If there is one thing that is universal about governmental structures across the globe, be they Communist, Western-Style Democracy, Islamic or some other form, it is a 100% assuredness in Technocracy/Bureaucracy as the solution to any and all problems. Perhaps in Western countries where their Constitutions (or Common Law traditions) are supposedly sacred this tendency makes perfect sense. The Founding Fathers built America’s system to be bureaucratic as a defense against the excesses, abuses and whims of a single ruler or ruling party. So, we can be a bit forgiving to the West for falling into this logic trap, because it at least used to work in their favor and to an extent still does. But in Russia (where I reside) due to many historical events no one has any faith in the government, nor do they obey any laws they disagree with, and yet the answer to any tiny problem from Ivan Average is some vague government program. I have heard the same from those living in Italy, China and beyond – that all problems require a legal paperwork solution. But is this really an answer to anything? And why do all “problems” require a governmental solution?

Case in point, it would seem that over recent years numerous religious institutions have been threatened with violence, and some of the threats have become a reality including a hostage situation in Texas that Fox News describes in the following way…

“As Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker was preparing to begin Saturday services on the morning of Jan. 15, 2022, he welcomed a man who had knocked on the window and looked cold inside his synagogue. Cytron-Walker made the man tea and then began his livestreamed Shabbat service. With his back turned to the man, the rabbi recalls hearing a click, turning around, and seeing a gun.

For over 10 hours, this man held Rabbi Cytron-Walker and three other congregants hostage at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.”

Fox also goes on to mention a few other instances in which those who were attending religious services were actually killed in their houses of worship. Of course, every time some tragedy happens on TV/YouTube our monkey brains impose themselves onto the situation, this tendency is especially true among women but men can and do fall prey to it as well. A sort of “what if this happened to me” reasoning makes the public want to demand action to “prevent this sort of thing from happening again”. We human beings may live in a secular world, yet our monkey brains are still filled with lots of magical thinking. Take a look at Hollywood, which is probably the least religious place on Earth, yet every celebrity’s home is filled with magic crystals and other trinkets of supernatural protection. Many of us, if not most of us, really believe that somehow hate, violence, and other bad parts of life can eventually be completely overcome. Our Medieval ancestors certainly prayed to God to intervene against all the awfulness of their brutal lives as only God could provide the utopia we desire, at the very least after we are dead.

The problem is that today, our God today is the government. They are the utopia makers. The state is supposed to provide an explanation to everything and an answer for everything to demonstrate its omnipotence as the justification for our worship and submission. The God of the Bible was okay with being a bit vague, allowing us to think that “everything happens for a reason” even those that we don’t like, and that there is an eternal battle of good vs. evil happening around us that will go on forever until the End Times.

This older version of God was just fine with having some things go unanswered and as the Father of humanity was, just like a human father, happy to let the kids work stuff out on their own. But our Divine Government that replaced the God of the Bible doesn’t have such a Chad attitude. This authority constantly has to take action and try to solve every issue like a nightmarish helicopter parent the only way it knows how… with legislation.

So the “solution” brought forth by Washington’s human-suit technocrats to the problem of violence (and threats of violence) at religious institutions is the “Pray Safe Act”. The details of which look something like this…

The Pray Safe Act, introduced to the U.S. Senate last week, represents a joint effort on the part of U.S. Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) to provide faith-based organizations and houses of worship with easy access to security best practices, federal grant programs, and training.

 Cosponsored by U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV), the legislation would direct the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), working with the Department of Justice, the Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and others as deemed appropriate, to create and codify a federal clearinghouse on safety and security best practices for both faith-based organizations and houses of worship.

 That clearinghouse would be responsible for providing these organizations with safety and security recommendations, as well as providing information on federal resources and grant programs available to that end.

So by this logic, the hostage situation in Texas, if we could turn back time, would have been surely avoided thanks to “safety and security recommendations”, “information on federal resources” and corruption’s best friend “grant programs”. How utterly intellectually insulting this is. This is what spitting in the face to every victim of terrorism in U.S. history looks like. The exploitation of 9/11 for Foreign Policy goals was worse, but that does not excuse this fresh pile of madness.

Rather than accepting that horrific things happen from time to time and that overall, the rate of violence in America is still fairly low in the grand scheme of things, the senators listed above have chosen to exploit a tragedy to bloat the government even further and make grant money dance.

This is not a solution to this supposed “problem”, in fact there is no solution. If someone wants to randomly attack someone and kill them, and they are willing to go to jail or die to do it (possibly due to being insane) then they will do it. This is a fact of life, and the God-Government should really step down from its throne of self-assured omnipotence.

Absolutely nothing needs to be done about these acts of terror at religious institutions as murder is already illegal, as is hostage taking, the police in most nations generally blow the heads off of terrorists anyways immediately (“we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) and the average person knows that if they try something like this, they will surely die. The government, in this case the U.S. government has had all the proper mechanisms in place for this sort of thing since the 1700s. Everyone in society knows that if you commit an act of terror, you’re done.

Perhaps there is that mental health crisis in America that bloggers talk about. Some say that Feminism has had a brutal affect on men, creating the incel culture that is often at the heart of mass shootings. So perhaps there are means by which we could turn back the clock to a time before the idea of random public mass murder was even fathomable. But this would never SOLVE the problem, only reduce it to an absolute bare minimum, to a level of extreme rarity. I don’t mean to say that truly nothing can be done to defuse these events before they happen, but it is truly impossible to make over 300,000,000 people never commit some form of Terrorism including making threats. You can only punish them afterwards or Judge Dredd them on the spot if they don’t surrender, both of which local, state and federal authorities have already been doing properly since the beginning.

Piling on new legislation, programs, packages, assistance and whatever other buzzwords you can think of onto the legal system as a response to acts of Terror is an insult to the intellect of the American populace and an exploitation of those who were the victims of it. Literally, doing nothing in response would be better than exploiting the dead for political masturbation. We are all trapped in an endless loop of demanding to have more and more bars put around the cage of technocratic imprisonment for “our safety”. If we begin to accept that life will never be a utopia, that it could be better, but will never be perfect, then we can finally be free of this truly universal “logic” that affects everyone, not just America.

While the Western media hyperventilates over its own phony news of ‘Russian aggression’ and imminent invasions, the Kremlin has quietly turned its sights on an altogether different target: pedophilia.

Imagine for a moment if Hollywood, the mainstream media and the three-letter federal agencies spent as much time and cash in the war against pedophiles as they do in their perennial propaganda war against Russia. At the very least, the West would be fighting a real enemy and not one that has been concocted at some cluttered cubicle inside of the Ministry of Truth. Thus, it’s up to Russia, the global spiritual superpower of last resort, to fight this worthy battle mostly alone.

Last week, when many Western governments were trampling on the civil rights of their subjects due to a viral strain with a better than 99 percent survival rate, Russian lawmakers adopted – and without excessive fanfare and fainting spells – Law #1248305-7 that imposes life imprisonment for “crimes against the sexual integrity of minors.”

The document extends the maximum penalty of life imprisonment for pedophiles. Currently in Russia, repeat child molesters who have previously been convicted of violating a child under the age of 14 faces a life sentence. According to the updated legislation, which heads to the Kremlin next month for President Putin’s signature, a repeat offender found guilty of assaulting a minor above the age of 14 could receive a life sentence.

The Duma’s efforts to broaden the fight against pedophilia comes at a time when the world is struggling against a Western invasion of ‘progressive’ thought that is totally at odds with what defines a healthy and sane state. That is not to suggest that homegrown sexual deviants do not exist in Russia, or that Russia drafted these laws specifically with questionable Western values in mind. Nevertheless, Russia is fully aware of the radical progressive tendencies that have begun devouring Western capitals. And as most people can appreciate, ideas have no respect – especially in the age of the internet – for national borders, nor do they require passports.

