Thursday, April 23, 2020

Who controls the British Government response to Covid–19?

by Vanessa Beeley

Wednesday, 22nd April 2020

"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants" — Albert Camus

As Britain hurtles headlong towards neo-feudalist governance with heightened surveillance, micro-management of society and an uptick in fascistic policing of the draconian measures imposed to combat the "threat" of Covid–19, it is perhaps time to analyse the real forces behind this "new normal".
There is now serious doubt over the correlation between lockdown and saving lives. Reality is creeping into the Covid–19 dialogue. It is becoming apparent that people are getting sick because they are being isolated and effectively living under house arrest, condemned as "murderers" if they so much as think about breaking curfew, being snitched on by neighbours for "gathering" more than two people together in their back gardens.
The following graph was produced by UK Column and demonstrates the lack of correlation between lockdown and "saving lives":

Updated 21/4/20
The numbers game is acting in many instances as a smokescreen. It is impossible to rely upon "official" statistics, that vary wildly from one website to another: statistics that rely upon unreliable and sporadic testing procedures. and based upon death certificates that misrepresent the actual cause of death as Covid–19, regardless of pre-existing medical conditions. Statistics, too, that were set in stone very early on in the development stages, when the perspective was limited and compressed, before a true picture could be seen. The newly emerging statistics are now increasingly undermining initial conclusions and pointing to the futility and negative consequences of lockdown.

It is now accepted that there is a high mortality rate among the elderly in care homes in the UK and globally — among the same elderly civilians who are being "asked" to sign DNRs (Do Not Resuscitate) forms. This amounts to signing their own death warrant, should they present any of the Covid–19 symptoms. They will be neglected, isolated from their families when at their most vulnerable and left alone to die, even though it is possible that they have not contracted the virus.

Instead of offering proactive and positive suggestions that will enable our immune systems to combat the disease, the British Government is ensuring conditions that will suppress immune systems to dangerous levels and create the perfect environment for Covid–19 to flourish.
Britain has now received an estimated 1.4 million new benefit claims for welfare payments, "about seven times the normal level". The government has pledged to bail out "80% of pay of workers who are temporarily laid off" but I have personally spoken to self-employed individuals who find themselves falling between the cracks that qualify them for financial support and now face an indefinite period of time without income.
These measures are being imposed in a country that, since 2012, has seen an exponential growth in child poverty to potentially sub-Victorian levels. In March 2019, the number of children living in "absolute poverty" grew by a staggering 200,000 in a twelve-month period, to a total of 3.7 million. How will this number be further impacted by lockdown?
How did we arrive at this point? Who steered the UK Government towards this questionable and alarmist lockdown policy? The unexamined assumption is that conclusions were formed on the basis of sound epidemiological analysis and research by doctors and scientists who care about our welfare.
The reality is what we will examine in this article. Neil Ferguson, a professor at Imperial College, was responsible for the modelling of a response to Covid–19. His virtual model was recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and it passed through into policy with virtually no scrutiny. Ferguson's dramatic prediction of 500,000 deaths in the UK became the foundation of Boris Johnson's U-turn from herd immunity to collective quarantine.
While some understood that Ferguson later reduced his mortality calculations, he actually doubled down on his projections on Twitter, insisting that without drastic lockdown measures being taken, the numbers would be even higher.

Who is Neil Ferguson?

Ferguson is acting director of the Vaccine Impact Modelling Consortium (VIMC), which is based at Imperial College in London. According to Ferguson's biography on the website, "much of [his] work is applied, informing disease control policy-making by public and global health institutions."
The professor who derailed Johnson's semblance of "herd immunity" strategy is no stranger to controversy and is described as having a "patchy" record of modelling pandemics by one of his academic peers, Professor Michael Thrusfield of Edinburgh University, an expert in animal diseases.
Ferguson was instrumental in the modelling of the British Government's response to Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) in 2001, which Thrusfield describes as "not fit for purpose" (2006) and "seriously flawed" (2012). Thrusfield has highlighted the limitations of Ferguson's mathematical modelling methods, and applied the doubts he expressed over FMD to the current Covid–19 "crisis" response.
An estimated twelve million animals were slaughtered as a result of Ferguson's 2001 initiative. The farming community was devastated by suicides and bankruptcies that irretrievably altered the landscape of British agriculture — forcing healthy smallholdings into agri-corporate mergers and empowering the EU central governance in the agricultural sector.

