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Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

Remember the last time the globalists took the mask off?  It wasn’t that long ago, but some people might have already forgotten how the western world almost lost all individual freedom under the guise of an over-hyped health emergency.  When globalists are honest about what they truly want, it usually coincides with an engineered calamity.

In the two years since the failure of the covid pandemic narrative I have argued that globalist organizations are trying to regroup under a new plan. The evidence suggests that these people suffered a shocking revelation after their attempt to implement perpetual medical tyranny. They’ve realized they don’t have as much control over the flow of information and public discourse as they originally assumed.

Even with full-spectrum censorship using algorithms to bury contrary data, even with the full force of the government partnering with social media to silence dissent, even with the threat of economic exile for anyone refusing to take a steady series of mRNA jabs, they still failed. The truth about covid’s minimal Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) still spread, along with data proving the uselessness of the mandates and lockdowns.  There was nothing they could do about it.

Their golden ticket to total control was pushing the vaccine passport concept; the alternative media crushed that agenda like a pestilent cockroach. If the passport had been successful we would not be having this conversation now. Everyone would be in fear of having their passport rescinded. Everyone would be afraid to lose their economic access for saying the wrong thing. Everyone would be afraid of being forced into covid camps (which were indeed a real agenda). Or, we would be in the middle of a bloody civil war.

The events of 2020 were meant to initiate the ultimate coup against humanity. The globalists admitted to their plans over and over again. Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum proudly declared covid the catalyst for the “Great Reset” and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” They asserted that the lockdowns were just the beginning and that the sweeping restriction on our freedoms would be extended to climate change as well.

They thought they had won without firing a shot, but it’s not that easy. Far more people are awake and aware of their motives than they realized, and, at least in America, over 50 million of those people are armed.  The lockdowns are now gone, almost no one took the vax boosters, far fewer people took the vaccine than the CDC claims, and the vax passports were defeated. This victory was made possible due to the efforts of alternative media platforms circumventing Big Tech censorship. It’s that simple.

This is why the next event will probably be far worse in scale and consequence, and the globalists are already attempting to rectify their previous mistake of underestimating citizen journalism. They will try to silence us if they can and they are openly admitting to it in recent conferences and mainstream articles.  The mask is coming off once more and this suggests to me that something very bad is about to happen.

As I noted in 2023 in my article ‘From Covid To Climate Change: Vehicles For Global Authoritarianism’, the globalists seem to have shifted their more tyrannical efforts away from the pandemic and into the climate discourse. If you really want to know what they are up to these days, you have to watch the climate conferences.

At the end of September there was a host of climate change summits including one held by the WEF in New York called the Sustainable Development Impact Meeting.  It was held by the WEF in tandem with the United Nations General Assembly. Not surprisingly, discussion often veered away from climate into “threats to democracy” as well as bitter complaints about the “spread of disinformation.”

John Kerry, former Democratic presidential candidate, former Climate Czar under Joe Biden and a longtime participant in the WEF, said the quiet part out loud at the summit. He argued that the 1st Amendment was a “roadblock” to proper governance and was preventing the elites from controlling public consensus.

His statements are quite blatant.

First of all, consensus is highly overrated and often poisonous. The very basis of science is that it is always up for debate according to the evidence. Once you have forced a “consensus” you have abandoned all due diligence under the scientific method.

This was made obvious during covid, where the “consensus” was exposed as utterly fabricated and most of the claims made by governments and puppet “medical experts” have been proven false. Keep in mind, these were the same people that tried to ban YOU from going to parks and waterboarding at the beach in the name of “flattening the curve.”

I mean, how retarded do you have to be to believe that outdoor activities will lead to viral transmission? That’s not science, that’s hysteria promoted by people claiming to represent science. The same thing goes for the mask mandates, social distancing, the lockdowns, etc. Not one measure they enforced was legitimate.

If we are talking about the concept of man-made climate change, the claim of consensus in science is a lie. The data suggests there is simply no such thing as man-made climate change. There is no evidence of causation between carbon emissions and global warming. No evidence that global warming causes extreme whether. No evidence that our current warming cycle is significant or unique compared to any other warming cycle in history.

In fact, the Washington Post recently and accidentally proved the alternative media’s point on climate change when they tried to map the temperature history of the Earth over 450 million years, only to discover what I have been saying for the longest time – Today’s temps are far lower than they have been through most of the Earth’s history.

