A Deep State in the United States rules the country regardless of the outcome of elections

Tucker Carlson: SO WHO’S REALLY IN CHARGE? THAT’S A REALLY INTERESTING QUESTION. TO ANSWER THAT QUESTION, WE ARE HONORED TO BE JOINED BY SOMEONE WHO HAS BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS FOR AN AWFUL LONG TIME. THAT WOULD BE GLENN GREENWALD, WHO WRITES FOR SUBSTACK. HE HAS BEEN COVERING THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE FOR DECADES SAYING THINGS IN RETROSPECT THAT PROVED TO BE TOTALLY TRUE. WE ARE HAPPY TO HAVE HIM JOIN US NOW. THANKS SO MUCH FOR COMING ON.

AS JUST NOTED, YOU HAVE BEEN ON THE TRAIL OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE LONGER THAN MOST PEOPLE THOUGHT IT WAS ANYTHING MORE THAN A CONSPIRACY THEORY, AS WE NOW SAY. WHO DO YOU THINK IS ACTUALLY IN CHARGE OF THE GOVERNMENT AT THIS POINT?

Glenn Greenwald: IT’S BIZARRE, TUCKER, BECAUSE THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY BROUGHT SO MUCH EVIDENCE SHOWING US WHO WAS. ONE OF THE VIDEO CLIPS THAT I ALWAYS POINT TO WAS WHEN CHUCK SCHUMER WENT ON THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW DAYS BEFORE TRUMP WAS INAUGURATED WHEN HE HAD POSTED SOMETHING CRITICIZING THE CIA FOR GETTING IRAQ WRONG, AND CHUCK SCHUMER SAID ETHICS ASIDE, HOW CAN DONALD TRUMP BE SO STUPID AS TO DO THAT TO THE CIA — IF YOU CHALLENGE THE CIA, THEY HAVE SIX DIFFERENT WAYS TO SUNDAY TO GET BACK AT YOU.

I MEAN, THE ENTIRE TRUMP PRESIDENCY WAS DRIVEN BY ALL SORTS OF NARRATIVES FROM THE MEDIA ABOUT HOW THESE HEROIC, INDEPENDENT GENERALS, LIKE MATTIS AND JOHN KELLY AND H.R. McMASTER WERE GOING TO SAVE US FROM THE ELECTED PRESIDENT. AND THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF REPORTS ABOUT HOW THE SECURITY STATE OFFICIALS WOULD CONCEAL CLASSIFIED INFORMATION THAT THEY DIDN’T WANT PRESIDENT TRUMP TO HAVE IN ORDER TO MANIPULATE HIS DECISION-MAKING OR EVEN SUBVERT OR IGNORE HIS DECISION-MAKING, LIKED WHEN HE WOULD TELL THEM TO WITHDRAW TROOPS FROM SYRIA, AND THEY WOULD LIE TO HIM AND PRETEND THEY DID WHEN THEY JUST MOVE THEM INSTEAD.

AND THIS WAS CELEBRATED WHILE AT THE SAME TIME THEY WOULD SAY, IF YOU SAY THAT THERE IS A DEEP STATE IN THE UNITED STATES, WHICH IS NOTHING MORE THAN WHAT DWIGHT EISENHOWER WARNED ABOUT, A PERMANENT POWER FACTION IN WASHINGTON THAT RULES THE COUNTRY REGARDLESS OF THE OUTCOME OF ELECTIONS, THEY WOULD TELL YOU THAT YOU ARE CRAZY, OR THAT YOU ARE CONSPIRACY THEORY, EVEN AS THEY WERE CHEERING FOR THE CLASSIC DEFINITION OF THE DEEP STATE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

SO YOU HAVE TO BE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST OR INCREDIBLY GULLIBLE NOT TO BELIEVE THAT THAT EXISTS.

Tucker Carlson: SO HERE IS THE EVIDENCE THAT WON ME OVER. FAMOUSLY PEOPLE SAY IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO IS REALLY IN CHARGE, WHO YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO CRITICIZE. WHAT IS THE ONE GROUP REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS NEVER CRITICIZE? THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE.

REPUBLICANS ARE HAPPY TO GO AFTER THE IRS OR THE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT. I CAN’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME A REPUBLICAN LEADER MEANINGFULLY CRITICIZED DOJ OR THE PENTAGON. OF COURSE, DEMOCRATS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME. THAT KIND OF TELLS YOU EVERYTHING, DOESN’T IT?

Glenn Greenwald: EXACTLY. AND THE AMAZING THING IS, I MEAN FOR WHATEVER FLAWS YOU WANT TO POINT TO IN DONALD TRUMP’S COMPORTMENT AND GOVERNANCE, WHICH I THINK THERE ARE SEVERAL VALID ONES, ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS THAT HE DID WAS HE DEVIATED FROM THAT CAGE THAT PRESIDENTS ARE KEPT IN, HE TOLD THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THERE ARE THE SECURITY STATE AGENTS WHO THINK THAT THEY RUN THE GOVERNMENT AND HE STOOD UP TO THEM AND CHALLENGED THEIR ORTHODOXIES AND PIETIES AND SHOWED AMERICANS, ESPECIALLY PEOPLE IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ON THE RIGHT, THAT THESE INSTITUTIONS ARE NOT NOBLE OR BENEVOLENT BUT ARE HIGHLY PERNICIOUS. THEY WANT TO INTERFERE IN OUR DOMESTIC POLITICS AND THEY OUGHT TO BE DEEPLY DISTRUSTED.

