “violent insurrectionist movement.” The news story contended it was the aim of Diagolon to “establish a white nationalist state … that would run diagonally from Alaska through westerns Canada’s provinces, all the way south to Florida.” The news story cited a Facebook post in October 2021 by Carbert where he said he was “prepared to die in protest of government mandates.” Carbert apparently posted, “I’ll likely be dead soon and likely will be front page news … I will die fighting for what I believe is right and I mean this.” He added in another post, “I won’t live long. I’ve come to terms with this.” Radio-Canada stated that “Carbert has prior convictions for assault, drug trafficking and two drunk driving convictions.” However, Granny Mackay has learned from Chris Carbert that he was never convicted of assault. Another man picked a fight with him in a bar. Carbert was given a conditional sentence. He has no record of an assault conviction. The drug charge in question concerns getting some ecstasy for a friend when he was in his early 20s. Both happened prior to 2004. Jerry Morin posted on February 13, 2022 “This is war. Your country needs (you) more than ever now.”[23]
On April 25, 2022 the CBC reported that crown prosecutors Aaron Rankin and Matt Dalidowicz stated that the plan was to try all four men in one trial. Daldiowicz told the CBC that the cases for Carbert, Olienick and Morin were “moving quickly.” But there were complications with the Lysak case.[24] The Lethbridge Herald reported on June 10, 2022 that three of the Coutts Four had been denied bail, with Jerry Morin awaiting his bail hearing.[25]
In early September 2022, some of the contents of the Information To Obtain search warrant by RCMP Constable Trevor Checkley was made public in the press. The warrant in question was the one granted by an Alberta judge to allow RCMP officers to search properties. This was due to Checkley’s urgent request and belief that a serious crime was about to be committed. In the ITO, Checkley swore before the judge, “I have reasonable grounds to believe that (Tony) Olienick, (Chris) Carbert and (Jerry) Morin were part of a group that participated in the Coutts blockade and brought firearms into the Coutts blockade area with the intention of using those firearms against police.” The officer attested that “I believe (these protesters were) arming themselves for a standoff against police.”[26]
On November 30, 2022 the Calgary Herald ran the attention-getting headline “Some Coutts protesters wanted to alter Canada’s political system.” Allegedly, in conversations with undercover officers, RCMP Constable Trevor Checkley stated Anthony “Olienick described (Christopher) Lysak as a hitman, sniper and gun-fighter.” Checkley emphasized that Jerry “Morin said it was World War Three and that stripping freedoms and making everyone slaves was warfare.”[27] The next day, the CBC ran a story about how the Coutts Four were making calls while in custody directly to their bosses in “the extremist network called Diagolon.” It was inferred that bosses outside of Coutts who were directing the Coutts Four to agitate for a new order.[28]
On the Good Morning with Jason podcast, a woman named Danielle who has attended the pretrial motions in June 2023 spoke about the media coverage. A regular guest on the Good Morning with Jason show, Danielle observed “ever since Christmas (2022) mainstream media has been very, very quiet about this. Global News hasn’t reported a single thing on it (since December 2022). There’s been absolute crickets.” Jason Lavigne spoke to a staff member of the Western Standard in Alberta, who is also a friend. In addition to the publication ban requested by the defense to protect the jury pool process, there is also some sort of gag order related to the media. Lavigne’s contact at the Western Standard, who he spoke with in July 2023, is not at liberty to discuss this any further.[29]
Coutts Protests, Arrests, on the A-list to Justify Invocation of Emergencies Act
Testimony by numbers of government officials at the POEC pointed to the protests at Coutts as being on the A-list of events triggering the Emergencies Act. Clerk of the Privy Council, Janice Charette, raised the alarm about the protests in Coutts in the context of discussing the conversation about whether to invoke the Emergencies Act. “We were seeing the results of the law enforcement activity and what was happening at Coutts and we were seeing the size of the stash of firearms and ammunition that were found in Coutts amongst the protesters. So, this was new and I would say relevant information in terms of just the nature of the threat that we were worried about in terms of the risk for serious violence.”[30] Charette testified that “the situation at Coutts was more complex … It looked like it was getting fixed, then it was not getting fixed; looked like it was getting fixed, then it was not getting fixed …. The quantity of weapons and ammunition that was discovered by the RCMP conducting that law enforcement activity was more than I would have expected. So that, to me, indicated a seriousness and a scale of the illegal activity that was either contemplated at Coutts or people were ready to engage in at Coutts … that was beyond … my prior expectations …. ” When discussing the Freedom Convoy protests across Canada, including Coutts, Janice Charette warned of insurrectionist intentions. “There was talk of overthrowing the government and installing a different government with a governor general …. ” [31]
Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council, Nathalie Drouin, was asked if she knew that the protesters in Coutts intended to leave the area. “Well, I was not aware of that. No, that’s not true. I have heard about the potential breakthrough in Coutts. …prior to the enforcement action, we didn’t know about the cache.”[32] Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained one of the reasons invoking the Emergencies Act was on the table “was (the) presence of weapons at Coutts …. ” Trudeau complained that once Premier Jason Kenney removed “a number of mandates” in Alberta, “the occupation at Coutts seemed to be emboldened … ‘Let’s keep going.’” Trudeau also revealed under cross examination that he had been considering invoking the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests “from the very beginning.”[33]
National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister, Jody Thomas, reflected in the decision-making process on the road to invoking the Emergencies Act. Regarding “acts of serious violence,” can that include “the violence that people … of Ottawa were experiencing on the streets, … the inability of the Town of Coutts to function, is that a line? … There is a spectrum of activity and behaviour and threat in there that we need to understand …. ”[34]
One of the Liberal cabinet ministers who cited the situation in Coutts as a catalyst in the A-list of reasons to invoke the Emergencies Act was Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. He testified that “not knowing exactly how it was that the operation in Coutts was going to play out at that time, and bearing in mind the sensitivities, the fact that the situation was combustible, that the individuals that were involved in Coutts were prepared to go down with a fight that could lead to the loss of life, that if that had happened and that occurred, it still remains an open question in my mind as to whether or not it would have triggered other events across the country. And so that’s why I – in my mind, it was very much – it was a threshold moment.”[35]
In her testimony before the POEC, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke about the protests in Coutts as accelerating the sense that the government had to respond decisively to the Freedom Convoy. She recalled that on February 12, 2022 when “we heard from the RCMP Commissioner about concerns that there were serious weapons in Coutts. …that really raised the stakes in terms of my degree of concern about what could be happening in this sort of whack-a-mole copycat situation across the country.” [36] Minister of Emergency Preparedness, Bill Blair, also echoed this view in his testimony before the POEC on November 21, 2022.
The mayor of Coutts, Jimmy Willet, also testified before the POEC on November 9, 2022. A text was entered as evidence from Mayor Willett to CTV reporter Bill Graveland. In it the mayor described the protesters in Coutts as “Domestic Terrorists.” But told Graveland in the text “You need to find someone in a protected position to call these guys what they are, Domestic Terrorists. Won’t be me. They are right outside my window. I would be strung up, literally. Just a thought.” He stated that his wife saw some protesters “moving heavy hockey bags” and said “it’s guns.”[37] Why the mayor’s wife presumed the hockey bags contained guns has not been followed up by any reporters.
Jeremy MacKenzie and Diagolon
On Tom Marazzo’s Meet Me in the Middle podcast in June 20, 2023, Jeremy MacKenzie spoke about his February 3, 2022 arrest in Nova Scotia. “They tried to play it up that I was in hiding. I had lawyers who were trying to talk to these people. What is going on. They flew four RCMP officers on their own planes and flew it from Saskatchewan to Halifax, where I spent six days in solitary confinement. And then flew me out to Saskatchewan in chains and ankle and arms and belly chains. And then I did two and a half months in jail in Saskatchewan before I could get bail. I have no criminal record. Never convicted of anything. And there was a murder while I was there, a woman stabbed another woman at a dance club. She was out on bail the next day. But, I’m too dangerous to be let out. And if it wasn’t for my lawyers and my legal team, I’d probably still be in there … on a common assault charge.” The common assault charge relates to an incident in Saskatchewan in November 2021, and not anything connecting MacKenzie to the Freedom Convoy protests. He told Tom Marazzo on the podcast that sixteen months after the protests in the winter of 2022, “I still to this day have not been asked a single question by the RCMP or CSIS … regarding any of this (Diagolon).” MacKenzie asserted that the government of Canada needed a scapegoat to justify invoking the Emergencies Act.[38]
At the POEC, MacKenzie testified from his prison cell in Saskatchewan Correctional Centre. MacKenzie confirmed that in January 2021 he drew a diagonal line on his cell phone from Alaska, through Alberta and Saskatchewan, through the Dakotas, down to Texas and across to Florida and named it Diagolon. It became a brand name for followers on his podcasts. He made a plastic goat figurine, named Philip, the vice-president of Diagolon. Philip, he explained to his viewers was a demonic time-travelling, cocaine addict. He pointed out that the official narrative about Diagolon as “militia” and “extremist, has come from the largely government-funded Canadian Anti-Hate Network. MacKenzie observed how Anti-Hate posts scary articles about Diagolon which both the media and the police take at face value.[39] While in Ottawa, Jeremy MacKenzie posted that he wanted any of his followers at Freedom Convoy protests “If there’s a speed limit (go) slower than that. Don’t even litter. Don’t sit. Don’t even throw a snowball. Don’t give anyone any excuse to point at you and say, ‘Look what you’ve done.’”[40]
In his testimony, MacKenzie confirmed that he had met Chris Lysak in person at a meet-and-greet in Saskatchewan in the summer of 2021, and at a BBQ where people were having steak on the grill. MacKenzie spoke to Lysak sometime after the charges for conspiracy to commit murder. He confirmed that the patches on some tactical vests looked like Diagolon patches. But that anyone could have made them and sold them. “I really can’t speak to their origins,” stated MacKenzie. Though he did not claim that the RCMP might have planted the Diagolon patches on the tactical vests discovered among the weapons cache in Coutts, MacKenzie stated “law enforcement (in) Canada has a history of things like this taking place. It’s not outside the realm of possibility … Could it be planted? … I would leave that open to possibility.”[41] During POEC testimony, it was confirmed that Jeremy MacKenzie has no criminal record.
A reasonable person might conclude that an organization whose vice-president is a plastic goat figurine that does time-travelling and has a narcotics addiction should not be taken seriously. Anymore, than a friend at a bar having one too many announces “one day I’ll be Prime Minister.” How might the United States government view an attempt to trigger the secession of 26 states from Alaska, and Idaho across to the Atlantic coast from Virginia to Florida?
But police and intelligence in Canada in 2021-2022 took every statement on Jeremy MacKenzie’s podcasts at face value. If Jeremy MacKenzie read the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, would Canadian law enforcement issue an all-points-bulletin to be on the lookout for a little girl with blonde hair on charges of breaking and entering, and damaging personal property of the Bear family?
What Sparked the Protests?
As I have written in previous articles, the Freedom Convoy protests began in response to the Canadian government ending the truck driver exemption from vaccination in order to cross the Canadian border. [42] Truck drivers had enjoyed an exemption since the start of the pandemic were hailed as heroes by Prime Minister Trudeau. No data about COVID-19 spread and truck drivers was presented to the House of Commons Health Committee in January 2022. The infection fatality rate for Covid-19 was about 0.25%.[43]
Source: Children’s Health Defense
For truck drivers entering the United States, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh clarified the Biden Administration’s new regulations. “The ironic thing is most truckers are not covered by this, because they’re driving a truck, they’re in a cab, they’re by themselves, they wouldn’t be covered by this,” Walsh said. Though often framed as equivalent to Canadian mandates for truck drivers, American mandates were less restrictive. The US Administration mandate exempted workers “who do not report to a workplace where other individuals such as coworkers or customers are present.”[44] And there were no vaccine requirements for truck drivers entering Mexico. Canadian truck drivers were not being deprived of making a living due to regulations in the United States. During the pandemic, with other nations concerned about healthy economies and supply chains, Canada was an outlier in its vaccine restrictions for truck drivers.
Original Search Warrant Listed Only Mischief Over $5,000, No Mention of Weapons or Conspiracy to Commit Murder
A Search Warrant was issued on February 13, 2022 to RCMP Constable Trevor Checkley. The search was granted, effective 10PM, February 13th, due to the officer’s sworn oath that he had reasonable grounds to suspect “Mischief Over $5,000.” The warrant was not issued on “weapons charges” or “conspiracy to commit murder.” The search stated officers could search for “Documents and data related to planning organization and operations of the protest group’s security for the Coutts blockade.” A question the lawyers for the Coutts Four need to determine is if it is legitimate to have a search warrant for a minimum charge; if the RCMP believes a far more serious crime is about to unfold, but not name it in the search. Donald Best, a former Sergeant (Detective) with the Toronto Police, highlights that in order to get a search warrant, there are affidavits and likely photos presented to the judge to support the Information To Obtain search. [45]
Behaviour of Those Arrested Resembled Ordinary Citizens, Not Domestic Terrorists
On the Good Morning with Jason podcast, a local woman named Danielle, summarized the arrests of the Coutts Four. The first person to get arrested was Christopher Lysak at 9PM, on February 13, 2022, “in front of Smuggler’s” Saloon, in Coutts. This was in front of many other protesters. When Anthony Olienick learned that Lysak might have been arrested, “he began videotaping and posting online saying he wished the cops would put their guns down and come and have coffee with us.” What Olienick did not do was head off and grab a bunch of guns and start a standoff with the police. Then Olienick was arrested about 9:50 PM. This was “in amongst the protesters.” Danielle reports that “Chris Carbert was sleeping in his trailer when they (RCMP) did the raid on the property …. He also knew the other two had been arrested.” Yet, Carbert chose to go to bed. He didn’t try to overthrow the government. He was arrested around 12:30 AM on February 14, 2022. Later that day, after having gone to work in Calgary, Jerry Morin was arrested by the RCMP about 12PM. At the time of his arrest, Morin knew the other three had been arrested. All of the Coutts Four were unarmed when they were arrested. None of them were running or hiding.
Retired police sergeant Donald Best flags several problems with the timeline of arrests. “This is all politically driven. They (several Liberal cabinet ministers) knew about it in Ottawa before the warrant went down. We saw that from the Commission (POEC). … that means the politicians on the political side of this were involved in the creation of, and the timeline, and the date and time of execution; and if all that is true, and I believe it is … these men deserve to see their day in court. And they deserve to be out with an ankle bracelet, or whatever.[46]
Commenting on the cache of weapons displayed by the RCMP on February 14, 2022, local gun owner Zach Schmidt made these observations. “This is not what I would be choosing if I were to hypothetically (try) to take down the RCMP.” There were about 50 RCMP vehicles in the Coutts vicinity and so about a hundred officers …. This just looks like someone’s basement was raided. Numbers of the guns are rifles that would be better for hunting deer. There are no sniper rifles, no precision rifles. They’re just run-of-the-mill hunting guns …. ” Donald Best added, “When the RCMP were investigating the multiple shooting in Nova Scotia (in 2022), the lead investigators refused to release the types and photos of the weapons involved. Why? Because they’re in the middle of an investigation. They want to know where they came from. Contrast that with the RCMP action in Coutts.”[47]
There are some instances in the past where the RCMP have created a threat, or impeded ongoing investigations. On July 1, 2013 there were reports that a plot to bomb the British Columbia legislature had been averted by the RCMP. Offices acting undercover, with the support of over 200 staff working to prevent the plot, saved the day and caught the plotters red-handed. Or so the public was led to believe. When the case went to court it turned out that the RCMP was in the spotlight, and uncomfortably so. The CBC headline reported, “RCMP entrapment of B.C. couple in legislature bomb plot was ‘travesty of justice,’ court rules: John Nuttall-Amanda Korody’s convictions had been stayed due to entrapment, abuse of process.”[48]
In her verdict, Justice Catherine Bruce wrote, “Simply put, the world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor the sufficient motivation to do it themselves.” Bruce made clear that the RCMP had not foiled a pre-existing plan. The couple in the RCMPs crosshairs were not terrorists. They were not people with capacities that terrorists might want to recruit. Said Bruce, “This is truly a case where the RCMP manufactured the crime.”[49]
Writing for The Tyee, Bill Tieleman asked:
Why did the RCMP create the July 1, 2013 B.C. Legislature bomb plot and train and equip a hapless, methadone-addicted, developmentally challenged couple to undertake terrorist actions? And why did the RCMP also break Canada’s laws in doing so? Money. Lots and lots of money. John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were freed Friday after three years in jail thanks to a stunning decision that saw a respected judge condemn the RCMP in the strongest terms possible, while overturning a jury’s guilty verdict on terrorism changes because the Surrey couple were “entrapped” by police, who also committed an “abuse of process.”…
So why did the RCMP take such obviously reprehensible actions? What was their motivation in turning two sad, naïve recovering heroin addicts who barely left their basement apartment into Canada’s most famous terrorists? To get government money for its huge operations. The RCMP has a $2.8-billion annual budget and more than 29,000 employees. It depends on the federal government for its funding – and counterterrorism dollars depend on results, as I wrote in The Tyee in 2013 after covering the first court appearances of Nuttall and Korody. The RCMP is also competing with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for financial support, so it is highly motivated to show public success. And in the RCMP’s Departmental Performance Report one of the major “expected results” is “Terrorist criminal activity is prevented, detected, responded to and denied.”
