What follows is an unedited version of what award winning reporter Glenn Greenwald said in a message to his readers on 12.28.2020. While MHProNews would note some possible disputes with certain largely tangential points, such as Greenwald’s passing take on Viktor Orbán, the thrust of his narrative are fact and evidence based and are thus difficult to reasonably dispute.
The notion that Greenwald is an attorney turned journalist from the political left should be meaningful to people across the left-center-right spectrum.
Greenwald’s picture of the power grab underway that and which is near at hand for a Democratic Biden-Harris Administration should be understood in terms of his pre-election warnings about the problems caused by manipulated, spin, and big corporate censorship of news such as the Hunter Biden scandal. It should also be understood in Greenwald’s strong condemnation of how sloppy the election was conducted in pre-battleground states compared to elections held in far poorer countries than the U.S.
To be clear, Greenwald is not a “Trump apologist,” or defender. Rather, the journalist is simply making the evidence based points that reveal just how corrupt big tech, much of big corporate media, the monopolistic power grab that has been underway in America for years before President Trump, and which Greenwald muses will get worse once Trump leaves office.
As with other MHProNews reports, this is shared for specific reasons which are not quite as dark as Greenwald’s conclusion. This is not meant to depress, which would be useless or counterproductive. It may be the eleventh hour, but it is not yet too late to avoid the dark future Greenwald describes under a looming Biden-Harris administration ruled by a merger of massive corporate and deep state interests.
First, Carefully consider what Greenwald writes, which has significance for business, investors, employees, retirees – essentially every American and others too. Then see the additional information from various sources, MHProNews analysis and Commentary that follow.
The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real,
and Has Nothing To Do With Trump
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and
information control in the hands of a few corporate
monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom.
– Glenn Greenwald Dec 28, 2020
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger. ##
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Note: It is worth mentioning that Greenwald has previously exposed how the “Deep State” also sabotaged the Sanders’ presidential campaigns. Note too that you can access the above and below via Greenwald’s Substack page, linked here.
Greenwald is among over 150 from media, academia, and publishing who have denounced the corruption in the news business, turning it more into an organ of propaganda that truly impartial news services.
Additional Information, MHProNews Analysis and Commentary
“Large family gatherings and office parties have been replaced with grim lockdowns, quarantines and isolation,” the Rev. Franklin Graham observed. “What used to be the warmest and most welcoming time of the year can now feel sterile and cold.”
Graham and other religious leaders are urging a response to #StopTheSteal and the #JerichoMarch, in their own ways.
I would like to ask you to especially pray for our nation & our president this weekend. Pray that God’s hand would be on President @realDonaldTrump, & that He would give him wisdom in the coming days; & pray that God would spare our nation from the evil that is before us.
— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) December 24, 2020
https://www.facebook.com/FranklinGraham/posts/3997038637018954
Christians who believe the Bible and live in Georgia—the soul of our nation is at stake. I ask you to rally God’s army…
Posted by Franklin Graham on Monday, December 28, 2020
I appreciate the fact that President @realDonaldTrump is willing to stand up to Democrats as well as Republicans. The President can’t be bought. Let’s continue to pray for him, that God would guide & direct him as he leads the affairs of our nation.
— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) December 24, 2020
Fr. Frank Pavone leads the largest pro-life ministry involving Catholics and other Christians. Fr. Pavone was a speaker at the #JerichoMarch and #StopTheSteal Rally on December 12, 2020. He gets right to the point in this tweet.
Let’s go, Senators!
Everyone, please call your Rep and Senators & urge them to do this!
Rep. Brooks Says ‘Dozens’ of Republicans Will Oppose Electoral Vote | https://t.co/Obe1AgGQs3 https://t.co/15aHm2vOYz via @Newsmax
— Fr. Frank Pavone 🇺🇸 (Text LIFE to 88022) (@frfrankpavone) December 28, 2020
On Saturday Franklin Graham posted to Facebook that Trump “has been maligned, falsely accused, and attacked on every front since before the election in 2016.”
