#and how the media has mainstreamed a damn criminal.

[cyarsk5230]

darn shame. It’s kcuf her now.

[scottguy]

Corporate media goes out of its way to present behavior as reasonable, that if displayed by liberals, would generate days of headlines as scandalous.

This is why democracy is on the line. Corporate media REFUSES to frame Trump as all the things he so obviously is: senile, incompetent, unqualified, having no policies, lying, traitorous, and criminal.

All the above is forgotten in the newest story where Trump is, magically, a reasonable choice again!

This is the "white rich male" double standard writ large. Right-wing men can do no wrong. Only Democrats have scandals. This has been going on for 40 years, starting with Bill Clinton.

The LEFT comes under microscopic scrutiny, the RIGHT gets a pass on say, starting an unending war in Iraq on false evidence and condoning actual torture.

This is why major corporate media is rapidly making itself irrelevant to younger generations. Now, avoidance of reality has reached a truly laughable extreme.

In five to ten years NO ONE except Fox viewers will care about the NY Times, the Washington Post, or CNN. (Unless they change.) All that demographic will have Fox. They won't need other corporate media that pretends they're fair.

Corporate media, your relevance and our respect for your "journalism" will die rapidly along with the Republican party. Why? You refused to sound the warning bell. You WANTED fascism and Trump. Was it just for the tax cuts or did racism and a desire for christofascism play a roll too?

Corporate media can be dinosaurs and become extinct or they can evolve. It's their choice.

Some of us will NEVER forgive them for allowing America to get THIS close to a totalitarian state. Write some articles comparing America and Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. German media was complicit too. When people ask, "How could people elect a Hitler to power?" The answer is because mainstream media ignored the danger on purpose just like now.

Rich people are so damn short sighted. That's why our climate is overheating.

Enough of him already! Put him in prison.

[xtruss]

“War On Gaza: How ‘The War Criminal & The Genocidal US’ Is Buying Time For ‘The Illegal Regime of Apartheid And Terrorist Isra-hell's Genocide.’”

As the US ambassador to the UN recently made clear in a rare moment of honesty, Washington is fully committed to facilitating Israel's destruction of the Palestinians

— Ammiel Alcalay | 28 February 2024 | Middle East Eye

The War Criminal US President Genocidal Joe Biden on the South Lawn as he departs the White House on 20 February, 2024 (AFP)

There are times when it makes sense, for the sake of one’s mental health, to simply ignore the boilerplate platitudes of politicians and official representatives, and other times when strict attention must be paid.

In the case of the US, given the truly dismal level of its official discourse at this point, it has become harder to tell the difference.

As the president himself is unsure of whether Ukraine, Iraq, Mexico or Egypt might be in question on any given day, or on those very rare days when he actually takes a question or two from a mostly stenographic and domesticated press corps, it has become easier and easier to just stop paying attention and simply write all of it off as subterfuge and nonsense meant to add yet another layer to the iron wall protecting Israel’s genocidal actions.

And yet, there are those rare moments when one official or another actually says what they mean and reveals how policies intend to proceed.

Following discussion and the scathing response by Russia's UN ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, to last week's reprehensible and criminal US veto of the Algerian resolution for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the US's ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, offered a very brief press conference.

In conclusion, she stressed the importance of “direct diplomacy on the ground until we reach a final solution”. The thrust of this, of course, is that there could be no “immediate ceasefire”, since the delicacies of “direct diplomacy” might be disturbed.

In other words, let the horrors continue, come what may, and let the rest of the world be damned, as the US and its few remaining allies buy more time for Israel to achieve its purported goals.

Through the fog of propaganda, disinformation and all kinds of coercion (not to mention the huge UN veto stick wielded by the US), can there still be any doubt about what those goals actually are?

As the Overton window of what has become normalised continues to expand exponentially on the ground in Gaza, it would be difficult not to understand the intent of Thomas-Greenfield’s phrase, "final solution", and the whiplash sense of cognitive dissonance it was meant to inflict.

Unfathomable Cruelty

The Gaza weapons testing, population control and surveillance laboratory, open to global consumers since at least 2007 and the Israeli imposition of a total blockade on the Gaza Strip, has clearly moved into a new phase.

While there are instrumental political implications of great import in this "new phase”, there is, as well, a direct affront to our very sense of what it still might mean to be human in the digital age of immediate global communication and the almost full lockstep consolidation and docility of mainstream western media sources.

What are we to make of the US enabling of the relentless Israeli killing and destruction machine, along with the almost unfathomable daily cruelty accompanying it? Is it simply in order to kill and terrorise as many Palestinians as possible, particularly children and women?

Is it to destroy all existing institutions and structures? Roads, water systems, power stations, agricultural capacities, homes, schools, universities, hospitals, libraries, mosques, churches, bookstores, bakeries, pharmacies and even so-called designated “safe zones” to the point of making Gaza completely uninhabitable?

Or is it in order to take over and exploit the offshore gas fields that Palestinians have a right to benefit from but have never been given access to? Might there also be other messages directed at the world?

In the days immediately following Thomas-Greenfield’s delaying tactic of yet another US veto to a ceasefire resolution, and her “final solution” utterance, Israeli occupation forces built a road cutting northern Gaza off from the south, while bombing Unrwa facilities and a Doctors Without Borders staff shelter.

Food and medicine supplies continue to be blocked and stalled by Israeli occupation forces. Following one of the first recorded cases of an infant dying from starvation, 10,000 more children are in imminent danger of starving from malnutrition, and after them, of course, many more children and elderly are likely to follow.

Some half-a-million people are close to famine in northern Gaza, even as Israeli snipers strafe Palestinians desperately trying to reach the little aid that trickles in.

With a precise level of genocidal cruelty that becomes ever more evident, Israeli forces carried out precision strikes in Beit Lahia and Jabalia to destroy rescue and sanitation machinery and vehicles.

This has increased the chance of disease spreading in those areas, while forcing residents to search through the rubble for survivors or the bodies and body parts of loved ones with only their hands and basic tools, even further exhausting the already malnourished.

Cynical US Policy

At the same time, Egypt - inexplicably not yet having torn up its peace agreement with Israel - continues apace in building some vaguely referred to “area” in the Sinai Desert at the border with Rafah. Most recently, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released his first sufficiently vague post-assault “plan” for control of Gaza.

Meanwhile, many Israelis remain displaced, the economy has taken a serious hit, and - other than pure destruction and death - things are not going so well on the ground regarding Netanyahu’s purported “aims” of the assault: repatriating Israeli hostages and destroying Hamas.

How, at this point, can anyone doubt that mass expulsion is not only possible but plausible? And, as both occupation and settler marauders continue their deadly rampages throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem, can anyone still seriously doubt the possibility of the actual destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, something constantly alluded to and even gleefully taught in some Israeli schools?

Clearly, the surround-sound blather spouted by various political figures is one of the prime means to contain our imagination, to refer to things only within certain parameters, making other things unthinkable, unimaginable, even as they stare us directly in the face.

On the broader geopolitical front, the continuing expansion of Nato as a means to maintain US hegemony in the face of Brics and the multi-polarity championed by the Russian-Chinese alliance has put the US into panic mode.

The Continuing Expansion Of North Atlantic Terrorist Organization (NATO) As A Means To Maintain War Criminal US’ Hegemony In The Face Of BRICS And The Multi-Polarity Championed By The Russian-Chinese Alliance Has Put The US Into Panic Mode

The utterly cynical US policy of paying for a proxy war in Ukraine as a means of effecting regime change in Russia has proven to be an utter failure, and seen so by more and more US taxpayers, asked to foot the massive bill, even as allegiance to this same war policy impoverishes Europe as well.

In the minds of neocon policymakers and the war-mongering uni-party alliance in Washington, this failure - and the geographic imperative to maintain control of certain shipping routes to assure US dominance - has almost made the opening of a new front in the Middle East inevitable, and it is the expendables, the Palestinians, who are being forced to pay the price.

Add to all this the fact that, following years of orchestrated cognitive dissonance in the US across a myriad range of issues - from purported Russian collusion, election fraud, Covid treatment, vaccination mandates, the summer of George Floyd, 6 January 2021, the war in Ukraine, the Twitter Files, to so many others - an ideal situation for those in power has been created.

Those once outraged at being censored or shadow-banned for views identified with the right are now all too ready to ban pro-Palestinian speech. And those now harassed, doxxed or even fired for airing their views can’t understand what all the fuss was about when Twitter banned President Donald Trump.

We now have an evenly divided population, at each other’s throats over almost every issue, with little or no ability left to stand on principle about anything. This can be seen most clearly in questions centred on free speech, and through the media and social media landscape, the very realms through which the atrocities taking place daily in Gaza are filtered or presented.

Information Saturation

We have moved far from the courageous revelations of Julian Assange, who is now appealing against a court ruling to extradite him to the US, where the same political and media class crying crocodile tears for recently deceased Russian dissident Alexei Navalny utter not a word in favour of Assange.

While the work of Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and others involved the exposure of information held in secret from the citizenry, we are now at the stage of unending information saturation in which secrecy no longer seems to matter.

With almost everything out in the open and available, the task has become about verifying, rather than uncovering, reality. And in doing so, “narratives” are built.

Despite various forms of censorship and disinformation, we have never lived through such a genocidal attack in which so much information is not only readily available but can often be seen in real-time. How, then, as both consumers and producers of information, as well as political constituents, can we respond to the present situation?

From this perspective, it is hard not to see the prolongation of this agony delivered upon a particular people, the Palestinians, and its broadcasting of their most vulnerable moments, as some kind of further testing ground of the very category of the human and humans, and it also brings into sharp relief just how limited our political powers are, even in ostensibly representative democracies.

The significance of South Africa bringing the charge of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice, along with the ICJ’s initial findings, cannot be underestimated, but it remains only a tool that we must learn how to use in order to expand the grounds upon which we think and act in the world.

As we watch the core institutions in our societies rot and disintegrate from within, due to an inability to name what is happening in Gaza and the world, positions once deemed principled ring more than hollow.

With Every Minute That Passes, New Lessons In Cowardice And Cruelty Are Given By The Terrorist Isra-hellis And Their US Enablers

As mothers in Gaza can barely give birth or feed their babies, as fathers cannot protect their children, as doctors cannot heal, and as many cannot even retrieve the bodies of their loved ones for burial, we can only conclude that this poisonous cruelty is aimed at the very idea of being a child, a mother, a father, a healer, a mourner.

We are up against a regime that has taken direct aim at humanity. With every minute that passes, new lessons in cowardice and cruelty are given by the Israelis and their US enablers. At the same time, we must stand in humble awe of the resistance and humanity shown by the people of Gaza.

But in continuing to expose this genocide, we must ask more of ourselves. We must find ever more useful ways to resist and stay human in pursuit of a just political solution to one of the world’s most exposed and festering wounds, whose time for healing has long been evident.

— Ammiel Alcalay is a Poet, Novelist, Translator, Essayist, Critic, and a Scholar. He is author of more than 20 books including After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future and the forthcoming CONTROLLED DEMOLITION: a work in four books. He is Distinguished Professor at Queens College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

[maximumninjavoid]

Mining for Unobtanium part FOUR of the Henry Cavill fic 

Eventually, there will be smut. It’s my first fic and I’m struggling with wrangling these imaginary people.