I THINK THAT WAS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS HE DID AND IT WAS FOR THAT REASON, HIS WILLINGNESS TO CRITICIZE THEM, THAT THEY HATED HIM AND SPENT FOUR YEARS TRYING TO UNDERMINE HIS PRESIDENCY. AND, TUCKER, THE AMAZING THING IS THEY ALWAYS TALK ABOUT THE SANCTITY OF DEMOCRACY. HOW IS DEMOCRACY MORE THREATENED THAN HAVING UNELECTED PEOPLE WHO OPERATE IN THE DARK FREE TO UNDERMINE AND SABOTAGE THE PERSON THAT AMERICANS CHOSE AS THEIR PRESIDENT?

Tucker Carlson: THANK YOU, EXACTLY. IF YOU WANT TO WRECK DEMOCRACY, THAT’S HOW YOU DO IT’S. THERE’S A LOT OF EVIDENCE THE LAST PRESIDENT WAS REALLY CONCERNED ABOUT THEIR POWER ON A PERSONAL LEVEL, HE UNDERSTOOD HOW POWERFUL THEY ARE. REALLY QUICK, DO YOU THINK AT THIS STAGE IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE FOR A PRESIDENT TO PUSH BACK AND TO STRIP THE UNELECTED POWER CENTERS OF SOME OF THEIR POWER IN OUR GOVERNMENT?

Glenn Greenwald: YOU WOULD NEED A BIG ARMY BEHIND YOU. THAT’S WHY PEOPLE IN WASHINGTON WERE PETRIFIED OF J. EDGAR HOOVER. HE KEPT DOSSIERS THROUGH THE FBI ON EVERY POLITICIAN IN WASHINGTON. THEY DO HAVE A LOT OF AMASSED POWER. YOU NEED THE POPULATION TO RISE UP AGAINST THEM FOR THAT TO WORK.

Tucker Carlson: I HOPE THAT HAPPENS — I THINK DEMOCRACY IS WORTH HAVING. I KNOW YOU FEEL THAT WAY, TOO. GLENN GREENWALD, AN ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN, WE ARE PROUD TO HAVE. THANKS.

GLENN GREENWALD: THANKS, TUCKER.

William Brighenti, CPA
Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC
http://www.cpa-connecticut.com

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What risk do unvaccinated people pose to vaccinated people if vaccines work?

Carlson: So everyone knows from watching television, reading the new York times, that the only people who haven’t gotten the vaccine are members of the qanon army, right-wing crazies. But actually it turns out just 30 percent of African Americans in New York between the ages of 18 and 44 are fully vaccinated. Hispanics are the second least vaccinated population in the country. So those mostly are not Republicans but you would never know that from reading the popular press.

The coverage of COVID has taken an openly political cast. People who don’t get the vaccine are considered criminals thought criminals: they’re right-wingers. Salon just ran this headline: quote, “it’s time to start firing unvaccinated people. Trump fans are overdue for a lesson in consequences.” Can you imagine that’s healthcare in America 2021?

Glenn Greenwald is an independent journalist. He writes for Substack. He joins us tonight. Glenn, what do you do? I mean, you’ve watched this whole thing from afar a year and a half into this and now virtually every part of the government’s response to COVID seems to have political overtones. Where does that leave us?

Greenwald: Yeah I mean it’s hard for me even to endure listening to liberal discourse about COVID anymore. Usually when someone has a view that’s different than mine, I can isolate the rationale that they’re using to come to that conclusion even though I don’t agree with it. And I’m at a complete loss to understand what the argument even is.

On September 9th when President Biden went to the White House and gave a speech on COVID to announce his COVID mandate for large employers, he said–this is not me–he said, Joe Biden said, if you’re fully vaccinated, the chances that you can get severely ill, not even die just get severely ill, are very low. And the statistic that he gave is, out of every 160,000 people who have been vaccinated, only one ends up going to the hospital with a serious illness.

So the risk if you’re vaccinated is almost zero, which means what danger do unvaccinated people pose to people like me who listened to that and went and got the vaccine? I can’t comprehend the argument. And yet when Joe Biden imposed the vaccine mandate. he said–because he had to to justify why he could do it legally–the bottom line is we need to protect vaccinated workers from the dangers posed by unvaccinated people.

What dangers do unvaccinated people pose to those who are vaccinated? None. It is purely punitive. It’s a way of saying, if you don’t obey us, if you don’t defer to our superior wisdom, we are going to inflict pain and suffering on you and take vengeance on you for your defiance. That is all that this is about.

Carlson: It’s hurting my brain too and and I just want to restate what you said. You are vaccinated. You know, you can be vaccinated. You can love the vaccine. You can have nine booster shots. That’s not relevant to the debate here. The question is should people who don’t want it be forced to get it and if so why? And no one’s explained that. And I thank you for restating that. I’m baffled all day long, every day.

Glenn Greenwald, I appreciate it.

Greenwald: Good to be with you, Tucker.

William Brighenti, CPA

Barefoot Accountant

http://www.cpa-connecticut.com

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The media participated in a lying campaign to influence a political election

Well, a business insider reporting today that when Joe Biden was the Vice President, Hunter Biden sought a retainer of $2 million a year to help quote, “unfreeze” money that belonged to the Libyan government. If that’s true, that’s very serious.

You’ll remember that Hillary Clinton had Muammar Gaddafi, the head of Libya killed for reasons nobody ever explained, completely destroyed the country and the lives of people who live there, and then money from the Treasury was impounded.

If Hunter Biden was actually lobbying the U.S. government while his dad was Vice President to get that money, that’s a very big deal, it’s probably a crime.

