Fruitcake links Ukraine and Brexit

I live with a conspiracy theorist but that part of her conversation just washes over me unheeded. But it does tell me how deeply such theories can be embedded. No point of argument and evidence. I think the ideas of the lady below are similar and should be ignored too

‘We are part of the plan. We have always been part of the plan.’ This is the latest stark warning to the West from Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Cadwalladr, as regular spiked readers are no doubt familiar, has spent the past several years tirelessly uncovering an elaborate hidden conspiracy that can apparently explain more or less every global development that liberal centrists see as unwelcome. Brexit, Trump and now the war in Ukraine are all part of the plot – and Russia, Facebook and Brexit-supporting businessman Arron Banks (who is currently suing Cadwalladr for libel) are always somehow connected.

In an extraordinary outburst last night, Cadwalladr claimed that the war in Ukraine is not all it seems. Rather, Russia’s invasion is merely one front in ‘the first Great Information War’. And we in the West have apparently been under sustained attack in this war since at least 2014. And if you haven’t noticed there’s a war going on, that’s because it is being carried out ‘invisibly’.

Social media may seem like a fun way to pass the time, or a good way to keep up with what’s going on in the world, but for Cadwalladr Facebook is a weapon – a ‘thermobaric bomb’, she says, only ‘online’. It has apparently allowed Russia to carry out ‘“hybrid warfare” on steroids’. It has given the likes of Vladimir Putin ‘a golden Willy Wonka ticket to manipulate hearts and minds. Almost completely invisibly.’ ‘We’ve been under attack for eight years now’, Cadwalladr claims. But we refuse to acknowledge this, because ‘in Britain, we’re a captured state’. Oh, and it’s somehow also the fault of her arch-nemesis, Arron Banks. Former Vote Leave mastermind Dominic Cummings gets a walk-on role, too. If this story doesn’t quite make sense to you, then perhaps the Russians have already got to you.

Such extraordinary claims are nothing new for Cadwalladr, of course. She has long tried to paint Brexit, in particular, as the handiwork of Facebook, of data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, of Russian money, Russian bots, Russian disinformation and Russia Today – as part of a coordinated plot to ‘hijack’ democracy by a ‘shadowy global operation’. Now that Brexit is done, she tells us that Brexit is just a small plot point in a much bigger, more nefarious scheme.

Carole has essentially fashioned herself as a QAnon leader for centrist liberals – a kind of Alex Jones for embittered Remainers in the UK and anti-Trumpists in the US. Yet unlike the real Alex Jones, who is shunned from mainstream platforms, Cadwalladr’s crackpot theories have been indulged and encouraged by the liberal elites. She has been lavished with awards from the Orwell Prize, Reporters Without Borders, the Hay Festival and the Political Studies Association, and was nominated for a Pulitzer in the US. Yet so many of Carole’s big reveals are presented with quite major caveats, such as ‘Is it true? Who knows?’ and ‘we are in the dark about so much’, suggesting that she might not know the truth after all.

Cadwalladr and her fans see themselves as truth tellers crusading against the tide of foreign ‘disinformation’, or dezinformatsiya, in the Russian, as Carole insists on calling it. And as the West is gripped by war fever, there is no doubt a receptive audience for any claim against Russia and Putin, no matter how mad (the first tweet in Cadwalladr’s Ukraine thread has over 46,000 likes).

But if these incoherent ramblings are what passes for ‘truth’ these days, then we are in deep trouble.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/28/the-invasion-of-ukraine-has-nothing-to-do-with-brexit/

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Top 3 Reasons Cancel Culture is Crumbling

Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, and Kanye West don’t have a lot in common. One thing that does come to mind is that they’re powerful men who the left has tried to cancel. The left failed at each attempt. While still a threat for now, cancel culture is crumbling.

For years, anyone with a public presence who has dared to contradict the leftist zeitgeist has been met with an angry Twitter mob demanding that individual to be fired, doxxed, de-platformed from social media, financially ruined, and publicly disgraced. Great men and women of history have been erased. Maybe a soft version of cancel culture, but the National Archives even labeled parts of the United States Constitution as “harmful content.”

Cancel culture stifles two of America’s most defining values, the ability to question authority and express ourselves through free speech. However, three major trends have emerged that will gradually destroy cancel culture.

