The Corporatist War On Free Speech - Are We A Nation Of Sheep?

 The Corporatist War On Free Speech - Are We A Nation Of Sheep?

The attacks on free speech are not coming from uniformed government officials shutting down newspapers. But that doesn't mean they are not coming from the government. How are "social media" companies and government working together to turn us into a nation of sheep?

Has America Become a Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy?

Has America Become a Dictatorship Disguised as a Democracy?

“The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”—They Live, John Carpenter

We’re living in two worlds, you and I.

There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police armed to the teeth.

All is not as it seems.

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.”

This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released 30 years ago in November 1988 and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.

Best known for his horror film Halloween, which assumes that there is a form of evil so dark that it can’t be killed, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.

Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.

In Escape from New York, Carpenter presents fascism as the future of America.

In The Thing, a remake of the 1951 sci-fi classic of the same name, Carpenter presupposes that increasingly we are all becoming dehumanized.

In Christine, the film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about a demon-possessed car, technology exhibits a will and consciousness of its own and goes on a murderous rampage.

In In the Mouth of Madness, Carpenter notes that evil grows when people lose “the ability to know the difference between reality and fantasy.”

And then there is Carpenter’s They Live, in which two migrant workers discover that the world is not as it seems. In fact, the population is actually being controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite. All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by subliminal messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada (played to the hilt by the late Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of doctored sunglasses—Hoffman lenses—that Nada sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through the lens of truth, the elite, who appear human until stripped of their disguises, are shown to be monsters who have enslaved the citizenry in order to prey on them. 

Likewise, billboards blare out hidden, authoritative messages: a bikini-clad woman in one ad is actually ordering viewers to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.” Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” A wad of dollar bills in a vendor’s hand proclaims, “THIS IS YOUR GOD.”

When viewed through Nada’s Hoffman lenses, some of the other hidden messages being drummed into the people’s subconscious include: NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, CONFORM, SUBMIT, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WATCH TV, NO IMAGINATION, and DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the decline of American culture.

A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

In this way, the subtle message of They Live provides an apt analogy of our own distorted vision of life in the American police state, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek refers to as dictatorship in democracy, “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”

We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.

The powers-that-be want us to feel threatened by forces beyond our control (terrorists, shooters, bombers).

They want us afraid and dependent on the government and its militarized armies for our safety and well-being.

They want us distrustful of each other, divided by our prejudices, and at each other’s throats.

Most of all, they want us to continue to march in lockstep with their dictates.

Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: the moneyed elite who rule us view us as expendable resources to be used, abused and discarded.

In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

Not only do you have to be rich—or beholden to the rich—to get elected these days, but getting elected is also a surefire way to get rich. As CBS News reports, “Once in office, members of Congress enjoy access to connections and information they can use to increase their wealth, in ways that are unparalleled in the private sector. And once politicians leave office, their connections allow them to profit even further.”

In denouncing this blatant corruption of America’s political system, former president Jimmy Carter blasted the process of getting elected—to the White House, governor’s mansion, Congress or state legislatures—as “unlimited political bribery… a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over.”

Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

Sound familiar?

Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests.

We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism. 

Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many. In this way, it is not a democracy or a republican form of government, which is what the American government was established to be. It is a top-down form of government and one which has a terrifying history typified by the developments that occurred in totalitarian regimes of the past: police states where everyone is watched and spied on, rounded up for minor infractions by government agents, placed under police control, and placed in detention (a.k.a. concentration) camps.

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary.

But why would a people agree to such an oppressive regime?

The answer is the same in every age: fear.

Fear makes people stupid.

Fear is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government. And, as most social commentators recognize, an atmosphere of fear permeates modern America: fear of terrorism, fear of the police, fear of our neighbors and so on.

The propaganda of fear has been used quite effectively by those who want to gain control, and it is working on the American populace.

Despite the fact that we are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack; 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane; 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack, and 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist , we have handed over control of our lives to government officials who treat us as a means to an end—the source of money and power.

As the Bearded Man in They Live warns, “They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.”

In this regard, we’re not so different from the oppressed citizens in They Live. 

From the moment we are born until we die, we are indoctrinated into believing that those who rule us do it for our own good. The truth is far different.

Despite the truth staring us in the face, we have allowed ourselves to become fearful, controlled, pacified zombies.

We live in a perpetual state of denial, insulated from the painful reality of the American police state by wall-to-wall entertainment news and screen devices.

Most everyone keeps their heads down these days while staring zombie-like into an electronic screen, even when they’re crossing the street. Families sit in restaurants with their heads down, separated by their screen devices and unaware of what’s going on around them. Young people especially seem dominated by the devices they hold in their hands, oblivious to the fact that they can simply push a button, turn the thing off and walk away. 

Indeed, there is no larger group activity than that connected with those who watch screens—that is, television, lap tops, personal computers, cell phones and so on. In fact, a Nielsen study reports that American screen viewing is at an all-time high. For example, the average American watches approximately 151 hours of television per month.

The question, of course, is what effect does such screen consumption have on one’s mind?

Psychologically it is similar to drug addiction. Researchers found that “almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension.” Research also shows that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brain waves slow down, thus transforming them into a more passive, nonresistant state.

Historically, television has been used by those in authority to quiet discontent and pacify disruptive people. “Faced with severe overcrowding and limited budgets for rehabilitation and counseling, more and more prison officials are using TV to keep inmates quiet,” according to Newsweek.

Given that the majority of what Americans watch on television is provided through channels controlled by six mega corporations, what we watch is now controlled by a corporate elite and, if that elite needs to foster a particular viewpoint or pacify its viewers, it can do so on a large scale.

If we’re watching, we’re not doing.

The powers-that-be understand this. As television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a 1958 speech:

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

This brings me back to They Live, in which the real zombies are not the aliens calling the shots but the populace who are content to remain controlled.

When all is said and done, the world of They Live is not so different from our own. 

We, too, are focused only on our own pleasures, prejudices and gains. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Racial injustice is growing. Human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.

Oblivious to what lies ahead, we’ve been manipulated into believing that if we continue to consume, obey, and have faith, things will work out. But that’s never been true of emerging regimes. And by the time we feel the hammer coming down upon us, it will be too late.

So where does that leave us?

The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.

Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters. 

When, for example, John Nada destroys the alien hyno-transmitter in They Live, he restores hope by delivering America a wake-up call for freedom.