Apologies for the formatting, and if you’re under 18, or not into sex, or adult themes, or BDSM, go elsewhere.

Summary: The incomparable Henry Cavill goes looking for someone who can teach him more about things he wants to know……

Not my gif…. But DAMN. 

Having finally figured it out, who the caller was, I was amazed I hadn’t freaked out and hung up. Internally I was fan girling my ass off , OMG I am on the phone with HENRY CAVILL. And, I can’t tell anyone. Damn my ethical standards to seven hells, and that NDA didn’t help, either. But, it made sense. I had gotten some scene vibe watching him, not from his roles, but in interviews and thought there might have been something else besides Big Dick Energy there.

Thankfully, he spoke. “ Issues? Like why I had to have solicitors involved? ”

“Well, that, of course. But there are other considerations. While what it is we do has become more mainstream, it is still taboo and playing with sex and power can have consequences. Especially for dominant men. Too easily twisted, and too easily misconstrued. And, you have a bright future to consider. Fifty shades of crap did a great deal more PR harm. I mean, if Christian Grey hadn’t been wealthy, it would have been an episode of Criminal Minds.” He laughed again “ Jon said you were funny. ”

“Oh I’ll have you holding your sides, but I’m not professionally funny. I do like your laugh, so that’s an incentive. But, here’s something you may not have considered. How do you explain me? I cannot just pop into your universe, and become some orbiting satellite. I mean, look at you for fucks sake.” I knew I was start to sound a bit exasperated , but it couldn’t be helped. “I’m ….. Well…..I’m …. Well shit. I’m twenty years older than you are.

You can’t be seen with me. You’re not Keanu Reeves, and even Keanu Reeves took a ration of flack for dating a woman his own age. And, besides, I look like, well…. Me. ”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that. You do realize I have seen photos of you. I don’t believe they do you justice.” That voice. Those words. And I wanted to let it pour all over me like a balm for my bruised soul. I could feel it oozing into the dented places, soothing the hurts. “ So you admit to being a stalker too, Hero? I hope you got great shots of me on my way to work. Or did you pay someone to hack my social media? That’s rich! ” Now I was laughing.

I could genuinely like this man, and that was a great place to start. But, I still had a mirror, and he still had paparazzi. We’d been on the phone for three hours, and it felt like minutes, but, I had to go.

“ This has been delightful. I’ll send your money back. I feel terrible for taking it. The NDA will remain in effect until the stars fall from the sky, or the end of the world. You’re safe. Thank you for a lovely conversation. Goodbye. ”

And I hung up.

I only wished I could stop thinking about it. And him.

As though the Gods themselves had conspired to create a perfect man.

Tall, broad shoulders, thick dark hair, blue eyes, that I swear could see through me, with that Brown part in one eye, so he’s still mortal. Strong chest, covered with the perfect amount of hair….. Which I was willing to bet was the right combination of crisp and soft. So you’d want to play with it, bury your face in it but just rough enough to harden your nipples.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Multiple ppl have responded to this by pointing out that [lolcow whom I shall not name] was recently alleged to have done some pretty fucked up stuff. Without even getting into the facts of the case (for which I just don’t have the stomach tbh), this is still a terrible reason to publicly fixate on her like the bloodhounds in the mainstream/social media did

Ppl do crazy huge quantities of fucked up shit every day that you do not hear of and do not talk about. And this is as it should be! You do not have the time or mental capacity to fume individually about every injustice in the universe, and if you did it would be mostly pointless anyway. There is simply too fucking much of it, and the overwhelming majority (like the recent shit with [lolcow]) has nothing especially to do with you

So when you start fuming about the claimed iniquities of a whipping girl placed on the internet pillory long beforehand by a dedicated team of sadist chuds, you need to ask urself: why do I give a damn about this, in particular? why am I allowing reactionary torment hobbyists to dictate how I direct my finite anger and attention? what kind of world am I helping to build by giving these cretins the time of day? You wouldn’t do it when it was the Trump administrations list of immigrant criminals, and u should not do it here

The first arc of Vinland saga centres on a Viking pirate who is able to exploit a teenage boy into committing innumerable atrocities against human life on his behalf bc the boy has a vendetta against him and he dangles the prospect of a duel to satisfy the boys vengeance. Thus the boy allows himself to serve as a terrifyingly efficient lapdog for his master all while convincing himself it is driven by spite and hate for the man whose interests he is faithfully and capably serving

This is so many of you motherfuckers about kiwi farms. You fixate on them and their campaigns of social terrorism all the while drawing public attention to their victims in exactly the way they want. This is WORSE when it is compounded by outrageous both-sidesism but even otherwise, you are just doing their fucking dirty work for them all while announcing yr hatred for the same. This is not what hate looks like, if you are earnest in yr hate then stop aligning yr interests with theirs

[sassyfrassboss]

I really, really, REALLY want Meghan’s merching whilst being married into the family to come out. I still don’t know why nobody in the mainstream media will just come out and say it - that she INTENTIONALLY defrauded the BRF, that this was always a blatant SCAM and that she is a CON ARTIST. I want her to be held accountable for fraud. She is a bloody criminal, there is no excuse around what she has done and it was damn well premeditated. I’m sick of the undeserving protection she gets.

It is amazing how the protect each other isn’t it? All the while preaching to others to follow the rules and mind the laws. 

We might never hear about it but I bet it will be brought up in the divorce. 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

“I've just been reading about the cyberwar launched by the Russian government against America and nearly all of its Fortune 500 companies. It is mind-numbingly broad and dangerous. The attack did not come from the standard, Hollywood model of computer geeks in a basement spearfishing emails. 

Nor was it an operation where in a USB was dropped by an agent and then accidently pocketed by some low-level employee who plugs it into a networked computer at this-and-such agency. Rather, in an operation that likely took years to stand up, the vulnerability exploited was through a software provider with thousands of corporate and governmental clients. 

That company - Solarwinds - was hacked and a virus was inserted into the root program of their database-management software. Then, when the company sent out one of its regular updates, thousands of agencies and private companies downloaded the hack onto the systems - completely unaware that this routine maintenance had just granted network access to the S.V.R., the Russian equivalent to the C.I.A. 

It's brilliant, really. Brilliant, devastating, and demanding a response. One that certainly won't come with Trump still in office, that traitorous fool. Couple all this with reports last week that the current administration is preventing the incoming Biden team from meeting with U.S. Intelligence Agencies, and you might understand why. They don't want Biden to know how bad this whole fiasco has become. They don't want the blame, cowards and criminals that they are.

Meanwhile ex-General and eternal-Conman Mike Flynn calls for martial law, which provides us with a perfect bookend to the entire, disastrous reign of the Tangerine Tyrant. This whole damn thing started four years ago this month with Jared Kushner setting up a secret backchannel to Moscow, while Flynn undermined the Obama effort to punish Moscow for interfering in the 2016 election by getting word to Kislyak and Putin that there would soon be a new sheriff in town, and that he'd be a creampuff when it came to defending the nation.  Maybe there was a piss-tape, or maybe not. Who knows? 

Maybe Trump did all this because he had hopes for a business deal in Russia, or maybe not. Who knows? Maybe this was all the work of kompromat, or maybe the whole damn lot of them working in this White House are just bloody morons, but four years ago this month, they collectively showed their tail to the Kremlin, and it's been right up to the hilt ever since.  

Now, four years later - four years of fawning obeisance, and unmonitored late-night phone calls between a KGB handler and his simp - we begin to see the enormity of the results: Russian penetration God-only-knows-how-far into our government agencies, our defense agencies, and our economy. I'm a dove and a half, but this level of calamitous disarmament in a deadly, dangerous world is criminal. It's absolutely criminal. 

Meanwhile, Republican Senators and White House apparatchiks chase the ghosts of a voting-fraud conspiracy theory that involves all Democrats in Christendom, the entire mainstream media, Fox News, the ghost of Hugo Chavez, Hunter Biden's Laptop, Chi-com Radicals, Republican Governors, thousands of American poll workers, fifty-seven state and federal judges, and all nine Justices on the Supreme fucking Court. 

But not Russia. Never, ever, ever Russia. The damage Donald Trump has done to this nation may never be clearly measured - and that fills me with patriotic rage. I don't know how it's going to happen, or who is going to get the great and holy pleasure of finally locking that asshole up and throwing away the key, but whatever punishment Trump faces for his crimes, will never be enough.  

And that's before tallying the dead from Covid. 35 days to go. 

Thank god I quit drinking, or I'd go broke off whiskey alone.”

[commentary by Michael Hussein Tallon]

[umbraja]

2020: Vindication for Losing My Mind in 2016

Have you ever made a prediction that was really a warning but everyone you told just blew you off? They called you paranoid, alarmist, or even crazy. They said it could never happen to us. You’re just over-reacting. It’s not going to change a damn thing. So they went about their normal lives completely oblivious to the absolute disaster you saw coming.

That was me in 2016.

Not in November like a lot of liberals. I went crazy in June. The first ones to dismiss me were the ones that lost it in November. They didn’t think America would elect such a cartoonish bigot. They still had faith left in humanity and didn’t realize just how bad things had already gotten. It only took a few months to prove them wrong. Sadly, a lot of them still missed the point. They found scapegoats and excuses to explain how this anomaly could have happened without taking credit for their part in the deal. Of course they’ve spent the time since doing nothing to fix it.

The people that believed me about the election took longer to prove out. They knew the silent majority was real or at least Clinton was unelectable but they didn’t think Trump would really be that bad. They figured he would be yet another lame duck and maybe send a message to DC that they need to give us better candidates next time. Some of them even voted for him. Some of those still don’t regret it. They’re so wrapped up in their party loyalty and fear mongering conservative narrative that they no longer live in the same world as liberals do.

I am not surprised.

2016 was unprecedented but it wasn’t unpredictable. It was actually inevitable. The logical progression of centuries of elitist politicians all fighting for the rich man’s favor while leaving the people behind. Then the Cold War came along and turned the people against each other creating a polarized climate of us vs them that crippled America’s ability to support social programs while also draining our resources on hapless foreign wars. The 80’s brought us Law and Order politics which allowed racists to criminalize parts of minority culture, exacerbating the already vicious cycle of generational poverty. The 90s saw globalization and automation reduce American jobs which widened the wealth gap and gave racists an excuse to blame immigrants for it. 9/11 scared America into giving up personal freedoms and militarizing the police for a War on Terror which galvanized conservatives under God and Guns while liberals struggled to agree on a direction, let alone a catchy slogan. 2008 gave us a black president and liberals called anyone who criticised him a racist which incensed conservatives into creating a movement of aggressive anti-intellectual propaganda using social media echo chambers to oppose the “liberal bias” of mainstream media. Around the same time the Great Recession of 08 exposed government and corporate corruption that had been eroding the middle class for decades and turned the people against the establishment. So the silent majority elected enough Republicans for Congress in 2012 and 2014 to give them their largest lead since the Great Depression. By 2016 the Republican party had already been taken over by alt-right extremists but Democrats were too out of touch to see them as a credible threat.

