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Sunday, February 21, 2021

We Will Crush You

If one thing has become clear during these early days of the Zhou Baiden regime, it's that the new regime is determined to crush all dissenting voices that might oppose the regime's agenda. Not surprisingly, that effort is starting on Capitol Hill, guarded now by the New Army of the Potomac--the National Guard units that are the regime's occupying force in the Imperial City on the Potomac. There can be little doubt that Nancy Pelosi's January Sixth Commission will be targeting GOP legislators, given that Pelosi's hand picked witchhunt leader has openly called for the likes of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to be "run out of DC" for their alleged role.

But all the forces at the regime's command are being marshalled to solidify power and control. Most chillingly, perhaps, is How the Biden Administration is Politicizing the Military


Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has made it absolutely clear that the U.S. military’s top priority is not facing external threats, ...  Instead, Austin sees the main threat as coming from within the U.S. military. In his confirmation hearings, Austin said that he would make it his priority to combat racism and extremism in the United States military. ...

 

Can you say "purge"? Any pretense that the national defense will be a bipartisan endeavor has been cast aside:


Austin’s order to remove all Trump appointees to the 42 Defense Department advisory boards is unprecedented and downright stupid. ... Advisory boards are a second set of eyes from outside the organization to review policies, planning or course curricula and offer suggestions. Often outside advisors spot a problem your organization overlooked or offer good ideas for better policy implementation. And it’s useful to have a diversity of ideas for policy review. But ... accepting advice only from Biden loyalists will ensure only party line thinking will be allowed in the military. Two notable defense secretaries were famous for not listening to advice or tolerating debate on policy ... Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, and both led our armed forces into military disaster. ...


What type of "extremism" will the regime be seeking to root out of the military? Remarkably, the regime has called in its political police to assist in vetting members of the military. And the FBI is known for partnering with far left organizations when it comes to defining domestic threats:


An especially troublesome feature of Austin’s focus on extremism is the preference of the military and the FBI to employ the ultra-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as their authority on extremism. ...


We can rest assured that, with the SPLC involved, the purge will be directly strictly against conservative views. As the author argues, this means a culture war that will have a decidedly negative impact on military preparedness:


Austin’s steps to politicize the military to a degree never seen before means a culture war on the conservative half of America. That might make Austin extremely popular with Biden, but it will make recruitment and retention for the armed forces pretty difficult. ... If Austin bans conservatives from the military under the SPLC definition of “extremism” and takes away the constitutional rights of citizen soldiers in the Reserve and Guard, he’ll never get enough recruits from the liberal states.


We'll be left with an inward focused military focused on policing society--just in case. That is exactly what concerned the Founding Fathers about a standing military, but is what the military presence in DC so aptly foreshadows.

Of course, the use of force to exert social control will remain a second or third option--once widespread use of the military is invoked too many dangers arise. No, the preference will remain to crush dissent by controlling the flow of information. That will come under the guise of controlling the flow of dis-information. You didn't know that that had become the government's business? Well, you might say--if you were a leftist--that the regime is engaged in the "moral equivalent of war," facing multiple "national crises." In such a situation, the argument runs, anything goes. For starters, there's the problem of those people who won't shut up and just take their shots.

This effort will blur or even erase constitutional distinctions between government and the private sector, but who does that surprise? The use of corporate America for the purposes of government control of information has been in the works for years. This has all the marks of a Corporate State, a Fascism of the Left:


Biden Admin "Working Directly" With Big Tech To Crush Vaccine Dissent

"In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship."

Those were the prophetic words of Caitlin Johnstone in 2018 warning of the slippery slope that Big Tech and its liberal minions were embarking on as the corporate-sponsored cancel-culture began.

...

... all the 'behind the scenes' nods and winks are gone and conspiracy theories proved fact as Reuters reports"The White House has been reaching out to social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s Google about clamping down on COVID misinformation and getting their help to stop it from going viral, a senior administration official said."


