Facebook censoring posts about vaccine hesitancy!

Facebook recently rolled out a beta test designed to censor negative vaccine information — regardless of its veracity and truthfulness — with the aim of eventually rolling this censorship program in all nations, in as many languages as possible.

Facebook and other social media companies suppressing your freedom of speech — often at the request of government officials, which is illegal — they’re also stealing your personal data and using it to control and manipulate you.

The comment demotion strategy that is currently being beta tested is very similar to shadow banning, where a user has been secretly banned — which means none of their followers can actually see their posts — yet they continue posting because they’re unaware that the content is not being disseminated.

Zuckenberg is openly aiding and abetting illegal activity, i.e. the punishment of conscientious objectors who expose the aforementioned illegal activities of his company. This not only violates employee rights but also breaks the law against censorship and discrimination exercised by private news and media organizations. He is pure cabal filth and he is the one who needs to be terminated not his employees.

Facebook Insider Blows Whistle on Vaccine Censorship
By Joseph Mercola
Mercola.com
June 2, 2021

May 24, 2021, Project Veritas released a video interview1 with two Facebook insider whistleblowers — a data center technician and a data center facility engineer — who have come forward with internal documents showing how the social media platform is suppressing science and medical facts in the name of combating “vaccine hesitancy.”

Facebook recently rolled out a beta test designed to censor negative vaccine information — regardless of its veracity and truthfulness — with the aim of eventually rolling this censorship program in all nations, in as many languages as possible.

The documents prove Facebook is working on behalf of Big Pharma and in coordination with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization to protect and promulgate the false narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for everyone. The platform is even hiding posts in which people who dutifully got the shots talk about their adverse effects.

Vaccine Hesitancy Comment Demotion

According to the internal documents, Facebook is beta testing a new algorithm that classifies users who post counternarrative information about vaccines into “vaccine hesitancy” (VH) tiers. The users are secretly assigned a “VH score” that dictates whether their posts and comments will be removed, demoted or left alone — regardless of whether they’re factually accurate. According to Project Veritas:2

“The insider … revealed the tech giant was running the ‘test’ on 1.5% of its 3.8 billion users with the focus on the comments sections on ‘authoritative health pages.’ ‘They’re trying to control this content before it even makes it onto your page, before you even see it,’ the insider [said] …

The stated goal of this feature is to ‘drastically reduce user exposure’ to VH comments. Another aim of the program is to force a ‘decrease in other engagement of VH comments including create, likes, reports [and] replies.'”

Two-Tiered Rating System for Vaccine Content

Vaccine content is rated based on its perceived ability to “discourage vaccination in certain contexts, thereby contributing to vaccine hesitancy or refusal.” According to a “Borderline Vaccine Framework” document, vaccine content is “tiered … by potential harm and how much context is required in order to evaluate harm.” The ratings are divided into three primary tiers:3

    Explicit discouragement of COVID vaccination
   Alarmism, criticism
  Indirect vaccine discouragement — This includes congratulating people who have refused the vaccine, “shocking stories” that may deter people from getting the vaccine, promoting alternatives to vaccination or “suggesting natural immunity is better versus getting the vaccine,” minimizing the risks of natural COVID-19 infection, voicing personal objections to or skepticism about the vaccine, and even “neutral discussion or debate”.

Depending on where your comment falls within these tiers, your post or comment will be either removed or “demoted” to varying degrees. As noted by investigative journalist and founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe, in a Fox News interview:4

“What’s remarkable about these private documents … is that ‘Tier 2’ [violation] says even if the facts are true … you will be targeted and demoted — your comments will be targeted and demoted.”

