Brownstone Institute
Julian Assange and the War Against You

BY
While obituaries this week will rightfully laud Daniel Ellsberg for his disclosure of the lies and deceptions behind the Vietnam War, two ideological descendants of the Pentagon Papers, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, remain unfree.
This weekend marks 11 years since Julian Assange entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and began his confinement as a political prisoner. The torture that he has endured is not just an attack on his rights of free expression and journalism; it is an assault on your right to be an informed citizen.
His persecution was a harbinger for the merger of state and corporate interests, the increased suppression of dissent, and the dual system of law that indemnifies the powerful and punishes dissidents.
War hawks have weaponized the financial system against their political opponents. The Justice Department and Intelligence Agencies look to kill a man for exposing their crimes. And an obsequious press corps dithers as the most influential journalist of the century rots behind bars.
Behind the tragedy and persecution of Assange as an individual is a broader societal narrative. The most powerful groups in the country don’t believe that you have a right to know their crimes or protest their policies.
Forget any preconceptions you may have about Mr. Assange’s character. The bogus“rape” charges and media smear campaigns are distractions from the meaning of his work. Authorities have persecuted Assange because he published information that they wished to keep secret. He committed the crime of journalism in an era of corporate press releases.
Consider the importance of just one story that Assange broke thirteen years ago:
In 2010, Wikileaks released “Collateral Murder,” a 38-minute video of American soldiers killing a dozen Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists. The recording remains available online, showing two Apache helicopter pilots unleashing fire on the men below as if it were a videogame.
“Look at those dead bastards,” one killer says. “Nice,” his co-pilot responds.
There was no strategic basis for denying American citizens the right to view the video; the coverup was a public relations maneuver designed to evade blowback from the apparent war crimes.
The response was a scandal in itself. No American soldiers or commanders were held accountable for the killing. Instead, the publisher is dying in a prison cell. For four years, Assange has been held at Belmarsh Prison, “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay,” where he awaits the United States’ motion for extradition.
After Collateral Murder, Senator Joe Liberman successfully pressured Amazon to remove Wikileaks from its server and convinced companies including Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal to deny financial services to the platform. Later, the CIA plotted to assassinate him in the Ecuadorian Embassy.
Assange and Wikileaks continued to serve as the most influential publishers in recent history. They uncovered 500,000 documents from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that showed the truth about civilian deaths in the United States’ military campaigns. They published the US Army manual for Guantanamo Bay, which outlined isolation tactics for prisoners. They revealed US State Department Cablesdetailing a secret campaign of drone strikes in Yemen. They released emails from the Democratic National Committee that showed a coordinated effort to favor Hillary Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders in the primary elections.
Now, Assange faces 175 years in prison for charges under the Espionage Act, a 1917 law used to jail President Woodrow Wilson’s political opponents and critics of US involvement in World War I. Presidential candidate Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 1918 for telling a crowd of followers, “You need to know that you are fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.”
A century later, Assange faces death in an American prison for exposing the cannon fodder of the War on Terror.
“Assange is not persecuted for his own crimes, but for the crimes of the powerful,” writes Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and author of The Trial of Julian Assange. “The persecution of Assange establishes a precedent that will not only allow the powerful to keep their crimes secret but will even make the revelation of such crimes punishable by law. Let us not fool ourselves: once telling the truth has become a crime, we will all be living in tyranny.”
Once Covid emerged, the established precedent was used against the citizenry at large, and the tyranny was suddenly obvious.
PayPal and GoFundMe used Senator Liberman’s strategy to punish critics of the Covid regime like the Canadian truckers’ convoy. Corporate media dithered as the Biden administration actively censored critical journalists. The mass surveillance that Edward Snowden revealed was used to usurp Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights under the pretext of public health. And our legal system became increasingly warped to insulate the powerful and deny justice to the masses.
The meaning of Julian Assange is simple: should the powerful be able to indemnify themselves from legal and reputation recourse, or do citizens have a right to hold their officials accountable? His case represents more than his right to publish information – it is a question of whether we have a right to the information necessary to expose the crimes and corruption of our leaders.
Assange did not use his knowledge of government secrets to profit or influence peddle; that could have landed him a partnership at Kissinger Associates or a board seat at Lockheed Martin. Instead, the Biden administration looks to jail him for life because he exposed international crimes and corruption to the public for free.
Now we can observe the long trajectory of history. It did not begin three years ago. The groundwork for the censorial technocracy we face today was laid with a series of targeted hits that created enemies of the state. They did great things for the public well-being but were brutally punished for it. To this day, these people languish in an imprisoned state, martyrs for the freedom we once took for granted and the rights we hope to regain.