In the absence of real terrorist plots to foil, the case of Nuttall and Korody indicated the RCMPs work can include manufacturing plots in order to foil them. From the success of these sting operations, the RCMP gets favorable media coverage and a subsequent boost in future yearly budgets. As long as they don’t get caught. [50]
In the past, the RCMP have engaged in policing to advance the political agendas of those in the federal government. The Halifax Examiner ran this headline in June 2022: “RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki tried to ‘jeopardize’ mass murder investigation to advance Trudeau’s gun control efforts.” The paper reported:
“RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki “made a promise” to Public Safety Minister Bill Blair and the Prime Minister’s Office to leverage the mass murders of April 18/19, 2020 to get a gun control law passed.” RCMP in Nova Scotia were left out of the loop regarding numbers of victims and release of information. The article detailed how “Contravening the agreed protocol, throughout the early hours of Sunday evening, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki agreed to a number of one-on-one interviews with reporters. At 7:36PM, CBC News quoted Lucki as stating there were 13 victims; at 7:40PM, CTV reported Lucki had said 14 victims; and at 7:56PM, the Canadian Press quoted Lucki as having confirmed 17 dead, including the gunman. The public and the press corps were both confused and alarmed.
“So how does it happen that Commissioner Lucki …. ?” Mass Casualty Commission lawyer Krista Smith started to ask Communications director Lia Scanlan during an interview last February. “I don’t know, ask National Headquarters,” retorted Scanlan. “The commissioner (Lucki) releases a body count that we (Communications) don’t even have. She went out and did that. It was all political pressure. That is 100% Minister Blair and the Prime Minister. And we have a Commissioner that does not push back.” [51]
During the FLQ Crisis in the fall of 1970, the RCMP was found to have engaged in illegal activities. As the McDonald Commission Report of 1981 found, the RCMP forged documents, was involved in the theft of the membership list of the Parti Quebecois, several break-ins, illegal opening of mail, and the burning a barn in Quebec.[52] The McDonald Commission recommended revisions to the War Measures Act. These were tabled by Perrin Beatty in Parliament in July 1988 as the Emergencies Act.
Discrepancies in Disclosure Pointed to During Pretrial Motions
Pretrial motions were heard at the Lethbridge, Alberta courthouse between June 12 and 29. At one point, there was an animated discussion between the judge, lawyers for the accused, and the Crown. One of those attending was a local woman named Danielle, who spoke to Jason Lavigne on his podcast on July 13, 2023. She described how “the Crown kept talking about the solicitor-client privilege.” A lawyer for one of the accused stopped them after a while. This lawyer said ‘Listen. This might not be the case that there’s evidence of unlawful activity. We’re talking about disclosure that has been discovered.’” Danielle described how the Crown had dumped thousands of pages of disclosure at the last minute on the defence. There was mention of “inadvertent disclosure” on a number of occasions. Danielle told Jason Lavigne, “I don’t believe they (defence lawyers) were supposed to have found it. I think she kind of found it. And she got excited that she found it. And then everybody got a lot more excited after the content of that was more apparent to them. Again, we’re not privy to exactly what’s in that conflict of disclosure. The Crown mentioned that due to the content, the disclosure conflicted not only about the disclosure. It is also in regards to two of the crown prosecutors …. This application (by the defence) coming up, (two) Crown prosecutors are going to have to be witnesses. So, they (the prosecutors who are representing the case for the Crown) are going to be part of the hearing.” This opens up the possibility that some Crown prosecutors may be defendants at some point in relation to this case.
Danielle described to Jason the importance of this moment during the pretrial motions. The defence made an application to the court during disclosure. It related to the cross examination of one of the witnesses as the case against the accused was being built. Danielle, stated, “There were notes. There were scribbled notes in one book. And there were scribbled notes in another book from the scribes that were hired for this person (witness). And there was also another scribe that had been hired that had … typed notes. … it was discovered that the typed notes were never submitted to the defence counsel. However, the witness had testified “I’ve given the Crown everything that I have.” So, it was discovered that there was a large pile of typed notes. What was problematic is the content of the scribbled notes, and the content of the typed notes contain crucial discrepancies. The defence was excited about this inadvertent discovery. What can explain these discrepancies? Were the typed notes exculpatory evidence helpful to the defense? [53]
Another guest on the Good Morning with Jason podcast Margaret “Granny” Mackay has also attended the pretrial motions in June. She also witnessed the astonishing developments in the court house that Danielle described to viewers of the podcast on July 13, 2023.
On the Good Morning with Jason podcast on July 24, Danielle discussed notes she took from the pretrial motions on June 29. That day one of the Crown prosecutors agreed to recuse themselves from the case. [54]
A Facebook group has sprung up under the name Alberta Political Prisoners. The RCMP and the Crown present themselves as having a solid case to convict the four accused on conspiracy to commit murder. But this may not be the case. It’s plausible that the case for the Crown is thin at best, as has been the case for the Trudeau governments justification for invoking the Emergencies Act. After over five hundred days without bail, more people are starting to pay attention to this case that’s been largely ignored by the media.
Chris Carbert has been leading a Bible study in the remand centre early into his custody. Jerry Morin has been leading other inmates in yoga classes. One of the guards told Morin after he’d been in custody for a few weeks, “This is weird. We were expecting a lot of different behaviour from you. We thought that you were a white supremacist.”[55] The four men in custody on conspiracy charges are looking less like insurrectionists, and more like political prisoners in Justin Trudeau’s Canada.
[14] “Supt. Patrick Morris, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, October 19, 2022, 184-305. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/d ocuments/Transcripts/POEC-Public-HearingsVolume-5-October-19-2022.pdf
[52] McDonald, D.C.,Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – second report, volume 2: freedom and security under the law, Privy Council Office, 1981. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/471402/publication.html
[53] Lavigne, “The Coutts Four | Day 515” (See note 29).
Rights activist Ji Xiaolong has stood trial in a Shanghai court on public order charges after he wrote to a Chinese leader criticizing the grueling COVID-19 lockdown of spring 2022, Radio Free Asia has learned.
The latest in a long line of COVID-19 dissidents to face the wrath of the government, Ji stood trial at the Pudong New District People’s Court on June 21 for “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” a charge frequently used to target peaceful critics of the ruling Communist Party.
According to his father, Ji Xinghua, the prosecution based its case on posts he made to Twitter that were “insulting” to China’s leaders.
“The prosecution said he tweeted something that insulted the country’s leaders,” Ji’s father said. “His lawyers said the authorities didn’t comply with regulations in their investigation and in their collection of evidence.”
“I don’t think that what he did caused any kind of public disorder, and I don’t think it adds up to picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” he said.
Ji’s detention came after he wrote to then Shanghai ruling Chinese Communist Party secretary Li Qiang, calling on him to resign for “blindly following orders from the central government” when implementing weeks of grueling lockdown in the city earlier this year.
Li has since risen to the position of Chinese premier.
Calls to quit
Netherlands-based dissident Lin Shengliang said that Ji’s targeting of Li Qiang was likely the biggest factor behind his arrest and trial.
“They won’t talk about the [real reason], which was that he questioned Li Qiang’s COVID-19 containment measures in Shanghai at that time,” Lin said. “They are even less likely to mention that now.”
Chinese rights activist Ji Xiaolong was put on trial for Twitter posts, his father says. Credit: Provided by Ji Xiaolong
He said the key was that Ji had called in his petition for Li to step down.
In the petition, Ji also wrote that he was fine with being jailed for opposing government policies in an era of widespread internet censorship and surveillance of ordinary people.
He was already under residential surveillance at his home, and police had prevented him from going back to his hometown in Jiangsu’s Shazhou county to visit his elderly parents, he wrote.
Ji, who has already served a three-and-a-half year jail term for writing political graffiti in a Shanghai public toilet, was a vocal critic of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy of stringent lockdowns, mass isolation and quarantine facilities and wave upon wave of testing that ended following nationwide protests in November 2022.
During the weeks-long lockdown, residents of Shanghai repeatedly complained of shortages of food and essential supplies and lack of access to life-saving medical treatment for those sick with something other than COVID-19, and Ji had posted a number of video clips and posts from lockdown.
During Ji’s initial interview, police confronted him with various comments he had made to overseas media organizations including Radio Free Asia, the Epoch Times and New Tang Dynasty TV, as well as the petition he started, some video clips he reposted and some social media posts he made.
‘Bad idea’
Ji’s father said he supports his son’s view of the zero-COVID policy.
“Of course it was a bad idea to put the city in lockdown … which brought a lot of inconvenience to ordinary people,” he said. “They weren’t able to control [the pandemic] through lockdowns, so it’s good that they stopped doing that.”
“Of course it was a bad idea to put the city in lockdown,” says Ji Xinghua, the father of Ji Xiaolong. Credit: Provided by Ji Xiaolong
Ji’s trial comes after authorities in the central city of Wuhan tried and sentenced citizen journalist Fang Bin, who disappeared for three years after filming from hospitals and funeral homes early in the COVID-19 pandemic from the city of Wuhan, in secret.
News only emerged in April 2023 that Fang, who fell silent after a Feb. 1, 2020, livestream from Wuhan healthcare facilities, had been sentenced in secret to three years in prison.
Fang, along with jailed Shanghai dissident Zhang Zhan, detained YouTuber Chen Qiushi and exiled journalist Kcriss Li, was among a number of high-profile bloggers who tried to report on the emerging and little-understood viral outbreak from Wuhan. His report also described the pandemic as a “man-made” disaster, calling on people to resist government “tyranny.”
On June 2, 2023, Zhang Zhan was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which described her as a hero who “should be honored by the world for their courage.”
“Instead of meeting those requests [for China to abide by international human rights law] with transparency and debate, Chinese authorities used their massive police power to censor and jail,” the Commission said in a statement.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gao Feng for RFA Mandarin.
The United States has 4% of the world’s population but 16% of COVID-19 deaths. This series investigates the failures by federal agencies that led to over 1 million Americans dying from COVID-19 and what that tells us about the nation’s ability to fight the next pandemic. Epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera is the host for this three-part series.
The first episode takes us back to February 2020, when reporters Rob Meyer and Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic were trying to find solid data about the rising pandemic. They published a story that revealed a scary truth: The U.S. didn’t know where COVID-19 was spreading because few tests were available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also didn’t have public data to tell citizens or federal agencies how many people were infected or where the outbreaks were happening.
Their reporting led to a massive volunteer effort by hundreds of people across the country who gathered the data themselves. The COVID Tracking Project became a de facto source of data amid the chaos of COVID-19. With case counts rising quickly, volunteers scrambled to document tests, hospitalizations and deaths in an effort to show where the virus was and who was dying.
The result is that Europeans are experiencing an energy crisis, and Germany in particular faces deindustrialisation. The Ukraine situation is not just a NATO proxy war with Russia. It is also a trade and energy war inflicted by the US on Europe.
Although the impact of the war is acutely felt by Europe, inflation continues to increase across the Western countries, including the US, and their economies are in crisis.
While the sanctions and war are having an inflationary impact, they serve as convenient cover for the effects of a massive increase in ‘quantitative easing’ that occurred in late 2019 and in 2020. The US Federal Reserve created almost a fifth of all US dollars ever created in 2020. According to economist Professor Richard Werner, central banks around the world also pumped more money into their economies during this period. He concludes that central banks are largely responsible for the inflation we now see.
Financial markets were collapsing in October 2019, and the crisis reached a head in February 2020 with a massive crash. Prior to COVID and then under cover of this bogus public health crisis, trillions of dollars were pumped into the economy and lockdowns were imposed to prevent an immediate hyperinflation shock. The global economy was shut down.
Much of the inflation currently being experienced is a result of this. COVID lockdowns were not a cause of economic collapse. They were a symptom of it. A temporary band aid for an imploding neoliberalism that now requires a radical restructuring of economies and societies.
And that restructuring is brutal. Neoliberalism has been on life support for some time and has resorted to various strategies (expansion consumer credit, speculative finance, debt, etc) to keep it alive. But these strategies have to a large extent run their course.
In response, we are witnessing a controlled demolition of large parts of the economy and a shift towards authoritarian governance to deal with the growing resentment and dissent that governments fully expect. While lockdowns can be regarded as extraordinary monetary policy measures for addressing short-term inflation risk, they also did much to accelerate the restructuring of economies, not least by closing down small independent businesses.
The effects of the current sanctions regime on Russia may be regarded as an extension of this restructuring. We must not assume that the people implementing the sanction policies were too ignorant to see what the outcome would be for the Western economies.
So, for ordinary people, what’s the end game?
Soaring inflation means your money will lose value. Your savings could evaporate. And rising interest rates will intensify hardship – both for ordinary people and for businesses. Increased interest rates in a debt-ridden economy could well precipitate economic collapse.
Enter central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). It seems likely that these will eventually be brought in as part of a new monetary system. When people have lost almost everything (the WEF mantra – own nothing and be happy), many might well be desperate enough to want a (programmable) digital universal basic income from the government.
But this – in the longer term – would lead to a digital prison: your carbon credit score and social credit score linked to your ability to use your digital currency, your freedom of movement and so on.
The fiat currency system is dying. De-dollarisation is now underway and the US’s longstanding partner – Saudi Arabia – is turning to China and accepting non-dollar payment for oil.
The world is increasingly trading in currencies other than the US dollar. Global US hegemony rests on the dollar being the world reserve currency. This is coming to an end.
What CBDCs will base their value on remains to be seen. A return to a gold standard perhaps. But the strategy appears to involve a process of economic restructuring (or demolition) leading to the impoverishment of populations then the rollout of CBDCs.
COVID was an accelerator that saw entire populations cajoled into submission thanks to a crisis narrative. Integral to the plan is the eventual imposition of digital IDs.
Whether it is immigration, war, food shortages, fear of pandemics, potential cyberattacks, climate emergency or some other crisis narrative, one way or another, circumstances will be manipulated to engineer the introduction of digital IDs – precursors to CBDC servitude. A servitude linked to ‘smart’ city surveillance technology, net zero ideology and 15-minute de facto lockdown cities.
Can this be prevented? What can ordinary people do?
We can, for instance, grow our own food (if we have access to land), use farmer markets, boycott the retail giants and cashless stores, use cash whenever possible, create our own credit unions and so on. But to act in unison, it is essential that we come together and do not feel isolated in a world in which division is encouraged.
Many instinctively knew from the start that there was something seriously amiss with the COVID narrative and the lockdowns. But the vast majority of people – at least at the beginning of the COVID exercise – went along with the narrative. Dissenters tended to feel isolated and came together online. As the weeks passed, they began to attend protests in person.
At these gatherings – the speeches aside – it felt uplifting simply to be in the company of like-minded people. But after the protests, many returned home and were again surrounded by friends, family and colleagues who still kept faith in the narrative and the relentless media propaganda.
COVID might have receded into the background at this point, but the end goal is clear. That’s why it remains important to continue to stand together – in person, in solidarity. From small acorns, movements grow.
With this in mind, Fifi Rose, who helped initiate the A Stand In The Park movement in the UK, describes as a non-hierarchal people’s collective of autonomous groups, tells an inspiring story on a recent edition of the Locked & Loaded podcast with Rick Munn on TNT radio.
The podcast shows how one man’s resistance – which involved standing alone in a Sydney park for weeks on end – helped create a growing global movement based on face-to-face interaction.
There’s a disturbing dynamic that occurs on every Manhattan street corner — virtually every minute of every day. By simply watching the typical New York City pedestrian as they reach the corner at a red light, you get a pretty good idea of what it’s like to deal with an overcrowded, rancorous metropolitan area on a daily basis. No one waits on the sidewalk.
Even if a thousand cars are racing by, practically every single New Yorker insists on stepping a few steps out into the street while waiting for the light to change. They’ll even go as far as squeezing themselves past other impatient street-crossers just to get to the front of the pack.
We are so hyped up, so overstressed, and so programmed to do everything quickly that we can’t even endure waiting 30 seconds for a traffic light. We’ll risk death by stepping off the curb in order to get a head start when the light turns green.
With this in mind, here’s a little thought experiment: Let’s say I’m on such a corner as a pedestrian pushes past me — too harried to realize that he is stepping directly into the path of an oncoming SUV. I reach out, grab ahold of his jacket, and yank his back to safety…only to realize it was none other than former NIAID director, Anthony Fauci.
How might that make me feel?
Reflexively, I’d likely be relieved and gratified to have saved a fellow earthling’s life. But what if that earthling is responsible, in part, for an incalculable number of deaths (with no end in sight)?
What if I would’ve known in advance it was Fauci whose life was in danger? Would I have acted to save him?
Sure, it’s so easy to publicly and hypothetically virtue signal and brag about how I would never help such a pernicious beast and would celebrate his demise.
In the heat of the moment, however, I’m aware that something very human in me might kick in to challenge the black-and-white of it all.
Dr. Fauci, in my estimation, has been a terrible, destructive force for decades — part of the much larger culture of relentless destruction. Saving his life (or the life of any other major political/corporate player) is, by definition, dooming countless others to more misery and death.
Meanwhile, if I didn’t react swiftly to pull Fauci to safety, surely his passing would cause sadness. Friends and family would mourn. People close to him would understandably be devastated and heartbroken.
However, Fauci’s efforts have spread global sorrow and mourning on a far greater scale. Has he, I wonder, ever considered the myriad of family and friends whose lives have been shattered thanks to his handiwork?
Also, of course, we can’t forget: he’s replaceable. There’s always another commissar ready to step in and keep the murderous machine running…with or without Fauci. Hence, those most victimized by this soulless structure would theoretically not even notice the change.
So, I return to the earlier question: If you knew in advance it was Dr. Anthony Fauci whose life was in danger on that NYC street corner, would you reach out— on purely instinctual, human-to-human terms — to save him?