While it’s unclear who approved this beta test, the listed authors of the “vaccine hesitancy comment demotion” program are senior software engineer Joo Ho Yeo;5 data scientist Nick Gibian6 who, according to LinkedIn, works on health misinformation and civic harassment; software engineer Hendrick Townley, who states his primary interests are in “harnessing technology and technical understanding towards strengthening our democratic institutions and solving pressing policy issues;”7 machine learning and data scientist Amit Bahl;8 and product manager Matt Gilles.9

A New Form of Shadow Banning

The comment demotion strategy that is currently being beta tested is very similar to shadow banning, where a user has been secretly banned — which means none of their followers can actually see their posts — yet they continue posting because they’re unaware that the content is not being disseminated.

 
Internal documents reveal that this suppression strategy is currently reducing “vaccine hesitant” comments by 42.5% within the test group.

Under this two-tier information suppression system, you will have no idea whether your posts or comments are being suppressed and can’t be seen by other users, and to which degree your post or comment is being suppressed. In general, however, the internal documents reveal that this suppression strategy is currently reducing “vaccine hesitant” comments by 42.5% within the test group.

Facebook Is Actively Suppressing Life-Saving Science

Now, an example of a “vaccine hesitant” comment is not just “I don’t know if I want the vaccine.” It also includes comments like, “I saw a study that said someone died who got the vaccine,” and personal experiences such as “Excruciating pain after my second vaccine! Shaking so bad, almost to convulsions.”

Facebook is even censoring and putting “fake news” labels on data obtained directly from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is jointly run by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

This despite having a public policy to “remove content that repeats … false health information … that are widely debunked by leading health organizations such as the World Health Organization and the CDC.”

They justify this by stating that VAERS data and other study findings cannot be communicated unless “full context” is provided. But as noted by the whistleblower, that’s a highly ambiguous term. What is full context? Do you have to post an entire study in order for it to be contextual?

In the final analysis, it’s clear that Facebook is actively suppressing and censoring science, medical facts and first-hand personal experiences, and in so doing, they are putting the whole world in harm’s way. By suppressing crucial information about vaccine risks they are eliminating any possibility of informed consent because it is impossible to understand the risks.

They are promoting ignorance that can, and I firmly believe, will, literally kill many of their users. And, since Facebook openly admits coordinating its censorship with the CDC and WHO, the same can probably be said for both of those organizations. As one of the whistleblowers tells O’Keefe:

“[Zuckerberg wants to] build a community where everyone complies — not where people can have an open discourse and dialogue about the most personal and private and intimate decisions. The narrative [is] get the vaccine, the vaccine is good for you, everyone should get it. If you don’t, you will be singled out as an enemy of society.”

Facebook Has Turned From Digital Town Square to Digital Jail

The second whistleblower, a data center facility engineer, says Facebook is now “prohibiting people from having an open dialogue about issues that affect their personal security.” He likens the platform to an abusive partner who doesn’t allow their spouse to speak to friends and family about what’s going on behind closed doors.

Ironically, leaked video from the same whistleblower shows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, back in mid-July 2020, expressing his own vaccine hesitancy during a video conference.

“I do just want to make sure that I share some caution on this because we just don’t know the long-term side effects of basically modifying people’s DNA and RNA,” Zuckerberg told his team, referring to COVID-19 vaccines under development.

As noted by O’Keefe, Zuckerberg’s own words would now violate his company’s public policy and rules of expression.

Children’s Health Defense Sues Facebook Over Censorship

In related news, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) sued Facebook in August 2020, charging the company, its CEO, Zuckerberg, and several fact-checking organizations with “censoring truthful public health posts and for fraudulently misrepresenting and defaming the children’s health organization.”10 As reported by The Defender, May 25, 2021:11

“The complaint12 alleges Facebook has ‘insidious conflicts’ with the pharmaceutical industry and health agencies, and details factual allegations regarding the CDC, CDC Foundation and the World Health Organization’s extensive relationships and collaborations with Facebook and Zuckerberg, calling into question Facebook’s collaboration with the government in a censorship campaign.

Facebook censors CHD’s page, targeting factual information about vaccines, 5G and public health agencies. Facebook-owned Instagram de-platformed CHD Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Feb. 10 without notice or explanation.