Right. As if we've had something like even minimal functional transparency during the Covid casedemic? Isn't transparency the most effective means of combatting disinformation? But transparency can be very problematic, when truth has been closely guarded by a bodyguard of lies. Once the truth comes out, who knows whose ox will be gored? What party's governors will be recalled? What party's governors will be ... indicted? What relatives of the regime head will be called to account?

And so, Pelosi's Dem House is openly pressuring an already only too compliant Big Tech to greater efforts. Glenn Greenwald elaborates, in one of his trademark long-as-your-arm articles. Here we learn that--surprise!--the Dems are concerned not only with vaccine doubters but even more so with election doubters. Which is to say, they're concerned with regime legitimacy, and they want Big Tech to crush any doubts in that regard:


Congress Escalates Pressure On Tech Giants To Censor More, Threatening The First Amendment

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”

The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” adding: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”


There you have it. Concerns about election fraud in America--concerns, by the way, that have been repeatedly expressed by international election monitoring entities--have suddenly become an "intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety." Reason enough to have DC under military occupation, right? The nationwide riots of last year, explicitly encouraged by the Dem leaders like Pelosi and featured on video during the second Faux Impeachment recently, weren't a crisis. But the doubts of a majority of Americans is a crisis that must be addressed by controlling the flow of information.


... “Industry self-regulation has failed,” they said, and therefore “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.” In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.


Greenwald describes Twitter and Facebook and Google almost as if they were victims of government coercion. The reality is that their CEOs (and Amazon's Bezos) willingly partnered with the Dems and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in doubtfully legal campaigns to change voting procedures in swing states. One can imagine the scene when the coercion begins: Go ahead, twist my arm! Ouch! I'll do it, I'll do it! Haha! Twist it again if you want!...


Little effort is required to see that Democrats, now in control of the Congress and the White House, are engaged in a scheme of speech control virtually indistinguishable from those long held unconstitutional by decades of First Amendment jurisprudence. That Democrats are seeking to use their control of state power to coerce and intimidate private tech companies to censor — and indeed have already succeeded in doing so — is hardly subject to reasonable debate. They are saying explicitly that this is what they are doing.


So, it's a good thing that we have a SCOTUS to guard the First Amendment rights of We The People against this new and sinister threat. If we're lucky any cases will get to the SCOTUS in, oh, maybe five years? And who thinks Big Tech will be the ones challenging government "coercion"?

Greenwald goes on to describe the unholy alliance we're seeing before our eyes in terms very similar to those of Caitlin Johnstone, describing the "corporatist" system of state censorship: 


One might think of tech companies, the corporate media, the U.S. security state, and Democrats more as a union — a merger of power — rather than separate and warring factions. But whatever framework you prefer, it is clear that the power of social media companies to control the internet is in the hands of government and its corporate media allies at least as much as it is in the hands of the tech executives who nominally manage these platforms.

...

The power to control the flow of information and the boundaries of permissible speech is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. It is a power as intoxicating as it is menacing. ...


Are conservatives, much less Republicans, ready for this battle? I don't see it.

 

32 comments:

  1. Generally speaking there are two kinds of people - the ones you can reason with and the ones you can't.

    Those you cannot reason with fall into two classes as well - those who will leave you alone and those who won't.

    There seems to be only one way to deal with folks who won't listen to reason and refuse to leave you alone....

    ReplyDelete
  2. Enter Donald J Trump

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  3. I've never witnessed a government of the USA act more like the Nazi party of Germany in the 1930s in my life. The similarities are right in front of us. BLM and Antifa parallel the Nazi Brown Shirts. Talks of reeducating those who are political enemies. Purging the military of potential political threats and of those who do not 'think right.' Control of the media and the new wrinkle - Big Tech, although today they are both willing toadies. Identifying white males as the new enemy. Creating White Supremacist villains from imaginary quotes. Always conjuring up a new crisis and stoking fears: Covid, Climate Change, systemic racism, etc. to keep the pot boiling; note that combating election fraud is not on their agenda. They just need to end or seriously impede the Second Amendment - the one big roadblock they have not found a way around. When they do, then it will be time for Red States to rise up and say no more. They know they have but a short amount of time to meet their goal of absolute power - before the mid-terms. The one thing missing is a Hitler type character to preach the litany if how wrong they've been treated by this white male paternalism for centuries, 'cause Plugs ain't gonna cut it. Nor will the Iowa caucus dropout he hired because of her biological sex and skin color...

