#hateful malicious trump regime

[webntrmpt2x]

First paragraph:

“Don’t get distracted. Don’t get overwhelmed. Don’t get paralyzed and pulled into the chaos that President Trump and his allies are purposely creating with the volume and speed of executive orders; the effort to dismantle the federal government; the performative attacks on immigrants, transgender people and the very concept of diversity itself; the demands that other countries accept Americans as their new overlords; and the dizzying sense that the White House could do or say anything at any moment. All of this is intended to keep the country on its back heel so President Trump can blaze ahead in his drive for maximum executive power, so no one can stop the audacious, ill-conceived and frequently illegal agenda being advanced by his administration. For goodness sake, don’t tune out.”

[beardedmrbean]

> criminal tresspass

College campuses are open to the public and protest is covered under the first amendment you dumb fucking commie. Go home to China and stand in front of a tank if you want to see a regime deal with protestors.

Not when you're told to leave and it's a private college. Even if it's a public college there's rules.

1A is not absolute and that limitation is not strictly fire in a crowded theatre.

Here's the ACLU link, it's gotta be painful for them to admit this kind of thing exists for the people that they want to have protesting. It's the Oregon office but the constitution is nationwide that includes the Bill of Rights.

If not they'd be loading up to go and defend these people. Might still be they hate when people they like get busted breaking the rules.

You have a constitutionally protected right to engage in peaceful protest in “traditional public forums” such as streets, sidewalks or parks. But in some cases the government can impose restrictions on this kind of activity by requiring permits. This is constitutional as long as the permit requirements are reasonable, and treat all groups the same no matter what the focus of the rally or protest.

The government cannot impose permit restrictions or deny a permit simply because it does not like the message of a certain speaker or group.

Generally, you have the right to distribute literature, hold signs, collect petition signatures, and engage in other similar activities while on public sidewalks or in front of government buildings as long as you are not disrupting other people, forcing passerby to accept leaflets or causing traffic problems.

Under the USA Patriot Act, non-US citizens who are not permanent residents can be investigated solely because of their First Amendment activities. Immigrants who choose to engage in a protest, march, or a demonstration should carry with them the telephone numbers of friends and relatives, as well as the telephone numbers of an immigration attorney or an immigrant advocacy organization.

Limitations on Speech

The First Amendment does not protect speech that is combined with the violation of established laws such as trespassing, disobeying or interfering with a lawful order by a police officer. Also unprotected are malicious statements about public officials and obscene speech.

This is one of those areas they screwed up with right here, they were told to vacate by the colleges and the order to break up the camp and leave was from that point forward a lawful order

Although an inflammatory speaker cannot be punished for merely arousing an audience, a speaker can be arrested for incitement if he/she advocates imminent violence or specifically provokes people to commit unlawful actions.

This is exactly the opposite of what Trump did on J6 btw, man appealed for calm and cooperating with law enforcement, if you understood 1A you could use that to defend the guy.

Limitations on Action Demonstrators who engage in civil disobedience – defined as non-violent unlawful action as a form of protest – are not protected under the First Amendment. People who engage in civil disobedience should be prepared to be arrested or fined as part of their protest activity.

Violating a order to disperse lawfully given by law enforcement counts as this

If you endanger others while protesting, you can be arrested. A protest that blocks vehicular or pedestrian traffic is illegal without a permit.

Would you like to see the video of them blocking walkways and building entrances among other places, or is the inclusion of roadways good enough, all them bridges they block, that ain't covered by 1A.

You do not have the right to block a building entrance or physically harass people. The general rule is that free speech activity cannot take place on private property, including shopping malls, without consent of the property owner. You do not have the right to remain on private property after being told to leave by the owner.

There's the building entrances again, and harassment too. There's that private property thing again too, which private colleges, there's some leeway given since they accept federal funds for tuition and such but that all goes up to the bit at the top anyhow.

If you feel that your rights as a protester have been violated, you can submit a Legal Request  or call us at 503-227-3186.

No fuck you ACLU, you may know my rights back and front but you won't defend the ones that matter or more recently people you find unsavory, you lost the mission when you decided to pick and choose who you would represent for fear of losing donations.

dumbshit anon wants to call me a commie, doesn't even understand how 1A works and thinks I favor an oppressive regime of any sort, I am very much on the record of defending people's right to say what I find abhorrent, I also understand the rules of how you can go about that.

Protestors back in the civil rights era understood the could be arrested and accepted that consequence, got some doing it now except they're crying all the way to processing because just like you they don't know what the rules are.

Please don't be stupid like this in my inbox again, even on anon it's just embarrassing for you

also a self proclaimed anarchist trying to fall back on 1A is just double embarrassing for you

[bllsbailey]

In Last Desperate Bid for Relevance, Liz Cheney Goes Off on Trump—and Gets Smoked

As we reported, Joe Biden laughably presented former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney the nation's second highest civilian award—the Presidential Citizens Medal—on Thursday for her role in being a key member of the corrupt J6 Committee. It was a Hollywood-produced show trial where there was no Republican cross-examination of witnesses, and Cheney herself has now been credibly accused of tampering with a witness, a charge that can come with a lengthy prison sentence.

Related: Now It's the Investigator Being Investigated: House GOP Concludes Liz Cheney Tampered With J6 Witness

Ted Cruz and Others Wreck Biden for Disgusting Award Ceremony for Liz Cheney

As if she needed to be shown yet one more time that she joined the wrong team, the medal ceremony was a cringefest where Biden was up to his usual creepy shenanigans. She got applause Thursday—but is there anyone who gives a rip about what she’ll have to say tomorrow? 

She has made herself into the most irrelevant woman in DC (other than Kamala Harris, of course) by participating in such a ludicrous banana republic show, getting voted out of office by massive margins, and throwing her weight behind odious people like Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and former Rep. (Cryin’) Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

Trump, naturally, let her have it:

His tweet continued:

Cheney has the distinction of losing her Congressional seat by the largest margin in History! The people of Wyoming understood how bad for our Country she was, but Biden rewarded her only because she hated “TRUMP.” She’s a Warmonger of low intelligence. All she wants to do is kill people in “Endless Wars,” with no gain other than to defense companies. Liz Cheney, Cryin’ Adam Kinzinger, Bennie Thompson, and the rest of these dishonest Thugs have gotten away with horrible things under the pretense of January 6th. Nancy Pelosi refused to accept the help which was offered for security. She is responsible, and admitted as much, for all to see, on her daughter’s tape. They have destroyed the lives of many people, and are rewarded by getting Biden Fake Medals. This is not America. January 20th cannot come fast enough. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Liz, in perhaps one of the last tweets by her that will ever get noticed, tried to take the high "I Stand For Democracy!" road. Unfortunately, she failed, because she has so compromised herself that she has no credibility left.

Many of your lawyers have been sanctioned, disciplined or disbarred, the courts ruled against you, and dozens of your own White House, administration, and campaign aides testified against you.  Remember how you sent a mob to our Capitol and then watched the violence on television and refused for hours to instruct the mob to leave? Remember how your former Vice President prevented you from overturning our Republic? We remember. And now, as you take office again, the American people need to reject your latest malicious falsehoods and stand as the guardrails of our Constitutional Republic — to protect the America we love from you.

Yawn. Really, Liz, this whole "danger to Democracy" narrative has just plain gotten boring—especially when you and yours seem to be the real danger. 

“This is not the Soviet Union,” she wrote. But do you know when it felt like it was? When the politicized Biden DOJ and the mendacious J6 Committee were conducting Soviet-style star trials and viciously going after political opponents. 

You know when else it felt like we were living under a repressive regime? During COVID, when the freedoms promised in our Constitution were taken away from us, jobs were lost, and lives were ruined for those who didn’t want to take an experimental mRNA vaccine or bow down to the censorship police. 

You've joined that team, Cheney.

It’s hard to know where the bitter congresswoman goes from here; perhaps a gig on a low-rated cable network like CNN or MSNBC—but Dems have a habit of turning on Republicans who savage the GOP. One minute, they’re useful, but the next, they’re not. Trump won, the GOP took the House and the Senate, and we’re in for a new era. Who is going to give a rat’s patootie what Liz Cheney has to say after January 20?

My guess is, not a whole lot of folks.

[dogsagainstbenitojuarez]

So this whole thread is a cluster fuck, but I hate myself so I will wade into it.

So 1. Not every military operation is actually analogous to operation iraqi freedom? You get to do this thing where you look at the facts and come to judgements other than this weird reactionary thing.

2. Do yall remember why Trump was impeached? You know the whole saying he waned to hold military aid until the Ukranian government resumed the corruption investigation into Barisma where Hunter Biden worked?

3. Trump DID actually get a lot of agreements signed by countries that moved towards peace. See North Korea and the David accords.

4. Ukraine, the Baltic States, etc. Are servant states of the US. They allow for things like Illegal biological weapons programs and torture sites because "muh Russia is worse." Ukraine very famously had many high level american politicians kids who work on high level companies foe purely cronyist reasons.

ANCAPS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE AGAINST THOSE THINGS. RETARDS.

5. The Russian federation is not the Soviet Union.

6. Countries like the US, The UK, France, and Germany have a long history of covert operations against countries they dont like. Having a "Ally" that you can base these from means that you allow yourself massive vulnerabilities to these groups that can run back and threaten total war if you want to do anything to them.

During the actual cold war, with the actual Soviet Union, that actually did want to take over the world, Austria and Japan were both deliberatly considered neutral to act as a buffer zone.

IF YOU DO NOT BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENTS ABOVE WOULD DO MALICIOUS COVERT OPERATIONS THEN YOU ARE NOT A BASED DISSIDENT. YOU ARE A REGIME STOOGE!

Anyway if I get a response (which I doubt I will) then im sure it will be as well thoughtout as this one.

Toodles :*

[newstfionline]

Thursday, July 29, 2021

Drone strike whistleblower (Washington Post) In 2013, Daniel Hale was at a peace conference in D.C. when a Yemeni man recounted through tears how two family members had been killed in a U.S. drone strike. He said they’d been trying to encourage young men to leave al-Qaeda. Hale, 33, a former intelligence analyst, realized he had watched the fatal attack, which he and his Air Force colleagues viewed as a success. Now he was horrified. It was such experiences, Hale told a federal judge on Tuesday, that led him to leak classified information about drone warfare to a reporter. “I believe that it is wrong to kill, but it is especially wrong to kill the defenseless,” he said in court. A U.S. district judge sentenced Hale to 45 months in prison for violating the Espionage Act, saying the documents Hale disclosed went beyond his “courageous and principled” stance on drones. Hale had shared three dozen documents with a journalist. One document revealed that during a five-month stretch of an Afghanistan operation, 90 percent of people killed were not the intended targets.

3 tech giants report combined profits of more than $50B (AP) Three tech companies—Apple, Microsoft and Google owner Alphabet—reported combined profits of more than $50 billion in the April-June quarter, underscoring their unparalleled influence and success at reshaping the way we live. Although these companies make their money in different ways, the results served as another reminder of the clout they wield and why government regulators are growing increasingly concerned about whether they have become too powerful. The massive profits pouring into each company also illustrated why they have a combined market value of $6.4 trillion—more than double their collective value when the COVID-19 pandemic started 16 months ago.

Mexico’s Cuba aid (Foreign Policy) A shipment of food, oxygen, and medical supplies bound for Cuba is expected to set sail from the Mexican port of Veracruz today, as President Andrés Manuel López Obrador makes good on his promise to provide humanitarian assistance to the island following protests earlier this month. The vessel follows in the wake of another ship carrying aid that left Mexico on Tuesday, and the delivery of 126,000 barrels of diesel fuel from Mexico’s state-run Pemex earlier this week. On Monday, López Obrador called on U.S. President Joe Biden to “make a decision” about the U.S. embargo given that “almost all countries of the world” are against it.

Europeans increasingly frustrated as White House maintains Trump-era covid travel restrictions (Washington Post) European lawmakers and business groups voiced mounting criticism of the Biden administration on Tuesday, after the White House said its restrictions on international travel would remain in place for the time being. Whereas vaccinated U.S. tourists have been allowed to return to much of Europe for weeks, most Europeans continue to be unable to travel to the United States under a ban that was first imposed by President Donald Trump in March 2020. The White House said Monday that the continuation of existing travel restrictions was attributable to concerns over the highly transmissible delta variant. But the delta variant has long been in the United States, already accounting for the majority of new known cases, and many European nations are now starting to outpace the United States in vaccinations: 49 percent of Americans are fully inoculated, compared with more than 46 percent of European Union residents. As vaccinated American tourists are traveling back and forth for their summer holidays in Paris or Rome again, European allies or partners of the Biden administration are finding it increasingly difficult to defend the U.S. stance, which critics say has divided European families and posed serious challenges to businesses.

