Twitter’s board has accepted an offer from billionaire Elon Musk to buy the social media company and take it private, the company announced Monday.
The stock closed up 5.64% for the day after it was halted for the news.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement included in the press release announcing the $44 billion deal. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
The cash deal at $54.20 per share is valued at around $44 billion, according to the press release. Twitter will become a private company once the deal is complete.
Assuming the deal closes and Musk takes ownership of Twitter, the company will be controlled by the world’s richest person and someone who’s been a heavy critic of the platform while using it in legally contentious ways, mostly through sensitive posts about his car manufacturer, Tesla. Though Musk has indicated that his primary interest in Twitter has to do with what he views as the company’s censorship of free speech, Musk critics are justifiably concerned that the billionaire’s control over the platform will result in the silencing of their voices and others with whom he may disagree.
Twitter’s board sought to fend off a hostile takeover by adopting a so-called poison pill, or shareholder rights agreement, that would allow other shareholders to buy the stock at a discount should Musk or another person or group acquire more than 15% of outstanding common stock. The plan would dilute that person’s holdings in a strategy commonly employed to prevent unwanted acquisitions.
The board seemed to have two reasons to consider rejecting the deal. The first was that the offer, while priced well above Twitter’s current share price, was arguably too low given it had recently surged above that price tag.
The second was that it was initially unclear how Musk would fund the deal. Despite being the world’s richest person, much of his wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, meaning he would likely have to borrow against his holdings to fund the deal.
But the offer became more concrete once Musk announced in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that he received commitments for $46.5 billion to help finance the potential deal. That included about $25.5 billion in debt financing from Morgan Stanley Senior Funding and other firms. He said he committed about $21 billion in equity financing.
Musk said in the same filing he was exploring a tender offer to purchase shares of Twitter directly from shareholders.
Musk’s interest in Twitter comes from his own frequent use of the platform. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO often uses his large platform to share jokes, engage with his 83.6 million followers and make business announcements.
The latter has gotten him in some trouble. He came under SEC investigation after tweeting in 2018 that he had secured funding at $420 per share to take Tesla private. The agency charged Musk with securities fraud as a result of those tweets. Musk and Tesla reached a revised settlement agreement over those charges in 2019, which Musk is now attempting to terminate.
Musk said at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver earlier this month that he did in fact have funding secured at the time of that tweet, adding that he was “forced to concede to the SEC unlawfully” in the settlement. The SEC declined to comment on Musk’s remarks at the time.
Also at the TED2022 conference, Musk shared how he would like to see the platform change under his ownership.
“I think it’s very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech,” he said at the time, acknowledging that some content moderation would be needed to deal with explicit calls to violence and ensure the service complied with the laws in the country in which it operates.
He also said he generally would prefer “time-outs” to permanent bans, which could suggest a path for former President Donald Trump to rejoin the platform under Musk’s control. Twitter banned Trump from the platform following his tweets around the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Some Republican lawmakers have expressed excitement at the prospect of Musk owning the company after complaining for years of what they say is censorship of conservative voices by mainstream tech companies. Twitter and others have said they do not censor speech based on ideology, but instead enforce their stated community guidelines.
“Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.
Under the terms of the agreement, Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction. The purchase price represents a 38% premium to Twitter’s closing stock price on April 1, 2022, which was the last trading day before Mr. Musk disclosed his approximately 9% stake in Twitter.
Bret Taylor, Twitter’s Independent Board Chair, said, “The Twitter Board conducted a thoughtful and comprehensive process to assess Elon’s proposal with a deliberate focus on value, certainty, and financing. The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter’s stockholders.”
Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s CEO, said, “Twitter has a purpose and relevance that impacts the entire world. Deeply proud of our teams and inspired by the work that has never been more important.”
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” said Mr. Musk. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”
Transaction Terms and Financing
The transaction, which has been unanimously approved by the Twitter Board of Directors, is expected to close in 2022, subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders, the receipt of applicable regulatory approvals and the satisfaction of other customary closing conditions.
Mr. Musk has secured $25.5 billion of fully committed debt and margin loan financing and is providing an approximately $21.0 billion equity commitment. There are no financing conditions to the closing of the transaction.
For further information regarding all terms and conditions contained in the definitive transaction agreement, please see Twitter’s Current Report on Form 8-K, which will be filed in connection with the transaction.
First Quarter 2022 Earnings Results
Twitter plans to release its first quarter fiscal year 2022 results before market open on April 28, 2022. In light of the pending transaction announced today, Twitter will not hold a corresponding conference call.
Advisors
Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, J.P. Morgan, and Allen & Co. are serving as financial advisors to Twitter, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Professional Corporation and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP are serving as legal counsel. Morgan Stanley is acting as lead financial advisor to Mr. Musk. BofA Securities and Barclays are also acting as financial advisors. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is serving as legal counsel.”
When the U.S. security state announces that Big Tech’s centralized censorship power must be preserved, we should ask what this reveals about whom this regime serves.
A group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy. The majority of this letter is devoted to repeatedly invoking the grave threat allegedly posed to the U.S. by Russia as illustrated by the invasion of Ukraine, and it repeatedly points to the dangers of Putin and the Kremlin to justify the need to preserve Big Tech’s power in its maximalist form. Any attempts to restrict Big Tech’s monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow.
While one of their central claims is that Big Tech monopoly power is necessary to combat (i.e., censor) “foreign disinformation,” several of these officials are themselves leading disinformation agents: many were the same former intelligence officials who signed the now-infamous-and-debunked pre-election letter fraudulently claiming that the authentic Hunter Biden emails had the “hallmarks” of Russia disinformation (former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Obama CIA Director Michael Morrell, former Obama CIA/Pentagon chief Leon Panetta). Others who signed this new letter have strong financial ties to the Big Tech corporations whose power they are defending in the name of national security (Morrell, Panetta, former Bush National Security Adviser Fran Townsend).
The ostensible purpose of the letter is to warn of the national security dangers from two different bipartisan bills — one pending in the Senate, the other in the House — that would prohibit Big Tech monopolies from using their vertical power to “discriminate” against competitors (the way Google, for instance, uses its search engine business to bury the videos of competitors to its YouTube property, such as Rumble, or the way Google and Apple use their stores and Amazon uses its domination over hosting services to destroy competitors).
One bill in the Senate is co-sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), and has attracted ample support in both parties, as has a similar House bill co-sponsored by House Antitrust Committee Chair David Cicilline (D-RI) and ranking member Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO). The amount of bipartisan support each bill has garnered — and the widespread animosity toward Big Tech reflected by this Congressional support — has shocked Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook lobbyists, who are accustomed to getting their way in Washington with lavish donations to the key politicians in each party.
This letter by former national security officials is, in one sense, an act of desperation. The bills have received the support of the key committees with jurisdiction over antitrust and Big Tech. In the Senate, five conservative Republican Committee members who have been outspoken critics of Big Tech power — Grassley, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Josh Hawley (R-MI), Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) — joined with Democrats to ensure the passage of one bill out of the Judiciary Committee by a 16-6 vote, with a companion bill passing that Committee with the support of 20 of twenty-two Senators. As The Intercept‘s Sara Sirota and Ryan Grim report: “Both bills have Big Tech reeling” since “a floor vote would likely be a blowout for Big Tech.”
The extreme animus harbored by large parts of the left and right toward Big Tech make it very difficult for any lawmaker to go on record in opposition to these proposed bills if they are forced to publicly take a position in a floor vote. Many Senators with financial ties to Big Tech — including the two California Senate Democrats who represent Silicon Valley and are recipients of their largesse (Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla) — have expressed reservations about these reform efforts and have refused to co-sponsor the bill, yet still voted YES when forced to vote in Committee. This shows that public pressure to rein in Big Tech is becoming too large to enable Silicon Valley to force lawmakers to ignore their constituents’ wishes with lobbyist donations. These politicians will work behind the scenes to kill efforts to rein in Big Tech, but will not vote against such efforts if forced to take a public position.
As a result, Big Tech’s last hope is to keep the bill from reaching the floor where Senators would be forced to go on record, a goal they hope will be advanced by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York due to his close ties to Silicon Valley. “Both [Schumer’s] children are on the payroll of companies the proposals would seek to rein in,” reportedThe New York Post: “Jessica Schumer is a registered lobbyist at Amazon, according to New York state records. Alison Schumer works at Facebook as a product marketing manager.” Despite that, Schumer claimed to The Intercept that he supports both bills and will vote in favor of them, even though he has engaged in maneuvers to impede the bills from getting a full floor vote.
This is where these former intelligence and national security officials come in. While these former CIA, Homeland Security and Pentagon operatives have little sway in the Senate Judiciary and House Antitrust Committees, they command great loyalty from Congressional national security committees. Those committees, created to exert oversight of the U.S. intelligence and military agencies, are notoriously captive to the U.S. National Security State. The ostensible purpose of this new letter is to insist that Big Tech monopoly power is vital to U.S. national security — because it is necessary for them to censor “disinformation” from the internet, especially now with the grave Russian threat reflected by the war in Ukraine — and they thus demand that the anti-Big-Tech bills first be reviewed not only by the Judiciary and Antitrust Committees, but also the national security committees where they wield power and influence, which have traditionally played no role in regulating the technology sector:
We call on the congressional committees with national security jurisdiction – including the Armed Services Committees, Intelligence Committees, and Homeland Security Committees in both the House and Senate – to conduct a review of any legislation that could hinder America’s key technology companies in the fight against cyber and national security risks emanating from Russia’s and China’s growing digital authoritarianism.
Why would these former national security and intelligence officials be so devoted to preserving the unfettered power of Big Tech to control and censor the internet? One obvious explanation is the standard one that always runs Washington: several of them have a financial interest in serving Big Tech’s agenda.
Unsurprisingly, Apple CEO Tim Cook has himself pushed the claim that undermining Big Tech’s power in any way would threaten U.S national security. And there is now an army of well-compensated-by-Silicon-Valley former national security officials echoing his message. A well-researched Politico articlefrom September — headlined: “12 former security officials who warned against antitrust crackdown have tech ties” — detailed how many of these former officials who invoke national security claims to protect Big Tech are on the take from the key tech monopolies:
The warning last week from a dozen former national security leaders was stark: An antitrust crackdown on Silicon Valley could threaten the nation’s economy and “cede U.S. tech leadership to China.”