Money Talks

Despite attempts by the left to cancel Rogan, Chappelle, West, and Aaron Rodgers, big business continues to invest hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars into these men.

Let’s start with Rogan. When several prominent artists, led by Neil Young took their music off Spotify to protest what they described as COVID vaccine misinformation on Rogan’s show, clips from old episodes caught fire online. Social activists and artists on the left launched a #DeleteSpotify social media campaign began calling for people to not only boycott Spotify but also deleting their content from the popular music and podcast platform.

Despite this, Rogan remains on Spotify. Even Spotify’s CEO said, “We’re not in the business of dictating the discourse that these creators want to have on their shows.” Rogan has an average of 11 million viewers per show. That’s more than Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, The Five, and Hannity combined. Rogan’s podcast show accounts for 60.5 percent of viewers across all nine of the primetime shows listed below. Rogan’s average viewer is a 24-year-old male.

Spotify seeks to produce its own original content and become the biggest podcasting network in the world. As Rogan leads not only in the U.S. market, but also 92 other countries, these viewership numbers signify BIG money. According to a recent article from New York Times, citing anonymous people familiar with the deal, Spotify actually paid Rogan more than $200 million in 2020 for exclusive rights to his podcast for three years. More viewership equals more ad revenue for Spotify.

CEOs and businesspeople care more about lining their pockets than placating people with blue checkmarks behind their names on Twitter.

This financial motive is why Netflix allowed comedy legend Dave Chappelle to say “gender is a fact” on his Netflix special “The Closer.” He was paid $20 million for the controversial standup. Since then, Netflix has offered to pay Chappelle to do more standup specials. Similarly, Rodgers’ 4-year, $134,000,000 contract was not cancelled after he stated that “The vaccines do offer some protection for sure, but there is a lot we don’t know about them.”

West, an eccentric African American man who wears MAGA hats and smokes joints, is the wealthiest rapper in the world with a net worth of $6.6 billion. He can’t be cancelled either. He understands the left’s game well.

“They’ll hit you with like accusations of somebody who you was with 10 years ago,” West said. “And also, there’s women who’ve been through very serious things, pulled in alleys against they will—that’s different than a hug, but it’s classified as the same thing. It’s power and politics. You know, power-hungry maniacs and just control. This is ‘1984’ mind-control we’re in.”

West sees through the smoke and mirrors and keeps selling records and selling out shows. These are but a few examples of how, at the end of the day, the power of money trump’s the hurt feelings of snowflakes. Cancel culture will continue to fail whenever it challenges big business.

Decentralization of Internet

Second, cancel culture will erode because of the inevitable decentralization of the internet along with the creation of parallel digital platforms.

The old saying “be careful what you wish for” applies to the left. The left wished for conservatives to be removed from their platforms, so conservatives, moderates, and other free speech advocates created and deployed their own platforms, based on their own infrastructure.

As banks start canceling accounts and freezing assets, like Canadian banks are currently doing with the truckers, the use of cryptocurrency and crypto wallets will surge. Although crypto will eventually be largely regulated, there will always be some blockchain-based coins that are untraceable and therefore not subject to cancellation. The social media site Gab is 100 percent funded by crypto as Visa, Stripe, Paypal, and other payment services refuse to do business with them. Gab’s CEO is a free speech absolutist who will not remove offensive content so long as minors aren’t exploited or harmed in any way.

When Twitter suspends people for saying they believe there are two genders, or that women should be feminine and men should be masculine, people will move to the free speech alternative Gettr. When YouTube removes videos for questioning the efficacy and/or safety of the COVID vaccine, people will move to Rumble. Neither Gab nor Rumble can be cancelled by Amazon because neither use Amazon Web Services. Unlike Parler, they were smart enough to build their own server hardware.

Speaking of Rumble, the company is experiencing tremendous growth. They only had 3 million active users in 2020. By late 2021, they had grown 10 times with over 30 million active users. Equally impressive, Rumble saw 19 percent growth on monthly active users from Dec. 2021 to Jan. 2022.

“On the heels of the decline in U.S. and Canadian users at Facebook, and with Rumble’s impressive January growth, it’s clear that we are witnessing a major shift on the internet. Users are sending a clear message that platforms supporting the free and open internet will be the future,” said Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski.

