Thursday, March 2, 2023

The Woke Wrecking Machine ~ VDH

Americans should end it now 
before it ends America first.


Almost everything that has followed from the woke mass hysteria gripping the nation since 2020 has proved disastrous. 

Wokeism destroys meritocracy in favor of forced equality of result—history’s prescription for civilizational decline. 

If we continue with the woke hiring of administrators, air traffic controllers, ground crews, pilots, and rail workers, there will be even more news of disasters and near-miss airline crashes. 

Wokeness demands a McCarthyite suppression of free expression. No wonder a woke FBI recently hired out social media censors to suppress stories it deemed unhelpful. 

Soviet-style, wokeism mandates strict ideological party-line narratives under the cover of “science.” No wonder a woke government lied that requiring vaccines would prevent both infection and infectiousness. 

Woke substitutes race for class in its eternal neo-Marxist quest to divide permanently the nation along racial lines, between victims and victimizers. 

Yet wokeism recently has embarrassed itself as never before. 

Take the COVID pandemic. 

The Department of Energy has joined the FBI and is now attributing the origins of the pandemic to a leak of a likely engineered virus from the top-security virology lab in Wuhan, China. 

Wokesters had long suppressed that reality, demonizing any who rejected its orthodox lies and spoke a larger truth: A dystopic China is not our global partner in greening the planet. Criticizing Stalinist China is not “racist.” China is not building a progressive society that is a model for others. 

The ongoing environmental catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio, following the train derailment revealed more woke moral bankruptcy. 

Ostensibly the ensuing toxic spill and noxious plume have poisoned a poor and working-class small town. It should have galvanized the old Democratic Party that once voiced loud support for all green causes and championed the lower American classes. 

But woke ended all that—substituting racial chauvinism for class concerns and ideology for genuine worry over the environment. 

Woke dogma mandates that pollution and poverty are no longer concerns—if they affect the white poor who are stereotyped collectively as privileged victimizers. 

Wokesters insisted that California is the greatest casualty of “climate change” defined as permanent drought.

Purported climate change required radical new bureaucratic rules and antidemocratic mandates over irrigation supplies, ground water, and contracted water deliveries from public reservoirs.

But then it rained. And it snowed. And it became terribly cold in supposedly scorching California. 

Southern California is blanketed in snow. 

Even so, for much of this cold, wet winter, state officials continued to claim the man-made drought was in full force. But finally, the most recent frigid, wet weather strangled the woke drought—and with it the credibility of our climate change Cassandras. 

Americans sympathize with Ukraine’s plight as Vladimir Putin seeks to destroy its autonomy. But woke brooked no deviation from the party line that Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zelenskyy is a saint, while Russia is near bankrupt due to sanctions, and doomed to lose the war. 

Accordingly, the United States was obligated to give Ukraine a veritable blank check given Kyiv’s commitment to freedom. Zelenskyy’s team now even talks of a victorious Ukrainian armored counteroffensive into Moscow’s Red Square. 

This week, however, we are learning the Russian economy is nearly as strong now as it was before the war. It has mobilized 700,000 troops to ensure that eastern Ukraine becomes a Verdun-like killing field where tens of thousands more will be ground up. 

Ukraine bars dissidents and maintains a government media monopoly. And the more Joe Biden promises another $2-3 billion in biweekly aid, the more Zelenskyy acts as if it is a pittance given what supposedly stingy Americans should be capable of supplying. 

Meanwhile, at home, new woke protocols mandate race as essential rather than incidental to the human experience. Supposedly such fixations will heal racial wounds. 

Under the new reparatory and compensatory diversity, equity, and inclusion rules, those deemed non-white were to be hired and admitted to colleges in greater numbers than their demographics. Even the old mandated proportional representation quotas were no longer enough. 

But racial chauvinism, nonstop talk of reparations, and the new campus segregation have not resulted in better racial relations. 

Polls show that there are greater racial tensions than ever before. 

Data on interracial and hate crimes show even sharper racial disproportionalities. The incidence of both black violent criminal perpetrators and black crime victims are near historical highs. 