So, there are no other ways to look at the lab-generated, multivariant SARS-2 than through the lens of mass murdering complicit media and the charlatans of propaganda, all in the employ of billionaires, millionaires and high income folks in this Big Pharma-Big Medicine-Big Feat triage of destruction? Who the hell with a normal-functioning mind believes that?
It’s a great piece here, at Gray Zone — Amid rising reports of vaccine-related menstrual disruptions, the CDC and FDA are dismissing women’s concerns and denying them information while corporate media pathologizes them in sexist fashion.
The writer drills down into the vaccine loving industries (ipso facto, thoughtful and investigative critical thinking maligning industries), and how women were not a big part of the mRNA trials (sic), and that the disruption of the reproductive system of a female ain’t no big thing, according to the FDA and Saint Fauci and Company. Imagine, the adverse effects of these shots, on everyone, and no fetuses. This Gray Zone article focuses on women, and the writer, Marcie Smith Parenti, looks from a feminist point of view, albeit, one flawed since she equates feminism USA style with supporting the Democratic party, AKA, War-Banking-Poverty Pimping Party, as equal in its profane treatment of humanity as the Republican party. Here, a quote:
I have five female friends who, after receiving Covid-19 vaccines, experienced disruption to their menstrual cycles. Their symptoms have included hemorrhagic bleeding lasting more than a month; heavy intermittent bleeding for four months; passing golf-ball size clots of blood; and extreme cramping, serious enough to land one friend in the ER.
Most of these women are in their 20s and 30s, and at least one of them thinks she might want to have children. She now worries that her symptoms might be the harbinger of long-term fertility problems. At least two of my friends have symptoms that have not resolved. All are feminists and have throughout the years been consistent Democratic Party voters.
Other women of childbearing age have reported becoming temporarily “postmenopausal” after their second mRNA shot; conversely, women in menopause are reporting suddenly beginning to bleed again; trans men on hormone therapy have also reported sudden bleeding. Apparently, the number of vaccinated women around the world reporting alarmingly disrupted menstruation is, to be conservative, in the tens of thousands.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), however, does not warn women who get the shots that they may experience a disrupted menstrual cycle.
The big issue and concern with this piece is that Parenti does not go into detail around the OTHER jabs that do not use mRNA DARPA-Mengele wizardry as the undergirding of the treatment protocols–
mRNA vaccine
A mRNA vaccine is made using mRNA that gives your cells instructions for how to make the spike protein found on the surface of the COVID-19 virus. After vaccination, your immune cells begin making the spike protein and displaying them on cell surfaces. This causes your body to create antibodies that can fight the COVID-19 virus.
Viral vector vaccine
A viral vector vaccine is made when genetic material from a COVID-19 virus is inserted into a unrelated, harmless virus. When the viral vector gets into your cells, it delivers genetic material from the COVID-19 virus that gives your cells instructions for how to make the spike protein found on the surface of the COVID-19 virus. Once your cells displace the spike proteins on their surfaces, your immune system creates antibodies that can fight the COVID-19 virus.
The Mayo Clinic lies here about the mRNA vaccine, and even this site doesn’t give the information on the alternative “vaccines.” But here, on this flagging blog, more information in a short screed than all of Mainstream Mush and Murdering Media:
What to know: The whole virus vaccine uses a weakened or deactivated form of the pathogen that causes COVID-19 to trigger protective immunity to it.
The two vaccines mentioned above – Sinopharm and Sinovac – both use inactivated pathogens, therefore they cannot infect cells and replicate, but can trigger an immune response.
3) NON-REPLICATING VIRAL VECTOR
Vaccines include: Oxford-AstraZeneca, Sputnik V (Gamaleya Research Institute)
What to know: This type of vaccine introduces a safe, modified version of the virus – known as “the vector” – to deliver genetic code for the antigen. In a COVID-19 vaccine, the “vector” is the spike proteins found on the surface of the coronavirus.
Once the body’s cells are “infected”, the cells are instructed to produce a large amount of antigens, which in turn trigger an immune response.
Benefits: Viral vector-based vaccination is another well-established technology that can trigger a strong immune response as it also involves both B cells and T cells.
What to know: The protein subunit vaccine contains purified “pieces” of a pathogen rather than the whole pathogen to trigger an immune response. It is thought that by restricting the immune system to the whole pathogen, the risk of side effects is minimised.
Benefits: The protein subunit vaccination is also a well-established technology that’s advantageous for those with compromised immune systems.
But reading Parenti’s piece, you can sense her socialism, her radical (root, fair, smart) belief that the wool has been pulled over the eyes of USA and Western societies Big Time by the war profiteers, and in this case, the war profiteers are those in this so-called war against a virus — Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Double Dealing. The planned pandemic that is, thanks to DARPA and the gain of function viral Mengele shit, is now an endemic — variants will come hell or highwater. What are we going to do about that? Boosters, straightjacket medicine — the resisters are the enemy. One Minute of Hate by Biden, that’s the ticket!
To many, this probably seems wrong-headed; and indeed, growing “scientific evidence” indicates it is a mistake. A recent University of Chicago and UC-Berkeley study found that women suffer higher rates of adverse reactions to pharmaceutical products than men, even when dosage is calibrated for differences in body weight. This is likely due to the more subtle dance of hormones that dictate women’s well-being, but the issue is very rarely studied.
It was not until 1993 that the federal government began requiring pharmaceutical companies to include women in their drug studies. And only in 2016 did the NIH begin to formally request that researcher grantees consider “sex as a biological variable” and specifically report on such findings.
Yet the fast-tracked Covid vaccine research skipped these provisions. Women were included in the initial Covid vaccine trials, however, none of these studies disaggregated research findings by sex.
Unfortunately, this is all tied to mind-stripping, and that Google guy, that celebrity in the movie, The Social Network, is being paraded around by lefties like Russel Brand. In that interview, Brand or the celebrity don’t look at what mind-stripping really does — not just scraping data and thoughts and emotions from people, the targets, but using that data to sway entire sectors of our lives, changing up to down, reality to fiction when it comes to regime change, the lies of Empire, the financial-AI-Wall Street thugs who want Cuba do go down, want Syria in flames, want Iran imploded by Israel’s nukes and alleged biological/viral/chemical bombs.
Russel Brand sometimes appears to be milquetoast, maybe, I don’t know, part of his UK roots, really, and this dude, Tristan Harris. You may recognize him from the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.
Here Tristan explains how our attention is being mined and that we have now become the product.”
I watched the The Social Network. Bad all around, geared to a 6th grade reading level, really, and this Harris guy is quite the multimillionaire charlatan. He’s in the film, about 1/3 of the total running time. Now, big tech is a million times worse than this shit-show demonstrates, and then when you see take-downs on Harris, on the film, we get those other misanthrope elite thinking Ayn Rands piling on their own libertarianism, and some equate questioning the main thrust of The Social Network — that big tech kills — to those who pushed the movie, Reefer Madness — trying to emote fear into citizens against pot smoking fellow citizens. Wrong comparison — apples to pig skins.
Techies are more than just smart arbiters of tech-surveillance capitalism; there is something highly broken in many of them, and they should never be in a position of power, legal or otherwise, that is, many of us believe. They are their own demigods, and they believe that Digital Tech is no different than the technology that brought us the bicycle. Look at this mind numbing stuff here criticizing the documentary for all the wrong reasons, I believe — “The Social Dilemma Manipulates You With Misinformation As It Tries To Warn You Of Manipulation By Misinformation.”
Note: Netflix, the company which produced, distributed and widely promoted the documentary, is also arguably the first big internet company to spend time, money, and resources on trying to perfect the “recommendation algorithm”! That’s capitalism, folks!
Taking this to the next stage, Ollie, the violent video games.
Yeah, so violent, murder-seeped, war-mongering, racist interactive X-box games, come on, they have zero effect on the brains of punks and not-so-punky kids and adults who play them, and live them, and spend countless human life hours joy sticking with them (Not). Look at this spin, “We present you our “TOP 10 Brutal FPS Games of 2021 & 2022” for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, STADIA & PC” ranking list. Hope you enjoy it!”
Well, isn’t that capitalism — you are what you eat, what you breathe, what you hear, what you think, what you read, what you believe, what you do, what you make, what you destroy, what you hope for, what you demand, what you consume in general, none of that has any effect on humanity. That’s the basis of the techies who see these violent, misogynistic and racist “games” as basically just entertainment.
That is the big smoke and mirrors, propaganda, lie of capitalism. This is not a lie:
The results showed that there was a significant positive correlation between exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression; normative beliefs about aggression had a mediation effect on exposure to violent video games and adolescent aggression, while family environment moderated the first part of the mediation process. For individuals with a good family environment, exposure to violent video games had only a direct effect on aggression; however, for those with poor family environment, it had both direct and indirect effects mediated by normative beliefs about aggression. This moderated mediation model includes some notions of General Aggression Model (GAM) and Catalyst Model (CM), which helps shed light on the complex mechanism of violent video games influencing adolescent aggression. (“The Relation of Violent Video Games to Adolescent Aggression: An Examination of Moderated Mediation Effect”)
Yeah, so 4 G, cell phones to the ear, all the EMF’s, now Internet of Things, Internet of Nano-Things, Internet of Biological Things, none of that create negative effects on humans, plants, animals. This is how these charlatans of the Mengele Brand work. However, let’s see where this takes us, RFK Jr.:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit published its decision Aug.13. The court ruled that the FCC failed to consider the non-cancer evidence regarding adverse health effects of wireless technology when it decided that its1996 radiofrequency emission guidelines protect the public’s health.
The court’s judgment states:
“The case be remanded to the commission to provide a reasoned explanation for its determination that its guidelines adequately protect against harmful effects of exposure to radiofrequency radiation…”
CHD Chairman and attorney on the case Robert F Kennedy, Jr. said:
“The court’s decision exposes the FCC and FDA as captive agencies that have abandoned their duty to protect public health in favor of a single-minded crusade to increase telecom industry profits.” (Source)
“The FCC will finally have to recognize the immense suffering by the millions of people who have already been harmed by the FCC’s and FDA’s unprecedented failure to protect public health. Finally the truth is out. I am hopeful that following this decision, the FCC will do the right thing and halt any further deployment of 5G.”
So, now, break out the masks, in my state, Oregon. Absurdity, and I have volunteer jobs, and the mandate is to have the masks on at interpretive centers, everywhere the public may walk into. I know for a fact after thousands of hours of research on the topic of mask efficacy and tertiary topics that these masks do not stop a virus. Truly. Alas, though, I can chuck everything by sticking to my guns and my knowledge base, or put up with a mask that I pull over (off of my nose) to breathe. Now, just applying for work, the vaccine passport will be mandatory. No passport, no job, no food, nothing. And these Democrats didn’t see this coming (bs), and now that it is here, Bring on the Stasi. No different than the white supremacist Republicans and their stupidity about racism, structural racism, structural violence, and the mis-history of their pathetic souls believing Young George Shall Not Tell a Cherry-Tree Chopping Lie. This country is diseased with infantilized thinkers, and putridity on both sides of the Apple Pie Red-White-Blue manure pile of political parties wafts in my air.
Danny does it well here, in the article at Black Agenda Report, “Critical Race Theory Debacle Signals the Collapse of the American Empire.” Old Stan and Ollie would be proud:
The GOP’s entire identity is shaped by white supremacy.
The question that must inevitably be answered is: where do correct ideas come from? It is clear they do not come from General Mark Milley. The U.S. military will not become less racist if it studies “white rage” because white supremacy is baked into the fabric of its very purpose as an institution. Correct ideas also do not come from the GOP, as its opposition to Critical Race Theory is based on the equally faulty and racist premise that “culture wars” are destroying what makes the United States “special.” Correct ideas are inevitably lost on dueling sections of a ruling class seeking to stabilize an illegitimate empire.
The people’s struggle to liberate themselves from systems of exploitation is the primary generator of correct ideas. Critical Race Theory’s growing influence correlates with the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests dating back to the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2011. The growth in the popularity of “socialism” can be traced back to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the struggle against union busting and austerity in Wisconsin, Chicago, and elsewhere. The history of class struggle, whether in the case of Black America or liberation movements abroad, is characterized in part by masses of people being propelled into a lifelong search for the correct alignment of ideas and actions that will bring qualitative changes in their conditions of life.
“Critical Race Theory’s growing influence correlates with the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests.”
The debate over Critical Race Theory will not resolve the contradictions that ensure Black Americans make less than sixty cents for every white American dollar , the U.S. military receives trillions to bomb Black and brown people abroad, and racist New Cold War tropes continue to be recycled to justify policies such as the extremely counterproductive sanctions on China’s solar energy sector . Super exploitation and war are all the American Empire has left to offer. A huge challenge for the class struggle in the United States is the fact that there are more corporate consultants and Democratic Party operatives posing as “anti-racist” than grassroots leaders and organizations prepared to take on the urgency of the political moment. Liberal elites, even when they tolerate criticisms of capitalism and racism, ultimately suppress or smear the revolutionary leaders and movements that inform revolutionary struggle. This is why establishment adherents to Critical Race Theory can offer anti-capitalist critique while scantly supporting organizations fighting to free U.S. political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal whose activities remain criminalized by the state.
The collapse of the condominium in Florida serves as an apt metaphor for the system of imperialism as a whole. Our search for correct ideas exists within the confines of the crumbling edifice of the American Empire. Conditions continue to worsen for the majority, which will inevitably lead to graver and more acute crises as demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The American Empire offers no answers, just platitudes and lies. Social transformation rests upon the ability of the oppressed to look beyond the narratives of their oppressor, seek truth from facts, and build a mass movement that can sustain radical and revolutionary debate and organization.
Of course, the word “critical” comes from a bedrock of critical thinking, looking beyond the looking glass, tossing all those the rose tinted shit Capitalism glasses to the crusher, and stopping the feeding tube filled with lies and historical fictions into our babies on through the K12 system. The amount of stupidity coming from many K12 teachers and administrators and curriculum dictators is reflected in the amount of deficits in thinking and knowledge and compassion and ethics and vital questioning of authority many of these 18 year old’s are plagued with once they graduate (sic). Yep, you are what you do not know, what you do not think, what you do not speak, what you do not hope for, what you are not exposed to, what you do not eat, drink, breathe, consumer, buy, do, believe, hope for, imagine, create, grow, what you do not read or discuss or debate.
Here it is, black and white, what you do or do not ask, what you do or do not investigate, what you do or do not study scientifically, what you do or do not engage in, that’s the Kurtz horror in our Heart of Darkness. These elite MDs, et al. are Mengele on a very sophisticated level.
When it comes to the Covid-19 vaccine and “fertility,” the official talking points have been dizzyingly contradictory. On the one hand, one regularly encounters passionate and categorical insistence that there is no evidence of any negative impact on fertility, short or long term, attending any Covid-19 vaccine. As of yesterday, the CDC now states, “There is currently no evidence that any vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines, cause fertility problems in women or men.”
In theGuardian article from April, Dr. Gunter sneeringly invokes the age-old, disingenuous, sexist, and murderous conflict between male “scientists” and female “witches,” saying, “No, the Covid-19 vaccine is not capable of exerting reproductive control via proxy. Nothing is. This is because it is a vaccine, not a spell.” Brumfiel of NPR asks, “Can vaccines cause infertility, miscarriages? The answer to all this is no.” Concerns to the contrary, he says, are nothing more than “a persistent set of lies.” The New York Times states, “Scientists have said there is no evidence that the vaccines affect fertility or pregnancy.” Dr. Brian Levine, founding partner of a reproductive health clinic, says, “No one has been able to say that there are any untoward outcomes on anyone’s reproductive potential or reproductive future as a result of receiving the Covid-19 vaccine or the sequence of vaccines.”
A widely quoted male gynecologist told the BBC that there was “no evidence to suggest that COVID-19 vaccines will affect fertility.” Alan Copperman, MD, of the Mt. Sinai Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Science, claims “the evidence shows that the vaccines will not affect anyone’s fertility.” Just yesterday, from the Boston Globe, we are told there is “conclusive evidence that the vaccine has no negative impacts on reproduction.”
Such statements give the unmistakable impression that the matter of Covid-19 vaccination and fertility is resoundingly decided.
But, here’s what is confusing. The menstrual cycle – and please, someone do correct me if I’m wrong – is a fertility cycle, consisting of a follicular phase, the ovulation phase, the luteal phase, and then the passing of the menses itself. If a woman accepts a Covid-19 vaccine and begins to suddenly and hemorrhagically bleed, for weeks or months or end, this by no means necessarily suggests she is permanently sterilized, but nevertheless indicates her cycle has been thrown off track, which is a fertility-related side effect – one which is particularly salient to a woman trying to conceive.
Indeed, when one reads the medical literature and official corporate and government statements with the uncharitable eye of a lawyer (which I am), the medical establishment’s position on Covid-19 vaccination and fertility is strikingly more circumspect than that which appears in the press.
It turns out that the lack of “scientific evidence” that Covid-19 vaccines affect fertility has at least something to do with the lack of actual scientific research on the question.
Again, Capitalism runs on chaos, confusion, patriotisms, false gods, scientism, divide and conquer technique, and much much more, but also relies on the head in the sand proposition; on overload, general anxiety disorder on steroids; and through the super-charged world of Social (sic) Media. To the point of most humanity in these United States of America having no conversations about masks, the mRNA, vaccinations forced while you are held down by the thugs of capitalism: banks, mortgage holders, landlords, employers, the cops/pigs, authorities, state, local and county boards. Mandates are marching orders. Mandates are, well, this: “If you don’t see, hear or speak the evil, then, we are dead, the living dead, when the evil is in the corporations, in the courtrooms, in the cop shops, in the various branches of government, in the military, in the Social Network brain zapping, mind stripping systems of oppression.”
