Aubrey Cottle, the hacker claiming credit for stealing convoy donor info, has boasted of work with the FBI and Canadian law enforcement. The data was published by DDoSecrets, an anti-Wikileaks non-profit which has targeted states in the crosshairs of US intelligence.

By Kit KLARENBERG

On February 13th, the names and personal details of almost 100,000 individuals who donated sums to support the Canadian truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates through the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo appeared online via Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), an online archive seeking to easily connect journalists and researchers with leaked information.

The mainstream media used the trove to frame the convoy as essentially foreign-funded, and harass small donors from average backgrounds. Numerous fascinating nuggets, such as the gifting of $215,000 by a donor whose identity, email, IP address and ZIP code was not recorded by the website, unlike every other giver, were in the process ignored.

The hack-and-leak represented just the latest broadside against the convoy activists. Hours later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau activated the Emergencies Act for the very first time in Canadian history, an unprecedented move effectively suspending the civil rights of the protesters and granting federal law enforcement the power to seize their bank accounts without a court order.

An alleged founder of hacktivist collective Anonymous, Canadian Aubrey Cottle, took credit for the hack of the convoy donors’ information in the form of an online “manifesto” and accompanying video overlaying a clip from the Disney musical Frozen. Echoing Liberal Canadian politicians, Cottle accused the convoy of holding Ottawa “hostage for weeks while terrorizing the peaceful citizens who live there.”

The hacker went on to baselessly allege the donations were being used “to fund an insurrection,” and that individuals who had contributed had also bankrolled the January 6th, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

Next, Cottle warned without evidence that the global “convoy movement” could be “a cover for a type of Trojan Horse attack where extremists and militia groups arrive in large numbers with weapons,” as “large convoys of trucks moving in capital cities will look normal given the theme of these world wide protests.”

Absolutely nothing I say could EVER prepare you for this video of Aubrey Cottle, dude who hacked #GiveSendGo, writhing, preening, full-throated screaming into the camera “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO TO ME HUHHHH??!?”pic.twitter.com/852h2RB6UB

— Mandy Stadtmiller (@mandystadt) February 18, 2022

It was a characteristically volatile outburst from the eccentric hacker, who has been praised in mainstream media for taking on the far-right despite his history of overtly anti-Semitic commentary.

Operating in broad daylight for many years, the prolific cyber-warrior has somehow been able to function freely without any legal repercussions.

Cottle’s impunity may stem in part from his apparently intimate relationship with a variety of intelligence services. In 2007, Cottle was reportedly visited at home by a representative of Canada’s Security Intelligence Service, the nation’s equivalent to the CIA, which wished to exploit his hacking nous to battle “al-Qaeda and terrorist groups.” He allegedly declined the offer after some consideration.

Nonetheless, Cottle claims to have “often…dealt with feds” such as the FBI and Royal Canadian Mountain Police. His activities include running “child porn honeypot operations” involving multiple sites that “still give [him] nightmares.”

“I’ve done work for the fbi before and i give zero fucks,” Cottle wrote on Twitter on January 20, 2017.

As the right-wing outlet American Greatness noted, Cottle has boasted that he has been “lucky” enough to be granted “the blessing of alphabet agencies” – slang for intelligence services – to “weaponize Anonymous” for “antiterrorism” purposes.

Further indications of Cottle’s ties to law enforcement arrived in July 2021 when journalist Barrett Brown released documents revealing how the hacker had collaborated with notorious neo-Nazi cyber-activist “weev” to conduct major hacks that could be blamed on Antifa. Brown suggests this “just happened” via GiveSendGo.

We released documents in July showing FBI assets led by Nazi leader Weev and fronted by racist police asset Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle were planning to conduct major #Anonymous hacks that would be blamed on #Antifa. It just happened via #GiveSendGo. https://t.co/VnSb7NK5TY

— Barrett Brown (@BarrettB) February 17, 2022

Cottle has recently taken to Twitter to praise the Canadian government for activating the Emergencies Act. The hacker declared that “THEY F***ED AROUND AND FOUND OUT.” Though his Twitter account has since been locked, he has continued to brag about his GiveSendGo hack in a series of bizarre videos.

In another possible hint of national security state involvement, a non-profit self-styled whistleblower site called Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, has taken possession of the information supposedly obtained by Cottle, and begun distributing it to mainstream media outlets.

Besides targeting right-wing websites, DDoSecrets has previously been implicated in hacking operations against the Russian government. Its founder, Emma Best, is a vitriolic antagonist of Julian Assange and has gone to extreme lengths to paint him as an asset of the Kremlin.

Emma Best of DDoSecrets

DDoSecrets’ founder smears Assange, implicates Wikileaks

Before its role in publicizing the GiveSendGo donors list, DDoSecrets published lists of GiveSendGo donors to causes such as the heavily-FBI penetrated Proud Boys, Kyle Rittenhouse, and an effort to fight “voter fraud” in the 2020 US Presidential election.

Clearly aligned with liberal and Democratic Party objectives, DDoSecrets has also been a key hosting ground for terabytes of hacked data on private and public communications between members of militias, neo-Nazi and far-right groups hacked from social networks Gab and Parler, which Cottle claims to have obtained themself. Data scraped from Parler, including video from the January 6th riot, was subsequently used in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump in February 20201.

DDoSecrets is a largely opaque outfit. Operated by an almost entirely anonymous or pseudonymous team living across the globe, its founder, Emma Best, is the group’s only public-facing member. A former WikiLeaks collaborator and prolific Freedom of Information requester, Best’s dissident bona fides seem on the surface to be beyond doubt.

In 2016, after hammering the FBI with seemingly endless FOI demands, the Bureau appears to have considered prosecuting Best for “vexsome” activities. Five years later, it outright banned Best from filing such requests at all, but the decision was later overturned. Best also played a pivotal role in compelling the CIA to publish its 13 million-strong declassified document archive online in 2017.

Likewise, DDoSecrets’ June 2020 release of 269 gigabytes of sensitive US law enforcement fusion center data – dubbed “BlueLeaks” – exposed all manner of abuses, corruption, criminality and excesses on the part of American police forces, leading to official investigations, and the seizure of servers hosting the information in Germany by local authorities.

So why have mainstream media enthusiastically embraced DDoSecrets while advancing the Western security state’s crusade against WikiLeaks?

The latter organization has faced condemnation, censure, and designation by the CIA as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency,” leading to the Agency hatching plots to kidnap or even kill its founder, Julian Assange, while subjecting his collaborators to intensive surveillance and harassment.

By contrast, in 2019, the same year Julian Assange was arrested in London’s Ecuadorian embassy and hauled off to Belmarsh Prison to face extradition to the US, the federally funded Congressional Research Service recognized Best’s organization as a legitimate “transparency collective” – and not long after the IRS granted it 501(c)(3) non-profit status.

The repeated hailing by mainstream and US government sources of DDoSecrets as a WikiLeaks successor – or even its replacement – is all the more perverse given that Best has repeatedly published private Twitter communications between the Wikileaks collaborators.

The contents of these private discussions were dished out to corporate news outlets like Buzzfeed, which presented them as proof Assange was deliberately seeking to secure the election of Donald Trump, and knowingly collaborating with Russian intelligence to do so.

You now have evidence? Emma Best’s role in 2016 was to obtain evidence for BuzzFeed that would tie Guccifer2 to WikiLeaks. Emma shopping leaks that we’re already in WikiLeaks possession is the proverbial dish “best served” cold. Thanks for playing. Game over. https://t.co/MHiZEbLtSf

— Pirate Party Weekly (@PiratePartyINT) April 6, 2018

Numerous interviews conducted by Best over the years amplified the fraudulent narratives used to frame Assange as a Russian asset. In the eyes of many, they have played a role in justifying or minimizing his life-threatening incarceration in Britain’s Gitmo on trumped up, bogus charges.

A handful of independent journalists have been harshly critical of Best as a result, wondering how the public interest was served by publishing private communications that implicated Wikileaks in a security state intrigue. The DDoSecrets founder has consistently attempted to parry criticism by claiming their actions were not an attempt to attack or undermine Assange, and were “curated for relevance.”

However, Best overwhelmingly curated comments and interactions painting Assange and WikiLeaks in the worst possible light, which inevitably proved extremely alluring to a hostile media. Any exculpatory content included in the leaks was summarily and unsurprisingly ignored.

What’s more, the DDoSecrets founder’s own surging contempt for Assange is unambiguous. Over the years, Best has branded Assange as among things a “cowardly, transphobic, antisemitic trash person made of tepid mayo and a bleached wig.”

1. I am going through the #AssangeLeaks by @NatSecGeek @DDoSecret: I still haven’t found a single problematic exposé/scenario/scandal.What I do find really problematic is to publish internal communications/meetings of a media org, UNLESS this is necessary to reveal serious crimes

— Stefania Maurizi (@SMaurizi) July 14, 2020

CIA hack-and-dump ops against Iran and Russia raise further suspicions

In November 2021, Yahoo! News reported that the administration of US President Donald Trump authorized the CIA to “run wild” with covert actions in a bid to destabilize Iran. In 2018, Trump sanctioned the Agency to conduct “much more aggressive” offensive cyber activities, leading to the CIA launching “covert hack-and-dump operations” against Iran and Russia and “cyberattacks on Iranian infrastructure” with “less White House oversight” than before.

Given that DDoSecrets was launched in December that same year, the timing of the effort was striking. The first major coup of DDosSecrets arrived weeks later when it published 175 gigabytes of “messages and files from Russian politicians, journalists, oligarchs, religious figures, and nationalists/terrorists in Ukraine.” The collection was dubbed “The Dark Side of the Kremlin,” and avowedly sourced from a “hacking spree” conducted against Russian targets.

Transparency activists release massive trove of hacked, leaked Russian documents https://t.co/pyYTBtsW7W pic.twitter.com/hd550XKTXX

— The Hill (@thehill) January 26, 2019

Best claimed to The New York Times that the tranche was not published “explicitly as payback” for Russia’s alleged release of the DNC emails in 2016, while remarking that “it does add some appreciable irony.” She also used the opportunity to take aim once again Assange and WikiLeaks, stating she was “disappointed” at their “dishonest and egotistic behavior.”