But the group was united by more than their histories of holding senior defense and intelligence roles in the Trump, Obama and George W. Bush administrations: All 12 have ties to major tech companies, either from working with them directly or serving with organizations that get money from them, according to a POLITICO analysis….
Seven of the 12, including Panetta, hold roles at Beacon Global Strategies, a public relations firm that according to a person familiar with the matter counts Google as a client…Five of the former officials, including former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Robert Cardillo and former National Security Agency deputy director Richard Ledgett, serve as advisory board members at Beacon. Panetta and Michael Morell, a former acting CIA director under President Barack Obama, are senior counselors for the firm….
Frances Townsend, who was a counterterrorism and homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush, is on the national security advisory board for American Edge, a Facebook-funded groupthat opposes changes to strengthen antitrust laws….Townsend is also on the board of directors of the Atlantic Council, which counts Facebook and Google as funders; the board of trustees for Center for Strategic and International Studies, which counts Apple and Google as funders; and the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, which receives money from Microsoft and counts Facebook and Google in its highest membership category.
As Rep. Buck, the Colorado House Republican who favors reform, put it: “It is not surprising that individuals who receive money from Big Tech are defending Big Tech. At the end of the day, Big Tech is harming U.S. competition and innovation through anticompetitive practices.” In other words, these former intelligence officials are exploiting their national security credentials to protect an industry in which they have a deep financial interest.
The view that preservation of Big Tech is vital for national security is by no means a unanimous view even in that world. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark and others have vehemently argued that this claim is a “myth.” As veteran internet security expert Bruce Schneier observed: “These bills will encourage competition, prevent monopolist extortion, and guarantee users a new right to digital self-determination.” But the National Security State has enough True Believers combined with paid shills to make it appear as if Americans should be desperate to preserve and protect Big Tech’s power because this power is crucial to keeping America safe and, particularly, fighting Russia.
There are indeed valid and rational reasons for these officials to view Big Tech monopoly power as a vital weapon in advancing their national security agenda. As I documented last week when reporting on the unprecedented censorship regime imposed in the West regarding the war in Ukraine, Big Tech censorship of political speech is not random. Domestically, it is virtually always devoted to silencing any meaningful dissent from liberal orthodoxy or official pieties on key political controversies. But in terms of foreign policy, the censorship patterns of tech monopolies virtually always align with U.S. foreign policy, and for understandable reasons: Big Tech and the U.S. security state are in a virtually complete union, with all sorts of overlapping, mutual financial interests:
Note that this censorship regime is completely one-sided and, as usual, entirely aligned with U.S. foreign policy. Western news outlets and social media platforms have been flooded with pro-Ukrainian propaganda and outright lies from the start of the war. A New York Timesarticle from early March put it very delicately in its headline: “Fact and Mythmaking Blend in Ukraine’s Information War.” Axios was similarly understated in recognizing this fact: “Ukraine misinformation is spreading — and not just from Russia.” Members of the U.S. Congress have gleefully spreadfabrications that went viral to millions of people, with no action from censorship-happy Silicon Valley corporations. That is not a surprise: all participants in war use disinformation and propaganda to manipulate public opinion in their favor, and that certainly includes all direct and proxy-war belligerents in the war in Ukraine.
Yet there is little to no censorship — either by Western states or by Silicon Valley monopolies — of pro-Ukrainian disinformation, propaganda and lies. The censorship goes only in one direction: to silence any voices deemed “pro-Russian,” regardless of whether they spread disinformation….Their crime, like the crime of so many other banished accounts, was not disinformation but skepticism about the US/NATO propaganda campaign. Put another way, it is not “disinformation” but rather viewpoint-error that is targeted for silencing. One can spread as many lies and as much disinformation as one wants provided that it is designed to advance the NATO agenda in Ukraine (just as one is free to spread disinformation providedthat its purpose is to strengthen the Democratic Party, which wields its majoritarian power in Washington to demand greater censorship and commands the support of most of Silicon Valley). But what one cannot do is question the NATO/Ukrainian propaganda framework without running a very substantial risk of banishment.
It is unsurprising that Silicon Valley monopolies exercise their censorship power in full alignment with the foreign policy interests of the U.S. Government. Many of the key tech monopolies — such as Google and Amazon — routinely seek and obtain highly lucrativecontracts with the U.S. security state, including both the CIA and NSA. Their top executives enjoy very close relationships with top Democratic Party officials. And Congressional Democrats have repeatedly hauled tech executives before their various Committees to explicitly threaten themwith legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more in accordance with the policy goals and political interests of that party.
Needless to say, the U.S. security state wants to maintain a stranglehold on political discourse in the U.S. and the world more broadly. They want to be able to impose propagandistic narratives without challenge and advocate for militarism without dissent. To accomplish that, they need a small handful of corporations which are subservient to them to hold in their hands as much concentrated power over the internet as possible.
If a free and fair competitive market were to arise whereby social media platforms more devoted to free speech could fairly compete with Google and Facebook— as the various pending bills in Congress are partially designed to foster — then that new diversity of influence, that diffusion of power, would genuinely threaten the ability of the CIA and the Pentagon and the White House to police political discourse and suppress dissent from their policies and assertions. By contrast, by maintaining all power in the hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state, the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.
In this new letter, these national security operatives barely bother to hide their intention to exploit the strong animosity toward Russia that they have cultivated, and the accompanying intense emotions from the ubiquitous, unprecedented media coverage of the war in Ukraine, to prop up their goals. Over and over, they cite the grave Russian threat — a theme they have been disseminating and manufacturing since the Russiagate fraud of 2016 — to manipulate Americans to support the preservation of Big Tech’s concentrated power, and to imply that anyone seeking to limit Big Tech power or make the market more competitive is a threat to U.S. national security:
This is a pivotal moment in modern history. There is a battle brewing between authoritarianism and democracy, and the former is using all the tools at its disposal, including a broad disinformation campaign and the threat of cyber-attacks, to bring about a change in the global order. We must confront these global challenges. . . . U.S. technology platforms have given the world the chance to see the real story of the Russian military’s horrific human rights abuses in Ukraine. . . . At the same time, President Putinand his regime have sought to twist facts in order to show Russia as a liberator instead of an aggressor. . . .
The Russian government is seeking to alter the information landscape by blocking Russian citizens from receiving content that would show the true facts on the ground. .. . . . Indeed, it is telling that among the Kremlin’s first actions of the war was blocking U.S. platforms in Russia. Putin knows that U.S. digital platforms can provide Russian citizens valuable views and facts about the war that he tries to distort through lies and disinformation. U.S. technology platforms have already taken concrete steps to shine a light on Russia’s actions to brutalize Ukraine. . . . Providing timely and accurate on-the-ground information – and disrupting the scourge of disinformation from Russian state media – is essential for allowing the world (including the Russian people) to see the human toll of Russia’s aggression. . . . [T]he United States is facing an extraordinary threat from Russian cyber-attacks . . .
In the face of these growing threats, U.S. policymakers must not inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology platforms to counter increasing disinformation and cybersecurity risks, particularly as the West continues to rely on the scale and reach of these firms to push back on the Kremlin . . . . Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the start of a new chapter in global history, one in which the ideals of democracy will be put to the test. The United States will need to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure that the safety of its citizens and the narrative of events continues to be shaped by facts, not by foreign adversaries.
It is hardly controversial or novel to observe that the U.S. security state always wants and needs a hated foreign enemy precisely because it allows them to claim whatever powers and whatever budgets they want in the name of stopping that foreign villain. And every war and every new enemy ushers in new authoritarian powers and the trampling of civil liberties: both the First War on Terror, justified by 9/11, and the New Domestic War on Terror, justified by 1/6, should have taught us that lesson permanently. Usually, though, U.S. security state propagandists are a bit more subtle about how they manipulate anger and fear of foreign villains to manipulate public opinion for their own authoritarian ends.
Perhaps because of their current desperation about the support these bills have attracted, they are now just nakedly and shamelessly trying to channel the anger and hatred that they have successfully stoked toward Russia to demand that Big Tech not be weakened, regulated or restricted in any way. The cynical exploitation could hardly be more overt: if you hate Putin the way any loyal and patriotic American should, then you must devote yourself to full preservation of the power of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.
It should go without saying that these life-long security state operatives do not care in the slightest about the dangers of “disinformation.” Indeed — as evidenced by the fact that most of them generated one Russiagate fraud after the next during
We live in perilous times for freedom of speech, and we’re beginning to see the unchecked power of technology companies as they flex their muscle throughout the Ukraine conflict. Oddly, Facebook has decided to allow praise of a neo-nazi group in Ukraine, a local militia called the Azov Battalion. As Sam Biddle from The Intercept writes, “What happens when a group you’ve deemed too dangerous to freely discuss is defending its country against a full-scale assault?”
This issue of militias being put on Facebook’s Dangerous Organizations list also affects us in the United States, since we know hundreds of state militias in the United States have also been put on this list. So not only is Facebook involved in foreign policy, they are heavily involved in regulating state-based militia organizations. I discuss Facebook’s policy on nationalism and militia groups in chapter 7 of my book, titled Behind The Mask of Facebook: A Whistleblower’s Shocking Story of Big Tech Bias and Censorship.
Despite pushback against Facebook and tech titans, citizens and even foreign governments are powerless against tech companies’ wave of propaganda and influence in elections.
I’ve done my best to bring to light some of Facebook’s corruption, but little did I imagine myself four years ago being so involved in lawsuits and criminal referrals against Big Tech. I started as a content moderator for Facebook in March of 2018, and went public in 2020 with Project Veritas, after filming with a hidden camera for 9 months and exposing Facebook’s bias against conservatives and influence in the 2020 election.
Since then, I have contributed to a criminal referral to the DOJ for Mark Zuckerberg, helped organize a lawsuit against Youtube, spearheaded by Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies, and I’m currently working with the Social Media Freedom Foundation and their constitutional challenge against section 230.
