It was only a matter of time before a sizable number of citizens from the U.S., as well as some from abroad, would realize that America’s current two-party political system is largely a con-job and reflects the political defects of most of the world at large; and that certain vital issues will never see the light of day unless the “legacy” media is eclipsed by savvy alternative media outlets.
Furthermore, various other matters—from “climate change” to war and peace, 9/11, monetary reform, etc.—will need a new media and far greater political choices beyond America’s two-party system in order for such issues to be openly, intelligently and thoroughly explored. Only then could they be released from the stranglehold of media omission and censorship, in order to be widely understood, so that solutions become possible.
This UK Column reporter—having determined that the 2023 Independent National Convention (INC) held recently in Austin, Texas, was designed to explore these very things—covered that event, at which attendees, numbering in the upper hundreds or lower thousands, turned out for the three- to five-day April convention at the Palmer Events Center to engage in what many participants believe represents the beginning of the end of America’s Democrat-Republican “duopoly.” Even the name of the event was a wry allusion to the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention, which steer the course of the duopolist American parties with little transparency.
Former Democrat Congress members Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Dennis Kucinich of Ohio—though Gabbard, who’s become a popular commentator, recently made considerable headlines by going independent—addressed this second-ever Independent National Convention (INC) (the first such gathering took place in 2020). The INC’s overall stated goal is to chart a new political future that parts ways with the interventionist wars, medical overreach and myriad other perilous policies plaguing the United States and the world under the capricious rule of “bought” politicians, for whom putting party before principle is automatic.
In the U.S. context, more often than not and despite notions to the contrary, the “two” dominant political parties do indeed function like two appendages of a single, larger nexus of illicit control, as a number of participants and attendees strongly emphasized at the Independent National Convention (INC). In some people’s minds, such an observation used to be largely limited to the meanderings of “conspiracy nuts,” but by now most INC attendees, representing an especially broad cross section of people from the left, right and center, would agree that genuinely new voices and new parties—with some attendees calling for far stricter election-integrity safeguards—are sorely needed and can become viable choices, rather than being mere “protest” votes that still aren’t enough to unseat the “lesser-of-two-evils” duopoly.
Event highlights
Journalists of considerable repute, such as former New York Times reporter-turned-independent Chris Hedges, helped drive home the Independent National Convention’s broad, bold mission, supplemented by dozens more presenters whose names might not be “household”; but several represented companies which promoted new technologies to give alternative media broader dissemination.
The 2023 event’s seemingly incongruent but official theme was: “Our independence is what unites us.” As I gathered while mingling with attendees, rebuilding the world under such a concept necessarily includes constructing an effective independent media that sidesteps and eventually surpasses the mainstream “legacy” media. The new media would seek to unite, rather than splinter, the populace under mutually agreeable concepts, touching on everything from localized agriculture / rural housing communities that defeat the so-called “inevitable megatrend” of people flocking to “global megacities,” to doing away with the ballot-access laws that stifle and defeat American alternative parties and candidates, to monetary reform, etc.
Alternative health, several electoral system reform measures, central bank digital currencies, water issues and other environmental matters, and achieving transparency in government were also covered at the event, amid other talks on culture, the arts, etc. Notably, the reform of election systems covered a sizable range of mainly technological proposals; however, the fundamental issue of computerized vote-counting happening nationwide beyond our scrutiny was, at best, briefly mentioned but not tackled head-on. (In the U.S., votes are cast publicly but counted away from the general public’s view via computerized voting machines whose proprietary software tabulates election outcomes. The machines that count virtually all U.S. votes are made by the “Big Three,” which are Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Hart InterCivic, and Dominion).
Criticism of the mRNA Covid injections was apparent at the Independent National Convention (INC), though not particularly widespread. However, noted vaccine super-skeptic Del Bigtree attended the INC and was outspoken on this matter, with particular attention to how the conventional media hides or downplays key data on Covid injection adverse reactions and keeps society paralyzed in a state of fear amid such corrosive censorship.
Below is a short excerpt from the Independent National Convention in Austin.
Del Bigtree is the second speaker on the right of the panel.
