These days, it doesn’t take much to antagonize MAGA, and James Gunn, the director of the new Superman film, scheduled to be released on July 11,  has set off another outrage cycle.

“I mean, Superman is the story of America,” Gunn said in an interview with the Times of London, “An immigrant that came from other places […] but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”

Amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, mass deportation plans, and creation of concentration camps like Alligator Alcatraz, Gunn also noted that his film leans into the character’s well-known backstory as an otherworldly refugee, a plot point that has been explored in Superman comics over the years.

MAGA influencers jumped on Gunn speedier than longtime Superman antagonist Lex Luther, General Zod, and Mister Mxyzptlk.  Fox News host Laura Ingraham dismissed the film entirely, declaring it as “another film we won’t be seeing.”

“He’s creating a moat of woke, enlightened opinion around him. He’s got a woke shield,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said as an on-screen graphic blared that the “Superwoke” movie embraced “pro-immigrant themes.”

“I’m going to skip seeing Superman now. Director is an absolute moron to say this publicly the week before release,” conservative radio host and OutKick founder Clay Travis complained.

“I can’t believe that we’ve come down to that,” she complained. “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us. I wonder if it will be successful.” MAGA-boosting Fox News host Jesse Watters, meanwhile, followed up by joking that Superman’s cape is now emblazoned with “MS-13.”

The Daily Dot’s Anna Good reported that “Gunn’s version of Superman focuses on empathy, morality, and alienation. These themes have been embedded in the character since his 1938 debut in the first issue of Action Comics. In his interview, Gunn acknowledged that the movie might be received differently in liberal vs. conservative parts of the country.”

Gunn’s take on aligns with the character’s Jewish roots. Created in the 1930s by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, sons of Jewish immigrants who fled the European pogroms, Superman was born of a need for hope during a time of rising anti-Semitism.

“Yes, it’s about politics,” Gunn told The Times of London. “But on another level it’s about morality. Do you never kill no matter what — which is what Superman believes — or do you have some balance, as Lois believes? It’s really about their relationship and the way different opinions on basic moral beliefs can tear two people apart.”

Gunn pointed out that “I’m telling a story about a guy who is uniquely good, and that feels needed now because there is a meanness that has emerged due to cultural figures being mean online.”

“My reaction to [the backlash] is that it is exactly what the movie is about,” he declared. “We support our people, you know? We love our immigrants. Yes, Superman is an immigrant, and yes, the people that we support in this country are immigrants and if you don’t like that, you’re not American. People who say no to immigrants are against the American way.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

On 2 November 2008, the New York Times Magazine headlined “Questions for James K. Galbraith: The Populist,” which was an “Interview by Deborah Solomon” of the prominent liberal economist and son of John Kenneth Galbraith. She asked him, “There are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis” which had brought on the second Great Depression?

He answered: “Ten or twelve would be closer than two or three.”

She very appropriately followed up immediately with “What does this say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?”

He didn’t answer by straight-out saying that economics isn’t any more of a science than physics was before Galileo, or than biology was before Darwin. He didn’t proceed to explain that the very idea of a Nobel Prize in Economics was based upon a lie which alleged that economics was the first field to become scientific within all of the “social sciences,” when, in fact, there weren’t yet any social sciences, none yet at all. But he came close to admitting these things, when he said: “It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.” His term “useless” was a euphemism for false. His term “blot” was a euphemism for “nullification.”

On 9 January 2009, economist Jeff Madrick headlined at The Daily Beast, “How the Entire Economics Profession Failed,” and he opened:

At the annual meeting of American Economists, most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.

I could find no shame in the halls of the San Francisco Hilton, the location at the annual meeting of American economists. Mainstream economists from major universities dominate the meetings, and some of them are the anointed cream of the crop, including former Clinton, Bush and even Reagan advisers.

There was no session on the schedule about how the vast majority of economists should deal with their failure to anticipate or even seriously warn about the possibility that the second worst economic crisis of the last hundred years was imminent.

I heard no calls to reform educational curricula because of a crisis so threatening and surprising that it undermines, at least if the academicians were honest, the key assumptions of the economic theory currently being taught. …

I found no one fundamentally changing his or her mind about the value of economics, economists, or their work.”

He observed a scandalous profession of quacks who are satisfied to remain quacks. The public possesses faith in them because it possesses faith in the “invisible hand” of God, and everyone is taught to believe in that from the crib. In no way is it science.

In a science, when facts prove that the theory is false, the theory gets replaced, it’s no longer taught. In a scholarly field, however, that’s not so — proven-false theory continues being taught. In economics, the proven-false theory continued being taught, and still continues today to be taught. This demonstrates that economics is still a religion or some other type of philosophy, not yet any sort of science.

Mankind is still coming out of the Dark Ages. The Bible is still being viewed as history, not as myth (which it is), not as some sort of religious or even political propaganda. It makes a difference — a huge difference: the difference between truth and falsehood.

The Dutch economist Dirk J. Bezemer, at Groningen University, posted on 16 June 2009 a soon-classic paper, “‘No One Saw This Coming’: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models,” in which he surveyed the work of 12 economists who did see it (the economic collapse of 2008) coming; and he found there that they had all used accounting or “Flow of Funds” models, instead of the standard microeconomic theory. (In other words: they accounted for, instead of ignored, debts.) From 2005 through 2007, these accounting-based economists had published specific and accurate predictions of what would happen: Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Stephen (“Steve”) Keen, Jakob B. Madsen, Jens K. Sorensen, Kurt Richebaecher, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller.