The Social Media Freedom Foundation, a 501c3 founded by Jason Fyk, has a unique legal approach to section 230. Since Fyk’s personal case against Facebook went to the Supreme Court, he has standing to sue the government, which he is doing under the 5th amendment, for depriving him of liberty and property. Fyk’s original case against Facebook, explained succinctly in this March 2022 interview with NTD News, is that Facebook sold his page to another entity because they were paying more in advertising than Fyk. Jason Fyk’s initial lawsuit against Facebook from 2018 can be found here. The new constitutional challenge against section 230 argues the following:
The Social Media Freedom Foundation (“SMFF”) non-profit charity organization (in conjunction with Fyk), challenges the constitutionality of the CDA’s delegation of regulatory authority that permits the discretionary restrictive actions of a commercial private entity. This discretionary enforcement resulted in the advancement of anti-competitive animus against Fyk (and many other users like Fyk), an animus that cannot, by definition, meet the qualification of “Good Samaritan” to enjoy the entitlement of complete immunity for any and all liability for any malfeasance or tortious conduct. Regulation, penalization, or deprivation in any form, carried out by an authorized government agent (i.e., whether private or public) “to fill up the details” (i.e., fill in the quasi-legislative rules) at the directive of Congress, must afford due process and free speech of the entity or person being regulated. The SMFF and Fyk lodges this facial and as-applied constitutional challenge of Section 230, with the law being glaringly violative of the constitutional doctrines and/or statutory canons cited above.
Something strange is going on with the Hunter Biden laptop story.
As regular readers know, the New York Post was excommunicated from social media shortly before the 2020 US election by Big Tech for reporting on shady international business dealings by the Biden family – particularly in Ukraine and China, contained within a trove of emails, text messages, photographs and financial documents that were on a laptop Hunter abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019.
Covering for the Bidens to help him win the 2020 election, people like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) insisted it was Russian propaganda, and outlets that reported on the laptop were smeared as conspiracy theorists.
“FBI & DOJ concur w/ Ratcliffe that Hunter Biden's laptop & the emails in question weren't part of a Russian disinformation campaign.”
More than 50 ‘former senior intelligence officials’ signed a pre-election letter proclaiming the laptop story ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’
THE TIDE TURNS
Two weeks ago, the New York Times confirmed the laptop exists, and is legit – and confirmed several previously reported aspects of the story, including correspondence between Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer, both of whom served on the board Ukrainian energy giant Burisma.
Today, the Washington Post and CNN are piling on – with the post confirming yet-more details of the laptop contents, and CNN running a blistering segment and reporting that the federal investigation into Hunter is ‘heating up.’
Whatever the case, Glenn Greenwald isn’t about to let the MSM get away with this U-turn unscathed.
Most of these details were reported and confirmed in several outlets *before* the 2020 election — as opposed to now when it's safe to say it — but they were censored by Twitter and FB based on the CIA lie spread by most corporate outlets that it was "Russian disinformation." https://t.co/WOrzmvlz8y
The laptop's authenticity was proven *from the start*. @mtaibbi just published the pre-election texts from @TheIntercep's editor Betsy Reed saying I couldn't publish because they weren't real. She knew that was a lie but, either way, no retraction now!https://t.co/5LfecVkO2N
In a separate article on how it verified the laptop's contents, WPost said it could authenticate some using cryptographic analysis. That was available from the start. But the way we verified the Snowden, Brazil & WikiLeaks archives was also present: confirmation from 3rd parties. pic.twitter.com/xm3AxUvZ0S
Ukraine is transferring citizens’ power to the state and handing it over to the WEF and other Supranational organizations.
A global system of totalitarian technocracy has arrived, and Ukraine has happily been globalists’ Great Reset Laboratory.
In the middle of a war, Ukraine has been stealthily working hard on being the first nation to implement virtually all the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Great Reset key hallmarks: Digital identity, Vaccination passports, Universal basic income (UBI), Chinese style Social credit scores which are all combined in their already operational Diia app. The country is transferring citizens’ power to the state and handing it over to the WEF and other Supranational organizations.
While a very real conflict is raging in Ukraine, spotlights aren’t shining on the struggles of digital distribution. Yet the advocates of radical world restructuring and total surveillance recognized long ago the potential of this Eastern European country. With the vigorous participation from President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine would be a Mecca for US bio-weapons laboratories and pave the way for digital networking, the Metaverse, and a transparent citizenry. The linchpin is the digital ID app known as “Diia,” an acronym for “The Government and me.”
Zelensky’s Social Credit System
The journey started in 2019 after Zelensky had only been in office for just a few months. The “Ministry for Digital Transformation” was founded, with the main task of creating a government platform for smartphones. The Diia app was launched in February 2020. Since then, progress has been accelerating. With more than 50 applications, online identification, and official governmental channels available via the app which include: Driver’s license, Covid vaccination passport, student ID card, the ability to set up a business, apply for insurance, and receive social benefits. A French tech portal wrote the following about it: “A model we previously only knew from China with its social credit system.” By the way, “ID Austria” is also supposed to go in this direction in its final expansion.
As a social credit system, it must also be implemented quite literally. Last year, Zelensky promised rewards of 1,000 Hryvnia (about 30 euros) – about one-tenth of a typical monthly salary – to any citizen who provided proof of a full vaccination record in Diia. Authorities are no longer permitted to insist on paper documents – and observers believe that the dual option is only a temporary solution. The timing is hardly a coincidence. Two weeks before it went live, Zelensky was named “Guest of Honour” for the first time at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit hosted by the “Great Reset” architect Klaus Schwab.
“Investment Mecca” for Tech Companies
Zelenski’s speech at the World Economic Forum included the buzzword of a “new normal.” He claimed that current global institutions do not function efficiently and that international security must be rethought. He presented a vision in which Ukraine would take a leading position in Central and Eastern Europe. In doing so, he openly gave his country’s opportunity for investment, recalling that many “big tech” companies started in garages. He presented his dream of a kind of Eastern European Silicon Valley that would turn his country into an “investment mecca.” Or, as Zelenski put it: “Ukraine is the place where miracles come true […] there is a substantial opportunity to expand new economic sectors”.
Schwab was enthused by the idea and pleased about the “reforms” in the country, many of which had been initiated by the WEF itself through WEF subordinate think tanks in Ukraine. However, the WEF isn’t alone in the interest of Ukraine. The globalist Atlantic Council, for example, recognized the potential for “innovation” shortly after Zelensky’s inauguration and mentioned an app that can operate door intercom systems by cell phone, as well as the blockchain company Bitfury. The Atlantic Council praised the developments as positive and mentioned a number of other IT companies in Ukraine. At a networking meeting, Schwab’s “young world leaders,” Justin Trudeau and Zelenski, discussed how to deepen such “innovations further.” Davos also has its own “Ukraine House,” which is regularly available for “networking” during WEF meetings.
Deals with Apple & Microsoft: Digital Census
After the WEF appeal, things moved quickly. A deal was quickly struck with Apple to jointly conduct a digital census in 2023. Once again, using the Diia app and the U.S. company assisting to improve it. In particular, Apple will identify “priority projects that will promote Ukraine’s transition to paperless mode.” Once again, the collaboration is running under the “Ministry of Digital Transformation” – and is not an isolated case.
As recently as 2020, the Ministry finalized a similar deal with Microsoft, which was expected to add $500 million in value. The collaboration is said to be far-reaching, creating a “highly secure cloud platform ecosystem.” This is expected to impact “various industries and promote energy transition, digital transformation of agriculture and sustainability.” In addition, the employees of the Ukrainian government and public authorities are to receive a fully networked environment.
Incidentally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is creating the Metaverse, a kind of virtual reality that will connect more and more areas of life, was photographed with Zelenski. Activist Naomi Klein already had concerns that Corona would allow “Silicon Valley” to create a digital substructure for a global dictatorship. It is quite conceivable that the war in Ukraine will be another springboard for such goals.
Ukrainians are being bought off for a virtual life – 5 times more salary
To attract further investment to the so-called “Diia City,” it was announced in 2020. This is a digital model for an economic zone with tax benefits for tech corporations. Among the few taxes required by the “Diia City” is a military tax to support the Ukrainian military. High wages are promised about five times higher than the average salary. The goal is to create 450,000 relevant jobs. The aim was to be an “economic model for simplified economic rules” that would form “the basis for the economic transformation of the entire country.” Zelensky fully backed the project. He repeated what he said in Davos: “We want to make Ukraine a global IT hub, a leader in innovation and technology.”
The goal was to attract Ukrainian and international IT companies, high-tech firms, investment funds, startups, and educational groups. The fields to be plowed ranged from agricultural technology to artificial intelligence, drone construction, aircraft and space technology, financial technology, medical neural networks and biotechnology, the advertising industry, trading platforms, the Internet of Things, publishing, blockchain companies, digital outsourcing, the graphics industry, and e-sports companies. In other words, a huge tax-privileged technology park for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” in which man and machine merge. The ultimate goal, of course, is the “Internet of the Bodies,” in which, according to WEF’s plan, the collection of “bodily data via a range of devices that can be implanted, swallowed or worn.”
Beginning of the end of cash based on the China model?
The plans are obvious: Ukraine was meant as a Beta Test for the fully networked Great Reset world. The renowned Forbes magazine, for instance, also attested the country to be leading the “digital currency revolution.” This is a double-edged sword: A system that starts as a decentralized attempt to regain financial freedom can quickly become a cashless nightmare. Recall China, for example, where free cryptocurrencies are banned – but the country began working on the digital yuan simultaneously. Currently, Chinese state employees already receive part of their salary as state digital money. In China, people are now even begging for alms with QR codes. Similar plans have long been underway in Europe, as Wochenblick previously reported.
Ukraine being proposed as a hub for the digital market is nothing new either. One lever for this is so-called “non-fungible tokens.” These are digital goods that have a certain equivalent value as unique items. Examples include digital art, music, or unique items in PC games. In theory, however, NFTs can take any popular form as long as it is represented in the blockchain. So in a particularly dystopian future, people could theoretically have to speculate with cryptocurrency for a loaf of bread. Recently, an NFT of a Ukraine flag was sold for $6.75 million to pump that amount of money into the country.
