The Pandemic Has Proven Democracy Is an Illusion

Greenwald goes on to explain how the signs of tyranny in the West have been evident for well over a decade. We just weren’t paying attention. Only now, as we stare tyranny in the face first-hand, are we starting to really see it for what it is:

“The decade-long repression of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, standing alone, demonstrates how grave neoliberal attacks on dissent have become. Many are aware of key parts of this repression … but have forgotten or, due to media malfeasance, never knew several of the most extreme aspects.

While the Obama DOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder failed to find evidence of criminality after convening a years-long Grand Jury investigation, the then-Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), succeeded in pressuring financial services companies such as MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Bank of America to terminate WikiLeaks’ accounts and thus banish them from the financial system, choking off their ability to receive funds from supporters or pay their bills.

Lieberman and his neocon allies also pressured Amazon to remove WikiLeaks from its hosting services, causing the whistleblower group to be temporarily offline.

All of that succeeded in crippling WikiLeaks’ ability to operate despite being charged with no crime: indeed, as the DOJ admitted, it could not prove that the group committed any crimes, yet this extra-legal punishment was nonetheless meted out.

Those tactics pioneered against WikiLeaks — excluding dissenters from the financial system and coercing tech companies to deny them internet access without a whiff of due process — have now become standard weapons. Trudeau’s government seizes and freezes bank accounts with no judicial process.

The ‘charity’ fundraising site GoFundMe first blocked the millions of dollars raised for the truckers and announced it would redirect those funds to other charities, then refunded the donations when people pointed out, rightly, that their original plan amounted to a form of stealing. When an alternative fundraising site, GiveSendGo, raised millions more for the truckers, Canadian courts blocked its distribution.”

Greenwald also highlights how American politicians have pressured Big Tech monopolies and the financial system to act as a joint censorship arm of government. Blocking people and companies from being able to use servers and financial transaction services have been key strategies to silence critical voices.

Why Assange Was Targeted

According to Greenwald, Assange’s capture was precipitated by his denouncement of the Spanish government’s violence against citizens of Catalonia in 2017 and 2019. Catalonia wanted autonomy from the Madrid-based Spanish government, and the government responded with shocking force.

“Spain treated the activists not as domestic protesters exercising their civic rights but as terrorists, seditionists and insurrectionists,” Greenwald writes. “Violence was used to sweep up Catalans in mass arrests, and their leaders were charged with terrorism and sedition and given lengthy prison sentences.”

Assange did not actually express support for Catalonian independence. He objected to the Spanish government’s violent assault on civil liberties. This was why Ecuador rescinded Assange’s asylum and handed him over to British authorities in April 2020. Since then, Assange has been held in a high-security prison in Belmarsh, even though he’s never been convicted of a crime.

“All of this reflects, and stems from, a clear and growing Western intolerance for dissent,” Greenwald writes.8 “This last decade of history is crucial to understand the dissent-eliminating framework that has been constructed and implemented in the West. This framework has culminated, thus far, with the stunning multi-pronged attacks on Canadian truckers by the Trudeau government.

But it has been a long time in the making, and it is inevitable that it will find still-more extreme expressions. It is, after all, based in the central recognition that there is mass, widespread anger and even hatred toward the neoliberal ruling class throughout the West.”

Surveillance Apparatus Was Created to Crush Dissent

In response to the growing anger against the ruling class, the technocratic cabal has “opted for force, a system that crushes all forms of dissent as soon as they emerge in anything resembling an effective, meaningful or potent form,” Greenwald notes.

A key part of that dissent-crushing system is the surveillance apparatus that has been erected all around us.⁹ While sold as a tool to hunt down dangerous criminals, we’ve come to realize that rarely is the system ever used to go after true criminals. Instead, it’s used to identify people who disagree with a given narrative. Its primary purpose is to stifle dissent among citizens.

As noted by the ACLU,¹⁰ while most Americans think the Patriot Act’s surveillance powers are there to facilitate the identification and roundup of terrorists, it “actually turns regular citizens into suspects.” Dissent is also stifled by applying criminal terms to those who disagree with the narrative. Case in point: “Anti-vaxxers” and anyone who disagrees with pandemic measures are now labeled domestic terrorists or domestic extremists. As noted by Greenwald:

“Applying terms of criminality renders justifiable any subsequent acts of repression: we are trained to accept that core liberties are forfeited upon the commission of crimes. What is most notable, though, is that this alleged criminality is not adjudicated through judicial proceedings — with all the accompanying protections of judges, juries, rules of evidence and requirements of due process — but simply by decree …

Few things are more dangerous than a political leader who convinces themselves that they are so benevolent and well-intentioned that anything they do is inherently justified in light of their noble character and their enlightened ends …

Within the logical world where one is convinced that they really are fighting a white nationalist, fascistic, insurrectionary global movement to overthrow liberal democracy, then all the weapons we were long taught to view as despotic suddenly become ennobled …

And it is through this self-glorifying tale which Western neoliberals are telling themselves that they have become exactly what they shrilly insist they are battling.”

We Must Repeal the Patriot Act and Pandemic Powers

In September 2021, the White House announced a $65 billion biopreparedness initiative as part of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan.¹¹ As I’ve explained in many previous articles, Build Back Better is part and parcel of The Great Reset, which in turn is a technocrat-led attempt to implement global authoritarianism. As reported by Biospace:¹²

“The first goal is to transform medical defense, including an improvement and expansion of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics against known threats, and lay the groundwork for unknown pathogens … Secondly, the plan calls for ensuring ‘situational awareness’ regarding infectious disease threats. This includes early warning and real-time monitoring of these viral threats.”

In a nutshell, what this biopreparedness initiative entails is more invasive biosurveillance — meaning, the monitoring of your internal biology. Right now, claims that government wants to monitor people down to their body chemistry will earn you the title of paranoid conspiracy theorist, yet the writing is on the wall. That’s where we’re headed, even if we’re not there yet.

I believe the U.S. must repeal both the Patriot Act and the biopreparedness initiative, or else all privacy and freedom will be destroyed.

Sources and References

• ^1, 3, 6 Strategic Culture February 16, 2022
• ² The New York Times February 19, 2022
• ⁴ Washington Examiner February 23, 2022
• ⁵ Fox News February 10, 2022
• ^7, 8 Glenn Greenwald Substack February 21, 2022
• ⁹ EFF.org October 26, 2016
• ¹⁰ ACLU Surveillance Under the Patriot Act
• ^11, 12 Biospace September 7, 2021

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