Dr. Michael Palmer and Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi Explain that Viruses do in fact Exist and that COVID-19 Exists
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From [HERE] In the context of the COVID-19 “pandemic”, many people have come to understand that political and scientific authorities have been systematically lying about the origin of the infectious agent, as well as the need for and the safety of mandatory countermeasures, including lock-downs, masks and vaccines. Some skeptics have gone further and begun to question the existence of the virus responsible for COVID-19, or even of viruses and pathogenic germs altogether. Here, we put these questions in perspective.
Before we go into any specifics on germs and viruses, we should acknowledge that the public has ample reason to mistrust not only politicians, public officials and the media, but also the “scientific community.” Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, several very senior members of that community had drawn attention to the deplorable state of scientific integrity in medical research. Particularly poignant is this quote by a former editor-in-chief of one of the world’s leading medical journals, Marcia Agnell [1]:
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Agnell’s assessment is echoed by The Lancet’s editor Richard Horton [1], leading epidemiologist John Ioannidis [2], and Bruce Charlton, former editor of Medical Hypotheses [3]. And, to be sure, this already precarious state declined even further in the COVID-19 “pandemic.” Here are some of the lies regarding COVID-19 that were told alike by politicians and their scientific court jesters the world over:
the SARS-CoV-2 virus is of natural origin and jumped spontaneously from bats or pangolins to humans;
PCR-testing of asymptomatic patients is an appropriate means for tracking the spread of COVID-19;
the early COVID-19 waves threatened to overload the healthcare system to such a degree that it became necessary to destroy the economy in order to “flatten the curve”;
general vaccination was necessary to overcome the pandemic;
even though the vaccines were “safe and effective”, vaccinated persons were still at risk of being infected by unvaccinated individuals (but not by other vaccinated ones).
These absurd and brazen lies have been dealt with elsewhere, for example by cardiologist Dr. Thomas Binder [4]. We only cite them here to make it clear that we sympathize in principle with the radically skeptical attitude of much of the public. Nevertheless, we think that in some cases this radical skepticism has been taken too far, and that the proverbial baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. To support our case, we will survey some of the history of “germ theory” of infectious disease.
1. The rise of germ theory in the 19thcentury
The idea that microbes cause transmissible diseases gained acceptance in the late 19thcentury. Its greatest pioneer was Robert Koch, a Prussian physician, who discovered the bacterial agents that cause anthrax, cholera, and tuberculosis. These discoveries paved the way for the prevention of such diseases by hygiene and surveillance.
Even before Koch’s discoveries, Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis had discovered that physicians could avoid transmitting puerperal sepsis from deceased to living mothers through antiseptic hand-washing; but because his empirical procedure lacked a theoretical foundation, it was ultimately abandoned, in spite of its demonstrable success. Semmelweis himself was committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he suffered physical abuse and died shortly after.1
Semmelweis’s personal fate illustrates that the public and the medical community at the time certainly were not ready for “germ theory”, i.e. for the idea of diseases being caused by tangible germs that could be transmitted from one person to the other, but which could also be identified and combated. It therefore is remarkable that Koch’s discoveries were recognized and accepted within a fairly short period of time. Soon, other researchers joined the hunt for further pathogenic bacteria. Other kinds of pathogens soon followed; for example, in 1898 British physician Ronald Ross discovered that the parasite which causes malaria multiplies within and is transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes.
What brought about this rapid triumph of germ theory? It seems fair to say that both the scientists involved and their audience made it happen. Robert Koch himself was an ingenious and meticulous experimentalist. He set himself an exacting standard for demonstrating that a certain infectious disease was caused by a specific microbe, the well-known “Koch’s postulates” [5]:
The given organism must be found regularly in the diseased tissue of the infected person or animal.
The organisms must be capable of being grown in pure culture in the laboratory.
The pure culture must produce the disease when administered to experimental animals.
The organisms must be found in the experimentally produced disease, and be capable of being recovered again in pure culture.
While Koch’s comprehensive evidence surely was compelling, his rapid success would not have been possible without his audience. Even though initially skeptical, this audience was also well-educated and open-minded—it had not yet become jaded, cynical, and disoriented by being relentlessly attacked with fake news and junk science.
The great scientists of the 19thcentury were very often hobbyists who were indulging their own whims and passions. They thus were independent from external interests, particularly from financial ones. Academic researchers, too, were more shielded from outside interests than are the “big shots” of today’s institutionalized science. But over the course of the 20thcentury, scientific research institutions became more and more dependent on external funding, often controlled by powerful special interests. This has severely compromised and undermined scientific integrity. We can but wonder, what would Robert Koch think of the likes of Christian Drosten and Tony Fauci? What of the Berlin “public health” institute that bears his name?
2. Successful applications of germ theory
If a theory can be used successfully in practice, this suggests that it is true, or at least a good approximation of the truth. Germ theory has many useful applications; here, we will only give a few early examples for illustration.
Less than a decade after Koch’s discovery of the anthrax bacillus, Friedrich Klein isolated Streptococcus pyogenes, the bacterium which causes puerperal fever, scarlet fever, and various kinds of skin infections. This discovery could explain the earlier success of Semmelweis’s empirically developed hand disinfection procedures for preventing puerperal fever. Hygiene, surveillance and improvements to sanitation made it possible to prevent outbreaks of enteric diseases such as cholera. The city of Hamburg, which initially refused to adopt such precautions, promptly suffered an outbreak of cholera in 1882 that claimed several thousand lives [6]. Robert Koch himself was tasked with overseeing the introduction of hygienic countermeasures, which swiftly brought the outbreak under control.
It was mainly through such preventive measures that infectious diseases were conquered, even before specific treatments of manifest infections became available. This is illustrated for tuberculosis in Figure 1. Malcolm Watson, a physician in the colonial service of the British Empire, devised successful methods for controlling malaria. His work, begun only a few short years after Ross had discovered that the malaria parasite was spread by Anopheles mosquitoes, was mostly based on thorough and meticulous drainage of wetlands and regulation of brooks and streams, with quinine prophylaxis and treatment of infections playing only a secondary role [7].
3. Germ theory vs. “terrain theory”—a false dichotomy
Opponents of germ theory like to point to the decisive role of the patient’s general health in susceptibility to infectious disease. This tenet is in fact accepted by mainstream medicine. For example, the significance of age and general health in the prognosis of pneumonia was summed up by the famous Canadian physician William Osler as follows:
In children and in healthy adults the outlook is good. In the debilitated, in drunkards and in the aged the chances are against recovery. So fatal is it in the latter class that it has been termed the natural end of the old man.
Osler’s words, written in 1892, are still true today, largely regardless of the germ in question. It matters not whether the pneumonia be caused by pneumococci, influenza virus, or SARS-CoV-2. Generally speaking, the notion of “opportunistic” infections that befall those in poor general health and states of immunosuppression can be found in the textbooks of medicine. But on the other hand, without any of those opportunistic pathogens, even susceptible individuals would not contract an infectious disease.
Figure 1 shows how, immediately after Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus, mortality due to tuberculosis went into a steep and sustained decline. Most likely, both hygiene and improvements to nutrition and general health contributed to this change for the better. Note, however, that there is no detectable reversal of this trend in the 1930s, i.e. during the Great Depression. In this era, many people were suddenly thrown into poverty, which would most likely also have lowered the quality of their nutrition and their resistance to tuberculosis. The continued decline in tuberculosis mortality in those years was most likely due to the continued surveillance measures.