Image copyright: Nick Green

Insight: Slaughtered on Suspicion, a documentary made by UK Column in 2015, provides a shocking insight into the suffering precipitated by Ferguson's model and the "new normal" imposed upon Britain's farming community. The following is a statement made by one of the contributors to the programme:

12,000,000 animals [Meat & Livestock Commission statistic] were slaughtered but that did not include lambs at foot, aborted lambs, calves or piglets. Further, tens of thousands of chickens were slaughtered in the early months — on welfare grounds, apparently. 88% of all animals slaughtered had not contracted FMD [source: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs].
Great Orton airfield was used to slaughter sheep under the "voluntary" cull: that was anything but voluntary, and farmers not participating were ruthlessly threatened. There was only one mild case of FMD recorded from the thousands of blood tests done at Great Orton [source: DEFRA].
There was a travelator that ran from the slaughter tent at Great Orton to the graves. This ran 16 hours a day, transporting "dead" young lambs. Slaughtermen working there told me that many of the lambs were buried alive.
The man that advised Blair during this fiasco was, as many will know, Prof. Ferguson of Imperial College. He was [reportedly] sacked by DEFRA late on during the epidemic, but the damage had been done! Prof Ferguson was awarded an OBE in 2002 for his work during FMD 2001." [Emphasis added]

In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would die from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, better known as "mad cow disease", increasing to 150,000 if the epidemic expanded to include sheep. The reality is: "Since 1990, 178 people in the United Kingdom have died from vCJD, according to the National CJD Research & Surveillance Unit at the University of Edinburgh." (2017)
In 2005, Ferguson claimed that up to 200 million people would be killed by bird-flu or H5N1. By early 2006, the WHO had only linked 78 deaths to the virus, out of 147 reported cases.
In 2009, Ferguson and his team at Imperial College advised the government that swine flu or H1N1 would probably kill 65,000 people in the UK. In the end, swine flu claimed the lives of 457 people in the UK.
Now, in 2020, Ferguson and Imperial College have released a report which claims that half a million Britons and 2.2 million Americans may be killed by Covid–19. The report has still not been peer-reviewed; despite this and Ferguson's glaring record of mathematical sensationalism, the British Government has adopted the devastating socio-economic lockdown that Ferguson has proposed.

Why is the British Government so quick to follow Ferguson's plan?

1. GAVI and Imperial College

The VIMC is hosted by the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College. VIMC is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and by "GAVI, the vaccine alliance" (GAVI's own title for itself). Bill and Melinda Gates began funding Imperial College in 2006, four years before the Gates Foundation launched the Global Health Leaders Launch Decade of Vaccines Collaboration (GHLLDVC) and one year after Ferguson had demonstrated his penchant for overblown projections on mortality numbers from H5N1.
Up to the end of 2018, the Gates Foundation has sponsored Imperial College with a whopping $185 million. That makes Gates the second largest sponsor, beaten to the top spot on the podium by the Wellcome Trust, a British research charity which began funding Imperial College prior to Ferguson's FMD débâcle and which, by the end of 2018, had already provided Imperial with over $400 million in funding. I will examine the Wellcome Trust's connections in part two of this series.

Wellcome trust also has a focus on global immunization programmes.

The Gates Foundation established the GHLLDVC in collaboration with the WHO, UNICEF and the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The following is taken from the Gates Foundation website:

The Global Vaccine Action Plan will enable greater coordination across all stakeholder groups - national governments, multilateral organizations, civil society, the private sector and philanthropic organizations -- and will identify critical policy, resource, and other gaps that must be addressed to realize the life-saving potential of vaccines.

The Collaboration's leadership council at the time included the Director-General of the WHO, the Director of NIAID, the Director of UNICEF, the President of Gates Foundation Global Health, and the Chair of the African Malaria Alliance. The steering committee included the Director of Immunisation, the UK Department of Health, and many other representatives from the WHO, UNICEF and associated organisations. It is a cluster of immunisation-focused individuals controlling the policy of world health governing bodies, who claim to be neutral.
The WHO was nominated as the "directing and coordinating authority on international health within the United Nations system" and was set up to be responsible for "shaping the health research agenda", among other tasks linked to the policy of global immunisation.
UNICEF, the "world's largest provider of vaccines for developing countries" has on-the-ground access to children in over 150 territories and countries (2010).
We are already seeing the potential for some serious conflict of interest behind the Ferguson model on Covid–19, and this will become even more apparent as the connections are now made to an entire pharmaceutical complex potentially protecting its own interests over any genuine concerns for the health and welfare of global populations.

Gavi, the vaccine alliance

"Gavi is the Vaccine Alliance, which brings together public and private sectors with the shared goal of creating equal access to vaccines for children, wherever they live."
GAVI is funded and partnered by the same network that forms the GHLLDVC, with some noticeable additions: the World Bank and donor/implementing country governments. The Gates Foundation is a primary sponsor, but is topped by the British Government, which was instrumental in creating GAVI and is its largest donor.

While many sectors of British society have seen their living standards plummet, with the elderly severely neglected, a National Health Service in decline and homelessness on the increase, the British Government, via UKAID, has pledged £1.44 billion to GAVI for 2016–2020 and will be hosting the 2020 GAVI pledging conference, which is due to take place in June 2020 to "mobilise at least US$ 7.4 billion in additional resources to protect the next generation with vaccines, reduce disease inequality and create a healthier, safer and more prosperous world." (Emphasis added)
The conference promises to bring together political leaders, civil society, public and private donors, vaccine manufacturers and governments to support GAVI, the vaccine alliance — which boasts that it has "helped vaccinate almost half the world's children against deadly and debilitating infectious diseases". This claim will be met with praise from the pro-vaccine lobby but concerns over the efficacy and safety of these mass vaccination programmes must be taken into account, particularly when being tested in poorer, developing countries.