It’s no wonder that a narcissistic conman like Trump would take advantage of all this to make himself the most powerful man in the world. Nor is it surprising that foreign powers would use the existing chaos to further divide this nation. Or that bigots would scare reasonable people into supporting their oppressive agendas. History is full of things like this. In America and all over the world, from beginning to end, history repeats itself. History also tells us that you can only sit on a powder keg for so long before someone lights the fuse.

Now it’s 2020 and the world is on fire.

Pretty much everything I was afraid would happen as a result of 2016 has. I tried to warn people about it but no one listened. I lost friends and haven’t seriously spoken to much of my family for years because they refuse to pull their heads out of their echo chambers and listen to reason. Yet I am considered the crazy one. I am the one that had a mental breakdown in 2016. I am the one with depression and anxiety and PTSD. I am the one who saw it coming and had to watch as they waved torches around the bomb.

They said it couldn’t happen but the last four years have seen nearly all my predictions come true:

Racist policies became norm, embolden racists to open bigotry

Mass shootings and domestic terrorism are on the rise

Trump abused the office for personal gain in so many ways

Environmental regulations rolled back, climate change denied

Financial regulations returned to what caused Great Recession

Democrats forgot to listen to the American people - again

Republicans pardoned Trump for everything regardless of facts

Fact and Truth have lost all meaning to “fake news”

Trump's conspiracy theories and lies further divided America

Trump protected his cronies and “fired” anyone that disagrees

Trump appointed two Supreme Court Justices, turn conservative

States proposed abortion bans that make it a capital crime

Tax cuts for the rich did not help the average American

The federal deficit has soared to new heights

American tax dollars were wasted on a big, dumb wall

Immigration policies separate families in camps, children die

Trump’s love of dictators let foreign powers manipulate him

Trump played hardball with Iran and nearly started WWIII

America first policy alienate allies, abdicate global power

China stepped in to the fill the power vacuum left by America

China has reduced human rights enforcement around the world

Trump levied tariffs on foreign goods that hurt the economy

Trump started an unwinnable trade war with China

China used this trade war to gain political allies

Trump yells about China for wrong reasons, hides real threat

Democrats didn’t learn, are running an establishment candidate

Racial and political tensions increased enough to cause riots

Federal officers were sent in to silence peaceful protestors

Political dissidents are being targeted by law enforcement

Trump followed the Fascist Playbook, emulated 1939 Germany

Trump put his own vanity above the safety of American people

Trump unable to handle crisis, thousands of Americans died

The only two things I predicted that haven’t happened yet are: Trump causes a war and Trump doesn’t give up power at the end. The year’s not over yet. We’re sitting on a radioactive powderkeg and the politicians are playing with matches. I’ve been predicting the fall of ‘Murcia for over a decade now but 2016 made me realize it might happen sooner than I thought.

It might happen in 2020

I really hope I’m wrong this time.

[whitehotharlots]

Cancel culture is real. And it’s conservative.

Osita Enwanevu  has a rather baffling piece up The New Republic that’s garnering a lot of responses. Titled “The Cancel Culture Con,” the essay makes a few points:

1. Cancel culture doesn’t seem to accomplish anything, since all the higher-profile instances of cancellation haven’t led to anyone’s career actually being ruined. 

2. Cancel culture should be understood simply as newly empowered groups seeking to express their righteous anger.

3. Conservatives do cancel culture-isms all the time, even though they’re not commonly regarded as such (Berri Weiss’ work demonizing BDS is held up as a fitting example).

4. The only people who complain about cancel culture is just jealous hypocrites and therefore Dave Chappelle is the same as Berri Weiss. (Also even though Dave Chappelle is making tons of money and beloved by millions he is actually unfunny and no longer relevant.)

5. In spite of not being a big deal, cancel culture is good because marginalized groups still suffer in today’s America (to prove this point, he ends with a graphic description of the beating of Muhlaysia Booker, a transwoman whose assault was livestreamed by rednecks and who was later found murdered).  

Now what makes this baffling is the pace of Enwanevu’s self-contradictions. As others have pointed out repeatedly, this argument just doesn’t make sense. If cancelling really doesn’t work--which its advocates proudly insist is the case--and if cancel culture is actually so bad at what it’s purported to do that cancelled people seem to benefit from cancellation, then why bother defending it? Is this defeatism, or something more sinister?

Enwanevu gets to the verge of admitting that something more sinister is afoot, but he pulls back before coming to grips with such a realization. This comes with his criticism of the contemptible Berri Weiss. Berri’s a whiner and an idiot, and, notably, a huge fucking hypocrite. She’ll oink sadly about celebrity cancellation, but then demand punitive censorship against those who dare support actions protesting Israel’s apartheid. 

The point here--obvious, but somehow unacknowledged--is that cancel culture actually does hurt people and censor thoughts, but such harm is inflicted almost entirely upon leftists or others who seek to materially disrupt the status quo. Efforts are underway to formally criminalize participation in BDS. The Obama administration viciously prosecuted drone pilots who attempted to whistleblow US war crimes, going so far as to freeze their bank accounts to prevent them access to legal defense. That is literal, direct government censorship. And, no surprise, it was initiated by a putatively woke politician, the sort of cool liberal who would never use bad words in public.

The widespread embrace of cancel culture is the natural result of the rightward slide of mainstream liberalism. It provides catharsis for its purveyors, a sense of doing something, anything in the face of abject of hopelessness (or, more cynically, gaining momentary satisfaction by censuring someone you don’t like, larger goals be damned). It’s been allowed to thrive precisely because the powerful are insulated from its effects. And it’s come with the added bonus of providing the powers that be a new means of selectively silencing anyone who gets a little too close to actually changing stuff. 

Consider three examples: Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. Trump was subjected to the process of cancellation approximately forty five thousand times during the 2016 campaign. He suffered nothing. Even if he had lost, he’d still be a billionaire, still exist above the rule of law, and still be regular fixture in American media. Hillary Clinton had an appalling civil rights record and repeatedly worked to cover up sexual assaults committed by her husband--precisely the sort of once-tolerated behaviors cancellers claim to seek to de-normalize. But outside of a few hard-left attempts that gained zero mainstream traction, no efforts were made to cancel Clinton. Indeed, those who attempted to bring up her shameful past were themselves subject to cancellation. Sanders, meanwhile, has about the best civil rights record imaginable for an American man in his 70’s. He and his supporters are nonetheless popularly compared to Trump--cancelled via the transitive property of wokeness--not because of anything Sanders has done or said, but because of his tone and posture. 

This is how things work because it’s how the system is designed to work. This is why cancel culture has become so pervasive so quickly: because it is conservative. 

We can argue as to whether cancel culture is reactionary or simply nihilistic. (I think it can be both, depending on its particular iteration). The effect, however, is always the same: an abandonment of left-material goals in favor of a superficial “politics” which views language policing as a means and an end. This is why Enwanevu can blithely dismiss criticisms of the ineffectiveness of cancelling, even as his essay is centered upon delineating examples of such ineffectiveness: he is simply unconcerned with the actual effects of cancelling. He therefore sees fit to end his piece with a description of the brutal beating of a trans woman--not because he wishes to advocate for policies that would make such violence occur less frequently, but to appropriate the woman’s pain and eventual death to serve as a backdrop validating the righteous anger of those who seek to cancel others. It’s not about effects. It’s not about winning. It’s about feeling right. And when the only option liberals have for political engagement is to join a movement based upon the embrace of defeat… well, that’s conservatism. 

[napoleoninrags]

President Barabbas

The mob chose a mobster. Elections have consequences.

by Greg Olear

"Easter is a very special day for me ... Easter Sunday, and you'll have packed churches all over our country.” —Donald John Trump, 24 March 2020

I WAS RAISED Catholic, which meant that every Sunday, come hell or high water, we went to church. The Catholic Mass is extremely rote. There’s a lot of call-and-response, a lot of standing up and sitting down, a lot of the same material, repeated over and over and over again. The Apostles’ Creed, for example, has been recited at Mass, in much the same way, since it was codified at the Council of Nicaea during the reign of Constantine the Great, a mere 17 centuries ago.

The best day of the liturgical year, in my recollection, was Palm Sunday. The priest always shared the same story: Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect, appeared before his subjects in Jerusalem on the occasion of Passover, and agreed to free a single Jewish prisoner. The mob had to choose: should Pilate free Jesus, the alleged “King of the Jews,” or Barabbas, a notorious criminal? Whereupon we, role-playing in the pews, would cry, WE WANT BARABBAS! My brother and I shouted with gusto, to my mother’s extreme annoyance: WE WANT BARABBAS! And so the killer was set free, and Christ condemned to die.

I didn’t know at the time that this passage, perpetuating as it does the “Jews killed Jesus” myth, was used for centuries by anti-Semites to justify their despicable deeds. I never interpreted it that way. To me, the story is about how mobs, led as they are by riled-up morons, can easily be fooled and manipulated into voting against their best interests.

The 2016 election is a recent example of how the angry masses, presented with a clear choice of good guy versus bad guy, chose unwisely. It’s not fair to either party to compare Hillary Clinton with Jesus Christ, and Pontius Pilate did not use the Electoral College system in determining whom to pardon, but notorious criminal Donald John Trump is absolutely President Barabbas. The mob went with the mobster.

Three years into the Trump Administration, and a shocking number of the president’s associates are either in prison, about to head to prison, under indictment, or under investigation. There is Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair, currently incarcerated. There is Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney, fixer, and bagman: ditto. There is the treacherous Michael Flynn, awaiting his sentence (or, perhaps, his pardon). There is Trump’s longtime buddy and shadow campaign advisor Roger Stone, soon to toddle off to the hoosegow. There’s also those who have not yet been indicted because of the nefarious machinations of the corrupt Attorney General, William Barr: Rudy Giuliani, Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Mick Mulvaney, Erik Prince, and Trump’s lousy kids Ivanka, Eric, and Don Junior.

What is remarkable here, aside from the obvious fact that Trump cavorts with an uncanny number of crooks, is that none of these people has flipped. Manafort pretended to, only to ratfuck the FBI. Flynn, too, lied to investigators. Only Cohen gave up some dirt—but how much did he really surrender? The thing is, the rest of these people aren’t nearly as hard. Trump wants to pardon Roger Stone because he knows him well enough to know that he will sing to stay out of the Big House. Jared Kushner, aka Boy Plunder, has done so many illicit things that he will keep FBI agents busy for years; is Mr. Ivanka really not going to flip to avoid prison? And I can’t imagine Don Junior exhibiting the same trollish swagger around Cellblock D.

Trump’s partners in crime are all selfish assholes. They have no real loyalty. Giuliani, for example, loathes Trump with every fiber of his noxious being. He’s only protecting him out of his own self-interest. At some point, to preserve themselves, these fuckers will all turn on each other, and it will be the end of Reservoir Dogs all up in here: a bunch of petty crooks threatening to take each other down.

So why haven’t they?

