Analysis by Joe Schaeffer
Glenn Greenwald knows a thing or two about system co-opting. The independent investigative journalist has watched the news site he co-founded, The Intercept, morph into a full subsidiary franchise of the progressive establishment.
On Sept. 7, Greenwald penned a very incisive slam on the American Civil Liberties Union, which has now become an official tool of the entrenched powers that be in Washington, D.C.
Two leading ACLU officials wrote an infamous op-ed in big-box media organ The New York Times on Sept. 2 in which they had the audacity to declare that coronavirus vaccine mandates “actually further civil liberties.”
Greenwald effectively noted that this is a 180-degree departure from what the ACLU was saying as recently as 2008, when the organization opposed what it saw as a coming Health Police State, displaying excellent awareness of what was looming just around the corner:
In 2008, the ACLU published a comprehensive report on pandemics which had one primary purpose: to denounce as dangerous and unnecessary attempts by the state to mandate, coerce, and control in the name of protecting the public from pandemics....
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Its key warning: “Not all public health interventions have been benign or beneficial, however. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have encouraged abuses of state power. Atrocities, large and small, have been committed in the name of protecting the public’s health.”
Greenwald points out that the group presciently foresaw how the hyped-up health scares of 2008 were fertilizing the ground for a medical tyranny in the not-so-distant future:
The immediate impetus for the ACLU's 2008 report was two-fold: 1) the 2008 emergence of the avian bird flu pandemic, which produced highly alarmist and ultimately false headlines around the world about millions dying; and 2) new pandemic legislation and regulatory frameworks, enacted in the wake of 9/11, premised on the view, as the ACLU put it, "that every outbreak of disease could be the beginning of some horrific epidemic, requiring the suspension of civil liberties.”
In essence, the ACLU warned of the very things we see happening today. From its 2008 report:
Lessons from History: American history contains vivid reminders that grafting the values of law enforcement and national security onto public health is both ineffective and dangerous. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have justified abuses of state power. Highly discriminatory and forcible vaccination and quarantine measures adopted in response to outbreaks of the plague and smallpox over the past century have consistently accelerated rather than slowed the spread of disease, while fomenting public distrust and, in some cases, riots.
So, what happened? How did this group that had made a (largely fictitious) name for itself as a “civil liberties champion” transform into a “forced experimental gene therapy jabs are freedom” monstrosity?
It’s no mystery. Big money and the cocooned progressive elite orbit the organization had comfortably fallen into made the transition inevitable.
The rise of the patriotic populist political movement represented by Donald Trump in 2016 clarified much of what had been happening in America for some 50-odd years. The Leftist “Long March Through the Institutions” had turned former “down with the establishment” progressives into full-throated cheerleaders for Deep State forces such as the CIA and FBI, which suddenly became the defenders of “democratic norms” in the wake of Trump’s attempt to challenge the reigning status quo.
This made for a fundraising money machine for organizations like the ACLU:
Abandoning any shred of above-the-fray neutrality and effectively joining the “Resistance” to the hated Trump administration, the ACLU has seen its fundraising coffers swell. In a little more than a year after Trump’s election, the ACLU saw its membership rise from 400,000 to 1.84 million, The New York Times reports. Online donations had been in the $3 million to $5 million annual range before the coming of Trump. With him in office, that number has risen to $120 million.
The price: full absorption into the ruling establishment nexus.
Is it really just a coincidence that David Cole, co-author of the Times’ op-ed endorsing vaccine mandates, was named ACLU National Legal Director in July 2016, as the anti-Trump fervor that welded The Swamp and the progressive Left together was in full swing?
Cole had served a professor of constitutional law and criminal justice at Georgetown University since 1990. Georgetown U. may be the third-most connected American college to our political establishment after Harvard and Yale. Its alumni and staffers can be found peppered throughout globalist think tanks such as the Atlantic Council, The Brookings Institution, etc.
Hillary Clinton even founded her own public policy academic program, the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, at the university in 2011.
ACLU exec Cole also serves as an editorial board member for Just Security, an “online forum for the rigorous analysis of national and international security” that receives funding from progressive globalist billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Just Security is fully ensconced in the fetid waters of the Swamp. On its website, it prominently features two previous members of its advisory board: Biden administration national security advisor Jake Sullivan and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
So to sum up: In 2008 an organization with a mission statement of being dedicated to the civil liberties of every American warned with devastating accuracy that hysteria about health pandemics was being used to usher in government tyranny.
This organization then became awash in cash by railing against Americans who are politically opposed to the very forces within their government that were cooking up the coming tyranny.
Those forces got their people to head the civil liberties organization, an easy enough task given that the group was already traveling in their elitist circle.
And now, the civil liberties organization comes out and says tyranny is freedom.
This is how The System works. Complete and total digestion, and they don’t even care anymore if you hear the burp.
INFORMATION WORLD WAR: How We Win . . . . Executive Intelligence Brief
