PP NewsBrief: 2021-03-12

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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The Antibody Deception

"The world has been fixated for months on novel-coronavirus PCR testing, contact tracing and vaccination.

Meanwhile, another major part of the Covid biomedical complex has received far less attention: the use of antibodies for detecting, diagnosing and treating infection with the novel coronavirus.

Hundreds of antibodies have been approved for these purposes since January 2020. And hundreds more are poised to start being marketed soon.

This is part of the biomedical gold rush: by last summer already, antibodies were on track to become the most lucrative medical product, with global revenue projected to reach nearly half a trillion dollars by 2024. Profit margins in the range of 67% aren’t uncommon.

Pharma giants such as AstraZeneca, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly are among the companies grabbing the largest chunks of the novel-coronavirus-antibody market. And some of the most muscular government agencies, including Anthony Fauci’s US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, are part of the action (see, for example, the second-last section of this article, on antibodies used to treat Covid).

Virtually every study and piece of marketing material related to Covid is premised on scientists having positively and correctly identified the presence of the novel coronavirus (also known as SARS-CoV-2) in the material they’re working with.

The job of that identification is usually given to antibodies that are said to bind to the novel coronavirus. The assumption is these antibodies are able to pick out the virus and only the virus from among every other organism and substance surrounding it.

Unfortunately it turns out that the antibodies rarely (if ever) do that. This is because of, among other things, inadequate verification of the antibodies’ accuracy in targeting the virus by the companies that manufacture and sell them. And there’s even less verification by government regulators.

...

I emailed one of the English-speaking world’s leading authorities on monoclonal antibodies, Harvard Medical School professor Clifford Saper, to get clarity on this. I asked him if it’s true that, as most in the antibody-commercializing arena claim, a monoclonal antibody can be created that’s specific for (that is, binds to) just one type of virus or just one other type of organism.

Saper replied...

   No, there is no such thing as a monoclonal antibody that, because it is monoclonal, recognizes only one protein or only one virus. It will bind to any protein having the same (or a very similar) sequence.

The implication of Saper’s statement is that any attempt to use a monoclonal antibody to verify the presence of the novel coronavirus will yield a large rate of false-positive results. That is, they will indicate that the novel coronavirus is detected when in fact it hasn’t been. That’s because there’s a high probability that the monoclonal antibody is binding to something else besides the virus (this is known as ‘cross-reacting’).

...

And in fact, the vast majority of antibodies and monoclonal antibodies marketed as being specific for the novel coronavirus were developed years ago for detecting SARS-CoV-1. They were then simply repurposed for identifying SARS-CoV-2 — with very few if any checks for whether they also cross-react to other organisms or substances."

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Mississippi Judge Orders New Special Election After Rampant Absentee Ballot Fraud Found; Notary Arrested

"A judge has ordered a new special election for an alderman seat in Aberdeen, Mississippi, after more than three-quarters of absentee ballots cast in the Democrat runoff election last June were found to be invalid, the Monroe Journal reported. In a separate order, Judge Jeff Weill, of Jackson, also issued a bench warrant for the arrest of a notary who was involved in the fraudulent election.

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According to court documents, the election was fraught with substantial irregularities regarding the accepting and rejecting of absentee ballots. The court also concluded that errors were made in accepting and rejecting challenged ballots. The judge determined that a whopping 78 percent of the mail-in ballots proved to be invalid.

The Court documents state; “an election in which 66 ballots have been handled erroneously and in which the winner led by only 37 votes is an election in which these erroneously accepted or rejected ballots could change the results of the election. Since no one knows who those 66 ballots were voted for, it is clear that the will of the voters is impossible to discern, and there can be no confidence in the integrity of the outcome of the vote.”

Judge Weill also brought up evidence of criminal voter intimidation and harassment at the polling place in his decision.

“The court is of the opinion there is probable cause that several individuals involved in the disturbances during election day at the polling precinct ‘willfully and corruptly violated’ one or more of the above criminal statutes,” the judge said. “The court will leave to the appropriate authorities to determine whether the actions of Maurice Howard, Henry Randle and S. Nicholas Holliday amounted to prosecutable crimes.”"

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Journalists Start Demanding Substack Censor its Writers: to Bar Critiques of Journalists

"...look how they grant themselves license to use their platforms to attack the journalists they dislike and generate hatred and harassment toward us. I really need someone to explain this to me: why is it permissible for Ryan Broderick to write articles attacking me and maligning my work, and for New York Times front-page reporter Taylor Lorenz to use her large Twitter platform and recruit all her media friends to attack me as well (or Taibbi, Weiss, Singal, Sullivan, etc.), but we are not allowed to write critiques of their work because doing so constitutes dangerous harassment that must be silenced?

Do you see how these online journalists have been taught to think about themselves and the world? Do you see the bottomless sense of entitlement and self-regard and fragility that defines who they are and how they behave? They specialize in trying to ruin people’s reputations and wreck their lives — not just other journalists but private citizens — but the minute someone objects to their journalism or what they say or do, they summon a team of teachers, psychologists, therapy dogs, digital police officers and tech executives to demand that their critics be silenced and their anguish be treated. They really do believe that the world should be organized so as to authorize them to attack whoever they want, while banning anyone who criticizes them when they do it.

...

This use of “right v. left” here is also quite important. In the war of information they have launched — to ensure that control over discourse rests solely in their hands and that everyone who dissents from their pieties be silenced or “moderated” — those traditional left/right labels have no real currency or cogency. That is why this Serial Plagiarist can refer to me as a “right-wing culture warrior” despite everything I have done and believe and have it not be regarded as bizarre by his media comrades. That is the stunted, blinkered prism on which they rely to make sense of the world.

But it has no applicability to the world they are creating, the information battle they are waging. The real division here is between those who believe in a free internet, free discourse, free thought, and those who do not — between those who want corporate journalistic elites to control what people can say and think and those who do not. Some of those who support that authoritarian vision of centralized information control are on what used to be called the left and some are found on the establishment right. But that is not the relevant breakdown. It is really a war between liberty and authoritarianism, and amazingly, it is journalists who have become the leading proponents of repression.

That is why platforms like this one that empower independent thinkers and critically-minded dissidents from their in-group repression are so vital: it is what enables a challenge to their hegemony. And they know that it is this important, a threat to their hegemony, or, in the words of Dr. Roberts, “so dangerous.” That is why they are waging war on these platforms and those of us who use them. The way to fight against them and their campaign to stifle dissent is to support these platforms and the independent journalists and commentators who use them."

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Criticizing Public Figures, Including Influential Journalists, is Not Harassment or Abuse

"The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.”

...

