Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Raytheon has called in retired engineers to help produce Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that the US has been providing Ukraine, Defense One reported on Thursday.

Stingers are shoulder-fired missiles that were out of production for 20 years until the US started sending them to Ukraine when Russia first invaded last year, a policy led by a former Raytheon board member, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

According to the Pentagon, the US has provided Ukraine with over 1,700 Stinger missile systems to date.

“Stinger’s been out of production for 20 years, and all of a sudden in the first 48 hours [of the war], it’s the star of the show and everybody wants more,” Wes Kremer, the president of Raytheon Missiles & Defense, said last week.

Raytheon needs to produce the Stingers using blueprints drawn up during the Carter administration, as using more advanced production methods would require redesigning the weapon.

“We were bringing back retired employees that are in their 70s … to teach our new employees how to actually build a Stinger,” Kremer said. “We’re pulling test equipment out of warehouses and blowing the spider webs off of them.”

The US Army placed an order for Stingers in May 2022 to replace ones sent to Ukraine, but the Pentagon said they won’t be delivered until 2026. Kremer said it would take at least 30 months for the first missiles to be completed due to the time it will take to restart production.

In March 2022, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes explained how the war in Ukraine would be a boon for the weapons maker.

“Everything that’s being shipped into Ukraine today, of course, is coming out of stockpiles, either at DoD or from our NATO allies, and that’s all great news. Eventually we’ll have to replenish it and we will see a benefit to the business over the next coming years,” he said.

About 30 million Americans are taking benzodiazepines like Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin- about 12.5% of the adult population. Doctors and psychiatrists have prescribed these drugs for decades to treat anxiety. But a new study reveals “benzodiazepine usage and discontinuing usage” can create “nervous system injury and negative life effects.” 

Researchers from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus said as patients enter the discontinuation phase of Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin, they face significant withdrawal symptoms.

“Despite the fact that benzodiazepines have been widely prescribed for decades, this survey presents significant new evidence that a subset of patients experiences long-term neurological complications,” said Alexis Ritvo, M.D, M.P.H., an assistant professor in psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and medical director of the nonprofit Alliance for Benzodiazepine Best Practices. She said the medical community must reevaluate how it prescribes benzodiazepines. 

The study was a collaborative effort between CU Anschutz, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and several drug advocacy that specializes in raising awareness of benzodiazepine harms. 

“Patients have been reporting long-term effects from benzodiazepines for over 60 years. I am one of those patients. Even though I took my medication as prescribed, I still experience symptoms on a daily basis at four years off benzodiazepines. Our survey and the new term BIND (benzodiazepine-induced neurological dysfunction) give a voice to the patient experience and point to the need for further investigations,” said Christy Huff, MD, one of the paper’s coauthors and a cardiologist and director of Benzodiazepine Information Coalition. 

About 76.6% of the respondents had long-lasting symptoms after discounting the use of benzodiazepines. Almost half of the respondents had these ten symptoms for more than a year: 

1. low energy
2. difficulty focusing
3.  memory loss
4. anxiety
5. insomnia
6. sensitivity to light and sounds
7. digestive problems
8. symptoms triggered by food and drink
9. muscle weakness
10.  body pain

The most alarming part of the study was the symptoms listed above were new and distinct and weren’t experienced before respondents used Xanax, Valium, and Klonopin. Many respondents reported damaged relationships, job loss, and increased medical costs. Also, 54.4% of the respondents reported suicidal thoughts or attempted suicide. 

But don’t worry because doctors and the government tell us benzodiazepines are safe, just like they said OxyContin wasn’t addictive in the 1990s. 

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has sent out a special mailing to taxpayers in disaster-affected areas, letting them know they have more time to pay their taxes.

The IRS said in a statement Thursday that the special mailing was being sent out to California and seven other states as a follow-up clarification after an earlier message wrongly told them they had 21 days to pay.

“Although the initial notice indicated a payment deadline of 21 days, taxpayers in these disaster-declared regions actually have until a later date this year to make their payments within the designated timeframe,” the agency stated.

Taxpayers with balances due who live in parts of Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee that fell under disaster declarations received a CP14 notice from the IRS in late May and June.

Many of the CP14 notices incorrectly said the affected taxpayers had three weeks to pay outstanding balances.

“We know our initial mailing caused confusion for taxpayers and tax professionals, and we worked quickly to send a follow-up reminder to help reassure people,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said in a statement.

“This mailing reflects how we’re trying to be more taxpayer-focused given the additional resources that we’ve been given under the Inflation Reduction Act.”

