Search Results for: ABUSE

Yet Another Female Jewish Prisoner of Conscience

BS”D 

Is Israel Asking for Yet More Divine Retribution?

ISRAELI PERSECUTION OF ANOTHER RELIGIOUS GIRL IN MILITARY PRISON

4 Shvat, 5781, Parshas Bo °°  January 17, ’21

Sunday, January 17, 2021

By Binyomin Feinberg

We received confirmation of yet another religious girl, Odel bas Oshras Sorah, incarcerated in Military Prison Number Six. She hails from a Chassidishe family of longtime ba’alei teshuva in Southern Israel. She’s been imprisoned for two weeks, in wake of her refusal to enlist in the Israeli Army.

According to Rabbis from across the spectrum, it’s absolutely prohibited for any girl to enlist in the Army. In Judaism, some prohibitions rise to the level of “Yai’horaig Ve’al Ya’avor,” requiring us to do everything possible to avoid transgression, including sacrificing one’s life, if need be (Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Daiyoh 157:1). As stated by numerous Torah leaders over approximately the past 70 years, women serving in the Israeli Army is included under the rubric of “Yai’horaig Ve’al Ya’avor.”

°  In recent months, the Army has been summoning religious girls to submit to a Rayon Dat (religiosity interview, or interrogation) – on the pretext that they studied at a non-religious school, and therefore ostensibly need to confirm their religiosity (to a panel of military officers intent on leveraging the Torah to undermine it). However, in the wake of widespread neglect by the Media, some askonim and Rabbonim, and most of the public, the Army is continuing their escalation of Giyus Banos.
This case of Odel is just one of an increasing number of religious girls recently being targeted by the Draft Offices – even without the pretext of a non-religious school.  Other religious girls being currently targeted include Anna bas Miriam and Shulamis bas Shoshana Bas Sheva (19 y/o). The Draft Offices are persecuting both, and in an apparently lawless manner.
° In addition, we’ve also received credible information that Odel is being severely mistreated in prison. Having covered these female refusenik cases for about two years, we know for a fact that this is a frequent occurrence – clearly part of an Israeli Army policy, a policy hard to construe as anything less than antireligious, specifically: anti-Jewish.   Sometimes they’ll deny the principled refusenik kosher food. Sometimes they’ll deny or severely limit communication with family or legal counsel. Sometimes they’ll even deny critical healthcare. Additionally, intensive verbal abuse appears to be a staple of the military prison regimen for female religious objectors.

°  Another frequent example of how many girls are persecuted in Israeli military prison is the widespread refusal to allow girls to wear skirts.  The hypocrisy is glaring: When the IDF wishes to market the Army to women around the world, they feign compatibility with Judaism and basic modesty by ensuring religious recruits have easy access to skirts. However, when a religious girl in military prison insists on wearing a skirt, in compliance with the Mesorah (religious tradition) of observant Jewish communities throughout the world, the IDF suddenly encounters acute clothing shortages. They employ a ridiculous rationing of skirts,  extending to the point that the prisons will often only provide makeshift skirts. They take pants,  cut open the legs, and ostensibly resew them, forcing the religious girl to walk around in a bizarre imitation skirt, as if to punish her for her resolve to maintain her modesty and the Jewish Minhag.  Thus, those women who cooperate with the Army’s “Mizron Tzahali” paradigm merit designer quality uniforms (for reasons best left unsaid here), while girls who insist on following the Torah are condemned to walk around in abnormal, if not disgraceful garb.

