Complaining about authoritarian government intrusion into one’s life or surreptitious rewriting of history no longer qualify as “Orwellian,” according to an article that ironically embodies the concept in trying to redefine it.

News outlet USA Today has managed to personify the term ‘Orwellian’ in its profoundly condescending writeup scolding readers for “using the term ‘Orwellian’ wrong.” Published on Monday, the piece goes to great lengths to shame those insecure about their vocabulary by suggesting the term “Orwellian” can only be used correctly by liberals.

“Chances are, you’ve seen George Orwell’s name thrown around a lot in the past week on social media, either by conservatives invoking his name with sincerity or by liberals poking fun at conservatives for its misuse,” the article starts, smirkingly laying the groundwork for canceling out all usage of the term by those on the Right.

But the examples it holds up to mock – presidential scion Donald Trump Jr.’s complaint about the disappearance of his father’s Twitter account and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s blaming the “woke mob” for the cancellation of his book contract – are not as wide of the mark as the thought police at USA Today would have us believe.

Hawley’s book denouncing the “tyranny of Big Tech,” for example, isn’t just “a publisher drop[ping] your book because your brand has become toxic” – it’s a disturbing example of what are supposed to be separate industries (social media, book publishing) marching in ideological lockstep with the prevailing political ideology.

Nor is the younger Trump’s complaint about Twitter deleting his father’s account ‘just’ an example of “an internet platform enforcing its terms of service.” For better or worse, Trump’s Twitter feed was a historical document, his primary means of addressing the American public throughout his presidency. Suspending it permanently is the equivalent of throwing four years of official proclamations down the memory hole, never to be seen again, as 1984’s protagonist Winston Smith did with inconvenient historical documents as a loyal Party member.

USA Today brings in a scholar who wrote his dissertation on Orwell to connect the iconic “Two Minutes Hate” to the “social media mob mentality” and the QAnon conspiracy theory, perhaps missing the forest (four years of “Orange Man Bad!” ritualistically shouted at the top of one’s digital lungs) for the trees.

The article notes that Orwell fought fascism in Spain, strongly implying today’s conservatives are the ideological descendants of Franco’s fascists – a conclusion it doesn’t try to support with facts, but merely guilt by association. Which dovetails perfectly with the writer’s efforts to narrow the definition of “Orwellian” by the use of “the manipulation of language” to conceal reality.

After all, even this heavy-handed propaganda piece acknowledges that Orwell discovered “the failures of Soviet communism,” finding it one of “two sides of the same totalitarian coin” with fascism and disowning both extremes.

And as much as 21st century liberal revisionists would like to lay claim to the term “Orwellian” just for themselves, the dystopian future-Britain of 1984 was crafted in the image of the Soviet Union, not fascist Spain or Germany. “INGSOC,” the name of the Party’s totalitarian ideology, is short for “English Socialism.” Attempting to dismantle the author’s own intent to sell the ideological flavor-of-the-month is pretty, well, Orwellian.

The celebration of unquestioning obedience accompanying the Covid-19 pandemic has turned individuals into spineless drones. Nothing makes that clearer than corona czar Fauci’s “wear a mask” scold being named quote of the year.

Out of every phrase written or uttered over the past twelve months, Yale Law School librarian Fred Shapiro chose Anthony Fauci’s finger-wagging “wear a mask” as the top quote of 2020, as if to administer one last slap in the face to free will and rational thought. It is a very sick society indeed that celebrates knee-jerk obedience to an ever-shifting narrative and praises fear as the highest form of human emotion.

Fauci’s quote and nine others are set to be included in the Yale Book of Quotations, a compendium of memorable epigrams, witticisms, slogans, and other short lines. Shapiro has previously explained he selects quotes that are “famous or revealing of the spirit of the times” rather than “eloquent or admirable”. But putting a banal, borderline-meaningless diktat like “wear a mask” next to famous lines such as PT Barnum’s “There’s a sucker born every minute” and Frederick Douglass’ “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” comes off like a bad joke.

After all, it’s not just the coronavirus commissar’s banality rounding out the top 10. Most of the other quotes selected for 2020 represent vapid political sniping so forgettable the average reader will scarcely be able to recall when they were said, let alone by whom, come the end of the year. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s throwaway pledge during her first press briefing back in May (“I will never lie to you. You have my word on that”) somehow made number five, while Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s bizarre “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black” outburst on Charlamagne tha God’s radio show clocked in at number seven.

The closest thing to a meaningful statement among the top 10 was “I can’t breathe” – the last words of police brutality victim George Floyd, which have become a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement. But even that phrase has been cheapened into a slogan to be sold as a souvenir of corporate-friendly ’resistance’ and shouted during ritualistic protests that authority tolerates as a release valve for popular frustration.

Heralding petty political divisions and cultlike appeals to obedience as “quotes of the year” suggests the American body politic is so hopelessly lost that any rule handed down with a patina of authority is immediately followed. After all, Fauci initially advised Americans against wearing masks, making the selection of his reversal as the year’s top quote all the more baffling. The health official told the ‘60 Minutes’ show back in March that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” explaining that, “when you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people ‘feel’ a little bit better … but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”

Guidance on masks has shifted repeatedly since then, with each new iteration held up as the absolute truth to which all must bow or risk ostracism (or at least a hefty fine). The World Health Organization, which initially acknowledged universal masking for healthy people was overkill, declared last week that everyone should wear masks inside. Some local health authorities are even calling for masks to be worn at home – even as the science concerning them remains inconclusive at best and flaws emerge in the ‘gold standard’ Covid-19 test itself.

The media establishment has been treating humans like foie gras ducks since the start of the pandemic, taking advantage of the captive audience served up by lockdown to force-feed gallons of fear-porn down their throats. We’re told again and again that it’s a terrifying world out there and only stern, finger-wagging authority figures can save us – thinking too hard merely transmits the virus. It’s no wonder so many are wallowing in throwaway lines from insult comics masquerading as politicians, or melting at the sound of Fauci or Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates threatening a long, dark winter if we don’t sit down, shut up, and mask up.

But if the best we as a society can come up with for a year-defining quote is “wear a mask,” we might as well throw in the towel on any pretense of having free will or independent thought. Humanity is better than this, and no amount of dull-witted gaslighting will convince the truly free to love their chains.

People who believe in so-called conspiracy theories about Covid-19 are actually suffering from “neuropsychological impairments,” says a neurologist, in what sounds more than a little bit like Soviet-era weaponized psychiatry.

‘Conspiracy theorists’ who refuse to wear masks and embrace lockdowns are the victims of their own scientific illiteracy, which has fundamentally damaged their brains to such an extent that they cannot understand the science of Covid-19, claims neurologist Bruce Miller from the University of California, San Francisco, in a paper published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Miller leverages his formidable credentials – he’s both director of the Memory and Aging Center and co-director of the Global Brain Health Institute at UCSF – to legitimize a baseless and frankly dangerous theory that could potentially be used to lock those same “conspiracy theorists” away in psychiatric facilities indefinitely. His questionable paper takes the pathologization of dissent even a step further than recent bogus “anti-maskers are sociopaths” studies, to a very dark, totalitarian place – ironically, the exact same endpoint feared by the conspiracy theorists he so glibly patronizes.

Dissent = brain damage?

Miller equates “anti-mask behavior,” “anti-vaccine beliefs,” and “conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19” with “denial of science,” blaming the whole package on low levels of science literacy rooted in poor-quality education. While the quality of US science education is certainly dismal, Miller’s reductionist viewpoint leaves no room for the many intelligent, educated people who hold these views. His area of expertise may be in delusional disorders, but writing off informed dissent as delusion born of ignorance is, well, ignorant and delusional.

Despite being published in JAMA, one of the most prestigious journals in medical science, Miller’s article cites very little actual science: two papers on the neurobiology of delusions (actual delusions, as in schizophrenia and dementia, not “differing views the writer doesn’t like”) and one comparing Covid-19 deaths in the US with those in other countries. While he liberally sprinkles medical terms throughout, hidden between his references to Capgras syndrome (the false belief that a loved one has been replaced by an impostor) and frontotemporal dementia (in which people falsely believe they are rich) are admissions that these paradigms do not necessarily apply to beliefs about Covid-19 that counter the establishment line.

It’s not that Miller himself isn’t a scientist – indeed, it’s his prestigious credentials that make him all the more dangerous, as the same scientific illiteracy he complains about makes people much more likely to be duped by his tactical deployment of neurological jargon. However, like most specialists, his expertise in neurology doesn’t necessarily translate to a deep understanding of politics. Or respiratory diseases, for that matter - he pooh-poohed the dirt-cheap malaria drug hydroxychloroquine despite scores of studies upholding its effectiveness in treating Covid-19, apparently believing every last one of them was conducted by delusional quacks (unlike, presumably, those that say it doesn’t work).

But what about the conspiracy theories?

In fact, the real science in most of the cases he cites favors the “conspiracy theorists” – or at least doesn’t rule them out. Take masks: the largest-ever randomized controlled trial of mask-wearing was finally published on Wednesday in the Annals of Internal Medicine after being blocked by JAMA and its fellow top-tier journals New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, showing face coverings do not protect against infection with the novel coronavirus.

There are dozensmore, though most relate to other respiratory viruses and mask-wearing. Some have been mysteriously deleted for being “no longer relevant in our current climate” – a chillingly Orwellian explanation that has nothing to do with science and everything to do with control.

And vaccine hesitancy? Vaccine frontrunner Moderna claims its jab is 95 percent effective, but the company has not released the results of its latest clinical trials – and the last time it did, the data revealed that all participants who got two shots of the highest dose experienced side effects, many of them severe. Even with the Pfizer jab, there are reasons for caution, especially with the UK Labour Party preemptively calling for blanket censorship of all “anti-vaccine” content. The last time the UK rushed a vaccine to market in the middle of a much-hyped “pandemic,” thousands of people were permanently injured, and some died. Meanwhile, UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock refuses to rule out making the jab mandatory, and several countries have floated making it a requirement for travel. Sound kosher?

As for the origins of Covid-19 itself, the official story has changed so many times (those darn Chinese and their wet markets! What, they didn’t sell bats at the Wuhan market? Well, the bat must have spent some intimate time with a pangolin, or maybe a snake… stop asking so many questions!) it’s no longer credible. Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier and US bioweapons expert Francis Boyle say it was created in a lab. The science is not settled, on this or any of the above issues, and it never will be if the establishment keeps smearing researchers who deviate from an increasingly threadbare orthodoxy as loony conspiracy theorists.

More than just public shaming

Miller’s paper goes one step beyond the usual establishment sneering, however. Tracing the origin of “conspiracy theories” to an organic brain defect reeks of the Soviet weaponization of psychiatry, a dark chapter in history that seems – if papers like this and another recent “study” out of Brazil are any indication – poised to repeat itself. During the 1960s and 1970s, the USSR weaponized psychiatry to institutionalize political dissidents, diagnosing them with mental illness – because after all, one would have to be crazy not to embrace communism! – and locking them away. The practice served to neutralize the targeted individual, marginalize others who shared his opinions, and terrify the rest of the population into keeping their doubts about the system to themselves.