4. Not all infectious pathogens can satisfy Koch’s postulates
One reads now and then that some pathogenic virus or other microbe does not satisfy Koch’s postulates, which is then construed as proof that it does not cause the disease for which it is known. This is fallacious. Koch’s postulates do not constitute some sort mathematical axiom; they should be understood in their historical context.
Koch needed to convince a public that was initially radically skeptical; thus, the more comprehensive and rigorous his evidence, the easier it would be for him to succeed. It thus made perfect sense for him to focus on pathogens that could be grown in pure culture—that is, in the absence of any other living things—and which could then be inoculated into experimental animals and isolated again as many times as desired. However, once the idea of infectious pathogens had taken hold in principle, it soon became apparent that not all of them met every single postulate in the canon. For example, Rickettsia prowazekii and Treponema pallidum—the bacterial agents that cause typhus or syphilis, respectively—cannot be grown in pure culture, and therefore cannot meet the second, third and fourth postulate. They can, however, be propagated in experimental animals, and Rickettsia prowazekii also in cell culture.
Viruses, by their very nature, can only multiply within living cells but not in pure culture. Therefore, no virus can possibly satisfy Koch’s postulates. However, we repeat that these postulates are not a logical necessity. If they are not fulfilled, the question of disease causation must be settled in some other manner.
5. What does it mean to isolate a virus?
Several people have expressed very sweeping criticisms of virology as a discipline. For example, twenty doctors and investigators recently published a memorandum entitled “Settling the Virus Debate” [9]. In it, we read:
Perhaps the primary evidence that the pathogenic viral theory is problematic is that no published scientific paper has ever shown that particles fulfilling the definition of viruses have been directly isolated and purified from any tissues or bodily fluids of any sick human or animal. Using the commonly accepted definition of “isolation”, which is the separation of one thing from all other things, there is general agreement that this has never been done in the history of virology. Particles that have been successfully isolated through purification have not been shown to be replication-competent, infectious and disease-causing, hence they cannot be said to be viruses.
Further on, the authors make it clear that they don’t agree with the use of cell cultures as part of the isolation procedure. According to them, cell cultures may on their own give rise to debris that might be mistaken for virus particles, and they therefore insist that a virus must be directly isolated from tissues or bodily fluids of infected humans or animals. This objection can be countered as follows:
The particles of many viruses have very characteristic shapes that are not likely to be confused with any particles produced by living cells, or with debris left behind by dead cells.
There are many biochemical methods for characterizing viral particles, and moreover for establishing that they contain genetic information characteristic of the virus rather than the host cell culture.
Not all viruses can easily be grown in cell cultures. Those which cannot are indeed routinely propagated in, and directly isolated from, laboratory animals.
A good example of such an animal study was published by Theil et al. [10]. It concerned the isolation of a novel virus from gnotobiotic, i.e. otherwise germ-free pigs. The abstract of the study reads as follows:
A rotavirus-like virus (RVLV) was isolated from a diarrheic pig from an Ohio swine herd. This virus infected villous enterocytes throughout the small intestine of gnotobiotic pigs and induced an acute, transitory diarrhea. Complete virions [viral particles] were rarely observed in the intestinal contents of infected animals … The genome of the porcine RVLV was composed of 11 discrete segments of double-stranded RNA …
The study shows both electron-microscopic pictures of the viral particles, as well as the result of an electrophoresis experiment that compares the genetic material contained in these particles to those of known viruses with similar morphology (see Figure 2). The novel virus could be serially passaged through multiple pigs without becoming “diluted” or getting lost altogether; therefore, it was clearly replicating within those pigs. Infection was detectable in the intestinal cells of the pigs and gave rise to diarrhea. We can see no reasonable objection to the authors’ conclusion that they had in fact established the existence of a novel virus that causes intestinal disease in pigs.[MORE]
Is it Safe to Get a Blood Transfusion from Someone who Got COVID Injections? Dr Mercola Discusses Potential Deadly Risks
/From [HERE] By Dr. Joseph Mercola In a recent meta-analysis1,2 posted on preprints.org, Japanese researchers warn of potentially deadly risks to patients who receive blood from people who have taken mRNA covid injections and call for urgent action to ensure the safety of the global blood supply. According to the authors:3
… many countries around the world have reported that so-called genetic vaccines, such as those using modified mRNA encoding the spike protein and lipid nanoparticles as the drug delivery system, have resulted in post-vaccination thrombosis and subsequent cardiovascular damage, as well as a wide variety of diseases involving all organs and systems, including the nervous system …
[B]ased on these circumstances and the volume of evidence that has recently come to light, we call the attention of medical professionals to the various risks associated with blood transfusions using blood products derived from people who have suffered from long covid and from genetic vaccine recipients, including those who have received mRNA vaccines, and we make proposals regarding specific tests, testing methods, and regulations to deal with these risks.
Blood From Injected Donors May Pose Risk to Neurological Health
One particular risk addressed in this paper is the implications of blood tainted with prion-like structures found within the spike protein. Prions are misfolded proteins that can cause neurodegenerative diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (“CJD”) in humans, by inducing the misfolding of normal proteins in the brain.
Prion diseases are characterised by a long incubation period, followed by rapid progression and high mortality. The suggestion that the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, especially from certain variants, might contain prion-like domains raises concerns for several reasons:
Transmission risk – If spike proteins with prion-like structures can be transmitted through blood transfusions, there might be a risk of inducing prion diseases in recipients. Prion diseases are notoriously difficult to diagnose early, have no cure and are fatal, making any potential transmission through blood products a significant safety concern.
Detection and removal challenges – Current blood screening processes do not specifically test for prions, partly because prion diseases are rare and partly due to the technical challenges in detecting prions at low concentrations. If spike proteins with prion-like properties are present in the blood of covid injected people, existing blood safety protocols may not be adequate to prevent transmission.
Long-term safety concerns – Prion diseases have long latency periods, meaning that symptoms can appear years or even decades after exposure. This delay complicates efforts to trace the source of an infection back to a blood transfusion and assess the safety of blood supplies over time.
Impacts on blood supply management – Concerns about the potential risks associated with prion-like structures in spike proteins might lead to changes in donor eligibility criteria or the implementation of additional screening measures. These changes could impact the availability of blood products, which are critical for routine medical procedures.
Public confidence – Public awareness of these potential risks, even if they are theoretical or have a very low likelihood of occurring, could affect people’s willingness to donate or receive blood transfusions, thereby lowering blood donation rates and the overall trust in the safety of blood transfusions.
The authors stress the need for comprehensive studies to better understand the implications of these prion-like structures in the spike protein, not only for mRNA jab safety but also for the broader implications for public health measures like blood transfusion practices. [MORE]
Barbaric IsrAlien Authorities are Systematically Targeting Hospitals and Disappearing, Detaining and Torturing Palestinain Doctors
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FROM [HERE]
From [HERE] AS EARLY AS November, reports emerged of doctors being detained and going missing in north Gaza. According to the World Health Organization, at least 214 medical staff from Gaza have been detained by the Israeli military. In early May, the detention and alleged torture of medical staff from Gaza made headlines when Israeli authorities announced the death of Adnan Al-Bursh, a well-known surgeon and the head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital. After being taken into custody in December, officials said Al-Bursh died in April while in Ofer Prison, an Israeli detention facility in the occupied West Bank.