He should have added several others. Paul Krugman, wrote a NYT column on 12 August 2005 headlined “Safe as Houses” and he said “Houses aren’t safe at all” and that they would likely decline in price. On 25 August 2006, he bannered “Housing Gets Ugly” and concluded “It’s hard to see how we can avoid a serious slowdown.” Bezemer should also have included Merrill Lynch’s Chief North American Economist, David A. Rosenberg, whose The Market Economist article “Rosie’s Housing Call August 2004” on 6 August 2004 already concluded, “The housing sector has entered a ‘bubble’ phase,” and who presented a series of graphs showing it. Bezemer should also have included Satyajit Das, about whom TheStreet had headlined on 21 September 21 2007, “The Credit Crisis Could Be Just Beginning.” He should certainly have included Ann Pettifor, whose 2003 The Real World Economic Outlook, and her masterpiece the 2006 The Coming First World Debt Crisis, predicted exactly what happened and why. Her next book, the 2009 The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, was almost a masterpiece, but it failed to present any alternative to the existing microeconomic theory — as if microeconomic theory isn’t a necessary part of economic theory. Another great economist he should have mentioned was Charles Hugh Smith, who had been accurately predicting since at least 2005 the sequence of events that culminated in the 2008 collapse. And Bezemer should especially have listed the BIS’s chief economist, William White, regarding whom Germany’s Spiegel headlined on 8 July 2009, “Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis.” (It is about but doesn’t mention nor link to https://www.bis.org/publ/work147.pdf.) White had been at war against the policies of America’s Fed chief Alan Greenspan ever since 1998, and especially since 2003, but the world’s aristocrats muzzled White’s view and promoted Greenspan’s instead. (The economics profession have always been propagandists for the super-rich.) Bezemer should also have listed Charles R. Morris, who in 2007 told his publisher Peter Osnos that the crash would start in Summer 2008, which was basically correct. Moreover, James K. Galbraith had written for years saying that a demand-led depression would result, such as in his American Prospect “How the Economists Got It Wrong,” 30 November 2002; and “Bankers Versus Base,” 15 April 2004, and culminating finally in his 2008 The Predator State, which blamed the aristocracy in the strongest possible terms for the maelstrom to come. Bezemer should also have listed Barry Ritholtz, who, in his “Recession Predictor,” on 18 August 2005, noted the optimistic view of establishment economists and then said, “I disagree … due to Psychology of consumers.” He noted “consumer debt, not as a percentage of GDP, but relative to net asset wealth,” and also declining “median personal income,” as pointing toward a crash from this mounting debt-overload. Then, on 31 May 2006, he headlined “Recent Housing Data: Charts & Analysis,” and opened: “It has long been our view that Real Estate is the prime driver of this economy, and its eventual cooling will be a major crimp in GDP, durable goods, and consumer spending.” Bezemer should also have listed both Paul Kasriel and Asha Bangalore at Northern Trust. Kasriel headlined on 22 May 2007, “US Economy May Wake Up Without Consumers’ Prodding?” and said it wouldn’t happen – and consumers were too much in debt. Then on 8 August 2007, he bannered: “US Economic Growth in Domestic Final Demand,” and said that “the housing recession is … spreading to other parts of the economy.” On 25 May 2006, Bangalore headlined “Housing Market Is Cooling Down, No Doubts About It.” and that was one of two Asha Bangalore articles which were central to Ritholtz’s 31 May 2006 article showing that all of the main indicators pointed to a plunge in house-prices that had started in March 2005; so, by May 2006, it was already clear from the relevant data, that a huge economic crash was comning soon. Another whom Bezemer should have listed was L. Randall Wray, whose 2005 Levy Economics Institute article, “The Ownership Society: Social Security Is Only the Beginning” asserted that it was being published “at the peak of what appears to be a real estate bubble.” Bezemer should also have listed Paul B. Farrell, columnist at marketwatch.com, who saw practically all the correct signs, in his 26 June 2005 “Global Megabubble? You Decide. Real Estate Is Only Tip of Iceberg; or Is It?”; and his 17 July 2005 “Best Strategies to Beat the Megabubble: Real Estate Bubble Could Trigger Global Economic Meltdown”; and his 9 January 2006 “Meltdown in 2006? Cast Your Vote”; and 15 May 2006 “Party Time (Until Real Estate Collapses)”; and his 21 August 2006 “Tipping Point Pops Bubble, Triggers Bear: Ten Warnings the Economy, Markets Have Pushed into Danger Zone”; and his 30 July 2007 “You Pick: Which of 20 Tipping Points Ignites Long Bear Market?” Farrell’s commentaries also highlighted the same reform-recommendations that most of the others did, such as Baker, Keen, Pettifor, Galbraith, Ritholtz, and Wray; such as break up the mega-banks, and stiffen regulation of financial institutions. However, the vast majority of academically respected economists disagreed with all of this and were wildly wrong in their predictions, and in their analyses. The Nobel Committee should have withdrawn their previous awards in economics to still-practicing economists (except to Krugman who did win a Nobel) and re-assigned them to these 25 economists, who showed that they had really deserved it.

And there was another: economicpredictions.org tracked four economists who predicted correctly the 2008 crash: Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Med Jones, the latter of whom had actually the best overall record regarding the predictions that were tracked there.

And still others should also be on the list: for example, Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider headlined on 21 November 2012, “The Genius Who Invented Economics Blogging Reveals How He Got Everything Right And What’s Coming Next” and he interviewed Bill McBride, who had started his calculated riskblog in January 2005. So I looked in the archives there at December 2005, and noticed December 28th, “Looking Forward: 2006 Top Economic Stories.” He started there with four trends that he expected everyone to think of, and then listed another five that weren’t so easy, including “Housing Slowdown. In my opinion, the Housing Bubble was the top economic story of 2005, but I expect the slowdown to be a form of Chinese water torture. Sales for both existing and new homes will probably fall next year from the records set in 2005. And median prices will probably increase slightly, with declines in the more ‘heated markets.’” McBride also had predicted that the economic rebound would start in 2009, and he was now, in 2012, predicting a strong 2013. Probably Joe Weisenthal was right in calling McBride a “Genius.”