That’s the key right there: we need to wake up.

Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by pointless political spectacles and pay attention to what’s really going on in the country.

The real battle for control of this nation is not being waged between Republicans and Democrats in the ballot box.

The real battle for control of this nation is taking place on roadsides, in police cars, on witness stands, over phone lines, in government offices, in corporate offices, in public school hallways and classrooms, in parks and city council meetings, and in towns and cities across this country.

The real battle between freedom and tyranny is taking place right in front of our eyes, if we would only open them.

All the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.

Wake up, America.

If they live (the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords), it is only because “we the people” sleep.

 JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Joseph F Barber,is a freelance writer and editor of the blog FREEDOM OR ANARCHY,Campaign of Conscience.it is my message to we the people and the citizens of our world to stand free and your ground feed another if you can ,I tell you this as it come from with in my soul There comes a point when a man must refuse to answer to his leader if he is also to answer to his own conscience. 

"I don't know how to save the world. I don't have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all Earth's inhabitants, none of us will survive - nor will we deserve to." Leonard Peltier

Pro Deo et Constitutione – 

Libertas aut Mors Semper Vigilans Fortis 

Paratus et Fidelis 

Joseph F Barber

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When the Google Dream Died

When the Google Dream Died

Google is throwing itself a hell of a 20th birthday party. And everyone is bringing the gifts.

While the dot com giant puts up celebratory doodles and shows off its original garage headquarters, Attorney General Sessions had already convened 14 state attorney generals to discuss censorship, privacy issues and antitrust issues involving, among other tech monopolies, the cutesy corporation.

Few meetings between Sessions and AGs well to the left, like California’s Xavier Becerra, would have gone as well as this, but big tech monopolies were already controversial on the left, now they’re also being unfriended by Republicans. There’s a growing consensus that they’re just too big and powerful.

Google’s August search market share in America stood at 84%. That means it defines the internet.

Its secretive algorithms determine what people see when they search. It can unilaterally redefine an issue, such as when it shifted the search results for “Jihad” away from counterterrorist sites to favor Islamist and pro-Islamist media sites. It shapes how political leaders, including President Trump, are seen, and manufactures an ongoing consensus by simply choosing one set of results over another.

(During the election, its search engine provided more positive results for Democrats than Republicans.)

And then there are the constant privacy scandals.

Even as Google is trying to celebrate its anniversary, it’s under fire for automatically signing Gmail users into its Chrome browser (which is a key link in its chain of monopolies meant to lock users into its search engine). After the outcry, Google, as usual, offered a partial retreat.

The scandal is fairly typical of Google which runs on privacy violations and monopolistic abuses. Before Google was rigging search results for political reasons, it was rigging them to favor its products. Search for “mail” and the first result won’t be the post office, it won’t even be mail.com which actually predated Google by a few years, it will be Google’s own Gmail. And that’s how it always works.

Google searches drive users to Google products. And Google products drive users to Google Search.

Its monopolistic vision of the future is of an Internet of Things, a smart home run on Google with eternally watchful smart speakers in every room of your house, processing your questions through Google, and sending every conversation in your house back along its servers to be analyzed by machine learning to better target you with ads on your smart fridge. And then it really will be Google’s world.

Or Amazon’s world.

America’s political and cultural elites already live in one world or the other. But despite the wide range of both companies, many Americans are unhappy with the power and control they wield over their lives.

And so the utopia in which Google is your home, your car, your clothes, your entertainment and your life, may never arrive. The company has more power, but also more enemies, than ever before.

Even as Google aspires to run the world, investing in a variety of moonshot businesses, from self-driving cars (Waymo) to delivering internet by balloon (Loon) through Alphabet, its mothership company, its core business, search, that delivers most of its revenue through ads, is stagnating. While Google dreams of answering your questions before you ask them using machine learning and voice search, it’s doing a terrible job of answering them when you do ask of them. Like all monopolies, its product is mediocre.

Google Search was retuned for mobile search by making every search trending. Search for “Supreme Court”, and Google will deluge you with Kavanaugh hysteria and assorted lefty media background pieces delegitimizing a “Republican” Supreme Court from FDR’s day to modern times.

This isn’t just a monopolistic abuse of power for purely partisan purposes; it’s also a poor product.

Trending stories are friendlier to mobile users who have less time and patience for extended queries. It’s also simpler to deliver inaccurate results that fit the needs of the lowest common denominator user, who types in Supreme Court to see stories about Kavanaugh, than to deliver actual accurate results.

And Google is rigging search results to browbeat sites into orienting entirely toward mobile. Just as it will, before too long, dumb down search even further, to aid its voice search ambitions.

Turning search into a lowest common denominator exercise isn’t about serving users, but about securing Google’s hold on the future. And, in ways both great and petty (like forcibly logging users into its browser), it isn’t shy about herding its user products like sheep into its digital products.

Naked political bias was meant to cover Google’s silicon fundament from its greatest political threat. Republican administrations have offered little threat to the big tech companies. It was largely the left that was actively agitating for breaking them up or limiting their power. And Google focused on the left.

(In last year’s major Google scandal, former Google exec chairman Eric Schmidt allegedly convinced the New America Foundation, a lefty think tank, to purge Open Markets for its criticism of Google.)

And then President Trump showed up.

The famous video of Google’s elites mourning Trump’s victory isn’t just political bias. As the firing of James Damore showed us, lefty political intolerance is baked into Google’s political culture. And anyone at Google who wanted Trump to win has to keep quiet and leak videos. But President Hillary Clinton would have also been really good for Google’s business interests.

Eric Schmidt, who once responded to Google privacy concerns by sneering, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place”, was a close Hillary ally. His “Notes for a 2016 Democratic Campaign” sent to Hillary’s people proposed a $1.5 billion operation that would create “a single record for a voter that aggregates all that is known about them.”

Schmidt was applying the Google ethos to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The unspoken back end of the pitch is that privacy violations can be harnessed for the good of powerful political interests. (The manufactured scandal over Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook scraping never touched the truly epic dot com privacy violators on the left.) Google’s vision of the end of privacy could be very good for President Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. So why regulate it?

That’s what Google elites were really mourning after Election Day.

They weren’t just crying because their lefty political movement lost, but because the vision of a Clinton-Google alliance running the country was lost.

President Trump has warned Google that it can’t expect to abuse its powers and avoid scrutiny. And the leading figures on the Democrat side are less promising for Google than Eric Schmidt’s pal.