With decentralized websites and payment gateways, independently owned server hardware, increased ease of web development, the digital future belongs to everyone- not just a few conglomerates. Cancel a man 100 times and he will still be able to find an online community.

Cultural Icons Push Back

Third, and perhaps the most potent antidote to cancel culture in the short-term, is cultural icons pushing back against cancel culture combined with the left canceling itself and feeling the nasty repercussions. Even someone as far left as Madonna, who joked about blowing up the White House during Trump’s Presidency, expresses legitimate fear of cancel culture.

“That’s something I want to disturb,” she said. “I want to disturb the fact that we’re not encouraged to discuss it. I believe that our job [as artists] is to disturb the status quo. The censoring that’s going on in the world right now, that’s pretty frightening. No one’s allowed to speak their mind right now. No one’s allowed to say what they really think about things for fear of being canceled, cancel culture. In cancel culture, disturbing the peace is probably an act of treason.”

A lot of people weren’t happy with Madonna over her comments. Aside from Madonna, many celebrities and cultural icons have faced backlash from the left for having independent thoughts. Elon Musk, Bill Burr, Chris Rock, Steve Harvey, JK Rawling, and Ricky Gervais have faced backlash for speaking opposite of the hive mind.

Perhaps the most recent example of the left nearly canceling itself involves Whoopi Goldberg and her comments about the Holocaust.

“The Holocaust isn’t about race. No, it’s not about race,” Goldberg said. “It’s about man’s inhumanity to man… But these are two groups of white people,” Goldberg added.

She was suspended for two weeks and allegedly was so embarrassed and angry that she had to take time off. Others on the left came to her defense. MSNBC news anchor Mika Brzezinski told viewers,

“Everyone knows Whoopi Goldberg. She’s been on TV for decades. She’s been putting herself out there for decades. If you don’t know her heart, then you haven’t been watching. And so that’s why the two-week suspension to me seems more about … this unbelievable need to punish and judge people when they’ve made a mistake.”

Brzezinski added, “If Whoopi Goldberg is canceled, that would be the end of this all. This cancel culture is getting so out of hand.”

Americans for Limited Government President Richard Manning said “Cancel culture will become futile as the decentralized internet continues to grow. As much as we disagree with the authoritarian precepts of the left, Americans for Limited Government believes that the First Amendment applies equally to everyone and that no one should be cancelled.”

It’s time to embrace free speech again. The First Amendment is the foundation of a free society.

https://dailytorch.com/2022/02/top-3-reasons-cancel-culture-is-crumbling/

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The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West

Those who most flamboyantly proclaim that they are fighting fascists continue to embrace and wield the defining weapons of despotism.

Glenn Greenwald

When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.

When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government's use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.

But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West's official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.

The implicit guarantor of this comforting framework is democracy. Western countries, according to this mythology, can never be as repressive as their enemies because Western governments are at least elected democratically. This assurance, superficially appealing though it may be, completely collapses with the slightest critical scrutiny. The premise of the U.S. Constitution and others like it is that majoritarian despotism is dangerous in the extreme; the Bill of Rights consists of little more than limitations imposed on the tyrannical measures majorities might seek to democratically enact (the expression of ideas cannot be criminalized even if majorities want them to be; religious freedom cannot be abolished even if large majorities demand it; life and liberty cannot be deprived without due process even if nine of out ten citizens favor doing so, etc.). More inconveniently still, many of the foreign leaders we are instructed to view as despots are popular or even every bit as democratically elected as our own beloved freedom-safeguarding officials.

