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The New Deal’s Dark Underbelly (Book Review)

Posted by M. C. on May 23, 2024

After Roosevelt secured reelection in 1936, the emboldened president made mistakes. The most well-remembered was his attempt to add six additional justices to the Supreme Court. Opponents of FDR’s heavy handedness, including the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Governance (NCUCG), played a key role in defeating the Court Packing Scheme.

The New Deal’s Dark Underbelly

Marcus M. Witcher

When I arrived at the University of Alabama almost a decade ago to begin graduate school and met the historian David Beito (who would become the co-advisor on my dissertation), he was just beginning a project on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disregard for Americans’ civil liberties. Most critics of FDR point to Executive Order 9066 which forced 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps—around two-thirds of which were in fact American citizens—as an anomaly of his otherwise solid record on civil liberties. In The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, however, Beito goes beyond internment and challenges these notions. Through detailed archival research, he has penned one of the most damning scholarly histories of Roosevelt to date.

The Roosevelt consensus among historians, to the extent that it ever existed, has been unraveling for some time. Free market critics such as Robert Higgs, Burt Folsom, Jim Powell, Thomas Fleming, and Amity Shlaes have rightly condemned Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression and his inclination to use the coercive power of the state to impose his policy prescriptions—often with undesirable results and unintended consequences. But there is also an emerging group of historians on the left—Richard Rothstein, Ira Katznelson, Linda Gordon, and Richard Reeves, among others—who criticize FDR for reinforcing the white male breadwinner home, for creating organizations such as the Federal Housing Administration that helped segregate America through redlining, for not supporting anti-lynching legislation, for not ensuring that the New Deal programs benefited minorities on a more equal basis, and for the internment of Japanese Americans. Even David Kennedy’s comprehensive history of the period is critical of Roosevelt on some margins.

Although some historians have criticized FDR, most of the historiography of Roosevelt gives him a pass on the abuse of civil liberties during his administrations and hails him as a champion of democracy often citing his soaring rhetoric and the Four Freedoms. In reality, as Beito demonstrates, Roosevelt’s liberalism did not lead him to care about Americans’ civil liberties and he violated the Bill of Rights time and time again while in office. Further, historians generally treat the internment of people of Japanese ancestry as an exception to Roosevelt’s solid record on civil rights and they generally excuse the president’s actions and cast blame on those who carried out the relocation and internment—such as General John L. Dewitt. Beito set out to prove that Roosevelt’s decision to intern Japanese Americans was consistent with his general disregard for the Bill of Rights.

Beito begins by chronicling the ways that FDR empowered his allies in the Senate to harass, undermine, and delegitimize political enemies and critics of the New Deal through formal investigations. According to Beito, the Black Committee—chaired by Hugo L. Black (D-AL) who was an ardent New Dealer—was used “as an instrument of political surveillance.” The committee was created to look into opponents of Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1935 at a time when many of the New Deal initiatives had suffered significant setbacks from the Supreme Court. The Roosevelt administration empowered and supported the committee’s activities. The IRS issued “a ‘general blanket order’ for access to the tax returns of potential witnesses.” Roosevelt’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) also granted “authorization to require the telegraph companies [to] comply” with Black’s requests that his committee be granted complete access to witness telegrams. Ultimately, the Black Committee succeeded in its goal to “spread the view that the main anti-New Deal organizations represented a small cabal of big business interests” and it successfully discredited opponents of the New Deal and discouraged financial contributions to FDR’s political opponents.

See the rest here

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Britain’s ID Card Proponents Expose Their Own Naivety

Posted by M. C. on May 4, 2024

Now that we realize just how dangerous a digital ID card is for civil liberties, we can talk about how putting faith in the state to execute their plan effectively is incredibly naïve too? There is a phenomenon taking over the United Kingdom where voters know that the government is completely inept at managing almost everything, but voters will still insist that it’s just the wrong people managing the levers of power.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/britains-id-card-proponents-expose-their-own-naivety

by Owen Ashworth

hand holding id card

David Blunkett, the former United Kingdom Home Secretary, appeared on the Politics Live show this week and argued obstinately for the introduction of ID cards, saying “My guess is we will get ID cards under a Labour government.” This is quite concerning since the next government is probably going to be Labour, who are currently 20% ahead in the polls. Blunkett claims that it will be easier to stop the illegal immigration issue with the introduction of ID cards, suggesting that migrants would need to show these ID cards to get access to work and other services. He has said that the opposition is mostly made of “fanatics,” who he implies are being rather unreasonable because we already have other forms of centralized systems like license plate registration etc.

I think it is rather revealing that Blunkett did not take the time to mention all the other areas of life the political class would like ID cards to spread to. This proposal contains ideas like connecting the ID to banking and intimate health records, meaning the government will have a vast array of very private information on their databases available whenever they so desire it. Blunkett laughed off concerns about threats to privacy, naively believing the likelihood of data being used for nefarious purposes is low. This is just another example of state actors thinking they are angelic and will never, ever use power for immoral purposes. History is a great tutor and the teachings are clear: the state acquiring extensive private information leads to colossal and repeated violations of your natural rights.