“Dr. Adnan’s case raises serious concerns that he died following torture at the hands of Israeli authorities. His death demands an independent international investigation,” Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health, said in a statement last week. “The killing and detention of healthcare workers is not a legitimate method of warfare. They have a legitimate and essential role to care for sick and wounded persons during times of conflict.”
Al-Bursh is one of at least 493 Palestinian medical workers who have been killed in Gaza since October 7, according to the Ministry of Health. The Israel Defense Forces has systematically targeted hospitals from the north to the south of the strip, claiming that Hamas operates in the facilities. Medical staff in Gaza’s hospitals have repeatedly denied this claim. This week, Israeli forces have launched new attacks on Kamal Adwan Hospital and Al-Awda Hospital in the north, with reports on Wednesday and Thursdayof medical staff being detained from Al Awda. [MORE]
The International Court of Justice Orders Israel to stop Genocide in Rafah
/From [HERE] The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nation's top court, has ordered Israel to "immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah," as it is not convinced that the Israeli military is doing enough to protect civilians.
The court acted in support of last week's application of South Africa, which brought genocide charges against Israel at the ICJ in December. The appeal sought several measures against Israel, accusing it of stepping up what it says is a genocide. "Those who have survived so far are facing imminent death now and an order from the court is needed to ensure their survival," Pretoria's filing read. (Related: South Africa calls for immediate halt to Israel’s military offensive in Rafah.)
ICJ head Nawaf Salam read the new ruling and said that its justices were doubtful that the evacuation efforts and the related measures that Israel affirms to have undertaken are not sufficient to "alleviate the immense risk" to civilians in Rafah. Salam said the humanitarian situation has deteriorated further since the court's last order in March and is now classified as "disastrous." The Palestinian city of Rafah hosted around 1.4 million refugees displaced from the enclave when Israel ordered around half that number to evacuate the city as it sent tanks and troops into its eastern neighborhoods.
"Israel must immediately hold its military offensive of [sic] any other action in the Rafah governorate," Salam continued, warning that failure to do so could bring about the wholesale destruction of life in the city.
A Mental Health Distress Call Turned into a Military Operation: Suit Claims Pittsburgh Cops Shot a Black Man in the Back while His Hands Were Raised to Force Him to Get Public Services
/From [HERE] A new federal lawsuit accuses a former Pittsburg cop of shooting a Black man whose hands were raised during a call over a “mental health crisis,” and although the same officer has already been part of a suit that settled for $7.3 million, this case may be the least of his legal concerns.
The lead defendant, Ernesto Mejia-Orozco, is set to plead guilty or no contest in two unrelated criminal cases two weeks from now. On June 10, he is scheduled for a change of plea hearing in a case involving allegations he was part of a scheme to quash traffic tickets for bribes. The following day, he’s scheduled to plead guilty in a felonious scheme to defraud the city of Pittsburg by fraudulently obtaining a college degree for educational incentive pay, court records show.
Now, Mejia-Orozco is also a defendant in a federal suit accusing him of shooting a man named Ashton Porter on Feb. 24, 2022. The lawsuit says that while Porter was barricaded inside a hotel room, officers used pepper spray on him and shot him with rubber bullets, before Mejia-Orozco fired a pistol at Porter, striking him twice. He survived.
Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, Porter said he feels lucky to be alive and was shocked by the police “lies and cover up.”
“I was looking for one or two good cops who would make sure nothing terrible happened to me,” he said. “Unfortunately for me there wasn’t any cops out there that stood up for me or tried to de-escalate the event.”
Mejia-Orozco would later claim that Porter came at him with a knife. Video shows Porter exiting the hotel room and standing a several feet away from officers. He appears to be standing still as the initial shots are fired and when his body comes into view of an officer’s body camera, his hands are raised. The suit says the video provided by Pittsburg police “does not support this version of events” and the suit itself includes stills showing Porter with his hands up, “milliseconds” before Mejia-Orozco shot him.
“Nearly two years after the incident, Mr. Porter still suffers every day from the physical and psychological injuries that the Defendant Officers inflicted upon him,” the lawsuit says. Porter’s lawyer, Adante Pointer, said Porter and his family have “bore brunt of police aggression, of police escalation, of police lack of discipline” and that Porter was initially jailed but charges were later dropped.
The suit also alleges that Pittsburg police Lt. William Hatcher, who helped supervise the incident, has a “troubling” history of covering up excessive force, referencing years-old claims by a whistleblower that he instructed officers to remove references to them hitting suspects with flashlights from their incident reports.
Mejia-Orozco was one of 14 current and former Antioch and Pittsburg officers charged in a wide range of crimes last year. Many of them have since pleaded guilty, including the alleged ringleader of the college-degree fraud scam, Patrick Berhan, who is set to be sentenced later this summer.
A former Antioch community service officer, Samantha Peterson, recently received probation for her role in the scam, and a third former Pittsburg and Oakland Housing Authority officer — Brauli Rodriguez Jalapa– is set to plead guilty June 25, court records show. Rodriguez Jalapa was also charged earlier this year with drunk driving and threatening cops in Clayton.
In 2020, a wrongful death suit involving Mejia-Orozco and other officers settled for $7.3 million. The suit alleged that the officers killed a man named Humberto Martinez, by placing him in a carotid hold and pinning him to the ground. Martinez died from having the blood stream to his brain cut off, according to the coroner’s report.
Study: Black Chicagoans are 20X more likely to be homicide victims as Arrest Rate Hits Low. Cops Fail to Protect but Fill the Jails w/Blacks who Possess Guns for Self-Defense in Unsafe Liberal City
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From [HERE] Black Chicagoans are 20 times more likely to be murdered than white residents, with the expectation of an arrest for the crime hitting a record low.
Hispanic Chicagoans were nearly 5 times more likely to be a homicide victim than their white counterparts. The stats were for the 12 months through April.
The arrest rate for these felonies hit a record low. Only 1-in-4 homicides resulted in an arrest between May 2023 and April 2024, compared to the same period in previous years.
In contrast, Chicago police made an arrest in 39% of homicide cases between May 2022 and April 2023. The number of arrests fell from 278 during that time to 148 through April of this year.
Chicago’s decade-long, nation-leading homicide crisis saw some relief during the past 12 months. Total cases dropped from 713 to 603, but Black Chicagoans were the victims in 77% of those cases where the victims’ race was known.
While Black Chicagoans were homicide victims 20 times more often than white residents, Hispanic Chicagoans were 4.7 times more likely to be homicide victims. Hispanic residents were 18% of homicide victims from May 2023 through April 2024. [MORE]
How does a reasonable, law-abiding non-white citizen living in a city run by elite white liberals measure the effectiveness of police? it seems logical to conclude that if a high number of crimes took place in Black neighborhoods then it means that police failed a high number of times to do their job of preventing crimes or protecting people in Black neighborhoods. If it occurs frequently it would seem then that police in general fail to do fulfill their perceived role of protecting Black people. Nevertheless, the Dependent media, which functions as “government media” in The Spectacle, always upholding authority, parroting police rationalizations no matter how ridiculous or factually unsupported and parroting facts from police perspective while assigning less credibility to civilian witnesses and perspectives, report crime numbers as if the police are helpless to do anything about crime. Often times the dependent media portrays cops as victims. We are made to believe that police are primarily engaged in actual police work and are aggressive crime fighters acting on behalf of people to fulfill their legal duty to Black citizens pursuant to the social contract, an agreement whereby citizens voluntarily agree to obey government authority in exchange for police protection and other services from the government.
