After anti-surveillance-state activist John McAfee’s reported death Wednesday, fellow expatriate whistleblower Edward Snowden warned of imminent danger to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
Europe should not extradite those accused of non-violent crimes to a court system so unfair—and prison system so cruel—that native-born defendants would rather die than become subject to it. Julian Assange could be next.
Until the system is reformed, a moratorium should remain. https://t.co/tUociySmVy
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) June 23, 2021
McAfee, the iconoclastic former libertarian presidential candidate and tech millionaire, reportedly killed himself in a Spanish prison where he was awaiting US extradition for alleged financial fraud over his promotion of cybercurrencies.
But his past warnings about being a prime target of the CIA—as well as his public skepticism of Jeffrey Epstein‘s 2019 death in a New York prison—immediately fueled a deluge of conspiracy theories.
McAfee had explicitly said, in fact, that if he were to disappear or die mysteriously, it was not suicide. He even had the word “WHACKD” tattooed on his arm, and he claimed to have put in place a mechanism for publicly unloading state secrets should any harm befall him.
Among the skeptics was Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted an informal survey, with more than 90% of respondents doubting the cause of death was self-inflicted.
Did John McAfee kill himself?
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) June 24, 2021
Compounding the mystery were reports that, shortly after McAfee’s death was announced, a picture with the letter “Q” appeared on his Instagram page, likely linking McAfee with the QAnon movement that the Left and its deep-state allies have vigorously sought to suppress and discredit.
McAfee’s suspicious alleged suicide—along with menacing comments this week from President Joe Biden and recent reports about pro-Trump political dissidents being aggressively “reprogrammed”—were raising the alarm to new levels among freedom-loving Americans.
With many of the built-in safeguards that preserved constitutional freedoms having been compromised and subverted at the behest of the neo-leftist Stasi state, even once-powerful critics of government surveillance and overreach feared they may be the next targets.
POLITICAL PRISONER
Ever since he was ousted from the Ecuadorian embassy in April 2019, Julian Assange has endured a fate similar to McAfee’s, awaiting his possible US extradition while being held in a London prison.
The US, British and Spanish governments all have been pursuing him for political crimes, claiming his publication of sensitive documents on Wikileaks had undermined their national security concerns and other sovereign interests.
Libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald noted that Assange remained stuck in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare, despite his already having served—well over a year ago—the “minor” sentence for which he was originally arrested.
“Assange is not currently imprisoned because he was convicted of a crime,” Greenwald wrote on Substack last December .
“Two weeks after he was dragged out of the embassy, he was found guilty of the minor offense of ‘skipping bail’ and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison, the maximum penalty allowed by law,” Greenwald continued. “He fully served that sentence as of April of this year [2020], and was thus scheduled to be released, facing no more charges.”
But shortly before he was due to be released, the US Justice Department indicted him on 17 criminal charges stemming from his 2010 leak of classified information about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, based on information which he had received from Army defector Chelsea (né Bradley) Manning, a former military intelligence analyst.
There was considerable speculation that former president Donald Trump might pardon both Assange and Snowden (now a Russian asylum claimant, who famously leaked a trove of files that exposed the National Security Agency’s illegal domestic surveillance during the Obama administration).
However, in his flurry of last-minute pardons, Trump inexplicably remained mute about the world’s most famous anti-government whistleblowers.
ENEMY OF THE DEEP STATE
The takeover of the deep-state-backed Biden administration, ironically, has sealed Assange’s fate for the time being.
When Wikileaks first came into prominence during the George W. Bush administration, Assange was widely celebrated on the Left for his work in undermining the unpopular foreign wars, which were launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But, as with Snowden, those same anti-government activities, doled out in equal measure to both sides of the aisle, made Assange’s transparency efforts anathema to his one-time cheerleaders during the Obama years.
Things only grew worse when his devastating leaks exposed corruption in the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, which helped to support Trump’s eventual victory.
On one hand, rumors swirled that Assange might be the missing link in the mysterious death of DNC staffer Seth Rich, a former Bernie Sanders supporter who may have been murdered for leaking the sensitive data showing how the DNC and Clinton had colluded to freeze out the socialist primary challenger.
Meanwhile, Clinton and her high-powered campaign operatives devised a plan to tar Trump with unsubstantiated claims of Russian collusion related to the leaks. That also involved baselessly smearing Assange as a partisan hack with a vendetta against Clinton.
After the Democrat candidate resorted to personal attacks on Assange, he redoubled his own efforts, exposing her for suggesting that the US government might take him out with a drone strike.
Hillary Clinton on Assange “Can’t we just drone this guy” — report https://t.co/S7tPrl2QCZ pic.twitter.com/qy2EQBa48y
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 3, 2016
DOOMSAYERS VALIDATED
As shocking as Clinton’s proposal may have seemed at the time, US military attacks waged against political dissidents—including US citizens—have now become the “new normal” for the Biden administration.
The president candidly acknowledged as much on Wednesday, while speaking about his crackdown on Second Amendment rights.
He argued that the right to bear arms was obsolete since the government it was intended to protect citizens against now possessed far superior weaponry.
BIDEN: “Those who say the blood of Patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government… If you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.” pic.twitter.com/BDawoxvMcd
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 23, 2021
The Justice Department has shown that such threats are no joke by continuing to crack down brutally on pro-Trump political dissidents who entered the US Capitol on Jan. 6, regardless of the circumstances of their alleged crime.
“Nearly every charging document filed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department in the Capitol breach probe mentions the defendant’s belief about the 2020 presidential election as evidence of wrongdoing,” reported American Greatness’s Julie Kelly in a shocking exposé of the efforts to “reprogram” MAGA protesters for their wrongthink.
Even as the radical Left begins to recognize the folly of its calls to defund local police departments and prosecutorial efforts free criminals for their material crimes after having been adjudicated and found guilty, its establishment of a police state to punish dissenting opinions has created, in effect, a complete about-face from the sorts of transparency and opposition to government overreach that it once supported.
It has left many Americans uncertain who really is the friend and who really is the enemy when it comes to acting in their best interests to preserve longstanding American values and institutions.
But with many of the headlines playing out in exactly the way doomsayers like McAfee, Snowden and Assange have long warned about, they now seem to be getting long overdue validation in the worst possible way.