But the more important issue here is John Kerry’s assertion that governance requires public information control. Kerry’s fundamental disconnect is his notion that it’s the job of the elites and the government to moderate information for the greater good. No one gave them permission to do this. The government does not exist to create consensus.

The people are in charge, John. As a politician you are just a public servant, nothing more. Your opinions on free speech don’t matter.

Some of the most egregious disinformation is often released to the public by the government and their approved media sources in the name of “saving democracy.” They lie constantly. John Kerry is just angry because now the public has the means to expose him and his cohorts. If a “democracy” requires censorship in order to survive, then it’s not worth saving.

Finally and hypocritically, Kerry suggests that democracy is “too slow” in implementing the changes to society that he views as necessary to create consensus and “unity.” If the 1st Amendment is a “roadblack” to more effective information control and governance, then he and his slimy brethren must intend to remove it. In other words, he believes tyranny would work better because it’s much faster that trying to manipulate the public with propaganda.

He doesn’t explicitly say this, but that’s exactly what he’s inferring.

Besides some of the speeches made by Klaus Schwab at the height of the pandemic, Kerry’s statements might be the most open declaration of globalist authoritarian intent I have ever heard. He’s pulling the mask off and this has me concerned.

His arguments fall in line with a number of articles published in the past couple months from establishment media platforms. The New Yorker just posted an article asking ‘Is It Time To Torch The Constitution?’ The New York Times published a treatise titled ‘The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?’ They also wrote an article highlighting the potential positives of despotic governments in countries like Brazil threatening to shut down public access to Elon Musk’s X (Twitter) in order to force the site to censor citizen accounts. These people are on a war path to convince the public that free speech is a threat.

When political elitists and their lackey’s start attacking free speech it’s usually in preparation for a major crisis that they hope to use as a vehicle to eliminate public freedoms. Free speech is the most important liberty because it enables the populace to discern through debate what the truth is and what to do about it.

The globalists thought they had a lock on information during covid and they were wrong. They won’t make the same mistake again. Whatever the next crisis ends up being, they will definitely seek to silence the the alternative media and any rebellious social media platforms before they move forward.

*  *  *

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A severe geomagnetic storm disrupted golf cart operations relying on GPS technology at courses across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. On Thursday, Club Car sent an email to courses, warning that a powerful solar storm “will impact all GPS devices” on these high-tech carts.

Courses that use ‘Club Car Connect,’ a heads-up display in the golf cart that utilizes GPS and acts as rangefinders for golfers while simultaneously allowing course management to geofence locations on each hole, experienced widespread disruptions during today’s solar storm, which brought many carts at various courses to a standstill.

“Geomagnetic storms will impact all GPS devices, and the Visage Units may be affected by this solar event. You may experience cars falsely triggering action zones during this event, our recommendation is to reduce the restriction of action zones or turn off the zones. We will continue to monitor conditions today,” Club Car Connected Account Manager David Nichols, PGA, wrote in an email to US courses.

In other words, the solar storm interfered with the GPS satellite signals used by the carts, causing inaccurate location data and triggering course restrictions. This sent many golf carts into snail mode, which only infuriated golfers. According to the email, the solution was to turn off the geo-fencing limits.

Into the evening, a severe solar storm is underway.

Colorful auroras could be visible in areas across the nation.

Intense solar storms can wreak havoc on the modern economy.

The chaos on courses today was a first-world problem.

Amid ongoing heavy fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah in south Lebanon, the only external troops which have long been present on the ground are a group of UN peacekeeping troops. They are a mainly Irish contingency, called the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), and have remained near the Israel-Lebanon border since the 2006 war.

The UN peacekeepers have been increasingly alarmed over the Israeli army setting up forward bases in areas near their operations, and this week the Israeli government alerted the UN troops they must move positions or risk coming under fire. 

That appears to have happened this week. On Thursday the UNIFIL force said its headquarters came under fire by the Israeli army and that two of its troops were wounded. The UN team had refused Israeli army (IDF) demands to evacuate its position further north, setting up for a bloody standoff as tanks moved in.

“The injuries are fortunately, this time, not serious, but they remain in hospital,” said UNIFIL in its statement. UNIFIL is further calling the fresh incident “very serious” given the IDF “deliberately fired” on its positions.

The UN HQ is located in the village of Labbouneh, and its team said IDF fire hit “the entrance to the bunker where peacekeepers were sheltering, and damaging vehicles and a communications system.”

The statement warned that “targeting peacekeepers is a very serious violation, not only of Resolution 1701 but also of international humanitarian law.” Monitoring cameras have also been destroyed. The Israeli action reportedly involved several tanks.

