Profiles in courage #2: Julian Assange

The canary in the coal mine

This is part 2 of a reoccurring series highlighting specific individuals who have displayed true, unquestionable courage standing up to the globohomo¹ behemoth against unrelenting pressures, serving as a bit of a counter to the typical grim perspective pushed on this Substack. These individuals pay a price, often a big price, for their courage, and for standing up anyway they deserve to be applauded. Part 1 covers Ian Smith, who stood up to global hysteria around the COVID narrative at its peak.

“Who am I? I fought for liberty and was deprived of all liberty. I fought for freedom of speech and was denied all speech. I fought for the truth and became the subject of a thousand lies.” - tweet by Julian Assange, April 10, 2019, the day before he was hauled out of the Ecuadorian embassy

Julian Assange is a controversial and complicated character. The globalist establishment has a special hatred for the man, which in turn makes him interesting. Given how blackly evil globohomo is, what about the man makes him dangerous to their agenda?

An interesting and idealistic but somewhat unsettling physiognomy, reflecting certain philosophical issues I have with him which will be discussed herein

I had vaguely heard about Assange as he became famous in the 2010s, and the broad strokes of his story are known by many. Originally an Australian hacker, he founded Wikileaks in order to serve as a repository for government and corporate leaks provided by whistleblowers, and then to publish them online as a journalist in the vein of Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers. Assange and his team would verify each leak — not the contents of the material, just whether they were official documents, a hard enough task — before releasing them to the public, with limited temporary redactions to protect life where necessary. Assange was always proud that his verification rate was 100% accurate and he never published fake documents in all the years that he published leaks, despite some sophisticated fakes being offered along the way. He offered leakers the very best in privacy protection, both via state of the art cryptography as well as rigid source protection protocols within Wikileaks, and he also promised to take whatever steps he could to maximize the impact of the leaks to balance the risk involved. Such impact maximization strategies required a careful understanding of the countermeasures that governments and corporations would use, and a considered approach toward pre-empting those countermeasures.

Assange’s approach was effective and he released a tremendous amount of material to the public, organized and systematized in a way that made searching it easy. The publications include revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, and the "Petrogate" oil scandal in Peru. Assange’s profile rose further when Wikileaks published Bradley/Chelsea Manning leak’s, which included the Collateral murder video (April 2010), the Iraqi war logs (October 2010), and a quarter of a million diplomatic U.S. cables in what was known as Cablegate (November 2010). Later leaks included the Guantanamo Bay files leak, the Syria Files, the Kissinger cables, and the Saudi cables. By mid 2015 Assange had published more than ten million files and corresponding analysis.

As a result of his early Wikileaks activities, globohomo targeted him with false rape allegations in Sweden in 2010 in order to tie him up in legal defense, drain his limited funds, curtail his activities, and serve as a dampener on both his reputation and his work. He eventually sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition on the false rape charges.

An interesting 3-hour meeting between Assange and Google head Eric Schmidt in 2011 became the subject of an Assange book called “When Google Met Wikileaks”, which includes a transcript of their meeting. It was published in 2014, and Assange by that time had come to believe that Schmidt did not visit him as a friendly tech compatriot as research for Schmidt’s upcoming book, but rather to spy on Assange and Wikileaks on behalf of the State department and other government organizations. It’s an interesting read to see what two titans in their respective specialties discussed. One interesting point is that Assange recommended Bitcoin in this 2011 interview, because globohomo had cut Assange off from all traditional banking and financial services, creating an Schmittian exception to the rule of law² (Assange was the canary in the coal mine for this treatment that would later spread and be applied to many more dissidents; recently Nigel Farage and Joseph Mercola experienced the same treatment, and other more controversial figures like Alex Jones and Andrew Anglin have experienced it as well). After Schmidt released his book, Assange, who had since woken up to his ulterior motivations, savaged it in a New York Times review. He also later wrote, “But in a wider sense, I think it is misguided to be looking to Google to help get us out of this mess. In large part, Google has us in this mess. The company's business model is based on sucking private data out of parts of human community that have never before been subject to monitoring, and turning that into a profit. I do not think it is wise to try to "reform" something which, from first premises, is beyond reform.”