Google was ranked as the single biggest employer of Bernie Sanders donors, and its search results were accused of favoring Sanders. As the Washington Post noted, “nine of his top 10 results were rated "very pro" in the analysis”. Google’s current top 10 for Trump, by contrast, includes a bonkers New York Mag conspiracy screed, “What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?” (In 1988, Bernie Sanders was honeymooning in the USSR, but Google doesn’t think that’s worth including in Bernie’s top 10.)

And while Bernie Sanders has been relentlessly attacking Amazon, a major Google rival, he has been fairly silent about Google. Meanwhile the Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s boss, has been critical of Bernie. But that doesn’t make him a reliable or ideal ally in Google’s war for the future.

Meanwhile Google faces the threat of Trump. A conventional non-populist Republican would have posed little threat to Google’s business interests. Elites love Google because of its shiny technocracy. Schmidt’s pitch to Hillary’s people is seductive to many in the GOP, but alienating to Trump and alien to his insurgent campaign which relied on populist enthusiasm rather than Big Brother level manipulation.

And Trump’s impact on the GOP has shifted it away from the unthinking worship of multinationals.

Google’s vision of the future is multinational, multilateral, multicultural and multi-everything. It’s a borderless world in which we’re no longer defined by nations, but by platforms. Every individual is a terabyte profile swimming among the vast server farm zettabytes in Finland, Singapore, the Dalles in Oregon and Quilicura, Chile, to be run on Google products designed by hipsters the Bay Area and manufacturerd by slave labor in China.

That was Hillary’s vision. That’s not Trump’s vision. 

Trump’s economic nationalism is antithetical to everything that Google and the big dot coms stand for. Their borderless world requires the dismantling of nations into united markets governed by global treaties. There’s no room for national interest if Google or Amazon are to run the world.

America isn’t just at war with a nebulous left, but with a leftist vision embraced by the big tech companies that have defined how we talk to each other, what we read and what we know.

Google isn’t just leftist by accident. It’s leftist by design. Its vision is globalist, its scope is endless and the only thing standing in its way, besides its rivals, is the nation-state. America.

The confrontation between Google and Trump encapsulates the clash between the national and the multi-national, workers in red states and elites in blue cities, tradition and technocracy, the individual and the machine. The struggle will decide whether the future belongs to the individual or to Google.





Daniel Greenfield

Trump Administration Agency Predicts 7 Degree F Rise in Global Temperatures by 2100

Trump Administration Agency Predicts 7 Degree F Rise in Global Temperatures by 2100

Oh, and the report suggests there’s no point doing anything to stop it. 
Hidden in a largely overlooked draft report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are some startling figures: the Trump administration believes there will be a 7 degree Fahrenheit rise in average global temperatures by 2100, and the report suggest we not even bother trying to stop it.

“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002, told the Washington Post.
Deep in the dog days of summer this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a 500-page report on the environmental impact of fuel economy standards. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this document was not widely-read. But on Friday, the Washington Post reported the fact that the paper assumes that if current practices are unchanged, the planet will warm a catastrophic 7 degrees F, or about 4 degrees Celsius.

It’s hard to overemphasize just how devastating a 4 degree warming would be. Under the Paris Climate Agreement, every other country on the planet is working to try to curb our emissions and fossil fuel consumption in order to slow the warming of our planet. The goal is to keep it from warming beyond 1.5 degree C—and never reach 2 degree C—above pre-industrial levels. A new United Nations report suggests that first goal is already very unlikely, but there is still hope of keeping us under 2 degrees.

Four degrees of warming would be, quite simply, catastrophic. At just two degrees of warming, our crop production would drop drastically, the ocean level would rise about 50 cm, freshwater would dry up by about 17 percent, and heat waves and storms would ravage more of the planet for longer. Double that and you’re looking at a completely altered planet.

What’s most alarming about the paper is that it takes this warming as a predetermined fact and, rather than advocating for change, uses it to justify not improving fuel efficiency standards after 2020, resulting in an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The report claims that this would be a negligible contribution to the inevitable warming the agency anticipates.

This article was originally published by "Motherboard" -  

The Ugly Terror Truth About Jamal Khashoggi

The Ugly Terror Truth About Jamal Khashoggi

In high school, Jamal Khashoggi had a good friend. His name was Osama bin Laden.

“We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” Khashoggi reminisced about their time together in the Muslim Brotherhood. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”

The friendship endured with Jamal Khashoggi following Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan. Khashoggi credited Adel Batterjee, listed at one time as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers” by the Treasury Department, with bringing him to Afghanistan to report on the fighting.

The media calls Khashoggi a journalist, but his writings from 80s Afghanistan read as Jihadist propaganda with titles like, "Arab Mujahadeen in Afghanistan II: Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah".

And when Osama bin Laden set up Al Qaeda, he called Khashoggi with the details. 

After Afghanistan, Jamal Khashoggi went to work as a media adviser for former Saudi intel boss, Prince Turki bin Faisal, alleged to have links to Al Qaeda. Those allegations came from, among others, Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged twentieth hijacker.

When the other 19 hijackers perpetrated the attacks of September 11, Khashoggi wrote that the Saudis would not “give in” to American “demands” for “unconditional condemnation” and “total cooperation”.

"Saudis tend to link the ugliness of what happened in New York and Washington with what has happened and continues to happen in Palestine. It is time that the United States comes to understand the effect of its foreign policy and the consequences of that policy," he declared.

"A Muslim cannot be happy with the suffering of others. Even if this suffering is that of Americans who neglected the suffering of Palestinians for half a century."

That’s the real Khashoggi, a cynical and manipulative apologist for Islamic terrorism, not the mythical martyred dissident whose disappearance the media has spent the worst part of a week raving about.

Jamal Khashoggi was not a moderate. Some describe him as the leader of the Saudi Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamist network admires Hitler and seeks to impose Islamic law around the world. Nor was he a supporter of freedom of the press. In one of his Al Jazeera appearances, he complained that the Saudi government was allowing some journalists to report positively on Israel.

His final project, DAWN or Democracy for the Arab World Now was meant to aid Islamists. According to Azzam Al-Tamimi, an old Muslim Brotherhood ally aiding Jamal, "The Muslim Brothers and Islamists were the biggest victims of the foiled Arab spring." Al-Tamimi has endorsed suicide bombings.