The new mailing, called CP14CL, will be sent out within the next several weeks, the agency said.

The earlier CP14 notices also included a special insert that features the correct payment deadline, which was extended under special tax relief to taxpayers in federally declared disaster zones.

The IRS has also updated these inserts, which will accompany upcoming CP14 balances-due notices so as to make it clear that the letter does not apply to people covered by disaster declarations.

Disaster-Related Deadline Extensions

Earlier this year, taxpayers in federally declared disaster regions—like ones hit by deadly winter storms—were granted tax relief by the IRS in the form of an extension on their deadlines to file their tax returns and pay amounts due.

The IRS issued notices granting such relief to taxpayers affected by severe weather in parts of Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, New York, and Tennessee. The deadline extensions varied across different disaster areas, with relevant parts of Florida, for example, getting an extension until Aug. 15, while Tennessee storm victims had theirs extended until July 31.

Read more here…

Authored by Andrew Moran via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Expiry dates and restrictions on “less desirable” purchases are some of the key advantages behind central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), according to an economist at a World Economic Forum (WEF) event.

The WEF hosted the 14th annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China, also known as Summer Davos. During one of the 30-minute panel discussions on June 28, Cornell University professor Eswar Prasad explained that the global economy is “at the cusp of physical currency essentially disappearing” and that programmable CBDCs and the technology behind these new forms of money could take the international economic landscape toward a dark path or a better place.

Prasad contended that one of the “huge potential gains” for the digitization of money is the programmability of CBDC units and attaching expiry dates. Governments can also utilize central bank money to socially engineer society.

“You could have … a potentially better—or some people might say a darker world—where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable like, say ammunition, or drugs, or pornography, or something of the sort,” he said. “And that is very powerful in terms of the use of a CBDC, and I think also extremely dangerous to central banks.”

The author of “Gaining Currency” and “The Dollar Trap” purported that CBDCs possess unique characteristics and could be employed “as a conduit for economic policies in a very targeted way, or more broadly for social policies.”

“That could really affect the integrity of central bank money and the integrity and independence of central banks,” Prasad stated. “So, there are wonderful notions of things that can be done with digital money, but again I fear the technology could take us to a better place, but equally has the potential to take us to a pretty dark place.”

CBDC Expiry Dates

Integrating expiry dates with CBDCs has already been discussed by various central banks worldwide.

The Bank of Canada (BoC) published a paper in 2021 entitled “Best Before? Expiring Central Bank Digital Currency and Loss Recovery.” The institution weighed the pros and cons of expiration dates, asserting that an expiry date would “automate personal loss recovery.”

“With this feature enabled, digital cash could not be spent after its expiry date. Consumers whose digital cash expired would automatically receive the funds back into their online account without having to file a claim,” the Canadian central bank wrote. “We show that offering the option of personal loss recovery could substantially increase consumer demand for digital cash. However, the length of time to expiry plays a key role. An expiry date that is too soon is inconvenient, but a date too far in the future slows down the reimbursement of lost digital cash.”

China has been exploring expiration dates for the digital yuan, suggesting that it would no longer be usable if not spent in a specific timeframe.

The World Bank studied the effects of expiring money and argued that this could be a “potential monetary policy tool” to stimulate consumption during recessions or pandemics.

“Expiring money would increase both the velocity of money and overall economic activity, similar to applying a negative rate to digital cash,” the organization wrote. “In practice, a carrying fee on money would encourage people to spend it and thus prevent it from being hoarded.”

Indeed, CBDC advocates say digital money can be a flexible instrument to micro-target sectors, regions, interest rates, and socio-economic demographics with real-time feedback.

Read more here…

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has ordered his armed forces to bolster defenses in the northern sector of the country near Belarus, days after Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was exiled there after leading a mutiny.

“The decision … is for Commander-in-Chief [Valeriy] Zaluzhnyi and North commander [Serhiy] Naev to implement a set of measures to strengthen this direction,” Zelensky announced on Telegram.

He said Kiev held an urgent national security meeting concerning the situation in Belarus, which lies just to the north of Ukraine, and early in the conflict had been a staging ground for Russian forces.

Prigozhin reportedly arrived in Minsk on a private jet on Tuesday, which was confirmed by President Alexander Lukashenko. The Belarusian leader had helped mediate a deal which resolved the internal Russian crisis peacefully, but which Washington has claimed left Putin “weakened”. 