A big queen sits in the middle of the stalemated chessboard, preventing all movement. The queen’s name is William Barr. He is the titular Attorney General of the United States, but his actual function is to slow-roll the Department of Justice from its takedown of Trump and his co-conspirators. To that end, he holds up witnesses. He stymies evidence from being sent to prosecutors. He cock-blocks US Attorneys, sure as he cock-blocked Mueller. He kicks the can and kicks it again and again and again, hoping to run out the clock. Barr has been so successful that the GOP is not even remotely worried about the bad stuff coming out. He’s gummed up the works so badly that we couldn’t even get witnesses at the fucking impeachment trial.

With a big, fat cork in the bottle of evidence, Trump and his fellow criminals do not have to fear retribution from law enforcement for as long as he stays in office. The only danger now is if they turn on each other. If they respect omertà, they are golden. Thus it is in all of their interests—Trump’s, but also Pence’s, McConnell’s, Pompeo’s, Kushner’s, and so on—to stay the course. These people will do anything, including exacerbate a global health crisis, to not get caught. They don’t care if we die. Repeat: they don’t care if we die. As Mr. White says in Reservoir Dogs: “The choice between doing ten years and taking out some stupid motherfucker, ain’t no choice at all.”

What are they hiding?

In Trump’s case, generations of criminal involvement with the mob—first La Cosa Nostra, later the Russian mafiya. His grandfather was a minor pimp at the dawn of the organized crime era, but Donald’s father, Fred Trump, was, as Lincoln’s Bible tells us, “a businessman front for the Genovese crime family.”

To best understand Fred, just track his rise from single-family home construction to big residential developments. From Shore Haven (1947) to Beach Haven to Trump Village, all were done with known mafia partners, in Genovese-controlled territory, and eventually with a fully Genovese-owned construction company (HRH Construction).

When the Russian mafiya began rolling in, they landed in Fred’s properties and partnered with the Genovese on some big ticket scams. This was also during the time that Fred and his attorney Roy Cohn set up S&A concrete (via Nick Auletta)—a joint venture between Tony Salerno (Genovese boss) and Paul Castellano (Gambino boss), so that donald could build in Manhattan. Remember donald’s quote, “Even my father, he said, you don’t want to go to Manhattan. That’s not our territory?” That’s because Manhattan, for construction, was Gambino territory. They controlled the concrete and unions. And Fred was a very loyal, shrewd front for the Genovese. To get his idiot, greedy kid into Manhattan, Fred and Roy Cohn had to get those two mob bosses to agree on a joint venture.

When the Russian mafiya pushed out the Italian mob after the fall of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump began laundering money for unseemly Vor associates of Semion Mogilevich. The Russians extended him credit when no US bank would touch him, and he remains in their debt—a fact the Mazars and Deutsche Bank documents will reveal, which is why Trump has moved heaven and earth to keep said documents secret.

Because the Russian mafiya works hand in glove with the Russian government, Trump is also, as Hillary Clinton correctly told us four years ago, Putin’s puppet. His ties to Russian intelligence (Putin, remember, is ex-KGB) go back decades. Recruitment of Trump by the KGB began in the Reagan Administration; for all we know, his succession of ex-Soviet-bloc wives better reflect his allegiance to the Soviets than his taste in women. He is also connected to the Russian organized crime via his friend Jeffrey Epstein, a collector of kompromat and money launderer for arms dealers; Epstein’s longtime partner was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Robert Maxwell, the spy and former business partner of, yes, Semion Mogilevich.

Trump’s underworld ties were all there in 2016, barely below the surface, for all the world to see. Wayne Barrett wrote about them for the Village Voice. Robert Friedman alluded to them in Red Mafiya. Craig Unger covers them closely in House of Trump, House of Putin. The mainstream media knew damned well what the guy really was, but chose to equate Trump’s years of actual mobbed-up crimes with HRC’s email server. The result? Every half-wit Fox News watcher proclaims, with a straight face, that Hillary, not Donald, is the crook!

Truth: Trump is a notorious criminal, a serial rapist and sexual assailant, wholly owned by the mob, controlled by the underworld and the Kremlin. He is a latter-day Barabbas—and because of the whims of a riled-up mob, he’s now, somehow, the President of the United States. Make no mistake: If he thinks it will help him avoid prosecution, he will order the churches open for Easter without qualm or hesitation. In his calculus, Jesus gave up His life for us, so we should give up our lives for Trump. He will happily pervert the holiest of Christian holy days to get what he wants. To this monster, nothing is sacred..

[tessatechaitea]

Superman: Year One: Book Three

Here's the back cover instead because I misread it as "We serve one purpose: Jesus," and I was ready to accept that.

Due to the amount of lava and debris, I would have gone with "sharts."

Superman saves Lois Lane from dying under the ocean which probably means she's going to reward him with her big city sexual prowess. But before Superman can accept his reward for being a nice guy, he has to defeat a troop of Navy SEALS who have come to capture him. So everybody's looking for Superman now because he showed off a few too many times while training in the Navy and his commanding officer became jealous that the mermaids let Clark fuck them. So Superman's big enemies are the god Poseidon and the American military, both because Lori Lemaris chose to fuck Superman instead of them. You might think I'm concentrating too much on Superman fucking the women he saved, and people being upset that they didn't get to fuck those women. If you are thinking that, it's probably because you haven't actually read Frank Miller's Superman: Year One. You'd totally understand that it's not me who is obsessed with Superman getting laid for fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way (honorably discharged version). It's apparently the entire theme of Frank Miller's Superman story. I just realized that I was going to make a Batman sucking Superman dick's joke based on the cover but then I didn't scan the cover. Oh well! Lesson learned! Any time somebody says, "Lesson learned," you should immediately ask them, "Oh? What was that then?" I bet most of the time, they won't be able to explain how they learned anything. The good thing about the cover of Book Three is that it was drawn by Frank Miller. And no matter what you think of Frank Miller's art, you have to agree (or at least better agree or we're going to have a problem) that it's better than John Romita Jr's art and better than Frank Miller's writing. After beating up the Navy SEALS and rescuing Lois Lane, Clark Kent winds up graduating from college and interning at the Daily Planet. Don't ask me what happened to Lori Lemaris and Atlantis! I guess it was such a terrible break-up that even Frank Miller doesn't want to write about it.

You can tell how dumb a person is by how much they defend Trump and blame the mainstream media. The fucking mainstream media bends over backwards not to point out just how fucking ignorant Trump is about everything!

Stepping away from the comic itself for a moment, here's what John Romita Jr had to say about this comic book after it was announced amidst a lot of "eye-rolls and groans" at San Diego Comic-Con. "The cynics that don't like my artwork or Frank's work were everywhere on the social media. Now we'll see what they have to say, because this is damn fresh, and I'm really proud of it." Well, I didn't have anything to say about it before reading it. I even bought it mostly knowing that I wasn't going to enjoy it even though I always hope that I enjoy everything I purchase as entertainment! Why else would I bother if not to hopefully be surprised and elated? Well, let me tell you, I was not surprised nor elated. Superman in the Navy might be fresh but it's also pretty fucking stupid. The whole idea was that Superman would join the Navy so he could see the world? But then he spends his entire time training in California where he learns he doesn't want to kill people after battling pirates in the Pacific waters off of the coast of California? Also he fucks mermaids during that time because why the fuck not? Now imagine reading all of that while looking at John Romita Jr's terrible facial expressions. The announcement of this comic book with this creative team should have garnered a lot more than groans and eye-rolls. There should have been jerking off motions as well. Working at the Daily Planet with Lois Lane (who, if you remember from the part where I said she wants to fuck him, wants to fuck him), Clark Kent realizes he needs a disguise. So Frank Miller makes sure to explain how the hat and glasses work as a disguise. The hat "changes his silhouette" and the glasses are just "the geek factor" he needs. The whole "dress to unimpress" angle is the disguise. Fucking bullshit. We all know that the glasses and the outfit are the least part of the disguise. He needs to discuss how he changes his posture, how he acts clumsy, how he puts on the air of naive farm boy, how he's terrible at pleasing a woman in bed. These are all aspects that work to make it unbelievable that he could be Superman. Christopher Reeves in Superman nails all of these aspects and I wish writers would be more upfront about how Clark Kent's disguise is less about the accouterments and more about the act Clark puts on. Superman begins deciding how to fight crime now that he's come to Metropolis. And his logic goes like this: "What do criminals want? Money! Where is the money? Banks!" And just like that, he becomes the protector of corporate America! He even thinks, "Never mind the third rate muggers and street swindlers." No wonder Batman doesn't respect this asshole! A third rate mugger killed Batman's parents and Superman is all, "Bah, they're harmless! Better get the guys going after the money that's insured!" Fuck this Superman! Next Superman goes after street level drug makers. That's better, I guess, but couldn't he go after the pharmaceutical industry itself?

What the fuck is "factory brand duct tape"? Having managed a warehouse on the Netscape campus back in the 90s, I'd say they should be wrapped in shrink wrap.

This morning, I discovered Carrot Cake flavored Oreos. It was nice living without diabetes but I must say goodbye to those years now. Later, Superman stops a man from abusing his wife and kids. I don't find out if she thanks him with her sex. But from what the previous chapters of this story have taught me, she did. After that, Superman frees some hostages from a hostage situation that was set-up by Lex Luthor so he could meet Superman. Lex manipulates Superman into working for him to stop Batman. Why does Lex care about Gotham and Batman? I don't know! I don't even really know how Lex manipulates Superman! And I don't think it's because I'm too stupid to follow the story. I'm pretty sure I'm smart enough to understand a comic book! But this comic book feels like a bunch of pages are missing. Hell, Superman's first words to Lex Luthor upon meeting him for the first time are "You're a damned liar!" What did he lie about? When did he ever say anything to Superman? What the fuck is going on?! Over in Gotham, Batman uses a gun. Okay. Whatever. Let's wrap this shit up.

Here's a terrible picture of Superman since I can't write about a story I can't follow.

The gist of the rest of the story is that Lex Luthor is tired of Batman and Superman foiling his crimes. So he decides to convince Superman that Batman is a jerk. After they get done killing each other, Lex Luthor will profit. Not that he isn't profiting already. But he'll profit more, I guess? Superman lands in Gotham to speak with Batman and Batman instantly tries to kill him. Oh yeah, Frank Miller totally understands these characters. Batman wants justice but is willing to kill Superman because Superman wants to talk to him. And Superman goes around doing good while constantly thinking, "I'll show them!" and "I could kill these guys!" and "Which other woman should I save so I can fuck her?" Batman tries all kinds of violence on Superman while telling Superman smarts are what counts. If only he'd use some and realize he can't hurt this guy. This might be the dumbest version of Batman I've ever seen. Eventually Wonder Woman arrives to point out to these two blockheads that maybe they should stop fighting and work together to make the world a better place. Batman is all, "Well, I can't hurt him anyway so I guess I'll work with him." And Superman is all, "How is she stronger than me? She doesn't need rescuing from anybody. Has she ever gotten laid?!" The issue basically ends with Wonder Woman telling Superman that she's ready to fuck him after he goes into space to learn to fuck (by fighting Brainiac?) and Batman telling Luthor he hopes he gets raped in prison. So exactly the way I'd expect a Frank Miller Superman comic book to end.

I wish I were right popular in high school.