The parallels to 2020 are impossible to ignore. If Miller’s scientifically baseless theory that belief in conspiracies represents an organic brain defect is embraced by the medical establishment (and there’s no reason to suspect it won’t be), dissidents could find themselves locked up indefinitely as incurable “cases.” Those who dismiss such a possibility need only look at the comparatively recent removal of homosexuality from the DSM-IV psychiatric manual. Many of the mindsets we now take for granted have been pathologized, and many which were once seen as normal (“oppositional defiant disorder,” “attention deficit disorder”) were created only recently.

Countries are also changing their laws to make it easier to institutionalize targets. One of the changes to UK law rammed through in its emergency legislation package reduced the number of medical professionals signing off on the decision to “section” (institutionalize) an individual from two to one. And now, American doctors are licking their lips at the possibility of sidelining those troublesome conspiracy theorists once and for all.

Are these the behaviors of governments that have nothing to hide? How long will it even be permitted to ask such a question?

While much of the US is succumbing to pandemic fatigue, caring less than ever about the latest scary numbers, a small but influential faction is demanding dictatorship for everyone to ensure compliance with “the rules.”

“All I want for Christmas are Covid-19 mandates,” Washington Post columnist Kate Cohen wrote as the holiday loomed on the horizon last week. Seemingly terrified that Americans’ festive habits might overtake their pandemic-inculcated learned helplessness for a few days and unwilling to “allow” people to celebrate in peace, Cohen spoke for the burgeoning Snitch Nation, begging for more rules to follow — and an iron fist to enforce them on the disobedient.

Lamenting that Americans “have been left to regulate ourselves,” Cohen whines “why don’t we just follow the rules?” Even as she admits those rules have been changing rapidly and illogically for months, she demands more of them, embodying the threadbare old joke about how “the food was terrible - and such small portions!”

“Please, mandate masks in public indoor spaces and enforce the mandate,” she pleads, not content with President-elect Joe Biden’s promise to request Americans wear masks for the first 100 days of his term or with her own slavish rule-obeying. “Close the places where we gather indoors against our (or our families’) better judgment…Restrict gatherings and travel and enforce those restrictions,” she continues, spinning a sadomasochistic fantasy.

“In other words, make us behave as though we are still in the midst of a massive public health crisis in which thousands of Americans are dying every day.” Translation: ‘Tread on us. Harder!’

Never mind that a Portuguese court recently ruled that the ‘gold-standard’ PCR method of testing for Covid-19 is scientifically worthless and a growing number of scientists have called for the retraction of the paper it’s based on due to conflict-of-interest-riddled, warped data. Keeping the national fear level at ‘red’ is what’s really important — and that requires a constant stream of new rules, the more Kafkaesque and contradictory the better.

It’s not enough for the lockdown-lovers of the world to merely stay home, Cohen makes clear. Rules — ironclad, unbendable rules ‑ must be put in place to ensure everyone stays home. The thought that someone, somewhere might not be living in abject terror is enough to keep Snitch Nation up at night. Forbes contributor Calvin Mackie agreed, literally accusing Americans of “loving their families to death” three days before Christmas. How dare they want to spend time together when the warm inviting glow of the television belching out apocalyptic numbers beckons?

There remains no proof that lockdowns prevent mass death, and even the World Health Organization has begun advising against them, admitting they are “making poor people a whole lot poorer”. Yet the charade must continue, as so much has been sacrificed over the last 10 months that to give up on this massive psychological experiment would mean admitting the decision to commit economic seppuku worldwide was misguided at best. The aim now, according to Mackie, is “behavior modification.” Forget the evidence of our senses and scrap your instincts — trust only the figures emerging from the Johns Hopkins Institute.

Cohen inadvertently gives away her real aims while chiding New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for “leaving it to us to police ourselves.” Sneering at his claim that “New Yorkers are smart” and thus “learn[ed] from Thanksgiving” (which didn’t produce the catastrophic death spike everyone was predicting, but who’s counting?) she asks the reader to “hang on a minute while I go check the Internet for evidence of people getting smarter.” The ever-shifting regulatory ground beneath her feet has left her so uncertain about what reality is that she must “check the Internet” to confirm basic facts, even sarcastically.

This flux – the rapid-fire flip-flops between “masks are useless for ordinary people” and “wear a mask or you’re committing genocide,” between “no such thing as asymptomatic spread” and “drop everything and get tested now, even if you don’t feel sick,” is no accident. Only if we’re forced to constantly second-guess the reality of our lived experience can we be persuaded to drop our critical capabilities and unquestioningly embrace Big Brother.

US coronavirus czar Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example, has been embraced by Americans, not just as a soothing velvet glove over the iron fist of corporate-state power, but even as a sex symbol. This popularity comes despite (or perhaps because of) Fauci’s self-admitted tendency to lie. The career health official recently boasted he’d repeatedly nudged the figure of how many Americans would have to be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity upwards, responding to what he perceived as growing nationwide trust in the vaccine. Republican Senator Marco Rubio — not typically a big fan of the truth himself — reminded Fauci he’d also “lied” to the American public about masks in the early days of the pandemic.

But Fauci’s fictions are delivered with such confidence that they reassure terrified Americans all the sacrifices they’ve made are worthwhile. A comforting falsehood is preferable to the unpleasant truth, especially during times so uncertain that one must rush to the internet to look up basic facts in case they’ve changed overnight (as the WHO did with its definition of “herd immunity”). Orwell’s memory hole is alive and well, and it takes a huckster like Fauci to trick the people into believing this is a good thing.

This is 1984. WHO changes definition of herd immunity.2019 definition and 2020 definition. Spot the difference... pic.twitter.com/kweKDaztQv

— Simon Dolan #KBF (@simondolan) December 22, 2020

Thus even as Pfizer and Moderna admit their vaccines may not stop the transmission of the novel coronavirus, Snitch Nation will cling to the false narrative that “anti-vaxxers” are responsible for the delay in the implementation of the pharmaceutically-enhanced “new normal” in which international travel and large gatherings are permitted once more (for those who have the right apps on their phones, that is). After all, “everyone is excited about the pipeline of multiple FDA approved vaccines,” according to Mackie at Forbes. Surely you wouldn’t want to be excluded from “everybody”? Pay no attention to the thousands of incapacitating adverse reactions that surfaced in the first four days of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine rollout, or Pfizer’s long string of government-imposed fines for fraudulent marketing, one of which broke a record.

No one should force those petrified of Covid-19 to step out of their bubbles and return to their normal lives, of course. Everyone has a different comfort level — whether it’s partying down in a bikini amid the snowdrifts or curling up by the fire at home with some establishment-produced fear-porn.

But the lockdown fetishists have no right to impose their delusions on those who’d rather return to normal life either. If reverting to the “old normal” was truly as impossible as the media establishment claims, there would be no reason for them to scream themselves hoarse denying the possibility. Americans need only decide they are ready to stop living in fear.

A notorious hedge-funder who’s left a trail of broken companies (and countries) in his wake has set his sights on ousting Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Users complaining about new features should know the platform may never be the same.

Elliott Management, euphemistically called an “activist investor” by timid media who fear its legendary founder Paul Singer, has reportedly snapped up a four percent ($1 billion) stake in Twitter, nominating four directors to its board as the start of a bid to oust Dorsey. The hedge fund supposedly resents the CEO dividing his attentions between Twitter, Square, and a six-month move to Africa, believing Twitter is capable of churning out bigger profits. Like any good hedge fund – so the narrative goes – they just want the value of the company to increase (stock jumped seven percent on the news).

What this coverage leaves out – and what makes Twitter’s plight more than the usual business scrap – is Singer’s history. A major Republican donor and huge booster for Israel, he’s also a notoriously ruthless businessman who embodies “vulture capitalism,” leaving a trail of asset-stripped companies and even a few economically-ruined countries in his wake over his insanely profitable career. Media coverage of Singer’s interest in Twitter has gone to great lengths to present his interest in the platform as “strictly business-related,” however, and some conservatives have even gotten excited by the thought that the neocon Singer will end the ideologically-motivated censorship they claim to experience on the platform – but nothing could be further from reality.

Here come the vultures

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson profiled Elliott Management’s strategy in December thus: “Buy a distressed company, outsource the jobs, liquidate the valuable assets, fire middle management, and once the smoke has cleared, dump what remains to the highest bidder, often in Asia.” Amid the financial crash of 2008, Elliott, with other hedge funds, acquired distressed US auto parts supplier Delphi, took billions in bailout money from the Obama government (a transaction the president’s “auto-czar” compared to “extortion”), then offloaded so many jobs overseas that 25 factories were forced to close, putting tens of thousands of union and white-collar workers out on the street, as well as slashing pensions. Elliott Management made over $1 billion from the deal.

When Singer’s fund sinks its teeth into its prey, it does not let go, and most victims have learned to give up and hope for a quick death. When Elliott bought an 11 percent stake in outdoors retailer Cabela’s, it began pushing for a sale of what was then a profitable company. The management so feared Singer that it sold within a year, sending stock prices through the roof but putting almost 2,000 people out of their jobs, setting off a downward spiral that, Carlson says, “destroyed” Cabela’s hometown of Sidney, Nebraska, whose residents feared to even speak about the hedge funder on camera four years later. AT&T similarly ran for its life when Singer’s fund bit off a $3.2 billion stake of the company in September, acquiescing to several demands within a month (and there’s still time for the rest).

Those who don’t acquiesce are guaranteed to suffer. After Elliott Management bought up a chunk of its debt, the country of Argentina defaulted, holding out for 15 years on Singer’s attempts to collect. A 13-year legal battle ensued, during which Singer’s fund seized an Argentine naval ship to prove they were serious about getting paid. Then-president Cristina Fernandez denounced the “Vulture Lord,” but her replacement, Mauricio Macri, finally agreed in 2016 to pay up – just in time for the threat of another debt default.

Peru and Congo have similarly felt the sting of Elliott Management’s tactics, having their distressed debt snapped up and then weaponized against them in court. And even when Singer doesn’t win, his opponents lose. Korean electronics giant Samsung was able to fight off his takeover efforts when he tried to block a move by the Lee family to consolidate their holdings, but the bitter battle ended in a five-year prison sentence for company head Jay Y. Lee on bribery charges and the impeachment of South Korean president Park Geun-hye.

…the ideologically-motivated vultures, that is

Singer’s corporate interests overseas don’t stop at outsourcing to cut costs, however. He founded an organization called Start-Up Nation Central to facilitate the transfer of huge chunks of the US tech industry to Israel. The initiative seeks to counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement by making Israel essentially boycott-proof, and Singer has accordingly used his billions to push American tech firms into Israel – Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple all have research and development centers there as of 2016. If he gets control of Twitter, the company’s US employees may be surprised to find their replacements speaking Hebrew, not Chinese.

As for the conservatives who think Singer will defend them from Twitter censorship? Singer was a hardcore anti-Trumper in 2015, backing Florida Senator Marco Rubio and funding the prototype of the notorious Steele dossier. Former Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon “declared war” on the billionaire in 2017 upon learning of his involvement. While Singer financially backs Trump now, journalist Philip Weiss and others have suggested the hedge funder “cut a deal with Trump on Israel,” offering his support in exchange for Trump going all-in on “protecting” the Jewish State.