But unlike Osama bin Laden, Khashoggi did not use the Muslim Brotherhood as a gateway drug to the pure and uncut violence of Al Qaeda or ISIS. He was still betting on a political takeover.

As he recently put it, “Democracy and political Islam go together.” 

Khashoggi went on making the case for the Islamic state of the Muslim Brotherhood. He went on making that case even as the Saudis decided that the Brotherhood had become too dangerous.

Like his old friend, Jamal Khashoggi went into exile in a friendly Islamist country. Osama bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan and Khashoggi ended up in Turkey. The Khashoggi family had originated from Turkey. And Turkey was swiftly becoming the leading Sunni Islamist power in the region. Living in Turkey put Khashoggi at the intersection of the Turkish-Qatari backers of the Brotherhood and the Western media.

His disappearance has touched off fury and anger from the Islamist regime that harbored him. And it has also set off an unprecedented firestorm of rage and grief by the American media which adored him.

Media spin describes Khashoggi as a dissident. And he certainly was that. But so was Osama bin Laden. 

What Khashoggi wasn’t, was a moderate. No more so than the Muslim Brotherhood. He wasn’t a proponent of human rights, but of Islamic rule. He could be found on Al Jazeera, Qatar’s Jihadist propaganda network, bemoaning Saudi opposition to the Brotherhood and its friendliness to Israel.

"Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should get rid of his complex against the Muslim Brotherhood and stop treating them as the enemy or a threat to Saudi Arabia," he complained, and urged the Saudis to fight Israel instead.

Jamal Khashoggi’s career of spouting Muslim Brotherhood propaganda for his new Turkish and Qatari masters came to an end in a curious way. Before Khashoggi allegedly entered the Saudi embassy, from which Turkey claims that he disappeared, he told his Turkish fiancé to call Yasin Aktay if he didn’t return.

Before the summer coup of 2016, Turkey was said to have 50,000 political prisoners. Many of them were members of the country’s oppressed Kurdish minority which is deprived of its most basic civil rights. These include even the use of their own language. Doing so can carry a prison sentence.

In that terrible summer, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamic tyrant, finished securing his absolute hold on power with the coup as his Reichstag fire. The alleged coup became a blank check for the mass arrest and torture of countless thousands of political prisoners. Amnesty International estimated that 50,000 had been detained. The UN listed a figure as high as 180,000. They included 300 journalists.

Lawyers described clients being brought to them covered in blood. 

Erdogan went after professors, judges, law enforcement, the military and the last remnants of a free press. A Human Rights Watch report documented electric shocks, beatings with truncheons and rubber hoses, and rape by Erdogan’s Islamic thugs. Heads were banged against walls. Men were forced to kneel on burning hot asphalt. Medical reports showed skull fractures, damage to testicles and dehydration.

The media didn’t show any of the hysterical outrage at these crimes that it has over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. The media cares more about Khashoggi, a former media mouthpiece of the Saudi regime before it turned on his Muslim Brotherhood brothers, than about 300 Turkish reporters.

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s consistency. 

Erdogan and Khashoggi are both militant Islamic activists. And their opponents, the victims of Erdogan’s Reichstag fire and the new Saudi king, had fallen afoul of them for being insufficiently militantly Islamist.

The media will always take the side of Islamists over non-Islamists. That’s why it bleeds for Khashoggi. 

There was a reason why Jamal Khashoggi felt so comfortable in Turkey, while actual journalists in the country were terrified of being locked up, tortured and disappeared. If that was the fate that befell Khashoggi, it was a commonplace one in Turkey. And it may have been carried out by his own Turkish allies who decided that their Saudi subversive had more value as a false flag martyr than a house guest.

The media’s disproportionate outrage over Khashoggi has nothing to do with human rights. If it did, the media would have been just as outraged at the arrests and torture of tens of thousands in Turkey.

It’s not. And it won’t be. 

And the politicians shrilly urging that we punish the Saudis never thought about curtailing arms sales to Turkey. Many of the same politicians were unhappy when President Trump used economic pressure on Erdogan in an effort to free American hostages, like Pastor Andrew Brunson, being held by Turkey.

This is about Islam. 

The struggle between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand, and Turkey, Qatar and Iran on the other, is the next stage of the Arab Spring. And, from Yemen to Turkey, the media has made no secret of being on the Islamist side. Its outrage over Khashoggi, like its claims of a human rights crisis over the Saudi bombings in Yemen, are not journalism, they’re the political spin of the Islamist axis.

The media has reported every claim of victimhood by the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar’s Al Jazeera propaganda arm, while giving as little attention as possible to the victims of Muslim Brotherhood church bombings. Its coverage of Israel has been little more than terrorist propaganda since Osama was in diapers. Its coverage of the Khashoggi case is every bit as dishonest as its slanted attacks on the Saudi embargo of Qatar, as its propaganda about the wars in Yemen and Libya, and just as devoid of context.

The Khashoggi case demands context. 

Before the media and the politicians who listen to it drag the United States into a conflict with Saudi Arabia over a Muslim Brotherhood activist based on the word of an enemy country still holding Americans hostage, we deserve the context.

And we deserve the truth. 

The media wants the Saudis to answer questions about Jamal Khashoggi. But maybe the media should be forced to answer why the Washington Post was working with a Muslim Brotherhood propagandist?

The real mystery isn’t Khashoggi’s disappearance. It’s why Republicans aren’t asking those questions.

The media’s relationship with Khashoggi is far more damning than anything the Saudis might have done to him. And the media should be held accountable for its relationship with Osama bin Laden’s old friend.








Daniel Greenfield 

The US Military’s Vision for State Censorship

The US Military’s Vision for State Censorship

In March, the United States Special Operations Command, the section of the Defense Department supervising the US Special Forces, held a conference on the theme of “Sovereignty in the Information Age.” The conference brought together Special Forces officers with domestic police forces, including officials from the New York Police Department, and representatives from technology companies such as Microsoft.

This meeting of top military, police and corporate representatives went unreported and unpublicized at the time. However, the Atlantic Council recently published a 21-page document summarizing the orientation of the proceedings. It is authored by John T. Watts, a former Australian Army officer and consultant to the US Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.

The Atlantic Council, a think tank with close ties to the highest levels of the state, has been a key partner in the social media companies’ censorship of left-wing views. Most notably, Facebook acted on a tip from the Atlantic Council when it shut down the official event page for an anti-fascist demonstration in Washington on the anniversary of last year’s neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville.