Woke policies of no cash bail, downgrading felonies, and no jail time only spiked violent lawlessness. 

Our elite universities are now fully woke. Almost weekly an embarrassing story further erodes their credibility and reputation. 

Ridiculous lists of  taboo words are issued on woke campuses, barring incendiary words like “American” and “immigrant.” 

Bragging of segregated dorms, graduations, and safe spaces recalls Jim Crow, not woke racial utopias. 

Grades and standards are deemed counterrevolutionary, even as incompetent graduates increasingly fail to impress employers. 

Someday wokeism will disappear because it is inherently nihilistic and cannibalistic. 

But in the meantime, Americans should end it now before it ends America first.




X22, And we Know, and more- March 2nd

 



Now that the goodbye posts have thankfully stopped (for now), I don't feel so overwhelmed by emotions now for the 1st time all day! 😁 Feels so good.

Here's tonight's news:


Iran Again: Does Anybody Care?

Iran Again: Does Anybody Care?


Israel certainly does, even if that means being abandoned by its allies.


One of the early scenes in the movie 1776 shows John Adams despairing for America’s freedom from British oppression. He sings, “Is anybody there? Does anybody care?” That scene came to mind when the latest news broke about Iran’s hell-for-leather race to develop nuclear weapons.

According to a report by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency earlier this month, Iran has enriched uranium to 84 percent, just 6 percent shy of weapons grade, which is 90 percent enriched. Iran has said its enrichment centrifuges were only capable of enriching to a level of 60 percent, which they reached last year.

The level of enrichment for peaceful purposes stops at about 20 percent, the level needed to fuel reactors for research or to generate electric power.

Iran has always sworn its nuclear program has been solely for peaceful purposes, but it has been lying about the program since it began soon after the ayatollahs took power in 1979. Iran’s aim has always been to develop nuclear weapons.

For about a decade, Iran’s nuclear weapons program proceeded under the purblind eye of Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). ElBaradei engaged in every sort of chicanery to cover Iran’s tracks and make excuses for its nuclear weapons development.

Then-President Barack Obama negotiated his “Joint Cooperative Plan of Action” in 2015. His agreement, he assured the world, would prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons for 15 years. Iran agreed to limit its uranium enrichment and end its ability to produce nuclear weapons for that time. But there were undisclosed “side agreements” that enabled Iran to “self-inspect” some of its primary nuclear research sites, with predictable results.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always been the strongest critic of Obama’s deal with Iran. On April 30, 2018, Netanyahu gave a televised briefing about Iran’s nuclear weapons program based on some 50,000 documents stolen by the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency earlier that year.

Netanyahu’s briefing was detailed, showing a tremendous amount of information from those documents and proving, without a shadow of a doubt, that Iran had been engaged in developing nuclear weapons. But the documents were several years old, enabling Obama — and the European signatories, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom — to deride it because, they contended, there was nothing in Netanyahu’s briefing to show that Iran hadn’t stopped its development of nuclear weapons.

Then-President Donald Trump canceled the Obama agreement about a week later, on May 8, 2018. It was, as he said, the worst deal ever.

Since the moment he became president, Joe Biden has been trying to revive the Obama deal with Iran. Although the negotiations have reportedly been ended due to Iran’s recalcitrance, Germany, France, and Britain have continued to try to revive it.

That effort continues to this day, as does Iran’s continued effort to develop nuclear weapons.

There is one nation that cares because it has to: Israel. The Jewish nation has been threatened with eradication by Iran so many times over the past 30 years that the Israelis have probably lost count.

We’ve lost count of how many U.S. presidents have promised the world that Iran will not be allowed to develop (or otherwise obtain) nuclear weapons. Among them are George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden.

It now falls to Joe Biden to take whatever action is necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. He won’t: he’s still fixated on a revival of Obama’s 2015 deal as the means to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

A Feb. 23 Fox News report says, based on a leaked report, that Netanyahu, after five meetings with military and intelligence officials, is preparing military strikes on Iran’s nuclear development facilities. The report quotes Netanyahu as saying last Tuesday, “A necessary condition and often a sufficient condition is credible military action.… The longer you wait, the harder that becomes. We’ve waited very long. The only thing that has ever stopped rogue nations from developing nuclear weapons is a credible military threat or a credible military action.”

