Category Archives: Transhuman News

Nils Melzer, the UNspecial rapporteur on torture, is one of the very few establishment figuresto denouncethe judicial lynching of Julian Assange. Melzer's integrity and courage, for which he has been mercilessly attacked, stand in stark contrast to the widespread complicity of many human rights and press organizations, including PEN America, which has become a de facto subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.

Those in power, as Noam Chomsky points out, divide the world into "worthy" and "unworthy" victims. They weep crocodile tears over the plight of Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China while demonizing and slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. They decry press censorship in hostile states and collude with the press censorship and algorithms emanating from Silicon Valley in the United States. It is an old and insidious game, one practiced not to promote human rights or press freedom but to envelop these courtiers to power in a sanctimonious and cloying self-righteousness. PEN America can't say the words "Belarus," "Myanmar" orthe Chinese tennis star "Peng Shuai"fast enough, while all but ignoring the most egregious assault on press freedom in our lifetime.

PEN Americaonly stopped accepting funding from the Israeli government which routinely censors and jails Palestinian journalists and writers in Israel and the occupied West Bank for the literary group's annualWorld Voicesfestival in New York in 2017 when more than 250 writers, poets and publishers, many members of PEN, signed an appeal calling on the CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, to end the organization's partnership with the Israeli government. The signatories includedWallace Shawn,Alice Walker,Eileen Myles, Louise Erdrich, Russell Banks,Cornel West,Junot Dazand Viet Thanh Nguyen. To stand up for Assange comes with a cost, as all moral imperatives do. And this is a cost the careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks, who leverage corporate money and corporate backing to seize and deform these organizations into appendages of the ruling class, do not intend to pay.

PEN America is typical of the establishment hijacking of an organization that was founded and once run by writers, some of whom, including Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, I knew. Nossel is a former corporate lawyer,listed as a "contributor"to the Federalist Society, who worked for McKinsey & Company and as vice president of U.S. business development for Bertelsmann.Nossel, who has had herself elevated to the position ofCEO of PEN America, also worked under Hillary Clinton in the State Department, including on the task force assigned to respond to the WikiLeaks revelations. I withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the 2013 World Voices Festival in New Yorkandresignedfrom the organization, which that same year had given me itsFirst Amendment Award, to protest Nossel's appointment. PEN Canada offered me membership, which I accepted.

Nossel and PEN America have stated that the prosecution of Assange raises "grave concerns" about press freedom and lauded the decision by a British court in January 2012not to extradite Assange. Should Nossel and PEN America have not taken this stance on Assange, it would have left them in opposition to most PEN organizations around the world. PEN Centre Germany, for example,made Assange an honorary member. PEN International has called for all charges to be dropped against Assange.

RELATED:The execution of Julian Assange: He exposed the crimes of empire and that can't be tolerated

But Nossel, at the same time, repeats every slanderous trope and lie used to discredit the WikiLeaks publisher who now facesextradition to the United States to potentially serve a 175-year sentence under the Espionage Act. She refuses to acknowledge that Assange is being persecuted because he carried out the most basic and important role of any publisher, making public documents that expose the multitudinous crimes and lies of empire. And I have not seen any direct appeals to the Biden administration on Assange's behalf from PEN America.

"Whether Assange is a journalist or WikiLeaks qualifies as a press outlet is immaterial to the counts set out here," Nossel hassaid. Butas a lawyer who was a member of the State Department task force that responded to the WikiLeaks revelations, she understands it is not immaterial. The core argument behind the U.S. effort to extradite Assange revolves around denying him the status of a publisher or a journalist and denying WikiLeaks the status of a press publication. Nossel parrots the litany of false charges leveled against Assange, including that he endangered lives by not redacting documents, hacked into a government computer and meddled in the 2016 elections, all key points in the government's case against Assange. PEN America, under her direction, has sent out news briefswith headlines such as: "Security Reports Reveal How Assange Turned an Embassy into a Command Post for Election Meddling." The end result is that PEN America is helping to uncoil the rope to string up the WikiLeaks publisher, a gross betrayal of the core mission of PEN.

"There are some things Assange did in this case, or is alleged to have done, that go beyond what a mainstream news outlet would do, in particular the first indictment that was brought about five weeks ago focused specifically on this charge of computer hacking, hacking into a password to get beyond the government national security infrastructure and penetrate and allow Chelsea Manning to pass through all of these documents. That, I think you can say, is not what a mainstream news outlet or a journalist would do," Nosselsaid on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC on May 28, 2019.