Best insisted that her organization had also posted material favorable to Assange “leaked from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.” This refers to internal files from National Intelligence Secretariat (SENAIN), a now-defunct Ecuadorian intelligence agency charged with protecting the WikiLeaks chief and extracting him to safety. The Guardian reported on these documents in 2018 and went to great pains to present SENAIN as villains in the process.

Oddly, those files have since been removed from the DDoSecrets archive.

In November of that year, The Intercept and New York Times published a number of articles titled “The Iran Cables” based on an “unprecedented leak” of 700 pages of reports supposedly compiled by Tehran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. The series sought to expose the scale of Iranian “influence” in Iraq, in the process revealing “the surprising ways in which Iranian and US interests often aligned” in the years following the illegal war.

News about Trump’s loosening restrictions on CIA cyberwarfare to authorize hack-and-dump ops makes me wonder if Langley was behind the ICIJ’s #ChinaCables and the Intercept’s Iran Leaks, among other leaks targeting designated enemies https://t.co/YMl3XbPMgM pic.twitter.com/MdDskVoRHB

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 16, 2020

The release of the leaked files may have played a role in escalating conflict between the US and Iran. A New York Times story based on the material focused heavily on the alleged role of Iranian General Qasem Suleimani as the shadowy puppet master of the Iraqi government, claiming he “more than anyone else” had employed “the dark arts of espionage and covert military action to ensure that Shiite power remains ascendant.” Two months later, Soleimani was incinerated in an illegal US drone strike launched as he left Baghdad International Airport for a peace conference.

An Intercept article purporting to tell the true “story behind” the cables’ release wove a dramatic narrative straight out of a Le Carré novel, and which may have been just as fictional, claiming a nameless Iraqi approached the publication with the material in order to “let the world know what Iran is doing in my country.”

Even if the outlet’s narrative was accurate, and the Russian and Iranian document troves had not been obtained through the CIA “hack-and-dump operations” sanctioned under Trump, it would be an extraordinary if not inexplicable coincidence that content which precisely matched that description was released the following year.

CIA hack-and-leak operations are an increasingly common information warfare tactic. For example, in June 2021 a US government official acknowledged Washington was secretly financing “investigative journalists and investigative NGOs” and employing “components of the intelligence community” including the Agency to expose corruption by public officials abroad, having created the Organized Crime and Corruption Project (OCCRP) to serve as a funnel for this material.

OCCRP is funded by a welter of US intelligence cutouts, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy.

In October 2021, the OCCRP released the Pandora Papers, raising obvious questions about whether the underlying information was obtained through a US intelligence-related hack.

Back in December 2019, DDoSecrets partnered with the OCCRP to publish documents and data related to the operations of Formations House, which registered and operated companies for organized crime syndicates, dubious state-owned companies, and fraudulent banks.

Whether DDoSecrets and its founder are witting or unwitting pawns of the CIA is a moot point. Its commitment to publishing and hosting as much leaked material as possible makes the organization an extremely attractive conduit for ill-gotten sensitive documents, and the origins of this material is never questioned by news outlets that report upon it. After all, the imprimatur of DDoSecrets lends its releases credibility and legitimacy.

DDoSecrets has been scrupulous about attributing sources in particular cases. For example, the DDoSecrets entry on the DNC emails released by WikiLeaks forcefully asserts the documents were “hacked by Russian intelligence services.” This claim was undermined, however, by the admission of the CEO of CrowdStrike – the cybersecurity firm that made the attributions – admitting under oath there is no “concrete evidence” the emails were “actually exfiltrated” by anyone.

Meanwhile, other entries are careful to note constituent material was released by individuals associated with Russian intelligence, and may include “forged” documents.

The only comparable disclaimer that can be found in respect of any Western intelligence service anywhere else on the DDoSecrets website today relates to Syrian government emails originally dumped by WikiLeaks. The emails now include an accompanying blurb noting “the hack itself was not [emphasis in original] directly sponsored or conducted” by Washington, although its subsequent release was “carried out under the direct supervision of the US via FBI informant Hector ‘Sabu’ Monsegur.”

Since its foundation, DDoSecrets has provided a reliable archive for compromising information and data tranches stolen from the servers of foreign states which happen to be in the US government’s crosshairs.

Following Biden’s call to Trudeau, during which he demanded swift action against the truckers’ convoy filling downtown Ottawa and blockading US-Canadian border crossings in protest of vaccine mandates, DDoSecrets surfaced once again as a promotional platform for hacked data on convoy donors.

And while Assange languishes in prison, DDoSecrets is once again shopping its data to mainstream media outlets and advancing the critical interests of crisis-wracked Western governments.

thegrayzone.com

By Marcus DEVONSHIRE

It is a near-universal claim that the world’s first computer programmer was Ada Lovelace. She is referred to as the “enchantress of numbers”, a mathematical genius, a visionary and a fundamental contributor to the field of computing. The second Tuesday of October is “Ada Lovelace day” – an event to celebrate women’s achievements in STEM[4]. There is even a programming language named after her.

Ada lovelace was not the first programmer, nor was she any kind of genius and she contributed almost nothing to the field of computing. Almost all of the claims about her are wrong and together they constitute the biggest lies told in the field of tech.

Charles Babbage originated the concept of mechanical programmable computers. He named his most ambitious design the “analytical engine”. Due to funding issues and the manufacturing limitations of the time, he didn’t get to create it, but his plans were sound. In 1833, Ada Lovelace met Babbage at a party. She was seventeen and fascinated with Babbage’s work and they became friends. As the daughter of Lord Byron, who was a sordid character of the time, Ada was born a celebrity. Attention, privilege, talent and attractiveness came together to form very high self-regard.

“The more I study, the more insatiable do I feel my genius for it to be.”
Ada Lovelace,[1]

In 1842, a paper was published, in French, by Luigi Menabrea – it was based upon a lecture Babbage had given in Turin, two years prior, where he outlined the analytical engine’s operation and presented diagrams of some of Babbage’s programs that could run on it[6]. Ada was approached to translate the paper into English and Babbage suggested that she add some notes of her own. She also included Babbage’s sample programs from his Turin lecture and, through haranguing Babbage for help, modified the program’s complexity.[5]

“I want to put in something about Bernouilli’s Numbers, in one of my Notes, as an example of how an implicit function may be worked out by the engine, without having been worked out by human head & hands first. Give me the necessary data and formulae.”

Letter from Ada to Babbage,[7][8]

That’s it. Ada Lovelace is called the first computer programmer because she translated a paper written by one man, about another man’s work, using example programs written by that man from two years prior that she modified with a lot of his help. All of the fuss about Ada being the first programmer is about this translated paper. The claims made about her range from establishment media puff-pieces[2][3] which claim she was “the first programmer”, to more subtle claims that she was the “first published programmer” or that she “wrote the first published program”.

It’s ridiculous to even consider that Charles Babbage, who conceived of the analytical engine long before a teenage Ada was told about it, would not know how to program it or would not have written his own programs for it. Claims that Ada “wrote” the program in the published paper are incorrect. The program was written by Babbage in Turin, two years prior. Claims that she is the “first published programmer” or that the program is “hers” are more insidious. If you wrote a formula which you presented in a lecture, which would then be included in a translated paper by someone else – would that person deserve the credit for the formula? I have a hard time thinking that if such a case were made before a modern peer-review board, that they would conclude anything other than that the original author of a work is the one who deserved the credit. She was not the first published programmer because the program she published was not her work.

People believe what they want to believe, and computing has been a thorn in the side of feminists for a long time now. Special attention is given to “women in tech” because it’s a cushy position for people of higher ability than normal. It’s for the smart, the creative, the logically minded, and it must hurt quite a bit to see one’s own sex so under-represented. Since the game of modern feminism is about beating men, there is a great amount of cognitive dissonance in their brain over clearly lagging behind in many important fields. I could state it no better than they do themselves:

Reading through most accounts of history, we could be forgiven for assuming that women were not the warriors, the great thinkers nor the pioneering scientists who shaped and changed our world.

That men alone birthed art, churned out literature and fiercely challenged the status quo, while women functioned only within the domestic realm. But though the canon has perpetually erased the contribution of women and their work has been systematically discredited, devalued and derided, their light has doggedly broken through the cracks.

In short, the massive achievement of the male sex in creating so much of the modern world that serves us all, is a con. Women are just as good – nay, even better maybe, as they were the first to do it in your male field. Our lack of achievement isn’t our fault at all – it’s the result of a conspiracy to keep us down. My failures aren’t my failures, it’s just the (literal) man keeping me down! It’s the baying call of the loser, and we see far too much of it in our world.

When it comes to controlling the minds of the masses, and therefore the fate of a nation, a myth or a narrative is more powerful than anything else. It supersedes all thought, and when implanted strongly enough, may control that person’s thinking until death. We all see the futility of disabusing people of their notions sometimes, and simply must wait out the clock until the mass of people who have a competing narrative outnumbers them. Increasingly, I look at society as the result of a dominant collective who believes in a certain way “just because”. Slow and persistent subversion replaces those values with each generation – changes the nature of that society. People believe what they were taught to, very few people rationalise why they believe the things they do. This results in a series of “what about”-isms, knee-jerk responses to points to disengage the mind from considering painful thoughts.

The prevalence of men in physics? – What about Marie Curie?

American exceptionalism? – What about slavery?

The moral quality of British culture? – What about opium wars?

What about the logical male mind, of the clear contribution of male logic to society in the form of technology? What about Ada Lovelace?

That is why they lie.

