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Coronavirus and the Gates Foundation | New Eastern Outlook

Posted by M. C. on April 26, 2021

Add to this the fact that the Gates Foundation and related entities such as CEPI constitute the largest funders of the public-private entity known as WHO, and that its current director, Tedros Adhanom, the first WHO director in history not a medical doctor, worked for years on HIV with the Gates Foundation when Tedros was a government minister in Ethiopia, and we see that there is practically no area of the current coronavirus pandemic where the footprints of the omnipresent Gates are not to be found. If that is to the good of mankind or grounds to be worried, time will tell.

https://journal-neo.org/2020/03/18/coronavirus-and-the-gates-foundation/

Author: F.William Engdahl

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Arguably, no one has been more active in promoting and funding research on vaccines aimed at dealing with coronavirus than Bill Gates and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. From sponsoring a simulation of a coronavirus global pandemic, just weeks before the Wuhan outbreak was announced, to funding numerous corporate efforts to come up with a novel vaccine for the apparently novel virus, the Gates presence is there. What does it actually entail?

We must admit that at the very least Bill Gates is prophetic. He has claimed for years that a global killer pandemic will come and that we are not prepared for it. On March 18, 2015 Gates gave a TED talk on epidemics in Vancouver. That day he wrote on his blog, “I just gave a brief talk on a subject that I’ve been learning a lot about lately—epidemics. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is a tragedy—as I write this, more than 10,000 people have died.” Gates then added, “As awful as this epidemic has been, the next one could be much worse. The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease—an especially virulent flu, for example—that infects large numbers of people very quickly. Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic.”

That same year, 2015, Bill Gates wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine titled, “The Next Epidemic: Lessons from Ebola.” There he spoke of a special class of drugs that “involves giving patients a set of particular RNA-based constructs that enables them to produce specific proteins(including antibodies).Although this is a very new area, it is promising because it is possible that a safe therapy could be designed and put into large-scale manufacture fairly rapidly. More basic research as well as the progress of companies like Moderna and CureVac could eventually make this approach a key tool for stopping epidemics.” Moderna and CureVac both today receive funds from the Gates Foundation and are leading the race to develop an approved COVID-19 vaccine based on mRNA.

2017 and Founding of CEPI

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USPS reportedly tracking Americans’ social media posts

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2021

“I just don’t think the Postal Service has the degree of sophistication that you would want if you were dealing with national security issues of this sort,” he said. “That part is puzzling.”

No Kidding! My thought is-concentrate on tracking packages.

https://nypost.com/2021/04/22/usps-reportedly-tracking-americans-social-media-posts/

By Natalie O’Neill

April 22, 2021 | 12:56pm | Updated “RIGHT WING LEANING PARLOR AND AIs ‘Big Brother Mail Man’ spying on you?https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.453.0_en.html#goog_10633790311:18/1:47 

The US Postal Service is running a shadowy surveillance program that tracks Americans’ social media posts —  including ones about planned right-wing protests, a report revealed Thursday.

The so-called Internet Covert Operations Program enlists the law enforcement arm of the USPS to hunt down “inflammatory” posts — made by groups ranging from the Proud Boys to demonstrators protesting coronavirus lockdowns, according to documents obtained by Yahoo News.

Posts deemed threatening are then sent to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to be monitored, the outlet reported.

“Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts,”  says a government bulletin, marked as law enforcement-sensitive on March 16. “No intelligence is available to suggest the legitimacy of these threats.”

The warning —  sent from the US Postal Service to the Department of Homeland Security — was in reference to the World Wide Rally for Freedom and Democracy planned by Q-Anon-linked groups in Washington, DC, on March 20.

Civil liberties and privacy experts were alarmed by the government surveillance effort, calling it “bizarre” and “concerning,” according to the report.

“It’s not at all clear why their mandate would include monitoring of social media that’s unrelated to use of the postal system,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program.

“If the individuals they’re monitoring are carrying out or planning criminal activity, that should be the purview of the FBI,” she told the outlet. “If they’re simply engaging in lawfully protected speech, even if it’s odious or objectionable, then monitoring them on that basis raises serious constitutional concerns.”

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone, appointed by President Barack Obama to review National Security Agency data, said it’s a “mystery” why the mail agency would be tasked with rooting out problematic protesters.

“I just don’t think the Postal Service has the degree of sophistication that you would want if you were dealing with national security issues of this sort,” he said. “That part is puzzling.”

“There are so many other federal agencies that could do this … you’ve got FBI, Homeland Security and so on, so I don’t know why the post office is doing this,” he said.