Outside BBC right now a man is trying to smash up Eric Gill statue while another man live streams talking about paedophiles. Gill’s horrific crimes are well known. But is this the way? pic.twitter.com/IzFUBIJfwT

— Katie Razzall (@katierazz) January 12, 2022

In the not-so-distant past, most people – at least among the mentally stable – would agree that pedophilia is a crime of the highest magnitude against society’s most vulnerable members. Nowadays, such a statement of ‘certainty’ finds no shortage of cynical detractors.

Although the Western world has not come out and pledged its allegiance to child molesters, or added a ‘P’ to the LGBTQ+ parade, there are some unmistakable signs that such a day is just over the horizon. Already we’ve crossed several Rubicons that were previously unimaginable.

As things stand, public libraries are proudly hosting (taxpayer funded) Drag Queen Story Hours; a 13-year-old transgender boy named ‘Desmond is Amazing’ is touted in the media as the ideal role model for children; and medical practitioners are strongly discouraged from challenging those children who say they want to ‘transition’ to the opposite sex, a decision involving hormones and surgical procedures that many people go on to regret later in life.

Whether intentional or not, the Western establishment is slowly conditioning people to accept the notion that very young children can make critical life decisions for themselves – up to and including what sex they may identify as (an incredibly complicated and unproven concept that is oftentimes planted in young and impressionable minds courtesy of social media). That’s not a very far leap from arguing that children should also reserve the right to decide at what age it is appropriate for them to enter into sexual relations, and with whomever they want. In other words, there is no longer any need for parental guidance, it is believed, in this bizarre new world order. The mainstream media, Hollywood, public schools and social media have taken over the shop.

This slow-drip indoctrination process has been gathering momentum for a long time in various publications. In 2017, for example, BBC ran with an article entitled, ‘Paedophiles need help, not condemnation – I should know.’ Here the reader is introduced to an anonymous 60-something male who opens his confessional by proclaiming: “It’s a long time since I’ve described myself as a paedophile. Paedophilia is a disorder, a deeply distressing sexual orientation. For me, it’s triggered by traumatic experiences in childhood.”

USA TODAY TRIES TO “UNDERSTAND” PEDOPHILES!!!

To me (and probably anyone who has been watching) this is nothing more than the first step of trying to normalize this kind of behavior. https://t.co/aiI77pxGri

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 11, 2022

Did you catch it? The author has said that pedophilia, as opposed to being a mental affliction, is yet another harmless “sexual orientation.” Just so we’re all on the same page, the World Health Organization (still) lists pedophilia under the category of ‘Disorders of Sexual Preference.’ Yet that has not stopped people who should know better from turning the tide against common sense.

Just this month, USA Today published an article entitled, ‘What the public keeps getting wrong about pedophilia’ where the boneheaded argument was made that a “pedophile is an adult who is sexually attracted to children, but not all pedophiles abuse kids, and some people who sexually abuse kids are not pedophiles.”

Thankfully, the author did not attempt to explain exactly who or what child molesters are thought to be, but it’s probably safe to guess, considering the state of the modern liberal mindset, they’d fall somewhere on the spectrum between ‘victim’ and ‘martyr’.

In any case, it is clear where this game of linguistic gymnastics of turning predators into victims is heading. The world must stand firm with Russia at this great turning point in history and demonstrate its intolerance to the ongoing effort to normalize the most egregious crime of them all. Children deserve nothing less than society’s pledge of full protection.

It seems that a very typical Color Revolution scenario is starting to play out in Kazakhstan just as it did in many former Soviet Republics. The big issue for those who are actually concerned with Human Rights is whether this will degenerate into a Ukrainian Maidan type of scenario leading to oppression, war and brutal poverty for the masses. So where is this all going and why is it happening now at this moment in history?

Picture: Augustus Bailey

Why does the chaos in Kazakhstan look like a Color Revolution?

Usually, it is something like elections or a new unpopular policy that gets people out onto the streets. The failed White Ribbon movement of 2010-2011 in Russia was in response to “electoral falsification” that seems to have been falsified itself. The Turkish Gezi Park protests of 2013 vastly overblew issues related to demonstrations for the good said park.

Screenshot: Video of a local Kazakh man saying the people want to live like in “Sweden or Norway” has gone viral on Russian social media. Vague plans with big promises and assertions of Western superiority are textbook Color Revolution strategies.

In the case of Kazakhstan it is the price of natural gas which has (ironically) sparked massive highly organized protests that seem to come out of nowhere. The demands of the disgruntled during a Color Revolution are always either abstract or impossible. Abstract demands are things like “we want Democracy even if we cannot define it” and impossible ones like “the entire government must step down because of feelings” are perfect examples. In Kazakhstan right now the protestors are demanding the latter, that the government should just go quietly off into the night of their own volition.

Since no government in history has unilaterally stepped down because of protestors’ fancy signs and pointing while sputtering we know that this demand cannot be met and thus is used as a justification for revolution and further action.

The Mainstream Media is also critical for any Color Revolution because they are the ones who can convince the public that the actual overthrow of the government has been completed. If every publication in the MSM tomorrow unilaterally said that the dollar is worthless, it would be. Thus, if all media shrieks that a revolution has taken place, then it essentially has. CNN is already on the case weaving their narrative but at least they were fair enough to point out that the government has already buckled to the gas price issue, giving the protestors in theory what they initially wanted, but that is not going to stop their organizers who have a whole laundry list of impossible to meet demands.

Will the scenario in Kazakhstan turn into Ukraine 2.0?

In many ways Ukraine and Kazakhstan are similar but they are far from being the same. Although the territory of Kazakhstan has been a part of Russia for hundreds of years and the majority of the population still prefers to speak Russian, the Ukraine is the inalienable cradle of Russian Civilization while Kazakhstan is a lovely later addition. You simply cannot trace the Tsars all the way back to ancient Almaty. Although the Russian-speaking population of the Eastern Steppe is big they are mostly non-ethnic Russians which can divide feelings in contrast to Russian-speakers in Ukraine, who mostly consider themselves Russian.

Screenshot: Color Revolutions take their toll on monuments – history and reality are the enemy.

As someone who lived in Kazakhstan for two years you could really feel the paradox of Kazakhstan being newly nationalistic yet favorable to the Russian language. The interpretation of historical events like the Russian Revolution and WWII were being quickly rewritten. At the time, even way back then, you could also see (that just like in Ukraine) Kazakhstan was trying hard to squeeze out Russian culture while making sure every child learned top-level English with Hollywood movies galore on TV. Both Kiev and Astana/Nur-Sultan have for years (even before the Maidan) tried to put governmental pressure onto the Russian language. This is an actual example of the “Institutional Racism” that our rainbow-haired friends always talk about, but because it happens to the Evil Russians it never counts.

Kazakhstan was able to drive out about half of its Russian population through various forms of intimidation and racist hiring practices in the government and big business. Non-Kazakhs especially Russians have complained to me that they simply had no choice but to leave or eternally be at the bottom economic rung of society.

This exodus means that only about one in four citizens of Kazakhstan are now Russians and they are mostly in the north. There were many rumors that in the early 90s the upper half of the nation could have broken away as it is far more industrial, Soviet-built, ethnically diverse, Russian-speaking and secular than the south. With far fewer Russians remaining and moving the capital from the extreme far southeast in Almaty, this potentially explosive issue seems to have been resolved, but if Kazakh nationalists start to put together their own Azov Battalions then a break-away people’s republic is sure to form in the north somewhere.