And also, Mike Whitney at InformationClearinghouse.info and other sites, headlined on 20 November 2006, “Housing Bubble Smack-Down,” and he nailed the credit-boom and Fed easy-money policy as the cause of the housing bubble and the source of an imminent crash.

Furthermore, Ian Welsh headlined on 28 November 2007, “Looking Forward At the Consequences of This Bubble Bursting,” and listed 10 features of the crash to come, of which 7 actually happened.

In addition, Gail Tverberg, an actuary, headlined on 9 January 2008 “Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008,” and provided the most detailed of all the prescient descriptions of the collapse that would happen that year.

Furthermore, Gary Shilling’s January 2007 Insight newsletter listed “12 investment themes” which described perfectly what subsequently happened, starting with “The housing bubble has burst.”

And the individual investing blogger Jesse Colombo started noticing the housing bubble even as early as 6 September 2004, blogging at his stock-market-crash.net “The Housing Bubble” and documenting that it would happen (“Here is the evidence that we are in a massive housing bubble:”) and what the economic impact was going to be. Then on 7 February 2006 he headlined “The Coming Crash!” and said “Based on today’s overvalued housing prices, a 20 percent crash is certainly in the cards.”

Also: Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens issued an analysis and appropriate graphs on 7 December 2007, headlined “When Animals Attack” and predicting imminently a huge economic crash.

In alphabetical order, they are: Dean Baker, Asha Bangalore, Jesse Colombo, Satyajit Das, Paul B. Farrell, James K. Galbraith, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Med Jones, Paul Kasriel, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Jakob B. Madsen, Bill McBride, Charles R. Morris, Ann Pettifor, Stehanie Pomboy, Kurt Richebaeker, Barry Ritholtz, David A. Rosenberg, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Gary Shilling, Charles Hugh Smith, Jens K. Sorensen, Gail Tverberg, Ian Welsh, William White, Mike Whitney, L. Randall Wray.

Thus, at least 33 economists were contenders as having been worth their salt as economic professionals. One can say that only 33 economists predicted the 2008 collapse, or that only 33 economists predicted accurately or reasonably accurately the collapse. However, some of those 33 were’t actually professional economists. So, some of the world’s 33 best economists aren’t even professional economists, as accepted in that rotten profession.

So, the few honest and open-eyed economists (these 33, at least) tried to warn the world. Did the economics profession honor them for their having foretold the 2008 collapse? Did President Barack Obama hire them, and fire the incompetents he had previously hired for his Council of Economic Advisers? Did the Nobel Committee acknowledge that it had given Nobel Economics Prizes to the wrong people, including people such as the conservative Milton Friedman whose works were instrumental in causing the 2008 crash? Also complicit in causing the 2008 crash was the multiple-award-winning liberal economist Lawrence Summers, who largely agreed with Friedman but was nonetheless called a liberal. Evidently, the world was too corrupt for any of these 33 to reach such heights of power or of authority. Like Galbraith had said at the close of his 2002 “How the Economists Got It Wrong“: “Being right doesn’t count for much in this club.” If anything, being right means being excluded from such posts. In an authentically scientific field, the performance of one’s predictions (their accuracy) is the chief (if not SOLE) determinant of one’s reputation and honor amongst the profession, but that’s actually not the way things yet are in any of the social “sciences,” including economics; they’re all just witch-doctory, not yet real science. The fraudulence of these fields is just ghastly. In fact, as Steve Keen scandalously noted in Chapter 7 of his 2001 Debunking Economics: “As this book shows, economics [theory] is replete with logical inconsistencies.” In any science, illogic is the surest sign of non-science, but it is common and accepted in the social ‘sciences’, including economics. The economics profession itself is garbage, a bad joke, instead of any science at all.

These 33 were actually only candidates for being scientific economists, but I have found the predictions of some of them to have been very wrong on some subsequent matters of economic performance. For example, the best-known of the 33, Paul Krugman, is a “military Keynesian” — a liberal neoconservative (and military Keynesianism is empirically VERY discredited: false worldwide, and false even in the country that champions it, the U.S.) — and he is unfavorable toward the poor, and favorable toward the rich; so, he is acceptable to the Establishment.) Perhaps a few of these 33 economists (perhaps half of whom aren’t even members of the economics profession) ARE scientific (in their underlying economic beliefs — their operating economic theory) if a scientific economics means that it’s based upon a scientific theory of economics — a theory that is derived not from any opinions but only from the relevant empirical data. Although virtually all of the 33 are basically some sort of Keynesian, even that (Keynes’s theory) isn’t a full-fledged theory of economics (it has many vagaries, and it has no microeconomics). The economics profession is still a field of philosophy, instead of a field of science.

The last chapter of my America’s Empire of Evil presents what I believe to be the first-ever scientific theory of economics, a theory that replaces all of microeconomic theory (including a micro that’s integrated with its macro) and is consistent with Keynes in macroeconomic theory; and all of which theory is derived and documented from only the relevant empirical economic data — NOT from anyone’s opinions. The economics profession think that replacing existing economic theory isn’t necessary after the crash of 2008, but I think it clearly IS necessary (because — as that chapter of my book shows — all of the relevant empirical economic data CONTRADICT the existing economic theory, ESPECIALLY the existing microeconomic theory).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

A New Zealand Kanak woman, Jessie Ounei, says young people in New Caledonia feel a sense of anger and betrayal at the way France is attempting to “snuff out” any prospect of independence for its Pacific territory.

France invaded New Caledonia in 1853 and pushed the Kanak people into reservations, denying them civil and political rights for a century.