Putin in a speech earlier this week indicated he would stick by the deal made which allows Wagner mercenaries to sign contracts with the defense ministry, or else they can go to Belarus, according to the statements. 

While there’s been nothing in the way of confirmation that a large-scale movement of Wagner fighters have crossed into Belarus, Western media reports are on Friday referencing satellite images which they say suggests new Wagner encampments on Belarusian soil: 

The satellite image appears to show activity at a disused military base about 13 miles (21km) from the town of Asipovichy – around 64 miles from Minsk, the capital of Belarus. The area has been reported in Russian media as a place which could house Wagner fighters.

BBC Verify has identified over 300 tent-like structures erected within the past two weeks.

A satellite image from 15 June shows none of these structures visible. The most recent high-resolution image we’ve obtained is from 30 June and reveals the extensive work being carried out at the base.

Satellite imagery show several hundred tent structures have appeared in a disused & secluded #Belarus military base – maybe for use by Wagner troops. Next to village of Tsel, base is 100km southeast of capital Minsk & around 200km from #Ukraine‘s border. https://t.co/Rdtmh6NOxy pic.twitter.com/wPRqvg61Y7

— Glasnost Gone (@GlasnostGone) June 30, 2023

But BBC cautions that, “It’s not possible to confirm that these new structures are intended to house Wagner forces, but the leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko has agreed to accommodate them.”

Meanwhile, on Friday Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov vowed that Russia will emerge “stronger” after the failed uprising, which saw some limited exchange of fire, including helicopter shootdowns by Wagner which killed Russian air force pilots. 

Ukraine’s top general says there was no noticeable battlefield effect in Ukraine from the rebellion contrary to a million Western pundits. pic.twitter.com/NuYD7KqRLh

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) June 30, 2023

“Russia has always overcome all its problems… it comes out stronger and stronger,” Lavrov told a press briefing. “It will be the same this time, too. This process has already begun,” he stressed. 

Lavrov also said that Moscow doesn’t owe an explanation to the West. “Thank you for your concern about our national interests, but you shouldn’t be worried,” he told a foreign journalist in response to a question.

Authored by Robert Kogon via DailySceptic.org,

German scientists have uncovered startling evidence that a substantial portion of the batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine deployed in the European Union may in fact have consisted of placebos – and that the German regulator knew this and did not subject them to quality-control testing.

The scientists, Dr. Gerald Dyker, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Ruhr University Bochum, and Dr. Jörg Matysik, Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Leipzig, are part of a group of five German-speaking scientists who have been publicly raising questions about the quality and safety of the BioNTech vaccine (as it is known in Germany) for the last year and a half.

They recently appeared on the Punkt.Preradovic online programme of the German journalist Milena Preradovic to discuss batch variability. Their starting point was the recent Danish study showing enormous variation in the adverse events associated with different batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, or BNT162b2 per its scientific codename. The below figure from the Danish study illustrates this variation.

It shows that the batches used in Denmark, which are represented by the points in the graph, essentially break down into three groups.

The ‘green batches’ clustered around the green line have a moderate or moderately-high level of adverse events associated with them. In the discussion with Preradovic, Gerald Dyker takes the example of the green point furthest to the right.

As he explains, it represents the batch that was the used the most in Denmark, with somewhat over 800,000 doses having been administered. These 800,000 doses are associated with around 2,000 suspected adverse events, which gives a reporting rate of one suspected adverse event per approximately 400 doses. As Dyker puts it, “That’s not a small amount if we compare to what we know otherwise from influenza vaccines.” According to Dyker’s calculation, the green batches account for more than 60% of the Danish sample.

There are then the ‘blue batches’ clustered around the blue line, which are obviously associated with an extraordinarily high level of adverse events. As Dyker notes, no more than 80,000 doses of any of the blue batches were administered in Denmark – suggesting that these especially bad batches may perhaps have been quietly pulled from the market by public health authorities.

Nonetheless, these batches had as many as 8,000 suspected adverse events associated with them. Eight thousand out of 80,000 doses would give a reporting rate of one suspected adverse event for every 10 doses – and Dyker notes that some of the blue batches are indeed associated with a reporting rate of as high as one suspected adverse event for every six doses!

On Dyker’s calculation, the blue batches represent less than 5% of the total number of doses included in the Danish study. Nonetheless, they are associated with nearly 50% of the 579 deaths recorded in the sample.

Finally, we have the ‘yellow batches’ clustered around the yellow line, which, as can be seen above, barely gets off the x-axis.