°  Worse, many girls are denied skirts altogether. Some have even been punished by solitary confinement for merely insisting on their religious and civil rights to wear a skirt. Solitary confinement in Israeli military prison is emotional tormenting. The room is intentionally undersized, often with poor ventilation. It’s a form of psychological warfare designed to break and severely punish those who insist on their human and religious rights.
°  Another reason for the Military Prison’s “Thou Shalt Wear No Skirt Before Me” policy is that the religious girls must be made to feel that they’re really not religious. There’s a concept of “gaslighting,” convincing you to question your own convictions.  This is a technique often employed against religious girls seeking to secure their legal entitlement to a military service exemption, in the Religiosity Interview (“Rayon Dat”) process. This trend is more than alluded to in the recently published Chotam Guidebook (for girls to avoid conscription:
https://www.chotam.org.il/media/61762/pinkaskis-orange-english.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1hBP9tHJxSIfF07n8ywx27I_kWn0jfd9EOBy7fYfRe1xNChBPBU4qLLo0 ).
°  The Army also seeks to compel the girls to violate the Halacha, and their own moral principles and sensibilities (see also
http://firstamendmentactivist.blogspot.com/2020/02/creep-state.html ). Thus, even if the girl ultimately prevails in obtaining her exemption, the antireligious establishment feels it still has had an impact – in eroding the inherent Jewish modesty nurtured by generations of Jewish mothers for four thousand years.

Trump Supporters Don’t Trust the Vote Counters, and You Shouldn’t Either

Why Trump Voters Don’t Trust the People Who Count the Votes

01/06/2021

Perhaps not since the nineteenth century have so many American voters so fervently doubted the outcome of a national election.

A Slate headline from December 13 reads: “82 Percent of Trump Voters Say Biden’s Win Isn’t Legitimate.” If even half true, this poll means tens of millions of Americans believe the incoming ruling party in Washington got its political power by cheating.

The implications of this are broader than one might think. Under the current system, if many millions of Americans doubt the veracity of the official vote count, the challenge to the status quo goes beyond simply thinking that Democrats are cheaters. Rather, the Trump voters’ doubts indict much of the American political system overall and call its legitimacy into question.

For example, if Trump supporters are unwilling to accept that the vote count in Georgia was fair—in a state where Republicans control both the legislature and the governor’s mansion—this means skepticism goes well beyond mere distrust of the Democratic Party. For Trump’s vote-count skeptics, not even the GOP or the nonpartisan election officials can be trusted to count the votes properly.

Moreover, unlike the general public, Trump supporters appear to have adopted a keenly suspicious view toward these administrators and the systems they control. This is all to the best, regardless of the true extent of voter fraud in 2020. After all, government administrators—including those who count the votes—are not mere disinterested, efficiency-obsessed administrators. They have their own biases and political interests. They’re not neutral.

Trump as Outsider

How did Trump supporters become such skeptics? Whether accurately or not, Trump is viewed as an antiestablishment figure by most of his supporters. He is supposed to be the man who will “drain the swamp” and oppose the entrenched administrative state (i.e., the deep state).

In practice, this means opposition must go beyond mere partisan opposition. It was not enough to simply trust the GOP, because, either instinctively or intellectually, many Trump supporters know he has never really been a part of the GOP establishment. The opposition from within the Republican Party has always been substantial, and the old party guard never stopped opposing him. For Trump’s supporters, then, the two-party system isn’t enough to act as a brake on abuse by the administrative state—at least when it comes to sabotaging the Trump administration. In the minds of many supporters, Trump embodies the anti-establishment party while his opponents can be found in both parties and in the nonpartisan administrative state itself.

This view has formed over time in a reaction to real life experience. Trump supporters have been given plenty of reasons to suspect that anti-Trump sentiment is endemic within the bureaucracy. For example, from the beginning, high-ranking “nonpartisan” officials at the FBI were actively seeking to undermine the Trump presidency. Then there was Alexander Vindman, who openly opposed legal orders from the White House and lent aid to House officials hoping to impeach Trump. Then there were those Pentagon officials who apparently lied to Trump in order to avoid drawing down US troops in Syria. All this was on top of the usual bureaucrats, who already tend to be hated by conservative populists: education bureaucrats, IRS agents, environmental regulators, and others responsible for carrying out federal edicts.