Eric Schmidt: lizard-like, squinting, heartless nerd physiognomy. Google retained a crushing monopoly for more than two decades before being subject to a current anti-trust action over its search monopoly. Assange: “Eric Schmidt is personably likeable in the sense that most billionaires are. You can't get there without making friends. Obama's also likable, but runs an extrajudicial kill list each Tuesday and has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. The problem with Google, as in the US administration is not the personalities. It is the structure, the business model and social and ideological matrix in which its decision makers are embedded.”

In July 2016 Wikileaks published leaks from the Democratic National Committee (likely from Seth Rich, who was quickly murdered by globohomo for it) and in October emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta, which were bizarre and sinister. Wikileaks released these utilizing a smart, sophisticated publishing strategy to maximize impact.

These leaks had a big role in Trump’s extremely surprising election win. To be fair, Assange did state he would release leaks on any candidate, but he received no leaks on Trump.

Then in 2017 Wikileaks published the Vault 7 leaks which detailed the CIA’s capabilities and activities with respect to cyber warfare. The CIA then considered kidnapping or assassinating Assange in response. Hillary Clinton famously inquired about whether they could “drone strike” him. Instead, they kept up the legal pressure as Assange remained in the Ecuadorian embassy with a constant police presence outside, ready to nab him if he ever stepped out. His internet was cut off and he was subject to all sorts of mental and physical pressures.

Finally in 2019 a superseding indictment was filed by the United States with charges of Conspiracy to Receive National Defense Information, Obtaining National Defense Information, Disclosure of National Defense Information, and Conspiracy to Commit Computer Intrusion and the British government dragged him out in 2019 (after globohomo overthrew the rule of his benefactor in Ecuador), where he has been held in a British prison awaiting his various appeals to the United States’s extradition efforts since. The process is the punishment, though, and Assange’s conditions in prison are quite poor and akin to torture.³ ⁴

Assange dragged out of the embassy. Note the smug, arrogant smile of the secret police agent who occupies central frame. What a disgusting globohomo cretin.

Trump considered pardoning Assange on his way out of office, but he ultimately did not pardon him or Snowden due to political pressure: Tucker Carlson claimed that he had heard Assange’s pardon was being blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who sent word to the White House informing Trump that if he pardoned Assange Republicans will be “much more likely to convict you in an impeachment trial.” Snowden correctly reacted to the development by tweeting that he was “not at all disappointed to go unpardoned by a man who has never known a love he had not paid for. But what supporters of his remain must never forgive that this simpering creature failed to pardon truth-tellers in far more desperate circumstances.” While Trump serves as a Schelling point for the frustrations of white Middle America, I agree with Snowden’s criticisms here and believe that he should have pardoned Assange.⁵ Although it’s likely globohomo would then have just killed Assange.

Anyway, there have not been very notable Wikileaks releases since Assange’s arrest. While the organization had a lot of grassroot support worldwide and many people who helped review and verify the leaks, Assange was the head of the organization and it didn’t run very effectively without him.

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Assange’s beliefs

Assange acted as an idealist whose goal was and is to seek radical transparency from government and corporations worldwide, who he believed generally sought to entrench themselves in positions of power and corruption at the expense of the masses.⁶ In December 2006, the same month WikiLeaks posted its first leak, he outlined the organization’s strategy: use leaks to force organizations to reduce levels of abuse and dishonesty, or pay a 'secrecy tax' to be secret but inefficient. As he explained,

"The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive 'secrecy tax') and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaptation."