“When President Trump says that this election has been rigged or stolen, I tend to believe him,” he wrote. “He has a track record of being right.”
LifeSiteNews has urged their largely Christian followers to #StopTheSteal by setting up a page that is linked below. That linked LifeSiteNews page has a tool that makes it easy to send messages to lawmakers. Their message system also makes it possible to modify their suggested message if you desire to personalize or change it.
Then, the #StopTheSteal website has a contact lawmakers pages you can access from their homepage that also provides suggested messages.
Rephrased, there are a growing number of voices that support President Trump’s legal challenges. These various voices, in their own ways, recognize that threat that lies ahead. They are urging Americans to speak up to their lawmakers and act on January 6, 2021 by voting to block acceptance of disputed Biden-Harris elector votes and instead accept the slate of alternate electors in 7 battleground states that would support the Trump-Pence ticket.
If Obama-era VP Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris (CA-D) get sworn into office, then the American Republic is arguably in the deepest danger it has faced in generations. The need to stop the steal using the method described in the infographic below is what forward thinkers must do, and then encourage all in your circle of influence to do likewise.
Some Have Questioned This Method…?
Some, including voices on the right, have said that protesting the ratification of Biden-Harris electors from the disputed battleground states is doomed to fail because in the House the Democrats are in control. Even if well meaning, those who say that are demonstrably wrong. The Constitution and the 12th Amendment are quite clear. Each senator gets one vote. But on the House side, each state delegation gets one vote. While there are more Democrats in the House, there are more state delegations in Republican hands. The delegates in a given state would vote, and the winner of that state delegation’s vote then becomes that ‘one vote’ for that state.
Rephrased, the plan in the infographic is about as close to foolproof as it can be.
It depends on a public outcry to elected officials that does not stop until after the January 6, 2021 Joint Session of Congress rejects the disputed Biden-Harris electors and accepts instead the slate of electors from 7 battleground states that represent the Trump-Pence ticket.
The Communist Chinese Threat
Communist China is not to be trifled with. It is from Communist China that this pandemic apparently originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is Chinese defector, Dr. LiMeng Yan. She is a medical doctor that has said as much and provided evidence to her own personal risk and that of her family that China deliberately developed this virus. Whether they intended to release it now or another time is moot, they covered up the ‘accidental’ release, and it became a deliberate act at that point. There is no reason to believe that a possible Biden-Harris administration, which has apparently been compromised through family financial ties with Communist China, would in any way seek to punish or stop China. A video of Yan is on the page linked below.
Roughly 9 months ago MHProNews cited international media and intelligence sources that came to the conclusion in February or March 2020 that the virus – by accident or design – had escaped from a BL4 (top) Wuhan bioweapons lab. The lies, deceptions, misdirection, and coverups have been occurring since 2019.
The threads connecting back to purportedly tainted Biden family are too many to ignore. That Joe Biden was in the know and in the loop has direct evidence, both verbal and documentary. This video was produced prior to the election, and while millions have watched it, millions more had little or no exposure to this information from Tony Bobulinski, who was an associate of Hunter Biden, and who knew from first hand experience that Joe Biden was part of a scheme to make their family wealthy with Communist Chinese money.
The Deep State and Big Corporate America
While someone can nuance the separate influence of big tech, big media, billionaires, and big corporations, those groups by accident or design are apparently routinely working in concert. That’s not a ‘conspiracy theory,’ that is evidenced by the money trail to candidates that they have supported. Sober individuals like Greenwald and others are staking their names and reputations on such claims, often naming names.
The existence of such a conjunction of forces pushing the Biden-Harris ticket is also in evidence by the deeds, and sometimes even the own words of big corporate actors. For instance, the Amistad Project has documented how hundreds of millions of dollars from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has flowed to the battleground states in ways designed to – in the view of the Amistad Project attorneys – improperly or even illegally influence the 2020 election.
Summing up, There are faith, small business, specific nonprofits, and alternative media leaders who have been speaking out about the 2020 election for weeks. The evidence that President Donald Trump won by a landslide is there for those willing to see it.