“Seditious” sheep: inside Hong Kong's crackdown on children's books (Worldcrunch) The Hong Kong National Security Police was on the move again recently, although this time the surprising target was a series of children's stories. On July 22, authorities arrested five people over conspiring to publish seditious publications. The accused are members of the General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists, as Hong Kong-based media The Initium reports. The operation against them marks the first time the National Security Law has been used to target stories directed at children. The three books in question center around an imaginary village of sheep. Authorities say the books are "creating hatred and instilling anti-government ideas among children." In a press conference, Steve Li, senior superintendent of the Police National Security Department, said that the images of sheep fighting wolves and of sheep being eaten up by wolves are an attempt to incite violence and hatred against the regime. "Sheep are gentle animals, but highlighting that they can attack is publicizing violence," he said. Li urged bookstores to hand in remaining copies to the police, and encouraged owners of the books to destroy their copies. Teachers, he added, are forbidden from using books for educational purposes. "This isn't about criticizing the government," Li explained. "It's that actions, books and so on, should never make people hate the government."

Kuwait bans unvaccinated citizens from travelling abroad (Reuters) Kuwait on Tuesday said only citizens who have been vaccinated for the coronavirus will be allowed to travel abroad starting on Aug. 1. A government statement said the rule excepted children under age of 16, those with a health ministry certificate saying they cannot be vaccinated, and pregnant women who have a pregnancy proof certificate from authorities. All arrivals will have to be home quarantined for seven days unless they take a COVID-19 PCR test inside Kuwait that comes out negative.

As Tigray war intensifies, Ethiopia parades new army recruits (Reuters) Thousands of Ethiopian army recruits paraded in Addis Ababa on Tuesday to bid farewell before leaving for training, potential future participants in a bloody eight-month-old conflict in the north that continues to spread and intensify. The mayor’s office said 3,000 young people would join the ranks of Ethiopia’s National Defence Force (ENDF). Some recruits spoke of pride in describing their motives. Others mentioned economic need. The conflict between the central government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the party that controls the Tigray region, is spreading to other parts of northern Ethiopia, and youth from other parts of the country are joining federal forces in the fight. Fighting first broke out in Tigray in November when the government accused the TPLF of attacking military bases across the region—an accusation the group denied. The government declared victory three weeks later when it took the regional capital Mekelle, but the TPLF kept fighting and has since taken back most of Tigray.

Turn off, turn on: Simple step can thwart top phone hackers (AP) As a member of the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Angus King has reason to worry about hackers. At a briefing by security staff this year, he said he got some advice on how to help keep his cellphone secure. Step One: Turn off phone. Step Two: Turn it back on. That’s it. At a time of widespread digital insecurity it turns out that the oldest and simplest computer fix there is—turning a device off then back on again—can thwart hackers from stealing information from smartphones. Regularly rebooting phones won’t stop the army of cybercriminals or spy-for-hire firms that have sowed chaos and doubt about the ability to keep any information safe and private in our digital lives. But it can make even the most sophisticated hackers work harder to maintain access and steal data from a phone. “This is all about imposing cost on these malicious actors,” said Neal Ziring, technical director of the National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate.

[crazyintheeast]

Caity Lotz said on Twitter that she loves Americans that will vote for Biden and Americans that will vote for trump as a response to RBG's death

I am aware.  I don’t blame her for it.  She tries to see the best in people and wants to believe that they are not malicious but simply ignorant. I experience something like this all the time whenever I see someone talk about communism. I come from an country that used to be a communist dictatorship. My country and my family has suffered from communism so when I see people joking about it, calling themselves proudly communist and post that damn hammer and sickle which for a lot of us is every bit as bad as the swastika my first reaction is of course to be enraged. But with years I have calmed down and understood that they are not doing this out of malice. They don’t say this stuff, post this symbol because they support the genocide under the communist regimes and the brutal oppression of civil rights. They do it out of ignorance and because they care more about mocking and enraging conservatives then they do about the pain of those who have suffered under communism. It’s not ideal but I don’t hate them and I was a more hippy kind of person like I would probably go on similar rants about loving everybody and trying to talk to each other So yes rage and hatred feel good. Really really good. It’s easy to  imagine your people on the other side be an army of malicious, sick monsters. But the truth is that more often then not it’s not really malice but ignorance. People leave in their own echo chamber were they have a justification and deflection for every criticism. Now I personally can’t stand people like this be they Trump supporters or communists so I simply cut them off nowadays and tell them to fuck off  but if I was a better person the way Caity is I would try to meet them with love and try to get to them. To educate them So yeah the whole outrage over Caity not hating people is absolutely ridiculous and I am guessing most of this is driven by people just looking for any reason to hate on Caity

[phroyd]

American presidents lie. They always have. Just Google “Lyndon Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin,” “Bill Clinton and NAFTA” or “George Bush and weapons of mass destruction.” Even Honest Abe likely told a fib or two.

But no U.S. president has ever lied as prolifically, constantly, insidiously and dangerously as Donald Trump. He never stops. He’s the Energizer Bunny of endless falsehood.

It’s enough to make even Orwell’s head explode.

Trump, who received votes from just one in four U.S. adults in 2016, claimed that he would have won the popular vote over Hillary Clinton were it not for the voter fraud of undocumented immigrants. The alleged criminal votes were never cast.

Trump called his 2016 Electoral College victory “The biggest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan.” It was no such thing.

Trump lied about the size of his inauguration crowd even as aerial photographs of the event contradicted his boasts.

He has repeatedly and preposterously claimed that the Latinx immigrant population is full of murderers, rapists and gang members. It is not.

Trump claimed that President Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower” just before his 2016 election victory. They were not.

He claimed to have as president-elect negotiated a deal to “save 1,100 jobs” at a Carrier plant in Anderson, Ind. He did no such thing.

He absurdly concocted a terrorist attack that never occurred, in Sweden, during his first month in office.

He claimed that the head of the Boy Scouts called him to say his speech was the best ever delivered to the Boy Scouts Jamboree. No such call ever took place. Trump’s terrible oration was widely reviled.

Trump claimed to have fired James Comey because the FBI director mishandled Hillary Clinton’s email scandal prior to the 2016 election, not because he was continuing to investigate Trump and the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. That was another baldfaced lie.

He claimed that white-nationalist and neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Va., were “protesting very quietly,” and that liberal and left counter-protesters “didn’t have a [protest] permit.” False and false.

Trump laughably told oil workers in North Dakota that environmentalists “didn’t know why” they opposed the ecocidal, petro-capitalist Dakota Access and Keystone-XL pipelines. Ridiculous.

Trump lied repeatedly and viciously about the number of people who diedduring and after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

He ludicrously claimed to have led a strong federal response to the devastating storm in Puerto Rico. (He gave himself a “ten.”)

Trump absurdly claimed that his former national security adviser Michael Flynn didn’t do “anything wrong.” Flynn was later convicted for lying about his communications with the Kremlin during Trump’s presidential transition.

Trump farcically claimed that Paul Manafort never played a major role in his 2016 campaign. (Manafort chaired the Trump campaign up through the Republican National Convention that year.)

Trump falsely claimed that a Justice Department inspector general report exonerated him of collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. The report did neither of those things.

Trump ridiculously claimed that Michael Cohen was never a big player in his career or campaign. Cohen was Trump’s longstanding personal attorney and “fixer,” and he too has been convicted on federal charges.

Trump has claimed to know nothing about the illegal campaign finance payoff of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Cohen exposed that lie this summer.

After Cohen turned himself in to federal authorities, Trump said that Cohen pleaded guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that “were not crimes.” False. The violations are indeed federal crimes.

Trump unbelievably claimed not to have known that his son and son-in-law met with Russians claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton in Trump Tower in June 2016.

Trump helped concoct the White House lie that the real subject matter of that June 2016 meeting was U.S. adoption policy.

He says that China “has been attempting to interfere in the upcoming 2018 elections.” There is no evidence to support that charge.

He falsely claims to be a self-made billionaire, something that The New York Times shows to have been a lie. (His father staked his entire business.)

Trump says that he and the Republican Party passed a “middle-class” tax “reform.” He certainly knows that they enacted a plutocratic tax cut, a great windfall for big corporations and the richest 1 percent.

Trump absurdly claimed before the tax cut that “we [U.S.-Americans] pay more taxes than anybody in the world” (we don’t) and that the tax “reform” would “cost me a fortune.”

He absurdly said that “public lands will once again be available for public use” while handing over 2 million acres to private corporations for coal mining, oil drilling, uranium extraction and other environmentally disastrous industrial activities.

He falsely claimed that he was legally compelled to order a “zero tolerance” border policy last spring that separated Mexican and Central American children from their parents.

In defense of his good friends atop the absolutist, head-chopping Saudi Arabian regime (which sends kill teams to torture, kill, and vivisect dissenting journalists in foreign embassies), Trump claims that Saudis have purchased $110 billion worth of military equipment from the U.S. and that this purchase creates “five-hundred thousand jobs,” later inflated to ““1 million jobs.” ”in the U.S.  His numbers here are absurdly exaggerated.

He claims without evidence that there are “people of Middle Eastern descent” in the latest Central American migrant “caravan” moving through Mexico towards the U.S.’ southern border.

He baselessly insisted that “Democrats are paying members of the caravan to try and get into the U.S. to harm Republicans in the midterms.”

He has sent U.S. troops to guard the border on the absurd lie that the beleaguered caravan constitutes a “national emergency.”

He preposterously claims that it is the mainstream media, which he calls “the enemy of the people,” and not him that has created our current climate of hatred and violence—even as he applauds a Montana congressman for body-slamming a young reporter.

Trump’s evasion of responsibility follows a hate-filled campaign and 21 months of ax-grinding in the Oval Office that has seen him call immigrants criminal gang members, murderers and rapists, while maliciously describing his political enemies and media critics and journalists as “evil,” “low lifes,” “low IQ” and “the most dishonest people on Earth.” Along the way, the openly sexist Trump has referred to women as “animals,” “dogs,” “horse-face,” “fat” and worse. The white supremacist who killed 11 people in a Jewish synagogue last Saturday was egged into violent action by Trump’s ridiculous and hateful caravan rhetoric.

The Trump Lie Machine is going into head-spinning and soul-numbing overdrive as the midterm elections draw closer.

Trump claimed earlier this year that leftist violence will break out across the country if Democrats reclaim Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. The absurdity speaks for itself.

Trump said in Arizona recently that immigrants had illegally taken over a city council in California. The claim was complete nonsense.

Trump has recently and insanely suggested that people are “rioting” in California “to get out of Sanctuary Cities. …They’re demanding to be released from sanctuary cities.” (This may be the single craziest thing I’ve ever seen Trump claim. It is truly bizarre.)

Trump is ridiculously claiming the Democrats will kick seniors off health insurance, abolish insurance protections for people with health problems, destroy Social Security, abolish U.S. borders and (I am not making this up) give “illegal” immigrants “free cars.” That’s right: “free cars” for “illegals.”

Trump repeatedly—36 times across seven political speeches this fall—called the Democrats “radicals.” Of course, the Democrats are a deeply conservative, Big Business-friendly, imperial/pro-military, and depressingly centrist apparatus. There isn’t a single genuine radical in their entire party.

Trump says that the “new platform of the supposedly ‘radical’ Democrats is to abolish ICE” (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement). That is flatly false.

Trump lies and distorts so relentlessly and profusely that tracking and fact-checking his false statements has become a full-time job for journalists at home and abroad.

One of these journalists is Daniel Dale, the Washington bureau chief of the Toronto Star. He calculates that Lyin’ Don has made four false claims per day since being sworn into the presidency 21 months ago with his hand on the Bible.

When Dale was first assigned the Trump beat in September 2016, he found the Republican candidate “so incessantly dishonest” that his habit of twisting and inverting reality required a specific focus “separate from the day-to-day news coverage I was doing.” Dale looked forward to being “freed from this [ugly] task” of covering Trump’s persistent untruths once Hillary Clinton prevailed, as was widely expected. Trump won “and so, [he] had to continue.”

What accounts for this endless mendacity and rhetorical manipulation? Speaking to “Public” Broadcasting System “NewsHour” anchor and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Judy Woodruff last week, Dale theorized that Trump and the Republican allies and outlets who repeat his outlandish and bogus assertions want to drive media coverage and political discourse away from topics they wish to avoid—health care, the Mueller investigation and “anything else the president doesn’t want us to talk about,” such as Trump’s still unreleased tax returns, climate change and the party’s regressive tax cuts.

Dale is on to something there, no doubt, but the real meaning of the president’s Twitter-amplified Fibby Pulpit is deeper and darker than mere diversion and partisan spin. As Chris Hedges suggests in his latest book, “America: The Farewell Tour,” Trump and his party’s continuing defiance of reality suggests that the United States is sliding into “corporate totalitarianism”:

Trump and the Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are intensified by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered by politicians like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. … But Clinton did not pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none were found.

The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of ‘fake news.’ They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted them with the revoking of net neutrality. … “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed,” Hanna Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. …

The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. … Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a report that proves the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not increase the deficit – only there never was a report. … The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. … When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, and depth and profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s faith in threats and force.

Consistency is discarded. The Trump administration has cited “states’ rights” in trying to roll back federal requirements that out-of-date coal and nuclear plants be shut down, even as it endeavors to federally negate the state of California’s right to enforce comparatively stringent emission regulations.

Republican Congressional candidates run campaign commercials proclaiming their commitment to retaining the Affordable Care Act’s provision prohibiting health insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions at the same time that the GOP is viciously challengingthat provision in court.