Meanwhile, Ben Schreckinger of POLITICO is out with a book that confirms that Hunter Biden’s laptop is not fake, it’s not Russian disinformation, the laptop contains evidence that the Biden family was in fact selling access to Joe Biden to entities in China and Ukraine, and many other countries.

A year ago, POLITICO reported that the Intelligence Community thought the laptop was quote, “Russian disinformation.” Why are they telling us this now? Not that we ever believe their lies.

Glenn Greenwald is an independent journalist, very independent. He writes on “Substack.” He joins us tonight.

So Glenn, I mean, I don’t think you’re shocked by this, but you do have to ask it. Why are they telling us this now?

GLENN GREENWALD, JOURNALIST: The evidence was overwhelming from the very beginning, Tucker, that the e-mails were authentic, and yet they lied and lied and lied as you just showed trying to convince people to not even pay attention to them on the grounds that they were disinformation that the e- mails were fake.

Now, the new book that just came out is from this young reporter at POLITICO who spent months digging into all of these e-mails and obviously, he unearthed proof that these e-mails were forgeries and put that in his book, he would be a star. You would know his name, he’d be a household name, he’d be on every TV show.

But because his reporting that said the opposite, he found even more proof that all those e-mails were authentic, which meant that these media outlets, all of them pretty much, with a few exceptions deliberately lied to the public in the weeks before the election by telling them that this was Russian disinformation when they knew it wasn’t true. They are ignoring his book.

He is not a right-wing journalist, he is from one of those mainstream publications. He has the proof in his hands that they all lied and they don’t want anyone to know it.

CARLSON: Do you honestly think that they — if you’re NBC News, if you’re CNN, if you’re “The New York Times,” “The Washington Post,” can you just sort of move forward as if you didn’t participate in a lying campaign to influence a political election?

GREENWALD: You know, as you know, Tucker, I was at the media outlet that I founded when this all happened and they were the ones who published as well the claim that this was Russian disinformation and then a week later told me that I couldn’t report on this story because the documents weren’t verified in contrast to the C.I.A. lie that they had published.

So all throughout the media, this is their prevailing mindset. They know that they have an audience filled with liberals who hate Donald Trump and the Trump movement, and their only business model is to aggrandize those people. And they know that even if they lie and get caught lying, their audience and readers don’t care. In fact, like them even more, because they believe they’re on the right side.

So you have huge number of journalists who believe that, they have the right to lie and even when they get caught, they don’t care because they know their audience won’t hold it against them.

CARLSON: You came on, I think, immediately after you left “The Intercept” and I thought it was sad then, but looking back on it, the media outlet that you founded tried to make you lie or prevented you from telling the truth. I mean, that just really sums up the moment we’re living in.

I’m really sorry that you went through that. I just think it’s awful in every way, but you’re thriving, obviously.

Glenn Greenwald, thank you.

GREENWALD: Yes, thanks, Tucker.

William Brighenti, CPA

The Barefoot Accountant

cpa-connecticut.com

The media participated in a lying campaign to influence a political election

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The Deep State has declared war on American citizens who oppose the Deep State

CARLSON: These people are craven buffoons and stupid, obviously, but it is notable that they are all saying exactly the same thing. It makes you think maybe everybody is on the same team, and you’re on the wrong team. Is that true?

Glenn Greenwald has been watching carefully. He is an independent journalist who writes on “Substack,” and you should read his stuff because it is excellent. He joins us tonight.

Glenn, thanks so much for coming on. What do you make of this? Is this realignment or was it a previous alignment? What are we looking at?

GLENN GREENWALD, JOURNALIST: I think it’s worth first of all remembering and I know that you remember, I started writing about politics in 2005, so I do how liberals used to be overflowing with so much hatred and contempt for George Bush. They frequently compared him to Adolf Hitler, claimed his family was crucial to the rise of the Nazi Party, claimed something I agree with that he’s a war criminal who belongs at The Hague.

He said he was so filled with racism that he purposely allowed New Orleans to drown because so many black people lived there, and every liberal I know believes that George Bush stole at least one election and maybe even two both in 2000 and 2004.

So basically, they concocted a person you can’t get much worse than that and suddenly, in the Trump years, as he began lightly criticizing Trump, they began saying things like, you know what, I didn’t agree with George Bush all the time, but I never questioned his character and his values and his patriotism.

But this weekend, it turned into this love fest. I mean, they dripped with effusive praise for him because what he said there that essentially the 9/11 attacks that he was there to commemorate are the same as the three- hour riot on January 6th, and more importantly that the people who did 9/11, al-Qaeda are similar or identical to kind of the same foul spirit as he put it, Trump supporters essentially and that they ought to be treated the same, a war on terror against al-Qaeda, now a domestic war on terror against your fellow citizens.

It is music to the ears of American liberals because they want nothing more than a new domestic war on terror than treating their political adversaries like the Bush administration treated al-Qaeda.

CARLSON: It’s such a lunatic and extreme thing to say, to compare. It’s like Hitler comparisons. I mean, to compare people whose politics you don’t like in the United States, who haven’t killed anybody so far as I know to Osama bin Laden, why is that not instantly disqualifying? Just because of the overstatement.

GREENWALD: The reason is because it is a political priority and I probably have spent more time reporting on this this year than any other topic. It is a political priority of the political class to launch a new domestic war on terror.

You can go back to before January 6 to November of 2020 and see articles in “The Wall Street Journal” where Joe Biden was saying, my top priority as President once I get inaugurated, will be to combat domestic extremism. Once January 6th happened, that became the pretext for doing it, like a lot of neocons wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11, and then 9/11 happened and then they got to use that as the pretext. That’s what they’re using January 6th.