    DJL

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  4. It’s weird: even during the National Socialist period the German Wehrmacht in general was largely apolitical (the way the German military was always schooled, to be apolitical). With organizations like the SS however it was a different story. Only after the attempted plot on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944 that “National Socialist ardor” became a sought-after mode of thinking & of course by that time the Wehrmacht had more important things to worry about.

    The Red Army however was political from the get-go. The famous purges of the 1930’s cut off its head which was readily apparent during the Winter War of 1939-40 with Finland & then when Operation Barbarossa commenced on 22 June 1941. In the Red Army there was always a Political Commissar who could countermand a military order if he thought it “defeatist” or “unworthy of the Revolution”.

    Is that where we’re headed - a Political Commissar in every unit taking loyalty oaths? This is in part the reason the Soviets lost over 3,000,000 men in as many months after the commencement of Operation Barbarossa. They play around with this nonsense & we’re going to get our a** handed to us by China or possibly even the North Koreans.

    Dude, where’s my country?

    Boarwild

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  5. Don't believe server farms are hardened, yet. Something to think about.

    0311

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  6. Isn't the merging of government and corporate power one of the hallmarks of the fascist state? Just as demonizing opponents, silencing dissent and purging ranks Antifa, the brown shirts of the left, and the military now being groomed to destroy any and all opponents in the name of preserving the Constitution.

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    1. Yes - “Fascism is the merger of corporate & political power.”

      - Benito Mussolini

      Posting that on FB got me banned for a week.

      Boarwild

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    2. @Boarwild

      President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about this in 1961:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyBNmecVtdU

      His address is largely remembered for his warning of the implications of creating an immense armaments industry.

      He didn't call it 'fascism' but he also warned of the implications of the federal government’s collaboration with industry, and the risks of abuse of power.

      I suppose if he said these things today, they'd have to cancel Ike, too.

      Its only 16 minutes to watch and well worth it.

      Delete
  7. Suppose this situation is dire enough to rouse John Roberts from his slumber?
    Probably just me being a “niggling malcontent”, forget I even brought it up.

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  8. Conservatives are wholly unprepared for what is coming at them. They also flatly refuse to even believe in the majority of the core issues at stake. Most keep right on believing were gonna "vote" our way out of this.

    We also have far too much "white knight", "save me" and "someone else's job" syndrome. Many want to keep on believing he Repubs are on their side.

    The more effective side of the right who would push back has been startled into infighting. They, aka the government, deep state, media, social media, or whatever you wish to call them has done an amazing job of scaring the bejesus out of most of them. Every third person is being fingered as an informant or something worse.

    The Jan 6th DC rally was a very bad idea, the right was far to naive about what they were up against. We have no communication, no leadership, no organization. Spend some time learning about antifa and you'll quit making fun of the pink and blue haired kids. Their light years ahead of Conservatives when it comes to communication, organization, funding, etc.

    I've no idea what it's going to finally take to wake everyone up but, it needs to happen!!!

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    1. The folks at Gab have the right idea, though in my view an unhelpful focus on religion as a motivator for what they are doing.

      Conservatives and libertarians need to construct our own safe economy that will protect us from being cancelled. Social media is one part of it, but the myriad of financial services are also all required.

      The tech part that Gab is working on is actually the easier one to do. The tough one (because it requires a ton more financial capital) is the financial services (primarily banking and lending, payment processing, insurance). The rest of the "conservative and liberal financial world" would be easy to implement. With communication and financial security, it would be extremely difficult to shut down anything simply for being conservative or libertarian.