But Nossel did not stop there, going on to defend the legitimacy of the U.S. campaign to extradite Assange, although Assange is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. Most important, and left unmentioned by Nossel, is that Assange has not committed any crimes.

RELATED:Julian Assange and the future of democracy: Is this a turning point in World War IV?

"The reason that this indictment is coming down now is because Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for years trying to escape his extradition request," she said on the program. "He faces an extradition request to Sweden where he has been charged with sexual assault and now this huge indictment here in the U.S., and that proceeding will play out over a long period. He will make all sorts of arguments about why he faces a form of legal jeopardy that should immunize him from being extradited. But there are extradition treaties, there are legal assistance treaties where countries are able to prosecute nationals of other countries and bring them back to face charges when they have committed a crime. This is happening pursuant to that. There are U.S. nationals who are charged and convicted in foreign courts."

WikiLeaks releasedU.S. military war logsfrom Afghanistan and Iraq, a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables and 800 Guantnamo Bay detainee assessment briefs along with the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, in which U.S. helicopter pilots banter as they gun down civilians, including children and two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. The material was given to WikiLeaks in 2010 by Chelsea Manning, then known as Pfc. Bradley Manning. Assange has been accused by an enraged U.S. intelligence community of causing "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States." Mike Pompeo, who headed the CIA (and then the State Department) under Donald Trump, called WikiLeaks a "hostile intelligence service" aided by Russia, rhetoric embraced by Democratic Party leaders.

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Assange also published 70,000 hacked emails copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, and earned the eternal hatred of the Democratic Party establishment. The Podesta emails exposed the sleazy and corrupt world of the Clintons, including the donation of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, andidentified both nations as major funders of the Islamic State. They exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. They exposed Clinton's repeated dishonesty. She was caught telling the financial elites that she wanted "open trade and open borders" and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, while publicly promising financial regulation and reform. The cache showed that the Clinton campaign interfered in the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee, assuming he would be the easiest candidate to defeat. They exposed Clinton's advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate and her role as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.

The Democratic Party, which blames Russian interference for its election loss to Trump, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers. Hillary Clinton calls WikiLeaks a Russian front.James Comey, the former FBI director, however, conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary, and Assange has said the emails were not provided by "state actors."

"A zealous prosecutor is going to look at someone like Assange and recognize that he's a very unpopular figure for a hundred different reasons, whether it's his meddling in the 2016 elections, his political motivations for that, or the blunderbuss nature of these disclosures," Nossel said on Lehrer's program. "This is not a leak that was designed to expose one particular policy or effectuate a specific change in how the U.S. government was going about its business. It was massive and indiscriminate, while in the beginning they worked with journalists to be careful about redacting names of individuals. I was actually working at the State Department during the WikiLeaks disclosure period, and I was briefly on a task force to respond to the WikiLeaks disclosures and there was really a sense of alarm about individuals whose lives would be in danger, people who had worked with the U.S., provided information, human rights defenders who had spoken to embassy personnel on a confidential basis. There is a problem of over-classification, but there is also good reason to classify a lot of this stuff and they made no distinction between that [which] was legitimately classified and not."

RELATED:Why the Julian Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom of our time

Any group of artists or writers overseen by a CEO from corporate America inevitably become members of an updated version of the Union of Soviet Writers, where the human rights violations by our enemies are heinous crimes and our own violations and those of our allies are ignored or whitewashed. As Julian Benda reminded us in "The Treason of the Intellectuals," we can serve privilege and power or we can serve justice and truth. Those, Benda warns, who become apologists for those with privilege and power destroy their capacity to defend justice and truth.

Where is the outrage from an organization founded by writers to protect writers about the prolonged abuse, stress and repeated death threats, including from Nossel's former boss, Hillary Clinton, who allegedly quipped at a staff meeting, "Can't we just drone this guy?" (anddidn't deny it later) or from the CIA, whichdiscussed kidnapping and assassinatingAssange? Where is the demand that the trial of Assange be thrown out becausethe CIA, through UC Global, the security firm at the Ecuadorian embassy, secretly taped the meetings, and all other encounters, between Assange and his lawyers, obliterating attorney-client privilege? Where is the public denunciation of the extreme isolation that has left Assange, who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on Oct. 27, in precarious physical and psychological health? Where is the outcry over his descent into hallucinations and deep depression, leaving him dependent on antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine? Where are the thunderous condemnations about the 10 years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and nearly three in the high-security Belmarsh prison, where he has had to live without access to sunlight, exercise and proper medical care? "His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry," his fiance Stella Morris said of the stroke. Where are the demands for intervention and humane treatment, including an end to his isolation, once it was revealed Assange was pacing his cell until he collapsed, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall? Where is the fear for his life, especially after "half of a razor blade" was discovered under his socks and it was revealed that he called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself "hundreds of times a day"? Where is the call to prosecute those who committed the war crimes, carried out the torture and engaged in the corruption WikiLeaks exposed? Not from PEN America.