The following is an interview between UK Column reporter/author, Mark Anderson, and noted Covid vaccine critic, Del Bigtree, with emphasis on media malpractices.
Getting government to be far more transparent was linked at the event with enlarging the impact of alternative media, along with citizen activism and enabling alternative-party candidates to breach the duopoly, get into public office, broaden the national debate on transparency and various other matters and enact the necessary policy changes.
UK Column spoke in-depth to Attorney Paul Rossi, who specializes in helping reform ballot-access laws that were put in place by the two dominant "opposing" political parties in the U.S. (Democrats and Republicans) to keep alternative party candidates and non-affiliated candidates off the ballot as much as possible, thereby ensuring the dominance of the duopoly (two-party) system that too often operates as one.
UK Column's podcast interview with Paul Rossi below:
Gabbard’s keynote peace message
According to Tulsi Gabbard during her 4 April keynote address, the words “We, the people” are supposed to be indicative of self-governance—“but that only works when we lift our voices,” something that’s blocked by the media cartel. She also criticized the big media for, among other things, “selling the pro-war narrative, whatever that may be on any given day.” Gabbard, who has served in the military and takes a keen interest in foreign policy, added of the media: “They’re well in bed with the think tanks and the defense industry."
She added:
We have politicians [including President Biden and many from both parties] who sell these wars in a few different ways—under the guise of humanitarianism—we have to go bomb [so and so] country in order to help the people in that country. Or, we have to topple this dictator but we have to . . . destroy the country in the process . . .
Biden’s entire foreign policy is centered on this division in the world of democracies and autocracies, and he’s going to convene the democracies to defeat the autocracies [e.g., helping Ukraine take on Russia], yet never once being honest or transparent at any given point about how these very policies are undermining our own democracy . . . and our own ability to exercise the rights in our own Constitution [and] Bill of Rights.
Gabbard went on to specify that Biden and the rest of the “democracies” maintain that Ukrainian President Zelensky is supposedly a “scion of democracy", yet Zelensky “has completely taken control of all media in his country, has banned the leading political opposition party . . . and has gone after one of the biggest Christian churches in his country—if this is the democracy they’re celebrating and they’re wanting to protect, then we’re in real trouble.”
Gabbard received considerable applause at that juncture.
Hedge’s populist remarks
“If we are to wrest our power back from corporations and the billionaire class, who’ve carried out this corporate coup d’état in slow motion, as well as prevent the rise of neo-fascism, we must raise a left-right coalition, free of the moral absolutism of woke zealots,” said Hedges during his 4 April keynote, while proposing that the “one weapon” that the working class and middle class possesses—the strike—be wielded against the "economic and political power of the mega-rich oligarchs" who run the government and society. However, Hedges added:
Only 10.1 per cent of the [U.S.] workforce is unionized as of Jan 2022 . . . yet 71% of U.S. workers say they would like to belong to a union, the highest in nearly six decades, and up from 48% in 2009, according to a Gallup poll.
“When the Taft-Hartley Act was passed,” one of several anti-union measures that Hedges reviewed, “about a third of the workforce was unionized, peaking in 1954 at 34.8%; the act is a frontal-assault on unions,” he said, while saying that it prohibits not only all types of effective strikes, but also requires that employees of companies attend anti-union training sessions “as Amazon does with its workers." He concluded:
The right to strike in the U.S. barely exists.
Podcast interview below with well known centrist writer Chris Hedges, a former 15-year NY Times writer, who speaks out about media malpractices and other key issues.
Kucinich on transparency, money matters
Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, also speaking on the Independent National Convention (INC) main stage, made several calls for much greater transparency in government, while stressing the need finally to release all of the remaining documentation on the JFK shooting in Dallas.
“There’s things behind the scenes we don’t know about, and we have the sense that we’re being fed a party line,” Kucinich elaborated, scoffing at the notion that asking tough questions and speaking the truth should always be immediately dismissed as “baseless” conspiracy theories. “The more that happens, the more likely it is we’ll never be told the truth about anything that’s going on around us.”