Advocates for digital ID cards are putting an unnerving amount of trust into their own infallibility. If you take the time to listen to digital ID card proponents, you will notice a recurring theme where they either laugh off concerns that state actors could use them for nefarious purposes, or they argue measures will be put in place to prevent such action. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say they will act morally and never use the information they desire for immoral purposes; they won’t be in that position forever. Their love for democracy necessarily means that at some point there will be another set of state actors in their position. The British Parliament is sovereign and cannot be bound by previous governments so any measures put in place by one, in this case security measures for the usage of the database, can be easily changed by the next government that controls Parliament.

The United Kingdom is so polarized now that the dislike between supporters of all political parties is steaming ahead with no end in sight. The only question you need ask of the proponents of digital ID cards is this: Do you genuinely have faith that political parties you strongly disagree with, and sometimes openly dislike personally, will never use digital ID cards for their own political and immoral purposes? If the answer is anything but an immediate yes—which history shows is a deluded opinion—then you should completely abandon any proposal of digital ID cards. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was initially justified on national security grounds, yet it was revealed by Edward Snowden that these powers were being used to monitor private communications for those who had no relation to any activities that may threaten national security. This example alone should be enough for digital ID proponents to clearly see how using the state to collect a database of private information will be used by immoral state actors to violate the natural rights of numerous individuals in the United Kingdom.

See the rest here

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U.S. Aid, Political Rights, and Civil Liberties in the Middle East and North Africa

Posted by M. C. on December 7, 2023

by Joseph Solis-Mullen

It seems clear on the basis of this analysis, then, that more realist logic dictates the allocating of the nearly $40 billion dollars in U.S. aid that annually flows out to regimes around the world. However, given just how bad Washington has proven at playing grand strategy, from handing Baghdad to some of Tehran’s closest friends in the region to turning Libya into an extremist breeding ground, to pushing Russia and China together, that rationale too should ring hollow.

End foreign aid.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/u-s-aid-political-rights-and-civil-liberties-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/

foreign aid

The period 2003-2018 saw Washington annually spending hundreds of millions to tens of billions of dollars supporting regimes across the Middle East and North Africa. While some of the effects and outcomes of these “investments” are obvious, such as the lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the destruction of Libya, near destruction of Syria, and the rise of ISIS to name just a few, other outcomes and relationships are less readily apparent. Using a combination of the U.S. government’s own records of foreign aid contributions to each state in North Africa and the Middle East, and metrics calculating the relative protections accorded political rights and civil liberties in those same states, this statistical analysis focuses on the relationships, or lack of relationships, between these primary variables.

Below is a summary of its key findings:

  • First, changes in the amount of U.S. aid given had no statistically significant relationship with whether regimes backslid or improved in terms of protecting the civil liberties of their populations.
  • Second, changes in the amount of U.S. aid given had no statistically significant relationship with whether regimes backslid or improved in terms of protecting the political rights of their populations.
  • Third, similarly, there was no statistically significant relationship between a regime’s improvement or backsliding in the protection of the civil liberties of their populations and the amount of U.S. aid that regime received.
  • Fourth, similarly, there was no statistically significant relationship between a regime’s improvement or backsliding in the protecting of the political rights of their populations and the amount of U.S. aid that regime received.
  • Finally, how much aid was dispersed, and which states received it, had no statistically significant relationship with whether or not a Democrat or Republican was in the White House.

The dataset utilized for the series of fixed effects (fe) panel regression analyses comprising this study was created by the author using the United States Agency for International Aid and Development (USAID) Greenbook data for U.S. government transfers to the states of North Africa and the Middle East for the years 2003-2018; while for those states’ political rights and civil liberties scores, the author used the annual “Freedom in the World” country by country report published by Freedom House. That report ranks the relative political rights and civil liberties in each state on a 1-7 scale, with lower numbers associated with more political freedom and better protections for civil rights. Lastly, other variables utilized over the course of the analyses included binary variables for which party controls the White House (1 for Republican, 0 for Democrat), whether the state receiving foreign aid experienced a military coup (1 for coup, 0 for no-coup), or whether there was serious civil unrest in a given country (1 for unrest, 0 for no-unrest).1

U.S. foreign aid programs, managed by organizations like USAID and supported by the U.S. State Department, aim to promote American values such as political freedom, civil liberties, democracy, and human rights across the globe. By providing assistance in various forms, including development aid, capacity-building, and humanitarian assistance, the United States claims to seek the strengthening of democratic institutions, support of civil society, and empowerment of individuals, thereby contributing to a more stable and prosperous world in line with alleged U.S. values. The first battery of tests put these goals under the statistical microscope; regressing U.S. aid by country with the annual fluctuations in its Freedom House scores for political rights and civil liberties for the years 2003-2018, the results are as follows:

See the rest here

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The Democrats’ Disastrous Miscalculation on Civil Liberties

Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2023

Americans have been told a dangerous and uncertain world requires stronger managers and less freedom, but the decline of civil liberties is what started this mess

https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/the-democrats-disastrous-miscalculation?utm_source=direct&r=iw8dv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Matt Taibbi

At the hearing, Pee-Wee’s words of the day were clearly cherry-picked, money, and Elon Musk. Nearly every question asked of Michael Shellenberger and me involved our associations or motives. Florida’s Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said “being a Republican witness certainly casts a cloud over your objectivity” (only a Democratic witness can be trusted), while Dan Goldman tweeted that only someone who signed his version of a loyalty oath — a question about whether or not we “agreed” with Robert Mueller’s two indictments of Russian defendants — can “belong” in the public conversation:

Daniel Goldman @danielsgoldman

It is a complicated issue. But if you (and the GOP) won’t accept that 1) Russia interfered in the 2016 election through social media and 2) preventing that is a legitimate goal of the FBI, then you don’t belong in the nuanced convo on the balance between NATSEC and lawful speech.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

No, I hoped at least one or two Democrats would engage on this complicated issue. Everyone would have benefited from a discussion about weighing speech rights versus “disinformation” in the digital age. Instead we got childish attacks, which just degraded the debate. https://t.co/2l3iivDbbB10:33 PM ∙ Mar 11, 20238,708Likes1,600Retweets

These are behaviors we associated with Republicans in the War on Terror years, when Democrats howled over accusations that John Kerry “looks French.” That the roles have been reversed is old news, but the big question remains: why did this happen?

In the coming days you’re going to see a new release of Twitter Files material, about the creation of a multi-agency working group to address what experts described as vaccine “disinformation and misinformation.”

This cross-platform group looked for people who were just “asking questions,” which they viewed as a rhetorical trick for introducing misinformation. They took aim at people who “framed” ideas like vaccine passports as compulsory or authoritarian, as opposed to emphasizing their utility and necessity, which they interpreted to mean a tendency to more generally negative opinions about vaccines. Moreover, as disclosed last week, they saw a threat in people who wrote about “true stories of vaccine side effects” or “true posts which could fuel hesitancy.”

Most disturbing was a letter to a long list of academics, tech executives, and communications specialists from a staffer for the non-profit Institute for Defense Analysis. It referred to a new type of online influencer, “some of whom enjoy reach commensurate with mass media channels”:

In an age of declining trust in media, government, and institutions, influencers occupy a position of trust and enjoy a perception of authenticity. In addition to the rise of influencers, now-prevalent online crowds have been transformed into a significant force in shaping narratives; they are persistent and can be leveraged to achieve amplification of particular messages in the battle for attention.

“Online crowds have been transformed into a significant force in shaping narratives” is just another way of saying, “independent groups now have politically effective ways to organize,” which the authors clearly saw as a problem in itself.

The digital age has produced an almost involuntary general disrespect for personal boundaries. Probably all of us are guilty of it on some level. We peek, poke, and prod in ways that would have made us ashamed in the pre-Internet years.

We see a more ominous form of it throughout the Twitter Files, where content moderators are forever taking short cuts to judgment by blithely entering the minds of users, to make snap calls about intent. If people transmit true or possibly true stories that conflict with approved narratives, from human rights abuses in the Donbass to first-person accounts of “breakthrough” vaccine cases, these acts are algorithmically detected as intended to deceive and thrown in thoughtcrime baskets: undermining Ukraine, promoting hesitancy, etc.

The campaign against “disinformation” in this way has become the proxy for a war against civil liberties that probably began in 2016, when the reality of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination first began to spread through the intellectual class. There was a crucial moment in May of that year, when Andrew Sullivan published “Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.”

See the rest here

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Parler – Former ACLU Director calls out group’s new selective stance on free speech

Posted by M. C. on February 3, 2022

The ol’ mare ain’t what she used to be.

ACLU’s former Executive Director Ira Glasser

Former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser A group often praised for its work in defending citizens’ civil liberties, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has become the subject of criticism for its current stance on free speech and when it’s considered okay to defend it.

The ACLU’s former Executive Director Ira Glasser appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher to discuss the nonprofit’s changing position on free speech.

“They just produced a couple years ago new guidelines for their lawyers to use when deciding what free speech cases to take,” Glasser said. “In other words, before they defend your free speech, they want to see what you say.

Glasser, with Maher, acknowledged that all organizations change over time. Still, since no one else like the ACLU is defending free speech, the government will inevitably be left to decide.

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Watch “Liberty in America — Are We Past the Point of No Return?” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on October 21, 2021

George Leef gave the fifth talk in our webinar “Restoring Our Civil Liberties.” Giving an overview of the state of civil liberties in the United States, George tells us where we are and where we are going.

https://youtu.be/-QD2wmieYd8

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31 Reasons Why I Won’t Take the Vaccine | Gates of Vienna

Posted by M. C. on February 26, 2021

https://gatesofvienna.net/2021/02/31-reasons-why-i-wont-take-the-vaccine/

Why I Won’t Take the Vaccine

Posted on by Baron Bodissey

The following list was created by the Israeli rabbi Chananya Weissman. Many thanks to MC for the tip.