Trump blames the nation’s bourgeois media and a timid, centrist Democratic Party for the hatred, incivility and demonization that pollute U.S. politics while he calls his opponents “evil” and celebrates violence against liberals and journalists.

It is important to understand, as Hedges does, that the Trump-led assault on veracity, evidence and our very ability to separate truth from falsehood has been able to gain traction only because a decades-long corporate coup has devastated and discredited public education, academia, organized labor and the legal and criminal justice systems. It has done all this and more while turning the Democratic Party into what the late Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin called the nation’s Inauthentic Opposition.

Think of this distinctively American “corporate-managed democracy” and “inverted totalitarianism” as the nation’s pre-existing authoritarian condition for the rise of an Amerikaner-style fascism.

In the face of what an authoritarian like Trump and his white-nationalist Republican Party have done over the last two years of one-party rule—an annulment of what’s left of the U.S. Constitution’s much-ballyhooed “checks and balances”—there’s no credible moral argument against the notion that progressives living in contested districts should choose the lesser of two evils in next week’s midterm elections. Adolph Reed Jr., Noam Chomsky and Arun Gupta’s warnings about the dangers of a Trump presidency have been richly born out. I, for one, should have paid them more heed.

Still, we on the left, what’s left of it, should nonetheless retain our capacity to be properly nauseated by a yard sign I recently saw in arch-liberal, super-blue Iowa City, Iowa. Surrounded by other, smaller signs with the names of a handful of dismal local and statewide Democratic candidates, it read “MAKE AMERICA GOOD AGAIN: Vote.”

Please. The notion that the richly bipartisan corporate totalitarianism of which Trump is the apotheosis can be reversed, and the nation made “good” simply by voting Herr Donald and the Republicans out of office is a childish fantasy.

That, too, is a Great Lie. As marchers celebrating a rare legal victory over a white supremacist U.S. police state in Democratically controlled Chicago chanted last month, “The whole damn system is guilty as Hell.” It’s the whole damn system that must be democratized from the bottom up. From the dismal dollar Democrats, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, “P”BS, Tom Steyer, the Gates Foundation, the Brookings Institution, the CFR, the Atlantic Council, the Obama and Clintons on the so-called left, to the radically reactionary Republicans, the Koch brothers, the Mercers, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Fox News, the Weekly Standard, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, Breitbart, right-wing talk radio, the Sinclair Broadcasting Co., the Federalist Society and more on the actual right, imperialism, racial inequality and class rule have brought us to this menacing pre-fascist moment.

Paul Street

ContributorPaul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban League. Street is also the author of numerous books,…

Phroyd

[atlanticcanada]

No longer sustainable for social media giants to self-police on content: Facebook

It's no longer sustainable for social media companies to self-police content and time for governments to step in, the head of public policy for Facebook Canada said Friday.

That's why the social media giant is welcoming ongoing work by the federal Liberal government to roll out a plan, Kevin Chan told the House of Commons heritage committee.

“Right now, it's private companies like Facebook that are deciding what is and isn't allowed on Facebook and we think that that doesn't sit well with many people and they want public rules where there is legitimate public and democratic accountability,” he said.

“And so to the extent that lawmakers can agree on where that line should be drawn and then impose those lines on us, I think that would be certainly welcome.”

Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault told the committee work is underway as part of a three-pronged response to the challenges that social media platforms and other major internet-based content providers pose to the ways media in Canada has been regulated, financed and policed in the past.

One part of the response is a bill currently before the House of Commons to modernize the broadcasting regime, and a second is work to address how major internet companies are taxed, and in turn how traditional media companies are financially supported.

Then there is the issue of online hate, Guilbeault said, which has been brought to the fore during the pandemic as Canadians relied on digital communications to be connected and informed.

“Unfortunately, some internet users are also exploiting these platforms maliciously, to spread hate, racism and child pornography,” he said.

“There is currently illegal content being uploaded and shared online to the detriment of Canadians and our society. This is simply unacceptable.”

The coming bill will define a regulatory framework on hate speech, child pornography and content that incites people to violence, Guilbeault said.

A regulator will be established to implement the new rules and have the power to levy fines for infractions.

Both Guilbeault and Chan's appearance at committee came amid intensifying debate over the tension between free speech on social media platforms and calls for government regulation of it, especially in light of deadly riots in the U.S. Capitol earlier this month that had been co-ordinated and facilitated by content posted on social media.

Many social media platforms, for example, disabled the accounts belonging to former U.S. president Donald Trump in the aftermath of the riots, leading to allegations they were acting out of censorship, not to protect public safety.

But the two men hadn't been called before the committee to debate those points.

Rather, they were summoned by the opposition to discuss whether it was appropriate for Facebook to have asked officials in Guilbeault's department if they knew of anyone suited for a job at the social media company.

The Opposition Conservatives and NDP alleged the incident raises concerns about whether Facebook is too close to the government at a time when rules are being considered.

Chan and Guilbeault rejected that allegation, arguing the posting had been widely available in public circles and nothing untoward had happened.

The minister chastised MPs for even raising the issue, suggesting they were trying to undermine trust in the public service in a manner that undermined democracy itself.

“Canada has a world renowned public service and it's integral that we don't attack them to try and score political points,” Guilbeault said.

“I mean, we saw on Jan. 6 where that can lead, just south of the border.”

Chan was asked whether the foreign political interference on social media that was part of recent U.S. elections was seeping into Canadian ones.

None was reported during the 2019 campaign, Chan said, but work is underway to be on guard for the next time Canada goes to the polls, though there is no reason to believe things will be different then.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 29, 2021.

Facebook funds a fellowship that supports journalism positions at The Canadian Press.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/39vD7zt

[rauthschild]

Trump Faced With “Final Option” After Supreme Court Betrayal Masks Deep State March To War

By: Sorcha Faal, 

An informative new Security Council (SC) report circulating in the Kremlin today discussing events relating to Day 40 of the election war currently raging in America, says everything occurring yesterday has best been encapsulated in the article headline “The Supreme Court Had One Last Chance To Keep The American Republic Together...It Failed”—wherein it notes the United States Supreme Court rejecting to hear a constitutional case about the election, not because it lacked merit, but rather because they nonsensically said the State of Texas “lacked standing” to file the case—and whose rejection of this case came at the same time it was revealed that a fourth federal criminal investigation has been opened against the Bidens, as well as its being discovered that Hunter Biden referred to his father and associates with Chinese energy firm as “office mates” in a 2017 email.

All which means the American people are watching in horror as their highest court appears ready to place into power a Communist Chinese corrupted socialist Biden Regime—and in response to sees Texas Republican Party chairman Allen West having just declared: “This decision establishes a precedent that says States can violate the US Constitution and not be held accountable...Perhaps law-abiding States should bond together and form a union of States that will abide by the Constitution”—and among President Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters, now sees them declaring: “As of tonight, December 11, 2020, and because of the lawlessness by the US Supreme Court. we no longer live in a functioning constitutional republic...There is no longer any controlling legal authority that is functioning in America...Every peaceful option to resolve this election has now been exhausted...The remaining options will all involve kinetic engagement...The final option now remaining to save the republic is President Trump’s “national security” option, which would mirror the actions of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War”.

Declarations, however, ill advised and premature, as this election war is far from being over—which is why this past week, the Russian Federation, through its official representative Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, issued a warning stating: “We do not contact Biden’s team and we are not going to do so…We need at the very least to wait for the official results of the US presidential election, wait for the inauguration on 20 January, and then we’ll see…We don’t want some maliciously inclined individuals and there are many of them in Washington to look for reasons for some sort of endless absolutely groundless accusations directed at us…So we will simply wait, there is plenty of time, no rush”.

A warning based on the reality that even after 20 January, this election war will likely still be raging—and is why yesterday, all of the Security Council Members strongly urged those American people REALLY wanting to know what their own government is all about, how it works and why President Trump is feared and hated, to listen to Professor Di Dongsheng, who as the vice dean of the School of International Studies at Renmin University of China describes Communist China’s influence over the “inner circle of power” in the United States—and methodically details who is actually in control of America.

And if understanding these things, would enable the American people to understand that what the Supreme Court really did yesterday was use this election case to mask what is really occurring, and if President Trump is able to stop his Deep State from unleashing total war on the world—a continuous never-ending war funded yearly by a US defense bill that has been ultimately signed into law for each of the past 59-years—but this year President Trump has vowed to veto—is a defense bill that would deny President Trump the ability to remove US military forces from overseas and return them home so no more wars can be started—and this past week, saw the Deep State garnering veto proof majorities in both the US House and US Senate to pass this war mongering defense bill over President Trump’s objections—the hypocrisy of which is stunning to behold, because this was accomplished by the exact same Republican Party lawmakers who’ve told their citizens they support President Trump, now turning around and stabbing him in the back.  [Note: Some words and/or phrases appearing in quotes in this report are English language approximations of Russian words/phrases having no exact counterpart.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=AQrXJhkdMGY&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=ChinaObserver-VisionTimes

According to this report, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov having warned earlier today that “the West is trying to sabotage the formation of multipolarity in the modern-day world”, it remains a sad fact that the greater masses of the American people still have no knowledge of what President Trump has stunningly achieved in just the past four years—which was to turn the United States away from its “unipolar” stance of global hegemony to its being a nation in acceptance of a “multipolar” reality—a multipolar stance hated and loathed by the Deep State, which is why such articles are now appearing like “MSNBC’s Report On ‘Chinese Super-Soldiers’ Proves The Shady Relationship Between The US Media And The CIA Is Alive And Well”—but to defend his “American First” multipolar policies and keep the Deep State from being able to ignite total war, sees President Trump having left to use the “final option” known as  Title 18, Section 2331(5) of the US Criminal Code, that defines “domestic terrorism” as: “activities that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population and influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion”—and most critical to know about, are federal crimes indisputably committed by both the leftist mainstream media and socialist Democrats throughout this entire election as they wholesale lied and deceived the American people into a state of unjustified terror.

As just one example of the reign of domestic terror being inflicted on the American people by the leftist media and socialist Democrats, this report concludes, is the just published Wall Street Journal article “The Restaurant Lockdown Massacre”—wherein it documents how crazed terror spreading socialist Democrat tyrants have permanently shuttered 110,000 restaurants that account for only 1.4% of the coronavirus spread, while household gatherings make up nearly 74%—and in daring to stand up to these domestic terrorists yesterday, saw famed Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams being ejected from YouTube—a domestic terrorist censorship of truth that quickly caused Harvard University constitutional attorney Professor Alan Dershowitz to post his own YouTube video and declare to these vile monsters: “I dare you to remove this video!”—and in the past few hours, saw President Trump sending out a message to his citizens telling them: “WE HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!!”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFooNHQrR9A&feature=emb_logo

[jewish-privilege]

One September weekend in 1995, a few thousand people met at a convention center in Seattle to prepare for an apocalyptic standoff with the federal government. At the expo, you could sign up to defend yourself from the coming “political and economic collapse,” stock up on beef jerky, learn strategies for tax evasion, and browse titles by writers like Eustace Mullins, whose White nationalist classics include The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, published in 1952, and—from 1967—The Biological Jew.

The sixth annual Preparedness Expo made national papers that year because it served as a clearinghouse for the militia movement, a decentralized right-wing movement of armed, local, anti-government paramilitaries that had recently sparked its most notorious act of terror, the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal courthouse by White nationalists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. A series of speakers told expo attendees the real story: the attack had been perpetrated by the government itself as an excuse to take citizens’ guns away.

Not a lot of Black folks show up at gatherings like the Preparedness Expo, one site in an extensive right-wing counterculture in which White nationalism is a constant, explosive presence. White nationalists argue that Whites are a biologically defined people and that, once the White revolutionary spirit awakens, they will take down the federal government, remove people of color, and build a state (maybe or maybe not still called the United States of America, depending on who you ask) of their own. As a Black man, I am regarded by White nationalists as a subhuman, dangerous beast. In the 1990s, I was the field organizer for the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment, a six-state coalition working to reduce hate crimes and violence in the Pacific Northwest and Mountain States region. We did a lot of primary research, often undercover. A cardinal rule of organizing is that you can’t ask people to do anything you haven’t done yourself; so I spent that weekend as I spent many—among people plotting to remove me from their ethnostate.

It helped that, despite its blood-curdling anti-Black racism, at least some factions of the White nationalist movement saw me as a potential ally against their true archenemy. At the expo that year, a guy warily asked me about myself. I told him that I had come on behalf of a few brothers in the city. We needed to resist the federal government and we were there to get educated. I said I hoped he wouldn’t take it personally, but I didn’t shake hands with White people. He smiled; he totally understood. “Brother McLamb,” he concurred, “says we have to start building broad coalitions.” Together we went to hear Jack McLamb, a retired Phoenix cop who ran an organization called Police Against the New World Order, make a case for temporary alliances with “the Blacks, the Mexicans, the Orientals” against the real enemy, the federal government controlled by an international conspiracy. He didn’t have to say who ran this conspiracy because it was obvious to all in attendance. And despite the widespread tendency to dismiss antisemitism, notwithstanding its daily presence across the country and the world, it is obvious to you, too.