Singer is the second-largest donor to the bloodthirsty think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies and also supports JINSA and the American Enterprise Institute – all dyed-in-the-wool neocon groups cheerleading for war with Iran as they did in Iraq. If Trump’s “America-first” base thinks Singer is going to fight for their free speech on Twitter, they’re about to get a rude awakening. Anti-war voices on both sides of the spectrum will likely find the censorship intensified to the point where they long for the days of mere shadow banning.

Battle of the billionaires

Dorsey is prepared to stand and fight – for now. He announced on Thursday he’d put his plans to live in Africa for six months on hold, supposedly due to the coronavirus epidemic. Meanwhile, Dorsey’s fellow tech tycoon Elon Musk has pledged to help him fight the takeover, tweeting his support on Monday, and Twitter employees pledged their support with the #webackjack hashtag.

Twitter users complaining about the “Snapchatization” of their beloved platform should realize they’re looking at something quite a bit more serious than the rollout of an unpopular feature. Twitter, despite its numerous flaws, remains a vital communication channel for many. Whatever lies ahead for the platform – a stripped-down MySpace-esque husk, a megaphone for the never-Trump wing of the GOP, another addition to Israel’s Silicon Wadi – only one thing can be certain: it will be profitable for Elliott Management.

As the coronavirus epidemic monopolizes the attention of the American people, government is taking the opportunity to sneak through all manner of restrictive legislation, including a law that could end the internet as we know it.

Killing the internet… to save the children?

The ominously-named EARN IT Act (short for “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act”) that quietly debuted in the Senate earlier this month is a carefully crafted weapon for crushing encryption without explicitly banning, industry professionals have warned. While this particular bill purports to be all about ending child sexual exploitation, the industry is concerned it will make their business model unsustainable - while doing nothing to protect children. So are independent media producers, who fear their speech would be declared anathema. It would in practice strip section 230 legal immunity – protection from liability for third party content - from any website that failed to comply with a set of “best practices” imposed on a supposedly voluntary basis by a 19-member “commission” run by Attorney General William Barr.

Platforms that persist in encrypting messages despite Barr’s commission’s heavy-handed “recommendations” could be sued out of existence over user-generated content, which they become liable for with section 230 gone. This ingenious model keeps encryption itself legal - a crucial loophole for government agencies that rely on encrypted messaging to keep their own secrets, well, secret.

EARN IT is a nosy government agency’s wet dream, but it does more than just make encryption financially impossible. The open-ended notion of “best practices” leaves room for law enforcement agencies on the commission to draft far-reaching rules regarding what content can be transmitted over the platforms they control.

This isn’t mere speculation. Present at the Senate hearing was the vice president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who called for online platforms to screen all content for “abusive” messages and be held legally responsible for any offending content. Such a policy would incentivize preemptive banning of suspected “problem” users on a scale that makes YouTube’s controversial decision to de-rank “borderline” content falling within - but near the edge of - its rules look positively permissive.

Nor is there anything in the bill to stop overzealous law enforcement from expanding the definition of “abusive” and actionable speech to include political views outside the mainstream. Indeed, similar outcomes have happened in Australia and New Zealand, whose governments (also members of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence consortium) have also adopted laws severely restricting internet freedom.

The bill was introduced by Republican Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) and Democrat Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut). With 52 years in government between them, the pair have weathered enough crises to know that peak coronavirus hysteria was the ideal time to introduce their noxious bill. The civil liberties advocates who normally surface to oppose such draconian legislation were preoccupied with panic-buying toilet paper or watching the growing sea of red ink pooling in their stock portfolios. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose bread and butter is opposing laws like EARN IT, only rolled out its own warning a week after Graham had unveiled the measure in the Senate.

A crisis of opportunity

It may have been former president Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel who advised his boss to “never let a good crisis go to waste,” but the mantra has been embraced by both parties, in the midst of the coronavirus epidemic as ever. Just as the September 11 terror attacks were quickly weaponized by the George W. Bush administration to impose unprecedented restrictions on Americans’ civil liberties in the form of the Patriot Act and accompanying legislation, so is coronavirus becoming an excuse for lawmakers of all levels to dig out their police-state wish-lists and start crossing off items, taking advantage of the biggest distraction the country has seen in nearly two decades.

Bipartisan cooperation has flowered amidst the crisis, and not only in the bid to shut down the free internet that EARN IT represents. As average Americans fretted over whether to risk infection by going out to vote in primaries, lawmakers were quietly passing an extension to some of the most intrusive NSA surveillance programs, trumpeting the initiative as a victory for privacy while hoping no one would look closer. While the renewal bill reportedly took months to hammer out, the decision to bring it to a vote just four days before the controversial provisions were set to expire had more than a whiff of misdirection about it.

And while the Trump administration and even the media that oppose him are excoriating China for “abusing power,” that same administration has joined together with a “wide array of tech companies,” working together on a program that would use location data from Americans’ phones to “combat” coronavirus, as a glowing article in the Washington Post describes. Apparently, the idea of remotely monitoring citizens via their phones to ensure they don’t break quarantine lost its totalitarian sheen when it crossed the Pacific Ocean.

While the anonymous sources cited by WaPo repeatedly insist the project is “not seeking to collect and maintain a database of Americans’ whereabouts,” the involvement of Google - currently expanding a coronavirus testing website that debuted this past weekend into a national system that requires users to create an ID (or use the Google account they use for everything else) - hints that it could easily become such a thing.

Be careful what you wish for

Meanwhile, social media platforms have become home to the curious sight of Americans calling for more police state, confusing strict control with competent management. Hashtags like #ShutdownNYC and #LockdownLA from city-dwellers panicking at the thought that their neighbors might be out spreading the virus are the product of a 24/7 news cycle of fear, the necessary fuel for the crisis mindset that has allowed lawmakers to get away with so much. One can certainly point out that China’s (and Italy’s, and France’s) heavy-handed emergency measures, restricting citizens to their homes and (in the most extreme cases) sending tanks through the streets are saving lives. Unfortunately for Americans, police state powers adopted during a crisis are almost never relinquished - and never without a fight. When the country makes it through this crisis, its people will have another long, hard battle to fight if they hope to claw back their lost civil liberties.

“Elites” should get “a bigger say in choosing the president,” a Washington Post oped has declared, describing a system where regular voters just tell elites their pick and go home to let their betters work it all out.

The popular vote has been declared an anachronistic inconvenience in a WaPo oped by Marquette University professor Julia Azari that bemoans the “rocky start“ to the Democratic primaries. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is leading the popular vote in the first two states, but this doesn’t match the delegate count, which unsurprisingly favors establishment favorite Pete Buttigieg. It’s best, then — according to Azari — to throw out the whole system.

Starting from the relatively uncontroversial principle that the current primary system is overly complex and sometimes coughs up unviable candidates, Azari takes a hard oligarchic turn. She calls for further disenfranchising ordinary voters by making their “vote“ merely a suggestion given to an elected “intermediate representative,” who then “bargains“ with the other representatives without being bound by the wishes of the voters who put them in place.

If that sounds like the nominating system already in place at the party conventions, you’re not wrong. Azari, it seems, merely wants to extend the elites’ ability to pull the ripcord on populist drift down a step to make even the state primaries safe for her preferred, predetermined form of “democracy.” And if that sounds unfair — surely, she can’t be suggesting party elites rig the primaries — the whole point, in her mind, is to remove “uncertainty“ from the nominating process, then allow a kayfabe (controlled, pro-wrestling-style theatre) version in the general contest:

Democracy thrives on uncertainty — outcomes that are not known at the beginning of the process. But uncertainty doesn’t help parties strategize for the general election.

But Azari would be hard-pressed to find any rank-and-file voter who would agree that the problem with American elections is “uncertainty“ — or that the solution to the real problem is to give less power to the people. It’s not, after all, like the “elites“ are underrepresented in circles of power. No one who has made it to the general election in the last 20 years has done so without an Ivy League pedigree, the ultimate elite signifier, and the journalists who write about them (and sell them to the voters) often move in the same elite social circles. A for-show “preference primary“ in which the hoi polloi merely “inform elites about voter preferences,” which those elites are free to disregard, would forever seal off the process to genuine democracy, enshrining the “smoke-filled rooms“ Democratic National Committee lawyers defended when they were sued over rigging the 2016 primary into procedure for the foreseeable future. At a time when exclusion mechanisms like superdelegates are less popular than ever, to try to shove this “reform“ down voters’ throats is almost guaranteed to backfire.

This is, in a way, the point — both of the headline and of WaPo in general: to gaslight the reader into believing there is a national consensus behind the odious ideas it publishes, which are in reality the views of a moneyed oligarchy that feels only disdain for not only “flyover country,” but for the working-class denizens of the cities its members inhabit who keep the lights on and the shelves stocked. If the reader believes “superdelegates for primaries“ are a done deal, they’re less likely to take to the streets and start breaking things.

If the response on social media was any indication, Azari’s “fake the consensus“ model isn’t doing so hot these days — though it did inspire a bizarre consensus of its own between pro-Trump conservatives, #Resistance liberals, and progressives:

Democracy dies in darkness unless darkness is what the elites need to rig an election in which case maybe democracy isn’t all that great anyway. pic.twitter.com/GgRcDPI7Gd

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) February 19, 2020

It’s still over a month until April Fool’s Day, and Azari at no point breaks character, so the reader can only assume the piece is meant in full seriousness.

Amazon has deleted most editions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, along with several other Nazi-era propaganda titles. But letting the near-monopoly dictate what people can read embraces totalitarianism of another kind.

The Holocaust Educational Trust and a handful of other Jewish groups have been clamoring to have the books removed for years – not just the many low-cost translations of Hitler’s notorious opus, but also a handful of titles by Der Stürmer publisher Julius Streicher, including the anti-Semitic children’s book ‘The Poisonous Mushroom’. After putting up a principled protest, Amazon has quietly knuckled under.

The corporate behemoth has readily complied with the demands of censorship advocates in recent years, reversing an early promise to uphold freedom of the press – to sell “the good, the bad, and the ugly“ – only after consolidating what for all intents and purposes is a monopoly over book sales. Its muscular tactics and opaque criteria that leave affected authors and publishers without the ability to appeal have riled civil liberties activists, who question the wisdom of appointing an unaccountable megacorporation to be the arbiter of what consenting adults are permitted to read. While few would disagree that the content of the deplatformed books is abhorrent, the point remains that readers – not Amazon – should be the ones to decide whether to consume it.

Given Amazon’s own record of corporate totalitarianism – the company has threatened to fire employees who publicly criticized its environmental policies and its cozy relationship with police and immigration authorities – its expansion into the realm of content censorship should worry anyone concerned with free choice. Amazon’s customers do not need a megalomaniacal corporate babysitter vetting their reading materials for them – they are adults with the right to read as they wish, no matter how objectionable their choices might be to some third party.