31 Reasons Why I Won’t Take the Vaccine

by Chananya Weissman

1. It’s not a vaccine. A vaccine by definition provides immunity to a disease. This does not provide immunity to anything. In a best-case scenario, it merely reduces the chance of getting a severe case of a virus if one catches it. Hence, it is a medical treatment, not a vaccine. I do not want to take a medical treatment for an illness I do not have.
2. The drug companies, politicians, medical establishment, and media have joined forces to universally refer to this as a vaccine when it is not one, with the intention of manipulating people into feeling safer about undergoing a medical treatment. Because they are being deceitful, I do not trust them, and want nothing to do with their medical treatment.
3. The presumed benefits of this medical treatment are minimal and would not last long in any case. The establishment acknowledges this, and is already talking about additional shots and ever-increasing numbers of new “vaccines” that would be required on a regular basis. I refuse to turn myself into a chronic patient who receives injections of new pharmaceutical products on a regular basis simply to reduce my chances of getting a severe case of a virus that these injections do not even prevent.
4. I can reduce my chances of getting a severe case of a virus by strengthening my immune system naturally. In the event I catch a virus, there are vitamins and well-established drugs that have had wonderful results in warding off the illness, without the risks and unknowns of this medical treatment.
5. The establishment insists that this medical treatment is safe. They cannot possibly know this because the long-term effects are entirely unknown, and will not be known for many years. They may speculate that it is safe, but it is disingenuous for them to make such a claim that cannot possibly be known. Because they are being disingenuous, I do not trust them, and I want no part of their treatment.
6. The drug companies have zero liability if anything goes wrong, and cannot be sued. Same for the politicians who are pushing this treatment. I will not inject myself with a new, experimental medical device when the people behind it accept no liability or responsibility if something goes wrong. I will not risk my health and my life when they refuse to risk anything.
7. Israel’s Prime Minister has openly admitted that the Israeli people are the world’s laboratory for this experimental treatment. I am not interested in being a guinea pig or donating my body to science.
8. Israel agreed to share medical data of its citizens with a foreign drug company as a fundamental part of their agreement to receive this treatment. I never consented for my personal medical data to be shared with any such entity, nor was I even asked. I will not contribute to this sleazy enterprise.
9. The executives and board members at Pfizer are on record that they have not taken their own treatment, despite all the fanfare and assurances. They are claiming that they would consider it unfair to “cut the line”. This is a preposterous excuse, and it takes an unbelievable amount of chutzpah to even say such a thing. Such a “line” is a figment of their own imagination; if they hogged a couple of injections for themselves no one would cry foul. In addition, billionaires with private jets and private islands are not known for waiting in line until hundreds of millions of peasants all over the world go first to receive anything these billionaires want for themselves.
10. The establishment media have accepted this preposterous excuse without question or concern. Moreover, they laud Pfizer’s executives for their supposed self-sacrifice in not taking their own experimental treatment until we go first. Since they consider us such fools, I do not trust them, and do not want their new treatment. They can have my place in line. I’ll go to the very back of the line.
11. Three facts that must be put together: Bill Gates is touting these vaccines as essential to the survival of the human race. Bill Gates believes the world has too many people and needs to be “depopulated”. Bill Gates, perhaps the richest man in the world, has also not been injected. No rush. Uh, no. I’ll pass on any medical treatments he wants me to take.
12. The establishment has been entirely one-sided in celebrating this treatment. The politicians and media are urging people to take it as both a moral and civic duty. The benefits of the treatment are being greatly exaggerated, the risks are being ignored, and the unknowns are being brushed aside. Because they are being deceitful and manipulative, I will not gamble my personal wellbeing on their integrity.
13. There is an intense propaganda campaign for people to take this treatment. Politicians and celebrities are taking selfies of themselves getting injected (perhaps in some cases pretending to get injected), the media is hyping this as the coolest, smartest, most happy and fun thing to do. It is the most widespread marketing campaign in history. This is not at all appropriate for any medical treatment, let alone a brand new one, and it makes me recoil.
14. The masses are following in tow, posting pictures of themselves getting injected with a drug, feeding the mass peer pressure to do the same. There is something very alarming and sick about this, and I want no part of it. I never took drugs just because “everyone’s doing it” and it’s cool. I’m certainly not going to start now.
 