Netanyahu’s statement is a warning that time is running out and that Israel will act if the U.S. and Europe won’t. It is also a plea for those nations’ help and to Saudi Arabia, which is also a primary target for Iran’s nuclear weapons.

Israel, as this column has often pointed out, is highly dependent on the U.S. for its security. That means Netanyahu wouldn’t attack Iran without Biden’s permission unless the danger to Israel were imminent.

Biden won’t give Israel permission to attack, which leaves Netanyahu in an impossible position. Netanyahu can either attack Iran, trying to stop (or at least delay) an existential threat to Israel, or he can obey the orders of a president whose incompetence is a matter of record and alienate his only real ally.

Any Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities would require air refueling, which the Israelis have, suppression of Iran’s air defenses, which the Israelis can do, and the use of either nuclear weapons or deep-penetrating bombs.

In 2009, then-President Obama reportedly sold 55 penetrating bombs to Israel. Among them could not have been the massive ordinance penetrator that weighs 30,000 pounds and can only be carried by aircraft such as the B-2. Israel has no aircraft capable of carrying that massive bomb. Smaller weapons may not be capable of destroying Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities.

Any Israeli attack on Iran would begin a massive war in the Middle East. Iran would counterattack with its own missile forces and aircraft. It would order its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, to rain its thousands of missiles on Israel from Lebanon and, possibly, try to attack it with ground forces. Israel’s anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems, Arrow and David’s Sling, could be overwhelmed in such attacks. They have only so many war shots they can fire at incoming missiles and aircraft.

It is entirely possible that Israel could lose such a war. The Saudis might help them fight Iran, but it will come down to our willingness to fight.

Our military is stretched thin. Our weapons stockpiles have been depleted by Biden’s aid to Ukraine. One study, which I referred to last week, predicts that we would run out of munitions to feed our weapon systems in one week were the Chinese to attack Taiwan. European governments — even if, as unlikely as it is, they would want to help Israel — lack the military capability to do so.

Israel is so small a nation that one nuclear weapon could destroy its government and kill much of its population. Biden is incapable of focusing on Iran’s threat to the civilized world. He’s too busy with Ukraine to worry about Iran or China or think about the coming Iranian–Israeli war. He would likely blame Israel for the conflict and refuse to come to its aid.

As I have written before, Israel should not have to face Iran alone. Biden should make a statement pulling us out of any talks with Iran. He should revive the “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Iran imposed by former president Trump and ensure the world — including our pusillanimous NATO allies — that Iran will not be allowed to develop or obtain nuclear weapons.

Biden will not, of course, do any of that. Israel will have to face Iran alone, and soon.


Senators Grill Merrick Garland About a Weaponized DOJ, Yet Miss the Person Doing the Weaponization



Much was made yesterday surrounding a Senate hearing where Attorney General Merrick Garland was grilled about a host of issues highlighting the political weaponization of the DOJ.  Many ‘right side’ articles are noting Garland came across as weak, unsteady and nervous as he attempted to obfuscate specific examples and larger points of criticism.

Unfortunately, almost everyone is missing something. AG Merrick Garland has a control operative behind him.  That person is the uber political Deputy AG Lisa Monaco. AG Garland isn’t the one calling the shots on these specific examples being cited, DAG Monaco is.   Watch this questioning from the perspective that Monaco, not Garland, is the one calling the shots on the weaponization specifics. WATCH:


The Washington Post article being cited by Hawley is HERE.  In the article excerpt below, insert the name “Monaco” to replace the word “prosecutors” and everything else makes sense, including the stumbling ineptitude of Garland – who was installed specifically because he was, like Biden, a controllable puppet.

[…] Prosecutors argued that new evidence suggested Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise raid at the property. But two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.

Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute, one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president. The FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug. 8, recovering more than 100 classified items, among them a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities. (read more)

It is frustrating to see most punditry miss the importance of the people who operate as shadows in control.  In a similar way that most avoid noticing the importance of Mary McCord in the operations to remove President Trump, Lisa Monaco operates in the background of current Main Justice events and yet no one is paying attention.