Hateful, virulently antisemitic Nazi propaganda is available for sale not only on @AmazonUK. Books by authors like Julius Streicher can be found also on @amazon & @AmazonDE. Such books should be removed immediately. | @JeffBezos@AmazonHelphttps://t.co/rxNWZj8iDspic.twitter.com/viBjjZsYI5

— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) February 21, 2020

Defenders of the company’s actions may claim that merely offering such books for sale promotes hateful ideologies – indeed, that’s exactly what the Holocaust Educational Trust claimed in its most recent letter calling for their immediate removal, published last month and signal-boosted by the Auschwitz Museum. But the trajectory of the recently-released German edition of Mein Kampf belies such simplistic projections. When the Institute of Contemporary History of Munich (IfZ) published the first German-language reprint of the notorious tome since World War II in 2016, the book became a bestseller in Germany not because of a resurgence in Nazi sympathies, but because it “enriched a debate on the renewed rise of authoritarian political views in contemporary western society,” as the IfZ told the Guardian, pleasantly surprised at how its gamble had paid off.

It is disappointing that even as Germany loosens its famously-strict laws governing Nazi material – only since 2018 have historically-themed video games been permitted to depict swastikas and other icons of the era, like Hitler’s mustache – Amazon has embraced its heavy-handed role as censor, swooping in to memory-hole a growing body of work. The bookseller has consigned “Holocaust denial literature,” Nation of Islam publications, even the self-published works of ‘pickup artist’ Daryush ‘Roosh V’ Valizadeh to a growing bonfire of unmentionables, and true to the ‘slippery slope’ cliché, the jaws of ‘tolerance’ yawn wider with every bite. Earlier this year, the e-commerce giant even removed the Nazi iconography from film stills of ‘The Man in the High Castle’ in a tribute book it published to commemorate the Amazon-produced alternate-history series, which depicts America after the Axis Powers win World War II.

It’s a truism to say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, but one might hope that the advocacy groups who have pushed so hard to erase these and other works would understand that burning books, even digitally – no matter how noxious their content – never ends well for marginalized groups. Allowing a megacorporation with such disturbingly close business relations with the US government to play censor only strengthens the resemblance to the totalitarian regimes Amazon claims to revile.

The coronavirus epidemic had scarcely arrived on US shores when the Trump administration declared “war” on it, in the grand tradition of the ‘War on Cancer’ or the ‘War on Drugs’. But these invisible wars don’t end well.

President Donald Trump declared war on the “invisible enemy” – Covid-19 – last month, pivoting on a dime from downplaying the pandemic to doing his best Churchill impression. The surgeon general and other officials have referred to the coronavirus outbreak as another Pearl Harbor. The struggle against the coronavirus, Americans have been told in no uncertain terms, is a war – but on whom?

This is hardly the first time Americans have seen their country go to war against an invisible foe. Washington’s insistence on declaring war against intangible enemies has given rise to the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, even the War on Cancer – all ruinously expensive enterprises that have left the issues they were meant to fight stronger than ever. Income inequality has soared since the ‘War on Poverty’ was declared in 1964, while the nation’s prisons (and cemeteries) are bursting with victims of the War on Drugs. And cancer is not just the number-two cause of death in the US – it’s also a leading cause of bankruptcy, the cost of treatment pushed skyward by the billions dumped into the ‘War on Cancer’.

Perhaps the most catastrophic failure has been the War on Terror, which attempted to marry ideological struggle with actual combat and set the Middle East on fire in the process. No one would mistake the drone pilots lighting up Afghan wedding parties for the men who put their lives on the line to storm the beaches of Normandy. But that hasn’t stopped the US military from trying to channel that righteousness, to the point of bringing back World War II-era uniforms.

The problem with declaring war on the intangible is that mission creep is inevitable without a concrete enemy. The War on Drugs ended up targeting drug users, while the War on Poverty ultimately victimized poor people. The War on Terror wasn’t satisfied with merely declaring war on terrorists, so it took out the entire Iraqi and Libyan governments, and tried to do the same to Syria.

Now, trigger-happy congressmen like South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham are trying to reorient the War on Coronavirus to become a War on China, urging the Trump administration to cancel US debt held by Beijing and hinting that the Communist Party must be “severely punished” for allegedly covering up what half of Washington insists on calling the “Chinese virus.” Lawyers and even small businesses are trying to sue China, while scapegoating pundits fan the flames of jingoism around the country.

Even if Trump manages to rein in his attack dogs, the War on Coronavirus is already turning into a war on America’s poor. With millions of newly unemployed Americans stuck at home, told they’re “not essential,” suicides – already epidemic in the US – are beginning to rise further, outpacing coronavirus deaths in some places. Millions more risk being evicted when their states’ temporary eviction bans expire in two months. CNN’s Chris Cuomo may liken sitting on the couch binge-watching Netflix to wading ashore at Dunkirk, but that’s cold comfort to those who’ve already fallen in “combat.”

With over half of every discretionary budget dollar going to feed the military beast, it’s easy to see why American governments see every struggle in terms of war. But war always disproportionately affects the poor and vulnerable. The War on Coronavirus will be no different. When all the Trump administration has is a hammer, everything might look like a nail, but there’s nothing stopping the president from trading in that same defective hammer for more useful tools.

Technocratic activists are full of solutions to the coronavirus crisis – the same panaceas they’ve been pushing for years. What problem wouldn’t be solved by abolishing the family, privacy, and other things we take for granted?!

Under the time-honored rubric of “never let a good crisis go to waste,” the usual suspects have come out of the woodwork to tout their favored “solutions” as answers to the coronavirus pandemic and the attendant economic crisis. Of course, they’ve been pushing these initiatives for years, and there’s a reason (or three) that they haven’t been terribly popular – they’d require completely upending current societal models, and few have the stomach for such fundamental change.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. Surely there’s something of value in these revolutionary projects? Let’s have a look, shall we…

Abolish cash

On the surface, doing away with physical currency in the middle of an epidemic would seem to make sense. Common wisdom holds that banknotes are dirty, and it’s logical to think that they might spread disease. Reports that China was “quarantining” shipments of cash, coupled with a World Health Organization advisory to use contactless payments wherever possible in order to avoid spreading coronavirus, have gone a long way toward manufacturing consent for the concept of dropping cash altogether.

However, MIT Tech Review found no real evidence that cash has been a vector for coronavirus, having queried several microbiologists to get to the bottom of the matter. That won’t stop proponents of the cashless society from pushing the theory, of course, but it does take the wind out of their sails (and perhaps their sales). There’s a lot of energy behind the movement to take the economy off cash – technocratic heavyweights like the World Economic Forum, former Bank of England chief Mark Carney, and of course Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have all invested serious resources in such a project. The idea is already gaining mainstream currency (no pun intended): a “digital dollar” provision made its way into the US’ must-pass coronavirus stimulus bill. While it was ultimately removed, cashless society proponents have continued championing it, reasoning that it’s the quickest way of getting the stimulus money into Americans’ hands. As the Federal Reserve pours trillions of dollars conjured out of thin air into the economy, it seems only fitting that Americans will increasingly embrace using imaginary money to represent imaginary value.

Abolish fossil fuels

The coronavirus pandemic has been seized upon by the climate-change industrial complex as proof that the world must transition away from fossil fuels. As the price of oil has plummeted alongside the generally-collapsing markets, promoters of renewable energy have shifted their appeals from pleading for the planet to pleading for investors’ pocketbooks. Why pour money into volatile oil companies when you can have steady profits with wind and solar? Imperial College’s Dr. Charles Donovan, one of the loudest voices calling for a coronavirus-inspired shift to renewables, admitted to Forbes that a renewable energy economy wouldn’t prevent the next pandemic, or even speed recovery from the current one, but papered over that gap with platitudes about “resilience” and the “big picture.”

There’s certainly something to be said for taking stimulus money earmarked for shale drillers whose operations were already in the red pre-coronavirus and investing it in renewables, especially because it’s very likely that air pollution has contributed to the high number of coronavirus deaths in areas like northern Italy and Hubei province. However, there’s a dark side to Donovan’s call for decarbonization. Making bailouts contingent on implementing “low-carbon transitions” is holding industry hostage to an agenda in a way that ensures rushed, poorly-thought-out decisions will be made in the name of expediency. Some climate campaigners have even hinted this is their desired outcome, frankly admitting that the dramatic changes ushered in overnight to fight the epidemic mean equally dramatic change is possible in the service of crafting their preferred green future. “Decarbonize in haste, repent in leisure” could save the planet, or destroy what remains of industry post-coronavirus – either way, it’s not something to be undertaken from a point of panic.

Abolish privacy

As coronavirus-related legislation peels back the privacy protections once enshrined in law, some activists believe we should dispense with this antiquated notion altogether and just embrace the microchip. Bill Gates has been an enthusiastic promoter of the idea, casually bringing it up during a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything‘ in response to an unrelated question. The Microsoft billionaire-turned-’philanthropist’ responded to a question about how governments might decide what businesses are “essential” during a crisis by suggesting the use of “digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.” Whoa there, buddy. Gates has funded research into “quantum-dot tattoos” that simultaneously vaccinate and leave a record of the vaccination, allowing recipients of the shot to be identified as such after the fact. He also backs the ID2020 initiative, which late last year announced plans to implant biometric ID technology in babies born in Bangladesh and homeless people in Austin, Texas. Articles about the dystopian initiative recently had a disclaimer slapped on warning that the program is “not [intended] to track individuals, as claimed by some conspiracy theorists.” Gee, that’s a relief!

Meanwhile, multiple tech companies, including Google, the surveillance state cheerleaders at Palantir, and (reportedly) the global mobile phone industry itself are at various stages of rolling out programs to track the spread of coronavirus using location data collected from people’s phones. The data is supposedly anonymized, but given tech companies’ abysmal history of paying lip service to privacy while feeding users’ data to government agencies – to say nothing of catastrophic leaks – I think we can be forgiven for urging caution before rushing headlong into this particular Brave New World.

Abolish the family

The coronavirus crisis is unprecedented in the amount of disruption it has caused, and outlandish manifestos are to be expected. But the call to abolish the family ‘because coronavirus’, published by OpenDemocracy, is in a class by itself. The writer, Sophie Lewis, seems appalled at the idea of families self-isolating together, because family homes are “fundamentally unsafe” spaces rife with inequality. The existence of abusive relationships is held up as proof that the family itself is an oppressive structure, while housework is likened to psychological torture. Instead, she calls on society to fling open the doors of prisons and detention centers and house the inhabitants in their “private palaces.”

It may be easy to dismiss as extreme a view that “the private family qua mode of social reproduction still, frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalizes and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals.’” But this isn’t just a personal blog, or some antifa kid’s Tumblr – this is an outlet sponsored by some very influential organizations, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Clearly it had to go through some kind of editorial approval before being published. “Social distancing” aside, there’s no logical reason coronavirus should make us put aside our family ties, and one has to wonder why an outlet like this is okay with calling on others to discard the parts of life that – for most of us – make it worth living.

Henry Kissinger, eminence grise of imperial US foreign policy, has warned in an op-ed that no government – even his beloved hegemon – can defeat Covid-19 alone, implying that the New World Order he’s always preached must follow.

If the US doesn’t couple its efforts to rebuild its own economy with the first steps toward creating a global government, humanity is doomed, Kissinger wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

“No country, not even the US, can in a purely national effort overcome the virus,” Kissinger warned. “Addressing the necessities of the moment must ultimately be coupled with a global collaborative vision and program.”

If we cannot do both in tandem, we will face the worst of each.

