Category Archives: Eugenics

Peter Jacksons trilogy has been loved by New Zealand for 20 years. Naomii Seah asks if its time we take a closer look.

Lord of the Rings is meticulously crafted, beautifully shot and visionary. The project pioneered visual effects techniques and camera work, employed over 20,000 people in New Zealand alone, and has boosted our national revenue through tourism and merchandise.

But I still dont like it.

Why? Well, for one I have the attention span of a gnat, and more than three hours per movie is just too much. But thats my own fault for watching too many TikToks.

Jokes aside, JRR Tolkien, although in many ways progressive for his time, was not immune to the rhetoric of eugenics and imperialism that permeated Britain in the early-mid 20th century. Theres been endless debate about whether Tolkien was racist. I dont care about that. But he was a British citizen, writing around the time of World War II. And it shows in his description of Orcs as squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types. Its also evident in the way Orc-Goblins and Orc-Men are considered monstrous: an unpleasant echo of the mid-20th-century eugenics movement, which sought to prevent inter-ethnic marriages. Genetic determinism is also front and centre in Middle-Earth, driving its central conflict.

For a film that began production in 1997, Jackson and co sure did carry over a lot of that 1950s prejudice.

Twenty years ago may seem like a long time. Times were different in the early 2000s! I hear you yell across the internet abyss. But it had been an even longer time between the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954 and Jacksons film.

Between 1954 and 1997, apartheid and the civil rights movement had brought global attention to systemic racism. Locally, the 1970s and 80s saw an era dubbed the Mori renaissance, where indigenous arts and language flourished, as those whod had their culture beaten out of them began to reclaim their whakapapa.

Increasing indigenous activism saw a rebrand of New Zealand as a bicultural nation, and perceptions of race relations between Mori and Pkeh continued to be seen positively overseas, despite the realities of day-to-day life.

And in the midst of this swirling debate about race relations, biculturalism and equity, Jackson created a white imperialist film?

Lets unpack. Tolkien aimed to create a sense of history with Middle-Earth. Tolkiens hobbits are meant to represent domestic middle-class England; a romanticised, pastoral, simple way of life that is long gone. Hobbits are ordinary folk and in Jacksons films, ordinary folk are exclusively white or at least white-passing.

That seems particularly damaging when one considers the films positioning as part of New Zealands national identity. Are all New Zealanders meant to identify with the (white) hobbits? Its a callback to the settler culture of New Zealand in the 20th century, when Pkeh glorified the motherland and anglophilia dominated the emerging culture.

Jackson himself noted that his vision of Middle-Earth is more like history than fantasy, and in his interpretation of the texts, Jackson has made it clear that his vision of history is white.

So where are all the people of colour in Jacksons Middle-Earth? Surprise! Theyre the bad guys. The screen adaptation takes the racial coding of Tolkiens description of the Orcs and supercharges it. In the films, Lawrence Makoare and Sala Baker two of the few cast members of colour played the villainous Uruk-hai captain Lurtz, and Sauron himself. Lurtzs White hand of Saruman bears disturbing resemblance to Aboriginal body art, and the facial piercings, darkened skin and dreadlocked hair of the evil races are all cultural markers of ethnic minorities.

While Tolkien at least attempts to humanise the Orcs in his novels, theres little such nuance in Jacksons films. Orcs are born bad, from literal mud and filth, and they oppose ordinary white people.

The central irony is the close association of free peoples and nature. Its a radically revisionist interpretation of history, considering colonisation decimated the landscape of Aotearoa. So it seems extra insidious that an English, and lets face it, white narrative, which explicitly labels the north and west good in opposition to the evil east and south, has become so deeply rooted in the national consciousness.

Its a beautiful film, and for New Zealand watchers, its particularly gratifying to see local scenes displayed in breathtaking panoramic shots. But Jacksons film is not set in New Zealand. And the conflation of Middle-Earth with its English values and imperial undertones with our post-colonial nation is a troubling one. Particularly when the film, and Jackson, are placed on such high pedestals.

But its time we had a closer look at our cultural narratives. Whos writing them? Whos funding it? (Spoiler, the New Zealand army helped build Hobbiton. Make of that what you will). What are their interests? And as a nation, arent we trying to move on from the atrocities of the colonial era?

So before anyone accuses me of being unpatriotic, let me finish by clearing the air. I dont hate Jacksons work. I hate what it stands for.

Were talking about elves, dwarves, cave trolls and sneaky little hobbitses for an entire week. Read the rest of our dedicated Lord of the Rings 20th anniversary coveragehere.

Here is the original post:

Why we shouldn't glorify Lord of the Rings - The Spinoff

Twentieth-century authoritarian regimes were obsessed with cleansing the unfit from the national body. A revival of that toxic urge seeps toward us like gas under a threshold. The leakage is global. Nevertheless, recent news out of Germany provides a unique lesson in the tenacity of a malignant ideology.

In mid-November, Germanys Euthanasia Society declared COVID vaccination a requirement for physician-assisted suicide. Citing public health concerns, the nation that identified life-unworthy-of-life (Lebensunwertes Leben) redesigned the concept to include a newly despised caste. Unvaccinated sufferers wanting to die are no longer eligible for assisted suicide. They can be left to their torments, condemned to the anguish of living as a lesson to everyone else. In effect, they have been deemed life-unworthy-of-death.

History gives a glimpse into the mutation of cultural pathogens. In the early 1930s Germany embraced the notion of racial hygiene. An offshoot of Social Darwinism, racial hygiene advanced previous emphasis on social hygiene with its stress on public health.

That earlier social hygiene movement, begun in the 19th century, reached a peak in the Weimar years. It laid the foundation for German eugenics and became a prerequisite for the well-being of the German people. Under National Socialism, the health and welfare of an individual was subordinated to the health of the nation.

A variant of that moral infection returns under its old cover of public health. Here is the November 19 press release from Germanys Euthanasia Society (Verein Sterbehilfe). Google translates:

Euthanasia and the preparatory examination of the voluntary responsibility of our members willing to die require human closeness. Human closeness, however, is a prerequisite and breeding ground for corona virus transmission. . . . In the difficult task of balancing the protection of our members, employees and doctors with the practical organization of our everyday life in the association, Dr. Martin Gomann, the head of our medical team, is on hand to advise. More details can be found in our Code of Ethics.

The Code presents assisted suicide (Suizidassistenz) as an extension of palliative care. It expands the patients options for action. The unvaccinated are now excluded from that option.

The press release uses the term menschliche Nhe. Many media reports, using Google Translate, interpret it as human closeness. However, an ample German dictionary suggests human contact. In this instance, contact is more suitable than closeness. To English speakers, the word closeness carries implication of emotional connection. But that does not apply here. Germanys euthanasia enthusiasts stake their claim strictly on spatial distance, not personal intimacy.

A more sensitive definition of nhenearby, at close range, within reachbetter illustrates the lunacy at work here. Vaccination itself requires close contact between the jabber and the jabbee. The two must be physically adjacent, within touching distance. Likewise, the two common methods of assisted suicideinfusion or injectionrequire the same proximity. In the main, distinction between means of vaccination and assisted suicide is a distinction without a difference.

Moreover, there exits a no-hands alternative to supervised suicide that completely dispenses with human contact. Oral anesthetic combined with barbiturates or a sedative (typically phenobarbital) can be taken by individuals themselves. The attending angel can oversee from a distance to ensure that the patient falls into a deep sleep prior to succumbing to cardiac arrest from the barbiturate.

If the euthanizer has already been vaccinated and boosted, why not add a hazmat suit for surefire protection? Answer: protection is beside the point. Risk of contagion is a smokescreen for something more lethal than COVID.

Call it malice. Hatred of vaccine dissidentseven ones in pain or despairexpresses itself first in marginalization and demonization. Then it advances to punishment of the non-compliant. We are in the early stages of coercive retribution. But the Societys vindictive decision hints at a larger end game that has little to do with public health.

