Are we getting set up to take the fall?
In America, that is.
Mainstream, corporate-owned media is helping to pave the way. Let us look at some of the things that a new authoritarian US might look like:
Mandatory medical screening could become the norm
It does not sound so bad, at first. It’s for our safety, after all.
Like all reductions of freedom, they will be first described as being for our safety.
Once the public is acclimated to being barred from work for a fever or any other health issue, through pre-entry testing, it will only be a matter of time when this may be employed everywhere people go.
In many places, you cannot get into city hall, or a courtroom unless you pass through a metal detector. In airports, people are treated to the undignified process of taking their shoes, off, getting a full-body scan and being frisked.
While being scanned, they hold their hands above their heads in the arrest posture.
There seems to be no indignity people will refuse to undergo in order to have safety. And there seems to be no indignity authoritarians will not impose, if they can get away with it – not always for our safety.
Mandatory screening sounds benign at first.
At its extreme – and it is believed this was done in China – people needed to be screened not just to enter a place but in order to leave their homes.
Consider, if down the road, you do try to enter someplace and test positive for coronavirus – what then?
The prospect looms that you will not just be turned away from entering work or a supermarket. Screeners may be required to report you to authorities. You may be required to isolate.
You may be required to reveal your contacts for whatever time period for whatever disease is being tested.
If you cannot quarantine “safely” at home [a determination made by authorities], you may be required to quarantine at a government facility.
We keep hearing the term “the new normal.”
Under the new normal, you would be basically under arrest. It could be argued that you are already under arrest at the moment you are ordered to quarantine whether at your own home or a government facility.
You are under arrest if you are ordered to shelter in place, even if you do not have coronavirus.
According to published reports, health and legal experts predict that on-the-job medical screening, such as temperature checks, antibody tests, and blood tests will be a reality for those who return to work in the months ahead.
Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot and Starbucks are taking temperatures of employees before they are allowed to work.
That may just be the beginning.
Another concept under consideration is the “immunity certificate,” which verifies that a person has had COVID-19 before they return to work. The UK is considering an “immunity passport” program.
It presents an ugly specter of people being allowed to work or leave their homes, perhaps as early as this fall, only if the government gives them a passport. A passport not to travel to a foreign country, but a passport in order to work or possibly leave your home.
It sounds impossible, but the hint from the experts taken in their most ominous but possible interpretation makes this entirely possible especially if the American desire for temporary safety trumps the desire for essential freedom.
***
They’ve Only Just Begun
YouTube and social media sites are just beginning their ugly road of censorship.
YouTube is removing content concerning coronavirus that ‘fact-checkers’ determine to be untrue.
They recently removed a video of two doctors who suggested COVID-19 death numbers were being inflated and urged an end to lockdowns because they believe they do more harm than good.
YouTube took down the video featuring Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, who run an urgent-care clinic in Bakersfield, California, because they claim it violated their user policy, which is that no one should be allowed to dispute government health officials, and especially the World Health Organization [WHO.]
The video with Erickson and Massihi had more than five million views before it was removed. Its popularity no doubt figured into the decision to remove it.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told CNN that “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”
The World Health Organization is now America’s ultimate authority.
“Consider that for a moment,” Tucker Carlson said. “As a matter of science, it’s ludicrous. Like everyone else involved in global pandemic policy, the WHO has been wrong in its recommendations. In January, WHO told us that coronavirus could not spread from person-to-person. In March, they told us that face masks didn’t work. Those are lies and they were welcome on Google’s platforms.”
Why is WHO the ultimate authority to the point of censorship?
Why should any scientist, scholar or even the average American who disagrees with WHO be censored?
The whole idea of free speech is to be able to dispute authority.
Big Tech is trying to control free speech during the pandemic and perhaps beyond. The question is why?
Why wouldn’t we want extensive debate on such an important topic as coronavirus?
Facebook and Twitter are also removing posts they say contain health “misinformation” or calls to break stay-at-home orders.
Big Tech now decides what is misinformation.
So why is Big Tech supportive of only theories supporting dread of a pandemic and not dread of governmental authority, or trying to question what is behind this pandemic, if there is something behind it, other than it accidentally erupted from China based on bats at a wet market?
Why shouldn’t we question measures used to suppress it?
This is not to say that the pandemic is not dreadful. But are there dreadful forces behind the pandemic and behind combating the pandemic?
Why shouldn’t there be robust discussion?
Is this suppression of dissenting voices – already well known in China – where the virus supposedly came from – merely for public safety? Does Big Tech gain by these changes to America?