In parallel with Nga Tamatoa in Aotearoa, a resistance movement sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s driven by young people, including Jessie Ounei’s late mother Susanna Ounei, and the territory has been on the United Nations decolonisation list since 1986.

• READ MORE:  French President Emmanuel Macron lands in Nouméa amid unrest
• LISTEN TO RADIO WAATEA: Interview with Jesse Ounea and David Small
• Liberation for New Caledonia’s Kanak people ‘must come’, says media educator — Audio
• President Emmanuel Macron to fly to New Caledonia within hours
• ‘You are not alone’ Pacific messages of solidarity for Kanaky
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

Riots broke out last week after the French National Assembly moved to give voting rights to settlers with 10 years residence, which would overwhelm the indigenous vote.

Jessie Ounei told Radio Waatea host Shane Te Pou the independence movement had tried to resist the move peacefully, but once the National Assembly vote happened young people took action.

“It’s a total betrayal. Young people have grown up with a sense of identity and we understand out worth and that’s largely because of the work that was done in the 1960s, 1970s and and 1980s to reclaim our identity so we’re not unaware of our worth or our identity, or how hard done we are being so we were hopeful this was going to be it,” she said.

France ‘pulled the rug’
“But France has totally pulled the rug out.”

Ounei said she had been hearing unconfirmed reports of rightwing settler militias taking vigilante action against the Kanak population.

Asia Pacific Report says French officials have cited a death toll of at least six so far — including three Kanaks, one a 17-year-old girl, and two police officers, and 214 people have been arrested in the state of emergency.

French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Nouméa today in an attempt to create a dialogue to resolve the tensions.

An interview with Jesse Ounei and David Small. Republished from Waatea News, Auckland’s Māori radio broadcaster.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

I cannot sit back and allow the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

— General Jack D. Ripper in Dr Strangelove

Most people would agree that in any modern, wealthy, multicultural, free, non-colonized, democratic society, people have the right to know what is going on in their community. In fact, in order to fulfill their various responsibilities as citizens, consumers, workers, company presidents, government officials, family members, etc., they have to know what is going on. We want and need to know what our own government and foreign governments are doing; what products, services, and sociopolitical programs are available in our country; and what medical choices we have when we are sick or injured. There are exceptions, such as children and psychopaths, but in general, all people have the right to benefit from the knowledge in libraries, on the Internet, in museums, and in doctors’ offices. In U.S. cities, almost everyone has a right to a library card.

During a “state of exception” or a state of emergency though, some convincingly argue that you do not have the right to certain dangerous information. The United States is officially not at war yet with Russia; we just supply their enemies with lots of expensive weapons. But if and when we are at war with Russia, do U.S. citizens have a right to hear Vladimir Putin speak? When we are under attack by a lethal virus, do we have the right to hear about all the various methods of protecting our health, even alternative, traditional, foreign, naturopathic, or unorthodox methods?

Some would say “no.” Just as you must not be allowed to buy enriched uranium and download from the Internet blueprints for how to make a nuclear bomb, you do not have the right to protect your health from SARS-CoV-2 without using mRNA vaccines. And people who advocate for the Russians, who love Russia, work with Russian companies, promote positive images of Russia, and facilitate the spread of state-sponsored, pro-Russia propaganda must be silenced or banned. Like hate speech, there are certain statements that are just beyond the pale, that are too dangerous and must be suppressed. Some, such as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, argue that when teens are jumping out of windows, the government has a responsibility to step in and prevent people from reading posts encouraging them to engage in this dangerous behavior. With the Supreme Court case of Murthy v. Missouri, Americans are now forced to think about exactly how precious our First Amendment is, and when we prioritize free speech over health and safety.

In the U.S. today, the government is censoring people and publications on both the Left and the Right, the typical library book-banning activities are up, and there is evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) systems are now doing some of the censorship work, strengthening the hand of the government vis-a-vis the people in ways generally only seen during great crises or wars. (This is documented in the downloadable report from the U.S. House of Representatives “The Weaponization of the National Science Foundation: How NSF Is Funding the Development of Automated Tools To Censor Online Speech”).

Here we delve into two cases of the Government suppressing free speech, one on the “Left” of the political spectrum and one on the “Right.” On the Left we see the anti-racist and anti-imperialist, African-American activist Omali Yeshitela and two other socialists. On the Right we see people such as Jill Hines, co-director of conservative Health Freedom Louisiana, and Jim Hoft, founder of Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news site that reportedly has published threats against election workers for false claims of election-rigging. Suppressed along with these two on the Right but actually going beyond political categories, we see Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologists that raised questions about government pandemic policies, and professor of psychiatry and human behavior Aaron Kheriaty, who was dismissed by the University of California, Irvine, for refusing an mRNA shot. And finally, we see the suppression of millions of people who do not identify with either the Left or the Right, some of whom are not conspiracy theorists, who have expressed dissatisfaction with the government’s public health measures that were taken in response to SARS-CoV-2.

Silencing African-American Socialists

In April of last year the “Uhuru 3,” Omali Yeshitela, an African-American man born in 1941; Penny Hess, a white woman over the age of 70, who is the chairperson of the African People’s Solidarity Committee; and Jesse Nevel, a young, white man who is the “National Chair of the Uhuru Solidarity Movement, the mass organization of the African People’s Solidarity Committee,” were charged by a federal grand jury with acting as unregistered agents of the Russian government. The Biden administration apparently considers them major threats to U.S. national security.

Yeshitela’s political roots go back to the Civil Rights Movement as a member of the legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1972, he and others felt the need to move beyond protests and to capture political power, so they formed the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP). This was and is an internationalist Black Power movement, or African internationalism, and has been developed over 50 years, fighting against colonialism, and this is not the first time that their free speech rights have been violated, he says.