From the time I documented my first White nationalist rally in 1990 until today, the movement has made its way from the margins of American political life to its center, and I’ve moved from doing antiracist organizing in small northwestern communities to fighting for inclusive democracy on a national level, as the Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice program officer at the Ford Foundation until recently, and now as a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Yet if I had to give a basic definition of the movement—something I’ve often been asked to do, formally and informally, by folks who’ve spent less time hanging out with Nazis than I have—my response today would not be much different than it was when I began to do this work nearly thirty years ago. American White nationalism, which emerged in the wake of the 1960s civil rights struggle and descends from White supremacism, is a revolutionary social movement committed to building a Whites-only nation, and antisemitism forms its theoretical core.

...The meteoric rise of White nationalism within national discourse over the course of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and freshman administration—through Trump’s barely coded speech at fascist-style rallies, his support from the internet-based “Alt Right,” and his placement of White nationalist popularizers in top positions—has produced a shock of revelation for people across a wide swath of the political spectrum. This shock, in turn, has been a source of frustration within communities of color and leftist circles, where White liberals are often accused of having kept their heads in the sand while more vulnerable populations sounded the alarm about the toll of economic crisis, mass incarceration, police violence, deportation, environmental devastation, and—despite and in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—the unending blare of everyday hate. This is an understandable reaction. It’s one I’ve often shared. But the fact that many of us have long recognized that the country we live in is not the one we are told exists doesn’t mean we always understand the one that does. Within social and economic justice movements committed to equality, we have not yet collectively come to terms with the centrality of antisemitism to White nationalist ideology, and until we do we will fail to understand this virulent form of racism rapidly growing in the U.S. today.

To recognize that antisemitism is not a sideshow to racism within White nationalist thought is important for at least two reasons. First, it allows us to identify the fuel that White nationalist ideology uses to power its anti-Black racism, its contempt for other people of color, and its xenophobia—as well as the misogyny and other forms of hatred it holds dear. White nationalists in the United States perceive the country as having plunged into unending crisis since the social ruptures of the 1960s supposedly dispossessed White people of their very nation. The successes of the civil rights movement created a terrible problem for White supremacist ideology. White supremacism—inscribed de jure by the Jim Crow regime and upheld de facto outside the South—had been the law of the land, and a Black-led social movement had toppled the political regime that supported it. How could a race of inferiors have unseated this power structure through organizing alone? For that matter, how could feminists and LGBTQ people have upended traditional gender relations, leftists mounted a challenge to global capitalism, Muslims won billions of converts to Islam? How do you explain the boundary-crossing allure of hip hop? The election of a Black president? Some secret cabal, some mythological power, must be manipulating the social order behind the scenes. This diabolical evil must control television, banking, entertainment, education, and even Washington, D.C. It must be brainwashing White people, rendering them racially unconscious.

What is this arch-nemesis of the White race, whose machinations have prevented the natural and inevitable imposition of white supremacy? It is, of course, the Jews. Jews function for today’s White nationalists as they often have for antisemites through the centuries: as the demons stirring an otherwise changing and heterogeneous pot of lesser evils. At the turn of the twentieth century, “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”—a forgery, first circulated by Czarist secret police in Russia in 1903, that purports to represent the minutes of a meeting of the international Jewish conspiracy—established the blueprint of antisemitic ideology in its modern form. It did this by recasting the shape-shifting, money-grubbing caricature of the Jew from a religious caricature to a racialized one. Upper-class Jews in Europe might have been assimilating and changing their names, but under the new regime of antisemitic thought, even a Jew who converted to Christianity would still be a Jew.

In 1920, Henry Ford brought the “Protocols” to the United States, printing half a million copies of an adaptation called “The International Jew,” and the text has had a presence in American life ever since. (Walmart stocked copies on its shelves and for a time refused calls to take them down—in 2004.) But it is over the past fifty years, not coincidentally the first period in U.S. history in which most American Jews have regarded themselves as White, that antisemitism has become integral to the architecture of American racism. Because modern antisemitic ideology traffics in fantasies of invisible power, it thrives precisely when its target would seem to be least vulnerable. Thus, in places where Jews were most assimilated—France at the time of the Dreyfus affair, Germany before Hitler came to power—they have functioned as a magic bullet to account for unaccountable contradictions at moments of national crisis. White supremacism through the collapse of Jim Crow was a conservative movement centered on a state-sanctioned anti-Blackness that sought to maintain a racist status quo. The White nationalist movement that evolved from it in the 1970s was a revolutionary movement that saw itself as the vanguard of a new, whites-only state. This latter movement, then and now, positions Jews as the absolute other, the driving force of white dispossession—which means the other channels of its hatred cannot be intercepted without directly taking on antisemitism.

This brings me to the second reason that White nationalist antisemitism must not be dismissed: at the bedrock of the movement is an explicit claim that Jews are a race of their own, and that their ostensible position as White folks in the U.S. represents the greatest trick the devil ever played. ... Contemporary antisemitism, then, does not just enable racism, it also is racism, for in the White nationalist imaginary Jews are a race—the race—that presents an existential threat to Whiteness. Moreover, if antisemitism exists in glaring form at the extreme edge of political discourse, it does not exist in a vacuum; as with every form of hateful ideology, what is explicit on the margins is implicit in the center, in ways we have not yet begun to unpack. 

...What I learned when I got to Oregon, as I began to log untold hours trying to understand White nationalists and their ideas, was that antisemitism was the lynchpin of the White nationalist belief system. That within this ideological matrix, Jews—despite and indeed because of the fact that they often read as White—are a different, unassimilable, enemy race that must be exposed, defeated, and ultimately eliminated. Antisemitism, I discovered, is a particular and potent form of racism so central to White supremacy that Black people would not win our freedom without tearing it down.

...The White nationalist movement that emerged in the last decades of the twentieth century grew across the country. But it was Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming that neonazis in the 1980s carved out as the territorial boundaries of their future Whites-only state, a region that self-identified “Aryans” from around the country began to colonize with nothing short of White national sovereignty as their goal. “Ourselves alone willing,” declared White nationalist leader and Aryan Nations organizer Robert Miles, “we shall begin to form the new nation even while in the suffocating embrace of the ZOG.” In White nationalist parlance, the United States is the ZOG, or Zionist Occupied Government. It was in the Northwest that the nascent militia movement—notorious in the 1990s after standoffs between White nationalist compounds and the FBI in Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas—declared war on their country loudly enough they could no longer be ignored.

...When folks ask me, skeptically, where the antisemitism in the White nationalist movement lies, it can feel like being asked to point out a large elephant in a small room. From the outset of my research on White nationalism all those years ago, it was clear that antisemitism in the movement is everywhere, and it is not hidden. “Life is uglier and uglier these days, more and more Jewish,” William Pierce wrote in The Turner Diaries. “No matter how long it takes us and no matter to what lengths we must go, we’ll demand a final settlement of the account between our two races,” the narrator promises at the book’s conclusion. “If the Organization survives this contest, no Jew will—anywhere. We’ll go to the uttermost ends of the earth to hunt down the last of Satan’s spawn.” White nationalism is a fractious countercultural social movement, and its factions often disagree with each other about basic questions of theory and practice. The movement does not take a single, unified position on the Jewish question. But antisemitism has been a throughline from the Posse Comitatus, which set itself against “anti-Christ Jewry”; to David Duke’s refurbished Ku Klux Klan, which abandoned anti-Catholicism in the 1970s in order to focus on “Jewish supremacism”; to the neonazi group The Order, inspired by The Turner Diaries, which in the mid-1980s went on a rampage of robberies and synagogue bombings in Washington state and murdered a Jewish radio talk show host in Denver; to evangelical leaders like Pat Robertson who denounced antisemitism but used its popularity among their followers to promote an implicitly White supremacist “Christian nationalism”; to the contemporary Alt Right named by White nationalist Richard Spencer, which has brought antisemitic thought and imagery to new audiences on the internet—and now at White House press conferences.

...Over years of speaking about White nationalism in the 1990s and early 2000s in the Northwest and then the Midwest and South, I found that audiences—whether white or of color, at synagogues or churches, universities or police trainings—generally had a relationship to white nationalism that, at least in one basic sense, was like my own. They knew the scope and seriousness of the movement from personal experience, and—if they didn’t take this for granted to begin with—they were not shocked to discover its antisemitic emphasis. The resistance I have encountered when I address antisemitism has primarily come since I moved to the Northeast seven years ago, and from the most established progressive antiracist leaders, organizations, coalitions, and foundations around the country. It is here that a well-meaning but counterproductive thicket of discourse has grown up insisting that Jews—of Ashkenazi descent, at least—are uncontestably White, and that to challenge this is to deny the workings of White privilege. In other words, when I’m asked, “Where is the antisemitism?,” what I am often really being asked is, “Why should we be talking about antisemitism?”

...I can answer this question as I have been doing and will continue to do: antisemitism fuels White nationalism, a genocidal movement now enthroned in the highest seats of American power, and fighting antisemitism cuts off that fuel for the sake of all marginalized communities under siege from the Trump regime and the social movement that helped raise it up. To refuse to deal with any ideology of domination, moreover, is to abet it. Contemporary social justice movements are quite clear that to refuse antiracism is an act of racism; to refuse feminism is an act of sexism. To refuse opposition to antisemitism, likewise, is an act of antisemitism. Arguably, not much more should need to be said than that. But I suspect that much more does need to be said. To the hovering question, why should we be talking about antisemitism, I reply, what is it we are afraid we will find out if we do? What historic and contemporary conflicts will be laid bare? And if we recognize that White privilege really is privilege, what will it mean for Jewish antiracists to give up the fantasy that they ever really had it to begin with?

...A central insistence of antiracist thought over the past several decades is that, as with any social category produced by regimes of power, you don’t choose race, power chooses it for you; it names you. This is why all the well-meaning identification in the world does not make a White person Black. Likewise, as much as I draw inspiration from the Jewish community, and as much as I adore my Jewish partner and friends, it was my organizing against antisemitism as a Black antiracist that first pulled me to the Jewish community, not the other way around. I developed an analysis of antisemitism because I wanted to smash White supremacy; because I wanted to be free. If we acknowledge that White nationalism clearly and forcefully names Jews as non-white, and did so in the very fiber of its emergence as a post-civil rights right-wing revolutionary movement, then we are forced to recognize our own ignorance about the country  we thought we lived in. It is time to have that conversation.

Read Eric K. Ward’s full article at Political Research Associates. It is long but amazing and important.

[militant-holy-knight]

When Libtards Take the Terrorist Side

Leftists used to champion women and LGBT’s rights. How long until they are okay with wife-beating, hand-chopping, child marriage, FGM, slavery and polyandry?

I used to believe that those in the PC culture sphere that identify themselves as “democrats”, “Labour”, “liberals”, “leftists”, “communists” or whatever that have consistently rebuked anyone who dares to criticize Islam have done so out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness mixed with ignorance. But at this point, we can’t remain blind anymore that some self-described “liberals” are now malicious in their intent, and makes me wonder if the same Left who used to champion women’s and LGBT rights will soon say its fine for Muslims to throw gays off buildings, for women to cover themselves up or they will be splashed with acid, for Christians to pay protection money or be crucified.

I am not necessarily putting the “Left” or “Muslims” as a whole under the same blanket, I will get to this later on, but I refer to an specific alliance between far-left activists with a genocidal hatred for anything “conservative” (anything to their right-wing, including liberals who disagree with them) and those who genuinely believe ISIS was completely justified and they want to repeat the same process in the West. And worse, this rot is seeped deep into politics for anyone who sees it. The more recent examples I could think of are:

A Canadian resolution that would have recognized the persecution of Assyrians, Yazidis and Shias by ISIS as genocide was blocked by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. 

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has consistently called terrorist organizations like Hamas as “friends”. Hamas is an terrorist organization dedicated in turning Israel into a Islamic state and has systematically implemented Shariah law in the Gaza Strip.

Muslim Labour member Aysegul Gurbuz have been suspended praising Hitler on Twitter.

Linda Sarsour is an activist that has been embraced by American feminists for criticizing Donald Trump but has a history of promoting Sharia law and saying Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Her fellow Women’s March Tamika Malory got into hot water for praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and refusing to say Israel has a right to exist.

Iranian feminist Masih Alinejad condemned female SJWs for using the hijab in solidarity after campaigning so hard to be free in the Iranian regime.

Despite factual evidence to the contrary, ABC��s Matthew Douwd believes Muslims in America are far persecuted far more than Christians worldwide.

That last point is the key issue the Western left has when it comes to perspective. Recent statistics show that liberals seem to be completely divorced from reality when comparing the genocide of Christians in the Islamic world when compared to the “persecution” of Muslims in the West.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of Democrats, however, believe most Muslims in this country [America] are mistreated, a view shared by only 22% of Republicans and 39% of voters not affiliated with either major party. Fewer Democrats (47%) think most Christians are mistreated in the Islamic world, compared to 76% of GOP voters and 64% of unaffiliateds...Women are more likely than men to think most American Muslims are mistreated here but less likely to believe Christians are mistreated in the Islamic world. Nearly as many voters under 40 think most Muslims are mistreated in America (51%) as think most Christians are mistreated in the Muslim world (57%).