Superman: Year One: Book Three Rating: What I learned from this comic book is that every woman in the DCU wants to fuck Superman and every man in the DCU is jealous of all the women Superman gets to fuck. What I also learned is that I should have read this series before purchasing Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child. I'd still like to know what happened between Clark and Lori. I guess he just left her the same way he left Lana and the same way he left Wonder Woman (who he fell in love with immediately, I guess?).

[workersolidarity]

Lee Camp isn't as funny as he likes to think he is. But the truth really isn't funny no matter how you put it.

I'm not really a big fan of any news show. Or Newspaper. Or news magazine. Or anything mediawise at all.

But I have to give RT credit where credit is due and without a doubt, RT has the most diversity in view points of any News Channel hands down.

Not that that's a particularly high bar to get over, but in a world where our choices are limited to the insane Fascist Right-Wing propaganda found at any given moment on Fox News, the "both sides" bullshit CNN and CBS have to offer, the mundane unimportant trivial bullshit zombie "family viewing" on ABC, or the Neoliberal Democratic Party Establishment mouthpiece "News" Channel MSNBC; suddenly RT doesn't seem all that bad.

In any case, Redacted Tonight, even with Lee Camp's terrible Left-Wing Jim Carrey-like character, he manages to cover some extremely important issues from a fairly Leftist perspective, at least compared to anything you're going to find in the media anywhere else.

Lee Camp covers issues ranging from the Endless Wars and the horribly obvious cheerleader role the mainstream media plays in advancing the Neocon/Liberal Interventionist Bourgeois Imperialist War Agenda.

He routinely exposes the Democrats for the Corporate Shills they really are. He exposes the absurdity of our "Criminal Justice" System, and in this particular episode above, Lee Camp tells the Story of Texaco, now a part of Chevron, and how it caused one of the largest environmental disasters in history in Ecuador, by dumping toxic waste by the billions of gallons and causing oil spills in the tens of millions of gallons.

Finally, years later, an American Lawyer working on behalf of local Communities in Ecuador that were affected by the toxic waste left behind by Texaco, won a major lawsuit and a judgement of around $9 Billion dollars from Chevron.

Of course, Chevron being the American Fossil Fuel and Chemical manufacturing giant it is, is protected by the US Government no matter what horrific crimes is commits in another country.

So Chevron ditched Ecuador and never paid a dime of the settlement. Instead, Chevron filed a complaint against the lawyer who had represented the Ecuadorian Communities poisoned for decades by Texaco.

The Judge in the case was, because of course he was, a completely corrupt Corporate goon and ruled in Favor of Chevron, had the lawyers license to practice Law suspended, ordered his passport be taken, subpoenaed his computers and devices for his personal and professional records, and forced him to wear an ankle monitor until he complies with the subpoena and turns over his computer records.

If this isn't one of the most sick, twisted abuses of power by the legal system on behalf of a environmentally disasterous Corporation with absolutely no responsibility towards the people, Communities and Countries it's happy to destroy in it's quest for l profits at the expense of out entire planet, than I don't know what is.

And that's the kind of actual news that Lee Camp covers in Redacted Tonight. As silly and really not that funny as he may be, many of the topics he covers you won't find elsewhere in the media, and they're deadly serious issues.

I haven't watched his show very many times, mostly because I found Lee Camp rather annoying, but I've never been disappointed by the topics he covers that no other news shows spend time on, or they just sweep it under the rug, or obfuscate by using CIA and other Govt Agency approved talking points.

Like any decent show, not everything is great, but a majority of the issues that come up, and the perspectives that Lee Camp gives are pretty decent. And you won't really get any higher praise than that out of me for television news. That's for damn sure.

[skepticalmuppet]

Hey, so I was tagged in a thing by @todaythesamesky and it’s the first time I’ve ever been tagged on Tumblr so part of me is all oh my god PARTICIPATION IN SOCIAL MEDIA LIKE A NORMAL PERSON WHAT EVEN IS THIS HOW EXCITING and the rest of me is all HOW THE FUCK DO I DO THIS I DON’T KNOW HOW TO COPY AND PASTE SHIT ON TUMBLR BECAUSE I AM AN OLD AND OLDS DON’T TECHNOLOGY WELL AND ALSO WHAT IS FORMATTING EVERYONE IS GOING TO THINK I’M INEPT but then I remembered no one ever looks at my blog so we’re golden. It completely doesn’t matter if I arse this up, I’m arsing in a vacuum, so arse it up I shall.

So, like this bit is supposed to be in bold I guess, and it’s probably also the header or title thing, but I wrote that paragraph and it would be weird to have this title and then that paragraph when clearly the title is supposed to be for the bit that comes next.

Pretend this is the title thing, all in bold: Get to know me!

And then the next bit is like questions in bold and then my answers, but I don’t know how to bold things, so keep pretending. It’s probably good for your brain. Something something neuroplasticity something.

Anyway.

Tagged by: (that was the bit that’s supposed to be bold) wait, fuck, I already fucked it up, I already said who tagged me in that first bit. I don’t want to tag again, because I don’t know if they get two notifications and also if that would be weird. So let’s skip this.

Moving on.

Name/alias: okay, I’m confused by this. My name, like the actual name I use in meatspace? Because that is not an alias. It’s just...my name. Is it giving me the option of providing an alias instead of my name, or is it asking what my name/alias is, like it’s assuming I have an alias like some sort of criminal and of course I’m not going to provide my real name because that’s how they get you?

I might be over thinking this.

Sam. My name is Sam. Let’s just leave it at that.

Hair colour: my actual hair colour, or my *alias’s* hair colour? I’m not falling for this. Like I already said, that’s how they get you. Moving on.

Zodiac sign: I don’t know. Daffodil? Is that a sign? It should be. Daffodils are the harbingers of spring, which I used to think was the harBRINGERS of spring, like they brought the har. Which, maybe they do, I don’t know. I’m not a botanist.

Height: what’s with all the questions? I mean, yeah, I have on occasion been known to say be gay do crimes, but I’m not actually a criminal, and this whole identifying characteristics thing is making me paranoid. Is this going in a database somewhere?

Hobbies: knitting

Favourite colour: okay, if you’re as old as I am, you might remember a little thing called mercurochrome, which was like a disinfectant for minor wounds that was applied with a little glass wand and stained your skin kind of a pinky orange. I loved that colour. I didn’t love the slow mercury poisoning that likely accompanied it, but damn, that was a pretty orange.

Favourite books: it sounds so trite now because everyone is into it, but The Handmaid’s Tale, way before it was ever a tv show. I read it back in the 80s, and it was a primary source of my feminism. And now it sounds like I’m all OH I LOVED THE HANDMAID’S TALE BEFORE IT WAS MAINSTREAM and just, ugh.

I also love I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. The best part is (SPOILER ALERT) when he straight up eats that fucking rabbit. Don’t fuck with a bear’s hat, man.

Last song I listened to: Apple Music tells me it was Tango Shoes by Bif Naked

Things I love: the Canadian prairies, cats acrobatically chasing their own tails, my wife’s dry as the Sahara sense of humour, kooky children’s books, random shit with the Batman logo, that one ballet done with kd lang’s music, the way that British crime drama focuses on one case over multiple episodes instead of a different crime every time, closed captioning, Lizzo, basic worsted weight wool, bookstores, thunderstorms, comfortable shoes, the concept of having a dog live in your house like it’s an animal and it’s in your house and it loves you and it’s a dog A DOG OH MY GOD DOGS ARE AMAZING

What brings me peace: knowing where my family is and that they’re safe and fed and housed

Last film I watched: I think it was Captain Marvel. Wife had to watch it for her feminism and pop culture class and I watch superhero movies because I never got to be a kid when I was a kid so by golly I’m gonna make up for it now.

Meaning behind URL: my internet handle has always been some variation of Skeptical, and my wife tells me daily that I’m basically a muppet.

Tagging: I’m not tagging anyone because I don’t really interact with anyone on Tumblr so I’m pretty sure anyone I tag is gonna be all “who the fuck is skepticalmuppet” and then just ignore it and that will make me sad. Well, not actually sad, but maybe sad adjacent? Also I don’t really know how to tag people. Do you just @ their names? I think that’s how I did it on Twitter back in the day.

[winterromanov]

high voltage in her lips [bechloe fic, part 2/?]

read part one here | on ao3

Beca wakes up to two bright blue eyes staring right at her from the side of the bed.

“Dude!” she exclaims, pulling her duvet tight around her, “What the fuck?”

Chloe smiles like it’s a totally normal thing for her to be doing. To. You know. Just be watching her sleep. “Good morning, sunshine.”

Beca rubs her eyes and her hands are streaked with black from last night’s mascara. She can feel the hangover thrumming at the back of her brain, her mouth dry and tasting faintly of wine she doesn’t remember drinking. “How long have you been perving on me?”

“Not long,” Chloe chirps. It’s then that she realises that Chloe is completely put together, like they weren’t screaming on a dancefloor just a few hours previously, hyped up on Sambuca shots. Her hair is newly washed and blow-dried and her face is bare, yet somehow still flawless, freckles dusted across her cheekbones. She’s wearing a neat top-and-skirt combo. Beca’s still wearing her clothes from last night. “Your ass was drunker than mine so I put you up in the spare room.”

Beca properly looks around the room, finally realising she’s not in her own flat—it’s way too clean and ordered, with a floral colour scheme that’s been carefully designed rather than thrown on the walls last minute. The duvet smells like honeysuckle. God, it couldn’t be more Chloe Beale.

“Thanks. Sorry to, uh, put you out?”

“Not a problem,” Chloe grins. She stands from her position crouching by Beca’s bedside, rubbing her hands together. “I’ve left you a coffee and some aspirin. I’ve got a meeting in the city so I’ve got to head out, but feel free to use the shower and stuff before you go. The door locks on its own so don’t worry about leaving it open or anything.”

Damn, this bitch is organised. Beca stretches out and tries to put together memories from last night—it’s all pretty vague, glimpses of fire-red hair and intense music, Amy running over before they leave and telling her that some dude called Juan was taking her to the Bahamas for a bit so not to wait up for her—

Okay, so she’s going to have to handle that at some point, but that point doesn’t have to be now, right?

“I had a great night last night, by the way,” Chloe says, smiling, “You’re great fun. I haven’t let loose like that in a while.”

It would help if Beca could actually remember clearly what exactly happened last night, but the sentiment warms her anyway. She smiles back, genuinely, vaguely recalling how her heart thudded like it was about to break out her ribcage. “I had a great time too. As far as I’m aware I didn’t leave with a minor assault charge, so. A win?”

Chloe giggles. She does that a lot. Giggling. Beca’s never giggled. It doesn’t match her image. “Definitely a win. I’d like to do it again sometime.”

“Well, we’re going to be spending the next three months on tour together,” Beca says, still not quite believing it. “I’m sure I’ll be able to haul you off the rails at least once in that time period. If your manager doesn’t kill me first.”

“Aubrey doesn’t control everything about my life, as much as she’d like to. I make my own decisions.”

“Awesome,” Beca replies. Her eyes linger on the coffee Chloe’s thoughtfully left out for her and it stings, a little, because it reminds her of stupid Jesse and the stupidly Nice Things he used to do for her. And maybe Chloe is another Nice Person she doesn’t deserve in her life. It’s why she hasn’t fired Amy yet. She’s just as fucked up as Beca is.