Some media greeted the Societys mandate as an absurdity. But no. It is much more than that. What appears absurd has purpose behind it.

Germany is the seedbed of Karl Schwabs megalomania and the aligned ambitions of globalist elites. They view nonconformity to vaccination diktats as insubordination, a threat to the utopian bottom line. Resistance to the reigning narrative is denounced as irrational. In the mind of our betters, it suggests mental illness, and poses a danger to the common good. Science denial is an error that has no rights.

The death penalty has been illegal in Germany for decades. Were it not for the ban, a few pellets of Zyklon B could be dropped into the would-be suicides oxygen tank. Again, no contact needed. But that would recallamong other thingsthe murder of psychiatric patients in Germany and its occupied territories.

In 1939, Adolf Hitler ordered the mercy death of mentally ill and handicapped patients. He authorized certain physicians, appointed by name, to assess incurables to be granted the kindness of death. By 1945, after some 70,000 compassionate killings, it was public knowledge that psychiatry had renounced the care of the individual in favor of Medizin fr das Ganze (Health for the Nation as a Whole), the stated goal of the Third Reich.

Canadas New Brunswick province has given food stores the right to ban the unvaccinated. Austria is proposing fines or imprisonment. True, Western democracies are not killing vaccine refuseniks. It is enough, so far, to tighten the screws gradually.

But there is a stench in the air.

Read more here:

Obsessing Over 'The Health Of The Nation' Conjures Some Dark Places - The Federalist

My friend and former colleague Parker Molloy has a wonderful newsletter (you should subscribe) where she does some of my favorite media criticism. Though undeniably progressive, Parker values nuance and knows bullshit when she sees it, and has a fantastic knack for articulating the truth beyond the hype.

Case-in-point: she's recently published a few fantastic pieces about the War on Christmas, explaining its deep history in America that far pre-dates the Fox News manufactured controversy factory.

Remember Henry Ford? American industrialist, founder of the Ford Motor Company, etc.? He was also a gigantic antisemite. (Also, FYI, this section will involve some discussion about Ford's antisemitism, so feel free to skip to the next header if you're not okay with/interested in reading about that.)

In the early 1920s, Ford's Dearborn Publishing Company released a four-volume set of essays penned by Ford and a handful of aides calledThe International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem. These essays had previously run in Ford'sThe Dearborn Independentnewspaper, and would go on to inspire the Nazis and their obsession with eugenics. Volume 2, chapter 36, "'Jewish Rights' to Put Studies Out of Schools" makes mention of Christmas with a familiar argument to those of us living in the present day: "Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth All of this begins with the designers of the cards. And even in this business one comes upon that same policy of declaring Anti-Semitic everything that is Christian."

In a sense, this was the first shot fired in the "War on Christmas" wars and a blueprint for how these arguments would play-out for the next century.

Molloy shares snippets of historical articles from across the 20th century, all using the same sort of fear-mongering rhetoric as Tucker Carlson does in the modern day. And a follow-up piece, she does a great job explaining how a sense of self-made victimhood is essential to the success of the War-On-Christmas meme:

For instance, the odd "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer actually teaches kids NOT to be bullies" line is throwback to a 2018 round of right-wing outrage sparked by right-wing media pretending thata video listed under HuffPost's "Comedy" verticalmeant to be a tongue-in-cheek "Viewers Noticed Some Very Disturbing Details In 'Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer'" joke was an actual "We need to talk about this problematic thing" post, which it wasn't. Anybody who looked at this for more than two seconds would realize this was a joke and the video was filled with joke tweets several from comedians. "The North Pole needs a HR department. All these bosses are horrible," reads one of the jokes.

But days (and even weeks) after the HuffPost video got posted, right-wing media kept insisting that yes, the left was trying to banRudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeerfrom TV (in 2021, they would have probably said something like, "The left wants to cancel Rudolph!!!") There's no doubt in my mind that the people working at Fox, for instance, were aware that the video was a joke. They just knew that their audience was fired up and decided to run with it.

But because nothing in the world is actually original anymore, Fox was essentially just rehashingsomething it aired way back in 2011when it invited a professor of some sort to come on air and claim thatRudolphsends the wrong message. They were only able to get a day's worth of content from that, but it shows exactly how the right-wing outrage machine works when it comes to "War on Christmas" stuff or anything else. The goal is always to present individual comments as though they're representative of the larger movement.

To top it all off, Molloy's wife Kayla has designed some new merchandise to mock the fake war on Christmas:

This may need to replace my current favorite holiday sweater, which says "Jesus Christ didn't die for you to be an asshole."

The ugly origins of the "War on Christmas" [Parker Molloy / The Present Age]

Original post:

A brief history of the war on Christmas - Boing Boing

The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization today. Its a landmark Supreme Court case, one that challenges and could potentially result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, thus restoring the ability of states to regulate abortion as they see fit.

However, Dobbs is not only about protecting unborn babies in the womb or empowering states to make their own laws on abortion; it also presents an opportunity to challenge the unchecked racism of the abortion industry.

That industrys history of racism should be well-known to the Supreme Court. Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Courts only black justice, has repeatedly pointed out abortions deadly impact on black lives. In his concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc., Thomas stated the dark truth behind the abortion industry quite clearly: Margaret Sanger started Planned Parenthood to eliminate black lives.

Thomas was right. In a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, Sanger outright admitted that we do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. For Sanger, abortion was a tool, a means to an end; Planned Parenthood was created to stop black families from reproducingeven if that meant killing black lives in the womb.

But Planned Parenthood didnt emerge in a vacuum; it was part of a broader culture of racism and eugenics in America. Around the turn of the 20th century, states across the country started passing laws encouraging those believed to possess superior genes to reproduce and those with inferior genes not to reproduce, sometimes by coercion. It was clearly racist, but several states developed targeted eugenics programs. These included such practices as forced sterilization of the disabled and of people of certain ethnicities. When the Supreme Court infamously ruled these programs were constitutional in Buck v. Bell, they began to proliferateespecially in the South.

Eugenics programs became so common that they acquired folk names. Mississippi, in particular, is infamous for the Mississippi Appendectomy, a form of routine, forced sterilization performed on black women without their consent, and often without their knowledge. Given Americas struggles with racism and segregation, it should come as no surprise that Americas eugenics programs disproportionately targeted and impacted black men and women.

The abortion industry continues that legacy today. Abortion is the leading cause of death for black Americans. And that is by design; nearly 80 percent of Planned Parenthoods clinics are within walking distance of poor black and minority communities. Despite making up just 13 percent of the population, black women undergo around 40 percent of the nations abortions.

This is what makes the Dobbs case so important. Challenging Roe v. Wade, and the pro-abortion judicial regime it created, this case is our opportunity to reckon with the racism built into the abortion industry. By asking the Supreme Court to reconsider the judicial precedent set by Roe v. Wade, Mississippis Attorney General Lynn Fitch is giving us an opportunity to fix the wrong of eugenics and combat the systemic racism still prevalent in the abortion industry today.

We cant afford to wait. The judicial regime established by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey gives legal cover to the abortion industrys systematic campaign to eliminate black lives. Millions of black babies have died from abortion. And unless Dobbs is successful in challenging the Roe/Casey regime, millions more will die in the years to come.

The stakes couldnt be higher. Thats why nearly 80 amicus briefs have been filed in support of Mississippi in Dobbs v. Jackson. And thats also why I was immensely proud to lend the voice of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, my own organization, to the dozens of other organizations submitting briefs in defense of a pro-life ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson.

So much of the contemporary conversation around abortion focuses on unhelpful euphemisms like reproductive autonomy or reproductive rights. We need to be more direct than that; we have to call the abortion industry for what it is: a racist institution that targets and harms black lives and black communities. Ending the ability of that industry to operate largely unchecked is one of the most important civil rights issues of today.