A spokesperson for WikiLeaks says Assange's essay was a "thought experiment" that the organization still believes to be true. "Organizations have two choices (1) reduce their levels of abuse or dishonesty or (2) pay a heavy 'secrecy tax' in order to engage in inefficient but secretive processes," the spokesperson writes. "As organizations are usually in some form of competitive equilibrium this means that, in the face of WikiLeaks, organizations that are honest will, on average, grow, while those that are dishonest and unjust will decline."

This was a meta-philosophy that Assange had above the level of politics: transparency was good for its own sake, regardless of its ramifications and regardless of whether it applied to a democracy or a dictatorship, whether it was pro-West or anti-West. He states:

Confidential government documents we have published disclose evidence of war crimes, criminal back-room dealings and sundry abuses. That alone legitimates our publications, and that principally motivates our work. Secrecy was never intended to enable criminality in the highest offices of state. Secrecy is, yes, sometimes necessary, but healthy democracies understand that secrecy is the exception, not the rule. "National security" pretexts for secrecy are routinely used by powerful officials, but seldom justified. If we accept these terms of propaganda, strong national security journalism becomes impossible. Our publications have never jeopardized the "national security" of any nation. When secrecy is a cover-all for endemic official criminality, I suggest to you, it bespeaks a strange set of priorities to ask journalists to justify their own existence.

Why was Assange interested in reducing these abuses? As he explains to Google head Eric Schmidt:

Let me first frame this. I looked at something that I had seen going on with the world, which is that I thought there were too many unjust acts. And I wanted there to be more just acts, and fewer unjust acts. And one can ask, “What are your philosophical axioms for this?” And I say, “I do not need to consider them. This is simply my temperament. And it is an axiom because it is that way.” That avoids getting into further unhelpful philosophical discussion about why I want to do something. It is enough that I do.

In considering how unjust acts are caused, and what tends to promote them, and what promotes just acts, I saw that human beings are basically invariant. That is, their inclinations and biological temperament haven’t changed much over thousands of years. Therefore the only playing field left is: what do they have and what do they know? What they have—that is, what resources they have at their disposal, how much energy they can harness, what food supplies they have and so on—is something that is fairly hard to influence. But what they know can be affected in a nonlinear way because when one person conveys information to another they can convey it on to another, and another, in a way that is nonlinear. So you can affect a lot of people with a small amount of information. Therefore, you can change the behavior of many people with a small amount of information. The question then arises as to what kinds of information will produce behavior which is just and disincentivize behavior which is unjust?

In an interview with Spiegal International, he made a similar statement regarding his motivations: “We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work.”

According to Assange, we aren’t able to sit out of this fight. Either we are a participant of history or a victim of it: “I think first it’s necessary to have an understanding that one is either a participant in history or a victim of it, and that there is no other option. It is actually not possible to remove oneself from history, because of the nature of economic…and intellectual interaction. Hence, it is not possible to break oneself off….Because no one wants to be a victim, one must therefore be a participant, and in being a participant, the most important thing to understand is that your behavior affects other people’s behavior, and your courage will inspire actions. On the other hand, a lack of courage will suppress them.” And: “Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find.”

In addition to his general philosophy, Assange was increasingly concerned about the NSA’s bulk collection capabilities, which he thinks has enormous and under-appreciated potential for abuse, and he had an active and significant role in securing Edward Snowden’s passage from Hong Kong to Russia, along with WikiLeaks investigations editor Sarah Harrison, and in supporting Bradley/Chelsea Manning. With respect to the NSA, Assange takes a very dim view toward their mission: “It's important to understand what the NSA's actual "job" is. The NSA is a piratical organization, that specializes in stealing information from across the world and selling it to its "customers", in exchange for money and political support. That's it.” With respect to their bulk collection program and the censorship of journalists, he wrote:

The first thing they can do is place a moratorium on mass surveillance. The mass surveillance of significant portions of the world's population is an ongoing violation of rights on a mass scale. Putting an end to it - pending a full investigation into who was responsible, and who gave the orders - would be a good first step. Official channels for releasing documents exist: FOI laws, for instance, and declassification laws. I would support making these stronger and more transparent, of course. But they cannot supplant the function that a free press plays: the safety valve of secret institutions.