When Chicago Jesus was carrying out his ‘fundamental change’ agenda, it was the women around him who spearheaded the operations and held the most steadfast loyalty.  Susan Rice, Lisa Monaco, Kathleen Ruemmler, Samantha Power, Sally Yates and Mary McCord were all key figures in the systems as they were created and weaponized. Those loyal guardians of the agenda are still around, Lisa Monaco specifically as Deputy Attorney General, yet few pay attention to them.

Current Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco was Barack Obama’s former homeland security advisor and former legal counsel in the White House.  Monaco was the tip of the spear in using political activism under the guise of ‘homeland security’ to target political opposition.  That type of political targeting is her specialty.  Lisa Monaco is now the Deputy Attorney General of the United States.

As a direct result of her skill-set in combination with her current position, it is a guarantee that Deputy AG Lisa Monaco authored the DOJ targeting memorandum that AG Merrick Garland eventually signed and sent to the FBI that became explosive around the issue of the FBI targeting parents at school board meetings. Again, weaponizing internal political targeting under the guise of homeland security concerns is what Monaco is specifically famous for doing.

You might remember, even before becoming President Obama’s key Homeland Security Adviser, Lisa Monaco was the head of the DOJ National Security Division. You might also remember the DOJ-NSD was at the center of the “small group” collaboration between DOJ-NSD and FBI Counterintelligence unit.  Remember, it was the DOJ-NSD (via Sally Yates) who would not allow OIG Oversight.  (John Carlin quit; Mary McCord quit; David Laufman quit, all to protect themselves from incoming Trump)

During the 2015/2016 presidential election Lisa Monaco was one of the key WH figures doing the unmasking of raw intelligence provided by the “small group” collaborators (with Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes).  Remember all the unmasking from the user account of Samantha Power?  Yeah, that datapoint disappeared with Power just saying, “it wasn’t me.”

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco was also one of the key policy strategists, heck, she was the architect, who utilized the compartmentalization of intelligence to hide the fingerprints of collaboration. This was the issue that initially stymied HSPCI Devin Nunes.

You may also remember in June of 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that Deputy AG Lisa Monaco would lead a “whole of government” effort to label any political opposition to the Biden regime as “domestic terrorists”.

To facilitate that objective, Garland announced that DAG Monaco was reconstituting “the domestic terrorism executive committee,” an investigative agency process used in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing in 1995. Additionally, Garland noted the January 6th Capitol Hill protest was the current equivalent of the 1995 bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. The Domestic Terrorism committee, led by Monaco, would focus their efforts at ensuring the center of U.S. government is never again put at risk.

The overarching Lawfare framework, the issues which are being cited by the Senate today, was created by President Obama’s former White House Legal Counsel and current U.S. Asst Attorney General Lisa Monaco.  DAG Lisa Monaco is also the connection between the DOJ targeting efforts of the J6 members, and the bridge to Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Just as Andrew Weissmann was really the control operative behind Robert Mueller, so too is Lisa Monaco the control operative behind AG Merrick Garland.


Biden’s DHS Just Revealed How It Plans To Use Your Tax Dollars To Interfere In U.S. Elections



In its latest attempt to interfere in the electoral process, the Biden administration announced on Monday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is planning to award millions of taxpayer dollars to local governments throughout the country for so-called “election security” purposes.

In an agency press release, the department revealed its plans to provide “more than $2 billion in funding for eight fiscal year 2023 preparedness grant programs,” which it claims are designed to “help state, local, tribal, and territorial officials prepare for, prevent, protect against, and respond to” so-called “acts of terrorism.” Under Joe Biden’s presidency, DHS has routinely identified targeting “domestic violent extremism” as its top priority. Of course, such proclamations are never in reference to violence carried out by leftist groups such as Antifa or Black Lives Matter, but rather right-of-center people and organizations that threaten the regime’s narratives and policy goals.