Global vaccination market revenue worldwide is projected to reach $59.2 billion by 2020; this number may well increase with the arrival of Covid–19. The British Government's investment in GAVI alongside vaccine promoter Bill Gates must, again, raise the issue of conflicts of interest. To what extent is the British Government protecting its own assets in forcing the lockdown upon its population? Vaccines are set to be a major source of income for the world's largest pharmaceutical corporations, and the British Government is invested in that lucrative future.

The GAVI replenishment conference is to be hosted by a British Government whose lockdown policy is effectively shattering the domestic economy and is collectively punishing the most vulnerable in British society.
When Bill Gates partnered with GAVI twenty years ago, he had been considering where next to focus his philanthropy and was "increasingly focusing on the power and potential of vaccines". It was Gates' substantial sponsorship that launched GAVI, and ten years later Gates launched his own "vaccine decade" plan for the 2010s.
The Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) 2012–2020, endorsed by the 194 member states participating in the World Health Assembly (2012), is led by the same members of the Gates "vaccine decade" consortium, promoted by the WHO, and brings together governments, elected officials, health professionals, academia, manufacturers, global agencies, research and development, civil society, media and the private sector — to promote global immunisation. This is a profit-driven corporate complex harnessing the "humanitarian" sector to lend credence to the claims of philanthropy, or more realistically, philanthrocapitalism.

2. GAVI and ID2020

A glance at the partner page of the GAVI website reveals that not only is GAVI heavily invested in immunisation campaigns, it is also closely connected to the Gates, Microsoft and Rockefeller Foundation seed-funded ID2020 project (Digital Identity Alliance), which incorporates Accenture, Microsoft (Gates), Ideo-Org and Rockefeller Foundation into the GAVI alliance, all with ties to the ID2020 initiative.
ID2020 is promoting the concept that there is a need for universal biometric verification, because "to prove who you are is a fundamental and universal human right," as asserted on the ID2020 website. An article by journalist Kurt Nimmo for Global Research dismantles the "humanitarian" alibi for tyranny.
OffGrid Healthcare explains:

What they really want is a fully standardized data collection and retrieval format, and cross-border sharing of identities of the entire population of the planet, in order for the stand-alone AI-powered command center to work without a hitch, and for purposes of calculating everyone's potential contribution, and threat to the system.

Nimmo describes the potential for Covid–19 to be used as cover for mandatory biometric ID. An April article carried by Reuters confirms the suspicion that biometric ID might soon be introduced, ostensibly to "help verify those who already had the infection and ensure the vulnerable get the vaccine when it is launched". This may sound perfectly sensible to those who are buying the government strap-lines on Covid–19 but — as Nimmo warns us — "COVID–19 is the perfect Trojan horse for a control freak state itching to not only micromanage the lives of ordinary citizens but also ferret out critics and potential adversaries and punish them as enemies of the state."
Prashant Yadav, senior fellow at the US-based Center for Global Development, has said:

Biometric IDs can be a gamechanger. They can help governments target population segments e.g healthcare professionals or the elderly population, verify people who have received vaccination, and have a clear record. [Emphasis added]

Such statements can easily be interpreted as the harbingers of mandatory vaccination and the inclusion of biometric ID in the "humanitarian" package.
Martin Armstrong of Armstrong Technologies introduces an even more sinister projection into the mix. Armstrong talks about a digital certificate that verifies you have been vaccinated, developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Microsoft, which will merge with ID2020. Covid–19 will be exploited to encourage us to accept digital implants and tracking devices that will enable authorities to keep an eye on us. Armstrong argues that just as 9/11 conditioned us to accept X-ray booths at airports, now we will be chipped alongside our dogs and cats.

The road to 2020 - the future for digital identity in the UK. (Title of Innovate Identity article June 2019)

At this point, it is worth remembering that UKAID is heavily involved in GAVI, and one presumes they are on board with the digital ID2020 project. Rob Laurence, director at UK-based Innovate Identity, presented proposals for the future of digital identity back in June 2019. The UK Government Verify scheme was identified as a fledgling version of the future of digital ID.
Laurence describes the digital ID "ecosystem" that is emerging: Oliver Dowden, Minister for Implementation at the Cabinet Office (the British Government's co-ordinating department), will form a new Digital ID Unit to "pave the way for the government to consume digital identities from the private sector". Laurence describes 2020 as the "now-or-never year for government and industry to collaborate" in the creation of an "interoperable digital identity market".
Covid19 provides the opportunity that might just fulfil these predictions.

It is no coincidence that a British start-up — Microsoft-funded Onfido — has recently raised $100 million to "boost its ID technology" to enable the creation of "immunity passports" for governments "battling coronavirus".
In December 2019, researchers at MIT created a "microneedle platform using fluorescent microparticles called quantum dots (QD) which can deliver vaccines and at the same time, invisibly encode vaccination history in the skin": the QDs can be detected by specially adapted smartphones. The "new normal" will mean we are tracked and monitored by our own communication systems to an even greater and more intrusive extent.