That is deliberate. Under this formulation, if you criticize the ways Lorenz uses her very influential media perch — including by pointing out that she probably should stop fabricating accusations against people and monitoring the private acts of non-public people — then you are guilty of harassing a “young woman” and inflicting emotional pain and violence on her (it’s quite a bizarre dynamic, best left to psychologists, how her supporters insist on infantilizing this fully grown, close-to-middle-aged successful journalist by talking about her as if she’s a fragile high school junior; it’s particularly creepy when her good male Allies speak of her this way).

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This is worth focusing on precisely because it is now so common among the nation’s political and media elite. By no means is this tactic unique to Lorenz. She did not pioneer it. She is just latching onto it, exploiting it, in order to immunize herself from criticisms of her destructive journalistic misconduct and to depict her critics as violent harassers and abusers. With this framework implanted, there is no way to express criticisms of Taylor Lorenz’s work and the use and abuse of her journalistic platform without standing widely accused of maliciously inciting a mob of violent misogynists to ruin her life — that’s quite a potent shield from accountability for someone this influential in public life.

But this is now a commonplace tactic among the society’s richest, most powerful and most influential public figures. The advent of the internet has empowered the riff-raff, the peasants, the unlicensed and the uncredentialed — those who in the past were blissfully silent and invisible — to be heard, often with irreverence and even contempt for those who wield the greatest societal privileges, such as a star New York Times reporter. By recasting themselves as oppressed, abused and powerless rather than what they are (powerful oppressors who sometimes abuse their power), elite political and media luminaries seek to completely reverse the dynamic.

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One of the many ironies of these tawdry attempts to shield the world’s most powerful people from criticism is that they fundamentally rely upon the exact stereotypes which, in prior generations, had been deployed to deny women, racial minorities and LGBTs fair and equal opportunities to ascend to powerful positions. Those who purport to be supporters of Lorenz speak of her not as what she is — a successful and wealthy professional woman in her mid-30s who has amassed a large amount of influence and chose a career whose purpose is supposed to be confronting powerful people — but instead as a delicate, young flower, incapable of withstanding criticisms...

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This transparent tactic is part-and-parcel of the increasingly ideological exploitation of identity politics to shield the neoliberal order and its guardians from popular critique. Step lightly if you want to criticize the bombing of Syria because the Pentagon is now led by an African-American Defense Secretary and Biden just promoted two female generals. No objecting to the closeness between the Treasury Secretary and Wall Street banks because doing so is a misogynistic attempt to limit how women can be paid. Transportation policy should be questioned only in the most polite tones lest one stand accused of harboring anti-gay animus for the department’s Secretary.

The CIA and FBI celebrate its diverse workforce in the same way and for the same reason that gigantic corporations do: to place a pretty but very thin veneer on the harmful role they play in the world. The beneficiaries of this tactic are virtually always the powerful, while the villains are their critics, especially when those critics are marginalized. It is a majestic reversal of the power dynamic.

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If you do journalism well, then you’re going to make people angry, and if you’re making people angry, then they are going to say unpleasant and hurtful things about you. If you’re lucky, that is all that will happen. The bigger your platform, the more angry people there will be, and the angrier they will be. The more powerful the people angered by your work, the more intense the retaliation. That is what it means to call someone “powerful”: they have the capacity to inflict punishment on those who impede them.

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Anyone who cannot endure that, or who does not want to, is well-advised not to seek out a public platform and try to become an influential figure who helps shape discourse, debate and political outcomes, and especially not to become a reporter devoted to exposing secret corruption by powerful factions. It would obviously be better if all of that did not happen, but wishing that it would stop is like hoping it never rains again: not only is it futile, but — like rain — there are cleansing and healthy aspects to having those who wield influence and power have to hear from those they affect, and anger.

But with that cost, which can be substantial, comes an enormous benefit. It is an immense privilege to have a large platform that you can utilize to shape the society around you, reach large numbers of people, and highlight injustices you believe are being neglected. Those who have that, and who earn a living by pursuing their passion to use it, are incredibly fortunate. Journalists who are murdered or imprisoned or prosecuted for their work are victims of real persecution. Journalists who are maligned with words are not, especially when those words come not from powerful state officials but from random people on the internet.

And even when such criticisms do emanate from powerful officials, it still does not rise to the level of persecution: when Jair Bolsonaro hurled an anti-gay slur at me online and then maligned our family at a press conference, it was not even in the same universe of difficulty as being threatened with prosecution by the U.S. or Brazil governments or receiving credible death threats. I’ve said plenty of critical things about him as well. That is why I always found it so preposterous to treat Trump’s mean tweets about Chuck Todd or Jim Acosta like some grave threat to press freedom. Imprisoning Julian Assange for publishing documents is a dangerous press freedom attack; mocking Wolf Blitzer’s intellect is not. And if the U.S. President’s mean words about journalists do not constitute an attack on press freedom — and they do not — then surely the same is true of random, powerless people online.

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...The problem is that “this is not civilized discourse” to them because “it’s often coming from some of the least educated and most angry.” That’s why online censorship is needed. That’s why media figures need to unite to demonize and discredit their critics. It is because people like Taylor Lorenz — raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, educated in a Swiss boarding school, writing on the front page of The New York Times — now hears from “the least educated and most angry.” This is the societal crisis — one of caste — that they are determined to stop.

Taylor Lorenz and her media allies know that she is more privileged and influential than you are. That is precisely why they feel justified in creating paradigms that make it illegitimate to criticize her. They think only themselves and those like them deserve to participate in the public discourse. Since they cannot fully control the technology that allows everyone to be heard (they partially control it by pressuring tech monopolies to censor their adversaries), they need to create storylines and scripts designed to coerce their critics into silence."

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The Collapse of Trust in Public Health

"The great epidemiologist Donald Henderson in 2006 made two firm predictions of the consequences of lockdowns. First, he said, doing so would have no benefit in terms of disease mitigation. Indeed, lockdowns did not work.

Second, he said that doing so would result in discrediting public health and cause a “loss of public trust in government.” The loss in public trust – not just officials but also in media – is palpably obvious.

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Even if the pandemic had been as grim as the models predicted, there is no evidence in the historical record of lockdowns doing anything about a virus except to disrupt and destroy social and market functioning in a way that makes dealing with severe health outcomes even more difficult.

Consider one huge and unprecedented mitigation measure deployed last year: the stay-at-home order. Most states imposed them and enforced them with police power. It was not that different from near-universal house arrest – right here in the United States.

The claim was that this would slow or stop the spread or somehow cause the virus to be controlled, resulting in fewer severe disease outcomes. The propaganda became outrageous at points, with signs everywhere ordering people to “stay home and save lives,” as if leaving your house would result in lives lost.