From the digital nightclub to real virtual hell
Digital applications in the Metaverse can take any form – and again, Ukraine is a playground for these ideas. Kyiv-based startup MultiNFT launched its own token-based cryptocurrency a few days ago. So far, the company operates digital nightclubs in the Metaverse, for example. Such venues and events could also be used to support the country in the current conflict and beyond.
What seems like an environment of solidarity now could become an illusory world horror of coexisting interconnected Metaverses in the future. The WEF is already hoping to correct the “system error” of the uncontrolled Internet. Imagine if we all have to enter virtual reality as cyborgs or holograms for important bureaucratic purposes. There would be no easier way to eliminate any dissidents – quite literally. Considering that future possibility, the WEF praise for the “climate goals of the Ukrainian central bank” no longer sounds like a harmless part of the radical transformation…
“I’m concerned about Russian disinformation spreading online, so today I wrote to the CEOs of major tech companies to ask them to restrict the spread of Russian propaganda,” US Senator Mark Warner tweeted on Friday.
Since then YouTube has announced that it has suppressed videos by Russian state media channels so that they’ll be seen by fewer people in accordance with its openly acknowledged policy of algorithmically censoring unauthorized content, as well as de-monetizing all such videos on the platform. Google and Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta both banned Russian state media from running ads and monetizing on their platforms in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Twitter announced a pause on ads in both Russia and Ukraine.
“Glad to see action from tech companies to reign in Russian propaganda and disinformation after my letter to their CEOs yesterday,” Warner tweeted on Saturday. “These are important first steps, but I’ll keep pushing for more.”
For years US lawmakers have been using threats of profit-destroying consequences to pressure Silicon Valley companies into limiting online speech in a way that aligns with the interests of Washington, effectively creating a system of government censorship by proxy. It would appear that we’re seeing a new expansion of this phenomenon today.
And the imperial media are pushing for more. Articles and news segments warning of the sinister threat posed by Russian propaganda to misinform and divide Western populations using the internet are being churned out at a rate that’s only likely to increase as this latest narrative management campaign gets into full gear. The Associated Press has a new article out for example titled “War via TikTok: Russia’s new tool for propaganda machine”.
“Armies of trolls and bots stir up anti-Ukrainian sentiment. State-controlled media outlets look to divide Western audiences. Clever TikTok videos serve up Russian nationalism with a side of humor,” AP warns.
“Analysts at several different research organizations contacted by The Associated Press said they are seeing a sharp increase in online activity by groups affiliated with the Russian state,” AP writes. “That’s in keeping with Russia’s strategy of using social media and state-run outlets to galvanize domestic support while seeking to destabilize the Western alliance.”
The “different research organizations” AP ends up citing include “Cyabra, an Israeli tech company that works to detect disinformation,” as well as the state-fundedNATOnarrative management firm The Atlantic Council.
As tends to happen whenever a consensus begins to form that a certain category of speech must be purged from the internet, imperial spinmeisters are already working to expand the definition of “Russian propaganda” which must be purged from the internet to include independent anti-imperialist commentators like myself.
Imperial narrative manager Robert Potter has a thread on Twitter currently calling for me and other anti-imperialist content creators to be labeled “State-Affiliated Media” on Twitter and ideally de-platformed across all Western social media, in my case solely because RT is one of the many outlets who occasionally choose to republish some of my blog posts for free.
I am not as Potter claims “an OP Ed columnist for Russia Today.” I don’t work for RT, I don’t write for RT, I don’t submit articles to RT, and I’ve never been paid by RT or the Russian government. RT is just one of the outlets that sometimes avail themselves of my longstanding invitation for anyone who wants to republish my work free of charge. That RT editors would find my daily rants against Western imperialism agreeable is not scandalous or conspiratorial but normal and self-evident.
Yet for agents of imperial narrative control like Potter (who ironically works directly for the US State Department but thinks my posts should be labeled “State-Affiliated Media” by Twitter), even this is enough to justify complete silencing. I will not be in the slightest bit surprised to see a great deal more of these efforts as the new cold war continues to escalate.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, an empire-loyal NGO ostensibly focused primarily on fighting racism and prejudice, has published a report accusing Facebook of failing to label Russian propaganda as such 91 percent of the times it occurs. The CCDH decried Mark Zuckerberg’s “failure to stop Facebook being weaponized by the Russian state”.
This sudden narrative management thrust has also seen RT taken off the air in nations like Australia, Germany and Poland, with pressures mounting in Franceand the UK to follow suit.
This despite the fact that all Western powers would have to do to eliminate RT completely is simply start allowing leftist and anti-imperialist voices to be heard on mainstream media platforms. It would immediately suck up RT’s entire foreign audience as people who’d previously needed to look outside the mainstream for sane perspectives gravitate toward media made with much better funding and a higher level of talent.
But of course we all know that’s never going to happen. The imperial media aren’t going to subvert RT by platforming voices who dispute the empire’s narratives no matter how badly they hate it, because the exact reason they hate RT is because it disputes the empire’s narratives. They’re not worried about Russian propaganda operations, they’re worried about someone else running interference on their own propaganda operations.
RT’s audience makes up about 0.04% of TV viewing in the UK. This isn’t about RT, it’s about the the agenda to continually expand and normalize the censorship of unauthorized speech. That’s what it was about when they were pretending it was about the need to fight Covid misinformation before that, and when they were pretending it was about the need to fight domestic US extremism before that, and when they were pretending it was about the need to defend election security before that, and when they were pretending it was about the need to fight Russian propaganda the first time before that one cycled back around again.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Humans are storytelling creatures, so whoever can control the stories the humans are telling themselves about what’s going on in the world has a great deal of control over the humans. Our mental chatter tends to dominate such a large percentage of our existence that if it can be controlled the controller can exert a tremendous amount of influence over the way we think, act, and vote.
The powerful understand this, while the general public mostly does not. That’s all we’ve been seeing in these attempts to regulate ideas and information as human communication becomes more and more rapid and networked. An entire oligarchic empire is built on the ability to prevent us from realizing at mass scale that that empire does not serve us and inflicts great evil upon our world. The question of whether our species can awaken to its highest potential or not boils down to whether our dominators will succeed in locking down our minds, or if we will find some way to break free.
In this article, we will explore the true nature of the international rules-based order (IRBO) and examine the forces that shape it. We will consider if the narratives we are commonly fed stack up.
It is widely accepted that the IRBO is undergoing disruptive change. That transformation is often reported as an eastward shift in the balance of power between nation states.
It is said that this new, emerging international order will be founded upon a global multipolar system of sovereign states and international law. This new system allegedly stands in opposition to the fading, western “rules-based” model.
This time, rather than relying upon western imperialism, the new international law-based system will emphasise multipolar cooperation, trade and respect for national sovereignty. It will instead be led by a Eurasian economic and technological power-block.
The apparent, ongoing antagonism of geopolitics looks likely to maintain the East-West divide we are familiar with. However, what is now being framed as the multipolar order is, in reality, the multistakeholder order.
As we shall discover, nation states are not the driving force behind the current restructuring of global governance. The geopolitical narratives we are given are frequently superficial.
Those leading the transformation have no allegiance to any nation state, only to their own globalist network and collective aspirations. In their hands, international law is no more of an impediment to their ambitions than a vague commitment to “rules.”
National governments are partners within this network formed of both state and non-state actors. Despite professed animosities, they have collaborated for decades to fashion the global governance complex that is now emerging.
No matter who is said to lead it, the IRBO is set to continue in a new form. As the post WWII system recedes, the framework being imposed to take its place is completely alien to the people who live in the former western, liberal democracies.
Thus, we too must be transformed if we are to accept the realignment. We are being conditioned to believe in the promise of the new IRBO and the global technocracy it is built upon.
Rooted firmly in American exceptionalism, Patrick described how the so-called IRBO acted as a mechanism for hegemonic control of global politics, the world’s economy and the international monetary and financial system (IMFS):
“What sets the post-1945 Western order apart is that it was shaped overwhelmingly by a single power, the United States. Operating within the broader context of strategic bipolarity, it constructed, managed, and defended the regimes of the capitalist world economy […] In the trade sphere, the hegemon presses for liberalization and maintains an open market; in the monetary sphere, it supplies a freely convertible international currency, manages exchange rates, provides liquidity, and serves as a lender of last resort; and in the financial sphere, it serves as a source of international investment and development.”
While international law is a component of the IRBO, it is not in and of itself law. Professor Malcolm Chalmers, writing for the UK Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), described the IRBO as a combination of universal security and economic systems combined with international agreement and conflict resolution processes.
The current IRBO is supposedly a western system of international norms and institutions. Based upon both the post WWI and WWII settlements, what is suggested as order is little more than a realisation of “might is right” on the international stage.
Actions Not Words
In the West, we have been educated to have faith in the IRBO. It is sold to us as an arrangement that establishes normative behaviour for nation states. A basis for international relations is supposedly agreed upon and acceptable behaviour ordained.
Far from being a set of rules to facilitate peaceful coexistence between nation states, the IRBO has always been a tool for manipulation. The question is who wields it?
The recent joint statement between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China appeared to explicitly redefine the current IRBO. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping agreement read, in part:
“Today, the world is going through momentous changes, and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation. It sees the development of such processes and phenomena as multipolarity, economic globalization, the advent of information society, cultural diversity, transformation of the global governance architecture and world order. [. . .] a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world. [. . .] the international law-based world order, seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role.”
By contrast, the speech delivered by UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to the Lowy Institute, a Rothschild backed Australian policy think-tank with a focus upon the Asia-Pacific region, illustrated the western position. She said:
“Russia and China are working together more and more, as they strive to set the standards in technologies like artificial intelligence, assert their dominance over the Western Pacific. [. . .] They’re destabilising the international rules-based order and they’re chipping away at the values that underpin it. [. . .] We believe in freedom and democracy. [. . .] As Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, ‘we know from the evidence of human history that democracies are the engine room of change.’ [. . .] Technology has empowered people by enabling incredible freedom, but we know it can be seized upon by others to promote fear. [. . .] By joining forces with the US we are showing our determination to protect security and stability across the region.”
Taken on face value, we would inevitably conclude that, while the axis is in flux, the adversarial stand-off continues. To a great extent, this is a fabrication.