Yeshitela explains that he got in trouble with the law this time by touring the U.S. in 2016 to gain support for a movement charging the U.S. with genocide, and going to Russia to speak about self-determination with a Russian NGO, not for the government of the Russian Federation. According to Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors, for the sacrifices he made for white, capitalist Russia, he has received the whopping sum of $7,000. In a summary of the case in October, the Grayzone’s Anya Parampil warns that “lawyers for the Uhuru 3 maintain that the DOJ’s justification for prosecuting their clients sets the stage for the US government to legally harass and prosecute other Americans who criticize US domestic and foreign policy, particularly where designated enemies like Russia or China are concerned.”

Award-winning peace advocate, spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace, and 2016 candidate for U.S. vice president on the Green Party ticket Ajamu Baraka has provided insightful analysis of this case. Early on in the “Russiagate” hype, he warned that those fearmongering about Russia would soon target anti-capitalist, Black liberation movements, just as they did at the end of the Second World War, when peace activists including W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and Paul Robeson (1898-1976) suffered government oppression. (Robeson also charged the U.S. government with genocide. He did so in 1951 for their failure to stop U.S. lynchings).

Like Noam Chomsky, Baraka categorizes the U.S. as a lawless, “rogue state.” He warns that our “national security state” is engaging in systematic repression against anyone who opposes them, including “the Left” (from around 7:30 in the video). For example, people who protest “Cop City” are being labeled as “domestic terrorists.” What we are looking at is “McCarthyism 2.0,” he suggests. The Peninsula Peace and Justice Center is one of the few organizations standing up for the Uhuru movement’s right to free speech.

As Chomsky once said, “Democratic societies can’t force people. Therefore, they have to control what they think.”

Silencing Opponents of Government COVID-19 Policies

Besides the violations of free speech that have resulted from Russophobia, Afro-phobia, and reparations-justice-phobia, we are now also facing such violations caused by SARS-CoV-2-phobia, the biosecurity panic, and the war on the virus. In the opinion of Benjamin Wallace-Wells writing for the New Yorker, “the most eyebrow-raising revelations in the Twitter Files, documented mostly by Matt Taibbi and Lee Fang, concern the extent to which the F.B.I. and the Pentagon were interested in controlling what was seen on the platform.” For instance, Lee Fang has written about a British company called “Logically.ai.” According to AP, they are “an established social enterprise bringing credibility and confidence to news and social discourse,” and they launched an app in the U.S. in 2020 that enables “users to receive personalized, verified and in-depth information on any storyline in order to restore digital trust.”

Such words might make some people feel safe, but Lee Fang warns about the American censorship advocate Brian Murphy, who used to be an FBI agent leading the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, and is an executive of Logically.ai. Murphy has argued that the U.S. government must now rein in the social media companies, and we, U.S. citizens, must give up some of our freedoms that we “need and deserve” so that we can get our “security back.”

“Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.” The company Logically is doing work outsourced to them by the British government. The government agency responsible, called the “Counter Disinformation Unit” or “CDU,” were targeting a “former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies,” Fang explains. Apparently, not only groups that opposed lockdowns but also groups that promote peace are being surveilled and flagged as dangerous, by a foreign company based in a foreign country.

Not long ago, few would have guessed that Stanford University would be against free speech, but now it appears that some segment of the university is actively participating in censorship, as a kind of government proxy. Professor Jay Bhattacharya at the Stanford School of Medicine, who is an expert on health policy at Stanford University, and who holds an M.D. as well as a Ph.D. in Economics, has summarized the free speech case Murthy v. Missouri that is currently before the Supreme Court. He points out that Stanford University, his own employer, has a program called the “Stanford Internet Observatory” (SIO) (10:00 to 12:00 in the video) who describe themselves as a “cross-disciplinary program of research, teaching and policy engagement for the study of abuse in current information technologies, with a focus on social media.” The program was founded in 2019.

In an appellate court struggle, his own university weighed in against him, and they claimed that the Stanford Internet Observatory is not a government cut-out, is just doing research, and is not meant to violate the 1st Amendment. He describes that as “disingenuous.” Stanford has a rule that they require researchers to adhere to, like universities around the world, that human subjects of a research project must not be harmed by the research. Yet this Internet Observatory is basically making a list, effectively a blacklist, of organizations or people to suppress. That would constitute an ethics violation, since the subjects of the research are U.S. citizens, and their rights under the 1st Amendment have been violated. Either this is not research, or it is unethical research, Bhattacharya argues.

In his expert opinion, the U.S. government is “the number one source of misinformation during the Pandemic.” His “short list” of their misinformation includes the following:

1. The government overestimated the lethality of COVID-19.
2. The risk to children was minimal, but the government talked as if everyone was equally at risk.
3. The government suppressed the “idea of immunity after COVID recovery,” and made people wait for the vaccine.
4. Evidence that masking was ineffective was available during the early stages of the pandemic. There was no consensus among scientists that masks worked, but the government recommended masks anyway.
5. The government promoted the illusion that there was a consensus about lockdowns and censored the Great Barrington Declaration.
6. The government censored people who provided evidence that the vaccines were not safe and effective, even after evidence emerged that there was a risk of myocarditis.

(12:00-17:00 in video)

In May of last year, the “New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s ongoing efforts to work in concert with social media companies and the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Virality Project to monitor and censor online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.”

The Stanford Internet Observatory is a proud member of the “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP) along with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (“DFRLab”), Graphika, and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. The Atlantic Council are notorious militarists.

In his Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi calls the Stanford Internet Observatory the “ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations.” The DFRLab is partially funded by the Global Engagement Center (GEC). And they, the GEC, are part of the State Department. Taibbi views the GEC as part of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex,” along with organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the DFRLab itself, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). In other words, it appears that many of the same organizations that have engaged in fear mongering over Russia or promoting militarism have also engaged in censoring Americans.