“If the situation becomes impossible for the mission to operate in the south of Lebanon … it will be up to the Security Council to decide how to move forward,” the UN said. Israel’s military did not issue immediate comment.

Days prior, UNIFIL said it is “deeply concerned by recent activities by the IDF immediately adjacent to the Mission’s position 6-52, southeast of Maroun al-Ras… inside Lebanese territory.”

Italy is among countries contributing to the UN mission who are outraged, and its government summoned the Israeli ambassador in Rome. “The shooting at the UNIFIL headquarters” which involved “small arms fire” is “intolerable, they must be carefully and decisively avoided,” Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto Crosetto said in a statement.

 Ireland too has issued formal protest and is livid:

Two United Nations (UN) peacekeepers in southern Lebanon have been wounded after an Israeli tank directly hit a UN observation tower, prompting outrage from troop-contributing nations.

Italy, which leads the 10,000-strong peacekeeping force along the Lebanon-Israel border, said firing on UN bases broke international law, and summoned the Israeli ambassador. 

Ireland, which contributes several hundred soldiers to the force, said targeting peacekeepers was “reprehensible and unacceptable”.

Typically in any UN Security Council vote which seeks to censure Israel for military actions, the United States is among the lone vetoes. Washington has rarely spoken up in defense or support of the UN peacekeeping mission in south Lebanon. The UNIFIL force was establish all the way back in 1978, in connection with Israeli incursions into Lebanon, and related to the events of the Lebanese civil war of the latter part of the 20th century.

First, Springfield, Ohio, then Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and now Logansport, Indiana—these small towns share one thing in common: Each has seen a massive influx of Haitian migrants that the Secretary of Homeland Security granted Temporary Protected Status. These migrants are dumped into towns with factories, replacing blue-collar native-born workers by the thousands in what we’ve dubbed the ‘Great Job Replacement.’ 

Local news outlet Mercer County Outlook said the small community of Logansport, located about 78 miles north of Indianapolis, had experienced a 30% population jump since 2021, or about around the time VP Kalama Harris began her new position as ‘Border Czar.’ 

Population in Logansport as of the last census is just over 18,000…according to statements made the population has increased by 30% since 2021…roughly 5,400.

The influx of migrants in the small town has strained local resources, including the school system. 

BREAKING: Local officials in Logansport, Indiana are sounding the alarm on the huge influx of migrants causing a strain on the local school systems.

Hundreds of migrant minors are being enrolled in the local schools. The Haitian student population alone has increased 1378% since… pic.twitter.com/UPRjZOY3AX

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 10, 2024

FOX59/CBS4’s Angela Ganote spoke with one Haitian migrant who said he came to Logansport because of the Tyson meatpacking plant. 

The Haitian migrant noted that immigrants make “good money” at the Tyson plant. However, it’s just not good enough for native-born workers.

Globalists at Tyson have worked with NGOs to replace their US labor workforce with migrants. This was detailed in a note earlier this year titled “How Shadowy Network Of NGOs Supplies Mega-Corporations With Migrants To Exploit Cheap Labor.” Bloomberg also covered this story in a piece titled “Tyson Is Hiring New York Immigrants for Jobs No One Else Wants.”

Back to Logansport, US Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) commented on the migrant crisis in the small town:

In just 2 years an est. 5,000 Haitian migrants have been moved to Logansport, Indiana, a town of 18,000 people. No small community can survive that pace of change. Biden and Kamala’s CHNV program + parole abuses are wreaking havoc in heartland towns like Logansport. Congress must END it.

In just 2 years an est. 5,000 Haitian migrants have been moved to Logansport, Indiana, a town of 18,000 people.

No small community can survive that pace of change.

Biden and Kamala‘s CHNV program + parole abuses are wreaking havoc in heartland towns like Logansport.…

— Jim Banks (@RepJimBanks) October 10, 2024

Pivoting to Charleroi, journalist Christopher Rufo found out just exactly how the 2,000 Haitian migrants suddenly arrived in the small PA town. He said the answer was “an open conspiracy between the federal government, publicly funded NGOs, and private corporations.” 

We conducted an investigation to understand how 2,000 Haitian migrants suddenly arrived in Charleroi, Pennsylvania. The answer: an open conspiracy between the federal government, publicly funded NGOs, and private corporations. Here’s how it works:https://t.co/497fkBJXVu

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 8, 2024

This is also happening in Springfield. 