Included in the new DHS press release are six “national priority areas” for the 2023 grants, with one of the priorities being what the department calls “election security.” Under the directive, grant recipients such as the agency’s “Urban Area Security Initiative” are required to spend at least 3 percent of their total grant money on so-called “election security” efforts. As even the left-wing Bipartisan Policy Center admitted, federal funding for elections has never been conducted this way.

While the press release doesn’t specify what the agency means by “election security,” a separate report detailing the specifics of the 2023 grant program lists several vague “core capabilities” of election security, including “cybersecurity,” “operational coordination,” and “long-term vulnerability reduction.” The document also lists numerous examples of potential projects local election offices could invest their grant money in, such as “online harassment and targeting prevention services” and “physical/site security measures — e.g., locks, shatter proof glass, alarms, access controls, etc.”

Furthermore, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has indicated these grants will be directed toward primarily urban areas, where voters routinely favor Democrat candidates over Republican ones. Recall how private funding from partisan actors such as Mark Zuckerberg was injected into government election offices primarily in the blue, urban areas of swing states, creating what amounted to a Democrat get-out-the-vote effort. As Mayorkas said:

This year, we are therefore expanding the reach of our more than $2 billion in funding by adding four additional urban areas as grant recipients: Austin, Texas; Honolulu, Hawaii; Jacksonville, Florida; and Nashville, Tennessee. This is in addition to the thirty-six urban areas we continue to support, bringing the total number of funded urban areas to 40.

The new directive is hardly the first example of Biden or his administration attempting to insert themselves into state and local election administration. In March 2021, Biden signed an executive order mandating that all federal agencies, and thus the partisan bureaucrats who staff them, “expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.” If past is prologue, these efforts will be concentrated in Democrat hubs, but the plans have been obscured.

Efforts by government watchdog groups to obtain documents related to the order have been met with resistance by federal agencies, which worked relentlessly in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms to cover up how they intended to follow the president’s directive.

Further attempts to insert the federal government into the electoral process continued into Election Day, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) deployed attorneys from its Civil Rights Division to mostly blue and swing counties to monitor polling locations “for compliance with the federal voting rights laws.” Among the localities the agency surveilled were Democrat strongholds such as Fulton County, Georgia, and Wayne County, Michigan.

The DOJ’s sensationalized pledge to “prohibit [the] intimidation of voters” came at the same time legacy media outlets were publishing story after story warning that GOP poll watchers were plotting to disrupt local election precincts on Election Day. Like most other media-manufactured narratives, the tale never came true.



Secession Is Inevitable. War to Prevent It Is Optional.

 Secession Is Inevitable. 

War to Prevent It Is Optional.


Never is a very, very long time in politics. Yet whenever the topic of secession or so-called national divorce comes up, how often do we hear that “secession will never happen.” It’s difficult to tell if people using the term “never” actually mean it. If they mean “not in the next ten or twenty years,” that’s plausible. But if they truly mean “not in the next 100 (or more) years,” it’s clear they’re working on the level of absolutely pure, unfounded speculation. Such statements reflect little more than personal hopes and dreams.

Experience is clear that the state of most polities often changes enormously in the span of a few decades. Imagine Russia in 1900 versus Russia in 1920. Or perhaps China in 1930 versus China in 1950. If someone had told the Austrian emperor in 1850 that his empire would be completely dismembered by 1919, he probably would have refused to believe it. Few British subjects in 1945 expected the empire to be all but gone by 1970. In the 1970s, the long-term survival of the Soviet Union appeared to be a fait accompli. For a visual sense of this, simply compare world maps from 1900 and 1950. In less than the span of a human lifetime, the political map of the world often changes so as to be unrecognizable.

Yet there are always those who are quite comfortable with the status quo and who tell themselves it will continue indefinitely. Many find comfort in the hope that their favorite national regime will be a thousand-year reich, living on indefinitely into the rosy future of “progress.” Claims to political immortality are also frequently important as rallying cries in support of the state. As French Marxist philosopher Régis Debray noted, the idea that “France is eternal” may be empirically untrue, but the sentiment nonetheless serves to motivate the French soldier or French nationalist to preserve his regime.