People undertook enormous personal sacrifices to comply, at great personal expense. The economic costs were huge but so were the psychological and social costs. The result was an epidemic in loneliness and a rise in deaths of despair.

How did it work? A new study in Nature by four epidemiologists looked at the experience of 87 countries with a variety of policies, some loose and some extreme in strigency. They sought to correlate state-at-home orders with virus control. The results: they were unable to do so. The relationship does not exist, which is to say that it is consistent with randomness. The policy was worse than useless.

This study is the 31st that AIER has assembled using data nationally and internationally showing that lockdowns achieved nothing and cost everything. You are welcome to peruse the list and share it with your friends, who will be astonished (or maybe not) to discover that the public health edicts were unscientific and pointlessly brutal. All that sacrifice for nothing.

How many other things did public health authority get wrong? Thanks to a large email dump, from an account used by Anthony Fauci, we know that he was warned in early March 2020 that PCR testing was giving inaccurate results. As a result, almost all the data we thought we had now lives under a cloud. If testing is wrong, so too could be death data and so on. It’s a mess of confusion. The same email dump revealed that a US delegation went to China in mid-February to learn from the best in the politics and arts of locking down a society.

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This collapsing trust is hitting about the time that the CDC has finally begun to put on its website some clarifying data. These charts for example make it clear that another public health measure from last year was wildly wrong: that getting the virus was very nearly a death sentence. We are at least getting some accurate data on the demographics of severe outcomes.

In truth, this was known since late March 2020. We reported on it on April 5. Even earlier, from March 8, we reported accurately on the nature of this virus, and fully expected that once the information was revealed, public fear would decline and the world would reopen. Instead, a combination of media and government messaging stoked that fear and fed more and longer lockdowns, disastrous policies that governors are racing to repeal even as the federal government warns against it."

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Facebook uses guise of “fact-checking” to censor doctor who said scientists shouldn’t “manipulate the public”

"“Fact-checkers” hired by Facebook are at it again, labeling content they see as Covid misinformation, and this time they hit a major mainstream media outlet, the Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper announced that an op-ed authored by Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins, got flagged by fact-checkers who said they had three scientists analyze it and find it was misleading, unsubstantiated, and missing context.

In the article, Makary was presenting his assessment as to whether “herd immunity” might be achieved in the US, suggesting that this could happen as early as by April, through a combination of factors such as the number of people who already had coronavirus, and vaccination.

The professor also shared that some of his colleagues privately agreed with his prediction – considered as “bold” – but also said that he perhaps should not speak about it – for fear it might make people less likely to follow anti-Covid rules or get vaccinated.

“But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth,” he added.

Speaking up in defense of its contributor, the WSJ is now basically branding Facebook’s third party fact-checkers as “opinion-checkers,” saying their move to flag Makary’s article was based on their own opinion rather than fact.

The WSJ editorial board was blunt in its reaction, when it blasted the move by fact-checker Health Feedback – a World Health Organization (WHO) project, that made the decision to label Makary’s article – as “counter-opinion masquerading as fact-checking.”"

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Home Invasions: All the Ways the Government Can Lay Siege to Your Property

"The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion. Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that fortress—and the Fourth Amendment alongside it—to a crumbling pile of rubble.

Two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court this term, Caniglia v. Strom and Lange v. California, are particularly noteworthy.

In Caniglia v. Strom, police want to be able to carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize lawfully-owned guns under the pretext of their so-called “community caretaking” duties. Under the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment, police can conduct warrantless searches of vehicles relating to accident investigations and provide aid to “citizens who are ill or in distress.”

...

In Lange v. California, police want to be able to enter homes without warrants as long as they can claim to be in pursuit of someone they suspect may have committed a crime. Yet as Justice Neil Gorsuch points out, in an age in which everything has been criminalized, that leaves the door wide open for police to enter one’s home in pursuit of any and all misdemeanor crimes.

At issue in Lange is whether police can justify entering homes without a warrant under the “hot pursuit” exception to the Fourth Amendment.

The case arose after a California cop followed a driver, Arthur Lange, who was honking his horn while listening to music. The officer followed Lange, supposedly to cite him for violating a local noise ordinance, but didn’t actually activate the police cruiser’s emergency lights until Lange had already arrived home and entered his garage. Sticking his foot under the garage door just as it was about to close, the cop confronted Lange, smelled alcohol on his breath, ordered him to take a sobriety test, and then charged him with a DUI and a noise infraction.

Lange is just chock full of troubling indicators of a greater tyranny at work.

Overcriminalization: That you can now get pulled over and cited for honking your horn while driving and listening to music illustrates just how uptight and over-regulated life in the American police state has become.

Make-work policing: At a time when crime remains at an all-time low, it’s telling that a police officer has nothing better to do than follow a driver seemingly guilty of nothing more than enjoying loud music.

Warrantless entry: That foot in the door is a tactic that, while technically illegal, is used frequently by police attempting to finagle their way into a home and sidestep the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

The definition of reasonable: Although the Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless and unreasonable searches and seizures of “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” where we run into real trouble is when the government starts dancing around what constitutes a “reasonable” search. Of course, that all depends on who gets to decide what is reasonable. There’s even a balancing test that weighs the intrusion on a person’s right to privacy against the government’s interests, which include public safety.

Too often, the scales weigh in the government’s favor.

End runs around the law: The courts, seemingly more concerned with marching in lockstep with the police state than upholding the rights of the people, have provided police with a long list of exceptions that have gutted the Fourth Amendment’s once-robust privacy protections.

Exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement allow the police to carry out warrantless searches: if someone agrees to the search; in order to ferret out weapons or evidence during the course of an arrest; if police think someone is acting suspiciously and may be armed; during a brief investigatory stop; if a cop sees something connected to a crime in plain view; if police are in hot pursuit of a suspect who flees into a building; if they believe a vehicle has contraband; in an emergency where there may not be time to procure a warrant; and at national borders and in airports.

In other words, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.

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What we are grappling with is a government that has forfeited its purpose for existing.

Philosophers dating back to John Locke have long asserted that the true purpose of government is to protect our rights, not just our collective rights as a people, but our individual rights, specifically our rights to life, liberty and property. As James Madison concluded in the Federalist Papers, “Government is instituted no less for the protection of the property than of the persons of individuals.”

What we have been saddled with is a government that has not only lost sight of its primary reason for being—to protect the people’s rights—but has also re-written the script and cast itself as an imperial overlord with all of the neo-feudal authority such a position entails."