Is there giant money behind advancing the “new normal?”
Will it become illegal to even ask this question?
It may never be illegal, but because Big Tech controls search engines, you can become invisible, just for asking, just for publishing that which does not support Big Tech’s agenda.
[My comments in bold and brackets].
US Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has a message for the CEOs of Google, YouTube and Twitter when it comes to coronavirus misinformation: please be more like Facebook.
[Don’t allow anything that authorities decide is misinformation to be published.]
It’s an unusual request from a D.C. lawmaker after Congress has spent the past few years scolding Facebook for its misinformation policies.
[Read “misinformation policies” as “free speech policies”.]
But the coronavirus pandemic has given Facebook an opportunity to reclaim its reputation
[Read “reclaim its reputation” as “a censor of free speech”.]
and at least one lawmaker is taking notice.
Facebook said earlier this month it would notify users if they had engaged with a post that had been removed for including misinformation about Covid-19 in violation of its policies. Facebook will also direct users to myths debunked by the World Health Organization.
[WHO, the ultimate authority].
That marked a major step for Facebook, which has wrung its hands over other forms of misinformation, most notably in political ads. But even while it has refused to fact-check
[It is not the job for a free speech platform to fact check political ads.]
or remove most political ads that contain false information,
[Incumbents want to tell Facebook what is a true political ad, versus a false one.]
Facebook said it would remove any that contain misinformation about the coronavirus.
[“Misinformation” being decided by Facebook and, ultimately WHO, despite the fact that no one really knows the truth about coronavirus and official versions are changing all the time.]
Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee that investigated Russian meddling in the 2016 election, asked the chief executives at Google, YouTube and Twitter to consider a similar policy to Facebook’s in letters sent on Wednesday.
[Schiff wants everything that does not support WHO’s theories on the pandemic to be censored.]
“While taking down harmful misinformation [as judged by WHO or any approved government authority] is a crucial step, mitigating the harms from false content that is removed requires also ensuring that those users who accessed it while it was available have as high a likelihood of possible of viewing the facts as well,” Schiff wrote to the CEOs.
CNN Dominates – But Why?
CNN is by the leader in propaganda supporting WHO and one of the most virulent anti-Trump media.
It is perhaps not astonishing – in our new normal censorship world – that CNN ranks highest, even dominates the Google search engines for the term “Coronavirus”.
CNN often ranks higher than the New York Times, Fox or any other major media outlet.
It is evident that mostly anti-Trump stories make it to the first few pages of Google searches for coronavirus.
That cannot be by accident.
Many conservative sites have large audiences, some as large as CNN. You will never find them in the first few pages of Google. Consequently, the average person who searches news online for coronavirus is being guided by search engines which seem to present above all else – CNN.
Let’s look at Google News search at 11:24 pm April 29. There are reportedly 1.4 billion results for the term “coronavirus”. In my search, CNN had nine stories out of the first 34 stories.
The following day, same time, CNN had seven of the first 34, including the number one story.
Despite there being thousands of media outlets publishing stories on coronavirus, CNN dominates the dialogue.
Why is that?
Regardless of the reason, it shows Big Tech controls who gets to be most read, whose bias is to be most widely disseminated. And for now, during the pandemic, it seems to be CNN.
Between bias and censorship, we are beginning to do a China-light method for propaganda for Americans for the coronavirus.
It may get worse.
An Army of Tracers
A new report released by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security estimates that, to prevent a resurgence, the United States would need at least 100,000 contact tracers spread out across the country…
In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo detailed the state’s plan to trace all coronavirus cases… He said the system aims to trace the whereabouts of everyone who tests positive for the virus, then notify anyone they came in contact with while infected.
Cuomo said they will train 30 “contact tracers” for every 100,000 people in an affected area. If that estimate is reached, New York could need anywhere from 6,400 to 17,000 tracers statewide.
“It will require, under any scale, a tracing army,” he said.
The plan would require erecting regional isolation facilities [emphasis mine] to monitor the outbreak and hiring a dedicated pool of so-called contact tracers to track the spread of the virus.
“Local regions will need to build isolation facilities for infected patients, [Cuomo] said.
Regional isolation facilities?
What will these look like?
So, let’s see if I have this right: New York will have 6,000 -17,000 tracers to find people who have been in contact with people who tested positive.
And if need be, people will be put in isolation facilities?
Who decides?
Will dedicated contact tracers have police powers or be required to report to law enforcement?
What if someone declines to go into a regional isolation facility? Will he or she be removed by force from their home?