And then there were the federal medical “experts” like Anthony Fauci, who insisted Americans ought not to be allowed to leave their homes until no new covid-19 cases were discovered for a period of weeks. Translation: never.

Health technocrats like Fauci came to be hated by Trump supporters, not just for seeking to shut down churches and ruin the lives of countless business owners, but for setting themselves up as political opponents of the administration through daily press releases and other means of contradicting the White House.

It only makes sense that Trump’s supporters would extend this distrust of the bureaucracy to those who count the votes. After all, who counts the votes has always been of utmost importance. It’s why renowned political cartoonist Thomas Nast had Boss Tweed utter these words in an 1871 cartoon: “As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?”

Boss Tweed

 

This has always been a good question.

Old party bosses like Tweed are now out of the picture, but the votes nowadays are calculated and certified instead by people who, like Tweed, have their own ideological views and their own political interests. The official vote counts are handed down by bureaucratic election officials and by party officials, most of whom are outside the circles of Trump loyalists.

Given the outright political and bureaucratic opposition Trump has faced from other corners of the administrative state, there seems to be little reason for his supporters to trust those who count the votes.

Learning to Mistrust the Administrative State

Thus, whether facing FBI agents or election officials, Trump supporters learned to take official government reports and pronouncements with a healthy dose of skepticism. The end result: for the first time, under Trump, the American administrative state came to be widely viewed as a political force seeking to undermine a legitimately elected president, and as a political interest group in itself.

Naturally, the media and the administrative state itself have reacted to this with outrage and disbelief that anyone could believe that the professional technocrats and bureaucrats could have anything in mind other than selfless, efficient service to the greater good. The idea that lifelong employees of the regime might be biased against a man supposedly tasked with dismantling the regime was—we were assured—absurd.

Civil Service Reform and the Rise of the Permanent Bureaucracy

Although Trump’s supporters may get some of the details wrong, the distrustful view of the bureaucracy is the more accurate and realistic view. The view of the American administrative state as impartial, nonideological, and aloof from politics has always been the naïve view, and one pushed by the Progressive reformers who created this class of permanent government “experts.”

Before these Progressives triumphed in the early twentieth century, this permanent class of technocrats, bureaucrats and “experts” did not exist in the United States. Prior to civil service reform in the late nineteenth century, most bureaucratic jobs—at all levels of government—were given to party loyalists. When Republicans won the White House, the Republican president filled bureaucratic positions with political supporters. Other parties did the same.

This was denounced by reformers, who maligned this system as “the spoils system.” Reformers insisted that American politics would be far less corrupt, more efficient, and less politicized, if permanently appointed experts in public administration were put into these positions instead.

The Administrative State as an Interest Group

But the rub was that in spite of claims by the reformers, there was never any reason to assume this new class of administrators would be politically neutral. The first sign of danger in this regard was the fact that those who wanted civil service reform seemed to come from a very specific background. Murray Rothbard writes:

The civil service Reformers were a remarkably homogeneous group. Concentrated almost exclusively in the urban Northeast, including New York City and especially Boston, the Reformers virtually constituted an older, highly educated and articulate elite. From families of old patrician wealth, mercantile and financial rather than coming from new industries, these men despised what they saw as the crass materialism of the nouveau riche, as well as their lack of good breeding or education at Harvard or Yale. Not only were the Reformers merchants, attorneys, and educators, but they virtually constituted the most influential “media elite” of the day: editors, writers, and scholars.

In practice, as Rothbard has shown, civil service reform did not eliminate corruption or bias in the administration of the regime. Rather, the advent of the civil service only shifted bureaucratic power away from working-class party loyalists, and toward middle-class and university-educated personnel. These people, of course, had their own socioeconomic backgrounds and political agendas, as suggested by one anti-reform politician at the time who recognized that civil service exams would be employed to direct jobs in a certain direction:

So, sir, it comes to this at last, that…the dunce who had been crammed up to a diploma at Yale, and comes fresh from his cramming, will be preferred in all civil service appointments to the ablest, most successful, and most upright business man of the country, who either did not enjoy the benefit of early education, or from whose mind, long engrossed in practical pursuits, the details and niceties of academic knowledge have faded away as the headlands disappear when the mariner bids his native land good night.