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Facebook Comes for Geography

"There is also the weird reality that we’re here, again. If you’re a Gen Xer, as I am, you remember the wails decrying the “puritanical” beliefs and rules inflicted upon our young selves by society. We were punished for using profanities or drawing obscene pictures on the homemade covers of our best friend’s textbooks (sorry David). And ultimately, our whining won the day. Nobody could stop you from using bad words or drawing crude pictures! That’s free speech, baby!

And now, this. We’re back again, only this time there’s no longer the “Puritanical”—or simply Christian—ethic behind this policing that says that we fail to love each other when we are intentionally crude to each other and that only in loving each other may we brighten the path to eternal life. Today’s thought police aren’t motivated by anything like this. They have no eternal concern for you. They have no temporal concern for you. They are the worst sort of Puritans—policers without mercy, not even a means for expiation. Your sin is noncompliance. It cannot be purged. You are condemned, and there is no one who may pay your debt on your behalf. Only your silence and suffering (and suffering in silence) will do.

The argument here is much more eloquently articulated by author Joseph Bottum in his uncannily prescient 2014 book, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, in which he argues that the collapse of mainline Protestantism in America has left in its wake a generation of people who love the moral clucking, the judgment, and the punishment part of their former faith, but they don’t believe in the part where our sin has been bought and paid for.

They don’t believe in the Jesus part. They only believe in the stamping out sin part. And that goes a long, long way toward explaining how we got to the new religion of leftism: all pain, no gain."

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Dystopian “Great Reset”: “Own Nothing and Be Happy”, Being Human in 2030

"The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting at the end of January in Davos, Switzerland, brings together international business and political leaders, economists and other high-profile individuals to discuss global issues. Driven by the vision of its influential CEO Klaus Schwab, the WEF is the main driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, a tectonic shift that intends to change how we live, work and interact with each other.

The Great Reset entails a transformation of society resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceuticals corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.

Using COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions to push through this transformation, the great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which older enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or absorbed into monopolies, effectively shutting down huge sections of the pre-COVID economy. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs will be carried out by AI-driven machines.

...

The jobless (and there will be many) could be placed on some kind of universal basic income and have their debts (indebtedness and bankruptcy on a massive scale is the deliberate result of lockdowns and restrictions) written off in return for handing their assets to the state or more precisely the financial institutions helping to drive this great reset. The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of ownership under the guise of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘saving the planet’. Of course, the tiny elite who rolled out this great reset will own everything.

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The billionaire class who are pushing this agenda think they can own nature and all humans and can control both, whether through geoengineering the atmosphere, for example, genetically modifying soil microbes or doing a better job than nature by producing bio-synthesised fake food in a lab.

They think they can bring history to a close and reinvent the wheel by reshaping what it means to be human. And they think they can achieve this by 2030. It is a cold dystopian vision that wants to eradicate thousands of years of culture, tradition and practices virtually overnight.

And many of those cultures, traditions and practices relate to food and how we produce it and our deep-rooted connections to nature. Consider that many of the ancient rituals and celebrations of our forebears were built around stories and myths that helped them come to terms with some of the most basic issues of existence, from death to rebirth and fertility. These culturally embedded beliefs and practices served to sanctify their practical relationship with nature and its role in sustaining human life.

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The great reset includes farmerless farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. What will happen to the farmers?

Post-COVID, the World Bank talks about helping countries get back on track in return for structural reforms. Are tens of millions of smallholder farmers to be enticed from their land in return for individual debt relief and universal basic income? The displacement of these farmers and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and their cultures was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.

Cut through the euphemisms and it is clear that Bill Gates – and the other incredibly rich individuals behind the great reset – is an old-fashioned colonialist who supports the time-honoured dispossessive strategies of imperialism, whether this involves mining, appropriating and commodifying farmer knowledge, accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations or facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through IP laws and seed regulations."

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Moderna’s Top Scientist: ‘We Are Actually Hacking the Software of Life’

"As I listen to Dr. Zaks lay out the achievements of his company in creating the mRNA vaccine, I cannot help but think of how incredibly arrogant it sounds. That scientists think they can rewrite the genetic code [his words not mine for all you out there who still don’t believe these mRNA vaccines change the genetic code just because some ‘fact checker’ says they don’t], believing they can improve on a person’s God-given genetic makeup is entering dangerous territory. Who’s to say they won’t correct one problem and create something far worse?

Zaks wrapped up his 2017 speech with the following words.

   “If you think about what it is we’re trying to do. We’ve taken information and our understanding of that information and how that information is transmitted in a cell, and we’ve taken our understanding of medicine and how to make drugs, and we’re fusing the two. We think of it as information therapy.”

Information therapy. Just like a computer software code.

These scientists truly believe that the human body is nothing more than a machine that can be hacked into and reordered according to some programmer’s instructions.

The same ground-breaking nature of this research that excites some, is what horrifies others.

A person’s genetic makeup is, as Dr. Zak said, “the software of life.”

If this is true, then who should be the ultimate authority over each human being’s genetic software code? If we truly live in a free society, wouldn’t it stand to reason that we would want to have an energetic debate over how to answer that question? Shouldn’t it be the number-one issue being debated in Congress and the media? Instead, nobody is allowed to even ask these questions without being threatened, censored, rebuked, deplatformed. Members of the corporate media who dare broach the question get fired.

Contrary to what some scientists believe, we are not machines. We are human beings with bodies, souls and free wills. Anyone who tries to mandate the acceptance of an experimental gene-altering treatment is going against the international Nuremberg Codes, which require informed consent of any experimental treatment."

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France warns it could make covid jabs compulsory for health workers amid 'unacceptable' uptake

"The French government has said that the level of Covid-19 vaccine uptake among those working in healthcare settings "is not acceptable" and said it could make the jab compulsory if vaccination rates don't improve.

"For the last year our health workers have been heroic, but the vaccination rate among them today is not acceptable," Gabriel Attal, the government spokesman, told Le Parisien newspaper on Sunday.

Echoing the words of the Health Minister Olivier Veran last week, Attal said getting the jab was the responsible thing for healthcare workers to do. "It would be irresponsible to refuse to be vaccinated when one is a health worker… Everyone is rolling up their sleeves to get us out of this epidemic. Now they have to roll them up to the shoulder to get vaccinated," Attal said.

Attal added that the government would continue to encourage those working in healthcare settings to come forward and get the jab but, if that didn't work, making it obligatory "remains a possibility."

Last week, Prime Minister Jean Castex revealed that only 40 percent of health workers had been inoculated against Covid-19."