Lawyers for Children’s Health Defense are awaiting the ruling of Judge Susan Illston after defendants’ filed a motion to dismiss in the CHD lawsuit alleging government-sponsored censorship, false disparagement and wire fraud.”

Florida Governor Signs Law to Crack Down on Censorship

It seems legal action may be the only way to rein in censorship that has spiraled out of control, and Florida, my home state, is paving the way with brand-new legislation, SB 7072,13 to hold social media companies liable for their censorship. As reported by NBC News, May 24, 2021:14

“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis … said the bill … cracks down on … social media ‘censorship’ while safeguarding Floridians’ ability to access social media platforms. ‘One of their major missions seems to be suppressing ideas that are either inconvenient to the narrative or which they personally disagree with,’ DeSantis said …

DeSantis … and others have accused social media companies of censoring conservative thought by removing posts or using algorithms that reduce the visibility of posts …

The bill also imposes hefty financial penalties against social media platforms that suspend the accounts of political candidates. The bill would fine companies $250,000 a day for doing so …

Florida’s attorney general can bring action against technology companies that violate the law, under Florida’s Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and social media platforms found to have violated anti-trust law will be restricted from contracting with any public entity, DeSantis said.”

The bill also allows private users to sue for certain violations, with statutory damages totaling up to $100,000 per proven claim or actual damages, plus punitive damages “if aggravating factors are present.”15

Facebook Harms Users in Other Ways Too

As detailed in “Harvard Professor Exposes Surveillance Capitalism,” which features an interview with Shoshana Zuboff, author of the book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” free social media platforms aren’t free. You pay with your personal data.

So, not only is Facebook and other social media companies suppressing your freedom of speech — often at the request of government officials, which is illegal — they’re also stealing your personal data and using it to control and manipulate you.

Their primary function isn’t actually to allow you to communicate with others. Their primary function is surveillance, data collection and social engineering. In other words, you are the commodity, not the other way around. They need you far more than you need them.

Companies like Facebook, Google and third parties of all kinds have the power, and use that power, to target your personal inner demons, to trigger you, and to take advantage of you when you’re at your most vulnerable to entice you into action that serves them, commercially or politically.

Your entire existence — even your shifting moods, deciphered by facial recognition software — has become a source of revenue for corporate entities as you’re being cleverly maneuvered into doing (and typically buying) or thinking something you may not have done, bought or thought otherwise.

Facebook’s massive experiments, in which they used subliminal cues to see if they could make people happier or sadder and affect real-world behavior offline, have proved that — by manipulating language and inserting subliminal cues in the online context — they can change real-world behavior and real-world emotion, and that these methods and powers can be exercised “while bypassing user awareness.”

Other technologies, such as digital security systems, employ hidden microphones to spy on your private conversations. All of these data streams, from cell phones, computers, “smart” appliances and video cameras around public areas add to ever-expanding predictive modeling capabilities that, ultimately, are used to control and manipulate you.

We Need New Laws

As noted by Zuboff, the reason we’re in this creepy situation is because there are no laws in place to curtail this brand-new type of surveillance capitalism. Indeed, the only reason it has been able to flourish over the past 20 years is because there’s been an absence of laws against it, primarily because it has never previously existed.

Google and Facebook were the only ones who knew what they were doing. The surveillance network grew in the shadows, unbeknownst to the public or lawmakers. The good news is, it’s not too late to take back both our privacy — and our freedom of speech online — but we need legislation that addresses the reality of the entire breadth and depth of these systems in their entirety. As noted by Zuboff:16

“The choice to turn any aspect of one’s life into data must belong to individuals by virtue of their rights in a democratic society. This means, for example, that companies cannot claim the right to your face, or use your face as free raw material for analysis, or own and sell any computational products that derive from your face …

Anything made by humans can be unmade by humans. Surveillance capitalism is young, barely 20 years in the making, but democracy is old, rooted in generations of hope and contest.