The effort by government branches to monitor Americans’ social media posts has for months been hotly debated. Posts on Facebook and Parler have allowed law enforcement to track down and arrest rioters who breached the US Capitol building on Jan. 6 — but the method has sparked concerns about the surveillance of free speech and peaceful protests.

The US Postal Service did not respond to questions about the social media tracking effort sent by Yahoo News.

Instead, it sent a general statement about the program, noting it is set up to assess threats to its own employees.

“The Internet Covert Operations Program is a function within the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, which assesses threats to Postal Service employees and its infrastructure by monitoring publicly available open source information,” the statement said.

“Additionally, the Inspection Service collaborates with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to proactively identify and assess potential threats to the Postal Service, its employees and customers, and its overall mail processing and transportation network. In order to preserve operational effectiveness, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service does not discuss its protocols, investigative methods, or tools.”

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USA Today Publishes Fact-Check On Whether A Priest, A Rabbi, And A Minister Really Walked Into A Bar Together

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2021

https://babylonbee.com/news/usa-today-publishes-fact-check-on-whether-a-priest-a-rabbi-and-a-minister-really-walked-into-a-bar-together

U.S.—After hearing someone tell a questionable story about how a priest, a rabbi, and a minister walked into a bar together, USA Today published a 1,200-word fact check on the tall tale.

Citing over 15 sources to cast doubt on the story, USA Today handily dismantled the fib. 

“It is clear, after reviewing the evidence, that a priest, a rabbi, and a minster could not have walked into a bar together as the storyteller claimed,” the piece read. “They are unlikely to have agreed on a place to have a drink, as the rabbi would have required a kosher restaurant. Furthermore, the so-called ‘joke’ suggested the minister was a Baptist, and he wouldn’t go to a bar. Well, not without a disguise anyway.”

“The Catholic priest might go throw a few back, that’s true,” the fact-checker conceded. “But not alongside the rabbi and the minister.”

The fact-check called into question numerous elements of the joke, such as the part where a UFO showed up and deposited a cow in the bar and the part where Prince walked in. “Wikipedia says Prince has been dead for years, so that part is immediately questionable.”

USA Today found the story “false” and will receive a Pulitzer Prize for the publication’s amazing journalism.

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An Age-Old Story – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2021

But it is notoriously difficult to get the lower social classes to change their habits. Therefore, in the name of equality (for could there be any equality more important than in the number of years lived?), men of high social class, and women of all social classes, should be encouraged to smoke more, to smoke for the sake of social justice.

https://www.takimag.com/article/an-age-old-story/print

Theodore Dalrymple

As everyone knows, or by now ought to know, the only possible explanation of differing outcomes between groups is prejudice, privilege, and oppression by those groups with more favorable outcomes. It follows that the only solution to the anomaly of differential outcomes, and the restoration of the primordial equality that is natural to mankind, is restitution, compensation, expropriation, positive discrimination, etc.

One of the most startling differentials, of course, is that between men and women. It is surely time for it to be redressed.

For example, I was reading in Le Figaro only yesterday that nearly 58 percent of deaths from Covid in France were of men, and only 42 percent of women. This only brings into sharp relief a fundamental injustice that has gone unaddressed for decades, indeed has been largely unnoticed, namely the fact that women live, on average, several years longer than men. For example, women live just over three and a half years longer in Britain than men; in the U.S., the difference is five years; in France, six; in Russia, ten. Overall in the world, men were the victims of 73 percent of fatal road accidents and 78 percent of homicides. “Once equality of life expectancy is achieved, our societies will be much happier.”

What is to be done about these truly shocking statistics? As we all agree, equality is one of the most precious, if not the most precious, of all political values, for there can be no justice without it.

Let us take homicide as an example. In only two countries, Switzerland and Hong Kong, is the desirable goal of equality of victimhood reached. How have they reached this elevated level of civilization, that is to say a just, fair, and equal distribution of the murdered? I confess that I do not have the answer, and I doubt that anyone else has it either. Could there be a more appropriate subject for an international commission of inquiry? Once it had reached its conclusions, other countries could institute homicide awareness training, to ensure that murderers, or potential murderers, were aware of the social justice implications of their acts.

Of course, achieving equality will not be easy: We shall have to guard against overcorrection, which would be equally unjust. But it must be frankly admitted that it is easier to increase the numbers of homicides than to reduce them, so that, regrettably, if the ultimate goal of equality is to be reached, it may be necessary… Well, I leave it to the reader to draw the conclusion.