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Digital Health Pass: IBM and Moderna Hook Up to Capitalize on COVID Reset

"IBM is partnering with Covid-19 mRNA vaccine maker Moderna to track vaccine administration in real time through its various blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and hybrid cloud services. According to a company press release, the collaboration will “focus on exploring the utility of IBM capabilities in the U.S.,” such as a recently unveiled pilot program for a Covid-19 Digital Health Pass in the State of New York, which effectively deputizes private businesses to enforce government-imposed Covid-19 regulations.

...

The development of these health-tracking, blockchain-based technologies as part of a broader redesign of supply chain and capital organization structures — often referred to as the “new normal” or the “Great Reset — has been in the works since at least 2016. It began with the “Use of Blockchain in Health IT and Health-related Research Challenge,” co-hosted by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where IBM submitted its white paper, “Blockchain: The Chain of Trust and its Potential to Transform Healthcare – Our Point of View.”

Since April 2020, these efforts have sped up considerably through initiatives like the COVID-19 High Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium, a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) “spearheaded” by IBM and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which brought Big Tech players like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft together with academic institutions and federal agencies to apply an “unprecedented scale of computing power to support COVID-19 research.”

...

As covered by MintPress in a recent three-part series by this author, the intersection between blockchain technology and health data is at the center of a global campaign to recreate capitalism as a data-driven economic model based on a so-called “impact investment” paradigm, which purports to solve the world’s health, social and environmental problems through market-based solutions."

========

Newly Revealed Emails Show Green Bay Officials Gave Keys to 2020 Election to N.Y. Dem Operative

"The Wisconsin House of Representatives on Wednesday held a hearing to review election irregularities after newly revealed documents obtained by Wisconsin Spotlight revealed that Democrat activists, funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were able to infiltrate the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin’s five largest cities.

In Green Bay, a Democrat activist was actually given keys to the room where absentee ballots were stored before the 2020 presidential election.

The city received a total of $1.6 million in grant funding from the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life, according to Wisconsin Spotlight. A Democrat operative from New York named Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein became a “grant mentor.”

Spitzer-Rubenstein was the Wisconsin head of the left-wing National Vote at Home Institute, and has worked for several Democrat Party candidates.  The Democrat mayor’s office gave the liberal activist access to Green Bay’s absentee ballots just days before the election.

The Wisconsin Spotlight’s report has prompted several Wisconsin lawmakers to call for the resignation of Green Bay’s mayor, and for an investigation into the city’s handling of the November presidential election.

According to the report, the emails show that Green Bay’s “highly partisan” Democrat Mayor Eric Genrich and his staff usurped city Clerk Kris Teske’s authority and let the Zuckerberg-funded “grant team” take over in “a clear violation of Wisconsin election statutes.”

...

The documents show that Green Bay City Clerk Kris Teske initially resisted Spitzer-Rubenstein’s efforts to correct or “cure” absentee ballots returned to her office, but eventually, amidst an intense pressure campaign, gave up.

“Can we help with curing absentee ballots that are missing a signature or witness signature address?”  Spitzer-Rubenstein wrote to Teske in an Oct. 7 email.

“While the Wisconsin Elections Commission permitted clerks to fix absentee ballot errors or omissions, it didn’t say former Democratic Party operatives could ‘help,'” the Wisconsin Spotlight pointed out. “The city clerk declined Spitzer-Rubenstein’s offer.”

The Democrat mayor’s office then began to pressure and bully staffers in the Clerks Office, reducing them to tears and leading several of them to seek new jobs.

“The grant mentors would like to meet with you to discuss, further, the ballot curing process. Please let them know when you’re available,” Celestine Jeffreys, Genrich’s chief of staff, wrote to Teske.

Spitzer-Rubenstein argued that the National Vote at Home Institute had cured ballots before, and thus had a “process” to do so.

...

   Eventually, Teske could take no more. On October 22, she wrote in an email she was taking a leave of absence. By the end of the year she had officially resigned to take a similar position with the nearby community of Ashwaubenon.

   In Teske’s absence, it appears Spitzer-Rubenstein and his team ramped up their involvement in the upcoming election. The state leader for the National Vote at Home Institute seemed to be everywhere, leading just about every aspect of Green Bay’s election administration.

   “Are the ballots going to be in trays/boxes within the bin? I’m at KI now, trying to figure out whether we’ll need to move the bins throughout the day or if we can just stick them along the wall and use trays or something similar to move the ballots between stations,” Spitzer-Rubenstein wrote in an email to city liaison Amaad Rivera two days before the election.

The documents show a city official, after talking with someone from the National Vote at Home Institute,  “brainstorming” about how the city could livestream the Central Count at city hall “so that (election observers) do not enter the building.”"

Nothing to see here. This was the most secure election in history, dontchaknow?

========

No COVID Vaccine? No Travel, Air Force Officials Say

"The U.S. Air Force Air has created policies intended to restrict the movement of personnel based on their COVID-19 vaccination status — despite the fact that the vaccines are not mandatory, are still in phase 3 clinical trials and are still considered experimental, having been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under Emergency Use Authorization (EAU).

The Air Force is actively coercing uptake of the vaccines in violation of medical ethics, federal law and, in the case of Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, Calif., in violation of California state law.

On Jan. 13, Lt. Col. Joseph Rountree, Commander 30th Healthcare Operations Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base created a policy to strong-arm uptake of an experimental drug for all personnel without regard for individual contraindications and without providing information on alternatives, as required by the Emergency Use Authorization.

Rountree, who is not a doctor, may not be aware that the clinical trials were designed to measure symptom mitigation, and neither Pfizer-BioNTech’s nor Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine have demonstrated efficacy to prevent infection or transmission.

In a memo obtained by The Defender, Rountree misinforms on the potential protective benefits of the vaccine and omits the risks of adverse reactions:

   “While the vaccine is not currently mandated, vaccine research reports that it produces a highly effective immune response in those who receive it. The vaccine provides robust protection, and cannot be forgotten or removed like masks and sanitizers; therefore is more powerful than other precautions.”

...

Rountree also established a new form and counseling session with the chain of command for personnel to justify why they choose to exercise their rights to opt-out of what amounts to participating in a phase 3 clinical trial of an experimental drug, thus creating a culture of coercion in violation of medical ethics:

   “BLUF, if people are not vaccinated I will likely NOT approve travel outside of CA. I will listen to exceptions on a case-by-case basis, so please encourage our people to set up a meeting (flight leadership, them, me and MSgt Hill) to discuss if there is a compelling reason they should stay unvaccinated but need to travel.”"

If you #SupportTheTroops you shouldn't support this.

========

Cancel Culture’s Newest Victims

"You can get rid of all of these “bad” things, you can erase every single one, but then you might as well give up any hope of understanding the past. Though it is odd to have to explain this, the past was different from the present, just as the present will be different from the future. Times change, as do cultures, modes of thinking and living, and prevailing societal mores.