There are evil forces out there, Mister Ostrich, and I ain’t talking lions and leopards. The evil is the banality of it, the Eichmanns, the folks wearing lab coats, the uniformed military, civilians and such in DARPA who are just regular people working on the next and the next evil virus that can’t be taken down by normal methods.
Now this is evil suppression of a theraputic — SaNoTize, it should have been approved March 2020! Imagine that, nasal spray, to cut down on viral load. Guaranteed to work better than social distancing, masks and endless antimicrobial spays and foams that are not creating AMR — antimicrobial resistance on steroids.
The self-administered nitric oxide spray, developed by Vancouver biotech firm SaNOtize, is said to have yielded promising results in its UK and Canada clinical trials, including against the UK variant. The company is preparing submissions to worldwide regulators for emergency approval.
“We are currently working to find the right partner in India and hoping it will be approved as a medical device in India to prevent Covid-19,” said CEO and co-founder of SaNOtize Dr Gilly Regev.”What I would have loved right now is to go and give this to a whole town in India and show that everyone using it is not getting infected,” she said. “We would have saved millions of lives if we could have brought it to market last year.”
Again, you are what you are not allowed to see, not allowed to read, not allowed to hear, not allowed to watch, not allowed to speak:
Meanwhile, Merck Co. – which manufactured the drug in the 1980s, has come out big against the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19. In February, the company’s website read: “Company scientists continue to carefully examine the findings of all available and emerging studies of Ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 for evidence of efficacy and safety. It is important to note that, to date, our analysis has identified no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against COVID-19 from pre-clinical studies; no meaningful evidence for clinical activity or clinical efficacy in patients with COVID-19 disease, and a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.”
As the Post points out – Merck has not launched a single study of its own on ivermectin.
“You would think Merck would be happy to hear that ivermectin might be helpful to corona patients and try to study it, but they are most loudly declaring the drug should not be used,” said Schwartz.
“A billion people took it. They gave it to them. It’s a real shame.”
In closing, the research team writes that “Developing new medications can take years; therefore, identifying existing drugs that can be re-purposed against COVID-19 [and] that already have an established safety profile through decades of use could play a critical role in suppressing or even ending the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.”
“Using re-purposed medications may be especially important because it could take months, possibly years, for much of the world’s population to get vaccinated, particularly among low- to middle-income populations.“
‘Oh say can you say, by the dawn’s early propaganda/censoring/book-internet burning’: You can’t view this on YouTube or Facebook. Now that’s a crime against humanity.
If events since March 2020 have shown us anything, it is that fear is a powerful weapon for securing hegemony. Any government can manipulate fear about certain things while conveniently ignoring real dangers that a population faces.
Author and researcher Robert J Burrowes says: “… if we were seriously concerned about our world, the gravest and longest-standing health crisis on the planet is the one that starves to death 100,000 people each day. No panic about that, of course.”
No panic because the controlling interests of the global food system have long profited from a ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy that ensures people unnecessarily go hungry when corporate profit rather than need dictates policies.
US social commentator Walter Lippmann once said that ‘responsible men’ make decisions and must be protected from the ‘bewildered herd’ – the public. He added that the public should be subdued, obedient and distracted from what is really happening. Screaming patriotic slogans and fearing for their lives, they should be admiring with awe leaders who save them from destruction.
During COVID, Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern urged citizens to trust the government and its agencies for all information and stated: “Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.”
In the US, Fauci presented himself as ‘the science’. In New Zealand, Ardern was ‘the truth’. It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach.
Like other political leaders, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’. Those who questioned the COVID narrative – including world-renowned scientists – were smeared, shut down and censored.
It was an internationally orchestrated campaign involving governments, the big tech companies, media and the WHO, among others.
The EU Times reported on 17 December 2022 that the US Centers for Disease Control worked with social media to censor facts and information about COVID that ran afoul of official narratives.
The organisation America First Legal noted in a press release that the fourth set of documents it released – obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – revealed: “… further concrete evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to censor free speech and silence the public square under the government’s label of ‘misinformation’.”
Twitter ran a ‘Partner Support Portal’ for government employees and other ‘stakeholders’ to submit posts that it would remove or flag as ‘misinformation’ on its platform.
The US government was actively working to ‘socially inoculate’ the public against anything that threatened its narrative. Big tech corporations monitored and manipulated users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it talked of censoring more than sixteen million ‘pieces of content’ containing opinions or information the government wanted suppressed.
AFL noted that the CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF, the WHO and IFCN member and leading civil society organisation Mafindo” to mitigate ‘disinformation’. Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia and funded by Google.
AFL states: “What is clear is that the United States government, big tech platforms, and international organizations were fully entangled in an intricate campaign to violate the First Amendment, to silence the American people, and to censor dissenting views.”
The CDC’s mask guidance policies for school children were also shown to be driven by politics rather than science.
Across all the major Western nations, there was a clamp down on dissent and a massive censorship campaign to justify a policy framework of social and economic lockdowns, masking, distancing and state intrusion into almost every aspect of private life.
The findings of AFL indicate how centres of power can and do act in unison when they need to. The fact that it involved a worldwide campaign shows something huge was at stake.
The official narrative was about protecting populations from a deadly virus. And any dissent that did seep into the edges of mainstream discourse (like Tucker Carlson on Fox News or a few presenters on Talk Radio in the UK, for instance) tended to focus on politicians going too far on lockdowns and restrictions and being caught up in their egotistical lust for power and control.
Such a superficial explanation avoided a deep, critical analysis of the situation. Indeed, any focus on big finance’s – Wall Street and the City of London – role in this was conspicuous by its absence.
In March 2022, BlackRock’s Rob Kapito warned that a ‘very entitled’ generation of people would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives as some goods grow scarce because of rising inflation. BlackRock is the world’s most powerful investment fund.
Kapito talked about the situation in Ukraine and COVID being responsible for the current economic crisis, conveniently ignoring the inflationary impact of the trillions pumped into imploding financial markets in 2019 and 2020 (dwarfing the crisis of 2008).
The war in Ukraine as well as COVID are being used to explain the roots of the current economic crisis. But COVID policies were a symptom not a cause of the crisis – they were used to manage what by late 2019 was regarded as an impending economic meltdown. Draconian COVID policies had little to do with a public health emergency.
On 15 August 2019, BlackRock issued a white paper instructing the US Federal Reserve to inject liquidity directly into the financial system to prevent “a dramatic downturn”. The message was unequivocal: “An unprecedented response is needed when monetary policy is exhausted and fiscal policy alone is not enough. That response will likely involve ‘going direct’.” It also stated the need to find ways to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders while avoiding hyperinflation.
Six days earlier, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) had in a working paper called for “unconventional monetary policy measures” to “insulate the real economy from further deterioration in financial conditions”.
Vighi’s shows why the hegemonic class reacted so severely to a public health issue that impacted a minority of the population. This response only makes sense when viewed within the context of economics.
Come late 2019 and especially 2020, pumping trillions into the financial system followed by lockdowns (to prevent hyperinflation) were used as the “unconventional monetary policies” that the BIS had called for on 9 August 2019.
Did you really think the authorities cared so much about something that mainly affected the over-80s and those with severe co-morbidities that they would lock down the entire global economy?
Did they really care so much about ordinary people, especially unproductive labour – the working class old and working class infirm – when through the years of imposed austerity, we saw the working classes being treated with utter contempt?
And did those who imposed restrictions and lockdowns really believe there was a ‘deadly’ virus on the loose?
Think of booze parties at Downing Street, Neil Ferguson’s breaking of lockdown rules to carry on an extra-marital affair, Matt Hancock breaking his own COVID rules with his lover, maskless world leaders gathering in London while their servants wore masks, various US political leaders ignoring their own rules and the public theatre of Fauci et al masking up for TV cameras then maskless as soon as they were off camera.
While such people tyrannised populations with fear and lockdowns, it is clear they themselves were unworried about ‘the virus’.
After embarking on a massive anti-Russia media propaganda campaign earlier this year to garner public support for Ukraine, the centres of power in the West are now sending billions of dollars of the public’s money into the coffers of the likes of weapons manufacturers Raytheon and Boeing.
Such corporations are more than happy to profit from sacrificing the lives of ordinary Ukrainians in the geopolitical quest to weaken and balkanise Russia so that US interests can gain a dominant, strategic foothold on the Eurasian landmass.
And while billions of dollars are being spent to achieve this, a wholly unnecessary ‘cost of living’ crisis (resulting from reckless economic neoliberalism which has finally imploded) is being imposed on working people in the Western countries – regarded as mere collateral damage when it comes to economic policies, war and corporate profit. The result is misery and poverty and the demonisation of some of the (now striking) workers who were lauded as ‘heroes’ during COVID.
But – of course – the powers that have so much demonstrable contempt for the lives of ordinary people at home and abroad will close down the entire global economy to protect their health!
Those who believe this are testament to the power of propaganda.
COVID-related policies were wholly disproportionate to any risk posed to public health, especially when considering the way ‘COVID death’ definitions and data were often massaged and how PCR tests were misused to scare populations into submission.
And the big winner has been Big Pharma, an industry with a track record of dirty tricks, false advertising and death and injury resulting from its products. If, say, Pfizer were an individual, given its corporate crimes, it would be serving a lengthy prison sentence with the proverbial key being thrown away.
But corporations with lengthy corporate rap sheets across many sectors are promoted to the public as being trustworthy and dependable. When governments partner (conspire) with such enterprises, they are conspiring with criminal recidivist companies. And when people purchase stock in them, the same applies.
Given the reference to the global food system at the beginning of this article, of particular interest are the crimes of Dupont and Bayer (see the Powerbase website), and Monsanto and Cargill (see the Corporate Research Project (CRP) website).
And, of course, Pfizer and its disturbing corporate rap sheet also appears on the CRP site.
These immensely wealthy corporations spend millions each year funding various groups and lobbying governments and international bodies. Little wonder that they wield tremendous influence and, in one way or another, become ‘trusted partners’ of governments, the WHO, the WTO and the like.
In Pfizer’s case, trusted so much as being granted ‘emergency use authorisation’ to have its ‘vaccines’ brought to market and then forced on the public via the coercive policies of governments.
Returning to Lippmann, since early 2020 so many people have feared for their lives and have admired with awe leaders who supposedly saved them from destruction. Even now as reports on vaccine injuries, vaccine inefficacy and increased mortality rates since the jab rollouts are largely taboo within the mainstream media, the public are being kept on message as the WHO and Big Pharma work towards a global treaty that will strip all their rights come the next economic meltdown or ‘pandemic’.
This article was written over the Yuletide period, an increasingly secular celebration stripped of religious connotation. These days, ‘in Big Pharma we trust’ might be more apt along with blind faith in a Zuckerberg-esque fantasy metaverse where Facebook is fact, government is truth and Big Pharma is God.
Because (heaven help us) that we should be left to think for ourselves!
A novel coronavirus, deadly and unnecessary lockdowns, civil unrest, political division, economic crises, a rise in mental health issues — the list goes on and on and on.
Since March 2020, most of the world has suffered immensely in one way or another. But, amidst the madness, there is room for gratitude. More specifically, I’m suggesting we should be grateful for what and who has been exposed over the past 32 months or so.
6 Reasons to Feel Grateful for the “Pandemic”
1. Exposed: Science and Medicine
If you ever had a doubt that these two “institutions” were hotbeds of corruption and greed, the response to Covid-19 surely cleared things up for you. Everything — from social distancing to masks to vaccines to other treatments being demonized to deadly protocols — was a poorly constructed lie.
2. Exposed: Corporations
If you ever had a doubt that these two “institutions” were hotbeds of corruption and greed, the response to Covid-19 surely cleared things up for you. Everything — from social distancing to masks to vaccines to other treatments being demonized to deadly protocols — was a poorly constructed lie.
3. Exposed: Government
It’s a well-worn script: A crisis unfolds and elected officials — across the ideological spectrum — exploit it to enhance their power. Were you unsure whether or not any politician could be trusted? If so, you now have your answer.
4. Exposed: The #woke Left
The same clowns who once marched against Monsanto are now shilling for Moderna. Plus: Censorship, support for mandates, hypocrisy, thought control, groupthink… need I go on?
5. Exposed: Media and Social Media
All media outlets and social media platforms — regardless of their ostensible “narrative” — are nothing more than AI-assisted stenographers to power.
6. Exposed: The General Population
Did you ever wonder how your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, etc., would respond to a genuine (or manufactured) crisis? Well… take a good look around. Most of them, it seems, will follow orders and respect authority without question, willingly surrender their autonomy, volunteer to be lab rats, and gleefully turn on anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep. Now you know.
I’m so thankful that so many people and institutions in my life have openly clarified who they are and how they behave under duress. To connect with like-minded and open-minded comrades, you are required to first move on from those seeking to harm you or, at least, hold you back.
If you wish to continue growing, learning, and evolving, you must be willing to relentlessly see and accept what’s going on.
Translation: You must reclaim the subversive pleasure of thinking for yourself.
I have no doubt that the C19 shots are our modern holocaust, which will cost more human lives than WW2. The implementation of Agenda 2030 is rapidly accelerating. Many people stand on the sidelines and do nothing. They just say – “wake me up when this is over”. Their inaction contributes to the rapid, insidious progression of the globalist agenda.
— Vera Sharav, holocaust survivor and founder of Alliance for Human Research Protection
There’s so much to unpack when it comes to propaganda propagating a society, or in this case, the collective west, that is collectively insane. “Amazing” is not really the operative word, since there are so many allusions to and examples of “good Germans” throughout the collective west, even before Hitler and Bernays and Goebbels and hasbara.
Milgram experiment, remember?
The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:
‘Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?’ (Milgram, 1974).
Some of the aspects of the situation that may have influenced their behavior include the formality of the location, the behavior of the experimenter and the fact that it was an experiment for which they had volunteered and been paid.
Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up.
Authority, fear, bandwagon, transfer, glittering appeal, etc., in the propaganda, Mad Men arena:
Bandwagon propaganda
Card Stacking propaganda
Plain Folk Propaganda
Testimonial Propaganda
Glittering Generality Propaganda
Name Calling Propaganda
Transfer Propaganda
Ad nauseam propaganda (source)
To the point of an apartheid state, Israel, with its deep roots in terrorism against the British and then mass gulag incarceration for the indigenous people, being not only called a great democracy, but one where it has a shadow government in the USA-UK-Canada-EU, in the form of Israel-Firsters of both the Jewish and non-Jewish persuasion.
Israel’s Secret Poisonings in 1948: New article by Benny Morris and Benjamin Kedar indicates that well before the botched assassination attempt 25 years ago on Hamas’ Meshal, Israel attempted mass poisoning during the war in 1948 [so, this comes out October 6, 2022, in Haaretz, but there will never be a documentary on Netflix or dramatization on Hulu covering this one of a million stories of Israel’s pogrom]
Now? Check out the flip-side of flipped-out propaganda and truth: “Israel Is Arming Ukraine’s Blatantly Neo-Nazi Militia, the Azov Battalion.” USA-Israel has been for years:
What is going wrong with the so-called mainstream journalism tied to Ukraine is what was/is wrong with the MSM and left-wing narratives around masks, lockdowns, obeying the marching orders of corrupt Big Pharma, and listening without pushback against faux scientists, while allowing for the silencing of medical experts, and public health experts who had/have a different analysis of SARS-CoV2. Hook, line and sinker:
We’ll get to the Covid test for journalists in a minute, but the idea of exacting image management and agnotology and black is white, lies are truth mentality has taken off with algorithms and censoring and the onslaught of Google and Deep State and Corporate State seeding the world with a system of dumb-downing by 1,000,000,000 managed internet hits and mass hysteria.
Zelenskyy has been using 3D imagery to deliver speeches all over the world by using a hologram.
Zelenskyy’s “participation” in world events using a hologram has been reported by several renowned media outlets, as can be seen below.
A hologram is created through holography, a photographic technique which records the light scattered from an object and displays it three-dimensionally.
Images, and the Mass Incarceration Media Management Show:
Oh, these image management boys and girls:
It’s taken off like gangbusters with the few and the mighty controlling 90 percent of “media,” i.e. publishing (including k12 books) and radio and TV and cable and the Holly-Dirt manufacturers of lies, half-truths, multimillionaire thespians who end up acting in politics. All the world’s a stage for coiffing the reality of the poor masses, us, we useless eaters-breeders-breathers-shitters.
Then, with this total absorption of Hollywood images, the marketing ploys, the perceived, planned, hoped for complete transition from citizens to consumers to data zombies to useless to nobodies, we can have this sort of audacity, in my local rag. All full-page rainbow colors and all:
Imagine that, driving in Newport, while seeing all those employee solicitations plastered up on the local Burger King and Pizza Hut billboards, seeking drive-thru help or pizza dough assistants, for $16 an hour plus signing on bonuses and a 30 percent discount on fat, salt and sugar, man.
I’m not sure what the Burger King/Pizza Hut Covidian Madness Requirements are for those teens or Baby Boomers lining up for this gig, to actually get hired with background checks, drug checks, and vax checks, but I know the school district requires SARS-CoV2 experimental jabs, and CDC proof of it, to walk the halls of the school or help those kids on the teether ball court.
Note, the hourly wage for substitutes has been set by a staffing agency working hand in glove with the district — $14.07 an hour. When I was substituting, well, I’d get $18 an hour, and that included pay for a full day if I pinch-hit a couple hours after the morning bell rang. That was $140 for six hours work! Not anymore!