Surveillance capitalists are rich and powerful, but they are not invulnerable. They have an Achilles heel: fear. They fear lawmakers who do not fear them. They fear citizens who demand a new road forward as they insist on new answers to old questions: Who will know? Who will decide who knows? Who will decide who decides? Who will write the music, and who will dance?”

How to Protect Your Online Privacy

While there’s no doubt we need a whole new legislative framework to curtail surveillance capitalism and censorship alike, in the meantime, there are ways you can protect your privacy online and limit the “behavioral surplus data” collected about you. (As of yet, there’s not much you can do about online censorship, other than encourage your state legislators to address it, as Florida just began to do.) To protect your privacy, consider taking the following steps:17

Sources and References

    1, 2 Project Veritas May 24, 2021
    3 Project Veritas May 24, 2021, Image 4 and 8
    4 Fox News May 25, 2021
    5 Pulse
    6 LinkedIn, Nicholas Gibian
    7 LinkedIn, Hendrick (Henry) T.
    8 LinkedIn, Amit Bahl
    9 LinkedIn, Matt Gilles
    10, 11 The Defender May 25, 2021
    12 Children’s Health Defense Case 3:20-cv-05787-SI
    13 Florida Senate SB7072: Social Media Platforms
    14 NBC News May 24, 2021
    15 Florida Senate SB7072: Social Media Platforms, line 567-578
    16 New York Times January 24, 2020 (Archived)
    17 Medium March 17, 2017

The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government

Just recall George Orwell's novel 1984 if you didn't realize what this article is about after seeing the headline...

Make Way for the Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

 

“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”—Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype

We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors.

This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

This far-reaching surveillance has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum.

Indeed, long before the National Security Agency (NSA) became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.

Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine.

It’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.

We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.

All of those internet-connected gadgets we just have to have (Forbes refers to them as “(data) pipelines to our intimate bodily processes”)—the smart watches that can monitor our blood pressure and the smart phones that let us pay for purchases with our fingerprints and iris scans—are setting us up for a brave new world where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

For instance, imagine what the government could do (and is likely already doing) with voiceprint technology, which has been likened to a fingerprint. Described as “the next frontline in the battle against overweening public surveillance,” the collection of voiceprints is a booming industry for governments and businesses alike. As The Guardian reports, “voice biometrics could be used to pinpoint the location of individuals.”

We are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven, technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall mass surveillance that makes the spy programs spawned by the USA Patriot Act look like child’s play.

Fusion centers. See Something, Say Something. Red flag laws. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

These are all part and parcel of the widening surveillance dragnet that the government has used and abused in order to extend its reach and its power.

The COVID-19 pandemic has succeeded in acclimating us even further to being monitored, tracked and reported for so-called deviant or undesirable behavior.

Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted.

This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality.

Despite the fact that its data snooping has been shown to be ineffective at detecting, let alone stopping, any actual terror attacks, the government continues to operate its domestic spying programs largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls, emails, text messages and the like.

The question of how to deal with government agencies and programs that operate outside of the system of checks and balances established by the Constitution forces us to contend with a deeply unsatisfactory and dubious political “solution” to a problem that operates beyond the reach of voters and politicians: how do you hold accountable a government that lies, cheats, steals, sidesteps the law, and then absolves itself of wrongdoing?

Certainly, the history and growth of the NSA tracks with the government’s insatiable hunger for ever-great powers.

Since its official start in 1952, when President Harry S. Truman issued a secret executive order establishing the NSA as the hub of the government’s foreign intelligence activities, the agency—nicknamed “No Such Agency”—has operated covertly, unaccountable to Congress all the while using taxpayer dollars to fund its secret operations. It was only when the agency ballooned to 90,000 employees in 1969, making it the largest intelligence agency in the world with a significant footprint outside Washington, DC, that it became more difficult to deny its existence.

In the aftermath of Watergate in 1975, the Senate held meetings under the Church Committee in order to determine exactly what sorts of illicit activities the American intelligence apparatus was engaged in under the direction of President Nixon, and how future violations of the law could be stopped. It was the first time the NSA was exposed to public scrutiny since its creation.