By acting as though the only way to deal with the past is by pretending it never existed at all—insisting that the only virtuous people in all of human history were those prescient enough to think exactly as we think today—we are saying that no culture is so perfect as our own and no human being so good as ourselves. Applied to race, this attitude would be called “racism.” Broadly speaking, the appropriate term is “ethnocentrism”—the tendency to believe that the way one lives is better than the way everyone else lives. It is a viewpoint unconsciously held by the youth of almost every generation, as well as by many adults who remain children of the mind. It is the inevitable result of arrogance mixed with ignorance, the first flower of the young intellectual.

...

It is ironic that the Left is seeking to whitewash our cultural history by pretending it never happened. The more sensible among us wish to preserve history as history—the good and the bad—for instruction, for education, and, yes, for entertainment.  

I happen to enjoy reading Anthony Trollope, one of the greatest of all Victorian novelists. Many of his books contain a dose of anti-Semitism, which was prevalent in Great Britain at the time. The woke Left thinks because I’m Jewish this should bother me. But it doesn’t. Why should I deny myself the tremendous enjoyment to be found in his unbelievably charming work? The man shared a common contemporary weakness. Some of his beliefs were undoubtedly wrong. Many were right. I have learned from both.  I didn’t need protection from having my feelings hurt, because I am not an infant.

...

The danger is not that the future will fail to emerge, but that the past will be erased. The one card these legacy industries hold is their ownership of all the content produced by their more imaginative predecessors. And the internet, for all its advantages, also gives cancel culture a tool beyond even Orwell’s imagination: It is much easier to revise past articles, books, movies, and TV shows when there are no physical copies to be amended or destroyed.

For the legacy-culture elites, correcting previous insensitivities, redacting faux pas, deleting history, is now as simple as cutting an offensive scene—or even an entire episode—from a streaming service. The content is simply not available anymore. Perhaps it never existed. You may find one or two niggling references online, but you’ll never see the offensive scene itself: The legacy media will refuse to say exactly what has been removed, for fear of reprinting racist and sexist content. The internet will be purged.

Giving away that DVD box set of “Friends” may come to seem like a huge mistake. And how can future generations tell if they’re reading a redacted version of Huckleberry Finn if the original has simply ceased to exist? Sure, we have physical copies now, but with each passing year, there will be fewer of them.

And no doubt, in the near future, platforms like Kindle will make it easy for books to be continually re-edited as new offenses come to light. You, the reader and owner of the book, won’t even be able to tell that anything has been changed—and you certainly won’t be able to find the original.

The Ministry of Truth would have loved that."

========

Putin Blasts World Economic Forum “Honchos” at Davos “Gabfest”

"Powerful members of the WEF decided that the Coronavirus presented the perfect opportunity to implement their dystopian strategy which includes a hasty transition to green energy, A.I., robotics, transhumanism, universal vaccination and a comprehensive surveillance matrix that detects the location and activities of every human being on the planet. The proponents of this universal police state breezily refer to it as “The Great Reset” which is the latest make-over of the more familiar, “New World Order”. There’s not a hairsbreadth difference between the Reset and one-world government which has preoccupied billionaire activists for more than a century. This is the group to which Putin made the following remarks:

   “I would like to speak in more detail about the main challenges ..the international community is facing…. The first one is socioeconomic….. Starting from 1980, global per capita GDP has doubled in terms of real purchasing power parity. This is definitely a positive indicator. Globalisation and domestic growth have led to strong growth in developing countries and lifted over a billion people out of poverty….Still, the main question… is what was the nature of this global growth and who benefitted from it most…..

   … developing countries benefitted a lot from the growing demand for their traditional and even new products. However, this integration into the global economy has resulted in more than just new jobs or greater export earnings. It also had its social costs, including a significant gap in individual incomes…. According to the World Bank, 3.6 million people subsisted on incomes of under $5.50 per day in the United States in 2000, but in 2016 this number grew to 5.6 million people....

   Meanwhile, globalisation led to a significant increase in the revenue of large multinational, primarily US and European, companies…In terms of corporate profits, who got hold of the revenue? The answer is clear: one percent of the population.

   And what has happened in the lives of other people? In the past 30 years, in a number of developed countries, the real incomes of over half of the citizens have been stagnating, not growing. Meanwhile, the cost of education and healthcare services has gone up. Do you know by how much? Three times…

   In other words, millions of people even in wealthy countries have stopped hoping for an increase of their incomes. In the meantime, they are faced with the problem of how to keep themselves and their parents healthy and how to provide their children with a decent education….

   These imbalances in global socioeconomic development are a direct result of the policy pursued in the 1980s, which was often vulgar or dogmatic. This policy rested on the so-called Washington Consensus with its unwritten rules, when the priority was given to the economic growth based on a private debt in conditions of deregulation and low taxes on the wealthy and the corporations….

   As I have already mentioned, the coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated these problems. In the last year, the global economy sustained its biggest decline since WWII. By July, the labour market had lost almost 500 million jobs…. In the first nine months of the past year alone, the losses of earnings amounted to $3.5 trillion. This figure is going up and, hence, social tension is on the rise.”

...

Putin knows how globalisation works, just as he knows who it was designed to benefit. It’s no secret. Check out this quote from the Russian president in a speech nearly 5 years ago:

   “Back in the late 1980s-early 1990s, there was a chance not just to accelerate the globalization process but also to give it a different quality and make it more harmonious and sustainable in nature. But some countries that saw themselves as victors in the Cold War, not just saw themselves this way but said it openly, took the course of simply reshaping the global political and economic order to fit their own interests.

   In their euphoria, they essentially abandoned substantive and equal dialogue with other actors in international life, chose not to improve or create universal institutions, and attempted instead to bring the entire world under the spread of their own organizations, norms and rules. They chose the road of globalization and security for their own beloved selves, for the select few, but not for everyone.”

...

Putin understands that the Covid-related lockdowns and closing of “non-essential” businesses is merely prelude for the massive societal restructuring project elites have in store for us. They’ve already put millions of people out of work and expanded their surveillance capabilities in anticipation of the social unrest they are deliberately inciting. Putin thinks this futuristic strategy is unnecessarily reckless, disruptive and fails to account for intensifying social animosities and widening political divisions that are bound to have a catastrophic impact on democratic institutions. But Putin also knows that his appeal for a more cautious approach will be brushed aside by the billionaire powerbrokers who set the policy and call the shots. Here’s more:

   “Society will still be divided politically and socially. This is bound to happen because people are dissatisfied not by some abstract issues but by real problems that concern everyone regardless of the political views that people have or think they have. Meanwhile, real problems evoke discontent.”