Gone were the old party activists who had worked their way up to a position of power from local communities in which they had skin in the game. The new technocrats were something else entirely.

Today, of course, the bureaucracy continues to be characterized by ideological leanings of its own. For example, government workers, from the federal level down, skew heavily Democrat. They have more job security. They’re better paid. They’re less rural. They have more formal education. It’s a safe bet the bureaucracy isn’t chock full of Trump supporters. Civil service reform didn’t eliminate corruption and bias. It simply created a different kind.

Trump supporters recognize that these people don’t go away when “their guy” wins. These are permanent civil “servants” whom Trump supporters suspect—with good reason—have been thoroughly opposed to the Trump administration.

So, if the FBI and the Pentagon have already demonstrated their officials are willing to break and bend rules to obstruct Trump, why believe the administrative class when they insist elections are free and fair and all above board? Many have found little reason to do so.

From Mises.org, here.

The Demands of the Galus Jew

The mental illness of the galus Jew was on full display in a recent email correspondence I had with a Jewish woman from the United States. I will refer to the essence of the correspondence and have removed any identifying information.

She wrote that she asked around about homes in Israel. She is looking for a home that has two or three bedrooms and two bathrooms, with a nice kitchen. It must be no more than a few minutes from restaurants and nightlife (which eliminates much of the country), and was looking to spend $250 thousand. Surprisingly enough, no one was able to “find a place with those requirements”.

She concluded her initial email with the following admonishment: “How about in your next column in The Jewish Press, you make recommendations for where Americans interested in moving to Eretz Yisroel might find a comfortable home and community.”

I replied in part as follows: “Maybe your aliya wish list is a little too demanding. Israel is a large and beautiful country with many affordable communities. American Jews tend to be very materialistic, demanding, and spoiled, and if they cannot afford to live in the Old City, the center of Jerusalem, or a well-established, high-end Anglo community, they declare that they can’t afford to live in Israel and aliya is not for them. For a fraction of the cost of living in the Beverly Hills of Israel you could get a villa in other communities and give up a little on your materialistic demands in favor of the blessing of coming home.

“You mention [an expensive Anglo neighborhood], but the fact is that you would have sniffed your nose at [this neighborhood] when it was under construction. You wouldn’t have bought there at $250K and waited a few years for it to go up. Were you willing to lower your demands, you could find many more such opportunities in other parts of the country. That’s the hard truth, and I hope you will consider it.

“Life in Israel isn’t perfect, but neither are you. If you will come to Israel with a positive attitude, accept it for what it is, and help bring us closer to the goal, the land will take a favorable view toward your imperfections as well.”

Tough words, but honest and to the point.

She replied with a long diatribe about how she grew up in poverty and now donates money to Jewish institutions. She went on to call me “arrogant…insensitive and a disgrace to the title rabbi. I certainly would not want to live in a community filled with people like you. Now you have uncovered your face for the world to see…no one cares what you want.”

Woof.

Now, all that may be true, but it doesn’t negate my response to her list of demands to make aliya. I replied: “I’m truly sorry that Israel cannot offer you an apartment with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms in a developed Anglo community a half hour away from restaurants and nightlife for $250,000. Obviously the problem is with Israel, and I am a disgusting person for observing that your demands are unreasonable, overly materialistic, and display a distorted perspective of what aliya should be about. I wish you luck in finding a community that makes you happy and has only people who tell you what you wish to hear.”