Original post:

A horrible truth behind today's big abortion case - WORLD News Group

CASTLETON The Vermont State Colleges System Board of Directors announced Monday that Jonathan Spiro, interim president of Castleton University, will be stepping down in just over a month.

Spiros departure has been called a retirement effective Jan. 3, 2022.

According to a news release issued by the college late Monday, Spiro has given nearly 20 years of service to Castleton University and the Vermont State Colleges system as a faculty member, administrator, and most recently as Castleton University interim president since May 2020.

In the release, Chancellor Sophie Zdatny noted, President Spiro is known for his collaborative approach, his thoughtfulness, and his sense of humor. ... Spiro dedicated the majority of his professional career to Castleton as a faculty member, administrator, and leader. We are grateful for his service, professional expertise and contributions, and his community engagement, and we wish him well in his very deserved retirement.

Castleton Universitys provost, Thomas Mauhs-Pugh, has accepted the position of interim president. He spent 22 years at Green Mountain College, where he served as provost and vice president of academic affairs, interim president, dean of the faculty, education department chair, and as a professor of education.

In the release, VSCS Board Chair Lynn Dickinson stated, I offer my sincerest thanks to President Spiro for his many years of service to Castleton University and the Vermont State Colleges system.

She said Spiro led Castleton through a tremendously challenging time as it navigated the challenges of the pandemic and the resulting impacts on students and employees. She said he established the Center for Teaching and Learning at Castleton; fostered a rise in student retention; and steered Castleton through their 10-year accreditation visit from the New England Commission on Higher Education, among many other accomplishments.

When I reflect on President Spiros long career at Castleton, his time in the classroom as a professor of history, his notable research on eugenics, race, and American history, and his many successful endeavors as an academic dean and department chair particularly stand out. While we will certainly feel the loss of President Spiro at Castleton, we wish him the best in his retirement, she said.

According to the release, Mauhs-Pugh offered congratulations to Spiro on his coming retirement and stated, I am honored to serve Castleton University and its outstanding students. Our campus is positioned to thrive well into the future with strong enrollment, immense gains in first- to second-year student retention, and many new initiatives on the horizon. Adding its strengths to the proposed Vermont State University will expand access to Castletons programs and open new opportunities to our students from our sister institutions.

Read more:

CU's Spiro announces he is retiring | Local News | rutlandherald.com - Rutland Herald

In 1906, in response to the British Administration in the Transvaal, South Africa passing the Asiatic Law Amendment Act designed to enforce registration of the colonys male Asian population, Mohandas K. Gandhi led a group of fellow satyagrahis (nonviolent activists) to defy the just-introduced pass law: they publicly burned their passes. In the seven year campaign that followed, thousands of Indians were jailed (including Gandhi himself) and activists were flogged or even shot for striking, refusing to register, burning their registration cards, or engaging in other forms of nonviolent resistance. Nevertheless, the campaign was eventually won.

More than 100 years later, citizens the world over (not just in one country or region) are already being required, or will be shortly, to carry a pass, this one ostensibly signifying vaccine status but, beyond this, to be used as part of a sequence of measures designed to track movements and control behaviours. Given its role in the package of measures launched as part of theWorld Economic Forums Great Reset, including those critical to implementation of the fourth industrial revolution along with the associated measures in relation to transhumanism, cyber polygon and eugenics, the vaccine passport threatens an intrusion into the lives of citizens vastly more heinous than the passes the Transvaal government intended and to which Gandhi objected so strenuously.

Hence, national societies and the international community currently lurch rapidly towards a world in which individual identity, freedom, rights, privacy and even volition are destroyed as the Global Elite implements its long-standing plan to create a New World Order in which the very meaning of the word human is under threat. Moreover, we have been promised that, by 2030, we will own nothing and we will be happy about it! SeeYoull own nothing, and youll be happy.

So why isnt everyone vigorously resisting the World Economic Forums Great Reset and its related measures?

Misunderstanding what is happening around the world at the moment is understandable. Misrepresenting what is happening through misunderstanding it is also understandable.

However, it certainly makes it difficult to get the truth out there when blatant and persistent lying is being used by relevant international organizations (notably including the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and the World Health Organization), national governments, the pharmaceutical and medical industries, and the corporate media to terrorize people into believing that a virus that has never been isolated and proven to exist seeCOVID-19: The virus does not exist it is confirmed!,Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI)andNo Record Found:FOIs reveal that health/science institutions around the world (137 and counting!) have no record of SARS-COV-2 isolation/purification, anywhere, ever is killing substantial numbers of people and that we need several experimental gene-altering injections (that are, in fact, killing substantial numbers of people), for the rest to survive! See, for example,The Truth about the Covid-19 Vaccine,A Final Warning to Humanity,COVID Shots to Decimate World Population, Warns Dr. Bhakdi,Finally! Medical Proof the Covid Jab is MurderandAbstract 10712: Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: a Warning.

As Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945 noted: If you tell a lie, tell a big one.

Of course, on the surface it may appear that it is simply ignorance of the evidence and relevant data that has most people unaware of what is really happening. But this is only true in the most superficial sense.

After all, given the monumental nature of what has taken place over the past two years with virtually everyones life profoundly upended, ostensibly because this was necessary to combat a virus claiming that people submitted to government direction out of ignorance and/or trust in the relevant authorities is to miss something fundamental.

People who are being deceived by the elite-driven narrative almost two years into this crisis are, in fact, terrified. This terror is invariably unconscious: that is, it is suppressed below conscious awareness. But it is the true explanation of why a narrative that is so fundamentally flawed, with extensive evidence available to those who seek it, continues to maintain its dominance over the truth.

So why are so many people so terrified of investigating what is really happening, and responding accordingly?

Because each human being is unique, the individual is born with a powerful evolutionary gift: Self-will. This means that the individual has an incredible range of tools, including the capacity to apply sensory perception (sight, sound, touch) to observe what is happening, the emotional capacity to feel what this means (is it satisfying, enjoyable, frightening, infuriating), to consider evidence and think for themself about the significance of it, to compare and contrast it with relevant memories, to gauge it against ones conscience and so on until an integrated sense of how to behave in response is formulated and then acted on.

If a person is doing this then we might describe them as Self-aware. And they are, truly, an individual.

However, in the name of socialization, parents terrorize children into obedient submission to those people identified as authorities and this ranges from the parents themselves as well as teachers and religious figures in the childs life to those institutions that will later play vital, if largely invisible, roles in profoundly shaping the adult life of every individual: international organizations, governments and corporations (including corporate medicine and the corporate media), as well as legal systems, all of which are controlled by the global elite.

As just one outcome of this terrorization which I have elsewhere labeled, with comprehensive explanations, visible, invisible and utterly invisible violence: seeWhy Violence? the individual who can genuinely think and investigate for themselves, critique society in any meaningful way, engage emotionally with the ramifications of what they learn, and then act to resist injustice courageously and strategically is all too rare.

In fact, because of the experience of childhood terrorization, virtually all children are compelled to surrender the essence of these various capacities, and hence their Self-will, by a very young age. In these circumstances, the child becomes a malleable instrument, easily transformed into a victim who is now devoid of the capacity to look deeply within themselves to make sound judgments about what is taking place and to behave powerfully in response.

Instead, they simply obey the will of another: parent, teacher, religious figure, employer, corporate executive, political leader. and act more out of habit than consideration. Given the endless violence (usually labeled punishment) that is inflicted to ensure that children are obedient to others, rather than allowed to follow their own self-will, it takes an extraordinary child to survive with even a semblance of the potential with which they were born. As a result, most human behavior lacks consideration, conviction, courage and strategy, and is simply driven compulsively by the predominant fear in each context.