References

[1] The cogwheel brain, Doron Swade
[2] Ada Lovelace Day: We should never forget the first computer programmer
[3] Who was Ada Lovelace? https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/49960544
[4] Ada Lovelace Day
[5] What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?
[6] Charles Babbage left a computer program in Turin in 1840. Here it is.
[7] Luigi Menabrea Publishes the First Computer Programs, Designed for Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
[8] Excerpts from the letters of Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace

unz.com

The current trade war with China began at the very outset of the Trump administration. Apparently alarmed at America’s dependence on Chinese goods, particularly the extent to which its defence industries are reliant on Chinese components and rare earths, Trump had a point but may have better served to speak softly about this vulnerability. He mentioned only two dependencies, there are thousands of products that America relies on China exclusively for.

In moves that were simply anti-competitive practices he then launched in a “tech war” with China. Banning the sale of chips and semi-conductors, along with bans on Chinese 5G and Huawei the global leader in particular. Not content with that the U.S. launched a global push to pressure its “allies’ to also ban Huawei and its state of the art 5G technology. Not to be taken in isolation, the tech war was just part of an overall strategy to damage and restrain China’s economy. “Decoupling” had arrived into the general lexicon.

To an extent the measures worked, the chip shortage caused a slowdown among many tech dependent sectors, but not for long. China has developed its domestic production at a pace not possible anywhere else. It has also convinced China that it needed to greatly accelerate its self-sufficiency across all sectors.

As it stands today, America has nothing that China needs that it can’t make or buy elsewhere. America conversely needs China desperately, without China’s goods the American economy grinds to a halt. The extent of that dependency has been highlighted by Americaэs ongoing supply chain chaos. Manufacturing, retail, construction and countless other industry sectors have stalled without Chinese goods. No country in the world is as dependent on imports as the U.S. Attempts to find alternatives to China are fruitless, no other country can match the efficiency, infrastructure, economies of scale and cost that China can. American manufacturing only accounts for 20% of the American economy, self-sufficiency for Americans is a fantasy, even in the best case scenario, it is generations away.

Long spoken of is “China’s nuclear option”, dumping its dollar holdings and rendering the dollar worthless. China doesn’t want to do that. Firstly the loss of a trillion of its own dollar holdings is not to be taken lightly, and it would also damage the holdings and economies of its other trading partners around the world. Such a move would be an absolute last resort. China’s real nuclear option is the withholding of essential goods to America.

China has all but monopolised the rare earth industries, now accounting for more than 85% of global production. Without rare earths Americas tech and defence sectors would be paralysed. All the seventeen critical rare earths are mined and refined in China in high volume. Some are mined in other countries in smaller volumes: developing alternative sources to China would a very lengthy process. For the foreseeable future, China decides who gets rare earths, and who doesn’t.

Unknown to many Americans the pharmaceutical industry is among the most heavily dependent of China. 80-85% of its products and precursors come from China, and there are currently few alternatives. I leave it to the reader’s imagination to visualise an America without medications, think Zombie apocalypse.

Some recent developments in China have given us a glimpse of the future. China is stockpiling food and other commodities at unprecedented levels. It is believed to hold more than half the world’s grain and maize already, other essential food stuffs are also being stockpiled at similar levels.

Iron ore, steel and other industrial raw materials are also being hoarded in previously unforeseen quantities. In a world of chronic shortages China has realised that commodities hold more value than cash.

More significantly, China just published a Governmental “White Paper.” It emphasises the need to conserve natural, finite resources (again think rare earths.) It also addresses the paradox that Trump was concerned about, why is China supplying parts to the U.S. military contractors? These among many other sectors will now require a “special export licence”. Read between the lines. China can apply these principles across any exported product it chooses. If they don’t like where it is headed, or what it will be used for, it isn’t going. Fertilisers, for which China accounts for about 30% of the world’s production are already banned from export. This is already forcing American many American farmers to switch from wheat to less fertiliser-intensive crops like soybeans.

China didn’t start or want this trade war, to date it is has been a one-sided assault on the Chinese economy by an increasingly desperate American government. China has not retaliated or employed any of the measures it could have in response, until now.

America now truly has its trade war, and more decoupling will follow, but from here on in, it will be on China’s terms.

(Click on the image to enlarge)

How Mark Zuckerberg’s millions and the Center for Technology and Civic Life turned Wisconsin blue in 2020.

By William DOYLE

Democrats seem to know that they cannot win a national election without employing the same tactics that they used to win in 2020. As Nsé Ufot, CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project, said “If there isn’t a way for us to repeat what happened in November 2020, we’re f—ed.”

What happened in 2020 involved a highly coordinated and privately funded “shadow campaign” for Joe Biden that took place within the formal structure of the election system itself. Through the injection of over $419 million of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s money, laundered through the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), the professional left presided over a targeted, historically unprecedented takeover of government election offices by nominally nonpartisan, but demonstrably ideological, nonprofit organizations and activists in key areas of swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Our research shows that CTCL spending in Wisconsin generated enough votes for Joe Biden to secure him an Electoral College win there in 2020. We estimate that CTCL spending in Wisconsin purchased Joe Biden an additional 65,222votes,without which Donald Trump would have won the state by 44,540 votes.

Although CTCL and CEIR are chartered as non-partisan 501(c)(3) corporations, our research shows that the $419.5 million of CTCL and CEIR spending that took place in 2020 was highly partisan in its distribution, and highly partisan in its effects. Targeted CTCL and CEIR spending played a decisive role in building a “shadow” election system with a built-in structural bias that systematically favored Democratic votes over Republican votes.

Big CTCL and CEIR money had nothing to do with traditional campaign finance, media buys, lobbying, or other costs that are related to increasingly expensive modern elections. Rather, it had to do with financing the infiltration of election offices at the city and county level by Democrat activists and using those offices as a platform to implement preferred administrative practices, voting methods, ballot harvesting efforts, and data sharing agreements, as well as to launch intensive multi-media outreach campaigns and surgically targeted, concierge-level get-out-the-vote efforts in areas heavy with Democratic voters.

The injection of bias into select local election offices through CTCL infiltration introduced structural bias into Wisconsin’s entire 2020 election. This involved favoring certain voters and voting practices over others, and disfavoring other classes of voters and voting practices, giving CTCL’s preferred voters and voting methods an outsized impact on the final election results. The outcome of the 2020 election in Wisconsin is not the outcome that would have occurred if the election had been conducted on the basis of established election laws, equal treatment of voters, and administrative neutrality.

CTCL In Wisconsin: Ground Zero For CTCL’s Nationwide Effort

CTCL’s Safe Elections Project in Wisconsin was not the result of a grass roots clamor for greater election funding among money-starved municipalities desperately seeking additional election funding. It was entirely a top-down endeavor, initiated by CTCL operatives, and funded by a massive inflow of money from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who cultivated connections among “Wisconsin Five” mayors and other city officials, incentivized the first grant applications, and provided funds and advice to aid in their completion.

CTCL involvement in Wisconsin’s election began in Racine. In late May, CTCL issued a $100,000 grant to the southeast Wisconsin city to “recruit other Wisconsin cities to join the ‘Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan.’” Racine Mayor Cory Mason spoke to his fellow liberal mayors in Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Kenosha about accepting CTCL’s grants—with the proviso that there would be strings attached.
CTCL authorized the City of Racine to distribute from its initial $100,000 grant, $10,000 to each of the four recruited cities (keeping $10,000 for itself), as an incentive for them to participate with Racine in applying for the larger CTCL conditional grants.

Emails obtained through public records requests show Mason’s office in May 2020 setting up numerous virtual meetings with the four other mayors three months before CTCL publicly announced the first round of grants to the “Wisconsin 5” on July 7, 2020. The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, and CTCL involvement in Wisconsin’s election was the culmination of a collaborative effort between CTCL’s activist directors and election officials in Green Bay, Kenosha, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine. These cities would soon come to be referred to in CTCL inner circles as “The Wisconsin 5.”

At least 10 other cities in areas that were important to Democratic efforts to retake Wisconsin would eventually seek to become part of the plan by applying for and accepting significant CTCL grants considerably in excess of the minimum $5,000 offered to non-urban election offices throughout the state.

CTCL And “The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan” to Infiltrate Wisconsin’s Election System

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan—which would emerge out of a collaboration between high level CTCL Advisors, several representatives of the Pierre Omidyar funded National Vote at Home Institute, and Milwaukee’s City Clerk office during Summer, 2020—was the lynchpin of CTCL’s involvement in Wisconsin’s 2020 election. Fulfilling its major objectives was a condition for CTCL funding. City officials among The Wisconsin 5 signed off on “clawback provisions” that allowed CTCL to reclaim their grant money if it was not used to further the objectives contained in the plan.

For example, the CTCL contract that Green Bay approved warns that the grant was to be used “only for” safe and secure election administration, “and for no other purposes,” which means under the ambitious terms they set forth in their portion of the WSVP. The grant’s clawback provision stated that “CTCL may discontinue, modify, withhold part of, or ask for the return of all or part of the grant funds if it determines, in its sole judgment, that (a) any of the above conditions have not been met or (b) it must do so to comply with applicable laws or regulations.”

How The Wisconsin 5 Sought to Implement CTCL’s Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan: Bonfire of the Inanities

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan lists CTCL’s four major strategic objectives.

• First, to “encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” mainly through providing “assistance” in absentee ballot completion and submission, and the installation of ballot drop boxes
• Second, to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.”
• Third, to recruit new election workers, mainly from among paid young activists who would replace the usual, older election day volunteers.
• A distant fourth, both in emphasis and level of funding, was the funding of Covid-19 related safety measures.

CTCL funded election offices in Wisconsin seemed particularly intent on courting a demographic favored by the activists at CTCL—a loosely defined “New American Majority” coalition—to replace the working-class voters who had abandoned the party in droves in 2016, and who formerly made up a significant part of the old Democratic “Blue Wall” in the industrial upper Midwest.

This coalition encompasses people of color, single women, young people, and is often extended to include members of the LGBTQ community. Two of the non-profits most closely affiliated with CTCL, the Voter Participation Center and the Center for Voter Information, are at the forefront of proponents of this electoral strategy. According to Democracy Docket, “In the 2020 election, VPC and CVI overcame unprecedented challenges to help engage voters from the New American Majority.”