On Dyker’s calculation, the yellow batches represent around 30% of the total.

Dyker notes that they include batches comprising some 200,000 administered doses which are associated with literally zero suspected adverse events.

As Dyker puts it, “malicious” observers might note that “this is how placebos would look”.

And malicious observers might be right.

For Dyker and Matysik compared the batch numbers contained in the Danish study with publicly available information on the batches approved for release, and they made the startling discovery that almost none of the harmless batches, unlike the very-bad and not-so-bad batches, appear to have been subject to any quality-control testing at all.

Unbeknownst to most observers, it is precisely the German regulatory agency, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), which is, in principle, responsible for quality control of all the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine supply in the EU. (The institute is named after the German immunologist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Ehrlich, not, of course, the Stanford biology professor of the same name.)

This reflects the fact that the actual legal manufacturer of the vaccine, as well as the marketing authorisation holder in the EU, is the German company BioNTech, not its more well-known American partner Pfizer.

Dyker and Matysik found that the PEI had tested and approved for release all the very bad ‘blue’ batches, the overwhelming majority of the not-so-bad ‘green’ batches, but almost none of the harmless ‘yellow’ batches – as if the PEI knew in advance that these batches were unproblematic.

This is shown in the below slide from Dyker’s presentation during the Punkt.Preradovic interview. The title reads: ‘Which batches from the Danish study did the Paul Ehrlich Institute test and approve for release?’

In the PEI column of each of the tables, “ja” means, of course, that the batch was tested, “nein” means that it was not. Note that only the first batch in the ‘yellow’ table was tested.

The caption under that table reads: “The PEI did not generally regard testing of the harmless ‘yellow batches’ as necessary.”

As Dyker put it, with notable restraint, “this would support the initial suspicion that they are maybe in fact something like placebos”.

Or, in short, to paraphrase the German scientists’ findings on the variability of the Pfizer-BioNTech batches, it would appear that the good was bad, the bad was very bad, and the very good was saline solution.

*  *  *

(The full Punkt.Preradovic interview with Gerald Dyker and Jörg Matysik is available here in German. The above translations are by your writer. A full, presumably machine-translated, English version of the interview is also available on the Punkt.Preradovic webpage.)

Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, translator and researcher working in Europe. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on Twitter.

Social unrest spread like cancer across French cities for a fourth consecutive night, with hundreds of buildings and vehicles set ablaze. President Emmanuel Macron’s government struggled to contain the violence, which was sparked on Tuesday after a teenager was shot dead by a police officer. 

In an update on Saturday, France’s Interior Ministry said 2,500 fires were reported overnight. Rioters set fire to 1,350 vehicles and 235 buildings nationwide. About 1,300 people were arrested, while the government mobilized 45,000 police officers with armored vehicles to quell the violence. 

According to The Telegraph, French police said they were “at war” with “savage hordes of vermin” on Friday night. The country’s top police unions threatened revolt unless Macron’s government restored law and order. 

“Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will enter resistance and the government should be aware of this,” police unions said. 

Footage of the chaos overnight:

🚨🇫🇷 Riots – France 🇫🇷🚨

Overnight French Islamist rioters have burnt down buildings, killed, injured & even maimed French locals, looted shops, destroyed vehicles & laid waste to every major French City.

These scenes will be repeated across the whole of Europe & are starting… pic.twitter.com/8mnAZlPVqi

— Concerned Citizen (@cotupacs) July 1, 2023

😡🔥❌💔
This is school. I repeat this is SCHOOL 🏫. This could be school of my kids. Why ? Why school ? This people are mentally sick 🤢 #France #FranceProtests #FranceRiots #war #Macron #franceViolence #UkraineWar pic.twitter.com/H60YTdH4YC

— Santosh Gupta (@santoshskm) July 1, 2023

#FranceRiots: A jewelry store in Marseille was ransacked & looted during the ongoing race riots part of France’s George Floyd moment following the police-shooting death of a French Algerian youth. pic.twitter.com/khFPjTTESG

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) July 1, 2023

FRANCE RIOTS: 🇫🇷
Cameras destroyed with guns in Lyon region. pic.twitter.com/0T6q3BYu1v

— Sir Paul Alves (@StarshipAlves) July 1, 2023

#FranceRiots: Cars in a parking lot in Angers, France have been set on fire in attacks carried out by rioters. France is now on its fourth day of race riots by youths of immigrant background, anarchists, #antifa & the far-left. pic.twitter.com/4eGtDAETJV

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) June 30, 2023

White people are attacked at random here in France
Some attacks seems to show mutilation with machete by Muslims

Everything going well here #riots #France #AttackOnFrancepic.twitter.com/GzdWxF01MO

— llebou (@llebou) July 1, 2023

FRENCH REVOLUTION🧵: The French police have lost control of the streets and in frustration are cracking down on every infraction with maximum force. pic.twitter.com/6YHwajeKAZ

— @amuse (@amuse) July 1, 2023

MUST WATCH: A pharmacy in Montargis, France collapses after being ravaged by fire and looting pic.twitter.com/G6fL1I9Jhi

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) July 1, 2023

These are not protestors !!