Yet, in reality, crime data demonstrates that police don’t protect Black and Latino people and are not really involved in ‘police work’ in our communities. Rather, authorities use the perception and reality of crime to stalk, surveil, manage, control and kill Black and Latino people. Any beneficial “public service” provided by cops is random, incidental or done only under the most egregious or convenient circumstances and even then, it is done primarily to maintain manufactured public relations and provided on a compulsory, involuntary basis. Professor Alex Vitale states, “It is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys. As the veteran police scholar David Bayley argues,
“The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society’s best defense against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth.”
Corpse Biden's DOJ Only Requiring Arthur Grand Technologies to Pay a $38,000 Fine for its ‘Whites Only’ Job Posting. Northern VA Company Sought "Only Born US Citizens (White)”
/From [HERE] A northern Virginia tech company has agreed to pay out a settlement after claims that it discriminated by posting a job listing seeking white, U.S.-born candidates for an opening as a business analyst.
The Justice Department announced that it had reached a settlement with Arthur Grand Technologies, an information technology firm in Ashburn, Virginia.
The company will pay $38,500 as part of the settlement.
The company listed the business analyst job online in March 2023, specifically seeking "Only Born US Citizens (White) who are local within 60 miles from Dallas, TX (Don’t share with candidates)."
"It is shameful that in the 21st century, we continue to see employers using ‘whites only’ and ‘only US born’ job postings to lock out otherwise eligible job candidates of color" said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s civil rights division in a statement. "I share the public’s outrage at Arthur Grand’s appalling and discriminatory ban on job candidates based on citizenship status, national origin, color and race."
In the settlement agreement, the company said the ad was "generated by a disgruntled recruiter in India and was intended to embarrass the company," and that it never intended to dissuade non-citizens from applying.
Arthur Grand did not return a call and email Tuesday seeking comment.
The settlement includes a $7,500 penalty to settle a Justice Department investigation and $31,000 as part of a settlement with the Labor Department to compensate individuals who filed complaints alleging they were discriminated against by the advertisement.
The agreement also requires Arthur Grand to train its personnel on the requirements of the federal hiring and discrimination laws and revise its employment policies.
In 2019, another northern Virginia tech firm, Cynet Systems, apologized after posting an online ad seeking "preferably Caucasian" applicants for an account manager job in Florida.
Merrill Lynch to pay $19 Million to Settle a class-action lawsuit that Claimed it Discriminated Against Black Financial Advisors
/From [HERE] Merrill Lynch has agreed to pay $19.95 million to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming it discriminated against African American financial advisors, according to a filing on Friday in federal court in Florida.
The lawsuit, which dates back to July 2021, was brought by four former Merrill advisors who sought “to challenge discriminatory compensation and promotion practices at Merrill.” They alleged that African American brokers were afforded fewer “business opportunities,” including less support and more difficulty joining teams relative to their white counterparts.
As a result, African American financial advisors were terminated or “washed out” at higher rates than their white counterparts, and fewer earned corporate titles such as senior financial advisor or private wealth advisor.
The proposed sum is earmarked to fund payments to at least 1,000 eligible class members who were previously disadvantaged because of their race in addition to covering administration costs and $6.6 million in attorney fees. The settlement must be approved by a judge before it is final.
“We reached an agreement to resolve this matter so we could focus on initiatives to assist Black financial advisors and their clients,” a spokesperson for Merrill said in an emailed statement. The wirehouse has also “implemented numerous policies and programs over the last 10 years,” including annual leadership symposiums, workshops and increased training and coaching to improve diversity and inclusion, the spokesperson added.
Over the past decade, the number of Black financial advisors at Merrill has increased by more than 40%, and representation on teams has more than tripled, the spokesperson said.
As part of the proposed settlement, Merrill agreed to additional policy changes governing how it trains employees and newbie financial advisors about diversity and facilitates teaming among existing advisors.
Merrill said it would educate employees about how to “recognize implicit or unconscious bias” and “create an inclusive work environment that will evaluate employees and candidates fairly,” according to the Friday filing.
Not Unalienable Gun Rights but Gun Favors Granted by Master based on Zip Code/Race: Rolebotic NYC Judge Told Black Man, ‘Dont bring the 2nd Amendment into court. It dont exist here' Sentenced to 10yrs
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According to the supreme court “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. Under Heller, when the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct, and to justify a firearm regulation the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with the Nation’shistorical tradition of firearm regulation.”
BELIEVE IN THE ABOVE AT YOUR OWN RISK. SO-CALLED CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS ARE IMAGINARY IN THE FREE RANGE PRISON - RIGHTS SUCH AS 4TH AMENDMENT AND 2ND AMENDMENT RIGHTS ARE PARTICULARLY MORE RESTRICTED FOR BLACK PEOPLE. AT ANY RATE THE RIGHT TO SELF DEFENSE IS SAID TO BE A NATURAL RIGHT OR UNALIENABLE RIGHT THAT EXISTS WITHOUT A GOVERNMENT. FUNKTIONARY EXPLAINS:
unalienable rights – the state of a thing or right which cannot be sold. Things which are not in commerce, as public roads, are in their nature unalienable. Some things are unalienable, in consequence of particular provisions in the law forbidding their sale or transfer, as pensions granted by the government. The natural rights of life and liberty are UNALIENABLE. Bouvier’s Law Dictionary 1856 Edition. “Unalienable: incapable of being alienated, that is, sold and transferred.” Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, page 1523: You can not surrender, sell or transfer unalienable rights, they are a gift from the creator to the individual and can not under any circumstances be surrendered or taken. All individual’s have unalienable rights. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” ~DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. [MORE]
From [HERE] The American tradition of home gunsmithing was not specifically codified in the Constitution. Perhaps it should have been.
I understand why the Founders left it out. They were practical men, of course, chock-full of common sense. They knew Americans couldn’t fully enjoy their newfound right to keep and bear arms without the ability to build and maintain firearms in their homes, so why add unnecessary verbiage to a document that was already running a bit long.
Unfortunately, the Founders had no idea how their brilliant composition would be misused, misquoted and misinterpreted a couple centuries later, by prosecutors, judges and politicians whom they would have tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail.
I had never built a firearm in my home or anywhere else until last year when 80% Arms offered to send me two GST-9 pistol kits. They were looking for someone with zero gunsmithing experience – I certainly qualified – to build the pistols and chronicle the experience.
From start to finish the entire build process was incredible, but truth be told, I was a bit nervous during the first one. However, both pistols turned out perfectly, function flawlessly and look great.
I walked away from the experience with more than a couple reliable shooters. Building a firearm in your home is a uniquely American experience, one which we all should be able to enjoy. For a brief period, I had something in common with gunsmiths of old – something more than a shared passion for liberty and good whiskey.