It's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of Muslims persecuting Christians are not "terrorists" (at least not formally), but rather come from all rungs of Muslim society. Take Egypt, for example (the 17th worst nation according to Open Doors, an organization that tracks persecution of Christians world wide). According to the report, along with "violent religious groups," two other segments of society are "very strong[ly]" responsible for the persecution:  

"non-Christian religious leaders" — meaning Muslim clerics, sheikhs, imams, and the rest — "at any level from local to national" 

"normal citizens (people from the general public), including mobs."

Similarly, "officials at any level from local to national" are "strongly responsible" for the "oppression" of Egypt's Christians, particularly "through their failure to vindicate the rights of Christians and also through their discriminatory acts which violate the fundamental rights of Christians." Now, compare all this to the supposedly worse — in liberal minds — "mistreatment" Muslims suffer in America. According to a November 2017 Pew report: "In 2016, there were 127 reported [Muslim] victims of aggravated or simple assault." In the preceding decades, assaults on Muslims averaged around 50 a year.

Even if this number were accurate, it pales in comparison to what millions of Christians — not 127 — are experiencing under Islam. But the fact is many of these anti-Muslim hate crimes are later found to have been fabricated or grossly exaggerated. Note, for instance, how the Pew report conflates "assaults" with "simple assaults" — even though the latter "does not involve physical contact with the victim."

Moreover, Muslims in America do not experience institutionalized persecution — that is, persecution at the hands of governments, authorities, and police — as Christians under Islam do...Nonetheless... all these actual facts have little to do with what a significantly large segment of the American voting population — mostly liberals and Democrats... believe. Why they are so misinformed becomes apparent when one understands that the liberal media is dedicated to maintaining liberal narratives at all costs: in this case, that Christians are always the aggressors, while Muslims always the misunderstood victims.

Hamed Abdel Samad is an Egyptian political scientist and a former Muslim who made a scathing remark about the Western left when it came to cuddling up to Islam:

"The beginnings of the European left included principles like criticism of religion… Karl Marx was the first leftist, and he said that religion was the opium of the people. The left founded feminism and fought for women's liberation. Nobody fought for freedom of expression more than the left. The left said that nobody is above the law, and that nobody – not Moses, nor Jesus, the queen, the king, or any celebrity – is above criticism. They criticized, drew [cartoons], and made comedies about all of them. Nobody defended homosexuals more than the left, and the same is true of women's rights. But when it comes to Islam, the left morphs into the conservative right. You can draw [cartoons] of Jesus, of Moses, of anybody, but don’t draw Muhammad, because that's racism… Why is it racism? When you say that the immigrants have problems in their neighborhood, the [left] says: 'Don’t talk about the immigrants. They are victims of the West.' Man, the [immigrants] are killing one another. Their neighborhoods have become dreadful. No, you cannot criticize the immigrants, or else you are labeled racist and Islamophobic. They picked up the term 'Islamophobia' from the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, and they keep talking about Islamophobia all the time.”

"In Denmark, when a Muslim kid comes to school with bruises on his face or neck, nobody says anything. They leave him alone. But if they see bruises on a white Danish kid, they report it to the police and the social services, so that they will come and investigate his family. But when the Muslims beat their kids, it is viewed as part of their culture. This is a despicable leftist approach. I call it the racism of low expectations. They look at a Muslim and say: He will never be like us. He cannot be expected to uphold human rights, to accept criticism, or to accept dissenting views. They view Muslims as barbaric savages. I saw to my Muslim brothers: Don't be pleased that these people are defending you. They are looking down on you. It's true that I myself criticize you and your religion, but I respect you and your intellect. I want you to be better and to gain your rights. I don't want you to be satisfied by someone who pats you on the back.” (...)

"The [leftists] have a psychological complex towards their Western countries. They hate capitalism. They hate America. They hate the West. They see the West as the worst thing in the world, and they embrace and defend anything that is anti-West. They always wanted to defend the working class, but there are no working classes in the world anymore. (...)

With the working class gone, the leftists were looking for someone to defend, so they got us the 'Third World' – our beloved people of the 'Third World,' who are persecuted by colonialism, imperialism, and whatnot… Bring me a 'Third World' to defend… But the 'Third World' is no longer what it used to be, and nobody uses that phrase, so along came the immigrants, especially the Muslims ones. They come to the West... How nice! Come, I will defend you. Be quiet, and let me defend you. Don't say a word, and I will get you your rights. Some Syrian refugees who come here to Germany are young and eager to work and learn German. They want to make something of themselves before it's too late. They know that things in Germany might change, and they would be sent back, just like that. If economic or political conditions change, or if a right-wing party comes to power… So the young want to start… But you see that the leftists who help them say to them: 'You are still traumatized. You are still affected by the war.' Traumatized? They want to work. But they are told it’s not time yet. They want to keep them in the role of the victim. They want to keep them in a jar or in a zoo cage, like monkeys.

"This is the left that deals with the Muslims. These leftists defend the hijab and make a hijab-clad Barbie doll. The leftists are very happy, even though the company did it for gain: 'How wonderful. They made a Barbie doll!' I will dedicate an episode of my show to this subject. I will talk about how they are promoting the hijab in Europe these days. In the past, they would say that the hijab represents modesty. But the Muslim Brotherhood realized the West would not go for that modesty business, so they changed their rhetoric. They began to say that the hijab symbolizes freedom, self-determination, and emancipation. Now they are saying that the hijab means empowerment of women. Seriously?! The hijab means empowerment of women? To hell with this deception. And the leftists willingly buy anything the Muslim Brotherhood sells them. They are oppressed… They are all victims of the West… I should dedicate an entire episode to this psychological issue. The European left has created a hierarchy of victims. The best victims are the victims of the West, of Israel, of imperialism, and of capitalism. But a Muslim who kills his wife is a 'poor little thing'… The West drove him to this…

"When a terrorist says in his message that he is killing infidels because he was told to do so by the Prophet and the Quran, and that he must cleanse the land from abomination and corruption, and he even quotes Quranic verses in support of his point of view – the leftists say to him: 'No, you didn’t do it because of your religion. You are marginalized. You are a victim of the West. You are a victim of racism. You are a victim of colonialism. You probably applied for a job and was rejected by the West. You must have tried to become part of society, but was rejected.' [The terrorist himself] cites the Prophet Muhammad and the Quran as the reason, and in his last testimony, he writes that he did it because of his religion, because he wants to break bread with the Prophet Muhammad in Paradise… But it’s to no avail. The left has him pegged as a victim. For the leftists, any Muslim or African is a victim of the West. That's pure racism. It means that they do not see Muslims or Africans as people responsible for their own lives. No, the leftists want someone to defend. They like to play the role of the advocate. They have a sort of 'mother complex' and want to protect someone – even if it is from the leftists themselves."

It hasn’t been no surprise that our biggest academic institutions have been funded by Saudi petro-dollars, which gave an open space for Islamists to infiltrate it and disseminate their ideology. The most moderate liberals are usually indoctrinated into believing that past Islamic societies were more advanced and progressive than the European West, which is why they frame things that we would consider discriminatory like the jizya and dhimmitude as some kind of enviable status where religious minorities are protected and respected when it was factually untrue.

The most shrewd of these far-leftists see this as an game against their political opponents and Islamists like Muslim Brotherhood members make the more natural allies since they share one thing in common: being control freaks. They work side by side to ensure their power base, say liberal memes in public to rally the useful idiots and the public with their media as propaganda arm. This way they can hope to get people they disagree with de-platformed, silenced or maybe even killed.

Case in point, Islamist apologist (and possible terrorist sympathizer) Omar Aziz has recently penned an article in response to the Christchurch attack denouncing atheist author Sam Harris for having emboldened the NZ terrorist into carrying out his attack. Harris pointed out that Aziz’s article is dishonest because he is aware of Harris’ political positions as someone who opposes fascism and identity politics of any kind, yet writes such an article wasn’t tailored at refuting his points, but to discredit him in the eyes of the masses who don’t know anything about Harris. Aziz is even more dishonest by the fact the terrorist manifesto doesn’t mention Harris once the whole time, but since the public will be discouraged from reading it (and it constitutes as an crime in New Zealand), its very fortunate into misleading the audience.

The most frustrating thing about this is that Muslims and liberals themselves that disagree with the collective are rebuked and persecuted by their own rather than by “the other side”. I can’t keep keep track of the number of Muslim reformers (adherents or atheists) that are criticized by the left such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Maajid Nawaz, Mohammed Tawhidi, Ed Hussein, Zineb El Rhazoui or Tarek Fatah, I don’t even dare Google them to see what is the latest hit piece written by some leftist retard. On a even more serious note, some of these might actually have their lives in danger.

Zineb El Rhazoui was a writer in the Charlie Hebdo magazine who survived the 2015 massacre due to receiving a Holiday extension and being at her home in Casablanca when the attack took place where twelve of her friends were killed including Charb. After the massacre, extensive security routines became a part of Rhazoui's life. She avoids eating at restaurants, taking the train and later moving from place to place because Islamists have issued fatwas calling for her death. 

Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali used to be a Dutch politician before having to move out of the country after her close friend Theo van Gogh was assassinated by a Moroccan Islamist for making a movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies.  Considering that two years before van Gogh’s death, Dutch politician Pym Fortuin (a gay Catholic mind you) was also assassinated by an jihadist, Ali’s safety could not be ensured in the Netherlands and she had to flee. 

Tarek Fatah is a liberal Indian Muslim who advocates for secularism, gay rights, opposes shariah law and other things. He regularly clashes with Canada’s Muslim community and in 2017, has been nearly assassinated by a man hired by Muslim mafioso Dawood Ibrahim.

Rather than drawing condemnation for, the left has been at best silent or ignorant, or at worse unsympathetic if not downright cheerleading for their deaths to happen:

When van Gogh was killed, Rohan Jayasekera made light of his death for “overusing his freedom of speech” to criticize Muslims (yet, Jayasekera gave a platform for Holocaust denier David Irving).

Former Charlie Hebdo employee Oliver Cyran said his former employees brought their deaths on themselves and also accused Rhazoui of being anti-Muslim racist, without revealing her name or gender to give the impression everyone in Hebdo were all white bigots. She further goes to own him by saying that (from Wikipedia):   

if she were raped "the websites that posted your article will definitely say I was asking for it because I don’t respect Islam," she observed that Cyran himself had implicitly endorsed all of this by embracing the "whole moralizing discourse about how one must 'respect Islam,' as demanded by the Islamists, who do not ask whether Islam respects other religions, or other people.”

How are we supposed to expect the people to uphold liberalism that can’t even protect their own free-thinkers and politicians who dare to speak out against Islamic radicalism, are going to protect the average individual. I live in Brazil where no-go areas are a sad reality of our lives, but when I look at what happens in places like Europe (specifically Sweden), I get terrified. Our drug dealers are really crazy, but none are willing to go as far as carrying out bomb attacks or are that much in a rush to get into Heaven.

And if you think the creation of Islamic states backed by the Left is unlikely, you are sorely mistaken. Islam makes up only 3% of the population in the USA, mostly concentrated in Minnesotta, yet the local politicians want to enforce blasphemy laws in response to the Christchurch attack. Minnesotta, the same state where Ilhan Omar came from and is buddies with Linda Sarsour. The people reading this and believing it to be pure paranoia would have been shitting bricks if a evangelical Christian conservative was making similar prepositions. 

The first people hurt by this of course will be liberals themselves; surely they have already been. Maria Ladenburger for example was the daughter of an top European Union official who was raped and drowned by an Afghan asylum seeker who was already arrested before for trying to rape a Greek woman and admitted in prison to have raped a girl in Iran even before that. More recently, two Scandinavian girls Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and Maren Ueland were beheaded while in a trip to Morocco by ISIS militants. Several people on the far-right were specially unsympathetic, specially in the latter case it surfaced  that the girls were pro-migrants themselves.

It’s easy for certain heartless individuals on the right-wing to say “they had it coming” or “burn the coal? Pay the toll” with glee, but this is an symptom of Western liberal pampering where women in particular are raised to believe everyone will be as open-minded as they were. Even though Morocco is sure a nice to place to visit, its far from an ideal place to live if you are a Christian, a woman or specially a Scandinavian liberal. I’ve seen Scandinavians saying that liberal virtue-signalling is just an natural and innocent thing to do in their countries in order to fit in better. 

I am sad to say that its not just exclusive to Scandinavia. Ever since 9/11, vast portions of the Western Left have disgraced themselves by their failure to acknowledge the threats posed to security and social cohesion by radical and fundamentalist Islam, and a craven willingness to align with Islamists in opposition to American foreign policy, entangled in an obscurantist web of moral relativity, postcolonial theory, identity politics, anti-Zionism, and general moral confusion. Even back then, many leftist ideologues argued that the World Trade Center attack was a “justified” action because of the USA for supporting Israel and their actions in the Gulf War, never mind those weren’t related - bin Laden repeatedly used the sactions against Iraq to rally Muslims against the West but never had any love for Saddam Hussein and Ba’athism. The most infamous incident was an essay made by Ward Churchill where he basically called the 9/11 victims “little Eichemanns” (in reference to Adolf Eichemann, one of the architects of the Holocaust) because they were bureaucrats working for the “genocide in the Middle-East”. Not a very wise move.