Brownstone Institute
Counting Coup: The Great Comeuppance For The Deep State

From the Brownstone Institute
By
It is, yet again, fashionable amongst the dwindling tribe of progressives to yell loudly that what is happening now in DC is a coup.
Donald Trump (and his Muskian minions) are running roughshod over the government, destroying norms and constitutional precedents and being very rude about it in the process.
Despite being elected on a platform of doing exactly that only a few months ago, the deep and/or woke state (before woke became a cool and easy way to grift graft billions, the deep state didn’t really care about things like trans whale rights, by the way) and its well-credentialed but poorly educated horde of government job dependent supporters are crying – literally – foul.
Elon Musk is unelected. You have no right. This is not a dictatorship. How dare you change anything that has worked so well for us for decades? At least slow it down. (Note – if you really thought you were being murdered you would yell “Stop!,” not “Slow down,” so maybe even progwokes get it, at least at a subconscious level.)
This is a coup, they yell.
Well, no it’s not. The nation – eyes wide open – elected Trump to do exactly what he is doing right now, whirlwinding through federal agencies to end the generational oligarchical scam.
Note – Joe Biden theoretically was elected to bring normalcy and decency to DC only to see his administration become a corrupt cavalcade of lies. In fact, unlike Trump, Biden did exactly the opposite of what he said (or mumbled or read) during the campaign that he was going to do as president.
If a coup involves false pretense, then look no further than Delaware.
Obviously, all actual coups involve change, but not all change is by definition a coup.
The concepts are not transitive.
And everything that has been done so far is well within the purview of the president – in theory, Joe Biden could have done everything Trump is doing now, if his handlers had let him or if it had ever occurred to him to do so.
What is happening is not a coup – it’s basic reform. It’s trying to sort out the absurdities of government spending and programs and to shut down the most egregious; case in point the USAID.
Vast billions slushed through the agency (one hopes the ludicrously named, cartoonishly-villainous National Endowment for Democracy is next) under the cover of political correctness and/or expediency on its way around the globe, most of which ended up in odd pockets of strongmen and politicians and “civil society” power-base builders who would then turn around and support the agency and its many many QUANGOs and foundations and such.
The money was not about helping actual real people – it was about creating an international network that could be called upon to do the bidding of the American intelligence community and the globalist socialist socialite statists, now one and the same. When you pay people they will pay you back, however they can, from writing op-eds to going on MSNBC to railing against populism – whatever you need at the moment.
That being said, there is one possible interpretation of the idea of a coup that could have more than an element of truth to it – counting coup.
Counting coup was a Plains Indian warrior tradition in that you didn’t necessarily have to kill your opponent in a battle but merely touch them – essentially bonk them on the head – and get away unscathed. That humiliated your opponent and counted – more than counted – as a moral victory (in fact, amongst the Crow – at least – it was one of four tasks that had to be completed in order to become a war chief.)
It was bravery personified.
And it can be said that Trump, Musk, and his hyper-caffeinated hackers are doing that with every move they make – counting coup.
Millions for gender-diverse Serbians?
Bonk on the head.
Paying global media types to twist the truth to benefit the interests of the deep state, including pushing to prolong the war in Ukraine and even possibly support the impeachment of Trump?
Bonk on the head.
Trying to help overthrow foreign governments?
Bonk on the head.
Government DEI programs?
Bonk on the head.
Paying for the BBC, climate change silliness, and Iraqi puppet shows?
Bonk, bonk, bonk on the head.
Not only is this not an actual coup, this is not even revenge or retribution but long and desperately needed reform.
And while counting coup was a way to humiliate an opponent it is not clear if that is the current intent, though one can be sure there is more than a little snickering glee amongst those involved in the process.
What is happening now is the tearing down – from the inside – of the ossified calcified oppressive state that has built up over the last 40 years.
The deep state is finally getting its much-deserved comeuppance and it may be happening just in time.
Bonk.
Author
Agriculture
How USAID Assisted the Corporate Takeover of Ukrainian Agriculture

From the Brownstone Institute
By
A recent essay titled “The Real Purpose of Net Zero” by Jefferey Jaxon posited that Europe’s current war against farmers in the name of preventing climate change is ultimately designed to inflict famine. Jaxon is not speculating on globalist motives; he is warning humanity of a rapidly unfolding reality that is observable in the perverse lies against cows, denigration of European farmers as enemies of the Earth, and calls by the WHO, WEF, and UN for a plant-based diet dependent entirely on GMOs, synthetic fertilizers, and agrichemicals.
Revelations about the evil doings of the Orwellian-monikered “United States Agency of International Development” (USAID) reveal a roadmap to totalitarian control unwittingly funded by America’s taxpaying proles. USAID’s clandestine machinations have long focused on controlling local and global food supplies as “soft colonization” by multinational chemical, agricultural, and financial corporations. European farmers revolting against climate, wildlife, and animal rights policies are harbingers of this tightening globalist noose.