...

Putin’s recommendations, of course, are going to be dismissed with a wave of the hand by the men in power. The last thing these sociopaths want is “inclusive growth.. and decent standards of living for everyone.” That’s not even on their list, and why would it be. After all, they know what they want. “They want more for themselves and less for everyone else.” (George Carlin) Which is why the system works the way it does, because it was constructed with that one solitary goal in mind.

Putin also acknowledges the need for greater state intervention in the economy to counterbalance the more destructive effects of “smash and grab” capitalism. And, while he rejects the swift and far-reaching structural changes (The Great Reset) that would precipitate massive social upheaval, he does support a larger role for the state in providing essential fiscal stimulus, employment and a more equitable distribution of the wealth. This does not imply that Putin supports state socialism. He does not. He merely supports a more regulated and benign form of Capitalism that veers from the “scorched earth” model backed by powerful members of the WEF and other elitist organizations."

========

Can We Get Public Works Right Again?

"Shane Hazel is the most famous libertarian in America today. Now known as “The man who cost Republicans the U.S. Senate,” Hazel achieved his instant national fame—or infamy, depending on who you ask—running as a Libertarian in November against David Perdue and Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s U.S. Senate race. Hazel earned 2.3 percent of the vote, which threw into a runoff the race that Perdue had come within 0.3 percentage points of winning. Perdue lost the runoff, and the rest is history.

In defeat, Hazel scored a remarkable victory. He served notice to Republicans that if their congressional voting record is comparable to liberal Democrats—and Perdue’s was—they’ll get knocked off by a third-party candidate who promises to uphold the U.S. Constitution. That’s a tough lesson.

If your preference is to reform the Republican Party from within, thus preserving its viability against an even more dangerous Democratic Party, it’s hard to accept the decision by Libertarians to run candidates in close races. Hazel appeared to rub it in when Reason quoted him saying, “Give me your tears. They are delicious.” This is why, in several recent articles I cited Hazel, in unflattering terms, as a prime example of how Libertarians enable Democratic victories.

These criticisms, directed at Libertarians in general and Hazel in particular, earned me an invitation from Hazel to appear on his podcast. During an 81-minute back-and-forth, two things became clear to me. First, for all his apparent bombast, Hazel is a sincere man, whose political activism is inspired by deeply held beliefs. To make this observation has consequences. Hazel cannot be dismissed merely as a spoiler. He has serious intentions, and a productive way forward is to have a serious conversation.

My second takeaway from my discussion with Hazel is that although we shared something fundamental in common—love for our country and respect for its Constitution—on matters of policy, there are areas of agreement, such as Second Amendment rights, but also areas where a lot of further discussion is warranted.

One of those areas of initial disagreement, which I described “as a flashpoint philosophically because of what would it mean if we didn’t have them,” is the existence of public utilities. This is a good place to start an ongoing debate with libertarians because it brings the issue of public and private space into sharp relief and offers concrete examples.

...

Opponents to public works correctly point out that the use of eminent domain to acquire the right-of-way for power lines, aqueducts, and freeway corridors is a violation of property rights. But these objections, to be constructive, have to answer the inevitable question they raise: How are we going to build power lines, aqueducts, and freeway corridors, if we don’t authorize the government to implement eminent domain to compel recalcitrant property owners to sell?

Principled opposition to eminent domain, and principled opposition to using public funds, makes sense if politicians abuse the process. Somewhere between an aqueduct that must exist to prevent millions of people from dying of thirst, and a clear abuse of power taking the form of acquiring and demolishing an established residential neighborhood to enable private, subsidized developers to come in and build high rises, a line is crossed. But the challenge should be finding that line, not condemning any and all forms of eminent domain, or any and all publicly funded infrastructure projects.

...

Forty million Californians now live in a state with public infrastructure sufficient for a state of 20 million people. They are living on assets that were constructed two generations ago, and attempts to expand or upgrade the conveyances that make urban life possible are met with blistering opposition from environmentalists, abetted by libertarian tax fighters. The system lacks resilience, and the only solution policymakers can offer is the rationing of everything, monitored by Big Tech. That is the toxic byproduct of this ideological purity. The cure is worse than the disease.

What Californians have been living with for decades is coming to America. It is accurate to say that most Republicans have been complicit in the rollout of endless new regulations and unsustainable public boondoggles. The solution, however, cannot simply be neglect. A policy agenda that walks away from public works because they violate libertarian principles must offer a viable alternative. As Shane Hazel’s political aspirations migrate from the U.S. Senate to the Georgia governor’s mansion, he would do well to present alternatives. Specificity is encouraged."

The outright rejection of public works is what drives some people into the arms of the Democrats.

========

Terrible Good Advice

"Those of us who entered the workforce (or attempted to do so) during the Obama years invariably found ourselves on the receiving end of a particular genre of advice that is somehow completely true and completely useless at the same time: Get a job. Get married. Have kids.

More recently, reciting this mantra has come into vogue among gutless conservative and libertarian grifters who would prefer to avoid confronting the actual situation in which most young Americans find themselves. It is a situation caused by policies many of those same intellectuals once shilled for as representative of “true conservatism”: NAFTA, China’s admission to the World Trade Organization, an immigration policy based on labor equilibrium with the Third World. Not to mention the constant losses in the culture wars, where in less than a decade the Overton window has moved from same-sex marriage to chemically castrating prepubescent boys.

In the face of this, sneeringly admonishing young men to “get a job, get married, and have kids” is obscene—rather like burning down someone’s farmhouse, raping his wife and daughters, salting his fields, and then rhapsodizing to him about the pleasant pastoral joys of being a farmer.

Beyond being useless advice, the motives behind it are disingenuous. Little thought was given by the thinkers to the new problems of the individual and the family in the globalized age, at least not until the growing discontent led to the ascendancy of the dissident Right and the mass rejection of academic conservative and libertarian dogma.

...

Now that the torch-wielding barbarians are at the gates, the bowtie cabal is shooing them away with the admonishment, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.”  Either that, or they are simply not attuned to the feeling of modern America, where, to borrow a line from Clouscard, “everything is permitted but nothing is possible.”

...

This is life during the fall of an empire. The once widely accessible domestic institution of marriage is becoming more and more the domain of a fortunate few. Our culture is actively anti-natalist and anti-family. This is no country for young children. Good jobs are few and far between. Virtually every material metric is headed in the wrong direction for family formation and class mobility.

Getting a good job, getting married, and having kids are all within the realm of the possible, but this possibility becomes smaller and smaller as we slide further into oblivion.