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Rejecting the ‘Proposition Nation’ | Chronicles

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2021

The left’s ‘1619 Project’ and the conservative 1776 Commission both rely on a distorted picture of the American founding.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/rejecting-the–proposition-nation-/

By Brion McClanahan

0421-PROPOSITIONNATION-2

In January, Donald Trump’s President’s Advisory 1776 Commission released its 45-page “1776 Report,” which, according to The New York Times, is “a sweeping attack on liberal thought and activism that…defends America’s founding against charges that it was tainted by slavery and likens progressivism to fascism.” Joe Biden scrapped it the day he entered office, and the report has since been scrubbed from all government websites.   This is perhaps for the best. However noble the intentions of the Commission’s members, their document is a profoundly flawed vision of American history, one that places the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln at the center of the American experience. That Lincolnian vision is now the accepted “conservative” consensus regarding American history.   American conservatives looking for an intellectual home should avoid claptrap like the 1776 Commission and its intellectual sibling, “The 1619 Project.” They are in reality two sides of the same coin. Both rely on a fantasy about the founding that Lincoln invented at Gettysburg in 1863. Accepting the assumptions behind either view of America is tantamount to a coin toss in which the rules are heads they win, tails you lose.   Trump created the 1776 Commission in September 2020 to combat The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which paints American history as a story of black slavery and white supremacy. However, his appointments to the Commission led its report down a predictable path.   Trump tapped Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn to head the Commission and appointed 17 other academics and politicians to serve in advisory roles. Vanderbilt University Political Science and Law Professor Carol M. Swain and Hillsdale Constitutional Government Professor Matthew Spalding served as vice-chair and executive director, respectively. Swain’s prior publications focused almost exclusively on race and the dangers of “white nationalism,” including tomes fully in accord with the credo of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Spalding penned the popular We Still Hold These Truths (2009), a book steeped in neoconservative deceit.   Other appointments included Thomas Lindsay, director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, who drafted most of “The 1776 Report,” as well as conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson. While Hanson has recently bemoaned the effects of cancel culture on American history, for years he never found a Confederate statue he did not want removed.    Consider the required reading recommendations for American students from “The 1776 Report,” which include the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration calling for women’s suffrage, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Stanton looked to the form and substance of the Declaration of Independence in crafting the Declaration, and King asserted that the Declaration and the Constitution constituted a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”   No contemporary of Stanton or King would have confused either for a “conservative.” Stanton sided with the Republican Party during the 1850s because she perceived it as a conduit for reform, and complained loudly of betrayal when it refused to back women’s suffrage following the Civil War. King flirted with communism, and like the academics who crafted “The 1776 Report,” viewed the Declaration’s “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” as a foundational promise betrayed by bad actors in American history, mostly from the South.   Not to be outdone by King, the 1776 Commission blames John C. Calhoun for modern identity politics, for the distortion of the true founding principles enshrined in the Declaration, and for the deaths of the 600,000 men who perished in the Civil War. If not for Calhoun, “The 1776 Report” authors seem to suggest, the United States would today be a utopia of free-thinking nationalist egalitarians dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”   Can you guess who else holds similar views? To name two: leftist Civil War historian Eric Foner and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead journalist for “The 1619 Project.” In his book The Second Founding (2019), Foner writes:

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Brion McClanahan

Brion McClanahan is editor of The Abbeville Review and the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers (Regnery, 2009) and The Founding Fathers’ Guide to the Constitution (Regnery History, 2012).

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Allan Stevo’s Blatant Lie! – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2021

We, as individuals, cause a great burden upon others around us when we do not stand up for what is right.

And it’s not just about saying no to a mask every chance you can. It’s about saying no to everything that does not edify and to do it every chance you can. The mask is a gateway, the mask is training ground, and the mask is a symbol for so much more.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/04/allan-stevo/allan-stevos-blatant-lie/

By Allan Stevo

A reader writes:

Allan’s statement concerning the Kentucky soccer coach, as below, is a blatant lie and discredits his existence in your publications, IMHO….

Lew, Allan’s published statement (below) is ridiculous and a blatant lie!…

“But because of his courage, he is also the father of the only soccer player in the county who plays without a mask.”

I’ve never seen, or heard, on any kids playing soccer with masks on???  He discredits himself and your website with this kind of writing, IMHO!

-An Auburn Observer

———————————————

Dear Auburn Observer,

Mr. Rockwell has forwarded a note to me that you have not seen any kids playing soccer in masks.