Melzer,in his book"The Trial of Julian Assange," the most methodical and detailed recounting of the long persecution by the United States and the British government of Assange, blasts those like Nossel who blithely peddle the lies used to tar Assange and cater to the powerful.

When Assange was first charged, he was not charged with espionage by the United States. Rather, he was charged with a single count of "conspiracy to commit computer intrusion." This charge alleged that he conspired with Manning to decrypt a password hash for the Department of Defense computer system. But as Melzer points out:

Manning already had full "top secret"access privileges to the system and all the documents she leaked to Assange. So, even according to the U.S. government, the point of the alleged attempt to decode the password hash was not to gain unauthorized access to classified information ("hacking"), but to help Manning to cover her tracks inside the system by logging in with a different identity ("source protection"). In any case, the alleged attempt undisputedly remained unsuccessful and did not result in any harm whatsoever.

Nossel's repetition of the lie that Assange endangered lives by not redacting documents was obliterated during the trial of Manning, several sessions of which I attended at Fort Meade in Maryland with Cornel West. During the court proceedings in July 2013, Brig.Gen.Robert Carr, a senior counterintelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Department of Defense, told the court that the task force did not uncover a single case of someone who lost their lives due to the publication of the classified documents by WikiLeaks. As for Nossel's claim that "in the beginning they worked with journalists to be careful about redacting names of individuals," she should be aware that the decryption key to the unredacted State Department documents was not released by Assange, but Luke Harding and David Leigh of the Guardian in their book "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy."

RELATED:Former congressman offered Trump pardon to Julian Assange in exchange for discrediting Russia probe

When the ruling class peddles lies, there is no cost for parroting them back to the public. The cost is paid by those who tell the truth.

On Nov.27, 2019, Melzer gave a talk at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlinto dedicate a sculptureby the Italian artist Davide Dormino. Figures of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, cast in bronze, stood on three chairs. A fourth chair, empty, was next to them, inviting others to take a stand with them. The sculpture is called "Anything to Say?" Melzer stepped up onto the fourth chair, the hulking edifice of the U.S. embassy off to his right. He uttered the words that should have come from organizations like PEN America:

For decades, political dissidents have been welcomed by the West with open arms, because in their fight for human rights they were persecuted by dictatorial regimes.

Today, however, Western dissidents themselves are forced to seek asylum elsewhere, such as Edward Snowden in Russia or, until recently, Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

For the West itself has begun to persecute its own dissidents, to subject them to draconian punishments in political show trials, and to imprison them as dangerous terrorists in high-security prisons under conditions that can only be described as inhuman and degrading.

Our governments feel threatened by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowdenand Julian Assange, because they are whistleblowers, journalistsand human rights activists who have provided solid evidence for the abuse, corruptionand war crimes of the powerful, for which they are now being systematically defamed and persecuted.

They are the political dissidents of the West, and their persecution is today's witch hunt, because they threaten the privileges of unsupervised state power that has gone out of control.

The cases of Manning, Snowden, Assange and others are the most important test of our time for the credibility of Western rule of law and democracy and our commitment to human rights.

In all these cases, it is not about the person, the character or possible misconduct of these dissidents, but about how our governments deal with revelations abouttheir own misconduct.

How many soldiers have been held accountable for the massacre of civilians shown in the video "Collateral Murder"? How many agents for the systematic torture of terror suspects? How many politicians and CEOs for the corrupt and inhumane machinations that have been brought to light by our dissidents?

That's what this is about. It is about the integrity of the rule of law, the credibility of our democracies and, ultimately, about our own human dignity and the future of our children.

Let us never forget that!

The tenuous return to power of the Democratic Party under Joe Biden, and the specter of a Republican rout of the Democrats in the midterm elections next year, along with the very real possibility of the election in 2024 of Donald Trump, or a Trump-like figure, to the presidency, has blinded human rights and press groups to the danger of the egregious assaults on freedom of expression perpetrated by the Biden administration.