In discussing the IRBO, we immediately run into a nomenclature problem. Sometimes referred to as the “rules-based international order;” at other times the “international order” or “rules-based system;” or occasionally the “rules-based international system,” now we seemingly need to add “international law-based world order.”
While there is no settled definition for this alleged system of global governance, it all amounts to the same thing. The fulcrum may have moved, but the ruse remains intact.
This definition problem illustrates the primary flaw with any notion of a global rules-based order. It is ill-defined and transient. It relies more upon the realpolitik of the day than any genuine moral, legal or political precepts.
While Truss accurately outlined how that so-called order can be seized and exploited, she misled her audience in regards to who the abusers are. Nor is the existing IRBO founded upon democracy and freedom. Her claims were a deceit.
Recently the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stated that undermining trust in the government was achieved by individuals spreading “false” narratives and that this was tantamount to terrorism. In other words, no US citizen has any right to question government policy. If they do, they are spreading disinformation. Consequently, the DHS suggests that not trusting the government should be prosecuted as a crime.
This is the claimed justification for the focus of the new domestic terrorism unit working alongside the US Justice Department’s National Security Division. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen told a Senate Judiciary Committee that the unit was created to combat the growing threat of “extremism,” which apparently includes “anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.”
To question either “authority” or “government” is an extremist position, according to the US Justice Department and the DHS. There is no room for freedom of speech in the government’s extremist ideology. Without freedom of speech, US democracy is finished.
Similarly, in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader) admitted her government’s intention to ignore people’s inalienable right to roam unless they submitted to vaccination. So too with the European Commission, whose EU Digital COVID Certificate limits freedom of movement only to citizens who have the right pharmaceutical products injected into them.
These vaccine “certificates” are the gateway to full digital ID for all compliant citizens. Speaking in June 2021, the President of the EU Commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen, said:
“We want to offer to Europeans a new digital identity. An identity that ensures trust and protects users online. [. . .] It will allow everyone to control their identity online, and to interact with governments and businesses, across the EU.”
In other words, the EU citizen’s vaccine status, which will form a key part of digital identity per EU plans, will also be required for them to access goods and services. Without the appropriate authorisation, they will be excluded from society.
The commitment to digital identity, controlling every aspect of our lives, is inherent to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 16.9. The policy trajectory towards digital identity is global, no matter who allegedly leads the IRBO.
None of these policies indicates, as Truss claimed, any underlying belief in “freedom and democracy.” Among the Five Eyes nations and across the EU, all we see is a commitment to authoritarian dictatorship.
In the UK, where Truss is a leading government figure, plans for a dictatorship are at an advanced stage. The UK state has exploited the pseudopandemic to progress and enact a slew of dictatorial legislation.
The Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2020 empowers the state to commit any crime it likes and removes all legal liability from its operatives; the Police, Crimes, Sentencing & Courts Bill effectively outlaws all public protest and, while currently stalled after the House of Lords rejected the Bill, some minor amendments will almost certainly see it passed into law; the Online Safety Bill, when enacted, will end freedom of speech online and the proposed changes to official secrets, counter-espionage; and counter-terrorism legislation will remove the journalist’s defence of acting in the public interest, effectively ending whistle-blowing and investigative journalism in the UK.
All these tyrannical changes are exemplified by the UK government’s proposed Human Rights Act reforms. Their press release demonstrates how their claim of respecting individual rights, freedoms and democracy is nothing more than propaganda designed to dupe an unsuspecting public.
While they speak of diversity and a historical commitment to freedom, peppering their press release with fluffy sound-bites, their actions belie their intent. They state:
“The government wants to introduce a Bill of Rights in a way that protects people’s fundamental rights whilst safeguarding the broader public interest [. . .] [T]he growth of a ‘rights culture’ [. . .] has displaced due focus on personal responsibility and the public interest. [. . .] Whilst human rights are universal, a Bill of Rights could require the courts to give greater consideration to the behaviour of claimants and the wider public interest when interpreting and balancing qualified rights. [. . .] The shift of law-making power away from Parliament towards the courts, in defining rights and weighing them against the broader public interest, has resulted in a democratic deficit. [. . .] [F]reedom of expression cannot be an absolute right when balanced against the need to protect national security, keep citizens safe and take steps to protect against harm to individuals.”
While the UK state claims “human rights are universal” they clearly aren’t if they are “qualified rights” based upon whatever the government decides to be more important. Individuals pressing their rights in court has hampered the government’s programs. This is considered to be a “democratic deficit.” Therefore, the New Bill of Rights will protect the government’s power and authority over-and-above the freedoms of the people.
The UK Government will define “national security.” Protecting it, as they see fit, will override all individual rights. Freedom to roam, of speech and expression will not be tolerated by the UK state. Instead a commitment to the “public interest,” “safety” and protecting the population from some nebulous notion of “harm,” will replace freedom and democracy.
On both sides of the Atlantic, and in the Five Eyes global south, a new system is emerging which facilitates what Mussolini described as the Fascist State:
“The Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State. [. . .] Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. [. . .] The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people.”
It is the US led alliance of Five Eyes nations and the European Union that claim themselves to be the protectors of the international rules-based order. With their commitment to a new form of global fascism, the idea that the IRBO keeps us safe is questionable. In truth, the current IRBO has never actually promoted either freedom or democracy.
While the western hegemony insists that all follow their rules, they don’t hold themselves to the same. A few recent examples, among many, have witnessed the U.S. unilateral withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), often referred to as the Iran Nuclear Deal; NATO renege on assurances, given to the last Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, that it would not expand “one inch eastward”; and the imprisonment of journalists.
This is not to claim that the supposed opponents of the current IRBO, notably Russia, China and Iran, are above reproach themselves. However, it is untenable for the “leading nations” of the existing IRBO to commandeer any moral supremacy.
Politicians like Truss promote the IRBO as the cornerstone of international peace and security, but these are meaningless platitudes. There is nothing inherently peaceful or secure about it.
The Real IRBO
The current IRBO is portrayed as a project of western, formerly liberal, democratic states that has capitalised upon U.S. economic and military dominance. However, despite that being how mainstream media (MSM), academia and think-tanks present it, that is not what the international rules-based order is today.
The IRBO can more accurately be described as a vehicle for a worldwide stakeholder capitalist network to manipulate nation states in pursuit of its own predominantly private, corporate agenda. Indeed, we might argue that is all it has ever been.
A truly global network of corporations, think-tanks, private foundations, intergovernmental organisations, NGOs and governments work in partnership to convert global policy agendas into policy and legislation at the national and local government level. This is the Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P) and its reach extends to every nation.
We may view the global political map as a patchwork of sovereign nations, existing in a state of anarchy (no one rules them), but the G3P does not. What the global stakeholder capitalist network (G3P) sees is an authoritarian, compartmentalised structure to be manipulated to reach their objective, with that objective being, to create a cohesive system of global governance under their rule.
Throughout the pseudopandemic, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has partnered with government and intergovernmental organisations to promote its Great Reset policy agenda. The G3P is the embodiment of what the WEF calls the multistakeholder model of global governance.
In October 2019, shortly before the pseudopandemic began, the WEF published Global Technology Governance: A Multistakeholder Approach. Assuming the authority to demand that the world accepts the intrusion of its planned 4th Industrial Revolution, the G3P, represented by the WEF, bemoaned what they considered to be the lack of progress towards global governance.
Our democratic oversight only reaches as far as our national government’s influence as a G3P stakeholder allows. We can appreciate the extent of this democratic accountability if we consider the comments of Dominic Cummings, former chief advisor to UK Prime Minister. In testimony given to a parliamentary committee on May 2021 (go to 14:02:35), Cummings said:
“In March I started getting calls from various people saying these new mRNA vaccines could well smash the conventional wisdom.. People like Bill Gates and that kind of network were saying. Essentially what happened is, there is a network of people, Bill Gates type people, who were saying completely rethink the paradigm of how you do this […] What Bill Gates and people like that were saying to me, and others in number 10, was you need to think of this much more like the classic programs of the past.. the Manhattan Project in WWII, the Apollo program […] But what Bill Gates and people were saying […] was, the actual expected return on this is so high that even if does turn out to be all wasted billions it’s still a good gamble, and that is essentially what we did.”
Cummings was talking about the UK government’s public health policy response to an alleged global pandemic. These were decisions that would impact the health of every man, woman and child in the country.
His comments reveal that the UK government was simply following the orders issued by the network of “Bill Gates type people.” The UK state designed a crucial national policy at behest of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). They were acting under the instruction of a private, tax exempt foundation.
The BMGF are among the leading stakeholders within the G3P. Like the WEF, their partnerships with government and intergovernmental organisations are extensive.
As we now know, the alleged vaccine safety and efficacy claims made by the BMGF, and the politicians who implemented public health policy for them, weren’t even remotely accurate. We also know that this failure is immaterial to the BMGF because the “return on this is so high” it doesn’t matter.
The policy think-tanks lie at the heart of the G3P. They collaborate with other G3P stakeholder partners to devise the policy agendas that governments then enforce upon their populations.
Think-tanks, such as the Royal Institute for Interantional Affairs (RIIA – Chatham House), are invariably formed by representatives from multinational corporations (including central banks), financial institutions, NGO’s, philanthropic foundations, private donors, intergovernmental organisations, academic institutions and governments, etc.
For example, Chatham House members include the United Nations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, The Bank of England, Astrazeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The City of London, The European Commission & Union, BAE systems, Goldman Sachs, De Beers, BlackRock, China International Capital Corporation, Huawei, Kings College London, the London School of Economics (LSE), Oxfam, the British Army and governments from around the world. The list goes on.
To imagine that these globalist organisations are effectively powerless and exist merely to help governments devise policy is extremely naive. A more accurate summation has been offered by a few academics. Prof. Hartwig Pautz wrote:
“[T]hey seek to influence policymakers and the wider public, and that they try to do so via informal and formal channels and by making use of their well-connected position in often transnational policy networks encompassing political parties, interest groups, corporations, international organizations, civil society organizations, and civil service bureaucracies. [. . .] [P]olicymakers increasingly need curators, arbiters, or filters to help them decide which information, data, and policy expertise to use in their decision-making processes.”