The investigation revealed a sophisticated operation whose surveillance programs paid little heed to such things as the Constitution. For instance, under Project SHAMROCK, the NSA spied on telegrams to and from the U.S., as well as the correspondence of American citizens. Moreover, as the Saturday Evening Post reports, “Under Project MINARET, the NSA monitored the communications of civil rights leaders and opponents of the Vietnam War, including targets such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohammed Ali, Jane Fonda, and two active U.S. Senators. The NSA had launched this program in 1967 to monitor suspected terrorists and drug traffickers, but successive presidents used it to track all manner of political dissidents.”

Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the NSA, understood only too well the dangers inherent in allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers “at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

Noting that the NSA could enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny” upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

The result was the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the creation of the FISA Court, which was supposed to oversee and correct how intelligence information is collected and collated. The law requires that the NSA get clearance from the FISA Court, a secret surveillance court, before it can carry out surveillance on American citizens. Fast forward to the present day, and the so-called solution to the problem of government entities engaging in unjustified and illegal surveillance—the FISA Court—has unwittingly become the enabler of such activities, rubberstamping almost every warrant request submitted to it.

The 9/11 attacks served as a watershed moment in our nation’s history, ushering in an era in which immoral and/or illegal government activities such as surveillance, torture, strip searches, SWAT team raids are sanctioned as part of the quest to keep us “safe.”

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans’ phone calls and emails. That wireless wiretap program was reportedly ended in 2007 after the New York Times reported on it, to mass indignation.

Nothing changed under Barack Obama. In fact, the violations worsened, with the NSA authorized to secretly collect internet and telephone data on millions of Americans, as well as on foreign governments.

It was only after whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that the American people fully understood the extent to which they had been betrayed once again.

Even so, nothing really changed.

Since then, presidents, politicians, and court rulings have come and gone, but none of them have done much to put an end to the government’s “technotyranny.”

At every turn, we have been handicapped in our quest for transparency, accountability and a representative democracy by an establishment culture of secrecy: secret agencies, secret experiments, secret military bases, secret surveillance, secret budgets, and secret court rulings, all of which exist beyond our reach, operate outside our knowledge, and do not answer to “we the people.”

Yet the surveillance sector is merely one small part of a shadowy permanent government comprised of unelected bureaucrats who march in lockstep with profit-driven corporations that actually runs Washington, DC, and works to keep us under close watch and, thus, under control. For example, Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for the CIA, and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying on us for the government.

Most recently, the Biden Administration indicated it may be open to working with non-governmental firms in order to warrantlessly monitor citizens online.

This would be nothing new, however. Vast quantities of the government’s digital surveillance is already being outsourced to private companies, who are far less restrained in how they harvest and share our personal data.

In this way, Corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and abetting the government in its militarized domestic surveillance efforts.

Cue the dawning of what The Nation refers to as “the rise of a new class in America: the cyberintelligence ruling class. These are the people—often referred to as ‘intelligence professionals’—who do the actual analytical and targeting work of the NSA and other agencies in America’s secret government. Over the last [20] years, thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly for-profit.”

The snitch culture has further empowered the Surveillance State.

As Ezra Marcus writes for the New York Times, “Throughout the past year, American society responded to political upheaval and biological peril by turning to an age-old tactic for keeping rule breakers in check: tattling.”

This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct, technologically-wired age.

Marcus continues:

“Technology, and our abiding love of it, is crucial to our current moment of social surveillance. Snitching isn’t just a byproduct of nosiness or fear; it’s a technological feature built into the digital architecture of the pandemic era — specifically when it comes to software designed for remote work and Covid-tracing… Contact tracing apps … have started to be adapted for other uses, including criminal probes by the Singaporean government. If that seems distinctly worrying, it might be useful to remember that the world’s most powerful technology companies, whose products you are likely using to read this story, already use a business model of mass surveillance, collecting and selling user information to advertisers at an unfathomable scale. Our cellphones track us everywhere, and our locations are bought and sold by data brokers at incredible, intimate detail. Facial recognition software used by law enforcement trawls Instagram selfies. Facebook harvests the biometric data of its users. The whole ecosystem, more or less, runs on snitching.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we are dealing with today is not just a beast that has outgrown its chains but a beast that will not be restrained.