It’s demented to compare 9/11 and January 6, but it’s so central to the agenda of the security state, the Democratic Party to essentially initiate a surveillance regime, a detention regime against people on the right who are against the establishment, and they’re already doing it.

They put people on the no-fly list, the kind of defining feature of the first war on terror, want to do new legislation that gives the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. new powers, spending lots more money on law enforcement. This war on terror is crucial to them.

CARLSON: I think you’re exactly right, and it’s not just going to be people on the right, it will — it’s any dissent, anyone who opposes the regime, I think that would include you, too, Glenn Greenwald so good luck.

Thank you for coming on tonight.

GREENWALD: Thanks, Tucker.

 

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The Deep State intervened in US politics to undermine the elected President Donald Trump

Carlson: So now we’re arming the Taliban and marooning our own citizens in Afghanistan. Who could possibly have seen that coming. Glenn Greenwald is one of the few journalists who did see it coming. He writes for Substack where all of us read him. You should, too. He joins us tonight. Glenn, thanks so much for coming on.

So it’s a little weird for the news organizations that repeated uncritically, and not just on the left, I hate to say it, but almost all of them just repeated these this kind of happy talk, about how Afghanistan was progressing for 20 years and then they whip around and are shocked that actually it’s a mess and always have been. There’s some dishonesty there, isn’t there?

Greenwald: The whole thing was a fraud. And you know, you can go back to things like in 2019, the Washington Post publishing what it called the Afghanistan papers, there’s now a book out by the reporter who broke that really important story, they did a good job on it, where they obtained secret documents going up to 2016 under the Obama years where internally they were saying the exact opposite of what they were saying publicly about the war in Afghanistan just like they did in Vietnam as revealed by the Pentagon Papers.

They were saying to the public, as you just showed, we’re making great progress, we have faith in the Afghan national security forces. Internally they knew the Afghan national security forces were a joke. They were filled with illiterate people who couldn’t do anything, with drug addicts, with people who had no interest in fighting: they would disappear as soon as they got their paycheck.

The whole war for years and years and years was a lie. And so while I do agree, of course, that there are ineptitudes in how we withdrew, the fact that we withdrew because two presidents, first President Trump and then President Biden, ensured that it happened, is something to celebrate in large part because it’s the first time in as long as I can remember as these people what I do know is the Deep State that manipulate us all the time, that lie to us all the time for their own benefit, have finally lost, and the media is turning against Biden, not because they suddenly became fair but because they’ve been in bed with the Deep State: that’s who fed them Russia-gate, that’s who fed them all the leaks during the Trump years.  And they’re angry on behalf of the faction that they genuinely serve.

Carlson: well I hate to say I agree with you. I mean I think Biden is an awful President, the worst I can remember, and totally out of it, senile. On the other hand, he’s the President of the United States. You’re not supposed to leak an audio tape of his recorded conversation with another Head of State. I mean that’s that’s a felony for one thing. And for another like how can any President do real diplomacy if he’s being undermined by permanent Washington.  Like why shouldn’t we be worried about that?

Greenwald: You know I think this is the key point for me at least when I look at the Trump years. A lot of people obviously ask me why weren’t you as worried as other people on, you know, the left about the Trump presidency. And my reason was because what I saw in opposition to the Trump presidency was something far more dangerous than anything that I thought he would be capable of doing. Which is that they took their masks off. They made clear the CIA, the Pentagon, the permanent military and Security State inside the United States that they were willing to intervene in US politics to undermine
the elected President.

The very first article I wrote before Trump was even inaugurated in January 17, 2017 was headlined, “the Deep State Goes to War with the Elected President.” The fact that we have a Deep State, that the US media was cheering, they were thrilled that these generals they were heralding as heroes for ignoring Trump’s orders, for keeping classified information away from him, for manipulating him, for subverting his decisions, they were cheering these generals as saving us from our elected leader, which is the definition of a Deep State at the same time as they were calling anyone who was pointing out that we have a Deep State unhinged, crazy, conspiracy theorist. That to me is the most dangerous development of the last five years is that unelected generals, intelligence operatives, arrogated into themselves, while the media cheered, the power to override our democracy whenever they thought that it was in our best interest to do so.

Carlson: And that leaves the entire population powerless. You know, your vote doesn’t matter, and that makes the society super volatile and dangerous. And I agree with you 100%. I used to laugh at the term the Deep State but it’s totally real unfortunately. Glenn Greenwald, I appreciate your coming on today. Thank you.

Greenwald: Good to be with you Tucker. Thanks.

Carlson: Thanks.

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The new fascism is the woke industrial complex consisting of big US corporations and the big governments of China and the United States

Vivek Ramaswamy: When I think about the health of a democracy, really any democracy but especially American democracy, it’s really simple. It is the percentage of people who are willing to say what they actually believe in public. And right now we are doing abysmally on that metric.

And when I reflect on it, first personally as a human being, I wasn’t free to say what I actually believed as CEO. That’s why I had to separate my voice from my company. But now I am a citizen and I’m not going to mince words about what I think we need to do about the cultural epidemic that we’re that we’re facing as a people.

What you have is a bunch of people in my generation, a bunch of woke millennials get together with a bunch of big banks, together they birth woke capitalism. And then they put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption, and that’s really when wokeness met capitalism, that’s when it went from a fringe theory in the academy to becoming supercharged with the potency of capitalism.

And when it mixed with capitalism, that’s when wokeness became….