He also added:

The key actors in society who influence its political process: publishers, journalists, dissidents, MPs, civil society foundations, if they can’t operate then you have an increasingly authoritarian and conformist society. Do not think that this will not affect you. Even if you think that you are of absolutely no interest, the result this attitude is that you have to suffer the consequences of the society your apathetic conformism helps to produce.

You’re not an island. When you don’t protect your own communications, it’s not just about you. You’re not communicating with yourself, you’re communicating with other people. You’re exposing all of those other people. If you assess that they’re not at risk, are you sure your assessment is correct? Are you sure they’re not at risk going into the future? Perhaps the biggest problem with mass surveillance is that the knowledge of mass surveillance. Fear about it produces intense conformity, so people start censoring their own conversations and eventually they start censoring their own thoughts.

It’s not enough to create fears about mass surveillance. At the same time, one has to create an understanding of how to avoid mass surveillance or an understanding that at the moment, most of the mass surveillance authorities, like the NSA and the organs it feeds are pretty incompetent. But that will change as artificial intelligence merges with mass surveillance, when the data streams from the NSA and PRISM program are fed into artificial intelligence.

He further added ominously: “Mass surveillance is a mass structural change. When society goes goes bad, its going to take you with it, even if you are the blandest person on earth.” This was nine years ago, and his prediction was powerfully correct. And it’s only getting worse…

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Assange in relation to neoliberal feudalism

Reading “The Wikileaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire”, which provides an overview of the hundreds of thousands of State department cable leaks around the world, Assange and the various contributors to the book note a general pattern. Essentially, America learned over a long trial-and-error process that direct military occupation and colonialism of nations around the world was not a very efficient process. It was expensive, unwieldily, had a negative impact on world opinion, led to charges of imperialism and racism and other things. Rather, indirect control was a much cheaper and sophisticated process without many of the other drawbacks that came with the former process. Indirect control came from the Washington consensus, where a country could be controlled via foreign loans, which would put pressure on the nation for deregulation, foreign investment, decreased minimum wage, i.e. strip-mining the country to benefit globohomo overlords. If a country was deemed too immature to advance the Washington consensus via democracy, it would support a strong-man in power to achieve these goals. Once the country was deemed mature enough, they would seek to cast aside the strong-man in order to institute fake “democracy”, which was seen as easier to control than the strong-man past a certain point of development. Populist movements which sought actual nationalism and self-sufficiency, i.e. to nationalize industries and plants owned by foreign powers, to default on its foreign debt obligations, were deemed anathema to foreign investment and therefore had to be rigorously stamped out using as much brutality as necessary.

One of the reoccurring, ongoing tensions within the Western political establishment are the various factions arguing how far along the process a particular country is - is the country underdeveloped enough where it still needs a strongman to implement neoliberal policies? Or has it progressed enough to the point where they can transition to an easier to control fake democracy type? Generally speaking the Pentagon prefers the former type and the State Department prefers the latter type, but that is just a general rule of thumb.

One of the last things that Assange tweeted out before he was taken offline was the following, which shows the structure for how the higher layers of globohomo coordinate worldwide:

In addition, Assange had a very clear understanding of the financial incentives behind many of these wars. He succinctly explained the rationale behind the 20 year Afghanistan war in this 30 second clip, which I have posted a number of times:

Now, Assange is and was a brilliant man. His insights across a whole range of issues are incredible, and he reached these conclusions long before they became apparent to more of the world when the deep state revealed itself in its opposition to Orange Man. He was an early programmer with a brilliant systems-oriented mind. My issues with his approach to the neoliberal feudalism framework are three-fold:

1. Either he didn’t understand or for strategic reasons he didn’t speak publicly about the level of ownership above the CFR/Trilateral Commission/WEF, which is the small number of families that own the central banks of the world, which is a critically important point in order to understand their overarching plans and motivations — how could he fight back against enemies at a top level he possibly knew nothing about?,

2. I think Assange generally agrees with worldwide integration and intervention where necessary, so long as globalists abide by their own stated standards of egalitarianism without hypocrisy, while my impulses are much more isolationist and toward autarky, seeking an end to private ownership of the central banks of the world; and

3. I have a sense of ambivalence regarding his meta-strategy of transparency at all cost.

An artist protesting the Federal Reserve by painting it on fire

With respect to #3, perhaps transparency at all costs will lead to a better future for all down the road, but a non-productive elite using guile and military might to secure the excess production of farmers has existed universally since the neolithic agricultural revolution. It is simply human nature. There isn’t going to be a kumbaya moment where the masses are smart and dedicated enough to prevent this kind of elite grifting from occurring; rather, the important thing to me seems to be supporting an elite that have noblesse oblige to the masses instead of noblesse malice, that promotes values of greatness, honor, nobility, and strength of purpose instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator, and ties responsibility to power, which is only possible with a king or dictator versus an oligarchy. An oligarchy will stick figureheads in power while they operate behind the scenes to crush the population in order to suck it dry; but a king or dictator knows that ultimately they will be held responsible to the public, and therefore they will try to deliver better results to the masses than an oligarchy. By Assange pushing for transparency at all costs, I think he may have gone up against too fundamental of a drive of human nature. His naive libertarian beliefs contributed to the ruination of Libya by promoting the overthrow of Qaddafi and led to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt which would have, over time, destroyed the Coptic Christian community. What good is radical transparency if those are the kind of expected results?⁷ Instead of transparency at all costs as a Schelling point for the world, I think demanding public ownership of the world central banks along with strictly enforced audits would be popular with all but the small number of central banking owning families and their vassals.

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Conclusions

Regardless of these criticisms, it’s undeniable that Assange possesses great courage to stand against the endless and horrific onslaught of globohomo. Assange said, “People often say, ‘You are tremendously courageous in doing what you are doing.’ And I say, ‘No, you misunderstand what courage is. Courage is not the absence of fear. Only fools have no fear. Rather, courage is the intellectual mastery of fear by understanding the true risks and opportunities of the situation and keeping those things in balance.”⁸

Edward Snowden argued, “[Wikileaks is] absolutely fearless in putting principles above politics…Their mere existence has stiffened the spines of institutions in many countries, because editors know if they shy away from an important but controversial story, they could be scooped by the global alternative to the national press. Our politics may be different, but their efforts to build a transnational culture of transparency and source protection are extraordinary - they run towards the risks everyone else runs away from - and in a time when government control of information can be ruthless, I think that represents a vital example of how to preserve old freedoms in a new age”.

Assange was careful about not trying to hype globohomo’s power levels to Olympian heights, because he thought that would give them more power than they deserved: “All the talk of mass surveillance is very dangerous if it doesn't come with some hope of a solution because it grants more perceptual power to a system that already has a radical, extreme and destabalising amount of it. All that is necessary to control others is the projected perception of power. That's why we have worked hard to break that perception, for example in the race to spirit Edward Snowden to asylum vs. Washington DC's race to arrest him, we won, demonstrating that with a few good ideas and some determination it is possible to beat this power cluster in a well defined head on contest. Solutions are going to come form the demand that organisations, governments and individuals have for protection. Don't be dispirited; a lot of people are now working rapidly on tools and standards to counter the mass surveillance attack. There's a great flowering in that field.”

When asked on Reddit nine years ago (2014) if Wikileaks was likely to succeed against globohomo, though, he answered, “These are cascading effects with geometric amplifiers in both directions. It's hard to say, but at least we can say we fought and gave people a choice to know themselves and their civilization.”