The future is being modelled — but not for our benefit

In part one of this two=part series, my intention has been to raise questions over who is driving the British Government response to Covid–19. Those who have influenced the lockdown policy have very clear conflict of interest question marks over their agenda.
The scientific clique influencing government decisions is one that is incorporated into a for-profit Big Pharma industrial network which will, undeniably, benefit from the measures being taken by the British Government — a government that is financially embedded in the same complex.
Why are the views of epidemiologists, doctors, scientists, analysts and health advisors who challenge the lockdown being ignored or censored by the media and by government? Why is the government not widening the circle of advisors to take into account these opposing perspectives that might bring an end to the misery that is a consequence of enforced quarantine? Off-Guardian has recorded these views here, here and here. It is also worth following Swiss Propaganda Research for regular updates on emerging analysis and statistics that you will not always find in the mainstream media.

World Economic Forum report on the psychological experiment that is the Covid19 lockdown.
Instead, the British Government is effectively endorsing the breeding of distrust in society, the erosion of public assembly, the isolation and state-sanctioned euthanasia of the elderly, the emerging police state, snitch lines, loss of dignity and livelihoods, greater dependency upon the state for survival, depression, suicide and voluntary incarceration.

An article in New York Times reports on the death toll in care homes which "reflect a global phenomenon" in a world under lockdown.

The UN has issued a warning that the economic downturn could "kill hundreds of thousands of children in 2020". Gates, the WHO, the British Government and UNICEF are focused on global immunisation for a "pandemic" that is not living up to the alarmist virtual projections sponsored by Gates and the Big Pharma complex, while children really will start to die from malnutrition, neglect and a myriad of consequence of extreme poverty generated by the "steepest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s" (IMF).

In part two, I will delve deeper into the interlocking interests of state and private corporate sectors that should not be interfering in policies which affect the welfare of British citizens. I will reveal how the same players are influencing the media response and ensuring that their interests are given the most powerful platforms to promote their agenda.
The questions must be asked: Who is really in charge of the Covid–19 response? Who benefits most? Who will suffer most from the long term consequences? And who will provide respite from those consequences when the "pandemic" has disappeared from view?

SOURCE https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/who-controls-british-government-response-covid19-part-one
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Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Covid-19: Neil Ferguson, the Liberal Lyssenko

By Thierry Meyssan on April 21, 2020

Thierry Meyssan – Voltairenet.org April 20, 2020

In the past, European political leaders yielded to the orders of their astrologers. Today, they refer to them identically to the statisticians of the Imperial College. In the past, the latter have provided them as much justification as they needed for their liberal hospital policy. Today, they predict millions of deaths without any scientific rigour. Thierry Meyssan reveals how these charlatans have taken control of the policies of the European Union, the United Kingdom and certain states of the United States.

Professor Neil Ferguson, high priest of liberal hospital management and inventor of the generalized containment against Covid-19. Click to enlarge

In the early days of the Cold War, it was customary in the West to make fun of the blindness of the Soviets who believed in the nonsense of Professor Trofim Lyssenko. The First Secretary of the Party, Joseph Stalin, had banned the teaching of genetics and used Lyssenko as a scientific justification for Marxism, but he drew no practical consequences. Today the same mental illness has reached the West. Professor Neil Fergusson assures that statistics can predict the behaviour of living beings. This is stupid, yet many high-ranking political leaders believe it. Unfortunately, unlike the Soviets, they draw political consequences that ruin their countries.

The Creation of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

For the past two decades, Western political leaders have been trying to use statistical knowledge of epidemics to determine the right decisions to be made in the event of danger. Following the SARS outbreak in 2003, the European Union established the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDPC) in 2005. During the second half of 2008, this centre and the French rotating presidency organised a colloquium to study the advisability of closing schools to combat a flu epidemic and to determine when it should occur and when it should stop. There was still no talk of widespread containment of the entire population.

The main contribution was made by Professor Neil Ferguson and Simon Cauchemez from Imperial College London. It compared statistical data on school closures in Hong Kong in 2003 and 2008, on the impact of the teachers’ strike in Israel in 2000, on the impact of zonal holidays in France from 1984 to 2006, on the closure of schools infected with influenza in France in 1957, and on the impact of Spanish influenza in some US cities and in Australia in 1918. And it pointed out the inequalities and injustices associated with school closures in the UK and the USA

From that point on, the problem was turned upside down. Experts had observed that school closures did not have a significant impact on the final number of deaths, but only on the speed of the spread of the disease. Their task was to provide a solution to the closure of hospital beds that were not occupied on a day-to-day basis. Statistics were no longer at the service of the health of Europeans, but of an ideology, that of the liberal management of the state.
Bernard Kouchner, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs who organized this symposium, was the one who, when he was Minister of Health (1992-93, 1997-99, 2001-02), began the reorganization of the French hospital system no longer according to medical criteria, but according to a logic of profitability. In about fifteen years, France has thus been able to make substantial savings by closing 15% of its hospital beds; savings that are derisory compared to the current cost of containment.