Conclusion

The U.S. has become a nation-state that is obsessed with national security. Ajamu Baraka sums up our situation best:

It’s us today but it’s you tomorrow, if you persist in any kind of oppositional politics, because the ruling element in the U.S. is serious. They are serious about attempting to maintain their hegemony, and their global hegemony. And the notion, of some of the values of the liberal framework, liberal philosophy, liberalism—they have completely abandoned that. They have jettisoned that. And basically they are engaged in lawlessness. The U.S. is now a rogue state. What we have domestically in the U.S. is systematic repression from a national security state that seems to be completely unbound by any kind of standards beyond its own. (From 6:50 to 7:40 in video).

Then Baraka raises a very important question, i.e., “Where is the opposition?” Our national security state is currently run by “liberals,” people who are supposed to care about freedom of speech and freedom in general, like their liberal predecessors who espoused the idea that freedom was an essential condition for happiness. (Never for people of African or Native American descent or for women, but they did espouse it for wealthy white men). Instead of protecting our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” they are giving us “death, shackles, and misery.” Now the question is, “What are we going to do about it?”

We need free speech if we are to build peace. Today they are coming for militant revolutionaries who reject white supremacy, for the narrow-minded Right, and for the medical scientists who recommend a different approach from the government’s approach to SARS-CoV-2. Without a thriving movement against the current censorship, the U.S. government, along with the companies that help the government censor people, could easily pull the rug out from under our feet, even as we diligently work for peace and human rights. Do not be surprised if tomorrow the FBI, or the “Blob,” (i.e., the foreign policy establishment including the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA), or any of the many companies that work for them in this constantly expanding biodefense industry come after you next.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Joseph Essertier.

Well, everything before age 18 or 19, I don’t count. I had no sense of self. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school when my AP Lit teacher put on a Ted Talk about how the American public school system stifles children’s creative talents that I woke up.

Growing up on Long Island, it was a privileged upbringing that I recognize and I’m grateful for but in terms of my own development and socialization, it was difficult. It was a very conservative environment. Me being queer and being more creative was very looked down upon. I forced myself to conform to what was expected of me by my town and by my school for many years.

Public or private?

Public. Mariah Carey did go there. She also hated my school.

Not kind to creatives, more college prep oriented?

Kids in my grade would cry if they got a 99 and not 100. They had a wall of scholars of the top 10 students per year and kids would fight to death to get on the list.

Before that moment senior year I never had a critical thought about my own experience. I had all these flashbacks to my elementary school teachers yelling at me and ripping my drawings out of my notebook. I constantly got in trouble for being creative and for being myself.

I realized I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing just taking all these AP classes and not the stuff I’m naturally really good at. I started taking art classes outside of high school which put me on a track to study it.

Of course the US school system stifles creativity…America seems to hate funding and supporting the arts.

A lot of time people want to applaud artists and they think that doing creative stuff is so cool but when it comes down to it only a very few percent of creative people actually make money off of their creative work. Their lives are not funded by that.

That leads to a topic people love to call out right now, nepo babies. You’ve mused on that culture in LA on social media.

In LA, my first big eye opening wow moment was seeing that certain people I looked up to had extreme familial wealth. LA seemed to be a hub of all these creatives who are really established. But after actually meeting them and learning different stories, you learn that they aren’t transparent about what’s funding their lifestyle. Or on the flipside, it’s a lot of people living way above their means in order to “flex” a certain lifestyle. It’s a very show off-y culture out here.

How do you deal with that?

I deal with it by recognizing it and not comparing myself. You really have to force yourself to not aspire to be them and to be grateful for what you have. It makes me really want to build up my body of work and continue to develop myself as an artist.

Do you think it’s a privilege to be creative?

Yes, I do. I want to say everyone can be an artist and do it. But even me being able to go to art school at a public college, that was a privilege.

Not many people own or acknowledge that.

It also ties into virality which is something I’ve come to analyze. We live in this immediate feedback culture where people aspire to just put stuff out, go viral, and then get X, Y, Z opportunity, but I think many people don’t think about the long term. It’s all about the instant gratification which is something I’ve had to work on with myself. I think a lot of people assume I’m younger than I actually am and that I’m just starting out, but I’ve been doing this for six years. I see some of my peers getting big opportunities and it’s hard. You can’t have that instant gratification mindset and compare yourself to other people. It’s not healthy and it’s not worth it.

Right, how will influencers fare in 10 years?

It’s so true. If you study Myspace or old Youtube, anyone who was big on those platforms is no longer relevant. Everyone says the internet is forever, but it’s really not. Things get deleted. You can’t go to old websites. You have to learn from the past. I’m a big history girl. It seems unhelpful to achieve virality as a number one goal.

What’s it like to gain exposure through online platforms you’re critical of? What’s your offline side?

I’ve been reading a lot more over the past few years which has really helped me generate a vocabulary to talk about my art. I was going by my drag character “Virgo Couture” for a while which is how I gained my following online. I was presenting as a persona and made content as that persona. I was doing the Virgo character and realized it was getting really toxic. I hated having to introduce myself as a character. Virgo Couture was a Paris Hilton bratty drag queen. That is a certain aspect of me, but it’s not all of me. I got rid of that character so I could be myself. I go by Jessie now when I’m dressed up and when I’m not. My personality never changes. I talk the same, I act the same. I do act a bit more hyper feminine. It was getting hard to have two identities so now I just have one.

I used to put so much focus on the end product, but now I see my power as an artist is the ability to shift into different forms. Not everyone has the ability to change their appearance and augment how they look at the flip of a switch. It’s a very niche ability.

You’re not changing, it’s just the outside.