Dexter Taylor, a law-abiding 53-year-old data engineer and father from Brooklyn, will spend the next 10 years in a New York state prison for his home gunsmithing experience. His only crimes were living in a state that does not recognize his Second Amendment rights, and appearing before a fruitcake of a judge who feels the same way.
Taylor’s home gunsmithing hobby somehow came to the attention of both the New York City Police Department and the ATF. On April 6, 2022, these Redcoat-wannabes executed a search warrant of Taylor’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
According to a press release from Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, officers recovered “four AR-15 style assault weapons, five handguns, four rifles and over 50 rounds of ammunition in addition to gun powder, shell casings, triggers, a 3D printer, and various upper and lower receivers used to build firearms.”
Fifty rounds? What an archcriminal.
Things went from bad to worse when Taylor went to court. Judge Abena Darkeh famously told Taylor’s defense attorney: “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So, you can’t argue the Second Amendment. This is New York.”
Truer words have never been spoken. The Second Amendment does not exist in New York.
Last month, a New York City jury convicted Taylor of “two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon; three counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon; five counts of criminal possession of a firearm; unlawful possession of pistol ammunition; and prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers.”
On Monday, Taylor was sentenced to 10 years in a state prison.
After the sentencing, District Attorney Gonzalez said in a statement, “Ghost guns are a threat to New Yorkers everywhere, and my Office is working tirelessly with our partners in law enforcement to stop their proliferation. Today’s sentence should send a message to anyone who, like this defendant, would try to evade critically important background checks and registration requirements to manufacture and stockpile these dangerous weapons. Every ghost gun we take off the street is a win for public safety.”
Taylor never tried to evade anything. Gunsmithing was his hobby. He was never accused of misusing his homemade firearms. Mere possession was enough to revoke his liberty for the next decade.
Taylor’s case highlights the incredible dichotomy between free states like Florida, where I can build as many homemade firearms as my budget will allow, and tyrannical blue states like New York, where a single “ghost gun” coupled with a lunatic of a judge ends in imprisonment. Taylor got caught behind enemy lines trying to exercise a tiny bit of freedom, and the Statists stomped on his head as a result.
To be clear, Dexter Taylor is a prisoner of war – a prisoner of Joe Biden’s war on our guns.
A GiveSendGo account was created to help Taylor’s legal defense. So far, it has raised more than $200,000.
A Change.org petition was created to remove Judge Darkeh from the bench. So far, it has more than 2,600 signatures.
Dumbocrats Martyrize and Niggerize Donald Trump w/Guilty Verdict in Obviously Politicized Prosecution that Causes His Donation Page to Go Viral. Felony Conviction Won't Disqualify Him from Presidency
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From [HERE] WinRed, the Republican donation platform, crashed due to overwhelming traffic moments after Former President Donald Trump was found guilty on all charges in his New York ‘hush money’ trial:
Users were flocking to Trump’s donation page only to be greeted with an error message telling them “Engineers have been notified.”
Nothing in the U.S. Constitution bars a felon from running or becoming president. The conviction isn’t disqualifying. [MORE]
Tucker Carlson railed against a New York jury’s decision finding former President Donald Trump guilty on 34 counts of fraud, saying it ensures his victory in November, but signals the death of the American justice system.
“Import the Third World, become the Third World. That’s what we just saw,” Tucker wrote on X.
Similarly, Infowars’ Alex Jones declared the verdict signals the Biden admin and the corrupt Deep State have decided to go all-in on their police state lawfare tactics, arguing this is actually a win for the people, as it has forced the authoritarians to expose themselves. [MORE]
James Freeman observed, “The obscene spectacle in a Manhattan courtroom seemed to be an almost daily reminder that the protections for the accused that we all learned about in school do not exist for Donald Trump in the chambers of Juan Merchan, who allowed falsehoods to be repeated to a jury, allowed prejudicial irrelevant testimony to paint the defendant in the worst possible light, and allowed a prosecutor with an obvious bias against the defendant to bring the case in the first place. To top it off, as the defendant prepared for trial he was not even told precisely how he was supposed to have committed felonies.”
The so-called Constitutional protections that we were indoctrinated to believe also don’t exist in reality for most Black people charged with crimes; as racism is the dominant feature of the criminal justice system and “race” is a political category. In other words, overzealous liberal dumbocrats have now niggerized Trump. Their obvious political prosecution of Trump was the exact opposite of Robert Mueller’s painstaking efforts to present an unbiased, non-political prosecution of an elected puppetician. Without the appearance of justice, the outcome is often rendered meaningless; once it looks political, it’s over - the verdict in this matter can’t be taken any more serious that one rendered from a Taliban court in Afghanistan or from children playing ‘court on the playground’
THE DISTRACTED ATTORNEY ALVIN BRAGG IS More Busy Defending a Porno Ho for his White Liberal Masters than He is Protecting Blacks from NYPD who Surveil/Stop Them w/Impunity? So Far, He Hasn't Prosecuted Any Cops: MR. BRAGG CAME INTO OFFICE VOWING NOT TO CHARGE NUMEROUS NON-VIOLENT CRIMES AGAINST PUBLIC ORDER. BUT HE MUST’VE MEANT TO PROMISE ‘NOT TO CHARGE WHITE FOLKS’ BECAUSE SOMEBODY IN HIS OFFICE IS FILLING UP MANHATTAN COURTROOMS AND RIKERS ISLAND JAIL WITH BLACK PEOPLE. BOB GANGI, DIRECTOR OF THE POLICE REFORM ORGANIZING PROJECT AND LONGTIME COURT WATCHER, SAYS HE’S SEEN LITTLE CHANGE FROM HIS PERSPECTIVE IN THE BACK ROW OF MANHATTAN ARRAIGNMENTS.
“THEY WERE STILL PROSECUTING LOW-LEVEL BROKEN-WINDOWS TYPE CASES, IT SEEMED TO US, AS OFTEN AS VANCE’S OFFICE WOULD DO,” GANGI SAID, REFERRING TO BRAGG’S IMMEDIATE PREDECESSOR AS MANHATTAN ATTORNEY GENERAL, CY VANCE JR. [MORE].
DATA FROM THE COURT MONITORING PROJECT DEMONSTRATE THAT THE NYPD TARGETS BLACKS AND LATINOS: AS BLACKS/LATINOS MAKE UP 90% OF ALL NYPD ARRESTS, MOSTLY FOR VICTIMLESS CRIMES. WORKING HAND IN HAND WITH THE NYPD, MR. BRAGG’S DA OFFICE IN MANHATTAN — ONE OF THE WEALTHIEST AND LEAST EQUAL PLACES IN THE COUNTRY — HAS CONVICTED BLACK PEOPLE OF FELONIES AND MISDEMEANORS AT A RATE 21 TIMES GREATER THAN THAT OF WHITE PEOPLE OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES. THIS DISPARITY IS THE LARGEST OF ANY COUNTY IN THE STATE. [MORE] and [MORE]
A White Man Sentenced to Death by an All White Jury after a White DA Removed All the Black Jurors Can’t Appeal Decision b/c Attorney Didn’t Object, Says ALA Criminal Ct of Appeals [also a white jury]
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From [HERE] On May 3, 2024, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals announced its decision in the case of Christopher Henderson, a death-sentenced man who had been tried by an all-white jury in Madison County, Alabama, where the population is 24.6% Black. Prosecutors in his capital trial used peremptory strikes to remove six of the 10 qualified Black potential jurors and all remaining jurors of color. Mr. Henderson’s appellant counsel from the Equal Justice Initiative identified evidence that the prosecutor’s strikes were racially discriminatory in violation of Batson v. Kentucky, which held that excluding a potential juror based on race is unconstitutional.