Professor Trofim Lyssenko claimed that, by applying Marxist dialectics to the natural sciences, he had demonstrated that petty-bourgeois genetic science was wrong. On this point, he said that just as the Party generated a new man, it was possible to modify the genetics of plants according to the organization of the fields. His nonsense became the official truth in the USSR during the Stalinist period. Science and ideology are always a bad combination. Click to enlarge

Professor Neil Ferguson’s Charlatanism

Simon Cauchemez, who was his right-hand man in 2009, now heads the modelling unit at the Pasteur Institute. He is, of course, a member of the Scientific Committee of the Élysée, where he proposed generalized confinement. This committee was set up by the Director General of Health, Professor Jérôme Salomon, the spiritual son and former technical advisor to Bernard Kouchner.

The Ferguson team’s seizure of power was based on an intellectual swindle. Mathematical biology” (sic) could justify the liberal management of health services.

Unfortunately, while statistics can be used to evaluate the effects of this or that measure after the fact, they cannot predict the behaviour of a living organism, a virus. A virus seeks to spread, not to kill, which it unintentionally does when the species in which it nests does not yet have appropriate antibodies. No virus will eliminate any species, including humans, because if it killed them all, it would disappear with them.

Incidentally, extrapolating influenza measures to the Covid-19 epidemic is absurd: influenza affects many children, not Covid-19, which in demographic terms only kills elderly people or people with diabetes or high blood pressure. Children infected with Covid-19 have a very low viral load, it is not even known to this day whether they are contagious.

Professor Ferguson admitted on March 22 that he had carried out his calculations on the Covid-19 epidemic exclusively with a 13-year-old database of influenza epidemics.

In fact, one cannot help but notice the drift of this guru, who is no longer content to justify liberal policies applied to public health, but has come to advocate depriving entire peoples of their freedom. To hide the reality of this drift, Professor Fergusson’s supporters distract the public’s attention by proposing the use of surgical masks, which we have already explained are of no use in the face of the epidemic [1].

Professor Didier Raoult’s results speak for themselves. Also, a communication campaign was orchestrated against him by the disciples of Professor Neil Ferguson exactly as Soviet geneticists were persecuted by Lyssenko’s supporters. Click to enlarge

The Polemic with Professor Didier Raoult

These explanations shed new light on the polemic that opposed the disciples of Professor Neil Ferguson to those of Professor Didier Raoult [2]. Contrary to what has been said, this is not a problem of methodology, but of finality.

Neil Ferguson is a charlatan caught up in his swindle, while Didier Raoult is a clinical doctor. The followers of the former need dead people to believe in their religion, those of the latter care for their patients.

The problem we are facing is not a scientific debate, but a war of repeated errors against the scientific approach. It is astounding to hear members of the Scientific Council of the Élysée reproach Professor Raoult for not conducting comparative studies with a control group. In times of crisis, should a responsible doctor fail to treat some of his patients and deliberately sacrifice them?

Thierry Meyssan

Translation

Roger Lagassé

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[1] “Panic and Political Absurdity in the Face of the Pandemic” , by Thierry Meyssan , Translation Roger Lagassé , Voltaire Network , 7 April 2020.

[2] “Covid-19: propaganda and manipulation” , by Thierry Meyssan , Translation Pete Kimberley , Voltaire Network , 21 March 2020.

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Thursday, April 9, 2020

Is The “Hate Group” Concept A Legitimate Intellectual Concept Or Nothing More Than A Weapon Of Cultural Marxist Hegemony?

June 17, 2019/26 Comments/in Featured Articles /by Amalric de Droevig

I attempted to criticize the “hate group” concept on Wikipedia, by adding a section doing just that to its “hate group” article. The top editors over there would have none of it. Wikipedia’s editors are so left-wing, they think the SPLC is a neutral, apolitical organization, if you can believe it. Wikipedia, a supposedly unbiased and independent online encyclopedia and information source, has unfortunately become a mouthpiece for the Cultural Marxist US power class.

Here is what I wrote, and what they subsequently scrubbed from the internet:

==Criticism of the hate group concept==

The “hate group” concept has come under fire in recent years from academics and intellectuals on both sides of the political spectrum, but especially the political right. Like “hate speech”, “hate group” is a concept not traditionally recognized by American courts and the American legal system.[i] Nevertheless, outside of the American legal context, the concept is widely accepted and employed.

Many critics of the term argue that the demographic divisions (racial groups, whole religions) the term attempts to insulate from group criticism are arbitrarily or ideologically selected. For example, why aren’t lesser political groups (atheist organizations, for example) or smaller religious denominations (scientologists, for example) equally protected by the label and the stigma surrounding it?

Thus, instead of protecting the powerless, the term seems to insulate from criticism those populations with sufficient numbers, power and prominence to command protection.