Addressing these challenges would involve a large commitment of financial and human resources in Wisconsin. There was therefore considerable anguish expressed in the Wisconsin Safe Voting plan about the “hand holding” level of assistance that such voters required in order to cast valid votes, even under greatly relaxed absentee ballot standards during Covid-19 afflicted 2020. To meet this need, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee, and Racine together budgeted over $540 thousand of their CTCL grant money toward various forms of “non-partisan voter education” alone.

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan outlined the prodigious efforts that the Wisconsin Five were willing to make in order to bend the election system from within toward these untapped tranches of low-propensity potential Democratic voters, and thereby increase Democratic votes in their cities, and in the statewide totals. Established by officials of the Wisconsin Five in collaboration with CTCL advisors, it would serve as the general template for CTCL’s efforts in other key swing states nationwide. It is an extravagant wish list of far-left Democratic election concerns and priorities.
Some of the highlights:

• Concern was expressed about “voters who, understandably, were completely confused about the timeline and rules for voting in the midst of a pandemic and required considerable public outreach and individual hand-holding to ensure their right to vote.”
• Concerns were also expressed that many targeted Democratic voters would have no idea how to cast absentee ballots. WSVP participants lamented the fact that “countless voters” in their municipalities attempted to submit cell phone “selfies” as valid photo ID. Explaining to them that this was not a valid form of photo ID and instructing them on how to properly submit valid ID “took considerable staff time and resources.”
• Green Bay planned to spend $45,000 to employ bilingual “Voter Navigators” to help residents properly upload valid photo ID, complete their ballots, comply with certification requirements, and offer witness signatures.
• Racine wished to create a small corps of “Voter Ambassadors.” Racine officials said they would use their grants to recruit, train and employ paid Voter Ambassadors who would set up at the City’s community centers to assist voters with all aspects of absentee ballot requests, including photo ID compliance.
• Green Bay allocated funds to install secure drop boxes at the city’s libraries, police community buildings, and potentially several other sites including major grocery stores, gas stations, University of Wisconsin Green Bay, and Northern Wisconsin Technical College, in addition to the one already in use at their City Hall.
• In Madison city officials planned to install one secure drop box for every 15,000 voters, or 12 drop boxes total. Madison also planned to provide a potential absentee ballot witness at each drop box, utilizing social distancing and equipped with PPE.
• City officials from all of The Wisconsin Five sought additional funds “to accommodate those who [either do not] want to vote by mail, or go to the polls on election day or to early vote.” Funds were therefore sought to enable absentee “curbside” and “drive-thru voting,” particularly for those with health concerns who could “remain in their cars and have a virtually contact-less voting process.” Each of the five cities asked for significant resources to expand drive-through “curbside” voting for four weeks prior to election day.
• Madison officials sought $160,000 to provide 18 in-person absentee voting locations for the four weeks leading up to the November election. Madison officials also proposed the use of carts for their ExpressVote ballot marking devices for curbside voting so that the use of ExpressVote could be “normalized” to help voters with disabilities feel “less segregated” during the voting process.
• Green Bay sought to motivate potential voters through a CTCL-funded multi-prong strategy utilizing “every door direct mail,” targeted mail, geo-fencing, billboards, radio, television, and streaming-service PSAs, digital advertising, and automated calls and texts. The City guaranteed that these efforts would be undertaken in English, Spanish, Hmong, and Somali. Additional grant funds to fund voter outreach from within Green Bay’s election office would be “distributed in partnership with key community organizations including churches, educational institutions, and organizations serving African immigrants, LatinX residents, and African Americans.” The total amount that Green Bay sought for this initiative alone was $215,000, or about 64 percent of their entire pre-CTCL election budget.
• Milwaukee wanted to develop a broad-based voter outreach strategy that would appeal “to a variety of communities within Milwaukee, including historically underrepresented communities such as LatinX and African Americans, and would include a specific focus on the re-enfranchisement of voters who are no longer on probation or parole for a felony. Additionally, this campaign would include an edgy but nonpartisan and tasteful communications campaign to harness the current [Black Lives Matter] protests’ emphasis on inequity and ties that message to voting.”
• Racine expressed the desire to obtain funds to purchase “a Mobile Voting Precinct so the City can travel around the City to community centers and strategically chosen partner locations and enable people to vote in this accessible (ADA-compliant), secure, and completely portable polling booth on wheels, an investment that the City [would] be able to use for years to come.”
• Madison planned to launch “a robust and strategic poll worker recruitment effort, focusing on people of color, high school students, and college students” to replace older, experienced poll workers.
• Milwaukee promoted a similar plan to increase staffing by launching a recruitment campaign aimed at “a new generation of election workers to sign up and be involved in their democracy.”

Absentee Ballot Chaos Heavily Favors Joe Biden in 2020

CTCL won Wisconsin for Joe Biden, and they did it mainly with absentee ballots. Covid-19 was used as a pretext in many states to put a moratorium on election integrity laws, guidelines and ballot verification procedures that have been long standing and time tested. The result was chaos, especially in states that suddenly moved from very limited absentee voting toward near universal mail-in voting in a very short period of time, such as Wisconsin.

CTCL’s major objective, as set forth in all their internal documents and grant applications, was to promote absentee voting. This involved getting absentee ballots into the hands of reliably Democratic demographics, showing them how to complete them correctly, convincing them to submit them, and providing as many avenues as possible for those ballots to be returned and counted.

CTCL’s involvement in the 2020 election appears exceedingly complex on the surface, at times requiring a program to keep track of the major players, scandals, and institutional relationships that grew out of the CTCL Safe Elections Project. This aspect of CTCL involvement in Wisconsin has been extensively documented by Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist and M.D. Kittle of the Wisconsin Spotlight, among others.

But all of the resources devoted toward ballot curing, drop boxes, vote navigators, partisan activists infiltrating local election offices, and other voter outreach efforts funded by CTCL were aimed at one ultimate end: Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.
While Democrats knew that the radical move toward near universal absentee balloting in Wisconsin and the chaos that would ensue would probably work in their favor, they could not be sure. This is where CTCL performed an invaluable function that could not have been performed from outside the election system, and why infiltration and the injection of large amounts of funding into local election offices was of such importance.

As Hayden Ludwig of the Capital Research Center, an expert on mail-in voting, told us:

The surge of mail-in ballots due to Covid-19 was one of the 2020 election’s greatest novelties and the key to how the election was manipulated in favor of Joe Biden.

Democratic leadership came together behind vote-by-mail in early 2020 as their best shot at overcoming voters’ Covid fears and defeating Trump, in large part because of pressure from election activist groups, such as the National Vote At Home Institute.

The resulting tsunami of mail-in ballots created unprecedented security and chain-of-custody problems in states where vote-by-mail has never been tried on this scale. It strained the U.S. Postal Service’s ability to deliver mail-in ballots both to voters and vote-counters on-time.

It also stressed the budgets of local elections offices, requiring additional personnel and ballot-counting machines even as Covid-19 restricted working conditions. Without a surefire way to get these mail-in ballots first into voters’ hands, and second into ballot-counters’ hands, the Left could not have been confident the outcome would have significantly helped Biden. This is where CTCL proved essential.

A large part of CTCL’s grants paid for private ballot collection bins outside of USPS’s jurisdiction and with questionable oversight. CTCL also funded additional poll workers and vote-by-mail equipment to count incoming ballots, favoring large, Democratic-leaning cities in battleground states.

How CTCL’s Promotion of Mail-In Voting Favored Democrats in Wisconsin

In Wisconsin, absentee ballots can be submitted by mail or “in person.” The majority of absentee ballots in Wisconsin were submitted via mail or deposited in private drop boxes whose contents were then harvested and delivered to the City Clerk. The Wisconsin 5 ended up having the highest rates of mail in voting in the state. All were well above the statewide average of 59.8 percent, with the highest being Dane County (Madison) at 74.4 percent and Milwaukee County at 70.6 percent. This was a major contributor toward increases in Democratic votes among Wisconsin’s CTCL funded counties.

By September 2020, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) had already approved a proposal to fund the mailing of all registered voters absentee ballot request forms, and then assisted further increases in mail-in voting by refusing to intervene in a campaign to convince voters to prevaricate about their absentee ballot status to avoid ID and signature matching requirements.

This campaign veers toward actual election fraud. Clerks in liberal bastions Dane and Milwaukee counties in March 2020 advised voters that anyone could use the threat of Covid-19 as a reason for claiming “indefinitely confined” status for absentee voting, which excuses them from voter ID requirements. This message reached hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters, and spread beyond Dane and Milwaukee counties. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that, while this advice may have been ill advised, it was ultimately up to each voter to determine their status. Ultimately, about 215,000 voters claimed this status, four times more voters than had claimed to be “indefinitely confined” in 2016.

Absentee voting by mail has a well-known partisan bias that favors Democrats. According to the Election Lab at MIT, the partisan differences in voting by mail increased substantially in 2020. The number of Democrats voting by mail increased by more than 200 percent, while the number of Republicans utilizing vote by mail increased by only 50 percent compared to 2016. In total, they estimate that nearly 60 percent Democrats cast their ballots by mail in 2020, compared to just 30 percent for Republicans. Mail-in ballots are therefore twice as likely to be cast by Democratic voters as Republican voters.

This is well known, and is one of the reasons that Democrats advocate so strongly for universal mail-in voting, but it is far more than a matter of tailoring voting practices to their voters’ preferences. What they fear is that a significant portion of their coalition will not vote at all without mail-in ballots.

Table 1 shows the breakdown of absentee voting among the Wisconsin 5 counties and the other five counties that received significant CTCL grant money.