I would like to thank you for this note. I have repeatedly told people that my favorite place to write is LewRockwell.com because the readership is diligent about fact checking.

Too Many Student Athletes Are Forced To Be Masked: Zero Is The Proper Number 

School-by-school, there has been a debate over the past year on when student athletes should be masked. A quick internet search produced this video of a Kentucky coach speaking to masked players who had just left the field. Or in this image you’ll see a girls soccer player focussed on the ball with a masked face. Or there is the example of this masked Massachusetts team.

The topic of masked student athletes has been an issue across the country: Kentucky, Massachusetts, Arizona, New Jersey, Colorado, and California alike. Rural and urban. Blue areas and red areas both.

The debate should not be school-by-school. Health decisions are to be made individual-by-individual and decided upon by an individual, not by plebiscite.

I Will Not Live In Denial Of The Evil In Our Midst –Will You?

When a father from a well-established soccer family wrote me repeatedly over these past months with his trials and tribulations, I took this matter to heart.

Denial is something the advocates of liberty do not need at this point in history. The horror stories of tyranny we have heard are accurate and only the tip of the iceberg.

The Kentucky soccer father I cited in the original piece has had a difficult year attempting to protect his daughter from the mask mandates. His is not an isolated story.

Don’t for a second think I feel bad for this man though. Comfort is not promised to the righteous. Ease is not promised. A light burden is not promised. If you want to do righteous work, you are sometimes going to have to put your back into it. What I feel bad about is that every decent parent and every decent non-parent alike is not standing by such a person and emulating his example.

I’m blessed to be able to report that so many parents are realizing that simply by standing up and giving the slightest resistance, they are having tremendous success. They are identifying their boundaries, communicating their boundaries, and identifying their boundaries. Done clearly, this process works wonders.

Clarity Goes A Long Way 

It’s as simple as being clear: “My daughter will not be putting a mask on for any reason.” That’s pretty clear.

Simply being clear with another person and never wearing a mask again is a lot easier than you may think. It’s hardly a project that anyone needs to literally or metaphorically put their back into. 

My retelling of his story, this Kentucky hero, is not a blatant lie. It is the painful truth. Unfortunately, there are children right now running around playing sports with masks on. I suppose the number is in the millions each day. Many parents obediently subject their children to this harmful behavior, that has no provable positive effect and many provable negative effects. The story of this Kentucky hero is a story I have heard over and over again.

I Hear Face Mask Horror Stories Like These Daily & I Hear Many Stories Of Victory 

I hear these horror stories daily. Literally daily. Over and over. I wish it were a lie. Even better if it were a blatant lie. I wish all the one-size-fits-all mandates that “brave” and “free” Americans are accepting with the shrug of a their shoulders were not the reality of life.

Shortly after I read your note saying that masked student athletes are a blatant lie, a situation I would far prefer to reality, another reader of these pages sent me a text message on my cell phone at 12:59 p.m., Friday, April 16, 2021:

“I am having an email exchange with my daughter’s AYSO soccer coach, who is a typical mask wearing coward, and he is telling us that masks may be required on the field during the match (not just when players are sitting on sidelines or halftime).  First game is tomorrow. I sent him long message why it’s very unsafe, unnecessary and insane to play sports with a mask covering….”

The rest of the message I will omit.

I spent more than an hour Friday, helping him to navigate this topic.

If you want an address, I can provide you with the address on a given Saturday in which all but one girl will be wearing a mask on the soccer field. Based on what I know of this father, there is no chance his daughter will walk onto the field in a mask.

The True Inheritance You Leave Your Child 

What a blessing a father like that is in a child’s life. So few are like that. A daughter of a father like that will have a head start over nearly any peer, a head start that no amount of treasure left as inheritance can match. There are haves and have nots in this world. The greatest haves of the next generation will come from those children whose parents were not cowardly after the Ides of March 2020, but who were diligent about their values, rather than flexible or apathetic.

Not everyone gets to be born into a family like that. Those who do will have an advantage that money simply can’t buy.

I write pieces like this partly because I want to thank those parents. They are truly treasures in the lives of their children. 

The People Who Really Matter In This Battle — The Courageous & Righteous — The Rest Are Distractions 

I want to encourage parents like them. The world is full of discouragement for loving parents. Not here. Not me. I want parents to prosper. I want their homes to prosper. I want their families to prosper. I want to be among men who will protect their home at all cost, will protect the space around them at all cost, who will walk through the world as men of values, unbreakable values, not as flexible, compliant men of preference. I want to walk among fellow lions.