The roots of the current globalist plan to “save humanity from climate change” link directly to the infamous Kissinger Report, which called to control world food supplies and agriculture as part of a globalist collaboration between nation-states and NGOs to advance US national security interests and “save the world” from human overpopulation using “fertility reduction technologies.” Kissinger’s 1974 Report was created by USAID, the CIA, and various federal agencies, including the USDA.
Fast forward to 2003, the Iraq War justified using fear-mongering propaganda about weapons of mass destruction and neo-conservative malarky about rescuing the Iraqi people. The US-led occupation of Iraq became a rapacious profiteering smorgasbord for colonizing corporations husbanded by USAID. Iraq is heir to the birthplace of human civilization, made possible by early Mesopotamian agriculture: many of the grains, fruits, and vegetables that now feed the world were developed there. Iraq’s farmers saved back 97% of their seed stocks from their own harvests before the US invasion. Under Paul Bremer, Rule 81 (never fully implemented) sought to institute GMO cropping and patented seed varieties, as Cargill, Monsanto, and other corporations descended upon the war-ravaged nation using American tax dollars and USAID.
That playbook was more quietly implemented during the Ukraine War, once again orchestrated by USAID. Before the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe, prohibiting GMO technologies and restricting land ownership to Ukrainians. Within months of US intervention, USAID assisted in the dismantling of these protections in the name of “land reforms,” free markets, financial support, improved agricultural efficiency, and rescuing the Ukrainian people. In just two years, over half of Ukraine’s farmland became the property of foreign investors. GMO seeds and drone technology were “donated” by Bayer Corporation, and companies such as GMO seed-seller Syngenta and German chemical manufacturer BASF became the dominant agricultural “stakeholders” in war-torn Ukraine. Russia may withdraw, but Ukraine’s foreign debts, soil degradation, and soft colonization will remain.
The UN, WTO, WHO, and WEF all conspire to peddle a false narrative that cows and peasant farmers are destroying the planet, and that chemical-dependent GMO monocropping, synthetic fertilizers, and patented fake meats and bug burgers must be implemented post haste (by force if necessary) to rescue humanity. The argument that pesticides and synthetic fertilizers (manufactured from natural gas, aka methane) are salvific is patently false. They are, however, highly profitable for chemical companies like Bayer, Dow, and BASF.
Jefferey Jaxon is exactly correct. The Netherlands committed to robust agricultural development following a Nazi embargo that deliberately inflicted mass famine following their collaboration with Allied Forces in Operation Market Garden. France boasts the highest cow population in all of Europe. Ireland’s culture is tightly linked to farming as part of its trauma during the (British-assisted) Irish Potato Famine. The corporate/NGO cabal now uprooting and targeting farmers in these nations and across the EU in the name of staving off climate change and preserving wildlife is a direct outcropping of Kissinger’s grand dystopian scheme launched through USAID in 1974.
Americans watch European farmer protests from afar, largely oblivious that most all of US agriculture was absorbed by the Big Ag Borg generations ago. Currency control linked to a (political, environmental, and economic) social credit scorecard promises the fruition of Kissinger’s demonic plan: “Control the food, control the people.”
Modern humans suffer a double hubris that blinds them to the contemplation of the truth of Jaxon’s hypothesis: a cultish trust in technology, coupled with an irrational faith in their self-perceived moral superiority to past civilizations (Wendell Berry calls this “historical pride”). Yet, as long as mankind has had the capacity to harm another for personal gain, humans have devised ways to control food for power or profit. Siege warfare generally depended on starving defenders of castle walls into submission.
Even if globalist food control proposals are well-intentioned, a monolithic, monocultured, industrial-dependent worldwide food system is a lurking humanitarian disaster. Berry observed:
In a highly centralized and industrialized food-supply system there can be no small disaster. Whether it be a production “error” or a corn blight, the disaster is not foreseen until it exists; it is not recognized until it is widespread.
The current push to dominate global food production using industrial systems is the cornerstone of complete globalist dominion over all of humanity. The “Mark of the Beast” without which no American will buy or sell goods – including guns, bullets, or factory-grown hamburgers and cricket patties – is mere steps away. Mr. Jaxon is correct that these leaders “know these basic historical and current facts,” and that “[f]armers are becoming endangered because of government [climate] policy … and it’s being allowed to happen.” USAID has been actively seeding and watering this dystopia for decades.
Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates are as fully cognizant of this fundamental truth as Henry Kissinger was in 1974. USAID has aided all three. Having lost almost all of their small farms over the last century, Americans are well ahead of Europeans in their near-complete dependence on industrial food.
That’s the plan.
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