• Prior to 2020, the rate of absentee voting in Wisconsin was 4.6 percent on average in 2016, and 5.5 percent in 2018. Wisconsin had no experience with widespread absentee voting in 2020 when the statewide absentee voting rate suddenly soared to 58.9 percent.
• The vast majority of votes in the top 10 CTCL counties were absentee votes in 2020. Among the Wisconsin 5 counties, 70.6 percent of all ballots were absentee ballots.
• For the top 10 CTCL counties, the average rate of absentee voting was 67.5 percent, considerably above the state average of 59.8 percent.
• There is strong correlation between high absentee voting rates and counties that generated the most excess votes for Joe Biden compared to 2016, which is the hallmark of a successful get-out-the-vote effort.
• Biden’s vote margin in Milwaukee and Dane counties, which each had absentee voting rates above 70 percent, was a staggering 267,652 votes, over 25 times his statewide margin of victory.
• Four out of the five counties that experienced the largest Democratic shift in 2020 were the four counties with the highest absentee voting rates.

Financing Wisconsin’s Shadow Election System: The Myth of Underfunded Local Election Offices

While we cannot attest to the particular strains on election budgets caused by Covid-19, we do know that by July 2020 the federal government had already distributed over $470 million in CARES Act election grants. The state of Wisconsin received $7,362,345 from the Federal Government and provided state matching funds of $1,472,469 for a total of $8,834,814 to deal with Covid related election expenses.Due to Wisconsin election law, CTCL grants were actually made to cities and not to counties, as in many other states. CTCL marketed its Safe Election Project as an attempt to address the needs of underfunded local election offices in the face of Covid-19 related election challenges. CTCL characterized the problem as “A chronic pattern of systemic underfunding of elections – made more acute by a pandemic.”

To give some idea of the scale of CTCL funding of Wisconsin’s election, this is almost exactly equal to the $8.8 million that CTCL ultimately provided to the Wisconsin Five alone, even though those cities contain less than 20 percent of the state’s population. If they were “underfunded” before CTCL appeared, they were certainly not underfunded afterward by any statewide standard.

But an examination of the election budgets published by the state’s most populous cities shows that The Wisconsin 5 already had some of the most generous election funding in the state. After accounting for CTCL grants, an obvious two tier election system – at least in financial terms – emerges in Wisconsin between the Wisconsin 5 plus 1 (the additional city being Janesville in Rock County) and the rest of Wisconsin cities.

• Average per capita election budgets among the six largest CTCL grant recipients was $5.61. Among the next 5 largest Wisconsin cities it was $2.64 per capita. CTCL singled out for its largest grants some of the most well funded election offices in the state.
• After accounting for CTCL grants, average per capita funds available for election spending rose to $15.48 among the Wisconsin 5 while among the next 5 most populous Wisconsin cities, after accounting for their much smaller CTCL grants, average per capita election funding was only about $3.63.
• Not only was CTCL funding not based on any objective criteria of “underfunding” at the state level, but CTCL grants greatly exacerbated existing election funding disparities significantly, even between high grant CTCL cities, and low grant or no grant CTCL cities.
• Approximately 25 percent to 35 percent of Wisconsin’s population benefited considerably from CTCL funding, while the remainder of the state’s population would have to make do with their existing budgets, supplemented perhaps by one of CTCL’s nominal $5,000 grants.

Partisan Bias in The Distribution of CTCL Grants: Why It Matters

In Wisconsin, CTCL grants were awarded to cities and towns, which are in charge of administering elections. Partisan bias in the distribution of CTCL money is important not only because it is unfair, but because it introduces an easily quantifiable structural bias that favors Democrats in the election system in places that are already more inclined to generate more Democratic votes than Republican votes.
Table 3 shows that big CTCL money went to some of the most heavily Democratic cities in the U.S.

• The Wisconsin Institute For Law and Liberty estimates that 216 communities in Wisconsin got CTCL grants totalling about $10.3 million.
• $8.8 million, or 85 percent, went to The Wisconsin 5, all heavily Democratic cities.
• $9.2 million, or about 90 percent of total CTCL spending in Wisconsin, went to the top 15 cities which are distributed among 11 out of 72 of Wisconsin’s counties.
• The top 9 CTCL grants all went to heavily Democratic cities. 80 percent of CTCL’s large grants, which amounted to 90 percent of all CTCL spending in Wisconsin, went to reliably Democratic cities.
• CTCL has repeatedly claimed that the distribution of their grants shows no partisan bias. This is because in Wisconsin, over 200 of their small $5,000 grants, which appear to have been handed out indiscriminately, accounted for only 10 percent of their statewide funding. The distribution of CTCL grant funding, on the other hand, shows considerable and systematic partisan bias.
• Between Dane (Madison) and Milwaukee Counties Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 364,372 votes in a state that Biden won by less than 21,000 votes. Taking into account grants to Fitchburg and Sun Prairie in Dane County, and West Allis in Milwaukee County, the two most heavily Democratic counties in the state got $4.79 million in CTCL grants, or 46.5 percent of total CTCL spending in Wisconsin while they make up only 25.6 percent of the state’s population..
• About 85 percent of CTCL’s Wisconsin grants went to the Wisconsin Five cities, whose average partisan bias is D+37 percent.
• 87 percent of cities that got substantial CTCL grants became more heavily Democratic. Even Republican majority cities like Wausau, Waukesha and Brookfield (in Waukesha County) became less Republican in 2020. This is not because of voters switching sides. Donald Trump increased his vote totals throughout these counties over 2016 by over 12 percent. It is because Democrat votes in CTCL cities increased by a larger amount than Republican votes increased.
• By targeting such heavily Democratic cities, even in Republican counties like Brown, Kenosha and Racine, CTCL money could be relied upon to generate the maximum possible vote gains for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Even in CTCL cities where Donald Trump won, he won by fewer votes than he did in 2016 as a result of a greater percentage increase in Biden votes, which is all that matters for statewide vote totals.
• The GOTV multiplier we estimate for these cities shows how a randomly targeted get-out-the-vote effort will affect their net additional Democratic votes. For example, in Madison an additional 1000 votes is expected to generate a net gain for Democrats of 670 votes. In Kenosha, it would be 160 votes.

The Impact of CTCL on Wisconsin’s Election, 2020

Joe Biden won only 14 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. In the ten counties Biden won that did not receive substantial CTCL money, the sum of his victory margin was only about 19,600 votes.

In the remaining 4 counties in which Biden won, all of which were CTCL counties, his margin was 380,371 votes. Biden’s margin of victory came almost entirely from CTCL funded counties, so that is where we look to attempt to discover the impact of CTCL funding on Wisconsin’s 2020 election results.
Many counties received more than one CTCL grant that add up to a substantial total, so we include countywide grant totals in our analysis. Our conclusions are based on a binary in group/out group analysis, where the in group consists of counties that were awarded over $50k in CTCL funds. These counties when combined exhibit different statistical characteristics than Wisconsin’s other 62 counties when we focus on CTCL spending as a determining variable. We conceptualize elections in CTCL counties as “Get Out the Vote” machines for Joe Biden based on our GOTV multiplier in Table 3, where a randomly targeted get out vote effort will generate net gains in votes for Joe Biden based on the D+ percentage. Since the get-out-the-vote effort in CTCL counties was not randomly targeted, this methodology gives very conservative estimates.

Using this method, and adjusting for systematic increases in turnout and population growth, we estimate with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that CTCL spending in Wisconsin caused: 65,222 Additional Joe Biden votes. Since Joe Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 was 20,682 votes, we conclude with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that in the absence of CTCL in Wisconsin: Donald Trump wins Wisconsin by 44,540 votes.

This estimate is closely aligned with our undisputed Texas results, where we were able to employ a more sophisticated methodology because of the greater number of counties that received CTCL grants, and higher and more continuous variability in grant amounts. In the Texas case, using BART analysis, we estimated that additional Biden votes that could be attributed to CTCL was about 200,000 votes, or 3.8 percent of his statewide total. In this case our estimate is 4 percent of Biden’s Wisconsin statewide total, so these results are closely aligned with our Texas results.

CTCL spending had other effects, in addition to increasing Biden’s vote total. With the exception of Fond Du Lac County, all of the counties which comprise our CTCL in-group shifted significantly toward Democrats in 2020, despite the fact that all witnessed significant increases in Donald Trump votes over 2016, usually in the neighborhood of 10 percent to 12 percent. This was not a systematic pattern that we observed in Wisconsin’s other 62 counties, in which Republican to Democratic shifts are far fewer and more randomly distributed.

Waukesha County, Wisconsin’s reliably red and third most populous county, shifted Democrat by an astonishing 5.85 percent in 2020, while solidly red Marathon County also shifted Democrat. Though they remained Republican counties, they are much less so now.

Extremely blue Dane County became even more blue, with the Democrat vote share increasing by an equally stunning 5.28 percent from an already high level. Unless this is reversed, one of the most significant effects of CTCL’s intervention in Wisconsin was to make its most populous counties significantly more Democratic than they were in 2016. These changes could have a decisive impact on elections in 2022 and 2024, especially if an organization like CTCL attempts to replicate their 2020 effort in the future.

We can assert with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that CTCL’s $10.3 million investment in Wisconsin flipped the state from red to blue in 2020. A bill to prevent private funding of Wisconsin’s elections in the future recently passed both houses of the Wisconsin legislature but was vetoed by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. We doubt he will reconsider his veto after reviewing this report.

theamericanconservative.com

Fifteen years ago, a man who was head of the GW Bush White House bio-terrorism study group, and a special adviser to the President, unexpectedly found himself propelled into becoming the ‘father’ of pandemic planning, after Bush had come to his bioterrorism people to demand some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. “We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?”. From his perch of influence – serving an apocalyptic president — Dr Venkayya became the driving force for a dramatic change in U.S. policy during pandemics.

The then White House guidelines (born out of a bio-terrorism context), allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and with churches shuttered, all in the name of disease containment. It seemed so simple; “Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?”: A model of disease control, based on stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.

Well, from there, the “founding father of lockdowns” (not unnaturally) became successively head of pandemic policy at the Gates Foundation, and then President of Global Vaccine Business Unit. However, as U.S. commentator Jeffrey Tucker observes, the policy models developed by this White House study group “kept spitting out a conclusion that shutting down schools would drop virus transmission by 80%. I’ve read his memos from this period — some of them still not public — and what you observe is not science, but ideological fanaticism in play”.