Meanwhile, the opposite impulse, a recognition of the regime’s mortalityis seen by many as a kind of heresy against the national political idols. It may be obviously true, but to say it out loud is “treason.” The cry of “traitor,” of course, has long been the go-to strategy for those with an emotional attachment to the regime. Like many heresies before it, this one must not go unpunished. Thus, “traitor” was the cry of the French republican who thought it better to butcher women and children in the Vendée rather than allow that portion of France to be independent. It was the cry of the Turkish imperialist who carried out a genocide against Armenian separatists.

The reality is that the current shape of any regime is more tenuous than many hope. The debate is not whether the US regime will fundamentally change in size and nature. The question is when and in what way. Those who are willing to examine the possibility of gradually unwinding state power peacefully through decentralization—rather than letting internal national conflicts explode into violence and revolution eventually—display a far better grasp of political history than the knee-jerk unionists.

The emotional nature of this opposition to secession can be seen in the fact that the opposition grants no middle ground in the debate. The only allowable options are the status quo or war.

Options for the “middle ground” include a confederation built on a consensus model in the style of the old Dutch Republic. There is the model of the very loose confederation in the style of the old Swiss confederation. There is the option of a customs union with voluntary membership, such as the European Union. There is the option of a mutual defense compact among independent polities, as we find in a multitude of defense leagues. None of these options require a state that imposes nationwide regulation and taxation in the manner of the enormous administrative state that we have today.

Yet most of those who oppose secession also oppose all of these options. We don’t hear, “Well, secession is too far, so let’s move toward a much more decentralized model.” Why do we never get this olive branch from the centralizers? Because their opposition to secession is more about supporting the status quo. They want a national government to impose nationwide policy in a way that reflects the national ruling class’s values. It’s the colonialist mindset all over again: “Oh, we can’t let those people in state X set their own rules for elections/abortion/trade. Those people are too unenlightened/racist/stupid to be allowed local autonomy.”

This intransigence can also be found in the way that the opposition often delights in the idea of using violence against potential separatists. Congressman Eric Swalwell, for instance, suggested the US government use nuclear weapons against internal separatists. And then there are those who make light of the idea of a second blood-soaked civil war. Indeed, the insistence on tying twenty-first-century decentralization to a war in the mid-nineteenth century (160 years ago) implies that the unionist “solution” back then justifies the same solution now. Note the emphasis is always on the American Civil War and not on the many examples of peaceful secession movements: Iceland from Denmark, Norway from Sweden, Singapore from Malaysia, Malta from the British Empire, and the Baltic states from the Soviet Union (to name a few). Instead, the average American antisecessionist is apparently obsessed with making war against his own neighbors. 

Of course, that sort of thing can only be carried out today if modern Americans are willing to die and kill—or have their children die and kill—in the name of “preserving the union.” How many are willing to do this? Hopefully not many. Those who are willing to do it can only be described as fanatics.

The presence of these proviolence antisecessionists does remind us of the continued danger of political union, however. Those who favor union may interpret mere discussions of disunity as a sign of the need for ever-greater federal control over the population. This is also the strategy preferred by states: tendencies toward disunion are countered by an ever-stronger and ever-more-unyielding state. The strategy is tried and true. This is how a fragmenting Roman Empire was preserved for another 150 years after a breakup seemed all but assured during the third century. The emperor turned the empire into a military dictatorship. The same method of imposing unity has been employed countless times across countless polities—and at great cost to human rights and self-determination. Yet not even Diocletian’s dictatorship could ultimately prevent the secession of the western regions of the empire. (Justinian’s later attempts at reunifying Italy with the empire failed as well, and only brought enormous and unnecessary death and destruction.) Secession and disintegration have always been inevitable for large diverse states. The Romans were not immune. The Americans are not immune.

The answer lies not in doubling down on political unity, maintained through endless violence or threats of violence. Rather, the answer lies in peaceful separation through expanded self-determination, regional autonomy, confederation, and consensus. The choice we now face is between a rearguard attempt at preserving political unity “forever” and facing the inevitable reality. On one side, there are the unionists with their devotion to the status quo and their colonialist mindset. On the other side are those who seek to temper the power of the central state and pursue local self-determination. The centralizers are on the wrong side and will ultimately be on the losing side as well.