Kucinich also addressed UK Column’s questions on monetary reform legislation, H.R. 2990, in 2011 when he was a U.S. Representative from Ohio (and before that, mayor of Cleveland). He told UK Column that the proposed NEED Act (standing for National Emergency Employment Defense) would disempower, though not totally eliminate, the Federal Reserve private central bank by placing it within the U.S Treasury. The Treasury would then issue interest-free and debt-free U.S. national currency, as Federal Reserve Notes would be phased out.
Kucinich’s idea, which stems from model legislation—the American Monetary Act drawn up and proposed by the American Monetary Institute—is similar to the “Bradbury Pound” British currency policy that actually was enacted for a time during World War I and has been referenced over the years by UK Column.
UK Column’s audio-podcast interview with Kucinich, who spoke about an interesting monetary reform bill that he championed and its current relevance:
Gage engages
Architect Richard Gage of richardgage911.org, formerly with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth but now working independently, whom I have previously covered in reporting for UK Column, described the U.S. Government at the Texas event as “blatantly non-transparent; they’re hiding major secrets from the American people,” based on his studies of three South Manhattan buildings annihilated during the 9/11 attacks.
“There was a decision not to tell the people the truth about 9/11,” Gage said, referring to a 9/11 Commission that many at the Independent National Convention rated as lowly as the Warren Commission that probed the JFK crime.
“When we expose 9/11 to the American people, they will shoot down this false double-winged bird and the Phoenix will rise,” Gage heartily predicted. Notably, an offshoot of his two decades of research on what happened to Building 7 and the larger Twin Towers on 9/11 is 9/11: Crime Scene to Courtroom, a current project described as "an unprecedented film series taking hard evidence of 9/11 crimes to court.”
[Editor’s note: Gage was also in Austin to give separate slideshow presentations at another venue. See www.mixNstream.com for archived, on-demand livestream videos of his detailed presentations on 9/11, as well as Mark Anderson’s slideshow on the “Mass Media Cartel,” which includes media-censored information on the WHO Pandemic Treaty.]
While several Independent National Convention (INC) participants gave interviews to UK Column that were recorded as podcasts to chronicle the details of their pursuits—podcasts which, as noted, are included with this report —the convention featured activists who advocate viewpoints that the legacy-media cartel won’t even acknowledge, let alone report. And it appears that the large daily Austin-American Statesman and San Antonio Express-News newspapers ignored the convention altogether. Ditto, evidently, for the region’s TV and radio outlets representing the “mainstream tradition” of blotting out entire schools of thought, while spiking even the slightest suggestion that there are alternatives to Democrats and Republicans.
News anchor’s revelations
On that note, former mainstream television news anchor Kristi Leigh, who spent much of her career reporting for Ohio-based major network news affiliates, spoke with UK Column. She recalled how she would receive scripts to read on air via teleprompter which, more and more often as time passed, would lack sources and typically would give just one side of the issues.
This became acutely evident, she added, when government claims of a Covid–19 pandemic came along. Suddenly, the station for which she worked would dole out unsourced medical advice, including steady suggestions that the public should get their “safe and effective” Covid vaccines, as if the station itself was a medical authority. There was no longer even a pretense of objectivity, she recalled.
Of secession and new nations
Daniel Miller of the Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM) and Czech Republic native Vít Jedlička, president and founder of a budding new eastern European micro-nation state known as the Free Republic of Liberland, certainly brought forth some interesting information at the Independent National Convention (INC) in terms of the lengths to which they are going in order to establish governing structures that they believe will, by orders of magnitude, be more free and just than many of the world’s governments, whose central goal in too many cases is to cede their nationhood to higher “global authorities”.
On the Palmer Events Center’s second floor (there were three panel discussions going on simultaneously all three days of the event on the first and second floors and on an outdoor stage), Miller explained that the Texas Nationalist Movement had facilitated the laying of a bill before the Texas legislature that, if and when approved by that body, would enable Texans to conduct a state-wide vote (referendum) on whether they would favor secession from the U.S. The secession proposal has been dubbed “Texit.”
Asked by UK Column during a panel discussion whether current corruption in Texas politics could make secession backfire (in other words, why “divorce” the U.S. only to end up with something nearly as bad in the long run), Miller replied that once the state achieves nationhood, it could finally get a handle on fully controlling its border with Mexico and straighten out various other problems. Corruption, he reasoned, is everywhere in the political world and its presence should not be seen as an excuse to set aside the need to make fundamental reforms.