Tucker Carlson: Talk about an axis of evil. I mean this might be the ugliest most dangerous alliance in American history. I can’t think of anything more destructive than what you just described.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah and it’s the funny thing is it’s an arranged marriage but not of love. It is more like mutual prostitution because each side in this marriage secretly has contempt for the other. They have secret contempt for the other. And any marriage in which each side secretly disdains the other isn’t going to end well. But right now it’s working because each side is getting something out of it.

Tucker Carlson: Can we skip to the part where they eat each other and we enjoy it.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well there’s a part that comes in between them, which is where this, uh, this bilateral arranged marriage actually turns into what I call a threesome, which is the Communist Party of China getting in on the act, right? So they see what’s going on here with this arranged marriage and they say, okay, this is actually an opportunity and the opportunity is this: if we can get those companies to criticize the United States in the United States but stay silent about our actual human rights abuses here in China, we can do the thing that we could have never done with our nuclear arsenal, and that is to undermine the moral standing of the United States on the global stage. So they got in on this act.

There’s a Chinese word for wokeness as you well know: baizuo, which literally refers to all
white people, they used to laugh at us, but it’s not just a joke. They are now using that as a
geopolitical tool to say, oh, Nike and Disney and the NBA and Marriott, you want to criticize the United States, have at it. If you criticize China, we’re going to build a great Chinese wall and you can’t enter our market. But if you criticize the United States, we’re going to roll out the red carpet to you.

And by the way if you’re airbnb, we’re going to roll out the red carpet if and only if you give us the consumer data that you gathered from your progressive consumers who love it when you post a black square on Instagram, a condition for airbnb’s entry to China. That’s a little little-known secret that the Wall Street Journal reported on last year.

But that’s how this game is played.

Tucker Carlson: You’re upsetting me. [Laughter]

Vivek Ramaswamy: It it makes my blood boil.

Tucker Carlson: I know all this. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it as clearly explained as you just did.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Well I spent a year and a half thinking about it for the book so I better be able to tell you a little something about it. But it is maddening to watch the way in which they’re playing us like a Chinese mandolin. And it is working. And the way they’ve done it is they have turned these corporations into Trojan horses that undermine the United States from within because they are now the new international arbiters of moral justice.

And so China can go to the UN and if they’re pressed about the Uyghur human rights crisis by European, by the EU, as they were last year, the first thing that comes out of Xi Jinping’s mouth is, actually black lives matter shows that the United States is no better. But now you don’t have to take it from Xi Jinping, you could take it from Nike, you could take it from the NBA, you could take it from Disney, the neutral arbiters of moral justice who actually make a better buck because they can enter the Chinese market if they shut up about China but they criticize the United States.

But for China they get something out of that trade, back to that mutual prostitution. It’s now a three-way prostitution where China is able to get something out of it, which is the people who are known to criticize injustice, never criticize injustice over here. That creates this false equivalence between Chinese nihilism and American idealism, and when that happens, Chinese nihilism wins every time. Thank you Lebron James, thank you Disney, thank you NBA. That’s the world that we live in.

And so that is what I call the birth of this woke industrial complex. It is a new leviathan, a new monster, that is far more powerful than what Thomas Hobbes might have envisioned 400 years ago, and it is the biggest threat to individual liberty today. It is not big government alone. Its conservatives are reciting lines that they memorized in 1980, thinking that big government was the threat to individual liberty. Maybe it was in 1980. It’s not today. It is this new hybrid of big government and big business and big government not just in the United States but big government in places like China, co-mingled with big business creating the actual threat to our liberty and our prosperity.

And it’s really hard to know what to do about it when we have spent the last 40 years defending the castle of capitalism from the front door without recognizing that that castle was invaded through the back door from woke activists to the Chinese Communist Party. And I think the defining challenge for us as Americans today is how do we actually sterilize that castle without burning the whole thing down.

Transcribed by William Brighenti, CPA

The Barefoot Accountant

http://www.cpa-connecticut.com

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Censorship is antithetical to the scientific method because it requires free speech and open debate and skepticism

Vivek Ramaswamy is the author of “Woke Inc.” He spent a long career in business and has taken a break from that because he thinks the country is in trouble, not least because of things like this. Vivek, thanks so much for joining us tonight. We appreciate it.

So, what should we make — what lesson should we draw when politicians exempt themselves from their own rules? When Barack Obama has his guests, 500 guests and 200 servants to his oceanfront home in Martha’s Vineyard at a time when the rest of us aren’t allowed to do that — what should we learn from that?

VIVEK RAMASWAMY, BIOTECH ENTREPRENEUR AND AUTHOR, “WOKE, INC.”: We should learn, Tucker, that the guiding principle is, “Do as I say, not as I do,” when it comes to government officials policy on COVID-19. It is funny, it reminds me a lot of a white-collar criminal in the 1980s, Leona Helmsley who famously said, “We don’t pay taxes, only little people pay taxes.”

Well today, only little people are the ones who are expected to abide by these COVID-19 restrictions. It is laughable if the consequences weren’t so serious and the government has given the public absolutely zero reason to trust anything they have to say, Tucker.

The government did not trust the public at the start of this pandemic and now, the public doesn’t trust the government in return and that’s a problem.

CARLSON: Well, it is a problem particularly in public health. I mean, you’ve been in public health. You ran a pharma company, a successful one developing new drug treatments for disease. If the public doesn’t believe physicians or public health authorities, like what kind of country do you have over time?

RAMASWAMY: That’s absolutely right, and now we see the censorship to top it off. I’ll tell you this, Tucker. I was a Harvard trained scientist. I started a biotech company. I care about the integrity of science and science is not what some government official says on a given day depending on what side of the bed he woke up on.