But in its decision in Henderson v. State, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals refused to even consider the evidence of illegal racial bias in jury selection, declaring instead that this claim was distinct from all other legal claims and would no longer be considered if presented as plain error.
Alabama’s “plain error” rule has long provided that, because death penalty cases require the highest possible level of reliability and scrutiny, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals must address errors or issues raised for the first time on appeal. It applied a higher standard to claims that were not preserved at trial, but it could not refuse to consider those claims.
The Henderson court departed from decades of precedent when it declared that claims involving racial discrimination in jury selection would no longer be reviewed under plain error. The court will still review other claims for plain error if they were not raised at trial—but an unpreserved claim of racial bias in the selection of the jury in a death penalty case is now the only claim asserting a constitutional violation that is barred from review on appeal.
The ruling is believed to be the first time a state court has proclaimed a bar on review on a single issue while permitting review for all other issues.
Plain error review emerged in Alabama in response to serious problems in the state’s indigent defense system, especially in capital cases. There is no statewide public defender in Alabama and no capital defender office to represent indigent defendants at trial or on direct appeal.
Instead, lawyers from the private bar are appointed to represent poor people facing the death penalty. Until 1999, attorneys were paid only $40 per hour for in-court work and $20 for out-of-court work, and compensation for out-of-court work was capped at $1,000. Nearly half of the people currently on Alabama’s death row were convicted under this compensation cap, and indigent people facing the death penalty in Alabama continue to struggle to find adequate legal assistance.
In contrast with limits on defense counsel, Alabama’s system puts no limits on the number of capital murder indictments a prosecutor can seek, resulting in rampant over-charging. At any given time, more than 300 people are awaiting trial for capital murder in the state, which is more pending capital cases than in most other Southern states combined.
Under Alabama Rule of Appellate Procedure 45A, known as the “plain error” rule, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals is required to review claims on appeal, even if there were no objections at trial. Rule 45A allowed appellate attorneys to identify and correct unconstitutional conduct in capital trials throughout the state. As a result, many wrongful convictions and illegal sentences have been brought to light. Mandatory plain error review has been responsible for nearly 40% of all reversals in Alabama death penalty cases.
Plain error has been especially important for addressing illegal racial discrimination in jury selection. Alabama has a long history of racial bias in its criminal legal system. The earliest Supreme Court decisions calling out the illegal exclusion of Black people from juries because of their race came in appeals from the wrongful convictions and death sentences of nine Black teenagers wrongly charged with raping two white women and convicted by an all-white jury in Scottsboro, Alabama. The “Scottsboro Boys” were innocent but falsely convicted because—as the Supreme Court found in Norris v. Alabama—Alabama courts would not evaluate evidence of racial bias.
Racial bias continued to plague jury selection in Alabama, prompting the Supreme Court to address racially discriminatory peremptory strikes in Swain v. Alabama in 1965. That decision created a legal standard that made it impossible to prove intentional discrimination even when prosecutors excluded every single African American from the jury, and growing criticism forced the Court to overrule it two decades later in Batson, which made racial bias in jury selection reversible error because of the fundamental way it undermines the integrity of the legal system.
Many prosecutors found ways to avoid the new standard in Batson and have continued to routinely exclude Black prospective jurors from serving on capital trial juries in Alabama. In 2010, the Equal Justice Initiative conducted a comprehensive study of racial bias in jury selection and found that Alabama appellate courts had identified illegal, intentional racially discriminatory jury selection in 25 death penalty cases, with compelling evidence of racially biased jury selection in dozens of other death penalty cases where no relief was granted.
In 2022, the Alabama Supreme Court, over the objections of several justices, changed the rules of court to make plain error review in death penalty cases discretionary rather than mandatory. Since then, the Court of Criminal Appeals continued to engage in discretionary plain error review until it ruled in Henderson that claims involving racial bias in jury selection—and only those claims—are now barred from review. This ruling is troubling, given the long history of racial bias in the administration of the death penalty and in Alabama in particular. This action also sets Alabama apart in its approach to racial bias even as other states are advancing innovative approaches to identify and eliminate bias in jury selection.
On the Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder by Police “Journalists” are Asking 'Has Anything Changed?' Of Course Not. Police Still Have the Uncontrollable Power to Use Force Offensively Against People
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FREEDOM CANNOT EXIST IN THE PRESENCE OF SO-CALLED AUTHORITY. On the Anniversary of George Floyd’s Murder by police officers in Minneapolis mostly neuropean “journalists” are provocatively asking, ‘what has changed since his death?’ Can you make a mirror out of a brick?
First of all the operating system of racism white supremacy is thriving - as it goes on continually updating and refining itself while most Black sheople are oblivious to its existence, continue to live in a reactionary state and have become politically powerless, “complicit in their own political emasculation,” and kept in a continuous state of checkmate. The quality of Black citizenship is so low that; no matter what the law says Blacks are prohibited from possessing guns and Blacks are subject to omnipresent interference by cops with their freedom of movement and their right to be left the fuck alone. Police exist primarily to manage the behavior of Blacks & Latinos and any protection from them is incidental and random. [MORE] Their goal is to place Blacks & Latinos in greater confinement. Said factors exist in a legal context in which law enforcement is uncontrollable by citizens, generally unaccountable to them, can’t be hired or fired by citizens and it has irresponsible, limitless power to take life on the street as they see fit while providing a compulsory “service” that citizens have no “right” to decline. Dr. Blynd observes, "people who are awake see cops as mercenary guards that remind us daily through acts of force, that we are simultaneously both enemies and slaves of the Corporate State - colonized, surveilled and patrolled by the desensitized and lobotomized drones of the colonizers."
Most importantly however, nothing can ever change with regard to police brutality so long as police have the power to use force offensively on “citizens.” In fact, despite the falling violent crime rates since 1993, police killings have increased. According to Mapping Police Violence, “Police killed more people in 2023 than any year in more than a decade. Police have continued to kill at a similar rate in 2024.“ Police killed at least 1,247 people in 2023. Black people were 27% of those killed by police in 2023 despite being only 13% of the population. Thus far, there have been only 9 days in 2024 where police did not kill someone. Black people are most likely to be killed by police and are three times more likely than whites to be killed by police. 33% of Black people killed by police were running away, driving away or otherwise trying to flee. Regardless of race, there is no accountability: 98.1% of killings by police from 2013-2023 did not result with officers even being charged with a crime. [MORE]
Petitioning puppeticians for reforms, or begging them to enforce the status quo by punishing police for conduct that is already illegal or begging them to defund or lower police department budgets can have no effect on the extraordinary police power to use force offensively on citizens. Said non-reformable and uncontrollable power to initiate the use of unprovoked violence on people is called “authority.”
As you will see, if you indulge BW here, due to the fact that "authority" is immoral and unjust and there is no legitimate or rational way to account for belief in its existence, the legal system is entirely based on physical coercion or violence. In other words, we are not free.