I’d meet the school secretary, get signed in, and then that was it — look at the absent teacher’s notes for the day and then greet the 3rd graders and the math classes in the high schools, music room sub, or special education sub. Even PE and even all sorts of classes K12. Now, the poor souls getting $14 an hour have to jump through the staffing agency hoop, a company out of Tennessee:
And this another aspect of the smoke and mirrors game of Western Society — the staffing agencies, the middlemen and middlewomen just making bank by adding on to all the daily costs of living, of surviving, with their powerful Salesforce apps and servers, all of that, taking over teaching, for the time being, until it all goes on-line, in home “learning”:
Over the last 22 years, we have innovated education staffing to provide dynamic solutions to school districts and professional opportunities to passionate educators. Our team serves over 4.5 million students with a pool of 80,000 substitute and permanent employees throughout 33 states. Internally, the ESS team is comprised of 650 individuals with a passion for education working together to ensure our 900 partner districts experience valuable education every day.
This is the big rip-off, the taxpayers’ spending trillions over the years to establish/prop up public education, schools, buses, college prep programs, all those state colleges and junior colleges, all those school districts throughout the land, so that one day the PT Barnums’ of the world can come in and swoop up and take some munches out of that public-private partnership bs.
I have never seen journalists question this rip-off scheme because (a) journalism has always been on life-support, always there as a town barker and nice guy in the business story realm, and (b) because “going deep” journalistically means going deeper into how immersive the rip-off schemes are in U$A.
I’ve written about my bad times here in Lincoln County, about the spinelessness of ESS, and, well, each criticism of these systems puts another nail into my useless eater-breather-shitter life:
Again, I think the biggest question in maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people?
The problem is more boredom and how what to do with them and how will they find some sense of meaning in life, when they are basically meaningless, worthless?
My best guess, at present is a combination of drugs and computer games as a solution for [most]. It’s already happening…
I think once you’re superfluous, you don’t have power.
– from a transcript at Rielpolitic Alexandra Bruce, “Brave New World: Yuval Noah Harari asks, “What to do with all these useless people?”
Harari goes on to outline a transhumanist vision of the future in which brain-computer interfaces make our footedness in the material world obsolete, human relationships become meaningless due to artificial substitutes, and the poor die but the rich don’t.
Transhumanism, boiled down to its bones, is pure eugenics. It calls itself “H+,” for more or better than human. Which, of course, is what eugenics is all about.
Alarmingly, transhumanist values are being embraced at the highest strata of society, including in Big Tech, in universities, and among the Davos crowd of globalist would-be technocrats. That being so, it is worth listening in to what they are saying under the theory that forewarned is forearmed.
Big issues, no, for the 21st Century of Fourth Industrial Revolution, Web 3.0, Social Impact Bonds, pay for success, blockchains, twinning, and so-so much more that the average gumshoe journalist just can’t dig deep because it will upset the entire playing field they so badly need to get a sense of sanity from the insane. But reporting on insanity is what we need in a time of Transhumanism and Covidian Cults?
Try this out for size:
When you enter the “invest in kids bonds” door knowing there are plans to create asset-backed securities in toddlers and trade them (and perhaps short them) on global markets, the single-minded interrogation of cryptocurrency exchanges and NFT rip-offs feels woefully inadequate. If the stakes weren’t so high, it might be amusing to watch folks who’ve been swimming in the shark-infested waters of financial derivatives for years point fingers decrying crypto-Ponzi-schemers. Calls for better regulation and professed empathy for those who lost their savings to fraudulent digital money schemes ring a bit hollow once you realize many of the panelists’ livelihoods are intertwined with the same financial interests, journalism outlets, and think tanks that were enmeshed in the crash of the global economy via toxic-real estate debt products. These are the same folks who are now in the process of developing the risk modeling, tokenomics, and APIs needed to run the smart “Ricardian” contract, “sustainably resilient,” open-air prison. — Alison McDowell, Wrench in the Gears
Read what the billionaire class and the techno gurus are after, and it’s data, man, tracking us, every blink, twitch, hiccup, burp, step, defecation as well as every purchase, every debt, every desire, to create the ultimate robotics, AI. It’s universal basic chump income blathering, man, and it is that World Economic Forum adage on steroids: “You’ll own nothing but be happy.”
Go here, too, for more:
So, as a real journalist, I have experienced that old time religion of lack of bandwidth, lack of humane reporting, the lack of looking at many sides, and coming out the other end of a story with, well, some solutions that are not the black-and-white game of divide and conquer. False balance, equivocation, relying on diploma-ed and credentialed sources, fear of litigation, the whole nine yards of mainstream journalism requiring an inverted triangle of information; i.e., the lede and important stuff at the top, and the superfluous and unimportant stuff (sic) at the bottom. Of course, it is the stuff at the bottom that IS important.
Case in point: I did the story on 13 Salvadorans found dead in the Organ Pipe National Monument along the US-Mexico border. Newspaperman. Yeah, the hurly burly of all those cops, helicopters, forensics wagons, and a young reporter who happened to have friends working with refugees of El Salvador (and Chile and Guatemala) and who actually did some assistance with the so-called underground railroad. You know, assistance that would have gotten me fired and banned from journalism, even got me arrested, as in, well, helping undocumented folk get from point A to point B in my pick-up truck.
When the grisly scene came into play, and with my background in that work, of course I got a hold of some folk working to assist those coming into the USA for sanctuary and political asylum. Of course, I knew a few academics and authors who had been writing about the dirty schemes of the Salvadoran government, businesses, military and police who were exacting hell on common people, on farmers, and on labor unionists with the material support and intellectual help of USA!
That bottom-of-the-inverted triangle “stuff” was fought over, parsed, edited out, and eventually cut, as the newspapers I worked for was all about the facts, ma’am, if it bleeds, it leads, just get the information from the officials on the spot.
You know, don’t upset the local readers, don’t go into “that” political stuff, and don’t bring in guys and gals from universities all the way from Cochise County, Arizona, to Chicago in your stories?
That was in the early 1980s.
It’s gotten worse. And, I have found over the years that journalists are intimidated by or enamored by the scientists, the reef biologists, the astrophysicists, the dudes and gals mixing up the chemicals, designing the motherboards, and trading derivatives.
Journalists are also tone deaf to history, to backgrounding, and, alas, if the motherships are New York Times and Washington Post and another dozen or so papers sprinkled around the U$A, then that modelling has what has tainted the media, The Press.
How disturbing it is to see the fornication of corporations and media, how disgusting it is to see what is and is not off limits in the reportage arena.
Then, in book publishing? Fewer and fewer books of importance.
This prefatory bit I’m etching in hyperbole before introducing a piece on how the “left” failed the Covid reporting test big time is my angst, for sure, and my ability to see the big picture(s), even if they are holograms and 4 D chessboards in the entire propaganda game. Systems thinking, and while much about capitalism is boorish and raw and just plain usury and scamming and parasitic, there are some complicated and very technical aspects of how finance is moving into your local community, your neighborhood, your lives. BlackRock? Who controls the world?
CEO Larry Fink built a shadow government of former agency officials in a bid to become Hillary Clinton’s Treasury secretary. That didn’t stop Fink from becoming part of the main private-sector advisory organization to Donald Trump until that panel disbanded after Charlottesville.
Alas, though, we’d expect that non-legacy journalists, or those who were once in the Mainstream who are now leftist, supposed anti-monopoly, anti-corporation, skeptical beyond skeptical of any governmental narrative reporters, that they would have peeled back the onion peels on this SARS-CoV2 bioweapon, and then question the funny juiced-up cocktails that we call the mRNA jab.
You’d think that the censoring of doctors, scientists, just plain deep thinkers and activists on the lockdowns, the mandates, the failure to get the data from the Moderna’s and the Pfizer’s on these bizarre untested and rapidly released jabs would pique their interest.
Instead, many went blank, called millions of us as poorly informed, conspiracy theorists, anti-this and anti-that dupes. Imagine that, journalists who question empire, question the United Fruit Company, question authority, Vietnam, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the MIC, FIRE, and who want to look deep into the well that is American Manifest Destiny and Exceptionalism, that they would flip like dying dogs, or either go blank on the virus front, or even patronize those of us who have the gumption to look into the origins of that “virus” and who have the interest in understanding what a great reset is, and how a pathogen and mass hysterical and controlled media on that front can compel people to submit to these fascist things. Typical leftist yammering:
“I got my vaccinations, but I understand that some people who might have personal or whatever beliefs have the right, I guess, to not get forcefully jabbed. Well, yeah, I got the jab because the information just came to me in a dream -haha. I understand science and I understand how much smarter these virologists are, and, heck, a conspiracy of them producing products that would be bad for us, or cause deaths, or that the decent governmental employees would cook up fakes on all this, get real? I get why people might not want to have blood transfusions because of their religion, or not get this vaccine, but for the greater good of all, really, this is a pandemic. We have to follow the science. Sometimes the government-law has to intervene if the Jehovah Witness parent is putting their kids in jeopardy with this inane superstition about blood transfusions and keeping them on life support. Get real, and be part of our collective society.”
So, yes, I only have a BS in marine biology from a long time ago, and, yes, only a masters in Rhetoric and another one in urban and regional planning, and only years underwater diving, and decades as a many-venue journalist, and many decades teaching college, and many years as a sustainability coordinator, and, well, so, if I doubt the narratives around Event 201 and Gates and gain of function lies and what those bio-labs in Canada and USA and even Ukraine and former Soviet Union region are actually up to; and if I delve into many many sources tied to what the hell is going on with corona virus, bats, civets, and SARS, and what the history of Japan’s Unit 731 is, and what the history of biological warfare (ARPA and DARPA) and what is in the minds and labs (Plum Island, Fort Detrick) of U$A, well, again, lefties, liberals, Democrats: “Shut the f#@% up and just do what a good citizen should do . . . your commie countries are doing it too . . . China, Nicaragua, Cuba . . . so take off that tin foil hat and just relax and take it as it is: these scientific things, these mRNA clipping things, this incredible advancement in the science of working with RNA and DNA, well, it supersedes your ability to understand where these big Pharma outfits are coming from. Shut up, and if you doubt any of this, then you are, well, akin to a Trumpian or Q-Anon or just a plain wacko antivaxxer, man. Embarrassing.”
Sure, everything else written about exposures of this bizarre multiple front narrative is verboten:
No Doubting Thomases here:
RNA for Moderna’s Omicron Booster Manufactured by CIA-Linked Company
Since late last year, messenger RNA for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, including its recently reformulated Omicron booster, has been exclusively manufactured by a little known company with significant ties to US intelligence. (source)
Sinister, man, and I will not belabor the point here citing even a dozen of the hundreds of sources I have read that look at what was being cooked up in labs, from North Carolina to Toronto to Wuhan, and on and on. Bill Gates? The media? Big pharma? Pathogens dropped on the Chinese in Korea in 1950? Right, the record of scientists and MIC working hand in hand is wonderful!
This billionaire is a murder incorporated, continuing criminal enterprise booster:
In October, 2019 Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who, together with his wife, runs the richest and most powerful foundation in the world, co-organized a simulation exercise on a worldwide corona epidemic. Videos were posted documenting the exercise. But intriguingly Gates now denies such an exercise ever took place.
Why? On April 12, 2020, Bill Gates said in an interview to the BBC, “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”
This is the same person who, just six months before the outbreak of the pandemic, organized a series of four role-playing simulations of a corona pandemic with very high-ranking participants. Event 201 was a simulation of a corona pandemic conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins University in October 2019.
Participants from the private and public sectors were presented with a scenario, not unlike the one that has unfolded in reality, and discussed what needed to be done. There are official videos of the four meetings and a best-of-video scenario presentation and discussion by the participants, who are members of a pandemic control council in the role play. (source)
Enough already. Here, Mister Harrington’s piece which does question those journalists which I have cited many many times concerning US and global policies that are screwing us over royally. With permission from Harrington, here it is, at Brownstone Institute.
He titles it, “Why did the Left Fail the Covid Test So Badly?”
Here, a few paragraphs:
Like every other important social phenomenon, propaganda regimes have historical genealogies. For example, a very strong case could be made that the ongoing, and sad to admit, largely successful Covid propaganda onslaught under which we now live can trace its roots back to the two so-called demonstration wars (the Panama Invasion and the First Gulf Conflict) waged by George Bush Sr.
The American elites were badly stung by the country’s defeat in Vietnam. In it, they rightly saw a considerable curtailment of what they had come to see as their divine right since the end of WWII: the ability to intervene as they so fit in any country not explicitly covered by the Soviet nuclear umbrella.
And in their analysis of that failure, they correctly alighted to the role that the media—by simply bringing the tawdry and ignoble reality of the war into our living rooms—had played in undermining citizen willingness to engage in such fruitless, costly and savage adventures in the future.
But his piece could have been titled: “Why did the Left, Right, Middle Fail the, now, fill in the blanks, Vietnam-Korea War Test? The Chemical Corporations Polluting Us Test? Why did they, the left, right, middle, fail to go after Carter for mining Nicaragua, for the Gulf of Tonkin Affair, for Vilifying Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader?” Harrington discusses the failure of left-wing writers who have failed to dig deep and parse through the entire reason, pretext for, history of, practice games with, this Planned Pandemic.
It is the failure of actually sticking to your guns; i.e., question EVERYTHING corporations do, sell us, tell us, connive with government to hide from us.
The price? Ending careers, and PayPal shut downs, and bank accounts seized, and endless ghosting and libeling on social media. Infinite social media assaults for anyone who might want to look into SARS-CoV2, the culprits in those biolabs, why the gain of function experiments were continued, why Fort Detrick was shut down months before the media wave of SARS-CoV2 hit? Why there are so many bio-labs at universities in USA and Canada and, well, in former Soviet Union; i.e., Ukraine.
Again, his, Harrington’s, hard-edged words, but real words, with the context, with the history and backgrounding to support what he is saying:
Reading this final flourish while remembering the lamb-like silence of John Pilger in the face of the sustained Covidian onslaught of institutionalized lies and Soviet-grade censorship, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
And when considering that virtually all those he endorses as exemplars of propaganda-savvy journalism—people such as Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone all of whose work I have frequently and enthusiastically championed over the years—took the same cud-chewing path, the sense of farce only grows.
Go to Harrington’s piece and the piece Pilger wrote which Harrington references. You decide yourself how the left failed the Covid Narrative Badly.
John Pilger, “arguably one of the brightest and more persistent leftist analysts of establishment propaganda,” published “Silencing the lambs: How propaganda works” on his website and then a number of progressive news outlets.
[Leni Riefenstahl, center, filming with two assistants, 1936. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)]
The Branch Covidian putsch is the most heinous crime ever perpetrated in the history of medicine, and some would argue, in the history of the world. Its success is attributable to the strong presence of Nazi bioethics within the ranks of Western physicians, as well as a broad base of support from the ranks of neoliberals. This inhuman cult dogma, so destructive to the human spirit and antithetical to democracy, is anchored in a contempt for informed consent, and is fueled by careerism, hubris, blind obedience, and an unwavering belief in the infallibility of the public health agencies.
Like any other cult ethos, Branch Covidian dogma operates outside the boundaries of logic and reason. Moreover, all totalitarians are amnesiacs in the sense that they have lost the ability to place political events in their appropriate historical context. Consequently, they can be lied to repeatedly without this leading them to question the veracity of an official narrative mired in pseudoscience and malevolent propaganda.
American doctors have been groomed for the biosecurity putsch for years, as their military-style training is predicated on the notion that their superiors are demigods that must be obeyed unquestioningly. Pronouncements frequently parroted by the legacy media that end up being demonstrably untrue, such as the tale that the mRNA vaccines will take us to herd immunity, fail to break the stranglehold that the cult has over its followers, but rather, as Mattias Desmet has noted, only seem to reinforce it. The claim (reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitism) that the unvaccinated are spreaders of disease, and that they will have to live with the shame of having murdered their friends and relatives, is still being reiterated even long after it has become apparent that the vaccines do not prevent transmission.
There are dozens of studies that show the ineffectiveness of masks, and dozens that underscore their deleterious health effects when worn incessantly. There are also no less than 140 studies demonstrating that natural immunity to Covid-19 is durable, robust, and long-lasting. The new claim by the apostolic power, that the vaccines diminish virulence, is clearly an attempt on the part of the health care papacy to invent a new narrative following the failure of the “immunization drive.”
“Follow the science” is, in fact, a euphemism for “Be quiet and do as you’re told.” The claim that an experimental vaccine can be rigorously tested in under a year and found to be “safe and effective” is absurd, as the process typically takes at least ten years using traditional vaccine technologies. Yet the Branch Covidian isn’t interested in the rule of law, science, morality or even basic common sense. Like the followers of Jack in Lord of the Flies, they are transfixed by the intoxicating power of the death cult.
A few weeks ago I asked one of my doctors how the vaccines could be safe when there were over 30,000 deaths on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), to which he replied, “Well, a lot of people took them.” In other words, this is an acceptable degree of collateral damage. In many ways, this is an even more deranged line of reasoning than that made by Dr. Gerhard Rose, head of the Koch Institute of Tropical Medicine during the Third Reich. Rose attempted to justify doing typhus vaccine experiments on concentration camp prisoners at the Doctors’ Trial by claiming that it was acceptable to sacrifice a hundred men if tens of thousands of German soldiers could potentially be saved, as the Wehrmacht was being ravaged by typhus. This argument was rejected by the court, and he was incarcerated. Like Fauci, Walensky, and Collins, Rose was also “really smart.”