She replied with another long diatribe about how she grew up in poverty and worked her way up to a nice standard of living, which she refuses to give up. “I simply cannot afford the lifestyle… Yes, there is a problem in Israel if you cannot find a residence to fit your family. You act as though I am requiring a palace. I don’t need a palace, but I do want a home above a Bedouin tent.”

My reply: “As I mentioned previously, there is a huge divide between a “Bedouin tent” and a developed Anglo community near restaurants and nightlife. Thank God the people who came to Israel before us, who truly cherished the land and built it, did not have such a list of requirements to consider themselves not “impoverished”. I never judged you as a human being, and your childhood and how much tzedaka you give are irrelevant to the discussion.

“You presented me with a list of requirements for moving to Israel that I consider unreasonable and overly materialistic, and I gave you an honest response. You reacted by heaping praise on yourself and heaping abuse on me. So be it.

“I stand by my assessment of your shopping list, and there is no reason to continue this discussion. When Black Lives Matter and Antifa pay a visit to your suburb, maybe you will adjust your requirements for living in Israel, and maybe you will even prefer a Bedouin tent in your own homeland among rude, arrogant, and overall disgusting people like me. Good luck to you.”

Well, she had an answer for that contingency! “If Antifa or BLM come to my home, they will see the end of my AR-15.”

To which I replied: “Good luck with that, Rambo.”

The Land of Israel cries for its children. It cries as follows:

“Life here might not yet be everything you want it to be. You know what? You’re not everything the Land of Israel wants you to be, either. I’m willing to view you favorably because you are the children of those I loved most, even though at times you hardly resemble them. I will do this on the condition that you view me favorably, and not complain about how I don’t resemble the land you must leave behind. I’m not supposed to. I’m different, and you are supposed to be different than the people in those lands. If you work to create a better life in Israel, I will work to make you a better person.

“This is your only home. Come here to stay and make it work.”

Most galus Jews will not listen. But maybe one more will hear the call.

____________

www.chananyaweissman.com

https://www.facebook.com/etm.shabbatons

Vicious Black American Slaveowners

A Brief History of Nonwhite Slave Owners in America

By Lipton Matthews
Mises.org

November 10, 2020

The study of slavery is one of the most contentious issues in contemporary America. But frequently this history is abused by thinkers across the spectrum to score political points. To understand the complexity of such an institution, we must desist from underestimating the role of minorities such as African Americans and Native Americans in it. For much of history, slavery was the norm, and by downplaying nonwhites’ involvement, we diminish their humanity. Pursuing one’s self-interest to acquire profit or power is consistent with human nature. Depicting minorities as innately virtuous relegates them to the status of infants. Instead, we should aim to highlight their autonomy as rational agents who sought to fulfill specific objectives in the context of a slave economy. Blacks and American Indians possessed the capacity to be just as calculating as white slave owners, and it is patronizing to suggest that they failed to perform as self-interested actors.

One of the earliest reports on black slave owners was pioneered by historian and activist Carter G. Woodson. Woodson advanced what is widely known as the theory of “benevolent slaveholding.” According to this view, black slaveholders primarily purchased relatives and friends from white masters to provide them with a better quality of life. To curtail the growth of the free black population, restrictive laws were instituted, thus making it difficult for black slave owners to manumit slaves without approval from the state. In South Carolina, for example, after 1820 free blacks who bought relatives, spouses, or friends had to receive permission from the state prior to manumitting enslaved Americans. Hence, purchasing black slaves from white owners was a strategy used by free blacks to secure a greater degree of freedom for their loved ones. Indeed Woodson’s thesis remains popular among academics, as adumbrated by Philip J. Schwarz: “Increasingly restrictive legislation, stringent economic conditions, the choice of many free blacks to own other blacks only temporarily, and perhaps the aversion of other Afro-Americans to human bondage guaranteed, that free black possession of human property would be significant only as an anomaly, not as a typical experience.” Though Woodson’s theory is still influential, many have charged that he minimized the materialistic tendencies of African American slave owners.