“I’m going to head off,” Chloe says, making her way towards the bedroom door, “So I’ll see you later?”

“Sure.”

She flashes Beca one last smile before disappearing, and Beca’s touched that the girl seems to trust her enough to leave her alone in her apartment after meeting her once. It’s a naïve choice, perhaps, but sweet all the same. She reaches out and takes a swig of the rapidly cooling coffee and pops two of the aspirin then just sits, wrapped up in the duvet, everything silent other than the hum of the air conditioning.

Yeah, she’s still not sure how this whole tour thing will work, but she kind of wants it to work? And maybe that’s the point.

-x-

THE PRINCESS AND THE REBEL – CHLOE BEALE AND BECA MITCHELL SPOTTED IN DOWNTOWN LA

Los Angeles seems to be the hotbed of the billboard’s newest collaborations, a factory of number one hits and Grammy awards—but a sighting of two of music’s seemingly polar opposites has us here at Glitz dot com totally stumped. That’s right. Notorious bad girl Beca Mitchell (of Where Do You Go? fame) and pop’s hottest starlet Chloe Beale were papped together outside the Luna club last night, looking very comfortable in each other’s company indeed.

It’s true that there’s been a small fanbase on social media hoping that the pair would eventually collaborate, but it hardly felt like a realistic goal. After all, Mitchell’s just dodged another felony whilst Beale is climbing to the top of her game. Their interests don’t seem to overlap, but there’s definitely a friendship we’ve never heard about there.

Whether this club night is just two friends meeting up or the beginning of a potential collaboration, it has got us pretty excited. Mitchell’s sultry, no-nonsense sound mixing with Beale’s simultaneously romantic and empowering girl-power anthems will be a guaranteed eargasm which we’re TOTALLY here for. But—it begs the question whether these two artists will actually be good for each other. It’s no secret that Mitchell’s been a bit off the rails recently while Beale is pristine, role-model material; will Beca drag Chloe down or will Chloe bring Beca back up again? Only time will tell.

Keep up to date with everything Beca Mitchell and Chloe Beale by following us on twitter: @glitzmag

ARTICLE BY DAISY FULLERTON

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“Hey bitch! You’ve reached Fat Amy, only you haven’t reach Fat Amy, because I’m totally boning a really hot Spanish dude in the Bahamas right now while drinking a shit ton of Tequila Sunrises. Sooooo… Leave a message if you want, but I probably won’t get back to you for several days if it all. Adios!”

“For fuck’s sake, Amy, you are literally the worst manager ever and I’m firing you as soon as your ass is back in LA. Ok. So. There’s been some—articles, which I’m sure you’ve seen, because despite never answering my calls you’ve uploaded about sixty videos to your snapchat story of you on a speedboat, you monster. Anyway. I’m sick of the media painting me as some fucking criminal out-to-corrupt-your-children type when I’m really not, and yes I do have a tattoo I got when I was off my face on pot but that was years ago and really, that’s literally the only regrettable thing I’ve done that wasn’t a product of you. Please just tell someone, anyone, that I’m actually pretty rad and I’m probably not going to drag Chloe Beale’s impeccable reputation through the trash. As my manager that would literally be the bare minimum you could do for me right now. You’re an asshole. Ciao.”

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queenbeale just uploaded a photo to Instagram

got to hang out with the amazing @becamitchell on Saturday!! can’t wait to tell you guys what we’ve got in store for y’all xx

chloebealer commented: oh my god???? OH MY GOD???

jaydababe34 commented: MY TWO FAVES ARE UNITED I’M SCREAMING

chloefan789 commented: not sure how this will work… I’m not a beca mitchell fan at all

becamitchell commented: I look so drunk in this photo and I hate you for uploading it :)

queenbeale commented: @becamitchell you look like a dream

madisonbealer commented: @queenbeale @becamitchell *whispers* GAYYYYYYY

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It takes another two weeks of meetings and contracts and publicity before the tour dates are released to the public. They’re visiting thirty-two cities across North America in the space of two and a half months: it’s wild on a scale Beca’s never seen before. Yeah, she’s had three tours across the same area in the past, but the venues were smaller and not so extensive, and not all of the dates were sold out. The tickets for this tour sell out in a grand total of eleven minutes.

The tour also generates a tidal wave of interest across every single internet platform available. Her old songs are repeated alongside Chloe’s on the radio, her follower count on Instagram sky-rockets and their names are trending on Twitter. The last time Beca saw her name in that bar was when she was arrested for the coke incident (fuck you, Amy). And the support, surprisingly, is unreal. Like the unsavoury articles that emerged after she was papped outside Luna with Chloe earlier in the month, she’d expected people talking shit about her past, wondering if Beca’s razor sharp edges would rip Chloe to shreds—but there’s been an overwhelming amount of positivity, like the curiosity of what they could produce together overshadows what could potentially go wrong.

Her return to mainstream media ends up alerting people she thought she’d left in the past of her presence again, but she’s still surprised when Jesse ends up leaving her a voicemail on the Thursday after the announcement. It’s been five months of total radio silence between them. She’d kind of anticipated that it would be longer than that. After all, she did end a seven-year relationship on his fucking birthday, which she’d completely forgotten about.

Maybe she does owe him one.

Beca meets him for lunch in a small restaurant a twenty minute walk from her apartment—a neat, little kitschy place she doesn’t often visit, but they serve ciabatta and paninis and squashy cooked tomatoes still on the vine, and that’s the kind of thing Jesse loves. She gets there fifteen minutes early but of course he’s already there, sat on the long bench by the window and overlooking the street. She pretends she hasn’t seen him from the outside, even though he’d clocked her half a block away.

He still looks the same. Clean-shaven, dark hair cropped, clean t shirt and pants and sneakers like they’d never been worn before. He leaps off his stool nervously when the door shuts behind her.

Oh. Wow. She’s never known Jesse to be nervous before. He’s usually annoyingly confident. All through high school she’d hidden behind his infectious smile. At least the last two months have allowed her to just be her, even if that means she’s been stuck in a fucking prison cell once or twice. Or thrice.

“Becs,” he says breathlessly, taking her in. She half-smiles tightly. “Hey. How are you?”

“Oh, you know,” Beca shrugs, pulling her bag strap tighter around her shoulder. She’s nervous too. “Not in prison, depressed or dying, so not all bad. You?”

Jesse relaxes and his mouth softens. She’s still the same old Beca. “Same. It’s…uh, it’s been a while.”

“It has.”

“I kept meaning to… well, call, I guess, but I didn’t know if you wanted me to. In the end I just bit the bullet.”

“It’s cool. We both needed space.” Beca drops her bag on the floor and jumps onto a barstool and he copies, their seats inches apart yet somehow miles away. It’s weird, considering how close they used to be. Used to be. “For the record… I kept meaning to call too. But I didn’t know if you wanted to hear from me.”

Jesse smiles, biting his lip, before looking back up at her. “I always want to hear from you. I think that was probably the issue.”

He’s not wrong, he’s really not, because Beca’s terrible at keeping up with messages and most of the time just didn’t bother replying, leaving his I love you’s on read and not giving it a second thought. She didn’t think that would hurt him for some reason, even though she’s well aware that Jesse’s actually a good, thoughtful person who cares about her and wouldn’t mind some of that care back. It was alright when they were in high school and when they regularly shared an apartment because she’d always be there in person to offer that reassurance. That wasn’t so easy when she was away on tour.

And it broke him. But it broke her a long time before that. Believe it or not, she’s not totally emotionally void.

Jesse grabs them both coffees and ham paninis and they sit in silence for a bit, looking out across the city; the one she’d forgotten they shared. He takes a deep breath before talking. “I saw you were going on tour. With Chloe Beale. That’s amazing, Beca.”

“Yeah. It’s pretty cool. The management is manic, but. I’m glad to be out there again.”

Jesse takes a sip of coffee. “Does that mean there’s going to be some new music out soon?”

Beca withholds an eye roll, because that’s been the question on everybody’s lips—Chloe’s on a high from a newly released number one album and she’s still utterly clueless, wondering if she can get away with singing mostly her old stuff on the tour. It begins in less than six months. That’s not enough time to write, produce and release at least ten songs worth of new material, especially seeing as the deterioration of her last relationship and moving out and all that stress hasn’t been particularly good for her creativity. “Probably not. Song-writing is apparently not my forte anymore.”

“Well, you never know. You might find some inspiration soon. I know you, Becs. You just pull amazing tracks out of thin air like it’s nothing.”

She raises an eyebrow sceptically. “As much as I appreciate you massaging my ego, that doesn’t really help me right now.”

“I’m not worried,” Jesse says calmly, “I once watched you write a whole album while high, remember?”

“Your Love Fucking Sucks Balls, Dude?” Beca says, and Jesse laughs, clinging onto the bar for support. “Yeah, somehow I don’t think that’s going to be breaking the billboard top one hundred. Yet… stellar tracks like I Really Like Your Dick and Smash Me Good might be my only hope. Like, if I go another year without making music my label might drop me, even with the tour, so…” Beca doesn’t want this to turn into a pity party so she turns, resting her chin in her palm, back to Jesse. “What have you been up to? Anything exciting? Scored any Oscar-noms?”

Jesse laughs with an eyeroll, looking down into his coffee cup. “I wish. No, still doing ad work, but you never know. As soon as Pixar put an ad up for a composer on Craigslist, I’m there.” He pauses. Drums his fingers on the tabletop. Beca knows what’s coming. “Look, Becs—“

“No, Jesse.”

“No, no,” Jesse shakes his head, “No, this isn’t… I don’t want to get back together.”

Well, that’s a relief. She can feel her stomach shift back to its normal location. “Oh. Okay. Good.”

“This is more about… It is about me and you, but five months without you in my life has been hell, Beca. We were together for seven years. That doesn’t just fall away into nothing, even if the romance isn’t there anymore.” He coughs, clearly nervous. “I still love you. Of course I do. And I want you to be happy, like, more than anything in the world. And I know you’re not going to be happy with me, and that’s fine. But I’d still like to be part of your life.”

Oh. His sincerity stuns her, for a second, because maybe this is the kind of reaction she should’ve expected all along.

“We don’t have to talk every day. We don’t even have to talk regularly. I’d just like to be, you know—someone who is there for you. Your friend Jesse who just so happens to be your ex. We can grab dinner when our schedules don’t clash and watch movies and maybe text every so often. Or we don’t. Whatever. Just… I don’t want to lose you, Becs.”

She smiles, suddenly nostalgic for a time when everything was easy: when Jesse would pick her up from work in his beat-up Civic and he’d leave stupid romantic notes in her locker (which she definitely didn’t keep in a scrapbook under her bed, by the way) and they’d drink lukewarm cider and make out under the stars on the football field. It was all achingly simple back then.

But then she thinks of her life now, and how slowly and surely it’s coming back together, and how most of the time she doesn’t miss Jesse’s beat-up civic and his stupid romantic notes and the lukewarm cider, although she does kind of miss the making out and she does kind of miss him. He’s proposing a zero-commitment friendship, a no string attached deal, someone she can turn to and will always be there.