6 Ways The Censorship Complex Silences Speech It Doesn’t Want You To Say Or Hear

Thanks to the Censorship Complex, Americans are no better off than those in authoritarian countries with state-controlled media.


Margot Cleveland reporting for The Federalist

Since Trump entered the political arena and proved the efficacy of sidestepping the legacy media and speaking directly to the people, a cabal of government agencies, politicians, academia, nonprofits, the corrupt press, and Big Tech have joined forces to erect a Censorship Complex. Collaboration, funding, and groupthink connect these players, and an analysis of their functioning reveals six ways they operate to censor speech in America.

1. Big Tech Censored Speech It Didn’t Like

While Twitter censored certain speech as part of its coordination with other partisan actors, Twitter also censored speech in the normal course of its operations. And because Twitter was staffed heavily by Democrats, it was mostly conservative voices that were silenced.

As the “Twitter Files” revealed, “Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a ‘Search Blacklist’ (for Dan Bongino), a ‘Trends Blacklist’ for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a ‘Do Not Amplify’ setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk.” As one insider explained, the visibility filtering is a “very powerful tool” “to suppress what people see.” 

Twitter used visibility filters to keep certain users from showing up in search results, limit the reach of certain tweets, and ban certain users’ tweets from hashtag searches and the “trending” section. Twitter aggressively applied these filters to Trump prior to the election and almost certainly to other elected officials’ accounts as well. And while censoring the speech of Americans, Twitter allowed the Department of Defense to run covert propaganda operations, “whitelisting” Pentagon accounts to prevent the covert accounts from being banned.

2. Twitter Coordinated with Intel Agencies

Over the course of some 15 “Twitter Files” exposés, independent journalists also revealed the tech giant worked closely with intelligence agencies, resulting in the censorship of more speech. As Matt Taibbi put it:

The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government — from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.

“Requests poured in from FBI offices all over the country, day after day, hour after hour: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Baltimore,” Taibbi wrote, with Twitter “taking requests from every conceivable government agency, from state officials in Wyoming, Georgia, Minnesota, Connecticut, California, and others to the NSA, FBI, DHS, DOD, DOJ, and many others.”

And although Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, could only share Twitter’s internal communications, that material showed the CIA — referred to under the euphemism “Other Government Agencies” in the emails — “ended up sharing intelligence through the FBI and FITF [Foreign Influence Task Force] not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Cloudfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia.” The “Twitter Files” also revealed that the multi-agency FITF met on a monthly, and then weekly, basis with Twitter and other industry executives. Other emails revealed the DHS and the House Homeland Security Committee came back time and again to the senior moderation staff with requests for information to be removed from Twitter. 

The constant censorship flowing from requests by intelligence agencies proved minor, however, compared to the blocking of the Biden family pay-to-play scandal, which followed warnings by intel agencies of a Russian “hack-and-leak” operation. According to both Twitter and Facebook, warnings from those agencies prompted the tech companies to censor the New York Post’s coverage of the scandal. But the FBI knew the laptop was not “hacked” and that the emails and other material published by the Post were authentic, revealing the danger of the government having a hand-in-glove relationship with Big Tech and the media. 

3. Twitter Followed Requests from ‘Disinfo’ Groups

As if accepting government censorship requests through the FBI were not enough, Twitter allowed nonprofits to ask for tweets to be blocked if those organizations deemed them “disinformation.” A partnership portal expedited censorship requests from outside think tanks, such as the Stanford Observatory, which, at times, passed along requests for other nonprofit organizations. 

4. Chorus of ‘Disinfo’ Claims Prompted Censorship

While at times Big Tech censorship followed requests solely from the government or nonprofit “disinformation” think tanks, more often Twitter was pushed into silencing speech because of a concerted PR pressure campaign undertaken when private organizations, academics, the media, and government actors — including agencies, commissions, committees, and individual lawmakers — fanned unfounded claims of “disinformation.” 