I am for one sick and tired of their collusion, but I am afraid this won’t be the last time I write about such topic. While the outrage against Brunei applying sharia law appears to show that liberals will draw a line at somewhere, I don’t think this will amount to anything and I personally find their outrage hypocritical. I close this off with something for you to ponder: if you think the Muslims you know personally are moderates just ask them if they would like Sharia law to be legally enforced, then you will discover the truth about how moderate they claim to be.

[endenogatai]

Will online privacy make a comeback in 2020?

Last year was a landmark for online privacy in many ways, with something of a consensus emerging that consumers deserve protection from the companies that sell their attention and behavior for profit.

The debate now is largely around how to regulate platforms, not whether it needs to happen.

The consensus among key legislators acknowledges that privacy is not just of benefit to individuals but can be likened to public health; a level of protection afforded to each of us helps inoculate democratic societies from manipulation by vested and vicious interests.

The fact that human rights are being systematically abused at population-scale because of the pervasive profiling of Internet users — a surveillance business that’s dominated in the West by tech giants Facebook and Google, and the adtech and data broker industry which works to feed them — was the subject of an Amnesty International report in November 2019 that urges legislators to take a human rights-based approach to setting rules for Internet companies.

“It is now evident that the era of self-regulation in the tech sector is coming to an end,” the charity predicted.

Democracy disrupted

The dystopian outgrowth of surveillance capitalism was certainly in awful evidence in 2019, with elections around the world attacked at cheap scale by malicious propaganda that relies on adtech platforms’ targeting tools to hijack and skew public debate, while the chaos agents themselves are shielded from democratic view.

Platform algorithms are also still encouraging Internet eyeballs towards polarized and extremist views by feeding a radicalized, data-driven diet that panders to prejudices in the name of maintaining engagement — despite plenty of raised voices calling out the programmed antisocial behavior. So what tweaks there have been still look like fiddling round the edges of an existential problem.

Worse still, vulnerable groups remain at the mercy of online hate speech which platforms not only can’t (or won’t) weed out, but whose algorithms often seem to deliberately choose to amplify — the technology itself being complicit in whipping up violence against minorities. It’s social division as a profit-turning service.

The outrage-loving tilt of these attention-hogging adtech giants has also continued directly influencing political campaigning in the West this year — with cynical attempts to steal votes by shamelessly platforming and amplifying misinformation.

From the Trump tweet-bomb we now see full-blown digital disops underpinning entire election campaigns, such as the UK Conservative Party’s strategy in the 2019 winter General Election, which featured doctored videos seeded to social media and keyword targeted attack ads pointing to outright online fakes in a bid to hack voters’ opinions.

Political microtargeting divides the electorate as a strategy to conquer the poll. The problem is it’s inherently anti-democratic.

No wonder, then, that repeat calls to beef up digital campaigning rules and properly protect voters’ data have so far fallen on deaf ears. The political parties all have their hands in the voter data cookie-jar. Yet it’s elected politicians whom we rely upon to update the law. This remains a grave problem for democracies going into 2020 — and a looming U.S. presidential election.

So it’s been a year when, even with rising awareness of the societal cost of letting platforms suck up everyone’s data and repurpose it to sell population-scale manipulation, not much has actually changed. Certainly not enough.

Yet looking ahead there are signs the writing is on the wall for the ‘data industrial complex’ — or at least that change is coming. Privacy can make a comeback.

Adtech under attack

Developments in late 2019 such as Twitter banning all political ads and Google shrinking how political advertisers can microtarget Internet users are notable steps — even as they don’t go far enough.

But it’s also a relatively short hop from banning microtargeting sometimes to banning profiling for ad targeting entirely.

*Very* big news last night in internet political ads. @Google’s plan to eliminate #microtargeting is a move that – if done right – could help make internet political advertising a force that informs and inspires us, rather than isolating and inflaming us.

1/9

— Ellen L Weintraub (@EllenLWeintraub) November 21, 2019

Alternative online ad models (contextual targeting) are proven and profitable — just ask search engine DuckDuckGo . While the ad industry gospel that only behavioral targeting will do now has academic critics who suggest it offer far less uplift than claimed, even as — in Europe — scores of data protection complaints underline the high individual cost of maintaining the status quo.

Startups are also innovating in the pro-privacy adtech space (see, for example, the Brave browser).

Changing the system — turning the adtech tanker — will take huge effort, but there is a growing opportunity for just such systemic change.

This year, it might be too much to hope for regulators get their act together enough to outlaw consent-less profiling of Internet users entirely. But it may be that those who have sought to proclaim ‘privacy is dead’ will find their unchecked data gathering facing death by a thousand regulatory cuts.

Or, tech giants like Facebook and Google may simple outrun the regulators by reengineering their platforms to cloak vast personal data empires with end-to-end encryption, making it harder for outsiders to regulate them, even as they retain enough of a fix on the metadata to stay in the surveillance business. Fixing that would likely require much more radical regulatory intervention.

European regulators are, whether they like it or not, in this race and under major pressure to enforce the bloc’s existing data protection framework. It seems likely to ding some current-gen digital tracking and targeting practices. And depending on how key decisions on a number of strategic GDPR complaints go, 2020 could see an unpicking — great or otherwise — of components of adtech’s dysfunctional ‘norm’.

Among the technologies under investigation in the region is real-time bidding; a system that powers a large chunk of programmatic digital advertising.

The complaint here is it breaches the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) because it’s inherently insecure to broadcast granular personal data to scores of entities involved in the bidding chain.

A recent event held by the UK’s data watchdog confirmed plenty of troubling findings. Google responded by removing some information from bid requests — though critics say it does not go far enough. Nothing short of removing personal data entirely will do in their view, which sums to ads that are contextually (not micro)targeted.

Powers that EU data protection watchdogs have at their disposal to deal with violations include not just big fines but data processing orders — which means corrective relief could be coming to take chunks out of data-dependent business models.

As noted above, the adtech industry has already been put on watch this year over current practices, even as it was given a generous half-year grace period to adapt.

In the event it seems likely that turning the ship will take longer. But the message is clear: change is coming. The UK watchdog is due to publish another report in 2020, based on its review of the sector. Expect that to further dial up the pressure on adtech.

Web browsers have also been doing their bit by baking in more tracker blocking by default. And this summer Marketing Land proclaimed the third party cookie dead — asking what’s next?

Alternatives and workarounds will and are springing up (such as stuffing more in via first party cookies). But the notion of tracking by background default is under attack if not quite yet coming unstuck.

Ireland’s DPC is also progressing on a formal investigation of Google’s online Ad Exchange. Further real-time bidding complaints have been lodged across the EU too. This is an issue that won’t be going away soon, however much the adtech industry might wish it.

Year of the GDPR banhammer?

2020 is the year that privacy advocates are really hoping that Europe will bring down the hammer of regulatory enforcement. Thousands of complaints have been filed since the GDPR came into force but precious few decisions have been handed down. Next year looks set to be decisive — even potentially make or break for the data protection regime.

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[tomperanteau]

New article has been published on The Daily Digest

New article has been published on http://www.thedailydigest.org/2018/10/28/jewish-rabbi-shmuley-condemns-biden-obama-after-pittsburgh-mass-shooting-at-synagogue-video/

Jewish Rabbi Shmuley Condemns Biden, Obama after Pittsburgh Mass Shooting at Synagogue (VIDEO)

On Saturday morning Trump-hating Nazi Robert Bowers walked into the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue and opened fire.

Eleven Jews were murdered in the vicious attack.

Immediately after the mass shooting where 11 Jews were killed in cold blood former Vice President Joe Biden released a statement blaming President Trump for giving a “safe harbor” to hatred.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach condemned Biden’s statements this morning and blasted the Obama administration for legitimizing the Jew-hating Iranian regime.

Rabbi Shmuley: Hatred of the Jews it springs up almost anywhere and everywhere. It’s the world’s oldest most insidious, most malicious hatred. But what we dare [READ MORE HERE]

[oldguardaudio]

Joan Swirsky Explains 🔥 Obama’s Bunker Festers in The Swamp

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http://canadafreepress.com/article/obamas-bunker-festers-in-the-swamp

Obama’s Bunker Festers in The Swamp

By Joan Swirsky —— Bio and Archives—February 4, 2018

Once upon a time, a seasoned political operative ran for President of the United States against a candidate who had virtually no political experience.

She––Democrat Ms. Hillary Clinton––former First Lady of Arkansas, former First Lady of the United States, former U.S. Senator from New York, former Secretary of State under the faux “president” Barack Obama, was clearly the favorite.

Her opponent––Republican Mr. Donald J. Trump––the billionaire builder who lived in the American version of the Palace of Versailles in Manhattan and in several other resplendent homes around the country and the world, who hosted two wildly successful TV shows, who owned casinos and built golf courses and was a favorite of tabloid magazines, and who had been lionized and courted by the Hollywood crowd, the media whores, and both Democrats and Republicans for his generous contributions, was the clear loser.

Ha ha ha sputtered the political experts. The idea that this neophyte, this (pardon the expression) capitalist could go up against a representative of the outgoing Big Government regime––which brought us socialized medicine (Obamacare) and socialized education (Common Core) and 94-million unemployed Americans and strangulating regulations and horrific trade deals and a foreign policy that bowed deeply to our enemies and spit in the faces of our faithful allies––well that just struck the experts as preposterous.

With the powerful Clinton Machine behind her, the endorsement of the outgoing faux “president,” the immense help of rigged-election experts like ACORN, the incalculable assistance of a bought-and-paid-for leftwing media, and with the good-old-reliable votes of feminists and blacks and Hispanics and gays and all the other groups that stupidly believe Democrats have helped them over the past 60 years, Hillary had no competition at all.

THE BEST-KEPT SECRET      

The cocky Hillary supporters believed that millions of deplorable Americans failed to notice their candidate’s frequent coughing fits, the help she needed simply to ascend three stairs, her peculiar head-bobbing spasms, the cringe-producing effect of her strident voice, and her frequent absences from the campaign trail, not to mention her promising more of the same socialist-cum-communist policies that had failed so miserably for the previous eight years..

They also failed to realize that her opponent had hired an extremely savvy pollster.

That pollster told candidate Trump, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, how Americans throughout the country were responding to his America First message. And it was all good. And it was a secret that the entire Trump Team kept to themselves.

Or so they thought. But the information that was so damning for Hillary’s candidacy apparently reached the corrupt upper echelons of Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ), and scared them enough to hatch an illegal, seditious, unconstitutional plot to derail the Trump candidacy and, failing that, the Trump presidency.

For months on end, fake polls, as reported by fake news shills, told us that Hillary was a slam-dunk. Right up to 8 p.m. on the night of November 8, 2016, when the entire leftwing media started to wipe the avalanche of egg yolks dripping down their faces.

TRYING TO BRING DOWN A PRESIDENT

To those of us who supported Mr. Trump from the beginning––I wrote an article back in 2011 entitled “Trump is Already Running the Country”––it was clear that every now and then in American history, someone comes along to save our country from those who hate it.

FDR is in this category, bolstering America’s spirits through the worst Depression in our history and a devastating World War (although I personally revile Roosevelt for condemning six-million Jews to annihilation when he could and should have bombed the concentration camps in Germany and Poland to which Hitler condemned his defenseless victims).

Abraham Lincoln is in this category, miraculously uniting our country after the ferocious Civil War that almost tore it apart.

President Trump belongs in this category, accomplishing more that is good for America in one year in office than any chief executive in our history––all while the clinically hysterical liberals in the media and among the populace continued to beleaguer, hound, protest, vilify, insult and harass him, and when ill-intentioned actors from Obama’s DOJ and FBI put their malevolent plot into action, a plot that accused both candidate and President Trump of colluding with Russians to swing the election his way.

To this malicious end, they did the following:

Hired British spy Christopher Steele (who admitted in writing that he “hated” candidate Trump) to create a phony story about the Republican candidate being in a Russian hotel engaging is raunchy acts with a prostitute;

Hired the political opposition-research group Fusion GPS to distribute the phony info.

Paid for this sham scenario with multimillions of dollars from both Hillary’s campaign coffers and the Democratic National Committee’s monies;

Went to the judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to apply for a search warrant without informing the judges about (1) the Trump-loathing spy’s bias, and (2) who paid for the warrant. By the way, who are these judges and exactly who appointed them???

Obtained the warrant which allowed the partisan hacks from Obama’s DOJ and FBI to conduct a more than year-long collusion investigation which produced NOTHING!

Oops… make that something. It produced hard, cold, concrete, irrefutable, and to my mind indictable evidence that the people who were in collusion were––ta da––the corrupt upper echelon of the DOJ and FBI who lied to the FISA judges, as well as Hillary Clinton who as Sec. of State gave 20 percent of U.S. uranium to the Russians (similar to her husband Bill giving nukes to North Korea and their ideological clone Barack Obama giving nukes to Iran!).