For elaboration of this explanation, seeThe Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth,The Psychology of Victimhood: Obama, Cameron, Netanyahu, Clinton, KissingerandFearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice.

A primary outcome of this childhood terrorization experience in materialist cultures is that the child learns to suppress their awareness of how they feel by using food and material items to distract themself. By doing this, the child rapidly loses their emerging self-awareness and learns to consume as the substitute for this awareness. Clearly, this has catastrophic consequences for the child, their society and for nature (although it is immensely profitable for elites and their agents whose Self-awareness is non-existent). For a fuller explanation, seeLove Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War.

In essence, a victim is utterly terrified and powerless. These feelings are unconscious to the victim, which is why they are incapable of intelligently seeking out and personally assessing evidence (such as that in relation to Covid-19 and how it is being used) and they simply submit without protest once told to obey.

An equally important outcome for the victim is that they have little, if any, capacity to see beyond themselves or their immediate concerns (which might include an activist preoccupation). They are incapable of perceiving and considering the wider ramifications of what is taking place the big picture such as the impact on those millions of people who are experiencing mental health problems, sexual and/or other forms of violence, unemployment, poverty, homelessness, starvation or even being killed outright by official responses to the non-existent pandemic. Any sense of a wider self, of human solidarity beyond the most superficial kind, is incomprehensible to them.

Moreover, among those who can penetrate the elite-driven delusion in relation to the injectables, the most significant effort is dissipated in petitioning and lobbying governments as well as protesting against governments, as the elite intends. Of course, governments, elected or otherwise, are simply the tools the elite uses to control the various national populations (either by deluding most people into believing that they live in a democracy or simply by subjecting them to dictatorship) so effort directed at governments is the equivalent of treating the puppet as the puppetmaster: virtually always, a complete waste of time, as the historical record demonstrates. SeeKilling Democracy Once and for All: The Global Elites Coup dtat That Is Destroying Life as We Know It.

Of course, it is this terrified submission to authority that the elite is relying on to compel the bulk of the human population to submit to the death needle, given its crucial role in implementing their depopulation agenda. SeeKilling Off Humanity: How the Global Elite is using Eugenics and Transhumanism to Shape Our Future.

However, for those left alive, the intention is to use their submission to turn them into transhuman slaves who are even more readily monitored and controlled. SeeBeware the Transhumanists: How Being Human is being Re-engineered by the Elites Covid-19 Coup.

Hence, as the global elite progressively implements its agenda to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and turn the bulk of those left alive into transhuman slaves, it can rely on those who are submissively obedient to act as its agents against those who are not. And this is crucial for its agenda to be achieved.

Simply because, in the end, it is not just the technological measures at its disposal now or in the future that will enable the comprehensive surveillance and behavioural control they desire to be achieved. It is because the Global Elite can rely on those too terrified to critique what is happening, and to act powerfully in response, to monitor and try to control the behaviour of those around them. Whether by requiring businesses to have us wear masks, register QR codes, prove vaccine status, pay with plastic cards and not cash, and so on, governments are effectively using certain sections of the population to control the others. And, often, unwillingness to do so is neutralized by threat of financial penalty or imprisonment for non-compliance.

Even more deeply, governments are requiring members of families to discriminate against each other on the basis of vaccine status.

And this is how it has always been. Just ask the Nazis in Germany in World War II whose relative lack of technological means was no impediment to social control. Managing how peoples fear is projected is always the key, just as elite propaganda is used to project peoples fear to support deployment of the US/NATO war machine against an endless sequence of enemies.

Jews, Gooks, Muslims, a virus, unvaccinated it doesnt really matter what. Just identify where the fear is to be projected and use propaganda to focus it. There are plenty of unconsciously terrified people out there who wont challenge the narrative.

Unfortunately, then, those around us, ranging from family members and friends to our employers and the businesses we visit, become the gatekeepers, effectively deciding who can visit whom, and who can or cant go about their daily routine. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell would be impressed with how easily their dystopian visions have been realized.

And this will jump a giant notch upwards with the introduction of vaccine passports, far more intrusive and controlling than the passes that Gandhi found so objectionable more than a century ago. Hence, ever more draconian measures by governments will ensure greater levels of submission by those who are terrified: The gatekeepers of hell.

Fortunately, among those who are more courageous, there is considerable resistance already. However, we need to expand this and also get it onto a more strategic footing so that it functionally undermines the power of the Global Elite to conduct this coup. And dont assume that the Global Elite will back off. It is criminally insane. SeeThe Global Elite is Insane Revisited.

So, once again, our liberation strategy must thwart those key measures of their coup that would give them the control they want. This will not be easy because we must mobilize millions to act strategically. Mass mobilizations, like most of those that have been conducted so far, can have no impact against the Global Elite unless they are used to identify and inspire strategically-focused acts of nonviolent resistance that are ongoing.

For an integrated strategy to defeat the elite coup, see theWe Are Human, We Are Freecampaign, which has 29 strategic goals for defeating the coup including meaningful engagement with police, military forces and mercenaries to assist them to understand and resist, rather than support, the elite agenda. If you want to read more detail, you can do so atNonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

But for a simpler presentation, see theWe Are Human, We Are Free 7 Days Campaign to Resist The Great Reset. One-page flyers in English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian and Spanish, outlining essential nonviolent actions that we must undertake, can be downloaded from this link. Other languages are being added as they become available.

The Telegram group ishere.

In addition, it will be invaluable if you make yourself increasingly self-reliant as the mechanisms that you have been seduced into becoming dependent upon are progressively and rapidly being taken away. SeeThe Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth.

And if you have the chance to talk to someone about what they think is going on, try listening! SeeNisteling: The Art of Deep Listening.

We have a choice. We can choose to resist, strategically, now, while we can still make choices.

Or we can watch as homo sapiens continues to be decimated and those left alive lose those very qualities that define humanity.

There is no third option.

Gandhi and his fellow activists resisted passes far less intrusive more than a century ago. Are you going to resist these now?

This article was also published at Transcend Media Service (TMS)

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Resisting The Gatekeepers Of Hell: Gandhi, 'Vaccine Passports' And The Great Reset OpEd - Eurasia Review

Illustration: Djibril Morrissette-Phan

The setup to The History Of Science Fiction is fairly straightforward: Guides, most of them fictionalized versions of significant white men from science fictions past, elaborate on the history of the genre for two robots in a futuristic museum. As comics are the art of sequentiality, a graphic novel purporting to be the sequential history of science fictionput out by the publisher of so much seminal sci-fi, no lessis likely an intriguing prospect for many comics readers. Presented with an index and a list of principal art sources, the book is clearly attempting to be of some academic or referential use, on top of its wider appeal. But the English translation of Histoire De La Science Fiction fails utterly as a proper historic workand worse, ends up functioning as weak hagiography.

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Djibril Morrissette-Phan

Mark Waid and Amanda Lucido

Bruno Lecigne and Eric Marcelin

Which is a shame, because the art shines throughout the book. Its especially wonderful when recreating the angles of famous shots from sci-fi films. In fact, in terms of visuals alone, The History Of Science Fiction would be a commendable work. There is a literal timeline that runs through the bottom of some pages and highlights various sci-fi works, usually relevant to the content on the rest of the page.

Unfortunately, the book also claims to be the history of science fiction; but it only really presents the history of Western science fictionand a skewed version, at that. More precisely, it primarily functions as a history of science fiction from France, the U.K., and the United States. The notable writers and editors to which the comic team gives literal voice are primarily from those locations, with writers from other countries serving as little more than window dressing. For example, though objects and ideas from Japanese sci-fi litter the futuristic museum, no Japanese author is given anywhere near the depth as writers from the aforementioned countries. Considering that one of the primary sources for this book is able to be precise about its purview (La Science-Fiction En France Dans Les Annes 50, or Science Fiction In France In The 50s), its a baffling decision on the part of everyone involved here to not specify thisespecially while calling itself history.