Yet another one of my physicians recently brought up the issue of Covid and suggested that I might consider getting the mRNA vaccine. His reasoning was as follows: he had a difficult bout with Covid despite being “fully vaccinated.” In other words, instead of concluding, as any rational person would, that the Covid vaccines demonstrate questionable efficacy, he concluded that the vaccine saved his life, that it dramatically reduced virulence, and that without it he might have ended up in an intensive care unit. Both doctors attended prestigious schools, and at least ostensibly, are of sound mind.
When the FDA panel met to discuss whether to go ahead with approving the investigational inoculations for children aged five to eleven, Harvard professor and editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of MedicineDr. Eric Rubin said “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.” Does one have to be a graduate of an elite medical school to see that this is an utterly depraved argument?
The government of the Third Reich deceived millions of Germans into believing that they had a vast array of enemies, all of which were the spawn of the Nazi propaganda apparatus: Jews, communists, Russians, and Poles to name some of the most prominent. A similar thing has transpired with the Branch Covidians, who have been taught to despise “anti-vaxxers,” “science deniers,” “flat-earthers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “misinformation spreaders.” This obsessive need to scapegoat is also on display with regard to the neoliberal hatred of “white privilege,” “white supremacists,” “nativists,” “misogynists,” “Trumpers,” and “Putin apologists” – the list seems to be growing by the week.
Furthermore, this scapegoating is inextricably linked with efforts to dismantle the First Amendment, as authoritarian regimes cannot abide criticism. In an article in The Federalist by doctors Harvey Risch, Robert Malone, and Byram Bridle, the eminent authors warn of a regime which is increasingly intolerant of dissent:
Questioning the competence and integrity of government bureaucracies like the FDA doesn’t make someone a bad person or a spreader of disinformation. Government bureaucracies can be wrong, and historically the citizens of democracies have viewed it as not only their right but their duty to scrutinize public officials’ decisions. Dissent is an integral part of the sacred compact between government and governed that underpins a free society, and Americans allow the current regime of censorship to continue at their extreme peril.
When giving an introduction to Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others at a book event in New York City, Dr. Harvey Risch denounced the devastating effects of the lockdowns, saying that the isolation has turned us into “sub-people.” Chelsea Manning has compared the lockdowns with putting billions of human beings into solitary confinement, saying “people are going to take years to recover from this.”
Blatant lies spewed by the three letter agencies, such as the claim that Hydroxychloroquine can damage the heart, or that Ivermectin is only a veterinary drug when it is on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines, fail to shake the Branch Covidian belief that the orchestrators of the Covid response are irreproachable. (As Dr. Pierre Kory has done with Ivermectin, an entire book could be written on the war on Hydroxychloroquine).
Calls to halt the disastrous mRNA vaccine program are being ignored, even when they come from distinguished voices such as the World Council for Health and renowned cardiologists Aseem Malhotra and Peter McCullough. Only those who represent the Branch Covidian priesthood – replete with its artful pope, cardinals, and bishops – are ordained to be “the experts.”
The Western elites are acutely aware of the fact that if they can obliterate informed consent they can destroy democracy, as this would render both freedom of speech and habeas corpus obsolete. Having reached the zombie stage of capitalism, the Branch Covidian wallows in a state of unreason, amorality, and an atavistic yearning. Like Adolf Eichmann, they no longer live in a world where good and evil exist. There is only one’s career, the illusion of having overcome an excruciating alienation, and the sense of ecstasy that comes from a newfound sense of belonging to the Covid religion.
For many years the education system has played a key role in fomenting totalitarianization by replacing humanities courses with increasingly specialized vocationally oriented courses, while rewarding ideological subservience and punishing creativity, integrity, honesty and critical thinking. It is not a coincidence that many of the most indoctrinated Americans went to the most competitive schools, as they were invented for this very purpose.
Intertwined with the ongoing weaponization of medicine, medical students and residents are often mentored in a manner where they invariably acquire a derisive attitude towards informed consent. For example, practice pelvic exams done on anesthetized patients, patients arm-twisted into accepting the presence of trainees during their physician office visits, trainees instructed to disregard do-not-resuscitate orders (or its antithesis), trainees immersed in an environment where unnecessary surgeries are regularly performed, pediatric residents inculcated with contempt towards parental informed consent, gynecology residents trained to blackmail women into having Pap smears in exchange for birth control; and a willful failure to caution trainees regarding the highly addictive nature of opioids, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, and many psychotropic drugs – all are commonplace in American teaching hospitals.
As transpired in Weimar Germany, the West is undergoing a period of cataclysmic destabilization which has led to a growing sense of meaninglessness, alienation, unprecedented levels of atomization, and an unraveling of centuries-old mores and ethical norms. This disintegration of communities, coupled with a growing economic inequality, has brought about the rise of a hyper-careerism where millions of people will do anything to advance their careers. The more coveted the job, the more professional success demands a deep-seated ideological and political conformity. Since there is no perceived benefit in the eyes of the hyper-careerist to being educated regarding the many serious and complex political and socio-economic problems that we face, self-imposed ignorance presents itself as a sensible course of action.
The failure of the Branch Covidian doctor to acknowledge the irrationality behind “the science” (often preposterous even to a layperson), along with their inability to acknowledge the absence of a sound risk-benefit analysis behind any of the official Covid policies, is indicative of their having lost their souls to the cannibalistic machinery of corporate medicine. Every physician, especially in the West, should have been able to immediately ascertain that the lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, forced testing, etc., had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with authoritarianism due to the utter absence of informed consent. That this didn’t occur, underscores how, with the exception of the handful of courageous doctors that have spoken out, the medical profession has been led into a morass of profound moral degradation.
Undoubtedly, those who have doubts about the official narrative yet remain silent, do so out of fear of losing their job. What they fail to understand is that this craven silence may eventually lead to a situation where the penalty for speaking out will be a loss of freedom which is total and absolute. Indeed, if informed consent is irrevocably lost, the pathologizing of dissent will be normalized. This is evidenced by the fact that Canadian physician Dr. Mel Bruchet, and for a somewhat shorter duration, Swiss cardiologist Dr. Thomas Binder, were committed and handed over to the Cult of Psychiatry for expressing heretical views on Branch Covidian theology, and so the process is already underway. This is the last stage of biofascism.
The penchant for overspecialization (which many doctors are presently hiding behind), ruthless ambition, and an indifference towards the most outrageous forms of regulatory capture has caused the biomedical technocrat to be molded into an insensate automaton of a rapacious oligarchy. How is a Branch Covidian doctor who believes that the psychopathic Covid mandates have been necessary to protect people from a virus any less deluded than an American soldier who is sent to Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan and believes that they are “fighting for democracy?”
Writing in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt emphasizes the connection between evil and mindlessness:
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
Karl Brandt, Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation and one of the most senior Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg, insisted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing when taking the stand at the Doctors’ Trial, despite having been a leading proponent of the Nazi euthanasia program and having been involved in forced medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates. The Nazi medical establishment believed that these ghastly crimes, which were in such incontrovertible violation of the Hippocratic Oath, were acceptable due to the credo of “the greater good” being upheld. Indeed, the Nazi doctor’s sense of utilitarianism regarded German society as one organism, with each person like a cell that collectively comprised this organism. Hence, killing Jews, the mentally ill, along with other Untermenschen, was rationalized in the same way that an oncologist today would regard liquidating cancer cells in an attempt to save a single human life. Today, the Volk is not a race, per se, but the Western elites.
This extreme collectivist mentality, which is as intertwined with Branch Covidian doctrine as it was with the Nazi medical ethos, is antithetical to the informed consent ethic and has played a critical role in laying the foundation for a burgeoning health dictatorship.
One must get vaccinated to protect other people. One must wear a mask to protect other people. One must practice social distancing to protect other people. One must get tested to protect other people. The foundational precept of the Nuremberg Code is that medical ethics is rooted in the right to informed consent of the individual.
Dr. Paul Alexander, a pandemic advisor under the Trump administration, who has repeatedly decried the catastrophic harms of the lockdowns, and who possesses more empathy than the overwhelming majority of American doctors put together, has recounted a story about how he asked a senior CDC official where they got the science of the “six feet rule” of social distancing from, to which the official laughed and said it had nothing to do with science – it was about power.
Mindless compliance with policies which are obviously not backed by science, which have an irrational risk-benefit analysis, and which trample on every human being’s inalienable right to bodily autonomy, have brought us to a crossroads where we are hovering over an abyss of a brutal authoritarianism. Nevertheless, it is essential that we continue to intellectually challenge the sleepwalkers.
The Pentagon sacked Iraq; the Romans, Carthage; and the Greeks, Troy. Yet the Branch Covidians have sacked the whole world. Only through the restoration of reason and compassion can humanity cleanse itself from this demonic and fiendish scourge.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has tested positive for Covid-19 and is being kept in total isolation at Belmarsh Prison as he continues to fight extradition to the US, his wife Stella told media on Monday.
“The next few days will be crucial for his general health,” the lawyer, who married Assange in March, told reporters, adding “He is now locked in his cell for 24 hours a day.” Assange became sick on Friday with a cough and fever and was given paracetamol before testing positive for the virus the following day, she said.
The Australian native applied in early 2020 to be released on bail due to a chronic lung condition he has suffered from for over a decade, placing him in a high-risk category for Covid-19 infection. However, his request was declined, and a UK court ruled earlier this year that he can be extradited to the US to face espionage and hacking charges for making classified Pentagon documents public.
The Wikileaks publisher’s health has suffered noticeably during his confinement in Belmarsh, where he has been confined since the Ecuadorian government revoked his asylum status in 2019. He lost a significant amount of weight and the ability to speak coherently following his incarceration, leading prison authorities to move him to the hospital wing. In December, he suffered a stroke, leaving him with a drooping eyelid, memory problems and apparent neurological damage, according to his wife, who said the incident was triggered by the stress of ongoing extradition proceedings.
Prior to his arrest, Assange spent seven years under de facto house arrest in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, having fled there to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex crimes charges that have since been dropped. While he has long since served time on the only charge brought against him in the UK – bail-jumping regarding the no-longer-extant Swedish case – he remains incarcerated pending extradition to the US.
While a UK court initially ruled in his favor against extradition, agreeing with his lawyers that he would be kept in conditions in the US that would easily provoke suicide, that ruling was reversed last year.
Assange faces a 175-year sentence on charges he leaked secret documents he received from a US Army analyst regarding the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Wikileaks supporters have argued that he was only practicing journalism by publishing the documents, which were redacted to remove some sensitive information, and accused Washington of retaliation against the outlet for exposing its own war crimes.
We all remember the beginning of COVID lockdown in the spring of 2020, and the resulting feelings of isolation, panic, grief and loneliness when faced with a new viral pandemic claiming the lives of so many. But, in Feral City, Jeremiah Moss documents something else. In New York City, during the lockdown, he noticed a rewilding of the city as people reengaged with public space. And this fostered the kinds of cross-pollination squashed by decades of gentrification, surveillance, hyper-policing and homogenization.
With “no stores, no shoppers, no restaurant reviews or fashion trends to incite consumption and competition, no office workers rushing around, no eyes staring at iPhones, no outward signs of bourgeois acquisition and productivity,” there was more freedom to roam, Moss writes, and the city pulsated with a kind of street life that Moss, who has lived in New York for almost 30 years, hadn’t experienced at this scale in decades.
Once mass protests erupted after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and cities across the country ignited in public outcry and autonomous action, the streets of New York became politicized. “Pandemic time bends and lags, expanding as it falls back on itself in a churn that coughs up debris from the past and casts it forth into the present,” Moss writes. And it’s in this time of trauma and restlessness that public space in New York once again became populated by poor people and protesters, people of color and queers, outcasts and artists and dreamers. It was “a return of the lost that was not lost,” Moss writes, as people pushed to the margins reemerged in a raucous spectacle of resistance.
In this interview, Moss discusses “what can happen when capitalism is put on just the slightest hold” — the possibilities for intimacy, transgression, collaboration and transformation that emerge — and the policing of public space and public behavior that diminishes the options for self-determination.
Mattilda B. Sycamore: One of the things that makes Feral City so immediate is its focus on embodiment. Reading the book felt like an adrenaline rush, like I was going through everything with you. How did it feel to write?
Jeremiah Moss: I was writing everything down right after it happened. So I’d come home from a bike ride or an action, after being in the intensity of it all, and I’d stay up late to get it down in raw form, when it was still fresh in memory. That writing came out fast, like the adrenaline rush you describe, and then I did all the reworking, which is slow writing, reflecting on experiences with some distance, puzzling out how I felt and what I thought about it all. I wrote Feral City with a good deal of anxiety about getting it “right,” because I was writing about this massive shared experience, that was yet not shared equally, and also writing about other people, so I wanted to be careful, full of care. I do a lot of battling with inner critics when I write, so the process is not smooth. Except in moments of poetry where everything’s flying. But those moments are few and far between.
In writing about activism, I think there’s a tendency to talk about the politics and the protests, the strategies and struggles, the enemies and heroes, but not so much the day-to-day experience of living, of feeling everything. All the possibilities and contradictions. And you do such a great job of this, throughout the book. How did you keep this focus?
I kept coming back to memoir, reminding myself that I was writing my own personal story. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of trying to represent “the movement” or “the pandemic,” because I can’t do that. No one can. It would be hubris to try. As long as I kept it small, I could make it big. As a writer, I started out as a poet and always believed in what William Carlos Williams said about reaching the universal through the particular. I love everyday specificity. And affect. I come to know things through feeling.
In talking about gentrification in New York City, you write about the “New People” who flocked to New York when it became a whitewashed symbol of post-9/11 patriotism. You say, “Their newness is not the problem,” since new people have always flocked to New York. What is the difference now?
It has long been a struggle to come up with a name for these people. When I started my blog, Vanishing New York, in 2007, I called them “yunnies,” a riff on yuppies that stood for Young Urban Narcissists. But that was too limiting, and too cutesy, so I dropped that. For the book, I wanted to coin some great term, but ended up with New People, which I’m not satisfied with either. What I mean is that these people are a new kind of personality type in the city. They’re not New because they’re newcomers; they’re New because they’re not like the sort of people who’ve historically flocked to the city and, specifically, to countercultural neighborhoods like the East Village. They often don’t feel quite human. They feel android-like, manufactured, and this is because — I believe — their personalities have been engineered by the culture of neoliberal capitalism, especially in the 2000s when social media spreads neoliberalism like a virus. In The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino just published an essay about “Instagram face,” what she calls a “single, cyborgian” look, and this is part of what I’m talking about. The New People are perfect neoliberal subjects, engineered to conform, perform and succeed, and this makes them quite violent in the way they enter and commandeer urban space — and in the way they approach people who are unlike them, who they see as beneath them. They are also violent toward themselves through de-subjectification, the process of hollowing themselves out. I find it difficult to empathize with them, though. I keep trying, but I feel so assaulted by them, I just can’t.
I love how you eavesdrop on your influencer neighbors to give us the flattened details of their lives. Surveillance has stifled so many of the possibilities of urban life, and yet here you’re flipping the gaze to examine the gawkers and their “contemptuous disregard.” What do you find?
“Flattened” is a good word and it describes well what happens when someone de-subjectifies themself; they smooth out all the bumps that make them human and particular. They are the cyborgian Instagram face, the flat sameness of the glossy catalog image, drained of all personality. And — here’s their violence — they aim to de-subjectify everything and everyone around them. This goes way beyond gentrification. This is about turning the entire urban landscape into a slick, frictionless, endlessly repeating Instagrammable scene, devoid of affect, risk and surprise. To create this nightmarish hollow city, many of us will have to be removed, and if we refuse to go, we will be controlled — by the police, by systems of surveillance, and by the contemptuous disregard that the New People throw like poison darts from their eyes. They are trying to annihilate us. To make us not exist.
At the beginning of COVID lockdown in New York, so many of these “New People” left the city.
The day lockdown began, in March 2020, they fled in droves. The people who stayed behind and roamed the streets were the sort of New Yorkers I used to know. I’m talking about the ordinary people who aren’t cyborgian, along with the poor and working class, the nonwhite, the queer, the weird, the unhoused, the old, the artists, basically everyone who’s not a New Person. So the city refilled with all this gorgeous subjectivity! It was like a cloud lifted and we could see each other again. We could feel each other and look at each other. We became un-alienated.
So, you are struck by the “poetry of the streets” at the same time as the pandemic is claiming so many lives in New York. You ask, “How is it that tragedy would make me fall in love with the city again?”
It was the most joyful time of my life — and I know how that sounds. People were dying, suffering, and I had the privilege to continue working from home, making a living, being relatively safe. I could afford to feel joy, which is not a common affect for me. But I also spoke to many people without my privilege and they, too, expressed feelings of joy and release in lockdown. The pandemic came with a tremendous freedom, especially for those of us who’ve been constrained. We connected with each other. I fell in love with the city again because the city felt like a very loving place in 2020.
You describe the scene in Times Square right after George Floyd was murdered by the cops in Minneapolis. This is before the mass protests, and there’s just one Black man engaged in a theatrical protest of his own. Your description feels so intimate that it’s almost shocking. And you do this throughout the book — painting pictures of activists and wanderers as individual weirdos engaged in daily struggles of survival and resistance. I wonder if you could talk more about this method — it feels journalistic in approach, but without the unnecessary distance.
Is that what I do? You’re telling me something I didn’t know I did, so I don’t know how to answer this question. It’s not something I try to do. Like I don’t sit down and say, “I want this to feel intimate.” I wonder if what’s coming across is the intimacy I feel when I encounter certain people in the city, the weirdos who are strangers to me and yet I feel this connection with them. I think I’ve always felt this — and it’s an urban feeling for me — the way New York gives you this shocking intimacy at a distance.