The look is always the same. I change the backgrounds, but it’s the same face I generated through my drawings when I was 18. In art school, I got a sketchbook and kept drawing this face over and over. I had a fixation on this face. When I started experimenting with face paint, I translated the drawing onto my face and created my drag persona called “Virgo Couture.” Drag was always the jumping off point for me.

So, now you’re a different character.

I don’t call it a character, it’s just my look. You know how people put on eyeliner? This is what I do instead, it’s just maximalist. What’s really gratifying is painting other people or seeing other people replicate my face online. Other people will copy it and tag me. I love seeing their inspired looks. I love turning other people into me. It’s my face that I’ve designed but it’s like a fashion design. You don’t want to just wear your own fashion design, you want other people to wear it.

Though you’re always the same, people must treat you differently. You’re naturally brunette, but your look is blonde.

People see me as an image, so they project fantasies on me that aren’t based in reality. They’re like “she’s a clown.” But they’re not actually talking to me or understanding the root of why I do this. It creates a narrative that isn’t true because they want to compare me to something they understand, which is that of a clown, a bimbo, a crazy party girl, etc.

With the term “face production,” I get why you wanted to name it. I love how you talk about erasure and building. You’ve worked with so many different people. Do you mainly freestyle or do commissions?

It depends on the client. I enjoy when people ask me to try something new. When I work with photographers, I prefer direction.

Do you like being in front of the camera?

Yes and no. It depends on the situation and the photographer. I’ve had to embrace this “model” persona, which is funny because I’m a 5’2” Jewish girl from Long Island. I’m not Bella Hadid. I always need documentation because the medium of face paint is so ephemeral. It’s definitely built a relationship between me and photographers, which I understand because they want to get my image, but when it’s done in an invasive way it can be anxiety inducing on my end. When I’d go out in New York, I would get swarmed by photographers.

Are your looks only for nighttime? Would you walk down the street?

Oh, I’ve done it a bunch of times in the day. In LA, no one bothers me which is great. In New York, they’d bother me. I was younger back then, but I would take the subway to Brooklyn from the Upper East Side and I would get so anxious. I’m sure no one cared but it used to stress me out so much. When I was doing shoots, cars would stop on the street. Here they do not give a fuck. I love it.

Let’s talk about your eyeballs, you also transform them for your look.

I love augmenting every part of my face. I see the physical body as a material for self-expression. This is why I’ve been getting more tattoos that are digitally inspired because I believe in the blending of digitization with the physical form.

I also see the eyes as a blank canvas that can be augmented. It’s something that feels very intuitive to me, which is why I do it so much. I use a lot of cyber contacts because it correlates with my whole digital vision. I’m really interested in the intersection of plastic surgery and technology, which I think is the future.

What are those?

Micro chips or computer chips.

In your eyes?

Yeah, I’ve been putting costume contacts in my eyes since I first started.

I don’t think many people realize that when I’m in a look it’s painful. I’m in pain a lot. It’s very physically demanding. Only drag performers can really understand the level of physical discomfort you’re in wearing a look. When I put in contacts they make my eyes burn and I tear up. I have to sit and stare at myself for hours, which requires a lot of concentration. I glue down my eyebrows and then basically redraw my entire face from scratch. Then I do the wig and the lipstick so I can’t really eat or drink. It inhibits you. It’s hard to function normally when I’m dressed up which sucks because I love the look but when it comes down to it, it’s not super functional. But, I think it really shows how much I believe in what I’m doing because otherwise I probably wouldn’t be doing it too much.

What else have you put in your eyes?

Just contacts. Do you know what scleras are? They’re contacts that cover your whole eye. You have to roll them back into your eye to get them in. It’s like level two contacts. Sometimes people will ask me to do like seven looks for a brand or a shoot or whatever but it’s because they don’t realize how much effort goes into a single look.

How much time from start to finish on average?

Usually two to three hours. If it’s an intensive paint, three or more hours.

What type of paint and tools do you use for your face production?

I primarily use Mehron paradise paint. It’s a water-based face paint that works best for me. It’s similar to a watercolor. I like the pigmentation and I have a bunch of different colors. I don’t really blend so it’s more like a collage. I’m really into colors. I organize compositions based on colors.

What’s your favorite color to work with?

Blue’s my favorite.

I ran into you at my friend Hadley’s “Glitch” show where you performed “user_manual_01.” Can you talk about glitch culture?

I love the idea of a glitch as a basis for identity. I read Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell a few years ago, it’s a cyber feminism text. The author talks about existing as a glitch. Especially how it relates to queer people since the straight world isn’t really set up for you to exist in. Now that I’m doing my look outside of queer club space more and more, people don’t associate it with my queerness even though I always see it ingrained in what I do. Glitched bodies disrupt the idea of normative bodies, it’s a disruption of what’s expected. It’s really funny honestly because I feel like most people “glitch out” when they see me in public like their brains can’t process me.

Like hyper pop? You do some sound-based art as well, is it glitchy?

I kind of hate the term hyper pop because it’s sort of a throw-away term people use to describe a certain sound. I love PC music though. It’s a record label from the 2010s created by A.G. Cook. He was a big pioneer in utilizing computerized sound and creating pop music in a conceptual way. He also worked closely with SOPHIE, one of my biggest creative inspirations.

Back to augmentation and surgery…go off.

I’ve always had this deep fascination with plastic surgery since I was young, especially people who have “extreme” looks, like Amanda Lepore. She would be at the parties I went to in NY. Since the 90s, she’s been getting plastic surgery and now she has a huge butt and crazy boobs, a very severe Jessica Rabbit hyper femme look. One of my other big inspirations is Pete Burns. He’s a pop singer from England who got a lot of plastic surgery as well.