15. Those who raise concerns about this medical treatment are being bullied, slandered, mocked, censored, ostracized, threatened, and fired from their jobs. This includes medical professionals who have science-based concerns about the drug and caregivers who have witnessed people under their charge suffering horrible reactions and death shortly after being injected. When the establishment is purging good people who risk everything simply to raise concerns about a new medical treatment — even if they don’t outright oppose it — I will trust these brave people over the establishment every time. I cannot think of a single similar case in history when truth and morality turned out to be on the side of the establishment.
16. This is the greatest medical experiment in the history of the human race.
17. It is purposely not being portrayed as the greatest medical experiment in the history of the human race, and the fact that it is a medical experiment at all is being severely downplayed.
18. Were they up front with the masses, very few would agree to participate in such an experiment. Manipulating the masses to participate in a medical experiment under false pretenses violates the foundations of medical ethics and democratic law. I will not allow unethical people who engage in such conduct to inject me with anything.
19. The medical establishment is not informing people about any of this. They have become marketing agents for an experimental drug, serving huge companies and politicians who have made deals with them. This is a direct conflict with their mandate to concern themselves exclusively with the wellbeing of the people under their care. Since the medical establishment has become corrupted, and has become nothing more than a corporate and political tool, I do not trust the experimental drug they want so badly to inject me with.
20. We are being pressured in various ways to get injected, which violates medical ethics and the foundations of democratic society. The best way to get me not to do something is to pressure me to do it.
21. The government has sealed their protocol related to the virus and treatments for THIRTY YEARS. This is information that the public has a right to know, and the government has a responsibility to share. What are they covering up? Do they really expect me to believe that everything is kosher about all this, and that they are concerned first and foremost with my health? The last time they did this was with the Yemenite Children Affair. If you’re not familiar with it, look it up. Now they’re pulling the same shtick. They didn’t fool me the first time, and they’re definitely not fooling me now.
22. The government can share our personal medical data with foreign corporations, but they won’t share their own protocol on the matter with us? I’m out.
23. The establishment has recruited doctors, rabbis, the media, and the masses to harangue people who don’t want to get injected with a new drug. We are being called the worst sort of names. We are being told that we believe in crazy conspiracies, that we are against science, that we are selfish, that we are murderers, that we don’t care about the elderly, that it’s our fault that the government continues to impose draconian restrictions on the public. It’s all because we don’t want to get injected with an experimental treatment, no questions asked. We are even being told that we have a religious obligation to do this, and that we are grave sinners if we do not. They say that if we do not agree to get injected, we should be forced to stay inside our homes forever and be ostracized from public life.
This is horrific, disgusting, a perversion of common sense, morality, and the Torah. It makes me recoil, and only further cements my distrust of these people and my opposition to taking their experimental drug. How dare they?
24. I know of many people who got injected, but none of them studied the science in depth, carefully weighed the potential benefits against the risks, compared this option to other alternatives, was truly informed, and decided this medical treatment was the best option for them. On the contrary, they got injected because of the hype, the propaganda, the pressure, the fear, blind trust in what “the majority of experts” supposedly believed (assuming THEY all studied everything in depth and were completely objective, which is highly dubious), blind trust in what certain influential rabbis urged them to do (ditto the above), or hysterical fear that the only option was getting injected or getting seriously ill from the virus. When I see mass hysteria and cult-like behavior surrounding a medical treatment, I will be extremely suspicious and avoid it.
25. The drug companies have a long and glorious history of causing mass carnage with wonder drugs they thrust on unsuspecting populations, even after serious problems had already become known. Instead of pressing the pause button and halting the marketing of these drugs until these issues could be properly investigated, the drug companies did everything in their power to suppress the information and keep pushing their products. When companies and people have demonstrated such gross lack of concern for human life, I will not trust them when they hype a new wonder drug. This isn’t our first rodeo.
26. Indeed, the horror stories are already coming in at warp speed, but the politicians are not the least bit concerned, the medical establishment is brushing them aside as unrelated or negligible, the media is ignoring it, the drug companies are steaming ahead at full speed, and those who raise a red flag continue to be bullied, censored, and punished. Clearly my life and my wellbeing are not their primary concern. I will not be their next guinea pig in their laboratory. I will not risk being the next “coincidence”.
27. Although many people have died shortly after getting injected — including perfectly healthy young people — we are not allowed to imply that the injection had anything to do with it. Somehow this is anti-science and will cause more people to die. I believe that denying any possible link, abusing people who speculate that there might be a link, and demonstrating not the slightest curiosity to even explore if there might be a link is what is anti-science and could very well cause more people to die. These same people believe I am obligated to get injected as well. No freaking thanks.
28. I am repulsed by the religious, cult-like worship of a pharmaceutical product, and will not participate in this ritual.
29. My “healthcare” provider keeps badgering me to get injected, yet they have provided me no information on this treatment or any possible alternatives. Everything I know I learned from others outside the establishment. Informed consent has become conformed consent. I decline.
30. I see all the lies, corruption, propaganda, manipulation, censorship, bullying, violation of medical ethics, lack of integrity in the scientific process, suppression of inconvenient adverse reactions, dismissal of legitimate concerns, hysteria, cult-like behavior, ignorance, closed-mindedness, fear, medical and political tyranny, concealment of protocols, lack of true concern for human life, lack of respect for basic human rights and freedoms, perversion of the Torah and common sense, demonization of good people, the greatest medical experiment of all time being conducted by greedy, untrustworthy, godless people, the lack of liability for those who demand I risk everything… I see all this and I have decided they can all have my place in line. I will put my trust in God. I will use the mind He blessed me with and trust my natural instincts. Which leads to the final reason which sums up why I will not get “vaccinated.”
31. The whole thing stinks.
 

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The billionaire takeover of civil society – spiked

Posted by M. C. on February 1, 2021

The Omidyar Network

Omidyar, whose Omidyar Network funds AELP, also funds the Democracy Fund which is now part of Omidyar Group (1). The Democracy Fund, in turn, together with the Knight Foundation, Quadrivium, the McArthur Foundation and Luminate (also funded by Omidyar) fund Democracy Works (2). Omidyar also funds Democracy Fund Voice, which in turn contributes to Defending Democracy Together (3). Then there is Healthy Democracy which is funded by the Democracy Fund, Silicon Valley Community Foundation (which also receives money from Democracy Fund) (4) and the Ford Family Foundation. The Omidyar Network also co-funds New Public by Civic Signals, along with the Knight Foundation, One Project, the National Conference on Citizenship and the University of Texas at Austin, Centre for Media Engagement. Of course, the University of Texas at Austin, Centre for Media Engagement is also funded by the Omidyar Network, the Democracy Fund (funded by Omidyar), the Knight Foundation, Robert McCormick Foundation, and Google. To name just a few others, the Ada Lovelace Institute also receives funding from Luminate, the Wellcome Trust and Nuffield Foundation, while TicTec, a MySociety event about ‘civic tech’, is funded by Facebook, Luminate and Google, among others.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/29/the-billionaire-takeover-of-civil-society/

Roslyn Fuller

As the founder and operator of a pro-democracy civil-society organisation, I’ve often been astounded at calls to give NGOs a greater say in rule-making, more visibility during negotiations and privileged access to decision-makers. Because I know what few people do – that small, member-driven, self-funded NGOs are relatively rare.