Political “authority” can be summed up as the implied right to rule over people. It is the idea that some people have the moral right to forcibly control others, and that, consequently, those others have the moral and legal obligation to obey.’ [MORE] Authority is the basis and operating system for all governments throughout the world, regardless of type, function or characterization. As so-called representatives of authority, police officers (among other authorities) are empowered to use force offensively against citizens who are legally and morally obliged to obey authority.
However, all use of force offensively is immoral and evil. Acts that would be considered unjust or morally unacceptable when performed by “citizens” are just as unjust or morally unacceptable when performed by government agents. Putting your hands on another human being, not in self-defense but offensively, without their consent and ‘manipulating their body in disregard of their volition is evil’, whether its done by citizens or representatives of “authority” wearing blue costumes. Larken Rose explains, “authority is permission to commit evil – to do things that would be recognized as immoral and unjustified if anyone else did them.”
To be clear, all persons have the natural, inalienable right to defend themselves and come to the defense of others if they believe another person is in imminent danger from an aggressor. Private security workers and guards work under said natural law. In contrast, police officers and other representatives of authority have the extra or added “power” to act offensively as aggressors; higher authorities have granted police the power to use force offensively on people or initiate unprovoked acts of violence against people whenever they deem it necessary. As such, police are permitted to do things “citizens” cannot do, such as, stop individuals, touch them against their will, attack (make arrests) people, kill people, interfere with their freedoms in many ways, kidnap people (that is, ‘detain and transport’) or imprison them because higher authorities have empowered them to do so. In turn, “citizens” are said to have a moral and legal obligation to obey all government orders, laws and have no right to resist an unlawful arrest in most states. Authority must be obeyed on a content-neutral basis (regardless of whether citizens agree or not.) [MORE] This hypothesized moral property (authority) believed to be possessed by all governments is said to make government the supreme authority over human affairs. Subconsciously we know and understand that ruling over other people through violence is irrational and barbaric. [MORE]
There is also no legitimate or rational way to account for our belief in the existence of authority.
“Authority” does not come from people nor is it derived from any rational or natural source. All governmental power allegedly is said to come exclusively from the people. It is believed that citizens delegate their individual power to the government and it’s representatives for government to represent citizens and act on their behalf. Such political representation works much in the same way agents represent principals in all kinds of business or other contractual relationships. For instance, a manager at McDonalds represents the franchise owner when she carries out his everyday business requests, like ordering inventory and hiring workers, etc. She is the agent and the owner is the principal who empowers and directs her work. Naturally, an agent only can possess whatever powers the principal gave to her. For instance, the McDonalds manager does not have the authority to sell the store unless the owner granted her such power. Similarly, the McDonalds manager could not have the power to do things that the franchise owner has no power to do - such as change the McDonalds logo to a black panther or use another business’ parking lot for its storage. Additionally, numbers don’t change anything – a group of McDonald’s owners still wouldn’t have the power to grant an agent the power to use another business’ parking lot either. An agent cannot have more power than the principal because all his/her power necessarily originated exclusively from the principal.
In the case of government however, the government has somehow granted itself the power to do things that no individual citizen could ever do. While citizens have the inalienable right to act in self-defense or come to the defense of others, citizens have no right to initiate unprovoked acts of violence (use force offensively) on other people and no right to forcibly control other people. When citizens commit such acts it is considered unlawful and/or criminal. Citizens cannot possibly delegate rights they don’t have - so it is logically impossible for citizens to delegate the power to forcibly control others to the government and its agents. Larken Rose explains simply, “you can’t give someone something you don’t have.” [MORE] and [MORE] He states;
“Despite all of the complex rituals and convoluted rationalizations, all modern belief in “government” rests on the notion that mere mortals can, through certain political procedures, bestow upon some people various rights which none of the people possessed to begin with. The inherent lunacy of such a notion should be obvious. There is no ritual or document through which any group of people can delegate to someone else a right which no one in the group possesses. And that self-evident truth, all by itself, demolishes any possibility of legitimate “government.”
Rose correctly explains, ‘the people whom the politicians claim to represent have no right to do anything that politicians do: impose “taxes,” enact “laws,” etc. Average citizens have no right to forcibly control the choices of their neighbors, tell them how to live their lives, and punish them if they disobey, So when a “government” does such things, it is not representing anyone or anything but itself.’ He further explains
“if those in “government” have only those rights possessed by those who elected them, then “government” loses the one ingredient that makes it “government”: the right to rule over others (”authority”). If it has the same rights and powers as everyone else, there is no reason to call it “government.” If the politicians have no more rights than you have, all of their demands and commands, all of their political rituals, “law” books, courts, and so on, amount to nothing more than the symptoms of a profound delusional psychosis. Nothing they do can have any legitimacy, any more than if you did the same thing on your own, unless they somehow acquired rights that you do not have. And that is impossible, since no one on earth, and no group of people on earth, could possibly have given them such superhuman rights.”[MORE]
Thus, there is no rational basis for the belief in authority or rational way to account for its existence as a legitimate basis for government. Other explanations for authority have been thoroughly debunked, here is a summary:
SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY. How about the social contract theory - the idea that there is a contract between people and the government in which the government protects the people and enforces the laws, in exchange for citizens obedience and taxes? That is, individuals have contractually agreed to obey the government and must do so and the government is obliged to provide services and protection. However, if such an agreement exists, WHEN DID YOU SIGN IT? We were born into this arrangement, no one signed anything. Yet we are bound to obey authority. Therefore, there is no contract and no social contract exists.
At any rate, the so called “public duty” doctrine renders the “social contract theory” meaningless. Decades ago the Supreme Court ruled that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen. It means for instance that police have no legal duty to protect any victim from violence by other private parties unless the victim was in police custody. [MORE] and [MORE] This means that police cannot be sued for any federal constitutional claim for a failure to protect citizens. Unless a state negligence law exists allowing such a lawsuit, victims cannot hold police liable for a failure to protect from harm from private parties. [MORE] and [MORE].
Pursuant to the social contract, citizens are contractually obliged to obey all laws and commands and when they fail to do so the government punishes the citizen, usually with fines or imprisonment. However, authorities are bound to do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it and to whom they choose, but no one in particular. Dr. Blynd asks “Makes you feel like a fool, doesn’t it?” There is no contract between the individual and the state. It is device or trick to control the populace.
IMPLICIT AGREEMENT. What about an implicit agreement to obey authority - where we are deemed from birth to have agreed to obey authority until we decline, opt out or reject it? This proposition is also an illusion because whether you reject or object to authority you must obey authority regardless. You have no real choice in the matter. Like a plantation system, there is no way to opt out and avoid being a slave subject to another (authority) plantation owner.
AGREEMENT BY ACCEPTING BENEFITS. Perhaps authority is made legitimate when citizens agree to accept the benefits provided by government, such as public schools or police “service?” For the same reasons no one has an implicit contract with the government. Government authority is not made legitimate through acceptance of benefits. Whether a person accepts the benefits of government or not, all persons are still subject to the laws and required to obey authority.