President Jedlička, by all indications, is creating a new government from scratch, as opposed to living in an existing subnational state (Texas) or separating from a national union of states (the U.S.).
According to Jedlička, the Liberland ministate is mapped out and is taking form quite rapidly. He said Liberland has over 700,000 signed up to be citizens and that its location, a 7-square-kilometer nook between Serbia and Croatia, sounds small but amounts to three times the area of Monaco and ten times that of the Vatican. Liberland, Jedlička continued, is intended to follow a hybrid form of government: a republican form like that of the U.S., but with a direct-democracy component, like that of Switzerland.
Blockchain technology would undergird Liberland’s monetary system, and artificial intelligence, or AI, would be carefully applied (while observing limitations and avoiding abuses, as Jedlička assured UK Column) in order to help manage the overall logistics of Liberland. The goal would be maximum freedom and prosperity for its citizens.
UK Column’s interview with a longtime acquaintance and president of a newly forming mini-state called Liberland, Vít Jedlička. In this intriguing interview at the Austin convention, "Vít," as he's named (pronounced Veet), describes the size, location and basic outlook of this polity.
WEF connection questioned
The inclusion of Bryan Talebi, CEO of Ahura AI (Artificial Intelligence), and entrepreneur and thought-leader Brock Pierce at the Independent National Convention (INC) was questioned privately by some INC attendees.
An attendee named Cassy from East Austin, for example, mentioned to UK Column that both Talebi and Pierce in May of 2022 had spoken in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum—which many in the freedom movement, including UK Column viewers, consider to be hostile toward human liberty, largely due to the WEF invoking a dystopian-sounding “great reset” amid the Covid “pandemic” while also training young leaders to take part in government in various nation states, apparently to embed the WEF worldview with minimal publicity and use it to mold policy.
At the Independent National Convention, Talebi and Pierce shared the stage as part of a discussion on Central Bank Digital Currencies, Privacy and Data. This is not to say that Talebi and Pierce necessarily fully agree with the WEF’s worldview, nor does it mean that their contribution to the INC was without merit. It is simply that those looking for solutions to national and world problems, in an age riddled with deceit, want to make sure that everything is “on the level” in pursuit of greater accuracy in information and ultimate remedies.
Other speakers
While the full roster of the Independent National Convention event and complete video footage of every presentation is posted at the INC organizer’s website, participants and presenters at the INC, in terms of UK Column’s direct coverage, included:
John Bush
Texas entrepreneur and activist, John Bush, whose rural-living ethos and practical plans to make rural communities a productive and affordable reality, provided an alternative to the so-called “inevitable” transfer of the majority of the world’s people to live in or near so-called “global cities” by about the year 2050: something the world’s elites have proclaimed to be the wave of the future, as I have previously reported.
“For the longest time, I’ve realized, why should the globalists, the cabal, the predator class—why do they get to have a monopoly on determining what the future looks like?” Bush remarked, taking a break from his display table among the Independent National Convention exhibits. “There’s more of us; we have better ideas. We operate from a place of light, of freedom, of harmony with one another.” He added that the people must cast “fear and reaction” aside “and start building the kind of world we want to live in.”
Accordingly, Bush noted that his business, the Live Free Academy, helps people “create freedom, community and prosperity in their lives” via “online courses, workshops [and] consulting.” Notably, the Exit and Build Land Summit, held from 18 to 22 May, was designed with the idea “to help people exit the ‘smart cities,’ to buy land and to build community in the country”—a goal which would include affordable housing arrangements, as well as the means to grow local food and achieve a greater level of personal, local and regional sufficiency in a world of immeasurably long and needlessly fragile supply chains engineered by the globalist class.