And Assange has fought. Substack writers are doing what they can to make an impression, too, but Assange even back then was pessimistic about that approach: “Public commentators are obsessed with influencing the public, but the reality is the US public isn't going to solve this. A powerful, invisible, intangible, complex, global system, with a scale only the deeply numerate can appreciate has been erected. Until we see the bulk release of individual's emails or SMS messages, the average person isn't going to believe its real. Until then, the pushback is going to come from technical organisations and other state's counter intelligence units.”

We see what has happened since then. Censorship has exploded through the roof in every direction, show trials of political enemies are happening every day, NSA spying has been standardized and is used by 10,000 federal contractors to spy on white Middle Americans (which is only growing)⁹, Assange has been silenced and Wikileaks rendered into irrelevance. The censoring of Assange and Wikileaks closes a small but important ability to speak truth to power, and it is greatly missed as globohomo solidifies its hold on power and sticks its tyrannical boot in everyone’s face.

What’s the pessimistic scenario? Per Assange: “The negative trajectory [is] a transnational surveillance state, drone-riddled, the networked neo-feudalism of the transnational elite…How can a normal person be free within that system? They simply cannot, it’s impossible. Not that anyone can ever be completely free, within any system, but the freedoms that we have biologically evolved for, and the freedoms that we have become culturally accustomed to, will be almost entirely eliminated. So I think the only people who will be able to keep the freedom that we had, say twenty years ago - because the surveillance state has already eliminated quite a lot of that, we just don’t realize it yet. -are those who are highly educated in the internals of this system. So it will only be a high-tech rebel elite that is free.”

But perhaps there is a silver lining to this. According to Assange, “[Censorship] is always an opportunity, because it reveals a fear of reform. And if an organization is expressing a fear or reform, it is also expressing the fact that it can be reformed.” And “When organizations or governments of various kinds attempt to contain knowledge and suppress it, they are giving you the most important information you need to know: that there is something worth looking at to see if it should be exposed and the censorship expresses weakness, not strength.”

Regardless, Assange’s actions transcend the traditional right/left dynamic and in his attempt to hold truth to power and to fight back against mass surveillance and the corruption of Western elites, he deserves to be applauded. Assange’s rejection of America’s empire resonates with me, as it is founded and propagated on death, destruction, and the skulls of millions, all out of an insatiable greed. More money, more power, more control, more domination, more death and destruction and Mcdonalds on every corner and iPhones and propaganda pumped into everyone’s heads, and for what ultimate purpose? So the ultra rich in D.C. can live in giant McMansions, have vacation homes, yachts and planes, have sex with underage sex slaves, feel like lords and masters of the world and consume consume consume to their heart’s content, with no longterm planning for sustainability or a better world for the future, all while larping about racial, gender, and sexual orientation inequalities so the masses are too busy infighting to focus on their theft? What kind of garbage vision is this? It is gross and decadent and awful, some macabre nightmare from the fires of Hell.

For Assange’s attempts to make the world a better place, even with his faults, he deserves to be highlighted as a Profile in Courage.

1. For new readers, globohomo is a portmanteau of either “globalization plus homosexuality” or “globalization plus homogenization”. It is the latter interpretation that makes the term superior to “global American empire” (“GAE”), because it references a technical, technological process that is turning the world into a kind of gray, androgynous, secular nihilistic sludge, reducing the world’s populations to hollowed-out, atomized digits with no group culture and a McDonalds and Starbucks on every corner. It is a process larger than empire.