The steady march towards heavy-handed state censorship was accelerated by the Obama administration, whichcharged 10 government employees and contractors, eight under the Espionage Act, for disclosing classified information to the press. The Obama administration in 2013 also seized the phone records of 20 Associated Press reporters to uncover who leaked the information about a foiled al-Qaida terrorist plot. This ongoing assault by the Democratic Party has been accompanied by the disappearing on social media platforms of several luminaries on the far right, including Donald Trump and Alex Jones, who were removed from Facebook, Apple, YouTube. Content that is true but damaging to the Democratic Party, including the revelations from Hunter Biden's laptop, have been blocked by digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Algorithms have, since at least 2017, marginalized left-wing content, including my own.

The legal precedent set in this atmosphere by the sentencing of Assange means that anyone who possesses classified material, or anyone who leaks it, will be guilty of a criminal offense. The sentencing of Assange will signal the end of all investigative inquiries into the inner workings of power. The pandering by press and human rights organizations, tasked with being sentinels of freedom, to the Democratic Partyonly contributes to the steady tightening of the vise of press censorship. There is no lesser evil in this fight. It is all evil. Left unchecked, it will result in an American species of China's totalitarian capitalism.

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PEN America, the "human rights" careerists and the betrayal of Julian Assange - Salon

When Vinoth voluntarily asked Ajith Kumar whether he would like to watch the rough cut of the film, the actor said: "no". Sources say that Ajith completely trusts Vinoth's vision and even told the director that he would watch the film after the censor screening.

Ajith also specifically told Vinoth to go ahead and edit the film as per his vision. No one other than Vinoth has seen the film so far. Of course, Ajith and other actors have seen their portions while dubbing for their lines in the film.

Produced by Boney Kapoor, the screening for the CBFC officials will happen either by the end of this week or early next week. The makers are also working on the trailer but they haven't confirmed the release date yet.

Produced by Boney Kapoor, Valimai is all set to release this Pongal.

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Ajith completely trusts Vinoth's vision, will be watching the film after censor! - Sify

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL Virtually all Omicron cases in Denmark were reported in vaccinated individuals, most of whom were fully vaccinated, new data from the Danish government show.

Seventy-nine percent of Danes who had contracted Omicron by Dec. 15 were fully vaccinated. Thats according to a report released Tuesday by the Statens Serum Institut (SSI), a Danish health ministry that tracks suspected COVID-19 variants.

Of the 17,767 Omicron infections (as per December 15) registered in Denmark since the first case was reported on Nov. 22, more than 14,000 were among people with dual vaccinations.

Those who had received booster vaccination accounted for another 10.6% of cases of the new variant, and single-dose injectors accounted for another 1.8%. The unvaccinated, about one-fifth of the Danish population, accounted for only 8.5 percent of Omicron infections.

Vaccinated individuals also controlled cases of other suspected COVID-19 strains. More than three-quarters of Danes who had contracted delta or another variant in addition to Omicron between Nov. 22 and Dec. 15 received at least one dose, and 73% received a vaccination or the entire course of treatment, according to ISS data.

In Denmark, 77.6% of the population was fully vaccinated as of Sunday, including 35% of residents who have received the third dose since the Scandinavian country began rolling out booster doses to the general public last month.

Consistent with the official narrative and its data, Denmark currently has one of the highest infection rates in the world and the second-highest Omicron rate in Europe, behind the United Kingdom, which has similar vaccination rates and an even higher booster dose rate.

Danish government researchers have acknowledged that vaccination does not provide adequate protection against the putative Omicron variant, and some analyses suggest that it increases the risk of contracting it.

Experts also cautioned that a sharp increase in breakthrough cases might indicate primordial antigenic sin, which occurs when vaccination results in the inability to generate an effective immune response to a viral variant, leading to worse health outcomes for those vaccinated.

Nevertheless, COVID-19 is a treatable disease for the vast majority of people, and Omicron so far appears to be less lethal than previous strains.

According to ISS, only 0.6% of Danes with Omicron have been hospitalized since Nov. 22, compared with 1.6% for other variants during the same period.

Nevertheless, the Danish government responded with severe restrictions on Christmas: Cinemas and other public facilities have been closed, vaccination cards are required for buses and trains, and vaccination of children between the ages of 5 and 11 is being stepped up.

Booster vaccines will be available to Danes aged 40 and older as early as 4.5 months after the second dose.

Notably, Denmark had lifted all COVID measures in September and hailed vaccination as the way out of the pandemic. The epidemic is under control; we have a record vaccination rate, Heunicke had said at the time.