Like the tour, she’s not really in a position to turn it down.

“Sure,” she smiles, “But no movies. I’ve not got girlfriend status anymore, so you can’t force me to watch fucking Star Trek—“

“Star Wars, Beca, I’ve got no interest in Star Trek whatsoever.”

“Okay, weirdo, Star Wars. Whatever. But the point still stands. I’m under no obligation to sit through your ridiculous commentaries.”

“That’s cool,” Jesse nods, “I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but that’s cool. And anyway. I don’t actually want you to be my friend. I just want you to fill me in on every single detail about what Chloe Beale is actually like. Does she really own a poodle that’s naturally fluorescent pink?”

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BECA MITCHELL SPOTTED WITH OLD FLAME AND EX LONG TERM BOYFRIEND JESSE SWANSON – IS ROMANCE BACK ON THE CARDS?

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“Beca, I really don’t want to intrude, but I’ve seen those pics on twitter of you and your ex-boyfriend,” Chloe rubs her hands excitedly, “And are you, like, back together? Because that guy is a total cutie.”

Beca’s not actually seen Chloe beyond a professional capacity for over two weeks as their schedules are so hectic, but the girl texts like she’s running out of time and for some reason, she actually replies to her strings of emojis and exclamation marks? In addition, her lengthy paragraphs of information are usually incredibly intrusive, so it comes clear to Beca that Chloe doesn’t really have any boundaries or filter when it comes to asking the potentially difficult questions.

“Oh, no,” Beca answers straight up, her reflection staring back at her. She hisses in pain as the hairdresser burns her scalp with the curling iron, who then hastily apologises. “No, no, no. That’s definitely not a thing that’s happening.”

Beca’s sure that Chloe looks pleased, which sets off some weird emotions, but she somehow manages to fight the blush taking over her cheeks. “What happened there, if you don’t mind me asking? Your Wikipedia said you’d been together for, like, seven years. Which is a pretty long time.”

The shameless way Chloe admits she’s definitely stalked her ass online is actually kind of funny but Beca doesn’t laugh, because maybe then she’d be forced to admit that she’s done the same thing. The hairdresser—who is called Katie, or Kathy, or something, Beca’s not that good with names—wraps another one of her locks tight, like she’s going to pull it clean off her scalp. “It’s—really not exciting. We’d been together since high school. He went to UCLA while I tried to break onto the music scene and when I did we kind of just… drifted apart.”

(She was also an utter ass about it, but this is not something she’s going to admit while sober.)

“Oh. That’s sad.” Chloe smiles sympathetically. Her stylist has straightened her naturally wavy hair so it hangs in a scarlet red sheet, framing her cheekbones and eyes. She’s not even airbrushed or photoshopped within an inch of her life yet, goddamn, and she already looks fucking flawless. Totally unfair. “Drifting apart just comes with the territory, I guess. My last ex dumped because I didn’t have enough time for him. Which is fair. It’s not easy.”

Beca’s not sure if she feels totally comfortable going into it with an audience of stylists, especially with one who seems to hate her hair as much as Karen does. Chloe seems completely at ease, but she gives off this edge of being totally confident with herself—something Beca’s not blessed with, as much as she likes to pretend she doesn’t care.

“He also kept trying to persuade me to do a sex tape on several occasions,” Chloe unnecessarily elaborates, “And I kept telling him no, mostly because I was scared that if we did break up he’d try and sell it to TMZ or something. For the record, I’m not against sex tapes. I think they can be very fun and intimate representations of cinematography. But I’d only make one with someone I could trust inside-out and back-to-front, so to speak.”

Oh. Wow. Beca grits her teeth, but there’s a smile there. “That’s… good to know, dude.”

“I know! And I’ll have you know my sex life is far from vanilla. I have a very long list of kinks and some of them are pretty unconventional. Like, this one time, Mark made me try this thing with ginger—“

“And that’s enough!” Beca laughs awkwardly, mainly because the stylists are having a fucking field day and Beca doesn’t want it on record that she and Chloe were discussing figging while getting ready for a shoot.

“Oh,” Chloe says, looking briefly behind her before grimacing at Beca. She mouths I forgot we weren’t alone.

A few minutes later the lady who is coordinating the shoot calls them through to an office with a wall covered in white tarpaulin, the lights all the brighter for it. It’s a pretty low-key thing for Teen Vogue, but it’s the first shoot they’ve done together since the tour announcement, so Beca’s kind of bricking it. Chloe takes everything in her stride. She struts over to the tarpaulin and Beca quickly follows.

She thinks that the costume department might have gone a bit overkill on the rebel and the princess thing that’s been coined for them, because Beca’s dressed in a black mini-dress, leather jacket and doc martens, whilst Chloe is wearing a glittery pink off the shoulder number with white leggings, her feet in ballet pumps. Beca’s eyes are smudged with charcoal black whilst Chloe’s are pearlescent, and she looks every inch the twenty-first century pop princess. Beca’s not sure what she looks like.

The photographer is a young guy, maybe a bit older than she is, wearing a fake waistcoat attached to a t shirt and skinny jeans. He ushers them together, keeps saying to act natural, which in mainstream media terms means attempt to look sexy and maybe pout a bit.

The pictures actually turn out pretty good. Beca gets more element as the shoot drags on, sticking her tongue out for the camera and laughing and trying not to cringe as she tries the sexy hair-flick, smouldering the camera over her shoulder.

It’s the pictures of them together that turn out the best, though. There’s this beautiful shot of the pair of them caught off guard, Chloe’s hand slung over Beca’s shoulder as she laughs, hand over her chest. She looks fucking ecstastic, just to be there, they both do; like they’re ecstatic to be together. It’s almost typical that that one doesn’t make the cover (they go with one of them both straightfaced, stood side by side, like they’ve never met in their lives). The picture doesn’t even make the article. But later on someone from the magazine sends her the unedited rough-cuts, and she saves that one photo to her hard drive.

(Eight months, two weeks and three days later that photo is her desktop background.)

Two hours later and the magazine has all the photos they need so they’re allowed to leave and Beca can keep the leather jacket.

(“I like it on you,” Chloe says, smoothing the leather out with her fingers, “You look super edgy.” Aka, it’s a real turn-on.)

On their way out from the building, Chloe pauses in the middle of the street like she’s suddenly had the best fucking idea. “Hey—my apartment is about a five minute cab ride from here. Do you want to head over there if you haven’t got plans? There’s something I’m desperate to try.”

Beca’s way too intrigued to possibly say no to that.

[tinyshe]

RFK Jr. Opens 'CIA Can of Worms'

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola, October 02, 2021

Story at-a-glance

February 10, 2021, Instagram banned the account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for “sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”

The real reason Kennedy is being censored is because he understands and exposes the global technocratic agenda that is pushing us toward global totalitarianism

The corporate media are indistinguishable from the CIA when it comes to matters of domestic and foreign matters. The CIA has also played an important role in furthering the technocrats’ agenda of global domination since its inception

Big tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon are also deeply connected to the military-industrial-intelligence complex. They serve important surveillance and data harvesting functions without which the technocratic agenda cannot not be realized

The core of the technocratic power structure includes entities such as the Trilateral Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome, the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Institute, the Brookings Institute and other think-tanks

This article was previously published February 27, 2021, and has been updated with new information.

February 10, 2021, Instagram banned the account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an attorney, founder of Children's Health Defense, and co-founder and president of the environmental group, River Alliance. According to Instagram, his account was removed for "sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines."1

This comes as no surprise to anyone who has paid attention over the past year, when privately owned social media companies started censoring users in earnest, often at the request of government officials, thereby qualifying themselves as bona fide instruments of fascism.

As described in "Fascism Definition With Examples,"2 a hallmark of fascism is an economic system in which government controls private corporations and where "a central planning authority directs company leaders to work in the national interest, which actively suppresses those who oppose it."

The welfare of the population at large is subjugated in such a system in order to achieve "imperative social goals." This could, for example, be the goal to vaccinate the entire population against COVID-19, which will ensure the vaccine industry can profit rather than go bust. Public health be damned.

Of course, the entire premise of a mass vaccination campaign against COVID-19 is that it will protect people and prevent unnecessary deaths from the virus. But a hidden, underlying agenda is revealed by the fact that injuries and deaths from the vaccine are either suppressed or shrugged off as collateral damage in the name of the greater good.

In other words, dying due to poor health is unacceptable and must be prevented with a vaccine, whereas dying in good health and at a young age due to vaccine injury is a perfectly acceptable price to protect the vulnerable. The end result is the same: People die. The only differences are how and why people die, and whether or not big business, which funds politicians, can profit in the process.

Don't Trust the Medical or National Security Establishment

In the November 16, 2020 Ron Paul Liberty Report above,3,4 Kennedy talks about evidence suggesting his father, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated by a CIA agent hired as a security guard.

He goes on to review some of the history of the CIA — how it was initially established as an espionage organization tasked solely with intelligence gathering, only to transform into a paramilitary agency engaged with the overthrowing of democracies around the world and other nefarious and antidemocratic activities.

He also touches on the infamous CIA program called MK Ultra, in which individuals are brainwashed to carry out orders, including murders, against their own will.

CIA and Corporate Media Are One and the Same

The CIA's role in the current flood of censorship may be more significant than most people imagine. In the Off-Guardian article,5 "Opening the CIA's Can of Worms," Edward Curtin highlights the close ties between the CIA and corporate mainstream media.

The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy.

He cites Douglas Valentine's book, "The CIA as Organized Crime," in which Valentine states that "The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy." Curtin describes the media as "stenographers for the national security state's ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people," adding that:

"For all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished."

While information warfare and psyops have been par for the course for a long time, it's only in recent years that more people have started really noticing it, and it's only become blatantly obvious in the past year or so, thanks to the rapid expansion of individuals, groups and topics being silenced.

In the past year, even licensed medical doctors and award-winning scientists have undergone the modern version of being tarred and feathered online, followed by expulsion from their web-based communities for the crime of asking commonsense questions and speaking truth to power.

Guilt by Headline

The aim and purpose of the kind of information warfare we currently find ourselves embroiled in is to "win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity," Curtin writes. Again, in regard to COVID-19, the purpose is clearly to get everyone to buy into the necessity of getting vaccinated and to reject objections, no matter how logical.

That the CIA-run media, medical establishment and national security apparatus are all working in tandem on this issue, and using classic propaganda tactics, is unmistakable. Curtin writes:6

"Just the other day The New York Times had this headline: 'Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.' Notice the lack of the word alleged before 'false virus claims.' This is guilt by headline.

It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram's ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook, Instagram's parent company …

This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order."

Curtin disagrees with journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi and Chris Hedges, who argue that social media companies really don't want to censor but are pressured into it by hubris-filled, power- and control-hungry corporate media personalities.

There's more to it than that, Curtin says, pointing out, "These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so."

He argues that they're all "part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus — a system, a complex — whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many," and that, it is this that makes the CIA and media "parts of the same criminal conspiracy."

Who Pulls the Levers of Control?

"To argue that the Silicon Valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense," Curtin says, because:

"These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA's program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today."