Kissinger laments that the pandemic has led to the return of a “walled city” model of nationalist governance, suggesting that “exploration at the frontiers of science” alone can save humanity from disease in his vision of a globalist utopia. But developing cures takes time, and the notion that countries should be discouraged from protecting themselves in the interim is suicidal. If anything, one of the reasons Italy, Spain, and France were hit so hard by coronavirus was the EU’s dysfunctional insistence on open borders amid the pandemic.

“Global trade and movement of people” are all well and good, but the pandemic has exposed the weaknesses of the globalist system like never before. It will take years for nations to rebuild, and repeating their mistakes is not something they can afford to do.

While serving as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser under presidents Nixon and Ford, Kissinger played a starring role in bombing campaigns against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and oversaw regime-change operations that placed brutal dictators in power in Argentina and Chile, as well as supporting state-sanctioned repression in Indonesia. A notorious report he penned for the Ford administration called for dramatic reductions in population growth across developing nations. One might think, given his record, that he’d be on the side of the virus.

But the Nobel Peace Prize recipient is here presenting himself as an experienced statesman who deeply cares about the future of humanity, calling on the US to “draw lessons from the development of the Marshall Plan and the Manhattan Project.” Sure, revisiting the Marshall Plan makes sense – there are no doubt insights to be gained from revisiting the rebuilding of Europe’s shattered post-war economies, especially since some of the countries hit hardest by the epidemic are in Europe.

But the Manhattan Project? How does a top-secret, international doomsday project that produced weapons with unparalleled killing potential have any bearing on the coronavirus crisis?

Listening to Kissinger, it must be said, is what got the US into its current situation – believing itself exceptional, distrusting all world powers who do not swear abject fealty to it, repeating the same failed policies to the point of parody. A looming presence in the George W. Bush administration, Kissinger advised the country to plunge headfirst into the ever-expanding War on Terror, penning an editorial in the days following 9/11 that called for taking on “any government that shelters groups capable of this kind of attack.” Following such guidance has bankrupted the US and turned it into a banana republic, printing money frantically while its roads and bridges crumble, its citizens struggle to keep a roof over their heads, and the international community looks on, mouths agape, as its government continues to lecture them about human rights.

Kissinger concludes his jeremiad with a warning that “failure [to safeguard the principles of the liberal world order] could set the world on fire.” If, as he himself writes, the “purpose of the legitimate state is to provide for the fundamental needs of the people: security, order, economic well-being, and justice,” those principles collapsed long ago. The US’ first step, post-pandemic, should be to put out the fires set by Kissinger and those like him who seek to cloak empire in the rhetoric of liberal democracy.

The meaning of ‘free speech’ is devolving rapidly, with an ever-widening swathe of journalistic content deemed deplatform-worthy, but one writer’s run-in with the Israeli lobby should remind us where “cancel culture” began.

Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson, a columnist for the Guardian, tripped over Tel Aviv’s time-honored third rail back in December. He was incensed - as any sane American might be - by the truly preposterous piles of money that were being bundled off to Israel as part of what was supposed to be an omnibus spending bill combined with Covid-19 stimulus passed by Congress as a life-raft for a desperately needy American populace. So he sent out a tweet.

Robinson’s tweet - which wryly suggested “it’s the law” that “the US Congress is not actually allowed to authorize any new spending unless a portion of it is directed toward buying weapons for Israel” - was a joke that took a moment to recognize as a joke, given its resemblance to reality, as the best satire often is. But, at some point, he seemed to get cold feet, following up the tweet with a qualifier noting while it wasn’t really the law, it was “at least so customary as to be functionally identical” to it.

Apparently smelling weakness (and finding satire a wholly inappropriate pastime for a Guardian columnist), the Guardian’s US editor ordered him to delete the tweets, declaring they were not “helpful to public discourse.” One might ask how 95 percent of what’s printed in the Guardian is helpful to public discourse, but one would probably not receive a reply. The email also included what seemed to be a forwarded message from some humorless individual who denounced the tweets as “clearly anti-Semitic,” arguing they were “saying that the only Jewish state controls the most powerful country in the world” and were liable to “inform murderous hatred.”

“Delete this and apologise,” the nameless critic demanded.

Robinson at this point was going to get fired no matter what. He could have stood his ground, explaining to his editor that only the unsigned letter-writer had claimed “the only Jewish state controls the most powerful country in the world,” a conclusion which was nowhere to be found in Robinson’s tweets. He could have pointed out that deeming criticism of Israel “anti-Semitic” was itself anti-Semitic, because plenty of Jews disapprove of the sociopathic actions of the Israeli government and don’t appreciate being used as human shields for those actions. Or he could have just said “no.”

Instead, he went the route traveled by so many journalists desperate to save their jobs, deleting the tweets, groveling at the feet of his editor, and even asking for guidance from the Guardian on what was off-limits - only to be told there was no such code, just an “unwritten one.” Thus was Robinson sucked into the apology vortex that has destroyed so many upwardly-mobile political and media figures - including UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn - who’ve dared to oppose the “war crimes” of a foreign country.

After weeks of emails going unreturned, Robinson was informed his services would no longer be needed.

His fate certainly had a ring of poetic justice - his last column published by the Guardian denied the existence of “cancel culture,” gloating that “bigots like Jordan Peterson” aren’t owed a platform after some employees at the publisher who’d already inked a deal with Peterson complained.

However, the Israeli lobby has been bullying journalists since long before “cancel culture” had a name, as Robinson himself documented in a typically long-winded piece posted to his website after he discovered his groveling had been for naught. Indeed, today’s “cancel culture” practitioners most likely learned their craft from observing the craven sneak-attacks practiced by the Lobby that dare not speak its name.

Like the Israeli lobby’s defenders, cancel culture practitioners pile on their targets without regard for logic, fact, or common sense. They hammer away at not only their victim, but their victim’s employer until it becomes easier to just give them what they want, even if the “offensive” statement that started the controversy was utterly unimpeachable.

Robinson’s criticism of the US dumping billions of taxpayer dollars at the feet of Israel while millions of Americans struggled to make ends meet was accurate, as most job-killing jabs at Israel are. Because there is no way of justifying the expenditure of $3.8 billion per year on a country that deliberately antagonizes its neighbors in order to justify the purchase of more American weaponry, Israel’s defenders merely lob the same “anti-Semitism accusation” grenade, again and again. As former Israeli minister Shulamit Aloni has freely admitted, “it’s a trick, we always use it.”

The ties between Israel and the American Jewish establishment are very strong.

It doesn’t matter if the critic of Israel is himself or herself Jewish, either: The list of Jewish critics of the Israeli government’s heinous crimes, all dismissed as “self-hating Jews,” could fill a book (whose publication would no doubt be censored). The Israeli government does not represent the Jewish people, no matter how hard it pretends to, and to suggest it does is itself anti-Semitic.

Unfortunately, the American establishment is utterly unwilling to stand up to these bullies for fear of being smeared as anti-Semitic itself, leading to the spectacle satirized so well in a New York Times cartoon from two years ago - one which also got its creator fired.

It’s a trick they will keep using until someone in the media establishment grows a backbone. As more and more self-styled aggrieved groups pick up on how ‘cancel culture’ works, eventually journalists will be unable to speak at all.

Determined to stamp out ‘wrongthink’ in all forms, the media establishment has declared a holy war against free speech. Once the bedrock of US society, it faces a redefinition into something more convenient – or oblivion.

If everyone is permitted to speak freely, their reasoning goes, people’s lives will be put at risk. Those whose opinions diverge from the mainstream should not be permitted to voice those opinions, lest their words hurt people – not just people’s feelings. Yet at the same time as this self-styled Ministry of Truth calls for free speech to be swept into the dustbin of history, it insists its victims’ freedom of speech is not under attack at all.

In the past few weeks, establishment outlets from the New York Times to NBC to the Independent have issued calls for the very idea of “freedom of speech” to be rethought – or better yet, scrapped altogether – because it is no longer in harmony with modern society. This is a tacit admission that the media establishment’s own opinions can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas, and that, despite their best efforts, they can’t censor their way out.

The establishment’s cries for a bigger, better memory hole don’t stop at praising social media censorship, though there’s plenty of that – Twitter and Facebook’s decision to suspend US President Donald Trump’s accounts has been universally praised by the paper(s) of record. Amazon’s decision to kick the entire social media app Parler off its servers is right up there with storming the beaches of Normandy in the fight against fascism, according to these outlets. They’ve even moved on to demanding cable TV providers push conservative networks such as OANN and Newsmax overboard, and alternative platforms from Telegram to Minds are now in their crosshairs.

But at the same time as they insist this behavior does not curtail the free speech of the tens of thousands of social media users who’ve been given the boot in the past few months, they’ve called for the very idea of free speech to be retired, as it supposedly has no place in the 21st century.

The media establishment blames “free speech” for the raid on the Capitol earlier this month, with the Hill skewering social media platforms for putting their dependence on “clicks and ratings” above some sort of higher calling – even though the media establishment’s own dependency on clicks and ratings has forced numerous outlets to merge, downsize, or even close offices as Facebook and Google eat their lunch. Even more absurdly, NBC claimed the FBI would have warned about the raid, except they had concerns about the First Amendment – as if the FBI hasn’t at some point designated almost every American as a domestic terror threat.

The entire argument has the air of something cooked up at the last minute to justify a long-desired end, and sure enough, the media have long been frustrated watching alt-media sites and YouTubers in their bedrooms producing quality content that also – in some cases, at least – has the added value of somewhat resembling the world its audience inhabits. Trying to deplatform the most popular content creators while pretending to uphold the noble mantle of the Fourth Estate has never been an easy balance to strike, and it must come as a relief to many establishment figures to finally dispense with the pretense of embracing freedom of speech.

While not everyone in the media establishment is on board with this new direction, many of those opposed are too scared to speak up, lest they lose their job or be shunned by colleagues. But this sort of cowardly behavior is what has turned the establishment into such a monster. In less than a decade, American liberalism was co-opted by a tiny fraction of screeching malcontents who shouted sanity into hiding with their insistence that “words are violence” and strong opinions they disagreed with were the literal equivalent of curb-stomping oppressed minorities.

Because the ‘silent majority’ (who, contrary to what has become the prevailing doctrine, were not all straight white males) were reluctant to go to war with the unhinged barbarians who’d shown up at their gates, “words [that I don’t like] are violence” became the official doctrine of the academy. Most of those who didn’t like it merely gritted their teeth, held their tongues, and groused in private about the excesses of their cultish colleagues while those colleagues indoctrinated class after class of impressionable young people. Their dogma now dominates the media establishment to the point that journalistic awards are given out not for groundbreaking reporting, but for demonstrations of ideological fealty – and indeed, truth just gets in the way. No wonder much of their audience has fled to YouTube and Twitter for their news.

However reality-averse their work may be, these zealots are keenly aware that their captive audience despises being lied to, demonized, and told that the most normal behaviors – from studying the classics to voting to gathering with loved ones in their homes - constitute racism, Nazism, and attempted genocide. There is no way to package such outrageous slanders that will convince those thus degraded to swallow them. So, the only option is to ban arguments from the “other side.”

It’s no longer a question of “if you can’t beat them, join them” – the establishment has issued its verdict, and those whose opinions do not fall within the ever-narrowing borders of the mainstream have been declared anathema. The only problem the narrative managers now face is convincing their targets they don’t have the advantage of numbers. Thus, if you can’t beat them, ban them. What’s the point of having absolute power over the media otherwise?