2. “In Conversation with Julian Assange, Part II”, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Journal #26, e-flux, June 2011: “I think the attacks on us by Visa, PayPal, Mastercard, Bank of America, PostFinance, Moneybookers, and other U.S. companies - predominantly banks and financial intermediaries - is the most interesting revelation that has come out of what we’ve been doing. Like the Pentagon Papers case, the reaction and overreaction of the state and other groups involved in it will be seen to be one of the most important outcomes of the revelation itself. What we see is that the United States, in its reaction to us, behaved no differently than the Soviet Union in the 1960s toward Solzhenitsyn, and in the 1970s toward Sakharov, just in. amore modern way. Previous censorship actions in the West have been more subtle, more nuanced, and harder to see, but here we have a case of absolutely naked, flagrant, extrajudicial state censorship working through the private sector.”

3. Julian Assange in His Own Words, footnote 4, p. 8-9: “In a letter published in the British medical journal the Lancet on June 26, 2020, 200 eminent doctors around the world, representing 216 colleagues from 33 countries, decried yet again the ongoing mistreatment of Julian that they first wrote about on February 17, when they condemned the “torture and medical neglect” that since then, with the coronavirus pandemic, had exacerbated the seriousness of his situation….When United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer, along with two medical doctors, visited Julian in prison in May of 2019, they recognized clear signs of psychological torture and they called for an immediate end to such treatment. “The evidence is overwhelming and clear,” Melzer said. “Mr. Assange has been deliberately exposed for a period of several years, to progressively severe forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the cumulative effects of which can only be described as psychological torture….In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law….The collective persecution of Julian Assange must end here and now!”

4. Julian Assange in his Own Words, 102: “The Obama administration, supported by varying degrees by its Western allies, in the last eight years has prosecuted and investigated more publishers and journalists under the Espionage Act than all previous presidencies combined…What a number of these cases have in common is not simply that they are recent, or that they are conducted sometimes without any charge, or that there are abuses in the formal process, it is that a technique has been developed in the West where the process was clearly the punishment.”

5. Vivek Ramaswamy, a character I am ambivalent about due to the fraudulent way he made his high net-worth and for multiple other reasons, although I think he is smarter than the non-Trump Republican candidates especially including Ron “Meatball” DeSantis, has said that he would pardon Snowden, Assange and Ross Ulbricht if he is elected.

6. As

Caitlin Johnstone

explains, “Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Understand this key point and you’ll understand why plutocrat-controlled media outlets are constantly smearing Julian Assange, why they never fail to fall in line to support a US-led military agenda, why they pay massive amounts of attention to some political candidates while completely ignoring others, and why they put so much energy into keeping everyone arguing over the details of how the status quo should be maintained instead of debating whether it should exist at all. The unelected power establishment uses its control over politics and media to determine what the public believes about what’s going on in their world in order to keep them from rebelling against a status quo which does not serve them; without the ability to effectively propagandise the masses in this way, they cannot rule."

7. Julian Assange in His Own Words, p. 115: “I do have a political temperament, which is a combination of libertarianism and the importance of understanding. And what emerges from this temperament is holding power to account through action driven by understanding. So, if you have a libertarian temperament, then you’re temperamentally opposed to authoritarian power. And if you have a temperament that is inclined to understanding, then you want to know what power is about. These two things combined drive forth a position, an intellectual and political position, that is about understanding power to such a degree that power is not able to express its more abusive aspects.”

8. Assange, When Google Met WikiLeaks, p. 115-116.

9. A declassified FISA report stated that the FBI ran 3.1 million illegal FISA searches on American citizens in 2017 alone, compared to 7,500 combined searches by the NSA and CIA in the same year. It later came out that the law firm Perkins Coie had its own NSA search terminal set up in its D.C. offices to spy on domestic opposition; it was placed there to provide the perpetrators protection. In 2023 the DOJ Inspector General revealed that more than 10,000 federal employees have access to the NSA database for surveillance inquiries (which show everything you have ever typed electronically on your computer or used on your phone), more than 3.4 million search queries were ran between 12/1/2020 and 11/30/2021, and approximately 30% were outside the rules and regulations that govern warrantless search, showing the pattern of illegal governmental behavior is extreme and only expanding. See here, here and here.