Instead, the kind of organisation that tends to drive the political agenda is generally billionaire (or at least multimillionaire) funded. The most well-known examples here are groups funded by conservatives like the Koch brothers and large companies like ExxonMobil. I had naively assumed that others criticised these organisations for the same reasons I did – because their actions undermined the principle of democratic equality by giving the impression that their ideas enjoyed far more backing than they did.

However, I stand corrected.

A few months ago, I suffered a rare relapse into naivety and decided that it was about time I got on to the NGO ‘funding’ gravy train. Apparently, floods of money were out there waiting for me in the democracy world. Meanwhile, for incomprehensible reasons, I was stubbornly insisting on behaving like some old-fashioned grandmother, cackling things like, ‘In my day, we used to go around with a tin can collecting for Amnesty International at Christmas! We met in the basement of a pub and everyone paid for their own beer!’

People were so baffled at this attitude that I began to doubt myself and look into how to get funding for projects in the democracy space. And because I thought it would be a good idea to be organised about it, I made a database.

That turned out to be a good idea, because it revealed the influence exerted by a wealthy few over civil society. To illustrate this, I am going to show how just a tiny fraction of a small slice of one funding network starts, but definitely does not end, with eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

I should stress that I have no particular axe to grind against Omidyar, who has supported things I whole-heartedly approve of, like the Intercept under Glenn Greenwald. I also don’t believe that Omidyar is the source of any kind of unique evil or that he is up to anything other wealthy people aren’t. I merely picked him as my starting point to illustrate the generalities of the modern NGO-industrial complex, which includes an end-to-end web of political financing, of which Omidyar is merely a part.

Omidyar provides funding for, among many other things, the American Economic Liberties Project. AELP views itself as a check on the influence of big business on politics. According to its website: ‘All across society, monopolistic corporations govern much of our economic lives and exert extraordinary influence over our democracy.’

According to a typically fawning article about the AELP, during one meeting:

‘the conversation turned to a report the group was producing: a series of graphics showing that different brands of a certain product – or coffee – were, in fact, owned by a small number of conglomerates. The graphics represented the group’s hope that people will understand how concentration affects their lives – and be moved to do something about it. [To which AELP’s executive director Sarah Miller said:] “Let’s just wonder at it for a minute.”’

And that is exactly what we’re going to do here: just wonder at the concentration of power behind a bazillion different brand names and hope people understand how it affects their lives.

See the rest here

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2020: The Year We Lost Our Common Sense, Courage and Civil Liberties — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2020

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For the Fortune 500 companies, however, the pandemic has translated into a windfall. Between April and September, at a time when thousands of small business were quietly getting crushed underfoot, 45 of the 50 most valuable publicly traded American companies turned a profit, according to the Washington Post.

At the same time, at least 27 of the 50 largest firms slashed their workforce this year, collectively cutting more than 100,000 workers, while at the same time distributing billions of dollars to shareholders. As just one example, Walmart distributed more than $10 billion to its investors during the pandemic while terminating 1,200 office staff.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/12/28/2020-the-year-we-lost-our-common-sense-courage-and-civil-liberties/

Robert Bridge

Once it became clear to the Western elite that their subjects would readily accept draconian anti-Covid measures, it encouraged them to usher in a code-red lifestyle where there will be no ‘return to normal’ in the foreseeable future and, possibly, never.

If nothing else, nobody can say we were not warned about the madness that would descend upon leap year 2020, making it one of the worst 366 days ever recorded on the Gregorian calendar.

On October 18, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, together with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted the incredibly visionary Event 201, an exercise that simulated the outbreak of a pandemic “transmitted from bats to people that eventually becomes…transmissible from person to person.”

The simulation proved to be so uncannily similar to the real thing that started just three months later – from imagining a dramatic drop in air travel and business, to breaks in the global supply chain – that Johns Hopkins eventually felt compelled to release a statement saying their exercise was not intended to be a prophecy of future events.

Isn’t it crazy how “social distance for two weeks so our hospitals aren’t overwhelmed” evolved into “social distance til 2022 until a vaccine is developed…”

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) April 26, 2020

“To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise,” the statement read, in what just might be the creepiest caveat ever. “For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction… We are not now predicting that the nCoV-2019 outbreak will kill 65 million people.”

Shortly after the global elite played Nostradamus, on January 15th to be exact (the very same day, incidentally, that the Democrats presented articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump in the Senate), the first Covid-positive person arrived in Seattle from Wuhan, the Chinese city where the disease is said to have sprung to life. From there it has been a non-stop roller-coaster ride of government-sponsored insanity.