This article was originally published by "WSWS" -  Confident that none of the thousands of journalists in Washington will question, or even report, what he writes, Watts lays out, from the standpoint of the repressive apparatus of the state and the financial oligarchy it defends, why censorship is necessary.

The central theme of the report is “sovereignty,” or the state’s ability to impose its will upon the population. This “sovereignty,” Watts writes, faces “greater challenges now than it ever has in the past,” due to the confluence between growing political opposition to the state and the internet’s ability to quickly spread political dissent.

Watts cites the precedent of the invention of the printing press, which helped overthrow the feudal world order. In the Atlantic Council’s estimation, however, this was an overwhelmingly negative development, ushering in “decades, and arguably centuries, of conflict and disruption” and undermining the “sovereignty” of absolutist states. The “invention of the internet is similarly creating conflict and disruption,” Watts writes.

“Trust in Western society,” he warns, “is experiencing a crisis. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked this erosion, showing a 30 percent drop in trust in government over the last year in the United States.”

Watts notes that this collapse in support for the government cannot be explained merely by the rise of social media. This process began in the early 2000s, “at the dawn of the social media age but before it had become mainstream.” Left out are the major reasons for the collapse of popular support for government institutions: the stolen election of 2000, the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction, unending war and the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

However, while it is “hard to argue that the current loss of trust results solely from the emergence of social media,” Watts writes, there “can be little doubt that it acted as a critical amplifier of broader trends."

He continues: “Technology has democratized the ability for sub-state groups and individuals to broadcast a narrative with limited resources and virtually unlimited scope.” By contrast, “In the past, the general public had limited sources of information, which were managed by professional gatekeepers.”

In other words, the rise of uncensored social media allowed small groups with ideas that correspond to those of the broader population to challenge the political narrative of vested interests on an equal footing, without the “professional gatekeepers” of the mainstream print and broadcast media, which publicizes only a pro-government narrative.

When “radical and extremist views” and “incorrect ideas” are “broadcast over social media, they can even influence the views of people who would not otherwise be sympathetic to that perspective,” Watts warns. “When forwarded by a close friend or relation, false information carries additional legitimacy; once accepted by an individual, this false information can be difficult to correct.”

People must be isolated, in other words, from the “incorrect” ideas of their friends and family, because such ideas are “difficult to correct” by the state once disseminated.

But how is this to be done? The growth of oppositional sentiment cannot be combatted with “facts” or the “truth,” because “facts themselves are not sufficient to combat disinformation.” The “truth” is “too complex, less interesting, and less meaningful to individuals.”

Nor can the growth of political opposition, for the time being, simply be solved by “eliminating” (i.e., killing or jailing) political dissidents, because this only lends legitimacy to the ideas of the victims. “Eliminating those individuals and organizations will not be sufficient to combat the narrative and may in fact help amplify it.” He adds, “This is also the case for censorship as those behind the narrative can use the attempt to repress the message as proof of its truth, importance, or authenticity.”

Enter the social media companies. The best mechanism for suppressing oppositional viewpoints and promoting pro-government narratives is the private sector, in particular “technology giants, including Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter,” which can “determine what people see and do not see.”

Watts adds, “Fortunately, shifts in the policies of social media platforms such as Facebook have had significant impact on the type and quality of the content that is broadcast.”

The private sector, therefore, must do the dirty work of the government, because government propaganda is viewed with suspicion by the population. “Business and the private sector may not naturally understand the role they play in combating disinformation, but theirs is one of the most important…. In the West at least, they have been thrust into a central role due to the general public’s increased trust in them as institutions.”

But this is only the beginning. Online newspapers should “consider disabling commentary systems—the function of allowing the general public to leave comments beneath a particular media item,” while social media companies should “use a grading system akin to that used to rate the cleanliness of restaurants” to rate their users’ political statements.

Strong-arm tactics still have a role, of course. Citing the example of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, Watts declares that “governments need to create consequences” for spreading “disinformation” similar to those meted out for “state espionage” – which can carry the death penalty.

What Watts outlines in his document is a vision of a totalitarian social order, where the government, the media, and technology companies are united in suppressing oppositional viewpoints.

The most striking element of the document, however, is that it is not describing the future, but contemporary reality. Everything is in the present tense. The machinery of mass censorship has already been built.

The Atlantic Council report, based on high-level discussions within the military and state, is a confirmation of everything the World Socialist Web Site has said about the purpose of changes in the algorithms of internet and social media companies over the past year-and-a-half.

On August 25, 2017, the WSWS published an open letter to Google alleging that the company is “manipulating its Internet searches to restrict public awareness of and access to socialist, anti-war and left-wing websites.” It added, “Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting.”

Over the subsequent year, key details of the open letter have been indisputably confirmed. At congressional hearings and in other public statements, leading US technology companies have explained that they reduced the propagation of political views and statements targeted by US intelligence agencies, and did so in secret because they feared a public outcry. At the same time, they have explained the technical means by which they promoted pro-government, pro-war news outlets, such as the New York Times and Washington Post.

But the Atlantic Council document presents the most clear, direct and unvarnished explanation of the regime of state censorship.

The struggle against censorship is the spearhead of the defense of all democratic rights. The most urgent task is to unify the working class, which is engaged in a wave of social struggles all over the world, behind the struggle against censorship as a component of the fight for socialism.

Return to Sovereign Nations in Globalisation

MF – WB – WTO – Scaremongering Threats on De-Globalization and Tariffs – The Return to Sovereign Nations in Globalisation

As key representatives of the three chief villains of international finance and trade, the IMF, World Bank (WB) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) met on the lush resort island of Bali, Indonesia, they warned the world of dire consequences in terms of reduced international investments and decline of economic growth as a result of the ever-widening trade wars initiated and instigated by the Trump Administration. They criticized protectionism that might draw countries into decline of prosperity. The IMF cuts its global economic growth forecast for the current year and for 2019

This is pure scaremongering based on nothing. In fact, economic growth of the past that claimed of having emanated from increased trade and investments has served a small minority and driven a widening wedge between rich and poor of both developing and industrialized countries. It’s interesting, how nobody ever talks about the internal distribution of GDP growth that these handlers and instruments of empire and liars for the elite are boasting about; nobody ever seems to question the way these growth rates are calculated – or perhaps just drawn out of hot air? Take the case of Peru, a resource-rich country that boasted in the past often an economic growth of 5% to 7%. On average, the distribution of this growth was such that 80% went to 5% of the population and 20% was to be distributed among 95% of the people. This doesn’t even address the fragmentation of the lower and higher tiers of the percentage breakdowns, but it surely creates more poverty, more inequality, more unemployment and more delinquency.