Failure to triumph in the marketplace of ideas – by the topsy-turvy logic of the Words Are Violence crowd – merely means the marketplace needs stricter regulations. If two plus two cannot be persuaded to equal five, that’s only because math is racist.

In designating freedom of speech – once the foundation of American society – as a threat to democracy, the thought police running the media establishment have essentially completed the job of destroying everything that once made the country successful. The only question remaining is whether Americans are going to take this sort of insult sitting down.

The US’ future looks grim indeed in the face of a ‘Great Reset’ proposed by the same powers that steered it into a deadly economic quagmire. Why are Americans allowing those who broke their world the privilege of ‘fixing’ it?

Americans with more power and connections than sense have rushed forward over the last year, attempting to seize the right to ‘fix’ a society broken by shockingly stupid responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entire generations are being rendered suicidally depressed, unemployable, hopelessly alienated, and worse, while the likelihood that the current generation of children will mature into functional adults is rapidly shrinking. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for such a heterogenous population, and this moment calls for an unprecedented degree of creativity and imagination if we are to survive as a society.

So why are those most victimized by this system running into the arms of the same crew of unimaginative, solipsistic sociopaths who have repeatedly wrecked society in the first place? Whether it’s the ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks who asset-stripped the American middle class in 2008, overloading the country’s already fragile social safety net and driving a stake through the heart of the once-achievable American Dream, or the World Economic Forum, a breeding ground for selfish and self-interested corporate hacks who just want to fly their private jets in peace with the option to lecture the ground-bound hoi polloi on their carbon usage, those who’ve put themselves in charge are precisely the wrong ones for the job.

Indeed, the WEF – whose conveniently-timed book Covid 19: The Great Reset surfaced just in time to be seized upon by world governments as a supposedly better-than-nothing playbook for lifting humanity out of a mess even its writers admitted wasn’t nearly as disastrous as it seemed – was the first to claim experimental sovereignty over the poor unfortunates its leaders consigned to misery. Acknowledging they were putting humanity through the largest psychological experiment in history, one which technically violates the Geneva Convention and Nuremberg Code given that informed consent from its experimental test subjects was never obtained, is perhaps the worst possible messiah substitute to lead humanity into a brighter future.

Certainly, no one elected the WEF to guide Americans through the troubled times its members have largely created. The US is trapped in an identity crisis, crushed between the media establishment’s portrait of Our Democracy™ having narrowly escaped orange-tinted fascism and a newly-inaugurated administration that literally admitted to stealing the election on the front cover of Time Magazine. Joe Biden’s administration has claimed for itself the right to ‘Build Back Better’, its plagiarism-prone president once again ripping off his battle cry, this time from the World Economic Forum itself. A scriptwriter who submitted such an on-the-nose screenplay to their producer would be fired on the spot, yet Americans are expected to live with it.

Far from ushering in a golden age of democracy, Biden and his henchmen have held the reins of power in Washington for decades, bringing nothing but suffering to the American people. Despite his cabinet’s swaddling the iron fist of neoliberalism in warm fuzzy buzzwords like “inclusion” and “sustainability,” Biden himself is in large part responsible for the Patriot Act, which stripped American citizens of their most important constitutional rights. He also authored the 1994 crime bill that set up mandatory minimum sentencing for minor drug infractions, funneling tens of thousands of mostly black men into lifetime prison sentences. While he’s finally admitted the latter was a “mistake,” he nevertheless tried to dodge responsibility for having written the disastrous legislation by blaming individual states for how they implemented it. Expecting him to lead Americans into a bright new future is like expecting immaculate table manners from a starving grizzly bear.

Barely unable to keep from gibbering and squealing about a proposed new plan to tackle “domestic extremism,” Biden and his diversity all-stars – whose diversity stops at skin level as they march in ideological lockstep – are as much a menace to American society as the WEF member corporations pulling their strings behind the scenes. Americans seem helplessly caught in the vicious cycle of an abusive relationship, unable to flee the “devils they know” despite full awareness they will come away from their next encounter with a black eye (or an empty bank account, or utter social collapse). Embracing the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ – a future of “fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity,” according to the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, who further clarified this involves technology that can “intrude into the hitherto private space of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior” – is perhaps the worst possible future humanity could enter. Yet we are sleepwalking into precisely this outcome, unaware that we have any other options.

Even as Americans emerge from the fear-based fog that has consumed them for the better part of a year, they’re still – whether they know it or not – following the directions of the same class of authority figures that led them into this mess in the first place. But these figures have no idea what they’re doing any more than those who are merely following their “leaders” out of habit. Why, having suffered so under the leadership of these utterly worthless figures, would they continue to follow? There is no precedent among the current generation for the economic collapse that has seized the US and no evidence that the WEF, or a wildly incompetent presidential administration, or corona czar and resounding failure Dr. Anthony Fauci, have any idea what to do about it.

At this point, diverging from the dysfunctional and downright deadly paths forged by these repulsive figures is not even a matter of making the right choice – it is a matter of survival.

Though marketed as ‘the shining city on the hill’ envied by all other nations, America is rapidly proving to its own inhabitants and the world that not only can it not keep its own people safe – it can barely keep them alive.

Between the Covid-19 pandemic and the disastrous economic fallout engendered by government responses to that outbreak, the US has proven itself shockingly incapable of actually functioning in any way its peers might consider “normal.” Whether it’s keeping the lights on in American households, providing healthcare that cures rather than kills, educating children, or merely standing out of the way while residents try to build a life for themselves, Washington has demonstrated a profound, almost malignant ineptitude at the simplest tasks, so much that one might ask if it actually wants to perform them at all.

Dozens of Texas residents perished amid the massive snowstorm that seized the state last month. The storm knocked out the electric grid and left over 4 million residents with neither heat nor light. The state’s electricity vendors added insult to injury by slapping customers with absurdly high electric bills (some over $10,000) as the utility’s money-grubbing equivalent of “surge pricing” kicked in – all in a state where energy can literally be pulled out of the ground.

Texas is only one state, though – surely the rest of the country can’t be so horrifically incompetent when it comes to something as basic as electricity? But oh no, out West, there’s always California bidding to fail bigger and better. The Golden State’s own power supplier PSE&G was sued for starting the wildfires that destroyed entire neighborhoods in 2017 and 2018. Indeed, PSE&G has been blamed for more than 1,500 fires since 2014 alone and is in the process of declaring bankruptcy after being sued by over 70,000 of its victims, including the entire city of Paradise. It’s so inept when it comes to not burning down the state that for years it has shut off power – often for extended periods – during the summer, lest its equipment trigger still more wildfires.

OK, but surely such travesties are rare? It’s not like the US government just goes around displacing people from their land deliberately? Yet Georgia man Tim Leslie is living through that Kafkaesque nightmare of his own right now after having bought a plot of land in Polk County to homestead and raise animals with his family. Because they haven’t built their house yet, they’re (legally) living out of a trailer on that land – or were, until the police forced them to abandon their animals and move to a proper RV park. It’s difficult to imagine a community so free of crime that it wouldn’t have benefited from the cops finding something else to do during the hours spent harassing the Leslie family, but victimizing law-abiding citizens is much easier than going after criminals.

Policing – once the pride and joy of the world’s largest prison state – has itself deteriorated rapidly. New York City endured a major surge in crime thanks to the shutdown, while cops who might have been able to stop it were ignominiously tasked with guarding Mayor Bill de Blasio’s virtue-signaling “Black Lives Matter” mural or (somewhat schizophrenically) detailed to clobber the odd BLM protester. The NYPD even punished its own officers for public display of Trump fandom while real crimes went ignored and unpunished. (New York also released hundreds of supposedly low-level convicts last year “because Covid,” only for the public to learn they were guilty of much more serious offenses, with many ending up right back in the clink after committing further crimes. It’s an ominous state of affairs indeed for the country with the most prison inmates per capita in the world, and those numbers are almost guaranteed to further explode thanks to law enforcement’s new fixation on “domestic terrorists” – a group defined so broadly as to include anyone who’s expressed opinions outside the ever-narrowing mainstream.

Maybe the US is just focusing its efforts on combating the Covid-19 pandemic? Americans may spend more on healthcare than any other first-world country, but it wasn’t getting much for its money even before Covid. When the pandemic hit, all hell broke loose in many states, and when hospitals were barred from seeing ‘normal’ patients for lucrative procedures, they instead turned to ventilating anything that moved in order to get reimbursed by the government – even though 88 percent of those intubated died. Governors didn’t beg for lifesaving treatments – indeed, they banned some. Instead, they pleaded for ventilators, all while shunting Covid-infected patients into nursing homes where they would go on to decimate the helpless population.

If this is how the US treats its sick, what about its children? Despite some scientists confirming vanishingly few kids are falling ill, major teachers’ unions refuse to return to the classroom, never mind how poorly most children have been shown to learn over a distance model. In some areas, the shutdown of schools revealed a problem the US had been covering up for a while – the need to feed the millions of destitute children who rely on their schools not just for learning, but for free meals their families can’t afford. At the same time, these kids’ parents spent hours lined up in the cold for free groceries from the nearest food bank, and millions remain out of work or severely underemployed, many dangling on the verge of eviction. Sorely-needed stimulus checks never arrived for many, whose only recourse now is to claim the check on their taxes in the hope of maybe getting reimbursed later.

Most of these problems could be solved with some smart policies and a fraction of the infusion of cash that has already gone out to large corporations. But there’s wars to fight, and no evidence the ruling class wants its domestic problems fixed anyway. Instead, it seems to take sadistic pleasure in gaslighting Americans to within an inch of their sanity, insisting the rest of the world wants to be just like us. After all, it’s not like we can fly there to check.

The Internet Archive has begun slapping “fact-checks” on archived pages, supposedly to provide “context” they’re missing. But readers don’t need their thoughts babysat, and it’s a small step to deleting the page altogether.

The nonprofit, which operates the Wayback Machine – an archive of old web pages spanning decades – announced last week that it would begin adding “fact-checks” and “convenient links to contextual information” to certain archived pages, unsettling internet freedom activists and researchers who rely upon the 40-petabyte mega-archive to do their work.

The Internet Archive insisted in its blog post announcing the change that fact-checks were “important data for our users.” A glimpse at the replies excoriating the archive for taking a big step closer to turning its once-venerable servers into a giant memory hole might suggest otherwise. However, a visit to the Archive’s “about” page reveals exactly which ‘users’ the site is striving to serve by shoehorning fact-checks into its formerly faithful attempts to preserve the internet.

The Archive’s top funders happen to be the primary financial backers of the fact-checking industry – specifically the Knight Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rita Allen Foundation, and eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund. These entities also fund the Poynter Institute, the digital journalism powerhouse that has transformed fact-checking from a noble profession conducted out of readers’ sight to a public scolding tactic aimed at quashing dissent. Fact-checkers are no longer working on the same side as journalists – the new breed, trained by Poynter and the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) it operates, are eternally on the prowl for narrative deviance. The pinnacle of professional achievement is calling out a high-profile journalist for veering away from prevailing narrative orthodoxy and applying the “fake news” label. And Archive.org has just become a potent weapon in their arsenal.