Anyone who sincerely cares about the next generations should save the stupid admonishments, put away the ideological prejudices, and start paying attention to reality."

========

What About ‘Whataboutism’?

"We live in an age of change. New phrases and new concerns appear every day. Transgenderism. The menace of insurrectionists. One of the more subtle entrants is “whataboutism.” I don’t recall hearing this phrase until a couple of years ago. Now it appears everywhere.

What does it mean? According to the whataboutism haters at the Huffington Post, “Whataboutism refers to the practice of deflecting criticism by pointing to the misdeeds of others. Oxford Dictionaries defines it as ‘the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.’”

Critics say whataboutism deflects from the issue at hand and fobs off responsibility. Donald Trump, the Irish Republican Army, and even the KGB have been described as some of the greatest purveyors of whataboutism.

...

This is unfortunate. Stigmatizing such defenses shuts down a normal discussion, where relative degrees of moral harm and fidelity to principle matter.

Ranking evils in competing systems, for example, is a type of whataboutism. It is a way of saying that it matters who is doing the accusing....

...

Personal character also matters. Hypocrisy is a marker of bad character that essentially everyone understands. A hypocrite’s pleas are better understood as another tool in his arsenal of manipulation, rather than something worth taking at face value. As Alexander Hamilton said, “Who talks most about liberty and equality? . . . Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?”

Even critics of “whataboutism” resort to contextualization rather instinctively, as in, for example: “When someone denounces the hatred and violence at a white supremacist rally, people say, ‘What about the violence at Black Lives Matter marches?!’ Of course, they forget—or haven’t bothered to pay attention to—the hundreds upon hundreds of BLM rallies and marches that have been nothing but peaceful . . . .”

...

Symmetry and consistency are important parts of our intellectual heritage, as well as our legal regime. The common law proceeds from the concept of precedent, where records of decisions are recorded and authoritative, so that like cases can be treated alike. Understanding the ways two situations are similar and how they are different is part of developing sophistication and a more granular understanding of the world around us. This is as true for an intellectual system, as for a legal and moral one.

There is good and bad whataboutism. Blanket calls to ignore comparisons are usually done in bad faith. The better question to ask is whether a principle being advanced is correct, whether the standard is being applied fairly and consistently, and whether the speaker is credible to the extent the argument depends on credibility."

========

The Other 1619 Project

"Former President Barack Obama raised eyebrows recently when, on his new podcast co-hosted with Bruce Springsteen, he said he was always open to the idea of reparations for slavery, but never raised the issue as president because of “the politics of white resistance and resentment.”

He further told Springsteen, black reparations are justified because “there’s not much question that the wealth of this country . . . a large portion of it was built on the backs of slaves.”

The statements had an effect apparently. While the Biden Administration expressed a willingness to commission a study on the question, this past weekend, White House advisor Cedric Richmond told Axios, “We don’t want to wait on a [reparations] study. We’re going to start acting now.”

If “resentful whites” really are a problem on the reparations question (polling does show a sizeable racial gap, at least), a way for the now gung-ho Biden to make the idea more palatable is to consider reparations not just for the black slavery experience but for the white one as well.

English researchers Don Jordan and Michael Walsh’s 2007 book White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America should have been the tour de force that did to the American slavery narrative what The Jungle did to the meatpacking industry. By showing the extent of America’s similarly shameful history of white slavery, it could have exposed the decades of educational mismanagement and distortion of this most important issue.

But in spite of its readability, thoroughness, and expert research, White Cargo failed to ignite interest among those in the academy. It did not influence further books and research, nor did it kickstart a national dialogue on the issue. Now might be the time to try again. Then as now, too many Americans think slavery not only was a uniquely American institution, but one in which black Americans were the only victims.

...

The reality is that in the 17th and 18th centuries, around 300,000 whites, mostly English and disproportionately children, were brought to the colonies to live unnaturally short lives producing cash crops like tobacco and cotton. In its earliest days, at least, the institution of white slavery was about as deadly as what came after it.

While it did not entail permanent ownership, indenture generally carried terms of 7 to 14 years. And, as Jordan and Walsh argue, the fact that it’s often characterized as simply “mortgaging one’s labor and nothing more” is “nonsense.” “In practice,” they write, “autonomy and freedom existed only at the discretion of the master.”

Moreover, quibbling over semantics would not portend well for the schools and media outlets currently promoting the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” Indeed, the equatorial West Africans who did arrive in Jamestown that year—hence the project’s title—did so not as permanent slaves but also as indentured servants—in fact, one of them went on to buy both land and indentured servants of his own, both black and white.

Further, that transaction was a one-off, and precisely because the colonial plantations at the time were already filled with subordinated and malaria-stricken whites. It would take almost a century in fact for enslaved blacks to outnumber “mortgaged” whites.

...

In rebutting the servant/slave distinction so often used to dismiss the history of white American slavery, the authors compare how actual servants had it back in England. Unlike their American cousins, for instance, their contracts were annual, not multi-year, and couldn’t be unilaterally extended for “broken conditions.” Further, they were never sold like chattel and their treatment was more akin to that of an extended family member, not livestock. Also, unlike American indentured servants, their masters would have had little chance of getting away with it if they killed these servants.

White American slaves generally came in three types: petty criminals, kidnapped children, and, as Jordan and Walsh call them, “free-willers.” But similar to how impoverished Africans would often sell their children into slavery, the latter was largely composed of dirt-poor peasants who sold themselves to traders out of a desperate hope of someday owning land (which was often promised in phony pamphlets commissioned by American plantation owners).

Unfortunately, Jordan and Walsh found, the majority would die still in bondage. And among those who didn’t, the bulk often ended up landless, poor, and “no better than when they’d arrived.”

...

Republicans must raise these historical facts in the looming reparations push. The talking points used in the past—i.e. the cost and distribution problems such payments would entail—won’t budge the hyper-emotive Left or light a fire under apathetic independents. That a whole slave class has been omitted from history and disregarded in the discussion about “repairing” past injustices is a moral claim and should be fought as such. If the Democrats feel this group deserves reparations but that group deserves nothing at all, they should be forced to answer why.

While injecting instances of historical suffering into the public dialogue for political gain doesn’t sit well for white conservatives, or conservatives generally—preferring, as they do, to earn respect through their own achievements rather than through moral intimidation—they certainly have an equal claim to make arguments on these grounds if those are to be the grounds of the argument.

After all, the descendants of those described in White Cargo—people who absolutely suffered institutional subordination, exploitation, and utter misery—were central in forming the nation in its very earliest days. If we are supposed to be so dead-set on settling centuries-old scores, these Americans deserve recognition as well."