Cosmetic augmenting isn’t a bad thing?

People see plastic surgery as a bad thing because a lot of people do it from a place of insecurity so it’s pretty widely demonized by the culture. Not many people view it as a creative tool for self-actualization. In Pete Burns’ memoir, he talked about feeling like he had a face underneath that was covered by film. When he got his surgeries, it was like peeling off the film to reveal what was always there. That’s basically how I feel when I do my look.

Of course, that ties into drag and queerness, the inside not matching the outside.

Exactly, like I haven’t gotten any plastic surgery, but I feel like my paint serves as a form of visual augmentation, even if it’s not permanent. Reading Pete’s memoir was really eye opening for that.

What about having to take it off? Is it sad?

It is sad, but it’s something I’ve had to come to terms with. As long as I have photo evidence it’s OK. Documentation and image-making is just as important in what I do.

I like how you embrace ending and restarting. Like Virgo Couture and Jessie.Mp3. What’s to come?

I’m always doing a lot of things at once: face painting, video editing, collages, drawing, conceptualizing performance ideas. Creating music and sound design for the Jessie.Mp3 project is something I’m super passionate about but I also never want to forget my face painting roots. I’ve recently been experimenting with using my medium in new ways like painting text or imagery on people that’s different from my usual look. I actually call it face production. It’s nice that I now have the vocabulary to explain that to people.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Mira Kaplan.

The publication ruffled feathers, enraged officials, and stirred the blood of those working in the intelligence community bothered by this “digital Pearl Harbor”.  The exercise involved the pilfering of 180 gigabytes of information and constituted, according to the agency, “the largest data loss in CIA history”.

The CIA’s WikiLeaks Task Force was charged with investigating the incident and submitted its findings to the director in October 2017.  Pompeo should have been grudgingly grateful – WikiLeaks had given the organisation a good excuse for cleaning the cobwebs and removing the creases.  The report, for instance, found that the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) had placed greater emphasis on the building of “cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems.  Day-to-day security practices had become woefully lax.”  The cyber weapons were also “not compartmented”, passwords at various administrator levels were shared “and historical data was available to users indefinitely.”  In what reads like a vote for the dull and the tedious, the report took issue with “a culture that evolved over years that too often prioritized creativity and collaboration at the expense of security.”

The individual responsible for taking the loot to WikiLeaks was the fractious Joshua Schulte, who worked at the CCI as a software developer and had himself created a number of hacking tools.  On February 1, he was sentenced in the New York federal court to 40 years in prison.  His list of previous convictions was encyclopaedically colourful: espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and child pornography.

At the sentencing hearing, Judge Jesse M. Furman, in that time honoured tradition of judicial vagueness, remarked that, “We will likely never know the full extent of the damage, but I have no doubt it was massive.”  This was a silly claim, given that the leaks were, as Axios reported, “largely inconsequential, with most being instruction manuals for old hacking tools”.

The prosecution was similarly imprecise (and disingenuous), as they tend to be when measuring the extent national security is supposedly impaired by information disclosures.  “He caused untold damage to our national security in his quest for revenge against the CIA for its response to Schulte’s security breaches while employed there,” stated the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams.  Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen further added that Schulte had “directly risked the lives of CIA personnel, persisting in his efforts even after his arrest.”

In comments made to the court prior to the sentencing, Schulte touched on the wonderful penal conditions that mark the US penitentiary system.  He had, for instance, been denied hot water.  He had been extensively exposed to artificial light and constant noise.

He also had – and here, British judges should take note regarding Assange’s own arguments against extradition to the US – been deceived by the prosecutors in a plea deal offer that would have seen him sentenced to 10 years in prison.  Instead, he got an additional three decades.  “This is not justice the government seeks,” Schulte accurately observed, “but vengeance.”

Schulte proved an important figure in the roistering annals of WikiLeaks.  It was his disclosures that signalled the cold and vicious turn in US policy in targeting Assange.  The release of the Vault 7 files sent the then director, Mike Pompeo, into a rage.  The 2021 Yahoo! report, which famously noted various opinions within the intelligence community on what could be done about the Australian publisher, reports that change of approach.  According to one former Trump national security official, the director and CIA officials “were completely detached from reality because they were so detached about Vault 7.”

Soon, Pompeo was publicly tarring WikiLeaks while privately pondering options to kidnap or assassinate Assange.  In April 2017, in a speech given to the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, the director hoisted the black flag.  “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence.”  Nonsensically, Pompeo imbues the publishing organisation with dictatorial and mesmeric qualities.  “It directed Chelsea Manning in her theft of specific secret information.”  (No, it did not.)  “And it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations.”  Given the concentration of unstable power at the heart of Washington, and its imperial pretences, Pompeo can hardly be surprised.

The speech is worthy of close analysis.  It declares, inevitably, that the CIA is a noble organisation incapable of abuse, a saintly enterprise of patriots who should be treated as such.  It takes issue with those who give the game away.  And, more fundamentally, it refuses to have any truck with a publisher who aids that cause.

Pompeo, for instance, dismissed Assange’s own justifications for publishing national security material as “sophistry”.  He could hardly be compared to Thomas Jefferson or “the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of legitimate news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.”

Dangerously, the strategy behind the bluster becomes clear, and would find itself gorily displayed in the indictment against Assange.  It picks and chooses between publishers as sacred and profane, the ennobled and the condemned.  It ignores the pointed fact that national security information is almost always pilfered and leaked, sometimes patriotically, sometimes selfishly.  Punish Assange, and you are opening the door to punishing any news outlet of any stripe operating anywhere.  And that, fundamentally, is the point.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The post Carousel: Jeanne Powell’s Timeless Contrapuntal Essays on Racism, Jesse Jackson, and the Kindness of Strangers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jonah Raskin.