Screenshot: Protestors attack an ambulance. What an odd target.

In short, Kazakhstan’s government has acted much like the one in Ukraine pre-Maidan and there are some similar demographic, linguistic and cultural issues between the two, however they are less extreme as the Ukrainian situation, which almost looks like a nation designed to fail from the start that should break into two more logical pieces. Kazakhstan is potentially a watered down version of the Ukrainian Crisis.

The Russo-American factor is always at play

Coincidences are not proof of conspiracy, but it is certainly interesting that a new Color Revolution on Russia’s former territory that could lead to a Maidan scenario has flared up just days before the potentially historic big negotiation session between Putin and Biden.

Screenshot: Government buildings ablaze – very similar to the Maidan Revolution.

Although it is unclear of what exact positions have been unofficially agreed upon going into the meeting, starting a Color Revolution in Kazakhstan will not sit well with Moscow. However, the necessity to resolve the Ukrainian Crisis and make a final deal about how NATO’s troops and Washington’s nukes will be distributed in Europe is of such great importance to the Russians that anarchy in Kazakhstan can be ignored at least for now and the negotiations will go forward mostly unaffected.

We cannot forget that the U.S. and Russia were on the brink of nuclear war at least twice due to the Maidan Revolution: once over the absorption of the Crimea, and once due to the potential “big one” attack that was supposed to have been launched by an emboldened Kiev when Biden took office. You can only roll the dice so many times before eventually snake eyes come up, and anything happening in the heart of Central Asia cannot be allowed to force the great powers to keep rollin’ them bones.

So will Kazakhstan turn into post-Maidan Ukraine?

This is simply a matter of waiting a year to see if the Russians have really finally mastered the process of deflating Color Revolutions. They lost in Ukraine, won in Belarus and Kazakhstan will be the deciding “best of three” for their hopes of restoring their former glory and sovereign foreign policy.

By Bradley DEVLIN

Recently, Ukrainian authorities announced former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko under formal investigation for high treason, the same charge his predecessor was convicted of just two years ago. Does this sound like a kind of democracy worth shedding American blood to save?

The treasonous activity, according to Ukrainian officials, is his alleged material support of pro-Russia separatist forces in the Donbas. The investigation into the Ukrainian former President emerged from similar charges brought against Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russian lawmaker in the For Life Party with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, for allegedly working with officials in Poroshenko’s administration to buy coal mines in the Donbas to finance separatist efforts. The For Life Party has denied any wrongdoing by Medvedchuk, who has spent the past six months under house arrest.

Poroshenko’s European Solidarity Party has also stood behind the former President. A statement from European Solidarity Party’s Oleksander Turchynov claimed that the allegations against Poroshenko were a fabrication from current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and would “turn into a farce just like all the previous ones.”

The allegations against Poroshenko are shocking, much less because he staked the precipice of his political career on taking back the Crimean Peninsula from Russia and quashing the separatists, whom he called terrorists and likened to Somali pirates, in the Donbas. During his tenure, Poroshenko ratcheted up Ukraine’s war in the Donbas to put the screws on Russia-backed separatists.

Poroshenko is now the second consecutive Ukrainian president to face accusations of high treason after leaving power. His predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, was convicted of high treason, among other crimes, in January of 2019 for his actions against the Euromaidan demonstrators and his capitulation to the Russian military that wanted to intervene to support him. His sentence, handed down in absentia because he still resides in exile in Russia, was 13 years in prison.

Yanukovych was ousted from power in February 2014 after violent clashes between Euromaidan demonstrators and Ukrainian police forces, which resulted in the deaths of well over 100 protestors and 18 police officers. The Euromaidan demonstrations broke out in the wake of Yanukovych’s decision to back away from the Association Agreement with the European Union after Russia gave the Ukrainians an economic ultimatum and Brussels refused to acknowledge the reality of the destabilizing unrest.

It’s easy to write off Yanukovych, an ethnic Russian, as another Putin puppet, as the western media and political establishment has since his ousting. But Yanukovych’s tenure is much more complex than his opponents would have you believe. An ethnic Russian himself, Yanukovych was elected in 2010 by getting just over one-third of the country’s vote, primarily from ethnically-Russian regions. Instantly, Yanukovych found himself between a rock and a hard place. His constituents from ethnically Russian areas were not as keen on furthering European integration as western Ukrainians were, and neither the Association Agreement nor a customs union deal with Russia had the support of a majority of Ukrainians. Yanukovych was expected to continue down the path of European integration, and did for quite some time before the aforementioned ultimatum given to him by Putin.

Rather than recognizing the bind that Ukraine found itself in and that Yanukovych had successfully enacted a number of hotly-contested liberal reforms Brussels demanded with two-thirds majority support in the Verkhovna Rada, the E.U. continued to make big asks of Ukraine. One such demand was dialing back the criminal prosecution brought against former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko for abusing her power during a negotiation of a gas deal with Russia in 2009, which resulted in a seven-year prison sentence in 2011. The U.S. and a number of European countries, even Russia, suggested it was a political prosecution. Brussels claimed Ukraine jeopardized a trade agreement with the E.U. if it failed to release Tymoshenko from prison to receive medical treatment abroad. However, the Rada failed to pass a motion for Tymoshenko’s release.

The negotiations now laid in shambles, and though Yanukovych called for a trilateral negotiation between Ukraine, the E.U, and Russia, but Brussels refused. Thus, the Euromaidan protests, openly egged on by the United States and other western nations, continued to gain momentum, causing Yanukovych to turn to Russia in a last ditch effort to prevent further destabilization. The effort obviously failed.

Certainly, the western liberal establishment bears responsibility for Ukrainian democracy’s current shortcomings, where former leaders are summarily charged with high treason. The truth is that Ukraine is just another country our foreign policy blob destabilized so they could say they saved it sometime in the future. Now, the foreign policy establishment thinks that time has come, and wants us believe that protecting this democracy is worth risking a war with Russia, in which an untold number of American soldiers will die.

theamericanconservative.com

Law enforcement officials have begun a watch beat of sorts against the American Civil Liberties Union, whose support of justice reform has translated into more criminals roaming the streets as police officers lose their jobs.

A number of liberal activists, armed with the most altruistic intentions, of course, are busy remaking America into a liberal bastion of utopian thinking, where the Cultural Marxists have put down the stakes on their zany new world, which promises to go international. But if surging gun sales in the Golden State are any indication, the progressives are off to a disastrous start.

“I’ve always been anti-gun,” Debbie Mizrahie of Beverly Hills said, as quoted by Michael Shellenberger in the New York Post. “But I am right now in the process of getting myself shooting lessons because I now understand that there may be a need for me to know how to defend myself and my family. We’re living in fear.”

And it’s not difficult to understand why. According to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report released in September, the nation experienced a 30 percent increase in murder in 2020, the biggest annual jump since the bureau began tracking crime statistics 60 years ago. That record comes attached with a footnote that the mainstream media is at tremendous pains to ignore: this year, of the 12 major U.S. cities that broke annual homicide records, every one of them – from Rochester, New York to Baton Rouge, Louisiana – are run by Democrats. Or more specifically, by organizations that wield tremendous power and influence over the Democratic Party.