“Blow Your Mind”: Ex-WSJ Journo Uncovers Hub Of An Alleged Migrant Trafficking Network In Springfield, Ohio https://t.co/Wz1hOGy3XD

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 18, 2024

And Colorado. 

Union Makes Shock Claim: Colorado Meat Factory Involved In “Mgmt-Led Human Trafficking” Of Haitians https://t.co/fusclWbmax

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 25, 2024

And we believe nationwide. 

US Map Shows Potential Areas Of Migrant ‘Great Job Replacement’ https://t.co/L0IfntWwmK

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 19, 2024

Great job replacement is already well underway.

How is this not the biggest political talking point right now: since October 2019, native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs. pic.twitter.com/Z5HVWmQ24C

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 15, 2024

This is not America First – this is globalist open border corporate profits first. 

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rurtherford Institute,

“What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”

– Hannah Arendt

In a perfect example of the Nanny State mindset at work, Hillary Clinton insists that the powers-that-be need “total control” in order to make the internet a safer place for users and protect us harm.

Clinton is not alone in her distaste for unregulated, free speech online.

A bipartisan chorus that includes both presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has long clamored to weaken or do away with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially acts as a bulwark against online censorship.

It’s a complicated legal issue that involves debates over immunity, liability, net neutrality and whether or not internet sites are publishers with editorial responsibility for the content posted to their sites, but really, it comes down to the tug-of-war over where censorship (corporate and government) begins and free speech ends.

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes for Reason, “What both the right and left attacks on the provision share is a willingness to use whatever excuses resonate – saving children, stopping bias, preventing terrorism, misogyny, and religious intolerance – to ensure more centralized control of online speech. They may couch these in partisan terms that play well with their respective bases, but their aim is essentially the same.”

In other words, the government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.

The internet may well be the final frontier where free speech still flourishes, especially for politically incorrect speech and disinformation, which test the limits of our so-called egalitarian commitment to the First Amendment’s broad-minded principles.

On the internet, falsehoods and lies abound, misdirection and misinformation dominate, and conspiracy theories go viral.

This is to be expected, and the response should be more speech, not less.

As Justice Brandeis wrote nearly a century ago: “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Yet to the government, these forms of “disinformation” rank right up there with terrorism, drugs, violence, and disease: societal evils so threatening that “we the people” should be willing to relinquish a little of our freedoms for the sake of national security.

Of course, it never works out that way.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns only to become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands.

Indeed, in the face of the government’s own authoritarian power-grabs, coverups, and conspiracies, a relatively unfettered internet may be our sole hope of speaking truth to power.

The right to criticize the government and speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

You see, disinformation isn’t the problem. Government coverups and censorship are the problem.

Unfortunately, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. Every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Thus, no matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

The next phase of the government’s war on anti-government speech and so-called thought crimes could well be mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.

Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are already being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

As the Associated Press reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.

The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.

The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.

In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.”

Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how you subdue a populace.

The ensuing silence in the face of government-sponsored tyranny, terror, brutality and injustice is deafening.

According to alternative media outlet The Grayzone, the State of Israel has arrested US citizen and Grayzone investigative reporter Jeremy Loffredo just days after he defied censors by posting a report on Iran’s ballistic missile strike, to include documenting the precise location of an apparent impact close to the headquarters of the country’s principal intelligence agency, the Mossad. 

“I’ve just learned that @loffredojeremy was among the journalists arrested by the Israeli military and is still in jail,” said Grayzone founder and editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal via social media. “His phone has been confiscated. That is all I’m able to say for now.” On Wednesday at midday, Grayzone journalist Aaron Maté wrote that Loffredo had already been held for more than 24 hours.

Russian independent journalist Andrey X said he and Loffredo were among five journalists grabbed by Israeli security forces, with all but Loffredo having been released. No details have yet surfaced about where or why they were arrested.   

Today I was beaten, kidnapped, blindfolded and taken to a military base by the Israeli Occupation Forces, together with 4 other journalists.

Two of us were held for 11 hours without charges, my phone was confiscated (stolen), and one of us is still in custody.

Full story soon.

— Andrey X (@the_andrey_x) October 8, 2024

On Oct. 1, Iran unleashed multiple waves of ballistic missiles on Israel in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of the Lebanese political and military organization Hezbollah, and Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Abbas Nilforoushan, among others. Despite compelling video evidence that many of those missiles found their targets, Israel downplayed the effect of the Iranian strike while simultaneously declaring it illegal to report on where missiles hit. 