After all, any number of randomly selected demographic categories could be deemed above group criticism or political opposition, yet few are. Why do certain groups seem to be so much more worthy of the term’s protections? In sum, the term appears to place arbitrary or ideology-laden restrictions on speech and activism, in defiance of the liberal democratic tradition, which asserts that all ideologies, movements, groups, and religions are fair game for philosophical critique and peaceful opposition.[ii] [iii] [iv]

THE INVENTION OF THE TERM

Other critics of the term argue that the label is not only arbitrary, but selectively applied.[v] Some well-known champions of the term are even on record admitting as such. Mark Potok, former senior fellow at the SPLC, the organization that basically invented the term “hate group”, conceded this years ago. In a 2009 interview, he stated that the “hate group” label is not uniformly applied, because the SPLC is by no means apolitical, but is instead a fundamentally leftist organization that does battle with radical groups on the political right in an effort to “destroy them” (his words), and that it is sometimes very much guilty of focusing on the political right, while roundly ignoring bad actors on the political left which engage in the self-same tactics and employ the self-same incendiary language as supposed “hate groups”.[vi]
Some believe this political bias is driven partly by perverse economic incentives, that the SPLC chooses to focus its ire and its activism on right-wing groups and activities because that is how it appeals to its donor base and funds its massive war chest, which totaled upwards of half a billion dollars in 2018.[vii] Nevertheless, many believe that an anti-right bias is not something unique to the SPLC’s hate monitoring and classification system, but instead something that inheres in the term itself, which is to say the very concept of “hate group” is rooted in, steeped in, and defined by the ideals of the political left, and is thus partisan by nature and design.
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Some have argued that virtually any political organization could potentially meet the standard definition of the term, given its breadth.[viii] For example, a cadre of left-leaning academics that regularly publishes papers criticizing “White privilege” or “White fragility”, could easily be understood to be expressing hatred toward, exhibiting animus toward, or even dehumanizing Whites, as a race.

Likewise, a feminist activist organization that regularly criticizes the putative prevailing culture of the patriarchy or the toxicity of masculinity, might also be said to be a “hate group”, according to the accepted definition of the term, given its willingness to insult an entire sex.

Occupy Wall Street might also have been labeled a “hate group” on account of its open disdain for financial executives and oligarchs, who its members so endearingly labeled “banksters”. Unsurprisingly, however, Occupy Wall Street was never labeled a “hate group” by the pundit class or society at large, and none of the hypothetical groups would be labeled as such, because groups like these—that is those with the “right” values, residing on the “correct” side of the political spectrum—are rarely, if ever, described this way by the press or the powers that be.

There is therefore concern in many circles that the label is being surreptitiously employed as an illiberal and antidemocratic backdoor contrivance by various powerful entities in the West to sideline political viewpoints and democratic movements that powerful oligarchs and interest groups dislike.
A wide array of commentators on the right have pointed out that organizations that share the leftist views and values of the United States Federal Government and its corporate accessories, especially on hot button issues like race, sex, and sexual orientation, are essentially completely insulated from the pejorative appellation, “hate group.”

We find a curious analogue to this structural bias for “hate group” designations in the “terror” designation process by the U.S. State Department.
For example, “state sponsors of terrorism” are almost invariably nations which stand in the way of United States geopolitical dominance, or which have poor diplomatic or economic relations with the U.S. After all, a vast amount of terrorism is committed by the U.S. government and her allies.
Moreover, a vast amount of resources and weapons which find their way into the hands of terrorist groups worldwide originate in the U.S. and nations allied with the U.S.,[ix] and are built by weapons manufacturers intimately connected to the U.S. government and the governments of its closest allies.[x]
Alas, however, those allies (Israel, UK, Saudi Arabia, Qatar) are basically never deemed state sponsors of terror, and the press never accuses entities deep in our own government of sponsoring terror either.
Thus, being an actual state sponsor of terror seems to be an insufficient condition to land a nation on the State Department’s list. It seems that a nation must also have the wrong politics, values, leaders, or foreign policy to earn such a designation.
Similarly, only those domestic political groups which possess the “wrong” values, worldviews, or politics seem to be worthy of the “hate group” label, despite the fact that many other political groups, if not most political groups, could be fairly or accurately described as such.
In some cases, as with Syria and Iran today, and Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, a strong argument could be made that being an actual sponsor of terror is not even necessary to land one on the “state sponsor of terror” list, and that the process is wholly political/geopolitical in character, having nothing whatsoever to do with the actual policies of such governments regarding terrorism.
Ergo, the process of designating nations state sponsors of terror, is, in fact, subordinated entirely to the political aims and interests of U.S. elites and is thus perfectly divorced from anything resembling reality.

Likewise, a cynic might argue that the very purpose of the “hate group” label is to delegitimize perfectly legitimate dissident political organizations in the eyes of ordinary people, thus rendering “hate groups” not so much a major source of state-sponsored repression, as many in the U.S. power structure are fond of alleging, but instead a major target of state-sponsored and quasi-state-sponsored (read: corporate and NGO) repression.