      Delete
  9. Comparisons with Nazi Germany overlook the popular support Hitler had when he took power, and that he did better the lives of Germans at the outset. Biden has neither of those advantages. The majority of Americans will simply ignore politics and Washington, unless DJT is recognized as the rightful President. People will keep their opinions to themselves and the result will be Washington will exist as an enclave divorced from the country with no public support or a military capable of prevailing in any future encounter.

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  10. Yes, we are in a de facto fascist country. Just as the “Resistance” in the federal government did not need a top down command structure, our private business does not need it either. Maybe not in Biden’s term, but probably not long after we will
    officially be in one. That would occur, in my view, if a non American first Republican is elected, by the way.

    Meanwhile, notice that Pence declined speaking at CPAC. Someone else here posted the speakers and they were heavy on Trump/MAGA/American First people and now Trump is speaking.

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    1. Litmus test. We are /have been sorting ourselves out since the man came down the escalator. Trump was invited so Pence declined, one more AmericaNS Last Republican confirmed for all. Thank you PDJT. I think anyone who doesn't see what's going on at CPAC as the splitting of the Republican Party hasn't been paying attention. Mitch and the gang are the rump party. Uniparty. Oligarchy. Whatever. Either your policies put Americans First or you are an Elitist / Totalitarian. Watch the Master Persuader establish the simple criteria. Watch the squishes try to wiggle out of the determination. Watch the left double down on racialist smears, watch Trump turn those smears against them. Insurrection my eye, they haven't seen anything yet and they know it. They know it way better than we do.

      Mark A

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  11. Because Antifa is allowed to exist.

    Anything even slightly similar not fully to the left, is throughly destroyed.

    >Spend some time learning about antifa and you'll quit
    >making fun of the pink and blue haired kids. Their light
    >years ahead of Conservatives when it comes to
    >communication, organization, funding, etc.

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    Replies
    1. Ray, they didn't start off that way and no matter how much we may disagree with them there are lessons to be learned there.

      One example that I've found to be glaring is the number of Conservatives who went to DC Jan 6th using cell phones and straight up text messages to communicate.

      Tech and how it works is like a unknown foreign language to the right. VPN, general encryption, encrypted messaging, etc are general basics of OPSEC and then yet what do we keep seeing the prosecutors referring to in the 200+ DC cases?.... Text messages, GPS Meta data.

      We're not helping ourselves here.

      The left has built their own systems of communication, they have their own apps to prevent getting caught. They didn't get good at this just because they were allowed to do it. They got good at it because of you show up at a local chapter meeting of ANTIFA they are sweeping their own for electronic devises. They build plausible deniability into everything they do from funding to transportation.

      Someone taught them these methods,

      I reached out to several different organizations on the right and I was dumbfounded by what I found in the way they operate.

      Maybe I'm just weird, bored, to analytical, or bat$hit crazy but the right is far to trusting. We decry data collection but we keep wrapping ourselves in it.

      I don't care what you want to call it, left, right, deep state, government, protected, unprotected... If we ever hope to have a chance of holding a candle to any type of resistance we have to be smarter about it.

      To be very clear in not dabbling off into the area of legally questionable activities. I'm speaking in general. You will never be able to organize another protest or public assembly, rally, etc without friend or foe identification in place. Else you run the risk of standing next to ANTIFA's supporters wearing trump hats flanked by embedded CNN reporters passing out free crowbars.

      Even if no one is accepting them, you still run the risk of the painted association when the glass starts breaking.

      It may seem silly but that exact situation is what just transpired last month and has conservatives trembling in fear.

      It's easy to point fingers and decry the wrongs, but we have to look at ourselves first.

      Delete
    2. I think that's very true. For too long conservatives had the attitude that, If I'm not doing anything illegal, then I have nothing to worry about. That may work under a government that wouldn't dream of framing dissenting voices, but not in the real world we inhabit. Hell, even Trump had to be clued into that reality by Adm. Mike Rogers.

      Delete
    3. Devilman - I agree with you on the professionalism of Antifa. The assassination of the proud boy was incredible the tradecraft shown. Not to mention their training manual in the us. And the sharing of what works and does not work with their European fellow travelers.

      https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/?m=1 Coverage has been eye opening.

