When I was a sparring partner for professional boxers many, many years ago, I was taught to be wary of the jab. It is a tactic used to distract an opponent while setting him up for a devastating power punch that takes him down for the count.
Biden is throwing jabs.
The power punch is a little noticed Executive Order with the innocuous number 14067 and its title, “Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets.”
An author should be pleased to see his thesis bolstered by events. Yet since writing The Coming of Neo-Feudalism in 2020, I have not found any joy in the continued growth of the West’s class divides, as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in ever fewer hands. The good news is that the working and middle classes are not yet out for the count, and are showing welcome signs of pushback against both state and corporate power.
All these projects to digitize the world are also programs to digitize you, to turn you into a virtual rather than real human being.
The most egregious act that brought the world’s attention to the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy was when Justin Trudeau ordered banks to freeze the accounts not only of peaceful protesters but also of their financial supporters and even some people related only by association, such as ex-spouses. This move inspired so much outrage that, in a somewhat unprecedented fashion, this feckless prime minister was later excoriated to his face by some members of the European Parliament. In a blistering speech that went viral, MEP Mislav Kolakušić of Croatia declaimed, “You block the bank accounts of single parents so that they can’t even pay their children’s education and medicine, that they can’t pay utilities, mortgages for their homes,” and so forth.
Croatian Member of European Parliament and former judge Mislav Kolakusic calls out Justin Trudeau during his visit to the European Parliament in Brussels yesterday:
“To you these may be liberal methods. For many citizens of the world, it is dictatorship of the worst kind.” pic.twitter.com/3HRXUrnErC
— James Melville (@JamesMelville) March 24, 2022
Beginning in April 2023, Discover will become the first credit card issuer to track gun purchases made by their cardholders.
On September 11, 2022, Breitbart News noted that Visa caved to pressure from gun control groups and New York Democrats, agreeing to flag gun and ammo purchases via a new sales categorization. The Associated Press observed that Mastercard and other major credit cards also agreed to flag gun sales.
A State Department-backed “disinformation” tracking group blacklisting conservative news outlets pressured advertising companies to punish websites boosting the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory, which a federal agency now says is the most likely origin of the virus.
The Global Disinformation Index, a British group with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit organizations, has continued to come under fire for feeding conservative news blacklists to advertising companies. This same government-funded entity repeatedly applied pressure on companies to cut ties with websites promoting the once alleged right-wing “conspiracy” that COVID-19 emerged from a lab — which the Energy Department recently concluded is probable based on intelligence.
A group of Stanford professors are fighting back against a woke tattle-tale tool that lets students anonymously report each other for discrimination.
More than 75 professors argue in a petition to school administrators that the online tool threatens free speech on campus, with one telling the Wall Street Journal it reminded him of systems in place in the Soviet Union and China.
The Maxient reporting system, employed at 1,300 institutions around the country, has already been challenged by free speech advocates in Florida, Texas, Michigan and Oklahoma.
Air Canada announced it has launched digital identification, becoming the first airline in Canada with approval to offer customers the safety and convenience of a new option using facial recognition technology to confirm identification. In a pilot project currently underway, Air Canada’s digital identification is now available for customers departing from Vancouver International Airport (YVR) when boarding select flights to Winnipeg, and for eligible customers entering the Air Canada Café at Toronto Pearson International Airport. Air Canada plans to expand digital identification options to select Canadian airports and Maple Leaf Lounges as part of its pilot project phase.
… Customers choosing to use digital identification will benefit from a simplified and seamless process at the gate and when entering our Maple Leaf Lounges,” said Craig Landry, Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Officer at Air Canada.
Gee thanks Big Brother!
h/t XC
Central banks are creating their own surveillance state
Should we really be surprised that the Treasury and Bank of England are exploring whether to launch a state-issued digital pound? Sunak, after all, was the chancellor who first floated the idea of backing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) — already dubbed “Britcoin”. Nor was he alone: 11 countries, including China, Nigeria, The Bahamas and Jamaica, have already launched their own digital currencies, while more than 100 others, representing over 95% of global GDP, are deciding whether to follow suit. In the United States, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has launched a pilot programme; the European Central Bank hopes to make a decision about the creation of a digital euro this autumn.
On February 8, 2023, while arguing on behalf of fired NYC workers who declined covid vaccination, attorney John Bursch stated in open court that unvaccinated teachers in New York City were flagged with problem codes in their personnel files, and when that occurred “their fingerprints are sent with that flag to the FBI and the New York Criminal Justice Services.”
h/t Mauser
As Congress begins to investigate government interference and Big Tech’s role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, MRC Free Speech America’s exclusive CensorTrack.org database hit another milestone — 5,000 documented cases of censorship
In a recent addition to the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi revealed to the public how Twitter — the preferred social media platform of politicians, academics, and journalists — co-opted the algorithmic blacklist of a bipartisan neoliberal propaganda outfit known as Hamilton 68.
Hamilton 68 was a digital dashboard that, as my colleague Emily Jashinsky recently discussed, was used to perpetuate and mainstream the myth of Russian interference in American politics through algorithmic censorship and suppression.
Honourable colleagues,
There is a certain essay by Cicero called “The Second Philippic” which was written to expose the power of the state against freedom of speech and freedom of thought—and the power of one man, Marc Antony. It is a brilliant proclamation and shows Cicero at his best and bravest. It was delivered in the Roman Senate, and Cicero paid for writing it with his life. His hands were cut off and taken to Marc Antony, as proof that Cicero would never write again.
Cicero lived in a dangerous time.
The U.S. federal government is tracking people who decided not to get the COVID-19 vaccine injection, according to bombshell federal government records and video
h/t XC
In preparation for the tabling of new laws to censor “harmful” online content, federal officials are spending millions of dollars researching subtle forms of racism, “queerphobic cyber-violence,” (alt-)right-wing attitudes in gaming, credibility attacks on journalists and the use of children to counter “misinformation” within their families.
The initiative launched by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to test the use of digital credentials in travel with the participation of Canada and the Netherlands has been finalized, says the Dutch government, which is now planning a new digital identity project with Ottawa.
This news comes after Transport Canada recently told The Epoch Times all parties involved in the Known Traveller Digital Identity (KTDI) WEF initiative were “committed to close out the project,” suggesting that some aspects could have been ongoing.