The “Twitter Files” exposed several examples of this scenario at play, but the most striking concerned how Twitter moved from saying there was no significant Russian activity on the platform, to internally deciding to censor “any user identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber operations against targets associated with U.S. or other elections, or an entity associated with such operations…”

Supposed disinformation experts, such as those behind Hamilton 68, pushed the narrative of Russian malfeasance to both congressional aides and media outlets, which then amplified the claims. Democrat Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Mark Warner and Rep. Adam Schiff added more pressure by threatening a legislative solution and demanding Twitter do more to address “Russian Influence Operations,” even while Twitter countered both on and off the record that Hamilton 68’s methodology was flawed.

Twitter eventually caved, removing accounts it had previously found not of concern. It also changed its internal policy to defer to the U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessments, even though internal communications showed it “had not observed much recent activity” by foreign actors.

5. Twitter Heeded Requests from Government Officials — Past and Present

When it came to Covid, internal communications reveal that both the Biden and Trump administrations pushed for the silencing of virus-related content. 

Early on during the pandemic, the Trump administration, concerned about “panic buying,” asked the “tech companies to combat misinformation” about “runs on grocery stores.” But, as independent journalist David Zweig noted: “There were runs on grocery stores.”

Twitter’s internal communications showed many more requests coming from both the Trump and Biden administrations related to Covid. Twitter eventually censored, in essence, any contrarian view, whether it concerned vaccines, masking, or school closures, and even if the post was true, supported by scientific research, or a reasoned matter of opinion presented by an expert. The “Twitter Files” also exposed that other tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, participated in the Trump administration’s Covid-response meetings, suggesting censorship requests extended much beyond those demanded of Twitter.

Even former government officials succeeded in prompting the censorship of speech, the “Twitter Files” show. An email by former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb to Twitter’s top D.C. lobbyist, Todd O’Boyle, exposed this scandal. 

“This is the kind of stuff that’s corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote about a tweet posted by Dr. Brett Giroir, the former U.S. assistant health secretary, in which Giroir had written: “It’s now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine immunity, by A LOT. There’s no scientific justification for #vax proof if a person had prior infection.” Giroir’s tweet then told the CDC director and president to “follow the science,” and concluded, “If no previous infection? Get vaccinated!”

Gottlieb told Twitter’s lobbyist that the tweet drew “a sweeping conclusion off a single retrospective study in Israel that hasn’t been peer reviewed,” and he bemoaned the possibility that “this tweet will end up going viral and driving news coverage.” 

At the time Gottlieb pushed for censorship of the tweet, he was a board member at Pfizer, one of the pharmaceutical giants profiting from Covid jabs. But when O’Boyle forwarded the email complaint to Twitter’s strategic response team, he mentioned only Gottlieb’s prior position at the FDA. 

According to Alex Berenson, who reviewed the “Twitter Files”:

A Strategic Response analyst quickly found the tweet did not violate any of the company’s misinformation rules. Yet Twitter wound up flagging Giroir’s tweet anyway, putting a misleading tag on it and preventing almost anyone from seeing it.

6. Those Who Control Ads Are Censoring Speech

The Censorship Complex also seeks to silence conservative news outlets, as the Washington Examiner exposed via its reporting on the Global Disinformation Index. That self-appointed arbiter of truth created a list of the supposedly “riskiest” and “least risky” news outlets to “guide” advertisers. Of course, the corporate outlets that overwhelmingly lean left and repeatedly peddle false stories are deemed the “least risky.” Meanwhile, conservative outlets that accurately reported the Russia hoax, the Hunter Biden laptop, and a myriad of other important stories are branded the “riskiest” ones that should be starved of advertising dollars. 

Whether the censorship comes directly from Big Tech, indirectly when alternative media are starved of advertising dollars, or from one of the other six mechanisms noted above, the results are the same: Americans will be deprived of the facts.

Those facts might be about Covid, the safety of vaccines, civilian casualties in military operations, or candidates running for office. Or maybe the censored information concerns the danger of chemicals from a train derailment, a shot-down balloon, or conditions on the ground in Ukraine or at the border. 

We just don’t know what we don’t know when it comes to what has been or will be censored, leaving Americans no better off than the citizens of authoritarian countries with state-controlled media.