These are terrorists looting & vandalizing France !!

pic.twitter.com/5yodCerxqh

— حسن سجواني 🇦🇪 Hassan Sajwani (@HSajwanization) July 1, 2023

French looters have become so confident that they are now seizing 5.56mm caliber machine guns from the police. pic.twitter.com/YLMI5dzH51

— Russian Market (@runews) July 1, 2023

“Many of the protesters identify with the teenager [shot and killed by police earlier in the week], who has been named only as Nahel M. and who was of Algerian and Moroccan descent,” The New York Times said. 

Predictive programming? 

Take a look at what’s going on in France 👀

They always tell you first 💥

‼️ 🇲🇫 Nearly a year ago, Netflix released its initial trailer for the film Athena about a future civil war that commences when African and Arab immigrants begin rioting after an Algerian youth is shot… pic.twitter.com/fe4fSFr4fa

— {Matt} $XRPatriot (@matttttt187) July 1, 2023

What’s alarming is that French police unions threaten to protest if the government refuses to clamp down hard on the rioting. France is in a state of near anarchy. French police said they were “at war” with “savage hordes of vermin.” This is further decay and one step closer to societal collapse. It will be a long summer in Europe. Are these organized rioters attempting a ‘color revolution’ in France? 

Via Remix News,

The first question asked by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in his Facebook post is: “The only question everyone is asking here in Brussels is: Where has the money gone?”

Orbán is currently attending the two-day summit of EU leaders in Brussels, and one of the hottest topics is the question as to where the EU’s budget money has disappeared to. The Hungarian prime minister said that the European Commission had submitted a budget amendment proposal asking member states to pay tens of billions of euros.

“The question arises: How did this situation come about and how did they bring the European Union to the brink of bankruptcy?” Orbán asked.

Brussels, #EUCO. We want to know who is responsible for bringing the European Union to the brink of bankruptcy. Where is the money @EU_Commission ? pic.twitter.com/va7l1ipcNy

— Orbán Viktor (@PM_ViktorOrban) June 29, 2023

Orbán also noted that the EU is demanding more money from member states, although it is only two years into its seven-year budget. In other words, the money that was approved to be spent and was supposed to be there for the next five years has already been spent.

Just 2 years into the 7-year budget, #Brussels is running out of money. How did this happen? What happened to the budget? Where is the money, @EuropeanCommiss ? pic.twitter.com/yENyF7jXgY

— Orbán Viktor (@PM_ViktorOrban) June 29, 2023

The prime minister then went on to list what Brussels is demanding for the budget.

“They want to get €50 billion from the member states to give to Ukraine, while they cannot even account for the money we have given them so far. They want more money from the member states so that they can pay the interest on the European Union loans that they have previously taken out. These are loans that Poland and Hungary have not seen a single cent from so far,” Orbán said.

Orbán said the EU commission is asking member states for more money for migration, not for border protection, but to bring in illegal immigrants.

“Of course, they didn’t forget about their own pockets. They are asking for billions of euros to raise the salaries of Brussels bureaucrats,” he said.

“The Hungarian position is clear,” he said.

“First, we want to know what the huge amount of money we have given them so far has been spent on. Afterward, we want to know who is responsible for the fact that the European Union is on the brink of bankruptcy.”

Orbán is attending the summit of the Council of EU leaders on Thursday and Friday, where the main topics on the agenda are the issue of additional financial support for Ukraine, mandatory migrant quotas and shaping the EU’s policy toward China.

The government of Vladimir Putin is taking serious measures to ensure stability of its armed forces and a return to normalcy after cracks appeared due to the dramatic events of last weekend, when Wagner Group under now exiled Yevgeny Prigozhin mounted an armed mutiny, seeking to overthrow military leadership. 