Or just look at the insane and totally unfounded IMF prediction of 1 million percent inflation of the Venezuelan new currency in 2018 and 2019? – What are they talking about? No substantiation whatsoever. The same with the prediction of dire consequences from reduced trade, when trade as we know it, has and is serving almost exclusively the corporate world of rich industrialized countries, leaving poorer developing countries behind with a burden of unfair deals and often a resulting debt trap.

Such manipulations of truth coming out of international financial and trade organizations, especially the IMF and the WB, are so flagrantly and scrupulously wrong that they cannot be backed with a shred of professionalism, yet they get away with it, because of their apparent unfailable reputation, scaremongering government into doing what is against their and their peoples’ best interest, namely caring for their own local, sovereign economy, without any foreign interference.

Time and again it has been proven that countries that need and want to recover from economic fallouts do best by concentrating on and promoting their own internal socioeconomic capacities, with as little as possible outside interference. One of the most prominent cases in point is China. After China emerged on 1 October 1949 from centuries of western colonization and oppression by Chairman Mao’s creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mao and the Chinese Communist party first had to put a devastated ‘house in order’, a country ruined by disease, lack of education, suffering from hopeless famine as a result of shameless exploitation by western colons. In order to do that China remained practically closed to the outside world until about the mid- 1980’s. Only then, when China had overcome the rampant diseases and famine, built a countrywide education system and became a net exporter of grains and other agricultural products, China, by now totally self-sufficient, gradually opened its borders for international investments and trade. – And look where China is today. Only 30 years later, China has not only become the world’s number one economy, but also a world super power that can no longer be overrun by western imperialism.
But you don’t need to look that far. North Dakota saved herself from the 2008 “crisis”, by using public banking addressing the ND State’s economic needs – not the shareholder’s greed – and planning production and service activities that guaranteed basically full employment, while the rest of the country’s unemployment skyrocketed. The State’s economy grew by close to 3% in 2008 and 2009 – and is still today the State with the fastest growth rate in the country and with the lowest unemployment rate. This is mostly due to a state economic development policy that concentrates on local capacities and that banks on public banking. Today, North Dakota has still the only public bank in the country; but other States, like New Jersey, New Mexico, Arizona and others, as well as the city of Los Angeles are at the brink of creating pubic banking. The mainstream media, however, doesn’t propagate such examples, as they are not in the interest of the banking and corporate oligarchs.

Local economy with local investments for the benefit of the local population, is, of course, not what the ultra-capitalist system wants. It doesn’t fit the neoliberal economic doctrine – driving globalization forward, pushing its bitter medicine of austerity down poor governments throats, so to further exploit their people, creating more poverty, milking their social systems and steeling their natural resources.
Enough! Wake up! – Whatever you may think of President Trump – and he is certainly no panacea for world peace and his abject policy of interference in foreign lands and fueling conflicts and wars in the Middle East and around the globe must be condemned – but his protectionist policies, the “tariff wars” are a welcome sword into the belly of globalization – of the very neoliberal doctrine that has for the last thirty years brought more misery to 99.99% of the planet’s population than any other economic doctrine since Adam Smith. Trump may or may not know what he is doing, but certainly his handlers and advisers, hidden or overt, know the purpose of their newly professed turn of international policy.

Its intention is to cut the political cohesion created by globalization, to divide again for the empire to conquer. Yes. The intention is not to promote local economies, per se, but rather to get countries ready for unguarded bilateral negotiations and agreements between Washington and the developing world, under which the latter have no protection, and with their mostly corrupt leaders, they buckle under facing the harsh conditions of the empire. So, the purpose is not to help, say, the Latin American US backyard to become sovereign again, to the contrary, with imposed bilateral deals – see Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia – they are slated to become increasingly vulnerable to and dependent on the US and US-dollar hegemony.

The point is – for self-conscious and alert governments with the desire to return to their sovereign national politics – this is a crucial moment of truth to take advantage of. The ship is turning. It is the moment to jump off the globalized bandwagon, the globalized trade – the open borders for indiscriminate foreign investments; it is time to sit down and reflect – and return to autonomous local policies: local economies, for local markets, with local money and local public banking for the benefit of the local economy. Trade, of course is part of a local economy; but trade should best be kept within the realm of friendly neighbors and nations that have similar interests and similar political convictions. Trade under de-globalized circumstances should and will return equal benefits for partners, a win-win situation for all trading partners – as it should be according to the original interpretation of trade. By contrast, modern trade as we know it, has almost consistently benefitted the rich countries to the detriment of the poorer ones.

A good example for fair and equal trade may be ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América) – an association of 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries (Antigua and Barbuda Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Nicaragua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Surinam, the Grenadines and Venezuela), initiated and created by Venezuela and Cuba. ALBA may be an excellent illustration on how trade should work between countries or groups of countries. Most people have never heard of ALBA, for the simple reason, the international media are typically silent about it, because the neoliberal elite doesn’t want a case of equality to become an example for others to follow. There exist currently other similar, even lesser known cases of fair and equal trade, throughout the world, that are equally silenced by the media

Promoting fair and equal trade is not an agenda item of WTO, nor of the IMF or the World Bank. Their role is just the contrary, being facilitators for the west to further exploit the people of the South and to further deplete the workers’ accumulated funds of their social safety-net that are still available in many western industrialized countries, especially in the western EU. It’s the bedrock of social safety that can be privatized and sucked empty by the international corporate banking system, along with privatization of social infrastructure, such as water supply and sanitation, electricity, hospitals, airports, railways – and much more. All what has the air of profitability can and must be privatized under neoliberal economic doctrines.
Countries, nations and societies, beware from listening and adhering to and working with these nefarious globalizing organizations – IMF, WTO and WB. They are mere servants of western corporatism and debt enslaving financial systems driven by the US Federal Reserves (FED), as well as Wall Street and their European banking partners.