Additionally, there is an ugly tendency in the book to gloss over the more reprehensible aspects of the writers featured. At one point, a fictionalized version of British author Michael Moorcock updates a fictionalized H.G. Wells on the state of science fiction after his death. The book has Moorcock say, Although the Huxley family didnt always agree on everything, Julian (a renowned biologist who later popularized the term transhumanism), Aldous, and you, Herbert, were all staunch supporters of Darwinism and eugenics that would be of benefit to the human race. In contrast to the extremist eugenic ideas of the Nazis, for example. This statement is nonsensical; even if one accepts the possibility that the creative team wholly disagrees with eugenics but feels that Moorcockgiven the opportunity to speak with Wellswould say this, its presented without question, when in actuality there is no eugenics of benefit to the human race. It literally generates inequality.

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Illustration: Djibril Morrissette-Phan and Xavier Dollo

Illustration: Djibril Morrissette-Phan and Xavier Dollo

Illustration: Djibril Morrissette-Phan and Xavier Dollo

Illustration: Djibril Morrissette-Phan and Xavier Dollo

There is brief mention of how the closed-mindedness of some lionized writers affected science fiction. For example, John W. Campbell is described as being marred by racism and rather questionable stances, particularly on pseudo-sciences such as scientology. However, while the book imagines and renders Campbells moments of brilliance in illuminating flashbacks, it does nothing of the sort with his racism, even though those noxious beliefs equally shaped the science fiction of his time and place. Choices like these make The History Of Science Fiction seem absurd as a serious historical work.

Finally, the book comes off as confused about how the history of science fiction has resulted in its present. It quotes Rebecca F. Kuangs Hugo acceptance speech, outlining what she would tell a new writer of science fiction: The chances are very high that you will be sexually harassed at conventions, or the target of racist microaggressions, or very often just overt racism. Yet six pages earlier, it features a hagiography of Harlan Ellison that omits his very public 2006 groping of fellow Hugo winner Connie Willis (there is literally footage of the incident).

By not mentioning this, the book itself contributes to how the larger culture of science fictionthat results in sexual harassment at conventionsis maintained, permitting acts of sexual harassment and assault. The Kuang quote continues, with her saying, the way people talk about you and your literature will be tied to your identity and your personal trauma instead of the stories you are actually trying to tell. By including this specific comment by Kuang, who is only mentioned in this instance, and whose work is never discussed, is The History Of Science Fiction not doing exactly what she is decrying?

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The History Of Science Fiction utterly fails to live up to its title - The A.V. Club

Fox commentator Lara Logan.Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Peter Klein is the executive director of the Global Reporting Centre and professor at the University of British Columbia.

This week, Fox News commentator Lara Logan went on the air to criticize the U.S. response toward the COVID-19 pandemic, which is being led by President Bidens chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fair enough we should certainly be debating those policies in an open forum.

She then shared this gem: What you see on Dr. Fauci this is what people say to me, that he doesnt represent science to them. He represents Josef Mengele, referring to the Nazi doctor who experimented on Jews during the Second World War.

As the child of Holocaust survivors, whose cousins, aunt and uncle died in Auschwitz the camp where Dr. Mengele worked I cant help but take offence to such a comparison. The notion that a physician who has helped millions through his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as adviser to seven U.S. presidents, would bear any resemblance to a torturer who peddled eugenics and pseudoscience is, of course, ridiculous.

But I also come to this as Laras former producer at 60 Minutes, where we worked on stories about national security and war, and my first response, after eye-popping disbelief, is what I often said to her in the newsroom: show me the facts. She said on the Fox program, I am talking about people all across the world are saying this. Who are these sources who are widely comparing Dr. Fauci to Dr. Mengele?

Of course, there are no such sources, beyond perhaps a small circle of far-right activists she may be associating with these days.

My phone and inbox have been overflowing with questions from friends, colleagues and strangers, asking if Lara was always this way. Let me set the record straight: no.

Its true that Lara tried to push the envelope sometimes, but theres a system in place at reputable news organizations that keeps journalists in check. I remember a heated argument with her in the edit room, in which she insisted on calling the Iraq-based terrorist group Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn by the shorthand Al Qaeda. I pointed out that this group, often referred to as Al Qaeda in Iraq, is not the group founded by Osama bin Laden. The conflation of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan with Sunni terrorists in Iraq is precisely what we, as journalists, had the responsibility to set straight with the public and policy makers. While the groups founder did pledge allegiance to Al Qaeda in 2004, I said that calling them the same thing would be akin to saying the Beatles and Wings were the same band. She changed the script.

The Lara I worked with was a good reporter. She was brave and curious, she listened during interviews and she knew how to tell a good story. While she did her share of pieces that glorified the U.S. military, she was also open to critiques, as in our 2007 story Dissension in the Ranks, which looked at service members refusing to redeploy to Iraq over their concerns about how the war was being run by the Bush administration.

Thats not the Lara we saw emerge two years ago. After she was put on leave by CBS News over a discredited report on the Benghazi attack, she went on an obscure right-wing podcast run by a retired Navy SEAL she had previously profiled, to excoriate the media for what she perceived as liberal bias. I called her out in private over the comments, and she listened respectfully but, nevertheless, she persisted. She has gone on to host a streaming show with the ironic title Lara Logan Has No Agenda, and she pops up occasionally with controversial comments that keep her relevant.

The risks of these comments go beyond destroying her reputation. It fosters skepticism in scientifically sound health policies, and it feeds the attacks on Dr. Fauci, whose life is in constant danger because of this kind of propaganda.

The other question I get is does Lara really believe the drivel she peddles? These days, she strikes me more like Sacha Baron Cohen playing the character Borat, when he got a bar in Arizona to sing along with the refrain Throw the Jew down the well. Or like in his recent film, when he got the crowd at a pro-Trump rally to sing Dr. Fauci, what we gonna do? Inject him with the Wuhan flu! Playing to a gullible audience.

Thats the sort of radical populism that has kept Laras crowd stirring, and has kept her career alive. But when it comes to her credibility as a fact-based journalist thats dead.

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Opinion: As Lara Logan's former producer, I was stunned by her recent comments - The Globe and Mail

Eugenics is the idea to selectively improve humankind by only allowing specific physical and mental characteristics to exist. It focuses on systematically eradicating undesirable physical traits and disabilities, and although it has been long discredited as a science, some of its ideas are still surprisingly prevalent in todays society.

In some forms, eugenics actually has a remarkably long history. Some indigenous peoples of Brazil practiced infanticide against children born with physical abnormalities, and in ancient Greece, the philosopher Plato argued in favor of selective mating to produce a superior class. The Roman Empire and some Germanic tribes also practiced some forms of eugenics. However, eugenics didnt truly become a large-scale idea until the 20th century.

The foundation of eugenics lies on racist beliefs and ideologies and especially something called scientific racism: a pseudoscientific belief that tries to empirical evidence to support or justify racism.

In 1981, American paleontologist Stephen Gould wrote The Mismeasure of Man, a book in which he discusses the problems of the continuous belief in biological determinism that later became eugenics. He gave examples of the instances of scientific racism and how some scientists contributed to providing evidence to the superiority of white people, shaping faulty beliefs for decades or centuries. In the book, you can find the a remarkable list of horrid theories and studies which the researchers insisted on putting one race above the other.

The most famous ranking of races was developed by 19th-century physician Samuel George Morton. Morton, believing himself to be objective, used his collection of skulls of different American Ethnicities to compare cranial capacities and try to prove superior intelligence of one group over the other. His study was basically done by ranking average head sizes (which is not directly connected to intelligence) but mixed different heights in his samples, which induced an obvious bias to his analysis. The analysis was strongly skewed towards linking intelligence with white men, and Mortons conclusion was that white men were the most intelligent race on the face of the Earth. Gould criticized Mortons data (though he does mention that the bias may have been unconscious), noting that the analysis includes analytical errors, manipulated sample compositions, and selectively reported data. Gould classifies this as one of the main instances of scientific racism.