Undaunted, Loffredo set out to find missile impact sites, and filed a 6-minute video report to The Grayzone‘s YouTube channel, which has nearly 400,000 followers, and to its Rumble channel. In addition to showing the remains of an Iranian missile near Israel’s Nevatim Airbase in the Negev desert, Loffredo was able to find what is almost certainly a huge missile blast site less than a thousand feet from Mossad headquarters.

“This information is missing from all Israeli media reports, due to the fact it’s been officially censored,” said Loffredo in his report, before showing the precise longitude and latitude of the impact site.  

When it comes to challenging Israeli government narratives, The Grayzone has been among the most intrepid outlets in journalism. It was among the first to report on evidence that many Israeli deaths during the Oct 7, 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel were inflicted by the Israeli Defense Forces. The Grayzone was also quick to credibly challenge near-universally-accepted claims that Hamas militants beheaded babies, burned babies in ovens, cut a fetus from its mother, and engaged in mass rape. On this Oct. 7, the outlet released a 44-minute documentary titled, “Atrocity Inc: How Israel Sells the Destruction of Gaza.”

Loffredo’s previous reporting from Israel included a set of candid and, to some, disturbing interviews with nationalist Israelis who were blocking humanitarian aid for war-ravaged Gaza. While it’s not clear why, it’s currently not possible to link directly to Loffredo’s posts on X/Twitter or to embed them.

Journalism is not a crime.

I will continue to stand strong for press freedom in Russia and worldwide, and stand against all those who seek to attack the press or target journalists.

— President Biden (@POTUS) July 20, 2024

President Biden claims to stand for press freedom around the world. Let’s see if his administration takes a stand against Israel on behalf of this American journalist…or instead shrugs and redistributes a few more billion dollars of American wealth to the perpetrators. In the meantime, watch Loffredo’s last report before he was seized and locked up: 

Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Editor’s note: The following story contains graphic descriptions of violence.

On Jan. 17, 1989, Rob Young happily walked to school sporting a brand-new pair of LA Gear tennis shoes he had received for Christmas. He still remembers how good those shoes felt on his 6-year-old feet.

Later that day, he sat under his desk and wondered if he was going to be in trouble over the blood soaking into his shoes. His best friend and fellow first-grader, Scotty, sat next to him, contemplating the gaping wound in his own leg.

“And that’s when he told me, ‘You know, Robbie, I think we’ve been shot,’” Young said.

The Stockton Schoolyard Shooting

On that foggy morning 35 years ago, as Young and his friends played kickball, a disaffected loner sprayed the Cleveland Elementary School playground in Stockton, California, with bullets from an AK-style semiautomatic rifle.

As children began running and screaming, Young felt something sweep his feet up over his head and then slam him to the ground as something impacted his chest. One of the bullets passed through his foot, narrowly missing the bones. A second bullet lodged in his chest, where it remains today.

Young said investigators believe the second bullet ricocheted off the ground before hitting him: a bullet of that caliber could have easily passed through his body if it hadn’t been slowed. Doctors determined that removing the bullet was too risky.

Five children were killed, and 30 other people, including a teacher, were injured.

The shooting was the impetus for California officials to write the state’s—and the nation’s—first ban on certain semiautomatic rifles, sometimes called “assault weapons.” But that was not the end of the response, the ripples of which are still being felt today.

Last September, President Joe Biden opened the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. He recently signed executive orders regulating homemade guns and promoting active shooter drills in schools. Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to do more if she is elected to replace her boss.

“We know how to stop these tragedies, and it is a false choice to suggest you are either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away. I am in favor of the Second Amendment,” Harris said on Sept. 26 ahead of Biden’s signing the order.

“I believe we need to reinstate the assault weapons ban, and pass universal background checks, safe storage laws, and red flag laws.”

Many of the survivors of what has come to be known as the Stockton schoolyard shooting became champions of gun control.

However, Young took a different path, going on to a career in law enforcement. The best thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, he said.

He points out that the Stockton shooter ended his rampage by shooting himself, but did so only after he realized armed police had arrived.

“I always realized that the gun was just a tool that a crazy man used,” Young said. “Would you ever blame a vehicle for a drunk driver who plows into a bunch of kids on a park bench? It didn’t make sense to me to blame an inanimate object.”

Sutherland Springs

Zachary Poston said he knows precisely what Young means. On Nov. 5, 2017, he, too, saw the power of a good guy with a gun.