Bots in the belfry

Ironically, this strain of fact-checkers is notorious for its loose grasp of facts. Archive.org uses an old version of a page from independent news collective IndyMedia to illustrate the new fact-checking policy, linking it to an investigation by fact-checker Graphika that declares it’s part of a Russian propaganda network with the ominous name of ‘Secondary Infektion’. Any right-thinking reader will scurry away from the page as fast as possible, lest they be “infekted” by those nasty Russian bots they’ve heard so much about.

Yet Graphika employs discredited conspiracy theorists like Ben Nimmo, a character assassin affiliated with the UK’s nefarious Integrity Initiative and NATO-backed pro-war think tank the Atlantic Council who sees Russians under his bed at night and specializes in smearing UK citizens as bots. Graphika’s flashy illustrations, though impressive-looking, appear to be an attempt to distract from the lack of proof for its allegations (and the presence of shills like Nimmo on the masthead of almost every “investigation” it has ever conducted).

The Internet Archive’s list of fact-checkers bristles with similarly dodgy entities. Also listed is the Stanford Internet Observatory, whose head Renee di Resta previously worked with New Knowledge (now Yonder) – the firm whose fake “Russian bots” infamously gifted Democrats a Senate seat in 2017. Fellow “fact-checker” Lead Stories is little more than a clubhouse for CNN alumni. PolitiFact is itself owned by the Poynter Institute, and the Washington Post recently paid out millions of dollars to a high school boy for smearing him with a viral video. The reputations of these fact-deficient fact-checkers benefit significantly from having their credibility laundered through the Internet Archive, which has historically been seen as above the partisan fray.

Slope gets slippery

When Archive.org first began applying warning notices to old pages in May, tacking its “yellow boxes of shame” onto deleted posts from the Medium.com blogging platform that had been removed for violating that site’s strict policy on “disinformation” related to the novel coronavirus, defenders insisted the policy was just a one-off. There was no way the Internet Archive would become the memory hole, they said. Last week’s developments have proved them wrong.

The Internet Archive surely knows by now – after watching Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube get sandblasted by the media and Congress alike for not cracking down even harder on political wrongthink – that anything short of a total purge of dissent will merely lead to complaints a platform isn’t removing enough “disinformation.” These people can be ignored, but if one throws them a bone, they won’t let go until they’ve gotten the whole skeleton.

As George Orwell himself said, “he who controls the past controls the future.” The Internet Archive’s deep-pocketed backers now control the internet’s shared past, and there’s nothing stopping them from highlighting it all and hitting “delete.”

Most parents would scorn quid-pro-quo ‘sugar dating’ as glorified prostitution – one step from riding the Lolita Express with Jeffrey Epstein. But with the economy circling the drain, neoliberalism leaves girls little choice.

‘Sugar dating’, in which a typically older romantic partner offers financial incentives to woo a usually much-younger paramour, is being threatened with a ban in Denmark. The concept has spiraled out of control in Scandinavian countries, with recent investigations suggesting it has become a gateway to full-on prostitution for girls as young as 13 in Sweden and Finland.

But it could also be argued that the “sugar babies” on the younger end of the equation are just monetizing their most valuable assets. In a culture that lives and dies according to the doctrine of neoliberal economics, aren’t teenage sugar babies just claiming their place in the free market, offering the only goods they have that others value – their bodies?

With economic conditions declining rapidly around the world thanks to catastrophically ill-advised government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, articles praising ‘soft’ prostitution are a dime a dozen in establishment media. Men’s magazine GQ, for example, recently featured a fawning interview with the founder of OnlyFans, which lets celebrities and online influencers offer their followers the chance to subscribe to self-made – frequently pornographic – content.

Packaged in the nonthreatening edges-rounded design of Web 2.0, OnlyFans bears no surface resemblance to the gritty peep shows and dingy porn theaters of 1970s Times Square or any of the similarly squalid aesthetics typically associated with desperate women selling themselves on the streets. Indeed, the more successful purveyors of racy photos on the site might even call the experience empowering. Yet few parents would come forward to declare that they want their daughters to become a top seller on OnlyFans – or a star on any of the internet’s numerous porn marketplaces.

And while ‘sugar dating’ sites like Denmark’s own SugarDaters.dk insist they are just normal dating platforms, not watering holes for budding prostitutes and the predators who want to pimp them out, the simple fact is that they would not have to issue such disclaimers if so many people did not consider the sugar-dating phenomenon to be analogous to the world’s oldest profession.

Denmark’s age of consent is 15, with 18 the cut-off age at which individuals can procure sex (in exchange for money, gifts, or the usual rewards lavished upon sugar babies by their benefactors). This puts the country’s sugar babies in the same gray area inhabited by the harem of deceased sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, who weaponized young girls just shy of the age of consent in order to blackmail politicians.

Girls like Virginia Roberts Giuffre were trafficked among powerful men by Epstein and his alleged Mossad handler Ghislaine Maxwell in a manner that – according to the morals of Western society – constituted a serious violation of the young girls’ rights. But another strand of Western morality suggests that offering these economically disadvantaged girls the opportunity to spend a few nights with boldface names like (allegedly) Prince Andrew actually gave them an advantage – or at least a fair selling price for their young bodies – and the fact that the girls returned time and again to Epstein’s various mansions and private planes suggests they got something out of the experience, as much as they might be legally classified as victims – too young to make their own decisions, or unaware they were being used to extort the men they were ordered to service.

Certainly the young women Maxwell recruited off the streets of Palm Beach and New York City (with the help of other girls she’d already recruited) would not have otherwise found their way into the company of such powerful individuals had they not been taught the value that their assets – their flesh – represented to these aging, quasi-vampiric billionaires.

Because as grotesque as the trade appears in the cold light of 20/20 hindsight, it’s just as vile to think that when they got into a car or a plane with Epstein and Maxwell, the pair’s victims had no other route out of poverty. For many, it was no doubt a choice between the Lolita Express and the trailer park, and they’d already seen their older sisters and friends go the way of the trailer park. Indeed, many of Epstein’s alleged victims reported they had been on the brink of homelessness, living in foster care, or otherwise trapped in unstable situations when Maxwell swooped in and plucked them off the streets – searching specifically for that level of vulnerability which made them the perfect prey. Many didn’t have parents to intervene, and those who did were estranged enough from their family members that the latter rarely if ever saw fit to interfere in what for some girls amounted to hundreds of (financially lucrative) “massage” visits to Epstein’s mansion.

Those parents who did know what was going on must have struggled with the guilt inherent in the knowledge that Epstein and his wealthy friends could offer more to their daughters than they, the girls’ parents, could. At least Epstein’s plane held the promise of adventure at the end of the rainbow, a lure powerful enough that some girls actually held their nose and (allegedly) went to bed with Alan Dershowitz. It’s a horror that does not bear imagining, and one that is almost always left out of every story written about the Epstein affair.

The reality of neoliberal economics is that it leaves the vast majority of its participants out in the cold, driving them to do increasingly desperate things – hook up with an old man on an internet dating site in exchange for a nice purse or a student loan payment, sell nudes on OnlyFans (never mind who might later use them as blackmail), take a ride on the Lolita Express with a withered old politician, whatever the case may be – just to survive. Yet whenever a country’s leaders get together to bloviate over how they might ostensibly make their constituents’ lives better, altering the dead-end economic system in which so many of them live is never on the table.

Thus, while Danish parents may pat themselves on the back, believing their daughters have dodged a bullet by escaping the dreaded “sugar bowl,” their leaders have merely treated one of the symptoms. Playing economic whac-a-mole won’t turn the slippery slope sending their children toward glorified prostitution into an economic ladder to success.

Unleashing weaponized robotic dogs to supplant the US’s metastasizing police forces is not just a bad idea – it’s a disastrous move that will vastly compound the levels of human suffering for which cops are responsible.

“DigiDog,” the nickname given to Boston Dynamics’ robo-canine monster by the New York Police Department, has been tested over the last year by the agency for its ability to see in the dark, assess threats, and otherwise perform policing duties human officers cannot. Hailed for its usefulness by the NYPD’s emergency service and bomb squad units, it was singled out last week by New York City Council member Ben Kallos, who called for a unilateral ban on the use of “robots armed with a weapon” in a manner “likely to cause death or serious physical injury.”

Kallos unveiled the No Killer Robots Act in an effort to crack down on the use of secretive surveillance and technology tools, with New York one of three American states (along with Massachusetts and Hawai’i) that have made a not-so-subtle show of testing the quadruped attack dogs in public.

New York’s City Council passed its Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act in June, in what was ostensibly an effort to keep citizens informed about their police force’s use of armed robots and other technological advances and to give them a say in how such tactics are rolled out, though the dog’s recent reappearance last month at the site of a home invasion would suggest the NYPD hasn’t been adhering particularly strongly to the rule.

The No Killer Robots Act would be the country’s first law barring police from deploying armed robots against citizens in the streets, though Boston Dynamics has implied Spot is really just a friendly, if expensive at $74,500, little surveillance puppy. Not to be confused with the ferocious dog-like robots who hunt down helpless humans in the 2011 Black Mirror episode - that’s just fiction, got it?

“All of our buyers, without exception, must agree that Spot will not be used as a weapon or configured to hold a weapon,” Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter declares in the company’s terms of service. Given the NYPD and its fellow police force’s general disinclination to adhere to inconveniences like laws, especially those involving murder, however, it’s unlikely that mere terms of service will keeps the city’s cops from venturing into the legal no-man’s-land of unleashing the killer potential of a herd of wild Spots.

Even Kallos has clarified he’s not 100% against the idea of using Spot (or DigiDog, or whatever cuddly name the NYPD opts to ultimately slap on its four-legged supersoldiers) to perform tasks that would be considered dangerous for humans, like deactivating a bomb - only “weaponized robots” would be off limits under his bill.

But the possibility for armed robots to snowball into tools of suppression and terror is a very real risk, as California Polytechnic University’s director of the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group, Patrick Lin, told Wired earlier this month.

“Robots can save police lives, and that’s a good thing. But we also need to be careful it doesn’t make a police force more violent,” Lin explained.

Drone warfare has made the Pentagon less apprehensive about recklessly diving into new conflicts, knowing that the worst that could happen to the US military is one of its unmanned aerial killers being shot out of the sky, even as its adversary - say, Libya - is catapulted into a horrific nightmare replete with open-air slave markets and refugees regularly drowning off the coast. So, too, a police force comprised of mechanized dogs of war would avoid the macabre spectacle of coffins being marched down the street in a multi-officer funeral.

So what’s to stop DigiDog being given a tool to incapacitate the bomber after it defuses the bomb? Given the human instinct to recoil from these beasts, inhabitants of the uncanny valley as they unapologetically are, it will be awfully tempting for police (after losing bot after bot to creeped-out citizens unable to resist the urge to soak the vile creatures in saltwater, shorting their circuits) to start acting on the urge to fight back. Playter notes optimistically that “robots will achieve long-term commercial viability only if people see robots as helpful, beneficial tools without worrying if they’re going to cause harm.” Fat chance.