Larry Koger in his groundbreaking text Black Slaveowners: Free Black Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860 disputes the dominant narrative propagated by disciples of Woodson:

When Carter G. Woodson asserted that free blacks purchased slave relatives and friends, he was quite correct. However, free blacks who held loved ones bought other slaves to be exploited for profit. To classify these transactions as benevolent would be a mistake. Even though these slaveowners usually demonstrated benevolent behavior towards their slave relations and friends, a commercial and materialistic exchange existed between them and their slaves purchased as investments. In fact, the free blacks who maintained a dual relationship with their slaves had no universal commitment against slavery. To them, slavery was an oppressive institution when it affected a beloved relative or a trusted friend, but beyond that realm, slavery was viewed as a profit-making institution to be exploited.

Other scholars implore us to not be shocked that blacks in America expressed an interest in owning slaves, as summarized by Calvin Wilson: “The Negroes brought with them from their native land African ideas and customs. Many of those brought thence to America had been slaves in their own lands. Others had been owners of slaves in Africa. In both cases, they were used to slavery. It did not, therefore, seemed unnatural for a Negro in America to hold his brethren in bondage when he had become free and able to buy his fellows.”

Also, like their white peers, some black slave owners were notorious for their brutality. Ronald E. Hall in his landmark publication An Historical Analysis of Skin Colour Discrimination: Victimism among Victim Group Populations challenges the assumption that black owners were always humane using the example of William Ellison: “William Ellison is prominent for both his wealth and the cruelty toward his black slaves, for which he was known among Southern blacks and whites. Historians for whatever reasons have attempted to justify his version of victim-group discrimination perhaps as a matter of political correctness.”

Yet if you assume that Hall’s commentary on Ellison is an anomalous case, then maybe this condemnation of black slave owners by a Louisiana slave featured in Frederick Law Olmstead’s Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom will alter your perspective: “You might think, master, dat dey would be good to dar own nation; but dey is not. I will tell you de truth, massa; I know I’se got to answer; and it’s a fact, dey is very bad masters, sar. I’d rather be a servant to any man in de world, dan to a brack man. If I was sold to a brack man, I’d drown myself. I would dat—I’d drown myself! Dough I shouldn’t like to do dat nudder; but I wouldn’t be sold to a coloured master for anything.” Clearly, Woodson’s thesis is untenable.

With greater potency than most writers Hall discredits the position that black slaveholders were mainly motivated by humanitarian concerns:

In most instances of black slave ownership, the records suggest that blacks who owned black slaves did so for the same reasons as whites: profit….Astonishingly, in 1860 there existed at least six Negroes—likely light-skinned—living in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves. Among them C. Richards and P.C. Richards who owned 152 of their black brethren as slaves to work their sugarcane plantation. A similarly impressive Louisiana free Negro Antoine Dubuclet owned in excess of 100 dark-skinned black slaves. He was also in the sugar business and boasted an estate estimated to be worth in (1860 dollars) $264,000. To put Dubuclet’s wealth in context, the mean calculation of wealth for Southern white men at the time averaged $3,978.

Similarly, Native Americans were also players in slavery, and it must be noted that the institution existed before the arrival of Europeans. According to the scholar Joyce Ann Kievit: “Many North American Indian tribes practiced some form of slavery before Europeans arrived in North America. The status of slaves varied from tribe to tribe. Some slaves were exploited for labor, others were used for ritual sacrifice, a few provided for the needs of women whose husbands had been slain in war, and many were adopted into the tribes.” However, with the introduction of plantation slavery by European settlers, Native Americans became alert to the financial opportunities that could be gained from this venture.