But it gets even worse. Colonialism was working hand in hand with the idea that Europeans were carrying out a civilizing mission. White Europeans were doing nothing but a generous act of helping inferior races to develop and become civilized. This patronizing notion is easily debunked with historical evidence. For instance, we know Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations were empires and they didnt need foreign influence to achieve progress. Take Stonehenge for instance, a monument in England we believe was built around 3000 or 2000 BC. Though very impressive and with enough complexity, it is not as advanced as the Giza pyramid complex in Egypt, which was created around nearly the same period, proving how civilizations were evolving independently.

Another interesting aspect of eugenics is so-called social Darwinism. Social Darwinists believe that survival of the fittest also happens in society some people become powerful in society because they are somehow innately better.

Social Darwinism was invented by one of the founders of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton, one of Charles Darwins cousins. He believed that eugenics should help the human race to reach its ultimate potential accelerating the evolution by eliminating the weak and keeping the appropriate races.

The problem is it does not fit any scientific evidence. First, genetics has clearly shown that we dont have a separation in races, race is rather a social construct more than a genetic one. Differences do exist, but they have to do with common ancestry. In our species, we share 99.9% of our DNA, regardless of race. As a result, one ethnicity is not better than the other in anything, not in appearance, behavior, or intelligence.

The other misconception lies in natural selection itself. Evolution, for humans, is a slow process, it takes time for a genetic trait to become dominant in a species. Social change, on the other hand, is much faster; regimes fall, presidents change, policies change. The changes in society can be beneficial or not for some people, maybe everyone will have easy access to vaccines and survive an epidemic, while in a different regime people can get sick for not having these basic rights. Or worse, shorten the number of people simply because they do not have enough to eat. This has nothing to do with a group being stronger than the other, but the choice of leaving some unassisted.Simply put, social Darwinism has little scientific evidence to back it up and a lot of evidence against it.

Mortons ideas are obviously flawed, but scientists took them as an objective analysis for decades and thats when the chaos started. One scientist cites the other, and the other, propagating false ideas and sending their echo through history affecting millions of lives for years. More theories like those emerged, with developments that come with the evolution of science, but the insistence of ranking white men as the apex predator perpetuated. Even leading scientists can fall prey to racist ideas, and mask them as scientific racism.

Even with modern machine learning and big data, these ideas can still continue to propagate. If the scientists involved dont make sure that their code is not being susceptible to biases, the computer wont be objective. That happened to a machine learning routine using data from hospitals in the US. The algorithm wanted to find patients with risks, one of the easy ways is to look for the amount of money spent by a patient in one year. Seems reasonable, but the problem is the model excluded a large number of black people, for obvious reasons, our society is biased. The fact that this particular system involves money has nothing to do with the patients condition.

Machine learning is based on statistics, and some of the fathers of statistics are intertwined with eugenics. If you ever took a statistics course, you may have heard the name Pearson. Karl Pearson developed hypothesis testing, the use of p-values, the Chi-Squared test, and many other useful tools for science still used today. However, the scientist held strong beliefs in Social Darwinism, a distorted idea that due to natural selection some groups struggle more because in the end the stronger survive. Pearson even supported wars against inferior races. In 2020, the University College London renamed lecture halls and a building which originally honored Pearson and Francis Galton.

Besides ethnicity, the next eugenicist target is intelligence. The French psychologist Alfred Binet invented what we know today as the first version of the IQ test. He wanted his test to be used to help kids at school those who performed poorly would be sent to special classes to get help adapting. He didnt want that to be a label to segregate people. However, his ideas were distorted by some scientists in the USA. In the American continent, the test was used to reinforce the old fallacies for ranking people, even becoming a mechanism to select immigrants.

In time, the IQ test became the one you know today. The problem with it is that its often used to segregate people, without accounting for cultural or socioeconomic factors that could affect IQ scores. Thats not all: American psychologist Henry Goddard, the one responsible for corrupting Binets ideas, defended the idea that feeble-minded people should not have children. In addition, he and other gentlemen chose words like idiot, moron, and feeble-minded to classify people words we still use today to insult someone.

The ultimate goal of eugenics is perpetuating only the good genes which means not allowing those who have bad genes to reproduce.

This led to forced sterilizations in people with mental disorders. The most famous example was the case Buck vs. Bell in the US in 1927. Most of the over 60,000 sterilizations happened in the United States in people whose conditions were labeled as feeble-minded and insane between the 1920s and 1950s.

These procedures were typically carried out in asylums or prisons, with a medical supervisor having the right to decide whether the inmates reproductive systems should be altered or not. The practice is now considered a violation of their rights and the motivation that it would improve inmates lives is considered bogus, as is concern about the financial burden the inmates would provide if they had children, punishment, and of course avoid the reproduction of the unfit. All these with Californias law that the person had no right for objection or appeal.

A lot happened from Goddards time to the 1930s and 1940s when autism was discovered. Know the famous guy, Hans Asperger? Well, he was a nazi Austrian pediatrician known for understanding one type of autism, later known as Asperger Syndrome. The diagnostic criteria for Asperger Syndrome were removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013. There are no longer sub diagnoses, it is all called Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

Asperger observed there were autistic children who were more adaptable to the social norms, they could act normal, so he labeled those children as high functioning, while others were low functioning. The low functioning was considered a burden and not fit for the Third Reich because they couldnt do the tasks of a normal person. In other words, they wouldnt be profitable. Asperger would then transfer these genetically inferior children to the euthanasia killing programs, making the choice of who was worth living and who wasnt. Next time you meet people suffering from autism, ask if they want to be connected to that idea before calling anyone low functioning/high functioning/aspie spoiler, they almost definitely dont.

Genetic research can be eugenist, without mentioning the word or directly defending the idea. Nobody seems to ask autistic people what types of research could be done in order to make their lives better, it is usually a concern on how parents should not have a burden pay attention to the advertisements, do they display autistic people in successful positions, or are they pictures of children with their parents?

More recently, Spectrum10k research was paused. The UK-based researchers wanted to interview and collect DNA from autistic people and their relatives. The autistic community was not consulted and questioned on who the data would be shared with. They realized people involved in the project had a history of questionable research regarding autistic DNA, so advocates protested and the study was paused with the promise they will listen to autistic people.

People with disabilities are genuinely concerned that these developments could result in new eugenic practices and further undermine social acceptance and solidarity towards disability and more broadly, towards human diversity.

Gould saw a problem with many ideas back in the 90s, he edited the book to add the biased research of his time, with the hope to alert scientists not to make those same mistakes. It is evident that our world of today has no more space for racist/ableist science like thise, so why is it ok for labels which came from those eras to be in machine learning, the therapists offices, and schools? Its about time to cut the eugenics out of our civilization.

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Eugenics: how bad science was used to promote racism and ableism - ZME Science

Project Censored's State of the Free Press 2022, edited by Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff, is available for preorder now. Published in collaboration with Random Lengths News, this is the second of two parts. Read the first five stories on the list here.

6. Canary Mission Blacklists Pro-Palestinian Activists, Chilling Free-Speech Rights

Before the critical race theory moral panic fueled a nationwide uprising to censor discussions of race in education, there was an opposite moral panic decrying cancel culture stifling certain peopleespecially in education. But even at the peak of the cancel culture panic, perhaps the most canceled people anywhere in Americapro-Palestinian activists and sympathizersgot virtually no attention. Even though a well-funded, secretly run blacklist website, known as Canary Mission, explicitly targeted thousands of individualsoverwhelmingly studentswith dossiers expressly intended to ruin their careers before they even began, and which have been used in interrogations by Israeli security officials, according to the Forward, a Jewish publication. Theyve also been used by the FBI, as reported by The Intercept.