Ray Velez
New York City-based activist Ray Velez stressed that the U.S. is a republic and not the full-blown democracy that many Independent National Convention attendees and presenters stated or implied during various remarks and presentations. Velez, who is vice-president of the New York De Jure Assembly, told UK Column and INC attendees during several presentations that “without a lawyer and without millions of dollars,” the Assembly was able to get New York City Mayor Eric Adams and District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. into the New York State Supreme Court for exceeding their authority. This was done, Velez explained, via the “summary inquiry” provision of the City Charter; a route which he described as “a remedy offered in the Charter to the people.”
“The de jure Assembly”, he said, “creates Committees of Safety within our counties, and we collectively come together to form a state assembly; and we monitor our public servants, making sure they’re within the confines of their authority.” Those acting contrary to the Constitution, Velez said, are “held accountable."
Media matters
Alex Riggs-Miller, founder and CEO of iProdoos, and journalist Linton Johnson, founder of Ovis Media, both took part in an important and, some would say, long-overdue panel discussion on the Independent National Convention’s final day on the future of alternative media, focusing on how the new media can disseminate its message more widely and efficiently, to eventually eclipse the already-declining conventional media.
Generally speaking, they envisioned a loose knit constellation of independent media utilizing the latest technology to get their message out.
Diane Sare
Diane Sare, who was recently interviewed by UK Column Editor Mike Robinson regarding the extremes that the political establishment will go to in order to keep independent “peasants” out of public office, showed up at the Independent National Convention. Although she faced numerous obstacles challenging current U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) in 2022 as an independent—largely because he would not investigate the intelligence agencies that Sare believes are keeping the U.S. embroiled in frequent military actions—she said that she’ll still seek public office again in 2024.
To run again is a decision that reveals her tenacity. She recalled that in the November 2022 mid-term election, the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans tripled the ballot-access petition requirement from a minimum of 15,000 valid signatures of registered voters to 45,000.
With a purely grassroots effort, her team nevertheless gathered 66,000 signatures, which achieved ballot access—but when the vote count for her race was televised, she was bluntly stripped of actual votes. For example, she retired on election night with 57,000 votes and climbing, yet thanks to a friend taking screen shots of TV election returns, managed to capture a posted figure saying that Sares, suddenly, had received only 53,000 votes.
“By the time I got up, my vote was down to 29,000,” she told UK Column at the Independent National Convention. “In Rockland County [her home base], I had 6,212 votes . . . That next morning, on that county board of elections, it said I had 177 votes.” And in 30 of 62 counties in New York State, the exact number of votes that Sares received “was switched to blank votes”, which consist of ballots on which voters did not cast a vote for this particular U.S. Senate race.
Sares drew attention to an important insight stemming from her bizarre experience of having reams of votes stolen from her. “It’s not just that you tell a big lie,” she said. “The way you get dictatorial control is you tell a lie that everyone knows is a lie but they feel powerless to do anything about it and that makes them terrified.” In other words, learned helplessness grips the population.
With that in mind, she said her votes could have been subtly stolen behind the scenes, rather than her dwindling numbers being openly broadcast on television, with the caveat that the theft was only detectable when Sare and friends took periodic screenshots of the posted vote totals in order to record, and apparently prove, that something was drastically out of order.
She came to the Independent National Convention hoping to find measures to make elections more secure and trustworthy.
Dean Rodgers
Dean Rodgers, a member of Virginia’s Libertarian Party, shared his view with UK Column that, as Ray Velez of the New York de Jure Assembly stated, the Independent National Convention event was wrongly operating on the assumption that the U.S. is an actual democracy, when it is in fact a republic. Rodgers pointed to the outcomes of the “tyranny of the majority” in an outright democracy, where God-given birthrights can be overturned simply because a majority, even a razor-thin one, has been persuaded through media misdirection to adopt an unwise or errant view and vote accordingly.
In summary
All told, the Texas convention showcased that independently minded people who've grown tired of the dominant "two-party" system in the U.S. are eager to seek viable alternatives and reveal previously hidden or downplayed truths in the process, which can foster a stronger alternative independent media. That, in turn, would create a better-informed public and a chance to turn the tables on the globalist viceroys who have worked their will on the world for way too long.
It is vital, moreover, that those seeking fundamental changes remain vigilant regarding infiltration by the very forces they are trying to defeat at such a pivotal time, when the stakes of who controls the narrative are unprecedentedly high.