That day, 17-year-old Poston went to church with his grandmother at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, as he had every Sunday for most of his life.

As a senior at La Vernia High School, he enjoyed computer games and flying the drone that recorded his school’s football games. He looked forward to enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps after graduation.

Poston is tentative when asked to recall the events of that day, referring interviewers to court records.

“It’s been a minute,” he told The Epoch Times.

According to Poston and another witness, the congregation had finished singing a hymn and were waiting for the sermon to begin when bullets began punching through the church’s front door.

A convicted felon with a history of mental health issues and a hatred for religion was shooting through the church’s front door. He then moved down one side of the church, shooting through the wall and windows, forcing the people inside to take cover.

The murderer then moved inside the building, still shooting. Poston saw that a little girl in front of him was in the open, so he pushed her under the pew in front of him with his foot. The act drew the killer’s attention, and he raked Poston’s body with gunfire.

Poston’s grandmother threw herself over him.

“My grandmother took the bullets that would have killed me,” Poston said.

Across the street, Stephen Willeford had been resting in anticipation of being called to his plumbing job at a local medical facility later in the day.

He thought he heard someone tapping on his window. Then his daughter came into the room and told him something was happening at the church across the street.

As Willeford walked to his living room, he recognized the sound of gunfire. He told his family to call 911, grabbed his AR-15 and a handful of cartridges, and began loading a magazine.

He hadn’t had time to put his shoes on.

As he got to the front of the church, he saw the killer preparing to shoot a man in the head. He yelled to get his attention. The killer dropped his rifle and pointed a pistol at Willeford.

Willeford shot the gunman six times. The killer, who was wearing body armor, got into his car and fled.

Willeford flagged down a stranger named Johnnie Langendorff, who was in a pickup truck across the street. The two men chased the gunman, who ran off the road and shot himself several miles outside of town.

Poston’s grandmother, Peggy Lynn Warden, was one of 26 people killed in the massacre.

Both Willeford and Poston say that access to guns did not cause what happened in their rural Texas town. Poston points out that the rampage ended when Willeford returned fire. He said if he finds himself in a similar situation again, he wants to be able to stop the killing.

“I won’t go without [a gun] because I don’t want it to happen to me again or to whoever I’m around. I just don’t want it to happen to someone else,” Poston said.

Groups promoting gun control and gun safety disagree. They say the solution to the problem of mass shootings is a resurrection of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban implemented by the Clinton administration. In a recent email to its membership, Brady: United Against Gun Violence leadership stated that weapons like the one used in Stockton ensure high body counts in mass shootings.

“We know that a federal ban on assault weapons will save lives, and the majority of Americans support this measure. It is past time Congress listens to the American people and protects our communities by passing the Assault Weapons Ban of 2023,” the email reads.

Victims and Survivors

Other survivors of mass shootings who spoke with The Epoch Times said they are glad that their assailants met with armed resistance.

Massad Ayoob is a firearms instructor who has taught police techniques and civilian self-defense for decades. He has written extensively on firearms, combat techniques, self-defense, and legal issues. Ayoob spoke at the Gun Rights Policy Conference on Sept. 28 in San Diego.

He said that gun control activists capitalize on the emotional impact of the victims’ stories, while ignoring those who survive because someone was there with a gun to take down the shooter.

Michael Collazo agrees. He is one of the metro police officers who engaged a mass shooter at Covenant Christian School in Nashville on March 27, 2023.

Police bodycam video caught the moment Collazo and another officer shot the killer who had murdered three children and three adults at the school.

Collazo spoke during the Gun Owner Advocacy and Leadership Summit, sponsored by Gun Owners of America, in Knoxville, Tennessee, in August. He said school staff, including the principal, who was killed that day, had received active shooter training. The principal tried to stop the shooter even though she was unarmed, Collazo said.

Their stories are examples of heroism and courage, he said.

“They didn’t have to do that. They’re teachers; they signed up to teach kids, not to go into a gunfight,” Collazo told the gathering. “They had gotten some training prior to the incident occurring, and they did everything phenomenally.”

Gun Was Locked Up

The only gun on campus that day was locked in a car and inaccessible, Collazo said.

Meanwhile, Young said the Stockton shooting and his law enforcement experience have given him a unique perspective.

Several of his friends and former teachers are active in the gun control movement. He loves and respects them, he said.

Nonetheless, Young said that violent crime doesn’t come from a weapon; it comes from violent criminals. The most effective means of stopping violent crime is to stop violent criminals, he said.