The one obvious name that always surfaces when speaking about the ‘criminal reform’ initiatives well underway in liberal-run cities is the billionaire philanthropist, George Soros. As the Democratic Party’s most prolific benefactor, Soros has filled the campaign coffers of various District Attorney races. For example, last year, amid the George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests, Soros donated $2 million to a PAC that backed Kim Foxx, who went on to become the State’s Attorney for Cook County, Chicago, where murder is now at its highest rate in almost 30 years. In keeping in line with woke ideology, which blames the ‘oppressive white system’ for the behavior of felons, Foxx immediately began to defer many prosecutions while reducing bail and sentencing guidelines for hardened criminals.

As it turns out, however, Soros is in good company, particularly with the ACLU, which is also working overtime defending the worst elements of society, while depriving victims of their rights. For a long time, this watchdog group was doing all the watching, imposing its warped worldview on communities around the nation. That looks set to change, however, after a coalition of seven police unions from three states put together a website to track exactly what the ACLU has been up to.

Sponsored by the San José Police Officers Association, San Francisco Police Officers Association, Los Angeles Police Protective League, Seattle Police Officers Guild, San Diego Police Officers Association, Sacramento Police Officers Association and the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, ACLU Watch says it is “dedicated to fighting for victim’s rights, accountability for criminals, and exposing those that defend the indefensible.”

One of the ACLU’s pet projects involves bail payments, the site disclosed, which have been dramatically reduced in the name of ‘combatting racism and economic inequality.’ The initiative allows the convicted to put up just 10% of an already drastically reduced bond requirement, which has led to all of the predictably tragic consequences.

As just one example, James McClendon, 45, who police said had been in and out of jail dozens of times, was suspected in June of committing a double shooting that left a man dead and a woman injured in Atlanta. Yet the judge in his trial set bail at just $50,000, and McClendon was free to walk three weeks later.

“Most of the individuals were getting out within a couple of days and the bond was generally low,” Maj. William Ricker told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “On average, $28,000 was the general bond amount. Then, of course, you talk about being able to just pay 10%, that’s a significantly small amount for people to be back out on the streets.”

If bail reform doesn’t keep criminals on the street, then Proposition 47 certainly will, at least in California. Under the updated ruling, shoplifting charges on the theft of merchandise $950 or less was reduced from a felony to misdemeanor. Then-Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, together with the ACLU were supporters of the legislation.

“Prop. 47 reduces the barriers that many people with a low-level, non-violent felony conviction face to becoming stable and productive citizens, such as a lack of employment, housing and access to assistance programs and professional trades,” the ACLU wrote in support of the legislation back in 2014.

But it’s not just the thieves and murderers that the ACLU seems determined to defend, but kiddie flashers as well. Back in 2018, The Ohio House voted 80-0 for a bill that increases penalties for people who expose themselves to children. As Tier 1 sex offenders, such individuals are forbidden from living within 1,000 feet of a day care center or school. Such a rule seemed, somehow, incomprehensible to the New York-based watchdog.

“There is no evidence these policies and laws keep people safer or reduce recidivism,” said Gary Daniels of the ACLU of Ohio in written testimony. “Exiling sex offenders and making it more difficult to find housing and unemployment increase the chances they will commit another offense,” he said, as though employment has ever stopped perverts before.

Since the murder of George Floyd, these ‘crime reform’ endorsements by the ACLU, which negatively affects two groups of people – the victims of crime, and the police officers who were hired specifically to ‘preserve the peace’ – have been moving ahead full steam. Yet now, with the introduction of ACLU Watch, more people can better understand that a robust police presence is not the true source of America’s crime problem. By coddling criminals, the ACLU has helped to make U.S. neighborhoods infinitely more dangerous, something which more Americans need to understand.

Americans are facing a new type of crime wave that got its start in the mad liberal laboratory, where the utopian notion that going soft on criminals is going terribly awry. While threatening the traditional brick and mortar shopping experience with extinction, and making communities a living hell, the left needs to stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

Apparently unwilling to wait for Black Friday discounts, roaming gangs of young men are descending on retail outlets and pharmacies in flash mobs, clearing out the store shelves in a matter of seconds as clerks look on helplessly.

$100k in handbags stolen at a Louis Vuitton store near Chicago! pic.twitter.com/jaElFgbkWO

— Asian Crime Report (@activeasian) November 19, 2021

In one pre-Thanksgiving raid, about 90 individuals stormed a Nordstrom outlet in Walnut Creek, situated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Members of the masked mob pepper-sprayed one employee, and assaulted another with a knife before making off with an estimated $100,000 in merchandise. Many of the looters made their getaway in some 25 vehicles parked out front.

Disturbingly, as this sort of mayhem unfolds in major cities across the country, liberals seem more preoccupied with determining how to define the criminal acts.

Lorenzo Boyd, PhD, Professor of Criminal Justice & Community Policing at the University of New Haven, and a retired veteran police officer, is just one academic who seems more obsessed with semantics than digging to the root of the problem.

“Looting is a term that we typically use when people of color or urban dwellers are doing something,” Boyd remarked in an interview with ABC7 news channel. “We tend not to use that term for other people when they do the exact same thing.”

And by “other people” it is abundantly clear who Boyd is referencing.

It’s looting. Just like there were riots in Kenosha, not just protests. https://t.co/trvUHxsCHU pic.twitter.com/nmdUTg6IXT

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) November 23, 2021

Martin Reynolds, Co-executive director of the Robert C. Maynard Institute of Journalism Education, invited listeners to compare the current wave of flash mob thefts to the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, when many marginalized New Orleans residents, the majority of them Black, were labeled looters for stealing from local businesses.

“This seems like it’s an organized smash and grab robbery,” Reynold said, speaking about the current phenomenon of flash mobs. “This doesn’t seem like looting. We’re thinking of scenarios where first responders are completely overwhelmed. And folks, often may be on their own,” he said.

While both academics do make some valid points, there is a risk of liberals getting trapped in a game of semantics that eventually leads to social disaster. More on that in a moment. At the same time, the radical progressives wish to ignore the fact that the primary reason for these crimes happening at all is because they went soft on crime.

Back in 2014, the Democrats in California passed ballot initiative Proposition 47, which legislates that theft of less than $950 in merchandise is considered to be a nonviolent misdemeanor. In other words, such cases are rarely prosecuted. The repercussions of such stupidity should not have been hard to predict.

Prop. 47 led to a rise in the larceny theft rate of about 135 per 100,000 residents, an increase of close to 9 percent compared to the 2014 rate, according to a report by the Public Policy Institute of California. Police Chief David Swing, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, responded, saying that the PPIC’s conclusions “are consistent with what police chiefs across the state have seen since 2014.”

But for store owners in California and elsewhere, there is no need for special reports. The damage from the shortsighted legislation is abundantly clear.

“Theft in Walgreens’ San Francisco stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, and the chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle, discussing just one of the myriad casualties of Prop 47.

Experts caution use of ‘looting’ in describing rash of Bay Area smash and grabs https://t.co/dQfftRG84T

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) November 23, 2021

Compounded with the problem of a legal system that is increasing willing to let criminals walk, a confab of writers, agitators and academics are more inclined to see the ‘poetic justice’ of young marauders clearing out stores in coordinated flash mobs.

Last year, during the street protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, a Chicago Black Lives Matter organizer called looting in the Windy City “reparation” for past crimes committed against Black people.

“I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci’s or a Macy’s or a Nike because that makes sure that that person eats,” Ariel Atkins screamed at a rally outside the South Loop police station.

“That’s a reparation,” Atkins said. “Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance.”

But even before George Floyd had become a household name, self-described agitator Vickie Osterweil had penned a book entitled, ‘In Defense of Looting,’ provided an apology for the act of looting before it was cool.