      It’s basically a cell based guerilla force that is deliberately being ignored by the government, as well as the main stream press.

      Delete
  12. Many (or most?) of the well-known conservative commentators I was reading on Twitter, have been cancelled.

    I suppose just a question of time until the lesser lights are gone as well.

    Frank

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  13. I bet Trump is seeing it.

    >Are conservatives, much less Republicans, ready for this
    >battle? I don't see it.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Understanding and Embracing the Role of the 21st-Century American Dissident

    https://www.brenthamachek.com/post/understanding-and-embracing-the-role-of-the-21st-century-american-dissident

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  15. Also post it notes: " Havel was here."

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  16. O/T but related, and I am under no illusion this post makes me appear a bit paranoid - so be it. I make my living in the search marketing field, but what I just had happen on my cell phone is troubling.

    My dad is post-retirement and 2 weeks ago was discharged from a hospital stay, to a 'luxury' rehab center near his senior facility.

    You have to understand: I've lived in that area for more than 50 years, so I was 99% sure where this rehab facility was located.

    I've never used a search engine to find ANY info including address for this facility on my laptop, cell phone or any tablet device. I have location data turned off on my Android phone, and I do not use Google Maps.

    As I drove to pick him up, I used a THIRD party map (not Google/Apple etc) - again, *w/o location/GPS turned on* - to double check which side of the street this place was on.

    This was last Friday.

    This morning, I have re-targeting advertisements for this facility showing up in my Android device.

    I have ZERO permissions given to Google for any other apps, and have uninstalled all but one Google app on this device.

    I understand how proximity marketing works, but I've never once searched for this place on any Google app - ever.

    I will discuss with my tech team, but it appears Google is mining search and other data from my Android device from apps that do not belong to them, and are defacto tracking me despite every effort to ensure they don't...

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    1. Yep - Google does that unless you get a special version of Android with the tracking stuff removed.

      Delete
    2. A good lesson in going dark, don't trust what they tell you about your cell phone data/GPS data. Remove the battery, only way to be sure.
      0311

      0311

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    3. Ray is correct, if you read google's fine print all you are really turning off is 3rd party access and ease of use.

      You can go to a rooted phone and custom ROM if you are savy and overly concerned about it. Or buy them already built but you're gonna pay for it. The average Joe doesn't need that, but yes, google's still being google in your pocket. I USE to be super paranoid about this but I've some what surrendered because I can't get a phone I want with a removable battery anymore. Hence I can never really "turn it off".

      People mistake Androids for being less secure for Iphones, the truth is the opposite of that. The reason IT and Security departments hate Androids so much is that they can be easily modified and reconfigured by the user / owner to do what YOU want it to (or not) do, where a iPhone (unless you're REALLY talented) does what apple tells your phone to do.

      Delete
  17. It doesn't matter how long it might take a case to get to the Supreme Court, it hasn't got the guts to protect the First Amendment.

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  18. SWC on the latest SC decision re PA: it would have taken one justice of the three who denied review to have had the case heard by the full court.

    Roberts, Kavanaugh or Barrett. I'll go out on a limb here. AC Barrett will prove to be a waste of time. Kavanaugh isn't far behind her.

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    1. Thanks for the heads up. I've been writing all morning and now will need to do more shoveling. Obviously a major disappointment in line with the abdication from institutional responsibility under the constitution with the TX case. Disappointing but not unexpected. But we can always hope for Durham, right? :-( This signals that the SCOTUS is no longer an equal branch of government--and acknowledges as much.

      Delete
  19. Yep, those people are not Conservatives, their Repubs. I was against ACB the day her name first came up for nominations.

    As time goes in we'll see people treating her like Roberts and saying "she changed"... Nope, that's just what you unknowingly cheered for.

    If Mitch McConnell supported them, it was worth asking why.

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  20. Thomas Hobbes is winning out right now, just sayin

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