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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_illusion_of_freedom_were_only_as_free_as_the_government_allows

The Illusion of Freedom: We’re Only as Free as the Government Allows

“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”— George Carlin

We’re in a national state of denial.

For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

Case in point: on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court appeared inclined to favor a high school football coach’s right to pray on the field after a game, the high court let stand a lower court ruling that allows police to warrantlessly track people’s location and movements through their personal cell phones, sweeping Americans up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

Likewise, although the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for a death row inmate to have his pastor audibly pray and lay hands on him in the execution chamber, it refused to stop police from using hidden cameras to secretly and warrantlessly record and monitor a person’s activities outside their home over an extended period of time.  

For those who have been paying attention, there’s a curious pattern emerging: the government appears reasonably tolerant of those who want to exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner that doesn’t challenge the police state’s hold on power, for example, by praying on a football field or in an execution chamber.

On the other hand, dare to disagree with the government about its war crimes, COVID-19, election outcomes or police brutality, and you’ll find yourself silenced, cited, shut down and/or branded an extremist.

The U.S. government is particularly intolerant of speech that reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. For instance, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the latest victim of the government’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers, is in the process of being extradited to the U.S. to be tried under the Espionage Act for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Even political protests are fair game for prosecution. In Florida, two protesters are being fined $3000 for political signs proclaiming stating “F—k Biden,” “F—k Trump,” and “F—k Policing 4 Profit” that violate a city ban on “indecent” speech on signs, clothing and other graphic displays.

The trade-off is clear: pray all you want, but don’t mess with the U.S. government.

In this way, the government, having appointed itself a Supreme and Sovereign Ruler, allows us to bask in the illusion of religious freedom while stripping us of every other freedom afforded by the Constitution.

We’re in trouble, folks.

Freedom no longer means what it once did.

This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

My friends, we’re being played for fools.

On paper, we may be technically free.

In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

Government surveillance, police abuse, SWAT team raids, economic instability, asset forfeiture schemes, pork barrel legislation, militarized police, drones, endless wars, private prisons, involuntary detentions, biometrics databases, free speech zones, etc.: these are mile markers on the road to a fascist state where citizens are treated like cattle, to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.

Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction. The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

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https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/04/26/covid-a-summary/

Covid: A Summary

Today in Florida the only places you need a mask are offices of medical conglomerates, such as Ascension (Sacred Heart), a hospital group that also has doctor’s offices where the MD is hired and not in private practice, and Quest Diagnostics where medical tests are performed.  In bureaucratic organizations, once a rule is introduced the enforcement bureaucracy tends to retain it. 

As the news narrative shifted overnight from the “Covid crisis” to the “Ukrainian crisis,” that is, from one deception to another, the “Russian threat” has replaced the “Covid threat” before people understand what was done to them. 

Covid was a threat, not so much in itself as in the protocols enforced to combat it.  Most of the people who died did so because they were denied effective treatment with Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin for the sole purpose of profit for pharmaceutical companies and profit for those, such as Tony Fauci, associated with them.  The emergency use authorization of the untested mRNA “vaccines” could only happen because “medical authorities” declared that there were no known treatments or cures for Covid.  To make this falsehood stick, scientists on Big Pharma’s payroll wrote “studies” published in prestigious medical journals by gullible or corrupt editors falsely characterizing the known cures as dangerous and ineffective.  To be clear, people died from lack of treatment.

The mRNA “vaccines” are not vaccines in the normal meaning of the word. As evidence conclusively shows, the “vaccines” turn the vaccinated person’s immune system into a weapon against the person’s health, producing in many severe adverse reactions and deaths, and makes the vaccinated more susceptible to Covid.  A large amount of evidence, much of it posted on this website and available in throughly documented form in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, indicates that the mRNA “vaccines” are more dangerous than Covid.

It is likely that the alleged “pandemic” was an orchestration.  The falsehood that the virus originated in a bat to human transfer in a market in Wuhan China has been disproved. It is a manufactured virus.  It is a fact revealed by NIH documents that Tony Fauci financed “gain-of-function” research first at the University of North Carolina and then at the Wuhan laboratory from which the virus allegedly escaped.  There is circumstantial evidence that the research at Wuhan was financed as a cover-story for the intentional release of the virus for profit and control purposes. Simulations of the “pandemic” were conducted just prior to the appearance of the virus, and the protocols followed the procedures established by the simulation.  This will never be investigated.

The only purposes served by the lockdowns and mask mandates, both ineffective in preventing Covid transmission, was to train and accustom populations to obey mandates that violate constitutionally protected civil liberty.  The vaccine mandates are strictly medical crimes in violation of the Nuremberg Laws preventing coercive testing on human populations.  There are legal efforts underway to hold those responsible for vaccine mandates accountable, but no government will indict itself or its own public health authorities.

In his book, Robert Kennedy describes the massive conflicts of interest between the NIH, CDC, FDA, and WHO and the pharmaceutical industry.  In short, the so-called “public health agencies” are just shills for Big Pharma.  The occasional fines are just window dressing to give the appearance of enforcement, but no pharmaceutical employee, whether executive or scientist, is ever indicted for inflicting death and injury.  As Kennedy puts it: “By all accounts, Anthony Fauci has implemented a system of dysfunctional conflicts and a transactional culture that have made NIAID a seamless appendage of Big Pharma. There is simply no daylight between NIAID and the drugmakers. It’s impossible to say where Pharma ends and NIAID begins.”

Several decades ago the University of Chicago economist George Stigler pointed out that the problem with regulation is that the regulatory agencies are sooner or later captured by the regulated industry and become servants of the industries they were created to regulate.  This has happened in the United States, and the purest example is the pharmaceutical industry.