As potent as this mythological framework is, reinforced by large media corporations over so many decades, it cannot withstand the increasingly glaring use of precisely these despotic tactics in the West. Watching Justin Trudeau — the sweet, well-mannered, well-raised good-boy prince of one of the West's nicest countries featuring such a pretty visage (even on the numerous occasions when marred by blackface) — invoke and then harshly impose dubious emergency, civil-liberties-denying powers is just the latest swing of the hammer causing this Western sculpture to crumble. In sum, you are required by Western propaganda to treat the two images below as fundamentally different; indeed, huge numbers of people in the West vehemently denounce the one on the left while enthusiastically applauding the one on the right. Such brittle mythology can be sustained only for so long:

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

While the Obama DOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder failed to find evidence of criminality after convening a years-long Grand Jury investigation, the then-Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), succeeded in pressuring financial services companies such as MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and Bank of America to terminate WikiLeaks’ accounts and thus banish them from the financial system, choking off their ability to receive funds from supporters or pay their bills. Lieberman and his neocon allies also pressured Amazon to remove WikiLeaks from its hosting services, causing the whistleblower group to be temporarily offline. All of that succeeded in crippling WikiLeaks’ ability to operate despite being charged with no crime: indeed, as the DOJ admitted, it could not prove that the group committed any crimes, yet this extra-legal punishment was nonetheless meted out.

Those tactics pioneered against WikiLeaks — excluding dissenters from the financial system and coercing tech companies to deny them internet access without a whiff of due process — have now become standard weapons. Trudeau's government seizes and freezes bank accounts with no judicial process. The "charity” fundraising site GoFundMe first blocked the millions of dollars raised for the truckers and announced it would redirect those funds to other charities, then refunded the donations when people pointed out, rightly, that their original plan amounted to a form of stealing. When an alternative fundraising site, GiveSendGo, raised millions more for the truckers, Canadian courts blocked its distribution. And it was just over a year ago when Democratic politicians such as Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) successfully pressured tech monopolies Google and Apple to remove Parler from its stores and then pressured Amazon to remove the social media site from its servers, at exactly the time the social media alternative became the single most-downloaded app in America. (This morning we published a new video report on Rumble that traces the emergence of this new anti-dissent tactic first pioneered on WikiLeaks and now widely used against dissent generally: “Banishment from the Financial System: the War on Dissent").

That the U.S. and UK Governments have kept Assange himself — one of the most effective dissidents in the West in decades — in a cage for years with no end in sight by itself highlights how repressive they are. But the precipitating cause of Assange's apprehension from the Ecuadorian Embassy has been forgotten by many and it, too, illustrates the same disturbing trend.

In 2017, mass protests erupted in Barcelona as part of a movement in Catalonia for more autonomy from the Madrid-based Spanish government, culminating in a referendum for autonomy on October 1. In 2019, even larger and more intense protests materialized. The methods used to crush the protests shocked many, as such domestic aggression had been rarely seen for years in western Europe. Spain treated the activists not as domestic protesters exercising their civic rights but as terrorists, seditionists and insurrectionists. Violence was used to sweep up Catalans in mass arrests, and their leaders were charged with terrorism and sedition and given lengthy prison sentences.

About the crackdown, a protest video proclaimed that Spain had just witnessed “a degree of force never seen before in a European member state.” While a fact-check by the BBC failed to affirm that maximalist claim, it documented multiple grave attacks by the police on protesters in Catalonia. Meanwhile, “Spanish police engaged in excessive force when confronting demonstrators in Catalonia during a disputed referendum, using batons to hit non-threatening protesters and causing multiple injuries,” Human Rights Watched concluded, adding that though the protesters were "largely peaceful,” some “hundreds were left injured, some seriously. Catalonia’s Health Department estimated on October 2 that 893 people had reported injuries to the authorities.”

From the Ecuadorian Embassy, Assange, in both 2017 and then again in 2019, used WikiLeaks’ platforms to vocally publicize and denounce the actions of the Spanish government — not to express support for Catalonian independence but to denounce the civil liberties assaults used to crush the protest movement. Assange made multiple media appearances to object to the use of violence by the state police, and WikiLeaks’ Twitter account, virtually on a daily basis, was publicizing videos and other testimonial evidence of the crackdown.