It brings to mind the phenomenon that happens when you’re sitting on the subway, on a local train going through the tunnel, when the Express passes by and you look into the windows of that other train and you feel deeply connected to the humanity of the strangers over there, so much that it can make you cry. I think it’s the distance between the two trains that allows this to happen. I don’t feel it for the people sharing my train car. They’re too close. So there is distance, but it’s the kind of distance that permits an exquisite closeness with others.
There’s a lot of vulnerability in this book, and part of this is in revealing your own limitations. You write that as a white person you were aware of white supremacy and racist police tyranny for years, but that 2020 was the first time that you joined a Black Lives Matter protest, “Because it’s the end of the world and I’m tired of feeling powerless.” How does this moment change you, and what does it make possible collectively?
That line came about because my editor asked me why I joined the protests at that moment and I had to think about it. I’m not sure my answer is quite right, but it’s the best I could come up with. I wonder now, as you’re asking me essentially the same question my editor did, if the experience of being in a re-New Yorked city, a de-alienated city, allowed me to plug into the intersectionality of that moment. Most people fight for the stuff that matters to them personally, so queer and trans fights are my fights, and having lived as female, women’s fights are my fights. Those are easy for me to jump into. As a white person in the U.S., I’ve been trained by white supremacy and capitalism to disidentify with Black people. Maybe when we were all left alone in the city together, when capitalism receded a bit, that made room to feel more connected across race. I’m not sure. This is something I want to keep thinking about.
“We’re all outside because of the virus,” someone says to you. “Everyone together. It hasn’t been like this in 25 years.” There’s a danger of nostalgia here, but at the same time your book feels phenomenally in the present. You write about how, during the pandemic, the “master-planned phantom zone” of Times Square and the corporate NYU-colonized Washington Square Park reemerge as wild spaces for autonomous cross-pollination centering around people of color, queers, social misfits, party people and dreamers. You ask, “Why is there so much 1970s feeling in the air?” And I wonder if part of this is because the 1970s were the last time we had a more viable welfare state in the United States, and in 2020 some of these policies briefly reemerged.
Exactly. I write in the book about hauntology, the way Mark Fisher used it when he wrote, “What is being longed for in hauntology is not a particular period, but the resumption of the processes of democratization and pluralism,” the processes cut short in the 1970s when neoliberalism took the wheel. So it’s not nostalgia — although, as a proud nostalgist, I take issue with the demonization of nostalgia and the way the right has co-opted it for their “Make America Great Again” Archie Bunkerist “those were the days” rallying cry. I do think, though, that what many people, across the political spectrum, are feeling when they feel “those were the days” is the loss of human connection that comes with accelerated, unfettered capitalism, which feeds on and reproduces alienation. As a culture, are we more alienated than we used to be? Most definitely.
That quote — “We’re all outside because of the virus. Everyone together. It hasn’t been like this in 25 years” — was said by a middle-aged Black man in Washington Square Park during one of our weekly pandemic dance parties. I think he was expressing nostalgia, a word that literally means “homesickness,” and what is home? Ideally, it’s a place where we don’t feel alien, where we feel part of a family, whether that is by birth or choice. We feel belonging. This is what many of us felt during lockdown. Capitalism just sort of seized up, like an engine with no gas, and this opened a magnificent gap into which many of us could feel free and connected. That also freed us to feel love for one another. Because when you’re not swept up in the scarcity mindset of competition and production, you have much more capacity to give and receive love.
There’s so much camaraderie in the collective impulses toward pageantry and protest in this book, and yet you also know that “All the beautiful parts of this time will be taken away from us.” Tell us about this loss.
I’m still reeling from that loss as it continues at this very moment. The engine of capitalism started turning again when the city “reopened” in the spring of 2021 and it’s only gotten worse. I watched people change all around me — quite simply, they closed up, turning away from collective life on the streets. I felt it in myself, too, as much as I fight it. It’s contagious. We became re-alienated.
As the New People, and others, started returning to the city, the police became a more aggressive presence, locking the city back into constriction. They’ve been harassing Black and Brown people, queer and trans people, unhoused people and artists, pushing them out of the public spaces they had migrated into during lockdown. They do this to make the city feel comfortable and safe for tourists, the wealthy, and those New People who seek a risk-free, frictionless, Instagrammable experience of urban life. Such a city must be as supremely normative as possible: white, straight, cisgender, bourgeois, on and on, with no surprise, no crumminess, nothing out of order. It’s an emotionally dead space.
But it’s not just the police in blue uniforms who do the controlling, it’s also the hyper-normative people who radiate social control as they dictate norms. They came back to the city in a rage, so angry that those left behind had covered it in graffiti and trash, in queerness and Blackness, and liberation. The reopening of New York was a terribly depressing time for many of us. It’s been bewildering to go from so much freedom and connection, so much shared subjectivity, back to everyday violence and alienation. It is deeply painful.
I am, however, grateful to the experience, because it revealed what can happen when capitalism is put on just the slightest hold — and what happens when it comes roaring back. Lockdown was a profound accidental experiment. It showed us what can be.
You are a trauma therapist, and this undergirds many of your experiences in the book, but none more clearly than when you end up holding a woman while she’s having a panic attack at a protest because she’s remembering when she was recently assaulted by the cops at another protest. You think about the risks of COVID but you can’t let go. I was sobbing when I read this. Because it’s everything at once, right? Trauma, panic, risk, alienation, connection, intimacy, a rare sudden beauty. “Have I ever held a stranger like this?” you ask. And I wonder: How could we hold each other like this all the time?
That is the question, isn’t it? We are all susceptible to internalized capitalism, which travels like a virus from host to host, and carries a heavy payload of white supremacy with it. When the city reopened, I felt it take hold of me again, as much as I resisted it. This is powerful stuff. I felt myself turn away from people, become suspicious and fearful. I felt myself become busy, self-interested and envious. Holding each other — which means holding each other in mind, being mindful of one another — this is profoundly difficult to do in our current social system because that system is a massive machine hell-bent on breaking us apart from one another. I can only tell you how I do it, or try to do it.
I participate in a weekly mutual aid event and join protests when I can, when they happen, which is less and less often. I also believe in the power of individual, idiosyncratic protest. This means carrying one’s body as a place of resistance. I try to do a little deviant thing here and there — this can be as simple as talking out loud to yourself in public, or walking in an odd nonlinear way, or singing on the street. This is a kind of holding, too, holding open a little space for other deviants.
I slow down. This is essential. When I feel myself get swept up, on the sidewalk where people are radiating capitalism and control, I slow the fuck down. I dawdle and look at things closely. I also put on music, but not in headphones — I put my music on a speaker that I carry, boombox music, publicly shared, and this both repels some people and attracts others. It helps me to drop into what I call substream, the other city, where people are not alienated from each other. So when I’m walking with my music, some people will groove with me — these are usually people outside the supreme norm of white, straight, cis, bourgeois, etc. So, a Black man, or a trans woman, or an unhoused person will dance or give me a nod and a smile and this is like — bam! I’m being held again and I’m holding again, and we’re together.
Copyright, Truthout and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. May not be reprinted without permission.
Goroka town is under lockdown and remains tense as Papua New Guinea police mount a heavy presence following the brutal slaying of the PNG Ports chief executive Fego Kiniafa outside the Eastern Highlands provincial capital.
Kiniafa was slashed to death at Nagamiufa on Saturday after he allegedly shot a Nagamiufa man.
Four men who were with Kiniafa are alleged to have been taken hostage by Nagamiufa villagers.
His relatives from Korofeigu, Lower Bena, are reported to have mobilised and attacked Nagamiufa village, sparking a tribal conflict that shut down businesses in Goroka and sent people scattering.
Highway travellers were left stranded as vehicles deserted the roads between Lower Bena and Goroka, and international visitors to the just ended Goroka Show were also stranded at the new airport.
Police reported the Lower Benas wiped out Nagamiufa village in a 4am dawn raid yesterday.
Most people had fled in fear of the attack to neighbouring villages.
Raid because of no arrest
The raid allegedly occurred because there has not been any arrest made in relation to the death of Kiniafa two days after he was slashed to death near Nagamiufa village.
PNG Ports chief Fego Kiniafa … Goroka reported to be tense after his killing. Image: PNG Investment Conference
Spears, guns and other weapons were used as Goroka town was deserted with businesses shut down and the Goroka General Hospital also on lockdown as security was tightened.
Travellers wishing to travel out of the province after the EHP show were left stranded and locked inside the terminal as the airport closed its gates.
On Saturday morning, Police Commissioner David Manning confirmed the death of Kiniafa, 43, from a confrontation near Nagamiufa village.
EHP Police Commander Chief Superintendent Michael Welly said that the killing occurred between midnight and 6am on September 17.
According to police reports, Kiniafa was allegedly involved in a confrontation with several suspects from the surrounding settlements around Nagamiufa village in Goroka.
Kiniafa allegedly shot another man, and in retaliation the relatives of the man ambushed Kiniafa and his driver with bush-knives, killing them.
Four men allegedly kidnapped
Superintendent Welly said: “It is alleged that four men who were with Mr Kiniafa are said to have been kidnapped as well with police investigating the allegations and as well as investigating the incident on Saturday.”
Kiniafa was found at the scene and rushed to the hospital before being pronounced dead on arrival.
PNG Ports on Saturday afternoon released a short statement confirming Kiniafa’s death and announcing that chief operations officer Rodney Begley would manage and oversee the office of the CEO.
Kimiafa, who turned 43 on PNG’s Independence Day — Friday, September 16 — was one of the youngest chief executives of a government entity.
In recent years, governments have been demonstrating their subservience to their billionaire masters in Big Finance, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, BlackRock and the entire gamut of forces in the military-financial-industrial complex behind the ‘Great Reset’, ‘New Normal’ or whichever other benign-sounding term is used to disguise the crisis and current restructuring of capitalism and the brutal impacts on ordinary people.
In late 2019 and early 2020 (due to collapsing financial markets immediately prior to COVID) and during COVID (via COVID-relief packages), trillions of dollars were handed over to elite interests while lockdowns and restrictions were imposed on ordinary people and small businesses. The winners were the likes of Amazon, Big Pharma and the tech giants. The losers were small enterprises and the bulk of the population, deprived of their right to work and the entire panoply of civil rights their ancestors struggled for.
In August 2020, a report by the International Labour Organization stated that COVID policies had severely disrupted economies across the world with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020.
The restrictions and closure of the global economy impacted the most vulnerable – the 1.6 billion informal (low-income) economy workers, representing half the global workforce.
In India, lockdown pushed around 230 million into poverty. A May 2021 report by Azim Premji University highlights how – to survive lockdown – the poorest 25% of households borrowed 3.8 times their median income, as against 1.4 times for the top 25%.
The Modi government has handled the pandemic by prioritising the profits of big business and protecting the fortunes of billionaires over protecting the lives and livelihoods of workers.
But this approach was not limited to India. Between April and July 2020, the total wealth held by billionaires around the world grew from by 25% to $10+ trillion.
Due to financial COVID ‘relief packages’, governments are now under the thumb of global creditors and the post-COVID era is seeing massive austerity measures due to strings-attached loans, especially in Africa and the Global South. This was the inevitable consequence of closing down the world economy. Something that was known beforehand and devised to benefit hegemonic interests and their geopolitical goals.
What we are witnessing is an economic reset – which policies carried out under the guise of preventing COVID helped set in motion. This reset includes energy and food ‘transitions’ and is tied to a ‘green’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda and emerging green bond financial markets that will be highly profitable for banks and investors. Moreover, current sanctions placed on Russia are helping to disrupt food and energy markets thereby accelerating the planned changes.
As part of the ‘food transition’, we hear much talk of ‘precision’ agriculture driven by AI and cloud technology. Farmerless farms and driverless machines are to become the norm. This transition involves commodity crops – patented, genetically engineered seeds doused with chemicals – cultivated for ‘biomatter’, manipulated by biotech companies and constituted in giant vats into something resembling food.
This is part of the brave new world being promoted by the self-labelled ‘visionaries’ associated with the World Economic Forum – an Orwellian future where capitalist ‘liberal democracy’ has run its course.
To sell this to people, ‘smart’ is key to the sales pitch – smart cities, smart interconnectivity, smart agriculture and so on. A ‘smart’ digital world encompassing almost everything, not least ‘precision’ surveillance of the population – its behaviour, its dissent or conformity, its digital money and its purchasing.
Integral to this is the financialisation of nature and an ESG agenda linked to the ‘green profiling’ of nations, companies and individuals and their carbon footprint. A green imperialism (no doubt forced through on the back of debt-related conditionalities) to ensure countries (and people) comply with sustainability/net-zero goals that are used to facilitate highly profitable technologies and fresh business models.
For instance, how could countries demonstrate their ESG ‘green’ credentials while maintaining their international credit ratings? Perhaps by allowing herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that the strategically influential GM industry and its lobbyists misleadingly portray as ‘climate friendly’.
Or maybe by displacing indigenous peoples and using their lands and forests under the guise of ‘carbon sinks’ for global corporations to ‘offset’ their pollution and claim ‘net-zero’ status.
With this in mind, let us turn to the current farmer protest in the Netherlands, where there is a plan to remove farmers from the land, using concerns over the environment as justification.
On one hand, there is the official government narrative that this ‘transition’ is needed to reduce animal-based agriculture and the meat industry’s dangerous emissions. This is where the ‘food transition’ comes in: ‘precision’ agriculture, fewer farmers and fake-meat made in a lab – sold as climate-friendly which is anything but, given that it will rely on intensive commodity cropping and long-line supply chains for biomatter.
On the other hand, however, the Dutch government’s official narrative of reducing nitrogen and ammonia emissions by transforming farming can easily be used as cover for a standard ‘land grab’ to line the pockets of property developers and investors as part of the vision for a mega ‘tristate’ city – mentioned in the 2017 article “Dutch investors launch new marketing programme for NL: Tristate City“.
Dutch campaigner Willem Engel is reported on the Rio Times website as saying that, under the guise of climate protection, the way to get there seems to be through forced expropriation. He claims that the Dutch government is not seeking to eliminate about a third of its farms for environmental reasons. Instead, it is about the construction of Tristate City, a megalopolis with a population of around 45 million extending to areas of Germany and Belgium.
Engel says that the so-called ‘nitrogen crisis’ is fictional, a purely political issue to reshape the country’s landscape. He argues that the largest nitrogen emissions are not caused by agriculture but by industry.
This is not to imply that the Netherlands is to become a country totally buried under concrete. But much farmland is strategically important to industry and housing. The tristate concept is based on a giant unified ‘green’ urban region ‘smart’ enough to compete with the massive metropolises we see in Asia, not least in China.
Of course, the food transition and the tristate concept are not mutually exclusive and can both be regarded as integral to the overall ‘sustainability’ agenda. Either way, the type of corporate environmentalism, economic reset and corporate-led ‘food transition’ currently being promoted globally has little to do with protecting the environment. It is a financially lucrative agenda that has co-opted the terms and concerns of genuine environmentalists.
That much has been made clear by investigative journalist Corey Morningstar who has described the nature of and links between the corporate-billionaire interests driving this process in her revealing multi-part article ‘The Manufacture of Greta Thunberg’.
In finishing, let’s turn to the official tristate city website where it states:
Dit model heeft geen enkele relatie met het stikstofbeleid van de Nederlandse overheid!
Translation:
This model has no relation to the nitrogen policy of the Dutch government!
One year on from Aotearoa New Zealand’s longest covid-19 lockdown, an epidemiologist says further lockdowns cannot be ruled out, instead preparing to do them better.
On 17 August 2021, New Zealand went to alert level 4 because the deadly delta variant had arrived.
Aucklanders had no idea that day that they would still be in lockdown until December, and that after 18 months of trying to keep covid-19 out, it would be here to stay.
The city was asked to hold the line so the country could get vaccinated, something critics said should have happened much earlier.
Auckland University epidemiologist Professor Rod Jackson was vocal in urging the country to aim high and vaccinate more than 95 percent of eligible people.
Reflecting back, he said New Zealanders responded well, with most areas hitting that mark or higher by the measurements at the time.
Much had been learnt about the virus — and how to respond to it — since then, with the highly contagious but less harmful omicron variant changing everything at the start of this year, he said.
But the danger was not over.
Random severity of variants
“I think there are a lot of people who think, ‘oh look, it’s getting less severe over time so we’re fine,’ but it’s pretty random whether the next variant is going to be less severe or not,” he said.
Either way, it would need to be at least as spreadable as omicron to take over, he said.
Empty … an Auckland motorway near the city centre, mid-morning on 19 August 2021. By 7 September 2021 the rest of New Zealand had moved to level 2, but Auckland stayed in alert level 3 restrictions until December 2. Image: Robert Smith/RNZ
The government has said lockdowns are not part of any future covid-19 plans, with the traffic light system taking its place.
But Professor Jackson said that may not “cut the mustard” if the worst happened.
“If we get a new mutation that is more severe, that kills more people, then we’ve got something huge to worry about,” he said.
“If that happens, if people start dropping dead in the street like the original version of covid, we will have little choice but to lock down.”
That was why the country still needed to be prepared for the worst, he said.
Frontline of delta outbreak
As an Auckland GP and co-leader of Te Rōpū Whakakaupapa Urutā, Dr Rawiri McKree-Jansen was at the frontline of the delta outbreak and lockdown and the vaccine rollout.
Some Māori and Pacific health teams had initially struggled to be given the resources they needed, or to be listened to.
The work they were able to do for their communities and the country showed what they were capable of and should be a lasting legacy, Dr McKree-Jansen said.
They were crucial to the vaccine roll out and helped the most vulnerable, especially those isolating.
“The mobilisation was impressive, relentless and co-ordinated,” he said.