Bloomberg is reporting Friday the Kremlin has authorized a significant boost to salaries across the national armed forces, writing that “The Russian government will increase salaries for military servicemen by 10.5% from Oct. 1, a government decree published on the official web portal showed on Friday.”

The report specifically cites the short-lived uprising by the mercenaries which had previously been instrumental to Russian operations in Ukraine. “The move comes days after an abortive armed mutiny by the mercenary Wagner Group, which briefly took control of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and marched towards Moscow,” Bloomberg continues.

Further underscoring that this measure is geared toward boosting morale and bolstering loyalty at a sensitive moment, UK Defense and Security Analyst Professor Michael Clarke has highlighted in the wake of the decision that Russia has been having “a real problem with pay” for troops.

It must also be remembered that for months prior to the Wagner’s revolt, Prigozhin had been loudly calling out the “incompetence and corruption” of the military’s top leadership, going after defense minister Sergei Shoigu in particular.

Currently, there is widespread reporting that Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the deputy commander of the Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, has been detained in relation to the Wagner uprising. The New York Times and others days ago alleged, based on anonymous US intelligence officials, that Surovikin had foreknowledge of the Wagner rebellion, and suggested he may have even helped, in a move against Putin’s grip on power. 

Interestingly, former President Trump weighed in on the whole saga, saying in a fresh interview with Reuters that Putin has been “somewhat weakened” by the mutiny, but also said the Russian president is “still strong”. 

“You could say that (Putin is) still there, he’s still strong, but he certainly has been — I would say — somewhat weakened, at least in the minds of a lot of people,” Trump concluded. The GOP presidential hopeful has lately touted that if he were president, he would negotiate a end to the war within 24 hours.

Throughout the conflict, there have been periodic rumors that Putin will authorize another big round of conscription and ‘national mobilization’. There have also been widespread reports of huge numbers of troop deaths, in the tens of thousands, but confirmed casualty figures haven’t been forthcoming from either side of the war.

Prigozhin himself had highlighted this in the days and weeks before the Wagner mutiny, and even questioned the decision to go to invade Ukraine in the first place.

Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”

– Thomas Jefferson

The government is goosestepping all over our freedoms.

Case in point: America’s founders did not want a military government ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

Most Americans seem relatively untroubled by this state of martial law.

Incredibly, when President Biden bragged about how the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against the government’s massive arsenal of militarized firepower, it barely caused a ripple.

As Biden remarked at a fundraising event in California, “I love these guys who say the Second Amendment is—you know, the tree of liberty is water with the blood of patriots. Well, if [you] want to do that, you want to work against the government, you need an F-16.  You need something else than just an AR-15.”

The message being sent to the citizenry is clear: there is no place in our nation today for the kind of revolution our forefathers mounted against a tyrannical government.

For that matter, the government has declared an all-out war on any resistance whatsoever by the citizenry to its mandates, power grabs and abuses.

By this standard, had the Declaration of Independence been written today, it would have rendered its signers extremists or terrorists, resulting in them being placed on a government watch list, targeted for surveillance of their activities and correspondence, and potentially arrested, held indefinitely, stripped of their rights and labeled enemy combatants.

This is no longer the stuff of speculation and warning.

For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

A 2008 Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report goes on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

Subsequent reports by the Department of Homeland Security to identify, monitor and label right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) have manifested into full-fledged pre-crime surveillance programs. Almost a decade later, after locking down the nation and spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that is colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

The events of recent years have all been part of a master plan to shut us up and preemptively shut us down: by making peaceful revolution impossible and violent revolution inevitable.

The powers-that-be want an excuse to lockdown the nation and throw the switch to all-out martial law.

This is how it begins.

As John Lennon warned, “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you—pull your beard, flick your face—to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”

Already, discontent is growing.

According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 7 out of 10 Americans believe that American democracy is “imperiled.”

Americans are worried about the state of their country, afraid of an increasingly violent and oppressive federal government, and tired of being treated like suspects and criminals.

What we’ll see more of before long is a growing dissatisfaction with the government and its heavy-handed tactics by people who are tired of being used and abused and are ready to say “enough is enough.”

This is what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent.

Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Brace yourselves.

There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by political theater and public spectacle that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

The architects of the police state have us exactly where they want us: under their stamping boot, gasping for breath, desperate for freedom, grappling for some semblance of a future that does not resemble the totalitarian prison being erected around us.

The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to express their displeasure with the government is through voting, yet that is no real recourse at all.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, what is unfolding before us is not a revolution. This is an anti-revolution.

We are at our most vulnerable right now.