*

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org

UFO Report To Promote Arms Race!

If a real enemy does not exist, it has to be artificially created to increase military spending...

MSM Wastes No Time Using Senate UFO Report To Promote Arms Race

by Caitlin Johnstone

The New York Times has published an article on the contents of the hotly anticipated US government report on UFOs, as per usual based on statements of anonymous officials, and as per usual promoting narratives that are convenient for imperialists and war profiteers.

Together with one voice, the anonymous US officials and the "paper of record" which is supposed to scrutinize US officials assure us definitively that the mysterious aerial phenomena that have reportedly been witnessed by military personnel are certainly not any kind of secret US technology, but could totally be aliens and could definitely be a sign that the Russians or Chinese have severely lapped America's lagging military development.

"The report determines that a vast majority of more than 120 incidents over the past two decades did not originate from any American military or other advanced U.S. government technology," NYT was reportedly told by the officials. "That determination would appear to eliminate the possibility that Navy pilots who reported seeing unexplained aircraft might have encountered programs the government meant to keep secret."

Oh well if the US government has ruled out secret US government weaponry programs, hot damn that's good enough for me. Great journalism you guys.

One senior official said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology.

He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology https://t.co/bgYtohKC9O

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) June 4, 2021

"Intelligence officials believe at least some of the aerial phenomena could have been experimental technology from a rival power, most likely Russia or China," the Times reports. "One senior official briefed on the intelligence said without hesitation that U.S. officials knew it was not American technology. He said there was worry among intelligence and military officials that China or Russia could be experimenting with hypersonic technology."

"Russia has been investing heavily in hypersonics, believing the technology offers it the ability to evade American missile-defense technology," NYT adds. "China has also developed hypersonic weaponry, and included it in military parades. If the phenomena were Chinese or Russian aircraft, officials said, that would suggest the two powers’ hypersonic research had far outpaced American military development."

The article goes on to describe how the US military have been "unsettled" by aircraft moving and behaving in ways known technologies cannot explain. The implication of scary foreign adversaries having "outpaced American military development" to such an extent is of course that the US military is going to require a far bigger budget with far more intensive weapons development.

This would be the same New York Times that has consistently supported all of the US military's devastating acts of mass murder around the world, by the way.

This won't be the last time we hear the imperial media warning us that UFOs may be a sign of a frightening gap in technology leaving the US defenseless against far more powerful foreign foes, and they've already been priming us for it. Republican Rachel Maddow aka Tucker Carlson has been shrilly pushing this narrative for weeks now and demanding that the US government do more to address the fact that in alleged encounters with these aircraft, "our military was completely outmatched technologically by whatever these were."

"UFOs, it turns out, are real, and whatever else they are, they’re a prima facie challenge to the United States military," Carlson said on a segment last month. "They’re doing things the U.S. military does not allow, and they’re doing it with impunity. And they appear to be focused on the U.S. military."

"Why isn’t the Pentagon more focused on this? It seems like a threat if there ever was one," Carlson huffed.

In another segment Carlson had on military intelligence veteran Luis Elizondo, a leading figure in the steadily intensifying new UFO narrative which kicked off in 2017, claiming the aforementioned Senate report on the subject will reveal "an intelligence failure on the part of the US intel community on the level of 9/11."

"If there's a foreign adversary that can put a nuclear warhead within moments over Washington DC, okay, that's a problem," Elizondo told Carlson's Fox News audience.

All this over some completely unverifiable testimony, and a few videos being confirmed by the Pentagon which can all be explained by easily identifiable mundane phenomena.