Indeed, many suspect Facebook is the public-friendly version of DARPA's Lifelog, a database project aimed at tracking the minutiae of people's entire existence for national security surveillance purposes.7 The Pentagon pulled the plug on Lifelog February 4, 2004, in response to backlash over privacy concerns.8 Yet that same day, Facebook was launched.9 Coincidence?

Whether by fluke or preinception collaboration, there can be no doubt that Facebook now fulfills the Lifelog purpose of surveilling, tracking and data mining its users both on- and offline.

Similarly, Google, Amazon, Twitter and other major tech companies are also tied to the "military-industrial-intelligence-media complex," to quote Curtin's term. All provide invaluable surveillance and censorship functions, and without them, the totalitarian control system we now find ourselves caught in wouldn't be possible.

"The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives [tech companies] its marching orders," Curtin writes.10

"That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon Valley monopolies …

All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled. But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.

They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have.

In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world's wealth through the stories they tell. It is a symbiotic relationship."

Operation Mockingbird: The Great Reset

What Curtin is talking about is the same elite 0.001% of the global population I've written about before. While the specific identities of the individual string-pullers are difficult to discern, what's clear is that there is an international "deep state" whose plans are implemented in a coordinated fashion around the world, seemingly at a moment's notice, as we saw when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.

Within days, all the world's leaders sang the same tune. The same message was stated in dozens of languages, often verbatim, as if they were reading the same cue card. Looking at global nongovernmental agencies makes it easier to ascertain who these cue card writers might be, as they form a vast, intertwined web that keep circling back to each other.

We can discern, then, that the core of this technocratic power structure includes entities such as the Trilateral Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome, the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Institute, the Brookings Institute and other think-tanks, just to name some of the most obvious.

Members of these exclusive "clubs," many of which are by invitation only, include leaders from major industries, corporate media, political offices and the military-industrial complex.

As noted by Curtin, "They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship." The CIA, as you might suspect by now, has also been part of this "deep state cabal" from the very beginning.

And, if the CIA and corporate media are two sides of the same coin, we can deduce that the global psyop currently underway has the purpose of ensuring the successful implementation of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution — two terms that describe different aspects of the same agenda of enslavement.

While it may seem unrelated to some, the vaccine agenda does play an important part in this scheme, especially long-term, which is why vaccine skeptics and anti-vaccine voices are now being slapped down at a furious pace. It's not the sole reason for their silencing, however.

The Real Threat Kennedy Poses

As Curtin points out in his article, Kennedy is not censored simply because he's raising questions about vaccines, Bill Gates or the drug industry in general. No, it's because he's a direct threat to the highest echelon of this hidden global power structure that seeks to take control:11

"His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.

To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues.

To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.

This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state's assassination of both his father and his uncle.

It is why his wonderful recent book, 'American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family,' that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces."

According to Kennedy, the CIA murdered his father. The reason they did was because he was a powerful and popular politician who, like Curtin says, "could have … tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords."

In other words, he knew the CIA was the figurative center pole holding up the pole tent, and if you yank that out, the roof caves in. They couldn't let that happen.

Connecting the Dots

Kennedy discusses many of the same topics covered in the Ron Paul Report in his much longer interview with Patrick Bet-David, above. In both interviews, he reviews his family's tragic yet heroic history, but he also gets into the topic of vaccine safety and the folly of ignoring published science showing there are significant problems — and the fact that the medical establishment refutes and denies these problems without ever presenting any actual counter-evidence.

Kennedy also discusses data suggesting the COVID-19 lockdowns may have caused more deaths than the virus itself, as well as the civil rights issues involved. Like many other experts, he believes the lockdowns are scientifically indefensible and when the final tally comes in will have killed far more people than COVID-19.

Based on a recent cost-benefit analysis12 of global lockdowns, Kennedy is correct. Data suggest the cost for lockdowns in Canada — in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years and Wellbeing Years — is at least 10 times greater than the benefit.

In Australia, the minimum cost is 6.6 times higher, and in the U.S., the cost is estimated to be at least 5.2 times higher than the benefit of lockdowns. So, yes, pandemic measures are robbing the public of more life and fruitful years than this virus ever could.

In his interview with Bet-David, Kennedy also delves into known side effects of vaccines that in turn drive a highly profitable chronic illness industry, the lack of safety studies for vaccines, the irresponsible practice of testing vaccines against false placebos such as another vaccine, and the vaccine industry's indemnity agreement with Congress that further prevents safe vaccines from ever being developed.

He also talks about the aggressive advertising of drugs and vaccines which, as a side effect, allows drug companies to influence media coverage of their products; the questionable integrity of Dr. Anthony Fauci how mortality data are conflated to falsely inflate influenza deaths as a marketing ploy to sell flu vaccines, the dangers of 5G, modern-day electronic surveillance and social media's data harvesting; and the detrimental influence of Bill Gates' so-called philanthropy.

As Curtin notes, Kennedy's observations, which help people connect the dots, ultimately point people to the core problem of our day, which is a hidden control structure that is seeking to destroy the American Constitution and rob us of our rights and freedoms, if we let them.

At the end of the day, that's what all of this censorship is about. That hidden power structure does not want us to realize what's being done to us, because then we might rebel. And, if that happens, the jig is up, since there are far more of us than there are of them.

A Well-Informed Humanity United Is the Answer

This is precisely why we must never stop seeking out and sharing this type of information. Those who buy into the propaganda are quite literally helping their soon-to-be jailers erect the prison bars around them. It's self-destructive, which is why we need to help those we care about to understand the bigger picture and not get locked into details of differing opinions that don't matter.

As noted in Kennedy's October 24, 2020, online speech,13 "International Message of Hope for Humanity" — which kicked off a day of protest against the coup d'état by the technocratic elite — we must shed our imaginary fears, reject media fearmongering, insist on freedom of speech and engage in the democratic process.

"The only way we can win it is with democracy," he said. "We need to fight to get our democracy back, to reclaim our democracy from these villains who are stealing it from us. Notice the people who are getting richest from this quarantine are the same people who are censoring criticism of the quarantine."

Kennedy also stressed another crucial point, namely the need to unify. We must put aside our quibbles over nonessential things like race, religion and political affiliations, and stay laser-focused on the real enemy.

"What the Big Tech villains … want us to do is fight with each other. They want Blacks fighting against whites. They want republicans fighting against democrats. They want everybody polarized. They want everybody fragmented because they know that if we all get together, we're going to start asking questions and those are questions they can't answer …

If you're a republican or democrat, stop talking about that. Stop identifying yourself. The enemy is Big Tech, Big Data, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the medical cartel, the government totalitarian elements that are trying to oppress us, that are trying to rob us of our liberties, of our democracy, of our freedom of thought, of our freedom of expression, of our freedom of assembly and all of the freedoms that give dignity to humanity …

The free-flow of information, the cauldron of debate, is the only thing that allows governments to develop rational policies in which self-governance will actually work and triumph.

You are on the front lines of the most important battle in history — the battle to save democracy, freedom, human liberty and human dignity from this totalitarian cartel that is trying to rob us, simultaneously, in every nation in the world, of the rights that every human being is born with …

And I pledge to you: I will go down dying with my boots on, fighting side-by-side with all of you to make sure that we return these rights and preserve them for our children."

And, that, right there, is why Kennedy, like his father and uncle before him, is a target for elimination by the technocratic-CIA-media-drug-industrial-political-military complex. The good news is that the more people know and understand who the real enemy is, the lower the risk is for those in the know.

After all, the CIA cannot assassinate an entire country, or the entire world. At a certain point, silencing people becomes moot because too many people know the truth already. I believe this is the case with Kennedy at this point, which is why the worst they can do is try to limit his reach on social media. And with your help, even those efforts will ultimately fail.

Sen. Warren Threatens Amazon to Ban ‘The Truth About COVID-19’

Since the publication of my latest book, “The Truth About COVID-19,” which became an instant best seller on Amazon.com, there’s been a significant increase in calls for censorship and ruthless attacks against me.

Most recently, so-called “progressive” U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in an outrageous, slanderous and basically unconstitutional attempt to suppress free speech, sent a letter to Amazon, demanding an “immediate review” of their algorithms to weed out books peddling “COVID misinformation.”

Warren specifically singled out “The Truth About COVID-19” as a prime example of “highly ranked and favorably tagged books based on falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines and cures” that she wants to see banned from sale.

Two days later, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., followed in Warren’s footsteps, sending letters to Facebook and Amazon, calling for more prolific censorship of vaccine information. Even President Joe Biden has recently used a debunked report as his sole source to call for my censorship.

Sadly, these attacks are being levied by the very people elected to safeguard democracy and our Constitutional rights. Essentially, what they are calling for is modern-day book burning. This is a democracy, not a monarchy.

[brandonmcadory17]

I don’t give a fuck what if anybody like my Mom’s husband, who voted for Joe Biden and if anybody who is affiliated with the establishment part of the Democrat Party is so called so tired of conservatives, non establishment Republicans and Trump voters talking about how Joe Biden and the Dems bad and corrupt they are because they’re just as bad as Joe Biden and the Dems, they’re getting exactly the opposite of what they voted for and people like my mom’s husband are a part of the problem. My Mom’s husband will be held accountable by God for his constant opposition and temper tantrum about Trump being in office and he will be judged harshly. Fact is, facts don’t care about my mom’s husband’s feeling. From now on, he better be asking me to vote Democrat in the 2022 midterm elections to protect Joe Biden and the Dems because it’s not going to happen. I’m telling Joe Biden and the Dems to fuck off and never ask me for my damn vote ever again because all the Dems do is get elected as dictators, do absolutely nothing and give absolutely nothing in return. My Mom’s husband should be ashamed of himself. It’s not my damn problem if my Mom’s husband voted for Biden knowing that all of the bad things happen under Joe Biden’s watch. My mom’s husband voted for abortion, airstrikes in Syria, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, criminal Democrats, Democrat dictators who get elected, Democrats who do absolutely nothing, Democrats who give absolutely nothing in return, Democrat white supremacy, higher premiums, higher taxes, human trafficking, normalized pedophlia, murders by illegal immigrants, open border, partisanship, sex trafficking and for being brainwashed by the mainstream media. So here’s the thing. My mom’s husband’s partisanship is why the Dems deserve to lose in the 2022 midterm elections and Joe Biden and the Dems have absolutely nothing to blame but themselves and my mom’s husband has absolutely nothing to blame but himself. Also, that’s why the Dems are battling in the 2022 mid term elections without me and I don’t want to hear him bitch moaning and groaning about it when the Dems lose to the GOP in the 2022 mid term elections because the Dems had an opportunity to show serious bipartisanship and be more moderate with their policies, but they’re making the same mistakes under Joe Biden, just like they did when Barack Obama became President. My message to Biden supporters only affiliated with establishment Democrats is if you voted Democrat based on your deep hatred for Donald Trump and non establishment Republicans and knowing that the Dems get elected, do absolutely nothing and give absolutely nothing in return, then you are a part of the problem, you don’t know what the fuck you voted for and you don’t know what the fuck your talking about p and if that’s the case, then maybe you should out of American politics in the United States Of America and that’s my message to Biden supporters only affiliated with establishment Democrats.