I want to be surrounded by men like that, so surrounded by them that there is hardly even room for anyone but men like that around me, with my life saturated by fellow men of courage.

The Faucis, Gateses, Cuomos, Newsoms, and Schwabs want parents like that to think differently, to be worn down. To be demoralized.

That won’t happen. Those weaselly folks won’t win. They won’t beat the powerful and righteous men and women who enter my orbit. Such power exists among those who I have been lucky enough to come across this past year. You may have come across similar people, one of the true blessings of the past year, a reordering of society.

I have even more good news. You may not see it yet. I see it clearly. What I see is that those parents are winning. Though righteous and bold parents of courage may tire under the burden at times, they are winning in so many ways and in ways even at times so unpredictable.

Every Regime Falls Unexpectedly 

Every regime falls unexpectedly. This is a story repeated throughout history. The stories of the communist regimes that fell in 1989 are full of such anecdotes. On a Thursday, everything is normal. That Friday that regime is gone. Or in another country, on a Monday, the most repressive policy was in place, business as usual. On a Tuesday, the whole thing had just collapsed. You only need to turn on the television to hear how desperate and out of touch with reality the present regime is. I don’t know if they last 4 days, 4 years, or 40 years, but I know that the regime is feeling more out of control than they have ever been.

The Institutions That Have Prospered Have Done So Through Bravery, Not Cowardice 

We have the brave to thank for that. We have the courageous. In every institution that is the case, even in the most cowardly institution of the past year — the church. The church had to do nothing more than keep its doors open and keep having Sunday services as it’s been doing for the past two thousand years. Even in that cowardly demographic, we have the small numbers in the church who have lived lives of faith and not fear through 2020 and 2021 as true disciples practicing what they preach. The brave babe made such a difference. Those congregations that have stayed open have prospered.

And in the institution of family, we have parents who have relied on the same truths they knew five years ago. A media narrative doesn’t change the truth. The cowardly deserve so little attention. The brave deserve our full attention, our praise, and our emulation, not our denial of the important battle they wage on the behalf of their family, their crew, their community, but also, whether they realize it or not, a battle they wage on the behalf of all humanity.

The brave have gotten us through this tough time and the brave will secure us victory. Anyone on the sidelines, anyone who puts on a mask accomplishes the very opposite.

Be Decisive & Help Others Carry The Burden, So That We Can Win This Victory Swiftly & Bravely 

See the rest here

Allan Stevo [send him mail] writes about international politics and culture from a free market perspective at 52 Weeks in Slovakia (www.52inSk.com). He is the author of How to Win America, The Bitcoin Manifesto, and numerous other books.

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Alex Berenson on Censorship and the Death of Journalism – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2021

Kennedy wrapped up the interview with this observation:

“You know, we need debate and discussion. It’s the sunlight, it’s the oxygen for democracy, and the fact that it’s being choked off is killing our democracy.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/04/no_author/rfk-jr-and-alex-berenson-on-censorship-and-the-death-of-journalism/

Children’s Health Defense

Alex Berenson thinks the push to vaccinate millions of people with experimental vaccines has been carried out in a “crazy way.”

What’s even crazier, he asks? Censoring the debate on COVID vaccine safety.

The former New York Times reporter and author of 12 novels and two nonfiction books was interviewed by Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the RFK Jr The Defender Podcast.

Berenson, subject of a hit piece in The Atlantic which called him out over his questioning of COVID vaccines, says he doesn’t agree with Kennedy on everything, including childhood vaccines.

But the two agree on this: Corporate media not only isn’t doing its job when it comes to reporting all the facts about COVID vaccines — it’s going out of its way, with help from government agencies, to silence anyone who questions the pharma-government narrative.

Berenson says:

“They know what these questions are. Why aren’t they asking? And if the answer is, you know, there’s a slight advantage to the vaccine or actually no, the unvaccinated population had slightly fewer deaths, whatever it might be, let’s get the answer. Let’s ask the question.”

Kennedy wrapped up the interview with this observation:

“You know, we need debate and discussion. It’s the sunlight, it’s the oxygen for democracy, and the fact that it’s being choked off is killing our democracy.

Listen here + subscribe to the RFK Jr The Defender Podcast:

https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/show/30DqNXrHLKzz4xzmoty6xf

Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. CHD is planning many strategies, including legal, in an effort to defend the health of our children and obtain justice for those already injured. Your support is essential to CHD’s successful mission.