Barbara Krauthamer shrewdly dispels the notion that Native Americans had less interest in exploiting black slaves for monetary benefit:

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the U.S. Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw men and women held people of African descent in slavery. Like their white Southern counterparts, Indians bought, sold, owned, and exploited black people’s labor and reproduction for social and economic gain. Choctaws and Chickasaws purchased slaves—men, women, and children—to work on their Mississippi farms and plantations and to serve in their homes…Choctaws and Chickasaws understood that slavery allowed for the accumulation of personal wealth.

Neither should we entertain the fable that Indian slave owners were universally generous. R. Halliburton in an intriguing book, Red over Black: Black Slavery among the Cherokee Indians, argued that the treatment meted out to black slaves ranged from kind to excessively atrocious, indicating that generalizations about slave masters are often inaccurate.

To imply that only white people have a vicious ability to calculatingly pursue their interests at the expense of others is insulting to blacks and American Indians. Inherent in humans is the passion to achieve distinct objectives even when they are inconsistent with the goals of the wider group. Romanticizing the history of minorities to portray them as saints is quite dehumanizing. The racist subtext is that white people are uniquely human because they possess the fortitude to outwit competitors.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

From Mises.org, here.

Ron Paul’s Recent Article on Corona

No Vaccine for Tyranny

written by ron paul
monday november 2, 2020
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently admitted that lockdowns cause more harm than good. Following this announcement, one would have expected American politicians to immediately end the lockdowns. After all, the WHO ‘s pronouncements are considered infallible, so much so that social media sites silence anyone who dares challenge the great and powerful WHO. Yet, governors, mayors, and other government officials across the country are ignoring the WHO’s anti-lockdown position.

Instead of admitting that the lockdowns were a mistake, many in the political class, which includes a disturbing number of medical professionals whose positions and prestige depend on government, claim that we cannot return to normalcy until a coronavirus vaccine is in wide use. This suggests that people among the majority of Americans who do not wish to be vaccinated will remain under lockdown or be forced to be vaccinated against their will.

The assault on our liberty will not end with deployment and use of a vaccine. Moncef Slaoui, the chief adviser of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, a “public-private partnership” in charge of producing and delivering a coronavirus vaccine, has said that those who receive a vaccine will be monitored by “incredibly precise … tracking systems.” Slaoui has also indicated that tech giants Google and Oracle will help the government keep tabs on the vaccinated individuals. So, the vaccine program will lead to an increase in government surveillance!

Slaoui is just the latest “expert” to endorse forcing the American people to relinquish their few remaining scraps of privacy to stop coronavirus. Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have urged development of a digital certificate for those vaccinated for coronavirus. People without the certificate would find their liberty severely restricted.

Those who think that the new surveillance system will be limited to coronavirus should remember that Social Security numbers were only supposed to be used to administer the Social Security program. They should also consider that the PATRIOT Act’s expansion of warrantless wiretapping was supposed to be limited to stopping terrorists. However, these powers have been used for a wide variety of purposes. Whenever government is given power to abuse our rights for one reason it will inevitably use that power to abuse our rights for other reasons as well.

Fauci and Gates’ digital certificate could, and likely will, be expanded to include proof individuals have received a variety of other vaccines and medical treatments. The digital certificate could even extend to monitoring a person’s lifestyle choices on the grounds that unhealthy habits make one more susceptible to diseases.

The digital certificate could also be tied to the REAL ID program to deny individuals who have not been vaccinated the right to travel. It could also be combined with a future mandatory E-Verify system to deny unvaccinated individuals the right to hold a job. Those who consider this “paranoia” should consider Britain is already developing a covid passport.

Liberty lost in the “war on covid” will not be voluntarily returned when the coronavirus threat ends — assuming the government ever stop moving the goal posts and declares the coronavirus threat is over. Instead, the people must be prepared to take back their liberty from the politicians. Fortunately, we still have the ability to do so by the peaceful means of educating our fellow citizens and pressuring our elected officials to reverse course. We must all do what we can to use these peaceful tools before we are in a “dark winter” of authoritarianism.

From Ron Paul, here.