Whatever its parentage, the lockdown movement that this adviser authored is global, ferocious, and, as a fully credentialised meme (bio-war parentage, White House and Gates), is almost irrepressible. It is the same in today’s euphoric stock markets: everyone gets caught up in the dance … chasing credentialised stock narratives to the point of irrationality. Who cares about the fundamentals, contra-indications, or even warnings from financial or medical experts. This pandemic policy approach has evolved into a form of contagion, in itself.

As in markets, so in politics: Memes, however well-credentialised, shift. The global political meme since early 2020 of lockdown and vaccine pandemic control – that became a quasi-hegemony – now is being overtaken by a fresh meme, and a new rising phase of politics: the politics of inflation.

Hot inflation figures are already defining the debate on the Biden agenda, the broader economy, and spooking the White House. Prices rose in the U.S. 0.9% from last month, for an annual inflation rate of 6.2% (the biggest inflation spike in 30 years).

This spike in inflation may sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB), potentially killing a quick deal on the $1.75 trillion package. Many Americans are unsettled, finding themselves inhabiting this ‘weird pandemic economy’. Shelves are empty. Wages are up, but so are prices (by more than official figures suggest), on almost anything you want to buy. The stock market soars, on the conviction that the Fed can never allow ‘the market’ to fall more than 10%. The economy is adding jobs, albeit mainly low quality ones. But ports are backlogged. ‘For hire’ signs are plentiful. Yet businesses report difficulty recruiting workers. And no one knows when things are going to straighten out, or even if they will straighten out.

Republicans have been ramming home the message that the inflation spike effectively, is a covert government ‘tax’, and they blame Biden’s ‘Big Spend’ for the inflation demon’s frightening apparition. Some ‘up’ the anxiety further, reminding Americans that the global ‘Davos’ élite have been openly telling us that one day we will own nothing; have no privacy, and will be happy. And the way they will make it happen, it is said, is through destroying the value of money.

It seems that the ‘politics of fear’ may be ‘crossing the aisle’. But, in this shift, Big Tech cannot ride so easily to the Establishment’s rescue. With the vaccine meme, it has been relatively routine for the Tech social media to censor and delete all contrarian opinion, whether credentialed or not; but when it comes to inflation, ‘fact-checking’ becomes not just redundant, but counter-productive, for the ‘facts’ are visible with every purchase made. And every consumer can attest that prices are rising well above 6.2%.

Inflation will become the hottest political issue as we head toward 2022. Two ex-Federal Reserve members say the Fed should raise rates to “at least 3%,” and maybe 4%. And two current Fed Presidents warn that the Treasury market is “not as resilient” as it should be, and that even modest stress could break it.

The former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, says that if the Fed doesn’t deal with inflation, then it “could result in the re-election of Donald Trump”. The Fed however, is locked tight in a corner of its own making: it has to finance Biden’s big BBB spend – and this implies keeping interest rates low (to keep Federal interest expenditure from ballooning). To ‘Go Big’ with fiscal spending will just accelerate inflation, yet this what the White House wants to do, when it says that spending will win the voters hearts, and that Biden too, very much shares Americans’ worries about inflation, and the prospect of rising mortgage payments. It is a plain non-sequitur.

Another ‘fully credentialised’ meme, chased to the point of exuberance, has been the ‘re-opening’ and return of ‘normal’ meme – if only (and when) vaccination rates were to reach 70% (a rate recently upped to 90%). But there is no normal. We’re living in a new post-pandemic world. The ever more complex, network, economic system is experiencing breakages at key points.

The notion that the economy could be locked down for two years, and then simply would ‘rebound’ just as ‘it was’, entirely intact, was always magical thinking, (and yet was widely embraced on Wall Street). The more complex the system, the greater the risk of systemic instability, as cascades start to slide away.

And human psychology and social culture is yet another complex networked system. The pandemic has made us question the ‘way we were’, and to rethink our life-balance. The behavioural changes induced by the Great Depression, for instance, did not fade until 30 years after the Depression was over. Such is the staying power of social trauma – whether it be war, depression or pandemic. Accordingly, we will not likely recover from this pandemic according to the logic embraced by the ‘bounce back’ meme.

On the whole, the ‘meme-politics of lockdown and vaccine mandates’ may be fading, but the inflation meme and the economic aftermath meme has only just begun.

Digging down deeper, we find that all this furious meme-chasing does have a common thread. Tucker observed that that the original pandemic planning was deeply ‘ideological’. How so? It may have become political-ideological since 2020, but the planning was years earlier. The link perhaps is expressed in the career progression of the ‘father of lockdown’ (as Tucker calls him): aide to the U.S. President, head of pandemic policy with the Gates Foundation and President of the Global Vaccine Business Unit.

The link would seem to be the commingling of Big Tech (Silicon Valley), Defence Tech, Big Business (Davos) and Big Pharma – giving birth to the technocratic managerialist mindset. (The managerial technocratic approach which so spectacularly blew-up, with the U.S. rout in Afghanistan, leaving in its wake only systemic human instability seeping across the nation).

Tucker gives us this thought about the ‘ideology’ underlying so many of these seemingly credentialised memes:

“In a surprising interview, Bill Gates said the following: “We didn’t have vaccines that block transmission. We got vaccines that help you with your health, but they only slightly reduce the transmission. We need new ways of doing vaccines.”

“What can we make of Gates’s passing statement: “We need a new way of doing vaccines”?”, Tucker asks. “Let’s travel back in time to examine his career at Microsoft and his shepherding into existence the Windows operating system. By the early 1990s, it was being billed as the essential brain of the personal computer. Security considerations against viruses were not part of its design, however, simply because not that many people were using the internet …

“The neglect of this consideration turned into a disaster. By the early 2000s, there were thousands of versions of malware (also called bugs) floating around the internet, and infecting computers running Windows worldwide … The problem of malware was dubbed ‘viruses’. It was a metaphor. Not real”.

It’s not clear that Gates ever really understood that. Computer viruses aren’t anything like biological viruses. To maintain a clean and functioning hard drive, you want to avoid and block a computer virus at all costs, explains Tucker. Any exposure is bad exposure. The fix is always avoidance until eradication.

“With biological viruses, we have evolved to confront them through exposure, and let our immune system develop to take them on. A body that blocks all pathogens without immunity, is a weak one that will die at the first exposure, which will certainly come at some point in a modern society. An immune system that confronts most viruses and recovers, grows stronger. That’s a gigantic difference that Gates never understood.

“In short, keeping viruses out of computers constitutes the single biggest professional struggle in Gates’ life. The lesson he learned was that pathogen blocking and eradication was always the path forward. What he never really understood is that the word virus was merely a metaphor for unwanted and unwelcome computer code. The analogy breaks down in real life.

“After finally stepping back from Microsoft’s operations, Gates started dabbling in other areas, as newly rich people tend to do. They often imagine themselves especially competent at taking on challenges that others have failed at simply because of their professional successes … And what subject did he pounce on? He would do to the world of pathogens what he did at Microsoft: he would stamp them out! He began with malaria and other issues and eventually decided to take on them all. And what was his solution? Of course: antivirus software. What is that? It is vaccines. Your body is the hard drive that he would save with his software-style solution.”

In parenthesis, we should note that dualism in ratiocination has be-devilled western thinking since the outset: First, the divine sphere of perfection redeeming the corrupted sinful sphere of humanity. And in its secularised form: Science redeeming wayward humanity towards universal utopias. And in our Tech age, AI ‘software’ correcting and ‘improving’ human hardware.

Here is the point; and here the thread: All our seemingly credentialised memes are hollow, in the same way Gates’ understanding of biology is. “Early on in the pandemic, to get a sense of Gates’s views”, Tucker says, “I watched his TED talks. I began to realize something astonishing. He knew much less than anyone could discover by reading a book on cell biology from Amazon. He couldn’t even give a basic 9th-grade-level explanation of viruses and their interaction with the human body. And yet here he was, lecturing the world about the coming pathogen and what should be done about it. His answer is always the same: more surveillance, more control, more technology”.

Let’s not pin this all onto Gates however – this dualistic way of ratiocination runs through all of western modernity. Tech vaccines are the solution to the Covid virus. And, forced (human) separation is good for placing the malware into quarantine. The real-economy is the hardware that Central Bank ‘software’ will protect against recessionary pathogens. The Davos’ Re-Set will upload new global software for a ‘fairer, greener future’. A fourth Industrial Revolution is the digital technological management that will clean out Climate malware. Etc, etc.

In reality, all these are highly complex network systems, not susceptible to dualistic intervention. They work – if they work – as organic wholes. At best, we face systemic instability, as a result of these naïve ‘software’ interventions. At worst, systemic collapse.

Academia, with its woke newspeak, is a god-awful thing. Only through the complete destruction of language can actually fascist policies, which threaten to eradicate humanity, be passed off as progressive, even social-democratic. Our aim is to build upon our previous chapters to show that these were not intellectual fishing expeditions – we’re here with the receipts.

Jeremy Bentham’s horrific theory and model of the Panopticon is openly presented as a ‘positive vision of the future’ which official academia endorses through its ivory-tower liberal idealists as the foundation of ‘Smart Cities’. The Great Reset openly takes its inspiration for the ‘Smart City’ from the Panopticon prison system.

In his 1975 work, ‘Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison’, the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, combining the ideas of his Marxist mentor Althusser and those of Nietzsche, looks at Bentham’s panopticon and traces it back in time to the concept of the quarantine justified by a plague. He goes on to describe the 17^th century city under quarantine as the basis of our modern conception of prison in horrifically prescient detail, given the present reality of a plague-justified lockdown, citizen tracking, and control system already imprisoning millions of people in Europe and the Anglophone world.

Is this a mere coincidence? Or have the planners of the Great Reset intentionally taken Foucault’s critical description of the plague-to-panopticon as their operating system?