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The United States Has Declared Defeat in Two More Wars | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on April 24, 2021

For example, we were told Iraq and Afghanistan would become “democracies” where Western-style human rights are protected and valued. That was the humanitarian justification.

We were also told these countries would become reliable allies of the United States, sort of like Germany or Japan. That was the geopolitical justification.

The US has failed on both fronts.

https://mises.org/wire/united-states-has-declared-defeat-two-more-wars

Ryan McMaken

President Biden announced last week that he planned to remove all combat troops from Afghanistan by September, which he says will mark the end of what is now a twenty-year war in the central Asian country.

A week earlier, the US and Iraq reaffirmed a deal to withdraw “any remaining combat forces” from Iraq, and to further wind down the US involvement there, which dates back to the 2003 invasion.

In both cases, of course, the stated plans to end military intervention have been framed in polite language designed to make it look like the US is leaving on its own terms—and also to allow the US regime some level of plausibility when it claims “mission accomplished.”

In reality, of course, both Iraq and Afghanistan are just two more wars that the United States has lost in a long list of botched military interventions dating back to Vietnam and Korea. Moreover, these withdrawals signal the US’s continued geopolitical decline in a world that is becoming multipolar and highly motivated to bring to a final end the US’s vanishing “unipolar moment.”

But what exactly do we mean by “lost” in this context? Well, by the standards of the objectives presented by the US regime itself when these wars began, these wars are complete failures.

For example, we were told Iraq and Afghanistan would become “democracies” where Western-style human rights are protected and valued. That was the humanitarian justification.

We were also told these countries would become reliable allies of the United States, sort of like Germany or Japan. That was the geopolitical justification.

The US has failed on both fronts.

The Failure of Global Democracy

When the United States first invaded Afghanistan, following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the US regime claimed the mission was both a punitive and a strategic one. The military intervention was, we were told, designed to punish and disable the Taliban regime, which was fostering terrorist training camps of the sort that supposedly led to 9/11.

But, not surprisingly, Washington then decided it was going to stay in Afghanistan for a long time. The voters were soon told to brace for a generational war, one that could last decades. After twenty or twenty-five years, though, we were told Afghanistan would become a liberal democracy where women could walk around in miniskirts and the youth would spend their days studying poetry and engineering at universities. Afghanistan, we were told, would end up like postwar Germany and Japan—outposts of Western liberal democracy.

Needless to say, the Pentagon never mentions that anymore. Even after twenty years, the political situation in Afghanistan can perhaps be most accurately described as an ongoing series of wars between warlords, with US-supported warlords on the “good” side. The idea that these US-aligned warlords represent the side of human rights, though, is wishful thinking at its most extreme.

Two years after the occupation of Afghanistan began, the promises of “global democracy” became even more grandiose as the regime tried to grow support for the Iraq invasion. The Bush administration pushed a grand vision for the entire region with claims that a new democratic Iraq would serve as the launching point for a total makeover of the Middle East, which would soon become a region of liberal democracies. The US repeatedly claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was something of a reincarnation of Hitler—rather than the run-of-the-mill dictator he was—and suggested that once Hussein was gone freedom and justice would flower throughout the region.

That didn’t happen. Indeed, even if life improved for some Iraqis—such as the Kurds—life became far worse for countless other Iraqis. As noted by NPR in 2018, as a result of the Iraq War,

Iraq devolved into one of the most dangerous and corrupt countries in the world. With an estimated 500,000 killed in war and violence since 2003, few families have been left untouched. Although security has improved immensely, corruption remains entrenched.

“The majority of people before—Sunni and Shiite—did not like the [Hussein] regime,” says [General Najm al-Jabouri]. “But many people, when they compare between the situation under Saddam Hussein and now, find maybe their life under Saddam Hussein was better.”

Today, Iraq’s standard of living remains crippled by the US invasion, and the democratic government amounts to a regime that is little more than a group of competing kleptocracies.

Moreover, the US invasion paved the way for the rise of religious extremism in Iraq, which led to the near-total destruction of Iraq’s Christian population—which had enjoyed legal protection under Hussein.

Rather than spread notions of liberal democracy and human rights in the region, the US regime has only doubled down in its support for the most repressive regimes. The US remains an enthusiastic supporter of the Saudi regime, one of the most despotic and blood-soaked regimes on earth today. The US has been propping up the military dictatorship in Egypt. Through its interventions in Libya and Syria, the US has taken the side of terrorists and Islamic zealots who traffic young women for sex slavery and enforce the most draconian sorts of Islamic law—something much more rare under the Hussein regime, or under the secular regime still ruling in Syria.