The website, established in 2015, seeks to publicly discredit critics of Israel as terrorists and anti-Semites, Project Censored noted, but its careless style of accusation has caused a backlash, even among pro-Israeli Jews. While some of those listed on the site are prominent activists, others are students who attended a single event, or even student government representatives suspected of voting for resolutions that are critical of Israel, the Forward reported. More than that, it reported three examples when Canary Mission was apparently retaliating against critics, including Jews.

But by far, its main targets are Palestinians, particularly activists involved with the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions or BDS movement that works to peacefully pressure Israelsimilarly to South Africa in the 1980sto obey international law and respect Palestinians human rights. As the Intercept reported in 2018, While Canary Mission promotes itself as a group working against anti-Semitism, the blacklists effective goal is to clamp down on growing support for Palestine in the United States by intimidating and tarnishing Palestinian rights advocates with the brush of bigotry.

While the FBI told the Intercept that it only investigates activity which may constitute a federal crime or pose a threat to national security, this didnt match up with its actions. If the FBI was concerned about criminal activity among the student activists, its agents made no indication of that in the interviews, the Intercept reported. They did, however, ask questions that echoed far-right propaganda about unproven links between pro-Palestine activist groups and militant groups.

The list itself has had a chilling effect on First Amendment rights, another Intercept story reported. A survey of over 60 people profiled on Canary Mission, conducted by the group Against Canary Mission, found that 43 percent of respondents said they toned down their activism because of the blacklist, while 42 percent said they suffered acute anxiety from being placed on the website. Some have even received death threats.

For many otherwise unknown activists, a Canary Mission profile is their most visible online presence, Project Censored reported, Its the first thing that comes up when you Google my name, the claim that Im a terrorist supporter and an extremist, one former activist on Palestinian issues told the Intercept.

Beyond Canary Mission, Projected Censored noted, a variety of pro-Israel organizations that seek to suppress pro-Palestinian activism have pursued litigation against chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, as reported in The Nation by Lexi McMenamin. A highlighted example at UCLA demanded the release of the names of speakers at a national conference, whose identities had been protected in order to prevent them from being put on no-fly lists, potentially denied entry to other countries, or contacted by the FBI over their organizing work. In March 2021 a California judge rejected that demand, noting that disclosure of their names would violate their rights to freedom of association, anonymous speech, and privacy.

Project Censored also cited a May 2021 federal court ruling that the state of Georgia cannot compel groups or individuals who contract with public entities to disavow support for the BDS movement against Israel, finding that the states law places an unconstitutional incidental burden on speech. Georgia is one of 35 states with similar anti-BDS laws or executive orders.

Heightened violence in Israel/Palestine in May 2021 has focused attention on powerful pro-Israel media biases in US news coverage, but Canary Mission and legal efforts to suppress pro-Palestinian activism have nonetheless received minimal corporate news coverage, Project Censored summarized, citing a handful of exceptions, a New York Times and a Washington Post opinion, plus two New York Times articles dating back to 2018, [that] made passing mention of Canary Mission, as a shadowy organization, But, Project Censored concluded, Aside from this coverage, major establishment news outlets have provided no substantive reports on the role played by Canary Mission and other pro-Israel organizations in stifling the First Amendment rights of pro-Palestinian activists.

7. Googles Union-Busting Methods Revealed

In 2018, Google dropped its long-time slogan, Dont be evil from its code of conduct. In 2019, Google hired IRI Consultants, a union avoidance firm, amid a wave of unprecedented worker organizing at the company, as Vices Motherboard put it in January 2021, while reporting on leaked files from IRI that provided a disturbing picture of how far Google may have strayed in its willingness sabotage its workers rights. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act makes it illegal for companies to spy on employees and guarantees workers the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. Nevertheless, Project Censored noted, companies like Google attempt to circumvent the law by hiring union avoidance firms like IRI Consultants as independent contractors to engage in surveillance and intimidation on their behalf.

[E]mployers in the United States spend roughly $340 million on union avoidance consultants each year, Lauren Kaori Gurley reported for Motherboard, but their practices are apparently so disreputable that IRI doesnt identify its clients on its website beyond saying the firm has been hired by universities, renewable energy companies, auto-makers, the nation's largest food manufacturers, and several top ten worldwide retailers, she reported.

Consultants specialize in operating in the grey areas of the law, John Logan, a Professor of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State told Gurley. Theyre not quite illegal but theyre sort of bending the law if theyre not breaking it.

The [leaked] documents show that the firm collected incredibly detailed information on 83 Seattle hospital employees, including their personality, temperament, motivations, ethnicity, family background, spouses employment, finances, health issues, work ethic, job performance, disciplinary history, and involvement in union activity in the lead-up to a union election, Project Censored noted, including descriptions of workers as lazy, impressionable, money oriented, and a single mother.

The documents Motherboard reported on didnt come from Google, but from two Seattle-based hospitals owned by Conifer Health Solutions, who hired IRI on the slya common practice.

Tracking the union avoidance firms behind anti-union campaigns is intentionally made difficult by firms that subcontract out work to other firms that hire independent contractors to avoid federal reporting requirements laid out by the Department of Labor and shield themselves from public scrutiny, Motherboard explained, adding that the union organizing the workers had no idea of IRIs involvement.

Google is not the only Big Tech company to enlist union avoidance consultants in recent years. In fall 2020 and spring 2021, employees at Amazons massive fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama launched a much-publicized unionization effort, Project Censored noted. As John Logan detailed in a lengthy article for LaborOnline, Amazon responded to the Bessemer drive by spending at least $3,200 per day on anti-union consultants Russ Brown and Rebecca Smith and by bringing in a second union-busting consulting firm, as well as hiring one of the largest law firms in the country specializing in union avoidance. Employees voted more than 2-1 against joining the union, but the election was overturned for a set of eight labor law violations after Project Censoreds book went to the publishera decision that Amazon is appealing.

There has been some establishment press coverage of large corporations hiring union-avoidance firms to undermine workplace organizing, mostly focusing on tech giants like Google and Amazon, Project Censored noted, including late 2019 stories in the New York Times and Washington Post reporting that Google had hired IRI, and a Feb. 23, 2020 New York Times Magazine cover story entitled the Great Google Revolt, which mentioned in passing the use of anti-union consultants by Google and others in Silicon Valley. However, there has been no corporate news coverage whatsoever of the sensational leaks that Motherboard released in January, and there has been very little in-depth corporate media reporting on the use of union-busting consultants in general, Project Censored summed up, concluding, The documents leaked to Motherboard confirm and greatly elaborate upon what labor organizers and educators have suspected of the specific tactics the union-busting firms employ.

8. Pfizer Bullies South American Governments Over COVID-19 Vaccine

Pfizer has essentially held Latin American governments to ransom for access to its lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine, Project Censored reports, the latest example of how its exerted undue influence to enrich itself at the expense of low- and middle-income nations going back to the 1980s, when it helped shape the intellectual property rules its now taking advantage of.

Pfizer has been accused of bullying Latin American governments in Covid vaccine negotiations and has asked some countries to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as a guarantee against the cost of any future legal cases, according to reporters at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

In one case it resulted in a three-month delay in reaching a deal. For Argentina and Brazil, no national deals were agreed at all, BIJ reported. Any hold-up in countries receiving vaccines means more people contracting Covid-19 and potentially dying.

Its normal for governments to provide some indemnity. But, Pfizer asked for additional indemnity from civil cases, meaning that the company would not be held liable for rare adverse effects or for its own acts of negligence, fraud or malice, BIJ reported. This includes those linked to company practices say if Pfizer sent the wrong vaccine or made errors during manufacturing.