Beginning by explaining that the word comes from the Hindi, lút, which means “goods” or “spoils,” Osterweil (who wrote the book under the name ‘Willie Osterweil,’ apparently at a different stage in life) goes on to argue that the idea of property in the United States is “derived through whiteness and through Black oppression, through the history of slavery and settler domination of the country.”

Funny how many of the oppressed and downtrodden of the world are willing to be consoled by Gucci bags, Samsung televisions and Nike tennis shoes. But I digress.

Osterweil goes off on a massively contradictory spiel, somehow equating the theft of property with liberation from the “White man’s world.”

“Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police; it gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected,” she says. “And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be. And I think that’s a part of it that doesn’t really get talked about — that riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.

How looting and stealing could help a person “imagine a world that could be” it is difficult to imagine, but the left must do better than merely coddling and apologizing for the criminals in their midst. More than just midterms are at stake.

In December 2019, the city of Chula Vista announced with much fanfare that it had been designated as California’s first Welcoming City. This designation honored the community’s commitment to include its undocumented residents. Located 15 minutes from the U.S.-Mexico border, Chula Vista has one of the highest populations of immigrants in the United States, about 30 percent of its population of 270,000. Rachel Peric, the director of Welcoming America, said this “inclusive environment” was a “model . . . to ensure residents of all backgrounds—including immigrants, can thrive and belong.”

College student Nicholas Paúl told me his city’s designation “was a proud moment” for his community. Raised on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Paúl is emblematic of many residents from Chula Vista. “I’m a fronterizo,” he told me. Every weekend he crossed the border to Tijuana to visit family and friends. “It’s a way of life,” he said. “It’s not something that is unique to me. It’s my whole family, my whole neighborhood.”

So it came as a shock to Paúl a year later, in December 2020, when an exposé by San Diego’s daily newspaper revealed that the Chula Vista Police Department was sharing information from automated license plate readers with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, and of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“They collect information not only about license plates but also the car—make, model, color, location coordinates,” Paúl said. Police mounted cameras on four patrol vehicles that constantly take pictures of license plates while they roam the city. Paúl and other Chula Vista residents feared that they were targeting the city’s undocumented population, possibly his very neighbors. Furthermore, the license plate reading program had been in effect since 2017, so this was happening even as Chula Vista received its Welcoming City designation.

Paúl’s testimony is in a new report, Smart Borders or a Humane World?, that I coauthored with immigrant rights organizer Mizue Aizeki, and border scholars Geoffrey Boyce, Joseph Nevins, and Miriam Ticktin for the nonprofit Immigrant Defense Project and the Transnational Institute.

In this report, we examine what a “smart” border is, especially the version bristling with surveillance and detection technologies currently championed by the Biden administration. Even as the events in Chula Vista spurred border residents, like Paúl, to join forces against invasive license plate reader technology in their community, border technologies are being presented nationally as harmless and humane, especially in comparison to the foreboding physical barrier that dominated the news during the Donald Trump years. The border will be “managed,” in the language of the Biden administration, and it will be as modern and cool as the smartphone in your pocket.

Former representative Nina Lowey (D-NY) expressed this technophilic framing perfectly in July 2020 after the House Appropriations Committee released its 2021 fiscal year draft. The budget, she said, provided “strong investments in modern, effective technologies” for border security while prohibiting funding for “President Trump’s racist border wall boondoggle.” In a way, this is the Democratic version of “border theater,” a smoke-and-mirrors routine that presents “smart” technology as an alternative to the border wall, rather than as an integral part, extension, and perpetuation of it.

The border wall is more than just a physical barrier; it is also a system of video surveillance systems, unmanned aerial systems (or drones), and license plate readers, like the ones used in Chula Vista, which are part of a broadening biometric collection strategy. Biometric collection has grown “big time” for CBP since 9/11, said Patrick Nemeth, the Department of Homeland Security’s director of identity operations, at the 2017 Border Security Expo, the industry trade show for new border technologies, held in in San Antonio, Texas. Nemeth said that CBP’s fingerprint data increased from 10 million to 212 million since 9/11. He boasted that DHS now had the second-largest biometric system in the world, “right behind India’s.” Since then, the number of “unique identity records” collected by the agency has increased to 260 million. And this will only keep growing as CBP upgrades its biometric system to Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology, which not only has facial, iris, and digital fingerprint capability, but will also be able to get a person’s DNA (which is already happening) and track an individual’s “relationship patterns.”

And if you were wondering what the future might entail, drone surveillance technology and biometrics are both melding and advancing together. In April 2018, DHS tested a small drone that can “fly unnoticed by human hearing and sight” along a “predetermined route observing and reporting unusual activity and identifying faces and vehicles . . . comparing them to profile pictures and license plate data.”

Technology evolves so quickly—and with so little transparency—that many border residents are unaware of how intensely their communities are being surveilled. After the exposé, Chula Vista residents like Paúl joined with the American Friends Service Committee and others to form the Chula Vista Surveillance Ad-Hoc Committee. They began to study the issue and planned to pressure City Council members at an April meeting. One obstacle, however, is that “there is a tolerance for this that has to do with society’s being much more used to using technology in a way that’s convenient for them, like using fingerprints or iris scans to open up their phones,” said Pedro Rios, the director of the U.S.-Mexico Border Program for the American Friends Service Committee.

Rios added that the “larger trend of using technology for security monitoring is for me one that is concerning because it could have a significant impact on our civil liberties.”

Chula Vista residents, Paúl and Rios explained, want to know how the Police Department could share data with immigration agencies for three years, since the city signed a contract with the private company Vigilant Solutions in 2017 to provide the Automated License Plate Reader system. When asked by reporter Gustavo Solis, Francisco Estrada, the chief of staff for Chula Vista mayor Mary Casillas Salas, acknowledged that the city chose to share information with the immigration agencies. “ICE and CBP are important,” Estrada said, “because crimes and criminals cross the border and while we do not share information about a person’s immigration status, we do work with federal law enforcement on drug interdiction, human trafficking, stolen vehicles and other crimes.” Thanks to community pressure after the exposé in December, the Police Department announced that it would stop sharing the data with CBP and ICE. Rios told me, however, that the license plate information could still be shared indirectly through “fusion centers,” intelligence hubs that DHS has throughout the country. The Chula Vista Police Department also receives funds from Operation Stonegarden, a DHS grant that funds police in primarily border states to coordinate with CBP.

The organizing committee wanted the city to get rid of the ALPR system altogether. But instead the City Council voted unanimously to keep the program, illustrating a fundamental point we make in Smart Borders or Humane World?: government officials tend to double down on surveillance instead of considering any sort of policy alternative. Casillas Salas, for example, claimed that the anti-surveillance committee was misrepresenting “what the license plate reader is or is not.” It is a tool, she claimed, to fight crime. “We will continue the dialogue, but right now I do not want to take one tool away from our police officers, not one.”

As you’ll discover in this new report, policy makers and elected officials have long asked the wrong questions and gotten the wrong answers about the border and border policing. This is especially true in a world with mounting global crises in public health, climate change, and endemic global inequalities, crises that often trigger migration. Rather than more “smart” technology, we need to “invest in the construction of a just, compassionate, and sustainable world,” as we argue in the report. Instead of asking, What is the best way to secure the border?, we need to ask better questions: How do we help create conditions that allow people to stay in the places they call home, and thrive where they reside? And, when people do have to move, how can we ensure they are able to do so safely?