“Those features are remarkable and give us a great sense of optimism about the contribution that Māori communities and Māori health professionals can make and I hope that is enduring.”
When it came to new variants, he said while it was important to be vigilant about what may come next, it was also important to focus on what was happening now.
“Omicron’s not done with us yet … I’m keen that we don’t forget the lessons we’ve learnt from the Delta and Omicron outbreaks – and supporting communities is fundamental to that.”
Both Professor Jackson and Dr McKree-Jansen acknowledged the people who had died since pandemic began, many more since the omicron outbreak that reached so many people.
But they said they were also grateful that many were protected by the lockdown and the vaccine rollout.
16 more people die RNZ News reports that another 16 people with covid-19 have died and there are 4489 new community cases today, according to the Ministry of Health.
There are 496 people in hospital, 13 of them are in a high dependency unit
Yesterday the ministry reported another 21 people with covid-19 had died and there were 533 people in hospital, including 12 in intensive care or a high dependency unit.
Deputy Director-General and Public Health Agency head Dr Andrew Old told media this afternoon that modelling from Covid Modelling Aotearoa showed New Zealand was continuing to track at the lower end of what was expected in terms of a second wave this winter.
“We passed a peak in cases earlier that the modelling suggested and now hospitalisations are also declining suggesting these too have peaked. It’s sitting somewhere between 800 and 850 occupied beds across the country in late July,” he said.
Te Whatu Ora-Health New Zealand interim national medical director Dr Pete Watson said the recent drop in covid-19 cases was an encouraging trend.
“By each one of us sticking to public health measures we are making a difference,” he said.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
And thus it renders more and more evident the great central fact that the cause of the miserable condition of the working class is to be sought, not in these minor grievances, but in the capitalistic system itself.
The IMF and World Bank have for decades pushed a policy agenda based on cuts to public services, increases in taxes paid by the poorest and moves to undermine labour rights and protections.
In 2021, an Oxfam review of IMF COVID-19 loans showed that 33 African countries were encouraged to pursue austerity policies. The world’s poorest countries are due to pay $43 billion in debt repayments in 2022, which could otherwise cover the costs of their food imports.
Oxfam and Development Finance International (DFI) have also revealed that 43 out of 55 African Union member states face public expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion over the next five years.
According to Prof Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization, the closure of the world economy has triggered an unprecedented process of global indebtedness. Governments are now under the control of global creditors in the post-COVID era.
What we are seeing is a de facto privatisation of the state as governments capitulate to the needs of Western financial institutions.
Moreover, these debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.
It raises the question: what was COVID really about?
Millions have been asking that question since lockdowns and restrictions began in early 2020. If it was indeed about public health, why close down the bulk of health services and the global economy knowing full well what the massive health, economic and debt implications would be?
Why mount a military-style propaganda campaign to censor world-renowned scientists and terrorise entire populations and use the full force and brutality of the police to ensure compliance?
These actions were wholly disproportionate to any risk posed to public health, especially when considering the way ‘COVID death’ definitions and data were often massaged and how PCR tests were misused to scare populations into submission.
Prof Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University implies we should have been suspicious from the start when the usually “unscrupulous ruling elites” froze the global economy in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (the over 80s).
COVID was a crisis of capitalism masquerading as a public health emergency.
Capitalism
Capitalism needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall. The capitalist needs to accumulate capital (wealth) to be able to reinvest it and make further profits. By placing downward pressure on workers’ wages, the capitalist extracts sufficient surplus value to be able to do this.
But when the capitalist is unable to sufficiently reinvest (due to declining demand for commodities, a lack of investment opportunities and markets, etc), wealth (capital) over accumulates, devalues and the system goes into crisis. To avoid crisis, capitalism requires constant growth, markets and sufficient demand.
According to writer Ted Reese, the capitalist rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. Although wages and corporate taxes have been slashed, the exploitability of labour was increasingly insufficient to meet the demands of capital accumulation.
By late 2019, many companies could not generate sufficient profit. Falling turnover, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.
Economic growth was weakening in the run up to the massive stock market crash in February 2020, which saw trillions more pumped into the system in the guise of ‘COVID relief’.
To stave off crisis up until that point, various tactics had been employed.
Credit markets were expanded and personal debt increased to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages were squeezed. Financial deregulation occurred and speculative capital was allowed to exploit new areas and investment opportunities. At the same time, stock buy backs, the student debt economy, quantitative easing and massive bail outs and subsidies and an expansion of militarism helped to maintain economic growth.
There was also a ramping up of an imperialist strategy that has seen indigenous systems of production abroad being displaced by global corporations and states pressurised to withdraw from areas of economic activity, leaving transnational players to occupy the space left open.
While these strategies produced speculative bubbles and led to an overevaluation of assets and increased both personal and government debt, they helped to continue to secure viable profits and returns on investment.
But come 2019, former governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King warned that the world was sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that would have devastating consequences. He argued that the global economy was stuck in a low growth trap and recovery from the crisis of 2008 was weaker than that after the Great Depression.
King concluded that it was time for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to begin talks behind closed doors with politicians.
That is precisely what happened as key players, including BlackRock, the world’s most powerful investment fund, got together to work out a strategy going forward. This took place in the lead up to COVID.
Aside from deepening the dependency of poorer countries on Western capital, Fabio Vighi says lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions allowed the US Fed to flood the ailing financial markets (under the guise of COVID) with freshly printed money while shutting down the real economy to avoid hyperinflation. Lockdowns suspended business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion.
COVID provided cover for a multi-trillion-dollar bailout for the capitalist economy that was in meltdown prior to COVID. Despite a decade or more of ‘quantitative easing’, this new bailout came in the form of trillions of dollars pumped into financial markets by the US Fed (in the months prior to March 2020) and subsequent ‘COVID relief’.
The IMF, World bank and global leaders knew full well what the impact on the world’s poor would be of closing down the world economy through COVID-related lockdowns. Yet they sanctioned it and there is now the prospect that in excess of a quarter of a billion more people worldwide will fall into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 alone.
In addition to helping to reboot the financial system, closing down the global economy deliberately deepened poorer countries’ dependency on Western global conglomerates and financial interests.
Lockdowns also helped accelerate the restructuring of capitalism that involves smaller enterprises being driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies and global chains, thereby ensuring continued viable profits for Big Tech, the digital payments giants and global online corporations like Meta and Amazon and the eradication of millions of jobs.
Although the effects of the conflict in Ukraine cannot be dismissed, with the global economy now open again, inflation is rising and causing a ‘cost of living’ crisis. With a debt-ridden economy, there is limited scope for rising interest rates to control inflation.
But this crisis is not inevitable: current inflation is not only induced by the liquidity injected into the financial system but also being fuelled by speculation in food commodity markets and corporate greed as energy and food corporations continue to rake in vast profits at the expense of ordinary people.
Resistance
However, resistance is fertile.
Aside from the many anti-restriction/pro-freedom rallies during COVID, we are now seeing a more strident trade unionism coming to the fore – in Britain at least – led by media savvy leaders like Mick Lynch, general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), who know how to appeal to the public and tap into widely held resentment against soaring cost of living rises.
Teachers, health workers and others could follow the RMT into taking strike action.
Lynch says that millions of people in Britain face lower living standards and the stripping out of occupational pensions. He adds:
COVID has been a smokescreen for the rich and powerful in this country to drive down wages as far as they can.
Just like a decade of imposed ‘austerity’ was used to achieve similar results in the lead up to COVID.
The trade union movement should now be taking a leading role in resisting the attack on living standards and further attempts to run-down state-provided welfare and privatise what remains. The strategy to wholly dismantle and privatise health and welfare services seems increasingly likely given the need to rein in (COVID-related) public debt and the trend towards AI, workplace automisation and worklessness.
This is a real concern because, following the logic of capitalism, work is a condition for the existence of the labouring classes. So, if a mass labour force is no longer deemed necessary, there is no need for mass education, welfare and healthcare provision and systems that have traditionally served to reproduce and maintain labour that capitalist economic activity has required.
In 2019, Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused British government ministers of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population” in the decade following the 2008 financial crash.
Alston stated:
As Thomas Hobbes observed long ago, such an approach condemns the least well off to lives that are ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. As the British social contract slowly evaporates, Hobbes’ prediction risks becoming the new reality.
Post-COVID, Alston’s words carry even more weight.
As this article draws to a close, news is breaking that Boris Johnson has resigned as prime minister. A remarkable PM if only for his criminality, lack of moral foundation and double standards – also applicable to many of his cronies in government.
With this in mind, let’s finish where we began.
I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within, so incapable of progress, as the English bourgeoisie… For it nothing exists in this world, except for the sake of money, itself not excluded. It knows no bliss save that of rapid gain, no pain save that of losing gold. In the presence of this avarice and lust of gain, it is not possible for a single human sentiment or opinion to remain untainted.
— The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), p. 275.
In May and June of 2022 two milestones were passed in the world’s battle with Covid and were widely noted in the press, one in the US and one in China. They invite a comparison between the two countries and their approach to combatting Covid-19.
The first milestone was passed on May 12 when the United States registered over 1 million total deaths (1,008,377 as of June 19, 2022, when this is written) due to Covid, the highest of any country in the world. Web MD expressed its sentiment in a piece headlined: “US Covid Deaths Hit 1 Million: ‘History Should Judge Us.’”
Second, on June 1, China emerged from its 60-day lockdown in Shanghai in response to an outbreak there, the most serious since the Wuhan outbreak at the onset of the pandemic. The total number of deaths in Mainland China since the beginning of the epidemic in January 2020 now stands at a total of 5226 as of June 19,2022.
To put that in perspective, that is 3042 deaths per million population in the US versus 3.7 deaths in China due to Covid. 3042 vs. 3.7! Had China followed the same course as the US, it would have experienced at least 4 million deaths. Had the US followed China’s course it would have had only 1306 deaths total!
When confronted with these numbers, the response of the Western media has all too often been denial that China’s numbers were valid. But China’s data have been backed by counts of excess deaths during the period of the pandemic as the New York Times illustrated in a recent article. Actually this is old news. The validity of China’s numbers, as shown by counts of excess deaths, was validated long ago in a February 2021 study by a by a group at Oxford University and the Chinese CDC. This was published in the prestigious BMJ (British Medical Journal) and discussed in detail here.
What about the economy?
Clearly China put the saving of lives above the advance of the economy with its “dynamic zero Covid policy.” But contrary to what was believed in the West at the time, saving lives also turned out to be better for the economy, as shown in the following data from the World Bank:
During the first year of the pandemic, 2020, China’s economy continued to grow albeit at a slower rate. In contrast the US economy contracted dramatically, dropping all the way back, not simply to 2019 levels, but to pre-2018 levels!
Interestingly the plot also shows the year that the Chinese PPP-GDP surpassed that of the United States, 2017, heralding a new era for the Global South.
The World Bank has not yet released data for 2021, but the IMF has PPP-GDP data for 2021 shown here. The U.S. economy grew at 5.97 percent and China’s at 8.02 percent. Unlike the World Bank data shown in the graph above for the years up to 2020, these data for 2021 are not corrected for inflation which for 2021 ran at 4.7% in the U.S. whereas China’s was 0.85%. So China’s growth would be even greater in comparison to the US, were inflation taken into account.
The bottom line is that for the first two years of the pandemic through 2021, China’s growth was always positive and greater than that of the US. China’s policy not only saved lives but protected the economy. Win-win, one might say.
Is China’s dynamic zero Covid policy “sustainable”in the face of the Omicron variant? The Shanghai Lockdown.
The period of the recent Shanghai lockdown which we can date from April 1, 2022, ended on June 1, and was the second largest outbreak in China since the original outbreak in January, 2020, in Wuhan. Each resulted in major lockdowns, the first in Wuhan lasted about 76 days and the second in Shanghai about 60 days. The first in Wuhan was due to the original variant and the second was due to the much more infectious Omicron.
During the recent lockdown in Shanghai, the Western press was awash with proclamations, all too many laced with an unseemly Schadenfreude, that China’s dynamic Zero Covid policy was not sustainable. This is all too reminiscent of decades of predictions that China’s extraordinary success in developing its economy to number one in the world in terms of PPP-GDP was a passing phase, a Ponzi Scheme that was – what else – “not sustainable. Recently the same press has gone silent, always a sign that China has met with success. So what are the results?
The Shanghai Lockdown ended on June 1 and from that day until today, June 19, there have been no deaths due to Covid on the Chinese Mainland. Cases nationwide are also way down to 183 per day from the peak of 26,000 on April 15. That was the largest number of cases in a single day for the entire period of the pandemic in China. For comparison, the peak in the US was 800,000 in a single day.
Both the Wuhan and Shanghai lockdowns demanded sacrifices and patience over the roughly two-month period for each. However, these difficulties are generally exaggerated In the West and based on anecdotes of the worst of the difficulties encountered. Such sordid journalism reached rock bottom in a NYT piece equating China’s hard working health care workers to Adolph Eichmann!
As an antidote to this kind of hit piece and to gain a feeling of life in the cities that were under lockdown during the Wuhan outbreak, Peter Hessler’s March, 2020, account in the New Yorker, “Life on Lockdown in China,” is enlightening and will dispel many misconceptions. Hessler was living and teaching in Chengdu, Sichuan, at the time.
For the moment China’s approach has succeeded although we cannot say what the future holds. But the public health measures that have worked so well in Mainland China should not be lightly dismissed let alone be the subject of mean-spirited attacks. Such measures may be a means of saving millions of lives when the next variant or the next pandemic strikes.
The US Needs a People’s Tribunal on the Handling of Covid-19.
Turning again to the US, what does it say when the US, one of the richest nations in the world, spending over $1 trillion a year on its “national security” budget, could not muster the means to deal with Covid-19 and ended up with more deaths than any other nation on earth? China’s handling of the pandemic certainly shows a completely different outcome is possible. The US death toll was not an inescapable act of nature.
That being so, should there not be a People’s Tribunal to investigate those in charge in the US government over the course of three administrations? That, and not an official white wash, is certainly needed? And should not punishment appropriate for a crime against humanity be meted out? The one million dead deserve no less.
Former Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins says his apology to journalist Charlotte Bellis does not extend to the Aotearoa New Zealand government’s MIQ system generally.
Bellis, a New Zealand journalist based in Afghanistan at the time, had gone public in January with her struggle to secure a spot in the managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) hotels while pregnant.
Hipkins publicly apologised to her in a statement this morning, admitting her MIQ application was deactivated in error and some of his comments about her case had been wrong.
He later told reporters there was no settlement payment involved, and both parties wanted to leave the matter behind them.
“We’ve concluded the matter. I’ve conveyed to her privately and now publicly my apology and she’s indicated she wants to leave it at that — and I’m happy to do that too,” he said.
“Right at the beginning, clearly there were a few things that got lost in communication, lost in translation. I do regret that and so my apology in that sense is a very genuine one.”
Hipkins was removed from the covid-19 portfolio just over a week ago, taking over police instead, with Dr Ayesha Verrall taking over the pandemic response.
Timing of the apology
He said the timing of his apology to Bellis had been agreed with her.
“She indicated that’s the timing that she wanted,” he said. “Obviously it would have ideally been better to have had this done before I gave up the covid portfolio rather than the week after, but ultimately MIQ’s been winding down now since February so I think everybody’s moved on from it.
“She indicated that she wanted something more public. I was happy to do that, it took a little bit of time to negotiate that and to get all of that ironed out.”
The National and ACT parties urged the government to also apologise over the handling of MIQ generally.
Journalist Charlotte Bellis … Hipkins said the timing of his apology had been agreed with her. Image: RNZ/YouTube screenshot
National’s Covid-19 Response spokesperson Chris Bishop said if Hipkins could apologise to Bellis, “then the government can surely apologise to all the Kiwis caught up in the lottery of human misery that was MIQ”.
“The High Court has found that MIQ unjustifiably breached New Zealanders’ rights from September to December 2021. The government should do the right thing and apologise for the way MIQ operated,” he said.
“There are countless other examples that haven’t hit the headlines. Other pregnant women who couldn’t return home. Kiwis trapped offshore who watched their visas expire in the countries they were in. People who missed the deaths of cherished loved ones and the birth of new lives.”
‘Caught out spinning’
ACT leader David Seymour said the government was not apologising for the misery its policy caused, just getting caught out spinning it.
“The government has rightly apologised for spreading misinformation about a citizen’s personal circumstances, now it should apologise for running MIQ selection so inhumanely and running it four months longer than necessary at enormous cost to the taxpayer and economy,” he said.
He said then Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield had advised MIQ was no longer necessary in December last year, and the government should be apologising for the $178 million it cost to maintain through to March.
“Included in that period was Charlotte Bellis’ repeated failed attempts to get a spot, forcing her to seek refuge with the Taliban,” he said.
Hipkins said they were very different matters.
“In this particular case there were some aspects of the information that I released that were incorrect and so I absolutely have acknowledged that and have apologised for that. In terms of MIQ I will maintain — and the courts in fact have maintained — MIQ was absolutely justified,” he said.
“What the court did find … the way we allocated space in MIQ wasn’t right. We tried a number of different things during that time to try different booking systems, to try and make that system fairer.”
Not contesting court ruling
He said he acknowledged the court’s ruling and was not contesting it, but repeated that the system as a whole was justified.
“Were MIQ ever to have to happen again in the future then those responsible for it would have to find a different way of allocating space within MIQ — but MIQ itself was absolutely justified.
“It’s the reason that we were able to go as long as we did without having covid-19 in the community.
“It’s also the reason why over the summer break, people managed to have a summer break and were able to have that opportunity to get their boosters before omicron arrived in the community.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