WHAT’S MISSING FROM THIS PICTURE?

For well over a year, we’ve had the fishy FISA memo, former FBI director James Comey being accused of covering up Hillary’s crimes, the witch hunt of President Trump by another former FBI director Robert Mueller, CA Democrat Adam Schiff’s manic attempts to impeach the president, the media’s narcotizing anti-Trump talking points, and the few lone voices––vox clamantis en deserto––in the conservative media, but what do they all have in common? What is missing?

Not outrage…they are all outraged.

Not accusations…the right blames the left and the left blames the right.

Not plain talk…conservative Sean Hannity has been clear as a bell, as are the leftist bought-and-paid-for shills on every leftwing news outlet, both electronic and print.

While all of them pointed fingers, cast blame, railed against the “system” they thought was crooked or biased or partisan, the elephant in the room––the subject they never raised, the person they never mentioned as the arch architect of the entire illegal corrupt plan to derail the Trump presidency––BARACK OBAMA!

Does anyone really believe that FISA warrants can be submitted or obtained by any underling in the American government? Of course not! That request has to come––or at least be approved––directly from the Oval Office.

Does anyone really believe that the anti-Trump talking points, rallies, vigils, disparaging articles, and orchestrated hatred is spontaneous? Of course not! They come directly from groups like Organizing For America, which was formed by the former community organizer Barack Obama with the express intent of dismantling traditional American institutions and converting them into the socialist and communist regimes they most admire.

According to journalist and author Paul Sperry, Obama sent a message to his “troops” saying that he “was heartened by anti-Trump protests. Yes,” says Sperry, “Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000— who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.”

Ah… the bitterness.

A FEW EXCEPTIONS

To their credit, a few people––so far––have cited Obama as a central player––probably the central player––in the Russian-collusion fiasco. As CanadaFreePress.com editor Judi McLeod has written, “One day after the release of the Memo, we should all be asking, `Where is Obama?’ Why is he so stonily silent…? The answer is that the scurrilous Obama, just like Steele, went into hiding. The Memo proves that the FBI is not just part of a USA intelligence apparatus that systematically spies on its own American citizenry, it paid…for filth completely made up by a foreign agent with whom they were in tight ‘Hate Donald Trump’ league.”

Daniel Greenfield, in an article entitled The Memo Reveals the Coup against America, writes that “the Democrats and the media spent a week lying to the American people about the `memo’”…claiming its release would be damaging to America’s spying and even treasonous. But “they didn’t mean American spying methods––they meant Obama’s spying methods.”

“The memo isn’t treasonous,” Greenfield continues. “It reveals a treasonous effort by the Democrats to use our intelligence agencies to rig an election and overturn the will of the voters. Today, the media and Dems switched from claiming that the memo was full of `classified information’ that might get CIA agents killed by insisting that it was a dud and didn’t matter. Oh, what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

And the other night the Fox News moderator Jesse Watters called out Obama for his significant role in this orgy of corruption.

But where are the other voices to identify the virulence––and jealousy––of the anti-Trump minions? And particularly Barack Obama’s role?

As I wrote in a former article, “James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor”––“Whether it’s in industry or the military or sports or show business, if a failure occurs, it’s always the top dog who is accountable. Not the assembly line worker or the buck private or the third baseman who calls the shots, but the one who occupies the ultimate seat of power. Look at what happened at the Democratic National Committee…the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief of Communications, and Chairwoman all resigned because of the hacking that proved the DNC to be both crooked and racist.”

So it is with the putative head of the Democrat Party, Barack Obama. And it’s not just jealousy or ideology that drives his obsession––it’s fear! All the honchos under Obama––John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, John Podesta, Obama himself, the list is long––quake with dread that their own scandals, acts of malfeasance, controversies, and possible illegalities will be unearthed and come to light during the Trump years and they will all be frog-marched straight into Leavenworth…hence the mad quest to frame the president and get him out of office.

They should be afraid. And they should be remorseful for their shabby tactics and constitutional violations. But if Hillary Clinton is an example of the left’s craven sociopathy––and I think she is the prime example––the American public can expect no apologies and no regrets but rather the same evasions, deceptions and lies that the Obama gang raised to an art form during his ignominious eight years in office.

In fact, not only is Hillary credited with creating the Russian-collusion fakery but as writer Mark Tapscott so thoroughly documents, the Clintons have been using the FBI against their enemies for years.

It is doubtful that when candidate Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” he had even an inkling of the vast number of slithering, predatory, reptilian creatures who inhabited that toxic environment. But being the smartest guy in the room, and a quick study at that, you can bet that he will decontaminate the place as swiftly as he pushed through the biggest tax and jobs bill in history.

For that, he will gain the eternal gratitude of the American people, a huge majority of the candidates he endorses in the midterms, and a thunderous reelection in 2020.

Joan Swirsky Explains 🔥 Obama’s Bunker Festers in The Swamp Joan Swirsky Explains 🔥 Obama’s Bunker Festers in The Swamp Joan Swirsky

[learnprogress]

ALERT: DeVos Makes Horrifying Move Against Rape Victims

In a shocking affront to student safety in campuses across America, Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has just needlessly repealed an Obama-era sexual assault policy that protected rape victims in American colleges. This is total madness, folks, and it WILL jeopardize the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of young American students.

Controversial doesn’t even BEGIN to describe this outrageous rescindment by DeVos, and—in extension—by Donald Trump. What is the rationale? Where was this in their 2016 platform? Why are they traumatizing sexual assault victims further? It’s unconscionable.

On Friday, DeVos issued new guidelines on how sexual assaults at U.S. colleges should be handled—formalizing her repeal of the hitherto standing Obama-era guidelines that were directly designed to protect student sexual assault victims.

Out with the good and in with the godawful, as it were, just like seemingly every other aspect of the Trump administration’s agenda. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, DeVos is using the power of the federal government to, in effect, attack sexual assault victims bureaucratically.

Californian Senator Kamala Harris—a rising darling of the Left—immediately blasted the rescindment of the Obama-era rules on Twitter, writing, “This is infuriating. We should be strengthening, not weakening, protections for sexual assault survivors.”

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) also issued a SCATHING statement against DeVos’s horrific move, declaring that “This decision shows the Trump Administration’s utter disregard for survivors of sexual assault. The effect of this policy reversal will be to delegitimize and suppress the voices of survivors, who are being told by this administration that they will be met with skepticism. Shame on the Trump Administration.”

Shame on the Trump administration, indeed, a million times over. An anonymous 20-year-old sexual assault victim in America told the U.K. publication The Independent that she’d be afraid to come forward under DeVos’ new stripped-down guidelines.

This is infuriating. We should be strengthening, not weakening, protections for sexual assault survivors. https://t.co/VP5EIKkMHp

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 22, 2017

That’s but one human tragedy out of thousands that DeVos is set to create thanks (but no thanks) to her outrageous repeal of Obama’s tougher rules. What is happening to our country?

The state of America’s executive branch leadership right now is purely absurd, and it’s hideous. We are being ruled by people who are malicious in their hearts and idiots in their governance.

The Resistance DEMANDS a return to Obama’s commonsense guidelines that protected sexual assault victims. Anything short of that is an affront to human dignity by the Trump administration.

POLL: Do you support sexual assault survivors?

Do you stand with sexual assault survivors against DeVos and Trump? Is this development totally unacceptable?

Stand up and speak out today. Please participate in our poll below!

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The American people should not tolerate this level of inhumanity in our government. DeVos’s cruel act is senseless and should have no place in our society.

The Trump administration’s affronts against our nation are comprehensive in scope. Their hateful regime MUST be reversed.

Help us hold these monsters to account. Please share this story on Facebook with everyone you know.

The post ALERT: DeVos Makes Horrifying Move Against Rape Victims appeared first on Learn Progress.

from ALERT: DeVos Makes Horrifying Move Against Rape Victims

[clubofinfo]