And maybe even more importantly, What is the world we want to live in, and how do we get there? Part of the answer can be found in what it means to be a Welcoming City: to build a place where all residents, regardless of their immigration status, can thrive and belong.

counterpunch.org

By Elizabeth VOS

Three months after it published the “Collateral Murder” video, WikiLeaks on July 25, 2010 released a cache of secret U.S. documents on the war in Afghanistan. It revealed the suppression of civilian casualty figures, the existence of an elite U.S.-led death squad and the covert role of Pakistan in the conflict, among other revelations. The publication of the Afghan War Diaries helped set the U.S. government on a collision course with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that ultimately led to his arrest last month.

The war diaries were leaked by then-Army-intelligence-analyst Chelsea Manning, who had legal access to the logs via her Top Secret clearance. Manning only approached WikiLeaks, after studying the organization, following unsuccessful attempts to leak the files to The New York Times and The Washington Post.

A major controversy surrounding the Diaries’ release were allegations that operational details were made public to the Taliban’s battlefield advantage and that U.S. coalition informants’ lives were put at risk by publishing their names.

Chelsea Maning in 2017. (Vimeo)

Despite a widely-held belief that WikiLeaks carelessly publishes un-redacted documents, only 75,000 from a total of more than 92,201 internal U.S. military files related to the Afghan War (between 2004 and 2010) were ultimately published.

WikiLeaks explained that it held back so many documents because Manning had insisted on it: “We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source.”

Manning testified at her 2013 court-martial that the files were not “very sensitive” and did not report active military operations.

“As an analyst I viewed the SigActs [Significant Activities] as historical data. This event can be an improvised explosive device attack or IED, small arms fire engagement or SAF engagement with a hostile force, or any other event a specific unit documented and recorded in real time.

“In my perspective the information contained within a single SigAct or group of SigActs is not very sensitive. The events encapsulated within most SigActs involve either enemy engagements or causalities. Most of this information is publicly reported by the public affairs office … They capture what happens on a particular day in time. They are created immediately after the event, and are potentially updated over a period of hours until final version is published on the Combined Information Data Network Exchange [CIDNE].

Although SigAct reporting is sensitive at the time of their creation, their sensitivity normally dissipates within 48 to 72 hours as the information is either publicly released or the unit involved is no longer in the area and not in danger.

It is my understanding that the SigAct reports remain classified only because they are maintained within CIDNE … Everything on CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A to include SigAct reporting was treated as classified information.”

Manning testified that the data she leaked had been “sanitized” of sensitive information. She further explained in her court martial, her motive for leaking the documents. She said:

“I believe that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A tables this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as [missed word] as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I also believed the detailed analysis of the data over a long period of time by different sectors of society might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to even to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the effected environment everyday.”

WikiLeaks explained its reasons for publishing Manning’s material:

“The reports do not generally cover top-secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations. However when a combined operation involving regular Army units occurs, details of Army partners are often revealed.

For example a number of bloody operations carried out by Task Force 373, a secret U.S. Special Forces assassination unit, are exposed in the Diary — including a raid that lead to the death of seven children. This archive shows the vast range of small tragedies that are almost never reported by the press but which account for the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries.”

Significant Findings:

Covering Up Civilian Casualties

Burying Afghan civilians. (Ariana News)

The Diaries documented cover-ups and misreporting of civilian deaths. The Guardian reported that the files illustrated at least 21 separate occasions in which British troops were said to have shot or bombed Afghan civilians, including women and children. “Some casualties were accidentally caused by air strikes, but many also are said to involve British troops firing on unarmed drivers or motorcyclists who come ‘too close’ to convoys or patrols,” the newspaper reported.

“Bloody errors at civilians’ expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack,” said The Guardian.

The Diaries revealed a cover-up of civilian casualties and possible evidence of war crimes. “These detailed reports show coalition forces’ attacks on civilians, friendly fire incidents and Afghan forces attacking each other – so-called green on green,” The Guardian said.  At least 20 friendly-fire cases were reported. Assange said in a written affidavit given in 2013 that the material documented “detailed records about the deaths of nearly 20,000 people.”

Pakistan Backing Terror Groups

Among the significant revelations of the Afghan War Diaries is the U.S. belief in the covert roles that Pakistan has played in the war.

Taliban in Herat, Afghanistan, 2001. (Wikipedia)

“More than 180 intelligence files in the war logs, most of which cannot be confirmed, detail accusations that Pakistan’s premier spy agency has been supplying, arming and training the insurgency since at least 2004,” The Guardian reported.

“Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants,” wrote The New York Times on the day the Diaries were published.

Radio Psyops

The Afghan War Diaries illustrated the implementation of U.S. and coalition-backed psyops via Afghani radio stations.

“Several reports from Army psychological operations units and provincial reconstruction teams (also known as PRTs, civilian-military hybrids tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan) show that local Afghan radio stations were under contract to air content produced by the United States. Other reports show U.S. military personnel apparently referring to Afghan reporters as “our journalists” and directing them in how to do their jobs.”–Yahoo News, July 27, 2015.

One June 2007 document, classified “Secret,” also describes alleged self-censorship amongst Pakistan’s media:

“Pakistan”s cable television operators report they are under continuing pressure (read “requirement”) to block news broadcasts emanating from three television news networks. Most cable networks are complying with government directives that trickled down to cable owners on June 1. On that day, all cable companies in Pakistan ceased airing ARY news, while AAJ TV became unavailable in 70 percent of the country. (Reftel.) As of 1700 local June 5, ARY was available again throughout Pakistan. We are attempting to ascertain whether the network is self-censoring”

Task Force 373

U.S. Army Special Forces soldier, left, and Afghan National Army commando scan area for enemy activity after taking fire,  Khogyani district, Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, March 20, 2014. (U.S. Army photo Spc. Connor Mendez/Released)

The Afghan War Diaries described the activities of Task Force 373, a unit whose existence was unknown prior to WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication. At least 200 incidents involving Task Force 373 were reported to have been found amongst the Afghan War Diaries material.

“The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed ‘black’ unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a ‘kill or capture’ list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list,” reported the The Guardian on the day of the Diaries’ release.

The article added: “In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.”

The Huffington Post also wrote regarding Task Force 373 in the weeks following WikiLeaks’ publication of the files: “The Wikileaks data suggests that as many as 2,058 people on a secret hit list called the “Joint Prioritized Effects List” (JPEL) were considered “capture/kill” targets in Afghanistan. A total of 757 prisoners — most likely from this list — were being held at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (BTIF), a U.S.-run prison on Bagram Air Base as of the end of December 2009.”

Reaction From, and Collaboration With, the Press

WikiLeaks’ publication of the Afghan War Diaries was groundbreaking in that it was the first instance of WikiLeaks coordinating with major news organizations such as the The New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian prior t0 publication.

New York Times front page story on the Diaries.

Mainstream media, which since the 2016 U.S. presidential election has taken a sharply critical view of WikiLeaks and Assange, were active participants in publishing the Afghan War Diaries. WikiLeaks gave the Diaries in advance to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel in an arrangement in which they published articles on the same day WikiLeaks made the archive public.

The Guardian described the project as a “Unique collaboration between the Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany to sift the huge trove of data for material of public interest and to distribute globally this secret record of the world’s most powerful nation at war.”

Der Spiegel described the process as one of vetting the material and comparing the data with independent reports, and wrote of the consensus between the three outlets working with WikiLeaks: “The publishers were unanimous in their belief that there is a justified public interest in the material because it provides a more thorough understanding of a war that continues today after almost nine years.”

Assange at briefing releasing the Diaries.

In a 2011 interview, Assange talked about his partnerships with corporate media.  “We’ve partnered with twenty or so newspapers across the world, to increase the total impact, including by encouraging each one of these news organizations to be braver,” he said.