Science is a method. It is a method of pursuing truth that requires free speech, open debate, and skepticism. Yes, skepticism is part of science and instead, science — we’ve seen science transform into becoming this institution. I think of it as a church, what I call the church of scientism.

And ironically, the church of scientism has put science itself on the altar as a sacrificial lamb. What we really need is a revival of the open discourse that allows us to discover what of our ideas will be proven wrong in the future, and without open debate, without open dialogue, we can’t do that.

CARLSON: And isn’t that why — I mean, you would know, since you started a biotech company, but the United States has led the world in scientific innovation for a hundred years because it is the most open country.

RAMASWAMY: That’s right. I mean, we have to be humble about what we do know and what we don’t. History teaches us that most of our beliefs will either be proven false or modified in some way, but the only way we get there is not through censorship, it is not through government government- coordinated censorship with these so-called private companies, but through open discourse, and honesty, and humility, and skepticism. That is what science depends on.

And now, in the name of science, the worst kind of betrayal of science, Tucker, is in the name of science itself and that’s what we’re seeing.

CARLSON: That’s totally right. Humility is the root of wisdom and it is the root of science, and thank you for reminding us of that. Vivek Ramaswamy, great to see you tonight.

RAMASWAMY: Thanks, Tucker.

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FBI CIA NSA are not only spying on American citizens but also are illegally unmasking their identities to journalists who support our fascist government

Well, a media outlet called “The Record,” which is owned by a cybersecurity company recently published a story about the N.S.A.’s monitoring of this show, effectively admitting that it happened. Our identity, “The Record” said was included in an Intel intercept and then quote, “unmasked.”

Intercepted — “The Record” rather did not explain how that would be legal, but it happened as we said it did.

Glenn Greenwald is an independent journalist. You can read him and you should on “Substack,” which is an unfiltered and uncontrolled website for people who are independent.

Glenn, thanks so much for coming on tonight. So, unmasked.

Why in the world would the U.S. government be unmasking journalists, particularly ones who are critical of them?

GLENN GREENWALD, JOURNALIST: Yes, I’m sorry, I’m trying to keep myself composed after that emotional footage you played about Congressman Kinzinger —

CARLSON: I’m sorry. And I’m sorry. I am sorry, I didn’t, you know —

GREENWALD: But that is, I think — yes, I mean, you should have given me a warning. I’m really on the verge of tears myself here after having heard that.

CARLSON: Sorry.

GREENWALD: You know, I think the critical question is exactly what you just asked, which is — let’s remember that the fundamental principle is that the N.S.A. is not supposed to be using its spying powers on American citizens unless it gets a warrant, which obviously didn’t have with regard to you.

Sometimes though, they do find out things that you’re doing or saying if you’re for example talking to somebody who they are spying on or people they’re spying on are talking about things you said or done, and when that happens, there are supposed to be protections in place for American citizens. They are supposed to hide your identity so that your privacy isn’t invaded, which is what happens when they learn things that you’re doing without a warrant.

In limited circumstances, they have the right to unmask the identity of the American citizen who appears in their record and then disseminate it through the Intelligence Community. For example, if they listen to people saying we want to kill Journalist A, of course they would want to unmask it to warn the journalist that they’re being targeted. None of that happened here.

And yet, where is the media complaining about that “The Washington Post” actually published a story by their media critic, Erik Wemple who has no experience reporting on surveillance justifying that the N.S.A. did this and claiming that you have no grounds for complaining about it. What conceivable justification is there, Tucker, for the N.S.A. to have gone and said, we want to know this journalist’s name who is trying to get an interview with Vladimir Putin?

And the reason the media doesn’t care, and in fact supports the N.S.A. is because they’re on the side of the Intelligence Community and are very happy when those powers are abused for ideological ends against their ideological enemy, which I’m sorry to say includes you.

CARLSON: Well, that’s exactly what it was. I mean, they spread to news outlets that I was talking to Russians in an effort to discredit and then control me. Of course, that’s the point. That’s why we don’t allow it.

So, I want to get your reaction, speaking of Federal powers that may be abused. BuzzFeed reported that most of the people involved in that famous plot, right before the election, to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer were in fact working for the F.B.I. You’ve covered a lot of these stories over the years. Were you surprised by that — most of them were working for the F.B.I.?

GREENWALD: You know, I think that as Americans, we are trained — and I know, even after all the reporting I’ve done to kind of reflexively disbelieve that the F.B.I. could do something like involve itself in a plot and then either encourage it or allow it. We all have that kind, no, that wouldn’t have happened.

But what I’m telling you is, I spent a decade during the first war on terror — this is the second war on terror — reporting in one case after the next where the F.B.I. would say, we caught four young Muslims plotting to blow up a bridge, and in almost every case, it turned out that these four young Muslims were not very smart, we’re emotionally unstable, we’re financially vulnerable, and the only plot that was created was one that was created by the F.B.I. that brought it to them and then used their knowhow of psychological manipulation to lure them into it.

The informants who were paid would do everything possible to get them to agree to it, then the F.B.I. would announce, oh we found this plot that was actually the F.B.I.’s plot in the first place.

CARLSON: That’s right.

GREENWALD: So, the only unanswered question that that committee should be asking, instead of in between all the sobbing and weeping and stuff is, what role did the F.B.I. have in terms of being embedded in the three groups they claim plotted this attack on the Capitol? And did they purposely allow it to go forward? Because as the F.B.I. has admitted, we need the citizenry in fear in order to increase our budget, in order to increase our surveillance authorities.