Before continuing, it is important to remember the context with which the pandemic has been happening, that is, in the most consequential U.S. presidential election in recent memory. It should thus come as no surprise that the Democrats and Republicans would use the scourge to achieve some sort of advantage, demonstrating Machiavellian opportunism at its very best. Indeed, such is the nature of the political beast.

For example, although Trump shut down the U.S. border on January 31 to Chinese nationals, the Democrats and leftist media pounced, saying the U.S. leader responded too late to make a difference. Even Trump’s use of the term ‘Chinese virus’ was slammed by his opponents as ‘racist.’ Meanwhile, it was the Democrats themselves who were the pioneers in taking the first draconian steps of locking down society to stop the contagion.

On March 16, 2020, six counties in northern California and the city of Berkley ordered an unprecedented stay-at-home order for some 7 million Bay Area residents. This was all part of “flattening the curve” logic that would “buy time for hospitals to gear up for the onslaught…” Well, 233 days later political leaders are not only still flattening the curve, but flattening their economies as well. Today, although the survival rate for those infected with Covid-19 is reported to be in the neighborhood of 99.85 percent, harsh lockdowns continue to wreak havoc, not least of all for small businesses.

Over 100,000 restaurants have closed this year due to lockdowns, but not a penny for them in the “Covid Relief” bill?

— Cari Kelemen (@KelemenCari) December 22, 2020

Consider the situation in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom has mandated yet another ‘shelter-in-place’ order, which has shuttered, among other businesses, hair salons, barbershops, personal care services, movie theaters, wineries, bars, breweries, family entertainment centers and amusement parks. What is hard to fathom, however, is how the corporate big-box stores are considered “essential businesses,” apparently immune to the scourge, while the small business owner is trashed as expendable.

By way of example, consider the tragic plight of Angela Marsden, the owner of Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill in Los Angeles. In an effort to comply with the ever-changing anti-Covid rules, Marsden spent over $80,000 to build an outdoor patio so she could stay in business during the pandemic. With Newsom’s latest lockdown restrictions, however, city officials denied her permission to serve clients on location, even in the parking lot.

To add insult to injury, the authorities granted permission for a film company to set up a large outdoor eating area for its staff just across the road from where Marsden had built her patio.

“I’m losing everything,” she exclaimed in a video posted to Twitter that has been watched almost 10 million times. “Everything I own is being taken away from me. They have not given us money and they have shut us down. We cannot survive; my staff cannot survive…”

This is criminal. Complete BS!!! I guess this is “science”! RT @ClayTravis: Watch this video of an LA bar owner that perfectly crystallizes the absurdity of California’s absurd and ridiculous shutdown rules. pic.twitter.com/XVLmAVyy70

— Larry The Cable Guy (@GitRDoneLarry) December 5, 2020

For the Fortune 500 companies, however, the pandemic has translated into a windfall. Between April and September, at a time when thousands of small business were quietly getting crushed underfoot, 45 of the 50 most valuable publicly traded American companies turned a profit, according to the Washington Post.

At the same time, at least 27 of the 50 largest firms slashed their workforce this year, collectively cutting more than 100,000 workers, while at the same time distributing billions of dollars to shareholders. As just one example, Walmart distributed more than $10 billion to its investors during the pandemic while terminating 1,200 office staff.

To put these figures another way, since mid-March – when President Donald Trump declared a national emergency – America’s 614 billionaires saw their net worth explode by $931 billion in total. Jeff Bezos, for example, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, saw his private wealth go from $73.2bn since the start of the crisis to a record $186.2bn.

What’s Good For Thee Is Not Good For Me

A thread ⬇ https://t.co/42p9Yc2xY7

— Patriotic Candor (@PatrioticCandor) December 3, 2020

It would probably come as no surprise that the very individuals who helped pave the way for astronomic wealth generation among the 1 percent, are the same ones breaking their own rules. Governor Newsom and his wife, for example, attended a birthday party with a dozen friends at the French Laundry restaurant in San Francisco. Equally maddening is that Dustin Corcoran, the CEO of the California Medical Association, was also in attendance. And who could forget the photo of Nancy Pelosi walking through a California hair salon when such businesses were deemed ‘super spreaders’?

Such incidences only served to reinforce the idea that the draconian lockdowns, the worst of which are centered on Democratic-controlled states, were specifically designed not to contain a contagion, but to foster as much anger and frustration among the general population in the most consequential presidential election in many decades. After all, unhappy people have a tendency to vote out their leaders whom they believe are responsible for such dire circumstances. And with the mainstream media almost totally in the Democratic anti-Trump camp, placing the blame on the president has proven no difficult task.

So where do we go from here? Now that we have reached the end of 2020, will the situation begin to improve? Will political leaders begin to loosen the screws and let some semblance of normality return once again? Or will people be forced to rise up and demand the return of their freedom and liberty?

At this great loggerhead in human history, there has been much talk about creating ‘freedom passes’ that will be demanded from people before they are allowed to travel or visit any sort of entertainment again.

“People who test negative for coronavirus could get a five-day freedom pass to attend big events or access public buildings, under plans being considered by public health experts running a trial program in England,” reported Bloomberg in November.