Expert: What are the events that led to the first direct military attack against the Syrian government by the USA? We are told that “on the morning of the 4th of April, in the Khan Shaykhun region, the Syrian airforce bombarded civilians with chemical weapons.” Video montage and Gebelism This was the accusation put forward by the jihadists who control the region. They presented a video, a product of malicious editing, with somebody presented as a volunteer doctor, who was later identified as a criminal known to the British justice for his involvement in terrorism and abductions. In the video that appeared on the Internet (where else?), there appear tens of victims of the supposed attack with chemical weapons. The main protagonists were little children, even babies, supposedly the main victims of this attack by the Assad regime. There has been no other confirmation of this incident or of these accusations whatsoever. Nevertheless, the western media of mass misinformation went wild against Assad to a degree that they really exceeded all extremes. A characteristic example is the front page of the next day (5th of April) of the French Libération, where they presented a collage with dead underage children as victims of Assad. When the obvious question was put to the director of this leftist and supposedly progressive newspaper as to how she knew that it was really Assad who murdered these children, and by using chemicals, she replied that she considered this fact to be more or less a given and that, consequently, the objective of the front page was to enrage people, and to turn them against the regime that stubbornly denies having committed such an atrocious crime. Of course if newspapers like Libération worked in a civilised state that respected its citizens, justice would immediately have intervened, at least for deliberate instigation of hate and provocation of war. But even today, France is under a modern Dark Age dictatorship, where Big Brother slogans dominate: Truth is lies. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength! The decision for the attack The next day, the 6th of April, Reuters broadcasted that the results of an autopsy confirmed that chemical weapons were actually used at the attack. Where did the autopsy take place? In Turkey. What’s more, the results of the autopsy showed that chemical weapons were used in the attack – that killed at least seventy people in the region of Idlib in Syria – according to announcements of the Turkish Minister of Justice, Bekir Bozdağ. Thirty two victims of the Tuesday attack were supposed to have been transported to Turkey, where the autopsy also took place. But even if there really was an autopsy proving that the dead were victims of a chemical attack, how is it inferred (or deduced) that the Syrian Airforce is responsible for this attack? Certainly not due to the autopsy of the victims. In order to find those accountable for the attack with chemicals, an autopsy of the spot where the attack took place is required, and this has not happened so far. But this is just small letters and useless details for the stupid journalists and their bosses. These announcements (through the video) were sufficient for the president of the USA, Donald Trump, to directly accuse the government of Syria and Bashar al-Assad personally, of crossing the ‘red line’ with the poison gas attack against non-combatants, and he announced that his handling of the case of Syria and Assad had changed. Since then, the road has been wide open for the first military strike against the official government of Syria. Using 59 tomahawks… The next day, 7th of April, at 3:40 early in the morning (local time), the attack against Syria began, with fifty nine Tomahawk missiles, launched from the guided missile cruiser USS Ross (DDG 71) and USS Porter (DDG 78), class Arleigh Burke, that were located in the Mediterranean. The target was the Shayrat airbase of the Syrian air force, which was according to the USA announcements, the one that launched the attack with the chemical weapons. Once more there no evidence was presented. At this airbase, which was not in the first line of the military operations of the Syrian airforce and the Russians, targets were hit, including mainly the two runways as well as the hangars housing airplanes of the Syrian air force that had been grounded for a long period. According to the Syrian government, there were fourteen dead, half of them civilians. However, the damage to the airport was not significant, since twelve hours later it was again ready to operate. Videos taken the day after show that the runways were operational. Even the images that the Pentagon released of the attack on Sheyrat airport do not show extensive damage, which would be expected after an attack with fifty nine Tomahawks. The Pentagon insists that all the Tomahawk missiles found their target. However, this is refuted not only by the images that the Pentagon itself released, but also by the announcements of the Russian Ministry of Defence that only twenty three Tomahawks found their target. What happened to the rest? They certainly did not hit other targets: neither the Pentagon claims such a thing, and nor have the Syrian authorities shown any craters created by Tomahawks, apart from those at the airport. UN Secretary-General António Guterres expresses his concern The same day on which the USA launched the attack against Syria, the UN Security Council delayed a vote for a resolution regarding the incident with chemicals in Syria. Three competing plans for a resolution were submitted to the Security Council. The joint resolution put forward by the United Kingdom, the USA and France asked the Syrian authorities to provide the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) with all the information regarding the flights of their military air force that took place on the day of the incident, and to allow free access to their military establishments around the specific region where the attack took place. It is worth noticing that the plan of the three does not mention any specific military establishment, despite the fact that the USA announced that they have some precise information that the attack with chemicals was launched from the Shayrat airport, the one that they hit with their Tomahawks. And of course it does not ask for the obvious: to extend the investigation in order to confirm the incident in the area that was hit with the chemicals. Why is that? The plan that Russia proposed asks exactly for this extension. It asked for a complete investigation into the incident to be conducted by UN and OPCW specialists, first and foremost in the area that is claimed to have been hit by chemicals, and it asks for all the participants in the conflict to cooperate. The third plan was proposed by the non-permanent members of the UN Security Council in an attempt to reach a compromise between the differences of the two other plans. Unprecedented unilateral action by the USA In this way, Trump made a unilateral decision to hit Syria without any trace of evidence that the Assad government was responsible for the supposed attack with chemical weapons in the Idlib region. Even more, he took this decision without any kind of international justification from the UN Security Council, not even a resolution with misleading terms, as in the case of Gaddafi’s Libya. Trump invoked as an excuse for the missile attack on Syria the “vital national security and foreign policy interests of the USA,” as he characteristically mentioned in the letter he sent to inform the Congress on the 8th of April. And in order to present himself as legitimate he invoked the authority to start military action based on a common resolution of the Congress and the War Powers Resolution (Public Law 93-148 of 1973), even though this resolution only authorises the president of USA to start military action after an official declaration of war, or in the case of a direct military threat against the integrity of the USA. It is the first time since George Bush – and his ‘coalition of the willing’ – who declared the Third World War, that a president of the USA goes ahead with a military action against a sovereign state in such a shameless manner and lacking any shred of even a pretext of legality, even invoking the ‘vital interests’ of his country, when there is not even a virtual threat against the USA. This has not been officially heard on the international scene since the Hitler era, who entered into the Second World War in order to defend the ‘vital interests’ of his country. Mrs. Hina Shamsi, director of the powerful and quite regime-oriented American Civil Liberties Union, wrote regarding the legality of the attack on Syria: Nobody questions that the use of chemical weapons by Bassar al-Assad against Syrian citizens is illegal, immoral and unacceptable. But Assad’s lawfulness is not an excuse for an unlawful reply. By ignoring not only the constitutional law disapproving of using violence without the congress’s approval but also the international law which does not allow the unilateral use of violence except in case of self defence, president Trump has started a unilateral attack against a state that did not attack us, and without any congressional permission. This violates some of the most significant legal restrictions on the use of violence. (“U.S. Strikes in Syria Are an Illegal Response to Atrocity,” Speak Freely, American Civil Liberties Union, April 7, 2017). The first target of the attack Well, that’s the first real target of the missile attack in Syria; to enable the president of the USA to get rid of every strict legal restriction deriving from both the Constitution and international law, in terms of provoking and conducting war according to how he himself estimates the vital interests of his country. And this is unprecedented, even for an American president. Before Trump, nobody else had dared to do so. They always looked for a legal pretext of a supposed ‘national emergency’ for the USA, or at least some kind of international backing from the Security Council. No need for alibis and feelings of shame any more. Whoever is arbitrarily considered by the president as a threat to the ‘vital interests’ of the USA may be hit by a military attack. Without even needing to apply the typical procedures that are required by the USA constitution, nor even more the procedures required by international law. This is about the imperial right to declare and conduct war, solely on the emperor’s judgement. And this makes the world more dangerous than ever. In other eras there would be many people rising and demanding the resignation of the president, because he had committed what no post-war president dared to commit. There would be organisations of civil and political rights, judges, senators and members of parliament rising up. But now they are all dead silent. But there are none of the famous system of checks and balances of the so called American democracy, supposed to exist in order to limit this kind of presidential behaviour. No measures have been taken against a president whom, not long ago, almost everybody had risen against and of whom they were demanding that he step down for forbidding the entrance to the USA of citizens from certain states. The most arbitrary bombardment of a state was needed in order for everybody to calm down, make peace with Trump and recognise his imperial right to make war. And in this way they prepare the ground in order to prove that Trump is the most dangerous president of the USA for international peace. The second target of the attack The second real target was Syria itself. In Syria the Assad armed forces, with the contribution of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah but also the Kurds, have in essence predominated against the mercenaries of the ‘armed opposition’ and the jihadists. And this predominating was the first big defeat of the policy of involvement against sovereign states and breaking them up, that Washington and Brussels have followed since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early Nineties. This fact put the legitimate Assad government and the coalition of the political forces that support it, back as the leading factor of the future developments in post war Syria. Assad’s predominance was such, that the return of refugees from neighbouring countries was already on its way. It is characteristic that the financial market sharks, masking themselves as capital donors, had already started discussions with the Assad government for the fast rebuilding of Syria. Only two days before Trump’s attack on Syria, it became known that donors from all around the world had promised 5.5 billion euros in financial aid for Syria, with Germany declaring that Europe should be ashamed that it does not do more, given the efforts by the Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey (EUObserver, April 5, 2017). The vultures smelled the burned flesh, an unprecedented destruction amounting to close on 70% of Syrian infrastructure, and in addition 13.5 million refugees, according to the UN, who have to return to their homeland. This is the time of incredible profits for the building industry. But this cannot happen with Assad at the steering wheel, and with a sovereign, intact and undivided Syria. This is what neither the USA nor Europe are able to accept. Syria must be broken up by whatever means, and Assad can at most remain ruler only of Damascus and its surroundings. But the breaking up operation could any more materialise with the mercenary jihadists from the USA, Europe and Turkey. The USA military forces had to take action. On Syrian soil. The military intervention of the USA in Syria The pretext is there. It is the war against Al-Qaeda and the Caliphate. Using the war for the retaking of Mosul as a pretext, about two months ago the Pentagon released military vehicle units outside Raqqa, supposedly for the occupation of the Caliphate capital inside Syria. Raqqa is of strategic importance for the break-up of Syria. It is the epicenter of the biggest surface and subterranean water deposits of Syria. At the same time it is close to the M4 highway, which makes easy access from Turkey and Iraq, and the the road that passes from Raqqa itself in essence divides Syria in two. Therefore, both for the Syrian military forces and the Americans — for entirely different reasons — Raqqa is of top strategic importance. But the Americans are unable to operate in the region without the help of the Kurds. For this reason Washington has already had an agreement with Kurdish chiefs for the creation of a Kurdish state with parts of Syria and Iraq. Great Kurdistan According to documents revealed by the Inside Syria Media Center on the 24th of March the authorities of the USA and Kurds of Syria reached an agreement last week regarding the borders of the Kurdish autonomous region on Syrian soil, that the Americans guarantee to the Kurds, provided that the Kurds help them to occupy Raqqa and Al-Tabqah (thirty four miles west of Raqqa). In addition, Washington has already defined the borders of the new state of Great Kurdistan on Syrian and Iraqi soil, which must be created after the defeat of the Caliphate and the final collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic. But contrary to the American plans, the forces of Assad, with the help of Russia, Hezbollah and Iran, are now much closer to capturing Raqqa as well as Al-Tampa. In that case, even the Kurdish chiefs will be forced to negotiate with Assad. And the USA is already in a very difficult position. How could this possibility be overturned? In two ways: the first possibility would be to reinforce the USA military presence on Syrian soil; however, the transfer of powerful ground forces without air cover and protection is not possible. The second possibility would be to push the Kurds against Assad. However, this would leave the Kurds exposed to Erdogan, who does not want in any way to be left out of the division of Syrian and Iraqi territory. And the Kurds know this better than anybody. What is left? The immediate reinforcement of the American army on Syrian soil. The Americans already have a motorised brigade ready to operate in the Raqqa-Tampa region, using Iraq as a base. But this is not enough. They urgently need additional forces as well as air cover. The Russian A2/AD system But how is it possible to send more military forces, ignoring the Russians, the Iranians and most importantly the Anti-Access/Area Denial system A2/AD that the Russians have installed in Syria? The system A2/AD is a weapon used in order to prevent an opponent from capturing or passing through a ground, sea or air region. This specific method that is used is not necessary to be absolutely effective on preventing the passage of enemy forces. It is sufficient to delay drastically, retard or put in danger the enemy. The fear of great losses is keeping the enemy away from the ground, sea and air that is protected by A2/AD. The Russians have the most advanced A2/AD systems in the world. They are so advanced, that the USA and NATO do not have a satisfactory countermeasure, at least for the present. Russia developed these systems in response to the supreme ability of NATO to operate air strikes on a massive scale. Therefore, Russia has created large Anti-Access/Area Denial zones or ‘bubbles’ around the countries of the Baltic, the Black sea, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Arctic. These ‘bubbles’ allow Moscow to deny the use of airspace, ground and sea in these regions and to limit drastically the transit of airplanes, ships and ground forces in case of a crisis. At the official announcement after the Warsaw Summit at 8-9 July 2016, NATO expressed its concern at these developments, declaring that it will not accept limitations on the free transit of alliance forces from Anti-Access/Area Denial zones. And the reason is simple. This way NATO loses its advantage of massive surprise air strikes from big distance as a preparation for ground operations. Tomahawks have tried the system A2/AD This was therefore the basic USA military target: to test the capabilities of the A2/AD system that has been installed in Syria; and to check what will be the percentage of losses and to evaluate operationally how they can penetrate the system’s net, without prohibitive losses. This way Trump did what Obama did not dare to do in 2013, using as a pretext a similar attack with chemical weapons at the eastern Ghouta region in August of the same year. Several countries, including France, the UK and USA examined the possibility of intervening militarily against the Syrian government forces. On the 6th September 2013, the US Senate adopted a resolution for the use of military force against the Syrian army as a response to the Ghouta attack. On the 10th of September 2013, the military intervention was prevented when the Assad government accepted the USA-Russia side agreement to give up all its stock of chemical weapons for destruction, and declared its willingness to enter the Chemical Weapons Convention. This is the convention that the Syrian army supposedly violated with the attack on the 4th of April. Despite the various controlled voices that wanted then to blame the Assad government in order to legitimise a direct strike, finally the investigation proved that the jihadists were responsible for the attack with chemical weapons in Ghouta. On January 2014 a team of specialists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published its results. The essay, by Richard Loyd, an ex-UN armaments inspector, and Theodor Postol, an MIT professor, was entitled ‘Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence’. It examined the missile’s design and calculated all possible orbits based on its useful load. The authors concluded that it would be impossible to launch the gas sarin from territory under the control of the forces of the Assad government. You cannot fail to notice the similarity of the two incidents regarding their management and propaganda. And despite the fact that today we know exactly who and why of the ‘armed opposition’ mercenaries set up the provocation using chemical weapons in order to create a pretext for military intervention by the USA and NATO against Syria, the stupid journalists and the mass media continue to attribute to Assad this attack with chemical weapons. What stopped the military intervention at the time, especially since Obama had ensured the Congress’s agreement. The main reason was the A2/AD that Syria already had, with Russia’s help. At that time Obama wanted to send the British and French air forces first, in order to test the effectiveness of the ‘bubble’. But the two US allies did not oblige. The political cost of a failed military operation forced Obama to rethink and forget for the moment a military attack against Syria; and what Obama did not dare to do, Trump arbitrarily dared to do. Russia advances its Integrated Air Defense System (IADS) in Syria. (Institute for the Study of War) Backed by Crete What was the result? Only twenty three of the fifty nine Tomahawks found their target. The rest fell in the sea due to the A2/AD system. This is 39% accuracy, or better expressed 61% losses. For an accurate weapon such as the Tomahawk these percentages are utterly unacceptable and may well depress the Pentagon and NATO headquarters. Suppose that the USA were trying to hit its target with an airplane raid. Out of one hundred aircraft, at least sixty one would not return to base; and in fact it would be even worse, as the A2/AD system is much more effective against aircraft than against Cruise and Tomahawk missiles. Imagine the cost of such an operation for the USA and its allies. The Tomahawk missiles were launched two thousand kilometres away from their target in Syria. The USA cruisers involved were in the sea region of Crete, so in the case of a Russian counterattack they could be protected by the Souda American Military Base in Crete. In Crete the most powerful radar exists. It is currently being upgraded by the Israeli army, and is out of Russian range. Of course, the reinforcement of the Russian fleet near Cyprus with frigates and cruisers from the Black Sea fleet gives Russia the ability to extend the denial zone up to Crete in order to hit targets even at its proximity. All this in case Trump carries out his threats to continue with his attacks. From a military point of view, the operation was a complete failure for the USA, not only because they were unable to penetrate the ‘bubble’ of A2/AD with reasonable losses, but because they were also unable to provide efficient air cover for a possible ground operation of their own in Syria. Neither it is easy, due again to the ‘bubble,’ to remove sufficient ground forces of tanks, artillery and helicopters from Iraq to Syria inland. They can only do that with the agreement of the Russians and Assad. All this of course does not mean that Trump will just sit waiting. His aggressiveness will increase. The hits next time will have greater dispersion and will be from air, sea and ground. Israel is already preparing to contribute. With them also the Greek air force, which is an easy target for the Russians, is trying to find a way of penetrating the A2/AD system. This is why Greece has regular joint air force exercises with Israel and the USA. Even above Athens’ air region, for the first time ever. And we have the suitable political system for this to take place. Crete has already been surrendered in order to become an unsinkable aircraft carrier for Israel and USA, as the Greek Defence Minister, Mr. Kammenos, has already announced. And all of us are waiting for the inevitable fate, even having stupid journalists in our country as well as various analysts (not named here but known to all) preparing the next step of the military attack on Syria from Greek ground, air and sea territory, trying at the same time to reassure the idle and naïve with stupidities regarding the ‘failure’ of the Russian and Syrian air defence. They are obviously aiming to persuade fools of their kind, who believe that the Americans will protect us and the Russians will leave us alone, to send the hawks from Greek territory to infiltrate their own A2/AD security zones. You see, stupidity is contagious. http://clubof.info/