This is an appeal to all countries that are proud of regaining their political sovereignty and economic autonomy, to ignore scaremongering and fear imposing threats by the IMF, the World Bank and WTO. They are not representing the truth, but their nasty role is to belie reality in favor of manipulative invented statistics that are expected to being believed because they stem from these so-called well-reputed institutions. Again, the best example of the IMF’s nonsensical statements is their repeated denigration of Venezuela, accusing the country of fostering an economy that creates a one million percent inflation in 2018 and even higher, they say, in 2019. – Can you imagine? – That says it all. Be aware – their words, whether spoken in Bali, Washington or Geneva, are nothing more than fear- and threat mongering hot air.


Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

You Want to Make America Great Again? Start by Making America Free Again

You Want to Make America Great Again? Start by Making America Free Again

“If the freedom of speech be taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”—George Washington

Living in a representative republic means that each person has the right to take a stand for what they think is right, whether that means marching outside the halls of government, wearing clothing with provocative statements, or simply holding up a sign. 

That’s what the First Amendment is supposed to be about.

Yet through a series of carefully crafted legislative steps and politically expedient court rulings, government officials have managed to disembowel this fundamental freedom, rendering it with little more meaning than the right to file a lawsuit against government officials.

In the process, government officials have succeeded in insulating themselves from their constituents, making it increasingly difficult for average Americans to make themselves seen or heard by those who most need to hear what “we the people” have to say.

Indeed, President Trump—always keen to exercise his free speech rights to sound off freely on any topic that strikes his fancy—has not been as eager to protect the First Amendment rights of his fellow citizens to speak freely, assemble, protest and petition one’s government officials for a redress of grievances.

Not that long ago, in fact, Trump suggested that the act of protesting should be illegal.

The president has also suggested demonstrators should lose their jobs or be met with violence for speaking out.

Mind you, this is the man who took an oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution.

Perhaps someone should have made sure Trump had actually read the Constitution first.

Most recently, the Trump Administration proposed rules that would crack down on protests in front of the White House and on the National Mall.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The rules would restrict gatherings that now take place on a 25-foot-wide sidewalk in front of the White House to just a 5-foot sliver, severely limiting crowds. The NPS [National Park Service] also threatens to hit political protesters on the National Mall with large security and cleanup fees that historically have been waived for such gatherings, and it wants to make it easier to reject a spontaneous protest of the type that might occur, say, if Trump fires special counsel Robert Mueller.”

Imagine if the hundreds of thousands of participants in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which culminated with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, had been forced into free speech zones or required to pay for the “privilege” of protest.

There likely would not have been a 1964 Civil Rights Act.

What is going on here?

Clearly, the government has no interest in hearing what “we the people” have to say.

It’s the message that is feared, especially if that message challenges the status quo.

That’s why so many hurdles are being placed in the path of those attempting to voice sentiments that may be construed as unpopular, offensive, conspiratorial, violent, threatening or anti-government.

Yet the right of political free speech is the basis of all liberty.

It’s the citizen’s right to confront the government and demand that it alter its policies. But first, citizens have to be seen and heard, and only under extraordinary circumstances should free speech ever be restricted.

No government that claims to value freedom would adopt such draconian measures to clamp down on lawful First Amendment activities. These tactics of censorship, suppression and oppression go hand-in-hand with fascism.

Efforts to confine and control dissenters are really efforts to confine and control the effect of their messages, whatever those might be.

That’s the point, isn’t it?

The powers-that-be don’t want us to be seen and heard.

Haven’t you noticed that interactions with elected representatives have become increasingly manufactured and distant over the past 50 years? Press conferences, ticketed luncheons, televised speeches and one-sided town hall meetings held over the phone now largely take the place of face-to-face interaction with constituents.

Additionally, there has been an increased use of so-called “free speech zones,” designated areas for expressive activity used to corral and block protestors at political events from interacting with public officials. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have used these “free speech zones,” some located within chain-link cages, at various conventions to mute any and all criticism of their policies.

This push to insulate government officials from those exercising their First Amendment rights stems from an elitist mindset which views them as different, set apart somehow, from the people they have been appointed to serve and represent. 

We have litigated and legislated our way into a new governmental framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

Indeed, while lobbyists mill in and out of the homes and offices of Congressmen, the American people are kept at a distance through free speech zones, electronic town hall meetings, and security barriers. And those who dare to breach the gap—even through silent forms of protest—are arrested for making their voices heard.

On paper, we are free to speak.

In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official may allow.

Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms.

Indeed, the Supreme Court has had the effrontery to suggest that the government can discriminate freely against First Amendment activity that takes place within a government forum, justifying such discrimination as “government speech.”

If it were just the courts suppressing free speech, that would be one thing to worry about, but First Amendment activities are being pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country.

Protest laws are not about protecting the economy or private property or public sidewalks. Rather, they are intended to keep us corralled, muzzle discontent and discourage anyone from challenging government authority.

The reasons for such censorship vary widely, but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

If Americans are not able to peacefully assemble for expressive activity outside of the halls of government or on public roads on which government officials must pass, the First Amendment has lost all meaning.

If we cannot stand silently outside of the Supreme Court or the Capitol or the White House, our ability to hold the government accountable for its actions is threatened, and so are the rights and liberties which we cherish as Americans.

Free speech can certainly not be considered “free” when expressive activities across the nation are being increasingly limited, restricted to so-called free speech zones, or altogether blocked. 

If citizens cannot stand out in the open on a public sidewalk and voice their disapproval of their government, its representatives and its policies, without fearing prosecution, then the First Amendment with all its robust protections for free speech, assembly and the right to petition one’s government for a redress of grievances is little more than window-dressing on a store window: pretty to look at but serving little real purpose.

What most people fail to understand is that the First Amendment is not only about the citizenry’s right to freely express themselves. Rather, the First Amendment speaks to the citizenry’s right to express their concerns about their government to their government, in a time, place and manner best suited to ensuring that those concerns are heard.

The First Amendment gives every American the right to “petition his government for a redress of grievances.”

This amounts to so much more than filing a lawsuit against the government. It works hand in hand with free speech to ensure, as Adam Newton and Ronald K.L. Collins report for the Five Freedoms Project, “that our leaders hear, even if they don’t listen to, the electorate. Though public officials may be indifferent, contrary, or silent participants in democratic discourse, at least the First Amendment commands their audience.”

As Newton and Collins elaborate:

“Petitioning” has come to signify any nonviolent, legal means of encouraging or disapproving government action, whether directed to the judicial, executive or legislative branch. Lobbying, letter-writing, e-mail campaigns, testifying before tribunals, filing lawsuits, supporting referenda, collecting signatures for ballot initiatives, peaceful protests and picketing: all public articulation of issues, complaints and interests designed to spur government action qualifies under the petition clause, even if the activities partake of other First Amendment freedoms.