I can't predict the future, but I won't be at all surprised if we begin seeing this arms race angle become the dominant aspect of this UFO story in the coming months/years. It would certainly fit the pattern of the US war machine and mass media promoting completely unverifiable allegations about foreign governments to justify further cold war escalations.

In the early sixties President John F Kennedy falsely promoted the "missile gap" narrative, telling the public that the Soviet Union had surpassed the United States in nuclear weapons when he knew full well the US nuclear arsenal had always far surpassed the USSR's in number, quality and deployment. Kennedy used this hawkish narrative to win an election and advance the largest peacetime expansion of US military power ever, leading directly to the events which gave rise to the Cuban Missile Crisis which came far closer to ending our world than most of us like to think about.

I have no idea what if anything is going on with these UFO phenomena, but I do know the world-threatening new cold war the US is waging against Russia and China is insane. There is no valid reason our planet's dominant power structures cannot at the very least cease brandishing armageddon weapons at each other and begin collaborating toward a better world together.

Reject the propagandists and cold warriors, no matter how elaborate or bizarre their manipulations become. Keep an eye on these bastards, and help spread awareness of what they're about.

= = =

Media Converges On The Narrative That UFOs May Be Russian/Chinese Threat

by Caitlin Johnstone

So in case you haven't been keeping up it's been pretty thoroughly confirmed that the US government's highly anticipated UFO report due this month won't contain any significant revelations and certainly won't verify anyone's ideas about these phenomena being extraterrestrial in origin, but it absolutely will contain fearmongering that UFOs could be evidence that the US has fallen dangerously behind Russian and Chinese technological development in the cold war arms race.

Unknown US officials have done a print media tour speaking to the press on condition of anonymity (of course), with first The New York Times reporting their statements about the contents of the UFO report and then CNN and The Washington Post. Each of these outlets reported the same thing: the US government doesn't know what these things are but is very concerned they constitute evidence that Russia and/or China have somehow managed to technologically leapfrog US military development by light years. All three mention these two nations explicitly.

This narrative was then picked up by cable news, with MSNBC inviting former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta on to explain to their audience that the US government should assume UFOs are Russian or Chinese in origin until that possibility has been exhausted.

"Is it your assumption that it is Russia or China testing some crazy technology that we somehow don't have, or are we sort of over-assuming the abilities of China and Russia and that the only other explanation is that if it is not us ourselves then it is something otherworldly?" MSNBC's Chuck Todd asked Panetta.

"I believe a lot of this stuff probably could be countries like Russia, like China, like others, who are using now drones, using the kind of sophisticated weaponry that could very well be involved in a lot of these sightings," Panetta replied. "I think that's the area to go to very frankly in order to identify what's happening."

"It sounds like you think we should exhaust that out, exhaust that hypothesis first before you start dealing with other hypotheses," Todd said.

"Yeah, absolutely," said Panetta, who for the record is every bit as much of a tyrannical, thuggish imperialist cold warrior as any other CIA director.

This UFOs-as-Chinese/Russian-threat narrative has quickly been picked up and thrust into mainstream orthodoxy by all the major branches of the mass media, from Fox News to Reuters to The Guardian to Today to the BBC to USA Today. Whenever you see the imperial media converge to this extent upon a single narrative, that's the Official Narrative of the empire. We can expect to see a lot more of this going forward.

Interestingly, the only mass media segment I've seen on this topic since the New York Times story broke which doesn't promote the UFOs-as-Chinese/Russian-threat narrative is a guest appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight by Lue Elizondo, the military intelligence veteran who got the ball rolling on the new UFO narrative which emerged in 2017. Elizondo goes out of his way to tell Carlson (who himself has been promoting the idea that UFOs may be a foreign adversarial threat with cartoonish melodrama) that there's no way these could be Russian or Chinese aircraft.

Elizondo, who seems to favor the UFOs-as-extraterrestrials narrative, argues that there are extensive records of military encounters with these phenomena stretching back seventy years, which rules out China since it could barely keep its head above water back then and rules out Russia because it shared its UFO knowledge with the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I don't know what's going on with that last bit; I see no reason to trust that an American spook is acting in good faith on such an easily manipulated topic, but it is entirely possible that Elizondo set out on this road out of a sincere desire for government disclosure on UFOs and is now trying to regain control of the narrative now that he sees the cold war arms race direction it has taken.