That courts and judges have been either cowed and/or corrupted is perhaps no surprise. When much of the ‘deep state’ has proven itself to be at war with a sitting president starting even before President Trump took the oath of office, the hesitancy of the courts to act is perhaps charitably seen as human weakness manifesting itself.
But understanding the weakness of numbers of judges is not to excuse their bad behavior. There is time enough to deal with them and others, after “We The People” assert our will loudly and proudly in favor of #StopTheSteal before and then on January 6th, 2021.
Summary
Yes, as Rev. Graham and others have noted voters in Georgia should vote for Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue. Yes, like many other lawmakers, they will have their own baggage. But they are all that is available, and voters must make the best of it. With thousands of poll watchers and enhanced scrutiny, there is at least reason to think that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who hailed from Georgia, is right. There has to be a victory there in GA for Loeffler and Purdue beyond the margin of fraud.
But it is naïve to think that just getting them elected is going to be a sufficient check on a Biden-Harris Administration, if they are allowed to fraudulently take office on January 20, 2021. The people being named for a possible Biden-Harris administration are often from the same corporate and lobbyist groups of insiders that have worked to put him into the highest office in the land.
Further, the Biden-Harris team are openly discussing a series of moves that would use executive orders (however illicit) to implement a leftist policy agenda. It ranges from control over ammunition and guns (apparent 2nd Amendment violations), to ‘forgiving’ student debt (which often benefits the well to do, not the common person and is also likely unconstitutional), to higher taxes (despite saying they will only raise taxes on those making over $400,000, ending the Trump tax cut of 2017 would raise the taxes of almost every taxpayer), to implementing foreign and domestic policy changes that would move America back into a more dangerous world and toward World Economic Forum’s (WEF) “The Great Reset.” Don’t forget that Biden’s “Build Back Better” mantra is used by the Great Reset backers. Those Great Reset supporters, as the videos and information from their own platforms clearly state, are routinely internationalists from here in the U.S. and abroad too.
Presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan warned that American freedom had to be protected against threats from within, not just foreign threats. Both types of threats are important.
Trump video
The safest and arguably the easiest think to do is to flood lawmakers with calls and messages. Tell them you are aware of the Navarro Report and similar evidence of election fraud. You want them to oppose accepting the Biden-Harris electors in the 7 battleground states publicly before January 6, 2021. Then you want them to do the same on January 6. Instead, the alternative electors from those same states should be acknowledged as the rightful electors, as provided by law and the Constitution.
How to Contact Your Elected Officials
https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials
https://www.votervoice.net/LifesiteNews/campaigns/78945/respond
Don’t wait for someone else to do this. Don’t wait for a public opinion poll. You be the one. Then, ask your circle to do same. God bless, guide, and inspire you and others to individually do what you can to save the American Republic in our time and for future generations as well.
Greenwald’s news and analysis article, shown above, confirms much of what this trade publication has been reporting on for years. To learn more, check out the linked and related reports above and below.
That’s a wrap on this installment of “News through the lens of affordable housing and manufactured homes” where “We Provide, You Decide.” © ## (Affordable housing, manufactured homes, reports, fact-checks, analysis, and commentary. Third-party images or content are provided under fair use guidelines for media.) (See Related Reports, further below. Text/image boxes often are hot-linked to other reports that can be access by clicking on them.)
By L.A. “Tony” Kovach – for MHLivingNews.com.
Tony earned a journalism scholarship and earned numerous awards in history and in manufactured housing. For example, he earned the prestigious Lottinville Award in history from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied history and business management. He’s a managing member and co-founder of LifeStyle Factory Homes, LLC, the parent company to MHProNews, and MHLivingNews.com. This article reflects the LLC’s and/or the writer’s position, and may or may not reflect the views of sponsors or supporters.
Connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/latonykovach
Recent and Related Reports:
The text/image boxes below are linked to other reports, which can be accessed by clicking on them.