Michel Foucault (left), Jeremy Bentham (right)

The prison grid society, the Panopticist project was developed by the 19^th century English liberal Jeremy Bentham, as we discussed in ‘Smart Cities: The Perfection of the Prison Grid Society’.

Smart Cities are not merely poor or distorted manifestations of a genuinely positive vision, they are genealogically defective, going back to that great enemy of humanity, Thomas Hobbes, whose influence on Bentham was profound.

From the perspective of planned development, these new cities are the culmination of several decades of ‘green’ initiatives at the heart of public-private synergy initiatives, which has been the meal ticket for any number of universities.

Academia in Service of Technocracy

Because of the corporatized decline of western civilization, including at the level of the academy, there has been a compartmentalization and lack of a truly critical interdisciplinary approach. This has left the schools of law, engineering, and technology the task of proposing neo-Benthamian panopticons as Smart Cities, and openly so, but with a shockingly impoverished understanding of political science and political philosophy. You see, in their minds, these things are good.

And yet these fields necessarily inform both the ethical and practical dimensions of any such civilizational project such as a ‘Great Reset’ to ‘build back better’ into ‘Smart Cities’.

None of which is to say that there isn’t some attempt to grapple with the ethics of the endeavor at the academic level. The point here is that the state of the academy has been so far impoverished, precisely as the result of the awards for faculty and chairs system has been driven by philanthropy – a philanthropy which in turn serves the interests of the technocracy, in line with the World Economic Forum’s projects like its ‘Partners Program’, which works in tandem with its ‘Young Global Leaders’ initiative.

This creates an echo chamber and vicious cycle, where chairs of departments with powers over curriculum and emphasis of the departments in question, then promote the next generation of candidates through their post-secondary programs, who in turn advance through a ‘merit’ program of awards on the basis of embodying the vision already laid out by the WEF. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

If we conceive of ‘social democracy’ as the economics of fascism with its twin system of corporate dominance plus a welfare state, add to it the recent emergence of an official ‘in-group vs. out-group’ two-citizen class system, take away meaningful elections, then we can see a parallel construction or analogous evolution of para-fascist technocracy emerging from various fields of ‘expertise’. All without the fachidiots in each field having a view of the entire leviathan.

The work of Foucault and his influence on ‘Smart Cities’ is not merely an abstraction we insist upon, but rests firmly and openly in the peer-review and academic literature on the construction of Smart Cities. We do not claim that Foucault advocated such, as his analysis is non-advocacy. But the institution he labored in had a reason for his retention.

For context, we will first cite the relevant section of the text from the above referenced ‘Discipline & Punish’.

“This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and the periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead – all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.[…]

But there was also the political dream of the plague, […] The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout by hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies – this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function, according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of the plague.” – (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, chapter ‘Panopticism’ pp. 197-198)

Those who are aware, who have enough of an interdisciplinary foundation to see what is truly developing, find themselves as either renegades of that system, or as its minions and ideologues, whose own motivations border on irrelevant given that the system will always tend to produce the parts which it requires.

A typical example of these minions can be found at the Queensland Institute of Technology, Faculty of Law. Emerging from corporate ‘synergy’ law studies in the arenas of intellectual property, ecological concerns, international law, and the development of ‘Smart Cities’ we find the Datafication and Automation of Human Life Research Program.

The entire project is framed just like the ‘criticism’ of the IMF which comes from the WEF. Their masthead art reflects that: it is a person imprisoned, and here we are to assume that they are against such a system. If polled, how many would affirm that they are opposed to illiberal solutions, and instead support a discourse of empowerment? Yet the meaning and substance of their work is entirely corporatist and technocratic, demeaning human beings and changing laws from minimum requirements to maximum demands of the technocracy.

For example, the work of Lachlan Robb and Felicity Deane of the DAHL program, in “Smart Cities as Panopticon: Highlighting Blockchain’s Potential for Smart Cities Through Competing Narratives”, we find a microcosm of the inverted world, where technocracy is disguised in the language of progressive newspeak, evidenced in the abstract alone:

“This chapter argues that the narratives of smart cities demonstrate the potential value of blockchain technologies. Drawing upon competing narratives within the cultural imaginary, both the ‘dream’ of a better city, and the ‘fear’ of an oppressive structure will highlight the need to consider both Bentham and Foucault’s Panopticon. The term ‘panopticon’ is defined and explored within the context of blockchain technology. In doing so three concepts are identified: the enabling nature of a panopticon; the use of a blockchain-enabled-panopticon to encourage human flourishing; and the ability for technology such as this to enhance standards above a basic minimum of the law. This chapter suggests that understanding smart cities, panopticon and blockchain, may allow for a better account for competing narratives of fear that can lead to a deeper understanding of how this technology can be deployed.”

What is being proposed here is identical to what we have consistently warned about in pieces such as ‘Deplorable Until Proven Compliant: Kafka, Social Credit, & Critical Theory’:

The change of law into community standards, to go from a basic minimum of legality, to enforced maximal conformity to an ideal; erasure of the distinction between lawfulness and ‘virtue’.

Also in the atrocious neo-fascist work of Deane, to add clarity and veracity to our interpretation of the newspeak, we have added, in brackets, the decoded meaning of the newspeak used in ‘Panoptic blockchain ecosystems: An exploratory case study of the beef supply chain’:

“Within this paper we look at this technology through a different lens and suggest blockchain represents a technologically enabled expression of the modern panopticon, somewhat turned inside out. [It is literal, not inside out]

The term panopticon, first conceptualised by Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century, initially described a physical structure of a jail, which at its heart included a central tower. Surrounding the tower are those who are objects of observation, ‘the watched’, or the prisoners.

The prisoners’ surroundings and circumstances meant that they could not tell if they were being observed in any given moment, and thus were encouraged [terrorized] to behave in the way that the rules dictated. To do anything short of this would potentially result in punishment after the behaviour had occurred.1

This panopticon can be likened to the existing understanding of law and governance. The suggestion that we promote in this paper is that blockchain technology can augment the negative power [disciplinary power] associated with law and governance. Indeed, we show how blockchain enables the creation of voluntary common knowledge associations (voluntary associations) [involuntary block-chain-gangs], in which the participating subjects are empowered to regulate themselves [forced to police each other in a collective punishment system] in a manner which replicates qualities of the panopticon.

To illustrate these ideas, we use observations from the Beefledger project [the project aims to reduce beef availability]. Through these observations we illustrate why blockchain-enabled technology and the resultant formation of voluntary common knowledge associations can be desirable using the metaphor of the panopticon. In the panopticon, the relationship is a one to-many [dictatorial and authoritarian] configuration where the one is a figure of authority (the watcher over the watched).

However, blockchains can enable a new role for the ‘watched’- namely, to also be ‘watchers’. The original ‘watcher’ can therefore take a step back, conserve energy, and let the subjects do their own supervision [involuntary block-chain-gangs]. In this regard, these voluntary associations will benefit [spare from further punishment] not just those who participate within them, but the broader community [community standards created top-down].”

Academia is Producing Moral Failures

Why is there such a desire to create systems suitable for prison, for the free citizens in a society?

Why is the actual failure of the Panopticon prison, built at Millbank, not mentioned? It did not produce meaningful labor from inmates, and the rate of mental illness and suicides skyrocketed. How is this left unaddressed?

This is because progressivism says that past attempts at social engineering only failed because the past didn’t enjoy the contemporary state of the science. Trust the science.

It is here we can see that the academic minions of the technocracy share Bentham’s conflation of technological innovation with good.

In tracing the perfection of this system of the panopticon itself, the new technologies allow the prison to be decentralized and not requiring location.

Movements, thoughts, activities which today are still legal, can at some later date be declared retroactively illegal, and the same can be used as a pre-crime prediction leading towards the algorithmically based arrest for crimes not yet committed.

The prisoners become the prison guards, and taking together Bentham’s panopticon with the 24-7 surveillance state, we have a system which overcomes any potential budgetary obstacle, which Bentham hoped himself to overcome through the tinted glass.

The panopticon of the Smart City is a system set up so that free citizens police, interrogate, and report on each other, and worse, internalize these technocratic rules such that a mass-collective Stockholm syndrome is induced. We see this cancer growing already with the ‘Karen’ phenomenon on Covid19 mandates.

Likewise, the system of academia is a system set up so that students enter with vaguely progressive ideals, and exit ‘Stockholmed’ with a discursive framework connotative of liberation but yet ironically denotative of the top-down order of the technocracy.

The author can be reached at FindMeFlores@gmail.com

“For now we see through a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” – 1 Corinthians 13:12, The Epistles of Paul, the Holy Bible

The ‘Smart City’ will be reintroduced as the better option, in the present age of artificial supply-line disasters, manufactured ‘cyber-terrorism’, closing off access to banking, and critical infrastructure.

What have the technocrats learned from the twenty year studies of the lives of prisoners and prison guards who live-on-facility, from places like Abu Ghraib and Gitmo?

What has their study of pain, captivity, and punishment revealed?

How have the use of psychotropics, and studies into neo-Buddhist nihilism, been integrated into the elite’s dream of a prison grid society, as specified in Klaus Schwab’s “Covid19: The Great Reset” and “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”?

What if life in a prison city was ‘better’ in most respects than life outside the city? Would one feel imprisoned, or privileged? Would they dare venture beyond the city, even if they could? What if ‘field-trips’ into the wastelands were occasionally allowed?

Would they voluntarily be interned? Would they even experience it as imprisonment?

In what ways is this scenario different from the system of city-dwelling modernity already developing since the 1950’s?

We will discuss the psychology of the prison grid society, and some of its basis, as these will characterize the new normal in the smart cities of today and tomorrow. In this way, we are building upon our work in Smart Cities & the End of the Era of Man.

Middle-class sensibilities about control, security, surveillance, economics, scarcity, finance, production, profit-motives are all irrelevant sensibilities in understanding the plans of the elite.