The possibility that flesh-and-blood police officers will instinctively treat their robot partners as normal K-9s also elevates the risk that Boston Dynamics’ inanimate objects will be protected with the same degree of solicitousness as real live K-9s - leaving open the possibility that the “lives” of bot K-9s will be avenged with the same ferocity as the real things - defeating the entire purpose of using them, as humans are murdered for “killing” non-living machines. $74,500 isn’t cheap, either - plus whatever added cost covers the weapon attachments - and there’s always the possibility cops will take it upon themselves to enact vengeance on civilians who trash their artificial partners, worried about having the cost docked from their pay.

There’s also the risk that robot dogs will be smuggled in through the side door, introduced as seemingly innocuous tools for maintaining ‘soft’ mandates like Covid-19 social distancing - a job they performed in Singapore with creepy but effective panache. But what’s to stop silicon K-9s from jumping the behavioral boundaries humans are innately programmed with - the instinctive aversion to killing one’s fellow man, say, or wiping out real dogs in the manner police officers seem so keen on?

Ultimately, Boston Dynamics’ robot dogs are creatures of their programmers. If one believes - as the Black Lives Matter slogan goes - that “all cops are bastards,” that umbrella will cover any artificial intelligence programmed by those officers. A bad apple is a bad apple, and a bad pooch is a bad pooch, no matter how much surplus cute-factor is ladled onto the basic framework the creatures are outfitted with.

If anything, the lack of presence of an actual human intelligence operating the dog implies a greater lack of responsibility, as the officers know they can get away with proportionally more misdeeds the further they are distanced from the machines they’re operating. Essentially, the problems of drone warfare will be writ large and set loose running through American streets.

Just as police officers who’ve served in the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan - or undergone “counter-terror” training in Israel - later treat the people they’re tasked with “serving and protecting” like second-class citizens, shooting first and asking questions later, nothing good will come of bringing drone warfare home to the US.

Armed drones have no place in the United States and must be banned before the first weaponized silicon canine sinks its teeth - or shoots its bullets - into an innocent human being.

Harvard University has more money in its endowment than 109 countries have wealth, a recent report said, and it’s not the only school with more cash than most nations. For the rich, maintaining the status quo doesn’t come cheap.

“America’s public schooling system may be in trouble, but its top universities are anything but,” said a story by Stacker, which compared the multibillion endowments of 50 American colleges to the “total wealth” of world nations as estimated by Credit Suisse. The list saw five universities – including Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and the University of Texas System – beat over half of world’s 195 economies. Topping the list with its massive $38.3 billion endowment came Harvard.

Perhaps more than even the other Ivy League colleges, Harvard sells more than just a degree. A Harvard education provides entrée into exclusive circles populated by the very wealthy and very influential, and the school puts a lot of effort into nurturing this reputation. The quality of a Harvard education has somewhat dipped over the past decade, now occupying the sixth spot according to The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, but the same firm has invariably ranked the institution’s reputation as pristine, scoring a perfect 100 on both research and teaching.

While teachers across the country have been staging walkouts over low wages and healthcare costs, college tuition costs have spiked as Wall Street got in on packaging student loan debts as it once packaged mortgage debts. Since ‘SLABS’ (student loan asset backed securities) were introduced, the total amount of student debt held by American students has doubled.

Ivy league schools have remained safe from credential inflation because alumni who occupy the positions of power have agreed that the degrees must remain valuable, a recession-proof asset for wealthy people understandably skittish in an uncertain economy. Just as modern art’s value rests on the auction houses that sell it for millions of dollars, Ivy League degrees have value because of the sheer financial might backing the institutions that bestow them.

The US is often ranked among the most unequal countries in the world, with just three people owning as much wealth as the poorest half of the population. It is also more unequal now than at almost any time since its founding, yet there are no Yellow Vest-style protests raging through the streets, and haven’t been since Occupy Wall Street. Why?

Data from the International Social Survey Programme show that as a country’s economy becomes less equal, its people perceive it as more of a meritocracy – the kind of place where, if you study hard and show up on time, you, too, can become a Master of the Universe. The kind of place where even a kid who grew up on the streets can go to Harvard. Doling out conspicuous scholarships helps Harvard perpetuate this illusion.

One of the most powerful and enduring founding myths of the US is that of the land of opportunity, where anyone with enough grit and tenacity can ‘make it’. This may once have been the case.

But when these schools have war chests larger than most countries, it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that the system does not work for everyone. With homeless populations in many cities reaching record highs, even as colleges in those cities greedily snatch up more real estate, the inequality has never been so stark.

Yet even as no one looks at a homeless person living in a Los Angeles tent city and imagines that as their future, there’s an entire profession devoted to convincing gullible high-schoolers that if they just pick the right college, the world is their oyster. A former Harvard admissions consultant attempted to deflate that myth a few years ago in an anonymous article titled ‘Ivy League Admissions Are a Sham: Confessions of a Harvard Gatekeeper’. It claimed that the rare candidates from the lower end of the socioeconomic scale who showed up on his desk always had some disqualifying factor that allowed them to be passed over for their wealthy peers groomed for universe-mastery from birth.

Whether or not this biter of the hand that fed them (they graduated from Harvard themselves) is exaggerating, it is no coincidence that most Ivy League alumni graduate with a remarkably uniform view toward the system they now have the power to change – if only they wanted to. But why rock the boat? That system worked well for them.

‘Philanthropy’ is an established tradition among the wealthy, many of whom feel it is important to be seen as ‘giving back’. Being ‘seen’ is the operative word here – charity doesn’t matter if no one sees you doing it. Charity balls form the backbone of their social lives, family foundations become the final resting place of their wealth (old-money families like the Rothschilds and Rockefellers rarely show up on ‘world’s richest’ lists because they are wise enough to hide their assets), and museum wings are named after wealthy benefactors so the poor know their duty is to be grateful, not resentful.

At least theoretically, everybody wins: the wealthy avoid taxes and the working class can cling to the dream that if their kids work hard, someday they might get into Harvard and join the ranks of their oppressors. Mom & Dad shelve the pitchforks for another day, and the wealthy breathe a little easier.

Why wouldn’t a wealthy person give back to an institution that created such a system? Doling out a handful of scholarships to the most promising members of the working class is a small price to pay for keeping one’s position atop an increasingly unequal society. The status quo doesn’t maintain itself. That’s Harvard’s job.

Billionaires are scrambling to ward off the specter of populist anger – from wealth taxes to increased regulation – looming over an age of unprecedented inequality. Perhaps they should have thought of this outcome 40 years ago.

The 2020 election may trigger a “war on Wall Street and wealth,” too-big-to-fail bank Citi has warned its clients in a letter quoted by Bloomberg this week. The bank laments that the rich these days are merely seen as a cash cow for “re-distributional policies, including further tax relief for low- and middle-income persons” – never mind that the primary beneficiaries of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts were the same rich individuals who received Citi’s letter, as well as the corporations they own. The pitchforks are coming out, and Citi wants its customers to be prepared.

The Citi letter is far from an isolated case of billionaires declaring themselves a persecuted class. The wealth tax floated by Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to pay for a much-needed reinforcement of the country’s tattered social safety net has clearly struck fear into the hearts of the super-rich, combined as it is with an upsurge in populist rhetoric and the gradual realization in other parts of the world that neoliberal capitalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Bloomberg, the only outlet to publish the letter, is named for its founder Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City who is so opposed to the idea of wealth taxes and increased regulation that he jumped into the presidential race last month, despite an already-crowded field and an electorate with no particular desire for another wealthy white male septuagenarian in the race. As mayor, he turned New York into a playground for the super-rich and a police state for the poor, a record that appeals to few – except, of course, his fellow billionaires.

“The vilification of billionaires makes no sense to me,” hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman told CNBC last week, tearing up on national television as he defended his fortune from the grasping hands of a hypothetical President Warren and insisted his fellow billionaires – Bloomberg included – have made the world a “better place.” Cooperman has called the wealth tax a “bankrupt concept” and warned that the stock market would crash if Warren is elected – a prediction that sounded more like a threat than a warning from the hedge-funder. When he dies, “I plan to give away all my money!” he whined, apparently shocked that such posthumous philanthropy didn’t impress politicians.

Fear of the pitchfork-wielding masses is nothing new, but with inequality so entrenched that billionaires are actually paying a lower tax rate than the working class, even a slight correction is bound to feel like a punishment to the monstrously rich. Perhaps this is why so few of them are trying to avoid the anticipated class war by championing initiatives that might work out positively for working people, such as closing the tax loopholes that allow the wealthy to hide their fortunes overseas or in “charitable” foundations, taxing Wall Street transactions, or taxing massive fortunes as Sanders and Warren want to do. Instead, billionaires are following the lead of former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz – the only Democratic candidate whom people have turned out to protest against – who insisted the public refer to his ilk as “people of means,” because of the negative connotation of the word “billionaire.”

After Warren released a commercial splicing together several billionaires’ incredulous reaction to her wealth tax, several of them fought back. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein suggested dumping on billionaires was discrimination – “criticism of people as a group” – and got in a dig at the Massachusetts senator’s ‘Native American’ origins. Cooperman got nastier, snarling “She doesn’t know who the f*** she’s tweeting” in response to her choice to superimpose “charged with insider trading” over his face.

“In America, people don’t hate the wealthy, they want to be them,” hedge funder Cooperman pleaded, continuing in his tearstained defense of obscene wealth.

But it’s not as easy as it used to be to enter the ranks of the rich in the erstwhile Land of Opportunity. Social mobility has dropped 70 percent in the US in the last half-century, according to Harvard economist Raj Chetty, to the point where by 2016 half of 30-year-olds were earning less than their parents had at the same age. The bottom half of workers by income have seen no real growth in their earnings since the 1970s, though Chetty points to 1980 as the “inflection point” after which inequality exploded. The once-secure American middle class has been decimated by offshoring and the dismantling of unions, while the “trickle-down” economic policies that kicked off the inequality epidemic have instead caused the savings of the working class to trickle up to the wealthy. And most Americans – four out of five – are struggling with some kind of debt. It’s not surprising people are starting to wake up from the American dream.

But it was one particular complaint of Cooperman’s that epitomizes the billionaires’ panic. “The idea of vilifying wealthy people is so bogus – they’re appealing to the masses!” he cried, as if appalled that any politician would speak to voters rather than the donors who typically fill their war chests. Big-time Democratic donors have even threatened the party with the removal of their support if Warren (or Sanders, who famously threw down the gauntlet with “I don’t think billionaires should exist,” now a bumper sticker) gets the nomination.

Genuinely populist politicians haven’t been a problem in the past – the last Democrat in the White House, Barack Obama, staffed his cabinet under the direction of Citi executives despite promising to fight for the people on the campaign trail. While he was taking orders, his predecessor was bailing out Citi and the rest of the banks that had destroyed the US economy with predatory mortgage lending, leaving almost a million families out on the street in 2008 alone. But a stubborn populist current has infiltrated American politics despite the best efforts of the (billionaire-owned) media, which equates populism with fascism any chance it gets – and young Americans are looking increasingly favorably upon socialism. Neither of these trends predicts a rosy future for the super-rich.

Of course, even if the next president sticks to their guns and targets billionaires in the wallet, success is not guaranteed. Citi alluded to this in its letter, reminding investors that any reform-minded president will have a tough time pushing legislation through a Congress loyal to Wall Street. And the rich can take comfort in the fact that everything else Washington has declared war on in the last 50 years – poverty, drugs, and terrorism – are all still thriving.