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More than 90% of Omicron cases in Denmark are vaccinated individuals, government data show - The Rio Times

On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Disgruntled mobs. Martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. A Constitution in tatters.

Between the riots, lockdowns, political theater, and COVID-19 mandates, 2021 was one for the history books.

In our ongoing pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, here were some of the stumbling blocks that kept us fettered:

Riots, martial law and the Deep States coup.A simmering pot of political tensions boiled over on January 6, 2021, when protestersstormed the Capitolbecause the jailer of their choice didnt get chosen to knock heads for another four years. It took no time at all for the nations capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpointsferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned. The subsequentmilitary occupation of the nations capital by 25,000 troopsas part of the so-called peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next was little more than martial law disguised as national security. TheJanuary 6 attemptto storm the Capitol by so-called insurrectionists created the perfect crisis for the Deep Statea.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance Stateto swoop in and take control.

The imperial president.All of theimperial powers amassed by Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bushto kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountabilitywere inherited by Joe Biden, the nations 46thpresident.

The Surveillance State.On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such asurveillance ecosystem, were all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. Consider that it took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of being part of the Capitol riots. Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and digital footprints we leave behind.

Digital tyranny.In response to the events of Jan. 6, the tech giants meted out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship. Suddenly, individuals, including those who had no ties to the Capitol riots, began to experiencelock outs, suspensions and even deletions of their social media accounts. It signaled aturning point in the battle for control over digital speech, one that leaves we the people on the losing end of the bargain.

A new war on terror.Domestic terrorism, usedinterchangeablywith anti-government, extremist and terrorist, to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered dangerous, became the new poster child for expanding the governments powers at the expense of civil liberties. As part of his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to wage war on so-calledpolitical extremism, ushering in what investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald described as a wave of new domestic police powersand rhetoric in the name of fighting terrorism that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

Government violence.Thedeath penalty may have been abolished in Virginiain 2021, but government-sanctioned murder and mayhem continued unabated, with the U.S. government acting as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that had already been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence. Police particularlyposed a risk to anyone undergoing a mental health crisis or with special needs whose disabilities may not be immediately apparent.

Culture wars.Political correctness gave way to a more insidious form of group think and mob rule which, coupled with government and corporate censors and a cancel culture determined not to offend certain viewpoints, was all too willing to eradicate views that do not conform. Critical race theory also moved to the forefront of the culture wars.

Home invasions.Government agents routinelyviolated the Fourth Amendment at willunder the pretext of public health and safety. This doesnt even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime used surveillance technology to invade homes: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices. However, in a rare move, the Supreme Court put its foot down in two casesCaniglia v. StromandLange v. Californiato prevent police fromcarrying out warrantless home invasions in order to seize lawfully-owned guns under the pretext of their so-called community caretaking dutiesandfrom entering homes without warrants under the guise of being in hot pursuit of someone they suspect may have committed a crime.

Bodily integrity.Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called emergency state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property interest in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these were just a few ways in which Americans continued to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

COVID-19.What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) became yet another means by which world governments (including our own) expanded their powers, abused their authority, and further oppressed their constituents. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., it remains to be seen how the rights of the individual will hold up in the face of long-term COVID-19 authoritarianism.

Financial tyranny.Thenational debt(the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) exceeded$29 trillionand is growing. That translates to almost $230,000 per taxpayer. The amount this country owes is nowgreater than its gross domestic product(all the products and services produced in one yearby labor and property supplied by the citizens). That debt is also growing exponentially: it is expected to betwice the size of the U.S. economyby 2051. Meanwhile, the government continued to spend taxpayer money it didnt have on programs it couldnt afford; businesses shuttered for lack of customers, resources and employees; and consumers continued to encounterglobal supply chain shortages(and skyrocketing prices) on everything from computer chips and cars to construction materials.

Global Deep State.Owing in large part to the U.S. governments deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it became increasingly obvious that we had entered into a new world ordera global world ordermade up of international government agencies and corporations. Weve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear. Fascism became a global menace.

20 years of crises.Every crisismanufactured or otherwisesince the nations early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the governments (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years from 9/11 to COVID-19 has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before.

The state of our nation.There may have been a new guy in charge this year, but for the most part, nothing changed. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. Over the past year, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans found themselves repeatedly subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc.

In other words, as I make clear in my bookBattlefield America: The War on the American Peopleand in its fictional counterpartThe Erik Blair Diaries, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

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2021 Year In Review: Madness, Mayhem And Tyranny OpEd - Eurasia Review