It was Assange's reporting on and denouncing of violence by the Spanish government against its own citizens that was the final cause of Ecuador's decision to rescind its asylum. The Spanish government made clear to Ecuador how indignant they were that Assange was publicizing their abuses. It was just several months after the first protest movement that Ecuador announced it was cutting off Assange’s internet access, claiming the WikiLeaks founder had been "interfer[ing] with other states” — meaning speaking out on the civil liberties abuses by Madrid. And it was the following year that Ecuador, pressured by the U.S., UK and Spain, withdrew its asylum protection and allowed the London police to enter its embassy, arrest Assange, and then put him in the high-security Belmarsh prison where he has remained ever since despite being convicted of no crime other than a misdemeanor count of bail-jumping. All of this reflects, and stems from, a clear and growing Western intolerance for dissent.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-neoliberal-war-on-dissent-in

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New Zealand High Court overturns police and defence forces vaccine mandate

A New Zealand High Court challenge questioning the legality of Covid vaccination mandates for Police and Defence Force employees has been upheld, with the court determining that the government mandate is an unjustified incursion on that country’s Bill of Rights, as well as being unreasonable under its Public Health Response Act.

In a decision handed down on February 25 in the matter of Yardley v Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety, Justice Francis Cooke held the mandates were not demonstrably justified.

As reported in the New Zealand Herald, the applicant police officers and defence force employees relied on two aspects of the NZ Bill of Rights – the right to decline a medical procedure (section 11) and the right to religious freedom (section 15).

‘The order limits the right to be free to refuse medical treatment recognised by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act (including because of its limitation on people’s right to remain employed), and it limits the right to manifest religious beliefs for those who decline to be vaccinated because the vaccine has been tested on cells derived from a human foetus which is contrary to their religious beliefs,’ Justice Cooke said.

More specifically with regard to the right to decline a medical procedure, Justice Cooke stated that while it is clear the government isn’t forcing Police and NZDF employees to get vaccinated against their will and they still have the right to refuse vaccination, the mandate presents an element of pressure.

‘The associated pressure to surrender employment involves a limit on the right to retain that employment, which the above principles suggest can be thought of as an important right or interest recognised not only in domestic law, but in the international instruments,’ Justice Cooke declared.

On the religious freedom argument, a number of those who made submissions referred to their fundamental objection to taking the Covid vaccines, given that they were tested on the cells that were derived from a human foetus.

Justice Cooke agreed with the claim, saying that ‘an obligation to receive the vaccine which a person objects to because it has been tested on cells derived from a human foetus, potentially an aborted foetus, does involve a limitation on the manifestation of a religious belief.’

With regard to the arguments concerning the lawfulness of the mandates under the Public Health Response Act, the court accepted that vaccination has a significant beneficial effect in limiting serious illness, hospitalisation, and death, including with the Omicron variant. However, it was less effective in reducing infection and transmission of Omicron than had been the case with other variants of Covid.

‘In essence, the order mandating vaccinations for police and NZDF staff was imposed to ensure the continuity of the public services, and to promote public confidence in those services, rather than to stop the spread of Covid-19. Indeed health advice provided to the government was that further mandates were not required to restrict the spread of Covid-19. I am not satisfied that continuity of these services is materially advanced by the order,’ his Honour stated.

‘Covid-19 clearly involves a threat to the continuity of police and NZDF services. That is because the Omicron variant in particular is so transmissible. But that threat exists for both vaccinated and unvaccinated staff. I am not satisfied that the order makes a material difference, including because of the expert evidence before the court on the effects of vaccination on Covid-19 including the Delta and Omicron variants.’

Critically, as noted by RNZ, Justice Cooke observed that: ‘The order being set aside in the present case was not implemented for the purposes of limiting the spread of Covid-19. Health advice was that such a further mandate was not needed for this purpose.’

Matthew Hague, counsel for the applicants, said that the affected workers must be allowed to return to work immediately.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon said all police officers and defence personnel who lost their jobs over the Covid vaccine mandates should be re-employed.

He said the ruling also had implications for vaccine mandates more generally, saying the mandates did not make sense in the Omicron-era and should be phased out after the peak of the outbreak.

Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Michael Wood released a statement following the decision, saying the government will take time to consider the decision and seek advice.

‘The judgment is clear that it is not questioning the efficacy of vaccines nor the role of mandates per se, but whether they were justified specifically for Police and Defence business continuity,’ the Minister said, while adding: ‘No Defence and Police terminations will proceed at this time.’

While this decision is a positive step forward, the million-dollar question, as it were, is whether it will have any persuasive effect regarding are the Australian cases challenging vaccine mandates.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/02/new-zealandhigh-court-overturns-police-and-defence-forces-vaccine-mandate

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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