The US’s regime change in Iraq supercharged al-Qaeda and ISIS, leading to humanitarian crises in northern Iraq and eastern Syria.

The Failure of Regime Change

But even if the US failed miserably on installing new human rights–loving regimes across the region, at least the US’s “national interests” are now much safer thanks to regime change. Right?

Well, not quite. Although Washington now claims that it is leaving Iraq and Afghanistan on good terms with the local regimes, the fact is that the US is leaving in power a great many enemies who are more than happy to see the US leave. And in many cases, the US strengthened those with an interest in undermining Washington’s interests.

In Afghanistan, for example, the anti-US warlords (i.e., Taliban-aligned groups) aren’t going away, and are likely to even increase in power as the US leaves. This, after all, is the central claim made by those who oppose Biden’s withdrawal plan. The US leaves behind an Afghanistan where anti-US powers are likely to quickly rush in and fill the power vacuum.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the main “accomplishment” of the removal of Sunni-aligned Saddam Hussein was to grow the power of the Shia minority. This now means the growth of Iran-aligned Shia militias, which are avowedly opposed to the US regime.

In other words, the US could maintain a foothold in both countries indefinitely, but it could only do so through old-fashioned—and very costly—military occupation. That’s certainly not what Washington promised twenty years ago.

With all its fanciful promises for fundamentally changing the calculus in the Middle East, the US has not come even close to shifting the balance of power toward the US by creating a new block of pro-US “democracies.” Mostly, the US has sown chaos in the region, paved the way for terrorist groups, and reaffirmed support for some of the worst dictators and regimes in the region.

All of this was bought and paid for by thousands of US lives and hundreds of thousands of lives in the invaded countries. And by trillions of US dollars. 

The last twenty years have been little more than the US regime spinning its wheels, all while condemning millions to a new reality of greater death, disability, and poverty.

It’s not over yet, though. The fact some announcements have been made about ending wars doesn’t mean they’re really over. There’s no time frame for the final removal of combat troops from Iraq. In Afghanistan, the US may not be ending the war at all, but only shifting toward a war fought by US-employed mercenaries.

In any case, the global political situation has become expensive and hostile to the point that it now makes sense to at least ostensibly bring these conflicts to an end. Also, now that the average American voter is barely paying attention—and that the US is facing an economic crisis and weak recovery—it has become politically expedient to forget about those old wars, preferably with an eye to starting a new one with Russia.  Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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The State-Corporate Convergence in Our State of Emergency | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on April 23, 2021

As I have written in Google Archipelago, Big Digital must be considered an agent of a leftist authoritarian state—as a “governmentality” or state apparatus functioning on behalf and as part of the state itself. “Governmentality” is a term that should become well known in the coming days and weeks. I adopted the term from Michel Foucault and have emended it to refer to corporations and other nonstate actors who actively undertake state functions. These actors will be doing this in droves with vaccine passports, which will vastly augment state power under a state-corporate alliance.

https://mises.org/wire/state-corporate-convergence-our-state-emergency

Michael Rectenwald

Perhaps the most pressing matter today for advocates of freedom is the prospect of the Left completing the institution of a totalitarian state. There is no other way to read the multiprong approach and the political maneuverings that political operatives are taking to rule under “Biden.” I put “Biden” in quotation marks here because the current president of the United States is not a singular person named Joe Biden. It is a central executive committee consisting of party rulers and advisers, plus corporate-state apparatuses. Make no mistake, the power grab that the Left is undertaking poses the most grievous threat to liberty in recent history, regardless of its effects on the Republican Party.

The signals could not be any clearer. In addition to the swath of executive orders, clearly composed by executive committee members and aimed at either ingratiating and expanding the Democratic Party’s base or extending federal power, the Democrats have initiated a growing body of laws which would, if passed, ensure uniparty rule for the foreseeable future.

These include especially H.R. 1, or the For the People’s Act, passed by the House. Should it pass the Senate (with the eradication of the filibuster), H.R.-1 would grossly favor Democratic candidates in federal elections. Notwithstanding the expansion of the Democratic base through various means, including overriding existing voter ID laws in many states and mandating that all states allow mail-in ballots without IDs, it would further centralize federal election oversight and, according to the Institute for Free Speech, “[e]xpand the universe of regulated online political speech (by Americans) beyond paid advertising to include, apparently, communications on groups’ or individuals’ own websites and e-mail messages.”