But there is a way to understand what a big part of this is really about. Since 9-11, citizens have been subjected to ‘voluntary’ unwarranted search and seizure just for the privilege to travel by air. The studies show terrorists aren’t hindered by the TSA screenings. But innocent civilians are harassed, fondled, humiliated, their intimate belongings fingered, their possessions trashed in front of them, and onerous pre-boarding processes have discouraged travel. In light of the ‘Green’ agenda to Build-Back-Better, which includes reserving air travel for the very well-off, we can say in retrospect, this has been the goal.

How are torturers created? Dr. Mika Haritou-Fatourou found, as summarized below, in the study of the ESA, the Greek Military Police Forces, under the old dictatorship:

<<“Young […] healthy Greeks were recruited from the army ranks. They […] had no criminal record. They couldn’t be suffering from mental illnesses […] because they would have been excluded from enlisting in the Greek Army. […] they were sent to “torture training centers”, where they were systematically shouted at, kicked, beaten, offended, terrorized and ridiculed.

Finally, a complex blood-oath ritual would make them part of the elite team.[…]

After training, they were described as sadistic monsters, who tortured, amputated and even killed suspects on a daily basis, for years, in order to extract information.>>

What can people be led, compelled, encouraged, and coerced to do once their spirit is broken?

We want to bring the reader face to face with this evil, to understand the macabre, to show that despite the framings of rationality, progress, technology, and reason, the real motor force is as timeless as it is sinister.

We observed at Abu Ghraib and at Gitmo, the torture procedures and the lives of inmates were only a part of the study in the creation of terrorists, as the other part of the study were the lives of the torturers and prison guards, who also lived as ‘voluntary’ prisoners at the same facility. Separated only in degree; degrees of movement, degrees of privilege, degrees of pain (the pain of delivering senseless pain, the pain of receiving senseless pain).

Just as the never-sent letters of the internee were examined in search of some truth, facticity, guilt, or clue, so too the movements, words, thoughts through the conversations and emails of the interners were examined in search of the same.

U.S Torture prison at Guantanamo Bay – guards and prisoners carry out near-identical patterns. PiP – a surveilled mess-hall for both guards and prisoners, alternated by time of day

Of course neither searching (nor finding) was ever really the aim, only the pretext which justifies the very system of stratification, subordination, humiliation, the system of different kinds of coercion, the techniques of supervision and control, which are simply ends unto their own.

The facilities such as Gitmo did produce usable intelligence, as exposed in the CIA’s own Reports on Interrogation Methods. Rather, it is that these facilities come to exist and exist with public knowledge, which is the first point. Truly, the point is that this cancer now exists openly and identifiably, a mark upon consciousness that comes to be accepted, and then can grow, metastasize, all the while doing so under the rationalistic rationale of the marriage of an invisible and insidious threat with the technology to do so (need + ability).

The relationship between these ‘centers for the study of pain’ deal deeply in the questions raised by Nietzsche and later Foucault, whose thinking has both critically examined but also, as a byproduct, informed the technologies where psychoanalysis and punitive measures intersect.

These technologies are even openly celebrated, ritualized, and spun in ways where aspects of the process of extraordinary rendition, can be spoken of in analogies and metaphors to art – in fact overtly.

Scene from “Marina Abramović: The Rothschild Foundation Lecture”, attended by Jacob Rothschild – PiP – an actual cell at Gitmo

Through a public figure of the elite’s sadism cult, Marina Abramovic at her Rothschild Foundation Lecture, an aspect of the technology learned from the study of pain and extraordinary rendition at the Guantanamo Bay torture facility is discussed with Jacob Rothschild through the medium of art and without overt reference to the facility or to torture by that name. Yet still:

“It was interesting how I could purify space […] and people could stay there for very long periods of time. 12 days, no food, large quantity of water, no talking […], no writing, no reading, sleep 7 hours; standing – unlimited; sitting – unlimited; lying – unlimited; shower – three times a day”

While Rothschild and Abramovic no doubt can remain veiled with the spectre of plausible deniability, because of ‘art lectures’ like this there will never be a leaked report that Rothschild was briefed on the new experiments on pain and consciousness carried out at these torture centers. One of the big takeaways from these is also that the prison guards were a part of the experiment, similar to the studies of Asch or the Milgram Obedience Study.

The works of Heidegger and Marcuse’s wunderkind Hannah Arendt, as well as the 1961 interviews with Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann also provided a foundation for understanding how masses interact with institutional evil as a form of unquestioning obedience, and the normalcy (banality) of it all.

Abramovic’s experiments also build upon the themes developed in MK-Ultra, where subjects to torture and brainwashing are not only voluntary but clamor for it – it is a privilege and something reserved for the elites. It brings to mind the history of potato eating in France.

This part of it is critical as we will see, in terms of the prison grid society of the smart city. Of course all prisons have guards, and we learn the best kind of guards are the unpaid kind. How can we turn the prisoners into guards?

The All-Volunteer Police Force: Casualties of Modernity

A new police, or rather prison guard, was created out of the refuse of humanity of the 3rd Industrial Revolution.  Towards the defunding of the police, it was drawn from those poisoned by toxins, by a culture of anger seeking revenge, casualties of the war upon consciousness, performative hypersexuality at the expense of sexuality and love, a Molochian religion with Bacchanalian theatrics and divas, hormone blockers and pseudo estrogens in the food and water. The gender non-binary zombie army of cancel-culture marches onward, empowered by Zuckerberg and Dorsey, like an alcoholic beat cop, who is given authority by the state to act out his own trauma and neurosis upon the state-approved victim.

Then came a new breed of enforces to the gendarmerie, those controlled by fears of a politically defined ‘pandemic’, where the plague came to be defined by ‘cases’ and not by deaths, where cases came to be defined by a broken test and not by symptoms, where symptoms could be anything but also meant nothing, where the fiction of asymptomatic illness was re-introduced – bringing to the fore the spectre of mass hysteria – an air-born HIV, for which there is no cure but total submission and surrender to secular, worldly, forces.

The cancel-culture gender dysphorics, along with the voluntary enforcers of lockdown, vaccine, mask (those of the new apocalyptic religion, the Branch Covidians), their policing is done for free, relieving the state budget, creating a psychological crowd, in the sense of Le Bon, and composed of civilization’s discontented in the sense of Freud, a mass of witch-hunters who are not paid by the church but instead go on dutifully paying their tithing.

The horrors of history are not the simple trajectory of bad men with their bad ideas per se, (which gives false hope that good men with good ideas can save us) but of increasingly totalized and totalizing mechanical forces beyond the control of individual men, so complex that they are possessed by the consciousness of netherworld daemons, where the dreamed-of utopias of humanist-idealists are inverted to dystopic, of the banality of bureaucratic ‘decision’ making, (justified often in part by lofty phrases and slogans, which invariably appeal to the middling classes of the day and age). This all comes together towards a grid of causality where naiveté and hubris act as agents of evil.

But how far back does the construction of a prison-grid society go? What was the thinking behind it, and how was it rationalized as ‘good’ in its time?

Bentham: Father of the Prison-Grid Society – ‘Smart City’

Jeremy Bentham believed erroneously in the rationality of men, and the rationality of systems, that good itself could be rationalized in utilitarian fashion, as a hubristic projection in the rationality of himself who, perhaps in a way like Klaus Schwab, believed they could tame the inertia of historical, judicial, legal processes such to produce a corrective disciplinary system that would please the ruling class and also pacify the masses.

It is Bentham who at first childishly develops the system of the panopticon, where prison guards may be once unveiled face-to-face, then concealed behind a mirror, darkly. And through not knowing whether or not the guards are there watching or listening behind this mirrored glass, the prisoners themselves become their own prison guards. In the panopticon, rather than be idle prisoners, Bentham introduced a system of prison labor, and so naturally he proposed that this same efficient and utilitarian system also be used in schools and factories.

Bentham’s Panopticon prison or labor factory – as illustrated in 1791

These were all the trappings of the 1^st Industrial Revolution, in an age of transition, where the Enlightenment project itself tried, but ultimately failed, to rationalize the good. Utilitarianism is the example of this folly, leading to the idea of slave labor camps, whether for the purpose of prison, or for industrial labor, no real distinction can be made between ethical and efficient in the techno-rationalistic enterprise of early modernity, where one simply seeks pleasure and avoids pain.

Bentham took for granted what we would later call the Dickensian conditions of factory life which Adam Smith deplored in the study of the pin factory in his ‘Wealth of Nations’. And so the prison as an institution might ‘reform’ the interned by providing more stable, sanitary, safer conditions than the factory conditions of the late 18^th century.

It takes this noble idea that people are born good, or at the very least a tabula rasa, and that institutions can form (or reform) them into efficient and productive citizens, but truly deforms it as the institutions themselves, as the definition of a ‘productive citizen’ is hardly distinguishable from a prison inmate.

Compared to the post-war boom of the 20^th century, the rise of the industrial worker into the middle-class, prison life with ‘meaningful labor’ stood several orders of magnitude below this Dickensian standard of living, which ‘clean, structured, safe institutions’ might appear – from thirty-thousand feet – as a better option.

Yet the city-prison, the ‘Smart City’, will be reintroduced as the better option, in the present age of artificial supply-line disasters, manufactured ‘cyber-terrorism’, closing off access to banking, and critical infrastructure; and in short, all the features of the Great Reset both from pandemic and from ‘eco-friendly’ legislation.

For the world outside the prison grid city-state will not be rolling green hills and pristine forests with running waters that you can see.

Rather, an inverse Potemkin village will be constructed along the field-trip courses that self-driving cars take the curious inmate-citizens. As far as the eye can see, which is not very far in the scheme of things, there will only be a staged ‘desolate wasteland’ produced by ‘climate change’, while the real blooming nature may exist in planetary-sized Gardens of Eden which are the playgrounds of the 0.1%.

In our next installment on the matter, we will further develop our research and publish our startling conclusions in showing how elements of this already exist openly in the stated plans of the elites for the ‘peaceful’ nihilist city-scape on the horizon.

The platform facilitates illegal immigration and human smuggling because its mission is above mere nations.

By Micah MEADOWCROFT