However, we only need look at the comments of people like Dominic Cummings or Hillary Clinton to recognise that even Pautz’ observations fall short. As then US Secretary of State, Clinton said that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) role – as a US foreign policy think-tank – was to tell the US State Department “what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.”
Governments, including those of the US, Russia and China, are G3P stakeholders. In 2017, speaking at a Harvard seminar, the founder and executive chairman of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, said:
“Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin, and so on, they have all been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum. But what we are really proud of now with the young generation like Prime Minister Trudeau, President of Argentina and so on, is that we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I know that half of this cabinet, or even more than half of this cabinet, are for our… actually Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum.”
This was no idle boast. Political leaders such as Tony Blair, Jacinda Ardern, Emmanuel Macron, Alexander De Croo (Belgian PM), Sanna Marin (Finnish PM) and many more political heavyweights have been through the YGL programme. This is why, in an address to the Canadian nation in November 2020, in direct reference to the WEF’s so-called Great Reset, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said:
“Building back better means getting support to the most vulnerable while maintaining momentum on the 2030 agenda for sustainable development and the SDGs. [. . .] This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change.”
Trudeau is one among many WEF Young Global Leaders (YGL), and members of its predecessor program called the Global Leaders of Tomorrow, who have shaped the global policy response to the pseudopandemic. As a YGL graduate, his task was to convince the Canadian public to embrace the G3P’s Great Reset policy agenda.
Despite Schwab’s claims, Russian President Vladimir Putin does not appear to have been among the WEF’s YGL protégés. Yet, speaking in 2019 to President Quesada of Costa Rica, Klaus Schwab repeated his statement about Putin:
“Mrs Merkel, Tony Blair, they were all, even President Putin, they were all Young Global Leaders.”
In 1993, when the Global Leaders of Tomorrow program began, Putin was 41 and the upper age limit for entry into the program was supposedly 38. It seems unlikely that Putin was “officially” a WEF YGL trainee.
Putin was instrumental in encouraging foreign investment into the city and it was during his time in St Petersburg that Putin seemingly developed a close relationship with Klaus Schwab. In his address to the WEF’s 2021 virtual Davos gathering, Putin said:
“Mr. Schwab, dear Klaus, [. . .] I have been to Davos many times, attending the events organized by Mr. Schwab, even back in the 1990s. Klaus just recalled that we met in 1992. Indeed, during my time in St Petersburg, I visited this important forum many times. [. . .] [I]t is difficult to overlook the fundamental changes in the global economy, politics, social life, and technology. The coronavirus pandemic [. . .] spurred and accelerated the structural changes.”
In terms of G3P partnerships, Russia’s is perhaps one of the closest to the WEF. The WEF’s annual Cyber-Polygon global cybersecurity training exercise is orchestrated by Bi.Zone, a subsidiary of Sberbank.
Other CCS partners include leading US foreign Policy think-tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), Europol (representing EU governments), INTERPOL, the Organisation of American States (representing the governments of the North and South American subcontinents), and national cyber security centres from Israel, the UK, Korea, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland (home of the BIS).
Of the many corporations involved in Cyber Polygon 2021, Russian companies formed the largest contingent from any single nation. In addition, the WEF partners with the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF.)
The SPIEF International Foundation was formed in St Petersburg in 1998 under the direction of Herman Gref. He was serving as vice governor of the city at the time.
In 1993, Gref was also a close associate of Anotoly Sobchak in St Petersburg where Putin was Sobchak’s senior advisor. Gref is currently the CEO and Chairman of Sberbank.
In 2017, Schwab recognised that the SPIEF and Russia were global leaders on international regulation and stated:
“In the new economic environment and with due regard for the latest technological breakthroughs, we are faced with the need for new cooperation formats. [. . .] I am absolutely positive that Russia, as one of the leaders in responsible global regulation, must play a central role in determining new forms of co-existence in the era of the fourth industrial revolution.”
Russia and the SPIEF are part of the G3P network and are heavily involved in global cybersecurity and, in particular, the regulation of technology. It is clear that, through partners like the CFR, BMGF and the WEF, the Global Public-Private Partnership is pushing a global policy agenda supported by both sides of the East-West divide.
WEF assets, like Trudeau and other compromised officials, are positioned to ensure policy distribution is as frictionless as possible. The Russian and, as we shall see, Chinese governments are equally active stakeholders in the G3P’s global governance efforts.
If we believed the western MSM, this would present a seemingly unfathomable conundrum. While these nation states are G3P partners, we are told that they are also undermining the IRBO. Something doesn’t add up.
All of this seems extremely odd given that western global corporations such as IBM, Deutsche Bank and Santander were engaged in cyber polygon preparedness exercises that were largely run by a Russian state-owned bank. If any of the MSM’s claims are even remotely plausible, the industrial espionage risk alone would appear to have been off the charts.
Governments from across the western world participate in the WEF Cyber Security Centre which was founded, in part, by Sberbank. At the same time, they keep warning their populations about the danger of Russian cyber attacks.
Frankly, these Russian cyber-threat stories are puerile. The western governments and corporations, who appear to follow G3P orders to the letter, are seemingly content to be guided by a Russian state bank’s cybersecurity assessment and recommendations.
A far more credible rationale for these MSM stories and government fearmongering is that they are designed to prepare us, and provide justification, for the digital transformation of the financial sector. In their 2020 cyber threats report, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) stated that the pseudopandemic had necessitated this change.
In a barely concealed reference to Russia and China, the CEIP asserted that cyber attacks from nation states were inevitable. They then predicted that the response to this supposedly unavoidable attack would be to fuse the activities of banks, the financial authorities and the national security apparatus of nation states.
Centralising authority, especially over financial systems, is always the solution as far as the G3P are concerned. Primarily because they assume the right to exercise that authority.
On the major issues, governments don’t form policy and policy is instead curated by the G3P think-tanks like the CEIP. We should not labour under the illusion that the think-tanks simply offer suggestions. They have the financial, economic and political power to make decisions on the global stage and they have done so for generations.
No one votes for think-tanks. To this extent, so-called representative democracy is a charade. We, the people, have never had any say on the “big issues.” For those of us who live in western democracies, government grandstanding simply serves to convince us that we are somehow represented in the deliberations. It is essentially a confidence trick.
This is the context within which we can come to understand the International Rules Based Order. While it currently relies upon what appears to be the western hegemony and is transitioning towards a Eurasian led multipolar system, both are just convenient mechanisms through which the G3P wields power and authority.
As noted by many commentators, including the WEF, the IRBO is changing. As it does we all move ever closer to an IRBO based upon the Chinese model of technocracy.
Technocracy: A G3P Love Affair
The G3P think-tanks, perhaps most notably, but not exclusively, the Trilateral Commission, have been pursuing the dream of creating a global Technate for nearly a century. The often heard pseudopandemic mantra of “led by science” exemplifies technocracy.
Technocracy grew out of the efficiency movement during the US progressive era in the early 20th century. It capitalised upon the principles of scientific management suggested by Frederick Winslow Taylor and the economic ideas of social-economist like Thorstein Veblan, who famously coined the term “conspicuous consumption.”
Veblan was among the founding members of a private research initiative in New York funded by John D. Rockefeller called the New School For Social Research. This soon led to the creation of the Technical Alliance.
Howard Scott, the leader of the Technical Alliance, subsequently joined M. King Hubbert at Columbia University. In 1934, they published the Technocracy Inc. Study Course.
This was a blueprint for a North American Technate. It proposed a society led by science, engineering and academia rather than politics. Hubbert wrote:
“Technocracy finds that the production and distribution of an abundance of physical wealth on a Continental scale for the use of all Continental citizens can only be accomplished by a Continental technological control, a governance of function, a Technate.”
Technocracy demands that the activity of every citizen be continually recorded and controlled. It requires constant surveillance of the population.
This enables the Technate’s total energy expenditure to be calculated in real time. The data is then collated and analysed in order for the central committee of technocrats to manage and distribute the Technate’s resources right down to the level of the individual.
Scott and Hubbert planned a new monetary system based upon energy consumption, with goods and services priced according to the energy cost of production. Citizens would be allocated the new currency in the form of “energy certificates.”
In the US of the 1930s, this was a technologically impossible task. Though popular for a decade or so, the people came to realise that the suggested Technate was something of an absurdity.
Despite the seemingly preposterous system proposed by Scott and Hubbert, the Rockefellers in particular could see the potential to use technocracy to enhance their control of society. They continued to bankroll the technocracy movement and associated programs, for many years, regardless of waning public interest.
In 1970, Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski published Between Two Ages: America’s Role In The Technetronic Era. At the time, he was a professor of political science at Columbia University, where Scott had met Hubbert in 1932. He had already been an advisor to both the Kennedy and Johnson campaigns and would later become National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter (1977 – 1981).
Through a paper thin veil of caution, Brzezinski wrote enthusiastically about how a global scientific elite could not only use all-pervasive propaganda, economic and political manipulation to determine the direction of society, but could also exploit technology and behavioural science to brainwash and alter populations’ behaviour. Describing the form of this society and the potential for authoritarian control, he wrote:
“Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behaviour and keeping society under close surveillance and control.”
While he didn’t use the word “technocracy,” Brzezinski nonetheless described a Technate. Realising that technology was fast approaching the point where technocracy would be feasible, he described how digital technology would dominate the “technotronic era” to transform society, culture, politics and the global balance of political power.
In 1973, Brzezinski joined David Rockefeller to form the Trilateral Commission. Their stated purpose could not have been clearer:
“[T]he most immediate purpose was to draw together [. . .] the highest-level unofficial group possible to look together at the key common problems. [. . .] .[T]here was a sense that the United States was no longer in such a singular leadership position as it had been in earlier post-World War II years. [. . .] , and that a more shared form of leadership [. . .] would be needed for the international system to navigate successfully the major challenges of the coming years. [. . .] The ‘growing interdependence’ that so impressed the founders of the Trilateral Commission in the early 1970s has deepened into ‘globalization.’ [. . .] Doubts about whether and how this primacy will change [. . .] have intensified the need to take into account the dramatic transformation of the international system. [. . ] Our membership has widened to reflect broader changes in the world. Thus, the Japan Group has become a Pacific Asian Group, including in 2009 both Chinese and Indian members.”