The legislative maneuverings include the ‘‘Judiciary Act of 2021,’’ which would simply expand the Supreme Court to twelve members plus the chief justice. This move, which would amount to adding four Democrat-approved justices, would essentially effect a legislative takeover of the Supreme Court, as the Democratic-controlled Supreme Court would increasingly “legislate from the bench” and likewise expand the power of the Democratic-controlled legislative and executive branches beyond official perimeters. The odds of its passage, as is, are slim, but the overture is indicative of an attempted power grab not seen since FDR.

But the most conspicuous sign of the nearing consolidation of totalitarian government is the effective merger of corporate and state functionaries, with corporations and other organizations acting as appendages of the government and enforcing corporate-state desiderata. The indications of this merger are so many and sundry that any exhaustive recounting of them would entail a book-length treatment.

But take, for example, the calls by Congressperson Maxine Watters (D-CA) that “protestors” “get more confrontational” if the Derrick Chauvin verdict is unacceptable. Given the widespread rioting since George Floyd’s death, Watters’s language is a call to nationwide insurrection. Yet this language meets the approval of the corporate-government-media complex, despite the Left’s insistence that Trump had done just that before the Capitol breach. Libertarians should take note of the double standard not as a sign of the continued diminishment of the Republican Party but of a doublespeak characteristic of totalitarian regimes.

The most conspicuous example of a corporate-state merger is the extension of governmental power to corporations and other organizations with the covid crisis response measures, which have now exceeded lockdowns and masking to include the issuance of vaccine passports that corporations and other organizations may enforce or are already enforcing. The best hope for resisting these totalitarian measures is a refusal on the part of state and local governments to allow such corporate implementations of governmental dicta.

The old saw that “these are private companies” does not hold water, because clearly these corporate bodies have been enrolled as state apparatuses. Operation Warp Speed was rolled out by the federal government and has enlisted private organizations—first and foremost Big Pharma—to execute it. The state has enabled Big Pharma to profit enormously by instituting a state-of-emergency regime which in the US makes non-FDA-approved vaccines legal. On the other hand, Big Pharma—along with the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—legitimizes the state-of-emergency regime, which in turn augments state power.

The enrollment of corporations in the scheme to vaccinate the population and to require such vaccinations for social participation should not be considered in terms of the prerogatives of private organizations but as part of the incursions of the state into private industry. What we are witnessing, and should be resisting, is a merger into a corporate-government complex, wherein government can bypass the legislative branch and enforce unpopular mandates by colluding with corporations and other organizations to make “policy.”

Perhaps the most egregious element of this corporate-state stranglehold on the population is the participation of Big Digital and the mainstream media. Big Digital conglomerates eliminate media outlets and voices that challenge the official covid narrative, including information about lockdowns, masking, and vaccinations, although the official narrative has not only changed willy-nilly but also has been proven factually wrong, as well as socially devastating. Big Digital and the media serve both the state and Big Pharma by eliminating oppositional views regarding the lockdowns, masks, and vaccines, and by pushing fear-inducing propaganda about the virus and its ever-proliferating variants.

As I have written in Google Archipelago, Big Digital must be considered an agent of a leftist authoritarian state—as a “governmentality” or state apparatus functioning on behalf and as part of the state itself. “Governmentality” is a term that should become well known in the coming days and weeks. I adopted the term from Michel Foucault and have emended it to refer to corporations and other nonstate actors who actively undertake state functions. These actors will be doing this in droves with vaccine passports, which will vastly augment state power under a state-corporate alliance.

Similarly, other major corporations perform state-sanctioned roles by echoing and enforcing state-approved ideologies, policies, and politics: indoctrinating employees, issuing woke advertisements, policing the opinions of workers, firing dissidents, and soon demanding vaccine passports from employees and customers.

The overall tendency, then, is toward corporate-state monopolization over all aspects of life, with increasing control by approved principals over information and opinion, economic production, and the political sphere. As the consolidation accelerates, the broad global state will require the elimination of noncompliant, disaffected, and “untrustworthy” economic and political actors. In the United States, with the elimination of political opposition, the tendency is toward uniparty rule, and with it, the merging of the party and state into a singular organ. Author:

Contact Michael Rectenwald

Michael Rectenwald is the author of eleven books, including Thought Criminal, Beyond Woke, Google Archipelago, and Springtime for Snowflakes.

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Watch “Talking About Stoicism 119 My Stoic Mantra” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on April 23, 2021

https://youtu.be/MS8gfU7lWh8

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