A 2014 FBI analysis found that the average police response time after an active shooter report is approximately three minutes.

The Stockton schoolyard shooting was over in about 3 1/2 minutes. “Twenty-nine kids at my school, including myself, were shot before the law enforcement officers got on scene,” Young said.

“There are a lot of good people that work in our school systems that cannot carry their firearms. It’s their God-given right. It’s afforded by the Constitution.

“It’s a tool that can stop a madman.”

If this week’s 3Y auction was subpar, yesterday’s 10Y was mediocre, then today’s 30Y auction was an absolute stunner. In fact, one could saw it was the strongest 30Y auction on record.

Starting at the top, the high yield was 4.389%, up sharply from last month’s 4.015% and the highest since July’s 4.405%. But that was not a surprise to the market, where the When Issued had already been trading around 4.404%, meaning the auction stopped through by 1.5bps, the first non-tailing 30Y auction since June.

The bid to cover was 2.50, up sharply from 2.38 in September and the highest since June 2023. Needless to say, it was well above the recent average.

But the internals were where the auction truly shocked, because Indirects soared from 68.7% to a whopping 80.5%, the highest on record, as foreign central banks and various other entities just couldn’t get enough paper.

And with less than 20% left for other participants, Directs took down just 7.6%, the lowest since 2018, leaving Dealers holding 12.2% of the final allocation, the lowest since July 2023.

And that’s what the strongest 30Y auction – certainly in recent history, perhaps on record – looks like. Not surprisingly, with yields rising to session highs just ahead of the auction result, we have seen yields slide by about 3bps since as the market was clearly surprised with just how much demand there is for long-dated paper, suggesting that while the Fed may indeed slow down its easing cadence for a few months, it will eventually have to be much more aggressive in monetizing US debt at a time when both Kamala and Trump promise to pump tens of trillions more debt in the coming years.

 

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

The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled on Oct. 8 that rape qualifies as a “predicate offense” under the state law, allowing for suspects to be denied bail and held in pretrial detention.

The state’s highest court found that because rape involves the use of physical force, regardless of whether violence or coercion through nonphysical means is used against victims, the crime meets the pretrial detention threshold.

The ruling arises from the case of Alvin Campbell, who faces multiple charges for allegedly luring heavily intoxicated women into his vehicle by posing as a rideshare operator outside Boston-area bars and clubs and then raping them.

Campbell faces a series of charges related to the alleged sexual assaults spanning from 2017 to 2019, including aggravated rape, indecent assault and battery, kidnapping, and photographing an unsuspecting nude person. He has pleaded not guilty, claiming the encounters were consensual.

Since his arrest in January 2020, Campbell has been held without bail, after prosecutors moved for “pretrial detention based on dangerousness,” as allowed under the Massachusetts law commonly referred to as “Section 58A.” To detain someone under Section 58A, prosecutors must show the defendant has been charged with a “predicate offense,” a category of crimes that include those involving physical violence or threats of violence.

At Campbell’s arraignment, prosecutors argued that he posed a significant threat to the community and that no conditions of release could guarantee public safety. A Superior Court judge agreed, leading to Campbell’s continued detention.

In September 2022, Campbell filed a series of motions, including ones for reconsideration of his pretrial detention, which were subsequently denied. The judge who rejected Campbell’s requests reasoned that rape qualifies as a predicate offense for pretrial detention under the force clause of Section 58A because an element of rape includes the use or threatened use of force.

Campbell’s attorneys appealed, arguing that the statute was being misinterpreted, as not all instances of rape involve physical force beyond the act of penetration itself. The case ended up before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which took a categorical approach, affirming that rape is inherently violent.

Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Frank Gaziano, who authored the high court’s Oct. 8 opinion, wrote that even in cases where the victim is incapacitated or coerced through nonphysical means, the violation of bodily autonomy still amounts to the use of physical force. Gaziano further noted that the statute’s language and intent align with federal interpretations of similar force clauses, further supporting the view that physical force is central to the crime of rape.

“Our recognition of the myriad ways in which an assailant may deprive a victim of his or her consent does not diminish the undeniable presence of physical force in rape,” the high court’s opinion reads. “To decide otherwise and determine that rape is not an offense with physical force at its heart would be to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the violation.”

The decision has significant implications for future cases, as it underscores the court’s commitment to a broad interpretation of physical force under the force clause of Section 58A.