Source: Trilateral.org
In 1973, the Trilateralists had already identified that US primacy would be dramatically transformed. This stemmed from Brzezinski’s realisation that global corporations in the technotronic era would surpass nation states in terms not only of their financial and economic power, but also in their ability to innovate and direct the activities of billions of citizens. In Between Two Ages he wrote:
“The nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multi-national corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state.”
Fully committed to the process of globalisation, the Trilateralists started to create the new IRBO. Rather than US economic and military power the new world order would be based upon a communitarian commitment to the efficient management of resources and, via that mechanism, social control.
Nation states would give way to a global network formed by the fusion of state and corporation. This network would manage populations and business activity through a new resource-based monetary system and economic central planning.
Individual citizens and businesses would be constantly monitored and their behaviour restricted and ordered. This would afford the G3P the global governance capability they sought.
Brzezinski suggested how this future could be secured. Technocracy would enable the transformation:
“Both the growing capacity for the instant calculation of the most complex interactions and the increasing availability of biochemical means of human control augment the potential scope of consciously chosen direction. [. . .] In the technetronic society the trend seems to be toward aggregating the individual support of millions of unorganized citizens [. . .] and effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason. [. . .] Though the objective of shaping a community of the developed nations is less ambitious than the goal of world government, it is more attainable. [. . .] In China the Sino Soviet conflict has already accelerated the inescapable Sinification of Chinese communism. [. . .] This may both dilute the regime’s ideological tenacity and lead to more eclectic experimentation in shaping the Chinese road to modernity.”
The modernisation of China was seen as an opportunity to develop an advanced technocratic society which, while developing both economically and technologically, would remain a dictatorship. This presented the G3P with a perfect test bed for the construction of a Technate.
Technocracy provides centralised authority over a managed capitalist system. It allows business to prosper so long as it adheres to the diktats of the technocrats.
The new IRBO will not be based upon the primacy of nation states or their imposition of any agreed values or norms. Rather, it will be founded upon the multistakeholder system, where nominally pragmatic solutions to a declared crisis form the moral imperative. Multistakeholding means a fusion between state and corporation.
“After the Second World War, leaders worked together to develop new institutional structures and governance frameworks. [. . .] The world has changed dramatically since then. [. . .] [T]he context for governance and cooperation is changing due to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. [. . .] We have entered a distinctly new era in which many of the assumptions of prior periods no longer hold. [. . .] As emerging technologies transform our systems of health, transportation, communication, production, distribution and energy, to name just a few, we will need to construct a new synergy between public policy and institutions on the one hand, and corporate behaviour and norms on the other. [. . .] As the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation, the Forum plans to use its platform to advance such thinking and collective action through multistakeholder dialogue. This bottom-up or inductive approach involving national governmental as well as non-state and subnational actors can help accelerate the pace of governance innovations needed in the 21st century as well as enhance the legitimacy and degree of public trust in it.”
Trust is a product of faith and we are being directed to believe in the new resilient and sustainable IRBO — one based, not upon the dominance of nation states who claim moral authority, but upon a globalist multistakeholder alliance between national governments and private interests who will keep us “safe.”
The WEF stresses the need for the people to have faith in the G3P’s globalist project. One of the key themes of the 2021 Davos meeting was rebuilding trust and for 2022 restoring trust. Referring to the alleged global trust crisis, Klaus Schwab said:
“[W]e see a degradation of trust in the world, and trust only builds through personal relations. [. . .] [W]e need a slogan. The slogan is ‘Working Together, Restoring Trust.’”
Trust is key because decisions that impact us at the local level will be taken at the global level by a policy making body that is predominantly a project of unelected private corporations. We must put aside any notion of democratic accountability or oversight and accept that the G3P knows best.
This multistakeholder, globalist structure will use technocracy to conduct its policies. We will be afforded the illusion of democracy in the form of civil society. However, via technocracy, we will be robbed of all agency and political means.
“China is a power with an enormous potential in human and other resources, and its leaders have set out on a course of rational modernisation intended to turn it into a leading world power […] China has never acquired a sphere of influence corresponding to its strength […] The West should not be content to defend its fundamental values […] It should set itself the objective to influence the natural processes of change […] in a direction that is favorable rather than unfavorable to those values. […] There seems to exist sufficient ways for aiding China in acceptable forms with advanced civilian technology […] To grant China favourable conditions in economic relations is definitely in the political interest of the West.”
A thriving export market in China and widening the Sino-Soviet split was in the political and economic interests of western nation states. However, constructing a new superpower to rival the Soviet Union also meant building one capable of challenging the existing IRBO.
As a G3P think-tank, the Trilateral Commission are among those that maintain they are little more than talking shops for the most powerful individuals on Earth. As with all think-tanks, they portray themselves as fundamentally reactive rather than proactive. They claim that they offer suggested policy agendas, but that they have no authority to enforce adoption of those policies.
Yet, these recommended policy agendas often unfold precisely as “suggested” by the think-tanks. Multinational corporations (MNCs) the world over seemingly responded to the Trilateralists’ agenda by engaging in a concerted effort to “influence the natural process of change” in China and to empower it to acquire “a sphere of influence corresponding to its strength.”
The economic, industrial and technological revolution in China has been remarkable, but it didn’t happen by chance. China now stands as the world’s first Technate and the western, liberal democracies are earmarked for the same transformation.
Chinese state media reported that, between 1983 – 1991, foreign direct investment in China increased from $920M to 4.37Bn. By 2019, it had eclipsed $2.1Tn. In 1994, in terms of US overseas investment, China ranked 30th. By 2000, it was 11th, as MNCs quadrupled their FDI into China between 1994 and 2001.
The pseudopandemic saw an initial 42% slow-down in global FDI. Yet, investment in to China actually increased by 4%, as it overtook the US to become the world’s leading recipient of foreign direct investment. Given the huge slump during 2020, inevitably global FDI bounced back in 2021. FDI, excluding financial services, reportedly rose by an additional 20% (in dollar terms) to achieve an annual record high of $178.48Bn in China.
In 1979, the US granted China full diplomatic recognition; in 1982, the commitment was reaffirmed in the third joint communiqué; in 1984, Beijing was permitted to purchase US military hardware; in 1994, the Clinton Whitehouse intervened to scrap the cold war embargo on the export of “sensitive technology” to China (and Russia); the 2000 US – China Relations Act was signed by President Clinton (a member of the Trilateralist Commission), establishing further improvements to trade relations; and, in 2005, then Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, called on China to take its place as a “responsible stakeholder.” Then, in 2008, China became the world’s leading US creditor.
This is not to suggest that the relationship between the western hegemony and the rising superpower were all plain sailing. For example, news of NATO’s “accidental” 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade wasn’t received well in China. There were also marked periods of apparent political enmity between the US, its western allies and China.
In 2001, while the mainstream media reported confrontations over downed spy planes and trenchant accusations from China of aiding and abetting its enemies, the Trilateralist (G3P) project remained on course. At the same time, the US supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation and soon thereafter the Bush administration established permanent normal trading relations (PNTR) with China.
Yet, a cursory look at the western mainstream media (MSM), and the persistent rhetoric of politicians like the UK Foreign Secretary, suggest we should be fearful and that China is a threat to the western order. How do we reconcile these allegations while, at the same time, the western order has been investing and transferring technology to bring about China’s transformation?
Despite the surface hyperbole, occasional vitriolic exchanges and alleged military accidents, the policy trajectory, in the political, economic and even military sphere, was consistent. Just as the Trilateralist Commission “advised,” the western hegemonic order tilted towards enabling the rise of China as both a technocracy and a superpower.
George Soros – Photo: Guliver/Getty Images
George Soros is a convicted insider trader, hedge fund manager, currency speculator and investor. His tax exempt Open Society Foundation has funded political campaigns, activist movements and coups around the world for decades. Though he is ageing today, he was formerly a member of the Trilateral Commission.
As such, Soros was among the global political, financial and corporate “thought leaders” who encouraged the modernisation of China. In a 2009 interview with the Financial Times, he said:
“You really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order; a financial world order […] I think you need a new world order that China has to be part of the process of creating it and they have to buy in. They have to own it the same way as, let’s say, the United States owns the Washington consensus […] A decline in the value of the dollar is necessary in order compensate for the fact that the US economy will remain rather weak […] China will be the engine driving it forward and the US will be actually a drag that’s being pulled along through a gradual decline in the value of the dollar.”
Years later, the 2016 – 2020 US Trump administration took what appeared to be an aggressive stance against China. Of particular alleged concern was the US bilateral trade deficit of up to $500Bn annually. A trade war ensued and tariffs were exchanged.
“America has a huge annual trade deficit with China [. . .] shockingly, hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Estimates are as high as $500 billion a year. We must immediately address the unfair trade practices that drive this deficit, along with barriers to market success. We really have to look at access, forced technology transfer, and the theft of intellectual property, which just, by and of itself, is costing the United States and its companies at least $300 billion a year.”
The Trump administration complained bitterly about so-called forced technology transfers(FTT) stipulated by China in exchange for access to their market. Speaking of the supposed trade war between the leaders of the current IRBO and China, the CFR think-tank were among those who criticised China’s apparent protectionism and suggested theft of intellectual property.
These allegations and the declared trade hostility appeared to be little more than a diversion designed for western public consumption. In truth, both public and private deals with China were consistently built upon FTT agreements.
In 2018, the Trump administration started to impose up to 25% tariffs on imports from China. The Chinese soon reciprocated. As the US’ largest single creditor, recently eclipsed by Japan, the US ran the risk of China dumping trillions of dollars worth of US treasuries – a nuclear option, in economic terms, which would also mean huge losses for China.
While a small reduction in the US trade deficit with China was achieved in 2019, global trade tensions increased the US deficit to the rest of the world. At the start of the pseudopandemic, the overall US trade deficit had not changed. In 2020, it reached record highs. During the FDI slump in 2020, the only investment winners were China and India.
