Of all the extreme measures carried out by various states in Australia, the collections and confiscations by the State Penalty and Enforcement Register (SPER) might just be the icing on the cake.

During the lengthy COVID lockdown in the state of Queensland, Australia (Brisbane area), most workers were not permitted to work or earn a living.

Several states stepped in to provide wage subsidies so people could purchase essential products and pay their living expenses.  However, during the lockdown if you were caught violating any of the lockdown rules, you were subject to a civil citation, a fine or ticket for your COVID violation.

Get caught too far from home, outside your permitted bubble, and you get a ticket.  Get caught spending more than the permitted 1 hour outside, get a ticket.  Get caught without a mask, even by yourself – and yep, ticket.  Enter a closed quarantine zone (park, venue, etc.) and you get a ticket.  Tickets were being handed out by police on the street as well as during random checkpoints on the roadways.

Additionally, people returning to Queensland were put into a system of involuntary quarantine.  The costs for that quarantine, mostly hotel rooms, were to be paid by the people being involuntarily captive and not allowed home.

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At 1:00am on August 25th, Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats came to an agreement on a massive spending proposal. The Senate previously passed a $1.5 trillion “infrastructure” bill, and a group of 9 House moderates -led by Josh Gottheimer- wanted to see it pass. However, the far-left progressive caucus wanted their $3.5 trillion social spending package which includes Green New Deal spending passed as part of the total budget agenda. {Go Deep}  For the past two months, the House Democrats have been working with Senate Democrats on the scale of the social spending package.

The ultra far-left communists and Democrat socialists have been negotiating on the social spending part.  They agreed to settle for 1.75 trillion in fundamental change and there’s approximately 10 House republicans that will also support it, but the AOC wing wants more.   The previously passed $1.5 trillion sits on Nancy Pelosi’s desk until it can be paired with the $1.75+ trillion social spending component.

The House Rules Committee is putting the legislative language together for the latest 1,600 page social spending part [you can see here], but the issue of constructing a bill that will pass the Senate is still problematic.  Pelosi was hoping for a vote today, and Joe Biden begged Democrats earlier to get it passed because his polling numbers continue to collapse.   The communists (AOC/Bernie Sanders caucus) and socialists (ordinary Democrats) are at loggerheads.

WASHINGTON – […] Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team were ultimately unable to win over dozens of dug-in liberals in time for a Thursday evening vote. House liberals said they want to review the legislative text of $1.75 trillion social spending legislation the White House outlined Thursday and get a commitment of support from centrist Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — something the two have not outright given.

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Well, well, well….  Unfortunately this is not a surprise.  Former Virginia Governor and current candidate Terry McAuliffe sits atop the executive suites in what remains of the Clinton political tribe.   McAuliffe is very close to the Clinton crime syndicate in all aspects of his politics.

As noted by Jonathan Turley, a concerned candidate McAuliffe has now enlisted the assistance of Clinton’s corrupt legal consigliere Mark Elias.

A verklempt Mr. Turley is shocked, shocked that a politician of McAulliffe’s pedigree would hire a known Machiavellian type like Mr. Elias:

Turley – “Elias has not been criminally charged in his actions related to the 2020 election. Yet, bringing Elias into the Virginia race in the midst of the Durham investigation is an astonishing decision by McAuliffe. There are a host of election lawyers but McAuliffe selected an attorney accused of lying to the media, advancing rejected conspiracy theories, and currently involved in a major federal investigation that has already led to the indictment of his former partner.” (read more)

Elias hails from the ever-familiar Perkins Coie law firm and has a specialty in assisting with corrupt election activity, and then defending against any effort to reveal it in the aftermath.

In the Virginia governors race, the White House will support the efforts of Elias (meaning, the DOJ/FBI will take a vacation for a few weeks)  because handlers just added Joe Biden’s credibility to the equation by having the White House occupant campaign there.