Some liability protection is warranted, but certainly not for fraud, gross negligence, mismanagement, failure to follow good manufacturing practices, the World Health Organizations director of the Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, Lawrence Gostin, told BIJ. Companies have no right to ask for indemnity for these things.

During negotiations, which began in June 2020, the Argentinian government believed that, at the least, Pfizer ought to be accountable for acts of negligence on its part in the delivery and distribution of the vaccine, but, instead of offering any compromise, Pfizer demanded more and more, according to one government negotiator, Project Censored summarized. That was when Pfizer called for Argentina to put up sovereign assets as collateral. Argentina broke off negotiations with Pfizer, leaving the nations leaders at that time without a vaccine supply for its people, in December. It was an extreme demand that I had only heard when the foreign debt had to be negotiated, but both in that case and in this one, we rejected it immediately, an Argentine official told BIJ.

That same month, just after the United States approved Pfizers COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, In These Times Sarah Lazare filed a detailed report on the history of the pharmaceutical giants opposition to expanding vaccine access to poor countries, beginning in the mid-1980s during the negotiations that eventually resulted in the establishment of the WTO in 1995.

Both globally and domestically, Pfizer played an important role in promoting the idea that international trade should be contingent on strong intellectual property rules, while casting countries that do not follow U.S. intellectual property rules as engaging in piracy, a view they promoted to multiple business networks, shielded from wider public debate. It was not a given, at the time, that intellectual property would be included in trade negotiations, she explained. Many Third World countries resisted such inclusion, on the grounds that stronger intellectual property rules would protect the monopoly power of corporations and undermine domestic price controls.

It is difficult to think of a clearer case for suspending intellectual property laws than a global pandemic, and a swath of global activists, mainstream human rights groups and UN human rights experts have added their voices to the demand for a suspension of patent laws, Lazare noted. But Pfizer was joined in its opposition by pharmaceutical trade groups and individual companies, such as Moderna, another COVID-19 vaccinemaker.

As a result, One could make a map of global poverty, lay it over a map of vaccine access, and it would be a virtual one-to-one match, she wrote. Once again majority black and brown countries, by and large, are left to suffer and die.

Pfizers dealings in South America are not exactly secret, Project Censored noted, but As of May 2021, there has been no corporate media coverage of Pfizers actual dealings in South America or how the pharmaceutical giant helped establish the global intellectual property standards it now invokes to protect its control over access to the vaccine.

Nor is this anything new, it concluded: Big Pharma has a long, underreported track record of leaving developing nations medical needs unfulfilled, as Project Censored has previously documented.

9. Police Use Dogs as Instruments of Violence, Targeting People of Color

The use of vicious dogs to control Black people dates back to slavery, but its not ancient history according to an investigative series of 13 linked reports, titled Mauled: When Police Dogs are Weapons, coordinated by the Marshall Project in partnership with AL.com, IndyStar, and the Invisible Institute. They found evidence that the pattern continues to this day, with disproportionate use of police dogs against people of color, often resulting in serious injury, with little or no justification. Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a majority-Black city of 220,000, is the dog-bite capital of America, with a bite rate more than double the next-ranked city, Indianapolis. According to Bryn Stole and Grace Tooheys February 2021 report:

Between 2017 and 2019, Baton Rouge police dogs bit at least 146 people, records show. Of those, 53 were 17 years old or younger; the youngest were just 13. Almost all of the people bitten were Black, and most were unarmed and suspected by police of nonviolent crimes like driving a stolen vehicle or burglary.

But Baton Rouge is hardly alone. Approximately 3,600 Americans annually are sent to the emergency room for severe bite injuries resulting from police dog attacks. These dog bites can be more like shark attacks than nips from a family pet, according to experts and medical researchers, a team of five reporters wrote in October 2020, as part of a summary of the main finding of their research. Other highlights from the series included:

Though the Black Lives Matter movement has significantly raised public awareness of police using disproportionate force against people of color, police K-9 violence has received strikingly little attention from corporate news media. There were exceptions: In October 2020, USA Today published a Marshall Project story simultaneously with the project, and in November 2020, the Washington Post ran a front-page story citing the Marshall Projects reporting. In addition, NBC News covered Salt Lake Citys suspension of its K-9 program, after a video circulated of a police dog biting a Black man who was kneeling on the ground with his hands held up. But aside from these examples, coverage appears to have been limited to local news outlets, Project Censored concluded.

10. Activists Call Out Legacy of Racism and Sexism in Forced Sterilization

Forced sterilization was deemed constitutional in a 1927 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell, after which forced sterilizations increased dramatically, to at least 60,000 forced sterilizations in some 32 states during the 20th Century, predominantly targeting women of color. And while state laws have been changed, its still constitutional, and still going on todaywith at least five cases of women in ICE custody in Georgia in 2019while thousands of victims await restitution, as reports from the Conversation and YES! Magazine has documented.

Organizations such as Project South, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, and the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab are actively working to document the extent of this underreported problemand to bring an end to it. Project Censored noted. But their work is even more underreported than the problem itself.

During the height of this wave of eugenics by means of sterilization in the U.S., forced hysterectomies were so common in the Deep South that activist Fannie Lou Hamer coined the term Mississippi Appendectomy to describe them, Ray Levy Uyeda wrote in a YES! Magazine article, How Organizers are Fighting an American Legacy of Forced Sterilization, which begins with the story of Kelli Dillon. Dillon was a California prison inmate in 2001 when she underwent a procedure to remove a potentially cancerous growthand the surgeon simultaneously performed an unauthorized hysterectomy, one of 148 forced sterilizations that year in California prisons, and one of 1,400 carried out between 1997 and 2010.

Dillon began organizing inside the womens prison gathering testimonials from other victimized prisoners and provided the personal accounts to staff at Justice Now that was laying the groundwork to petition for legislation that would ban the procedures in prisons, Uyeda reported. She eventually sued the state of California for damages, and helped to shape legislation to compensate victims (finally passed this year) a story told in the 2020 documentary film, Belly of the Beast.

All forced sterilization campaigns, regardless of their time or place, have one thing in common. They involve dehumanizing a particular subset of the population deemed less worthy of reproduction and family formation, Alexandra Minna Stern wrote at the Conversation. Stern directs the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, where Our interdisciplinary team explores the history of eugenics and sterilization in the U.S. using data and stories35,000 of them so far captured from historical records from North Carolina, California, Iowa and Michigan.

The history was more complicated than one might expect, Stern explained. At first, sterilization programs targeted white men, expanding by the 1920s to affect the same number of women as men. The laws used broad and ever-changing disability labels like feeblemindedness and mental defective. Over time, though, women and people of color increasingly became the target, as eugenics amplified sexism and racism, she wrote. It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway.

California Latinas for Reproductive Justice is working to secure legislative change for victims of the states sterilization efforts between 1909 and 1979, Uyeda wrote. It was signed into law after Project Censoreds book went to print, making California the third state with such legislation, following the lead of North Carolina and Virginia, in 2013 and 2015, respectively.

The history of eugenics has been thoroughly researched and criticized by scholars and human rights activists, but coverage by the corporate media of the US practice of forced sterilization throughout the 20th century and into the 21st has tended to be limited and narrowly focused, Project Censored noted. There was some corporate news coverage after the ICE forced sterilization stories emerged, but generally without any mention of the activists resisting the practice Some establishment press articles on the topic of forced sterilization include comments from members of these organizations to provide context on the issue, but few spotlight the groups tireless organizing and record of accomplishments. Two exceptions cited were articles from Marie Claire magazine and Refinery29, a website targeted at younger women. This only began to change in July 2021, as Project Censoreds book was going to print, with the Associated Press and other establishment news outlets reporting that California is preparing to approve reparations of up to $25,000 per person to women who had been sterilized without consent.

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Project Censored, Part 2: The New Normal Is More Normalized Censorship - The American Prospect