Other problems exist with the standard definition as well. How much organization is required for a a group of people to constitute a “group” in the first place?
Are largely disorganized, right-wing dissident networks on the internet (men’s rights activists, for example) “hate groups”, or even “groups” at all, in any meaningful sense?
Moreover, at what point does a comedy troupe that mocks and degrades conservatives, Christians, or “podunk” middle Americans constitute a “hate group”?
What if its members don’t really even consider themselves a political organization?
Furthermore, at what point do persistent attacks on a nation or an ethnic group constitute “hate”?
At what point does a baseless or overblown conspiracy theory about Russian meddling in a United States presidential election constitute bigoted, anti-Russian hysteria or anti-Russian “hate speech”?
Indeed, in the run-up to armed conflict, governments the world over almost always spearhead massive propaganda campaigns against the enemy (jihadists in the current War on Terror, Germans in World Wars I and II). Is it proper to understand all war propaganda efforts then as state-orchestrated “campaigns of hate”?

Additionally, how does one measure the amount of “hate” within a group or within the hearts of its members?
How much vitriol must be spewed by a person for his/her speech to be “hate speech”?
How much coarse or degrading language must a group employ for it to be a “hate group”?
Is not what constitutes offensive or hateful language a fundamentally subjective determination?
Furthermore, how much extralegal violence must a group engage in to earn the title?
What if a group has never engaged in or so much as advocated for extralegal violence of any sort, like Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance? Taylor’s principled unwillingness to endorse extralegal violence, no matter the circumstances, did not spare American Renaissance from being placed on the SPLC’s 2015 list of “active hate groups”.[xi]

A lack of any clear or quantifiable criteria for classifying groups as “hate groups” makes the concept particularly problematic.
When a concept is sufficiently amorphous it can be slapped on almost anyone with little effort or objection. Moreover, once such a label has been attached to you or your organization by someone with apparent expertise or authority, such a designation can be very difficult to shed, as claims of vague, highly subjective content are virtually impossible to prove or refute.

Indeed, this is one of the hallmarks of political concepts, as distinguished from intellectual ones. Such concepts are fuzzy by design, because if they weren’t, they would have very little use to the powerful. They can only exist as concepts insofar as they avoid all intellectual rigor and scrutiny.

The “flexibility” in their definitions is precisely what makes them so useful as instruments of power. Though everybody is actually guilty, the only people charged are whoever those with authority choose to charge, and since nobody is innocent, nobody can prove themselves innocent, and since nobody can prove themselves innocent, every charge is equivalent to a conviction. Political concepts cannot survive real scrutiny because they are generally ill-defined and logically inconsistent. Nevertheless, they do not need to be consistent, nor do they need to be well-defined, to survive as political concepts. The natural soil of political concepts is power, not truth.

The stakes are that much higher and the risks that much greater when highly political organizations such as the SPLC and the ADL are coaching and working alongside powerful law enforcement entities, as is definitely the case.

Law enforcement is not supposed to be politically or ideologically driven. Membership in a “hate group” could form the basis for “hate crime” prosecutions by local authorities, or for the targeting of “hate” organizations for state surveillance.
This problematic label, combined with a lack of any sympathy for such groups among the general public, create the risk that members of such groups could be targeted by local police, prosecuted selectively and unfairly by district attorneys, punished excessively by judges or magistrates, or otherwise crushed by the state on account of their political beliefs, with no repercussions for those doing the oppressing, bringing to mind totalitarian states of yore, where “enemies of the state” (also usually political dissidents) were targeted by state and quasi-state actors for persecution, imprisonment, or worse.[xii]

Some believe a number of Western nations are already very much there,[xiii] [xiv] but many who don’t are still understandably concerned that terms like “hate speech” and “hate group” are stepping stones to such a place.
Given the European Union’s willingness to use state power to crush political dissent of a supposedly hateful nature (an incredibly vague concept),[xv][xvi] and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s recent call to create a stasi-esque “hate and bias” database to carefully catalog instances of supposed “hate” within Michigan, even if those instances don’t constitute actual crimes,[xvii] there is ample reason to be gravely concerned.

Moreover, these are but the threats emanating from the state itself. As Big Tech censorship, well-funded left-wing boycott campaigns, and willfully discriminatory corporate policies have shown, the “hate group” and “hate speech” labels are used on a fairly large scale in the private sphere as well, as a pretext to marginalize, silence, disemploy, Blacklist, and even deny essential services to those with the “wrong” ideas or associations.[xviii] [xix]

What’s more, violent left-wing paramilitary organizations like Antifa and "By Any Means Necessary" have shown themselves quite willing to use these labels as justifications to engage in mob violence against innocent civilians, in many cases specifically to deny those civilians the free exercise of their essential rights and liberties.[xx] [xxi] As such, the threats to ordinary Westerners in large measure arising from these labels are by no means confined to state action.

Various social critics have also criticized the usefulness of the label. Some contend it amounts to little more than a slur or an ad hominem attack, and as such constitutes an informal logical fallacy.

In a similar vein, many insist that if one disagrees with another’s speech or another’s politics, there is no reason whatsoever to use a demeaning, tendentious label such as “hate speech” or “hate group” to describe such speech or such a group.