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Taxing “unrealized capital gains” sounds like a catchy and obscure way to make wealthy people pay more in taxes, but it doesn’t work.  A government that moves in this direction ignores the reality that people are not static.  The process also involves “taxing wealth” which then becomes an arbitrary definition.

Unrealized capital gains are not income, they are simply increases in value.

If your home was worth $200,000 last year and $300,000 this year, you have an unrealized capital gain of $100k.   A 15% tax bill on that value increase means the homeowner would have to pay $15,000 to the IRS.

Joe Biden is proposing to pay for his multi-trillion expansion in debt through this type of tax upon billionaires.   Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted this was part of their thinking to help pay for the Biden budget last Sunday.  WATCH:

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Proposing a tax on money that does not exist is the peak of government.   Sure the proposal applies only to billionaires who have massive gains in their stock portfolios, but billionaires are not esoteric titles.  Billionaires are people who can, if needed, move their physical location and avoid any U.S. tax on their wealth.

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This evening Senator Josh Hawley released an email (via Twitter) showing the evacuation guidelines given by the administration to the U.S. officials on the ground in Kabul Afghanistan.  The email details quoted instructions to Gregory A Floyd from someone in the administration speaking on behalf of Joe Biden.

As noted by Hawley: “This email was shared w/ me by an American official present in Afghanistan during the evacuation who was shocked by Administration’s failure to vet Afghans before they were evacuated. Email details orders from Joe Biden to fill up the planes – even without vetting:”

Team,

President Biden phoned Ambassador Wilson with the following directive about who to clear to board evacuation flights.

 “1. Anyone with a valid form of ID should be given permission to go on a plane if that person plausibly falls into the categories we will evacuate: U.S. citizens and LPRs plus their immediate families, LES plus their immediate families, those entitled to an SIV, and Afghans at risk.

2.  Families including women and children should be allowed through and held to fill out planes.

3.  Total inflow to the U.S. must exceed the number of seats available.  Err on the side of excess.”

This guidance provides clear discretion and direction to fill seats and to provide special consideration for women and children when we have seats. I expect that C17 flight volume will increase.

Thank you.

Greg

The goal of the leftist group who organized and coordinated the sequence of events behind Frances Haugen is becoming increasingly obvious.  Ms. Haugen first surfaced during a CBS 60-minutes episode where she promoted the idea that government needed to intervene in the Facebook censorship process because the content of speech was not being limited enough.  Ms. Haugen advocated for government intervention to enhance Big Tech censorship.

48 hours later, Haugen was testifying before congress.  That should have triggered all alarm bells that far-left political operatives were organizing an advanced censorship campaign to stop speech they deemed as detrimental to their interests.  That speech consists of any speech that does not comply with the leftist world view.   Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that Ms. Haugen is represented by the same legal group, and group of Lawfare lawyers, who supported Hillary Clinton. 

It is clear the psychologically unstable uptalker, and those behind her, have an interest in having left-wing politicians intercede in global speech to advance their ideological interests.  To further showcase this point, Ms. Haugen appeared today before the U.K. Parliament, again advocating that any speech against globalism and big government is considered extremist speech that much be blocked.  WATCH:

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In the periphery, you might notice that Barack Obama recently gave a speech in Virginia where he also talked about political opposition and “right-wing media” advocating for extremism and stirring up anger.  This follows another highly visible data point where the DOJ has instructed the FBI to consider parents who confront school board policy as extremists.

Keep in mind, this testimony and angle of attack from the political operatives is coming at the same time the U.S. House of Representatives is using the January 6th Commission to advance the same proposition; that all speech against government is considered extremist and violent.

There’s no doubt all of these different approaches are part of the EXACT same coordinated effort.  There is a larger narrative being advanced by the U.S-centered group of Chicago Marxists.   Keep a look out for innocuous things that might look different when viewed through this baseline prism.

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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the most adored leader amid global leftists.  She is worshiped and praised by leftists, globalists, socialists and those who love big government around the world.  Arden is unapologetic in her views that government should rule the citizens.