CONSENT BY PRESENCE. How about consent to authority by simply remaining in a particular location - consent by presence on the land? In other words, in order to remain on your own land then you must pay a government and obey laws to do so. Said theory means governments own all land and property everywhere government exists. According to such clogic as stated by Huemer, “Those seeking to avoid all governmental jurisdiction have three options: they may live in the ocean, move to Antarctica, or commit suicide.” [MORE]
Larken Rose explains, “To tell someone that his only valid choices are either to leave the “country” or to abide by whatever commands the politicians issue logically implies that everything in the “country” is the property of the politicians. If a person can spend year after year paying for his home, or even building it himself, and his choices are still to either obey the politicians or get out, that means that his house and the time and effort he invested in the house are the property of the politicians. And for one person’s time and effort to rightfully belong to another is the definition of slavery. That is exactly what the “implied consent” theory means: that every “country” is a huge slave plantation, and that everything and everyone there is the property of the politicians. And, of course, the master does not need the consent of his slave.”
It is also obviously circular thinking to say ‘the government has authority over everything and everybody because it has authority over everything and everybody’ - such statement may indeed be the case but it cannot be a justification for the legitimacy of authority in the first place.
CONSENT THRU PARTICIPATION. Finally, does consent through participation make government authority legitimate or valid? Not at all. “If you didn’t vote in the election, would you then not have to obey the laws made by whoever wins? Of course not. You will be subject to the same laws whether you vote or not.” [MORE]
MAGIC WORDS, CAPES & CEREMONIES. It should also go without saying but there is no magic ceremony, special costumes to put on, voting process or magic statements (oaths) which can grant certain people extra-human powers to rule over other people, exempt them from morality, accountability and do things which no individual or group of individuals can do.
All pretenses of civilization and “human progress” aside, the legal system is primarily based on physical coercion (violence): comply with authority or go to jail or die. There is no “free government” anywhere. Government does not rest on our voluntary consent, it is a system anchored in violence. As explained by FUNKTIONARY, “Government” is simply, unequivocally, and always initiation of force or coercion and nothing else. Citizens can either obey authority or go to jail. ‘The lie of tyranny is that you will maintain your freedom by obeying authority. The choices it offers you are a lifetime of obedience or death.’ [MORE] Government and it’s “services” are not voluntary but mandatory and individuals cannot opt out or reject government services or choose to live without government – rather, we are born into this involuntary arrangement.
All “Laws” in actuality are threats backed by the ability and willingness to use violence/force against those who disobey. An individual can choose not to comply with a law or an order, which will subsequently lead to another order/command or threat of a worse sanction, but in all governmental systems, at the end of the chain of orders or worsening sanctions comes a threat that the violator cannot defy. Michael Huemer states, “The system as a whole must be anchored by a nonvoluntary intervention, a harm that the state can impose regardless of the individual’s choices. That anchor is provided by physical force.” Huemer explains, “One can choose not to pay a fine, one can choose to drive without a license, and one can even choose not to walk to a police car to be taken away. But one cannot choose not to be subjected to physical force if the agents of the state decide to impose it. Thus, the legal system is founded on intentional, harmful coercion.’
The point here is not a theoretical discussion about the purpose of government or how it should run. Rather, it is the fact that there is no valid justification for one man (or government) to have supreme authority over another. Although we all assume that there is some valid explanation for why the government should be entitled to engage in behavior that would be deemed to violate individual rights if performed by anyone other than the government, there is none.
Due to fact that there is no legitimate basis for belief in authority or legitimate basis for government, then citizens are in actuality slaves or prisoners of authorities within a free range system of slavery or within a free range prison. FUNKTIONARY states, “citizens can come and go when they want and therefore have the illusion of true freedom—called “free-range slavery.”
SYSTEM OF POWER SUPREMACY. In reality, persons do not actually live under “democracies” or “republics” or monarchies or dictatorships. Said descriptions or characterizations are designed to conceal the reality of an elite ruling class and the master/servant relations it has with its citizens. In the United States and everywhere else government exists, Rose states
“there is a ruling class and a subject class, and the differences between them are many and obvious. One group commands, the other obeys. One group demands huge sums of money, the other group pays. One group tells the other group where they can live, where they can work, what they can eat, what they can drink, what they can drive, who they can work for, what work they can do, and so on. One group takes and spends trillions of dollars of what the other group earns. One group consists entirely of economic parasites, while the efforts of the other group produce all the wealth. It is patently obvious who commands and who obeys. The people are not the “government,” by any stretch of the imagination, and it requires profound denial to believe otherwise. For example, it is also claimed that “the government works for us; it is our servant.” Again, such statements does not even remotely match the obvious reality of the situation; it is little more than a cult mantra, a delusion intentionally programmed into the populace in order to twist their view of reality.”
Within said “consensus reality” created by elites, various other fictions and devices are used to disguise the reality of the master-servant relationship. These devices include concepts such as “consent of the governed,” “we are the government,” “democracy,” “representative government,” “majority rule,” and “constitutional rights” given to you by a magical government, which functions as your public master that gives and takes rights, etc. According to FUNKTIONARY these ‘fictions lead only to a progressive social, personal, racial and jurisprudential separation from reality.’ Dr. Blynd states, “discussion and debates about fictions such as “rights” merely evades the frequently avoided question of who is to enforce any “right” and who will benefit from the pretense? . . Government” is simply, unequivocally, and always initiation of force or coercion and nothing else. . . and “While there are varying degrees, “government” very simply is “one man violently controlling the life and property of another man.”
Although there are different brands and flavors of “government” across the ideological spectrum, it is more accurate to describe such systems as “free range plantations” or “free range prisons.” The inhabitants of such “jurisdictions” are “free range slaves” or “free range prisoners.” Some prisons or plantations are more restrictive than others but all “citizens” within them are subject to an implied authority. Slaves or prisoners in the Free Range Prison may face greater or lesser restrictions depending upon their income, status or race but none are free. Whether individuals choose to be willing slaves (citizens) or unwilling slaves (denizens) depends upon how aware they are of their true reality and their response to it.
Nevertheless, there is no need to revolt against authority. Authority is only a belief that must be dropped. FUNKTIONARY states, ‘there are no tyrants only tyranny exists. How can one man or woman rule a multitude against their will except through mind-control and word-conditioning control?’
Government means “control of the mind” and “authority is the means by which society uses to control its population.” Trent Goodbaudy describes this is as a “statist delusion.” Statist, within the meaning of FUNKTIONARY means “the belief “citizens” and “states” exist and the memetic thought patterns supporting such beliefs.” Goodbaudy states, “We are stuck in an illusory construct that only exists in a diseased psyche. There really are no rulers and no masters anyway; just claims of authority, and acceptance of these claims by the brainwashed. There really is no government other than what you choose to be governed by: they only have the authority that you grant them.”
Dr. Blynd states, ‘The real threat to "authority" is the masses overcoming info-gaps and verigaps through self-knowledge and the proliferation of symbols of opposition, not crime or destruction of property.’ FUNKTIONARY explains, “We don’t violently overthrow government, rather we silently and organically outgrow it in its current form as we know it. Where there is no energy for conflict upon which to feed, it starves itself into oblivion or becomes malnourished to the point of ineffectual irrelevance.”
Where a critical mass of individuals see authority for what it is – an irrational, self-contradictory, evil, granfalloon, contrary to civilization and morality that “constitutes the most dangerous, destructive superstition that has ever existed”- they will drop it like a wooden coin.