Chris Melon, another major player in the new UFO narrative, recently complained on Twitter that "some important information was not shared" with the public in the UFO report. So who knows, maybe the initiators of this new UFO narrative were acting in good faith and their efforts were just swiftly hijacked by forces beyond their control to advance preexisting cold war agendas.

Clearest indication yet that the Imminent UAP report to Congress was neutered by access problems, this from @ChristopherKMe4: “Undoubtedly, some important information was not shared, potentially for a variety of reasons. Congress should inquire about that” https://t.co/9jmZRDFdsH  — Ross Coulthart (@rosscoulthart) June 5, 2021

Regardless of whether or not that's true, it was always inevitable that this strange new rabbit hole of UFOs going mainstream was going to lead to more cold war propaganda. I've been interacting a bit with the online UFO community for the first time ever, and it seems like they're mostly decent people with good intentions and a lot of hope for this new governmental investigation. But it also seems like they're largely a community which mostly just talks to itself and is only just beginning to meet the cold harsh light of day that is the impenetrable depravity of the US war machine.

The US government is pure swamp; you can't use the swamp to fix the swamp. Democrats were never going to use a Special Counsel to remove Trump, Trump was never going to take down the Deep State, and the US government isn't going to investigate itself and tell everyone that aliens are real.

If there are indeed extraterrestrials and they are indeed flying around our world in strange aircraft, we are more likely to get the truth about this from the extraterrestrials themselves than from the US military. The war machine only does killing and destruction; it's not going to suddenly develop an interest in truth and transparency. The sooner UFO enthusiasts realize this the better.

A New World Order Brought to You by COVID-19

 “A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power.”? Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

The Global Deep State: A New World Order Brought to You by COVID-19
By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
April 29, 2021

For good or bad, COVID-19 has changed the way we navigate the world.

It is also redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.

Owing in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it has become increasingly obvious that we have entered into a new world order — a global world order — made up of international government agencies and corporations.

This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which has seen governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, has shifted this transformation into high gear.

Fascism has become a global menace

It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, the pharmaceutical industry and, most recently, by the pharmaceutical-health sector.

All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care

Global Disease

The COVID-19 pandemic has propelled us into a whole new global frontier. Those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes will find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.

We are about to find our ability to access, engage and move about in the world dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who have not.

“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.

Global Surveillance

Spearheaded by the National Security Agency (NSA), which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.

Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice.

Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:

    “The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”

Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).

Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.

Global War Profiteering

War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure,  spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

Global Policing

Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.

There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.

For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Interceptsums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”

This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerancewithin their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.

The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.

Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

Are you starting to get the picture now?

On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, you can bet that the government and its global partners have already struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished.

In its place is a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.

Given the trajectory and dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.

It’s taken less than a generation for our freedoms to be eroded and the Global Deep State’s structure to be erected, expanded and entrenched.

Mark my words: the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State.

Now there are those who will tell you that any mention of a New World Order government—a power elite conspiring to rule the world—is the stuff of conspiracy theories.

I am not one of those skeptics.

I wholeheartedly believe that one should always mistrust those in power, take alarm at the first encroachment on one’s liberties, and establish powerful constitutional checks against government mischief and abuse.

I can also attest to the fact that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I have studied enough of this country’s history—and world history—to know that governments (the U.S. government being no exception) are at times indistinguishable from the evil they claim to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

And I have lived long enough to see many so-called conspiracy theories turn into cold, hard fact.

Remember, people used to scoff at the notion of a Deep State (a.k.a. Shadow Government). They used to doubt that fascism could ever take hold in America, and sneer at any suggestion that the United States was starting to resemble Nazi Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.

As I detail in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re beginning to know better, aren’t we?

*
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org