The consensus among public health experts is that safely emerging from lockdown will require testing millions of Americans every week for the virus that causes COVID-19 and isolating those who test positive. [emphasis mine]
To make that a reality …. we … need people to actually take the tests and stay home if they’re positive.
… We should now turn some of our attention toward compliance – peoples’ willingness to be tested and, if necessary, go into quarantine. Compliance could turn out to be the biggest bottleneck to our success….
Even seemingly healthy people will need to take tests.
It will be easy to persuade those suffering from the symptoms of COVID-19 to take a test. The bigger challenge will be to persuade those of us who are feeling healthy. The science is clear. To bottle up the virus, we have to isolate the asymptomatic spreaders. To identify these hidden infections, we will have to test virtually all Americans regularly. [emphasis mine]
Where the virus is active, we might need to test people every week or even every day.
… [voluntary] compliance is likely to be low. Can we really expect a person who feels healthy to voluntarily go to a doctor’s office or pharmacy to be tested every week, likely waiting in line with people who have COVID symptoms, especially if he or she has tested negative on every other occasion?… imposing penalties or offering rewards [is the answer]…
To succeed, a “test and isolate” strategy for controlling the virus [must include] a policy that [uses] carrots [as well as] sticks…
…. If our modeling is correct … we have to quarantine up to 20 million people this year…
I understand the carrot part but I’d like to know more about the sticks that will be used on people who do not agree to be tested perhaps daily.
***
To me, it seems that what mainstream media is telling us is to get ready to sacrifice essential liberty for government’s version of your safety.
“There are times when government must curtail individual freedoms to protect the public. But those measures must end once the threat passes,” their Editorial Board writes on May 1, 2020.
“The nation is under siege from the worst pandemic in a century, and the United States is on track to suffer more deaths than any other industrialized country from SARS-CoV-2, the medical name for the novel coronavirus….
“Temporary limitations on some liberties don’t seem to concern most Americans at this moment. Polls show that 70 percent to 90 percent of the public support measures to slow the spread of the virus, even if those measures require temporarily yielding certain freedoms and allowing the economy to suffer in the short run.”
The Times seems to support more aggressive government approaches adding, “every country that has managed to get its Covid-19 outbreak under control has done so with measures far more aggressive than anything tried in the United States so far.”
“So far” – are the operative words.
“In China, South Korea and Singapore, the authorities quickly established comprehensive testing, along with rigorous contact tracing, isolation and quarantine.”
“Rigorous” in China, South Korea and Singapore means authoritarian.
“Civil liberties may feel to some like a second-order problem when thousands of Americans are dying of a disease with no known treatment or vaccine,” the Times continues
Is that so – civil liberties are a second-order problem? Is that ever true?
“Yet while unprecedented emergencies may demand unprecedented responses, those responses can easily tip into misuse and abuse or can become part of our daily lives even after the immediate threat has passed. For examples, Americans need look no further than the excesses of the post-Sept. 11 Patriot Act.”
Here the Times makes an excellent point.
The Deep State led by such as Robert Mueller and James Comey did use 9-11 via the Patriot Act to steal American freedoms and we never got them back. The Deep State will look to do the same with the coronavirus.
It is an opportunity to permanently steal freedom – by claiming the curtailment of freedom is only temporary.
This is an old bad government ruse.
Governments are now imposing restrictions on citizens that some in government will not want removed when the pandemic is gone.
In fact, it is possible [even if not probable] that plans are afoot to keep the populace in a constant pandemic or some crisis state to keep the people under ever greater control.
Currently, free speech, association and religious exercise under the First Amendment have all been suspended in states where there is a lockdown or where people are prohibited from gathering.
I don’t believe in the history of the US have church services been suspended until this year.
Greater Surveillance
“In normal times, the authorities generally have to obtain a warrant to search your personal property, like a cellphone, or to retrieve its data to find your location” the Times writes. But …. “Cellphones are particularly useful at this moment, when it’s crucial to know where infected people have been, and whom they’ve been close to. Several countries around the world, as well as some American states, have rolled out apps that either encourage or require their citizens to check in regularly and report their locations.”
Authoritarian countries require citizens to report their locations.
Will the US demand this from Americans under the name of safety?
Can cellphone data be used in a way that helps stem the spread of the coronavirus, and at the same time get people used to being monitored by the government at all times, like right out of Orwell’s 1984?
The key questions are what curtailing of freedoms will survive the pandemic? And are we being set up to take the fall – the fall of our freedoms, with the pandemic crisis being used as the “happy crisis” for authoritarians in America to makes us more like China, as slaves to the government?