There’s more.

Even more critical than the right to speak freely, or pray freely, or assemble freely, or petition the government for a redress of grievances, or have a free press is the unspoken freedom enshrined in the First Amendment that assures us of the right to think freely and openly debate issues without being muzzled or treated like a criminal.

Just as surveillance has been shown to “stifle and smother dissent, keeping a populace cowed by fear,” government censorship gives rise to self-censorship, breeds compliance and makes independent thought all but impossible.

In the end, censorship and political correctness not only produce people that cannot speak for themselves but also people who cannot think for themselves. And a citizenry that can’t think for itself is a citizenry that will neither rebel against the government’s dictates nor revolt against the government’s tyranny.

The end result: a nation of sheep who willingly line up for the slaughterhouse.

Still, as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas advised in his dissent in Colten v. Kentucky, “we need not stay docile and quiet” in the face of authority.

The Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials.

Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).

If we just cower before government agents and meekly obey, we may find ourselves following in the footsteps of those nations that eventually fell to tyranny.

The alternative involves standing up and speaking truth to power.

Jesus Christ walked that road.

So did Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and countless other freedom fighters whose actions changed the course of history.

Indeed, had Christ merely complied with the Roman police state, there would have been no crucifixion and no Christian religion.

Had Gandhi meekly fallen in line with the British Empire’s dictates, the Indian people would never have won their independence.

Had Martin Luther King Jr. obeyed the laws of his day, there would have been no civil rights movement.

And if the founding fathers had marched in lockstep with royal decrees, there would have been no American Revolution.

In other words, if freedom means anything, it means that those exercising their right to protest are showing the greatest respect for the principles on which this nation was founded: the right to free speech and the right to dissent. 

Clearly, the First Amendment to the Constitution assures Americans of the right to speak freely, assemble freely and protest (petition the government for a redress of grievances).

Whether those First Amendment activities take place in a courtroom or a classroom, on a football field or in front of the White House is not the issue. What matters is that Americans have a right—according to the spirit, if not always the letter, of the law—to voice their concerns without being penalized for it.

Frankly, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty.

Let’s not confuse patriotism (love for or devotion to one’s country) with blind obedience to the government’s dictates. That is the first step towards creating an authoritarian regime.

One can be patriotic and love one’s country while at the same time disagreeing with the government or protesting government misconduct. As journalist Barbara Ehrenreich recognizes, “Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”

Indeed, I would venture to say that if you’re not speaking out or taking a stand against government wrongdoing—if you’re marching in lockstep with everything the government and its agents dole out—and if you’re prioritizing partisan politics over the principles enshrined in the Constitution, then you’re not a true patriot.

Real patriots care enough to take a stand, speak out, protest and challenge the government whenever it steps out of line. There is nothing patriotic about the lengths to which Americans have allowed the government to go in its efforts to dismantle our constitutional republic and shift the country into a police state.

It’s not anti-American to be anti-war or anti-police misconduct or anti-racial discrimination, but it is anti-American to be anti-freedom.

Listen: I served in the Army.

I lived through the Civil Rights era.

I came of age during the Sixties, when activists took to the streets to protest war and economic and racial injustice.

As a constitutional lawyer, I defend people daily whose civil liberties are being violated, including high school students prohibited from wearing American flag t-shirts to school, allegedly out of a fear that it might be disruptive.

I understand the price that must be paid for freedom.

Responsible citizenship means being outraged at the loss of others’ freedoms, even when our own are not directly threatened.

The Framers of the Constitution knew very well that whenever and wherever democratic governments had failed, it was because the people had abdicated their responsibility as guardians of freedom. They also knew that whenever in history the people denied this responsibility, an authoritarian regime arose which eventually denied the people the right to govern themselves.

Citizens must be willing to stand and fight to protect their freedoms. And if need be, it will entail publicly criticizing the government.

This is true patriotism in action.

Never in American history has there been a more pressing need to maintain the barriers in the Constitution erected by our Founders to check governmental power and abuse.

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

My friends, let us not be played for fools.

The government’s ongoing attempts to suppress lawful protest activities are intended to send a strong message that in the American police state, you’re either a patriot who marches in lockstep with the government’s dictates or you’re a pariah, a suspect, a criminal, a troublemaker, a terrorist, a radical, a revolutionary.

Yet by muzzling the citizenry, by removing the constitutional steam valves that allow people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world, the government is deliberately stirring the pot, creating a climate in which violence becomes inevitable.

When there is no steam valve—when there is no one to hear what the people have to say, because government representatives have removed themselves so far from their constituents—then frustration builds, anger grows and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.

Then again, perhaps that was the government’s plan all along.

As John F. Kennedy warned in March 1962, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

The government is making violent revolution inevitable.

How do you lock down a nation?

You sow discontent and fear among the populace.

You teach them to be non-thinkers who passively accept whatever is told them, whether it’s delivered by way of the corporate media or a government handler.

You brainwash them into believing that everything the government does is for their good and anyone who opposes the government is an enemy.

You acclimate them to a state of martial law, carried out by soldiers disguised as police officers but bearing the weapons of war.

You polarize them so that they can never unite and stand united against the government.

You create a climate in which silence is golden and those who speak up are shouted down.

You spread propaganda and lies.

You package the police state in the rhetoric of politicians.

And then, when and if the people finally wake up to the fact that the government is not and has never been their friend, when it’s too late for peaceful protests and violence is all that remains to them as a recourse against tyranny, you use all of the tools you’ve been so carefully amassing—the militarized police, the criminal databases and surveillance and identification systems and private prisons and protest laws—and you shut them down for good.

Divide and conquer.

It’s one of the oldest military strategies in the books, and it’s proven to be the police state’s most effective weapon for maintaining the status quo.

How do you conquer a nation?

Distract the populace with screen devices, with sports, entertainment spectacles, political circuses and materialism.

Keep them focused on their differences—economic, religious, environmental, political, racial—so they can never agree on anything.

And then, when they’re so divided that they are incapable of joining forces against a common threat, start picking them off one by one.

 what we’re witnessing is just the latest incarnation of the government’s battle plan for stamping out any sparks of resistance and keeping the populace under control: censorship, surveillance, battlefield tactics, military weaponry, and a complete suspension of the Constitution.