Recently, the mad queen of smiley-faced fascism was asked if her national vaccination mandate was intended to create two classes of citizens in New Zealand, vaccinated and unvaccinated.  The Prime Minister did not flinch before gleefully exclaiming that is entirely her objective, “Yup, that’s exactly what it is, yep.”   WATCH:

https://youtu.be/17PZ1MvgDTM

The government of New Zealand acts like COVID-19 is a raging swarm of dragons circling the country waiting to snatch people out of their safe places. 

Worse still, apparently most of the country believes the panic and fear that has been pushed, and they tremble with cowed obedience to the regime.

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In a rare act of journalism, NBC actually followed up on the October 13th grand proclamation of Joe Biden to speed up California ports.  What they found is exactly what everyone suspected, the grand prose from the White House was a political pantomime – absolutely nothing has changed.  WATCH:

As noted, and as previously outlined, the issues with the backlog of the California ports have absolutely nothing to do with rapid unloading of ships and container vessels.  The issue is the inability of California truckers to move those containers.  The problem is a shortage of CA emission compliant internal transportation trucks to move the containers out of the port and into the U.S. mainland.

As a result… the politically expedient goal to get rid of the optical problem (the ships) by offloading containers into a California port system, that is already overwhelmed with tens-of-thousands of containers, is only making the original issue exponentially worse.  More people are now starting to understand the internal issue that has been created by recent California laws, rules and regulations.

Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine has a solid outline of the emission compliance issues and the problem of independent truckers not being able to work in California:

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When the Australian government began beating their citizens in the street for leaving their houses and protesting against severe lockdown rules, I said –somewhat tongue in cheek at the time– to watch Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Xi Jinping (China) trigger U.N. security council sanctions against the Australian government for human rights abuses.

The point I was making earlier was to highlight a danger.  If Western governments continued to devolve into totalitarian regimes, global autocratic leaders will take the opportunity to exploit vulnerabilities created by such open undemocratic hostility toward the principles of freedom.

Putin, Xi and the Mullahs in Iran can easily enlarge their global influence if citizens in formerly free democratic nations react to western COVID mandates by rightly and appropriately rebuking their national and regional leadership.

CONSIDER– What population inside a western democracy is going to want to fight Russian or Chinese geopolitical aggression when they view their own national leaders through the same totalitarian prism?

Think about it carefully, because we are at this inflection point.

♦Ex. If China takes military action against Taiwan, and the leaders of France, Germany, the U.K, Australia and the United States want to do something about it, their internal credibility accounts are overdrawn.  Western populations writ large will not support those requests, because the citizens no longer view those leaders through the prism of freedom, liberty and democracy.   This is the current situation.  This is the danger western leaders ignored when they jumped into their totalitarian COVID mindset.

In a clear example of how autocrats can exploit this self-inflicted vulnerability, check out this speech during a plenary session of the 18th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, by Russian President Vladimir Putin (h/t Rebel News):

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During a House Judiciary Committee hearing today, Representative Thomas Massie questioned Attorney General Merrick Garland about FBI agents and possible FBI informants planted in the crowd in DC to organize events.

Within the questioning, Massie presented Garland with a picture of Ray Epps, a former leader with the Arizona chapter of Oath Keepers attempting to agitate the crowd.

Massie also played a video [also below], highlighting how Ray Epps was one of the key people trying to stir up trouble and create an agitated mob response. Ray Epps is an interesting possibility, because he was never arrested or charged by the FBI. As pointed out by Sean Davis on Twitter, “At one point, the FBI had his picture up on its page of people it wanted to question (Photograph 16). Not only was he not arrested, his picture was quietly removed from the FBI “Capitol Violence” page.”

The issues of Ray Epps not being arrested; and then his photograph mysteriously being removed; can be reconciled by a hypothesis that Epps was actually working for and operating with instructions from the FBI itself. Not only would this not be surprising, it would actually track directly with coordinated activity the FBI is known for. WATCH (prompted):

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Below is the video that Thomas Massie shared….

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