“It made them braver, though it did not entirely work in the case of The New York Times. For example, one of the stories we found in the Afghan War Diaries was from “Task Force 373”, a U.S. Special Forces assassination squad.

“Task Force 373 is working its way down an assassination list of some 2,000 people for Afghanistan, and the Kabul government is rather unhappy about these extrajudicial assassinations—there is no impartial procedure for putting a name on the list or for taking a name off the list. You’re not notified if you’re on the list, which is called the Joint Priority Effects List, or JPEL. It’s supposedly a kill or capture list.

“But you can see from the material that we released that about 50 percent of cases were just kill—there’s no option to “capture” when a drone drops a bomb on someone. And in some cases Task Force 373 killed innocents, including one case where they attacked a school and killed seven children and no bonafide targets, and attempted to cover the whole thing up.

“This discovery became the cover story for Der Spiegel. It became an article in The Guardian. A story was written for The New York Times by national security correspondent Eric Schmitt, and that story was killed. It did not appear in The New York Times.”

On the day of the Diaries’ publication, Assange said in a video published by The Guardian: “It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on there is always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy and we think it is good to engage in, and in this case it will show the true nature of this war.”

The press response to the publication of the war diaries was far from uniformly positive.

Maximilian Forte described the issue via Counterpunch: “Wikileaks seems to be depending now on individuals to privately sift through thousands of records, and then to presumably publish their findings outside of newspapers, months from now, about events that happened perhaps years ago. This is great for historians, and not so great for anti-war activists who deal in the immediate, in the present.”

However, such a sentiment dismissed the coordinated release with papers of record from three countries. Anti-war activists and artists did make use of the material, especially using data-visualization techniques.

A televised CBS report aired in the days following the release called WikiLeaks a “shadowy website.”

Reaction from The Military

According Assange’s affidavit, just three days after the July 25 publication of the Afghan War Diaries, the U.S. Department of Defense and the FBI stepped up pre-existing efforts to prosecute Assange and disable WikiLeaks.

Assange said:

“With our publication of the Afghan War Diaries and the news that WikiLeaks intended to publish hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, U.S. government officials started an attempt to delegitimise the legal protections WikiLeaks enjoys as a publisher by casting WikiLeaks as an adversary opposed to U.S. national interests.

An article published by the Department of Defense on July 29, 2010 has since been deleted, but was retrieved via archiving services. The report states in part:

“Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced he has asked the FBI to help Pentagon authorities investigate the leak of the classified documents published by WikiLeaks. Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, condemned the leak in the strongest possible manner during a Pentagon briefing here today.”

The article said, “Calling on the FBI to aid the investigation ensures that the department will have all the resources needed to investigate and assess this breach of national security, the secretary said, noting that use of the bureau ensures the investigation can go wherever it needs to go.”

In the days following the release, Michael Hayden, a former NSA director who also served as CIA chief under President George W. Bush from 2006 until 2009, called publication of the Diaries a ‘tragedy.’

Political Response

The Obama administration’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones called the release “a threat to national security that could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk.”

Democratic Party Presidential candidate John Kerry called the publication of the Afghan WarDiaries “unacceptable and illegal.”

In a press briefing, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that WikiLeaks represented a “very real and potential threat.”

A White House memo sent to reporters shortly after the release of the Afghan war documents was said by Assange to have stated in part: “As you report on this issue, it’s worth noting that WikiLeaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan.”

The publication of the Afghan War Diaries would form a major part of the U.S. criminal investigation of Julian Assange that the Justice Department announced was underway in December 2010 and would ultimately lead to Assange’s arrest on April 11 of this year.

consortiumnews.com

In mid-July, Italy’s Chamber of Deputies approved renewing funding to the Libyan coastguard, despite non-governmental organisations urging the authorities to stop financing the failed state’s human trafficking network. Only a day earlier, Amnesty International released a report detailing the trafficking and violations occurring across Libya’s detention centres. European countries have downplayed the documented atrocities against migrants in Libya, preferring to focus on keeping the statistics down.

This week, a boat capsized just off Libya’s coast, with 57 African migrants now presumed dead, among them 20 women and two children. The International Organisation for Migration in Libya (IOM) recently established that almost 6,000 migrants were intercepted and returned to Libya this year so far. Migrants known to have perished in the Mediterranean this year number 970.

International interference in Libya since 2011 and the fall of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has resulted in a country in which militias compete for territory and power. Vested UN and international interests in the country have exacerbated the humanitarian ramifications.

While the deals which the EU reached with the Libyan coastguard have been deemed controversial by human rights organisations, public sentiment in Europe veers towards pushback. Migration is played as a powerful card across the political spectrum, with both governments and the public fomenting racism and xenophobia. The result is widespread oblivion about the politics which created refugees and failed states.

With governments focused on statistics, reports such as the recent one by Amnesty International exist to inform only those who are already well-informed. Hence the absence of connecting capsized boats to deliberate damage inflicted by the Libyan coastguard to the vessels, resulting in deaths away from Europe’s shores. Neither is the complicity between Libya and European states made evident in terms of the EU financing abuses and torture in Libya’s detention camps. The rift between politics and non-governmental organisations, in the case of migrants, has been reduced to accusations of trafficking, whereas political culpability, which plays a major role in terms of funding the occurring atrocities, is kept out of focus.

In one instance in July this year, the Libyan coastguard was filmed firing at migrants in Malta’s Search and Rescue (SAR) area. The Libyan coastguard also attempted to ram the boat carrying migrants several times.

Researchers have established a link between European arms sales and increased displacement of people. The link between Italy’s funding of the Libyan coastguard and the interception of migrants was also included in the report.

Testimony published in Amnesty International’s report is chilling. “Death in Libya: it’s normal. No one will look for you and no one will find you,” states one quote by a 21 year old male refugee. The oblivion extends beyond Libya. With European governments intent on keeping migrants away from Europe’s shores, the bloc, which is purportedly concerned with human rights, finds it easier to neglect its obligations. No one in Libya would look for a refugee, and no one in Europe would, either, especially since the EU is paying Libya to do its dirty work.

Amnesty International called upon the EU to ensure accountability. However, accountability from within the same paradigm of exploitation will merely create new victims. The EU cheered in 2011 when the NATO coalition intervened in Libya for regime change under the guise of bringing democracy. One bloody consequence of the decision has been the increase in human trafficking of migrants, which the EU sought to quell through militarisation and surveillance, but never through addressing its wrongs. To perceive refugees as a dissociated part of the wider narrative is a violation in itself, but who will hold the bloc politically accountable for delegating distasteful tasks to the Libyan coastguard?

How is a citizenry to respond to Evil, to publicly made threats that they are now in a period where novel viruses, cyberterrorism, and food shortages may strike at any moment?

What about the fact that making threats to achieve political or ideological aims is the very definition of terrorism itself, or the fact that using the internet to do this is the definition of cyberterrorism? When we look at those who have benefited politically and financially from the lockdowns, and who will undoubtedly do the same with the coming cyberterrorism seasons, we are reasonable in asking: Is the World Economic Forum website in fact a terrorist website?

Are the Davos people terrorists? Certainly, the plausible deniability here is that these ‘threats’ are actually just warnings, warnings that other nefarious actors like the so-called DarkSide, “thought” to be behind the Colonial Pipeline attack, are lurking in the shadows of supposed anonymity may carry out attacks or make threats.

What about the rising phenomenon of censorship, and the taking of political prisoners?

Well how about a bit of wisdom from wiseguys and gangsters, new and old, which goes something like this: those delivering warnings work for those behind the threats.

We ought to be able to warn about impending doom without being accused of being the agent of said doom. But in normal criminology, we ask – who benefited, and who had the power to carry it out. When a single agent can both gain from something, and had the power to execute it, they become a suspect.