And the one relevant question about January 6th that hasn’t been answered is the one that the media and the Congress has declared off limits to ask.

CARLSON: Boy, they hate it, and in fact, Republican Members of Congress were given instructions by their leaders not to push the F.B.I. on this, which is just mind-blowing, but we should push. I think, we should, and thank you for doing it.

Glenn Greenwald of “Substack.” Great to see you.

GREENWALD: Good talking to you, Tucker.

William Brighenti, CPA
http://www.cpa-connecticut.com

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The government is instructing social media companies what shouldn’t be allowed to be on the internet even though these companies are the least competent to judge what is misinformation

The left-wing media is trying to silence the right-wing media and censor free speech

And the attempt to restrict what information you’re allowed to see is now coming from the highest office in the land.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: My hope is that Facebook – instead of taking it personally – that somehow I’m saying Facebook is killing people, that they would do something about the misinformation – the outrageous misinformation – about the vaccine.

JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: –shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others, if you are for providing misinformation out there.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Here now a Pulitzer Prize winning and Independent Journalist Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, the biggest shock here – I don’t think it’s – that the modern Left thinks they can use this social media companies as their own not truth squads. But that the media seems to be just like whistling past the graveyard on this. Your thoughts?

GLENN GREENWALD, INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST: Well, I mean, I think the model was set when just weeks before the election, the Silicon Valley giants united to ban reporting done by “The New York Post” on authentic documents about the Biden family. And the media didn’t raise any concerns. In fact, they supported it.

And that sent the signal that the Biden Administration, once they’re in power, could use that model of suppressing information off of the internet with very little objection from the people who are supposed to defend free expression.

And the thing that’s so amazing, Laura, is even if you’re somebody who isn’t incredibly disturbed by the idea that the government is instructing social media companies what should and shouldn’t be allowed to be on the internet, these are the people least competent to judge what is misinformation.

They’re the ones who spent a year saying that the theory of a COVID lab leak in Wuhan was a crazy conspiracy theory, and now they say it’s highly plausible. Worse, these are the same people who flooded the country for five years with deranged conspiracy theories that Putin and the Russians had taken control over the U.S. through clandestine sexual blackmail. And now suddenly, they want to act like we should trust them to determine what is true and what is false. It’s incredibly dangerous now.

INGRAHAM: Like they haven’t been operating a bureau of disinformation on a multitude of issues, as I pointed out in THE ANGLE. I mean, again, when NPR, Glenn, writes an article about Ben Shapiro’s site, “The Daily Wire,” in this thing, they quoted Jamie Settle, Director of the Social Networks and Political Psychology Lab at William & Mary.

And she said that, “they tend to not provide very much context for the information they’re providing. If you’ve stripped enough context away any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation.” Glenn, you can see where this is going.

GREENWALD: Yes. I mean, I think, the reality of what’s going on is that these media outlets are losing their audience. Trump was kind of like a four year sugar high for them. He saved their jobs, and with him gone, their audiences collapsing. There’s data today is showing that “The Atlantic,” “The New York Times,” “The Guardian,” “Huffington Post,” have all lost between a third and half of their audience in the last year alone.

Obviously, the other two cable networks combined don’t get anywhere near the audience of this network. And so they look at Ben Shapiro and other Right Wing voices, and they’re angry that more people want to listen to them than to these corporate media outlets.

And so their only option, instead of looking in the mirror and asking why people don’t want to listen to them, is to try and just silence everybody so that they maintain their monopoly over the discourse, and everyone is captive to listen to them, because everyone else has been silenced. And that’s really all it’s about.

INGRAHAM: I want to get back to a point that I had made a few minutes ago. How did the Democrats – let’s say, it’s mostly happening right now on the Democrat side? How do they think it’s actually going to help them? It’s like none of these questions, whether it’s about kids and masks or any of these questions are, they’re not going to go away. Right.

So next year in the midterms, the questions are still going to be out there and it’s better to run themselves through the paces of tough interviews tough – I mean, fair interviews, these questions. But instead of when you ask a question, you raise a point – a data point, then you’re a vaccine denier, you’re anti-science, you have to be stopped, it’s disinformation.

I have never seen anything like this since I lived in the Soviet Union as a student in the 1980s. Glenn.

GREENWALD: It’s the same mentality. I think it goes back to the 2016 campaign when they were not really so sure that Hillary Clinton was going to defeat Donald Trump, but believe they had some kind of like divine entitlement for Hillary Clinton to become president.

And when they lost, fair and square, they started asking themselves, why did we lose. And instead of looking at the mirror,. again, they started blaming everybody except themselves. And especially they started blaming Facebook, saying you allowed all this disinformation, you allowed lies about Hillary Clinton.

And our only option to survive politically, is to control the means of communication that we no longer control, which is the internet. That was the whole point of the internet – was to liberate us from not having to be manipulated and controlled by centralized authority.

When they saw that allowing that freedom jeopardizes their political interest, the only conclusion that they reach was, we can’t allow that anymore. We can’t allow this freedom. We need to control it, we need to silence it, we need to censor it, and through the Trump years it just escalated. And they’re like this authoritarian faction now that genuinely believes that censorship is in the public good.

INGRAHAM: Yes, it is. Glenn, we’re going to keep tracking it. Thank you. Great to see you tonight.

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Our government is using Big Tech companies to circumvent the First Amendment and censor free speech on its behalf

Jon Scott: Critics are calling the White House’s push to stop Covid19 misinformation on social media another example of big tech censorship. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said today companies like Facebook have to do more.