Already, five global airlines – United Airlines, Lufthansa, Virgin Atlantic, Swiss International Air Lines and JetBlue – have announced they will observe the so-called CommonPass to passengers on some flights from December.

“The project, developed by non-profit group The Commons Project and backed by the World Economic Forum, uses a digital certificate downloaded to a mobile phone to show a passenger has tested negative for Covid-19,” according to the Financial Times. Here is the kicker: “The airlines are not making the CommonPass mandatory, but in time it will also be used to provide proof of vaccination.”

It seems rather obvious where all of this is heading: mandatory vaccination for anyone who ever wishes to board an aircraft or visit another entertainment venue again. Over time, it is not difficult to imagine a vaccine regimen extending to all human activities, including shopping and even getting a job. Yet what about the millions of people who have expressed extreme skepticism in being administered a vaccine that has been developed so quickly?

Whatever the case may be, should such a plan of action become mandatory, peoples’ lives will be entirely dominated by fears over a virus, together with an endless bureaucratic process of being tested and approved to move about. Vaccines will become a regular requirement since viruses are in a state of constant mutation, which makes them the authoritarians dream instrument of domination.

Such a system of totalitarian control, should it ever come into fruition, will have achieved in mere months what fascism could not in years: the pacification and unification of a great swath of the world’s population not by bayonet, but by syringe. In fact, today the people of London are fleeing their fair city not out of fear of the virus per se, but out of fear of the lockdown restrictions put in place by the authorities. To put it otherwise, the world gave an inch and the globalists took a mile, and a person would have to be a fool to believe it could have turned out any other way.

© 2010 – 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org.

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‘The greatest assault on civil liberties in our time…’ – RPI August 22nd Update

Posted by M. C. on August 22, 2020

The “experts” are literally destroying the next generation, and because of fear Americans are going along. The young son of a friend has recently taken his own life, incapable of managing the despair of the hell created for him by the monsters who have grabbed power in a manner that would even make Hitler blush. 

And they aren’t even making the older people safer with these asinine policies! In fact, thugs like Andrew Cuomo in New York purposely pursued a policy guaranteed to kill a maximum of older Americans – putting very sick people into nursing homes!

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/libertyassault?e=4e0de347c8

Dear Friends of the Ron Paul Institute:

First allow me to sincerely apologize for the scarcity of these updates of late. Since the Covid madness has taken over our country, spreading the real virus of authoritarianism to every corner of our republic, we have been barely able to come up for air. Literally every waking hour we spend preparing the next day’s episode of the Liberty Report, focusing on disproving the lies and correcting the misperceptions created by a mainstream media and politically-motivated actors to turn the country into a gulag. As you can imagine, refuting the lies of the mainstream media and politicized health “specialists” is beyond a full time job. They have all the resources at their fingertips, we are extremely limited so we have to work harder. And we have been so doing. 

The reaction to the virus outbreak has been the greatest assault on civil liberties in our time and the approach of those in authority will go down as perhaps the greatest disaster in US history. Even the Director of the CDC admits that more Americans are dying from lockdowns than from coronavirus. Meanwhile the virus is behaving as have all viruses in history: as it moves through society it infects, leaving healthier victims with immunity who in turn act as a wall to prevent infection of the vulnerable. Politicized medicine got in the way of this normal process, which cruelly led to a much longer period of potential exposure of the virus to the unhealthy and aged, its prime victims.

Young people, despite the media pile-on, are as Trump said nearly immune to this virus. According to CDC data, less than 300 Americans under the age of 24 have died from Covid-19. There is literally a better chance of being struck by lightening than dying of Covid if you are under 24. In fact by far the majority of deaths have occurred in those over 80 with other serious existing health problems. Yet these young people are being tortured by stay-at-home orders and masks and cancellation of school and destruction of their economic futures and cancellation of their very lives. No wonder three in four young persons has reported anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts over the coronavirus lockdowns.

The “experts” are literally destroying the next generation, and because of fear Americans are going along. The young son of a friend has recently taken his own life, incapable of managing the despair of the hell created for him by the monsters who have grabbed power in a manner that would even make Hitler blush. 

And they aren’t even making the older people safer with these asinine policies! In fact, thugs like Andrew Cuomo in New York purposely pursued a policy guaranteed to kill a maximum of older Americans – putting very sick people into nursing homes! Even the policies of lockdown and house arrest of the healthy have put the old and vulnerable at risk: the “second wave” is just a delayed first wave and the longer the virus hangs around without hitting the wall of herd immunity the more time the susceptible people can catch it and die.

Fear is the tool used throughout history to manipulate populations and to introduce totalitarian rule. A terrified population cannot make rational decisions, instead they desperately rush to hand their decisions off to a willing dictator to make for them. We know this movie and it does not end well. 

Yesterday the unelected state health commissioner of Virginia, Norman Oliver, announced that residents of the state would have no choice in the matter: the coronavirus vaccine would be mandatory. No exceptions. Your body, the state’s choice. 

From Germany to Ireland to beyond, citizens are rising up to protest the authoritarianism imposed by their governments in the name of a virus. Thus far in the US we have seen little of that. Unless Americans are willing to fight for their freedom there will soon be no freedom to fight for…

Sincerely yours,

Daniel McAdams
Executive Director
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

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