In addition to continuously approving technology transfers, the leading IRBO nations had significantly increased their research and development (R&D) partnerships with China over the same period. Irrespective of Trump’s media circus, a 2019 report by the World Bank, referencing western nations public-private R&D investments in China, noted:
“Governments in other high-income countries have supported specific technologies and industries, particularly by targeting research and development (R&D). In the United States, government agencies such as the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Institutes of Health provided critical financing for key technologies. [. . .] These policies are complemented by support for key enabling technologies and industries—such as the space, defense, automotive, and steel industries—including through various funds, such as the European Structural and Investment Funds (five funds worth more than €450 billion) and Horizon 2020 (€77 billion for 2014–20).”
The Chinese government openly stated its intention for China to become a manufacturing superpower. Degrading US influence and bolstering China’s had been hardwired into western foreign economic & industrial policy and MNC investment strategies for more than a generation. It is difficult to see how any current IRBO nation, or western corporation, has been “forced” to share technology or intellectual property rights against its will.
Although the western MSM and politicians persistently alleged that China was acting against the IRBO, quite clearly that wasn’t true. Western states, and their corporate partners, were fully engaged in a process of modernising China and transforming the international order.
In response to China’s 2015 announcement of the “Made In China 2025” strategy, Klaus Schwab said that China would become “the leader in the fourth industrial revolution.” This is just as Soros and his fellow Trilateralists planned.
The WEF, not national governments, has been the leading proponent for the 4th industrial revolution (4IR). With China clearly set as the “engine” driving the global technological transformation, and Russia leading on regulation, it is apparent that, despite the sabre-rattling of politicians, western governments and corporations have been willing accomplices.
“Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population.”
Rather like feudalism, resource distribution is controlled by a centralised authority, who mete out access to resources dependent upon the citizen’s behaviour. This is the preferred “social credit” method of population control in China. An increasing number of China’s citizens need a good social credit score in order to access resources and society.
The whole system is administered by central planners within a subordinate policy body to the State Council called the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). They oversee a data mining, collection and analysis operation on an immense scale.
China’s National People’s Congress Photo: Xinhua
Without any democratic oversight, technocracy in China stipulates that the people trust the edicts of the technocrats. They are required to believe, or at least publicly state, that decisions are taken in the interest of the general good. If they don’t comply the Technate can use its surveillance systems to identify offenders and punish them for their selfish behaviour.
In its 2014 document Planning A Social Credit System, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) spoke of their intention to “construct a social credit environment of honesty, self-discipline, trustworthiness, and mutual trust.” They announced:
“Our country is currently in a key period of economic and social transformation. Stakeholder entities are more diversified [. . .] the forms of social organization and management are undergoing deep changes. Comprehensively advancing the establishment of a social credit system is an effective method of strengthening societal creditworthiness, promoting mutual trust in society, and reducing social contradictions, and it is an urgent requirement for strengthening and innovating in social governance. [. . .] The establishment of a social credit system is an important foundation for comprehensively implementing the scientific viewpoint of development. [. . .] Accelerating and advancing the establishment of the social credit system is an important precondition for promoting the optimized allocation of resources.”
This is the epitome of technocracy. It is a monoculture where all are subservient to the technocratic state.
There are two arms to the social credit system in China. Both individual citizens and corporations are given a rating based upon the aggregation and analysis of the data collected from their lives and business practices.
Approximately 80% of China’s provinces have rolled out some form of the social credit system. While still in development, individual surveillance and control systems are most pervasive in the cities. People can either be placed on a “blacklist,” limiting their freedoms, or a “redlist” permitting them to engage in society in a manner deemed appropriate by the Technate. Punishments include denial of access to public transport, refused payments, public shaming or restricted employment opportunities.
Nationally, the focus has been on constructing the Corporate Social Credit System (CSCS). Millions of businesses in China are required to demonstrate their commitment to the general good, as defined by the Technate. As long as they do, they will be allowed to prosper. If they don’t obey, they won’t.
For numerous reasons, explored by Prof. Liu Yongmou in the Benefits of Technocracy in China, the Chinese political system lent itself well to the creation of the world’s first Technate:
“In China today, there exists a more favourable attitude toward technocracy than is found elsewhere. [. . .] Insofar as it is scientism applied to politics, the Chinese tend to have a positive attitude toward technocracy. [. . .] Technocracy also fits with the Chinese tradition of elite politics and the ideal, to reference a Confucian phrase, of ‘exalting the virtuous and the capable.’ [. . .] knowledge was more important than the representation of the interests of those being governed. [. . .] Against the background of the Chinese heritage of a long feudal culture, technocracy is a better way to confront social problems than authoritarian politics divorced from technical expertise.”
The WEF, the Trilateral Commission and other G3P think-tanks have encouraged the development needed for the PRC State Council’s NDRC to construct the burgeoning Technate. Foreign investment and an infusion of technology, from the current leading nations of the existing IRBO, has brought China to a position where it will provide the economic, political and cultural impetus for a new world order.
Technocracy, as piloted in China, is now being rolled out globally. Individual sovereignty and freedoms, the claimed moral basis for the current IRBO, are being replaced by a commitment to efficiency and resource management in the interests of the “general good.” In the West, we know this as “sustainable development.”
Such a system is perfect for those who want to wield supreme autocratic power, which is precisely why the G3P have long wished to install technocracy globally. It is the reason why they have assisted the construction of a Technate in China. The new IRBO will be led by the technocrat and they will serve the Global Public-Private Partnership.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol issued subpoenas Thursday to four social media giants – Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter – to learn about the companies’ roles in the 2020 election as well as in “domestic violent extremism” and “the spread of misinformation.”
Congressional concerns over the spread of misinformation have focused on the social media companies for years. Alphabet is the parent company of Google and Youtube, while Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
This is the second Jan. 6 committee request for information from Google, Reddit, Facebook and Twitter. The panel said the companies offered “inadequate responses” to its August 2021 request.
“Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps—if any—social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence,” Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) stated.
“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,” Thompson said. “The Select Committee is working to get answers for the American people and help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again.”
“We cannot allow our important work to be delayed any further,” Thompson added. Midterms are this fall and if the Democrats lose the House majority, the committee likely will be disbanded, so time is running out for the investigation.
The Alphabet subpoena focuses on the company’s subsidiary video platform YouTube. The committee says it “significant communications” took place on Youtube “that were relevant to the planning and execution” of Jan. 6, and livestream videos of the riot were posted on the website.
The committee stated that Meta platforms, notably Facebook, “were reportedly used to share messages of hatred, violence, and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”
The Reddit subpoena states that the ‘subreddit’ group “r/The_Donald” grew on the platform before moving in 2020 to TheDonald.win website, “which ultimately hosted significant discussion and planning related to the January 6th attack.” The website, also known as America.win, is no longer updating.
“I have been contacted by the US Government concerning the January 6th Mostly Peaceful Protests that have been mischaracterized by the Select Committee, Resident Biden, members of the news media, and Democrats in Congress. Because of their continued political persecution of many still being held without bond on what are typically minor charges, I have no desire to speak with any of them,” America.win’s webmaster wrote, explaining that the site will be shutdown for the foreseeable future.
The final subpoena to Twitter alleges that users planned and executed Jan. 6 on the platform. The committee notes that former President Donald Trump and other Twitter users “engaged in communications amplifying allegations of election fraud.” The social media platform was reportedly warned that it was being used to plan potential violence on Jan. 6.
The German government’s antitrust office has announced that Google meets its standard for regulation, a step toward possible action against the Big Tech giant.
“The Federal Cartel Office can now tackle concrete forms of behavior that harm competition,” office president Andreas Mundt said, according to Reuters. “We have already started looking more intensively at Google’s processing of personal data and the topic of Google News Showcase.”
The decision means that over the next five years, Germany can investigate Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company.
The website TechCrunch called the action “as significant as it is unexpected.”
Germany’s FCO said in a release that “Google is of paramount significance for competition across markets.”
“The company has an economic position of power which gives rise to a scope of action across markets that is insufficiently controlled by competition,” the agency said.
Mundt said Google is not alone.
“We are vigorously conducting other proceedings against Amazon, Apple and Meta, formerly Facebook,” he said.
A Google spokesperson said the company has done nothing wrong.
“We are confident that we comply with the rules and, to the extent that changes are necessary, we will continue to work constructively with the FCO to find solutions that enable people and businesses in Germany to continue to use our products,” the spokesperson said.
The FCO began probing Google’s use of personal information in May, followed in June by looking at the selection of news offered in its Google News Showcase.
Germany’s move comes as French officials fined Facebook and Google more than 200 million euros, about $226 million, saying the companies made it too difficult to avoid being tracked online, according to The Hill.
The two tech giants “offer a button allowing the user to immediately accept cookies,” but they do not provide an option to “easily refuse the deposit of these cookies,” a data privacy watchdog announced in fining Google 150 million euros and Facebook 60 million euros.
“Several clicks are required to refuse all cookies, against a single one to accept them,” the group said.
“The restricted committee considered that this process affects the freedom of consent: since, on the Internet, the user expects to be able to quickly consult a website, the fact that they cannot refuse the cookies as easily as they can accept them influences their choice in favor of consent,” it added.
In Europe, websites must ask users before tracking them, according to The Associated Press.
This Is Big! On Wednesday Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook testified before Congress in the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust.
Since 2016 and the election of Donald Trump the tech giants have been censoring and banning conservative voices online. The Gateway Pundit has been a huge target of these liberal tech giants.
Of course, the CEOs dismissed allegations that they are targeting and censoring conservative users despite ALL of the evidence to the contrary.
Now This… On Wednesday afternoon the Trump White House published their executive order on online censorship. The EO prevents social media giants from altering or editorializing free speech.
The executive order also demands the social media giants provide transparency requirements for their moderation practices!
BREAKING: President Trump directs FCC to implement Executive Order Preventing Online Censorship to limit Section 230 https://t.co/u8VTIVtWXZ
On Monday, the Department of Commerce, as directed by President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship, filed a petition to clarify the scope of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. The petition requests that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) clarify that Section 230 does not permit social media companies that alter or editorialize users’ speech to escape civil liability. The petition also requests that the FCC clarify when an online platform curates content in “good faith,” and requests transparency requirements on their moderation practices, similar to requirements imposed on broadband service providers under Title I of the Communications Act. President Trump will continue to fight back against unfair, un-American, and politically biased censorship of Americans online.
“As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.” -Hunter Thompson
The Underground Newswire 