Vivek Murthy: But what I’ve also said to them publicly and privately is that it’s not enough. That we are still seeing a proliferation of misinformation online. And we know that health misinformation harms people’s health. It costs them their lives.”

Jon Scott: Our next guest recently argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed quote: “Google, Facebook and Twitter should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines. Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats, Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution”

The author of those words, Vivek Ramaswamy. He is a biotech entrepreneur and the author of “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.” Uh, to the subtitle of the book first, Vivek, what do you mean “social justice scam”?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah well look, what I mean is that companies use the illusion of caring about something other than the pursuit of profit and power precisely to gain more profit and power. That is how the game of 21st century capitalism is played. It dupes consumers it dupes regulators, and it dupes the public at large to allow companies to accomplish their own objective but leave the American citizenry worse off in the end.

Jon Scott: Well, is Facebook an example for instance of that kind of thinking?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Yeah, Facebook is an example of it. I would put all of social media in this category, too, where there is an effective unspoken backroom deal with progressives in the Democratic Party to say that we are going to now use our corporate power as a weapon to silence content that you disagree with. But effectively we in Silicon Valley don’t do it for free. We expect you, the government, to look the other way when it comes to leaving our monopoly power intact. And I’m sorry to say that it is working masterfully for both sides.

And it’s an incestuous relationship that now goes in both directions because that’s what government has begun to realize is they can use these private companies to do indirectly through the back door what the government could not directly do through the front door under the Constitution. And that is what we are seeing with the essence of big tech censorship today to say that the First Amendment clearly prohibits the government from doing it directly so the government has found an extra constitutional measure through its fourth branch of government in Silicon Valley to effectuate censorship that the government couldn’t directly and I think that is actually the most dangerous form of censorship of all because the public doesn’t recognize it for what it is.

Jon Scott: Okay but you just heard the Surgeon General say that misinformation on outlets like Facebook is costing people their lives. We want to save lives, don’t we?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Of course we do. But look, I think the answer to misinformation and to bad speech is not less speech, it is more speech. And I think there’s both a cultural point and a legal point.

On the cultural point, the thing I would say is every dictatorship through human history has had its excuse for why it wanted to censor speech. Misinformation is the excuse of today. But people said the same thing. Now they say social media is unique. Well people said the same thing about the telephone. People said the same thing about the advent of radio. People said the same thing about the advent of television. Everyone thought their moment was unique when they were arguing for censorship in the past. It is no different today. The road still ends to the same place which is totalitarian dictatorship.

But the good news is we have strong legal doctrines in this country which say that even if you deputize a private company to do what the government can’t do. that is still a violation of the Constitution. And that’s why I argued that these companies ought to be treated as state actors and bound by the First Amendment when they engage in selective political censorship. And I think that’s what President Trump’s case has the potential to do by the way.

Jon Scott: The spokeswoman for the current President, Jen Psaki, was talking about the fact that the

Biden administration has been leaning on Facebook to silence what she calls misinformation. Senator Ted Cruz says that her point actually helped former President Trump. Listen.

Ted Cruz: Her press conference strengthened President Trump’s lawsuit against big tech. It makes clear that everything we thought about the Biden administration, about their willingness to trample on free speech, to trample on the Constitution, to use government power to silence you, everything we feared they might do, they are doing, and worse.

Jon Scott: Is he accurate in that assessment?

Vivek Ramaswamy: Senator Cruz and I actually exchanged messages after my op-ed came out on Monday. He’s absolutely right. I think that’s exactly the point I made in my op-ed on Monday. When I wrote on Monday that the government was using these companies through the back door to do what it couldn’t do directly, people said that was a conspiracy theory. Well apparently the difference between a conspiracy theory and reality today is as short as four days because we just saw Jen Psaki on Thursday and then on Friday bragging, boasting, about exactly what the government was directing Facebook to do in taking down misinformation, saying that if you were banned from one social media company, you should be banned from all of the social media platforms.

And so she is now making the case for state action even better than I did in my couple of Wall Street Journal editorials. But the point is the government today is boasting about using social media companies to effectuate its objectives. That is actually the biggest violation of the Constitution of all and I think that’s the case that President Trump is effectively trying to make. I think he has room to make it better in the complaint that he’s filed but that’s effectively the heart of his claim is that when the government dispatches private companies with threats, with voluntary willful coordination between the government and these private companies, and also with the special form of immunity in the form of Section 230 immunity, any one of those could be the basis for state action using Supreme Court doctrines. Here we have all three.  I think it may be the most egregious case of state action in the guise of private enterprise that we’ve seen in modern history.

Jon Scott: Okay, very quickly, but on a micro level, I mean there are millions of people watching right now, who are also Facebook users, what do you say to them about your concerns about the government leaning on that company?

Vivek Ramaswamy: If it can happen to the 45th president of the United States it can happen to anybody. This is not an academic issue and it is not a political or partisan issue. If they can do it to the right today, they can do it to the left tomorrow. These are the most powerful companies we’ve seen in the course of human history.  Even the Dutch East India Company had a private militia but it couldn’t control the bounds of acceptable debate.

And it’s not just the power of these companies alone that matters. When it’s co-mingled with the state, when big business mixes with big government, that creates the biggest threat of all, what I call the woke industrial complex, because each of big business and big government can do what the other cannot and that’s a threat to liberty whether you’re a Republican or whether you’re Democrat, whether you’re black or white, every American ought to be concerned. And I think that’s where the new solutions for both the movements on the left and on the right need to focus going forward.

Jon Scott: His new book is “Woke Incorporated.” Vivek Ramaswamy the author. Thank you, interesting.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Thank you.

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