The liberal tradition prescribes civilly stating one’s reasoned disagreement with such speech or such politics, not slapping some silly propaganda label on ideas or parties, so that one doesn’t have to actually grapple with what is being claimed or represented.
Katie Herzog, over at The Stranger, contends that the “hate speech” label in particular, is used not to encourage debate or understanding, but as an underhanded attempt to arrest all dialogue, debate, and inquiry.[xxii]
As such, both terms are both implicitly authoritarian, not to mention fundamentally illiberal and anti-intellectual, in that they are meant to advance a political agenda rather than describe the world as it really is.[xxiii]
Given that these concepts are often used to delegitimize dissident groups, and lay the foundation for persecuting, prosecuting, and materially harming people on account of mere speech and association, both essential human rights, some also therefore view the concepts as fundamentally totalitarian in nature or effect.[xxiv]

Others view the ideological foundations of these concepts, and especially the way such concepts manifest themselves in real-world sociopolitical contexts, as fundamentally Marxist or Cultural Marxist in character.

One’s license to use crass and harsh language against out-group members seems to reflect the prevailing views on the modern left regarding “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes/groups almost perfectly. The more allegedly powerful and oppressive is the group you speak for, the more worthy are you of censorship, contempt, and maltreatment by those with power. What’s more, the dynamics of the situation seem inherently paradoxical. Why are all of these supposedly powerful groups unable to defend themselves or advance their interests through peaceful advocacy? They are so powerful, they are voiceless, it would seem! Indeed, this seems to be a broader problem with Marxist and crypto-Marxist justifications for censorship. Groups that are truly powerful are not easy to silence. Thus, by the time you are able to silence the supposedly powerful, it is sort of self-evident that they are not really so powerful any longer, and if the supposedly oppressed are so weak and so marginalized, why are their interests so well-guarded by the censors and the powers that be?
Many proponents of “hate speech” restrictions and the forceful disbanding of supposed “hate groups” have also been known to contend that “hate speech” causes intergroup violence, genocide, and other like atrocities. Nevertheless, there is simply no evidence for this in the scientific literature.
Not only is a society’s toleration of radical political speech and expression, including but not limited to “hate speech”, essential for the proper functioning of democracy, the liberty to express oneself openly in a society is also strongly negatively correlated with the adverse outcomes aforementioned (genocide, interethnic and interreligious strife, etc.).
The most oppressive regimes on Earth (Saudi Arabia, North Korea) are certainly not known for their enthusiastic support for freedom of expression after all.

Research by Jacob Mchangama and Rasmus Andersen finds that only in the most closed and repressed societies, does loosening up speech restrictions lead to a slight uptick in intergroup violence, civil discord and unrest.
In the vast majority of cases, reducing speech restrictions and minimizing censorship reduces interethnic and interreligious violence, social unrest, and like adverse outcomes.[xxv]
What’s more, there is absolutely no reason to believe that restricting freedom of expression fosters tolerance or social cohesion.
A 2017 study out of the European Journal of Political Research finds that countermeasures like “hate speech” restrictions, which are intended to constrain radical right politics, paradoxically appear to actually fuel right-wing extremist violence.[xxvi]
Not only do such laws not achieve their stated goals, they actually exacerbate existing intergroup tensions, deepen perceived grievances, and further polarize societies.
Israeli scholar Amichai Magen has argued that one of the reasons for this is that political freedom, especially freedom of speech, allows grievances to be voiced before they boil over and turn violent.[xxvii]
Gordan Danning, author at Quillette, argues that although “hate speech” by powerful officials or elites, may, in rare cases, facilitate the carrying out of major atrocities, in that it can incite violence and aid coordination efforts by brutally repressive regimes, this threat does not extend downward.
When speech reaches the coordination phase amongst lesser, non-state entities, it is not mere “hate speech” at that point, but a criminal or terrorist conspiracy, and as such, is better addressed by counter-terror operations, rather than content-based speech restrictions.
Danning contends that there is no evidence to suggest that permitting “hate speech” by ordinary persons in everyday contexts, has any effect whatsoever on violence of this nature.
For that reason, placing hate speech restrictions on internet users, artists, or prominent social critics, for example, is horribly misguided.
What such labels really do is help create excuses for governments and other powerful entities to use allegations of “hate speech” to silence any ideas they dislike, or which might pose a threat to their rule.[xxviii]
As such, there are not only strong moral and philosophical reasons for rejecting these concepts, but strong practical reasons as well.

Those who cite the National Socialist era as proof that freedom of speech is a particularly dangerous right for a society to protect, especially on account of Adolf Hitler’s uncanny ability to rile the masses via passionate oratory, are ignoring the fact that the Weimar Republic had hate speech laws of its own, and that those laws were enforced regularly and aggressively against NS members and officials.[xxix]
Not only did those laws not stop them, they arguably aided them, by enabling them to successfully portray themselves as victims of hostile, left-wing, anti-ethnic-German elites.
Thus, those laws and the public prosecutions arising from them, arguably deepened the divisions in German society, enraged a sizable number of ordinary Germans, provided free publicity to Nazi leaders, and made a severe right-wing backlash all the more likely.

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Thursday, April 23, 2020