A separate though related case that ended up before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, known as Commonwealth v. Vieira, also focused on a challenge to pretrial detention based on Section 58A. In that case, the high court evaluated whether indecent assault and battery on a child under 14 constituted a predicate offense that justified pretrial detention under the statute’s force clause.

In Vieira, defense attorneys argued that expanding the interpretation of physical force to include crimes such as indecent assault and battery risked broadening the scope of pretrial detention beyond what the Legislature intended. They contended that such offenses might involve minimal or nonviolent contact, which does not rise to the level of physical force as required by the statute.

The high court acknowledged this argument and ultimately agreed, ruling that indecent assault and battery on a child did not qualify as a predicate offense under Section 58A, highlighting that only those crimes with clear and substantial physical force meet the threshold.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court’s Oct. 8 decision means Campbell will remain in custody as his case proceeds in lower courts, where he faces multiple indictments.

Attorneys for Campbell were not available for comment on the ruling before publication time.

Germany’s national dpa press agency (Deutsche Presse-Agentur) is reporting that Ukraine is scrapping plans for a second international peace summit which was to be held ahead of the US presidential election in November.

“The presidential office led by Andriy Yermak is responsible for preparing the gathering that seeks to bring together government representatives and organizations from around the globe to discuss Zelensky’s plan aimed at ending more than two and a half years of war with Russia,” the media outlet said.

“Initially, Ukraine had hoped for the second such conference to be held ahead of the November 5 election in the US, which could see the return of Republican Donald Trump to the White House, but an adviser to Yermak said on Tuesday that the plan was no longer feasible,” dpa continues.

It had been tentatively scheduled for October 30 and October 31, or also possibly the start of November, but now the Ukraine presidency’s office has announced that “The question of a date for the second peace summit will be decided after the thematic conferences have been concluded,” in reference to prior smaller conferences.

“The Second Peace Summit will not take place in November,” senior Ukrainian presidential aide Darya Zarivna separately confirmed.

The first big conference hosted in Switzerland this past June was attended by about 100 countries, and concluded without the conflict being any closer to moving toward peace talks between Moscow and Kiev. Quite the opposite… since then Russian forces have continued pushing back the Ukrainian army’s positions in the east, and pro-Kiev forces have only stepped up drone attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, including recent attacks in Crimea.

Moscow was invited to neither the summer conference nor the one that was supposed to take place this fall. On this basis the Kremlin has rejected the legitimacy of the talks. China too has said such conferences are futile without representation of the other warring party.

Russia and China have seen Zelensky’s efforts as an exercise in giving a rubber stamp to his ‘victory plan’ which he has promoted in Washington. A key controversial aspect has been that the US and NATO allies must approve long-range strikes deep into Russia using West-supplied arms. That approval has not come, at least publicly.

Hungary and Slovakia are two NATO countries who have lately been vocal against another part of Zelensky’s plan: a Ukrainian path to NATO membership. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico on Sunday vowed Ukraine will never join the military alliance under his wach.

“As long as I am head of the Slovak government, I will direct the MPs that are under my control as chairman of the [ruling Smer] party never to agree to Ukraine’s joining NATO,” he said on the weekly “O päť minút dvanásť”, as cited in Politico.

Zelensky is apparently canceling his second attempt at a “peace summit,” which was scheduled for next month, after the first version failed to include Russia.

But the announcement comes as Biden is pulling out of the next Ramstein meeting of NATO cheerleaders for Ukraine…… pic.twitter.com/a4okHRJopA

— Rachel Blevins (@RachBlevins) October 10, 2024

Russian state media has this week held up the ‘peace summit’ cancelation as another win for Moscow. “On Tuesday, the White House announced that Biden would not meet Zelensky in Germany as previously scheduled, since he has canceled all of his travel plans due to Hurricane Milton impacting Florida,” RT wrote. “According to Ukrainian media, Zelensky and Biden were supposed to discuss the ‘victory plan’ this coming Saturday.”

The Kremlin has also in fresh statements sought to emphasize it has received no real signals from the Ukrainian government that it is interested in starting peace talks or achieving ceasefire. Russian forces keep capturing villages and towns in Donetsk, and the defense ministry has said the whole region will soon come under total Russian control any day now.

This also as much of the West’s attention is focused on fast-moving events in the Middle East, where Israel and Iran are on the brink of total war, and with Washington backing Tel Aviv. Zelensky has begun to lose the global media spotlight which characterized the opening two years of the war. His presence in D.C. during his recent trip was also generally viewed as a lackluster trip.