It is reasonable therefore to look at those giving ‘warnings’, because they become threats when understanding that they also have the most to gain from their own proposed ‘solutions’ to said threats, and also have the power to carry out the attacks themselves. These aren’t solutions, they are the ultimatums.

They furthermore have direct control over political actors whose nominal obligations are to protect and serve the public. In many ways, it is a perfect crime. And if it can happen, then it will happen, and likely has already happened. We should go so far as to propose that this is indeed what has happened, and is happening to us right now.

Fascism at Home

We are nevertheless asked to believe that it’s merely an incredible coincidence that just as the U.S. deep state failed to make victory in a whole array of geopolitical endeavors, that they launch an attack on civil society called ‘the new normal’. It was reasoned by Marxist revolutionaries Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky a hundred years ago that the roots of Fascism lie in dying and frustrated empires; that when the costs of empire exceeded the gains, that the final solution was to turn the gears of the machinery of the state apparatus against the home population of the empire itself.

Then the politics of divide and conquer, deceit and confusion – normal within parliamentary systems anyhow – becomes a deadly game of cancel culture but with mass graves and concentration camps. This is how evil operates in the world

Perhaps this is what we are seeing today. Because we really need to ask, does anyone else find it amazing that right as this series of imperial failures happened all within the short span of a few years, that magically the entire narrative of society transmogrifies overnight into a giant ritual sacrifice to prevent novel viruses, cyberterrorism, and food shortages?

Here we are also asked to suspend rational thinking and science, in the name of rationalizing and trusting the science. Provisions that governments make against an ever-mutating virus are more often at odds with science and the pre-Covid understanding of how transmission works, or what infected means, and what the significance of symptoms are or aren’t. All of the provisions seem aimed at stoking fear, furthering divisions, and transforming this fear into an anger, but yet not at those who created the virus in a laboratory – as U.S. Senator Rand Paul has explained in hearings.

Instead we are required in our obligatory two-minutes of hate, to redirect this weaponized anger at those who question the entire narrative.

Indeed the hallmarks of fascism are abundant, even if in a very superficial and superstructural way the apparent ‘roles’ were reversed. Fascistic gangs (despite their leftist ideology) financed by big business in the form of Antifa and BLM ran rampant for a whole year, in protests that were 95% peaceful and 5% arson and murder. But going back to wiseguys and gangsters, maybe one only needs to take out 5% of adversaries to instill fear in the other 95%. On the streets it’s called ‘making an example’.

Of Stolen Elections & Political Prisoners

Once the populist forces – ‘the Historical Block’ – a united front of minorities, workers, veterans, students, the unemployed, and small and medium business owners nevertheless won the battle of democracy in what appeared as a Trump landslide on election night 2020, the election was stolen.

But the real affront was that it wasn’t truly stolen, it was taken – and taken in broad daylight in front of everyone and God – in an openly publicized non-conspiracy by the Transition Integrity Project, financed by the World Economic Forum’s Nicolas Berggruen and led by Clinton favourite John Podesta, working with Big Tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg and advertised by Jeff Bezos’ The Washington Post.

Even Time Magazine’s write-up read as a confession. No doubt this was to inoculate the last dozen or so geriatric readers of Time Magazine, before they heard about it from friends. First impressions, after all, are lasting impressions.

Then on January 6^th, when a tiny fraction of the historical block, still numbering countless tens of thousands, mobilized in a peaceful march on the Capitol, the FBI may have launched a false-flag attack that justified a coordinated parliamentary ‘about-face’ which brought to a halt the hopes of more than 70 million voters that the steal could be stopped. The corrupt DOJ would then proceed to hold a number of political prisoners, as they do to this very day, in grotesquely delayed proceedings on charges that in fact do not resemble the media charge of ‘insurrection’. And there are mounting credible reports that these political prisoners face torture and permanent bodily injury.

As attorney Joseph McBride, representing January 6^th prisoners, stated in no uncertain terms in an interview that aired on NewsMax and reported by The Gateway Pundit:

“What I can say about the Jan. 6 protesters who remain incarcerated or detained at this point, is that their constitutional rights and human rights are being violated by the Department of Justice and the Federal Government at this very moment. The law is clear that no type of punishment is appropriate for a detainee. Despite that numerous detainees are being held in solitary confinement for long periods of time. They’re being denied medical care. They’re taking beatings. They’re being denied sleep. They’re being psychologically, emotionally, and physically tortured on a regular basis [by guards,],”

That the torture and abuse of political prisoners is being ignored by the same corporate media that promoted the fraudulent electoral outcome which in turn provoked the demonstration in the first place, is of course no surprise.

But the eminent threat besides the fact that this torture is occurring, is that social media – which until five years ago was a relatively safe bastion for free expression – is now openly collaborating with government to silence dissent.

The ‘real cyber-terrorism’ from the point of view of the corporate-state apparatus aren’t the false flags, past and future, which they have planned for the public. Rather, the threat is citizens utilizing the horizontal, peer-to-peer nature of social media as real people to communicate the real existing dangers in an authentic way.

We Are Plagued by Evil

In conclusion we can say that we are plagued – plagued by an elite which has come to view authority and the correct exercise of power through the lens of the corporate boardroom’s social Darwinism. We have meditated on the utility of this term, of evil, knowing very well the metaphysical connotations it carries.

But we use it now with certainty. There were other ways to carry out changes in society, if in fact climate change and human overpopulation were the actual problems to be solved – if indeed these are problems (questions we have debated elsewhere).

As we have written, this would largely include a process of manufacturing consent through a system of positive reinforcement, not punitive measures, isolation, and coercive technologies. Planned obsolescence would have been done away with, making the production of goods which are the primary cause of carbon emissions, to decrease many-fold almost overnight. This actual solution also happens to fit precisely with the needs of a rising multipolarity which, at least for some intermediate time, appears to necessitate a slow-down of global supply chains. It also fits with the rise of automation and an increasingly post-labor economic system, if we admit that the planned obsolescence model was as much at keeping people employed as it was about increasing the velocity of money in the economy.

Similar goes with cyberterrorism, and as the public has become increasingly aware but reluctant to admit, the over-use of online systems to manage critical infrastructure and food distribution.

It had been noted with great alarm that consequences of the ‘attacks’ such as the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack on May 7^th of this year, were unnecessary. There is no rational underlying reason why the computerized system that Colonial uses, which regulates its pipelines, needs to be connected to computers which are in turn connected to the internet.

This raises serious questions about why it was deemed a good practice to have arranged this in the first place. And it also raises serious questions as to whether its computerized system controlling valves, measuring pressure, etc., was indeed connected to the internet. After all, Colonial’s shutting down in turn calls the entire official narrative into question, leading up to more and more on the ‘Russian hackers’ narrative.

In truth, whatever attack occurred or did not really occur, was claimed in thorough reportage to have affected its billing system, not the systems governing physical distribution. And yet, access to the pipeline was cut-off, affecting countless citizens in the process. Why? Was Colonial simply saying that if they don’t have a way to process payments, then we shut down distribution until further notice? Did Colonial attack itself?

The writing is on the wall. The medium is the message. For reasons explained in our works on this subject, the present elite in the west is governed by a misanthropic principle, which views the exercise of power as something measured by the degree to which it can be exercised in the most painful way.

So long as activists on the left and activists on the right are fighting over whether the Great Reset, lockdowns, and cyberterrorism is actually a capitalist plot or a communist plot, then it will be difficult for the public to organize an effective resistance to what this really all is: Evil.